A Day In The Life Of

I was going to write a “proper” blog post for you today, it was going to be the best blog post ever, it would have loads of colourful pictures, loads of funny words, some political satire and a sprinkling of information, but as I sat down to write the post my accountant called and arranged a meeting for the afternoon so I had to put the blog post on hold.

It’s now 6.45pm and I’ve just finished my Tea (it’s what us strange people from up ‘t north call our evening meal) and I know I need to write a blog post, but in all honesty I’m very tired and don’t have the energy to create a full post, so I’ve decided to put together a little tongue in cheek “a day in the life of..” type post.

Being a full time Internet marketer is no easy task let me tell you! So let me take you back to the futur…back to the beginning of the day, and show you what I did.

I woke up at around 8am and went downstairs for some breakfast; I fancied a laugh so I turned on the TV and navigated my way to Sky Channel 509 – Fox News. It was the morning after the final presidential debate and I fancied some “fair and balanced” coverage of the debate, I was actually in luck, they were re-showing the debate in full so I watched “The Maverick” and “The Yes We Can” trading insults until around 9.30am.

At 9.30 I decided I’d better get off my ass and do some work, so I powered up the PC for the day. I always spend the first 1 – 2 hours of the day approving affiliate commissions for the Boomerang List Builder, and answering support tickets and approving new orders for my hosting company, D9 Hosting. The D9 Hosting tickets are an ongoing task throughout the day, but so far today has been a good ticket day!

All new orders were also genuine which is always good! With hosting orders you have to be very careful when processing them, a lot of spammers like signing up with false details and then using our servers to send spam, but going through each new order manually means we have a very good track record for keeping spam away from our hosting. This improves our email deliverability rate, and keeps the servers running as stable as possible.

After the normal morning tasks were complete, I started to set up the payment processor for a new offline service that me and Paula will be launching in the next couple of weeks, it will be something else under the “D9” brand and without wanting to blow my own trumpet I think it will be really cool.

We actually got a call to our D9 Hosting UK phone number yesterday, I answered and it was a nice chap enquiring about the new service, he’d actually stumbled across our “beta” site on Google (I didn’t even realise they had indexed it!) and then wanted the service so much he tracked down our D9 Hosting phone number, so that gave me a kick up the backside to get on and finish the website.

During setting up the processor, I needed to get our “SWIFT” code from our bank, so payments can go into our account. I called up the bank but I don’t think the code the lady on the phone gave me was correct, so I’m going to call back tomorrow and hopefully I’ll get a different person on the other end of the phone.

So with that out of the way, I moved onto another new project, a live chat/help solution for D9 Hosting. I managed to get it going quite quickly, and existing clients should be able to see the live chat button if they log into their client area.

I did have 1 question about the software though, so I went over to the live chat providers help desk and opened up a live chat session. Usually with live chat services, you have a generic picture of a helpdesk agent to look at, but I was taken by surprise when I saw what looked like “The girl next door” looking back at me.

I’m realistic enough to know the actual person on the other end of the chat was probably nothing like the picture…and was probably not even female, but it was nice to see something different from the generic “stock man/woman with headset”. So if you ever request a live chat over at D9 Hosting and the operator looks like Brad Pitt, suspend logical thinking and go with the flow. 🙂

By the time I’d finished playing with the live chat system, it was around 1pm and time for some food.

I had a prawn cocktail pasta salad type thing, 8/10 – it was nice and tasty.

After dinner I set off to the accountants.

He’d just about finished doing my 2007 accounts, but needed some clarification on a few things. Including my incredibly complex/stupid PayPal income and expense details. Apparently it doesn’t help when some things are in British Pounds and others are in US Dollars, oh well, I’m sure he’ll get there in the end.

After an hour and a half with the accountant I drove home and got back to work. Just as a side point, if your car has an AUX input and you have an I-Pod, buy an I-Pod AUX cable on eBay for £1.99 – best purchase I’ve made in a long time!

I got back to the PC at about 3.30 and had a chat with Paula about a few business plans for the future, answered more tickets and actually took part in our first live chat session – it was with Paula but who cares!

It was coming to the end of the day so I started to wind down; I went on Facebook and posted on a few forums.

I then went downstairs at about 4.45pm and watched some TV and did some farm jobs. I then had the evening meal at about 6.00pm, and then came back onto the PC to write this blog post.

Before I started the blog post I went onto iTunes and purchased a couple of new tunes to listen to on repeat whilst I wrote this blog post. I went for a couple of Cher songs, probably not the best choice in hindsight but we live and learn.

That pretty much takes us up to where we are now. The next thing I plan to do is post this on my blog, “Digg” the post. Then I’ll go downstairs and watch Bones and the last part of TNA Bound For Glory. I’ll then come back on here at around 10pm to do a final email/ticket/blog comment check for the day and then head off to bed at around 11.00pm.

So there you have it, a day in the life of a full time Internet Marketer – thrilling isn’t it!

How To Save £30

Yesterday I wasted £30 – around $60 for my readers across ‘t pond.

Here’s what happened.

As you know, I run D9 Hosting with my business partner. The way we handle phones calls is to use an 0845 local rate number, and then the message is delivered to us via email, we then listen to the message and call back the caller using our own D9 Hosting skype account.

Yesterday morning we got a call, so I proceeded to call the client.

To my horror there was no sound coming from my headset, so the caller could hear me, but I couldn’t hear them, so I had no option but to hang up!

I tried messing around with all of my volume and sound card settings but no matter what I tried I couldn’t get any volume through the headset.

So I headed off to Amazon and purchased a brand new headset for £30.

A couple of hours later I was about to throw out the old headphones, but as an after thought I decided to plug them into the lap-top just to double check they were broken. To my surprise they worked perfectly!!

So back to the main computer I went, but this time instead of plugging in the headphones via the USB adapter I used the jacks (is that the correct term?) and they worked – turns out it was a Windows update that did something that the USB adapter didn’t like.

So I’ve now got a new headset on the way, even though my old one’s work fine now.

So there you have a nice random blog post, now back to work 🙂

A New Illness – Anal Glaucoma

A friend emailed me the following joke yesterday, it made me laugh so much that I thought I would share it with you…as it’s almost christmas 😉

A woman calls her boss one morning and tells him that she is staying home because she is not feeling well. “What’s the matter?” he asks.

“I have a case of anal glaucoma,” she says in a weak voice.

“What the hell is anal glaucoma?”

“I can’t see my ass coming into work today.”

George Bush meets the Chinese Primeinister

Another humor video, this one has been submitted by a newsletter subscriber named Derek Hyde. Thanks Derek!

Weird Al Yankovic – The Saga Begins

Another addition to the new humour section today. When I stumble upon something that makes me chuckle I will try and remember to post it here as well.

This addition is a rather comical music video created by the genious that is “Weird” Al Yankovic:

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