Quite some time ago on Aridni I wrote about a dilemma I had in getting a project done.  I didn’t have the technical skill to actually write the software myself and I did not have the time to learn it adequately enough.

Now that I am actively trying to restrict the number of projects I’m working on, I wanted to get these ideas out of my head.  They are not quite as powerful as they were when the ideas were born, but they might be of interest to someone out there.  If you decide you want to take on one of the projects, great!  Go for it.  I’ll even help you with getting hosting.

The three projects are right after the break.  They are ‘Hivemind Snapshot Project‘, ‘Articles of Organization and Operating Agreement Generator‘, and ‘Auto-task generation… thing‘

Hopefully you will find at least one of them useful!

(Continue reading this article…)

Last summer I was doing some work for a store with a lot of walk in traffic.  It was interesting how diverse the people who came in were, but aside from grandparents, adults, and teenagers coming in as customers we had another group as well.  People trying to sell us things.

They would have these ‘opportunities’ for us that could usually be described as ‘hemorrhaging money from the company.’  This is clearly not the best thing to do, unless you are trying to show a loss for they year.  Yet still we would have a couple of people per week who had no idea about the business come in with plans that offered little to no value.

To be fair, there were some legitimate ideas and a couple were even worth taking up.  For the most part they were a waste of time.

One particular company was basically putting together a local web directory.  To be in the directory you had to do a little interview so they could write a paragraph about your company.  Then they would let you be in the directory to try it out for 90 days.  After that time was over, you needed to shell out some money. $100 bucks per month.

While $100 a month isn’t a whole lot for online advertising, there are much better ways to spend it.  Especially due to the fact that our store’s web page had higher search engine rankings and we were able to track the minimal amounts of traffic that their site brought in.

There is some value in their business model; however it is not quite balanced.  The value that they provide is having another link to your website, presumably marketed to people living in or traveling to the area.  One of the bigger problems about this site was that it was to new.  It didn’t rank well in google for local terms and not a lot of people knew about it.

If they would have also had a deal along the lines of, “If you link to us as well, we’ll give you x% off each month.”  Then they could build up the amount of targeted local traffic to their site buy leaps and bounds.  The more people that link to them, the more valuable their links become.

Any business wants you to provide value to them.  If all you have is a team of salesmen then where does the value come from?

If you are going to pitch your product or service, make sure it benifits enough to justify your pricetag.

Something has dawned on me over the past couple of months. I might be a packrat for ideas. By ‘dawned on me’ I mean it has been smashing me over the head with a hammer.

Over the last couple of years I have had so many projects that I wanted to get done. And new projects and million dollar ideas were sprouting up all of the time. Some of them were online, some of them off.

These ideas were across a broad range, everything from building a chess board, building a giant ‘colony size’ ant farm, to creating a program that sent out lottery numbers after every draw (And most of them were just as dorky sounding!).

It’s time that I start retiring a couple of projects of mine. When I get ideas, I want them to happen, so I’ll begin. The problem is that new ideas come and I want them to happen, so I’ll begin. Of course there hasn’t been enough time to complete the original project before starting on the next. This basically means the old project is doomed.

Soon there is another great flash of inspiration and a new project emerges and another becomes doomed.

My final stance is I’m officially closing down some projects. A big problem is that juggling so many things, none of them ever got completed. It’s time to start filling that filing cabinet with those ‘million dollar ideas‘ and start focusing on fewer and fewer.

I’ll be posting quite a few ideas and one-day projects. By one-day projects, I mean “one day I’de like to…” Hopefully there is someone out there that can benefit from some them.

Has anyone joined Yaro’s Blog Mastermind Mentoring Program? Katie and I were talking about joining it, but we just wanted to see if anyone has any thoughts on it.

There are two different options that he offers.  Blog Mastermind runs at $497 and the second package is the Blog Mastermind as well as a newer program of his, ‘Membership Site Mastermind.’  The bigger package runs for $997.

I think that Yaro has done a great job in the past.  He provides a tremendous amount of value on his sites and through his email newsletter.

Just wondering if anyone had any thoughts before we make the plunge here.

Those of you who clicked www.makingthishome.com after my last post when I told you I lost the address may have been a little confused.  In Part 1, I told you someone else had purchased the domain name when enom central placed me on their fraud alert and canceled my domain purchased.  But I got the name back, and the website is running.

HOW I GOT MY DOMAIN NAME BACK BY PICKING UP THE PHONE

I hate to admit it, but I had become attached to the idea of calling my blog “Making This Home”.  It sounded perfect, and it was tough to believe that someone else would have thought of the exact same name only four days after I had.  So I decided to call the man who had purchased the name.

“I was wondering what you were planning on doing with that domain name,” I told him.

He laughed nervously and said, “Umm.  Make some money?”

The interesting thing was that he had no idea which domain name I was talking about, though he seemed open to the idea of selling it back to me.  I launched into my sad story instead.  It didn’t make sense to pay the guy for something neither of us had invested anything into.

He took a little time looking up www.makingthishome.com on his computer and said it hadn’t been making him any money.  It didn’t seem like his goal was to sell the website.  I almost wondered if he was seeking profits from residual traffic.  I really have no idea.  But he was very kind to me and said that he would give up the domain name; I could have it back.

The next morning, just as he promised, the domain name was available again.  I bought it, and now www.makingthishome.com is mine, and I do hope you’ll come visit me!

Last week I decided on a new domain name and purchased it at www.enomcentral.com.  I had chosen the company after browsing through the internet, reading about people’s experiences, and speaking with people about their experiences; the company sounded impressive.  I registered www.makingthishome.com, and I never suspected that anything could go wrong.  From there, nothing went right.

I guess my account was placed on fraud alert and my domain purchase was canceled.  The problem was that Enomcentral never contacted me about any of this.  All I had was a confirmation email about my successful purchase and a locked enom account.  As far as I knew, I owned the domain name.  When I called enom to see why my account was locked, the representative I spoke with said I had to email their risk management team.  I asked to speak to the risk management team instead (we all know how well emails to big businesses go).  The representative said e-mail was the only option.  

I emailed risk management immediately.  At the end of the day, they sent me a generic letter requesting a list of three documents to verify my identity.  They would accept this information by fax or email, and no other information was provided to me.

Faxing stuff like that isn’t really an option for me right now–I’m in Germany, so I emailed the requested information.  But I wasn’t totally dumb.  I sent the information Friday morning in an encrypted message.  To open the document, they would have to call me for the password.  I never heard back.

I kept calling their customer help line.  The representatives kept promising that the risk management team was working on my paperwork.  That’s one thing about Americans that drives me crazy–when we don’t know the answer, we make one up.  Wouldn’t you say that’s true?  We’re afraid of saying, “I don’t know.”  In this case, I knew the answers I was getting were wrong.  There was no one working on my documents because no one had the password to open them.

LOSING MY DOMAIN NAME

When I typed in www.makingthishome.com into the webhost, it said it was in process–meaning someone had bought the address and it was being established.  Naturally, I assumed that someone was me.  I’m not a techy person, and I’d been given no reason to believe otherwise.  (I suppose domain name savvy people would know something is up, that it shouldn’t take several days, etc.  But I am not a domain name savvy person.  This was my first time buying a domain name.)

On Sunday, I went to look at www.makingthishome.com and saw an advertisement.  It was clear that someone had bought my domain name.  Someone who wasn’t me.  My husband showed me how to look up the owner–someone named Chad in California.  It was pretty obvious that he didn’t buy the website for the same pretty-picture and girly reason that I had in mind.

The weekend enom representative told me to call back on Monday and ask for customer service.  So I did.  But then the new representative said that she could not forward me to them because my account was locked.  I asked her how to get my account unlocked so that I could speak to someone.  Anyone!  Risk management was being completely unresponsive.  Again, I was told that I should relax.  Risk management was “working on it.”  I resolved to stay on the phone until I was certain things were being handled.

GETTING OFF THE FRAUD LIST

Maybe an hour later, I received an email from risk management.  They requested the same information that was asked of me before.  But now they would only accept a fax of it.  Like I said, faxing wasn’t an option for me.  I wrote back and said I had already sent the information via email on Friday.  As with every email I wrote, I included my phone number, so it wasn’t a matter of risk management being able to reach me; it was a matter of whether they wanted to.

I have to say that putting a password on a document is the PERFECT way to get a real person on the phone with you.  When a risk management team member called for the password, I was absolutely shocked.  I gave it to him, and not even a moment later, he had the document open and said okay–my account was unlocked.

But what about my lost domain name, I asked.  He didn’t seem to care, and he didn’t seem interested in revealing any information about why I was placed on their fraud alert.  

It turns out that anyone using a US credit card outside of the US is automatically placed on fraud alert.  They don’t contact you about anything because then it alerts frauds.  What about the people who aren’t frauds?  Well I guess they haven’t thought about that part.

NOW WHAT?

It’s great to know that I had chosen a company that takes such detailed measures to monitor fraud.  Except if you land in the fraud pile, it’s near impossible to swim back to shore.  They need to work on that.

And they need to work on it fast.  Now I’ve been trying to think of a new domain name ever since.