When you run your own business, stress is a common issue you’ll face. I work long hours, spending 8 hours in the office, but working for an hour or so before I go in, and several hours after I come home. Lately I’ve been going strong until about 2am each night. This gets to be very taxing.

As an entrepreneur, you’ll always be stressed and busy. There’s always things to do, things to read, new things to learn. You’ll feel overwhelmed often, but push through it and you just might be successful.

Don’t let stress get the better of you, though. It’s easy to get negative when you’re overstressed, and it affects everyone around you.

Bosses tend to do this, and I’m guilty of it too. In the beginning of a company, people are all close, from the top down to the bottom. But as the company grows, the boss has to extricate themselves from the social aspect of the group. This is rarely well accepted, especially by people who’ve been there from the beginning. It’s not a mistake the boss made. It’s an important move, because the boss has to be the boss, not a friend. The further removed they are, the easier it is to act like a boss and perform the harder tasks, like reprimand, suspension, and firing.

However, this causes stress for the employees, because their relationship with the boss has changed. Now the boss is cold to them, professional, all business, and it leaves a bad taste in the employees mouths. So what do you do to alleviate this stress? Well, I sure went through it a while back, and I have a couple ideas to help out.

First off, the employees need to band together and understand this is the natural progression of things. Sure, it sucks, but it’s a necessary evil both for the boss and the employees.

The employees need to use each other for support to get through it, and eventually it’ll all work out. Schedule events, generate a rapport, lean on each other to alleviate the stress.

I know, it sounds stupid, but you just have to accept it. It’s better for the company, better for the boss, better for the employees.

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Filed under: Business Functions by Tim Caspersen
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Having only lived in Los Angeles for about 7 months now I am trying to get out into the networking community. I was given a sweet little tip by Stewart Wolfe over at RMS Direct about the LA Mixer. I didn’t know what to expect so this is an account of my experience while I was there.

First, the venue. It took place at the Shrine Auditorium and I didn’t really get to see what it looked like until I was leaving, a very beautiful building

Next I went inside, I knew that there would be a lot of presenters but I was literally overwhelmed by two floors of this place just packed tight with business displays.

As I started making my way through I met some pretty cool companies, let’s take a look at some of our favorites.

First we have Cheeky Ads and in this picture we have Kristen and Liseth. The basic premise of Cheeky Ads is to show some skin with your ad on it! How can you ignore ads like these?

Another really cool company was Eticket Farm, basically what they do is to provide printable tickets for your events whether they are large or small to help you bypass all of those nasty taxes and fees from certain larger companies. They also had this sweet Michael Jordan jersey to win, I don’t think I won it.

Next we had K1 Speed, they are an awesome little kart racing company that gives you a true driving experience. Here we have Denise Tran talking to a prospective client.

Having lived in North Carolina there was absolutely no way I could pass up this guy, Berkeley, owner of Berkley’s Backyard BBQ, his sauce was good, as was the BBQ, who would have thought good BBQ would make it to the west coast?

Here we have a very tasty Acai Berry energy drink called efusjon it was very good and I hope they make it, as it seemed much healthier than most other energy drinks.

Overall this was a great first outing for me, really cool and a great chance to get to know a lot of the “local” LA Businesses, I want to get a booth next year so we can have the position of power and collect a lot of cards from all of the people going through the floor, what should be bring as a giveaway prize though? Any suggestions?

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Filed under: Networking by Dean Karasinski
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When I first saw the new Adwords interface, I had the same reaction that I did when I first saw the new Linkshare interface: PURE OUTRAGE! Part of the reason for this outrage is my total hatred of change. I tend to be a creature of habit and I don’t like people messing with my world. Besides, Adwords was already the easiest and prettiest of the search engine ad platforms. Why take something that worked so well and is so easy to use, and change it? But unlike the new Linkshare interface, the new Adwords actually turned out to be at least as good as the original, if not better. I am not going to go into detail on all the changes that Google made, just the ones that I either really like or really hate.

Upon loading up the new interface, the first thing that I noticed was the change of colors. Well, actually, the first thing I noticed was that it wasn’t loading properly. In the orange box there is a message saying:

“The updated AdWords interface may not work properly in your web browser. We are working hard to add support for more browsers. Until then, please use Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3, or Chrome to manage your campaigns. The updated AdWords interface may be slower on older versions of Firefox. For better results, we recommend upgrading to Firefox 3.”

Since I am still rocking Firefox 2.0 (some of the add-ons that I love haven’t updated for Firefox 3 yet) I keep getting that message EVERY TIME I LOAD AN ACCOUNT. We have over 100 accounts in our My Client Center, so I am constantly bouncing between different accounts. Meaning, I have to see that message pop up constantly. For a company whose motto is “Don’t be Evil,” they are slowly driving me insane. Anyway, as you can see, the page clearly doesn’t load correctly.

The colors have also been tweaked with the green being a little darker and a graph tracking spend above the different campaigns. I think that this is the thing that bothers me the most about the new interface. But then again, I am the guy that changes the start menu and color scheme of any new computer back to Windows 98. I just don’t see why they couldn’t add in these new features while keeping the look of the old AdWords. Personally, I hope that they start offering themes for AdWords like they do with iGoogle and Gmail.

As for the features Google added, I really couldn’t complain once I learned how to use them. I really like how you can edit bids for a campaign without having to go into the actual ad group. I just wish that they would do something similar for changing ads. Also the changes in how you pause ads took me a few clicks to figure out and could be done a little smother.

Google also added a one step way to add new ad groups. Now you can create you ad, list your keywords, and enter your bids all on the same form. This is something that I have been wanting from a major ad platform for quite a while. This is really important for this new interface because it is slower. I never really had a problem waiting for pages to load on the old interface, but now I see a loading message quite often. Also, I kept running into pages where buttons wouldn’t load. The first time I tried adding an ad group in one step the “Save ad group” button did not appear. At first I thought I was just missing something on the page because I couldn’t submit it. But once I went back and tried it again, the buttons showed up.

Another new feature is the Account Tree that AdWords Editor has. I usually have this minimized because I feel it makes the screen too cluttered. Also, it lists all the accounts in each campaign in alphabetical order and all paused of deleted ad groups are grayed out. The fact that they are in alphabetical order is ridiculous. Often times, about half of the campaigns I have listed are grayed out. These should be at the bottom of the list, or they should be ordered by ad spend.

Overall, I don’t mind the new interface to this AdWords after I used it for a little while. I would have rather just seen these changes slowly added to the old interface though. But it does make you wonder why Yahoo and MSNs ad interfaces are still so bad. If the platform with the best interface is doing a facelift, why are the others not trying to catch up to at least where Google was? But what do you guys think? What do you like or hate about the new Google interface? Do you think MSN and Yahoo will ever have a platform that can rival Google in ease?

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Filed under: Adwords, Google, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engines by Chris Cremen
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Ok, so at first glance there doesn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary when it comes to using Share A Sale. I mean, it’s just like any other Affiliate Network, right? Before you answer too quickly, let’s delve a little deeper.

You’ve got your basic login page, which is fairly simple and straightforward to navigate. All you need to do is select Affiliate or Merchant login and you’re golden. So now that you’ve been granted access, let’s take a look at the home screen. Wowza! There’s a lot going on up in here. It seems like Share A Sale is not a fan of tabbed browsing, instead choosing to lay it all out there. Alright then, to each his own, but there is a whole lot of information just hanging out here so it can be a little daunting to a new user.

Speaking of new users, the first thing you’re going to want to do is join some merchant programs. Sounds easy right? I mean, all you have to do is look for the column marked “Find/Join Merchants” and click on the “View and Search Merchant List” link, which should bring you to a beautiful list of possible merchants for you to conduct business with. Oh no! Something must be amiss because all I have is a couple of link options, but no master list of merchants. Oh ok, I get it, I have to once again navigate to find a list of possible merchants.

Alright, let’s go with the “All Programs” link because it seems like a pretty safe bet. Awesome! I’ve finally got a list of merchants to get me started. Hmm, these don’t seem to be in any sort of order. I mean, it’s not alphabetical because the merchant names range from Unique USA to Global Scholar and then back to Seating Zone. Maybe it’s by category? Wrong again. We’ve got Home & Garden mixed in with Education and Gifts. Sale Commission? Nope. Lead Commission? Negatory. Ok, so maybe I’m going about this the wrong way. Let’s try sorting the columns alphabetically so that I can take a gander at all the merchants starting with the letter “A” and work my way through the alphabet. Once again, that’s not possible.

I give up, Share A Sale. Anybody got any ideas as to how I can butter up an Affiliate Program? Chocolates or flowers perhaps?

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Filed under: Affiliate Marketing by Caren Romanyschyn
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Well it’s Monday so it’s my turn to write a blog post.  And considering writing this is taking away from my study time for my Google Adwords Certification I have decided to write about that.

Becoming Google Adwords certified is no easy task, but can easily be achieved by some hard work and good ol’ fashion studying.  Adwords is an amazing advertising tool, and becoming certified will only help your online business.  Let us begin with the requirements.  There are four requirements you have to meet in order to become certified:

1. Sign up for Google Adwords and be in good standing (accept terms of use and are not in violation of any.)

2. Manage at least one Adwords account in My Client Center for 90 days.

3. Build and maintain at least $1000 total spend for your My Client Center account during the 90-day period

4. Pass the Google Advertising Professional Exam

Those are all the requirements, shouldn’t be too hard for anyone already familiar with Adwords.

By becoming an Adwords Qualified Individual/Company, you let your clients know that you are well trained and knowledgeable about what you do.  Having that logo on your webpage will put your clients minds at ease and gives you an automatic advantage over your competition.  After you pass the exam you will look at Adwords with a new perspective, knowing that you are now an expert in this field.  Another great advantage is that you will be able to apply all of your knowledge to other search engine based marketing, but that’s all for now.  I’ll go into more detail next week……I’m off to study

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Filed under: Adwords, Google by Matt Fern
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So I have to write a blog post, and I decided to make it easy (since it’s Friday) and give an update on the North Carolina affiliate tax woes.

To catch everyone up, North Carolina is proposing a Nexus Tax, similar to the one passed in New York last year. This law states that online retailers must collect and report sales tax on any sales made to residents and such in the state of North Carolina, but only IF these retailers have affiliate marketers located in North Carolina. The affiliate marketers are considered a physical extension of the retailer, giving the retailer a physical presence in the state, which forces them to collect sales tax.

From what I’m gathering, the tax portion of the budget has been the biggest problem with the budget being passed. Governor Perdue has insisted she will veto the tax section as a whole if it includes certain items. She does not have the ability to veto specific lines in the tax section, just the whole thing.

So here presents a problem. Several outlets have spoken with Governor Perdue, and it’s become very evident that she doesn’t understand what the Nexus Tax even means. With that being said, it’d be no shock if she just pushed that tax law through.

The proponents of this tax law are equally disillusioned. Their battle cry now is equality for brick and mortar businesses. They believe the sales tax will create a level playing field, make things fair, take away the advantage of selling online. What they refuse to see is that people don’t shop online because of the lack of sales tax. In fact, out of everyone I know, I can’t name a single person who would even factor sales tax into the equation of whether to buy online or to buy at a store. The sole reason people go online is to get better deals and the sheer convenience of not having to leave the house! I can be sitting at home, order a book from California, and never have to put on pants or leave the house!

For affiliates, this has been a nightmare. July 1st was when the budget was supposed to be passed. June 28th, Amazon removed all NC affiliates. The budget was pushed back to July 15th. But that didn’t stop the publishers. They took initiative and systematically removed their NC affiliates. Now it’s July 25th, and the budget still isn’t passed. The tax section, which includes the Nexus tax, isn’t agreed upon. In fact, it’s been leaked that they’re going to start from scratch and redo the tax section. Whether this new version will include the Nexus tax or now remains to be seen. So we’ll see what happens.

In the meantime, 7even Leaf Clover isn’t sitting idly back awaiting our fate. We’ve already formed PA businesses to operate under. We’ve visited PA to look at houses and apartments, and we’re making plans on relocating if this passes. It sucks to think about, our fate is in the hands of ignorant lawmakers who refuse to listen to the industry, simply keep their blinders on and stick to their old ways, still believing they’re smarter and better than the rest of us.

Yup, I’m angry. And we’re still fighting. If this is about equality, if this is about being fair, then why are affiliates the only people being affected? Why are they losing their jobs, their businesses, being forced to move out of the state? How is this even close to being fair?

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Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Google, Microsoft, Nexus Tax, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engines by Tim Caspersen
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In a not too shocking but definitely unexpected move, Google announced that they will be entering the OS race based on their already popular browser, Chrome.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

You can read the rest of the article at The Official Google Blog and download the Google Chrome Browser on their site.

But what does this mean for everyone who wants to use Chrome? Well, think about this Google already suggests that you sign into their web page to do search, look at maps and so on. This means they are collecting RIDICULOUS amounts of data about all of the people that are using their service. They can track you pretty closely, but now with Chrome OS it is possible they will be able to track what you do on a daily basis, what sites you visit without using Google Search, what programs you run on your desktop, how many pictures you have, how much music you have and so on and so forth. Scary right? Perhaps SkyNet isn’t that far off. Essentially Google is going to be controlling everything, people look to them for everything online, they have become a behemoth. Now I have nothing against Google I love them, but that doesn’t change the fact that they need to be kept in check and at least out of some portion of our lives. Lets hope they don’t put a little Analytics code into this OS of theirs. This is all really bad for privacy on all fronts.

Now the OS market only has so much room but a large company like Google should have no trouble getting into it, but can it stay there? Google has always been known for its streamlined, no bones, minimalist look and feel. So it may have a hand up against Microsoft and its bulky Windows. But Microsoft has had this market cornered for a long time, they have been dominant and continue to crush the competition. Only recently has Apple been able to achieve 10% market share of the OS market but I suspect that is due to things like the iPod, iPhone etc… introducing people to Apple and eventually leading them to a Mac. With that said Google has been a major thorn in Microsoft’s side ESPECIALLY online, they have pretty much shut them down in all aspects on the web, so if Chrome OS is a web based OS maybe Google has a chance. Little is known about Chrome OS so all if this is just speculation, I guess we will just have to wait and see what is going to happen and where this is going to go.

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Filed under: Google, Microsoft, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engines by Dean Karasinski
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