Michael Phipps

2 subjects. Crowdsourcing, with the story of how 2 sites so similar could be so different, and why you shouldn't abandon an idea when it doesn't work right up.

I recently tried out ideascale.com, which put simply is a feedback tool for your website. It didn't get any attention whatsoever. Today, I tried uservoice.com and had feedback within an hour of installing it.

So I've taken a look at Facebook's advertising thing. It's quite easy to manage, and my target market is so small, it's actually quite affordable for me as well! I'm thinking about taking the plunge and seeing what sort of response I can get from Facebook Advertising - and since I've stopped advertising with shopping.com, I've got cash alotted to advertising anyway.

If anyone has any good tips for advertising on Facebook, I'd love to hear them!

So yesterday I was all drugged up on cold and flu tablets, and I couldn't focus on any work, so I ended up creating a YouTube Theme for my channel page. I'm pretty happy with it - take a look and let me know what you think:

http://au.youtube.com/user/michaelphipps

I'm not a particularly wealthy person, but I thought you might find this post interesting none the same.

I use an online accounting system to manage my accounts called Saasu.com, as opposed to MYOB, which is a software solution. One of the things I can do is see my current wealth based on my balance sheet on the dashboard when I log in. It's a nice way of seeing how I am doing right now (particularly since my accounting automatically enters customer purchases)

A computer can only tell you what you tell it, so providing good information is important.

Something I've been considering adding to Find A Car is comments on vehicles that are up for sale. It's just been a case of me being too busy/lazy to actually make it happen.

If your website is about to get national coverage on a major television network at prime time, don't do something like this

While car dealers are amazing people, car salesman are among some of the laziest people I've met.

OK - let me clarify. They are lazy about the way they do their job UNTIL they get a lead. As an example, when I asked a car salesman for some content for his website, he flipped open a magazine. I thought great - He'll just give me a copy of his ad in a magazine to take queues from. NO. He gave me a copy of someone elses ad, and said "something like that".

I've just seen the Google Analytics Benchmarking tool in my account.

What an AMAZING piece of business insight! I used to guess if it was possible to improve a site in it's market, but now I've got statistics to tell me what the average site is achieving in my market place.

I now know it is possible to lift Tarotopia visitor a massive 75%. I know that bulletcars.com could get an extra 15% more traffic, but apart from that it is running very close to what other players in the same market are experiencing - in other words - we're on the right track.

Short answer is "you can't"

The longer answer is "you can't - with cpanel, but you can with WHM"

If you are a reseller, you should have access to WHM which contains an option that allows you to create a SSL CSR and Certificate.

That facility lets you create wildcard SSL CSR's where the standard cpanel interface won't let you.

I know those details are sketchy, but if it is a case of you only have access to cpanel, you need to chat to your hosting provider to see what they can do for you.

Yesterday, someone cut through the main Fibre Optic cable on the Gold Coast that affected over 1 million internet customers in South East Queensland. This single cable brought businesses to a halt. EFTPOS transactions couldn't be made, mobile phones stopped working, the internet was down.

It sort of affected me - but I just happened to be going out. I was actually unaware of the situation until yesterday afternoon, but a quick call to my Internet Company's support line answered the question - by being engaged.