Internet Marketing, Social Media, Business | StuckInTheFunnel

Don’t Buy a Toyota or You Might Drive Halfway Across the U.S. Without Stopping

Or, you could put the car in neutral if you sensed a problem.

I was car shopping in Oct-Dec of last year. All of my vehicle research/inventory browsing was done on the internet, which caused me to surrender my email address to many car dealership’s lead capture forms so I could receive more specifics on availabilty, cost and warranties for the vehicles I was interested in.

After about a month and half of research, I purchased my vehicle.

Since then, I have received an influx of emails from American car dealerships I previously inquired to (names will not be disclosed) explaining why I should buy an American vehicle while using Toyota’s recent accelerator recall folly as selling point. They told me how there was over 200 consumer complaints in the U.S. and Japan about the accelerators on their Toyota’s.

They tried to digitally persuade me with email.

Those kind of numbers are statistically irrelavant. If they told me there were 20,000, I would have listened a little harder.

Bottom line, car manufacturers always produce cars with some type of defect. However,  Toyota’s defect correlates with your acceleration which makes it a bit “scarier”. Look at the historical data for recalls and reliability of this company. They are in good standing.

Put the car in neutral, look at the recalls for all the cars you are considering purchasing and be a smart consumer.

A New Year With New Opportunities

[Tap, Tap, Tap] – is this thing on?

Excuse my overextended vacation from www.StuckInTheFunnel.com. I took some time at the end of last year to visit family, assess year-end accomplishments and start thinking about goals for this year. 2009 year was a tough year and I hope 2010 will be much more fruitful for my colleagues, family and friends.

January is a time where many of us think about who we really want to be professionally, spiritually, mentally and physically. The question always remains: how do I get myself there? Some think the answers lie in self-help books, therapy, meditation or the next fad diet. Others think planning every last detail of the week out works.

To me, it does not matter how you reach the goal, as long as you do. In order to do this, I firmly believe those goals should be measurable.

I “want to lose weight” is not a goal. Losing 15lbs is.

I “want to user Twitter to help grow my business” is not a goal. Having Twitter contribute 15% to your annual sales, is.

Now, that’s not to say a goal has to be quantifiable. Touching the lives of individuals through volunteer work cannot always be measured, but is certainly a good goal to have.

I have set my goals and I hope you have too. Here’s to a happy and prosperous 2010!

Pardon the Blogging Lapse

You may have noticed that I have not had a blog post in 2 weeks. I wanted to let my readers know that I have not vanished from the blogosphere. The fact is, I have taken time to take care of few personal items on my to do list.

In the past 2 weeks I have:

• Bought a car
• Spent 2 days at Internet Summit 09
• Bought a chug!

For those of you wondering what a chug is, it is a mixture of a Chihuahua and a Pug. I named him Max.

Here is a video of him in action:

I am back into the regular swing and will post the details of Internet Summit 09 here and at  www.rtpdesigns.com later this week.

Search PDF Files Like a Pro

PDF files, otherwise known as Portable Document Format files, are popularly used nowadays. With industries piquing everywhere, you would find all sorts of PDF files for brochures, forms, magazines, reports, and other materials that contain designs that would be too complicated when other kinds of files are used. Because of these PDF files, online reading has also become interactive on its own. This is a huge benefit we all can enjoy with PDF files.

Aside from materials usually used for media, even academic materials today are being converted into PDF format! The typical thesis, dissertation, and even the usual article are not in PDF format. Even books are in PDF format already, in the form of e-books! Now, this is actually kind of sad for the regular paper book because it has inevitably lost a large portion of its market. But since e-books indeed present more convenience for any reader, then more and more people are getting into the trend as well.

However, there are actually times when we would want to find an exact word or phrase in the material we read. This is something that you can easily do on a paperback book or physical article. All you have to do is highlight the significant text and you are good to go. But with PDF files, this is indeed something very hard to do. The usual copy-pasting functions are not easy to do either.

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Tags: pdf search, search pdf, searching PDF files

The Benefits of Using a CRM

CRM software, often called customer relationship management software, is becoming much more popular today than it was in years past. One reason for this is that more people understand what the software is and are deciding to use it. Another reason is that the software is getting better and easier to use. It has more features and benefits than it did in the past, and it is also becoming more user-friendly, which is very important. More people today are using the Internet for their businesses. As this trend continues to grow, there will be a larger need for CRM software, but only if it is found to be useful and compatible with the needs that a business owner or manager has.

There are a lot of benefits to CRM software, as well. Managers can use this software to keep track of their customers and vendors and organize them in many different ways. It is unfortunate that so many people only think of CRM software as being a datebook or contact-recording type of software. It does handle these functions, but it does a great deal more than that, which is something that many business people fail to realize today when they are presented with CRM software. This CRM software can be used to record names and dates. However, it also keeps track of sales, returns, important dates such as birthdays and anniversaries. In addition, it can help to remind salespeople of their prior commitments. This keeps them from missing deadlines, meetings, the returning of phone calls, or anything else that will affect the perception of them that their clients have.

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Tags: business, CRM, customer relationship management, software, technology