Unproductive

I had a really unproductive weekend. I hate that. Some days I just cant seem to muster up the energy to do anything, let alone be creative. I am still mulling over a couple options in my head regarding career choices (clients really). I really want to get involved in this online auction project, but I have worked with the guy in the past and he’s a real live wire. He moves fast with little planning and  aside from me, he doesn’t hire the best help.  In the past I have really felt hindered when trying to get something done. The problem is that if this takes off, and I miss the boat – the kicking I shall give myself is really going to hurt.

The local business marketing thing is plugging along at a decent pace, but its certainly not exciting. In order for me to stick around a boring gig, there better be a TON of money involved.

The day job almost came to a boil on Friday, 5 minutes before close. My dissaproval for the way things are handled here is becoming more and more obvious and I am not holding back. I would imagine they are shopping around for my replacement. Good luck with that.

Old client New Headache

I did some work for a guy in Canada a few months back. Nice guy, but man, trouble follows him. The last project was to promote an industry that is firmly planted in the gray area. It’s not sports gambling but is damn close. He came to me with a poorly done site, no real plan, no team, nothing in place. He wanted PPC work done but it was obvious that he could have the hottest paid search campaign on the planet but he didn’t realize what many people don’t, getting people to your site is easy, keeping them there is the hard part.  Now throw the fact that Google and Yahoo do not permit this kind of advertising, and some lousy designers and programmers that kept ripping him off and I had a $75 an hour migraine.

I ended up working for him for free for the last month because I felt bad for him, I do have a soft spot. It was a major source of stress for me. PPC became a small part of my job. Managing a designer, finding programmers, dealing with crooks, and fighting with Google and Yahoo to get ads approved took over. He has a frantic leap then look personality, he wanted everything done in 5 minutes and thought he was going to get rich, immediately. I became a shrink, teacher, manager, partner. It was a nightmare. He sort of faded away..

Well, you guessed it he contacted me again, with a new project. At first glance it looks like its a much more thought out idea, the site is sharp, the idea is relatively fresh. Now I have to decide, do I go back to work for him? Can I handle the stress? I know the money is there, but is it worth it. If nothing else, this could provide tons of material to write about. Decisions, decisions.

Outdated marketing methods – the dinosaurs still walk among us

It’s my birthday today. I am exhausted as usual. I’ve been in the office for 40 minutes and already my blood pressure is up. The decisions that are made here are based solely on speculation and outdated ideas. One bad decision after the other and a completely reactive environment. Every suggestion I make is shot down, it almost seems deliberate, like no matter what, go against the employee. More wasted money, more sub-par results.

Without going into too much detail, we are working on a project that is potentially really cool, however my enthusiasm has already been squashed because the way we are going about things is wrong, and I am tired of being ignored. The only reason I would make any suggestions now is to have the “I told you so” opportunity at the end.

I could write a novel on the wrong way to go about things. Whether you are marketing your own business or marketing someone elses, the steps that are necessary to succeed are the same.

1. Know your audience

2. Know your content

3. Know what works and what doesn’t

4. Know when to pull the trigger and when to pull the plug

Today I watch a fairly nice budget slowly get chipped away,  you could do a hell of a lot with $60,000. Let me give you an example. If you are promoting an event that is recurring, say it’s an annual event.  You should set up your marketing methods so that it builds on what you did last year. If you pay attention at all,  you should know that 85% of search marketing is reputation. A site reputation is no different than a persons reputation. To make it simple, reputation is based on age, history, and what people are saying about you. Simple enough right?

So, using those 3 pieces of reputation, which would you ithink would be the best idea?

a. Create a solid website that can be modified to fit the event each year. Build links to it, get reputation through social networking, let the site age, use it to showcase the event AFTER it happened so that the site generates traffic through out the year untl the date of the next event year? Oh yeah, and HOST THE SITE???

or would you think it was a good idea to:

b. Build the main (money site) as a profile page on a social networking site, then promote that website with paid search, viral marketing etc.  I guess you wouldn’t care that since you don’t own the site, you cannot control the uptime, you cannot harvest the email addresses or contact information directly to your database or email list. The paid search you are doing is actually promoting the network that is hosting the page, not the website, so any links that are built are actually pointed at the social network site that is hosting the page, thereby increasing the reputation of that social network (which is already the top 5 website on the internet). I don’t really need to continue here right? It’s obvious why this is an incredibly stupid idea, right? Apparently not.

There is a reason that Carl Icahn says that all CEO’s are morons.  Personally, I am totally OK admitting when I don’t know something, and if I don’t know something, I will defer to someone who does. Never assume you are the smartest guy in the room and there is no room for hunches in marketing. The beauty of marketing is that there is no shortage of stats, plans, metrics and methods that show exactly what you need to do.

Regardless of whether or not you want to be involved in the marketing of your business, you owe it to yourself to at least know what questions to ask.

1. What are you going to do to make people want to come to my site?
2. What are you going to do to get people to stay?
3. What are you doing to make them want to come back?
4. Is there a call to action on every page of the site?
5. What methods are you using to capture visitor information? Just because they aren’t interested now doesn’t mean they wont be in the future.
6. Are you taking advantage of social marketing methods? Do you understand them?
7. Are you paying attention to usability?
8. Are you leaving room to explore new avenues as they become available? Do you keep up with changing technology and trends?

Obviously, there are more but this gives you some idea. Internet marketing is interesting and fun. The ability to be able to modify campaigns at any time, stop on a dime and change directions, tweak and fine tune. There is no reason to fail.

Writing this rant gave me the idea to write up a list of questions to ask a potential search marketing company. I can give you 10 questions that will immediately tell you if the person is full of it or out of touch. I will try to get that up in the next couple days or so.

Choosing the best webhost for Magento : eComm Journey part 2

Things are progressing nicely on my quest to open up my own eCommerce store. My best friend Michael works for a large hosting company and he has his own server. He has let me have access to it for free so I can test out sites for Adsense etc. Unfortunately since its his personal server, he doesn’t do a lot of maintenance on it, so the 1 click installs are not up to date. The management console is Plesk, which I really don’t care for. I am a cPanel guy. The other issue is that because he gives me access for free, the support is lacking. Hey, you get what you pay for.

I would love to say that I installed Magento but I have many other things that I need to be doing to prep for this venture so I decided to contact my friend Nathan – who is actually the one that turned me on to Magento – and I offered him $200 to install and configure Magento and the various modules that I have to customize the site. 4 hours into it, he sent me a message of frustration. Something about having to disable CGI scripting, I don’t remember exactly, but I realized that if I was going to put up a real eCommerce site that was going to pay my bills, I would have to pay for a host. So the hunt began.

I started with Google search of “Best webhost Magento” and I got pretty much what I expected: review sites with affiliate codes to web hosting companies. I continued to dig around, checked in with some forums I frequent, and made some calls and instant messages. Web hosting is pretty cheap. When I first started online marketing , bandwidth was outrageously expensive. There was no such thing as unlimited plans, that was unheard of. The adult sites I worked on were paying thousands of dollars per month for hosting. You can now get decent hosting for $9 – $49 a month, depending on what you need.

What I was looking for was a fast host with a strong bias towards Magento. Magento is tricky, and if the host isn’t up on it, you can be in for some trouble. If Magento is mis-configured, it is a real pig on resources. I am not a Magento lover by any means, but for what I need right now – it’s the best option for me. It’s also free and the goal of this project is to spend as little money as possible. I was also looking for easy install of other applications that I need (wordpress, forums, etc). Webhosts with one click installs are often a good choice because they have the configuration optimized for their system. I also wanted a host that I could upgrade the plan easily. I wanted multiple domains, email addresses, the standard stuff. I compared 8 hosts side by side, with price being in the top 5 criteria, but not the clincher. I have no problems paying for quality. My computer is really slow right now because I am running a bunch of scraping apps so I am going to skip the list of features and benefits that I compared, but I will tell you that I decided on a host.

I decided to go with SiteGround Hosting. The plans that SiteGround offers are very reasonable, and I found a lot of positive reviews – especially about their Magento hosting. I picked out the mid range business plan for 12 months with 3 months free. I pulled out the credit card, set up the account, got my confirmation immediately. I logged into godaddy and changed the DNS to SiteGround. I went back to my cPanel account, went to site apps, clicked on Magento and in under 1 minutes, Magento was installed. Fantastic.  The admin holds all kinds of other goodies as well, its very fast. I am very impressed. So, if you are thinking about picking a new web host for an ecommerce site, especially Magento, my vote goes to SiteGround. I am a web marketer so I wouldn’t be doing my job if I neglected to put up a banner for them. Please check them out.

So far, this project has cost

Failed Magento installation: $200

New Hosting account with Magento Installation: $49

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