Asking for Money

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Category : Business Topics

Wait Wait Wait… this should be called “Do Your Job, Tell Your Story, Ask for Money”.

I just met with someone that is in charge of donations for a hospital. The hospital has over 160 beds and they give over millions of dollars a year in free services. They provide the free services by donations given to the hospital’s foundation.

My new friend is in charge of raising money for this organization. And after visiting with him for almost an hour, I realized that he has the same problem most organizations have. He doesn’t have a problem with his internal operations. His problem, like most organizations, is they aren’t good at telling they’re story.

Fundraising is a three step process:

  1. Do the work your customers expect and make sure they’re happy
  2. Tell the success stories
  3. Ask for the money

Like all the other great organizations that aren’t well known, my friend is good at number 1 and number 3, but they haven’t been telling their story. In essence, it’s a marketing problem. Remember, no matter what happens, if you rely on fundraised money, you have to be good at all three of these. If you’re bad at any of them, all three suffer.

Advantages of Outsourcing Your Network Management

Category : Business Topics, Sales

Big or Small, computer networks can be complicated. And in almost every business, they’re always extremely important to your organization’s operations. Think about this, 5 hours of down-time can equate to 5 engineers being down. If those 5 engineers are being paid at an effective rate of $45 per hour, that’s a total cost of $1125. Additionally, if those engineers are doing work that they bill at $200 per hour, that’s a total opportunity-cost of $5,000. So, in summary, 5 hours of down-time costs a 5 engineer team $6,125.

Network management includes functions such as planning the design of the network, maintaining hardware and software, integrating new software and hardware, server upgrades, customizing applications, overseeing the resources, supporting the users, defending the network from hackers, and trouble shooting any problems.

Maintaining your own network can be a real headache. As shown earlier, it can be a very expensive headache. Outsourcing your network management is a viable alternative. Here is a list of the advantages of outsourcing your network…

Specialization Pays
Outsourcing network management can save you money by utilizing people with optimal skills in your area of need. These people can attack tasks and create innovative solutions quickly and efficiently. They can also use their expertise to alter your network so that such problems may be avoided in the first place. Doing this helps minimize costly mistakes.

A Lot of Skills for One Price
Our engineers have a vast knowledge in how networks operate. This means they can set up, run, and successfully trouble shoot. They know the ins and outs of networking including database management, network security, hardware, and specialized software. When you outsource network management, you are hiring our entire wealth of knowledge at one low price.

Different Points of View
When you outsource your network management, you get different points of view as to how the network should be setup, executed, and repaired. These different points of view help to create a comprehensive plan, which produces a more successful launch, better maintenance, and less downtime for your network.

There are COSTS for Having Employees
Hiring a consultant is not as expensive in the long run as you may have thought. Take into consideration the expenditures you wave by procuring a consultant versus an employee; you don’t pay taxes, insurance, vacation, sick days, etc. Additionally, this type of environment forces information to be shared among many people. This means you don’t have the realized transition cost incurred that you might if your employed technician were to seek alternative means of employment.

Make Sure it Functions Properly
Believe it or not, network engineers like when the network runs smoothly, no problems to fix and no reason for extra billing. So, there are always extra preemptive measures taken to verify the health of the network.

Constantly Updating Their Skills
Network management professionals are dedicated to learning about all the new technologies. This means that your network will benefit from our technicians self-motivation to stay abreast with the changing technologies. This professional development is usually at a cost NOT billed to you. Whereas, if you have internal help, you almost always have to pay for professional development.

Post 2 – Monetize Your Blog

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Category : Business Topics, Monetize Blog

From Feb 7, 2007 until February 13, 2007 – 8.5 Hours
So, as some of you have seen, I’ve registered www.RJMartino.com and moved my blog to a different server. One thing that I’ve done is registered the name for 10 years. Search engines recognize this as a more “permanent” web site. This helps with “natural” search engine ranking. Registering and Setting up the domain was the easy part.

After the domain name was setup and the server was configured, I spent 8.5 hours moving the files and the database over to the new server. I also upgraded to the latest version of wordpress and upgraded all of my plug-ins.

Currently I’m using the following plug-ins:

  1. Akismet - SPAM control
  2. Feedburner Feed Replacement – Help users find the RSS feed
  3. Related Posts – posts related posts at the end of each post
  4. Text Link Ads – to publish ads from text-link-ads.com… CLICK THIS LINK IF YOU WANT TO USE TEXT LINKS
  5. WP-ShortStat – to view short statistics on my blog

After the upgrade my permalinks didn’t work correctly. I found out it was because the .htaccess wasn’t moved correctly. I removed my old SPAM control plug-in (it wouldn’t work with WordPress 2.1) and started using Akismet. From the articles I’ve read, it seems pretty sophisticated.

And lastly, I’ve removed my photo gallery (Gallery2 is what I was using). I’ve decided that I’ll start using flickr. I was a flickr user back when it wasn’t cool to be a flickr user.

This is another article in the “Monetize Your Blog” category and although we haven’t done a lot to make more money (we have only inserted an affiliate link for Text Link Ads) we are now up-to-date with our software and we can use the latest plug-ins with no problem.

We’ve also registered the domain name to increase visibility and awareness. And we’ve moved to a more stable server.

Any technical project requires a stable infrastructure… and that’s what we’ve done. We’ve stabalized our infrastructure. After 8.5 hours, we have a stable infrastructure.

Post 1 – Monetize Your Blog

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Category : Monetize Blog, Personal, Web 2.0

I’ve been making changes to my blog for a number of reasons. But one of the reasons is because I’m going to try and monetize the blog. Currently it doesn’t make any money, not directly. I hope that some of my “technical” articles have resulted in new service contracts for iProv, but either way, I haven’t personally seen a check for this site.

I’m going to keep everything public and feel free to ask any questions, I’ve making RSS feeds more visible. I’ve always been a big advocate of RSS feeds but I’ve never really “advertised” the ability.

I’ve also added the ability to leave a donation via paypal… really… EVERYTHING HELPS… It takes time to write a blog and I’m hoping my blog isn’t going to be so much of a “journal” but more about information and a knowledge base. Just click on the page that says “Donate to RJsWeblog”

I’ve added Google Adsense to show advertising to my main links. I will get a small royalty each time the link is clicked… SO CLICK THEM.

I’ve added “Recommended Amazon Stuff” so that if you order from that link, I’ll make a small referral fee. Yeah, small. But I get to choose what is “recommended.”

And lastly, I’ve added text-ad-links.com to the right hand side, these ads will also be published in the RSS feed as soon as I do the WordPress upgrade. I recieved $100 in free advertising just for signing up as publisher as well :)

I’ve reorganized some of my link categories too. I like to think I’ve organized them in order of interest.

I’ve got a list of other changes I’m going to make but I’m only spending about 2 hours a week on making the changes. The other time is going toward writing and my “real job.”

I’ll try to keep track of how much time I take as well.

Hopefully this weekend, I’ll upgrade from WordPress 1.5.2 to WordPress 2.1. Wish me luck.