Hey everyone, I’ve been a little faded on this blog for the last month.  Frankly, the month has been a complete bear! (no excuse).  I need to catch up on a whole slew of things, and rather than publish 5 or 6 blog articles all at once, I’m going to roll them all together in one big fat medley of blogging fun that I used to call house cleaning or a chore when I was a kid.

Guess that’s maybe the wrong word as I don’t typically see or think of blogging as a chore.  But after the last month, its been difficult to stay focused on blogging.  It kind of started right after Affiliate Summit in early August.  I got back home, slept all night, woke up and found out that my twitter account was suspended ( @brettbum ).

Disclosure: I did use the new SponsoredTweets system around this time, but do not feel that it was the reason behind the suspension.  I only made 2 tweets with it (I don’t really get any offers on the system or I would use it more.  Probably doesn’t have anything to do with this article that I wrote either Social Media Douche Bags Agree, Its Cool to ‘Say’ Sponsored Tweets Suck – White Paper

Now, in general, I’m more of a Facebook person than a twitter person.  Facebook just suits me better for relationships with people.  Twitter is good for a number of things imho, especially conferences or events, but I’m a reluctant twitter person.  It probably comes across in my tweets a bit.

Anyway, it wasn’t the end of the world when my twitter account was suspended, just very annoying, mostly because it was suspended for NO REASON.  Its back up now after a full review, and I’ve never been told why it was suspended in the first place.

Whatever, sometimes the fail whale shows up on your screen and sometimes the fail whale comes up underneath of you, bites you on the ass and flips you around like a seal.

Did I mention I’m going to SeaWorld next month?

So I got my twitter account back up after it was down for almost two weeks.  I had to setup a new twitter account in the meant time @brettbumeter which was a nice additional account that I don’t really need.

But this isn’t about how stupid twitter can be.  The point is that this was kind of the beginning of my bad / goofy month. (Rant Continues)

I also started having issues with my VPS (virtual private server).  I pay about $50 per month for a virtually dedicated amount of server space.  I have about 39 websites on this server, 30 of them are mine, and the others are friends, family and a couple clients that have very small websites on my server as well.

Well, the damn thing was upgraded from an old machine to a new one in July, and since then the CPU has been running super super super hot.  My host, InmotionHosting whom I normally love, can’t give me any details as to what is causing it and keep telling me that I need to switch to a $200 per month plan. 

Can’t Afford it

Now, I know quite a bit about optimizing sites for server performance.  I’ve been up one side and down the other on my sites improving everything under the sun, robots.txt, cache plugins, db cache plugikns, widget cache plugins, and much much more, but the thing still runs hot, and my traffic is not substantial (if it were, then I could afford the upgrade).

What does a hot CPU have to do with a hill of beans, IzeaFest or Michael Jackson for that matter?

I’m getting there.  For those of you that know me, I’m not typically shy with words, nor do I use 2 words when 200 are readily available.

The thing is all this futzing with re-optimizing 39 sites has been a serious time distraction, typically when I don’t have any time.

Add to that, my friends at Bank of America, some of the nicest people to talk to on the phone when they are proceeding to bury your ass in the ground, decided that I would be much happier and financially stable if they raised my credit card rates (for no reason) from 5% to 30%.

Can’t Afford it

Now all year long, my business has been growing like crazy and I’ve been keeping up with Bank of America, but then August hit.  In August several of my regular customers experienced financial problems with their customers and the fire hose of income that I had been receiving turned into a trickle down effect of pennies.

So through August, I’ve been scrambling to find new/additional customers.  Looking back from September, I’ve done pretty well, but it takes time to find a new customer and turn them into a paying customer, and I’m just getting to that last part.

Along the way, I almost worked out a job with the Las Vegas Hilton.  Thought it had some good potential, and then the Hilton just never responded.    That was unfortunate both financially, but because I could have helped them a great deal, and now I’m watching them continue to struggle.

Been There Seen That Before

I have wrapped up a couple nice projects for friends of mine that I met at the Podcast Expo and later BlogWorlds.

We have the upgrade and consolidation of sites for Mike McAllen’s events and media company just about finished over at Grass Shack Events & Media.

Similarly, Paolo & Francesca Tosolini hired me to upgrade Francesca’s Interior Design Website at CreatingInteriors.com.

I really liked the way both projects turned out.  Both websites received some serious functional improvements and great design improvements as well. 

From a business perspective however, these were July projects and as things went, some of the back and forth exchanges of information necessary to complete the projects delayed them a bit (mostly vacation and travel situations between everyone involved).

So going into August, the projects were just being finished, and I couldn’t hold them up as shiny new examples of my work either to help land new projects. 

And don’t forget while I’m working on these projects my hosting company goes into fits every other week….

And the last IzeaFest Ticket Winner IS…..

That brings me to IzeaFest.  I ran a contest give away my last IzeaFest Ticket. The drawing was scheduled for September 3, but I’m just doing it now.  The entrance options were shut down on the third.  I’ve been backlogged as I chase down problems, respond to Bank of America which wants to bury me, and trying to chase down new business so that I can keep myself out of a Bank of America coffin.

Its no excuse for being late, but sometimes life happens.  It did for me, and well here is the winner !

The winner of the Final #Izeafest ticket is . . . . . . . Rob Babiak @pbandsdad www.lookwhatmomfound.com Congrats Rob!

Rob really went the extra mile in entering this contest.  He tweeted, he blogged, he asked questions, he even designed a WordPress Theme from scratch to earn 100 Entries in the contest and 1 of those entries from the Theme batch of 100, earned him the prize!

Rob already won a ticket, so we are re-running the drawing with existing entries – stay posted for a few minutes . .

Toni Snearly is the Follow Up Winner of the last IzeaFest Ticket!

You can follow Toni @ItsToni or read her blog at Cheapomcfrugalpants.com.

I’m moderating the Advertising Panel for What an Advertiser Wants at IzeaFest.  As I write this, I need to get a pre-interview questionaire out to the other advertisers, then set up a conference call with them so that we can kind of meet and greet on the phone.  I’ve reached out to them a few months back already, but only got a couple responses then.  So need to lock things down before the big event in October.  In reality, I’ve been preparing for this for a year already, Just need to put the finishing touches on it.

I actually prepaid for my own trip to IzeaFest back in March.  Its a good damned thing I did that too, because right now, I don’t have the spare money to travel thanks to BoA.  They felt that I could pay my bills and debt easier if they charged me an extra $1000 per month in interest, instead of paying down principle with that $1k or investing it in my business to grow the business, earn more and then pay them.

BoA is not my favorite group of people right now.  Its not all their fault by a long shot, but it is largely their fault.

WordCamp Birmingham A week from Today

Next Friday, I’m travelling(6 hour drive)  to Birmingham for the second time in my life to attend WordCamp Birmingham for the second time in my life. 

It was a great event last year with about 120 people.  They have over double that this year and will probably hit 250 – 300 people before they cap it off this coming Tuesday. If you haven’t registered, do so now.  They shut down registration on Tuesday to make sure that the t-shirt orders and meals will get ordered for the right number of people.

I’m speaking at this event again, but this year I’m covering how to get started in WordPress Theme Design.  I’ve been doing this all summer at a number of events including the Raleigh Durham WordCamp and Barcamp Chattanooga.  I’ve got a speaking request in for Las Vegas WordCamp at BlogWorld, but I hear that Jim and Rick at Blogworld are making the speaker decisions, and for whatever reason they never return my calls even though I’ve sent them lots of new business over the last couple years.  I don’t get that, but assume they are busy or something, too busy to respond.  They are always very enthusiastic and friendly when ever I see them at events, but as soon as the events are over, the wall of silence goes up. 

Save 20% NOW on BlogWorld and New Media Expo 2009 registration with the code "BWESEP20"

Guess that’s social media for you. 

Everyone is happy to exchange asinine 140 character messages back and forth with you, but try and have a real conversation (even when you are sending them money) and nothing, they don’t have time to much tweeting to do, or something.  I’m not singling out the Blogworld guys on this, it seems to be happening everywhere.  And hay, guess what, I’m behind on crap too!

Holy Shit Just Got an Amazing Comment on one of My Articles!

No idea what I was just talking about, but I just got an email notification about a comment on one of my articles (Michael Jackson segue (pronounced segway never wrote that word before)).

Here’s the quote

Deb, I can assure you, the songs are not trash. It was always policy at Motown to record a multitude of songs on any given artist. Just because these songs didn’t see the light of day back then has nothing to do with the quality of the material. One song I have listened to is an out and out SMASH.

WOW!

You may have no idea what that comment is about, so I’ll fill you in.  It was made by Russ Terrana.  Russ worked for Motown for over 20 years and was the recording engineer/mixer for everyone from Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, Isaac Hayes, even Whitney Houston (different label) and much much more.

He’s mixed 37 platinum albums, 89 number 1 hits and over 300 songs that hit the top 100 billboard charts.

What the Hell is he Talking About?

Russ is talking about the LOST MICHAEL JACKSON SONGS DISCOVERED IN THE MOTOWN VAULTS OWNED BY UNIVERSAL.

Russ is mixing down these lost tapes and UMG (universal music group) is going to release these long lost songs in November.

NO ONE has ever heard these songs outside of the people that were in the studios with Michael Jackson back in the seventies! 

If Russ says there is a SMASH hit, There’s going to be a SMASH Michael Jackson Hit!

Guess what, you are reading it from the source and getting it from me first, because my friend Joe Klein and I broke this story.  Joe’s been friends with Russ for years and years and years.

So that kind of gets me around to the writing I’ve been doing the last couple weeks.  We published this great story Monday, but it has been buried in Google News a bit because of the Kanye West Jackass thing on the VMA’s.  Everyone is talking about Kanye West acting the ass, and they’ve missed the story about the discovery of NEW MICHAEL JACKSON HITS coming out in November. 

Guess that’s social media for you. 

That’s the thing about Social Media, it gets the buzz out about what the crowd is talking about, but if the crowd is talking about stupid shit, then the crowd misses the important or interesting stuff.

Is it OK to Blog About This?

That circles back actually to the last thing I wanted to talk about.  When we started looking at this Michael Jackson story, my friend Joe asked his friend Russ if it would be OK to blog about this project that Russ was working on, Mixing the original master recordings of Michael Jackson songs for a future release (imagine finding high quality lost recordings from Elvis at his prime 3 months after his death that had never been released!)

Now, Russ said yes, and Joe asked him again a couple more times.  Just wanted to make sure, because Russ and Joe are friends and the last thing Joe wanted to do was blog about something and maybe get Russ into a bad spot.

All seemed cool, but then we started hearing yesterday (4 days after the article was out in the world and on Google News) that UMG might not be so happy.  So we had some follow up articles that we were going to publish yesterday that we are now sitting on.

As a blogger, people usually just publish every damned thing and worry about the consequences later.  Maybe Joe and I are bad bloggers, but we didn’t want to do that type of thing.  Its no good screwing over a friend just to get some extra attention for your blog, even if that extra attention drives your traffic through the roof and maybe helps your profile increase so that you can earn a little more and fend off the Bank of America Nazi’s sending you robo-collection-calls (what’s up with that anyway?  I was a credit manager for years, and the idea of using robo calls for collections is the dumbest thing I’ve experienced this month, not counting the contractors that showed up at 1 am to work on my neighbors floor).

So if you are thinking about dropping a bombshell of an article, think twice about the collateral damage that might shake out.  We took every precaution, and even then there was some second guessing.  If I were TMZ (talked to them recently) or Matt Drudge (old school), the model would be to drop this story and damn the consequences.  But that’s not my style, and maybe that will improve my karma or maybe it will kill my credit, but at least I will sleep easy during the daylight.

Hi my name is Brett Bumeter, I’m a blogger, not a vampire, and I work late late at night.