blogging – Maine Creative Services

Web hosting: who's best?

Tom McKay — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 14:16:16 +0000

That’s the question a weekend New York Times article sought to answer. The fact is, there’s no clear-cut answer. But for us non-superstars of the Internet, my favorite Web hosting company is NearlyFreeSpeech.Net. Why? Their pay-as-you-go, pay-for-only-what-you-use hosting plan.

Like many people, I own a bunch of domain names, most of which are nearly dormant, but I want to keep them online to satisfy the Googlebeast. Before NFSN I was paying GoDaddy $3-10 bucks a month for each domain, but now I pay literally a penny or two a day for a few of my sites, and nothing at all for most of the others.

One NFSN account can have unlimited domains, so I drop $5-10 in my account and it keeps me runnin’ for months. You can open up an account with as little as $.25. Disk storage? A penny/MB per month. That’s right, one penny per MONTH.

No sales reps, no commissions, no pressure. No tacky pinup girls or extreme political BS. Also, unfortunately, no tech support, except FAQ pages. That means NFSN is probably not the best choice for beginners. While most of their directions are clear and easy to implement, if you do have problems, you’ll have to figure it out on your own — or call your 14 year old neighbor.

PS: I am not afiliated with NFSN nor do I receive anything for this endorsement. I just like their service.

It's true. I've become a Twit.

Tom McKay — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 14:31:49 +0000

Despite hearing a lot of hype about it, even from people I like and respect, I have been a huge Twitter skeptic. I perceived it as an enormous time-sink with little or no value, except maybe self-gratification. (No, not that kind!) That was until I finally took the time to actually visit the site yesterday. Wow, amazing people and ideas flying around there. Fun, too.

Now my problem is, how do I get any work done? Being a twit (hmm, that’s probably not the right term, is it?) is a lot more fun than actually working!

Shameless plug: Follow me at @tom_mckay

Blog marketing reaps $100K in 5 months

Tom McKay — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 20:33:08 +0000

Can a blog really attract customers? It can — if your customers are web developers. Peldi Guilizzoni, a solo software developer, built a web design mock-up tool called Balsamiq and promoted it on his blog.

In the “open” spirit of the Internet, Guilizzoni also posted his financial records right on his blog so everyone would know how things were going. And things are going… really, really well!

According to ReadWriteWeb, Peldi had $10k in sales within six weeks. Not bad. Now it’s five months later Balsamiq has brought in $100K (at roughly $79 per license). That averages out to $20K per month or $5K per week or $1000 per (work)day. Not too shabby for a one-person shop!

Have you experienced similar online success? Know of others who have? Share the joy in the comments.

Info-marketing catapults first-time author into Amazon Top 100

Tom McKay — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:15:12 +0000

Is information marketing effective? Does it really work to attract clients and income? Let’s look at Steve Pavlina, one of my favorite bloggers.

For almost four years, Steve has been writing about “personal development for smart people” and posting the articles on his blog. Today, his first book is among Amazon’s Top 100 in sales — three months before its release!

“It currently has a sales rank of 94. It also sits at #13 in the self-help category, #4 in the personal transformation category, and #5 in the motivational category. Those rankings are adjusted hourly, so they may be different by the time you read this.”

Steve has posted about 700 articles. That’s it. No outside promotion or advertising. Just quality content and word of mouth buzz, which have generated an incredible number of incoming links. Even his Google pagerank is a modest 4.

Not only has his writing attracted a publisher, Hay House, (yes, they came to him), but Steve claims the advertising and affiliate links on his blog earn him over $10,000 a month income.

It’s not the mere fact that he’s writing that has brought him this success. It’s the quality of his material.

Fixing up the old blog house

Tom McKay — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 02:36:52 +0000

Clean up, fix up, paint up” used to be the springtime motto. After a long winter of laziness and neglect (or was that just me?) the air is warm, the sun is shining, and everyone feels energized to spiff things up.

For the past day or so, I put a scaffolding around this old blog and started making some long-needed repairs and and improvements. Have you noticed? Let’s see…

I finally got around to putting rounded corners on the top image. Now it matches the graphic below it.
A drop cap (i.e., an oversized first character) has been added to the first word in each post, thanks to a nifty plugin by Rodney Campbell (Remorhaz). Elegant, no? Like a magazine… ~~(Update: Hey, it didn’t show up in this post!)~~ (Update #2: Got it!)
I changed the body font to Calibri and bumped up the size one click. I liked the font that came with the theme, but this one is much easier to read. And hey, this blog is all about your comfort!
I finally got the Photo Dropper plug-in working. This is a terrific blogging tool that lets you to search for Creative Commons-licensed photos on Flickr by keyword, right from your WordPress post page. Highly recommended!
Technorati tags now grace the footer of this and all future posts, via Will Garcia‘s plugin. (I installed and auditioned about five others before finding this one. Nice work, Will!)
Finally, I added a Share this button so you can email my posts, or send them to any of the big social networking sites. Ahem. Of course, that’s assuming I ever write something worth sharing.

And that’s coming, too. Buckle your seat belt. I’ve got big plans for this old blog home!

Photo by… me!