“Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven” -John Milton, Paradise Lost

“I’m not your boy.” -Emory Rowland

One week has passed since I traded my SEO Manager title for full time entrepreneur. I want to report back to you some things I’ve learned over just the past seven days. Some great wins along with a few defeats came my way. Here’s what is going through my mind along with some lessons learned and discoveries.

Doubts

Not overwhelming doubts but they have appeared. Can I actually succeed? I have told my wife not to worry, that I will make it happen. Talking about my trials and successes with you here will force me to stay accountable-hold me to it folks!

A little early to feel like Gary Cooper in High Noon

Making a Good Living

In the kickoff post, I didn’t mention what I would actually be doing and what my plan was—I know you thought I didn’t have a business plan and I forgive you. It turns out that being underestimated by others can be a strong success driver. I hope my competitors continue to underestimate me. In fact, if you are a competitor, you do realize I’m just some bored, unemployed, blogger right?

For some perspective, I’ve been behind the doors of an agency managing SEO client and cost per action campaigns for four years. During my off time, I’ve been tweaking Clickfire.com and building out other sites (can’t wait to tell you about these). Yeah, I love this stuff so much, I do it in my spare time at home.  I also feel like I’ve tightened up my affiliate marketing and social media optimization sensibilities.

So here I am on my own. What am I doing? A lot of my friends assume I’ll be setting up shop and trying to sell SEO services to whomever I can. Not exactly. SEO consulting or any kind of consulting for that matter can be a great way for established experts to make a living doing what they enjoy. For those with years of proven results and a network of industry contacts, this track becomes even more tempting.

But SEO consulting has its problems.

• Control – the most obvious drawback is that while the consultant may be working from home with flexible hours, he’s helping someone solve their business problems, that is, working for someone, that is, having a boss, that is, being told what to do. He will never get full credit for his contributions. Recommendations will be compromised and the consultant can easily be blamed for a VP’s mistakes.
• Sales, support and administrative burdens – A consultant could farm most of these tasks out but my sense is that the risk of being dragged into stuff other than figuring out what the client’s problem is and solving it will never be very far away.
• Limitations – I suppose there is no limit to what a client might be willing to pay. If a consultant’s skills are truly valuable, why is the consultant not deploying them for himself? I realize this doesn’t work for every industry, but with SEO, the little guy can compete with the big guy, which is one reason I so dearly love SEO and which leads me to what I really want to do as an entrepreneur.

I Don’t Want to Make a Good Living

I want to make a killing. My business will use organic search, paid media and email marketing strategies to develop and monetize web properties through advertising agreements. I don’t want to share specific targets or goals, at least not yet, but I’m looking at a time frame of one year to judge success and whether I want to continue. I will be doing some SEO consulting for select clients but I’ll stay devoted to the freedom and rewards of making my own business a success. Such as:

• Control over all major business decisions - freedom from being forced to observe the fruit of bad decisions warned about
• Ownership of all properties – 100% equity, zero company politics
• Profits go to me – (see org chart)
• Responsibility – I kind of like the idea of having no one to blame

Takeaways from the Week

• Work with partners, not for bosses – I love all of the partners and contractors I work with. If you don’t like working with someone, don’t.
• Get away and think – Escaping to a place of solitude gave me an opportunity to do what other entrepreneurs may not be able to do inside the office: thinking.
• Contracts are your friends – Sign a contract before investing time in any project
• Think big – why settle for the egg when you can have the chicken? Or the hen house? Why not the farm?
• Don’t spend too much time on social media, but definitely spend time. It’s beautiful.
• Listen to loud music while you work - the others won’t matter as much.

Good Morning Everyone!

Today is is an exciting day for me. It’s my first day on my new job of working for myself. I can already see that there is a big difference in working for a boss and being the boss. Another thing that strikes me about my first day on the job is how different certain things are from my previous job.  I’m getting the feeling that maybe I have been missing out on some benefits. Am I totally off base or could this be true?

New Org Chart

Let’s get one thing straight. I’m in charge.

New Office Staff

I love the people I worked with at my previous job, but not nearly as much as my better half/bookkeeper.

New Office Space

This is pretty much where world domination will occur.

New Company Switchboard

I challenge anyone to show me a better solution.

New Commute

Traffic consists of the ottoman and any clothes or objects dropped on the carpet.

New Accounting Department

I’ve been using QuickBooks for years and love it.

New Server

• Intel 3210 Processor – Quad Core
• 4GB Ram
• 2 x 500GB HDD SATA
• Raid Card (Raid 1)
• CentOS 5.x 64bit – cPanel/WHM with Fantastico
• 2000GB Bandwidth
• 5 IPs
• Fully Managed

Stare at those stats for a second… Yeah. It’s all good. I stumbled onto a dedicated server about a month ago and will be writing more about this subject later. Not having a good dedicated box had been holding back my business back more than I had realized.

New Smoking Policy

Nuff said.

New Bandwidth Usage Policy

If I had a boss, trust me, I wouldn’t be able to hear him. It’s going to be loud. I mean loud, brother.

New Company Car

I like the black one.

New Coffee Maker

Don’t even think about becoming the Foursquare mayor of this joint.

New Dress Code

I don’t wear pajamas.

New Salary

No complaints so far :)

I’m sitting there conversing with Sarah about an important financial transaction and just as things start to get heated, I realize she is a “Virtual Agent.”

I walked into Lowes and was greeted by the grim reaper. Oh, it’s Halloween, I recalled. Yet, the backdrop was a bunch of Christmas trees with price tags attached. Yeah, if you say so.

I look forward to celebrating Christmas… but not in October! Let’s get Halloween and Thanksgiving out of the way first, Lowes, okay?

Is the U.S. economy so bad that we have to fast forward 3 months ahead to Christmas?

McDonald’s feels the pain of Atlanta traffic and takes the opportunity to do some clever advertising.

Anyone who lives north of Atlanta and works in the city likely drives in via the Ga. 400 (Georgia 400) toll road. You guessed right if you imagined that driving Ga. 400 home from work at 5:30 on a summer afternoon is not something that most suburban Atlantans look forward too. It’s flat, hot and backed up with traffic–a great time to catch up on your talk radio or get into a mindless conversation with a salesman.

My Mom sent me this news that today, drivers will be able to come home from work via Ga. 400 without having to throw a couple of quarters into the basket at the toll booth from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. on June 3 thanks to McDonald’s.

The Atlanta Business Chronicle elaborates:

To mark the launch of its new line of McCafe beverages, the Greater Atlanta McDonald’s Operators Association will treat commuters to free toll payments and free specialty coffees. McDonald’s owner/operators will pick up the tab for drivers passing through Ga. 400 toll booths and will hand out free “Be Our Guest” cards for complementary McCafe coffees at Greater Atlanta McDonald’s Restaurants.

The gift cards are redeemable for a free small hot McCafe coffee or a free medium iced McCafe coffee.

“Just as our new McCafe beverages offer an escape from the daily grind, we’re offering a free pass for commuters eager to get to their destinations Wednesday afternoon,” said John Tamasi, president of the Greater Atlanta McDonald’s Operators Association, in a statement. “We want to thank our guests with free toll payments during those two busy hours on Wednesday and invite these commuters to our hundreds of local restaurants to enjoy an iced or hot McCafe beverage.”

Why the excitement about this? No matter how many bailouts and stimuli the U.S. economy sustains, I’m not so sure I’ll be buying my lattes at fast food restaurants. Never-the-less, I think this is an excellent way to advertise a product. Atlanta drivers can be comforted that there actually will be a positive about the trip home on Ga. 400 today, albeit small. This little McDonald’s freebie might even gain some ground toward replacing the blaring voices from the drive-in window speaker that linger in the mind with a warm feeling inside that transcends expresso.

I’ve been thinking deeply for a long time about the future of the term “webmaster” and wanted to express some thoughts. Most people recognize “webmaster” as a term from earlier Internet history that describes the activities of the person responsible for a Web site. I’ve previously defined it this way:

One responsible for designing, developing, and managing all aspects of a website’s content, connectivity and human resources.

I’ve always thought of myself as a webmaster, despite the unattractiveness of the term. Today, we don’t usually call ourselves “masters” of anything. Perhaps this is due to humility. Perhaps political correctness. I don’t know. I left any discomfort I had with the word back in the nineties.

On the positive side:
Google has chosen to continue using the term in products like “Google Webmaster Central” and “Google Webmaster Tools.” They are still calling the sacred SEO document the Google Webmaster Guidelines. If Google does it, it must be cool, right?

Causing me concerns:
Webmaster.org recently sold for $50,000, yet sites having “webmaster” in the domain don’t seem to be as popular as they once were. The approximate average monthly search volume according to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool for “webmaster” on exact match is reported at only 33,100.

With the advent of 3G and smartphones, the webmaster is no longer the mysterious guy behind a desktop or in an air-conditioned datacenter pulling switches. He’s at the coffee shop.

Blog software is another factor. The fact that anyone can get a WordPress or Blogger weblog up and running in minutes with a really nice looking pre-made theme makes coding and maintenance less of an issue. Most bloggers probably don’t think of themselves as webmasters.

What about the social media user? He doesn’t have to design, develop or manage anything except relationships. If he happens to be a poweruser, he may control a lot more traffic than the average webmaster.

These are some random entertaining comments I picked up from Digg users that show some insight into their view of the word:

Who still uses the term “webmaster”?

I remember the first time I read some “webmaster” complaining that Firefoxe’s [sic] rising popularity was making more work for them, and “breaking” all their pages. (Fake tear dabbed from my eye.) I almost burst a blood vessel. Firefox isn’t Netscape 4.7, people.

I haven’t used the “webmaster” term in years.

Well the term “Webmaster” died in 1998 so web developers had to come up with something legit sounding.

Does anyone else absolutely abhor the term “webmaster”?

…that’s what they called you 8 years ago if you knew HTML.

Any web guy that calls himself a “webmaster” probably isn’t a master of anything. The term “webmaster” has become a translation for the word “amateur.” The web has diversified into so many different realms that webmaster is no longer meaningful (was it ever though?)

The term “webmaster” just makes me cringe. “Look Ma, I’ve mastered the web!”

Never call yourself a webmaster. Why people still insist on using that terrible term is beyond all comprehension.

I thought webmasters were extinct.

You can tell Syria is behind in Internet technology when they use terms like “webmaster.” In the US we stopped using that term when they realized it made them sound like Spider-Man villains.

…the fact that he calls people that code and design for a living “webmaster”, proves that he is out of touch. he should go back to being a dungeon master like he was prior to writing this.

Dugg for use of the ancient term webmaster.

I don’t know what is going to become of the term “webmaster,” but I have an uneasy feeling about its future.

Sifting through some files on my PC, I found this letter that I wrote to my AT&T Broadband expressing the need for high-speed Internet service. The file is dated June 27, 2002. The note makes me remember the defeating sadness of 56k modem Internet life. Despite having to endure a painful Comcast outage or two, having a high speed connection these last several years has made my life much more productive and fun. I think it is beneficial for us who are fortunate enough to have a high speed connection to take a moment and remember from whence our slow past.

AT&T Broadband
P.O. Box 2127
Norcross, GA 30091

AT&T Broadband:

I am a current AT&T Broadband customer and operate a home-based business from my condominium complex. I am in need of a high-speed connection but have been unable to find out when the service will be available in my area. Over the course of about 5 years, I have been given various projections of when service will be available, but none have proved to be accurate. Can you advise me on when and if service will ever be available in my area?

Thanks for your time,

Emory Rowland

I’d like to thank Comcast for inspiring this post, without whom this would not have been possible.

It is one eerie evening here in the suburbs of North Atlanta, Georgia after the storm has passed. Earlier, my wife and I had gone out to the Flying Biscuit restaurant for a nice sizeable brunch. After being seated for a bit, we noticed the crashing and flashing and lights dimming, not an uncommon weather phenomenon for this part of the country during summer.

It got worse. Louder. Brighter. Soon the hissing of rain accompanied the meteorological medley and heads were turning away from eggs, bacon and biscuits to view the increasing ferocity of the storm. One group of people had occupied a table outside on the porch. I am honestly not sure what became of them.

Despite all this, the food was great. The waitress had a great sense of humor. We were having fun. The chair was even comfortable. I offered to pay in anticipation of the credit card clearing machine going down. I wasn’t about to wash my own dishes. The waitress happily accepted.

Umbrellaless, we trudged through the rain, thunder and lightning and managed to get home without being completely drenched. I had a lot of work to do. My wife and I had planned to launch our redesigned coupon site after having worked on it all day. I was looking forward to the launch. It would have been a good launch, I felt sure.

The next thing I know I’m staring at my pc. I opened my browser and nothing happened. Something wasn’t right with the lights on my modem. The wrong lights were blinking or not enough were blinking or they were the wrong colors—something! I began to get nervous. Not a good sign. I assumed that there was likely an outage due to the storm. My Comcast high speed Internet connection was operating at a speed less than that of competitors they sometimes make fun of in commercials. What I’d do for a 56k connection about now. I noticed the whirring cicadas outside for the first time in a while. They’d been out there every night, but I hadn’t heard them.

It was time to make the call to Comcast support and start unplugging and plugging and rebooting and holding. I needed to confirm that it was in fact, a Comcast network outage and that my modem had not been stricken by lightning in my absence. The support rep was friendly and didn’t ask me to unplug from my router as they often do.

“Besides the connection problems, how’s your day been going otherwise?”

I recognized the line from the other day from when I foolishly unplugged my modem to safely open a potential SPAM email (yeah, I need to upgrade my email client one of these days) and my connection went poof. I loathe that question. It was like asking someone being waterboarded how they were faring besides not being able to breathe.

It was around this time that I realized the television screen was black.

“Let me schedule someone to come out—ah, it’s a network outage.”

I felt better knowing that it was a larger problem, that others were facing the quiet like me, not getting work done and not playing multiplayer online games. Much better. But still, that eerie, powerless, useless feeling began overtaking me as I kept opening and closing my browser and seeing “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage” and thinking Web page is two words and Web should be capitalized. I guess the person who writes error messages didn’t know that. Such a trivial thought, but what was I supposed to think about during this severed connection.

Yes, it was an eerie evening even after the rain left. My wife and I cleaned and straightened up some items around our quiet condo. I tried turning on some music but neither of us could bring ourselves to enjoy the tunes we heard, the tunes that would sound much better under different circumstances of connectivity. We seemed to not know what to do or how to act. Perhaps we spent too much time on the Internet surfing, shopping, socializing, gaming and building Web sites?

“Let’s just spend some time together and talk,”

I finally suggested.

“Yes, let’s do that.”

Anonymous Webmaster asks…

Several of the Google AdSense ads on our site are showing a “page not found” error within the ad space. I have checked from multiple locations and still see the errors. Our ads are not showing in all cases. Can you advise as to how I can correct?

This error had been puzzling me until recently when I saw the problem on one of my own sites and had to do some debugging. The answer starts with Google AdSense Alternative Ads, which provides a way to display your own ads if Google cannot display an ad on your page:

Alternate ads allow you to utilize your ad space in the event that Google is unable to serve targeted ads to your page. By default, Google shows public service ads (PSAs) if no targeted ads are available.

To display an altnernate ad, users are instructed to specify a URL pointing to their alternate ad resource, which looks this way inside the AdSense code:

google_alternate_ad_url = http://www.example.com/docs/alternatead.html;

A further advanced feature allows webmasters to collapse their ad if there are no targeted ads available so that it takes up no page space. This URL is given as an example:

http://www.example.com/scripts/google_adsense_script.html

I discovered that in my haste, I had copied the example above and replaced “example.com” with my own site name. That should work, right? Nooo… because I left the directory “/scripts/” in the path  which made it point to a dead file instead of “google_adsense_script.html,” which lay in my root directory. 

To answer the original question, if you are seeing the ”page not found error” inside your AdSense units, it is likely caused by an invalid alternative ads path. Make sure your alternate ads URL path is pointing to the correct file location.

Remember that the page not found error only appears when Google cannot display an ad. It is difficult to test your fix because most of the time Google displays ads. If it displays an ad, it’s not looking for the alternative ad path and therefore not showing the error. ¿Comprende? 

Update: I have just discovered another way that the path gets messed up. When downloading the Google AdSense collapsing ad units script, Internet Explorer 7 truncates the file name by removing the “l” from the “.html” so this file:

google_adsense_script.html

Is saved on your desktop as this:

google_adsense_script.htm

Guess which browser I am using :)

As asked by Jules Letona…

Hello,

Great site! My name is Jules, I’m 23 yrs old. It would be great to become a webmaster my self. I have a very small hat per every responsibility you mention on Becoming a Webmaster Part 2. However, I have a basic knowledge of HTML and JavaScript. I was wondering in this day and age, is it necessary to learn the coding? I don’t know if I should continue to focus on HTML, JavaScript, DHTML, yadda etc, etc. or simply just focus on some type of code editor that will do all the coding for me.

Thank you for your time.

Jules,

Thanks for the kind remarks :)

You bring up a great question and an issue that I have struggled with along my webmaster journey. At one point in time, I felt sure that I was going to be spending a lot of my time writing code from scratch to develop new and exciting web applications to make the world a better place. As my webmaster skills progressed, it soon became clear that there were a lot of other developers out there who were better, faster and enjoyed solving coding problems more than I.

After learning a few things about myself, that I was more wired for right-brained creativity than left-brained analytics, I pursued other webmasterly skills that interested me. For one thing, I enjoyed writing so I researched and wrote a lot of content. I published the content on Clickfire and began watching my server logs to see what people were searching for and how they were arriving on my pages. It wasn’t long before I realized through tweaking the pages and links, I could influence the types and numbers of visitors arriving at my site from search engines. Many years later, I found myself doing SEO for large corporations.

So, my answer is to be guided by what really inspires you. Maybe the aspect of webmastering that excites you is not writing code but doing graphics, servers, domains, blogging or just a zeal to make money online. Dive into something and see where it takes you. You don’t have to learn all the coding languages out there. I do think that it is important to have a firm grasp of HTML. Editors are just fine as long as you are paying attention to the code. Knowing HTML will serve you well in whatever direction you take.

Let me know how things develop for you!

Best of luck,

Emory Rowland