Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

No, I haven’t left the blogging game, just been super busy trying to manage everything I get myself into. This includes new hosting, revamping sites, managing bloggers, patents, domain names, working full-time, planning wedding, etc, etc, etc, blah, blah blah.

Servers
First up, servers. I’ve decided to test out some new servers that can withstand more traffic, and more bandwidth. This means transferring blogs and making sure everything is set-up properly, time CONSUMING!

I needed these new servers because my traffic was growing steadily and I was consuming too much bandwidth for a shared hosting account. Aloha Update was dugg three times to the front page and the site was down for hours at a time until all my sites were pulled from the shared server and put on a super slow, “you’re being punished” server.

I estimated the loss in traffic from the week long ordeal at just under 15,000 unique visitors. For me that’s a lot of uniques.

So I took the plunge and am testing a server setup that costs me 10 times what I was paying previously. Eeek! But not too worry, the increase in traffic that I’ve seen from the diggtastic craziness will hopefully help offset this new cost.

Aloha Update
After chatting with Yaro a few weeks back I’ve decided to make some adjustments to Blogtown Press. One of those adjustments is a revamp of Aloha Update. I’ve been working feverishly into the night on a new layout and format that I hope to have ready for prime time in the next week. (We’ll see how the evenings treat me here in Tucson.)

Moving Forward
Although I’m not making the cover of Business 2.0 or finding myself in wikipedia yet, I like to think that I’m moving in a solid forward direction, no matter how slow it is. I’ll continue to keep you all updated with progress, without letting the cat out of the bag early, but not keeping you in the dark either.

I don’t want to be one of those black magic internet entrepreneurs. The ones where you’re never quite sure if they’re really making money or just BS’ing their way to making money. I’ll tell you when I fail (if) and when I succeed.

I just have to give a little shout-out to Yaro Starak who writes great content over at Entrepreneurs Journey. He was on his way back to Australia after being in Canada for six months and had a stop over in Hawaii for a few days. He happened to be staying in Waikiki, where I live, and we were able to meet up for dinner and some great discussion.

It was really nice to have a networking meetup like this and discuss blogging, entrepreneurship and many other things with someone who has had a fair bit of success in those areas. Yaro offered many tips to help me on my way building my blog network. I imagine I made him laugh or his head spin with my randomness and subject jumping that I often get myself into when I begun talking about all the crazy things I claim to be doing.

I did manage a picture via my cell phone that I hope to have up sooner or later but can’t figure out how to get it onto my computer without sending it and god knows what else I have to do.

Anyway, thanks again for meeting up Yaro, it was great. And all you readers make sure to stay up to date with his Blog Traffic School as I’m sure it’s going to be well worth it.

I know, I know. I should be happy I have such a problem as feeling the digg effect. But truth be told, it sucks. I’ve been getting slammed once again via digg and my server can’t handle it. It’s time for an upgrade.

I’ve spent the better half of the evening searching around for solutions to the digg effect for dynamic pages such as those served by wordpress (which is what I use) and have come up with one main solution. Get a dedicated server. However, I’m not quite ready for what I would consider the big-time solution of a dedicated server and have been searching around for other solutions.

One that I’ve found is Dreamhost.com. It would appear that several large traffic sites use dreamhost and I would assume that not all of them use dedicated servers. But I could be wrong?

Is there a shared hosting solution that my readers could suggest to alleviate my digg effect woes?

Thought I would share some exciting news. Blogtown Press had it’s first article to make it to the front page of Digg, all news! The article is from Aloha Update and is about Dog “The Bounty Hunter” Chapman and his recent back and fourth with the Mexican authorities. You can see the digg article here and vote or comment. At writing this it’s been Dugg 1,234 times and commented 233 times.

The article was briefly at the top spot overall, stayed on the front page of all topics for a few hours, and now is slowly working it’s way down the top all news. It’s still on the front page of Digg-Entertainment News and the screenshot above was from earlier this morning (HST) where we were the fourth.

Many people have top digg articles all the time but for Blogtown Press it’s a first. We were receiving about 1200 hits an hour and that’s slowly tapering off to the mid 100’s. Every once in a while the server gets a little bogged down but not too bad.

I’m anxious to see what this does to incoming links. We’ve picked up on about 3 or 4 trackbacks so far and there are over 45 comments on the article alone.

Just thought I would share some excitement with everyone else.

Becoming an entrepreneur is tough! But it’s a fun journey. I just wanted to give a shout out to all those people who help others cause they want to see others succeed, and cause helping others allows you to learn more. Which rocks.

I recently wrote about why I’m hiring bloggers and how it’s helped me build my blog network traffic 4 fold in three months. Sometimes when you’re trying to reach for big goals you gotta look for some help along the way.

Bringing on some extra help with the writing has made a huge difference in my ability focus on building my blog network as a business both from a financial standpoint as well as a promotional standpoint. As I’ve mentioned previously I don’t want to start a business where I’m the business.

With that said I’ve also realized that my coding talents only go so far and that there are really only so many hours in the day. I still work a 9-5 job (sometimes way later) at a biotech company as a biomedical engineer, I’m working on planning a wedding (mine), and I also love to help other people realize their entrepreneurial dreams. Currently I’m helping, in as much as I can which probably isn’t enough, my brother and another friend with various aspects of their companies.

Some may say I’m spreading myself way too thin, which I admit I am. (Especially my finance, who I know would love me to get my nose out of my computer.) But the reason I can’t say no to people is one, cause I can’t say no; and two, cause I love helping people that have energy towards doing cool stuff. If someone came to you and said I wanna start my own company, you wanna help me create a website, market my stuff, sell my stuff, would you say no?

I look at it from some other angles as well. If you help them work on their projects, you’ll learn more about all the aspects of business you might not have otherwise learned on your own. And also, they may be able to help you with your stuff. Which has happened numerous times with the current people I’m working with. I’ve gone in gung ho to just help and ended up having them help me just as much as I’ve helped them.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking of a way to write all this down, but just wanted to let everyone know that if everyone helped those around them out just a little more each day, everyone could get a lot more done

So thanks to all those who’ve helped me thus far and to those who will help me later, an early thanks.

As you know my brother and I are trying our hats as entrepreneurs, me building a blog network on the Internet, and he designing a clothing line. I have mentioned before that he got the art-creative side of things in the family and is super talented when it comes to design (although he won’t tell you that, and will probably smack me for saying so).

He launched his clothing line about 3 months ago with a limited edition run of shirts he hand designed. He’s also teamed up with SurfAid to donate some of his proceeds to their great cause of helping impoverished towns brought together through surfing. His concept is awesome as he is using his creative talents to help the world and bring people together.

He recently announced the addition of two sponsored riders, a surfer named Chase Fisher out of Southern California, and a surfer out of Hawaii, Morgan Hoesterey. These are great additions to the As One team to help spread the word about helping others.

Check out the surfers and check out his newest releases of clothing over at the As One Shop.

I’m thinking of undertaking a large shift in my blog network development and I’m finding the need for a Wordpress and Database Guru. I’ve thought about using a CMS like Joomla but I don’t think that it will be quite what I want and have too much extra junk that I don’t need.

So what I’m looking for is someone who knows the ins and outs of Wordpress really well, knows MySQL and also knows Java fairly well too. I know enough to get me by and I’m sure if I had about 40 more hours in the week to work on just programming I could find a way to develop what I want. But I don’t and I need to be efficient.

Therefor I’m asking my readership if they are or know anyone who is very keen at tinkering with wordpress, setting up and interacting with PHP and MySQL, and knows how to integrate all of that as well as throw in some JAVA. If you or they know how to and would like to do the design work as well that would be great!

I’m sure there’s a lot of small groups of people that run design “houses” but I just don’t know of them and would love it if any of you could point me in the right direction.

Thanks all, hope I get some good responses. I of course would offer money, possible profit sharing from the network, and maybe even some ownership of my to be formed corporation.

Previously I posted about the best blogging cartoon ever. It was a great cartoon from Family Circus and still ranks pretty high.

Here’s another that I just got via email from a friend who scanned in their daily calendar cover from The New Yorker.

Decide for yourself which is the best?

The transformation of my blog into a more entrepreneur based resource blog is taking place. As you can see from the title of both this post and now the title of my blog I’ve decided to go with a more “surfer-dude” approach and I’m calling the blog, “Board Shorts and Business Suits.” Cause who doesn’t want to show up to a board meeting wearing a business suit on top and board shorts on the bottom.

I live in Waikiki on the island of Oahu. I’m facing the fact that I love to work on building businesses and business ideas. And I want to combine the two and eventually conduct board meetings wearing business shorts on a beach front estate. (Wouldn’t that be nice)

I’m working on fully embracing my entrepreneur side and seeing that I love to and have always loved to start businesses. I’m only now learning how to follow through on that passion and build them into true businesses that can sustain themselves on their own. Without me always there to do everything. I want to build business systems rather than a myself “being” the business.

The process of changing my blog will be ongoing as I’m working on cleaning up the look and making it more friendly to the social bookmarking and search engine scene but it shouldn’t ever see large down-times.

I hope you all enjoy the new entrepreneurial feel around here as well as the constant spattering of random articles that I’ll no doubt continue to write and hopefully inspire you all to try something random and new. (Don’t worry I’m not going to get away completely from random thoughts and goals. Just more focus on the entrepreneur side of things.)

It’s a new year, I’ve made it back from vacation, and I’m looking towards a great 365 days to come.

It’s funny how when January 1st comes around people all over the world make promises to themselves and others that “this year will be different.” New Year’s Resolutions to be successful, loose weight, and accomplish all the goals they weren’t able to accomplish the year(s) before.

Will 2007 be different for you?

I’m not making any goals right now, but I will say this. I’m going to “Go Big” in 2007, and begin to build, build, build the businesses I’m starting by thinking BIG.

I’m reading the new book by Robert Kiyosaki and Donald Trump about Why They Want You to Be Rich, and everyone knows that Donald Trump thinks BIG! Now thinking big is one thing but what The Donald does is also act big. He acts on his thoughts and goes for it. I feel like I already think big but I don’t act on those thoughts. I don’t put those thoughts into action.

Therefore I’m going to focus on taking all the knowledge I’ve gained through reading and doing over the past year and combine that with some big thoughts, turning them into actions, and GOING BIG!

I’m not divulging my goals just yet but I’m going to be shifting the main focus of this blog, which really has no focus right now, into a more helpful resource of information for others who want to think and act big while building businesses. Don’t worry, for those of you who like the personal stories I’m not going to abandon those personal experiences. Rather, I’m going to better organize and intertwine them into a central theme of building businesses and business systems.

I hope you all continue to follow my progress work towards being BIG in your own way.