Sometimes clients want to write a recommendation or review. Here is a handy way to select and visit sites that have a JBS Partners account.

Social media can be a powerful growth engine for entrepreneurs. My first entrepreneurial venture, JBS Partners, was founded in 2002. Five years later (in 2007) Twitter and the Boston Social Media Breakfasts became a part of my experience.

From these two seeds my network and this business have expanded far more than the first five years.  Let’s look at how one of the shining stars of social media, Twitter, impacted my business.

Tweeple

Twitter impacted my business by connecting me with new clients and colleagues.

Clients

I have never met any of these clients in real life. I had never met or heard of them outside of Twitter and that remains true today.  This ruled out a lot of folks that I met on Twitter and then met in real life at Boston or Cambridge area events for example.

• Three WordPress migration projects and hosting clients and one WordPress MU project in California
• Three WordPress migration projects in Tennessee
• Three WordPress design and custom programming clients in Massachusetts
• One custom WordPress project in Texas
• Two WordPress MU projects in Arizona

These clients have received web services in the area of website or blog hosting, blog migration, custom WordPress design and programming, Thesis theme customization, merging a blog and website and a custom WordPress MU and BuddyPress installation.

Colleagues

The following list is again very restrictive and includes only folks that I know through Twitter and have never met in real life.

• Two colleagues in Colorado for total of 12 projects
• Three projects out of Arizona
• One project out of Texas
• Two  projects out of Wisconsin
• One project out of the Netherlands
• One project out of Illinois
• Two projects out of Florida
• One project out of Michigan

Partners

My entrepreneurial spirit has also grown since 2007 thanks to social media.  In April 2009 I joined with a partner to form BlogWranglers and we have completed at least 10 projects as of this writing.  Our introduction came through a mutual friend on Twitter.  Our work focuses almost entirely on blog platform migration and blog moves. For example migrating from Movable Type to WordPress or from one hosting provider to another.  He also became a hosting reseller for JBS Partners and has brought in many new hosting clients.

My go-to guy for a lot of development work on WordPress is in Oregon.  Once again we met through Twitter somehow.  We have worked on nearly 25 different projects together since March 2009. This has added a lot of horse-power to JBS Partners’ ability to take on new client work.

Summary

The above are solid numbers that add up to thousands and thousands of dollars in services and revenue that are a result of using Twitter effectively.  It may not be for everyone but I really like Twitter and social media and it has been very good for my business.

These numbers  are not something that happened just because I am on Twitter.  The numbers represents a lot of hard work and I will admit it is work that you could do on Twitter or Facebook or Linkedin or wherever you choose to spread your entrepreneurial wings in the social media space.

You can find me on Twitter as fairminder

What’s your take on social media and entrepreneurs? Can it be useful?

As a member of a recent WordPress Meetup panel, we were asked what new capabilities or solutions we were most looking forward to from WordPress.  The question did not produce much in the way of a response as I recall.

I circled back to this question later in the meeting with an answer.  Possibly not a very popular one.  Although a handful of people came up to thank me for making the point.   So, let me lay some groundwork before getting to my point.

1. Since 2002  entrepreneurs, marketers, authors, churches, attorneys, restauranteurs and large service companies have worked with JBS Partners mostly in developing new website and blogs, as well as various marketing services related to search marketing.
2. WordPress has been the platform of choice and has shown remarkable improvements in ease of use and additional capabilities over the years.
3. Using WordPress.com the average person can setup a new blog themselves.  Self-hosted WordPress installations can be as easy as a few clicks.
4. There are many extremely customized and advanced configurations of WordPress out there that small business folks want to emulate.

Here is my point

When the small business owner sees the fantastic capabilities that are produced by a talented team of developers, it is immediately assumed that the self-help approach is enough to complete an equally complicated configuration by themselves.  It is true that there is the added encouragement of the repeated message that “WordPress is easy”.

After repeated failed attempts to emulate the rock stars of WordPress, the enthusiasm for WordPress being “so easy to work with ” fades and frustration sets in.

By contrast, it is my opinion that Drupal does not have the same reputation.  Those who have not worked extensively with Drupal find it “hard”.

I have been known to explain that Drupal was built by developers for developers, while WordPress was built for writers and is therefor easier to work with, especially on your first project.  I am not here to stir a debate between Drupal and WordPress lovers and haters. Both platforms have a richly deserved place in the Open Source marketplace.

I am concerned with the issue of WordPress having a great reputation that encourages folks to feel like they have a SuperMan suit on and are now professional WordPress programmers and PHP coders.

What is your view?

Is this an issue you have come across?

What are possible solutions?

Jim Spencer answering questions at the Boston WordPress Meetup

Transferring your domain names should not be painful. But it is, especially because for many folks it is a once in a lifetime event.  I hope that this helps make your move less of a pain.

Rather than being completely agnostic as I would prefer, for the sake of clarity actual company names will be used instead of target registrar and source registrar.

This example will show how to transfer your domain name from Register.com to GoDaddy. (note: not a big fan of GoDaddy, but they can’t be ignored because of their domain registration market dominance)

Transfer Your Domain Name;

1. Unlock your domain name at Register.com otherwise nothing will happen
2. Be sure that you have access to the admin (Administrator) email account on file in your Register.com domain account. If needed update the admin email address
3. It is advised to cancel your Privacy Protection, but I don’t know why
4. Purchase a domain name transfer from GoDaddy – expires in 30 days. This purchase sends out an email with the Transaction ID and Security Code that you will need later
5. Obtain the Auth (authorization) Code from Register.com via email
6. Enter all there pieces of data at GoDaddy; Transaction ID, Security Code and Authorization Code
7. The transfer can take 5 days to complete

These fundamental steps should be the same for other registrars, so get those domains moving.

You are welcome to transfer your domains with www.jbspartnersdomains.com

Email Protection

Your email address is a vital resource. That is why businesses all over the web are trying to get your email address. They want to sell you something.

You value your ‘privacy’ and don’t like email spam any more than the next person.

Create a New Email Account

If you are handy that way and have unlimited email accounts you can create a new account every time you sign up for something. Just create a new email account with the name of where you are signing up.

For example; If you register at spammywebsite.com, you can create a new email account called spammywebsite@yourdomain.com.

In my case spammywebsite@jbspartners.com. Now if I ever get an email from anywhere else that uses that email address I know immediately who sold my information.

For those who say that is too much work, and have read this far, he is another great solution.

The Mailenator Solution

http://www.mailinator.com

Mailenator - email kind of

I had to read the entire FAQ until I grasped what they are doing at mailenator.com.

Here is how you use it when you want to sign up somewhere that requires and email address that you don’t want to share and you are sure you NEVER want to hear from them again, for any reason, no matter what.

In the email sign-up box type in <……>@mailenator.com You fill whatever you want between < and >.

Then go visit www.mailenator.com and in the big box on the home page enter the very same email that you entered at the other site.
You will be presented with the email message from the other site.

That is it. It is that sample.
You get the goods, without risking your email.

It is That Easy

Mailenator will keep your email for up to two hours, is entirely public, with no sign up whatsoever. I highly recommend you read the entire FAQ before using it and never use it for anything private. Oh, and they have other domain names that you can use if “Mailenator.com” gets refused when you enter the email address at the spammy site.

I used mailentor.com to obtain a free form that I wanted.  Great stuff.

How do you handle keeping your email address safe?

February 5th, 2010 the following presentation was offered to an engaged audience of entrepreneurs at LaunchCamp Boston.

The presentation covers four major areas

1. Domain Names
   1. How to Choose
   2. How to Register
   3. How to Retain
2. Why use WordPress for a website (even without a blog)
3. SEO
   1. Key Word Research
   2. Local SEO
   3. Directories
   4. Citations and Links
4. Website Redesign walk-through

The audience had great questions on choosing, registering and retaining domain names, key word research, WordPress for websites and renaming files. They also had great observations about the motives for the website redesign what made the changes appealing and effective.

Special thanks go to Selina McCusker for assistance with the slide deck design.

More LaunchCamp presentations;

click the link to visit the speaker’s site and view the presentation

Mike Troiano on Achieving Scalable Intimacy

The two character .com and .net auction over at Sedo seems to be moving right along. As of this posting three domains have risen into the $100,000 range. Six to eight are in a range about half that price.

Two out of three of the domains at auction remain priced at $10,000 or below.

There are no .net domains priced over $11,000. The .com domain names are clearly the most desirable in this auction.

Reserves Not Met

I am surprised to see that only 5 our of the 31 domains have met the reserve price. And one is bid up to the lowest price of the auction, $1,000 for 5r.net.

il.com has a reserve of $500,000. Even though it has bid up and shows one of the highest bids, it is still well shy of the reserve price.

cd.net seems like one of the most commercially viable generic names in the auction. Of course .com would be better, but for a current bid of almost $10,000, it is worth considering. One more bid and it meets the reserve price of $10,000.

Possible Buyers

Too bad the days of the P4 are over, or maybe the seller of p4.com might have interested Intel in that domain name for their Pentium processor.

I wonder if a major car manufacturer might be bidding on xb.com. Scion, where are you? That would be a great marketing move. Think of the resale value of that domain even if the car gets canceled in a decade.

It is interesting that some of these domains are showing less than 100 visitors a month. Clearly their owners have not been developing this Internet Real Estate. Instead they buy and sell, while leaving the development to someone else.

Two Days Left - Click to visit SEDO auction page

Which is the most commercially viable domain name in the lot?
If half of the domains do not meet their reserves, is this auction a failure?

Please leave a comment below and share your insights and questions.

See the first post in this series, along with the opening bids here - SEDO’s Two Character .com and .net Auction

I don’t see two character .com and .net domains at auction very often, so this is fun for me to watch.

There are 31 domains in an auction that began today and will run for 6 more days.  It is interesting that the reserve prices range from $1 to $500,000. Already nearly all of the domains have met their reserve prices.

The Domains

Every domain has at least one bid on the first day of bidding.

64.com already has 24 bids, the most of all today.

P4.com has 11 bids. Most  other domain names have one to five bids.

il.com has the highest bid of $85,000

nl.com has a bid of $30,000, which is the next highest

There are only 10 domains with a current bid price under $5,000

What, No Website?

Nearly all of these domains have no website and generally under a 100 inbound links.  Although one has over 8,000 inbound links.

This means that you are buying potential.  You are buying scarcity. You are buying Internet Real Estate.

These domains do not have operating websites with a developed revenue stream.  They may be parked (at SEDO of course) and earning a revenue stream on direct type in traffic converted via Google AdSense.

If I had the money would I love to own a 2 character domain name? Absolutely!

Day 1 of the Auction - click to visit SEDO site.

How Will it End?

Which domains will fetch the highest prices?

Which domains will garner the most bids?

Which domains won’t sell?

– What do you think?

Read Part Two of this series here SEDO’s Two Character Domain Name Auction

Don and I took an idea and turned it into a WordPress blog during one business day.  Here is how we did it.

The Idea

There has been a significant rise in the number of requests to move blogs to WordPress.  I was dealing with three clients in one week on this subject and figured there might be a niche business opportunity targeting blog moves / migrations / transfers to WordPress.

Domain Names

First, I thought of the qualities of a good domain name.  I started with keyword focused names like;

BlogMigration.com or MoveMyBlog.com.

I hopped on IM with my buddy Don to throw some ideas around.  In the process we  confirmed that we could not use the phrase WordPress, but we could use WP, in a domain name.  So, we considered shorter, brandable names like;

Move2WP.com and Switch2WP.com

Well, the domain names were flying back and forth.  I was not wild about numbers in a domain name. Putting keywords in the domain name made it really long.  So, we settled on a memorable and brand-able name instead.  Thanks for the suggestion Don!  I hopped over to my account at Fabulous.com and registered the name for $8.

We Registered www.blogwranglers.com

• This name is memorable, but a tad long
• It is a dot com, but it has only one keyword
• It is not limited to one platform, which is good, but it does not have WP in it.
• Best of all it is a name that we could have fun with.

Like many other purchases registering a domain name is full of compromises.

Hosting

Having a dedicated server for my business, setting up hosting was pretty simple.  No great details to share here.  I also installed WordPress right away.

Theme

I simply used the WordPress Admin area feature to search for a free WordPress theme because I wanted to get something up fast. Momentum is key when you have a great idea.

The wrangler term suggested blue sky, green grass and lots of brown colors; dirt, horses and so on.  I searched for a theme based on the blue and brown and in less than a minute selected an eco theme to start things off.

A Free Theme Made for a Quick Decision

Configuration

The first setting I changed was the title and tag line.  They have been refined a dozen times since then, but the message is getting clearer.

On the hosting account I configured the primary email account to forward to both Don and I. The rest of the email accounts forward to our individual day-to-day email addresses.  This way we do not have yet another email account to check

Plugins

Keeping it light to start with I installed just a few plugins

1. Contact Form 7
2. Sociable – removed due to 43 XHTML Validation errors
3. ShareThis
4. Retweet
5. Google Analyticator
6. Subscribe to Comments
7. WordPress Database Backup
8. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
9. All In One SEO Pack
10. Google XML SiteMap

Accounts

I created only a few important accounts to get things rolling.

1. GMail – BlogWranglers
2. Google Analytics – BlogWranglers.com
3. Twitter – BlogWranglers
4. ShareThis
5. Google WebMaster Tools – submitted XML SiteMap

I thought about Share This and a few other accounts, but used Sociable instead.  I declined to use TweetMeme, until they clean up their code so that it validates.

Content

Don was great and jumped in and wrote up the first three pages for the website.  I went in later and built the contact page and form.  We both provided complementary editing services to each others writing. That part was cool.

We had fun infusing the writing with the Wrangler theme. For example, the Contact Form button says “Give us a Holler” instead of Submit.  These subtle changes make a big difference.

Give us a Holler, instead of a Submit Button (Click to Enlarge)

No Dead Ends

Next, I revised every page to eliminate “dead ends”.  I added “call to action” text and a link to the contact page on the bottom of all three pages.

We want visitors to know what we want them to do and we don’t want them to read to the bottom of the page and wonder what to do next.

Posts

Next Don and I each wrote a post.  I wrote about a small trend I see driving the migration to WordPress.  Don wrote about the blog software used by the Top 100 Blogs according to Technorati.  WordPress is tops, being used twice as much as the next contender.

Links

Don operates a forum site that offer tips and was able to throw in a link to our new site.  He also found a couple of great blogs to leave comments on, which now link back to our new site.

What Did We Learn

Well, once we started to focus on content we did a few research based searches on the Internet and were greatly disappointed to learn that we were not the first to think of using the term Wrangler.  We had already named ourselves SEO Wrangler and Data Wrangler.  Oh well.  I figured, so what. No one can have a the sandbox all to themselves right?

Fun and useful domain names are available without having to go into the after market and spend lots of money.

Next Steps

I expect we will;

1. Keeping writing posts and articles
2. Continue building links to the new website
3. Evaluate submitting to a couple of directories.
4. Install an SEO plugin and get the meta titles and descriptions sorted out
   
5. Probably ignore the new BlogWrangler Twitter account and just use my account.
6. Setup a FeedBurner account and configure it
7. Consider designing a logo and a custom designed theme for the site

What Would You Do Next on Blog Wranglers?

Share your current suggestions in the comments area below. And thanks for stopping by.

Twitter tools number in the thousands, but picking out the ones that work for you takes some effort.  Below are a few of the Twitter tools that I recommend.

Twitter Searching

twitoria- Unfollow people who have not posted a tweet in week, 2 weeks, 1 month, 2 months, 6 months or a year.

tweetbeep – Alerts.  Track any time someone mentions you, your products, your company, anything, with hourly updates!

tweepsearch- Search friends and followers, or just a keyword in all bios currently indexed.

whendidyoujointwitter – Enter a user name name and see when the twitter account was created.

backtweets – searches for links on twitter, even shortened ones.

twellow – List your profile, search twitter, followers, friends, groups also includes a profile editor.

Anonymous Tweeting

secrettweet- A place to tweet anonymously – crazy, scary and hilarious tweets.

Twitter Hashtags

tweetchat- hashtagged tweets are aggregated into on place. You can tweet and it adds the hashtag for you. Great for events and webinars.

tagdef – look up the meaning of a hashtag, like #redsox, but we know what that one is.

Twitter Polling

twpoll- Create a poll and send it on to your Twitter followers on.

For more see Rachel Levy’s big list of Twitter tools

If you liked this post, you may also like Twitter Tools to Share with your Followers

as well as How Your Twitter Profile Can Attract Followers