I find I spend a lot of time “on the road”. Its the nature of a “to your door” computer service.

As soon as Computer Aid grew to having more than 1 person running the business, it became obvious that communication would be an important part of making sure everything ran like clockwork.

So for the past 3 years, me and my other half, have struggled with SMS, MYOB, and an awkward way of synchronising calendar and contacts between 2 Palm devices and MYOB…

Except for MYOB, I’ve found switching to a smart phone and google applications was a great solution.

In my case, I’m going with a windows mobile smartphone, but this could work just as well with the iphone, a blackberry, or an Android phone.

The “glue” that hold all this together is Google. I find it amazing that I can enter an appointment on google calendar, and if its a new customer, enter the details on google contacts… then the information quickly finds its way to any smart phone that I’ve setup for this.

On top of that, I can also check my google emails without needing to get to to office to read them.

And of course telephone and SMS are all well integrated, so I just need to lookup a contact, click on the phone number, and I’m dialling them. Quick and easy.

I would never have thought I could do all that, for free, without implementing an awkward outlook server system.

The smartphone also offers many other “features” that I probably won’t use (camera, mp3 player, messenger client, video player, games, spreadsheets, etc

Now I just need to get used to the “quirks” of windows mobile…

Posted by Computer Help as Business, Hints at 4:41 PM EDT

2 Comments »

A few weeks ago, I read a great article on how to make a company mission statement.

Take a look at seo review

Instead of the boring and meaningless one-liners that most companies use, this guy suggested something like a movie trailer.

So, following the cookie-cutter approach, I came up with a “movie trailer” for Computer Aid.

And it was real fun to make (even my wife had a laugh when I read it to her)

Now read this like you’re a movie voice-over guy:

In a town where computers slow down and freeze, one computer repairer comes to the rescue. When Internet connections fizzle and stop and all hope is lost, Computer Aid springs into action, and gets you surfing again. Computer Aid will impress you with their professionalism, experience, competence and efficiency. When things just don’t compute, someone can fix your computer and show you how to tame the internet.

You’ll laugh, when you see how easily they fix your problems. You’ll cry, when you realise you didn’t need to spend days trying to fix computer problems yourself.

Computer Aid: We can help you.

I was tempted to make the last line: Computer Aid: Coming soon to a theater near you!

Posted by Computer Help as Business, Humor, SEO at 4:11 PM EDT

2 Comments »

I recently heard of an interesting advertising company called exitjunction.

I liked the idea, as the advertising doesn’t take up space on my website.

The way it works is: someone finds your website via a search engine, they take a stickybeak, then decide to press the browser back button to look for something else. Instead of going back to the search engine, they get taken to an exitjunction.com advert page (that looks like search results).

At this point, you can either click on an ad, or you can click the back button once again, and end up back at the search engine.

Now, I did a bit of research, and I found some people saying it could interfere with google adsense. But nobody had any positive proof… it was all: “maybe”, “it shouldn’t”, “it might”.

OK, I’ll try it out.

I also decided to try out the new google youtube ads at the same time (I should know better by now: never do multiple changes, as you don’t know which one is causing the problem).

My adsense income is so low, that I figured that it won’t matter if I get penalised for a while.

At first, everything seemed fine, but after 6 days (15th Feb), I noticed a huge drop in traffic (from around 1,000 unique visits per day to about 500). See the graph:

I took a look at my website stats, and I could see that the traffic from google, yahoo and MSN search results, had dropped almost immediately after implementing exitjunction, but this drop was masked by an increase in direct and referred traffic (until all traffic dropped after 6 days). See graph:

So, I decided to take out exitjunction, and the search engine traffic started improving, but only slightly.

Luckily, the overall traffic didn’t drop to almost zero… thanks in large part to entrecard traffic… Thank you EntreCard!

Maybe it will take a few weeks for traffic to return to normal… I hope!

The income from people clicking on exitjunction ads was lower than what I get from adsense, so removing exitjunction was an easy decision.

I can only hope that at some point in the future, google and exitjunction will play together nicely. But for now, I’m putting exitjunction on the back burner.

Why does exitjunction affect search traffic?

Posted by Computer Help as Business, SEO at 4:46 PM EDT

6 Comments »

I find it amusing (and also annoying) that sale droids will call me offering great deals on internet and mobile phone.

So I tell them the truth: I currently spend less than AU$100 per year on my mobile (Virgin), and I get high speed ADSL2+ , 200Gb of downloads, for AU$80 per month (TPG).

Its amusing to hear them flounder for an explanation, and eventually admit that they cannot do better.

And the reason they cannot do better is that I’ve shopped around and deal directly with the ISP/phone company, while they have to pay phone consultants to drum up more business.

Otherwise, I like to string them along, as I mentioned in a prior post: annoying marketing phone calls

Posted by Computer Help as Business, Musing at 1:00 PM EDT

2 Comments »

I went to google today & saw an odd icon on my browser tab:

I think it looks awful.

It took me a long time before I realised its actually a white “g” on a colourful vomit background.

OK, personal artistic feelings aside, I also don’t like it from a marketing and branding point of view.

Most good marketing people know that you need to maintain consistency with your logo, and use it everywhere you can.

Mcdonalds is a good example. They use the golden arches everywhere (including their favicon).

I’ve tried the same with the Computer Aid logo (black name on a yellow oval, with a red oval border). For my favicon, I decided to only use the letters “CA”, since anything else would have been unreadable.

If I were google (don’t we all wish for that!), I would make use of their logo from their home page… but since its too big to fit into a favicon, then the first letter (maybe with a circle around it), would be the next best thing.

So, I would use the letter “G” (uppercase) as the favicon…

Hold on!

Thats what Google originally had as a favicon!

So, it looks like the new icon fails on a few fronts.

Even the slightly older small “g” failed, as they picked the second “g” from their name… not the first.

What do you think?

Posted by Computer Help as Business at 11:06 AM EST

15 Comments »

As many of you will have noticed, the Computer Aid blog (and even the main website) stopped working for a few hours today.

The joys of changing hosting companies.

I was originally with http://www.home-business-host.com/ for over 3 years.

They were great while Computer Aid was small: very helpful, and very reliable.

But over the last few months, it seemed that Computer Aid had outgrown the capacity of the shared hosting.

After a quick look around, I decided that a clustered hosting seemed like an ideal solution, but it was a more expensive solution.

It looks like when it comes to clustered hosting (like with many things in life), it becomes a case of: fast, cheap, reliable … pick any 2.

So I reluctantly went with: netfirms

They were cheap, but I read about many peoples bad experiences with Netfirms (mostly from 2006… so I hoped things had improved since then).

Well, I can’t comment on the speed yet, but as expected, customer support isn’t fast (so I had to really struggle to transfer my blog across.

My forum is still not working (and if me and netfirms cant fix it, then I might just dump it).

It seems that most problems arose from trying to transfer my site in a standard way: copy the files and copy the databases.

This worked to some extent, but it seemed that the .htaccess files I copied caused problems. But removing them didn’t help much either. Many people have complained about netfirms non-standard implementation of apache/.htaccess, I guess I’m another victim.

In the end, I created a blank blog using the netfirms control panel, then imported my original database, THEN copy my gila theme!

Anyway, I apologise for the outage.

I still have many plugins to enable, a forum to resurrect, and a re-installation of aw-stats… Looks like I’ll be busy for a while yet…

Posted by Computer Help as Business, Technical at 6:34 PM EST

2 Comments »

I just thought I’d let everyone know that some parts of this blog will become “paid content” sections.

To keep things fair (those who know me, will know that I’m a big fan of being fair, honest and open), it will only be selected posts… probably less than 10% of the overall blog.

The way I’d like it to work (this part is not finalised yet), is that paid posts will be split into 2 parts:

• The first part will be free and contain background information
• The second part will need to be paid for by paypal (I’m thinking around $4 – $8 per post), and it will contain the real interesting/vital information.

To be even more fair to my loyal readers, all new posts will be free, and a post might become a pay post only once it drops off the front page, and it shows a certain amount of long-term popularity.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and by looking at the stats on my website, I’ve noticed that certain posts are a lot more popular than others (even some posts from 2006 show up in my top 10 posts).

So I figured that if someone is looking for a solution to a specific problem, then paying $5 for the solution is a lot better than spending 10 or 20 times as much to have a professional tech fix the problem.

The stats also show that I get between 10,000 and 20,000 unique visitors per month, but only 1% will click on the google ads… each ad earns me an average of $0.23, with about an average of about 6 ad clicks per day, I’m getting about $40 per month.

I can easily see that most visitors to my site are looking for a specific solution… They read a relevant post, fix their problem, and then leave (rarely leaving any feedback, and rarely looking at other parts of the website).

I started thinking: If I could just earn $1 from each visitor, then my website would earn much more than Computer Aid!

So, I thought about how to increase my income from the Computer Aid website. Most solutions seemed to revolve around changing my website into a hard-sell site, with up-sells and continuity programs and all sorts of marketing stuff that I really didn’t like much…

So, I came up with a more subtle approach.

I’m not sure how well it will work, but its worth a try.

What are your thoughts? Do you think its a good/bad idea?

Posted by Computer Help as Business at 11:09 AM EDT

9 Comments »

Recently, I’ve been hearing lots of hype about the pepperjam advertising system.

It sound similar to Google Adsense, in that you can place contextual ads on your website.

So I thought: hey, I’ll give it a go.

After signing up (and being accepted), I manually selected who will be able to advertise on my website.

Now this can be both good and bad.

Bad in that either: I might have a limited number advertisers to choose from, or I might have too many (and need to spend a long time vetting them all).

Good in that I can have complete control what appears on my site.

So I selected about 12 relevant advertisers.

Some will automatically allow me to show their ad on my website, while others wanted to check me out first (I presume they check my website, to make sure it isn’t something like a porn website masquerading as a craft website).

I’ve had 2 advertisers reject me (I suspect it might be because they only want US websites, and mine is Australian).

There also seems to be 2 ways I can advertise

• place the adverts manually on my site (each advertiser will give you the code for the type of AD you want to display ie: anything from a simple text link, up to large animated graphic adverts).
• Use the pepperjamADS function

Now, pepperjamADS is similar to google adsense, except you select a range of ads (from the advertisers that are on your “partners” list), select the format of the banner (eg 728X90 leaderboard, 250X250 square, etc)

Once you place the code for pepperjamADS on your website, partner adverts are displayed as 1 or more text links (similar to google).

Since I only have 9 partners in my partner list, then I suspect the ads placed in the banner will be more of a random selection, than a contextual list.

So far, its all interesting, and shows a lot of promise.

But I have had one slight problem:

I tried the pepperjamADS vertical skyscraper/banner, and found that the wording seemed to get truncated (or the space allocated for the adverts wasn’t large enough… I’m not sure which).

The upshot is that many ads will end something like: “… for the best service and”

I figure: Its a new service, its bound to have some teething problems… I’m not concerned.

I’ll just send them a bug report, and see what happens.

I sent the report on Saturday, and by Wednesday night, I didn’t get any feedback.

Now, a small bug doesn’t worry me much, but not getting so much as a short email to say “we are looking into it” is a bit more worrying.

When a company doesn’t provide some feedback, then I start to question the quality of customer service.

At this stage I’ve removed all my pepperjamADS vertical adverts, and I’m going to wait and see what happens.

Hopefully, its just a minor hiccup.

Posted by Computer Help as Business, Review at 1:43 AM EDT

3 Comments »

I can’t believe this happened to me!

One day, around the beginning of May, I just didn’t want to help anyone.

I stopped answering calls, and I didn’t want to do this work anymore.

In hindsight, I can now see it had been building for a few weeks…

• i’d often work 10 or 12 hour days, for 6 days per week.
• I have very high expectations of myself, and the quality of my work.
• Mandy would book anyone who called… which would sometimes mean 5 or 6 customers per day.

Luckily I managed to not let my apathy show, while I was onsite… But a few minutes after leaving a customer, I would have an overwhelming feeling of sadness.

The weird thing is: I couldn’t understand why.

Well, me and Mandy managed to get over it.

As soon as possible, we arranged for me to take a week off (although I still had to do some “catchup work)… I spent a lot of the time sleeping, feeling depressed and withdrawn. By the end of the week, I was feeling better.

The week after was “reduced” duties (max of 2 customers per day).

The week after, I took another break, and did a lot of things that I had been meaning to do, but just kept putting off, as my workload had gradually increased.

Taking a “step back” as I did, I can see that Computer Aid is now a successful business, and it provides a high quality service, at fees lower than the industry average.

So we had to decide where to go from here…

There were many options:

• Sell Computer Aid (not what I really want to do).
• Work less (and increase my fees, but accept a lower income)
• Just shutdown Computer Aid
• Go to a purely contractor model (I do the occasional job)… but this option has its own set of headaches.
• Franchise. I don’t believe this works well with this type service industry

At this stage, I’ve reduced my hours to something more normal, and I will consider my future options carefully.

From now on, I’ll be sure to take regular vacation time… it doesn’t matter how much I like my job, its still possible to overdo it.

And for those of you who really like my blog, and might be worried that I might start posting less frequently: I don’t think so. I usually “buffer” my posts, so that they appear regularly… so they can take up to 2-3 months from when they are written, to when they get posted.

Posted by Computer Help as Business at 1:54 PM EDT

1 Comment »

I’ve had my first true non-paying customer (after nearly 3 years!).

A lady called Elizabeth Todd (ph: 0410 067 101), from Deception Bay, Qld, had non-starting PC.

It turned out to be a faulty motherboard, so I replaced it, did a repair install of windows, installed SP2, antivirus, etc etc.

All up, it was $140 for the hardware, and $140 for my time.

When I return the PC, she only has $140, but promises to give me the remaining $140 tomorrow.

Well numerous calls, and 6 months later, I’ve not seen the money.

I only started to call her 6 weeks after the payment was due (Computer Aid payment terms are 7 days)

I’ve heard lots of reasons:

• I forgot.
• I get paid on (a day of the week), I’ll pay then.
• I asked my partner to pay… didn’t he do it?
• I’ve had a difficult week, I’ll pay next week.

But in the end, I’ve had to write it off.

But I’d like to warn anyone else: if you meet Elizabeth Todd (from Donowain drive, Deception Bay), don’t supply her with any goods or services unless she pays upfront.

Posted by Computer Help as Business at 1:51 PM EDT

2 Comments »

I had a company ask me to give a brief presentation to a delegation of about 16 Chinese officials.

It sounds interesting, so I agree. Just a 30 minute talk about maintenance and security on PCs and the internet.

I’m then told that they are senior government officials… some part of the police system… hmmm

It needs to be a simple talk about “what is the internet”, PC maintenance, and the need to maintain PCs patched and infection free, as well as how to encrypt sensitive files… its all basic stuff (to me).

Although I wonder: the knowledge I’m giving should be easily obtainable within China.

Anyway, on the day, as I launch into my presentation, the translator/facilitator tells me I don’t need to mention the really basic stuff… they already use PCs and the internet, so I should focus on the PC security, in order to indicate the technical depth from by 20 years experience.

OK, so I use my presentation as a vague guide, and improvise. I end up doing a reasonable job (since I know a lot of this inside out).

At the end, everyone seems pleased, and I’m asked 2 or 3 relevant questions

So despite some miscommunication beforehand, everything turns out well.

It feels strange to be in a room full people, but not understand a word that’s being spoken.

Posted by Computer Help as Business at 1:03 PM EDT

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