I finally got into a groove working on next season’s stuff for Stevens Pass. So there were a lot of concepts and thus quite a few that weren’t selected. There were a couple related concepts I really liked just from a design perspective, but they weren’t quite a fit for the end goal.
If you’re ever  having a hard time upgrading your BIOS from a USB drive… for example if you get an error like:
Error reading file
Make sure you’ve plugged your USB drive into a port on the motherboard. Even if case ports work well for everything else, you might find your motherboard can’t read the BIOS update file when using a USB header (that then connects a front or case USB port).
In Intel motherboards, as well as some others, this applies to the F7 BIOS Flash process.
Microsoft seems to like to hide these at times. They usually don’t update the old download pages with the location of the new one. So I try to let this be one place that keeps active links of the refreshes.
The latest refresh (came out yesterday):Â Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image
There are so many bad online advertising opportunities out there it drives me crazy. If you’re selling a product online, and you don’t know the cost per conversion of your online advertising expenditures, there’s something wrong.
I’ve noticed that TV stations are joining the ranks of content providers trying to exploit businesses with bad online advertising options. After talking with one, I discovered they don’t even collect the data needed to give their customers a truthful representation.
There are great options out there. Google AdWords isn’t that bad. With the powerful data they give you, they also give you the power to shoot yourself in the foot if you like. But there is an extreme opportunity there, as with other several other providers.
Here’s a great AdWords case study that demonstrates five huge problems advertisers can run into, as well as a before and after comparison.
So with the same budget, a more organized and tightly themed account, and a strong smart phone bidding strategy we saw an increase in clicks of 181%, while reducing cost by 3.3%. As expected, when you remove statewide GEO and the content network, we saw a drop in overall impressions of 93.6% but the quality of the traffic was so much better that our Click Through Rate increased 45x, from .21% to 9.47%. This increase in CTR also improved our Quality Score, so our AVG CPC dropped 65.6%. The conversion rate increased 75x from .49% to 36.88%, and the cost per conversion dropped 99.5% from $184.03 to $0.84. From 19 conversions for the period before we took over, to 4,036 in the period after we took over.
Read the full story: Paid Search success story from Online Performance Marketing
Sometimes I find myself in discussions where I’ve brought up a half-baked idea that I’m not confident about. So today, on an email list of 2000 people I posted something. Normally I’d want to have it more thought out, but it seemed a good fit for a discussion. So I tossed the idea out there and it started getting picked apart. A discussion ensued and I enjoyed the constructive criticism that was given. As part of the discussion, this link was sent to me and I found it extremely valuable.
Over the years I’ve heard many reasons on what motivates us. This one does a great job of explaining why some of those reasons don’t always work. Better still, it gets to the core of the issue rather than creating superfluous reasoning.