Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Great quote
If you subscribe to my newsletter, you know that I like to end it with an inspirational success quote. Usually I have one that has a real impressive person quoted. I took my family to a movie tonight, though—finally seeing Batman Begins—and was impressed with a dandy quote from it.
Hey, it's not as impressive as quoting Winston Churchill or Mohatmas Ghandi, but it's an insightful quote worth repeating:

"The reason we fall is so we learn how to get up."

So true. Nobody ever admires those who go through life seemingly untouched by trouble. We admire those who learn to overcome whatever obstacles life places in their way. How we deal with troubles, how we deal even with failure is the measure of our success in life.

Troubles—even failures—are not unfortunate setbacks. They are what define us and give us the opportunity to grow. It's not where we eventually end up in our life's journey that's important. It's what we do with the misfortunes along the way.
Jeff

Little steps
It was fun today, putting pieces together. I'd done some extensive keyword research last week and today put it together with my referrer logs to see what people have most been looking for and refocusing some of my pages toward keywords that better match what they're finding.

I'm embarassed to find how unfocused some of the pages I had thrown up quickly some months ago were. But it will be interesting to see what kind of changes occur as the search engines pick up the new, more focused pages. This is the start of a major (although probably slow) overhaul of the site.
Jeff

No Shortcuts
I've had a couple of ebooks to which I had been offered free reprint rights tucked away. I wanted to add them to the collection of free ebooks available for downloading on my site. These new, three ebooks were done by people I think highly of and I figured the books would be useful to users of One Stop Web Support. Today I was going to put them up. But first I wanted to check them just to be sure they were what I expected.

I was disappointed. One of the three was written in 2000. Lots of links were outdated and the book was pretty much useless.

Ebook number two was more useful, but was done in one of those funky ebook software programs that break the ebook into separate minipages and requires you to hunt around the page to find the link to the next one. Considering that the material itself is in the public domain and available for anyone to reprint, it seemed foolish to make readers jump through hoops to read it in funky format designed to make it hard for people to copy it.

Ebook number three wasn't quite what I was looking for, but looks useful. It's a 14-page mini-ebook on one, specific promotion method. I wasn't particularly looking for ebooks that are that specialized—most of the current ebooks I have available are more general and more geared toward starting a business, but it should fit in nonetheless. That one will go up sometime this week.

I also considered buying reprint rights to an ebook I think highly of—a how-to guide offering step-by-step instructions to starting a site—but couldn't shake the nagging feeling that I could create a similar ebook based on my own insights—and covering some important areas I feel should have been covered more thoroughly in the other book—instead of paying $300 to sell someone else's book.

I guess when it comes to "free," you get what you pay for. The free ebooks I already have on my site are so good and were offered to me so willingly, that I've held out the hope for too long that I could find others of similar caliber. But I guess I have to stop looking and starting putting something together myself.

There are no shortcuts.
Jeff

What is success?
Today I was saddened at reading a profile on a well-known sports agent idolized on ESPN. Highly successful, with a $2.5 million dollar mansion in one of the ritziest neighborhoods in the world. He has one of just about every highly desired vehicle and just about every high-tech toy you can imagine.

The most talented athletes in the world have free run of his home, along with some of the most beautiful women. He especially seeks out athletes from humble backgrounds with no experience in managing money. He takes them on as clients and exposes them to the conspicuously extravagant lifestyle he lives, setting an example for what he tells them they should be living as well.

He offers them no advice when it comes managing their money—that's not his job, after all—and loans them money when they get into debt by quickly running through the millions his contract negotiations gain for them.

He gives them a shoulder to lean on as their debts grow and points the finger squarely where the blame belongs for their financial distress: the teams who are grossly underpaying his clients, as evidenced by the fact that they didn't have the money to live the extravagant lifestyle he models for them.

Then he leads the way in trying to rectify the situation by demanding that the teams tear up his clients' contracts and negotiate brand new deals with huge new bonuses that will enable his clients to pay off their loans to him as well as his fee for his services.

And the media adores this picture of success, featuring him incessantly, reporting his every proclamation. His success is the success of a leech, that attaches itself to another living creature until it sucks it dry and moves on to another host. His success is the success of a virus, that thrives in its host until it kills it.

It's sad to see this kind of "success" adored by the media. How much better it is to succeed by giving something of value to the world than by accumulating for oneself at the expense of others!

I much prefer the philosophy of Ken Evoy, the late Corey Rudl, Michael Campbell, James Martell and others who encourage web merchants to overdeliver, to give their customers more than they expect, as a way of winning loyal customers who buy from you repeatedly because they get treated well by them.

Earning a comfortable living doing something you enjoy—and bringing long-term benefit to others in the process—that's a better way to define success than all the toys in the world.
Jeff

Just a thought
I'll leave you with just a brief thought tonight:

Most people never fully pursue their dreams. They hold back because they think, "But what if I'm not good enough?"

But here's another way to look at it. What if you are good enough and never give it enough of a shot to find that out?

Makes you think, huh?
Jeff

Free links to rank-checking sites
It's Sunday night and time for another look at some of my favorite free links. This time we'll look at sites that let you look at your rankings in different ways.

YahooSearchRankings
Ever wish you could find out exactly where the search engines ranked your site for a keyword that isn't in the top 30—that is, without having to scan through page after page? This site lets you do just that for Yahoo! Enter your url, the keyword and how deeply you want it to search. In a moment it will return your ranking for that keyword. Just use it with moderation. If you hammer at it with search after search over a short period of time, Yahoo! will stop answering your requests until a couple of hours have passed.

GoLexa
GoLexa does a marvelous job of piecing together tools from a number of different sites. Enter a keyword and it will give you search engine rankings from Alexa.com—plus much more. In and around the entries are a multitude of buttons that lead you to specialized information about the page. You'll find access to:

• info on related sites
• IP address
• Whois info
• keyword density

—and much, much more.

A word to the wise, though. Some of the individual tools used to get these results can be a little balky. Don't be surprised if you can't access all the info at any given time.

Yahoo! vs. Google comparison
The different search engine might have a slightly different order of websites for any given search, but are pretty much the same, right? WRONG! And the Yahoo! vs. Google Comparison tool proves that vividly. Enter a keyword and it will line up two rows of 100 circles, one row for Google and one for Yahoo! It then colors the circles for those pages that appear in the top 100 for both and connects those circles to each other with a line. It's amazing how different results are for these two search engines! And if you're looking for a specific site in those results, just place your cursor over one of the circles. A tag appears identifying the page that that circle represents. Just keep hovering over circles until you find the one you're looking for.

That's it for tonight!
Jeff

Slow going, but getting better
It's been a slow week. Work has largely been of the maintenance variety, which never excites me. I like getting into new things. I actually had to hold myself back yesterday from taking on a new project. I wanted to investigate a new revenue source, but decided I had enough priority projects to keep me busy. I'll fit in this revenue source eventually—when the time is right.

A good bunch of maintenance stuff is out of the way now, though, and I'm starting to see a little more color to my work—and a little more optimism. It's funny how easy it is to let a colorless period of work affect attitude. I realized today that I have been dwelling a lot lately on things lost—old friends I have lost track of, times of my life that are now past.

But upon realizing that today, I started thinking about how small the failures I've been dwelling on have been and how many great things happened in my life during those same times. And there's a lot yet to accomplish.
Jeff