Beautiful Business Cards from VistaPrint
Help People Put a Face to the Name of Your Business
I have been running around crazy for the past few days trying to get things in order. I am heavily promoting one of the numerous web sites I run in an attempt to get the name out there and build my brand. So far I am having a lot of luck, and have been making a good amount of money, but it has required a lot of work on my part.
I think in the end it will be worth it because I will establish a site that will maintain itself over the long run, with very little maintenance from me. Right now is a crucial growth period for the site and I have been working on many things like backlinking, SEO, and general promotion in relevant places.
I have been telling a lot of my friends about the site and realized it will help a lot if they have something they can take with them to give to people who may be interested in it.
To start I decided to have 500 Business Cards made. I found a great place online called VistaPrint that did a really great job on the cards and had some really good pricing too.
While I was checking around for good deals on business cards I found a coupon code for their site that let me get the cards at 50% off, so I ended up paying next to nothing for all of them. If you need business cards you should definitely check them out and use the coupon code below to save even more money.
BizCard08 - 50% Off Business Cards
With so many web based businesses out there it is easy to get lost in the crowd. You need to really focus on promoting yourself and making your site stand out from the competition. If you are working on running a professional online business, I highly recommend getting some professional business cards made and promoting your company to everyone you meet.
Word of mouth is the most powerful form of advertising out there. Make it easy for people to recommend you and give them a couple business cards to give to people they know. Before you know it, you will have new leads contacting you almost everyday, and the traffic to your site will double in no time.
Taking Your Business to the Next Level
Do Not Limit Your Business Potential by Limiting Your Payments
It is well recognized in business circles that the easier you make it for someone to pay for something the more likely they are to buy it. This relies on the “don’t make me think” mentality that most consumers operate under. People don’t want to solve a puzzle in order to purchase something. They just want to purchase it.
I first realized many of the difficulties people had with online forms of payment when I was selling on eBay years ago. Since then I have worked hard to understand how to make money online, internet marketing, SEO and all the other factors that can make or break a business.
With one of my latest ventures I finally decided it was time to step it up and play with the big boys, no more PayPal only payments. I now have my very own merchant account, which allows me to provide all the common merchant services you find on other sites to my customers. This means I am now a fully functional, credit card processing machine… or at least my website is.
My merchant account allows me to take orders and accept credit cards right through my website, which is much more convenient to people than sending PayPal payments to an email address. I never realized how easy it is to get setup for credit card processing, but now that I am, I wish I had done it sooner.
The company I went through is called Merchant Advisors and offers great service because you can actually sign up for a free merchant account if you are unsure that you want to commit to a service.
Always remember that online business is about ease of use, convenience, and creating easy conversions for your visitors. Accepting numerous forms of payment makes it easy for your customers, which will make it easier for you to succeed as a business.
The Key to a Successful Web Business is Internet Marketing
Internet Marketing is Important if you want to Succeed
A lot of my friends have been asking me lately how they can make extra money through a web based business. I have been making money online for several months now, and everyone I talk to is very impressed by how quickly I have turned a hobby into a money making venture.
Currently I am running numerous websites that all bring in regular monthly income. I have had people tell me that this is the best way to go because all the money adds up quickly. Well it does, and it doesn’t.
The most important thing I have learned from maintaining all these sites is that you can have a hundred websites and they won’t make you a penny if people don’t know they exist. Enter Internet Marketing.
Internet Marketing is one of the most critical considerations people need to make when trying to make money online with a web based business. Whether you are trying to make money online by blogging, or selling widgets you need to get exposure to make the most of the time you invest into your business.
Now because making money online can be time consuming in itself, sometimes there is not always time to learn all the latest and greatest internet marketing techniques. This is where internet marketing consultants come in.
Because it is simply not realistic to control every facet of your online business, it can be very helpful to work with an Internet Marketing Consultant to make sure you are making the most of all the opportunities available to your company.
There are many internet marketing consulting companies out there so always make sure to check reviews, and ask some questions before jumping into an agreement with someone.
One site I always come back to as a valuable resource is Danny Demichele’s website which offers great tips and news on internet marketing. Even if you are not working directly with Danny his site offers valuable information to help you safe guard your online business. If you have questions that are not covered on his site you can always hire Danny to get the answers to all your questions.
It still amazes me how many people who are trying to make a living online over look the importance of a good internet marketing campaign. Knowing this you already have an advantage over those who are going to cross their fingers and hope that Google finds them in the sea of millions of websites.
Too Many Business Requirements from End Users
An ambitious project using MSFA failed due to demand-overload
My company started an ambitious project to run our entire ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system as a web application, and they were prepared to throw a lot of time and resources at the project to make it work.
We hired a consultant who had experience managing large scale projects and also had an extensive background with writing web applications. We even hired additional staff solely for this project. Despite all of our efforts, the project still ended up as a costly failure.
Now, there were a number of reasons why the project failed, but I would like to focus on what I believe to be the most significant problem: “too much, too fast.”
First, let me provide a little background on the software that we are currently using for our ERP. It is approximately 10 years old, and extremely limited in what it can do. Although it supports some standards such as SQL (a given for any database application) it has a number of bugs that prevent these features from being usable, meaning complex workarounds are necessary for almost every facet of our business.
There are upgrades for the software that fix these bugs and expand functionality, but since it is an “off the shelf” retail application upgrading all of our existing systems is prohibitively expensive. Especially considering that the most recent version would not satisfy all of our business needs and would only be viable as a temporary solution anyway.
We have done pretty well with what we have available, but it is just not enough. Admittedly, many of the problems we have are not with the software itself but with how we use it (and abuse it).
This project, which we started in november of 2007, was not the first attempt to migrate from our disfunctional ERP system, however it was the first attempt we had made using a proven methodology instead of just “winging it”.
You may have heard of Microsoft Foundations for Agile Software Development (MSFA) before, which is the methodology recommended to us by our consultant.
Part of this process involved defining Business Rules (what the current software does now), Business Requirements (what the new software would be required to do), and Use Cases (examples of how the current software is used).
All of this is intended to give a very clear definition of what functionality in the old system needs to be preserved in the new system, and what it will be expected to do better.
So if we allocated plenty of resources for the project, followed a proven methodology, and had experience from failed projects in the past, then why did this project fail? I believe the reason that had the largest impact was the fact that the end users both defined the business requirements and approved them.
Needless to say, this is a recipe for disaster since end users are focused on entirely different problems than developers are. I’d hate to use a car analogy, but if we were building a car, the end users would be more worried about leather seats and air conditioning, while we the developers are just trying to get the engine and transmission to work together so that we can move forward.
Now don’t get me wrong here, nobody knows more about what a system should do than the end users, since they are the ones who have to put up with it.
Ideally, they could provide a wish list of things they want the system to do and the developers could prioritize them based on how feasible they are. Unfortunately, there were several people at each development team meeting that probably should not have been, prioritizing power windows as more important than having a windshield.
Although this project left a bitter taste in my mouth, I learned a lot from it.
As of today I have been told that the project “isn’t dead, it’s just sleeping”, suggesting that we will pick it up again sometime when there is less going on.
Fortunately, I’m not that naive and I can see that the project as we envisioned it this time around is not only no longer reasonable, but should not even be considered desirable.
What we need is to get back to the source of the problems we are having now, and carefully work out as much of the details as we can before we start hiring additional resources to help.
Microsoft is the Debil! Linux Here I Come!
Microsoft, How I hate Thee! Let Me Count the Ways…
I noticed a couple people are starting to check out different parts of my blog. That’s great! I’m glad to see a handful of people are finding some of the random articles and posts interesting.
I wanted to apologize to anyone who is checking the blog for missing a post yesterday. I am trying to commit to posting one article per day and last night I missed doing a post.
But hold on! I have a valid excuse… “it’s all Microsoft’s fault!“.
All is forgiven now right? Hehe. Let me explain exactly why it is Microsoft’s fault.
I recently built a new computer for a customer of mine. I got it setup for her, and copied all her programs, documents, and settings over to the new system exactly as she had them on the old one so that she could run her business. She is very much into her routine so any changes on a computer are “un-welcomed” to say the least.
I got pretty much everything setup but due to “service outages” with TDS she was unable to confirm if her email was working. (5 days of service outages. Good job TDS! You are our only alternative to Charter and this is the service you provide.) Once TDS finally got their customer’s back online a week later I got a call from my customer letting me know her email was not working on the new computer.
I came over to check on this and found out the address book had not exported / imported correctly into the new system. I checked the CSV file and manually edited it in Excel to correct the issues so that it could be imported again the correct way. Unfortunately when I selected all her contacts and removed them from the address book to clear out the faulty contacts Outlook Express had a “hiccup”.
When I went to import the fixed contacts into Outlook Express I got an error message stating that Outlook Express could not import the contacts because the program was damaged and I would need to repair or reinstall it.
Now most of you know that Outlook Express is embedded into Windows so it cannot actually be removed. I went online and tried several suggested fixes. I ran the system file checking utility which found no problems. I did a repair of Windows which only lead to a blue screen reboot loop when Windows couldn’t make sense of the video driver.
I restarted in safe mode and removed the driver, rebooted and then got the latest driver for the video card. Now that I was back in Windows I tried to open Outlook Express again. No dice.
Now I was getting a Windows error saying the program could not start at all. I would get the OE splash screen and then the program would crash. Great…
I checked a couple things and determined the repair had rolled back the version of Internet Explorer which is tied in closely to Outlook Express. This is probably what was causing the problem. I determined this after trying the DBX fixes, and registry key fixes mentioned online, both of which had no effect on the program.
I went to the Microsoft update site and downloaded the IE 7 stand alone update because sources online stated that a service pack update should fix problems with Outlook Express and IE since they are embedded in the OS.
The IE 7 update did not correct the problem. I went back to the Microsoft update site to see if I could automatically get the service packs I needed. The only service pack that was offered was the SP3 update. Unfortunately this would not download correctly because it had been canceled earlier when TDS was running at 1.5kb a sec.
Apparently because it had been canceled it would not attempt to download the update a second time through the Microsoft update site. It just showed the update as being 1 failed, 5 pending and would do nothing.
Knowing good old Microsoft, of course there was no status bar or indication of how long the download / install / update would take, or any indication that the update was not responding. I finally told my customer I would leave it running and would check back with her tomorrow since I had been working on fixing the system for about 4 hours at this point, for problems that were all caused by Windows / Microsoft.
I left with a terrible headache and got home at about a quarter to 10 (pm). I played my guitar, drank a couple beers and then went to bed. I had been working on computer issues for about 14 hours so my brain was totally fried.
I was able to try and come back to things with a fresh start this morning. I decided I would go into work and download the SP3 stand alone update file and put it on disk to save myself time this afternoon. I also need to address a WPS file issue loading into new versions of Word. Because Microsoft is so into updating all their software you can no longer double click a WPS file on her computer and have it open, you actually need to open it through Word > File > Open which my customer is not happy with.
These are all trivial things, but I can understand why someone would prefer it their way. Why should they need to use their computer the way Microsoft is telling them they need to. Why can’t it work the same way it worked before, or would that just be to easy?
I have really come to hate Microsoft more and more every day. I have been forced to use Windows for WAY to long and will be looking into moving over to Linux on one of my home PCs very soon.
It’s a tough move to do because I am usually VERY busy from about 9am to 12am with the majority of that time being spent on the computer. It is hard to accept that a move to a new OS and the learning curve associated with it will affect my productivity, which I know it will to some extent.
To make the most of this I am going to document this OS transition for anyone who has been interested in moving over to Linux. You can learn it with me going from having almost no experience with Linux, to getting it up and running to the point that it can do all the basic things you need it to do. (Office work, web, web design, graphics programs, music, and movies.)
This actually also relates to problems we are running into at work with trying to clone a Linux image from a compact flash card, through Windows. But that’s another LONG story that I won’t bore you with at the moment.
Anyway I feel this rant has gone on long enough. I will try and post a second article today to make up for the missing post yesterday. As always, thanks so much for checking out Pseudorant. I really appreciate the support!
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