Obblogatory Ramblings About Life

Having just finished updating over 200 pages to BB2, I have to say several things about the SBI system:

1. The SBI system is a database-driven system, pages are served from a large cache prepared by the page generator. But the database is massive, hugely complex, and accessible indirectly through the tools in SBI. Whether it is vulnerable like WP can be, I don’t know. I sincerely hope not. But hope isn’t a very good replacement for backing up your website!

2. That updating the pages in BB2 was a complete time-sink. In WordPress, the updates wouldn’t have been necessary, and even the tweaks that I added such as ‘nofollow’, open in new page, affiliate links, so on, would have been handled in seconds literally (how do I know this, because I already made these changes on my blog), not days. Let’s not mention the many, many other tasks that WordPress makes easy, but then WordPress is a great way to write for beginners & experienced people to create a website/blog. But it requires some skill, and there is little backup if you have issues… But most of all, …

3. WordPress is not a complete end2end business system, like SBI aims to be. And that’s the point. That’s what I’m here to learn. It teaches you how to pick your niche, how to write (for the most part), how to build a page (horrible experience that it still is, and UYOH isn’t better at all though updating is easy), how to do many things… SBI is a unique solution to one set of problems. It is not perfect, it is not even current in many ways… But if you’re here to learn the business system, it doesn’t need to be ‘bleeding edge’. It just has to work.

How do I know this? Because I blogged and ran a couple of WordPress sites from WP v1.3 ( I think ), I’ve used BB1/2, UYOH, Xsitepro, private hosting, and even a couple of HTML editors… but none of these can teach you the things that SBI can. They are not comparable tools by any means.
In fact, I think the name is something of a mis-nomer: SBI… the B should stand for ‘Business’ not Build.

Kenneth

Doesn’t anyone else see the irony in this? Here’s a hardworking lady with a good site considering giving up the entire site… just because Google decided to clean up its search engine; and by doing so, laying waste her online business, and that of dozens of other SBI entrepreneurs as well.

It’s ironic because (and sadly so), there are so many stories of good owners running popular sites supplying information and resources people need & like being laid waste because Google can’t figure out that it needs them or not. I’m wondering just how many real online businesses have stopped developing now.

I guess that when you attack the eco-system that you feed off, then it’s only a matter of time before you starve yourself. Anyone seen Google’s recent results: lowered CPC, lowered CTR rates, much poorer results… and Google doesn’t seem to notice!

As a word of encouragement: Get your own business that’s immune to Google whether it’s online or offline, and let Google figure things out by itself… they’ll catch up with you eventually… And, if you can, stop them earning money from your site (via Adsense) at the same time they are using those profits to de-rank your sites.

If I may draw a parallel, you may buy gas from a particular gasoline station, but how much longer will you buy it if it causes your engine to become more & more erratic?

Kenneth

We have many customers in our business: we are sure we’re NOT the best school in the area for languages, but that is NOT what we sell our customers on. We sell them on our experience, our passion for teaching, our success in producing students who mostly will be able to use the language.

Moreover, we are trying to solve a number of other problems, as well. So our customers factor in a number of issues into making a decision: price, convenience, location, etc.. When there are so many factors, you cannot boil down the whole thing to just one factor.

If you just want to go shopping on a Saturday, would you buy a Ferrari or a Volvo? Which is better? If you want to race in Lemans, which would you buy then? If you want to go offroading, … etc.. There isn’t ONE answer to the question, which is the best car?

There is another reason: a customer’s reason to buy your product may not always be the same as the reason you provide the product. You need to understand more about how your customers see you. Avoiding words like better, worse, etc. can avoid some of the moral complications.

Moreover, even if you don’t make a sale, you can still ‘educate’ your customers on your product. That is an aspect that is seriously underrated. Even if they don’t buy from you the first time, they will surely remember where they learned about the product. So do a good job teaching your customers, and they will learn to trust you. They will then likely buy from you at some point, if not today, perhaps tomorrow. No matter whether you are selling airbrush tanning supplies, penthouse apartments, or fried chicken.

Just my 2c.

Google will always do what Google wants to do, it is responsible to its shareholders, not to its publishers. We don’t get to vote, or decide anything. The only thing we can decide is if we want to use whatever Google provides, that’s our choice.

As a result of these changes, I am not planning to update my site for Google’s sake, but for my readers’ sake. I’m not planning to change what I was going to do because of Google, I’m going to make decisions that are good for my readers, and for myself. I will use whatever tools I can to make (esp. from SBI) to make this site as good as I can. It is now a foolhardy game to chase your position in Google, each six months Google rolls out an update that impacts us, without much warning, … we can see our business decimated.

For some sites, this is the first, second (mine!), and third (or more …) time that these wretched animals have come to chew up the results. I can only assume that these updates are going to become MORE frequent, not less; that eventually, we may reach a stage where updates are rolled out multiple times daily, where results are updated hourly on the fly, and site positions are rotated regularly… who knows why?… but it’s coming and the results are likely to be so dynamic that we are unable to be certain where our sites rank for users. To some extent this is already happening with Social search and users logging into Google.

Google is scared of something… and it’s taking it out on the small publishers… I’m just not sure what Google is running from: Facebook search engine, Eu regulators, or user apathy… but Google is trying to cement its relationship with users, by answering their queries… by increasing the wiggle

For some of you who have interacted with on Forumosa, you may be wondering where or why I have gone.

I’m exiling myself from Forumosa.org because I have better things to do than build someone’s advertising business, so you’ll now find me on Taiwaneasia! Yes, they are smaller communities, but many of the people who made discussing on Forumosa interesting especially in the Biz and Tech forums seem to have moved away anyway. Perhaps I will return, perhaps not.

But I would like my views to be taken into account by the Admin at Forumosa!

Admin,

I appreciate your efforts to build an ad business here, and all the work that goes into running Forumosa. It is a lot of work….
Running ads is fine by me, but please know this, the smily is extremely irritating as it activates almost every time i visit forumosa. That is not good as I have to click fthe form to get rid of it. Every time.

Perhaps this is unintended, but i have already completed the form once. I don’t know if there is value in inconvevience for so many users.
I only suggested blocking ads as an extreme response to a very annoying problem, one that requires solution… And my browsers are all uptodate… So it is not a problem on my end.

But instead, you threaten to suspend my account without any recourse. That is not good way to treat me, one of your loyal users for many years especially all the content we create for Forumosa.

Solve this problem for your users… Please. And update your tos tomake sure that your terms of service include no adblocking, because your site tos does not include that.

Now you can choose to suspend my account, which is fine, but is that a good way to deal with a complaint that is a legitimate issue?… One that is shared by many users… Or you can address my complaint properly and look after your members because we are your customers, too.

A fellow stakeholder in Forumosa.
Kenneth

I received a reply from the admin in question, but I was too angry to read it. So I deleted it. Perhaps that wasn’t smart, but I didn’t want to be told off for my attitude or patronized… I just couldn’t imagine anything good coming from reading that reply.

Our business is fortunate becase we don’t need a lot of equipment, and most of what we need can be acquired easily, affordably, and quickly.

But if we were a larger endeavor, like a restaurant, can you imagine how much money the kitchen equipment alone costs? So, if you’re a small business, you have to find the capital to buy the equipment. And that’s a retail business, manufacturing or small to medium enterprises face really large capital purchase requirements when they start up or want to expand.

And with the ongoing credit crunch making small business equipment financing a tricky affair, small businesses are needing a lot of help getting started or expanding their operations. This is a very big obstacle that politicians don’t or can’t seem to solve.

Suggestions? Well, there aren’t many at the moment, but like a friend of mine, don’t be tempted to go to underground lending! They’ll eat you alive with their usurious interest rates, rates that make instore credit lines look like bargains!

It would be great if we could handle complaints effectively at our school. But this week we have had to deal with several complaints, and really neither of them was our fault.

The first was a boy who was always late for class, and we had arranged that he would be okay to come late. But the mother had the audacity to audit the bill she received and change (yes, change) the billing date on her paper-record account.

Obviously, we could have handled this cheeky action more diplomatically than we did, and it turns out the mother was embarrassed by this. Losing face like that isn’t good here. Our double mistake.

The second was a mother who has been ‘helping’ her kid do homework. Which would be very nice, if she wasn’t messing our work up. She’d take what we did with the kid, ask him to translate it word for word, and then wonder why he was getting bad grades at school and in our post-unit exams.

We don’t teach translation skills for beginners, it’s too difficult until you have enough command of English and your mother language to understand what language is, how one language kind of relates to another, and much more…

It’s hard to imagine how we as a company like Marcus Evans can adapt our complaints procedure to solve these issues. Most complaints can be handled simply by refunding or replacing the item purchased.

But service based business can’t really do either of these, especially when results aren’t guaranteed as in learning. Not every kid will go on to speak English fluently, not every kid will ace his or her exam.

So, it would be really helpful to attend Marcus Evans’ series of ‘effective strategies for dealing with complaints‘. It might help us to create new services that deal with those specific complaints, such as adding a homework class, parental teaching advice, …

It seems to me that Google is going to continue tweaking the wretched algos for the foreseeable future. We have a difficult situation on our hands: we’ve all developed sites where Adsense is responsible for a lot of the income, and yet Google is responsible for a lot of the traffic. Proportions may vary, but 70% for both of these numbers seems a useful guesstimate.

Clearly there are several issues that we need to deal with:

Changing your corporate boss for the boss of Google is not a smart decision when Google is the primary source of your traffic or income. Because as we are all coming a cropper right now, when we get Google smacked.

If you plan to make Google Adsense/Google Traffic your model for economic liberation (and building a business), then the foundations of your business are shaky, to say the least: you have one customer – Google.

To provide yourself with economic/financial security, you need to diversify your income sources, so that you have other ways to survive, live and thrive!

Your website can be a good business, even a full-time business, if you do the right things to build your traffic and your income. And you don’t have to rely on Google for either traffic or income, but it’s the ‘path less chosen’.

With ecards, I thought that the traditional print invitations business was over! But perhaps not. People still to keep their cards for posterity, and that’s difficult with ecards.

But with ecards you can add all sorts of things to make multi-media cards, as well. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to keep those, too?

Good day Obblogatory Ramblings,
I’m looking for any contact details (email, phone number or mail address)
of the website owner or marketing person that I can communicate with for
possible business venture on website income opportunities. We are very much
interested to do business with you. Please send me an email together with
your website name and I’ll be glad to call you to discuss this matter.
Thank you

We occasionally receive crap like this in our junk mail, but more oddly, it is being posted through our contact froms. The odd thing is if they visited my blog, they would be able to contact me directly. Unfortunately, they can’t even tell me the name of my own website!

Most people who contact me through the site for advertising purposes simply state what they want. To that end, they already know my blog name, and probably my email address! Weird, huh!

This is sent out to thousands, in the hope 1% return the email. Are you kidding? Would you reply to this crap? I think I have to put up some anti-spam measures to stop this.

It gets old fast.