Today feels like Friday to me, and not in a good way. More like a this-week-is-one-day-longer-than-it-should-be sort of way. Oh well. I was hoping to have the primary Brad Kelly Enterprises domain moved off of the old host and over to DreamHost by today, but I never really got around to it. The domain is current parked with Office Live, which is a great way to get a free domain, btw. When I do get it moved over, I’ll write about the process of obtaining the key and everything from Microsoft.

I’ve kept busy with changes to tshirtreviewblog.com this week, many of them under the hood. I’m particularly excited about the Project Wonderful ad box, just because it’s such a refreshing take on advertising and valuation. I’ll post about PW in the next day or two, after I’ve had a little more time to get a feel for how it’s working.

I’ve been enjoying a lot of reading lately on PPC affiliates. I’m fascinated on how calculating one has to be while still sort of “feeling” your way through it. Anything that’s an inexact science is pretty interesting to me.

I had another project I was hoping to launch tomorrow, but it’s sort of been back burner this week and will probably be delayed a bit.

I was actually surprised at how painless and quick this was. Over my lunch break, I searched for promo codes/coupons for Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter, and signed up for each. I created some keyword lists (need to be tweaked obviously) and an ad for each. I entered all my information and then paused my campaigns. Very easy setup. If you’re interested, here are the promotions I used.

Google AdWords: $50 in free clicks ($5 setup fee waived)
Microsoft AdCenter: offer code AFF0108V1 $50 in free clicks (plus $5 setup fee)
Yahoo Search Marketing: $100 in free clicks with ($30 minimum deposit)

This past weekend was the most unproductive I’ve been since the holidays. It’s not like I had nothing to do either, I just had a hard time staying focused. I did manage to experiment with a few different plugins though, one of which temporarily broke the Wordpress. I thought it’d be a good opportunity to recommend a test installation.

Basically, I keep a parallel instance of each site running privately so I can test things before rolling them out publicly. I just install wordpress to a domain subdirectory, and in setup I opt not to make it visible to search engines. Since I use DreamHost, and they have one-click installations, it literally takes me 5 minutes max to set it up. I copy the theme over to the test environment, and take the installation active.

Over the weekend, I was installing and testing the Adsense Deluxe plugin and placing adsense ads for tshirtreviewblog.com. By doing this in the test environment, I was able to try different ad sizes and locations without breaking or distorting the theme publicly. In fact, another plugin I was testing for managing 301 redirects broke the site pretty badly whenever a link was active. Again, this was thankfully done in the test environment and was invisible publicly.

This doesn’t just go for plugins of course, it’s great for trying new graphics or CSS tweaks. Once I know everything will work alright, I simply switch to the live installation and repeat. You could use one Wordpress test environment if you run substantially similar sites, but I have fairly unique plugin setups for both sites. If I clone T-Shirt Review Blog, which I may do in the future, I could continue to use the same test environment for multiple sites.

Update: Here’s a good personal example of how this setup can save your ass at some point.

With the explosion of new blogs online in the last few years, it’s been easy to overlook the pivotal role forums have played in the development of the web as we know it today. The evolution of the message board is a fascinating story in and of itself. I have experience in online communities, and it’s been exciting to see the evolution of the medium with the advent of social networking websites. People are finding more and more ways to network, communicate, and share ideas.

The management of these communities often ends up an overlooked and thankless job, but it’s crucial to the success of the community and can be a rewarding experience. The technical side of things has been covered countless times, but a community admin would be hard pressed to find some good advice from beginning to end, the how and the why. Managing a successful community is much more than installing some software and crafting a theme: you have to deal with people, promotion, direction, and trolls.

I don’t know anyone more experienced in this arena than Patrick O’Keefe. Though we haven’t always kept in touch, I’ve known Patrick for a number of years and have always kept an eye on iFroggy Network, his umbrella entity for nearly two dozen successful online communities and blogs. Patrick has poured himself onto the page and shared his knowlege of online community management in his new book, Managing Online Forums. You can check out the details at Amazon.

A discussion board can be an excellent addition to an existing website, or can be a standalone entity. I encourage you to learn from Patrick, whether you’re looking to create a new online community or take your existing community to the next level.

Patrick’s original post announcing his book is also an interesting read for anyone who isn’t familiar with the process of writing and publishing a book. I learned quite a bit about what is involved and how complex the publishing process really is. It’s a good read even if you’re not interested in the book’s topic.

Does anyone else find the post-dating feature of Wordpress especially useful? I regularly set posts to publish at a later time, and I think it’s a good way to exercise a greater level of control over the user experience and provide consistency to your readers.

On a standard Wordpress installation (I’m sure other CMS and publishing platforms support this too) the last item in your sidebar is “Post Timestamp.” By default, this is set to the time you opened the new post page. You can set it to whatever you’d like though. This is the time your post becomes active and visible to the outside world. You’re able to pick any time in the future or past. When you pick a time in the future, nobody can see it until it hits the time you specified. At that time, it appears as if you just wrote it. I rarely use this feature on this blog, but I use it quite a bit on tshirtreviewblog.com.

Here’s how I use post-dating to smooth out the experience for the end user.

Often times, when I’m browsing for new shirts to write about, I’ll come across two or three shirts that I’d like to mention, sometimes more. When I’m in that mode, and the creative juices are flowing, I find it best to knock out not just the first review (which can be posted immediately) but also the others. I could post three reviews in quick succession, but there are a few advantages to posting one a day for the next three days instead.

1. There’s a lesser chance that some articles may fall by the wayside
Content is the lifeblood of any site. It would make sense to milk every drop of audience out of each post. If I post reviews individually, with time in between, each one has its own moment in the sun. Posting a handful of reviews all at once can force them to share the podium so to speak, and compete for the readers attention. Since writing articles takes time, the farther you can go with the content you create, the more you’re able to stretch your time.

2. Erratic post schedules suck for readers
There’s nothing worse than going to a site that posts so much content one day I can barely wade through it all and then nothing for a couple days. I always feel like I’m missing the boat with sites like that.

3. The site can run itself for short periods of time
If I don’t feel like writing for a day or two, or if I’ve got a lot going on, it’s no big deal. Posts still can appear on a regular basis. You can also use this feature for planned time off or for vacations. It doesn’t work well for reactionary pieces or news sites of course, but for timeless content it’s doable.

4. It sets a rhythm for your readers
I write at all kinds of strange hours, but that doesn’t always line up with my readers schedules. If I see that a wave of readers tends to hit at 10 am, I’d like to make sure there’s some fresh meat waiting for them when they arrive. If the last chance I have to write is the evening before (I do work an 8 to 5) a non-timebomb post would sit overnight for the night owls to pick at, and becomes yesterday’s post. When the night owls get up the next day, there’s no content that’s new to them, and I have to write another post for that day.

Instead, it might be a good idea to knock out a small blurb (which takes a negligible amount of time) the night before, and timebomb your gem for 9 or so the next morning. That way, the post goes live with enough time for your readers’ RSS aggregators to update by the time the traffic wave hits.

Like most entries here, this arose out of something I encountered today. I was searching for some new shirts for tshirtreviewblog and came across several different sites I hadn’t seen before. By the time I realized what I was getting into, I’d found more than 10 shirts I was interesting in writing about. After setting aside a quick description and a URL for each, I got to work writing the actual reviews. I haven’t gotten through every one of them yet, but I plan to write the rest in a large block tomorrow. As an experiment, I will set them to time-release over the next week.

I don’t feel like writing all the time. Sometimes I have energy for writing, sometimes it’s for tweaking the code under the hood, sometimes for graphic design or site promotion. This timebomb feature saves me a lot of time, and keeps me interested and happy because I can always do what I’d like without feeling like writing is a chore.

When I launched tshirtreviewblog.com at the beginning of the year, there have been a number of little things I’ve been meaning to do since then. I spoke a bit about “get it out there and tweak it” in this blog’s first post, and I’m finally putting that into practice.

The last week or so has kept me pretty busy solidifying tshirtreviewblog.com in a few different ways. I have quite a bit more to go between now and this weekend (my arbitrary deadline) but things are coming along alright. Many changes are behind the scenes, but it’s worth a look nevertheless.

One important thing I’ve noticed though is that I’m finding is my groove. It’s my procedure every day; the things I have to go through to generate the best content I can and make sure I’m in the loop on everything. I’ve got to see what’s new, I’ve got to see what others are writing about. I’m an obsessive stats checker, so that’s of course part of the routine. I need to find out where my traffic’s coming from, why some things are getting a larger response than others, etc.

A lot of this is old news I’m sure to those of you that are veterans, but it’s new to me. The biggest thing I can suggest to anyone in my position though is to read. Nothing helps me stay in the right frame of mind and make correct decisions more than absorbing as much outside information as possible. Read everything you can on your given topic, but read completely unrelated sites and blogs as well. Finding someone’s archives, and determining how they’ve developed their “voice” and their outlook over time has been particularly helpful.

I find that once housekeeping tasks are out of the way (checking servers, email, stats and traffic, checking for comments, etc.) that my time breaks down to something like 70% reading and 30% writing, roughly. This may of course change over time, but that seems to be where I’m at right now. Does anyone have any similar experiences?

Whenever you’re selling anything, either online or in a brick-and-mortar environment, it’s important to be aware of your state’s sales tax requirements. If you’re selling anything with the intention of making a profit to those inside your home state, a sales tax license (in those states that require them) is essential.

The State of Michigan has a tiered payment schedule for those of us that have state sales tax licenses. Depending on how much sales tax you expect to collect throughout the year, you’re required to pay annually, quarterly or monthly. Since I estimated a particular amount for the course of a year, I was dropped into the quarterly category. 2007 was a short tax year though, because I started the company in the middle of July and wasn’t liable for sales tax before August 23 or something like that. I also didn’t anticipate well over 99% of my sales going to customers out of state.

Basically, I forgot about my quarterly status, thinking I was on the annual tier for some reason. I realized today I had $4.80 of tax due in October for a single sale just before the Sept. 30 cutoff date. I’ve been accruing penalties and interest on it since, to the tune of a whopping $0.59. The next quarter’s payment is due at the end of this week, and since I incurred no tax liability during that quarter (I’m such a slacker) I got to fill out that return with zeroes.

This really could have been a lot worse. Had I been selling merchandise in-state with volume, I’d have a much larger liability to contend with. Also, had I missed this second quarter, Michigan would have estimated my tax based on the annual estimate I gave them when applying for my license, and then they would have charged me interest and penalties based on that (much larger) amount. Once that happens, I’m responsible for that amount, regardless of what I would have actually owed.

 I did mention initially that part of this blogs goal was to help you learn from my mistakes so you don’t make them, here’s a perfect example! Thankfully my foul-up was done on a pretty small scale. It may be helpful to add tax due dates to your calendar. That was something I initially planned to do, but in the rush and excitement of getting everything set up, overlooked.

Well this weekend certainly seemed to fly by, is it Monday already? Lunch with Microsoft on Thursday was pretty good. It wasn’t the best steak I’d ever had, but I certainly can’t complain, it was a wonderful experience. I had the chance to learn a lot about their unified communications tools and licensing, two things I’ve been out of the loop on for a while now.

I do know that Cisco has an amazing unified communication/PBX type system as well. While I have an extensive Microsoft background, I also trained with the Cisco Academy for two years. I learned everything I would need to attain CCNA certification, but never actually took the test. Don’t ask me any questions about spanning tree protocol, I don’t remember.

In any event, I spent the better part of the weekend catching up on some much-needed housecleaning and running some errands. I fell quite a bit behind being sick in bed the first week of the year. Things are finally back to normal on the home front, and that feels good.

I have read on various blogs where people have trouble trying to work on a side business while also holding down a full-time job. I have to admit I can certainly feel where they are coming from. It’s indeed a challenge, not just fighting for the time, but also for the motivation. There are a lot of nights where I come home and I’m looking forward to unwinding, maybe playing a little guitar or something. I look at a computer screen all day, some days it’s just not that appealing to do the same when I get home.

That being said of course, I do find at least a part of every day where I get charged about the next step for BKE. I’m a procrastinator though, and I do need to work on my execution. You can plan forever, and sometimes you just have to pull the trigger.

My friends at Microsoft have invited me to lunch at Ruth’s Chris Steak House in Troy later today. I’ve known of Ruth’s Chris for quite a while and have been waiting for the opportunity to go. I’m certainly looking forward to it. The focus will be on maximizing productivity and getting the most out your company’s relationship with Microsoft. Alright, the focus will be on a great steak, but that’s what we’ll be talking about anyways.

So you’re raking in some dough with your business now. Maybe you’re a powerseller on ebay, or maybe you’re selling some tshirts online or something. No matter how you make it, you’ve worked for your coin. You should make sure your coin is working for you. Where are you putting all that money? If you have any noteworthy amount sitting in a checking account, it’s time to pack up and stash your loot elsewhere.

A standard checking account earns no interest. There are a number of high-yield savings accounts available online for individuals, but not many for businesses without high minimums. Don’t make the mistake of trying to store your company’s money in your personal high-yield account, separate accounts are important. Many money market accounts at large institutions are looking for $10-50k before they’re even paying a decent rate.

ING Direct has an Orange for Business account which is modeled after their Orange Savings account. There are no minimums, and it’s currently paying 4.50% APY. At that rate, $5k will earn a little less than $20 of interest in a month before it begins to compound. I currently have everything that’s not immediately needed to prevent a cashflow crisis in one of these accounts. It’s not the greatest return, but it’s a great return with minimal risk. The account is linked to your pre-existing checking account, keeping the funds close at hand.

If you’re interested in opening an account, give me your email address and I’ll send you a referral. It’ll get you a cool $25 bonus for making a $250 initial deposit (I get $10).