Is there any way to get rid of the list of recently accessed files? Actually, yes and it is quite easy to do. First, you should get the name of file (files) that you want to remove from recently opened list, then you should find the place where the list is kept and then you should remove the particular record.

It is easy to do for Windows recently opened file list, as the only thing you should do is to find the folder "recent" in Windows directory and delete links from there. Or a better option is to use an option built in task bar, but unfortunately, this function is no longer available in XP.

What about the list of recently opened files of other types. It depends a lot on many factors, for instance, for MS Excel or MS Word it is easy to find necessary records in Windows registry. For this very task you should run regedit program. You will need to select Run option in Start menu and type there "regedit". Then you will need to use built in regedit search function and find the record by the name of the file that was recently opened. The problem might be that you cannot just delete the record as this might damage the list of recently opened files and you will never see the MRU list again, but I think you'd wish to, as it really save a lot of time.

Also, there are a number of programs that doesn't allow to clear the list at all. For instance, for MS One Note, you will not be able to find a good way to clear the list of recently accessed files. Special software utilities will be needed in this case.

You might also want to clear the list of records in your browser. This task is much easier as developers of popular web-browsers are concerned about possible security problems and suggest a way to clear browser records, such as types links, cookies, recently accessed pages and so on.

Are records about recently opened files a sensitive information? Yes! If you will hide this information from possible intruder, then you will make his work much harder. But there is another problem with list of recently accessed files and browser records. Typically, it is easy to clear all records, even these you don't need to clear, so this is a big challenge for browser developers, it would be better, if someone could point only to the files and records that should be cleared, not all files and records.

Let's start with article marketing itself. First, what kind of investment you need to do? You will need to write an article for submission purpose and you will need to submit it to 100+ web-sites or just to few major ones. The costs for copywriting service start at 10$ per 500 words and depend a lot on quality of the article. As for submission you can do it yourself or find really cheap options, for instance you can submit to bulk sites for just 10$. What about results? You will have an article listed on hundred of sites, that tells about your niche, and you will have a link which points to your site. There are good chances that Google will treat this page and the link as useful. As link comes from article which is related to your web-site topic.

What about other methods. What about directory submission? There are a number of directories available, and it is quite easy to submit your site to 100+ directories with high PR. You will be able to specify submission title (e.g. anchor text for you link), your description and your link. Good news is that it will not cost much to submit your web-site to directories starting with PR4 Google rating. But let's think about content where your link will be listed. If you are submitting business management related web-site, then you should carefully choose a category to place your link, the perfect would be "Business > Management", but there will be also a lot of other links. There is no guaranty that Google will treat these links and their description as related to your niche. But directories submission works now fine, it's a cheaper option (or addition) to article marketing.

There are also a number of methods. For instance, it is talked widely, that you should participate in forums for your topic. This is a great idea, but it will cost you much more time to find and answer questions in forums. Also, if you would like to hire someone to answer posts in forum you will have to pay much more than in the case of article marketing or directory submission.

Any other options? Actually, yes. You can run a free link exchange with sites and get inbound links, but in this case you will need to invest your time in finding sites, that are willing to exchange links with you, also, you will have to put a link back to this site. An option might be buying inbound links, it is easier to find sites that will place your link for some fee, but typically you will need to pay for a link each month, that is not a good investment I think, unless you have found a very good sites related to your product's niche.

The best idea about article marketing is that is is measurable, you will easily find out what works and what doesn't work. It is a good long-term investment in your online visibility.

One of the corner-stones of business Philip Kotler defines marketing as human activity directed at satisfying needs and wants through exchange processes. The marketing activities commonly include market research, new product development, product life cycle management, pricing, channel management and promotion.

Two most conspicuous goals of marketing are the acquisition of new customers and the retention of the existing ones. Consequently, the effectiveness of marketing can be quantified and measured in numbers of new customers and new products purchased by the existing ones. Apart from this, there are aspects of marketing effectiveness that cannot be quantified. For instance, the status of a company, its ability to stay at the forefront of the customer's mind are also considered the benchmarks for testing marketing success.

In today's fast moving competitive business world measuring marketing performance is crucial to set future business goals, monitor progress, assess effectiveness and align objectives and tactics. To help businesses thrive marketers utilize analytical data to evaluate, recommend, implement and measure marketing initiatives, which can propel the marketing value of the business.

Marketing success is measured by certain performance metrics, which provide insights into better performance management. Some factors within the marketing framework contribute to enhancing performance management. They include aligning activities and resources with strategies and goals, linking marketing performance to financial performance, establishing and maintaining marketing team accountability, integrating and optimizing cross-functional spending, and improving the efficiency of marketing activities.

Many marketing system analysts argue that marketing performance is inherently ambiguous because it is difficult to say what is measured. Without well-defined performance metrics it is problematic to answer the question how the marketers calculate the value of a marketing campaign.

Marketing performance metrics differ depending on whether the aim is to evaluate performance for consumer or business to business companies. To diagnose the performance of both marketing communications such metrics as media effects analysis, integrated marketing communications tracking and customer satisfaction tracking are often employed. Other cutting-edge marketing performance metrics are brand equity and customer equity analyses.

However, depending on the situation different companies can focus on different types of metrics. Thus, efficiency metrics are aimed at describing the cost to execute marketing projects or campaigns, i.e. staff hours per project and cycle time per project. Program metrics are employed to measure effectiveness by comparing the costs and results. Brand metrics are used to measure attitudes related to a product by means of surveys. The knowledge of the brand, preferences for the brand, purchase intentions and product satisfaction enable marketers to predict future purchases. Customer value metrics help to estimate future sales by individual customers and customer segments. Segment results are of special importance because customers from different spheres of business, demographic groups and other categories tend to behave differently. The principle measures here are retention and purchase rate, which are derived from historical data.

It is essential to consider different metrics when building a system for marketing performance measurement.

Appropriate performance measures can include calculation of rates of return, space quality and comparison to market, unresolved transactions, monthly feedback by staff, accuracy and completeness of property records, quality assessment of properties, client surveys on staff performance and occupancy patterns.

Occupancy rates can be increased on condition of the availability of the right amount of space at the right time ? that's what prospective customers usually await. Meeting their expectations is key to customer retention and consequently to higher performance level.

In addition to other information, the occupancy rates can be viewed by property, lease changes, rent roll, operating statements and accounts receivable information. If the company gets the actual data, from accounts payable and receivable to lease origination and occupancy patterns it manages the entire portfolio cost effectively.

Building up value oriented real estate management, property companies look forward to the optimization of the portfolio and the relevant services seeking to measure strategic orientation, structures, processes, qualifications, performances together with the costs and resources by certain benchmarks.

Benchmarking is a continuous learning process targeted at creating advantages by means of identifying the problem, whether it is realization in profit or cost reduction potential, and finding the right solution. The latter can be the result of a profound analysis of the company's own experience as compared with others'. The points of the comparison may be standardization of properties information, a uniform performance measurement, identification of performance gaps and others.

To find the best solution to future development problems the benchmarking system known as the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is used for measuring and monitoring business performance. Designed as an early warning system it is based on the assumption that a future-oriented consideration of value influencing factors contributes to the optimized evaluation of the company's future progress. The benchmarks provided by the system enhance detailed controlling necessary for the further promotion of corporate processes and enable the company to evaluate the future ability of the property. The Balanced Scorecard goals may include several strategies. For instance, customer orientation means achieving client satisfaction. Financial perspective concerns providing financial management of real estate assets as well as managing and minimizing risk. Internal processes involve standardizing and organizing the tools to estimate usage efficiency. Growth projection is connected with management efficiency.

In other words the company can employ the effective instrument to measure the performance of the portfolio with regard to real estate controlling. Relevant evaluation gives information of present risks of investment and use as well as corporate rating resulting thereof. Identifying risk areas is a prerequisite for building up an effective real estate and services controlling.

Does performance measurement tools worth investing in? Actually, the question is do you realty want to measure and control real estate performance? I'm sure you will find performance measure tools to be must have to this business.

Efficiency is the primary quality measured in the Financial Perspective, and with the Balanced Scorecard used as a measurement system, it particularly means that the strategy execution should lead to improved results. Planning real estate processes should be focused on the strategic importance of occupancy costs to define, manage and measure them. It will provide information of business's true profitability and lead to more accurate valuation of real estate assets.

Occupancy cost escalation has a significant impact on how firms use their office space. If the business occupies too much space, it leads to overpaying that does not match the budget, and the company carefully reconsiders the utilization of the office space in an effort to reduce occupancy costs and achieve planned income goals. This primarily concerns law firms ? large consumers of office space. Among cost-saving measures there are strategies including moving support functions to less expensive space within a building or a combination of less expensive space and lower improvement costs which can also reduce location expenses. However cost-sensitive firms seek to measure and compare occupancy costs before considering facility relocation.

Sometimes it is problematic to assess true occupancy costs because of complex leases, billing procedures which often result in billing errors, and unexplained charges assessed by landlords and property owners. Besides, business costs can be disguised as occupancy costs and distort the productivity of a particular real estate asset. Without a good benchmarking system occupancy cost accounts are often used inappropriately and can hide the real expense of the use of an asset.

To solve these problems the National Association of Accountants (NAA) has established benchmarks for defining occupancy costs related to the use of real estate assets by business. The number of items which are assigned to occupancy costs can be broken into two types: those that fall under costs of operation and those that are associated with costs of providing the fixed asset.

Day-to-day operational expenses like maintenance, utilities, and management provide examples of costs of operation. Capital costs, property taxes, insurance, and depreciation charges refer to costs of providing assets.

Following the principle of charging costs to occupancy expense accounts as they would be charged in the open market, the NAA suggests four tests. The first focuses on the question if the expense reflects a cost of providing, maintaining or using real estate, while the others center on the cost as it compares to current market conditions. Accounting occupancy cost separately provides a basis for comparison, measure business performance exclusive of occupancy costs, and measure underlying real estate values separate from business performance.

On the whole companies consider Financial Perspective as a factor determining long-term profitability. One of the prerequisites for building up a profitable real estate business is assessing the corporate strategy shown in the balanced scorecard with regard to the perspective in question, assuming it is of key importance to business performance as it tells whether the strategy execution is leading to improved results.

Leading companies tend to focus on a balanced approach to performance measurement to assess processes and identify which of them needs improving before it turns into a serious problem. Customer relations is one of the perspectives to choose measures of key importance.

Whether a company is in the business of building, selling, servicing, or managing property, residential or commercial property managers support customer-driven business strategies that increase insight into operational performance and improve responsiveness to the unique needs of buyers, tenants, users and occupiers of real estate. Balancing customers' needs with the portfolio makes property companies pro-active real estate organizations.

The scorecard framework of a strategic measurement and management system known as the Balanced Scorecard can be modified to this mission as well. It can help to determine which factors, in addition to financial, are critical to the long-term success of a property company. The system enables organizations to transform data into actionable information and manage performance for all strategic objectives including customer relationships.

Customer-centric objectives are aimed at bettering manage relationships throughout the customer lifecycle ? from browsing a business web site, to an interested lead, to a qualified prospect, to a customer who has placed an order, to servicing that customer and to guiding him to re-purchase.

In choosing measures for customer relationships perspective companies dealing with residential property try to develop strategies that meet customers' real estate requirements. They enhance the customers' knowledge needed for effective decision making providing them with information on the company's policies, procedures and regulations. Considering customers the driving force of business, property companies try to obtain customers' feedback to learn about their changing needs and improve the real estate services.

Services which are performed when it comes to renting, buying or selling properties for clients, include ensuring terms and conditions of purchase agreements, acting as an intermediary in negotiations between buyers and sellers, coordinating appointments to show homes to prospective buyers, generating lists of properties that are compatible with buyers' needs and financial resources, participation in listing services and others. Improving the factors that lead to satisfied and active customers conditions successful business activities and procedures and higher level of performance accordingly.

Special programs implemented by many real estate industry leaders as supplemental measure in evaluating operating performance, facilitate strategic relationships with the customers from the initial point of contact through to the closing of the transaction. Thus, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) empowers companies to manage customer relationship management process with dashboard view, lead management, marketing campaigns, advanced forecasting, contact management, opportunity management, etc.

Constant reevaluation of performance measures should be balanced with the need to improve usefulness of the metrics with regard to Customer Relationships Perspective. That can result in higher productivity of business and maximization of revenue.

Even more beneficial form providing publishers with free content and advertisers with free advertising is online article marketing. Article marketing campaigns serve to promote business sites. Free distribution of well-written interesting and informative articles with "bio boxes" and "by-lines" incorporating references and contact information can seriously contribute to enhancing the business credibility and gaining targeted customers.

Online article marketing is considered an effective internet marketing strategy due to the fact that content articles present an unbeatable way of generating links and boosting the search engine rankings. In other words the concern of this type of marketing is the use of articles for search engine optimization purposes. The task of attracting a great number of site visitors results in the attempts to make a page rank higher. This can be done by means of on-line distribution of articles which usually contain numerous links to a business owner's web site. Visitors read through the article, get interested in the subject and click on the link which is placed for them to find out more information. This sends visitors directly to a business web site.

Text links use keywords which are most important to the web site business. These links are valuable to the business in the search engines because the words used to link to the site are read and referenced as important factors in determining the site rank and positioning in the search engines for particular key words. With major search engines well-linked pages have more value. Incoming links are regarded as votes of confidence which rank a page higher. The higher the rank of a page, the more traffic oftentimes it has, and consequently the more likely it will increase the website's rank within search engines. Many web site owners try to set up trade links with other businesses or even hire special firms to make inquiries to related sites for incoming links.

Much of a business success depends on the circulation of the article on the internet when it comes to providing traffic direct to the web site. As search engines identify the article on other sites, they credit a business site with links. The more articles published, the higher is the site's search engine ranking.

Submitting articles to directories such as other web sites, blogs or on-line magazines (ezines) is one of the ways to generate thousands of backlinks to a business web site. The revenue of such ezines is based on targeted search ads to web site visitors. Many of the ezines are published on a regulated basis (weekly, biweekly or monthly) providing free access to their content.

Skillfully written content articles can bring positive long term effect and foster the growth of a web site business. The benefits of on-line article marketing are increased site traffic, improved search engine rank and lead generation.

Is everything so simple? Actually, no. It's not hard to get many back links by submitting web-site to on-line link catalogs. But this method will bring even bad web-site in the top of search results. It worked a year ago, it works today too, but search engines are trying to fight with this issue and the possibility of getting high in search results for sites like these is getting lower. Why search engines do this? Because having many back links is easy and everyone with enough money can get these back links.

If not back links then what? Google is getting more clever and it is now taking into account not only links, but the quality of the source page and the content of the source page. So, it worth getting links from good pages (high PR) and relevant content.

For now, there are two opportunities to get a link from page with relevant content and high PR. First, you can buy this link. Depends on PR it will cost 20-100$ per month. But sometime it is really hard to find appropriate page to link from.

Another SEO tool is submission to ezine sites. There are a number of sites, that will be glad to take your content and put it on their web-site with a link back to you. It is good for you as you will have a link from relevant web-site. More over, you will be able to provide third-party with reprint rights, and you will have even more links from relevant web-sites.

But what about investment is submission articles? Does it cost money? Sure, you can do everything yourself. First, you will need to have a good article, you can write it yourself or ask copywriter to do it for you. Then you will need to submit this article to ezine websites. There are 3-5 main web-sites with high traffic and high PR, and you can submit to them manually, but to have a better SEO effect, you should also submit to another 100+ sites. If you will write 2 or more articles it will take too much time to submit to 100 sites. But it is not a problem, as you can hire an article submission service, which will do all the work for you.

How much does article marketing cost? Your first investment will be in copywriting, unique article will cost about 20$-200$, depends on what kind of content you need. Then you will need to submit to article sites, you will need to invest 30-100$, you supposed to pay more if you are using manual submission. Is is a good investment?! Yes, I'm sure you will have a better positions in search engines once you have submitted many articles and this investment is long-term investment, so you will have a long-term results.

When you are inside, you see a lot, I would say you can see to much business and business mechanism, you are flowed with unimportant data, you having too many things to care about and sometime you even don't understand where this business is going. If you are a manager, then it is not a problem, but if you are CEO, then you have to think about things like this.

You will need some information diet, e.g. very limited information, which will tell you a lot about your business. There are different names for this diet, some call it balanced scorecard, another key performance indicators (KPI), also people are using "metrics" and "measures" to understand business better.

That's great, but do we really know what we do? Once someone found a new type "diet" his is trying to use it for his business, but it is a wrong approach. Your business is different, there are departments, such as Sales, HR, Security, Financial. These departments function in a different ways and if you will apply the same information diet to all of them you will fail.

For instance, if you deal with Financial department and have to measure bank loans efficiency. What will you do? Will you be measuring customer satisfaction, growth opportunities and your ability to work with "internal process"? All these indicators means NOTHING! What is "customer satisfaction" for bank loan (if you are customer yourself) or if you are bank? You use this words, but you don't want to detail them into some real-life metrics and indicators. That is the most important thing. I'd better have 6 bad indicators, that 60 great mission statements without any mean.

If you will ask me about performance and how to measure it, I will not answer you that you should measure customer satisfaction or bank's loan financial aspect, I will answer you: "Give me metrics!", "Give me indicators!"

What is bad, good and great performance indicator or metric? It is up to you and up to your business, but there are some common issues one must remember.

First, metric or indicator must measure. It should me math formula, equation, function. It must look like X = F(A1, A2, ... An). Where A1-n is the number of indicators you must look at and the F is the function which tells what to do with indicators. X is the performance value.

What is bad indicator? It is when you tell, let's measure customers' satisfaction in bank loan niche. You don't tell about what are you going to measure, how you are going to measure this, it's not a metric, but it's a good mission statement that tells about nothing.

What is great indicator or metric? It is the good metric (which we where talking above), but it is taken from some real-world business. So, it's not just your idea or ideas of some reported from business magazine, it's idea that works and it was checked by you. What you will need to do? You will need to pass it through you own business and optimize it to your business tasks. Work hard with business performance, and soon you will have a great business control tool.

Most businesses believe that marketing effectiveness is expressed solely in numbers. Apparently, there are aspects (metrics) of marketing effectiveness that can be quantified and measured. The first and foremost goal of marketing is to create customers. Consequently, the effectiveness of this aspect of marketing can be evaluated by the number of new customers, new leads of a company or, in case of telemarketing, the number of completed calls. Another significant metric of effectiveness is the number of new products purchased by existing customers since the objective of any enterprise that intends to stay competitive in the market is not only to create new customers but to value and retain the ones they have already.

Apart from the above there are aspects of marketing effectiveness that cannot be quantified. Many marketing analysts state that the mission of marketing is to establish an environment in which the customer appreciates the benefits of doing business with your firm, to set the stage for making the sale, to create the circumstances that make the sale the next logical, appropriate step. The uniqueness of a company that sets it apart from the competitors, its strong hold on the market place, i.e. the status of a company as the acknowledged leader in the field, the ability to stay at the forefront of the customer's mind can all be considered the benchmarks for testing marketing success of an enterprise.

Marketing effectiveness that results in businesses achieving its sales targets, enhanced profits and increased bottom line performance is determined by both quantified and non-quantified metrics. The concept of singling out certain metrics when analyzing the efficiency of marketing policy and performance has been adopted by many and continues to evolve. Making marketing more accountable is an opportunity to put the effectiveness of your marketing performance to test. The elaboration of modus operandi for measuring marketing performance has become a hot issue in today's marketing discussions. There are two parties concerned that are interested more than others in the solution of the issue. The first party represented by chief executive officers, chief financial officers and board directors want to know that investment into marketing brings profit. Marketers that make the second party want to proof the same.

The solution of the problem took the form and shape of a scorecard, no surprise. Thus, marketing is becoming the last in the list of business functions to accept scorecards - a concise report featuring a set of measures that relate to the performance of an enterprise, as a means for measuring marketing activities in order to give an all-embracing view of the performance of the above business department.

The fundamental metrics should include not only quantified metrics that are easy to measure (for example, number of new customers, ROI) but also non-quantified ones (brand awareness, brand equity) since it is the latter which are mostly able to determine the long-term vitality of a business. Thus, elaboration of a perfect scorecard measuring marketing performance needs certain training. Surveys show that the ones that already exist may still need some refinement and updating.