If you are building a blog type site this is not as critical at the start.  You can easily start your site on a free hosted blog site and then if you feel it necessary you can more to a hoste solution with minimal headache.  Just make sure that you have your own domain so that you don’t lose too many links that you have built.

Difference between the two. Hosted like going with a host like Hostgator and between a hosted, wordpress.com, blogger, etc

What are the advantages of the hosted service.

• Don’t need to have any programming experience
• Don’t need to worry about keeping the programs up-to-date
• Minimal backend work needed
• Usually lots of easy to installed themes, and styles
• Security, hosted services are typically very secure.

Disadvantages of hosted service

• You don’t have control of what is used for the site
• You can’t customize certain aspects of the site
• Even though there are plugins and extensions available what you can do with the site is limited.

Advantages of using a host

• You can pretty much put anything that you want online
• You have much great control of the way the site looks and interacts with your audience
• You can use the host for your FTP, email, and many other services that the hosted version does not have
• There are many “unlimited” hosts that allow you to store large amounts of data at no extra cost.

Disadvantages

• If you are not careful, you may find that the site is down more than it is up.
• Customer service may be a nightmare (Although Hostgator is an exception to this.  They have done everything they can to make my life on their servers enjoyable) .
• There may be bandwidth limitations.
• The cost can be huge if you have a popular site with little revenue as the bandwidth charges can get expensive.
• You are responsible for ensuring that your site is secure.

Conclusions
It really depends on what you are planning on using the site for.  If you are only interested in a content site or a personal site that you can communicate with family etc.  They a hosted service, or using many different hosted services to serve the purposes that you need for them. 

This can include services like Wordpress.com, Flickr.com blogger.com, etc.  If you are interested in having a custom site programmed, want to have a email address with your domain or want to have the choice of how the site works.  If you want to have full control over the type of content, visitors, the script on the site etc then you are going to be looking for something that is hosted.  The other thing that you have to remember is that if you want to ensure that you have FULL control over the content of the site then you want to fully control the host.  The hosted services typically have a TOS stating that they do not assume any risk if you lose everything.

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Hostgator has had a few hiccups over the time that I started with them to where they are now.  They have grown and acquired tremendously, and typically you would think that the customer service would decline. 

The last few times that I have talked to the live chat I have noticed a decrease in their ability to help me out.  More and more they are simply trying to get me off the line and to send in a ticket.  In the “olden days” the live chat peeps would put in the ticket for me at the least, and in some cases I had them go and FIND someone to fix it while I was chatting.  That type of service is amazing.

Problems in Hosting Paradise

Fast forward to a couple of days ago, I noticed the other day that Fantastico still hadn’t been updated with Wordpress 2.7 for this domain.  This was important since I tried out 2.7 on a couple of my other sites that I manually install on and I found it was a HUGE improvement(You can search, and install plugins from the admin area AWESOME !!!) ,so when I had a free moment I logged onto the live chat to see what was up.  Here is the transcript from December 28, 2008:

(2:37:24 PM) Joseph Ve: has entered the chat.

(2:37:40 PM) Joseph Ve: We currently don’t have an ETA on the next Fantastico update

(2:37:56 PM) Joseph Ve: Until then you will have to either manually install or upgrade Wordpress

(2:37:57 PM) Jeff: Any guess?

(2:38:11 PM) Jeff: 2.7 has been out for a month

(2:38:51 PM) Joseph Ve: Really can’t tell ya. We’d have to roll it out to all of our shared servers (five or six hundred of em)

(2:39:25 PM) Jeff: Fair, but isn’t it a security risk to have so many out of date scripts installed?

(2:40:36 PM) Joseph Ve: If there was a serious security flaw in the older version of Wordpress that comprimised the safety of our hosting plan, we would roll it out asap

(2:41:33 PM) Jeff: Alright, I will have to upgrade manually

(2:41:39 PM) Jeff: Cheers, Jeff

(2:41:43 PM) Joseph Ve: Okay, take care and have a great day!

(2:41:44 PM) Joseph Ve: Thank you for using HostGator Live Chat. If you could take a minute to rate your experience with HostGator as well as my overall performance, that would help us to improve our customer service. To do that, just click the button that says Rate and Exit in the upper right hand corner. The survey takes less than a minute to fill out.

Twitter to the Rescue

So needless to say I wasn’t very pleased with the outcome of this. 

But I wasn’t going to kick up a stir yet, I am too busy.  I didn’t write a post about it, I didn’t t Twitter or bitch about them on the forums, I simply left a response on that stupid survey conveying the lack of usefulness that I got out of the live chat.

But out of the blue someone at hostgator contacted me on twitter.  So I replied to them and told them what was up.

This is when it got fast and the customer service experience got a lot better.  I told me the domain that I needed fixed and they GOT IT DONE.

When I asked why this was not something that could have been fix eariler.

HostGator Redeemed….For Now

So there you have it.  I should have got the service that I felt was deserved from Joesph (see above) when I went to get some help with the Fantastico service on my account.  It wasn’t done not because they have to do them all at once and they have a lot of servers, (Joseph Ve: Really can’t tell ya. …five or six hundred of em) or that it is controlled by Fantastico.  It wasn’t done because they didn’t want to put in the ticket, either they didn’t know how (doubtful) or didn’t want to.

I feel that when I put in the horrible review that I did after my online chat session, it flagged something.  Not sure how they figured out that I was the right guy though.  Maybe they just searched my email that I sent the survey from.  But going those extra few steps to contact me vis Twitter, and try to remedy the situation.  This puts me back in the good books and prevents me from starting my search for an alternative host.

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So in January I am going to do just that.  I am going to start to build a strategy that I can use to gain the income that I require in a short amount of time.  Like the 4HWW disciples say, what you do for your life should not be the same as what you do for work.

There are a couple of ideas that come to mind right off.  One is to build my online business to the point where active involvement will see rapid growth in profits, but a slow monthly decline when I stop being active.  Another is to go freelance with my professional work.  There are a lot of companies out there looking for contract employees for short term work.  The disadvantage to that is that I have to leave the area where I am at now.

There are a lot of ways that I can do it, and I think that it is a great goal.  For now I am aiming for a 6 month year.  So by the time the warm weather hits my home town, I will be winding down for the year.

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I have just got my first pass on the campaign online.  I have a lot of tweaking to do after I get my first round of keyword information.  I picked the time that I did to put it online so that I can play with the volume of traffic over the holidays and get some good keyword information.  I am not planning on making much in the lines of cash on this first batch, but with some major tweaking I think that the site will be a winner for me in the New Year.   I have spent approximately $700 on the site design and content to this point, and believe that all that I have left is the marketing and a small volume of blog posts. 

Some of the things that I have learned so far are:

Outsourcing is not the be all end all

As readers of this blog will no I have had some issues with outsourcing.  Some of these issues are my fault and not defining what I was expecting in the communications.  Other times are the freelancers not delivering on schedule.

I actually had one writer tell me that they were not going to be meeting the schedule.  I asked for a discount and they said that I was already getting a deal and to take it or leave it.  I left it.  If you decide to take the contract, and yes it is a contract, then you have a responsibility to follow it.

With writers you get what you pay for, and typically less

I am not a great writer and it shows a lot of the time.  But I am working on it.  SO when I was looking to get content for my affiliate site I decided to outsource as much as I could.  I can tell you this now, you really get what you pay for at best.  I have gone through a few writers on this site alone and I am not completely satisfied with any of them.  There are a few that I have blogging now that I think are the best, but I am still doing some editing to make them blog posts.  This is something that I think will improve.

However like I said above, there are some out there that feel like they are doing you a favour for giving you such a “deal” and expect you to just take what they give you.  If you come across such a writer, dump them.  You are hiring them because either you don’t have the skill or time, and as such shouldn’t have to deal with their BS

Choose Your Niche Well

This is another thing that people tell you to do all of the time, but I never really understood what they meant until now.  The niche that I am developing my affiliate site in seems to be very narrow as it is.  But when I am choosing the content for the site I realize that there is a broad range of customers that will be visiting your site.  So just because the service, type of service or product is very narrow.  The customer that will be visiting your site is broad. 

You might be selling blue widgets, and that would be a very narrow product niche.  However what type of customer are you targeting?  The person that is doing their initial research on blue widgets?  Finding out there is out there for blue widgets?  Or are you looking for the people that have decided on the type of widget they want and you just have to give it to them.  That is really where you want to be.

Then you have the demographic that you have to appeal to.  This could be a lifestyle demographic, geographic, or age and gender demographic.  There is a reason that all “woman” magazines look a certain way, and men’s mags look the way they do, they are targeting a particular demographic.

So why bother?

If you are interested in getting into affiliate marketing then get out there.  The Black Ink Project is a great resource for the beginner.  They are not really telling you anything that you can’t find online for free, and the only reason that I actually signed up was that it was free.

That said, there is something to be said for having all of the information that you need to get started in one place and one resource.

Oh yeah, and if anyone tells you that affiliate marketing is easy, they lucked out and will probably be doing something else next year.  There is a lot of work involved in marketing any product, but the beauty is that you can do it in your home office, or on the beach in some tropical paradise (if they have Wi-Fi).  This is the reason that I am doing this, and spending so much time writing, researching, and producing.  I want to be completely self-sufficient and with a nice nest egg in the next 2 years.  I have a multi-pronged approach to this that I will use to succeed and be diverse.

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This is a relatively old post, but I was going through my starred feeds and noticed it again.

There are a number of them that I have not heard of before, but there are a few books that I would definitely add to the list would be:

ProBlogger

I understand why he didn’t (Chris authored the book with Darren) but it is an amazing book for the beginner blogger, and a great resource for the blogger who has been around.  The chapters on “Blog Writing” and “Blog Promotion” were very useful to me.

The Dip

Seth Godin writes great books on marketing, and the Dip is great.  It is all about teaching when to quit and when you persevere.  I hear a lot of people saying that you should get the audio, but come on it is not that long.  I find that if you read it once, you will understand it better than listening to it 3 or 4 times.

And finally The Four Hour Work Week

This book by Tim Ferris is great, and like Chris mentions when talking about E-Myth is great for teaching what you can do to give yourself more time by having others do your tasks.  Like many I was fooled by the title, there is a lot of work to do before you can create a reasonable income only working 4 hours a week, but the book tells you how and makes you excited to get out there and try.

Is there any books that Chris or I missed that you think should be on the short list of every blogger or small business owners wish list?

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Starting in January I am going to be working on my site design, and the type of posts that I am writing to build up a brand.  I need an identity, I have other sites that I can shoot off my mouth, so bluenoser.net has to be about chronicling my experiences and helping others do it too.

What is the brand going to be?

I have been asked in the past on how to do this or that, regarding the building or starting a simple website.  How do they get the name?  How do you host it?  How do you do HTML and where can you learn?  I am going to be writing tutorials and such to help these people out.  This will be right from what is a website, the pros and cons of particular CMS systems and how do you monetize your traffic.  There are a couple of reasons that I feel that this is a great way to do it.  One it gives me great content for the site, two it gives me a definite place to point the people who are looking for information, and maybe they will use my affiliate links in the process and three it helps me build an identity.

What about the blog posts themselves?

The largest issue that I have for a number of sites is coming up with ideas on what to write.  If I can build this site into something that people visit, and I can build a trust with those users, I believe that they will be asking me questions that I can answer through the site.  This helps me build content that I know at least one person is looking for, and it is a big world out there so I am sure they are not the only ones looking for it.

And when there isn’t any questions, I have a lot of other projects on the go that I will be writing about.  Sometimes it will be good things, other times it will be about a business issue that I am having and means that I have used to solve it.

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There are a lot of great writers out there, and I simply don’t have time to blog about them all.  But I do have time to thumb them, and sometimes Twit them.  Now every Friday I am going to link them on this site.

Marketing

• #1 Pay Per Click Lie – This is all about the discussions that we all read on the forums.  What are the right keywords, or these keywords suck.  Well maybe your site SUCKs, maybe you are not converting because of the user experience and not the keyword.
• Are You on a Mission – What you and your company’s mission statement has to say, reflects a lot on the type of management there is within the company.  If your mission statement has a lot to say about the shareholders and not a lot to say about the employees and more importantly the customer, then you are probably working for a poorly managed company over the long run

Business

• Dilbert December 13, 2008 – Sometimes it makes a lot more sense when Scott Adams talk about it.  You don’t mitigate risk by buying more crap.

Blogging

• Do-Follow Blog Search – This is awesome, I have seen so many of these lists for sale on DP that it was getting stupid.  Now you can just search for the blogs that you want to post to.
• Keywords for WLW – AS you may know I have found WLW and I love it.  This is an old page but it has the information that I believe that I need to make WLW the best thing since sliced bread.

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This is a product that is on my personal wishlist, and since he is offering 5 entries simply for a trackback to the contest, well I might as well oblige him.

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However I did notice the use of Google Gears, which is awesome.  One of the reasons that I fell in love with Windows Live Writer was the fact that I could work on my posts while I was on the go.  Gears allows any blog to do the same thing.  I haven’t tested it yet, but it is on my list.

I don’t think that this will make me move from using WLW.  I really like the fact that you can write you post and know how it is going to look on your page in real time.  I think that this is one thing that the Wordpress editor could have used some work on.  It would be great if it could take in the information from the active theme and use it to help you edit your post. 

All said, 2.7 is a definite improvement and I am sure that it is just one more step into the direction of being the blog platform of choice, and the leader.

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So now the question is where? 

I am thinking about a 2 week tour of the Greek Isles, or maybe San Francisco.  Or Spain.  There are a couple of that drive where we go.  I live on the Atlantic Coast of Canada, and don’t want to go too many time zones away.  That might actually negate San Fran from the list.

Timezones are not a big deal for a long trip, but since I figure I will only be able to get away for a week at most I don’t want to spend time recovering from Jet Lag in either direction.  3 time zones I think are max, maybe 4.  So that really limits me to the west coast of Europe and the entire eastern seaboard of NA.

Where would you go?

We really have no idea where we want to go, but we do know that we want to have a blast, and there has to be beaches and warm weather.  the trip is scheduled for February.  So leave us some suggestions and links so that we can get this party started.  Once I know where and when it will be just the motivation that I need to get all of the crap that I have on my plate now DONE.

Cheers,

JM

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Well I am using it, and I think that I will be continuing to use it even though WP2.7 is so slick. 

You see, I don’t have one of those fancy cell data plans and am tethered to hot spots.  So there there is a lot of time when I am travelling that I can’t get online to write my blogs.  I tried to use ScribeFire for a while, but for some reason it wasn’t playing nice with most of the themes on my blogs.  So I simply started to use WORD to write them and then copy them into the Wordpress Editor.  This was incredibly clunky and I still had to play around with the format.

I have been using Live writer for a total of 10 posts so far, and everything looks exactly like I think it should.  I have had to do minimal editing to the post AFTER I published it, to make it look the way that I thought that it should.

So thanks M$ for making a decent product, and TC to helping me find it.

Cheers,
JM

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So, I get out there, it is a pain in the ass to get to the outlet in the first place since it is located in one of those parking lot jungles on the out skirts of town.  You know what I am talking about, those places that people like to call “business parks” which don’t have the necessary infracstruce to handle the loads, or lack of loads, of people in cars that all try to cram into them.

When I get to the store I wanted to get some gloves, so I go and pick them up, I am a guy so that took me all of 5 minutes.  Then I stand in line, and wait, and wait.

This was not me today

This is the point where I am getting annoyed, there are 4 tills, 2 people manning them and 3 floor people wandering around annoying customers that don’t want there help.  I stood in line for 15 minutes, and there were only 3 people ahead of me.  When I get to the front I explain that i am there to pick up my coat.  They search and search and then come to realize that I was called by mistake.

Opps, but then the lady that took my coat in the first place tries to tell me that there would be no reasonable way that my coat should be there, see they send it out only once a week and it takes………

No kidding, but then why was I called, and why is it my responsibility to quesiton when I am called.

The saving grace of the entire experience was that the one that was serving me at the time gave me her card and told me if anyone called to say that my coat was in, I can call her and she will courier my coat to me at no charge.

All in all, it was a 4 hour ordeal that made a waste of my day and all that I got out of it was a pair of gloves.

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I have re-read the 4HWW, and have developed a list of goals that I am striving for, and bringing the 20/80 to fruitration.  From these thoughts I have started yet another project, yeah I know it almost seems like I am diluting and creating more work, but I think that this project will turn out to be the “one”

For those that don’t know I am an Electrical Engineer by training.  Well, almost I still haven’t finished the paper work to get my P.Eng designation, but I still have a month before my self-imposed deadline.  I am going to start a training course for a very specific field in the electrical industry.  With this course I hope to both help myself by selling packages with it, and also bring more work into my employers coffers by recommending them for the studies.  This is a consulting task that I will end up doing, but I am not ready for the liabilty that this would entail.

Training Courses are the new Black

I have begun the task of the training course by writing a spec for preliminary research, the type of research that should allow me to discover what people are looking to know, and what types of questions they are asking.  This is a very important first step, as I don’t want to spend too many hours answering a question that only I have the interest in.

I have sent this spec to a few of the contacts that I have used in the past and depending on the response and costs I will either engage one of them or open it up to bidding on a freelance site.

From there I plan to start the research, again I will be out sourcing this.  At least at the beginning.  When I feel I have enough of the information I need I will write and format the course.  I will outsource the actual editing and final formatting.  I plan on having a book, presentation, a few tools and an exam to test the “students” knowledge.

I haven’t set a time line for this project yet, that I will do when I have the initial research data.  I will be sure to keep everyone up-to-date on this.

And that first picture? It is a Milk Shed, actually it is THE milk shed of my Grandmother in CB where I was on a weekend not too long ago.

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I either have to go in ot out of the tunnel.

I give up, and now I need to find an alternative.

I just spent all of this evening and most of my free time yesterday trying to fix one of my sites.  I still didn’t really fix it, the site only works when there is now www. in the url.  If there is, well 403 everywhere.

Does anyone out there have “people” that do the routine maintenance for their sites?  Ensure that the plugins are up-to-date, and fix any bugs that come up?

I would like to move to hosted solutions, however that limits what I can do with the themes, plugins etc.

Ideally I would like to pay someone in batches to update all of my sites and then fix any bugs for me.  Is this something that anyone out there has tried outsourceing on Enlance or the other alternatives?  If you have any experience with this type of outsourcing please let me know about your experiences.  I would especially like to know how you went about writing the description of work.

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I am facing the music now.  One of my favorite sites that I use as a general soap box that has both a front end blog and a back end forum, is on the fritz.  I got an email from my hosting service to tell me that there was a complaint that my site was hosting some malicious script.

It turns out that one of the scripts or addons that were installed on the site was out of date, and now there is a bunch of stuff simply not working.  However I think that I am going to take this time and restructure the entire site.  I am not taking entire advantage of some newer addons out there that may enable me to tie the different functionality of the site tighter together.

That is enough rambling for today, I have to get to bed and be up early tomorrow for meetings.

And the pic is just there to remind me to relax and just get the shit done, sometimes you just need to breathe.

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However, there are some things that I am really getting behind on, my day job just didn’t allow me the time.  One of the biggest things was to complete the Black Ink 2 training.  I started the seesions, I started building a site, I even started gathering some great content.  The niche that I was planning on entering was the Online Conference/Meeting space.  This is a space that I see getting bigger, and especially in the turblent economic times.  When money is tight people start to look for cost effective means of sharing information.  Why fly when you can sit there and hold the meeting face to virtual face.

One of my goals to get to before the end of the calendar year is to start having a positive cash flow on InnovativeMeetings.  I have already invested time and money into the site and I don’t think that I can simply flip it and expect to get much out of it as it stands now.  My other goals are not involved in my online business space.  They are to get my LEED AP Certification and P.Eng.  These are two things that will really help my engineering career, and will help me earn the seed money for my online business ideas.

The only way that I am going to be able to reach these goals is to learn how to write specs for out sourcing and learning how to manage that with minimal time commitments.  I have worked on this before and have had some cautious success with it.

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It has really been crazy around here.  The first week of September I was on Vacation in NYC.  If you have never visited New York, do it soon.  It is really a blast and you can do it on the cheap.  The shopping, Central Park, the shows and the people are amazing.  We have been there twice in the last 12 months.

After I got back from there I worked a 60 hour week and then headed to the IEEE sections Congress in Quebec City.  This was a great trip, I was able to hang out with a lot of great people and meet some new friends.  IEEE is a great place for Engineers to network and meet people of the same vein.  Engineers are a odd bunch they usually have to have two lives, one geeky one at work and a “normal” one at home.  When at an IEEE event you can sit down with a beer and talk about sports and the LHC.

I even had time inbetween meetings to tour around the city. Old Quebec is the closest that I have ever been to an old European city.  It has made me decide that I Old Europe is my next adventure.

And then last week I was in Minneapolis to visit a generator manufacturer and get some classes in.  It was a decent trip that involved a very convoluted trip from Halifax to Minneapolis, but that is a story for another day.

I didn’t have a lot of time to spend touring the town.  I was staying directly across from the University of Minnesota, and that place is huge.  I ended up working in a coffee shop across from the hotel, which was a lot of fun.  I talked to some of the students, not locals since I don’t think that I talked to one person who was actually from there.

And then I spent last weekend and this week trying to get everything settled, put out some fires and figure out where all my projects stand.  I finished that by the end of the day today, so now life should be reaching something closer to normal.

So what is next?

Well I am back to developing my business plan.  There are some courses that I have to finish and then I am going to get back to developing my latest project.  I still have the intention of reaching the modest level of $500 of passive proft by end of year.  Currently I am at $200 so it is entirely doable.

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Starting to get Frustrated

I am currently working on a brand new project.  I have approached this new project in a completely different way than I would normally do.  I have a plan, schedule, and budget.  The schedule necessitates that I can`t do all of the work myself, which is fine because I made a budget for that.

So some of my content has been outsourced, and it is going great.

My site design template was outsourced, well kind of, I simply went over to templatemonster and picked one that I thought would work well.

My first landing page was outsourced, now I don`t really think that it is the greatest, but that is more my fault with direction than that of the designer, and the price was very ~affordable~.

However I needed to get my Wordpress theme developed to match the template that I picked out.  So I headed over to DP and made a post.  I got a few great offers, too good to be true actually, so I dumped them.  I got some over the top and dumped them too.  Then I picked one that seemed great.  The guy wrote with decent English and wrote respectfully, and the price was mid-range.

However, I would not be writing this post if all went well.  This was supposed to be a job that took no more than a week, it has been more like three, and the guy doesn`t seem to be that interested in getting back to me in a timely manner.  I am starting to think that he has gotten his 50% upfront so now he doesn`t care.  I pay my bills but I am seriously thinking that I need to have a discount on part of the service that I am receiving.

What have you done when your out sourcing project has gone wrong? When the person on the other end of the inter-web does`t give to shits that you have a schedule to meet and knows that they will never meet you face-to-face?

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It is really simple really, you just have to add the following to your stylesheet.

img.centered {
display: block;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}

img.alignright {
padding: 4px;
margin: 0 0 2px 7px;
display: inline;
}

img.alignleft {
padding: 4px;
margin: 0 7px 2px 0;
display: inline;
}

.alignright {
float: right;
}

.alignleft {
float: left;
}

It is that simple.  So now get out there and fix it.  And add Daily Blogging Tips to your reader.

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What is Kiva?

Kiva is a person-person micro-lending website.

Kiva partners with existing expert microfinance institutions. In doing so, we gain access to outstanding entrepreneurs from impoverished communities world-wide. Our partners are experts in choosing qualified entrepreneurs. That said, they are usually short on funds. Through Kiva, our partners upload their entrepreneur profiles directly to the site so you can lend to them. When you do, not only do you get a unique experience connecting to a specific entrepreneur on the other side of the planet, but our microfinance partners can do more of what they do, more efficiently.

How it works

It is a real simple process, simply get an account, add some cash via paypal (you know you have some in there).  Then you can browse the available loans, and pick an individual that you would like to support.  Once you support the business that you are interested in, you watch everything happen.

When the loan term is complete the money that you gave out is put right back into your account so that you can then use it again to start a new loan, or withdraw it.

So what are you waiting for?  Get over there and get yourself started, make sure that you tell them that jeff{a}hosernews.ca sent you :)  And if you are interested in viewing my profile simply click here.

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Well that didn’t take long.  I guess I have a real problem.

I am going back to Twittering, but I will be sure not to be using it as I was before, a play-by-play of my life.  Instead I will be using it as a micro-blog.  I have a lot of little ideas and tips that I think of during the day, but don’t think that they are “important” enough to write a full blownblog post.

Don’t get me wrong, it is not that these things are useless, it is j
ust that they are tips and unless I put together a bunch of them there is not really a point to fill someone’s RSS reader.

So, Join me on Twitter and find out what life lessons (and affiliate business) I learn, as I learn them.

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You can work anywhere, including a pub with free wifi and music. So I did what any smart Haligonian would do, I headed to the pub. The Old Triangle was my choice.  I walked around the town and this was the only place that had free wi-fi.

I tried the Aliant Brand that was free up till recently.  It really sucks that most of the places that had free wireless in Halifax switched and now you have to either already be an Aliant customer or pay a huge amount to get online….I might as well stay home.

If you are downtown today, come on by, I am probably the only one working on a computer

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However the down side that almost had me asking for my money back, is the customer service.

I know that this is probably a one man show, but being a paid plugin means that it doesn’t have much of a community to help people out when they run into problems.  But even being a one man show shouldn’t mean that you don’t reply to your emails for days.  I bought the plugin a week from today, couldn’t get it to work and emailed the support.  I didn’t hear back for a couple of days and when their fix didn’t work I emailed them again.  I still haven’t heard back.

But anyway, if there was a free product out there that did what this WP Link Cloak plugin did, I wouldn’t be using it.  The fact of the matter is that there is only one other plugin that does the automatic keyword linking that this one does and that cost another $20 on top of the $77 of this one.  The free ones out there need you to automatically copy and paste the URLs, which is not a big deal for a new site, but for an old one that can be very time consumming.

I will be writing a more indepth review of the software in the future, but for now give WP Link Cloak a try and let me know what you think

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If they had the ability to scale then I am sure that I would stick around longer. But for now I am going to get out of the micro-blogging space. Maybe when fall comes around I will join up on FriendFeed.

What do you think about Twitter. Are they on the brink of failure, or have they already started on the downward spiral?

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I have a few ideas on what “niche” and market that I am interested in getting involved in. so…

1. Pick out the niche and product that I want to start targetting.
2. Find an “aged” domain that has all of the properties that I am looking for, or add a sub-domain to one of my existing sites (this is the way that I am leaning for these tests).
3. Pick out specific products that I am going to market.
4. Start working on gathering content and keyword related articles.  I am going to use a basic version of wordpress for the CMS as I have found that it works very well, and it is easy to add content to.
5. Start a PPC campaign.  For this I am going to start with Adwords as it is still the Cadillac network when it comes to volume of traffic.
6. Refine keyword list, refine landing pages, repeat.

My goal is to break even in what ever area that I decide to get started in, however I am going to give myself a month to do this.  I am also setting a $$$ limit on what I am willing to put up.  I don’t want to dig myself into such a hole that nothing I can do will get me out of it.

As for timeline I am planning on having my niche, domain and products decided on this weekend.  Then the landing page, contact page, about page and at least 5 other articles related to the product group published.  From there it will be getting some easy links to get spidered.  This will take me about a week or so.  Then the PPC, this I am planning to have started by the second week of July.

I will have a series of weekly posts every Monday or Tuesday as the experiment runs its course.

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