Jeff Rickard

I know I’ve gotten behind on my posts for 1760 MortgageGuide, so I decided to submit a little something about the cost of printing from your home office. I’ve worked with a lot of Realtors and Mortgage Professionals, and I know that they tend to do a lot of marketing straight out of their home offices but I wonder how many do the math and figure out exactly what it’s costing to print those fliers on your handy-dandy inkjet.

Just about everyone has owned an inkjet printer at one time, and experiences differ from person to person as to how well they liked or disliked that printer. I had an Epson several years ago that I used so infrequently the cartridges almost always dried up before I had the chance to expend them, the print head always seemed to be clogged when I did want to print and then I would get these weird stripes down the page. Not the best experience in the world and it put me off Epson’s for years.

Working in several marketing departments throughout my professional career, I’ve had a chance to work with a lot of different kinds of printers and print technologies, from an old black and white laser printer that boasted a smoking fast 1 page per minute print speed over an Appletalk connection, to a Xerox Phaser that used solid wax blocks of ink and boasted 30 pages per minute.

Inkjet printers are cheap. They’re practically given away at every store that stocks them - heck, I saw a stack of HP inkjet’s at Big Lots just before Christmas and they were $20 each - $20! The catch is that they’re given away because the manufacturer knows they will make their money back on the consumables ten fold. It’s kind of like a cell phone - they are given away to get you into the plan and once you’re signed up, everything you really want to do is an ‘extra’ charge.

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Found some updated numbers that I thought I’d share with you real quick.

Was surfing around and came across the Blog World Expo in Vegas next week and they had some interesting numbers.

Blogging Statistics

• Over 12 million American adults currently maintain a blog.
• More than 147 million Americans use the Internet.
• Over 57 million Americans read blogs.
• 1.7 million American adults list making money as one of the reasons they blog.
• 89% of companies surveyed say they think blogs will be more important in the next five years.
• 9% of internet users say they have created blogs.
• 6% of the entire US adult population has created a blog.
• Technorati is currently tracking over 70 million blogs.
• There are over 1.4 million new blog posts every day.
• 22 of the 100 most popular websites in the world are blogs.
• 120,000 new blogs are created every day.
• 37% of blog readers began reading blogs in 2005 or 2006.
• 51% of blog readers shop online.
• Blog readers average 23 hours online each week.

The convention is November 8 & 9th in Las Vegas.

There seems to be some confusion about RSS going around. I’ve been getting a lot of questions about it here in the past couple of weeks, so I thought I’d jump in and talk a little bit about it, offer a quick explanation and hopefully help folks understand what it is and how it works.

I will get back on my top questions about blogs next week.

If you have visited a news website, you’ve probably seen this icon once or twice before and wondered what it was:

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Should I be Blogging?

The last time we talked, it was about one of the most commonly asked questions I get: What is a blog? Now, we’re going to talk a little bit about the second most common question people ask me: Should I be blogging?

Well, that depends.

A lot of people are out there blogging right now. Technorati says it’s something like 71 million. With 71 million blogs out there, there has to be someone reading those blogs, right?
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Jeff has asked, and I’ve agreed, that I contribute to his blog and provide a technical voice to an already wonderful and informative site. I’ve decide that I would start with a couple of the questions I get a lot and then see where the muse takes us. So, without further adieu…

One of the most common questions I get asked these days is: What is a Blog?
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