Honest Marketing Secrets

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Recently my Mom and I drove 14 hours from home to Madison, Wisconsin for the holidays. We had lots of opportunity to talk and the subject turned to business and whether all the create-an-online-business hype was justified in any way. I had just received my copy of the Nitro Blueprint System in the mail and, since I had barely opened the box and hadn’t had a moment to review it, I brought it along for the trip, just in case.

My Mom started telling me all the reasons why she could never have an online business, why she had no good ideas, nothing she could sell and nothing she knew how to do that anyone else would be interested in, let alone want to spend money on. So I finally said, “Well Mom, shall we listen to the CDs in this new program from Nitro and see if there’s anything in there you could use?” She said “Sure, why not” and off we went with the 12 CDs that outline the entire system. And then, within about 15 minutes, a funny thing started to happen.

I kept stopping the CD. We were having a hell of a time listening to it. My Mom, who has been working in the same job for about 20 years and has expected to retire soon with little more than she started, began to have these sudden entrepreneurial seizures (I heard that term from David Ledoux at didyousmellthat.com). She kept getting more and more ideas for possible amazing products she could really help people with based on her 20 years of experience in her field. This was kind of freaking me out. [Just kidding, Mom, I wasn't really freaked out, well maybe a little, but in a good way! (aw crumbs, did I type that out loud?) ] I had not seen her so excited in years.

Here I had pre-judged the Nitro Blueprint System without having given it a proper review and my Mom was getting some of the best business ideas and entrepreneurial inspiration she’d ever had from it, and within 15 minutes, no less. [ yes, yes, OK, I was getting some great ideas too ]

Long story short, we managed to listen to the first 3 CDs during the trip, with long brainstorming sessions in between, and by the time we got to Wisconsin we had practically built a complete online business, with backend products and continuity systems. And to top it off, she was already planning to retire early based on her expected new income! (Don’t worry, I told her to hold her horses just a bit, but certainly encouraged her to maintain that interest level.)

Now, of course we have a lot of research to do and development as well, but the real point here is, this program really does have so much great information concentrated into one package that, frankly, you can’t go wrong getting it, no matter where you are in your development efforts. I am encouraging my Mom to actually buy her own copy of the Nitro Blueprint System so that she has the commitment to follow through based on making the investment herself. And if things continue the way they have been, I expect she really will be retiring sooner than she ever planned. If she follows the blueprint, she will certainly have a real shot at it and be off to a fantastic start, in my opinion. Click here to check it out.

Be well and have a great new year!

-Zack

PS- Of course I finished reviewing the entire program and am now completely convinced that the Nitro Blueprint System is worthy of your attention and your investment. Click here to check it out, I think you’ll love it!

UPDATE: The honeymoon is over, apparently. Since the new year arrived there have been a few posts by users having some possible big issues with Hostican. [post 1, post 2] I have not had any troubles with 2 of the accounts I’ve worked on, however, a BIG complaint that I have seen has to do with the hyper-sensitivity of their resource monitoring algorithm. If your site has a busy blog, or a busy forum, you may suddenly get a Hostican resource warning page instead of your web site. And I HAVE seen this on one account where a WordPress theme was using a particular image plugin and it was getting the warning page. So that was not good.

We did trace it back to a PHP configuration that was using 100% of memory and when we dialed it back the trouble went away, but the image plugin eventually had to be removed as it needed more memory than Hostican’s servers were going to permit. So there ya go.

While the support was helpful in getting the problem solved, the fact remains that I have never once used up resources with such a small WordPress blog on any of my other servers and this very account never had a single problem on the old server (to be fair, their old server was a VPS (Virtual Private Server) at Liquidweb, but this was one of over 100 accounts on a single VPS and still no problem on the Liquidweb VPS. I have no doubt that a shared hosting account at Liquidweb would also have no trouble with that blog since Liquidweb doesn’t oversell.).

Usually I stay away from any hosting companies that oversell unless they have a proven record for being a good company and my client absolutely, positively cannot afford anything better to get started. I had hoped that Hostican would be a good starter host for beginners and small business web sites and for the most part it probably is, unless you have a highly trafficked blog or forum.

So I am removing my links and recommendations for Hostican and will not recommend them unless they make significant changes to their resource use policy which, I feel, is way too stringent and makes their hosting useful only for small sites with no dynamic content (no blogs, no forums) that receive very little traffic.

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Hello! As you know, I don’t post to my blog too often and that’s because I usually spend a lot of time using the things I tell you about and only pass along the stuff that I really like. Well, guess what? I found something I really like!

I’ve been working with a Web hosting company for the last 5 months and they have surpassed my expectations every time. I’m pretty picky when it comes to the most important thing you MUST have in a good web host. What might that thing be? Glad you asked . . .

It’s customer service, of course. We expect that every web hosting company will have all the bells and whistles that their competitors have, and so the only things separating mediocre (or terrible) hosting companies from great ones is how well and quickly they respond to your request for help, as well as the quality of their educational materials.

I’m happy to say that, of all the companies I’ve dealt with in the past 8 years, this is one of the absolute best.

If you don’t really understand hosting, or know you should put up a web site and don’t know where to go, these folks have a wonderful support site with telephone access to real humans at all hours and great training videos embedded contextually in their control panel (the thing you use to manage your hosting plan).

Altogether they have won me over and I’m thrilled to be able to recommend them. I expect to be hosting many of my sites with them for many years to come.

Review their program even if you don’t think you’ll need it right away. It’s a great site to bookmark for future reference.

Hope your holidays are joyous!
See you in 2008!