Category Archives: Business

Where Can you Get RAL Tester Pots?

DIY, General, Home & Garden, Shopping,

With many more items being offered in colours in the RAL colour range, it can be useful to know where to get RAL tester pots so that you can check the colour before ordering.

RAL colours come in 210 shades for the matt colours and 183 in a gloss finish. They have been around since 1927.

You can actually buy RAL spray paint colours online for around £10 plus postage and you can get some more common colours in spray paint form from Amazon (see example to the left).

For example, many doors and windows come in anthracite grey which is RAL 7016, so if you need a touch up for that you can certainly get hold of something like that on the left.

In another example, a well known kitchen company offers kitchen that can be painted in any colour in the RAL spectrum. But obviously if you want to check out the colour that you are thinking of buying, then you might want to know where you can get RAL tester pots.

One place that you can go to in the UK is to Homebase where they have a Dulux mixing desk. here they can pretty much mix to any colour that you want including colours in the RAL spectrum.

So it is worth buying a couple of tester pots for £3.29 to decide on what colour you want the whole kitchen to be painted before going ahead with a big purchase like that.

Obviously when you get paint from different sources there may be slight differences in the actual result of the colour achieved so complete matching may be tricky.

In fact if you look online at pictures of specific RAL colours (for example google RAL 1013) you will get a massive variety of shades for one actual colour which will make it difficult to decide what it actually looks like!

What Are the Chances of Winning the Lottery?

Entertainment, Finance & Insurance, Fun Stuff, Games, General, Lifestyles, Money, Recreation, Society

What are the chances of winning the lottery with 59 balls?

In October 2015 the national lottery in the UK increased the number of balls in the draw from 49 to 59, thus making it much harder to actually win the jackpot.

Previously, choosing 6 numbers from 49 would give you a 1 in 14 million chance of winning the lottery but now with the extra 10 numbers to pick your 6 numbers from, the chances have massively decreased to 1 in 45 million.

This increase in the number of balls and decrease in the chance of winning have been proven with the fact that the jackpot has continued to be an elusive prize that has not been won since the changes were made, contributing to a massive jackpot of £50 million + which could go on for a couple of weeks.

Tonight’s draw (6th January 2016) will be the 14th rollover jackpot – continuous rollovers since the new rules were introduced. This could trigger more people to buy tickets just because of the size of the jackpot which could then mean that more of the number combinations are covered.

The national lottery website says the following about the limit on the size of any rollover jackpot:

The jackpot can only stand at £50 million for two draws. If no one wins in the second draw, the full amount rolls down and is shared between the players in the next winning prize tier.

So it might be worth waiting to see if anyone wins the jackpot this time and if they don’t then there might be a great chance of winning more money with lower odds in the draw where the jackpot will be filtered down if no-one wins. This would be next Saturday 9th January 2016.

If no-one wins the jackpot on Saturday then the chances of winning with 5 numbers and the bonus ball are around 1 in 7.5 million which is almost twice the odds as winning the jackpot before the numbers were expanded to 59!

So if you want to know what are the chances of winning the lottery with 59 balls then I would say much better if you wait until the jackpot has to filter down!

Does Niche Affect CPC?

Business, Internet, Money, ,

The question does niche affect CPC was one that I asked myself after some comments I got from potential buyers on a site I was selling on Flippa.

To summarise, CPC is cost per click from advertising like Google adwords which is the amount you get each time an end user clicks one of your ads.

A couple of potential buyers of my site had said to me that they had analysed the CPC for the niche that my site related to, and that the CPC was very low – about $0.02.

So I got a bit despondent and thought that may be why, although the site had tons of traffic, maybe that was why I was not earning as much ad revenue as I thought I should. So I went to the site and had a look around and came to a different conclusion. All of the ads that I saw referred to stuff that I personally was interested in or had searched for recently. None of the ads related to the topic of the website.

I also went back over the time I had had the site (nearly 4 years) and checked out the CPC. It was way higher than the $0.02 that the buyers had told me was the going rate for that niche.

One question I don’t know the answer for is – do the advertisers bid a particular rate for their ad showing in a particular niche? – and if that is the case then the niche might well be relevant to the CPC. But if the answer is No then surely the niche does not have much effect on the CPC at all.

The key to the CPC rate therefore must surely be the type of ads that are shown to the viewers of the website and what kind of things they are interested in. So to that extent the niche may have a bit of influence on the CPC because let’s say your website is about high end finance, then your end users may well be interested in stuff that would generate a high CPC. But if your website could appeal to anyone (which mine would, albeit mostly women) then the ads could surely be from any niche?

I went in search of info about how to increase CPC and to be honest I got a lot of rubbish. Some of the advice firstly was to select a high end niche to base your blog/website on – well that’s not much good for those who already have a website to start with. But I wasn’t impressed with much of the rest of the stuff I read. More useful were some posts saying not to worry too much about CPC, but to instead concentrate on ad look and placement to increase CTR. This seemed like good advice to me, especially after I went back and checked the CTR and I found it to be pretty low. I made some changes to the site style and ad location, as well as the colour scheme of the ads and hey presto, an increase in CTR almost immediately!

So, does niche affect CPC? I would say only to a limited extent, depending on who you are targeting with your niche, but it is not eh be all and end all of increasing ad revenue on your website.

How Many People Will I Reach for a $1 Boost?

Business, Social Networks & Online Communities,

So this was on my mind recently when I realised that the only way to reach the majority of people who had liked my facebook page was to boost one or more of my posts.

I had, like everyone else with a facebook page, come to the realisation that effectively facebook pages are not free advertising any more, because facebook limits the number of people who see what I post. It seems like my posts only get seen by about 15% of people who like my page (at the most, sometimes less) and most of those people are friends of mine who are probably not really the people I am trying to reach, much as I love them 🙂

So I wondered, if I paid to boost my post, how many people will I reach for a $1 boost?

I put in $1 to the amount field but it told me it couldn’t compute how many people this would reach! So I thought I would conduct an experiment with that $1 and see what the results were.

The result was that 41 people were reached by paying $1. Now I guess it depends on demographics and area etc as to whether it would be the same again for another day or another page, but at least this gives a bit of a guide. The other interesting thing was that unpaid reach was much more than on any other post too, I would say at least 25% more, so it seems that maybe paying this dollar helps to spread your post in other ways too.

I will likely pay the odd dollar here and there to keep my posts in people’s feeds although I’m not totally sure how much extra business it might get me!