Market IntelliSense

2011-12-03T19:11:00.000-08:00

What is Sample Size and why is it Important?

What is Sampe Size?

A sample is a part of an entire population that possesses attitudes, opinions, habits, or characteristics that you wish to study. The appropriate sample size is influenced by your purpose in conducting the research. If your sample size is too small, you could miss important insights. But if it’s too large, you could waste valuable time and resources, such as unecessary budget. There is usually no reason to inlcude more than 1,000 to 1,500 respondents in a given study. While the accuracy of results tends to improve as the sample size increases, the increase in accuracy diminishes when sample size is greater than 1,500 respondents. If you have reason to expect a high degree of correlation between variables, then you can use a smaller sample size for your study. Base the sample size on the minimum adequate sample size of important subgroups in the population.
When researching several distinctive segments or groups, findings cannot be lumped together and stratified sampling needs to be used. Stratified sampling determines the sample size for each segment/group separately. Therefore, the overall sample size for a study with distinctive groups is much larger than for homogeneous groups.

Why is sample size so important?

It is essential to use the correct sample size to accurately represent the population. Choosing a sample size that is too small may not give an accurate representation of the population distribution. Too large a sample size is wasteful and sometimes impossible to complete.

Sample Size Terms:

Confidence Level: The confidence level reflects the certitude that the answers of the sample truly reflect the answers of the total population. Most often, a 95% confidence level is sufficient for making business decisions. However, some companies choose a 90% confidence level due to timing, budgets, and response rates. Confidence intervals give us an estimate of the amount of error involved in our data. They tell us about the precision of the statistical estimates (e.g., means, standard deviations, correlations) we have computed. Confidence intervals are related to the concept of the power. The larger the confidence interval the less power a study has to detect differences between respondents in survey research.

Confidence Interval: When the research is performed at a 95% confidence level with a 2% confidence interval, the results reflect between 93% and 97% the true answers of the total population. A small confidence interval is more reliable than a large confidence interval.

Population: The sample size depends on the size of the target population and the homogeneity of the market.
When researching several market segments with similar characteristics, the sample size may be determined for the overall target market population.

Sampling: refers to the process of obtaining information from a subset of a larger group.

(Based on a 95% confidence level, +/- 5% acceptable error)

Stratified Random Sampling: also sometimes called proportional or quota random sampling, involves dividing your population into homogeneous subgroups (strata) and then taking a simple random sample in each subgroup. In more formal terms:

Objective: Divide the population into non-overlapping groups (i.e., strata) N1, N2, N3, ... Ni, such that N1 + N2 + N3 + ... + Ni = N. Then do a simple random sample of f = n/N in each strata.
There are several major reasons why you might prefer stratified sampling over simple random sampling. First, it assures that you will be able to represent not only the overall population, but also key subgroups of the population, especially small minority groups.
Second, stratified random sampling will generally have more statistical precision than simple random sampling. This will only be true if the strata or groups are homogeneous. If they are, we expect that the variability within-groups is lower than the variability for the population as a whole. Stratified sampling capitalizes on that fact.
Example: Take sample from each strata, of sizes n1 n2 n3 n4 total sample size, n = n1 + n2 + n3 + n4. (see chart below)

Relationship between Population Size and Sample Size:

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Phone: 248.390.4698

2011-12-03T18:58:00.000-08:00

How do I create my own Website?

With the advances in technology today, creating your own website is possible and sometimes easy. There are many website builder tools out there that make is relatively easy to build a website. But like everything, there are exceptions and limitations.

Do I recommend non-web designers to build their own website. Without website design education or experience, I would not recommend that you build your own website for a business. I recommend that you hire a professional website design company, such as Market Intelli-Sense, to ensure a professional image.

But if it's for personal use, then, why not. Although there are tools out there to make is easier, there is still quite a bit involved in the website design, development, and maintenance process. And to successfully manage a professional website, you must understand HTML, XHTML, CSS, and other code. Do-it-yourself website builders allow you to bypass learning this code, but you can only get so far and there are many limitations.

Here are just a few of the tasks included:

constantly update the site to keep content fresh
monitor web analytics and adjust accordingly
optimize search engine results
keep current on internet code standards
regularly test the website on multiple browsers
ensure the website complies with W3 standards
keep in tune with web browser version updates and new browsers
build links with other relevant websites to increase Page Rank
respond to technical inquiries
re-new your web domain on an annual basis
purchase expensive design software
...the list goes on...

So, you still want to build a website? Ok, well here are a few tools that will help you build your own website:

Website Builders, Website Design Tools & Website Hosting Companies

Yahoo! Small Business: Web Hosting, Domains, E-commerce, Email Yahoo! Small Business provides web hosting for your business website, domain name registration, e-commerce solutions for your online store, and business ...

Windows and Linux Web Hosting, Free Web Hosting, Free Web Site ... Brinskter offers shared web hosting, unmanaged dedicated web hosting, domain name registration, free domain names on select hosting packages, a free website ...

Free Website Hosting – Angelfire free website templates to make ... Angelfire is a free web host with easy site building tools for blogs, photo albums, Microsoft FrontPage(®) support, and ftp, as well as a variety of ...

Domain Names, Web Hosting and SSL Certificates - Go Daddy Register & transfer domains for less. Reliable hosting. Easy-to-use site builders. Affordable SSL certificates. eCommerce solutions. ICANN-accredited.

WordPress › Blog Tool and Publishing Platform A semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.

Web: http://www.marketintellisense.com
Email: info@marketintellisense.com
Phone: 248.390.4698

2011-12-02T18:43:00.000-08:00

How do I rank better in Google?

If we build, they will come, or not? You can't just build a website and expect people to flood the gates of your new website.

There are many different ways to market a website, one very important one being Search Engine Optimization (SEO). What is search engine optimization? Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a web site or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Although there are companies dedicated to doing just that, optimizing search engine results, here are a few tips that may come in handy in order to increase web traffic and place
your website higher in the search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Keeping Website Content Natural & Relevant:

Keep your website content as natural and relevant as possible. You may think that search engines are not smart enough to catch unnatural sneaks, but that is incorrect! In fact, search engines, such as Google, are able to identify unnatural text such as hidden text (white text on white background), keywords not relevant to the website, and so on. It's best to write in small paragraphs in a simple manner and sound like a human! Pretend for a moment that you are not writing for a website, and then go back and check for keywords after the fact.

How to Create Keywords for your Website:

Keep your keywords relevant to the content within your website. Again, the search engines are smart enough to identify websites where the keywords do not match the actual content of the website. Consider all variations of the keywords. You can use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to help identify all variations of and determine their search engine rank. Also, don't always compete with competitive keywords (those with a high-score). If you're an accounting firm, for example, the word "Accountant" would be some tough competition in the internet world. You can use the S EO Chat Keyword Difficulty Check Tool to determine the score on keywords.

And don't forget the basics on keywords:

Metatags
The page title
The Heading (H1)
Alt text of image files

How to Submit Your Website to the Major Search Engines:

This process is actually easy and FREE. Register your site with the following search engines:

Google:https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url
Yahoo! Search: http://www.search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
Yahoo Directory: http://dir.yahoo.com
MSN Search/BING: http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

How to Increase Search Engine Results with Link Building:

Keywords are important, but link building can be even more important to drive up your search results. What is Link Building? This is the process of having other external websites link to your website. Linking has a huge impact on ranking factors. Search engines look at links as a vote of popularity. And the more links (votes) you have to your site, the better! One caveat comes with the statement, more is better. Although generally speaking, the more links the better holds some truth, it is better to be selective on the websites that you link with. One website with a higher Page Rank is better to link with and will have more impact than linking to several websites with low Page Rank.

What is Page Rank? PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, used by the Google Internet search
engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. How do I link with other websites? Well, that's the hard part. You can't just automatically have other websites link to your website. You need to ask them! They need to add your link and keywords to their website. So when you do ask, do so in a sincere and human-talk fashion.

Web: http://www.marketintellisense.com
Email: info@marketintellisense.com
Phone: 248.390.4698