Saturday, January 30, 2010

Competing against myself

     Since I started my new blog, I've been dedicating a little less time to blogging here. And I guess it shows. The amount of views I get here is dropping slightly while the amount of views I get at Fail Hard Blog are going up dramatically. Soon they will pass each other and Fail Hard will be my most viewed blog. It will happen any day now. Can I blame people, no? This is more behind the scenes stuff, and the other...well it's quite a bit more laugh-inducing.

-Trent

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Value

     That picture is my lunch bag that I take to work each day. It's going on a couple months of use so far and as you can see there's a couple holes and a tear at the top. Most people would throw this bag away and start using a new one. I'm getting my value out of this lunch bag. It might save me $1/year by only using my lunch bag a few times, but that's not the point. Customers demand value, and who's going to give it to them? Someone will, might as well make it you. Value does not mean low price, it's about the "bang for the buck". There is perceived value and actual value. Perceived value is crucial though.
      A good example of perceived value is the new Apple iPad that was announced yesterday. Many people(myself included) did not see any perceived value to it. That as an initial reaction is never good. However, there may be some actual value there. Getting the customer to realize that value is harder once the perceived value is diminished. Come out swinging, and just as important, stick to it. If you have sales or immediately change a price point, you diminish the value further. Avoid it if possible. Sometimes a mistake is made. I'll use Apple as an example here again. The original iPhone came out at a very high price point and after only a few months, they dropped the price. Since then, they've stuck to their price points whenever a new model comes out.
     Want another way to kill value, fees. Nothing turns me off more than seeing 'convenience fees'. I'll see a promotion for something that is a great value, but you see the fees and you realize they're trying to just make more money while trying to keep the value there. It doesn't work. Build that into the cost rather than add fees to your product or service.
     No customer is going to happily pay for something that has no value to them, so focus on building the value of your brand, product, or service.

-Trent

Monday, January 18, 2010

Attitude adjustment

     The more I see people start small business, the more I see they think they are entitled. They deserve everything because they worked hard in the past, now they get to relax. Running a business is quite the opposite of a relaxing time and the sooner you realize that, the easier it will be.
     Back to the entitlement thing though, people expect big things without big effort. It's about time people humble themselves and recognize those who are successful at what their doing. I'd say 99% of the time they had to work their butts off to get where they are today. And most of them probably had a  few failures along the way. Fail happens, it's what you do with it after that makes the difference.
      I'm not here to say that you shouldn't dream big and know in your head that you'll become successful, just remember it involves a lot of work and probably a few failures along the way.

-Trent

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Fresh Start Update

     Here is an update to my Fresh Starting Point blog post. I now have 4 keywords in the top 10, 2 of which are in the top 5 on all the major search engines.Also, traffic has exceeded expectations and the Alexa rank went from non-existent to 1.6 million at the moment, but with traffic increasing, it is bound to go up. All this in less than a month. I'll probably provide one more update in a month or so.

-Trent

Thursday, January 7, 2010

New Blog

     Here's one announcement that got pushed up while my other announcement about the revised/revived project is pushed back to next week. I'm starting a new blog!
     I have a knack for getting myself into situations that no one else seems to get themselves into. This is often followed by my inherent clumsiness or lack of quick wit. Then, I go into damage control mode which happens to...create...more...damage. When I fail, I fail hard!
     This is an idea that Yom and I came up with while we were in Vegas. It will be contributed to by a couple of people with our life experiences of failing. We're all human, we make mistakes. Now you can laugh at our failures. Sounds great, right? Check it out over the upcoming weeks as more posts are added.

FailHard.Net

-Trent

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

The age of paper is dead

     How do I know this to be true, the calendar. Every year I get bombarded with free calendars from suppliers and clients. It then becomes a process of deciding which one I like best. Last year I picked a car themed one because well...I like cars. Anyway, this year I received zero calendars. I happen to know most of those suppliers are still in business so that's not the case. I'm sure it came down to budget cuts. However, it has been habit that when I sit at my desk, I glance at the calendar whenever I need to see an upcoming date. Problem is my calendar is stuck on December. Obviously I'm not going to base that paper is dead on this one incident, but I'm sticking with the calendar theme.
     I happened to be at Barnes and Noble right after the New Year and I was thinking about my lack of Calendars, so I decided to see if they had any left. Usually the racks are empty around this time, but not today. They still had a rather large selection. The same thing happened when I was at the mall passing by the kiosk that sells calendars and games. Plenty of Calendars to be had.
     My solution to the problem has been to keep a tab open with my Google Calendar or keep iCal open. Fortunately they're synced so I can get the information I need on demand, but it's still a little different for me to get used to.
     Some may argue that paper died off long ago, but I think only recently with eBooks becoming more prevalent and being able to sign contracts digitally, and using tablets on computers to draw that you can really start getting close to declaring the final nail in the coffin. 
     Currently I use a standard old fax machine as well and have been contemplating eFax solutions to replace the tired old machine. And with the age of digital signatures, text messages, Google Wave, eBooks, etc. do you consider the age where we rely on paper to be dead?

-Trent

Saturday, January 2, 2010

Expirement time!

   I tend to have a lot of old computers sitting around because I go through computers a lot and I got my first computer when I was 12. It's enough to drive my wife crazy because I don't get rid of them. Well I came up with a way to repurpose one computer and experiment at the same time.
   I've talked multiple times about the Opera Web Browser/Web Server. Right now I just have been keeping Opera open while I'm at work, so basically M-F from 8-5. It's a basic web page with a couple links and sure enough, I've gotten clicks from that webpage. So now, I'm going to launch a web page and host it on the Opera Web Server and on that server alone to see it how it handles that. This week I'll post the details and the link.

-Trent

Friday, January 1, 2010

No more daily blogging goals.

My experiment to blog daily really pushed me to be creative and try new things. It was great, but now, I need to focus on work and not force a blog post. I think it will add value to the blog. I still plan to contribute regularly, just not everyday. And it may happen every day, or like in some cases I'll come up with several at one time, type them out and schedule them once a day for a few days. We'll see how it goes.
Also, welcome to 2010!

-Trent

Happy New Year!

May the year 2010 be a successful year for you!

-Trent

P.S. This was scheduled to post at midnight, but didn't.