We had nothing going on, and the kids that were with us wanted to hang out, so we waited around and watched them break everything down.  When they were about done and only about 15 people were left hanging around, Pickler came out and we were able to meet her and the kids got autographs.  She was extremel nice.

Then today my son and I went to Tiger Walk at Auburn University, then got lucky and was in the Student Union eating when the downpour started.  We were able to score some great tickets about 10 rows up.  When the rain quit, we went to the stadium and enjoyed an incredible game where Auburn pulled it out in the end and beat West Virginia.  The game was unbeleiveable and the people we were around were extremely fun to hang out with.

On the walk from the stadium to downtown, we made it to Pita Pit with absolutely no one in line!  The line had about 15 people in it when we left, so we just beat the crowd.

I don’t know what I’ll do if tomorrow is as fun as the last two days, but it’s been a really fun weekend.

So, I decided to write an Adobe Air application in Flex 3 to tackle this data entry automation.  It has a built-in web browser that made it easy to create a quick app that would visit the site, login, go to the data entry page and fill out the form.  Unfortunately, this form has one file upload entry that uses a little javascript/ajax combined with an old fashion form upload.

In an ideal world, I would just be able to set the value of the <input type=”file”> and submit the form.  However, even though this is a desktop app, the browser’s security setup prohibits this from happening.  In a web-based scenario, the benefits of such a limitation are easy to see.  In my case, it was just frustrating.  I can have my program “click” the browse button on the file upload, but could not find a way to manipulate the dialog that pops ups to select a file.  I’ve tried about a million different methods to get this to work, but after two days of chasing this unicorn I decided to back off, regroup, and take another approach.

Examining the upload page, I noticed that the file upload was in it’s own form (not in the form of the rest of the data entry).  The data entry page contained an iframe, which pointed to another page that contained the file upload information.  This way, the file upload happened as soon as you chose a file and it displayed on the data entry page.  I modified my program to make this iframe point to a php file on my server.  This php file grabbed an image from the server, posted it to the data entry site posing as the form on the original page.  I even passed in cookies and session information so it looked as legit as possible. However, the image is not uploading.  After reviewing the page for several hours, I have come to the conclusion that there is more javascript/ajax involved in this upload than I had previously hoped and expected.  There MUST be something firing on that form once an image is selected that my script is not doing.

I’ll try to spend more time tonight reviewing the data entry’s javascript to see if I can find the culprit.  Unfortunately, it has thousands of lines of ill-formatted javascript with all the spaces and lines removed.  It makes for a fun night of code review!

I’ve heard a lot of tweets lately about customer service.  A few good ones are below:

Good service leads to multiple sales. If you take care of your customers, they’ll open doors you could never open by yourself.  – @ShanePike

“One customer, well taken care of, could be more valuable than $10,000 worth of advertising.” ~Jim Rohn – @ZigZiglarQuotes

These quotes are as true as they come.  However, depending on what you do, that $10,000 worth of advertising estimate may be quite a bit low.

I’ve had a few good customer service experiences in the last week.  Both instances really opened me up to the particular business I was dealing with.  Coincidentally, they were both local restaurants.  Last week, I went to Five Guys Burgers and orders my cheeseburger.  Well, it came out with onions instead of mushrooms.  Did I order onions accidentally?  Who knows, but I wanted mushrooms.  I took the burger up to the front and an employee saw me coming.  She came out from behind the counter and met me half way.  I was ready to give the whole story and go into the typical hoopla it takes at most restaurants.  However, she stopped me, went ahead and had them start me another burger, wrapped mine back up and handed it to me and told me to take it home to someone who might want it.  I was impressed!  Not only did she take prompt care of my “issue”, but she gave me the old burger as well because they could do nothing but throw it away.

This morning, I stopped by Wendys to try their breakfast as I had never had it.  I ordered a homestyle chicken biscuit and proceeded to the window.  The lady at the window informed me that it would be about 3 minutes for the chicken to fry and asked if I would like a drink while I wait (I had not ordered a drink).  I replied “yes” and got a free coke out of the wait.  Not a big deal, cost the company next to nothing, but small things like that help the customer to understand that you care about their experience and that they are important to you.

There was a comic posted at an office I used to work at that said something to the effect:  “Lack of preperation on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine”.  Live by that.  Don’t be afraid to say “no” or that you can’t meet a requested deadline.  Don’t fall into the trap of dropping what you are working on to take care of the “call of the moment”.  Make them wait their turn just like everyone else.

I have clients where everything is an emergency.  How could this be?  How could everything be this important?  It’s not.  It’s just their nature to be worrysome.  On the other hand, I have clients where I sometimes feel bad because their updates took so long, but they call and thank me for “jumping right on it” when they are done.

Being in business is more than managing projects.  It includes managing clients.  If you can manage your clients, then the job will eat you alive with stress.  So, chill out, seperate the truly time-sensitive updates from the rest and tell them to wait.

The truth is, you don’t need to have the best product on the market.  You simply need to have the best that a potential buyer HAS SEEN.  The key to this difference is that people are lazy, and they don’t always spend the time necessary to look at every available option.  So, if you are pro-active in finding buyers, then whatever you are selling will probably be one of the first items the buyer sees.  If they like it and it meets their price point, then you have a good chance of selling it.

For example, I had a potential buyer I was talking to on Twitter about my house.  He had found another house and was in process of purchasing, but the deal had stalled when the house didn’t appraise for asking value.  Well, I hit him up, talked him into coming to see my house.  He was thinking it over, but had already fallen in love with the house he was trying to purchase.  Even though, in my opinion, my house is better (bigger, recently remodelled, better lot, etc) and at the same price point, he had seen that house first, liked it, had spent the last few weeks dreaming about how he would fix it up, decorate it, paint it, etc and so he decided to not even come by to look at my house after the seller met the appraised price.  In this case, it did not matter that my house was better.  What mattered was what he saw and liked first.

When selling houses, the mistake is using a realtor right away.   I would always recommend you at least try to sell it yourself first, then if you are not able to sell it, find a realtor.  A lot of people look online for houses.  Put it on craigslist, in the local online classifieds for your paper and see if you can proactively go after a buyer.  Talk to everyone you know and push your house.  In this situation, they are pretty much comparing my house to the others on craigslist or in some cases only currently considering my house.  In this situation, if they like my house (not like it better than another, but if they like it at all), it is sold.  If I go with a realtor, my house is being compared with everything in the local MLS system.  The odds of my house being the best a buyer has seen is greatly reduced with a realtor.  The flip side is that realtors have a larger buying pool, but give it a go yourself before you give in and see if you can get it sold.

Initially, I thought this was going to be easier.  I built my landing page promoting several offers and submitted it to Facebook.  It was approved in about 12 hours and I was under way (so I thought).  Well, my ad was very weak and I wasn’t getting a good CTR so Facebook increases my recommended minimum bid and I stop getting impressions.  I quickly update my ads, changing the targeting of the one I already have and adding more that are a little edgier.

Well, the Facebook Ad Monitors now decide that my offers are not meeting the guidelines.  Of course, they don’t exactly tell you this.  They give you a hint as to what terms are violated, but they don’t tell you if it is the offers or your site.  So, I spend the next day redoing my landing page to make 100% sure it meets the guidelines but I am still unable to get any ads approved.

Over the last day, “Ad disapproved” has become my new best friend.  I’ve submitted over a dozen ads with none being approved.  In doing so, I have noticed that for the exact same targeting, my minimum recommended bid increases each time one of my ads are disapproved.  I’m wondering if I am beginning to be marked as a “trouble maker” because I am continuing to try to get these ads approved.

It was my assumption that the recommended bids are simply determined by the targeting of your ad.  However, this seems to be  firm evidence that past performance plays into your future advertising recommendations on facebook.

Recently, I have been trying to get back to spending considerable time and resources on affiliate marketing.  I learned a lot when I was focused on it, and was making good money in spots.  However, big projects came in and my available time decreased and I stopped working on my campaigns.

Yesterday, I started experiementing heavily with Facebook ads. Once I get a number of clicks on an ad, I like to make adjustments and submit another ad.  However, my ad approval time is taking 6-10 hours and it’s really taking all the fun out of testing and finding something that works. If my memory serves me correctly, this is about twice what it was taking last year when I was testing facebook previously.  Obviously, the moderators are much busier now.  It’s just another sign that facebook is exploding as an advertising platform.

For example, today I am looking at starting over on my QuickBooks file for the year because I am about as disorganized as I could possibly be.  If I were just a little more organized, I would finish projects faster and make much more money because I would keep up with records better and bill a lot more of my time than I currently do.  I struggle with this, but really need to force myself to slow down and track everything.  It really doesn’t take that long to do once everything is setup, but it is just so out of my nature to do so.

You need to examine your business and find out what you personally or the business as a whole sucks at doing.  Once you identify your weakness, find the best way to overcome that obstacle.  It may be as simple as putting forth more effort, getting your spouse to help, or it could come in the form of hiring more help.  Regardless, eliminating your weakness is a big step in preparing yourself for success.

We didn’t want to go too wild with our first attempt at it, so the template is fairly simple.  However, that is what Walking Canes’ market calls for so it worked out great!  The site has the premium domain name for this market and was ranked on the first page on Google for the main industry keyword of “walking canes”.  However, the site ranked poorly for just about all long tail keywords. We have moved them up to the top fold on Google with the new design launch and hopefully they begin to see some longtail traffic very soon.

Look at the site and post what you think.

Over time, I noticed a tremendous dip in the level of support they provided, but that seems to have recovered somewhat as of late.  This spells trouble for many others that I know use The Planet.  However, I handle my administration and keep pretty good control on my servers (and have been lucky) so I have not needed much support from them.

Today, one of my servers was unaccessible for some time (how long, exactly, is unknown).  I couldn’t get in touch with anyone at the planet.  However, through the power of Twitter, I quickly learned that it was a widespread issue and not my particular machine.  After I finished dealing with all the client phone calls and questions, the servers finally came back up.

I control a couple hundred domain names and hosting accounts (mostly my own sites).  I am constantly expanding this list and need to be able to expand my hosting as needed.  Anyone have any good suggestions that are in-line or better price-wise than The Planet and allow you the flexibility of setting everything up like you want it?