2009 is going to be exciting

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I have some goals for 2009 that I am going to reach.

500 Posts

The first one is to achieve 500 posts on this blog.  Bluenoser.net has been online for years, but I have only around 300 posts and some of those are useless ones that I put up at the beginning just to have content.

MORE PROFIT

In 2009 I have a goal to quadruple my online profits.  This is not an overly ambitious goal, and I think that by the end of January I will be making it a TEN fold increase.  Tim of 4HWW and some of has followers have said that making high goals actually increases your likely hood for success.

More Time

I am in 2009 going to increase my productivity to the point that I can spend more time doing what I want to be doing.  That includes travelling and reading.  This is the first year that I have read less than 10 GOOD books in a year.  I miss reading and increasing my knowledge.

Professional Equity

Along with my various online endeavours I am going to start working on building “professional equity”.  I am not sure if this term has been coined before, if not here is my definition.  Anything that increases your worth to your profession and company which in turn increases the demand in your services.  I have started doing this by achieving my LEED AP designation, and in the first of the year I will be gaining my P.Eng (once I finish my diaries).  There are two more on my list one is to get my FE in April and follow with my PE in Maryland, or another state in the US.

The other BIG thing is staying tight to my chest, but hear is a hint,  it is going to be a teaching program for a tight niche in my industry that I have expertise in, and believe that there is a lack of information available to fellow engineers and industry in general.  I hope for this to be my muse(read 4HWW if you don’t know what this is)

Self Hosted or Hosted

One of the first things that have to be decided when you are getting ready to start a website, whether if it is for a personal site, business site, or a hobby site is whether you are going to host the site yourself and or a hosted service.

If you are building a blog type site this is not as critical at the start.  You can easily start your site on a free hosted blog site and then if you feel it necessary you can more to a hoste solution with minimal headache.  Just make sure that you have your own domain so that you don’t lose too many links that you have built.

Difference between the two. Hosted like going with a host like Hostgator and between a hosted, wordpress.com, blogger, etc

 

Advantages of the hosted service.

• Don’t need to have any programming experience
• Don’t need to worry about keeping the programs up-to-date
• Minimal backend work needed
• Usually lots of easy to installed themes, and styles
• Security, hosted services are typically very secure.

Disadvantages of hosted service

• You don’t have control of what is used for the site
• You can’t customize certain aspects of the site
• Even though there are plugins and extensions available what you can do with the site is limited.

Advantages of using a host

• You can pretty much put anything that you want online
• You have much great control of the way the site looks and interacts with your audience
• You can use the host for your FTP, email, and many other services that the hosted version does not have
• There are many “unlimited” hosts that allow you to store large amounts of data at no extra cost.

Disadvantages of using a host

• If you are not careful, you may find that the site is down more than it is up.
• Customer service may be a nightmare (Although Hostgator is an exception to this.  They have done everything they can to make my life on their servers enjoyable) .
• There may be bandwidth limitations.
• The cost can be huge if you have a popular site with little revenue as the bandwidth charges can get expensive.
• You are responsible for ensuring that your site is secure.

Conclusions
It really depends on what you are planning on using the site for.  If you are only interested in a content site or a personal site that you can communicate with family etc.  They a hosted service, or using many different hosted services to serve the purposes that you need for them. 

This can include services like Wordpress.com, Flickr.com blogger.com, etc.  If you are interested in having a custom site programmed, want to have a email address with your domain or want to have the choice of how the site works.  If you want to have full control over the type of content, visitors, the script on the site etc then you are going to be looking for something that is hosted.  The other thing that you have to remember is that if you want to ensure that you have FULL control over the content of the site then you want to fully control the host.  The hosted services typically have a TOS stating that they do not assume any risk if you lose everything.

Thoughts?

So you know what I think, what do you think?  Let me know in the comments below. 

Cheers, JM

Hostgator just got back in my good books by using Twitter

I was just about to get pissed with my current web host.  A host that I have been using for a few years now, and that I changed to, after flipping from service to service. 

Hostgator has had a few hiccups over the time that I started with them to where they are now.  They have grown and acquired tremendously, and typically you would think that the customer service would decline. 

The last few times that I have talked to the live chat I have noticed a decrease in their ability to help me out.  More and more they are simply trying to get me off the line and to send in a ticket.  In the “olden days” the live chat peeps would put in the ticket for me at the least, and in some cases I had them go and FIND someone to fix it while I was chatting.  That type of service is amazing.

Problems in Hosting Paradise

Fast forward to a couple of days ago, I noticed the other day that Fantastico still hadn’t been updated with Wordpress 2.7 for this domain.  This was important since I tried out 2.7 on a couple of my other sites that I manually install on and I found it was a HUGE improvement(You can search, and install plugins from the admin area AWESOME !!!) ,so when I had a free moment I logged onto the live chat to see what was up.  Here is the transcript from December 28, 2008:

(2:37:24 PM) Joseph Ve: has entered the chat.

(2:37:40 PM) Joseph Ve: We currently don’t have an ETA on the next Fantastico update

(2:37:56 PM) Joseph Ve: Until then you will have to either manually install or upgrade Wordpress

(2:37:57 PM) Jeff: Any guess?

(2:38:11 PM) Jeff: 2.7 has been out for a month

(2:38:51 PM) Joseph Ve: Really can’t tell ya. We’d have to roll it out to all of our shared servers (five or six hundred of em)

(2:39:25 PM) Jeff: Fair, but isn’t it a security risk to have so many out of date scripts installed?

(2:40:36 PM) Joseph Ve: If there was a serious security flaw in the older version of Wordpress that comprimised the safety of our hosting plan, we would roll it out asap

(2:41:33 PM) Jeff: Alright, I will have to upgrade manually

(2:41:39 PM) Jeff: Cheers, Jeff

(2:41:43 PM) Joseph Ve: Okay, take care and have a great day!

(2:41:44 PM) Joseph Ve: Thank you for using HostGator Live Chat. If you could take a minute to rate your experience with HostGator as well as my overall performance, that would help us to improve our customer service. To do that, just click the button that says Rate and Exit in the upper right hand corner. The survey takes less than a minute to fill out.

Twitter to the Rescue

So needless to say I wasn’t very pleased with the outcome of this. 

But I wasn’t going to kick up a stir yet, I am too busy.  I didn’t write a post about it, I didn’t t Twitter or bitch about them on the forums, I simply left a response on that stupid survey conveying the lack of usefulness that I got out of the live chat.

But out of the blue someone at hostgator contacted me on twitter.  So I replied to them and told them what was up.

This is when it got fast and the customer service experience got a lot better.  I told me the domain that I needed fixed and they GOT IT DONE.

 

When I asked why this was not something that could have been fix eariler.

HostGator Redeemed….For Now

So there you have it.  I should have got the service that I felt was deserved from Joesph (see above) when I went to get some help with the Fantastico service on my account.  It wasn’t done not because they have to do them all at once and they have a lot of servers, (Joseph Ve: Really can’t tell ya. …five or six hundred of em) or that it is controlled by Fantastico.  It wasn’t done because they didn’t want to put in the ticket, either they didn’t know how (doubtful) or didn’t want to.

I feel that when I put in the horrible review that I did after my online chat session, it flagged something.  Not sure how they figured out that I was the right guy though.  Maybe they just searched my email that I sent the survey from.  But going those extra few steps to contact me vis Twitter, and try to remedy the situation.  This puts me back in the good books and prevents me from starting my search for an alternative host.

A idea for 2009

I was thinking today that something that I may try for 2009 is this.  Work like a crazy person until I reach the $ number that I feel I need to survive for a year and then take the remaining time “off”.  Go on a mini-retirement, read a book, etc.

So in January I am going to do just that.  I am going to start to build a strategy that I can use to gain the income that I require in a short amount of time.  Like the 4HWW disciples say, what you do for your life should not be the same as what you do for work.

There are a couple of ideas that come to mind right off.  One is to build my online business to the point where active involvement will see rapid growth in profits, but a slow monthly decline when I stop being active.  Another is to go freelance with my professional work.  There are a lot of companies out there looking for contract employees for short term work.  The disadvantage to that is that I have to leave the area where I am at now.

There are a lot of ways that I can do it, and I think that it is a great goal.  For now I am aiming for a 6 month year.  So by the time the warm weather hits my home town, I will be winding down for the year.

Working on Affiliate Marketing

I am working on my first site that will be purely made for affiliate marketing.  This is a site that I have built after taking everything that I learned from The Black Ink Project.  I am about 6 months behind schedule, but I have the site completely online, with a lot of content in the blog and most of my first campaign on the go.

I have just got my first pass on the campaign online.  I have a lot of tweaking to do after I get my first round of keyword information.  I picked the time that I did to put it online so that I can play with the volume of traffic over the holidays and get some good keyword information.  I am not planning on making much in the lines of cash on this first batch, but with some major tweaking I think that the site will be a winner for me in the New Year.   I have spent approximately $700 on the site design and content to this point, and believe that all that I have left is the marketing and a small volume of blog posts. 

Some of the things that I have learned so far are:

Outsourcing is not the be all end all

As readers of this blog will no I have had some issues with outsourcing.  Some of these issues are my fault and not defining what I was expecting in the communications.  Other times are the freelancers not delivering on schedule.

I actually had one writer tell me that they were not going to be meeting the schedule.  I asked for a discount and they said that I was already getting a deal and to take it or leave it.  I left it.  If you decide to take the contract, and yes it is a contract, then you have a responsibility to follow it.

With writers you get what you pay for, and typically less

I am not a great writer and it shows a lot of the time.  But I am working on it.  SO when I was looking to get content for my affiliate site I decided to outsource as much as I could.  I can tell you this now, you really get what you pay for at best.  I have gone through a few writers on this site alone and I am not completely satisfied with any of them.  There are a few that I have blogging now that I think are the best, but I am still doing some editing to make them blog posts.  This is something that I think will improve.

However like I said above, there are some out there that feel like they are doing you a favour for giving you such a “deal” and expect you to just take what they give you.  If you come across such a writer, dump them.  You are hiring them because either you don’t have the skill or time, and as such shouldn’t have to deal with their BS

Choose Your Niche Well

This is another thing that people tell you to do all of the time, but I never really understood what they meant until now.  The niche that I am developing my affiliate site in seems to be very narrow as it is.  But when I am choosing the content for the site I realize that there is a broad range of customers that will be visiting your site.  So just because the service, type of service or product is very narrow.  The customer that will be visiting your site is broad. 

You might be selling blue widgets, and that would be a very narrow product niche.  However what type of customer are you targeting?  The person that is doing their initial research on blue widgets?  Finding out there is out there for blue widgets?  Or are you looking for the people that have decided on the type of widget they want and you just have to give it to them.  That is really where you want to be.

Then you have the demographic that you have to appeal to.  This could be a lifestyle demographic, geographic, or age and gender demographic.  There is a reason that all “woman” magazines look a certain way, and men’s mags look the way they do, they are targeting a particular demographic.

So why bother?

If you are interested in getting into affiliate marketing then get out there.  The Black Ink Project is a great resource for the beginner.  They are not really telling you anything that you can’t find online for free, and the only reason that I actually signed up was that it was free.

That said, there is something to be said for having all of the information that you need to get started in one place and one resource.

Oh yeah, and if anyone tells you that affiliate marketing is easy, they lucked out and will probably be doing something else next year.  There is a lot of work involved in marketing any product, but the beauty is that you can do it in your home office, or on the beach in some tropical paradise (if they have Wi-Fi).  This is the reason that I am doing this, and spending so much time writing, researching, and producing.  I want to be completely self-sufficient and with a nice nest egg in the next 2 years.  I have a multi-pronged approach to this that I will use to succeed and be diverse.

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