Once again www.Lynda.com impresses me!

This time it is not the tutorials that caught my attention, it is their business model. After my last post about Lynda.com, I received a comment from a guy named Steve. Wouldn’t you know it that Steve worked at Lynda.com, Amazing!

This company not only realizes that if they have a great product people will spread the word, but they also know that the more they get their business name (and URL) out on the internet with keywords like www.linda.com, tutorial, etc. they will become much more search engine friendly (which = a higher ranking in search results, which = the number one tutorial site, which = more customer sign ups).

Don’t get me wrong Steve from Lynda.com, I am not saying this is a bad thing. I am saying exactly the opposite of that, you guys are doing a great job with the most inexpensive, global reaching marketing medium available, the internet. By the way, the personal touch about thanking me for being a customer, is pretty good too. You just may have my vote as number #1 Lynda fan for your site and business model.

Keep up the good work!

~ Chais Meyer

P.S. The real test will be to see if "Steve" or someone else responds again with a different message, or if it was a robot or a script the first time around. We’ll find out! Lynda.com we are testing you!

Ya, so am I!

I am tired of calling my graphic design friends to ask them a question about adobe cs3 products.

I am tired of spending hours on the internet to try and figure something out in Filemaker Pro.

And most of all, I am tired of finding a tutorial for something I really need to do and then having it not really teach me!

So, What should I do about it? I found my answer today, at www.lynda.com. I’ve always heard of lynda.com and how it had some cool tutorials for some specialty programs, but we are talking over 40,000 videos on over 100 programs!

I signed up for an account this morning and did over one hour of video training on filemaker pro. It has been so helpful! For anyone out there that wants to know more, and is tired of asking people or researching on the web, sign up (It is only $25/month). And NO, I don’t make money for saying this, I just want to share the knowledge to hopefully make your life easier.

Have fun learning and watching their awesome videos, most importantly, Have a Great Day!

~ Chais Meyer

Normally we hear about big business and how businesses go nationwide, not this time!  Control Yours goes local!

We are working on fine tuning our business systems and business model before we branch out to regional or nationwide levels. Becoming a chamber member with our local town’s Chamber of Commerce (in Kearney, NE) allows us to take advantage of the business services they offer. The first service that we are getting for signing up as a chamber member is a chamber email blast.

Normally when businesses send out email blasts they attach files such as PDFs, Jpegs, word documents, etc. We are going one step forward, pushing the envelope to stand out in a stream of advertising, we have created a custom video for the local Kearney area (click here to view this video , it is a 7.5 minute ‘personal’ tutorial of our product).

This provides an awesome opportunity for a small business like ourselves for these reasons:

1) We get one to one face time with 46% of the business owners in Kearney, Nebraska (if they choose to watch our video).

2) We get our business name out in the open (even if they don’t watch the video), so when we call them at a later time, they have most likely heard of our business name.

A couple of obstacles have come to our attention as well when we thought about sending a video through email blast:

1) An email (for the majority of businesses) can only accept a file of 2Mb or smaller as an attachment. A video that is 7.5 minutes long is going to be just a little bigger than that! (about 35Mb) Our solution is to write an email and attach a link to our website, here it is below:

"Hello Kearney Chamber Members,

Control Yours is a local business that has been created by Kearney Locals (Chais Meyer and David Lano). More importantly then where their located is what they are providing to Kearney.

Control Yours is a non traditional business name, named after the services they provide, "Giving Website Control Back to The Business". What does this mean? If you already have a business website or have been thinking about having a website created, You can actually control it! Change any images, any text, pricing on products, menu items, store locations, staff pages, etc.

How much is this service? Nothing upfront. The standard prices are $35 or $50 a month (depending on if you have a website already or you need a new one) and that includes everything.

Control Yours has made a custom video for the Kearney Chamber Members, this video gives a demonstration of how easy this product is to use in your own website. If you want to see how editing your website can be as easy as sending an email click here .

Thank you for your time, and have a Great day!." [Our contact info is listed below this]

2) If this video gets sent out to hundreds of businesses at the same time (which it will) and even 15% ends up going to our site to watch our video, it would hurt our little girly file servers. Meaning, slow video > causing impatient people > won’t want to wait to watch the video >  which will cause us to possibly lose future customers. We can’t go to all this work to piss of the local business owners, so we decided to host our video on Amazon S3 . A very technical (non user friendly) file storage server. The result: very fast download speeds for hundreds and even thousands of people to watch our video at the same time (we can only hope thousands want to watch it, because we’re ready!).

Thank you very much for reading, I hope you have an Awesome Labor Day!

~ Chais Meyer