bobjones.nl » Personal Development

My six favorite SaaS online business tools

Bob — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 14:58:28 +0000

In case you don’t know what SaaS means – Software as a Service

In my spare time, I’ve been known to startup small projects, such as WordPress plugin development. Basically I knew nothing about the business when I started, and I guess there’s still a lot to learn.

Over the course of time, I have gone through a lot of trial and error – resulting in me trying to find solutions for the problems I ran into. Here’s a list of apps I use to make live easier. Trust me, once you get paying customers for your software, you need every little bit of help you can get!

Listed in no particular order:

Google Apps: I’m sure most of you are familiar with this. For every new project I start, I create a new apps account, so that I’m sure ALL my email gets handled by Google. I can create new users in my organisation on the fly, and easily share documents with people that I’m working with. Highly recommended if you want to keep everything accessible in one place on the web.

TaskForce App: This is a great task manager widget that fully integrates with Google mail. Simply install, login, and you’ll keep track of whatever tasks you or your team needs to be doing. I actually use it more to quickly dump ideas into as soon as I have something i think is worth looking into later. Oh yeah, and it’s completely free.

UserVoice: I have only recently started using this, but I’m already in love with it. Previously I used to have a separate “support forum” and a “ticket system” for my users. Everything was locally hosted, had different logins, forums got spammed all the time, ticketsystem would lose tickets etc. It was a headache to handle. Then I discovered UserVoice. Now my users can browse a dynamic knowledge base, submit support tickets, leave suggestions for improvements in a public page, where others can vote for ideas, and help me filter out great additions I could offer my users. All I do is login to the admin panel, and I can keep track of everything in here. This isn’t completely free, but starting at $5 per month, its a no-brainer if you take customer satisfaction seriously.

Zopim: If you want to capture your leads while they’re browsing your product site, this app is a great help. It’ll give visitors the opportunity to get in touch with you, or one of your staff members, immediately. We live in an “instant culture” and you will really miss out on sales opportunities if you do not try and engage with your leads ASAP. There is a free option, but this is pretty limited. You get what you pay for.

Less Accounting: Since 99.9% of my business consists out of services and digital products, most of my payments are received through PayPal. The Less Accounting software automatically keeps tracks of all my income and expenses. All I have to do is login to see how poor I am, who still owes me, and who I still owe. Makes it a lot easier when having to decide any expenses that need to be made – I’ll know exactly how much I can spend. Comes with a cool iPhone app too, which lets your digitalize any receipts you might get.

TimeDoctor: The ultimate Virtual Assistant time tracker. This thing kicks ass, and is completely free! You get your VA to install this app, and you can log in to your online admin panel and see exactly what they’ve been working on, and how long. There’s an option to store a screenshot every minute, so you can browse through them to make sure your VA is doing what they are getting paid for. There’s no fooling the system, if no activity is being detected, it will put the user in a break mode, meaning no hours will get logged.

Hope these are of some use to you

Blogging for Beginners

Bob — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:17:44 +0000

That’s a question I have been asked several times now, so I figured I might as well write a post about it, so people can share it and I don’t have to keep repeating myself

Before I get started, I just want to make one thing clear; This is the way that I do/did it – and that doesn’t mean if you do things differently, that you’re doing it wrong. Everyone has got their own way of getting things done, and some are more successful than others – which is a good thing, since the Internet would be very boring if we were all equally successful.

Step 1. Get yourself the best possible domain name that you can get.

What do I mean by this? Well chances are that you’ve started blogging to make some money online. And you won’t make money from ads or affiliate sales, if nobody visits your blog. What you need to know is that search engines like Google will become the backbone of your little online enterprise. And therefor you will want to ‘accommodate’ those search engines as much as you possible can. If you make sure that they can find you, and know what you’re on about, they will start sending you targeted traffic for free. That’s traffic that converts!

If you buy a domain, try getting a keyword-rich name, something that relates to your blog’s topic. Try to figure what what sort of keywords and phrases (long-tail keywords) your desired audience is using to find stuff on Google. For example, if you want to start a blog about babies, try to see what most people are looking for. One of the quickest ways to do this is use the auto-suggest feature that Google offers. Just type one of the main keywords of your blog into Google, and see what gets suggested.

In the example down below, I’d probably try to get a domain name like babynamescenter.com or babyboysandgirlsnames.com – these two examples both have popular keywords in them, so there shouldn’t be a doubt for Google (or any humans) as to what your blog is about.

A domain name is just one part of the equation. And it too has other factors involved like age, length and TLD (Top Level Domain, like .com or .net) that can influence the position of your blogs ranking in Google’s search results.

I’m not saying that getting free hosting like blogger or wordpress is a bad thing, but I prefer to not have keywords in my link that I don’t need. (Free hosts usually have their own name or address in your site’s link address).

Step 2. A list of WordPress plugins that will help your blog grow big and strong

One of the greatest features that WordPress has to offer must be their plugin system. This makes it super-easy to add new functionality to your blog, without you having to know any difficult programming and coding. You simply find the plugin which does what you want, upload it, activate it, and in some cases – configure in in your WordPress admin panel. If you’re still unfamiliar with the admin panel, have a look at these WordPress tutorial videos. Here’s a list of my all-time favourites:

1. All-in-one-SEO: The name pretty much covers it all. This plugin will help you to make your blog stand out more for Google, helping it to get indexed quicker and more accurate. Basically you can tell Google what your blog is about by adding the right keywords in the right places on your blog.

2. XML Sitemap Generator: This plugin will create a sitemap of your website, taking out all the guesswork for Google. This ensures the Google is aware of ALL the pages that your site has to offer them. Sitemap = more pages indexed.

3. AskApache Search Engine Verify: Not really a necessity plugin, but ideal for newbies and lazy people like me. This plugin makes it a breeze to verify your blog with Google webmaster tools. If you haven’t added your site there yet, stop reading this post now and GO DO IT NOW!

4. WordPress Stats: Simply because its good to collect as much data as possible regarding your traffic. You can analyse the data to see where you can improve your site. (e.g flush out the 404 pages).

5. WP Super Cache: You probably won’t have much use for this plugin when you first start out with your blog, but when you’re starting to get featured on the frontpage of sites like Digg and Reddit, you’ll be glad you have it. It helps your webserver deal with a lot of traffic, by creating static HTML pages of your content on the fly.

6. SEO Search Terms Tagging: Adds keywords that people have used to find you with in the search engines to the footer of your posts, increasing the odds that your post will get ranked even better for that particular keyword later on.

7. Google Analyticator: Like plugin #3 – This plugin makes it easy for newbies and lazy people to get your Google Analytics up and running. Remember kids, the more data you can get, the better. nomnomnom.

8. Enforce WWW Preference: This plugin simply forces your site to have or not have the WWW in front of it. You should make a choice which one of these two you’re going to use, because Google will see your the site with WWW as a different site than the address without the WWW. Change your settings now in your WordPress admin panel > Settings >General. (The plugin was retired, but it still works, so I created a copy on my server for you to download).

Step 3. Tagging, categories, slugs, and robots

Every post you write has the option to add tags. Basically a tag is an extra keyword you can mark your post with, to help the search engines understand better what the main topic of your post is. Use this option – but don’t go overboard. Adding 5-15 tags will do fine. You don’t want Google to think you’re keyword stuffing/spamming.

Use categories. Not just for Google, but also for your visitors. Some people that are just looking for baby names can click on the baby names category, and find all the relevant information they are after. They don’t have to browse through all the other baby related posts about baby poo, baby vomit, baby pee, and baby snots. You don’t want to put them off having a baby in the first place do you ?

A post slug is a little trickier; what it does is make you have your cake and let you eat it too. If you have your permalinks setup something like this “/%postname%/” – you can have a link which is titled “Blogging for beginners” but which looks like this in your addressbar: “http://bobjones.nl/how-do-you-set-up-a-blog-frm-scratch/”. This way you can optimize your URL for the search engines, and optimize your actual title for other humans.

One more important file you’ll need to create is what we call a robots.txt. This is a (or can be a) simple txt file that looks like this: my robots.txt. This file will set the rules for every search engine that visits your site. If you want the world to find you, don’t add anything to the Disallow: list, but If you have stuff to hide, add it to the disallow list. Here’s a more detailed explanation of robots.txt.

Ok, so that sums up the very basics that I feel every new blogger should start with. There are heaps of other things I would like to tell you, but I feel this post is already longer than it should have been. I’ll write a ‘part 2′ sometime soon.

Hope you’ve learned something, and I advise you to bookmark this post for future reference. And feel free to share it on twitter and such with your friends that are thinking of becoming serious bloggers!

Fuck Facebook

Bob — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 06:52:13 +0000

A post by Jason made me realize that being banned by Facebook isn’t such a bad thing after all. I won’t be appealing to get my account back, and I won’t create a new account either. (Although I would like all my contacts and photos back from Suckerberg).

Facebook is a monster.

Learning Customer Skills with Imran Naseem

Bob — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 14:24:29 +0000

Hi kids. Today we will be learning customer skills 101 with Imran Naseem.

Lesson 1: The customer is always right, even when he’s wrong. Especially when his name is Imran Naseem.

Imran buys a domain from someone.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering why I keep posting about Imran – He keeps messaging me on gtalk about how great my posts about him are, and that I should keep it up.

New Imran Naseem Product Launched Today!

Bob — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 11:57:45 +0000

Some Scamhatter ripped Imran Naseem’s new product. This is for all you freebie seekers.

Click here to download the PDF file if you want to know how to make thousands of dollars every hour.

Imran Naseem – You crack me up

Bob — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 11:17:03 +0000

Please Imran ~~Narcisist~~ Naseem, stop digging. That hole you’ve made for yourself is only getting deeper.

Here’s a few replies to points in your blogpost (mirror, just in case you delete it again like you did with the last one), in which you try to justify your behaviour and attempt some form of damage-control.

1. I have now a “Cult Following” on several Blackhat “Scamhat” World forums.

Is that right Imran? You’re giving people on blackhat forums the name “Scamhatters”? So why have you been selling LOADS of blackhat products? (Google doesn’t lie). Does that mean you’re one of the SCAM hatters? Or are you just a two-faced hypocrite?

Here’s just a selection of blackhat sites you created and sold on flippa; blackhatgold.com – blackhatsalvation.com – blackhatcode.com – blackhattersmembership.com – blackhatcodebreaker.com

2. the link juice is excellent and my blog now has a PR of 3 ..thanks to a guy called “Bobby Jones” – who is a member of these “scamhat” world forums and is a professional con artist.

Oh, ok. So Google decided to give your blog a PR3 two days after I posted about you? That’s giving my blog too much credit Naseem. You really don’t know much about how SEO or Google or Pagerank works do you? Retorical question. (That means don’t answer Naseem).

And I’d love to see you give some substance to your accusation of me being a “professional con artist”. (You do know what libel is right? Ask your brother – he’s a professional qualified lawer, no?) I know you’re feeling threatened by the truth, but come-on…random name calling with not a shred of information to back-up your claims? That’s weak, even for you. Smoke and mirrors Naseem…

3. Is Frank Kern a REHASH KING?

Imran, I really don’t think you can consider yourself in the same league as Mr Kern. Oh, and did you know he has a product called Mass Control? Sounds like he’s copied the idea off your products; Mass Offline Control and Mass Cash Control. Funny that!

4. I love it when people talk about me – good or bad. In fact thanks to this “Jones” guy I had a lot of people purchase several products on my blog.

Stop lying Imran. My posts about you only had about 1000 views. Fake it until you make it comes to mind.

5. But all you do is smile and keep launching products and keep helping people make money online.

I think you made a typo there and was meaning to say; But all you do is smile and keep rehashing other people’s products and keep helping yourself to n00bies money online.

One other ‘interesting’ fact about your blog was this; You constantly seem to try and defend yourself against all the haters out there that are jealous and bitching about your online “success”. I’m starting to see a pattern Naseem. Perhaps people are bitching for a reason.

Anyway, that’s another ten back links I’ve given you. Maybe you’ll have a PR4 tomorrow?

Imran Naseem New Product Launched

Bob — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 05:32:51 +0000

Thanks to anonymous commentator who told me about Imran Naseems new CPA Product. Wonder if CPA Relapse 2 is going to be a CPA Relapse 1 rehash. Or perhaps Imran just ran out of names, and is now forced to rehash his product titles. Review anyone?

How to get a job as a blogger: the do’s and don’ts

Bob — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 06:28:05 +0000

This seemed like a suitable topic to write about, since I’ve just gone through the process of hiring a full time blogger for one of my other sites. The best place to either find a blogging job, or to find blogging talent, is the Problogger Job Board. There are more ways to find writers, but a lot of the responses I’ve received from the PB job ad were quite good. Unlike some forums, where people will do anything for a quick buck. When it comes to getting solid content for your blog, you need a solid blogger. Don’t cut corners, you’ll make the money you had to spent to advertise back in no time with a quality writer on your staff.

After all the replies I got for the job, I have a lot of comparison material, and I’ll give you several examples of how to – and how to not apply for an advertised writing position.

If you want to have a good shot of landing the blogging gig you’re about to apply for, please make sure you’ve covered these points.

The Don’ts.

At least act like you know what you’re getting yourself into.

1. The most important aspect would probably be; Make sure that you’ve familiarised yourself with the blog that is seeking to hire a blogger. Often a link is included in the job application, but at times you have to be slightly more creative, and find the site, based on the email address domain, or do some quick research on Google. – Several of the candidates that were applying seemed to have absolutely no clue as to what blog they were applying for. Either that, or they just chose to ignore the blog topic, and sent in extremely random sample material. If I want to hire someone to blog about TV shows, how is a school paper on gardening going to get me excited about you?

Can you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?

2. So the entire blog you are applying for is written in English. The entire ad for the job was written in English. What on earth are you doing, emailing me a complete application letter in Spanish? Besides me no speaky that muchos Spanish, why would you think that your Spanish articles will get published on my English blog? Please make sure you’ve written down point 1, then come back and try again. Hasta la Vista baby!

Minimalistic anyone?

3. I’ve worked hard on my blog to get it where it is today. I’ve put the hours in, I’ve spent money on advertising the job application. So do you really think that an email containing one single link to your blog is going to get me impressed with your high standard of work? Do you think I would feel good spending more money on someone that not only seems extremely lazy, but is also showing no interest in my blog whatsoever? BZZZZ! Think again.

can I haz spellcheckz?

4. Ok, so I can see that it’s not Spanish, but are you sure that your application letter was written in English? I’m not too thrilled to think of my new blogger to be writing articles as if they were typing on their cellphone. “I wuld luv 2 b a writer 4 u. Plz chk my appl. and get bck 2 me asap”. No thanks. Sure, I might not be the greatest writer myself, but for someone whom I am going to have to pay, I at least expect you to present me with a usable end-product.

We don’t do Pulitzer.

5. The email in which you’re applying for the TV blogger job could very well make the New York Times Editor in Chief offer you a job. University this, author of bestseller that…I think you might be slightly overqualified for this job. I don’t think that the people that visit my blog are expecting to read Time magazine articles. Thanks for applying, but I can’t see you connecting with my target audience. But don’t worry, I’m sure you can do much better with all those credentials under your belt.

And there’s my main don’ts you need to consider. I’ve cut the article in half, so come back tomorrow to find out what the Do’s are to get you hired as a blogger.

I Dont Think I’m Cut Out For This Blogging Stuff

Bob — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:52:24 +0000

Seriously. All the time and effort you have to put into a blog. If you add it all up, was it really worth your time? You could be blogging, just for the fun of it. But chances are, you’re in it for the money. (Haha, who ever told you there was money to be made in blogging?)

There are a select few bloggers that actually make (quite a lot of) money with their blog. I hate to burst your bubble, but it is safe to say that you are not one of them. I can count them on one hand.

The trick.

Remember what a magician does when he pulls a rabbit out of a hat? They distract you with one hand, and do their “magic” with the other. Po0f! instant rabbit!

The distraction these bloggers use is simple yet effective – They tell you how they do it! WTF!

Over the years they have managed to build-up an online profile that is recognised by hundreds of thousands of readers. This is one of the main reasons they make money. With time comes mass, with mass comes credibility, with credibility comes more mass. You get the picture.

I’m not going into specifics, but if you just have a look through their archives, you will see that they have touched base on the same subject over and over again throughout the years, but by slightly rewording things, mixing in new examples of recent “achievements”, their information always seems fresh.

It’s just not for me, rewriting the same old bullshit, over and over again. Sure, it gets you a popular blog. It will earn your readers respect, AND it will bring in the money you are looking for. But what about job satisfaction? I simply cannot derive any pleasure or satisfaction out of repeating myself – over and over and over again.

*Edit – This post was about twice as long, but for some reason, WP gave me 404 errors every time I updated the post! See? Another reason why I think blogging isn’t for me.

Top 10 Common Mistakes Bloggers Make

Bob — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 06:14:07 +0000

If you’re a blogger and reading this top ten common blogging mistakes list, you’ll recognize the obvious traps that can make or break your success as a blogger. Here we go: 1. Not completing tasks you’ve set for yourself (e.g … Continue reading → Related posts: