Art From Steel Ebay Store” />

We registered for our own eBay store last week and are in the process of populating it.

So far adding products is time-consuming but straightforward.  We’ve yet to uncover the advances store management tools yet but will be playing this by ear until we get the hang of it.

Unfortunately a lof of items listed are expensive to ship and I’m sure this will cost us sales.  We’ll be overcoming this by packaging a few items together as special promotions but this is a few weeks away.

We’ve added about 50 items so far and itend to add 5 - 20 each day until our complete catalog is listed here. 

Whilst sales from eBay would be great, we conside our eBay store as a compliment to our main Art From Steel site and hope it will bring us brand recognition and new site members. 

Vist the Art From Steel eBay Store Here

We weren’t 100% happy with our previous wordpress theme and have decided to upgrade it today.  We are much happier with the style and layout now - although we’ll be tweaking the greens to orange later in the week.

We discovered that our old ‘IsBlogged.com’ website had a number of security flaws and today we took the aggressive step of removing all spam blogs from it.

We’ve rebuilt the site using the lastest version of Wordpress MU and have filled it with 73 templates and 20 plugins.

If you are interested in having all the flexibility of Wordpress without the cost of hosting or or the time to set it up then visit the new IsBlogged.com site here.

For no discerible reason our Google Adsense accout was suspended today.

The only explanation we could possibly think of was that since registering for a US VPN perhaps Google believes us to be deliberately trying to hide our IP address when registering with them.

Fortunately we are not dependent on Google at all with any of our sites however, whilst the issue remains, a lot of these sites have gaping holes in them where adsense no longer is displayed.

Apparently we should have received notifiction from Google explaining the suspension but we certainly never received anything.

We are 100% certain that we’ve not done anything in breach of Google’s terms because all the sites that use adsense have been left dormant for many months as they’re not our big earners at all.

Now it’s a case of waiting a few days to be contacted by either a Google representative or (more likely) some automated email service to tell us what’s happened.

Our first instinct is to replace all adsense from our sites.  Google Adsense have twice now suspended accounts of ours without providing a reason and both times have been when the sites in question have not been modified in any way.

Whilst PlugandSave.com is doing incredibly well, we find that the platform it was built with is very inflexible and the site is very hard to update.

We are now working on a new site that will incorporate all the information from PlugandSave.com and will cover other energy-saving products and services such as energy-efficient lighbulbs, solar energy, e-books etc. 

We have now registered a domain name and have begun populating the site and modifying the template.  It should be complete and ready to launch within 5-6 weeks. It’s being built with Joomla 1.5 as we’ve gained a lot of experience using it.

We’ll update you once the design and content is ready.
 

We’re working in partnership with an established financial consultants in Thailand to generate leads.

Today we registered a new domain name and have installed a basic HTML template on it.  It will be 3-4 weeks before the site is completed as we’re docusing on two other sites as well.

We registered today with Mark Vurnum’s Lead-Generation Video Course and, based on the first 30 minutes of his tutoriual videos we are impressed and excited to get started.  It seems like the hardest part about lead-generation is finding businesses to buy leads and yet we’ve got this already finalized.

We’ll update you in a few weeks once the site is ready for inspection.

Twitter.com is an interesting new website that helps you keep updated about how your friends, industry gurus and businesses are doing.

The idea behind twitter is you add your friends to your list and get notified whenever they provide a news update.  These updates are limited to just 160 characters of text.  Socially you can use it to update all your friends with a phase such as "going to bed now" or similar mundanities however it’s being used now by internet marketers.

Many internet marketers now have their own Twitter accounts and keep their fans updated with promotions, weblinks etc. 

What’s nice is that the information is not being pushed at you too aggressively.  You can view these updates by logging in to Twitter, by syncronizing the messages with existing messenger applications, or by using custom software that lists your Twitter updates whenever you choose to view them.

We’ve seen Twitter used for shameless self-promotion e.g.  "only 15 more minutes until my special one-time-only offer finishes!!!!", for getting answers to questions (You can sent perivate messages between twitter accounts) and to update people on what websites a programmer is currently working on.

We now have our own Twitter account with the username"  truepotential and we update it perhaps once a day.  If you currently use Twitter please add us to see how our business develops.

There is a chance that Twitter will not grow too big.  The idea is quite a novelty for now but with the popularity of RSS subscriptions, email lists, podcasts, SMS advertising, social networking sites, messengers, voIP clients etc. Twitter may soon be yet another distraction that fails to really offer any value to it’s users. 

That said, we may be wrong, and Twitter could be the next big thing. 

Decide for yourself here

After 14 months of frustrations we are delighted to now have a US business bank account with a reputable bank.

This is extremely valuable to us because most of our clients are based in America and, undeniably the $US is the currency of e-commerce.

Aside from accepting bank transfers to our business name, we can now use Google Checkout as a payment processor and, should we choose to, we are one step closer to being approved for a merchant account.

We experienced problems today adding our business credit card to our PayPal account.

It eventually transpired that a company, we made a previous purchase from online, used our email address and credit card number to open a Czech PayPal account.

Stupidly, by using our email address they weren’t able to effectively verify this account but learning that this happened came as a shock.

Kudos to PayPal for their fantastic customer service.  Wait time was less than a minute, the three people I had to speak with were all extremely professional and we didn’t have to explain ourselves from the beginning when being transferred to the next operator.  They identified the rogue account once I gave them my credit card number and were happy to wait online whilst i reset the rogue account’s pasword, took a look inside it, removed my credit card info and closed the account down.

We know exactly where the information came from because we use unique email addresses for every business we deal with.  There is a possibility that this company got hacked and were unaware of it, but seeing as this new PayPal account was set up in Czech Koronas and the company we orderd from is also based there, we’re inclinded to think that this was a deliberate attempt at misusing customer information. 

No harm was done so this isn’t something we’ll take time to investigate but it is in PayPal’s hands now and we’re curious to know if the origin company will reply to our enquiry into what may have happened.

UWT4Me.com is to this day one of the best businesses and websites we’ve created.  We became telcom agents for the company "United World Telecom" in December 2002 and, although the promotion was tough, we developed an impressively successful business in about 12 months.

This really was the first website of significance that we created and, despite the fact that the site has not been updated for about 3 years (possibly longer) we have received residual monthly income of about $500. 

The main selling point for UWT4Me.com is that we have 676 customers registered.  This is far more valuable than the website itself or the domain name.

At it’s peak, we attracted a lot of Thai businesses and were earning over $3,000 a month in commissions.  Once the market changed, the business was overlooked in favor of other money-making opportunities.

The website itself, whilst dated by today’s standards set a lot of precedents.  The ‘telecom wizard‘ was unique to the industry and was designed to help visitors choose the best telecom service.  We designed what can only be described as an "intelligent mail-parsing sequential auto-responder" to parse welcome emails from United World Telecom and to re-format them and forward them to our customers directly.

Whilst the residual income is most definitely appreciated and has kept a roof over our head during some tough times, there’s no denying that a business windfall of $6,000 would give us a lot of flexibility to promote and to develop our other sites. 

If we do not get a sale then instead we’ll consider updating the site ourselves and using Adwords to build it back up again.

Below are the real-time auction updates. We’ve chosen to test Sitepoint out this time as it has an excellent reputation and may set the way to us advertising some of our older sites for sale too.