Pastrommy [dot] Com

Archive for November, 2008

It’s been quite some time since I opened my design business and I tell you, it has been quite the learning experience. You can read and read about how to do things but there is no better teacher than experience. One of the biggest things I’ve learned to keep customers coming back is getting to know them, what they are doing online, and how they like the work done. That is one of the premier advantages of owning a small business opposed to a larger company. People know small businesses are more about quality than quantity.

Getting personal with your customers doesn’t mean you have to know their life story. You could start by ending your e-mails with “Have a great day!” or “I hope things are going well for you!”. While these seem like simple, everyday phrases, people love to hear them. The thing is, bigger businesses don’t say things like that. That is because the businesses are paying support representatives to be robots. They are told to answer the question and ask for more, that’s it. When you own a small business and are more often than not your own customer support, take the time to write a little more. You may find customers coming back more frequently.

Here are some more business tips: Top 5 Business Tips

I came across a pretty cool Firefox addon a couple weeks ago called Flagfox. The addon displays a country flag depicting the location of the current website’s server and provides quick access to detailed location and webserver information.

Why is this important to webmasters? Well, it’s not that big of a deal really. There is some debate amongst search engine experts as to whether server location effects search results. It is, however, a known fact that domain extensions affect search engine results, especially for Google. For example, the domain pastrommy.us will be higher in the search engine rankings for users submitting the query from inside the United States. The same goes for .ca, .uk, and so on.

Either way, it’s up to you whether you want to run the risk of lower SERP’s because of your web hosting location. I’ve found a very reliable host located in Canada that I’ve decided to stick with despite the possible altercations.

Today I discovered something mildly hilarious. My school runs some educational software called Desire2Learn on a web server in order to manage classes. It’s basically a way for students to connect with their teachers over the internet. The funny part is that the server is hosted in Canada. You would think a state school with government grants and the like would be putting the money back into the United States economy. What ever happened to logical thinking?

One important part of search engine optimization is making sure your URL’s aren’t competing with one another. The URL “pastrommy.com” is different than “www.pastrommy.com” according to search engines. Since search engines are the most important traffic source, you better submit to their standards.

It doesn’t matter so much whether you choose to attach the “www.” or not but it is very important that you pick one or the other. Not choosing whether to append the “www.” or not means that your web pages will be spidered with and without the prefix. What does this mean to you? It means you’ll be competing with yourself! It’s hard enough to rank on competitive keywords so why make it harder.

So how do you fix it? Wordpress couldn’t make it easier. In fact, if you wanted to, you could totally forget you ever read this post and you would be perfectly fine. Wordpress automatically changes your URLs according to your settings.

For example, if your settings look like this:

Then when someone types “computermemoryinfo.com” into their browser, they are automatically redirected to “www.computermemoryinfo.com”. It is very important that everyone sees the same URL.

What if I’m not running Wordpress? If you’re not running Wordpress, you’ll need to make a file named .htaccess in the root directory and insert the following code.

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^YOURDOMAINNAME\.com$ [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.YOURDOMAINNAME.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Voila! You now have a single URL that all visitors see!

My name is Eric Stromsodt, but you can call me Strommy. I’m a 19 year old college student at South Dakota State University majoring in Electronic Engineering Technology. I’ve been working with computers since the age of 5 and first started my online business ventures around the age of 13. Since then, I have started my own web design company, launched multiple social networks, and had more trash websites than I know what to do with. If trash websites were food, I could probably solve world hunger. Unfortunately, they are not food. I’m beginning to dabble in affiliate marketing in the hopes of never having to work a nine to five job. We’ll see how that goes. If it works out, my readers will be the first to know.

Here I am, starting yet another blog. I’m not going to lie, I absolutely despise blogging and writing in general. However, I’m taking an alternative approach to this blog. Instead of just a sappy blog about life and its problems, I figure I’ll use this site to track my success as a businessman online. Whether it turns out to be decent content or not, at least I’ll have a record of my accomplishments and the methods I used to get to each level. Hopefully these posts will also give you, the reader, an idea of how to make cash online.

Anyways, welcome to Pastrommy [dot] Com. I hope I give you some insight to the world of online business and the life of a young entrepeneur.