Getting Down to Business

I was contacted today by another web designer, who does his business on the side, low volume, low pricing etc. He has a customer who wants to know why they aren't on the front page of a Google search for 'car alarms'.

Currently, a search for that results in 5.02 MILLION results. And they want to be first?!?!

Then I go look at their website. Splash page. (PR2)

Right click, view source. No keywords. No text on the page. Just a silly flash animation of cars zooming around. Oh gawd.

Ok, click to enter.

Next page, home. Not a lot of text, PR2. No keywords. No description. Heck even the page title is garbage.

Oh boy.

I tossed him back a quote to get their PR up to 3 or 4, but I doubt I'll hear from them again.

I've got about five customers going right now, which is a good thing. Finding motivation is difficult, which is a bad thing.

I'm hoping to finish up on a real-estate site this week. The client is a bit slow at times, so I'm not sure this will happen.

Same client also wants a reunion-type site for his high school. I've started this project, however I'm hoping to finish the RE site before getting too deep into this one.

An old client needs his work finished. Contacting him is difficult, and his project has actually be ongoing for about a year now. I'd like to finish it up soon.

Another client has major shipping issues with his OSC site, and I"m starting to delve into the world of custom-php scripting through OSC. I'm not at all afraid to tackle this, although I have a feeling its going to be quite a major task, not one I think he'll be willing to pay for...

Lastly, I have a few new hosting clients upcoming. Those are always good; easy money too.

instantly add targeted content to your website - Create pages that search engines will index to boost your traffic and profit!

Well I've successfully published my first e-book. The book is being promoted by around 100,000 vendors through ClickBank.net. Hopefully I'll start to see some income from that.

I've also modified my blog page to make more money, more about that in an upcoming post.

I've nearly completed RybackiProperties.com - a real nice looking site that is running on the OpenRealty platform.

I've also almost finished Enchanted Ridge, a kennel for miniature pinschers (sp?) in North Dakota.

Fun, fun, fun!

Today I finally got around to adding comments to this blog. Please, feel free to pipe in at any time.

I am scheduled to teach a class on basic HTML coding around the second week of October for an employer. This brings up an interesting idea, teaching HTML and PHP to 'the locals' for free or a reduced price. Perhaps I could offer the class through the public library.

Might be a way to increase my presence in the area, and to 'get known' by more people. As it is, techlh.com/arnold is the only local way I have to let people know I'm around. I'm considering targeting ads with adwords to sites that are Arnold-related, but I think they'll be hard to find. Most of the local sites are run by myself anyway...

Well I started my first Adwords campaign today for the Parent Connection. I set a maximum budget of $1.00 per day and like $.05 per click for my keywords. It's quite an involved deal, getting those keywords in the right sequence, etc. Geez, no wonder people make big bucks off of that as a service!

I also purchased getparentsinvolved.org today. My plan is to load up a phpBB forum on there, and then 'sponsor' the forum with the Parent Connection software. That's pretty much what PTOToday does.

Oh, and speaking of PTOToday, every time I post a message on there, the mods delete anything they feel like. Such as my sig with a link to the PCO. Idiots.

Today I'm submitting articles that I've written about web hosting and design to Article 99.

Of course, this helps along my page ranking by linking to my site. I've done similar things at EzineArticles.com. Also, these articles help establish me as a subject matter expert in the hosting/design area, which pushes business my way as well.

If a customer tells you that they want their website modeled after this, what do you do?

Yesterday, after 18 months of posting Google Ads on various websites, I finally hit the magic one hundred dollar mark. $102.31 to be exact. So, it looks like I'll be receiving a check in the mail soon from Google. Sweet.