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A good lesson learned.

March 27, 2005 by Aaron

This weekend I learned several good lessons. While meeting with a potential client, who became a client, they clued me in on a bit of advice about how to present myself. If you have been to this site before, my tagline used to be “Ramblings of the Village Idiot”, but I have since changed it to “Entrepreneur Extraordinaire” thanks to Jan’s advice.

See, the way we present ourselves to the world, gives people certain first impressions. By my having the tagline, even in jest, suggesting that I am the Village Idiot, it can put people off immediately, and diminish in their eyes, the quality of what I say. Even though my posts here are often meant to be taken tounge-in-cheek, that same feeling can be carried over to other areas of my life online. So from this, I’ve decided to label myself, at least here on this site, in a more positive light. This should not only give me a more positive view of myself, but also let others know that I do know what I’m talking about on certain topics.

I learned another important lesson this weekend about the value of your services, and offering fair value. In the last few months, I’ve been attempting to launch a new brand of hosting called Nerfix Hosting. This brand is catered more to the global community, those looking for higher resources for lower prices. Targeting those who are perhaps, a little more web savvy, and don’t require the hand-holding that local clients often need. Well, it has been a rough few months, with only 2 paid hosting customers signing up. This was a bit of a discouragement, but I still kept heart. I decided that I wanted to have a special of sorts, to entice users to sign up, even if at a small loss, to start building a client base for the brand.

I thought about lowering the price of the plan to a couple dollars a month, but then I though that it would be a bad idea. Part of what Jan told me on Friday, I was already figuring out for myself on Thursday. People place a certain value on a certain price level. For example, my normal hosting rate for Nerfix is $7.77/mo. So potential customers have a preconceived notion of what they value as $7.77/mo worth of hosting. If I were to lower the price to $1-2/mo, they would have an even lower notion of the quality of hosting, just due to the price level of the plan.

So I decided to keep the standard price at $7.77/mo, and offer a coupon code for 75% off the regular price. I advertised this in several forums, and did not post it on the site. Now these same potential customers saw that I was offering a hosting plan with the value of $7.77/mo, at the price of $1.94/mo. That was enough of a bargain that 5 people signed up within the last 2-3 days. That is twice as many had signed up in the last 2-3 months!.

So, I guess the point of this post is, people have a preconcieved notion of the value of things. Whether it is the value of a person, or the value of a service/product. You need to meet that preconcieved value, by offering a fair value, whether it is how you present yourself professionally, or how you price your services.

A fairly productive week

March 19, 2005 by Aaron

Well, I cant come up with a clever title for this entry, but it is accurate. I’ve had a fairly productive week this week. I got a lot of work done on my amishgeek.com site, as well as getting UtariaMail up and online. I’ve also re-tweaked my Image Up free image hosting site, and became a ClickBooth publisher for Image Up and my Get A Forum sites.

I still need to finish getting Elim’s website re-done in MXR, as well as play “Bill Collector” for a few other clients who need to pay for this next year of hosting.

Why do I do this?

March 15, 2005 by Aaron

I’m 22 years old, and I’m still doing all nighters like I was 18… Man, I need to stop doing this. Around 10pm, some friends of mine called, and were going to perkins. So I joined them, had a muffin, some pie, and a couple cups of coffee. Got home around 11:30pm, and plopped down on the computer to work on some websites.

I re-did some more work on my amishgeek.com site, I still need to fix my media gallery script for that site. I also did some work on a website for my church back home (Elim Mission). I’m re-working their site to use MXR as well.

I also had a good conversation with LadyLinux over AIM, that went until about 3am. We talked about all sorts of geeky stuff, and then moved on to talk about spiritual things (God, Jesus, the Bible etc). All in all, it was a cool conversation.

Well, its 5:30am now, and I have to work on campus at 8am. So it looks like I’m just gonna stay up. Thank goodness for caffeine, too bad I don’t have any at my house right now

How much wood…

March 12, 2005 by Aaron

Oi! It’s been a long, yet fruitful, day. At 10, I had a meeting with a client, and helped walk them through using Site Studio to put their site together. Then I headed over to my friend Caleb’s house to help him and his family cut wood. Their house is heated by in floor heating that is heated by a wood burning boiler in their back yard. So Caleb and I were out with the chainsaws cutting up 9-10ft logs into 2-3ft chunks while his dad used the tractor/bucket to carry the wood over to the wood pile.

All in all we spent probably 5hrs out there working, digging logs out of the snow/ice, cutting them, and stacking them. My arms, legs, and back are pretty sore, and I know I’ll definately be feeling it in the morning. But I enjoyed the work, I need to get more excersize, and there is just something about doing physical labor outdoors that makes you feel that much more alive. Plus, I like Caleb’s family, they’re all pretty cool. Plus, they cook really good food. )

After Calebs, I went to Church at 6:30, Pastor Sunny preached out of Ephesians, and we talked about ‘predestination’ and what it really means in Ephesians 1:5. Too many people look too deeply into what Paul meant by ‘predestined’, when all he was trying to say was that God loves us so much, that he chose us, and chose to save us, even before he created us.

Well, after church, a bunch of us went up to Country Lanes to go moonlight bowling. I didn’t bowl, and just watched/hung out with everyone. Now I’m back home, thinking to myself that I need to invest in a Hot Tub to relax my sore muscles.

I guess I’ll just have to do physical labor more often to get myself in shape, so I’m not this sore afterwards…

TGIF?

March 11, 2005 by Aaron

Well, today was a semi-average Friday for me. I woke up around 9:30, wishing I would have woke up earlier and not hit snooze half a dozen times. I quickly got dressed, ate some breakfast and went down to “Superior Street Fitness”. They are a fitness club in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Duluth. I received a phone call from them yesterday offering me a free tour, and a discount on their membership. Well, I went for the free tour, but haven’t signed up for the membership yet, they want $20/mo with an 18-month contract.

The fitness center there isn’t that bad, and walking through it makes me want to start getting back into shape. I really haven’t done any kind of strenuous activity since High-School. Dang, that was 4 years ago! Yeah, I really need to start working out. Maybe I’ll get a membership there… I should probably check out the other places in Duluth to see what else is available. If I’m going to be paying to join a fitness club, I’d like to be able to swim…

After the tour, I spent the day working on the computer. I didn’t get much done, other than re-installing some more programs from after my hard drive crash a few days ago. I really hope I can still recover my quickbooks files, as I don’t want to re-do the last 6 months of accounting. (Note to self, make backups, and KEEP THEM ELSEWHERE) I’m not too worried, I just need to hook my old hard drive up now and copy the data over to my new drive.

I had a meeting with a customer about a website I’m putting together for her organization. Unfortunately, when I met with her at Newtech, Jim had switched up his wireless network, so I couldn’t get on with my laptop, so I couldn’t go through anything with her, and Jim wasn’t there to help me out. I’m going to have to have words with him.

Well, I just got back from my friend Koz’s dorm room on campus. We watched a couple episodes of Band of Brothers. That is a really sweet mini-series about the 101st Airborne division in WWII. Those were some amazing soldiers.

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