The Many Uses of Rawhide

Rawhide dates back to the early Americans. Rawhide uses include shields, drum heads, lace, lamp shades, furniture, wraps, and much more. Rawhide is very firm as it has not been tanned; it has only been de-haired and cured. Soak it in water for molding, cutting and shaping. It dries, stiffens and retains its shape.

Rawhide is frequently and erroneously called leather. Rawhide has been used for many different purposes for thousands of years. Rawhide is made by scraping the skin thin, soaking it in lime, and then stretching it while it dries.

Rawhide is stiffer and more brittle than other forms of leather, and is primarily found in uses such as drum heads or western furniture where it does not need to flex significantly. It is also cut up into strips for use in lacing or stitching, or for making many assortments of dog chews or bones.

Rawhide was used to make par fleches (envelope-like containers), moccasin soles and ropes. Rawhide is what you typically see on Native American drums, par fleches, etc. Rawhide is animal hide which has been dried (by salting). Rawhide is used to make everything from clothing and personal items to building materials, furniture, and tools.

Rawhide is the untreated hide of an animal that remains in its natural state. Several companies use rawhide to make low-friction, high-impact, soft face hammers, mallets, These rawhide mallets are excellent for tooling and stamping oak craft leather.

Prepared rawhide can be purchased at some large craft stores, saddlery shops or leather distributors such as Leather Unlimited. Prepared rawhide may include rawhide goatskin, rawhide pigskin, rawhide drum covers, rawhide lace, and many other products.

Making your own rawhide is much easier than tanning a hide for the novice, and is quite cheap. Once this is done, turning a raw skin into rawhide is a somewhat simple process. If you want to save it for later use, once the rawhide is dry, roll it gently and tie with a lace for storage. When you are ready to use the rawhide, soak it again in a five gallon bucket until it is soft again, usually about fifteen to twenty-four hours, depending on the thickness of the hide. If you soak a piece of rawhide, then something comes up and you aren’t ready to use it when you planned, you can keep it hydrated for a few days and it won’t hurt it as long as you change the water at least once a day, depending on the temperature. Rawhide is really just skin that has been dehaired, and it has many uses.

Opportunities to work on such crafts as drums, rawhide making, rawhide tanning, cradles, moccasins and many other fascinating primitive technologies are great craft projects. First it must be converted to „rawhide“. Once tanned, the rawhide achieves the soft substance of leather that we are familiar with. Dog chew toys are a good source of rawhide if you don’t need large pieces. Why do you think we call it „rawhide“. : Rawhide is „raw“ because it has not been tanned. Most of the leather we use today is tanned leather, but rawhide is still used to make many products even though it is not technically tanned.

About the Author:

Marketing On A Smaller Budget

When times get tough, marketing budgets seem to be the first thing to be impacted. This is generally the case because upper management doesn’t see a direct return for the dollars being spent. This is unfortunate but the fact of the matter is that many marketing professionals have not done a good job of measuring the effectiveness of their marketing results. And as a result, their marketing dollars are seen as unnecessary.

The good news is that as the economy struggles, advertising, direct marketing, and other forms of promotion can be negotiated. Long gone are the days of $20 CPM’s. Keep in mind that everyone is struggling and as a result, you can often get a better price on what you’ve been purchasing.

Take stock of all of your marketing spend. Whether it’s for online advertising or simply direct mail, get a good understanding of all the costs involved in your project. Perhaps you’ve been sending post cards to your target prospects. Speak with your printer or mail house and see how they might be able to improve their pricing. With direct mail you have numerous options. Don’t be afraid to negotiate the cost of supplies.

Another area that marketers are reviewing more closely is their online budget. Even though Google Adwords and other sites remain competitive in your pricing, now’s a good time to evaluate what aspects of your online spend are most profitable. If you’re not sure, use a free resource like Google analytics to better understand where your money is best spent.

After a thorough review of your marketing expenses, your are in a much better position for determining how you can group promotions to lower costs and improve sell through. Consider how you might take advantage of your current campaigns. Do you ask customers to forward a promotion to a friend? Are you communicating to your mailing list on a regular basis? Are you collecting information about your consumers that can help you customize your campaigns and improve conversion rates? Think through each touch point and how you might improve your sales.

To be effective with a smaller budget, you really need to consider how you can reduce costs while improving the effectiveness of your marketing. Reducing costs can seem a bit frightening at first but assume that you can still improve your results with less marketing. In essence, you are focusing on enhancing the results of your campaigns while purging what hasn’t worked.

There are a number of ways to impact your marketing success regardless of budget size. Improving your results requires an in-depth review of your previous marketing efforts and a full understanding of what has worked for you in the past and what is likely to work for you in the future. Focus on leveraging your existing campaigns by asking for referrals and marketing in a viral way. By doing so, you can have others market for you. This eliminates significant costs and can certainly help you grow your business. Improving results with a smaller marketing budget is more than possible. Just give it some thought, apply what you know works and eliminate the rest.

About the Author:

Frequently Asked Question about Google…

To be successful online you might want to use Google Adsense. You can have your websites advertise other peoples websites that have different kinds of products. When someone clicks on one of the ads on your site you get paid for that click every time it happens. This is very effective and doesn’t cost much at all to do. Plus, making money from your website is the goal and this is the easiest way to do it.

However, there are also some FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) related to Google Adsense. So, below, there are answers to these FAQs.

What are channels? These work towards facilitating the advertiser to go through detailed reports related to some specific ads. This is, in fact a superb way to locate the kind of ads that are doing well and to which websites they are on and lead to maximum traffic to your site. The channels can be categorized into two basic types namely; URL and Custom. URL channels would want you to enter a URL you desire track. You can also opt a full website or some of its pages. Custom channels allow you to get information through a specific advertisement in order to compare them.

Most sites want to know how they get paid and when they will get paid and how much. Usually they are paid monthly. The minimum is usually about one hundred dollars. Usually you get paid in 30 days and it can be by check or it can be by deposit to your checking account. Most of the time you need to reach a thresh hold of at least $100 before they issue a payment. Lets say you made $130 in September you would get paid in October. Again, if you only made $50 in September you would have to wait until you made at least another $50 before you would get paid the next month following. You must hit the $100 thresh hold to get paid.

One of the most common concerns of a lot of website hosts for ads is whether they have any control over the advertisements placed on their website. These websites tend to get an opportunity for content filtration that arrives in for advertisements. All you require to do is to simply opt for the competitive Ad Filter in the Adsense set up tab. This will allow you to filter the content.

Can I make a lot of money? There is always that possibility, but you need to have the right ad’s placed with the right content. If it matches up well people will click on those ads and you will make money…how much? There isn’t a way to determine it except for testing it out…

How much to start? It only cost five dollars to get set up once you have that you can place your ads. Then you get charged depending on the number of clicks your ad produces. If you have a lot of click you will pay a lot more, not so many click then your bill won’t be so high.

Can I cancel my Adsense Advertising? Of course, you always have the option to stop your ads at any point. Just make sure to send in an email telling Google you would like to stop and your account will stop in about ten days. Keep in mind your advertisers will still want to be paid through that 10 day period as well.

What if I have any other concern or query? There is a superb customer service support team run by Google Adsense and it is available 24×7. You can easily contact them through phone or email in order to discuss issues you face with the program. You can even visit www.adwords.com

About the Author:

Upload Onsite Video Marketing – How You Can Make It Work For You

Upload onsite video is a term now often used in advertising. It is actually a type of marketing that offers many advantages to the advertiser.

The internet has easily become the most popular place. Everyone from all age groups gather to this one virtual place every single day. Businessmen, themselves, are using the internet to their advantage.

Such being the case, it is not surprising to see marketing trends going high-tech, too. Although you can still pretty much see classified ads and posters around, advertising your product online is more effective. One form of online advertising is through the use of videos.

There’s really nothing like having images and sounds to market your products. Even though your images aren’t exactly of good quality, they can still speak about your product more effectively than using plain text alone.

It’s not difficult to make your own videos at all. However, you will need a video onsite tool in order to upload them to certain uploading sites. A video onsite tool is a tool that has the ability to compress your videos to flash video format, and this does not entail a complex procedure at all. In fact, all you have to do is to add a certain code right to your page and then post your files to website’s server.

The next thing you need to do is to look for the perfect site where you can post your video. Certainly, you have heard of YouTube. Almost everybody uses YouTube to broadcast themselves. Even though it is not the best one around, YouTube is clearly the most popular among the uploading sites.

About the Author:

Choosing Just the Right Online Business

When you are trying to choose an online business to start there are so many to pick from that it can get discouraging. A lot of people want to start an online business but they have no idea of what they want to do.

They begin checking out the myriad of different businesses. Then are barraged from every direction with possibilities. This can become a frustrated effort when you can’t figure out which one is best.

Deciding what you want to do to start an online business is the first step. Which do you want to do, promote information products, design websites, provide content and information for other website managers or promote affiliate offers, or one of many other choices?

Then you will need to decide what it is you expect from the business opportunity. In other words, what is it you want to get paid, what kind of support are you expecting, what kind of marketing training do you want, and what kinds of marketing materials do you want to be provided with? These are just a few of the questions that you need to ask yourself.

You should always sit down and make a list of what you like to do and what you expect before you start looking for an online business. No matter what type of business it is that you join you want to make sure it is one that you would love to promote. When you do something that you like such as, a hobby you will have a much better chance of making it successful.

Persistence and hard work will be required with any business, either online or offline for a profitable business. Realize also there is a learning as well as income curve. This is because nothing happens overnight and anything worth doing will require persistence. One doesn’t become successful without some type of education, college or otherwise. Learning the ropes is necessary in any business.

Of course, the first thing when choosing an online business is to decide what to do. If you don’t do this, you will end up baffled by the available possibilities and may decide that this is not for you. If you determine this ahead of time, you can weed through the various possibilities and discard those that don’t apply to you. This will allow you more time to research the one that ends up being just right for you.

Summary: Among people many want to start an online business but don’t have an inkling as to what to do. Many ways are available to help find the exact business in which you will be successful.

About the Author:

SEO Shouldn’t Be a Retro-Fit Add-On, It’s Way More Important Than That!

I’ve just had a meeting with a potential client regarding their website. They launched into a list of things they wanted including, videos, animations, 360 degree images etc. What they hadn’t thought about was the whole purpose of the site. Who is was for, what it was for, who the stakeholders were and what success looks like.

Building a website is a time consuming and costly exercise. There are many component parts to a website, the look and feel being only one of them. The problem is many people only focus on the pretty pictures and Flash animations, only stopping to think about SEO once the site’s live. This is a recipe for disaster.

SEO starts before a single line of HTML is written or a single pixel has been added to an Illustrator canvas. SEO can be used to help you figure out some of the BIG questions you should be asking when developing a website.

SEO will help you better understand your market, SEO will ensure you understand what your potential market is searching for, SEO will help you understand the competition you are up against. In extreme cases SEO may even help you decide if your proposed enterprise is worth pursuing at all!

Leaving SEO until after your website is live is a big mistake and one that will ultimately cost you dearly. You will be left scrambling around desperately wondering why your site isn’t attracting customers and why Google and the other search engines are not listing your site when people search for what you offer.

Get SEO sorted from the get go and reap the benefits.

About the Author:

Web 2.0 Social Marketing Part-2

Blogs and new web 2.0 sites all along with social medium tools like wikis, podcasts, videocasting, photograph sharing sites, social bookmarking and amid others. Certainly,utilizing web 2.0 technology has become one of the most cost-efficient and effective ways of generating traffic to your website. Blog Reactions are the number of links to the blog’s home page or its posts from other blogs in the Technorati index. A subset of blog reactions, Technorati Authority is the number of distinctive or unique blogs linking to this blog over the last six months.Blogger.com is Googles service for those wishing to setup a blog speedily and get started nand get things happening.

Users can put together and enlarge new business contacts by their obtainable trusted associates and friends. LinkedIn permits users to see what their social groups or colleagues (or connections) are reading and continue updated on what their network is up to. Users of Face book and MySpace write blog entries, upload videos & photos, whereas many social media sites like Flickr and even Twitter these days have social characteristics – friend adding together, individual or group conversations. I do socialize online through Twitter than I do on Face book

Search is your friend, particularly the blog search engines. Remember you are looking for conversations. Search engine advertising/ marketing takes a lesser amount of time to get ranked than old search engine optimization techniques and search engine marketing is less expensive than previous seo techniques. The combination of social marketing, social networking, and other SEO techniques construct a structure that ranks rapidly and stays ranked, hence the companies spend less time to predict what competitors will pay on keyword advertising and more time managing new business they build up from leads generated online.

Links are, and always were, for direct traffic. They are designed to be in high traffic areas where people glimpse or see and click on them. LinkedIn posts new job listings every day and theres a very good probability you will come across one you like. Upload your resume to your profile and list your personal achievements and other remarkable deeds or endeavors.

Interesting and unique content gets forwarded fast – just like a virus. Fresh or new content is gobbled up rapidly. Attention grabbing ideas and content get passed along quickly. Make certain that adding fresh content is a main concern whether its a new booklist, podcast of an author reading, unusual/quirky facts about your community, or a background piece on a forthcoming city or organization occasion.

About the Author:

Internet Marketing With www.eBillboardsNA.com

eBillboardsNA is a Los Angeles based website marketing company, provides a full suite of online website marketing solutions directed to the internet community.

(PRWEB) April 21, 2004 — eBillboardsNA has built a strong technical and sales force aimed at providing the best online marketing services at the most affordable costs in order to service a wider array of online clientele. Their experience goes back 10 years in the Email Marketing arena and another 6 years in the Search Engine Optimization field. eBillboardsNA has most advanced by perfecting a quicker and easier Internet navigation system called Electronic Billboards of North America for those who no longer want to navigate using long complicated and hard to remember domain names, or hunt through thousands of search engine results to find what they are looking for.

With eBillboardsNA they can put your website on the front of all the major search engines. You can also then choose your desired keywords or phrases you would like to appear under. They put your website on the top of all the major search engines and actually open your website in the results. Once registered all traffic derived from your words will now be delivered to your website. You will have access to a login area were you can track your visitors.

Electronic Billboards of North America is intuitive, familiar words and phrases, such as generic phrases and names or a short description of the websites goods or services. For example, if the searcher types „Bank“ into the Search bar of any major search engine on an upgraded computer, they are instantly connected to the respective website.

Electronic Billboards of North America are used in conjunction with search engines to provide direct access to websites, giving users the ability to navigate from any point on the Internet directly to our client’s website, or even a specific location deep within their site.

To avoid many of the problems of the current domain name system, eBillboardsNA manage the assignment of Internet Keywords with the goal of avoiding misdirection of users and misappropriation of trademarks and trade names.

According to a recent Forrester Research study, search engines are the top method for accessing customer sites followed by email, and SEO.

eBillboardsNA.com is currently the largest provider of keywords in North America and is developing standards with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). To rapidly expand this technology, the Company has leveraged its existing customer relationships and is aggressively pursing new distribution relationships around the United States through ISPs, as well as providers of search, directory, e-commerce, portal and content services.

Client’s acceptance of the Electronic Billboards of North America product is almost intuitive. For anyone marketing on the Internet, keywords are foundational to online marketing strategies. Keywords are used in every websites meta-tags (these are hidden text descriptions) to notify search engines which words describe the site. There are also a number of sites that now sell keywords under what is known as a pay-per-click (ppc) model. Search Engine Optimization also focuses strictly on Keywords and meta-tags to increase a websites natural ranking on the major search engines.

eBillboardsNA’s SEO service offers the guarantee that you will not find with most of the other SEO services online, a guarantee of first page placement. They will do everything in their power to place their clients website to be ranked in the natural results on the first page of those major search engines. Where other companies shy away from guarantees in order to stay safe, eBillboardsNA will put their name on the line for their clients.

About the Author:

What Online Business Should You Choose?

Choosing the correct online business to start can be daunting. Most people who want to start an online business have no clue as to what to do.

So they start doing some research to find out about all of the different opportunities. Then they find themselves bombarded with every opportunity imaginable. This can get very discouraging and frustrating because you will not know which one you want to join.

Deciding what you want to do to start an online business is the first step. Which do you want to do, promote information products, design websites, provide content and information for other website managers or promote affiliate offers, or one of many other choices?

The next question is what expectations do you have for your online business? How much do you want to be paid, will it be necessary to pay for support, do you need marketing training and materials? There are many more questions for which you need answers.

Prepare yourself before looking for an online business by taking an inventory of what you do well and what your expectations are. Whatever the business you enter, it must be one you enjoy doing. Working in a field in which you derive pleasure provides you with a better chance of success.

Successful businesses, online and offline, are built on hard work and continual application of business principles. And you won’t make a ton of money when first starting out. Like a plant grown from a seed, success takes time while you apply what you learn. An online college education is cheap at twice the price. Education is one key to success.

Of course, the first thing when choosing an online business is to decide what to do. If you don’t do this, you will end up baffled by the available possibilities and may decide that this is not for you. If you determine this ahead of time, you can weed through the various possibilities and discard those that don’t apply to you. This will allow you more time to research the one that ends up being just right for you.

Summary: Among people many want to start an online business but don’t have an inkling as to what to do. Many ways are available to help find the exact business in which you will be successful.

About the Author:

Use a Unique Offering When Marketing to Internet Marketers

There may be a huge market out there, of business owners looking for informational products; but there also a lot of businesses out there who are catering to the needs of this market. To market your own informational product you’ll need to stand out from the crowd.

You will need to identify your unique selling point if you want to rise above the rest. There are various ways to achieve this:

Targeting Market Niches. You will up the chances of customers choosing your products if you target a defined group of business owners to sell to.

Selling Specific Products. You can specialize in one subject area, such as information on Private Label Rights content. Alternatively, your products can span a range of topics but deliver in particular formats, such as reports.

Experience and Knowledge. You can promote your products by emphasizing your competence in a particular field. People want expert knowledge and if you can establish yourself as an expert in that field you will enhance your credibility. You might want to highlight your business qualifications, such as degrees, or the time you have spent working in a particular niche.

Point of View- Sometimes giving a different point of view on a topic can establish your uniqueness and gain you a nice sharp edge on your competition. For example, maybe you have inside information on a particular topic. This could be used to play on the business owner’s desires.

Establishing a name for yourself- This is a strong tactic to use within the social networking communities. Once you build rapport with the fellow members of the group you have joined; you start to show them what you’re all about. As they get to know you; you start to become a ‚celebrity‘ of sorts within that niche. Voila! You’ve established a name for yourself and people have trust to buy from you.

Broaden your horizons- Get yourself out there to every corner of the internet. Join Message boards, forums, run a blogging community, and utilize all the available tools the internet provides like social bookmarking sites. The more your name is out there, the more your business is known. And then what? More Sales happen.

Show Your Human Side. There’s more to you than business and if you can show your caring and compassionate self, do it. You’ll find networking and trust-building blossoms if you’re not one-dimensional. If your market is work-at-home mums, and you’re one too, don’t be afraid to show it. People relate to people like themselves.

Use Formats Effectively. The conventional way to share information is via written materials, such as articles or eBooks. A different format could make your product and business stand out. You could experiment with:

Video format

Audio format

Teleclasses/Webinars

These formats give your customers a different way to learn their information from. Instead of always having to read a document on their computer, they can watch a video of you talking about it instead. You can also attach a written transcript with it, so they can follow along if they choose or give them something to refer to later on when questions arise.

Making money with informational products taps into online business owners‘ desires: the desire to succeed and the desire to improve their business in order to do that. It adds up to a great opportunity to make money.

Get into this billion dollar industry and market the information they want, need and most of all desire. This is Problem-Solution. They have a problem and you have the solution. You have the knowledge to offer them, so give what they desire-information on how to succeed.

About the Author: