Instigator Blog

It seems like one final email to Technorati did the trick. After being ignored and then ignored some more, Janice Myint at Technorati sent me an email yesterday:

Please accept my sincerest apologies for the delay in getting back to you. We’ve been experiencing a backlog in support and are working hard to address everyone. I’ve taken a look at the issue regarding picking up your pings for “www.instigatorblog.com“. It seems your blog was incorrectly classified in our system rather than the “www” in your URL. After making a small adjustment, I’ve sent our spiders to revisit your page and your blog has been indexed with your most recent posts and link count.

Today, after the Technorati spiders had some time to check things out here, my ranking jumped from about 1,100,000 to 82,027. Not too shabby.

It’s amazing how a lousy experience can turn positive when things are finally taken care of. For Technorati, fixing my problem probably took a few minutes at most. I don’t know if they have a system in place that ranks customer requests (by priority, severity, time to fix, etc.) but they probably could have taken care of this quicker and been able to cross it off their list.

Still, seeing the ranking jump and knowing that things are working (at least we’ll cross our fingers) it means I’m now a much more satisfied customer. There are people at Technorati listening…at least I wasn’t talking into a black hole…

And let me also take this opportunity to thank EVERYONE who has linked to Instigator Blog since I launched it a short time ago. I very much appreciate the support…

Blog About 5 Things Week Is Coming…Are You Ready?

[tags]technorati, customer service, linking, blogging, blogs[/tags]

Blog About 5 Things Week is coming soon…

Next week in fact…are you ready?

We’ve done a bonus podcast show at The Great Big Small Business Show about online tools and resources for small business.

Why?

1. One of the contributors missed our deadline for the main episode on online tools and resources (tsk, tsk *smile*); and,
2. We had a lot of demand to talk about this subject.

It’s a shorter show, covering the following worthwhile topics:

• Colleen Wainwright brings together the online and offline with her thoughts on books and bookmarks. Tools discussed: Library ELF, Half.com and del.icio.us.
• I follow up with some thoughts on Google Adwords and how to best advertise your small business with Google, including the use of WordTracker
• And Becky McCray ends the show with some insight into the value and importance of online directories for podcasts and blogs.

I hope you’ll go listen to the show!

And, feel free to subscribe as well, through iTunes or any of the other services available on that page.

Thanks!

Text Link Ads just came out with a new service called Feedvertising, which they dub as, “really simple RSS advertising.”

That’s true, it is very simple.

It only works for WordPress 2.0+ blogs though. Instigator Blog runs on WordPress 2.0+ so I thought I’d give it a try.

It was extremely easy to setup through a WordPress plugin.

The coolest thing about it is that you can put in your own ads.

You can run a total of 6 random ads (only 1 shows up on each post in your RSS feed), and while you can leave some to be purchased by Text Link Ads clients, you can also put in your own — for affiliate marketing options, other projects, etc.

I put in a simple “sponsor” ad for IGotNewsForYou giving away 1-year FREE subscriptions to the service (so subscribe and check out the feed for that!)

Here’s how that works (it’s simple):

The ads are short, and you can pick a specific prefix for them like Sponsor, Advertisement, or something custom. It would be cool if you could pick a different prefix for each ad that you put in there…

It’s a free service so I would go ahead and give it a try, and depending on the subject of your blog and the traffic you get, you may just generate a bit of a revenue from people buying RSS ads (hint, hint).

[tags]feedvertising, rss, blogging, advertising, text link ads, text-link-ads, link ads[/tags]

Pay the bills.

If the bills aren’t paid, the business won’t last.

It’s not the sexiest, most passionate or uplifting answer, but it’s the truth. Sure, we can continue to incur more debt but that’s a frustrating and risky place to be.

There are two sides to the equation when it comes to paying bills.

#1 - The bills themselves and, #2 - the money we make to pay them. Of course, we always prefer the equation looks like this:

One way of being able to pay the bills is to make more money. Pretty straightforward, but that side of the equation doesn’t take into consideration the amount of the bills. And we don’t want to get into a situation where the more we make, the more we spend, because we could easily end up not being able to pay the increasing costs.

So, making more money is one part of the answer but when starting a business, sales will likely be low…so we can’t just focus on that side of the equation.

The other side of the equation is cost. What’s it cost to run the business?

Click to continue →