Before I dive into boring work-related updates, I should mention that Leah has finally gotten me to get out and take walks. She’s been trying for more than a month but I was kinda down in the dumps. Now, I’m feeling a little better and a bit less stressed -though my situation has only marginally improved so far.
But, we’ve been walking several times over the past week and it really makes all the difference in the world. That time alone to walk and talk really helps. My conversations with her really perk me up and shines some light into my world. Soon, I also hope to get back in the gym and regain my cut physique and get back to playing racquetball, volleyball, and the like. I do miss it so!
Now, on to business: It’s a little earlier than expected, but my European client has come back to us with some answers on services they want from us. To my disappointment, they want to hold off on the crawler development until their next fiscal year (Oct, 2008), because they want to see us show some results with our other marketing efforts first.
That’s ok, I suppose. We will show them results, but it means a lot less money for me for now. I will probably make a little bit each month and every little bit counts towards paying the bills. So, that’s good. I am just a little bummed because I wanted to get my crawler and search engine more refined and usable for the masses. Perhaps it will happen next year, but it may be that my priorities will change by then. I suppose we’ll see.
In any case, I am still waiting until April 15th to hear exactly how much budget they will devote in the beginning and they will sign to start their campaigns on May 1st. Their budget will be based on a graduating scale, and with results (which I will bring), the budget will increase.
The best part about this deal is that I will still be in control of quite a sizable budget. So, even though only a relatively small portion goes to me each month, having control of that kind of budget gives me some bargaining power and respect in the industry. That budget coupled with the influx of recent business to LinkSmile and jAvVy, my two online marketing ventures, will give me even more weight in my niche. It’s just too bad that 99.999% of all my profits are pushed right back in to my companies. I’ve invested more than $160,000 into my businesses over the past year and a half and I’m hoping that will all pay off soon.
Aside from that, ShrinkTheWeb is really coming along. I have seen quite a bit of buzz generating about my service and the sign-ups are increasing to 5-10 per day. So, that’s great! People are really starting to use the system -which is awesome. Today, even, I had someone really put the custom-sized website previews through its paces and through them I discovered a little “bug” I introduced with a recent enhancement.
So, I got that fixed in about 30 minutes and tested the new enhancement plus the custom-sized thumbnails. All is well, and the customers site looked so much better than before, because they are getting perfectly sized thumbnails as opposed to stretching a smaller one to fit. I would link to their site, but the weird thing is that once they got it working, they then switched to one of my competitors and started showing the reduced quality again. I sent them a few emails and never heard back, so I guess I’ll have to assume that it was that competitor of mine trying out my service. Though, it wouldn’t be the first time! 
I also made quite a bit of progress on a web design project that I will finish this week and I have made a lot of progress on two bigger projects that I hope to complete within a week or two. So, things on that front are moving along nicely.
As you can tell, most things are work-work-work right now. So, I must apologize that these posts sound redundant and probably aren’t very interesting! hahah.
I have a little news in regards to a personal issue but due to legal disclosure reasons, I have to wait just a little longer before I publish what is going on in that respect. However, it is looking in my favor at the moment. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.
I hope everyone is having a great start to the week!
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