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.

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

SENuke: Automate Posting, Social Bookmarking, RSS, it does it all

I am a big fan of tools and automation. I have tried just about everything out there and continue to do so, but so far there are only a couple software solutions that rise to the occasion. If you are looking to kick start your marketing and you can’t afford to bring someone on to help you, you need to automate as much of the process as possible. When using any kind of automated submission tools the biggest concern is getting banned from the network you are trying to get your links on.

CLICK HERE TO TRY OUT SENUKE FOR FREE

There is a very simple formula to getting your site indexed and SENuke takes care of 90% of it. When I was working for Starkmedia, I was not given any staff. I was running the search marketing department which included paid and organic. The fact that I didn’t have any help still baffles me. I was in control of 30 or so websites, a few of which were big time (Briggs and Stratton power products) and I was expected to handle off site promotion by hand.  If creating a link on a journal site or social network takes 10 – 15 minutes, well, you do the math.

I paid for a couple pieces of software out of my own pocket simply to make my job easier. SENuke was and is my #1 goto solution. SENuke will allow you to create accounts on Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, 30 social networks, 12 video sharing sites, 50 social bookmarking sites, 20 RSS sites, and now will even create 200 high PR backlinks! It will spin content, and keeps track of everything in its own database. SENuke is hands down the MOST POWERFUL MARKETING TOOL AVAILABLE. The name SENuke is unfortunate because it has a real spammy sound to it, but thats not what the purpose it. I suppose you could use it for that, and I’m sure some do, but you can use it to do the work of 10 people.

I tell people that there are 3 tools that I pay for every month and will continue to do so for as long as I am in this business. SENuke is one of them. You can get a fully functional trial version of it, no credit card needed. The guys who make it know that if you use it for a week, it will become absolutely necessary. If you are thinking of starting an online marketing business, you could do it with this one piece of software. It does so much more, but I am on my way to a cooking demo so I will end it here. Make sure you check out SENuke, download the FREE trial and see for yourself. You will thank me later.

CLICK HERE TO TRY OUT SENUKE FOR FREE

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