The Road to Online Success - Words of Experience

Being prepared is not always enough, you also have to have the right mindset to be able to work in the right direction and to be able to overcome obstacles, cause no matter how prepared you may be, the high water may still wash out your home.

A few weeks ago we had a flood, not a literal flood, but we did manage to have the things we had worked on so hard for years get washed away.  On Memorial day in the USA, there was a bit of a problem at one of the Data Centers where our sites were located, but that’s not where the water started rising, it started rising right here at home.

We’ve got a pretty good backup system in place, or so we thought, where we have backups saved on our server, plus a backup drive on our local machine, redundancy is important right?  Having data in two places should guarantee that nothing should get washed away, right?

Well, in a word, no.

First we had a hard drive crash, our local backup drive crashed, and we were without backups.  On the Monday morning we figured we’d simply connect to the server and download some new ones.  But the server was acting up and we started looking at what was wrong.  Finally the server went down, and we tried to salvage data there.  Unfortunately, the server was a write off, and so was the remote backup drive.  Yes, the water was getting higher.

So we started looking for alternatives and started working on building the sites, by getting the “shell” ready for a re-launch.  We started re-building the sites on our local computer while our tech gurus got the server going again, but the last wave hadn’t rolled in yet….

The computer we had started the rebuilding on crashed.  Yes, the water was finally over our heads and we were about to drown, for even an excellent swimmer gets tired while being pushed at by the waves and pulled at by the undertoe.

Fortunately we didn’t drown, although it felt like we did.  We had to start from scratch, but we did manage to find a few things to help us along the way, we found ourselves some old design ideas that we were able to start with, we found some data here and there that were important to getting things back up again, we found our way, slowly but surely, to the surface and started again.  We’re building on higher ground this time, and we’ve got not only life rafts, but life vests as well.  Our backup strategy had taken quite a hit, so we started looking at that first, we’ve now got a quad redundant system in place that we hope will prevent anything from possibly going wrong again.

1. Backups on the remote server.
2. Backups on the local computer.
3. Backups on removable USB drive
4. Backups on dvd.

That should be enough, but we’re looking at other options as well.  The server was down for a few weeks, well, at least for some, the sites were accessible intermittantly by different people, and we were stalled a bit.  So what’s the next thing we can do to prevent future problems?  We’re working on it, a second server, and perhaps having that on a second host too.  A backup functioning server that will be ready to run at a moments notice, and a cooperative backup that will restore to this remote server as it gets backed up from the primary server.

But all of this costs money, needless to say, I think we’ll be busy for the next little while, refining our backup strategy, and getting it done better this time around.

Yes, be prepared, but be read yto go off in a different direction if you find you’re not going where you want to.

Ray

Be Prepared. It’s the boyscout motto and was probably MacGuyver’s motto as well. Part of any successful venture means you have to be prepared. There are many obstacles on any road trip, and many different sources of support and assistance. The one thing you may have to realize is that you’ve got to be prepared for success, no matter what it may mean to your personal life, cause, believe it or not, being successful can sneak up on you when you least expect it, and if you’re not prepared with what that entails, then you’ve missed something critical on your Road to Online Success.

Being Prepared for success means being ready to understand how your success will affect you, and if you’ve got an incorporated or registered business, how it will affect that. Depending on the laws in your respective local, you may have to start paying for different services that may have been free for a small up-and-coming company. You suddenly may have to start tracking the expenses a little more closely, understanding depreciation of equipment and how that affects what you can claim for your business. There are literally dozens of different laws that come into play in direct response to how successful you are. In my area, a person who is earning less than a certain amount can go without charging and keeping track of certain consumption taxes, but once you’ve reached that critical point, and you’re earning more than you expected, watch out, you now have to justify your activities over the year. Better to be prepared and have yourself set up to track this from the start.

Also Success can hit you in other ways as well, suddenly you have to pay a little more in taxes, and if you’re a “freelance” or “consultant” you may want to start thinking about paying lump sum installments throughout the year to make the hit at tax time feel a little less rough. You’ve got to think about what’s in store for the future, what to do when you get there, and what you should be considering before you get there as well.

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Success doesn’t just come on by just because you’re working towards it, you’ve also got to have a plan of action and realize where you might be lacking and take advantage of resources to cover whatever you might be missing. You may consider joint partnerships with others in a similar industry in which the partners are able to complement each other and fill in any gaps. But sometimes even that isn’t quite enough, or you’ve ran to your limit on some aspect of your abilities. One thing that marketers still like to do is use Articles for marketing, and I’ve got a friend who’s pointed out that no matter what your field is, there’s at least one or more person who’s got a problem in that field and you can help provide a solution for it. It’s called help articles, or step-by-step guides that will enable your readers to find the answers they’re looking for. Perhaps the answer is something you provide in your website, so you have a nice signature in your article with the link to your site. Also in your article, you shouldn’t be afraid to point people to other sources of helpful information. No, it may not link directly back to you, but it will help the reader, and they’ll remember who sent them, and naturally, they’ll come back and see what you have to offer as well.

Article marketing does require a certain ease with writing, and not everyone is very comfortable writing. Many people have the writing style that they may find turns people away, rather than keeps them intrigued, or they may only have enough energy to write a couple of times a year, rather than once a month or once a week that they feel they need in order to drive people to their websites. So what are they supposed to do, skip a beneficial way to promote their business? No, they use the tools available online to anyone who needs a little something.

Three effective sites to find a certain something to be written or created for you are Elance, Get a Freelancer, and Guru. At each of these sites, you can register for free and have an Article written for you, on just about any subject. You simply post a request on the board for an article on Plumbing, for example, and within hours you will find yourself getting a number of bids from everywhere in the world. People from all over will be ready and willing to ghost-write for you. This means that they’ll write the article, while you take the credit, and get the links you want and need for your site.

but it’s not just Articles that these sites are good for, there’s also people on there that will help you with just about any aspect of your business, be it programming a new user-interface, building a custom game for your site, or even building the site for you entirely from scratch. Different fields will bring different respondents. And each response will be slightly different from the others. You’ll be able to pick and choose from possibly dozens of creators for what you want, and can do it all for the lowest price, or the highest, all depending on your budget.

So make use of these tools, and promote your site in more that just the usual places. It’s not just Google Adwords, Yahoo Marketing or MSN that is available for your promotion, there are paper magazines that will publish your work if you ask and look into it, there are related sites who will trade banners and links, there are directories that will publish your articles and include you links. Look, see, listen, there’s more out there than you could possibly imagine.