Wal-Mart spokesman Steven Restivo said Monday that "while we have not shared an exact size of the small format ... we continue to evaluate a wide range of stores sizes across the country and will consider any format that puts us closer to our customers."

Bill Simon, the new president and CEO of Wal-Mart's U.S. business, told investors last week at a Goldman Sachs retail conference, said that "we will have a healthy mix of supercenters and small formats, including our grocery format, Neighborhood Market and smaller formats," he continued. He added that in particular, Wal-Mart is looking to open stores that are similar to the formats in Mexico, Central America, and Latin America.

"We are going to beg, borrow, steal and learn from them as quickly as we can, because it is important for our urban strategy," he added.

Wal-Mart, which now has more than 4,000 stores in the U.S. has hit a wall in the U.S. The company just reported its fifth straight quarterly decline in revenue at stores opened at least a year, considered a key indicator of a retailer's health.

Wal-Mart benefited during the recession as affluent shoppers traded down to cheaper stores. But stubbornly high unemployment and tight credit are still squeezing its main U.S. customers, lower-income workers who are having even more trouble stretching dollars to the next payday because of tight credit and an unemployment rate stuck at almost 10 percent. The discounter's own merchandising gaffes have also contributed to the company's revenue figure's decline.

Wal-Mart's rival Target Corp. is set to spell out more details of its urban strategy on Friday to the media at its headquarters in Minneapolis. Target had told analysts in January that it plans to open in the next few years smaller stores of 60,000 to 100,000 square feet. That compares with its current average of 125,000 square feet. But real estate executives including John Bemis, head of Jones Lang LaSalle Inc.'s retail leasing team, say Target also is looking at 20,000-square-foot locations.

"I think 20,000 makes more sense than 80,000 square feet," Sozzi said.

1. Stop the energy leaks from your home. Just over a fifth of U.S. energy consumption happens at people's homes, says the Department of Energy. That costs the average homeowner $2,400 a year. Half of that goes to heating and cooling, much of which is pure waste. Insulate ceilings and walls. Seal cracks and gaps. "Often people have so many small leaks around the home that it's the equivalent of having a three-foot by three-foot window wide open," says Kateri Callahan, president of the Washington-based nonprofit Alliance to Save Energy.

2. Change your light bulbs. The typical household has 46, says the Department of Energy. But only five of them are energy-efficient compact fluorescents. These can cut light bills by 75%. Don't like CFs? Matt Patsky, veteran green investor and the CEO of Trillium Asset Management, says new LEDs are much better still. They cut energy use by 95% and emit a much softer light. They're more expensive, but prices are coming down pretty quickly.

3. Stop heating an empty house. Or a house when everyone is asleep. Get programmable thermostats. They can cost as little as $50. "They typically pay for themselves in three months," says ASE's Ms. Callahan. They can cut your heating and cooling bills by 10%, she says, without any effect on your comfort at all. Turning down the thermostat in winter (and up in summer) a little helps too: Experts say each degree can trim 2%-3% from your heating bill.

4. Rethink your appliances. Replace any old ones with new, energy-efficient models. The older your current fridge or washing machine, the faster the payback. The more efficient models today have an EnergyStar seal from the Department of Energy. They typically use about 30% less power than a model without the seal, experts say (more details at wwww.energystar.gov). As for your TV: The bigger the screen, the more power it's using. How big do you need? Do you really want to see, say, a life-size Snooki when you're watching "Jersey Shore"?

5. Stop leaving your computers and home entertainment systems on standby overnight. The screen's black but they're still sucking power, needlessly. Power strips make it easier to switch everything off at once, and new smart strips make it easier, for example, to power down the TV while leaving the TiVo connected.

6. Make the most of your green taxpayer incentives. For example, Uncle Sam is offering to pay up to $1,500 of your costs on things like insulation or better-insulated windows, although the program expires at the end of this year. Your state government may provide additional incentives. The best overall guide to these deals is available at DSIRE, the Database of State Incentives for Renewables & Efficiency.

7. Tackle your hot water heater. It's one of your biggest energy users. Put insulation around the heater and the pipes. And dial down the thermostat. They are often set at 140 degrees. That's way too high: The Energy Department suggests turning it down to 115 to 120 degrees instead.

8. Drive a more-efficient car. How wasteful are we on the roads? I once watched a young woman drive through the cobbled streets of Boston's historic North End in a monstrous, gas-guzzling Hummer. She looked sillier than Michael Dukakis in that tank. What are we thinking? Super-efficient hybrids can be pricey, but Jessica Caldwell, director of pricing and analysis at car experts Edmunds, says there are a lot of deals around at the moment that can bring the price down. And you don't have to go hybrid: Ms. Caldwell notes the small Nissan Versa gets 29 miles to the gallon and only costs $16,000.

9. Get a home energy audit. The price of these has come down. For a few hundred dollars, experts using high-tech gadgetry, infrared scanners and computer models will analyze your home, work out in detail all the ways it's wasting energy and tell you what you can do to stop it. As the average home uses about $2,400 worth of energy per year, the payback is often impressive. Matt Golden, chief executive of San Francisco-based specialists Recurve, says he often finds he can cut bills by 20% to 40% just by eliminating waste. An audit can also help you rethink your heating and water systems, and identify possible sources of renewable energy, from solar paneling to a geothermal heat pump, that can help the environment and may save you money over time. Check for firms accredited by the trade body, the Building Performance Institute.

10. Buy an e-book reader. If you read a lot, they are very green. Traditional books, newspapers and magazines aren't: They do a lot of environmental damage, from cutting down trees to manufacturing and distribution. Emma Ritch, senior research analyst at the CleanTech Group, an environmental consulting firm, has done the numbers. Bottom line: A device like the Kindle has about the same impact on the environment as 23 books, or 280 newspapers, or 177 magazines, or some mixture thereof. So if you're going to use it to read more than that, you're helping the environment. By my reckoning, someone who buys a newspaper a day, a magazine a week and three books a month will break even by the fifth month.

1. Keep Your Home Simple
Billionaires can afford to live in the most exclusive mansions imaginable -- and many do, including Bill Gates' sprawling 66,000 square foot, $147.5 million dollar mansion in Medina, Wash. -- yet frugal billionaires like Warren Buffett choose to keep it simple. Buffett still lives in the five-bedroom house in Omaha that he purchased in 1957 for $31,500. Likewise, Carlos Slim has lived in the same house for more than 40 years.

2. Use Self-Powered or Public Transportation
Thrifty billionaires including John Caudwell, David Cheriton and Chuck Feeney prefer to walk, bike or use public transportation when getting around town. Certainly these wealthy individuals could afford to take a helicopter to their lunch meetings, or ride in chauffeur-driven Bentleys, but they choose to get a little exercise and take advantage of public transportation instead. Good for the bank account and great for the environment.

3. Buy Your Clothes off the Rack
While some people, regardless of their net value, place a huge emphasis on wearing designer clothes and shoes, some frugal billionaires decide it's simply not worth the effort, or expense. You can find David Cheriton, the Stanford professor who matched Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to the venture capitalists at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers (resulting in a large reward of Google stock), wearing jeans and a t-shirt.

Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of the furniture company Ikea, avoids wearing suits, and John Caudwell, mobile phone mogul, buys his clothes off the rack instead of spending his wealth on designer clothes.

4. Keep your Scissors Sharp
The average haircut costs about $45, but people can and do spend up to $800 per cut and style. Multiply that by 8.6 (to account for a cut every six weeks) and it adds up to $7,200 per year, not including tips. These billionaires can certainly afford the most stylish haircuts, buy many cannot be bothered by the time it takes or the high price tag for the posh salons. Billionaires like John Caudwell and David Cheriton opt for cutting their own hair at home.

5. Drive a Regular Car
While billionaires like Larry Ellison (co-founder and CEO of Oracle Corporation) enjoy spending millions on cars, boats and planes, others remain low key with their vehicles of choice. Jim Walton (of the Wal-Mart clan) drives a 15-year-old pickup truck. Azim Premji, an Indian business tycoon, reportedly drives a Toyota Corolla. And Ingvar Kamprad of Ikea drives a 10-year-old Volvo. The idea is to buy a dependable car, and drive it into the ground. No need for a different car each day of the week for these frugal billionaires.

6. Skip Luxury Items
It may surprise some of us, but the world's wealthiest person, Carlos Slim (the one who could spend more than a thousand dollars a minute and not run out of money for one hundred years) does not own a yacht or a plane. (Reducing the amount you spend is the easiest way to make your money grow.)

Internet Marketing is a valuable component to any domain or website, but if there are no measurable results, then it becomes useless. It is important to find a web company that delivers these measurable results. By utilizing web traffic analytics to study the behavior of your visitors, your site can be optimized for those visitors. They should collect a range of relevant metrics and data from your website's visitors and measure it against key performance indicators, allowing them to monitor your website, making targeted recommendations to improve your campaign. Better yet, website traffic analytics give you the ability to make informed marketing decisions instead of basing critical decisions on assumptions.

They should greatly help you maximize your conversion through a continuous process of refinement and measurement, ensuring that your marketing dollar is stretched as far as it can go. Being able to make recommendations based on factual data offers enhanced campaign performance for everyone.

Here is a good step by step that you and your web company should take to set up a good conversion analysis program:

Understand your customers - Who are your customers and what do they need? Identifying these components contribute to the foundation and direction of the campaign.

How do your customers use your website? Traffic Analytics allows us to capture how your visitors use your site. What do they click on? What don't they click on? What pages cause abandonment? How much time do they spend on your site? How many pages do they view? And so fort.

Improving Website Content/Article - a majority of websites around the web has lack quality content. Adding relevant content contributes to improving the site for visitors and for search engines.

Highlight calls to action - It is critical to establish the practice of providing your visitors a way to contact you at any point on your website. If your goal is to generate more contacts and leads, then you should always present a method of contacting you on every page, like asking for their name and email address.

Test, Analyze, Refine, Re-test - The most important component of conversion is to be able to create a website and campaign that has proven and successful results. To do this, it is necessary to implement a strategy, test, refine and retest to create an even stronger strategy.

Following a general plan like this should help your conversions and will at least get you on the right track for making the changes that will help your business.

Everybody wants to know how to make money online. How do you do it? There are lots of different strategies and methods, but what you go after is largely dependent on your personal skills, what your budget is, and how much time you have to work on it. I'm going to give you a quick overview of some of the popular strategies and methods that are used to make money online.

One of the newest, and most popular, strategies is social media. Twitter and Facebook have exploded with users all talking to each other about what they like and hot. If you are unfamiliar with these sites, they can seem a little intimidating to get started with. Not to fear! If your 14 year old niece can do it, so can you. Facebook allows you to start up your own a fan page that you can use to advertise your business on your pages and it is a nice place to send people interested in what you're selling. Whenever someone "likes" your page, all of their friends can see that, and may come to see what the buzz is about. This is a great way to build your fans virally, and gives you a simple forum posting to talk about your business to people who are receptive to your pitch. Twitter allows you to place a web short link and a little message in your profile that goes straight to your business page. You can also place links to your site in your tweets. Just remember that nobody wants to get bombarded with ads. Don't be a spammer! The best part about social media is that it's free!

Another free method that just requires a bit more effort is article marketing. Articles can be uploaded on many different article writing sites that build links back to your business site. When you sign up at article publishing sites, you want to write a short profile about yourself and include a link back to your site. When your article is accepted and published, your resource box is added to the end of your article and gives your readers the ability to click your link and find their way into your sales funnel. This method is great if you enjoy writing, but it takes time to build traffic. The more articles you can write the more you can output, the more links you build back to your site. The articles stay up on the web almost forever, so they continue to drive traffic long after you have expended the effort to create them.

The most popular way to build immediate traffic to your site is through pay-per-click advertising. This method can get complicated, as Google (the most popular place to advertise) has lots of rules you must follow to advertise with them. Do your research first to find out what Google wants before you spend any money on a google adword campaign! If you set up an ad campaign the wrong way, Google (along with Yahoo and Bing adopting some stricter requirements) can shut down your advertising and may even ban you from advertising with them altogether. So educate yourself, read their TOS and Terms of Use, and then build out quality campaigns to make the most of your advertising budget.

These are not the only strategies and methods to make money online, but they are the most popular for people who are new to online advertising. Starting with the free methods and building an internet presence will start to generate revenue that you can then invest in the paid methods. As you learn by doing, you will find out what works for you and what doesn't. There are people who are willing and able to assist you as you begin your online business. See my resource box to learn more!
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Here are the reasons why micro niche sites are working for me:

1. My sites are not just single page websites.
If you add just 1 or 2 content and created a Made For Adsense website you're in trouble. Your website must provide some value to the visitor.

2. I use wordpress. Google loves WP.

3. I don't use same templates for all my websites.
If you're using a template which is common among poor micro niche sites, you're in trouble. (Micro Niche Templates sold here are used by lot of websites with which many may be of poor quality.) Use any free wordpress template and tweak it for good adsense CTR. Don't give any footprints to Google. Randomize everything.

4. My niches are not too competitive.
Do proper keyword research as this is the backbone of Micro Niche Sites. I always go behind $0.70+ CPC value and 6000+ search volume.

Add content to your site frequently. Atleast once in two weeks. Don't ignore once it reaches front page of Google.

As long as you're providing some value to Internet and Search Engines, Google don't have problems with you!

Final point: Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Always diversify your revenue portfolio to reduce risk. Adsense contributes only around 25% of my income.
Read more...

Here are the reasons why micro niche sites are working for me:

1. My sites are not just single page websites.
If you add just 1 or 2 content and created a Made For Adsense website you're in trouble. Your website must provide some value to the visitor.

2. I use wordpress. Google loves WP.

3. I don't use same templates for all my websites.
If you're using a template which is common among poor micro niche sites, you're in trouble. (Micro Niche Templates sold here are used by lot of websites with which many may be of poor quality.) Use any free wordpress template and tweak it for good adsense CTR. Don't give any footprints to Google. Randomize everything.

4. My niches are not too competitive.
Do proper keyword research as this is the backbone of Micro Niche Sites. I always go behind $0.70+ CPC value and 6000+ search volume.

Add content to your site frequently. Atleast once in two weeks. Don't ignore once it reaches front page of Google.

As long as you're providing some value to Internet and Search Engines, Google don't have problems with you!

Final point: Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Always diversify your revenue portfolio to reduce risk. Adsense contributes only around 25% of my income.
Read more...

Here are some 5 proven ways on how best to improve your Adsense earnings.

1. Concentrating on one format of Adsense ad. The one format that worked well for the majority is the Large Rectangle (336X280). This same format have the tendency to result in higher CTR, or the click-through rates. Why choose this format out of the many you can use? Basically because the ads will look like normal web links, and people, being used to clicking on them, click these types of links. They may or may not know they are clicking on your Adsense but as long as there are clicks, then it will all be for your advantage.

2. Create a custom palette for your ads. Choose a color that will go well with the background of your site. If your site has a white background, try to use white as the color of your ad border and background. The idea to patterning the colors is to make the Adsense look like it is part of the web pages. Again, This will result to more clicks from people visiting your site.

3. Remove the Adsense from the bottom pages of your site and put them at the top. Do not try to hide your Adsense. Put them in the place where people can see them quickly. You will be amazed how the difference between Adsense locations can make when you see your earnings.

4. Maintain links to relevant websites. If you think some sites are better off than the others, put your ads there and try to maintaining and managing them. If there is already lots of Adsense put into that certain site, put yours on top of all of them. That way visitor will see your ads first upon browsing into that site.

5. Try to automate the insertion of your Adsense code into the webpages using SSI (or server side included). Ask your web administrator if your server supports SSI or not. How do you do it? Just save your Adsense code in a text file, save it as “adsense text”, and upload it to the root directory of the web server. Then using SSI, call the code on other pages. This tip is a time saver especially for those who are using automatic page generators to generate pages on their website.

These are some of the tips that have worked well for some who want to generate hundreds and even thousands on their websites. It is important to know though that ads are displayed because it fits the interest of the people viewing them. So focusing on a specific topic should be your primary purpose because the displays will be especially targeted on a topic that persons will be viewing already.

Note also that there are many other Adsense sharing the same topic as you. It is best to think of making a good ad that will be somewhat different and unique than the ones already done. Every clickthrough that visitors make is a point for you so make every click count by making your Adsense something that people will definitely click on.

Tips given by those who have boosted their earnings are just guidelines they want to share with others. If they have somehow worked wonders to some, maybe it can work wonders for you too. Try them out into your ads and see the result it will bring.

If others have done it, there is nothing wrong trying it out for yourself.
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Here is the steps to make a little cashflow on your pocket

1- Make a blog at blogger dot com

2- Blogger Name Should be in English, Related to your Articles

3- Now, Go to Some Articles Websites Like www dot ezinearticles dot com

4- Find the Best Articles for your Blog and Post Daily 5 Articles BUT MAKE SOME CHANGES IN ARTICLE TITLE AND IN ARTICLE BODY.

5- Now You have to have some visitors (between 100 to 150 only).

6- Now Post 100 to 150 Articles in your blog

7- Now Place 336x280 on the top of article (where articles start). and place the 160x600 also

8- Now if you are having more than 100 visitors/day. You will be able to Start Earning But if you are not having Don't be Upset. Keep Posting 5 Articles/day. Because in one or 2 weeks Your Blog will be indexed by Search Engines Specially By The Google

9- I know It Works 98% and 2% Depends upon your work.

10- Your Replies will help me to guide you toward Adsense Peaks.
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