Speaking of hedging, I just read an article in The Washington Post that revealed the massive incomes generated by several hedge fund managers that bet big on subprime mortgage securities going south.
John Pualson personally earned $3.7 BILLION with a capital “B” last year. Now if that isn’t absolutely killing it, I don’t know what is. He’s not alone either. Quite a number of other fund managers completely cleaned up betting on everything from the subprime mortgage collapse to the rising cost of commodities. These guys made billions.
The Post goes on to quote Daniel Strachman, a former hedge fund manager and author:
“It’s clear somebody has to win and somebody has to lose,” he said. “It’s not pretty at all because people say, ‘Oh my God. Look how much money these guys are making while people are losing their homes and are complaining about the cost of eggs and sugar.’ But so what? We don’t live in a society that is pretty all the time. That’s why it’s capitalism.”
You know, as much as I hate seeing the little guy (that’s you and me) lose as a result of the current economy, I have to agree with Strachman. Not everybody wins. That’s life and that, indeed, is capitalism.
Wise investors know full well that it’s best to hedge their investment risk. The same should be true for you as you evaluate your personal financial situation.
Most of us have one job. We go to work each day and diligently perform the duties before us. If we’re smart, we participate in our employer’s 401(k), contribute to an IRA and save at least three month’s salary. That is the most common strategy work-a-day slaves guard against loss of income and plan for retirement. And, that’s fine for most folks. However, it’s a position I find to be untenable in my situation for the short and long term.
There is no guarantee if you lose your job you’ll be able to find a new job that matches your skills, interests or even expected income level within your three month cushion. Sure, you can take a penalty a draw against your 401(k) or IRA, but you pay a steep penalty for doing so and it probably won’t buy you a lot of time anyway. Take my wife for example. She left a job nearly six months ago and has not found a suitable place to land since. Granted, she has had the advantage of my income to cover her expenses, but imagine if that were not the case. What would she have needed to do in order to meet her monthly outlay? Anything from working a couple part-time jobs to temping to taking a lower paying full-time job are all options she might have needed to exercise. That just sucks and it happens to lots of people every day.
If you are an executive, three months’ salary won’t cut it. You need to have a six to twelve month reserve. The higher you soar, the harder you fall and the more difficult it becomes to find the right fit as well as adequate compensation. That’s me in a nutshell. As I mentioned in my post on transitioning, if you are forced to move on, you have to have a game plan to replace your current income. In my case, it’s my start-up. What if you knew that you wouldn’t have a job in six months? What would you do?
It’s crazy not to diversify your income sources. It’s crazier still to accept your current income as sufficient. If I’m hiring a sales guy or business development guy, I always ask him what his income target is. If I get a response that isn’t titanic (better yet, infinite), it’s a real turnoff. Where is the hunger? You must be hungry to succeed and excel at whatever it is you do. It’s about passion.
Run through all the “what if” scenarios you can think of in your own life and start to consider how you can take active steps to mitigate risks. Think about it, it’s the very reason we buy insurance or extended warranties on big ticket items. Start working on an insurance plan for your income and do it today. The only thing that’s in your way is you. Find a few hours here and there and just get moving. Then, let that momentum carry you forward.
What are you doing to actively diversify your income? Tell me in the comments below!
Everybody and I mean everybody is talking (or tweeting) about Twitter. I swear, I just didn’t get it. But, the talkers kept on talking, the bloggers blogging and I finally gave in. I just Twittered my first tweet a few minutes ago.
At its most basic, Twitter just asks you to answer the simple question, “What are you doing now?”. When I first starting hearing about it in the mainstream media, Twitter was mostly brushed off as a casual curiosity without much use. Now that it’s on fire, answering that simple question really isn’t about answering that simple question. It’s about creating a way for you to tell others what you’re doing. Friends, family, colleagues and even strangers can follow you and respond to your tweets on Twitter. You can easily communicate with a group of your followers or even, say, just your family. What are you doing now? I’m writing a post about Twitter. What are you doing now? I’m picking up groceries, I’ll be home in 15 min.
So, it’s not so basic after all. I think that’s been the main problem with introducing newcomers to the service. It just isn’t easy to grasp without some real world examples of how people are using it. To that end, I’ll start tweeting away and see if I can help you understand it better. I do know that a lot of Internet marketers have picked up on the phenomenon and there have been some interesting findings about how Twitter accounts rank in the SERPs (um, search engine results pages for the uninitiated). If I get as addicted as everyone else, I’ll follow this up and let you know how it’s going. If I really adopt it, I’ll even add a widget to the blog so you can follow me right here.
Oh, and you can tweet in many ways and from many places. Here are some applications that work with Twitter to get you started.
If you’re using Twitter, let me know how you’re using it and whether you love it, hate it or are indifferent in the comments below. If you like you can follow me on Twitter. Follow me and I’ll follow you.
I wrote about the importance of a favicon for your blog or Website and how to get one, but left a crucial piece of the puzzle out. Want to use your own favicon on Blogger or another blog hosting service? If you have access to a server or image sharing account, it’s pretty easy.
Just edit the header of your theme/template and insert the following between the <head></head> tags:
<link rel=”favicon” type=”image/ico” href=”http://example.com/yourfolder/favicon.ico” />
Note, you’ll have to figure out how to edit the header with your particular blog host. For example, in Blogger, log in to your dashboard, choose layout, then choose the tab titled “Edit HTML”. Insert your relative link to your favicon then save your template changes.
Depending on how you upload files to your image host or server, you’ll either FTP in or upload to your directory. If you need some for favicon hosting, here is a short list of free image hosting for your favicons.
Once you’ve made the changes, you will likely need to clear your browser’s cache before you’ll see your custom favicon in the address bar.
Follow Google Trends and you’ll notice something interesting. The stuff people are Googling today is ripped from the headlines and enterprising bloggers are taking advantage of this by posting on the same subjects/keywords as they happen. The result? Instant, albeit short-lived, traffic.
As I continue to work on driving traffic to my various projects, sometimes I can’t help smiling when I see this crap. So much work for something that last for such a short amount of time. I’m wondering if any one out there can chime in and let me know if this has worked and, more important, is it sustainable? It would be an interesting experiment to try on a throw away domain for a week or two to see what happens. Load up the AdSense, read the news and Google Trends and post away (and profit?).
Sure, you can use Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail or whatever as your email provider and get good things like forwarding, your own domain, POP3 access, but if you want kick ass email you have to check out FuseMail. But, before you click, no it’s not free.
However, it is super affordable. At $0.99 per email account per month (minimum 10) and 1GB of storage, the price is looking right. But that’s not all. FuseMail has a ton of other sweet features. From a brand-able webmail client (that’s pretty slick I might add) to consolidating all of your other emails into one account to calendaring, contacts, notes, tasks, syncing — FuseMail has it all. Heck, I even use them as backup DNS for some of my sites. Their list of features is ridiculous. Heck, I even use them as backup DNS for some of my sites.
I’ve been using them for just over a year now and there service and support is hands down the absolute best. Disclaimer: I’m writing this because I love them. I don’t know anyone at the company and am not paid a cent by sending you their way.
If you are looking for a crazy, rock solid email provider, you can’t go wrong with FuseMail.
If you are a subject matter expert, it’s time to fire up your favorite editing application and write an eBook. eBooks are a great incentive to get visitors to your site to subscribe to your blog, newsletter, etc. in exchange for a free informative eBook.
Trouble is, if you don’t have Adobe Acrobat (the full version not the reader) producing a PDF is going to cost you. Or is it? Well, judging by the title of this post there’s a way to do it free.
The is an open source project called PDFCreator that lets you print PDFs from any application that has print functionality. And, it’s totally free as in beer. I’ve been using PDFCreator for years. Whether I want to deliver a proposal in a format that isn’t editable or provide a universally accessible version of any document or presentation, PDFCreator is a great solution.
Now, if you do need to edit or collaborate, you’ll need Acrobat, but for most uses PDFCreator will fill the bill.
Monika at Easy WordPress wrote the other day about the risks of shared hosting. I thought I’d clarify and write a little more about the issue here.
Using a shared hosting plan for your Websites or blogs can be problematic if you are sharing your IP address with other domains not under your control. Yesterday’s post about name based virtual hosts described how one IP address can have many domains. What I didn’t mention is that if you use a shared hosting plan where you do not control all of the domains on a given server, you are accepting a certain level of risk. As Monika pointed out, what if a domain on the same IP address you use is a spammer?
Once discovered, many networks may block access to that IP address. Also, what if there are sites that contain adult content? Lots of employers use filters such as Websense to filter the content available on the corporate network. Can you afford to be offline or banned by Google AdSense? Or any other revenue stream for that matter?
It pays to know who your neighbors are. There’s a neat tool called My IP Neighbors which allows you to enter your IP or domain name and returns a list of any other domains hosted on the IP address associated with your domain.
If like me, you are using an inexpensive host to incubate your sites, there isn’t a lot to risk. However, once you start to scale, it makes a lot of sense to at least make sure you move up to a dedicated IP address if not a virtual private server or dedicated server. Sure, it’s a lot more expensive, but it does mitigate a bunch of risk.
Have you ever had a hosting problem due to problematic neighbors? Share your story in the comments.
I’m not afraid of technology and damn it, I’m a cheap bastard. Unfortunately, that arrogance and frugality came back to bite me this morning. I learned a hard lesson about why you need to use a professional email campaign management solution when you are managing large email campaigns.
Yesterday, I triggered an email campaign distributed to roughly 260,000 recipients. I’ve done this in the past to a slightly smaller distribution without too much difficulty. Not this time. For my list, bounce backs come into an address that I download and move to a bounce folder using an Outlook rule. I then siphon the email addresses associated with the bounces. I then run a script against that file to opt those addresses out so that they don’t receive any further email. It’s a pretty simple, cost-effective solution.
Well, I opened Outlook yesterday morning and saw I had about 65,000 messages to download! Yikes! In fact, if I had actually tried using Outlook to download them, I’d be downloading email for the next week. So, I had to set up Outlook Express to download the messages. The good thing about Outlook Express is that it is way faster than Outlook when it comes to message processing. This is especially true if you have lots of rules or add ins running.
So, back to campaign management. You can go a couple different ways here. You can either outsource your email distribution, host and run your own solution or utilize a software as a service (SaaS) provider. I’ve done all three in the past. Outsourcing is very expensive, but you don’t have to do anything. It’s nearly hands off once you are set up. Using a SaaS set up is the next logical option. It’s cheaper and you don’t have to invest in the hardware and software. Generally, you pay a fee depending on how many messages you wish to send in a given month. Obviously, with large lists, this can be pretty expensive. Next, is licensing software and running your own server. This isn’t for the faint of heart. In my case, the distribution is sent by my server. The good news is I have people a lot smarter than me managing it. Deliverability is a huge concern and you need to get the necessary relationships in place with the major ISPs or your email will get blocked. For that reason, you really don’t want to send messages, say, from your desktop to large lists. Most ISPs will raise a red flag as soon as you start sending massive amounts of email. Some of them will even suspend your Internet connection until they can figure out what the hell is going on.
Moreover, the biggest advantage of using a service or having list management software on your server is it takes all of the administrative overhead away. Things like processing opt outs and bounces can be a huge pain. The software takes care of this for you. You don’t even have to think about it.
The downside is extracting the data from a database for your distribution segments and then maintaining those segments. It’s tedious and time consuming. Plus, you are still relying on a third party to get it right or for you to configure it correctly.
What solution do you employ to manage your email campaigns? Tell me the good, bad and ugly — I’ll have a very empathetic ear.
Yeah, I’m a geek, but understanding the technology behind your Internet venture is a must in order to be successful.
Name based virtual hosts is a sweet way to host more than one domain name on a single IP address/hosting account. This is especially handy if you have a large number of domains with micro-sites or niche content that don’t get a ton of traffic. As I mentioned before, I use GoDaddy to host this blog. However, I also use it to host a number of other domains that I’m currently marketing. GoDaddy has configured its servers (whether Windows or Linux) to examine the host name of the request and then direct the request to the appropriate site/folder on the server to call the correct site.
A side benefit to the rest of the Internet is that you aren’t using up already scarce IP addresses. IP addresses are the unique numbers that identify each device publicly connected to the Internet. When you type a domain name in your browser, the domain name system (or DNS) translates that name into a number — the IP address. Unfortunately, there are only about 4 billion IP addresses and they are beginning to run short in supply.
Having only one or two hosting accounts versus dozens not only keeps costs down, it also makes each site easier to manage because they’re all on only one or two IP addresses which means that you are only connecting to or managing one or two FTP accounts.
Before deciding on a host for your site, see if they allow unlimited domains on one account and use name based virtual hosts. It will really help as you continue to roll out your marketing destinations.
