eBusiness can be Tough

Posted on Sep 9th, 2011 in General Blog Posts | 3 comments

As a small business owner, a person who loves to just “be” on the internet, an author, a partner in a new web-venture, and a remote managed services provider; life is busy. The more I do, the more I have to do to maintain it. Even deciding which blog to post this on was a consideration I was forced to stop and consider thoughtfully. Is this a personal post belonging on carolinaregion.com? Since Im’ talking about business, maybe it should be on my twistednetworx blog. Then again I did mention I’m an author, so do I want to speak to those people who might want to read my book too? It’s crazy.

As soon as I hit the publish button little micro-agents are going to go out there and facebook this post, tweet it, send a notification to Google to ask them to spider it, send a ping to ping-o-matic, notify google analytics there is a new blog post to track, “digg” it and co publish the feed on feedburner, networked blogs, and half a dozen other aggregation sources. Even the digital hands-free world seems to have a lot to do on my behalf.

I just wrote a book on cloud computing so one might assume I have all this under control, right? Sadly, no. It’s still a massive daily routine that must be adhered to in order to prove successful.

Since I’m doing all this I thought I might take a moment to let those of you who read this blog know what’s going on in my life. I’ve been a busy little bee; that’s for sure! I just hope it’s all worthwhile in the end.

So, let’s cover what I’ve been up to lately!

I’m a published author:

Partly Cloudy - Getting Started with Cloud Computing

The Book Cover

Yes, in case you somehow managed to evade my agressive email, twitter, and facebook campaign strategies, I have finally achieved one of the goals I’ve had since turning in my first short story in tenth grade english class. I’ve written and published a book. I won’t go so far as to mislead you by calling it a novel. Rather it’s a recipe book, or “guide” to learning how to work with “Cloud Computing.” The book covers a few main topics.

I can’t spell them all out in the description on Amazon so I’ll do it here instead.

What is Cloud Computing? Chances are you already do a little bit of it and just don’t know it.
Why Will “I” Want to Use It? There are hundreds of small ways people can use cloud computing to improve both their personal and business lives on the Internet. In the book I cite a few examples to get you started; teachers, real-estate agents, small business owners, telecommuters, or non-profits, and every day individuals who want to gain a new tool that’s easy to use. I also explain really simply how to leverage FREE cloud-programs to replace programs you would otherwise have to purchase. Just from the examples in the book an average person can save over a thousand dollars on software costs alone!
How Simple Is It? I did my very best to write this book for the average-Jane. If you’re a geek like me you don’t need the book so why write to that audience? I wrote it for the normal person, people I know, people I see every day, and in response to the “Oh wow I didn’t know I could do that” comments I receive in my career daily.

Where can you get the book?

If you’re in the market to spend $2.99 and about an hour of your time learning some new tricks then I’d be happy to tell you how to get it. The easiest way is to click on the book cover above. That link will take you directly to the promo page on my new author website. You can purchase it from that link using either Amazon (if you have a Kindle or want to read it on your PC) or you can purchase it on Smashwords if you have any of the other ereader devices (Nook, iPad, iPhone, etc).

While I’m here I might as well ask you for a favor. I have two new web-presences I really need to promote to as many faces as I can. One is the new author’s web site. The other is the new Facebook page.

No, Tommy isn’t so vain that he’s about to start speaking about himself in the third person… wait.. I did it again, didn’t I? Really I just want to keep my personal presence online and my professional one completely separate. I enjoy that I can talk with my friends and family on my Facebook profile and through this blog. It’s both fun and cathartic for me. However, if I ever want to be taken seriously as a writer I have to have a presence online where I’m dedicated to a serious outlook and marketing strategies. That’s what these two things provide for me. Hopefully I’ve written what will be the first of many books, and these need a place online to themselves; away from me and my personal rants and raves.

If you’d like to visit the website for my author profile, you can find me at http://tommyjordan.me.

Feel free to leave comments, sign up for the newsletter, and interact with me on there. I need to get some interaction going with visitors so people know I’m actually there to respond to them and they’ll only post if they see others have posted as well. There seems to be this stigma against being the first person to comment on a new web site. I’m not really sure why. I really want you to use it, kick the tires, and spread the word, so check it out.

If you want to “Like” the professional site on Facebook I’d certainly appreciate that as well. The url for the author’s page is:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Tommy-Jordan/249592745072832

I currently have exactly 18 likes on Facebook. I’d really love to see that number hit 1,000 someday soon. Help me out will ya?

New Venture: WWW.OMJLIST.COM

Talk about a royal nightmare. I think I’ve just finished the hard stages of embarking the most difficult, yet promising, venture of my life thus far. I’ll tell you the story, in brief.

There’s a gentleman by the name of Bill Guyther whom I’m associated with through various social and business channels. He came to me and a few others with an idea for a web site. Being a programmer myself; I had all kinds of ideas on things to do, not to do, things to maybe try, and suggestions on how to do it. What I did NOT have was the time or programming background to be able to pull all the code together that was needed to pull it off. Even in my vanity I know my limitations.

He had a great idea but needed another programmer to make it happen.

After three or four months of trying to find the right programmer(s) we did finally assemble a team of winning individuals who made the project successful. However the drama lies in the intervening months between conception and delivery. Come to think of it, it was a lot like pregnancy in that we were sometimes hostile, sometimes wanted to kill people, and sometimes wanted to throw up. In the end it paid off though.

Given the internet in its current state, here was our given set of axioms:

eBay is cool, but expensive and hard to use.
Craigslist is very neat and free, but a little lame.
Facebook is everywhere, but doesn’t market to either of the people eBay and Craigslist do.

Problem: How do we mix that up and make a recipe for success for both ourselves as a company and the world at large as a service they want and can easily use?

Solution: OMJ was born.

Under the premise of “One Man’s Junk is Another Man’s Treasure” we launched a Facebook group for every county in our home state of North Carolina. Bill, his wife Michelle, and myself literally had thousands of Facebook messages per day from people wanting to join. The premise was simple. You’re already on Facebook, and you probably like eBay, so why not bring eBay and Craigslist functionality to Facebook as a launching platform to get people interested, then when we have our final product ready, move them all over to our new service. Oh yeah, and let’s do it all for free.

This baby of ours quickly grew into a screaming toddler who couldn’ t possibly be fed or pampered enough to keep it happy. Within weeks we discovered that once a particular county hit 200 members it seemed to take on a measurable and predictable life of its own. Bill headed up Gaston County and I headed up Stanly County. Six months later I have over 8,500 members in my county. Bill has over 6,000 in his county. Collectively we have about 35,000 members across the state of North Carolina.

Imagine putting up a free version of eBay with 35,000 active members and then doing it for free. They came in droves. Any given day Stanly County would have over 5,000 posts. Some wanted to sell speakers. Others wanted baby clothes, washers, microwaves. Before long people were selling cars and trucks, boats, jewelry, pets and anything else you can imagine.

As with all great ideas it didn’t take long before people tried to copy our idea. Competitive groups started popping up all over Facebook, but we can honestly say that none of them had six months of preparation and planning and the skills to be able to handle the project as successfully as we do, so we’re still number 1 in the free classifieds market on Facebook hands down.

As we grew we required more and more volunteers to manage adding members, deleting spam posts, moderating fiercely competitive housewives engaged in bidding wars! You really can’t imagine the four-letter words that fly between some of these ladies! And it’s almost always ladies! The volunteers grew into a close-knit community of moderators that have met in person and all become fast friends in real life. We chat with each other daily on our own OMJ Admins group. Yes, all of you OMJ-ers reading this; we actually have a group that’s secret on Facebook where we get together and plot how best to moderate, boot, ban, and sometimes murder our members! It’s like AA for moderators. We’re contractually required to complete our 12-step program…. Don’t boo at me. You drove us to it!

Last weekend it all came together. After four different website re-designs, two closed beta testing groups, one soft launch, and literally tens of thousands of hours of work, we all met at Bill’s house to launch omjlist.com officially as a nationwide service. We have had most of a year to work with our thousands of Facebook users to learn what people want, don’t want, and how they want the experience to function for them in order for them to get the most enjoyment out of it.

Guess what we learned? People don’t like fake people! They want a safe environment.

If one user was a no-show to meet someone who’d driven half an hour to deliver something to them, word spread fast and that person was quickly shunned by the community. If a person had a fake profile or the same blue truck with the same lady driving it was recognized under more than one name; people heard about it.

This opened up a new avenue for us; a way to be both profitable and to provide a service no other community on the Internet currently does. We are safe! During the beta phase of OMJ the single largest complaint we received was fake users or fake profiles. People want to know who they’re dealing with. This is only fair considering you’re going to most likely be performing cash transactions with them.

So, in addition to our Free OMJ service we launched the Verified Member program.

What does being Verified mean?

A member who wants to be verified pays 12 dollars per year (that’s 1 dollar a month) to be “verified.”

As soon as they subscribe to the verified service we contract to pull a state, federal, and DMV criminal record search. If you’ve EVER been convicted of a felony, you don’t get approved. If you’ve ever molested a kid, you can’t join. It’s as simple as that. We REQUIRE proof that your face profile pic matches some form of Identification, such as driver’s license or passport.

Can we guarantee that everyone who gets approved is reputable? Well of course not. Bad apples are everywhere. But we can guarantee that no one you deal with who has a “verified” logo on their picture is a criminal. That’s pretty cool if you ask me! Imagine if you could PROVE the people you deal with on eBay were who they said they were? That’s worth a lot to a person in our opinion.

Once you get verified there is no more cost to use the site, ever. There’s no limit to the amount of things you can sell or buy, no limit to the amount of questions you can ask in the community, no limit to the amount of photos you can post online to showcase your products. Did I mention all those things are free?

Ok, so I’m done spouting off about all the cool things www.omjlist.com can do for you. Go on over and check it out yourself. I’m an admin there, and part owner, so I’m around a lot of the time to help out with questions from new members! Tell ‘em Tommy sent ya!

Digressing a moment because this is MY blog and I CAN:

And to those of you who responded to our verified member program with “How dare you try to make money”… take a long walk off a short pier, lady. We have poured thousands of dollars of investor’s money into creating the service you can use for free, tens of thousands of hours of labor, and more sweat equity than you can possibly imagine. The people who created this service for you deserve to make a dollar here and there! We’re certainly not going to get rich off of it. Believe me! It takes money to run dedicated MYSQL servers, redundant hosts, and provide all the other services we do! (Ok, I just needed to get that off my chest).

Back to My Original Thought

So the original strain of conversation here was “Man, I’m busy lately.” And it’s true! Being an author and trying to spread the word about your book means constant daily tweets, searching out new potential readers and communicating with each of them personally. It means monitoring the author’s Facebook page and spreading the word daily about that as well. Then I have to check on Twisted Networx’s Facebook clients, my 300-500 daily emails, find some time to read my own friend’s Facebook pages to see what’s going on in their lives that I might want to share a moment of, etc. Now I’ve added moderating OMJ List on the official web site, responding to user questions there, verifying new members, helping new people figure out features of the web site, and still going back to all the 110 active Facebook groups with an ever growing community of members and moderating their complaints and debacles.

So, if you wonder why I say I don’t have time to chat on Facebook much lately… well, now ya know!

I was going to write a lot more, but I figure at this point you have a good idea of what I’ve been up to lately OR you’ve already nodded off at your keyboard, sound asleep.

So.. that’s it for now. Visit my author web site, buy my book, and come visit us on OMJ at http://www.omjlist.com

Have a great day!