Advice Network Founders Blog

Now that Advice Network is launched, marketing has taken a front seat in my attention. I spend almost all of my time wondering how to get the word out there about Advice Network without spending every penny I have AND without compromising my values.

I’m investigating telemarketing this week, but not without serious trepidation.

The numbers look good promising, from a pure return on investment. It costs about $1,000 to have 30 to 50 hours of calling. The way I look at those numbers, if I offer a 50% discount on the $50 setup fee. (Please don’t be jealous; To my loyal readers, I offer you a 99.98% discount on the setup fee, right here and right now. If you are reading this and want to register as a deluxe vendor on Advice Network, use the coupon blogreader to get $49.99 off your $50 setup fee. Please note, coupon expires  on my birthday, August 31 2008) Where was I? Oh yes, if I offer a 50% discount on the setup fee, and they get 22 people to sign up as deluxe vendors, then I break even on the campaign, and in month 2, I can start investing in PPC to get leads to those vendors.

Everyone wins! The vendors get a great placement on the directory, they get leads, they get business. Users of Advice Network get matched with vendors, their lives are easier, and Advice Network will (gasp) make money. Win win win.

The downside? I hate receiving telemarketing calls. Tom Mabe is one of my heroes.

Sigh.

I’d love to hear your feedback on this one. Please email me or comment and let me know what you think.

Thanks all fans and readers for your understanding during my hiatus. I also appreciate all of your support. no I am ok, I just could not get into the blog, and fixing the problem took a backseat to other issues.

For some reason never ascertained, I was locked out of the blog. My password did not work, and when I went to reset the password, I was sent an invalid link.

Just yesterday, I decided to tackle the issue in earnest. I posted the problem on wordpress.org, and was directed to a page explaining how to edit the database via PHP myadmin. For the technically unsophisticated, that was a nightmare.

But I was able to finally solve the problem with this simple hack:

Using the Emergency Password Reset Script

If the other solutions listed above won’t work, then try the Emergency Password Reset Script. It is not a Plugin. It is a PHP script.

Warnings

1. Requires you know the administrator username.
2. It updates the administrator password and sends an email to the administrator’s email address.
3. If you don’t receive the email, the password is still changed.
4. You do not need to be logged in to use it. If you could login, you wouldn’t need the script.
5. Place this in the root of your WordPress installation. Do not upload this to your WordPress Plugins directory.
6. Delete the script when you are done for security reasons.

Directions for use

1. Download the script from Village Idiot WordPress Emergency Password Script.
2. Unpack the downloaded zip file.
3. Upload the file emergency.php to the root of your WordPress installation (the same directory that contains wp-config.php).
4. In your browser, open http://example.com/emergency.php.
5. As instructed, enter the administrator username (usually admin) and the new password, then click Update Options. A message is displayed noting the changed password. An email is sent to the blog administrator with the changed password information.
6. Delete emergency.php from your server when you are done. Do not leave it on your server as someone else could use it to change your password.

Thanks again everyone!

I was listening to an old This American Life (TAL) episode last week, episode #84, originally broadcast over 10 years ago.

Breaking form for TAL, instead of picking a topic and playing a variety of stories on that theme, they have an hour long episode about Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington.

It’s an interesting episode, it uses this one story to dig a little bit into American politics and race, and it makes a lot of good points that might make one really hopeful. They even make the connection between Chicago 20 years ago, and the candidacy of the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, Senator Obama.

But the one gem that I love most of all is a quote from Mayor Washington about fairness. It seems that in Chicago, (and everywhere else in the world) to the victor belongs the spoils. The group that puts a mayor into office gets a bigger slice of the pie. But that was not how Harold rolled. He insisted on being fair. Every program and initiative he pushed through benefited whites and blacks equally, much to the chagrin of some of his supporters. They expert a speech from the mayor, he says:

“No one, but no one in this city, no matter where they live, or how they live is free from the fairness of our administration. We’ll find you and be fair to you wherever you are. “

(Listen to the clip here) I recommend having a listen, he is a great orator, and the clip is only 1 minute 30 seconds.

That quote tickles me to pieces, but it occurs to me that the internet and Advice Network embody this idea as well. For the first time ever, we are all free to get our name, or ideas, and our advice into the world.

As of May, 2008, Advice Network does not have any employees (besides myself). But maybe you have some employees at your company.

I just read an amazing article by Bill Taylor. It turns out that Zappos offers employees $1,000 at the end of their first week to quit. I highly recommend clicking over and taking a look at what Bill has to say.

I have to say, I got it right away. Having someone who doesn’t like their job, but they are sticking around because they need the money, how could that do anything but drain the company and team spirit.

I hadn’t heard of Zappos before, but apparently they are obsessive about customer service. That is the kind of company I want Advice Network to be.

My philosophy, if you are not making your customers happy, what is the point?

Many of you know besides being the founder and CEO of Advice Network I am a professional photographer.

I started doing professional photography in 2000, and at the time I lived in the Bay Area. For the entire course of my business, online marketing has been one of my biggest drivers of business. I’ve had a website since day one. I’ve bought qualified leads online since my first year. Every year more an more of my business comes from client referrals, but still most of my business comes from people finding me online.

Well, for the past few years, I’ve been putting those things together by inviting my clients to write reviews for me online. All those nice things they say about me, they can write it once, post it a few places, and people can read the reviews for years to come.

If you run a business and you are not already doing this, I recommend it strongly. There is a growing number of people who really trust and look to online reviews.

So where does this “tinyURL” come in? I wanted to email a link to review me on Google Local, but the link looked like this:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=l&hl=en&geocode=&q=schoenfeldt+photography&near=94117&jsv=111&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=37.735377,69.257812&ie=UTF8&latlng=37775034,-122430085,13992495282375185261&ei=UOcpSLuqNYq6jgPc1qyWCQ&sig2=slt5vvWo5UNHlL6zTz5I7w&cd=1

Yikes! And you know what the email program would do. It would break the URL into multiple lines, so they would end up clicking:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=l&hl=en&geocode=&q=scho

and the rest would be below in a separate line (or 3) like this:

enfeldt+photography&near=94117&jsv=111&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&

sspn=37.735377,69.257812&ie=UTF8&latlng=37775034,-122430085,

13992495282375185261&ei=UOcpSLuqNYq6jgPc1qyWCQ&sig2=slt5vvWo5UNHlL6zTz5I7w&cd=1

And when they clicked, they would get a “file not found.” and the review would not get written, and I’d have missed a great opportunity.

But at “TinyURL” you enter in the big long monster link, and it gives you: http://tinyurl.com/5zle86. Simple, safe, and email friendly.

And best of all, TinyURL is free (they do have a “donate” button.)

So go ahead and ask the clients who love you to write a review.

Alex

“To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing.”

- Raymond Williams

I’ve been listening to podcasts of Amory Lovins this week, and I must say, he is my new hero. Find them here. (I’m not sure if all of the talks are listed, but you can also look here.)

Lovins is the Cofounder, Chairman, and Chief Scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute. RMI is a think tank that focuses on energy efficiency and policy.

Their mission statement:

I was listening to a great podcast yesterday. A talk by Rasmus Lerdorf. If you are like me, you just said “who?” Well, Mr. Lerdorf is the person who invented PHP. Now, your saying “What?”

Don’t worry. I wouldn’t know what PHP was if I wasn’t running an internet startup, and truth be told, I really don’t know much about it. PHP is an open source language for building web pages.

So this guy, Mr. Lerdorf, was doing web programming, and he needed better tools, so he wrote a language called PHP. And instead of trying to make money off of it, he just gave it to the world, and let other people have it, use it change it, and improve it. Now, PHP runs some of the biggest sites on the internet, sites you use all the time like YouTube. Yet, it is still free.

It’s tools like PHP, and MySQL that allow sites like Advice Network to exist. Ten years ago, it would have cost 2 million to build Advice Network. Now, $100,000.

Mr. Lerdorf was talking about what it took to start a big open source project that people want to get involved in, and I felt really inspired.

You cannot run a decent open source project if you make it about you. It has to be about the people who contribute… You have to think about how do people feel about themselves when they are involved… We’re all in it together.

That is really how I feel about Advice Network, especially now that people are starting to write. It isn’t about me, it is about you, the writers and readers. And I truly hope that you get a lot out of being here. If you are writing, I hope you feel satisfied knowing that you made someones life easier while they tried to do something really hard. (buy a house, run a business, plan a wedding) AND I hope that it brings you more business.

If you are reading the advice, I hope we made your life easier, AND I hope you have a good experience with one of our vendors

Last week I was catching up on How To Change The World, one of my favorite blogs, by internet personality Guy Kawasaki.

This sentence stuck with me:

Click here to read the interview to learn about topics such as why the CEO of a publicly-traded company probably can’t write an interesting blog.

It really rings true. Advice Network is not even publicly traded yet I find myself forever compelled to maintain a “professional” voice. I fear the result has been a blog so dull that even I don’t read it. Really. The professional voice can’t say “I messed up.” or “Some jerk ripped me off.” or “I don’t know what I’m doing this week.” So it ends up saying “Blah Blah Blah…”

I hope Chad doesn’t read this post. Chad has been writing almost every post on this blog for months now, and he has been doing exactly as I have asked. By saying the blog has been boring, I simply say that I’ve given him a boring job. “Write articles that help people promote their business.” His articles have been good, and most of them would be great contributions to Advice Network, but that is not the same as an interesting blog.

An interesting blog has a point of view. It has a human voice. The Advice Network founders blog needs a human voice.

The gloves come off as of today. I am now going to begin writing a blog about starting an internet company that talks about my experience.

Starting an internet company is a hard and difficult thing that I do, and I am going to share my process with you unexpurgated. My trials, fears, triumphs, and setbacks.

I hope you enjoy reading about it.

Let me know in the comments if you think I’ve gone crazy.

Sometimes in business you can get so rattled with everything around you that you no longer have the usual enthusiasm for your job. You might get overwhelmed with the to-do lists and client issues that you are no longer fueled by the same passion that was there when you started.

In times like these you need to pretend to care.

I was reading Seth Godin’s blog yesterday and came across a very interesting thought. You probably recognize Seth as being the author of “Meatball Sundae”, “The Dip”, “Permission Marketing”, “Small is the New Big”, “Purple Cow”, “All Marketers are Liars”, and “Ideavirus”. Anyways, he also happens to put together a pretty incredible resource for marketers with articles added on a regular basis. Yesterday he told a story about some poorly trained city workers that simply did not do their job well because they didn’t care. He suggested, however, that if they at least pretended to care then they would eventually care for real.

“If people start out pretending to care, next thing you know, they actually do care. They like the positive feedback and they like the way being kind makes them feel. It spreads. It sticks.”

Have you stopped caring about something in your life? By paying careful attention to it and making it a priority, it will become more special to you and you will begin to genuinely care about it.

I challenge you to work on one thing this week that has become a drain in your life. What has been holding you back? Instead of viewing it as a chore, you should start viewing it as an opportunity. Think about what it was like when you first started that project and then recapture that passion.

The more time I spend with online businesses, the more I realize it truly isn’t a “get rich quick” scheme like so many people believe. If it was, wouldn’t everybody be rich by now?

Certainly some people have got rich online…very rich. But believe me, it usually wasn’t quick.

In fact, most successful internet business owners failed time and time again before they ever turned over a profit. Sure, they may have got rich quick with one business or another, but they had been studying, practicing, and working on that business plan for years before it ever came into fruition.

There are a few traits that an online entrepreneur should have to be successful – I italicized “should” because there are always exceptions to the rule. Here are the few that I consider most necessary:

Big Dreamer

If you want to achieve great things in life, you need to dream them up first. Without dreams you have no goals and without goals you can’t plan your future. By dreaming big and chasing your dreams, you’ll have a much greater chance at success than somebody who is blindly walking in an unknown direction.

Hard Worker

In order to chase your dreams, you have to work. Sure, it might not be the easiest part of business…but it’s absolutely necessary. I don’t know a single successful individual who hasn’t worked hard to get where they are today.

Innovator

You don’t need to create the next big thing to become a success story, but you should always be looking for ways to improve your products and services to continually offer the best in the industry. Find something that makes you different or find something your prospects or begging for…then come up with a solution.

Communicator

In the end, it doesn’t matter how great your product is or how amazing your services are…if you can’t communicate well with people then your business will die. Not only must you be likable to make a sale, but you also need to be able to describe everything you offer in a way that doesn’t intimidate prospects, but rather captivate them.

As with almost anything in life…communication is key.

Analyzer

This one barely made the list…because it is the easiest trait to outsource. Nonetheless, analyzing statistics and testing your success rates are a HUGE part of online business. So huge, in fact, that many companies are willing to pay millions to find out where they can improve their sales by a meager 1%. An analytical entrepreneur will not only be interested in tracking the numbers (conversion rates, revenues, traffic, etc), but also discover ways to improve them.

Any thoughts? Do you have another trait you think should be added to this list?