Peanuts to Profits With Thor Schrock
Peanuts to Profits With Thor Schrock

I would like to welcome Phil Walker and his website, www.plattevisions.com to the family of websites hosted and optimized by Schrock Innovations. Those of you who know who Phil Walker is may also know that his award-winning Visions Along the Platte River Valley CD series has sold more than 10,000 copies and is now featured in classrooms across the state as an interactive tool to teach Nebraska’s rich history.

I received a request for an interview today from the Midlands Business Journal regarding the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I staunchly believe that SEO is a must-have tool in any small or medium size businesses’ marketing toolbox, and after the 45 minute interview and numerous real-time examples of our current efforts and results, the interviewer had what she needed for her story.

The Midlands Business Journal is a weekly business newspaper that has been circulating state-wide for more than 75 years in Nebraska. Jill Hanson was the interviewer and we started our conversation speaking about how Google rates websites where it does. I explained that there are black-hat (bad) and white hat (good) methods that can be used to “encourage” Google to rank a website near the top of its results for a given search term. The good methods are above board and accepted by Google, while the bad methods are far easier to implement but will eventually get your website de-indexed (removed from all Google search results).

I used our newest client, Phil Walker as an example of the dramatic improvements that can be made in a website’s ranking with the smallest of changes. Phil Walker produces the Visions Along the Platte river Valley CD Series, and has sold more than 10,000 copies of his Nebraska History CDs since he started the series.

We have finalized the specifications for this year’s Holiday special, and I need one more person who wants a computer that will run circles around anything else out there for years to come.

As many of you know, each year at Schrock we put together an amazing computer for the holiday season and sell a limited number of them at our cost. The system always retails for $1,499.99, and has become know in Lincoln and Omaha as a unique opportunity to lay your hands on an extremely advanced system.

Channel 10/11 stopped by the Lincoln Service Center today to interview someone about Dell recalling 4.1 million batteries that could overheat and explode. The batteries, made by Sony, span more than 4 years of Dell notebook computers.

I was giving prepared remarks at the LIBA Luncheon, so Blaze filed in for me and did an outstanding job. You can watch the video on the 10/11 website!

Schrock Innovations is sponsoring August’s LIBA Lunch meeting next Tuesday. I will be addressing the membership about the often underestimated value of a website as part of a well rounded marketing plan. I also had a corresponding article published as part of this month’s LIBA Magazine that is mailed to the membership.

Although the majority of my prepared remarks have been ready for well over 2 weeks, I will have an 8 lb 12 oz. helper who will help me drive home the value of a well constructed and deployed website.

If you fail to ride the wave of change you will find yourself beneath it. For the past 4 weeks that overused motivational phrase has been my compass as all of the employees of Schrock from our web developers to our technicians have come together to launch a new chapter in Schrock Innovations history.

As many of you may have heard on the radio Saturday, I launched Schrock’s 2006 Back to School Sale. For the first time ever, we are now carrying notebook computers in stock. While I could bore you with all of the logistics and reasons we have not done this in the past, I think it is much more interesting to explain why it is important for the future.

The Journal Star’s feature article today about the new E-Waste recycling program available at Schrock Innovations has generated a surge in demand for computer recycling services.

Last week Schrock Innovations announced a major change to its policies on recycling old and obsolete computers. We are now the only place in Lincoln where businesses and consumers can recycle unlimited e-waste with no disposal fees.

If you frequent the Schrock Innovations Computer Repair website you may have noticed a new graphic on the bottom left corner of all of our pages. This is a tool provided free of charge by AltaVista that will allow you to instantly translate any page on the Schrock Innovations website into 8 different languages!

Since the launch of the Do It Yourself Computer Repair section of our website, we have been getting an ever increasing number of visitors from outside the United States. While our primary concern is always our local Nebraska customers, people outside of Nebraska and outside of the US also have computers and need help too.

The Schrock Innovations newsletter has started to hit the homes of our customers (I received mine yesterday). If you have not received yours yet, or you are not on the Schrock mailing list, you can download and read an electronic copy at www.schrockinnovations.com.

The newsletter is in PDF format, so you will need Adobe’s Acrobat Reader to open it. You can download Acrobat free on the Adobe website at www.adobe.com.

A new security loophole has surfaced in Microsoft Word 2002 and greater that could leave your computer open to any number of attacks. Microsoft acknowledged the threat today and explained a work around that does not immediately fix the problem, but would limit some of the effects if you were hit by a bug that exploited this vulnerability – run Microsoft Word in Safe Mode.

Running Word in safe mode is a little like running Windows in Safe Mode. It will restrict some of its higher-level functions such as integrating with Outlook as your email client.