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I was just about to get pissed with my current web host. A host that I have been using for a few years now, and that I changed to, after flipping from service to service.
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(2:39:25 PM) Jeff: Fair, but isn’t it a security risk to have so many out of date scripts installed?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.
I was thinking today that something that I may try for 2009 is this. Work like a crazy person until I reach the $ number that I feel I need to survive for a year and then take the remaining time “off”. Go on a mini-retirement, read a book, etc.
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.
I am working on my first site that will be purely made for affiliate marketing. This is a site that I have built after taking everything that I learned from The Black Ink Project. I am about 6 months behind schedule, but I have the site completely online, with a lot of content in the blog and most of my first campaign on the go.
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.
I am a huge reader and one of the things that I use my Online Profits for is cleaning out my Amazon Wish List. Now I have a number of new books that I am going to have to add to the list. ChrisG has written a post on ProBlogger called “5 Influential Books All Bloggers Should Know“.
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:
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.
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?
I have been following Mr Cruz for a while now, and I think that he is on to something. Now I know that he is not the first person to show how to build a blog up in real time, but he is the first that I have watched from the beginning, and I have a feeling that he really didn’t have much background in the blogging world before he got started. This is something of a capital that I feel that others that have done the “study” of blogging did have. They had existing traffic, and industry contacts that they could leverage in their endeavour. I understand that Tyler wasn’t completely new to the game, but I think that he was mainly involved in the poker world and they typically aren’t the audience that a webmaster blog would be looking for.
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.
