Author: knjohn

Scotland Will Be Home To The World’s Largest Floating Wind Farm | Co.Exist

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Offshore wind farms are getting more practical, partly because of a new technology that allows them to float. Scotland, or rather the ocean off Scotland’s coast, will soon become home to the world’s largest installation of the technology.

The Hywind Park will consist of five floating six-megawatt turbines, anchored in water over 330 feet deep, and situated 15-22 miles from land. The project, conceived in 2014 and recently given the go-ahead, has previously been called the “world’s first floating wind farm,” and now is apparently the largest.

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7 Retail Turnoffs That Send Customers Away Screaming | Small Biz Trends

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Today’s retail environment is more competitive than ever. With big retail chains launching their own apps, installing the latest technology in their locations and offering an omnichannel shopping experience, small retailers have a lot to keep up with. Fortunately, some of the effective ways to put your retail store on a level playing field with the big boys are also the easiest, according to a new study.

Retail Turnoffs

A recent Harris Poll surveyed U.S. customers to find out what their biggest retail turnoffs are, and the results may surprise you. It seems the basics — such as a clean, well-maintained store — make a huge difference in whether customers will return to a particular store. Overall, “general bad odor” is the biggest retail turnoff, cited by 78 percent of those surveyed. Close behind on the list of retail turnoffs:

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Make No Apologies for Marketing Your Business | Entrepreneur

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I had lunch at my local art museum today — their scallops and black rice are my favorite. As the waiter left our check, he invited us to look at his photography in the museum store. He half apologized, saying that the store manager told him to tell all of his customers that his work is featured in the store. He did not need to apologize. When you are an entrepreneur, you can’t afford to apologize for marketing your work.

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How Reposting Old Blog Content Will Boost Your Traffic | HigherVisibility

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“Content is king” is an adage that has been adopted and practiced by every successful blogger across the web for years. So practiced, that there’s a definite surplus in content. While content continues to flood the internet at an increasing rate, users continue to only consume so much of it. This creates a problem-or opportunity, depending on how you look at it-with blogging strategy. In an attempt to stay at the surface in such a competitive landscape, bloggers are cranking out content at a rate that takes away from the quality of their posts and contributes to the excess information put out there for users.

The effort of content production can be subsidized with reposting old blog content-an effort that can drastically increase your site’s traffic, make useable content readily available for your readers, and make your writing last longer. Content takes time to produce, so you might as well squeeze as much use out of it as you can. Part of doing that means upcycling and reposting old content, specifically the content that has performed well.

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Nokia Is Plotting A Big Comeback to the Phone Business | WIRED

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THAT BRAND YOU like is going to come back in style. Maybe.

Today Nokia announced that it will license its brand to a new Finnish company founded by former Nokia execs. The company, Global HMD, plans to use the Nokia brand to sell Android-based phones and tablets.

Meanwhile, Microsoft, which acquired Nokia’s handset line in 2014, is selling its feature phone line to manufacturing giant Foxconn’s FIH subsidiary for $350 million. These “dumb phones” will also carry the Nokia brand; HMD will sell and market them for FIH (got that?).

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Amazon Doesn’t Consider the Race of Its Customers. Should It? | Bloomberg

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For residents of minority urban neighborhoods, access to Amazon.com’s vast array of products—from Dawn dish soap and Huggies diapers to Samsung flatscreen TVs—can be a godsend. Unlike whiter ZIP codes, these parts of town often lack well-stocked stores and quality supermarkets. White areas get organic grocers and designer boutiques. Black ones get minimarts and dollar stores. People in neighborhoods that retailers avoid must travel farther and sometimes pay more to obtain household necessities. “I don’t have a car, so I love to have stuff delivered,” says Tamara Rasberry, a human resources professional in Washington, D.C., who spends about $2,000 a year on Amazon Prime, the online retailer’s premium service that guarantees two-day delivery of tens of millions of items (along with digital music, e-books, streaming movies, and TV shows) for a yearly $99 membership fee. Rasberry, whose neighborhood of Congress Heights is more than 90 percent black, says shopping on Amazon lets her bypass the poor selection and high prices of nearby shops.

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How Your Small Business Can Benefit From ‘Keep it Simple’ Selling | All Business

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Albert Einstein once said, “Things should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.” I agree. These words certainly apply to selling. Here’s how to keep it simple.

Simplify your number of offerings.

Some salespeople have to write proposals to make their sales, and others don’t ever write proposals. Whether you write proposals or not, you need to decide how many choices to present to your customers. Some salespeople think that offering a lot of choices is better to make more sales. They’re wrong. Salespeople should offer fewer choices to simplify their selling.

Here’s why. If you offer too many choices, you overload your customers–it makes it harder for them to make buying decisions. This may have happened to you when you were trying to make a purchase. It recently happened to me.

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Nobody Saw This Volcano Erupt … Except NASA’s Satellites | Live Science

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For the first time in 60 years, Mount Sourabaya erupted with a spectacular show of fiery lava — in fact, it erupted twice. But there wasn’t a single human soul who saw the eruptions live; nobody lives on the volcano’s remote island in the South Atlantic Ocean, according to NASA Earth Observatory.

Instead, satellites captured images of the eruptions, which happened on April 24 and May 1, 2016, NASA reported.

Volcanic eruptions in far-flung places, such as the South Atlantic, used to go unnoticed. But the advent of satellites and seismic monitoring has given scientists new insight into volcanic events worldwide, NASA officials said.

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