Tomorrow, I’m planning on sharing with you all a tip for bloggers and general webmasters. A difficulty I had with this transfer was the transfer itself. I usually relied on webhosts to do the migration for me, but I decided to conduct the move myself this time. I used the steps for four of my blogs recently and all of them transferred over fine, so I’m assuming it is somewhat fail-proof.

Anyways, I’ll see you all then tomorrow.

Merry Christmas!

I’m currently in the process of setting up a blogging forum. More info to come starting December 12th!

Every day, I try to do about 10 submits to new directories that pop up here and there for more of the newer sites. This takes me at maximum, about 15 minutes, so I don’t have much problems with it. However, I also do buy manual directory submissions ranging from 100~5,000 submissions ranging across various PRs to keep the back links increasing.

Awkwardly though, just a few minutes ago, it struck me that maybe I was wasting a lot of time. After all, isn’t time = money? Let me explain to you why.

Assuming that you don’t have a quick routine that I use to get the sites submitted manually (you can ditch the auto way as that’s unethical in my opinion), the entire process can take quite a while depending on how many sites you have. Now, couldn’t you use that time in a better way to actually promoting your site aggressively through other means? If not, how about producing some content? Directory submissions, in my opinion, may just not be as great as it seem to be.

Most Directories Suck

I was a directory owner a few years ago, and I’ll be honest with you. Most directories suck because the owners aren’t exactly big promoters of their directories. Take a group of a random 100 directory owners. See how many of them consider their directories as their biggest projects. More than likely, not one will consider their directories as their biggest projects, considering the number of newborn directories out there.

Directories >= Link Farms?

I’m sure you know how link farms are just slapped by Google. Other search engines don’t like them. I don’t like them. You don’t like them. I don’t want this blog to be listed beside a real estate blog as much as that real estate blog doesn’t want to be listed beside mine. Why? The niches are completely different. Same thing with most directories these days.

How many times do you see a specialized directory accepting a certain niche? Not so often. Same with RSS directories, bidding directories–you name it! Most will have the “General” tag on them. Isn’t this just a nice way of organizing your link farms? Sure there are super quality general directories, but also see if they accept all sites. They don’t–they have some standard.

The Lifespan

How many times do we see random domain names used to build directories? Nearly all the time. Chances are, these directories built on random domain names are bound to have a short lifespan. Wouldn’t you be mad if you spent all day submitting to 500 directories. You check the next week and see that 100 of them just got deleted?

End of Ranting

I’ll stop my ranting here to separate my post now. I think I’ll write a Part 2 on this matter on finding some solutions for us helpless directory submitters. Whoo… this was a short post. Just blazed by it.

Anyways, let me know what you think. Are you just as upset as me on how this directory niche is headed towards?

As I value uptime and cannot afford all my sites to be down simultaneously, I spread my sites over multiple hosting companies. Unfortunately, this ownership change affected the productivity of ahnternet very heavily.

Within the next two days, I’ll be talking about choosing the right web host to prevent problems like this. As much as your site is important, your site being up is also very important. Hence, look out, as I’m sure it’ll help many of you guys (especially any on budget hosting) quite a lot!

However, today I just wanted to bring up this thing about working upfront. One of my biggest sources of income is actually consulting. I’ve been in the web industry for a long time and while I do make money blogging, marketing, designing, and the sorts, aside from marketing, consulting is probably the biggest source of income for me.

How and why? The secret is that I go and find people to help. Usually it isn’t so hard, and depending on the difficulty of the subject, I charge people from free to whatever they wish to pay me. Recently, I met a person looking to start-up their “money making life” on the web and promised a low-XXX fee for consultation, which would include everything from the moment you login to GoDaddy to coding support. Now in regards to the payment, I had three options that I usually propose:

• Pay After Work
• 50% Upfront Payment
• 100% Upfront Payment

As my client was a young, yet aspiring person, and he was still worried about all the Internet scams that go around, I proposed to him a pay after work option.

So I began the week about telling him on how to setup a domain, get a host, WordPress, and SEO and advertising tips to get his blog/site known to both search engines like Google, and normal visiting people. I ended off the week with telling him about coding the backends of WordPress and giving him an in-depth step-by-step tutorial on monetizing the blog with multiple companies.

At the end of the week, I have not only worked quite a decent amount of hours just for this client, but also for lost a lot of hours with the client now showing up on time. In addition, what happens at the end? Well, the title is hinting at you.

After being notified that he is gathering the funds, he then goes off to claim the useless-ness of my consultation. Okay, I’m alright with the last part as I really have nothing to say if I didn’t teach him anything, although our sessions and his plethora of questions seem to question his assertion. Then, all communication with him stops. I give up on trying to receive my due payment and send him a clear message that I have given up and will leave the payment up to him and his morales in business.

At the end of the day, I lose out money wise, but I feel that I gain morale wise. People, if you’re looking to do business, stick to your words. While money is important, there are a lot more things important than money; I personally feel social relationships tops green by far as I know I have received millions of dollars of worth information thanks to the people I have developed a business relationship with.

Anyways, rant for today, finished.

Were you ever in such a situation? Do you know ways to prevent such events? I’m sure my readers are interested and so am I, so please feel free to comment.

What?! Shawn Hogan actually drops by and works on this forum? Are we in for an era on Digital Point where we actually have Shawn around?

One of the requirements of putting your name in the drawing lot was following @moontweet. When I first found out about this and tweeted my first #moonfruit, there was ~3000 followers. With the drawing part of the fun now over, @moontweet has ~43,000 followers. Yeah, a new 40,000 followers in seven damn days!

Twitter is undoubtely extremely viral. John Chow and Shoemoney has shown us. Moonfruit has shown us too. Hence, I have really stepped up my Twitter “abusing” to get something out of it.

What’s the point of this post then? To make you come back tomorrow to check out another post on Twitter. I’ll be discussing how you too can get your brand out in the Twitterverse.