I always seem to have a camera be it video or a dslr with me. I just never seem to use it when I should. I often see many a photo, or video worthy things taking place. But I am always thinking to myself “Ah man it is too much trouble to get that camera out.” Well not today! Today I caught an interesting event taking place that I decided I just had to video. After getting permission to post this video to youtube from the main “talent” I knew this was one I had to upload. No fancy editing here. Nothing extra ordinary, but I think you will enjoy the video none the less.

a

It seems no matter where you look on the internet today you will see ads everywhere telling you how you can make money from the internet. Now I do not deny that you can make money on the internet. I mean I do it every day, I have adsense ads on some of my sites as well as paid advertisers. But make a nickel per click or less is hardly what I would call making money on the internet.

True I have built and managed many online stores and they have all made money as well. But they have had to sell products. It takes money to buy the products to sell, money to store the products etc. I have also been paid for teaching people how to do things. But this was always a one shot deal. That is until I decided to make some informational products and sell them on the internet.

This is not a new idea of mine, and in a sense I have already been doing this. I mean I have many photoshop tutorials on this site that have adsense ads plastered all over them. But I have always want to make and sell training videos. So I decided to get more involved in this. Along the way I came across Kevin Rileys Program How To Make A Bundle Of Extra Spending Cash For Christmas – In Just 3 Days From Now. The price was right and I thought hey this would be a good way to cut my teeth on marketing an information product. Besides, having a product in three days. How could that not appeal to you?

I got the paid my money and promptly got distracted onto something else. Almost forgetting about it, and then I thought you know it is time to get off my butt and give this a try. That is exactly what I did. Kevin Rileys instructions were clear and very logically laid out. He takes from finding the idea of what to write about, actually writing the guide, to putting it online and making sales as well as promoting it. In less then three days I had my guide “Pictures Sell!” written and on the internet.

The one thing I didn’t really do from Mr. Rileys guide was promote my new product. In fact all I did was add the link to my signature on a few of the forums I visit regularly. Well the morning after I had my guide posted I was checking my e-mail as I always do and I was surprised to see not one, but a couple of sales for “Pictures Sell!”. I always love the excitement of selling something or getting money from an ad click. But this time instead of a puny few cents I had made close to $10.00. I know, big wow right? But it didn’t stop there through out the day I kept getting e-mails that another copy of my guide had sold. I mean come on, I haven’t even started promoting it yet. Now I really look forward to checking my e-mail because just about every time I do I find I have made another sale.

Kevin Riley is a stand up sort of guy. In fact he has even given me a little additional help over Skype. Not only is he very helpful he is a lot of fun to talk to. Although I always feel I am infringing on his valuable time, he never makes me feel that way. When Kevin asked me to write a testimonial for How To Make A Bundle Of Extra Spending Cash For Christmas – In Just 3 Days From Now I jumped at the chance. It was then I realized that I was not really sure how to write a testimonial. But it was easy because “How To Make A Bundle Of Extra Spending Cash For Christmas – In Just 3 Days From Now” is truly a great product.

The only possible flaw it could have is telling you how to take and edit the pictures. But don’t worry about that “Pictures Sell!” will teach you how to do that with FREE image editing software.

a

I think every blogger at some point has the dream of getting paid for blogging. Most bloggers run across sites where the blog owner is doing just that. Let’s face it we are envious of that lifestyle. I mean wouldn’t it be awesome to be able to work from the local coffee shop via a wireless connection and your laptop? No boss, no designated work schedule. The freedom to set your own hours. Your salary only limited by how much you want to do.

Working for oneself is rewarding and working from the comfort of your own home is even better. But how exactly do you go about doing that? I am sure you have all seen the ads on the internet claiming to make you a millionaire or something crazy like that with no work and in a short period of time. Well you know the rule, if it sounds to go to be true it generally is.

Most of us bloggers sign up for a Google Adsense account and wait for that glorious Google money to start pouring in. But after weeks upon weeks of only receiving pennies from Adsense many people get discouraged. In fact I know many a person who has never even received their first payment from Google. Getting to that $100.00 mark can take a very long time. I have been fortunate, I generally receive around $120 US ever three months. But let’s face it that is not going to pay the mortgage.

At this point many people give up on the whole idea of being able to make money online. But what if I told you that in only three days you could be making some quick cash for Christmas from the internet? That’s right in three days you could actually be seeing some cash from the internet. I have caught your interest now I bet. If you are serious about doing three days worth of work to make some quick cash on the internet I guarantee you will succeed. Click here to find out how.

a

Some people have accused me of having a time fetish. You seen things that happen in my life I have planned down to the minute. For example my drive to work and my drive home. I know that if leave at 7:02 in the morning it will take me x number of minutes to get there. If I choose to leave at 6:55 in the morning than it takes me y amount of minutes to get there. You might wonder why I seem so anal retentive when it comes to time. But time is the great equalizer of everyone. You see no matter who you are or how much money you have we all only have 24 hours in each day. I choose to spend my time as productively as possible.

No that does not mean I work all the time, in fact it is just the opposite. The more productive I am the more free time I am afforded. So if I can find a way to streamline something generally I will which will in turn provide me with more free time. I have found a secret method that if you follow it you can at least 30 minutes more free time every day. A secret that is extremely simple yet it does require a little work up front. So what is this secret? Increase your typing speed, yes that is it, that is all. By in increasing your typing speed by at least 20% you will find you will have more free time.
Think about how much typing do you do? Even if you do not use a computer for work, you are using one right now which is on the internet. So it is safe to assume you have an e-mail account. Which means you will eventually write an e-mail or too. Most people these days have at least one instant messenger they use to communicate with friends. That counts as typing too. If you are a blogger than you are doing a fair share of typing for sure.
Let’s face it that two finger chicken pecking just does not cut it in today’s technologically centered world. Learning to type faster is not hard, it just requires some discipline. Get yourself a copy of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing and spend at least twenty minutes a day using it. You will be surprised how much you improve in little as a week. The Mavis Beacon software is not very expensive to purchase, less that a meal at a nice restaurant. However the tangible benefits you will receive from using it are worth more than a meal at a nice restaurant every day for a week.
In summary if you what to increase your productivity which in turn will afford you with more free time you have to increase your typing speed. How do you increase your typing speed? You go and get the Mavis Beacon Teaches typing software and use it for twenty minutes every day.

a

So you have decided it is about time you jump into this whole internet fad and make your millions online by selling your widgets to the world. Well my friend you will need a online shopping cart system. I am not going to describe the pit falls and advantages here of taking your business online. But I am going to start off by bringing up a point you should consider before you even do your first Google search for an online store system or online shopping cart.

No matter how great of a product you have, or how awesome your website and online store / shopping cart is. If you cannot get people to look through it, or even at it for that matter you are not going to make any sales. Okay with the dismal news aside lets’ talk about what you actually need to process a transaction online.

For the purpose of this post we will assume you have a website which is acting as your store front. Now you need a way of tracking the items your customer selects, adding the total and allowing them to pay for it. Well an online shopping cart does some of that work but not all of it. This is where a lot of my clients who do not have brick and mortar stores get confused. You see the online shopping cart collects the items your customers select, sometimes suggests related items, and sometimes calculates shipping. I say sometimes because this will depend on the shopping cart software you select and how you configured it. The shopping cart should also securely collect the customers information. But the shopping cart DOES NOT process the transaction.

So to relate this to a brick and mortar store. Your customer has the items they have selected in their cart and they are now at the register waiting to pay for them. Now this is where things get tricky. When you pay at a store and use your credit or debit card, which the cashier or yourself swipe. That information is carried through secure (we hope) wires to a financial institution where the money is removed from your account and deposited into the merchants account (minus the credit card or banks fees).

With an online store we need to transmit that information securely to someone or some company that will process this information taking the money from the customer and paying us minus their service fees. Now it is a little more complicated sometimes when you involve a payment gateway. A payment gateway would be the same as those secure wires. Fortunately most companies that will process the credit card (merchant accounts) also provide gateways as part of their services.

Now you might be saying “Hey I have bought stuff online before ad never seen any of this taking place.” . My answer to that is good, that means everything was set up correctly. If you have bought something using a Pay Pal account then all this might seem to register in your head.

Okay so where is the meat of the post? How do you select a shopping cart? What features should you look for? Well my friends those questions will both be answered in a future post. But before we get to that good stuff we should discuss the topic of taking your business online…… to be continued……

a

Pod casts and pod casting is nothing new, and has been around for some time on the web. I have often thought that sometime I might try my hand at creating one. The problem you see is that I haven not really listened to many of them. That is until now. While using I-tunes at work the other day I had realized I had left my USB drive at home. Alas I had no music with me, so I decided to check out what I-Tunes had listed for pod casts.

Well I was pleasantly surprised to find hundreds if not thousands on interesting pod casts, in various categories. I was listening to health pod casts, business pod cats, and even some graphic design pod casts. I haven’t even begun to check out the video pod casts.

Some great pod casts I have found are below, check them out you might enjoy them too:

If you have suggestions of other pod casts I should check out please leave a comment.

a

While glancing over my shoulder at work the other day I noticed something very Mac like on a Windows XP machine. Now I should point out that I work in an environment that has a little bit of every flavour of operating system running in some form or other. My work environment is also highly creative and it is not uncommon for extremely strange things to be happening.

What I saw was a dock which looked very similar to the application dock on Mac OS X. I had to ask what exactly it was – it was Rocket Dock. Its a really cool little application that proves extremely useful. I tend to have several windows and applications all opened at once. In fact I tend to have so many windows across two monitors that I lose track of them all. But Rocket Dock also me to minimize windows right to the dock and keep track of them. It really is a great piece of software. Did I mention it is FREE?

Having developed “FREE” software before I know how much it really costs. As I like this little application so much I have even ordered a t-shirt. It is a karma thing, you have to support developers who develop great software. Plus you get a t-shirt to boot. Check out Rocket Dock, I am sure you’ll like it as much as I do.

a

If you have been surfing the web for a while, or have a site on the web you have no doubt heard the term PageRank. If you own a web site and have not heard about PageRank now is a good time to learn.

What is PageRank?

Essentially PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page and used by Google. PageRank was designed to make search results more relevant to the person using the search engine. It works by assigning a value to a web page based on what sites link to it. However it goes much deeper than that. PageRank also looks at the weight it has assigned to the linking pages. From the number of links to web page and the value of the pages linking to that site, PageRank determines the value it assigns for that page.

Sound complicated? That is because it is complicated. In fact my brief description does not really do it justice. Plus add in the fact that the engineers at Google are always updating the algorithm to prevent it from being abused. Not long ago Google rolled out a few changes that had dramatic effects across the web. Sites that had a PageRank of 7 (PageRank is out of 10) went to a PageRank of 3 overnight. needless to say it was a shock to a lot of people.

How does PageRank Affect a Website?

Well firstly PageRank will affect where the web site shows up in Google search results. As you probably already know the higher up a site appears in search results the more traffic it will get. But if you have or want to have advertising on your site it is also important. A lot of advertisers look at a websites PageRank when determining if they will advertise there or not. I also believe Google AdSense takes into account a sites Pagerank when determining which adds to place on the site.

At one time TenaciousCreations.com had a PageRank of 4. At the time I was upset that it was only 4, but now not having any PageRank I would gladly go back to having a PageRank of 4. However when this site had some PageRanking I consistently had Google placing higher paying ads on my site. As my PageRank decreased so did the price per click of the ads Google Adsense placed on my site.

How Do I Improve My Websites PageRank?

Okay so now we know what PageRank is and why it is important us. But how do we improve our sites PageRank? Well if you have followed my site at all you will know I always stress good content. If you have good content, that people can benefit from and want. You will have other websites deep linking to your site. More relevant links == more PageRank. Link exchanges can also work. However I feel Google has got smart on this and now puts less weight to a link exchange than they do a deep link with in another site. When ever i created a new Photo Shop tutorial I always submitted them to a bunch of tutorial sites. Most of these tutorial sites are nothing more than a collection of links. For a while I enjoyed a very good PageRank, however at the time of writing this article I have a pretty dismal PageRank.

You have to remember search engines are always trying to improve the way they work in order to provide better search results for their users (ie customers). A search engine wants to make sure when a user enters his or her search terms, the search engine will turn up the results they want. If you keep this in mind and provide quality content I am very confident that will also improve your PageRank.

a

Well a lot has happen since my last post in April. I have moved to a different city, and taken on a different (but coolest in the world) job. However as I said in the last post I want to once again get tenacious Creations rolling.

Maybe even get some page ranking back. Although I am pretty impressed that even with an almost total lack of new content this site still attracts 200 or more visitors a day. Most of my visits are for my photoshop tutorials. With the one about making a better virtual tattoo receiving the most traffic right now.

I guess that goes to show that if you have content the traffic will come. I only wish I knew then what I know now about Search Engine Optimization. I am sure I could of made all those photoshop tutorials rank a fair bit higher in the search engines.

So what am I going to do to get traffic back?

If all goes well I hope that with in two months I can increase the traffic to this blog to 400 hits a day. Not to big of a goal, and one that should be easily accomplished. As always if you have ay suggestions on how I can increase the traffic to this blog please feel free to let me know.

a

 Well after months and months of no activity here on Tenacious Creations I thought I should write a post of what has been happening. As well as maybe a glimpse into the future of Tenacious Creations. First off I want to thank all of you who keep coming back to this site even though there has been no new updates. Surprisingly my traffic has not dropped off as much as I thought it would.

 Secondly I want to apologize to all those whose blogs I used to regularly read and comment on. I just have not had the time to keep up with them. Although I have been able to rearrange my schedule a bit so I can start regularly reading a few blogs again. So look for my comments to start flowing once again.

 So what has been happening around here. Well I was running a small tech company on the side and that was taking up a lot of my time. However I have scaled back operations with it which has allowed me free time to start taking care of this blog some more.

 Here are some of the upcoming posts I am working on and which should be published soon, but not necessarily in this order:

 So those are a few of things I will be posting articles on in the near future. Hopefully you, my readers, will find them interesting and useful. If you are worried about missing these posts I suggest you subscribe to my RSS feed. I hope to hear comments from you all, and if you are a new reader I hope you will keep coming back for more.

Till the next post!

a

 As of late there has not been much action going on with the Tenacious Creations site. Other projects and hobbies have place constraints on my time. Unfortunately Tenacious Creations has kind of been left out in the cold.

 But as another year comes to an end it is time to take a look back at some of the most popular posts of the year.

 These were the top three posts of 2008. I am hoping to get some new posts happening in 2009. However as with most New Years resolutions this one may get broken before it is started.

 Thank you to all who have read and commented on my posts through out 2008, I wish you a prosperous New Year and I hope you will continue to rad my posts for 2009.

a

 I am sure just about everyone has heard of Skype and perhaps a lot of you are already using it. Now it is not too often that I give a product rave reviews but once again Skype has performed above my expectations.

 For some time now I have been using Skype as an instant messenger and for some conference calls. Yes that is right you can do conference calls with Skype. Not all your participants in the conference call need to be on a computer either. You can use Skype dial out service (for a reasonable fee) to call participants and involve them in your conference call.

 But what has impressed me the most about Skype is that this morning I used it for an online conference call with two other people. Now this may not sound that amazing, but when you factor in that one person was in England, the other in Japan, and me here in the center of Canada. It is pretty amazing.

 There was virtually no lag time and I could hear each person clear as a bell. In fact the clarity was much better than I have found on land line international calls. It was so clear that when one of the participants cell phone rang I almost thought the phone was right beside me and not on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

 If you are only using Skype online than you cannot beat the price, its free! If you are in North America or most places Skype has monthly packages if you are calling land lines. The price verys from place to place but I find it is extremely reasonable.

 My only complaint is that I cannot get a land line phone number here in Canada for land lines to call me. That’s right if you live in the US or England, and a few other places you can get a phone number that regular phones can call. You can answer these online or have them forwarded to a phone number of your choice.

Hopefully Skype will be offering this service in Canada soon. If you have never tried Skype, give it a try. Oh I also forgot to mention that you can also do video chats with Skype. It is an excellent piece of software that I highly recommend.

a

 If you read about improving traffic to your site or selling a product you have no doubt heard about branding. When I think of branding I am remind of growing up on the farm. I can still smell the mixture of red hot metal and seared flesh. Just like the brand on cattle identifies them as some ones property establishing a brand for your web site or product does the same thing.

 Examples of this are the golden arches of McDonald’s, the apple of Apple and I am sure now that you think of it several more come to mind. An effective brand will create an emotional response in the consumer. Why an emotional response? Well research has proven that if an advertiser can create an emotional response in the consumer the consumer will have a great chance of remembering the message.

 I recently found this article from Microsoft about branding with in a piece of software. If you are a programmer this is really an interesting read and I would recommend reading it.

 Branding seems to be extremely important to marketing people. For some reason I never seem to fully grasp the marketing concepts. However now that I am building software as an independent developer this has become more important to me. If people do not know about my products they surely will not buy them.

 So how do you let people know about your products? Well that is an easy one to answer, you advertise. But wait a minute, how do you make sure you get the most effective advertising? How do you advertise on a budget? Should you focus your advertising to your potential market?

 These are important questions that need to be answered. To be honest I am not 100% sure on the answers to these questions. If you are a marketing guru please use the contact form at the bottom of that page to contact me. I do know I have to do some more research on marketing so that I can answer these questions. I would hate to invest more money into advertising than I am going to generate from software sales. But I guess it is a risk one has to take.

 My biggest decision has been if I should brand my software under the Tenacious Creations name or use a new name. To that extent I having even researched some over names. I was shocked to see how many of them already have domains registered with that name. No web site there, just people holding onto the domain name hoping to make a quick buck. That is where Tenacious Creations has an advantage, it has been registered for a few years and is easy to remember. The down side is it is difficult to spell and easy to misspell.

 Next is a logo, I don’t really have a logo for Tenacious Creations. Unless you count the coyote.

 In any case it looks like learning about marketing is going to be an interesting adventure. Plus it should make for some good blog posts. I plan to post what I learn so maybe other people can learn from my successes and failures. I hope I get a lot of comments and suggestions from you the readers.

a

 Well I thought I better write a quick update as nothing has changed on this site for a while. As some of you might remember I was working on some software to work with AdSense a while back. Well I am happy to report that a company, that I can not name (nondisclosure agreements and all), and I are currently negotiating the sale of that software.

 Due to the fact of that software running on this site and the legal negotiations I have been very reluctant to post anything. In fact I cleared this post with my legal team before posting it.. I will try to keep you my loyal readers updated as much as I can as things progress.

a

 If you have been following my blog, you know that I have repeatedly reported on how evil FaceBook is.

 You may also know that I had disabled my profile on FaceBook. Well if you know me on FaceBook you may of noticed that I did indeed re-enable my profile a couple months ago. Now I know this sounds a little bit hypocritical. Well the reason is I was coerced into developing a couple of FaceBook applications with a business partner.

 These applications (which I will not name) did quite well and generated some decent income. They derived most of their income from data mining and selling the information gathered from our users. All through the process i did not feel right about doing this. I tried to convince myself that this was okay. My partner would say things like “They are going to call you a prick anyways, they might as well call you a rich prick.”.

 For a while I somehow managed to settle my conscious on this. But always in the back of my mind I knew it was wrong. Hell I used to be one of those guys developing encryption software so people had the tools to protect their privacy. Now here I was invading the same privacy I once was trying to protect. In some ways I felt like I did indeed sell my soul.

 Now don’t get me wrong I do not think making money is evil. But I do think it should be done in an honourable way. I felt like a spammer by using peoples personal information in a profitable way. Sure I didn’t take their information, I didn’t force them to reveal so much about themselves. Its not my fault that they don’t know any better. I mean I don’t even know them so why should I care?

 Well I still do not know why I care and why it bothered me so much. However I am happy to annouce that as of 13:00 h today I have sold off all my interests in these FaceBook applications. I will no longer be developing FaceBook applications.

 Maybe it was dumb to get out of a money making enterprise. Maybe I just don’t want success. In any case I feel much better about myself now.

 I was tempted by the dark side, lured by the money. However I am a JEDI and will never turn to the dark side.

a

 Contrary to the fact that there has not been a new post in a long time, Tenacious Creations is still alive. I was temporarily overwhelmed with the completion of several projects all at once. Not being the most organized person on the planet my life was completely overwhelmed.

 I was starting to feel like I was on the same road to burn out that I had followed once before. Things were going really well yet chaotic in my life. I could barely find my desk beneath the paper and other assorted items that had built up upon it. I seem to have the problem of once I get started into a field of work I get totally absorbed by it, and nothing else seems to matter. This in itself is a very unhealthy behavior.

 By chance I was talking with a friend of mine. My friend told me that he had this book and audio series that I really needed to read and listen to. I politely told him, “Hey man I don’t have time to brush my teeth let alone read a book.”. My friend being a very calm and collected individual calmly replied to me “That is exactly why you NEED to listen to this and read the book.”.

  The book was titled “Getting Things Done” by David Allen. It is known by many people on the web as “GTD“. Well I started reading it (still haven’t finished it completely), and listening to the audio CDs (I have finished these). Well I am not going to tell you things like it has revolutionalized my life or made me a millionaire. But I can tell you that it has allowed me to have a clean desk – everyday. I now also have an excellent reference filing system. In fact for the first time ever (that is with out having an executive assistant) I can find things that I have filed, and have an awesome method for filing things that I want for reference.

 The Getting Things Done Book has also allowed me to maintain an empty in box. Not only that it has trained me to not use my entire office as an in box. I not only get things done in my professional life but also things I want to get done around the house. It has taught me how to set up and use a tickler file (the best thing ever), to process items that need to be processed at a later date. But the best thing ever is it has doubled my ability to be creative and come up with new ideas. I highly recommend you check into it if you are constantly disorganized.

 Getting things done or “GTD” seems to be really popular in the techie geek world even though it emphasizes the use of low tech means. Now if you don’t know about GTD then the next little bit may not mean a lot to you. But currently all my list are paper based and the only high tech means I use is e-mail. David Allen recommends to start low tech. Complicated systems do nothing but steer you away from using the GTD system.

 So for about the past two weeks I have been using low tech means to follow the GTD system. It has worked great. I am getting more accomplished than I ever have before. My mind is much more free to come up with creative ideas. I don’t feel over burden by the enormous work load I have been shouldering. More important than all that I am now able to blog again.

 Whats next on my horizon. Well I am hoping to upgrade some of GTD practices to my old Tungsten E Palm Pilot while I await the arrival of my new Palm TX with wireless keyboard. I am in the process of giving Tenacious Creations a make over, so look for a new site look soon. I have a bunch of posts written that will begin appearing on Tenacious Creations. The Tenacious Creations Word Press AdSense Plug in will become publicly available in the next couple of weeks, as well as a couple other helpful word press plug ins that I have written. So in short the future looks bright for Tenacious Creations. I hope that you my loyal readers will continue to read and respond to my post. Sorry to the long absence of regular posting.

a