TJ Gamble

We have been experimenting and toying with the open source shopping cart platform Magento Commerce for some time.  If you read this blog, you’ll see the issues that we have encountered while testing the system.  However, we have decided to give it a full production run and have just completed our first Magento shopping cart.  We just unveiled the new design for Walking Canes this week and would like to know what you think.

We didn’t want to go too wild with our first attempt at it, so the template is fairly simple.  However, that is what Walking Canes’ market calls for so it worked out great!  The site has the premium domain name for this market and was ranked on the first page on Google for the main industry keyword of “walking canes”.  However, the site ranked poorly for just about all long tail keywords. We have moved them up to the top fold on Google with the new design launch and hopefully they begin to see some longtail traffic very soon.

Look at the site and post what you think.

I have been about as loyal to The Planet as I can be.  I’m not all that unhappy, but not particular thrilled by them either.  I started leasing my first dedicated server back years ago with Rack Shack.  Rack Shack was eventually bought out by EV1 Servers which was then taken over by The Planet.  So, I guess you can say I’ve been a client of The Planet since before they were The Planet.

Over time, I noticed a tremendous dip in the level of support they provided, but that seems to have recovered somewhat as of late.  This spells trouble for many others that I know use The Planet.  However, I handle my administration and keep pretty good control on my servers (and have been lucky) so I have not needed much support from them.

Today, one of my servers was unaccessible for some time (how long, exactly, is unknown).  I couldn’t get in touch with anyone at the planet.  However, through the power of Twitter, I quickly learned that it was a widespread issue and not my particular machine.  After I finished dealing with all the client phone calls and questions, the servers finally came back up.

I control a couple hundred domain names and hosting accounts (mostly my own sites).  I am constantly expanding this list and need to be able to expand my hosting as needed.  Anyone have any good suggestions that are in-line or better price-wise than The Planet and allow you the flexibility of setting everything up like you want it?

I’ve been around the block more than a few times.  I’ve designed and developed hundreds if not thousands of websites. If you find this useful and want some tips and pointers on your website and how it could be more successful email me your url and I’ll try to make this a regular segment.

Today, we will review the website of Spencer McDonald at MondayMorningGold.com.  According to Spencer’s Twitter Bio, he is an avid writer and speaker on the subject of life motivation, leadership, team building, and productivity. Also love, Pinot Noir, comedies, and family time.   I assume that his blog is about these subjects mentioned in his bio.

Blogging is not my specialty, although I’m getting better at it.  However, usability and website interaction are right up my alley.  So, hopefully I’ll be able to give Spencer some useful advice.

Design: The overall design of the site is fine.  Nothing ground breaking, but clean and legible.  A professional design would help, but there is nothing here keeping you back.

The content design is not good.  All of the fonts are the same color, headlines don’t stand out too well and the structure just isn’t as well designed as it could be.  It makes it difficult to scan the site and find an interesting post.  You should also design the links and “functions” of the site to really promote people to interact with it.  Big graphical buttons, well-placed will go a long way to prompt people to post comments and interact with your site.

I would recommend finding another theme that does a better job of content design.  It will almost always require some customization to get it right, but this is necessary to get some life into the blog.

Content: The focus of the blog is not 100% clear.  From the content, I am getting a self-help, motivational kind of vibe.  However, I am not sure.  The focus is the hardest part and what many people fail to deliver on when it comes to blogging.  You need a market to get traffic.  To find a market, your blog has to have a focus. That focus needs to be more clear to your users.  At least give me a tagline or something to let me know what the blog is about.

SEO: You want traffic, so you need some way of getting it.  Good on-page SEO is one easy way to get some traffic on whatever topic you are blogging about.  The main issue I see with your SEO is the page names.  I assume you are using wordpress.  If so, get the page names fixed!  It’s easy, no excuse not to do it.  You need to also work on the title of your home page.  It should contain a line explaining what the blog is because the name doesn’t really do that for me.

After you get these items straight, promote the blog.  Search Twitter, find people interested in your subject and follow them.  They’ll most likely follow you back and you now have some one that would be interested in your content.  There are a ton of other ideas to promote the blog, but we won’t get into them here.

Hopefully, Spencer, my useless opinion will help you improve your blog!

So, you work hard at your internet business.  You are doing everything right.  You are close to a breakthrough and you know it.  There are so many people out there like you with the skills and work ethic it takes to make it in this business but are just not quite getting it done.  Maybe they need a little direction, advice, or a little motivation to push them over that hump to success.  That is a big reason why many of the successful Internet marketers have mentors or connections with other big internet marketers.  At some point, everyone needs a little help or advice.

Good news, help is here.  Shane Pike at AskShane.org is having a contest where the winner will receive a once-in-a-lifetime access to resources that could help them take their business to the next level.  Anyone interested in Affiliate Marketing at any level will benefit greatly from the varied prize package in this contest.

The great thing is that Shane has a wonderful blog, but he doesn’t have the follower base like the ultra-well-known marketers like Shoemoney or John Reese.  That way, you have a much better chance of winning!

The price package includes:

• A brand new custom web design from Wildfire Marketing.
• A three-month subscription to Aaron Wall’s awesome SEO training — which is way more than just SEO, plus a powerful forum.
• A three-month subscription to ShoeMoney tools — an incredible array of applications to give your business an inside edge, plus another powerful forum.
• A year-long Pro subscription to Crazy Egg — one of the easiest ways to see huge improvements both in how efficient your site is for users and also in how well it converts.
• A year-long Pro subscription to BuzzStream — very cool buzz-building tools that will be released to the public in the next few days.
• Three hours of consulting with PR and link-building guru Jeremy Bencken.
• Three hours of consulting with me — covering anything from SEO, to PPC, to conversion improvement, to just about anything else…it’s up to you!

Go to AskShane.org and Enter!

I follow quite a few internet marketers on twitter, including John Chow (@johnchow).  Recently he posted a tweet about his new service TwitterFollower.com that was basically a list of people who would return a follow if you followed them.  I’ve been interested recently in increasing my follower base in an attempt to try and socialize with more people of similar interests, so I decided to give it a try.

Signing up was a breeze.  Fill out a simple form and submit it.  It requires email verification, so you’ll have to be on the lookout for the verification email before you can access the site.  I use GMail, and I had a little trouble getting the email to come through.  I signed up several times using the same email address and eventually saw one of the verification emails in my ‘all mail’ folder although it never showed in my inbox.

NOTE:  John Chow is an internet marketer, and a good one.  Everything he does is for a reason and to make money.  If you think TwitterFollower.com is an exception to this and just a product of his kind nature, think again.  You’ll notice on the confirmation emails that they are Aweber confirmation emails, which means your email address was just opted in to his mailing list.  How he’ll use this mailing list is of interest, but you never really know.

Once I got my confirmation and logged in, I needed to fill out my twitter information.  After that, I could see the “list” of 18 pages of potential followers (the list is over 23 pages as of this writing).  I spent about an hour following going from page to page following everyone.  Overall, I followed more than 400 people.

After waiting for a few days for the reciprocal follows to take place, I now sit at around 300 follows from that website.  So, about 75% of the people I followed actually returned the follow.

Once I had these numbers, I decided to just randomly follow people to see how the response compared.  After following over 1500 people, I am getting about the same return on follows.

So what does this mean for TwitterFollower.com? Well, it has it’s good points, but it is no better than randomly following people.  Why put your email address on a mailing list if you can just randomly follow people and get the same response?  I will give it this:  I assumed that a high percentage of the people on this “list” would be spammers and marketers that would just bombard me with crap tweets.  However, in actuality I found a much higher percentage of legitimate tweeters following people on “the list” as opposed to randomly following others.  The main drawback is the very limited number of people on the list that you can follow.  That number is growing, but excitement over this site has begun to diminish and growth has slowed so who knows how big it will get.

My conclusion:  TwitterFollower.com is just another resource to find people to follow.  You would be just as good doing a search for your favorite subject and following everyone in the results.  However, the main benefit of the site is the unfollow feature that allows you to easily purge your account of follows that did not return the favor.  I would say that this feature alone is worth putting my “spam-catcher” email address on John Chow’s mailing list.

Contrary to popular belief, the self-employment lifestyle is not about leisure, sleeping all day, and barely working.  Quite the opposite, especially in my experiences.  As with many self-employed people I work hard, too hard sometimes.  I am an entrepreneur at heart.  I have too many ideas and not enough time to chase them all.  Client work cuts into most of my time, so what time I can find I am always working on something. Add to the fact that, as a small business I now have to be the accounting department, sales, and production.  It can be overwhelming for many.  You have to truly be dedicated.

I have very few days where I am truly away from my work, especially not for an entire day, including weekends and holidays.  If you are looking for leisure, you had better stick to your 9 to 5 job because I guarantee you it is easier than being self-employed, its just not near as much fun.

Self-employment is more about freedom:  the freedom to work on what you want, when you want, and how you want to do it. Yes, you still have deadlines that you need to meet.  You might still have to occasionally take on a few projects that you would rather pass on.  However, you get to determine what you work on and when.  Don’t like working 9 to 5?  Then work from 12 to 8. Can’t stand a necktie?  Wear sweatpants.

Right now, it is 11:48PM central standard time.  I’m sitting at my dining room table.  I have been working since 10AM this morning.  I spent the morning on some website updates, the afternoon meeting with colleagues, and the evening at home with my family.  After midnight is when I like to do a lot of my productive work.  I have a Red Bull, a box of Everlasting Gobstoppers, and I’ve slipped off my shoes and put on some comfortable shorts and a t-shirt.  I’ll spend the next three or four hours working on a website that is due tomorrow and then I’ll sleep until 9 or 10AM.  It’s my fairly regular routine and it’s what I like to do.

I would love to hear from other self-employed people as to their favorite “ritual” or unusual work habits.

If you follow this blog, you know that I have been experimenting with the open source shopping cart Magento Commerce as an updated replacement for the OSCommerce/CRELoaded websites that I have been building. It has a lot of advantages and event though it has a learning curve, I was really enjoying the software. That was until I started using it.

The first installation was cumbersome. But once the server is setup, most of those problems were gone and the second installation went smoothly.

Creating a theme was difficult, but after learning the basics of how it works on the first one I was able to quickly build a theme on the second installation.

Now, there is managing products. On the first site I was working on, all products are simple with no attributes. In this setup, everything works great. With the second site, every product has attributes. Unfortunately, in Magento, you have to add a “sub-product” for each attribute you need. For example, if I have a shirt that comes in four sizes (small, medium, large, x-large) then I have to add the shirt, and then add the sub-products for each size. In this example, I have to create 5 products to show the one product on the website with 4 attributes. If the shirt also has 4 colors, then I have to add 9 products total to display this product. You can see how this can quickly get out of hand if you have a large number of attributes. It also takes for freaking-ever to add products.

I’m going to try and keep the cart on the sites I have it installed on currently, but I think this issue is going to be a deal breaker for me and unless I find an easier solution I am going to have to go back to CRE Loaded.

Any Magento Gurus out there know a better way to add attributes?

I have been making an attempt at following more people via twitter in the hopes of expanding my knowledge and network with other like-minded individuals.  In my efforts, I have been following people quite regularly today in hopes they follow me back and I can find some people that I relate to.

In most cases, I can quickly weed out those that are looking to tweet from those looking to sell me something.  The “marketers” have begun setting up automated systems that send you a direct message after you follow them.  These messages either say nothing useful or they try to get me to visit their blog and/or website(s).

I’m following you, man, I’ve already seen your freaking website.  Don’t hard sell it to me again.  If I was just a little less patient today, I would begin immediately unfollowing those who automatically direct messaged me after a follow.  It should be a sign of what is to come.

Someone should write a service that automatically drops people who “spam” or direct message you upon a follow.  Call it “twerp drop” or something like that.  What are your thoughts on the DMs upon follow?  Don’t care?  Bother you?  Am I over-reacting?

This is a struggle that almost all web development/affiliate marketing start-up/wannabes struggle with.  You need the short-term money to keep the bills paid, but you need to set aside some time to reach those long term goals that will get you the big dollars.

For most just getting started, the short term money comes in the form of a full or part-time job.  You work all day, then come home at night and on weekends and bang out those long-term projects.  The benefit is that your short-term income is stable.  You get a steady paycheck, the wife is happy, and the internet connection is paid for.  The bad side is that a full-time job takes up most of your working time.  By the time you finish work, get home, have dinner, spend time with the wife/kids/girlfriend/parents/whatever, you are exhausted and might be lucky to get an hour or so in on your own projects before sleep is a necessity in order to function at your job.  At this rate, it can take forever to finish projects of any moderate complexity and often times the goal is never reached.

For those like myself, my short term income comes from building websites for clients.  The benefit is that I am working on what I enjoy doing, it pays pretty well (if you have the right clients) and it allows a flexible schedule so I can try to work in my own projects on occasion.  The down side is that, when busy, it takes up much more time than a 9 to 5 job so I may sometimes go weeks or possibly months without having time to work on my own projects.

Ideally, you want to find something that takes up very little time, makes pretty good money (enough to live on) and is sustainable.  If you are good at it, affiliate marketing fits this bill.  This is where some of the bigger names online make their short-term income to pay the bills while they work on larger projects that make them the big dollars.  The down side to this is complacency.  If you find something that only requires a couple of hours work each day, makes enough money to pay your bills plus some, and is sustainable why would you put in all that work on something big that might or might not pay off one day?  Why not kick back and enjoy your new-found leisure?

My goals is to build sustainable online businesses that don’t depend on search engines or PPC.  However, I am beginning to dabble more into affiliate marketing to see if I can make enough to keep my business running while also freeing up the time I need to work on my projects.  Keep reading in the next months and years and we’ll see…

The extended warranty is always an interesting issue when I purchase new hardware, especially something that is as big of an “investment” as the new Macbook.

These items always come with some sort of standard factory warranty, typically for 1 year.  The place you purchased the item from then wants to sell you their extended warranty so it can be covered for one or two more years. The warranty is basically insurance that the product is going to function as it should for the duration of the warranty.

In my mind, an extended warranty is basically the retailer betting you $x that the product will not break.  For my macbook, the extended warranty was $250.  So, Best Buy is telling me that based on their research, the odds of any problem occuring during the extended warranty period that costs up to or more than $250 is slim.  If the odds were good, they would quit selling these warranties (or up the price).  This is where they make their money.  You placed a sucker bet and gave them $250 saying that your Macbook will break outside of the original warranty but in less than the extended warranty time frame.  If it doesn’t, then you are out.  If it does and costs less than $250 to fix, then you also lose.  The only way you win with a extended warranty is if the item breaks after the initial warranty and costs more than $250 to fix.

The warranty typically only covers defects in manufacturing or workmanship, not human-created problems.  Macs are well built, but things happen.  What are the odds that a part with a manufacturing error works fine for the first year while the original warranty is in place, but stops during the second year?  It could happen, and I’m sure it does, but the odds are in your favor on that one.

In vegas, they say always bet on the house.  The house knows the stakes, and the games are always in their favor.  In the case of an extended warranty, you can make the same bet the house is making.  If the retailers, after spending millions researching the subject, decide that it is a safe bet that the item won’t have repairs of more than $250, then it’s a bet I’m willing to take.  Consequently, I rarely get the extended warranty on anything.

NOTE:  You need to make up your own mind, I’m just putting out my opinion on my blog.  If you don’t get the extended warranty and your crap breaks, don’t come complaining to me.