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.

Get with the program

I really shouldn’t get in the habit of talking smack about people, especially people I work for, but sometimes it’s hard to keep my mouth shut.

Those who can do, those who can’t run a web marketing agency.

The amount of wasted money that flows through is staggering. There is no effort made to stay current, to learn what works, to even know the definition of social media, web 2.0, widget, twitter, social bookmarking – so say any of those things just gets a blank stare.

No interest in allocated even a fraction of the budget to article marketing, or content creation. The #1 method for getting incoming links – ignored.

I wouldn’t be so irritated if the powers that be were informed and made a conscious decision to not participate, but its the total lack of interest in learning about any of the methods that are essential to stay competitive. It baffles me.

There is no trick to marketing your business on the internet. No secret forumulas, no passwords or secret handshakes. It’s a new day. All you need to be successful online is :

1. Offer quality content
2. Educate yourself on what works and what doesn’t
3. Hire people who are actually interested in the process and give them incentive to help you succeed.

Apathy will kill your business like a cancer. You can work as hard as you want, but if your support system isn’t there, then it will all be in vain.

Small business marketing – In Milwaukee and elsewhere

Well, I am back. My motivation has returned to me – finally. I am joining forces with a local entrepeneur here in Milwaukee. We are starting a local business marketing power house. We have some amazing talent working with us, the projects are coming in, everything is looking good.

In the near future I plan to post some helpful articles on how to market your small business online.

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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