As usual, I’m always on the look out for a bit of a business opportunity and when one appears I give it serious thought, so last week when I spotted a website for sale for £995 I asked for further details.

The website in question was an information site in many ways, with Google Adsense Ads, Amazon links and Clickbank links… Sounds just the sort of thing I’m interested in and when I found out it had been making close to £2000 in the last six Months that really grabbed my interest!

I’m the sort of person that likes to mitigate as much risk as possible, and having just read Theo Paphitis biography this week I was determined to make sure this was the right deal for me! A few questions later and the seller had produced me a nice little spreadsheet that suggested he had only ever spent £200 on advertising… £2000 in six months, I’m very interested – so I asked him for some proof of those numbers.

At this time the price dropped to £695, great! I enquired about escrow and asked for the proofs I required… The seller agreed to escrow payments and provided me with a Word document of his bank statement – how very trusting.

I went a little further and did some research on the domain name, it appeared to only have been registered a month ago! The explanation for this was that he had just renewed it… I hate to say it but owning a hosting company the alarm bells started to ring!

I’ve asked for screenshots of Google/Amazon or access to the account (I’d accept doing it over VNC or Netmeeting) it’s not forthcoming, I’ve gone back to the bank statement this morning and noticed it includes very few other transactions than the one I’m interested in (does this guy spend no money?). The seller can’t produce statistics on visitors for me…

It’s a shame as I was genuinely interested, and would have been interested if it was making a lot less too…
(Oh and it’s £500 now!)

Related Posts

• I’ve got a Hunch…
• A Crack in Crackberry’s plan?
• Doing what you love!
• Buzzword Bingo & Internet Marketing!
• StumbleUpon, sold to the Highest Bidder!

The hosting business is about to become a limited company, I’ve gone part time at work, I’ve demolished my Mum’s garden and somewhere in the midst of that I’ve found time to book a holiday!

I’ve got a busy couple of weeks until we’re away so don’t expect too much (see what I’m doing, apologising before I don’t post!) until my accounts are out of the way – I’m automating lots more this year to try to stay on top of them (he says very hopefully!).

The automation has taught me a lot though – I maybe ought to look for other people that need their Quickbooks life simplifying!

On that note – I have a list as long as your arm to start and I want to settle down with a beer this evening – so I shall catch up with you all soon…

Related Posts

• I hate doing the Accounts
• Getting Back on the Horse!
• Solving Insurmountable Problems
• Automation – Making your life Easier, 600 steps at a time!

I made this post from posterous, a new service I’m testing – let me know what you think!

Posted via web from keiron’s posterous<

My current permalink structure has not sat well with me for the last year or so, it’s kind of thrown together and doesn’t look particularly nice… I’ve been itching to change it, but never dared (after all this blog has a reasonable PageRank and gets a decent amount of traffic!). The time has come to bite the bullet.

I know what you’re saying:

“Just go ahead – change the damned things – why should we care?”

Well it’s not quite that simple, changing them has a few knock on effects:

1. All my internal links to older posts referencing them will be broken.
2. All links by other people to my older posts will be broken (this is really bad in my opinion as I can’t contact them all to fix them!).
3. The search engines probably won’t like me much any more (and I quite like them, so this is also quite bad!).

online порно кaнaл

Solutions

Well I put out my request on Twitter and got all of two responses (and one retweet), the first didn’t understand the question at all and suggested I just change them and install All-in-one SEO. The second was more useful and suggested the Platinum SEO plugin (my concern with this is how it might react with my already install All-in-one SEO).

This really leaves me with the Permalink Redirect plugin which sounds like it might do exactly what I want through 301 redirects. I’ve heard good things about Dean Lee’s Permalink Migration plugin, so I think we’ll give that one a go!

Well it seems to have worked – but I’m convinced that the databae should be updated – that would make more sense to me than a permanent 301 redirect… Is that possible?

Related Posts

• 3 Spam Comments!
• Posting YouTube Videos (Again!)
• Reading Material
• Change Permalink Structure?
• OpenID with your own Wordpress URL!

This just made me laugh today!!

I still get tempted on the iPhone as I’m running more and more of the business on the iPod Touch… That said I love my hardware keyboard on the Touch Pro (and am still tempted by the Touch Pro 2)….

If iPhone did a slider keyboard I might be sold, it’s not the keyboard exactly that’s the problem…. It’s how much screen real estate you lose when it’s up!
I downloaded the Touch Term Pro app the other day (yes there’s an app for that!) and it has a myriad of gestures and features.. But an SSH session under a transparent keyboard worries me!

Also the other big concern I have is this, I don’t want to have listened to music all day and then suddenly need to make an urgent change to a server and not have enough battery life (particularly as a spare battery is a no-no on the iPhone) – do I really need an iPod Touch and an iPhone?!?! hmmmmm

I made this post from posterous, a new service I’m testing – let me know what you think!

Posted via web from keiron’s posterous<

хентай порно мультиков название

photo credit: Andres Rueda

As many of you know I run my own company and we’re in the proceeds of moving everything over to a limited company (for a variety of reasons but it’s just started to get a bit bigger than we expected!). This is great news and means we’re doing really well however I’ve hit a pretty major stumbling block today.

We’re in recession (or just coming out of it, depending on who you believe!), but it’s note really affected my business. If anything it’s been quite good for business, which is something we should all be pleased by.

In the process of the business moving to a limited company we’ve had to re-apply for pretty much everything (as a limited company is a legal entity in it’s own right) but my big stumbling block today has been WorldPay (the payment processor).

WorldPay

We’ve been with WorldPay for about 5-6 years, the rates aren’t that great (in fact we get a better rate through PayPal!) but we’ve been loathed to change since they’ve been very reliable during that time.

I completely understood when they said they needed me to re-apply for an account in the limited company name and promptly filled out all the details for them whilst being assured that my new account would function in the same way as the old one.

They’ve asked for far more financial details than they did when I applied all those years ago (and the numbers I’m giving them are considerably higher). Yet in their wisdom today they’ve come to this decision:

As you may already be aware where goods and/or services are paid for by credit/debit card, the card processing company becomes jointly liable with the merchant under the card scheme rules (VISA, MasterCard, etc.) for the provision of those goods and services.

During our assessment we look at many factors including the age of your business, its net worth and the goods/services you are intending to sell online in relation to the perceived risk of chargebacks*. It is designed to help us understand and determine the potential exposure for which we may be jointly liable.

On this occasion in order to proceed with your application we have found that we will need to apply a reserve to your account. The reserve level will initially be set to £2500 and represents additional security that may be required to cover our potential exposure.

Once you begin to trade, the reserve amount will be accrued from funds due to you and then, providing the reserve level has been met, we will transfer the remaining funds to your bank account in accordance with our standard terms.

£2500? What’s that all about (believe me I have asked and am awaiting a decent response), I put more business through PayPal than I do through WorldPay meaning that this is likely to take several months to accrue – during this time they won’t pay me a penny!!! This is ridiculous, and then on top of that I’ll need to pay transaction charges on each transaction (so it will take longer to hit the £2500!). That’s £2500 I could be investing back into the company… No company in their right mind can justify that surely?

Needless to say I’m looking elsewhere whilst they await my response!

The Economy

What’s all this got to do with the economy? Well I read an article this morning about starting up business on the back of a recession and will try to get around to listening to the show on listen again this week and one fact stuck with me all day….

We’re losing 120 small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) every day, but for each one of those around 11 are starting up. That’s approaching half a million new SMEs in 2009.

I’m not surprised businesses are going under when payment processing companies are doing the above. I also have a concern about how the new ones will survive when companies like WorldPay ask for this in their starting up costs!

Related Posts

• Economy Gastronomy!