Of This and That

Posted On: 2012-11-09

Ok so it's Friday and just like last week I should be into wind-down mode to prepare for the weekend but somehow that just doesn't seem happening.

Instead I've got a heap of work in front of me that includes everything from a little web design to some analysis of Adwords data, training for several clients in how to add stock to their online shops and later on a meeting with someone new to town who is into blogging in a big way ... but has no clue about how to make some important plugins work.

Yep it's going to be a busy day and the weekend is not looking any better either. Steve and I have been slowly building up three new online shops and progress has been very slow. Client work and other stuff just keeps getting in the way so this weekend we've decided we're going to take the phone of the hook, lock ourselves in our offices and just do nothing else but work together to get those shops to the point by Monday morning where we can start promoting them and they can start making sales.

It's definitely not the ideal way to spend a weekend but sometimes fairly drastic measures are called for if you want to make things happen.

A mobile reminder
I picked up a new cell phone yesterday ... it was one of the HTC models and if you're still living back in the dark ages and not building anything for mobile then this phone has got some news for you. It's time to wake up to the real world!

Right from the get go ... straight out of the box ... with nothing added ... this phone is aimed squarely at getting people online with their phone. Pre-installed apps included Twitter and Facebook, Gmail, YouTube and a bunch of other things to encourage people to surf from their phone and not from their laptop or PC.

So take the hint ... the world is going mobile and you had better be out there with your market place or you will get left behind. It's not a matter of "maybe" or "perhaps" ... it's much more definite than that, you will get left behind ... there's just no doubt about it.

And, looking at those Apps that came already installed along with some of the Apps that Steve has downloaded for his iPhone, I'm beginning to think that we're not too far away from being able to run an entire website from nothing more than your cell phone. Imagine how connected you could become to your followers if you were a web amateur.

You could video some hardcore outdoor action, do a little editing and upload it to your website a few minutes after you finished having fun and maybe you could even stream it live to your website. These days your imagination is about the only thing that will limit what you can do with your cell phone.

Parked domains
An interesting video from Google's Matt Cutts hit YouTube this week. In it he talked about what to do if you have a parked domain that you want to bring to life and he also mentioned that Google has a tool that can identify parked domains and it regularly crawls the Web.

His advice to anyone who was thinking of bringing a parked domain to life was to add two or three paragraphs of relevant text to the index page of the domain a month or two before the launch of the main website. That would be enough to alert Google to the fact that the domain was about to be taken out of parked status and made live.

Are you too busy?
Yes, I know, that's a rather dumb question. In this industry we're all busy working our nuts off to make money but are you too busy to notice what's happening to your business?

Are you too busy trying to make money to do other important things like looking at where your business is actually heading? Are you too busy trying to survive to take care of important aspects of your business and protecting them from those who might want to take them away from you by fair means or foul?

Sometimes you can be so busy churning out your free sites, galleries and other marketing sites that you lose sight of what's happening with your business. I know some people who have been so busy trying to make money that they haven't actually noticed that their business is going backwards rather than forwards.

So are you too busy ... being busy ... to notice what's happening around you? If you are then perhaps it's time to stop, take a deep breath and a serious look at your business.