There's Something About Harry

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

It is December 31 and the new year is almost upon us.  This has been a very good year for yours truly, and I hope you have had a great year as well.  As great as this year has been, I do expect 2009 to be so much better.  I know there’ve been financial crisis, and zany election problems, and lots of other strange things in the world.  But somewhere along the way, I managed to eke out a good year.  It took a hell of a lot of work, and with that in mind, I’m proud of what I’ve achieved this year.

In general, I was trained do things and choose my course in life such that I will not live with regret.  If I can achieve this throughout the entire year, the year has definitely been successful.  Now, I also set the bar for myself much higher than just living without regrets. 

As I proceed to 2009, I fully expect to achieve significantly more than I did this year.  For me, this is going to kick off heavily on January 6.  I’m traveling to Las Vegas that day to cover four or five different conventions and conferences.  I’m going to be in Las Vegas for eight days, and I’m going to see a lot of people that I already know, and even better yet I’m going to meet many more people I haven’t met yet.

I’m also excited because I’m going to be in Vegas to learn about an industry that I don’t know terribly much about.  It is affiliate marketing.  I’ve been working in affiliate marketing for a couple of years, but it is self-taught experience that I’ve accumulated so far.  I am looking forward to catching up with many more people that are far more successful affiliate marketing that I am, so I can learn and benchmark from their techniques.  Then I can work the magic that I always work, by building on those techniques with my own perspective and ideas.

I already have some great ideas about how to achieve that goal based on a great deal of work that I have been doing with one of my partners, Joe Klein, of New Media Creative.

I will be talking more about that as we go further into the year.

I’m also excited because as of January 1, I officially began working as an Izea Insider.  This is going to facilitate me traveling to more conferences than I could go to if I were doing this on my own budget.  More importantly, it is going to help me connect with many more bloggers to help them turn their blogs into a functional business.  I think it is great when a person blogs about a topic that they love.  I think it is even better when they have the luxury of doing this as a hobby.  I think it is absolutely fantastic when a person can do this so well that they can quit their day job and focus on what they love full-time.

That is exactly what I do today. 

There is nothing more invigorating than waking up every single day knowing that you get to do exactly what you love to do all day long. 

So my goal for two thousand and nine is to help as many people achieve the same goal as possible, and for me the Izea insider program is going to help make that a reality.

New Logos and Blog Designs

Thanks to many of you, I got some great feedback about how I could improve one of my websites, Maven Mappers Information.  I have been working very diligently to incorporate all of your suggestions into the new design for this website.  I haven’t quite completed all the work, I am getting much closer to being finished.  The results are already live than on the website.  I’m starting to move into the phase where I need to add a few little things here and there to finish off the site.  However the new design has evolved to the point that is far superior to the old design, and hence I went live with it. 

In preparation for all of the conferences that I’m going to next week, I also spent a significant amount of time working on developing a new business card.  This was extremely painful for me.  I am not a graphic designer.  And when it comes to using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, there is something about those programs that just don’t work for me.  I can never remember how to do anything in those programs.  The layouts of the menus in the structure of the programs in general just don’t work for my brain.  I love to use Dreamweaver, which Adobe also owns, but this was originally developed by Macromedia.  There’s just something about the design of Adobe products that just doesn’t feel natural to me.

So when I created my business cards, I had to use a template that was provided to me in either Illustrator or Photoshop.  Past experience in the same processes taught me that illustrator is a little easier to use for generating a business card and Photoshop is.  So three days ago actually, it was four days ago, I sat down to start creating my stupid business card.  It took me three days to finish and it was extremely painful.  I didn’t actually get the dumb thing moving along until I came up with a bit of an epiphany.  I can use Adobe Illustrator better when I’ve had a couple of beers.  I don’t know why this is, and I don’t suggest that everyone out there use beer to improve their illustrator skills.  I also don’t intend to devolve into a state of alcoholism based on my use of Adobe Illustrator.  I don’t view Adobe Illustrator as a gateway into alcoholism.  That said, there was something about the beer that relax my brain just enough so that I could use the stupid program and create business card.

I finished it up, and loaded up to Vista Print.  I had a promotional code for their services, but after a dreaded checkout I couldn’t get the promotional code to work.  I fiddled around with it for about an hour trying to get the promotional code to kick in so I can get the appropriate discounts.  I don’t know what I was doing, but I was doing it wrong.  I needed the business cards, so I placed the order anyway.

I call that the company the next day when their office hours opened up, and he walked me through the issue and ultimately fixed my order.  In fact, they fixed my order so well that I feel like I received an amazing deal.  I walked away from the transaction with some credits on my account even.  Furthermore, after I fixed up the order for my business cards, I was transferred to the design department.

While talking to the pleasant person at the design department, I learned that for a mere thirty dollars, I could have Vista Print design my business cards in the future.

Now I just spent three days designing my business card.  I could’ve earned a great deal more money than thirty dollars in three days worth of work.  I must admit that I am a complete moron.  I should’ve called a Vista Print first and had been design my cards right away.  But my ignorance cost me three days.  I write this now, not to admit my ignorance, but the possibly help you.  If you’re the type of person that is smart enough to learn from someone else’s mistakes, I would suggest that if you have difficulty making great looking business cards, then go pay the thirty dollars to Vista Print and let them figure it out for you!

I almost forgot.  In my efforts to create my business card, I had to come up with a new logo for my primary business website at  Softduit.com (see new logo above).  I’ve created a few logos for this website several times in the past.  They all sucked. 

Past Logos That I Didn’t Like

This one was created by one of those free logo design website things and there are soooo many people that use that light behind the logo thing that its embarrassing.  Almost like the excessive use of the microphone on red with free business cards used by too many podcasters.

This one used Illustrator and might be considered something of a design.  It kind of looked Softduit, but didn’t look so hot on a business card.

This one was created to try and capture the concept that there was a ‘conduit’ in use, but there’s nothing ‘soft’ about a metal pipe.

They all sucked a whole lot actually.  I believe I mentioned that I’m not a graphic designer. 

Well last night using one of my new programs I picked up about four months ago, I created a logo that doesn’t suck too much.  In fact, I kind of like it.  I think the color scheme needs a little tweaking, but this is good enough for now.  I have to redesign my website theme at Softduit.  So until I complete that redesign of that particular website, I’m not going to fret over the color scheme of the logo too much.  I will probably redesign the logo slightly when the time comes to do the entire website so that they match.  For now, the logo and the current web design theme go together pretty well.

So that is what I’ve been up to, I’m getting ready to go celebrate New Year’s Eve, and in the meantime I want to wish you a Happy New Year.  I do not know if I will write anything about my New Year’s resolutions.  I don’t really like New Year’s resolutions.  Plus I write about the things I’m going to do all the time.  So not necessarily certain that it makes sense to write about them just for the sake of making a resolution.  I worked very hard to do the things that I say I’m going to do.  Making a resolution, or a hollow set of goals for the year isn’t really my style.  If you want to know what my real resolution for 2009 is, simply click on the subscription options above and subscribe to my blog.  You’ll definitely be a lessee what my resolutions for the year will be as they unfold throughout the year.  that’s how it works in the blogosphere…

HAPPY NEW YEAR!