AGn Designs

Sean is hoping to follow me down the road of being self employed and registering his business with the state of Delaware. He’s been looking into quite a few resources on how to do this successfully and realized that he’s uninterested in housing his business information with his current web hosting provider. He’d like to start up an in-house server which includes everything from his business website to an email server just so he can store all of his email in house, to be accessed no matter what happens to be going on with the Internet connection to the house.

I’ve helped him search for a few companies to help him out with this search and found a few resources that could help me with everything from email server support to your everyday IT solutions. The one that showed up almost instantly on my searches was fastteks.com, they offer a full range or IT solutions to meet your entire home and business needs. Their staff provides professional, high-quality service at affordable rates in the comfort of your home or business location. I’m sure if it ever gets to the point that we’ll need in-house support, we may consider giving them a call. For now, we’ll work on the in-house support by ourselves. Starting up a business can cost quite a bit of money with advertising and basic setup in general – spending the extra money for something we can figure out for ourselves seems a bit pointless at this point in time. Of course we’re not opposed to it by any means, we’re just the “Do It Yourself” kind of people.

I’m sure I’ve spoken about this particular site before, but people have trouble reading through Archives sometimes.  If you’re looking for a completely free resource that tells you everything you need to know about the Ins and Outs of web hosting, including pricing, best hosts and quick FAQ’s then head on over to Web Hosting Choice, a direct link would be http://www.webhostingchoice.com.  I’ve been going through a few of their different sites, mainly the Reseller hosting because I house all of my personal websites under one reseller account with a different company.  I know it seems a bit strange to take that route but it’s a security thing.  Never house your business email addresses on the same server as your clients, if the site happens to go down then there’s no way to get in touch with anyone – you know?

With the Holiday Season running full speed ahead, I’ve noticed a rise in people looking for design work so they can either revamp their sites for the new year, or give the gift of a new template for their friends blog. Either way I’ve been pretty busy but I know for sure that this isn’t going to last so I’ve been looking into a few different options to get my name out there a bit more. I’ve always taken the free advertising route, I’ve also spent quite a bit of money advertising with different outside companies as well. And personal advertising never really hurt anyone either. I’m starting to rebuild a database of people on one of my myspace accounts so I can get this domain out there again. Thanks to Google I’m down to a PR3 and that upsets me considering how much work I’ve put into this domain over the years. Either way I still have the business I’ve always wanted, I just need a bit more of it in order to buy that house of my dreams, you know?

So as usual I’ve been poking around some new and interesting ideas. The one that stood out in my mind (almost instantly) was junk mail. Millions of people get little notes and postcards in their snail mail and believe it or not, many people do actually READ the mail. Naturally the bulk of them throw things away before or even after reading it, but for those who did read it and are actually pretty interested, they’ll take it to the next step – this would mean typing in the URL or calling the phone number listed under the contact section in order to request more information.

I always wondered where to go with something like this. There has to be a huge jump in sales when you take this route, so I’ve gone ahead and began looking into consumer mailing lists. There are a few companies out there but based on statistics alone I’m considering WholeSaleLists because they seem to have their act together.  They’ve been in business for over 10 years and while that may not seem like much to many people when it comes to the Internet world that means you’ve been around for quite some time. I’m just unsure of whether or not they’re only snail-mail based, or if they have any email marketing strategies.  I’m sure I’ll figure it out at some point.  I just wonder how much they charge.