Terra Firms is a holding company of niche e-services sites. We provide niche support, information, blog services, product development and prototyping, and online promotion campaigns for our customers.

Previous projects:

Psychiatric Residents Club of Saudi Arabia – Forums

Saudi Electricity Company – TCSP105 Procedure Update Content Management System

Some of our niches:

1- Supercharger Performance

2- Arabic Comedy

3- The Overqualified (The OQ)

4- Girls White Socks

5- Car Subs

6- French Manicure Nails

If you would like to join our network, or have a niche you’d like to promote or develop online … please feel free to contact us.

Thank you,

The TerraFirms Team

The firewall, has come to popularity as an intrusion detection and prevention tool for computers and computer networks.

The history of the firewall dates back to the Greeks and the greek fire (catapults and trebuchets  armed with tar dipped boulders and lit on fire).

In preparation for battle, different moat building techniques were used to prevent the aggressors from storming your castle or city walls. Keeping the enemy off your walls reduced the amount of manpower you’d have to spend taking down ladders and ropes… and increased the utilization of your long distance weapons such as archers and catapults.

These moats and ditches varied from natural canyons and cliffs (look at Irish ruins of old castles built on the cliffside facing the Welsch-Irish waters ) and sometimes using man made water filled or ditches.

The fire wall is a moat or ditch built by the Greeks. They would build this  ditch around the city or at least on the main entry point bottle-necks of the city. Not only would it be hard for armies and aggressors to cross these wide ditches (requiring rigged road works, bridges or roping), but also the greeks went step further.

They filled these ditches with tar and debris… in preparation. Once the enemy arrived on the battle field and started attacking the city walls, these moats could be ‘fired’ from distance using fire-tipped archery. This turned the entire moat into a 2nd city wall, made of fire, and called the fire wall!

The firewall creates 2 problems for an aggressor…

1- Anyone that is inside the wall is now stuck between immense heat, and between the wall guards shooting down on them from a top the walls… these people were most certainly doomed and and had no way to retreat but into the depths of the fire.

2- The firewall prevented any future attempts of aggression by burning any existing bridges or rope work used to cross the ditch, and making the whole are TOO hot to be bare-able or workable to even attempt to construct, repair, or build any crossing ways.

Even more, this kept the enemy at a safe distance which made them perfect ‘feed’ for the catapults and archers.

When we talk about ‘competitive’ advantage in business, we usually talk about having a competitive edge that prevents your opposition from aggressing on your market. Now the thing to look at here, is that as market deregulation continues to grow, then conventional firewalls of trade agreements, monopolies and oligopolies, trade secrets …etc begin to break down.

In a faster moving world where everyone has access to capital (credit based markets) and everyone has access to information (internet) and infrastructure (a global manufacturing network available an e-mail away), then the conventional firewalls and conventional ‘barriers’ to entry begin to break down.

This is great as an entrepreneur starting up because it allows you to get into the market, get your product out to the customer, and get on track with payments and cash flows.

This is also horrible as an entrepreneur because any opportunity that exists for you can similarly be exploited and possibly better executed by someone else.

This creates a huge need for a non-conventional firewall. In business this non-conventional firewall is going to be something that you ’strategically’ deploy that allows you to keep your existing market, grow it, and prevent others from aggressing into it.

In Seth Godin’s ‘the dip’ … to be continued !

“The supercharger performance power calculator is in the transition from being a product, to being a mega product. A mega product by definition (of Frank Kern) is one that has a combination of all the best features of competing products…..”

Read the rest of this article here:

Supercharger Performance Power Calculator – micro blog

Technorati Tags: Horsepower Calculator, Power Calculator, Supercharger Calculator, Supercharger Performance

A while back i was compiling a master email list for everyone that has contacted me through on of my blogs.

I make myself fairly available for interaction with my readers and customers, through blog comments forms, contact us forms, direct email, and even facebook page messages and tweets.

So in an effort to better stay in touch with everyone, I started compiling this master list that will enable me to email out updates and news to my readers and fans.

While i was doing this activity, several names and addresses popped out at me… and eventually I had to go back and re-read my conversations with my readers.

What I realize now, is that more than half of my sales, were generated from people I had talked to, helped, and advised earlier. Sometimes as far back as 6 weeks earlier (which explains why their names sounded familiar but at the same time I couldn’t exactly remember them personally).

Originally my comment is this:

“Never underestimate MY silence, because I keep a very long ‘to do’ list on my back-burner. And this list, I execute selectively and opportunistically”

This is very much true of my personality because I often perform assessments of my situation (personal, financial, emotional) and devise in my head a plan or a path towards my goal.

However, executing these plans is not always cost effective… especially when you have complex plans that require group orchestration or a group performance (weather this group is based on a group of people, or on a group of systems is besides the point).

So in classic management speak, these tasks and plans are very important, but not necessarily critical… furthermore, they may not even be POSSIBLE in the current situation.

I’ll give you an example.. say I do an analysis of my portfolio on the stock market and realise that ABC stock is undervalued by 25%. There are 4 months left till the end of the financial year, when the company will announce it’s growth in profits over last year (which I can see now from the last 3 quarterly reports and predict forward). So my purchase of this stock, although very important to the overall growth of my portfolio,  is not critical because I have from now up until the profits announcement to make my purchase.

This can be even more extreme if say I am currently fully invested in the market and have a 0% liquidity to assets ratio in my portfolio. Simply speaking, I want this stock but I can’t buy it till the situation changes… the decision is made, but the task goes on my long ‘back burner to do list’.

Here is the tricky part of this situation. Although everything I’ve said so far sounds completely reasonable, most people will not give you this much slack when looking at your performance.

The lack of trading transactions in your portfolio looks to your broker as a lack of interest in the market, just as much as a lack of busy work from you in the office looks like lack of interest from you in your job. Even if, you already have an amazing report planned for your manager, but are waiting for specific numbers you requested from the Sales department to make your case and grow the company.

People are mostly swayed by what they see, rather than what you think, have analysed or have decided to do.

Going back to the customer scenario.

A lack of sales activity from your customers, does not mean that they are not interested in the product. It does not mean that they don’t care about what you’re doing. It does not mean that they don’t trust you. It does not mean that they don’t want or need the product.

I know from personal experience (shopping for car performance parts online) that I personally my put a product in my shopping cart at an e-commerce store 10 times (yes 10 different visits to the store) before I’m finally sure that I’m ready to buy, I have the cash, it is important, and that in fact I am ordering everything I need this time around (and nothing more and nothing less).

So now if that is true for me, it must be true for my own customers, they will visit, read, browse, think, look for competitors, compare prices, rethink the situation, talk it over with their friends, google your company and product for feedback and recommendations, search you on facebook or twitter for comments and warnings, maybe hear about something negative and look you up in the better business bureau …

All of this before finally eliminating all their doubts, coming back, and clicking your ‘buy now’ button.

In a world with so many options, so many experts, so many blogs, so many reviewers, and so much information,,, it is understandable that your customers may take LONGER to commit to the sale.

Do not mistake this ‘transaction silence’ for lack of interest. Do spend your time proven to them, through constant steady nurturing, that you are in fact there to stay, to produce quality content, information, products and services, that they have nothing to worry about, and that ultimately when they do choose to purchase that they will get more VALUE back from you than the MONEY they had spent on your product or service. The occasional ’sale’ doesn’t hurt either (for those price sensitive shoppers that keep telling themselves that they would buy it if it were slightly cheaper… no reason not to call their bluff so long as it doesn’t hurt your bottom line…)

Never under-estimate silence, some of us keep a long to do list on the back burner,  and execute opportunistically.

As I work on re-writing my product (a software application) for one of my websites (affectionately known as the supercharger site)… and I embark on the journey of learning yet another tool to build my e-presence, I can’t help but think about Launch pads.

Just a few days ago I bought stock for my mom, and in doing that I looked at the near history of that company’s performance, realized they would post about a 30% growth in profits this year compared to last year (if the trend they’ve set in the last 3 quarters holds true) and that this mega profits announcement will come sometime in Jan of 2010.

Since our stock market is heavily fueled by news and announcements, then buying into the stock now, 2 months before the speculators and 3 months before the announcement seems like a no-brainer deal.

I think it’s easy to pick ‘winners’ based on previous performance… great directors are allowed to pick to work on greater movies, fast horses get access to better training and more interesting competition, great companies attract the best talent and so forth..

However, when you want to look at a smaller company… maybe even a tiny dot on the dot come circle (such as my company) … you have very little good news, past performance, or track time to judge yourself or your position based on.

This can be very frustrating if you’re surrounded by naysayers telling you that you will fail, and that your recent history will be a mould for your future and that more of the same failure is almost sure.

Frustrations aside… there are a few ways to gauge where you are and where you’re going even if you don’t have much to show for it at present.

1- In a cool startup presentation I watched on youtube, one of the presenters made a great point of illustrating demand ‘by proxy’.

For example, let’s say you’re building the first ever TV that allows you to order take out food through your remote control… you turn to the food guide, choose a food channel (restaurant), look at the program guide (food list) and choose something to eat… click ok and confirm and your order will be placed and fulfilled within 45 minutes.

Maybe it’s very difficult to show that such a TV actually has a market or demand for it. However, in illustrating demand by proxy, it is reasonable to do what follows:

Say you have very reliable data that shows that most people that do order take out, order it while they’re in their lounge at home watching TV (reasonable assumption).

Say that even more so, you have the ability to demonstrate that calls to food delivery joints spikes on on the quarter-hour, half-hour, and on-the-hour, for a duration of 5 to 7 minutes (which highly corresponds to typical commercial schedules in most TV shows).

If you can provide data for both of these items then it is a reasonable assumption that ”dinner and a movie” are highly correlated, and that creating a televised / net based solution to ordering delivery through your TV actual has a market.

You have just proved demand by proxy… for something that pretty much has no proven track record.

Since I like this example so much, I’m going to take this one step further… If you can somehow link commercials for Domino’s pizza (and say their monday night football double cheese special) to a certain button combination on the remote (click 53 to order this combo now) … while having the TV and Dominas already integrated with your delivery and payment information… then you could create something that not only has demand, but also has the incentive (ease of use) to shift potential customers off of the old system (look for the phone number, remember my customer ID with dominos, remember my order, try to find cash or change…etc) into a newer, faster, and easier to use system.

Awesome.

Now back on topic…

2- Another way to assess a company that doesn’t have strong past performance data and the main topic of this post, is assessing their ‘platform’.

Let’s look at two great examples…

A- Apple has a great platform in itunes. itunes is not a music sharing program, it’s a content delivery platform. Through itunes you can get books, music, programs, podcasts, radio shows…etc.

Maybe all of these channels were not built into itunes when it first came out, but if you were to assess a then infant itunes, and were able to recognize it as a potentially strong content delivery platform , rather than a music sharing program, you would’ve been in a better position to predict the growth and future potential of apple and itunes.

B- Another great example of a strong platform is Google.

Some one like me, who uses google everything for his business (mail, adsense, adwords, docs, groups, talk, search engine traffic and customers, trends (to scope out new markets), google web toolkit and google app engine …etc) feels a huge amount of debt to google.

Google is not a search engine. Google , I’d like to argue is a small business  ’empowerment’ and ‘enablement’ platform.

Thank about Google checkout in that context as well, although I don’t use it yet since it’s not available in my location or residence.

When you add in Youtube, Picasa, and blogger to the mix (also owned by Google) you realise how that , for free, Google allows you to get yourself, your company and your product online for little to no startup cost.

Ridiculous. … Genius

So how do I assess TerraFirms ?

Since I started this ’sabbatical’ I’ve learned the following (which can all be considered TerraFirms competences)

1- Search engine optimization

2- PHP coding and the wordpress platform

3- Flash content

4- Video and image marketing

5- Web2.0 integration into blogs and web 2.0 marketing strategies.

6- SQL databasing

7- Custom applications (Java /MySQL / Google Web Toolkit / Ajax)

8- Internet Marketing market research techniques, and using different market assessment tools.

9- Paid online advertising campaigns, techniques, and optimization.

So let me rephrase that in simple terms.

My current websites suck in terms of overall income generation potential. But, my platform is strong in that I can find a better market, a better idea, a better concept, and re-apply exactly all the same competences to launch a professional site, grab traffic, promote products, create custom applications, manage data and databases, and create both value for my visitors / customers and profit for my company.

Let’s think about that for a second… past performance, modest at best. Future potential, huge.

I know most people don’t want to gamble their hard earned money on ‘potential’ … but if the platform is there, then managing that platform and seeing it to maturity is all it takes to make it big.

There’s a great video on Youtube from TedTalks about the 5 levels of ‘tribes’ …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTkKSJSqU-I

This kind of talk really interests me for a few reasons.

1- I consider myself more of a motivator, rather than a leader. I don’t like to tell people what to do (even when I was in that ‘role’ in previous jobs, before I quit to build my own business). I rather like to setup the emotional , technical, and informational conditions that allow for the right things to happen, and push that with motivation and ‘goal oriented’ decision making.

2- I work really well alone, both because I can take on things with a steep learning curve and consume them very rapidly as well as because I have a way of about me in following my instincts, any data or statistics I can get my hands on, and having an overactive brain that can see any issue from many points of view… and so I have a constant internal dialog that is equivalent to a group meeting (Sans the group think and intimidation).

So group dynamics and group work has always interested me.

As I look back at things, my old Job at the power company was with a level 2 tribe…

The power company always thought ‘if we were a different utility, like telecom, we’d be able to be profitable off of cell phones, DSL subscribers, and fiber optics… but since we aren’t then our life sucks.”

Thus the type of work always done there was substandard, since we knew for sure that it would never result in profits (you can’t make profit on a fixed price product that is government subsidized and sold at 25% it’s actual delivered cost).

I resisted the atmosphere in the place and came out at level 3 tribal mentality often … “I’m good, and you’re not…” which was met with agreement on their part of yes “Our life sucks” …

This was really frustrating… but then… I broke away.

I am now in a new relationship with one of my old friends where we build custom websites for small business. This is not my main business focus as it’s hands on work that I have to do , that doesn’t generate auto income like my other e-commerce sites.

Even though this isn’t a scalable business model for me, I’m enjoying this new kind of relationship at ‘work’.

You take an artist that can’t do web development but can shoot great photo/video  &

You take me, a web developer that can’t fill his websites with high quality rich media content….

You put us together and you have a strong development house.

This takes both me and my friend from being isolated experts in our individual fields (namely level 3 tribes) and starts to create a new attractor at level 4. The thought that us, together, are stronger, than either of us alone is both exciting because it expands our incomes and our reach, as well as humbling as you are reminded daily that you are in a symbiotic relationship where your thrive is dependent on your partner and visa versa.

So in true TED Talks fashion, if I had to sit back and extract the ‘higher meaning’ of our relationship I would say this… when you look to expand your business, it may be a healthy thing to look at what kind of tribe you will be creating through your expansion…

Are you moving from level 1 to level 2 ? Where you are shifting your operating base from a location that is in crisis (where everyone around you is also in crisis) to a new location that is not… where you realize that your situation sucks, but there are other opportunities elsewhere to capitalize on ?

Are you moving from a level 2 to a level 3 by moving sideways into a new position where you are no longer disadvantaged but rather getting a lead on your competition with a new strategic partner, an inaccessible (to others) distribution or marketing network, a new patent protected product or service …etc ?

Are you moving from level 3 to level 4 ? By merging with your ‘competitors’ to create something larger than your current self ? What if we could merge Sega and nintendo back in the early 90s ? What if we could create 1 gaming box using the experiences from both manufacturers to create THE ULTIMATE gaming experience ?

In business, it’s very common for competitors to polarize. If I’m competing on size, you may compete on value, if I compete on simplicity and ease of use, you may compete on extensive advanced features.

After several iterations of market segmentation and each business polarizing itself to hold a position in the market (and a strong brand positioning with the customers) you find that the two resulting business, although technically competitors, go about things very differently.

What happens if for some reason we take the best that business A has learned about simplicity, design, ease of use and combine it with the intricacy, features, and technicality of the products produced in business B?

Couldn’t we create a level 4 ‘tribe’ and a new ‘mega product’ that combines features that are at first glance improbable or impossible to exist in the same product (ex. a faster car that gets better mileage… these things are possible even though they at first seem to be polar opposite… and are exactly what ‘innovation’ is all about).

Are you moving from level 4 to a level 5 tribe ?

The cause based business model is a very powerful one.

Wikipedia and craigslist are two strong examples of business that have high customer attachments due to a higher ideal truly running the business.

You have to think about these things not just in a personal sense in your self and your connections, but rather think about the ‘tribe’ of customers and how they see your business and utilize your products.

Are they buying your product because their life sucks and you are the only thing that they can afford (and thus you are serving a level 2 tribe ???)… Or are they buying your product because it enables them to move up the hierarchy by getting more informed, more connected, more experienced…etc

Interesting thought.

I wonder what happens when all my dreams come true. Do I stop working towards them, or do I start a new!

I wonder what people do, when tough times become true. Do they pick up and leave, or do they forge on through ?

I wonder why when I had a job, I worked so little and made alot.

I wonder why, I work so hard now, yet my faith in myself is all I’ve got.

The question that comes every day … is this more good money after bad ? That would be utterly sad ? Or am I so close I can almost taste it, I’ve come too far now, so why erase it ?

These limiting thoughts, they get in the way. They busy your brain and drive you a stray.

A moment of silence is all that’s required and some visualization technique is highly desired.

To shift the focus from why and how… from the what is now to what it’s about.

It’s about living a wonderful life, where you wonder, and work, and build and grow.

I think that, if I stopped wondering, I would be dead. And I’d be afraid of the silence within my head.

To swim upstream and against the current.

Bring your strength and bring your courage.

A long time ago , all we had on the web was HTML And SMTP (webpages and email) … and based on those two ‘free’ and ‘open’ platforms the first and oldest forms of e-discussion were created; namely, discussion boards and mailing lists. The key here, is once a person had a point of contact (his email), then asynchronous communication was allowed to take place all over the world through a series of messages linked to their owner by nothing more than an email address and a nickname. As the discussion continued to grow, the person would get an e-mail reminding them to check back and see what has come of their original thoughts. So here the e-mail was the ‘hook’… As of 2007, the hooks of the internet have changed…. a study presented by “AddThis” which is a button that can be embedded in any website to easily link and share content and news between multiple ‘news sharing’, ’social bookmarking’ and ’social networking’ sites, showed that in the period studied (the first 9 months or so of 2008) that e-mail was the #1 way that people shared things on the internet with a usage of around 50%, followed closely by facebook at around 20% and then trailing off dramatically…. The same study performed with later data (covering late 2008 to mid 2009) was very interesting…. in that short period of time facebook had grown from a 20% share to almost 60% … with email following closely with around 30% and the rest trailing off for other e-services. These numbers are astonishing for a few reasons: 1- The fact that people would rather use facebook than email to share things they like online means that most of the people that they’d like to share this with are already on facebook… If I had 10 friends, with 9 outside of facebook, then I’d probably share things by email… but if 9 out of 10 of my friends are on facebook then that’s more likely the platform that I’m going to use. 2- Facebook has worked hard at making content sharing a more pleasant experience, by including it in their search (when in the past you could only search for people and groups / business) and allowing you to like, unlike and comment on these things. The 1 feature that seems missing from Facebook sharing is rich responses such as responding to a video with a video… for at the moment any external link in your response is just represented as an off-page link unlike the primary posted content which CAN play within facebook. These responses are ‘communal’ in nature and can be seen by friends or friends of friends… whereas email sharing is more private and more threaded which does not promote healthy discussion. 3- That kind of internet wide growth for a platform, and to take down something as ‘rooted’ as e-mail is just astonishing (albeit expected) and goes to show that anyone not seriously interested in social media for their marketing efforts is seriously making a mistake. …. Now my most successful online project so far is Supercharger Performance which is present on both Facebook and Myspace (the world’s largest two social networks) with all of my blog posts automatically feeding into those pages via RSS. More interestingly I have also integrated those pages with twitter such that anything I post on either of those (or on my main blog) propagates over to my twitter account. This interlinked effort of networks allows me to post on one platform (my main blog) but to multiply that effort into 4 different networks (RSS, Facebook, Myspace & Twitter) and allows people that are interested in that niche to stay in touch without having to check my website on a regular basis. So when you think about marketing in the future… there are really two approaches to do this: 1- Follow the crowd: and the crowd is definitely using social networking to stay in touch, share, and recommend things to each other… decisions about a car used to be between you and your close friends… now a post about that car to your status gets your friends and their friends responses on the product … which can add great value to your decision making process if used wisely. It can also be a lead in to a sale for you as a company if you are present, active and engaged with your consumer base, and it can give you great insight into the kind of things that they like be pre-testing their responses to ideas, products and pitches before you spend a significant amount of money developing them. 2- Be intimate. Now that social networking is all the rage… if you look at your email box (like I do mine) you find that very rarely do I get anymore personal emails in my email. People that want to talk to me who are in my generation can talk to me on facebook, facebook chat, twitter or myspace… and email is left for spam, emails from people like my parents or uncles (who have not yet adopted social networking because they are comfortable with simple e-mail) and last but not least e-bills and credit statements and the likes. Now let’s say you have a really good spam filter, and let’s say you have automated most of your bill payments… what this does is it leaves your personal (non-work email) rather quiet and deserted. Think about this ? If your customer is constantly being bombarded by media and ideas and debate on facebook and myspace and what not… and then they come on e-mail to get away from it all and to see if they have a personal contact from their parents, distant friends or traveling friends who can’t get on facebook …etc How powerful do you think a personal contact letter from you (the small business owner) to your customers would be ? Do you think that if your letter were 1 of 6 e-mails they got today (vs 1 of 1000 interactions they had on facebook)… do you think that your message would be more likely to reach them through email ? or would facebook still be the weapon of choice? Summary: I’ve just kind of contradicted myself … telling you to move over to rich media, to ‘announce’ publicly everything that you’re doing, reading, and everything that you like, and are working on to your public through your FB, MS, and twitter status updates… at the same time I’m telling you that you can still reach your customers personally by e-mail. I don’t think there’s contradiction here… you just have to appropriate every medium for it’s proper use. A customer service request my better be placed and answered through email. A new upbeat video of the next unveiling of your latest product may be best served through facebook (to be shared and reviewed and communally critiqued). I think the change in e-mail and the lower ‘clutter’ in email is to our advantage as niche marketers trying to reach our readers. I also think the rich interaction provided by social sharing is great for delivering a ‘mental image’ or an impression to your prospects in a quick 2 to 3 minute video. I’d love to see where we get when both of those ideas merge with google wave… a new platform that mixes the one-to-0ne personal and intimate aspects of email, with the possibility for more expansive and branching out ‘waves’ in the internet.

The internet in my opinion, works much like real estate does.

A lot of forethought goes into ‘location location location’  as the location assures traffic and then traffic converts to business.

Then in real estate it takes a long time, and a lot of effort to build your structure….

Once the establishment is setup minimal manpower is required to keep it running… you rent it out, and pretty much forget about it till next rent is due as it runs on auto-pilot.

Minimal upkeep is required unless things go wrong and you are free to work on your next development.

After you have enough of these establishments up and running you can go golfing, fishing, or cruising, and the money will still come in at the end of the month.

I don’t want to make the real estate business or the online business sound like a breeze , it isn’t. Most people get tired and quit during the establishment phase because it requires too much time and effort. Some people’s personal lives and relationships suffer too from being too focused for too long on something that will not pay off in the short foreseeable future.

Now if you look at the online business… it’s a similar model.

You don’t choose a location on a busy street, but rather you choose a domain name on the information superhighway… get yourself an unknown brand name and work towards building your brand equity and it may take you years to get anywhere…. get yourself a search engine optimized (SEO’d) keyphrase derivative domain name and you may see your website rank and get traffic within a week.

This is exactly like trying to have a restaurant that people will go off-route to visit; vs building a less magnificent but still great restaurant in a busy district with high traffic flow. One is a 10 year strategy (and you may never make it… especially as a first time entrepreneur without deep industry experience) and one is a probably going to get you enough cashflow to get you started.

I’m not about thinking small. I don’t want to crush your dreams of Michelin starred restaurants that are worth the detour; however, it’s smart to be practical and if you’ve never owned a restaurant then a basic deli will be a handful, just like a first time INTERNET marketer gets his hand full with his first website and is definitely in no position to be ‘the next facebook’.

After you’ve picked your domain name and your SEO and other internet marketing strategies to grab your traffic, the next step is building your website (your store front). That’s right first you decide how you’re going to market your website, THEN you build your website to execute on that strategy.

This part takes a lot of effort but is dis-similar to real estate in that everything can be taken down and rebuilt.

The key to making a good e-commerce website (or other online entity such as a forum, blog or a social network) is to go through as many iterations of testing and correcting as possible. You think a certain theme works best because YOU like it… but you try out a different theme or skin for 2 weeks and monitor your analytics… if your analytics shows more activity from your visitors or more of the right kind of activity (sales, subscriptions, opt-ins) then you leave that alone and optimize something else.

After several rounds of brainstorming, tweaking, tracking, and correcting you end up with a website that is much more efficient than the one you started with  and hopefully you’ve learned something along the way about how your market likes to be dealt with… do they like a simple fast no frills craigslists style website ? or would they prefer something they can wow their friends with (using ajax on page and flash effects and navigation and state of the art API integration into other platforms) every time they log on.

If you look at some of the most successful sites outthere (youtube for example) you find that their layout gives them the ability to cram A LOT of information (Video, description, link to the video owner’s profile, related from the owner, related videos in general, comments, ratings, and cross platform integration) all one one page but without filling up all of the white space and without confusing the visitor about what is what.

Another strong thing about youtube is the strong brand integration… the top left button with the youtube logo is one of the largest clickable items on the screen with a prominent placement top left and quick access right next to the search bar.

These aren’t mistakes folks… these are results of rounds of testing, iterating, tracking results and refining the page.

So now that you’re on a traffic grabbing location, and that people can get to you, and now that your website is built and optimized both to grab their traffic and to serve them efficiently, in a way that THEY (not you) like the most, then you have an established business and you can start to collect your ‘rent’ money.

As the rent money comes in … you’ll find 2 things going on:

1- You have to spend minimal time backing up, supporting, and maintaining the existing site.

2- You have time to move on to build your next ‘complex’

3- You can take time off or spend the day out with your kids and come back and have a few emails to catch up on and minimal ‘daily’ work (probably less than 1 hour a day) to do to keep your customers happy in their new e-home.

The whole point of this post :

I’ve been thinking a lot about automation recently and maybe even outsourcing….

What happens, if you have multiple websites (say 10 websites), working for you generating great revenues. Each website requires ‘minimal’ interference of about an hour a day.

As your website portfolio grows, and without automation or outsourcing… the websites will hold you captive to 10 hours of daily ’support’ work between backups, fixes, email problems, registration codes, payment confirmations…etc

This all stuff that you HAVE to do to keep your customers happy and to keep the cashflows coming in. And even though you can put these things on hold for a few hours as you go do something else you like to do with friends or family, they are definitely things that you can not put on hold for ever as they pile up and drown you.

Now luckily (or unluckily) as it may be, I am not in the point in my business to be swamped by my website. But I do setup passwords for my clients manually because I don’t have my own custom written software integrated into my payment gateway to check payment confirmation and allow confirmed customers to setup their own acccounts automatically.

This at the moment gives me a fear of ‘walking away’ from my websites for more than 24 hours in case I get a sale that day. Which means my current e-umbilical chord (or USB cable as it may be) is only long enough for me to spend a day out doing something else besides working on my websites, but not long enough (yet) for me to leave the laptop at home and spend a week on the beaches of the Mediterranean with only an i-phone at my side.

So the next big step for me is automation (because at this point I would rather automated than outsource… it’s both cheaper, more scalable, and challenging to be interesting).

As I mentioned last time, I’m re-writing my software on GWT’s platform… part of the re-write is more features, another aspect is cross platform compatibility, and the last part which is most important to me is automation and payment gateway integration!

This is my first personal blog post on TerraFirms.com

I’ll give you a brief introduction.

My name is Haitham Al Humsi. I am an ex-electronics master engineer and ex-senior power protection engineer. I quit my position with the drudgery of cubicles at the Saudi Electricity Company to re-visit my dream of owning my startup and running my own show.

I will use this blog as a semi-daily diary of my work with Terrafirms websites and other client websites. You may learn tricks about internet marketing, e-commerce, and SEO from reading here. You may learn more about the ‘dry’ and ultra-creative mentality that it takes to be able to dive in, head first, out of ‘hell’ and into the entrepreneurial roller coaster.

Enough with the introductions…

Today I’m working on setting up google web toolkit (GWT) and google app engine (GAE) with Netbeans IDE (integrated development environment) to re-write my programs on GWT’s platform.

I first learnt about GWT through the amazing demo that google gave of their beta version of google wave. Not only is google wave impressive, but what is more impressive is that wave and all other google apps were developed on top of their tool kit.

The advantage of GWT is that it allows you to write software and code in a high level language such as Java. Then GWT takes care of translating that code into cross platform, standard compliant Javascript, CSS, and HTML.

What this means is that complex object oriented and client server software can be ‘translated’ by GWT down to a much ‘thinner’ language that can run on mobile devices, load faster in traditional browsers, and run on any operating system (Windows, linux, MacOS) …etc

Why do I need this ?

My first project through TerraFirms was Supercharger Performance which is a niche website targeting supercharger theory and application.

On that website I offer a unique product that I wrote myself which is a software that integrates over 12 commercially available part calculators into a single 1 shot package.

The problem with my software, is that although I wrote it on Java which is supposed to be a platform independent programming language, I am getting complaints from customers with older versions of explorer and on MacOs complaining that their versions of Java or their browsers can not run my application.

Entrepreneurial tip:

Even if your product is not perfect (Such as my calculator) do not hesitate to launch it… for 2 reasons:

1- When you launch it, you can start to sell it, which brings in customers and cash flow early on.

2- Customers are great at testing every single aspect, application, option, and platform of your software which you may not have the time, money or resources to do yourself.

Entrepreneurial insight:

No matter how things go (as planned or not)… you will learn new things from your endeavors every single day. This is very different from a repetitive cubicle job.

For example:

So in my example i start out designing software that is platform independent , only to later realize that part of that code can’t run on MacOS because Apple for some reason releases their own version of Java For Mac (JFM) which is a few releases behind and a few packages short of the universally available Java platform used by everybody else and distributed by Sun microsystems.

Entrepreneurial advice:

You are not Microsoft, and neither am I. When I get contacted by my customers with a problem I tend to apply a mixed attitude of professional friendliness.

You don’t want to be too friendly to have them walk all over you. In the end, to be frank, you’re new and you NEED sales.

You don’t want to be too professional because frankly you’re not… for me, I’m a 1 man company… there is no way I can procedurally full test every software package before i release it (at least not yet)… and so I let them know that I will take care of the problem professionally and in a timely fashion, while at the same time asking them to cut me some slack which they usually do because they can see the honesty of my intentions.

The most important part is this… if you’re customer is dissatisfied with the product or service you need to do 2 things:

1- Get AS MUCH feedback from them about the how the why and the what so that you can make things better.

2- Absolutely positively refund them.

I may have to put in my first refund for this problem as this customer is a Mac only user that won’t be able to use what he purchased (yet). But he’s at least seen me work with him to try and locate and solve the problem, and is going to be left with the reassurance that the next version of the product will run on Google Web Toolkit code and will in fact be faster, easier to use, more secure (for me), more feature rich, and most importantly Mac compatible.