Terra Firms

Archive for September, 2009

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.