Is Home Maintenance For Dummies?

Living in a society where being politically correct with the accepted use of words and terms is vogue, anyone can demonstrate their level of intelligence, and everyone can expose their lack thereof.

When choosing a website’s name and title like HomeMaintenanceForDummies and Hey, I’m No Dummy!, I was initially hesitant to use it because of the perceived ramifications and stigma that the title would bring.

However, I resolved the issue by rethinking the title’s truest meaning and purpose.

Hey, I’m No Dummy! is actually intended to provoke home repair & maintenance awareness in 4 groups of home owners who think of themselves as follows:

Let’s take a quick look into the thinking of each of these 4 groups of home owners.

Consider your own home maintenance IQ and see if you can identify yourself when reading the common characteristics found in each of these homeowners, and how they handle their home maintenance & repair.

I’m Totally Clueless

These homeowners are ones who have no idea how to use a screwdriver, have no business owning one, and don’t even care!

There are many reasons why these homeowners find themselves in this category:

Frankly, these are the dummies I am referring to in the website title!

These are the ones who are totally clueless, and show it by waiting until there is a major catastrophe to have their home looked after.

When one waits this long to have their home maintenance and repair issues addressed, hundreds, even thousands of dollars in costly home repair could be avoided.

I’m Smarter Than That!

These homeowners are ones who know how to use a screwdriver, own one or more, and are interested in knowing more about home repair & maintenance.

There are many reasons why these homeowners find themselves in this category:

These are the one who demonstrate that they are smarter than the first group by showing some interest in getting better acquainted with their home.

By learning basic home maintenance and repair tips, they do save money and time by avoiding costly home repair.

I’m Smart Enough!

These homeowners are ones who have a degree from the Home Maintenance School of Hard Knocks, own more tools than the local hardware store, and just want to see if there is an easier method.

There are many reasons why these homeowners find themselves in this category:

These are the one who can figure out most solutions to their home repair & maintenance issues.

But if there is a challenging repair, they know where to go to get their answers and know what tools to use.

By using their own tools along with basic home maintenance and repair tips, they save money and time by avoiding costly home repair.

I’m A Genius!

Finally, these homeowners are ones who put Bob Villa to shame, own their own hardware store, and want to know to make money doing home maintenance & repair.

There are many reasons why these homeowners find themselves in this category:

These are the one who figure out every solution to their home repair & maintenance issues.

There are no challenging repairs because they know where to go to get their answers and know what tools to use.

By using their own tools along with their own advanced home maintenance and repair techniques, they not only save money and time by avoiding costly home repair, they can make money by helping other homeowners do the same.

Now How About You?

Which characteristics listed above best described your home maintenance IQ?

Do you want to advance over into the next group?

Even if you are at a comfortable place in your management style, Hey, I’m No Dummy! can help you right where you are!

INTRODUCING: The Hey, I’m No Dummy! Newsletter will provide you with trusted resources on Home Maintenance and Repair, saving you time and money by pointing you to valuable:

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Free Featured BONUS: The Hey, I’m No Dummy! Monthly Maintenance Calendar will give you a monthly home maintenance checklist with reminders of easy projects you can accomplish in 30 minutes or less!

Wanna see how bright you are? Take a Home Maintenance IQ Test and see for yourself at www.HomeMaintenanceForDummies.com

About The Author

Rick E Patterson is a licensed General Contractor and is favorably known as the ‘Go-To-Guy’. He has gained notoriety as a Handyman Expert excelling in his innate, creative abilities to quickly analyze and provide practical solutions to home maintenance issues. Rick produces a series of how-to videos, and writes blogs and articles for homeowners sharing his insights, expertise, and experiences with others.

How to do Stress Free Entertaining

Do you get stressed when you know you need to host some important function or gathering?  Just the thought of entertaining can be very nerve racking, however it doesn’t have to be.  It all depends on the way that you approach everything is what will make a difference.

Drop the high class, everything need to be flashy and expensive idea.  Entertain according to your budget and also according to your abilities. You need to also have fun, so be yourself.  If you spend most of your time worrying that your gathering is as great as it should be, you will not be able to have a great time as you should.

Your family and your friends will appreciate the fact that you have decided to entertain and the more that you entertain the easier that it will get.

When entertaining you should keep everything as your style.  Be sure that you use what you are most comfortable with.  You do not need any new dishes nor do you need crystal stemware.  Keep in mind that you need a budget and you need to keep in that budget.  If your budget can afford a desert party or potluck, it is a great choice. In other words you do not have to impress your guests. A good way to entertain is to watch free movies online.

Everything that you make be sure that you have made it before and that you are comfortable with making it.  There is no need to conquer a new recipe at a time like this.

Be relaxed, enjoy yourself if your guests acknowledge this the will enjoy themselves a lot more too.  Also be certain that you keep your entertaining simple. It must be relaxing, like watching movies in a movie heaven.

The Oldest Surviving Carpet in the World

The art of Persian Oriental rug weaving has been around for centuries. Carpet weaving is an essential part of Persian art and culture and dates back to ancient Persia. Over time this art underwent many changes, but the principles and level of quality remained the same.

Wool is the most common material used for carpets, but oftentimes silk would be used to weave these precious oriental rugs. Silk carpets date back to the sixteenth century of oriental carpet weaving. Silk is more expensive, and less durable, but the value does tend to increase with age.

Unfortunately, over the passage of time, materials such as wool, cotton and silk start to decay. This leaves hardly any remnants for archaeologists wanting to research the history of Persian rugs and carpets.

In a very beneficial archeological discovery in 1949, the oldest Persian carpet in the world was found. The carpet was found in the grave of a Scythian prince amongst the ices of the Pazyryk valley in Siberia. It is thought that perhaps the ice from the mountains preserved the carpet, which has been dated through radiocarbon testing as being woven in the 5th Century BC.

The Pazyryk carpet is 283 by 200cm in size and has 36 symmetrical knots per cm squared. This oriental carpet indicates a long history of evolution of this art, because of the advanced weaving technique that can be matched up to the technique of latter centuries. The Pazyryk carpet is considered to be the oldest carpet in the world.

The Fundamentals Of Marketing

Practically every business on the planet sets out with the primary objective of making money. This is generally done by producing some form of product, or offering a service, and then charging customers money for it.

Firstly, it is a very rare case that a business can offer a product or service that is truly unique and cannot be provided by anyone else. This means that your company will be contesting with other businesses that sell a similar item and you will both be trying to earn money from the same shoppers, who only want to spend their money once. So how can you improve the chances of them spending money with you?

Marketing is the main tool used by modern organisations to draw potential customers to do business with them and not with their rivals. It is a very broad topic that is affected by a great deal of internal and external variables, but when done well it can be the one business practise that can make or break a corporation.

So where should you begin when creating a marketing strategy for your own company? Well, each situation is different, and every business will have its own set of strengths and flaws that must be taken into consideration, but there is a marketing rule that can be applied to almost any corporation to be used as a marketing platform. It is known as the “Marketing Mix”.

The Marketing Mix

The marketing mix was a phrase that was first coined during the 1950′s and is an expression that is used to express the fundamental building blocks of any marketing strategy. It reflects the fact that marketing is not a simple, blunt-edged business technique, but rather a subtle balance of different aspects of business functions. It got its name since it is similar to the ingredients checklist for a recipe.

The term was later built upon to include the idea of “four P’s” that described the critical elements of the marketing mix. The formalisation of these P’s made it very easy for company managers and marketers to quickly relate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own organisations, and by doing so could very quickly form a personalised and effective marketing plan. The four P’s are Product, Price, Place and Promotion.

This marketing model is not limited to physical goods, services such as floor painting can gain from fresh marketing ideas or a new perspective.

Product

Whilst every aspect of the marketing mix is a necessity, the “product” element mentioned as one of the four P’s is perhaps the most crucial of all. It identifies the physical product or intangible service that your company will be offering, and at the end of the day it is the reason that customers are going to spend money with you. If this part is not adequately managed then your organisation will find it hard to survive.

Several people do not think that marketing has any role to play when it comes to the actual product that your business is selling. In fact, the common train of thought very often bears the exact opposite sentiment. Surely it should be the opposite way around – your manufacturing department creates a product for sale and then it is the job of the marketing department to find ways to sell it, right?

Take the computer software market as an example. There are many established brands of both operating system and software application solutions in the marketplace already, and since the market is relatively well saturated it would be incredibly tough (and expensive) to “take on the big boys”.

Rather than developing an operating system and then trying to craft a marketing strategy to rival the likes of Microsoft or Apple, it would be far more effective to look at what types of product are sought after in the current marketplace, and how feasible it would be to manufacture and sell them.

Once your products have been fashioned and created it is still a critical skill to be able to objectively review your own products to identify the reasons why a customer would buy your product rather than a competitors’. The technique is called product differentiation and forms one of the fundamental skills of the product part of the marketing mix cake.

A different form of this part of the marketing mix is known as product variation and is typically used to either lengthen the lifecycle of a product currently in the market, or to make your brand new product attractive to as many consumers as possible.

The car industry uses this technique very effectively by offering different engines, trim packages and interior options with the cars that they sell. They use the marketing mix to great effect to sell their own goods in an extremely competitive marketplace. Whilst these companies may have substantial marketing budgets, the same concepts can be applied to all companies.

To maintain a standard corporate image a company should update their web presence an example we found was gas electricity price comparison who echo colours, fonts and also graphics associated with their own branding.

Price

Another key factor in the marketing mix concerns the price of your products or services. This isn’t a simple case of performing market research to determine the highest price that your customers would spend (although that can be a handy tool to use), but rather using the price of your products as a strategic tool designed to achieve any particular targets your business has.

Whilst it may seem obvious, it is still worth pointing out that price has always been, and probably always will be, one of the crucial factors that shoppers take into account when they are making a purchase. It is also worth noting that customers do not always consider the cheapest price to be the best price.

There are many questions that you need to ask yourself when devising a good pricing strategy, key amongst which are the price sensitivity of your customers, what your competitors are doing and how can pricing maximise your own profits. From a strategy point of view though, pricing can be covered by two primary principals; price skimming and penetration pricing. These are outlined below.

Price skimming

The principal idea behind price skimming is to make as much money as possible from the segment of the market which is price-insensitive and will be willing to spend a premium amount of money to get a product or service early on. Not only can this approach deliver great economic advantages, but it can also advertise an exclusive and high quality image of your item.

This pricing technique is very often used in the consumer electronics industry where customers will often eagerly await the launch of a new mobile phone or computer games console. Manufacturers could set almost any price they wanted to and there would still be a loyal core of customers that would pay it. By making use of this method as part of a pre-ordering strategy, a company can help to smooth its own money flow.

Penetration pricing

Penetration pricing is at the other end of the pricing spectrum, and is geared towards gaining a large market share at a short-term cost so that financial rewards can be made long into the future. It can be a risky strategy, but when employed correctly it can create revenue streams for many years to come.

Another thing to keep in mind is that “price” is the one part of the marketing mix that will generate income for a business. The other members of the four P’s will all cost money to produce or undertake.

Our organisation has tweaked its business web page so DVDs for children appears very regularly and more people can find us via search engines.

Place

Place is the part of the marketing mix that is often disregarded by companies, but it is still an important part of selling your product effectively. In a nutshell, it describes the way in which you provide your product to your consumer, and consequently how you receive money from them. It can be a great marketing approach when applied correctly.

The most common ramifications of place-based marketing are the physical venues in which your products are sold. For the vast majority of consumer products, this involves the distribution infrastructure between your manufacturing plants and shops or other outlets around the world. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is crucial to determine your own priorities and modify your distribution network accordingly. This is the primary application of this part of the marketing mix.

With the growing use of the Internet by your prospective customers, marketing techniques have had to consider how they use the Internet to help distribute their products. By using the Internet as a point of contact (or even as an entire distribution route in download-based markets such as MP3s) firms are now able to reach out to a large pool of possible customers.

Promotion

When you mention the word “marketing”, most people instantly think of the promotional aspect of the marketing mix, although as we have seen, this is only one branch of a more comprehensive system. Promotion can be employed on a very individual basis or as a mass communication tool, and whilst it can be a costly undertaking it is often an essential one. The key concern of promotion is to deliver a certain message that will increase sales.

Advertising is one of the most typical forms of promotion. Typically it would be done by posting on billboards, creating short clips for TV and radio or by physically distributing flyers or leaflets to potential buyers. With the coming of the information age we have seen a great increase in promotion via e-mail and the Internet, or simply as targeted advertising materials posted through your door.

Another significant part of promotion involves branding, which will not necessarily yield more product sales directly, but relates back to one of the initial functions of marketing; getting customers to choose your product over those of your rivals.

Putting it into Practise

As previously mentioned every business is different and will have different marketing requirements. By using a balance of the four P’s discussed above you can take a good view of your own marketing strategy.