“Let’s Make a Deal!” was a terrific run, wouldn’t you agree? We had a ton of fun deal-making and prize-awarding, through the original promotion and then again with its revival. However, like all good things, “Let’s Make a Deal!” must, too, come to an end. If you find yourself in tears, we understand. Take a moment. We’ll wait…

We would like to extend a final, congratulatory shout-out to our winners of “The Deal of a Lifetime” (Jesse C., Steven S., Danny F., Hendra S., and Adam B.), and an enormous “Thank you!” to everyone who entered. This will not be the last TurnKey Internet giveaway of its kind—mark my words!

With that being said, we have something brand new to share with you! Come on; would you really expect anything less from us? At this point, we hope you know as well as we do that we would be bored to tears without some kind of event going on.

Without further ado, we would like to introduce… The Truckload Sale!

An 18-wheeler just arrived at the TurnKey Internet data center, bursting at the seams with a medley of 8 GB, 16 GB, and 32 GB Intel E3 dedicated servers. To celebrate the arrival of this glorious mountain of technology, we are packing in the savings and marking every single one of them 40% off! All you have to do is enter the coupon E3TRUCK at check-out. That’s it! We’re all about making things easier.

E3’s are what’s hot right now, and they are being snatched up left and right. Don’t miss your chance to get in on this discount, because—trust us!—it won’t last long! Check out the Truckload Sale > 

Also… Yes, there is an “also”. Have you noticed there’s almost always an “also”? The E3 sale isn’t the only new thing starting up at TurnKey Internet this week. Since the truck arrived carrying only servers, we realized that we needed to show our other products and services some love as well. Naturally, we decided to offer savings on… well, everything. We just feel like a new year is started best when there’s a deal involved, you know? Especially when it’s a TurnKey deal, because those are our very favorite kinds of deals. So, see for yourself! Whether you’re looking for a reseller package or a virtual private server or anything in between, with this sale (and the coupon code TK2013), we know you’ll be able to kick off 2013 correctly.

So, are you as excited as we are? We hope so! But save some room for more, and keep an eye on our Facebook and Twitter pages. We may or may not have another contest all cooked up and coming your way in the VERY near future.

Pssttt… I’ll have it be known that by “may or may not” I mean “definitely do without question”, but that’s between you and me…

We have enabled a new feature for clients using our hosting packages (reseller hosting, SEO hosting, standard web hosting, e-commerce hosting, and website builder hosting), which will allow you to unblock your IP if you should be temporarily blocked or banned by our hosting server firewalls.

TurnKey utilizes highly secure servers, software, and firewall monitoring systems, which block remote access to IPs that appear to be repeatedly doing things they shouldn’t (like trying to login using the wrong password hundreds of times in a few minute period).  Unfortunately, from time to time, this can impact you, or the web sites you host for friends or clients, when someone has a misconfigured password somewhere.  In cases like this, it’s easier for you to be able to remove the block on your IP (and to see why it was blocked) and to do it instantly via the new web-based interface we have provided for you.

To access this system, go to https://secure.turnkeyinternet.net, click the link on the right-hand tool bar that says UNBLOCK IPS FROM FIREWALL, and you will have full and instant access.

Clients with VPS, cloud, dedicated, or colocated servers who think a firewall has blocked them, will need to open a support ticket for additional help – this feature is only for those on our hosting platforms as noted above.

If you have any questions, or continue to have issues, feel free to open a support ticket.

Howdy-do, TurnKey Lovers?

Jeremy here, with another entry for you to gobble up. “Gobble”? Well, that’s a funny use of the word, but it actually deals directly with my current post. The word “gobble” results in thoughts about turkey. Now, this could be due to the fact that I’m hungry. Any reference to food incites a bout of extreme hunger, causing me to crave that 5-piece spicy nugget from Wendy’s that I have left over. But, I digress.

The reason that I mention “gobble” is really to talk about turkey—not TurnKey—but turkey. That, sometimes dry, meat that you have to cook perfectly on Thanksgiving, or start looking for a gallon of water to just get through the meal. Turkey brings us to Thanksgiving; one of the joyous occasions most Americans celebrate every year by engorging themselves with as much food possible, and then passing out an hour later. Ok, that might just be me who does the passing out part…

There is also another GREAT benefit to this time of the year. Have you figured it out yet? Did you even guess? I’ll give you a hint; it’s the day after you recover from stuffing yourself with delectable food. Queue the jeopardy theme song—BLACK FRIDAYYYY!!!

Black Friday isn’t considered a holiday, but with the sheer amount of people out shopping, you would think it was the busiest holiday of the year. I will give you a bit of history on the day Black Friday:

This day, Black Friday, is the official kick-off to the Christmas shopping season. You will see/hear/read about many retailers opening up at 4AM or earlier to accommodate the large rush of customers expecting to find ridiculous deals on different products. Consumers every year look forward to this one day, so that they can purchase those headphones they’ve been eying for months that were a bit too expensive, or that new 50-inch LCD flat screen that they’ve been wanting to hang up over their fireplace since first seeing the ad on television.

To put this in perspective, I’ve included the table below from our good buddy Wikipedia, which depicts the average amount of money that is spent on this day:

Retail Sales

The National Retail Federation releases figures on the sales for each Thanksgiving weekend.

Now, you may be wondering, “What on Earth does this have to do with hosting?” Well, my friends, we live in a world with a digital economy now, and it seems that everyone and their mother has a website. Almost every major retailer has some sort of ad space where they post their upcoming deals for Black Friday. With so many consumers looking for the best deal, you can imagine that sites will receive heavy traffic spikes due to the demand of finding the best deals.

These large spikes of traffic need to be handled as smoothly as possible, so that retailers and consumers do not experience any downtime during this whirl-wind of a day. Enter stage left—expandable cloud servers, multiple VPS’s (virtual private servers), or another dedicated server to handle the increase of traffic. All of which you can find here, at TurnKey Internet.

Each solution has its unique benefits. For example, let’s say you have a cloud server. On Black Friday, your traffic quadruples. Well, one of the main benefits of a TurnKey cloud is the ability to add more resources without incurring downtime. You could have more RAM allocated, increased disk space, or even increased bandwidth. The scalability is very enticing. Then, after Black Friday has concluded, you can downgrade your cloud server with no issues.

Or, let’s say you purchase an additional TurnKey VPS to handle your increase of traffic. You could then have those extra VPS’s decommissioned. You see, the real winners on Black Friday are the consumers/retailers that plan ahead. They purchase the additional bandwidth or add another server before the day occurs. As my college professor would say, “Prior preparation prevents poor performance.” That could be increasing your Turnkey cloud resources, adding an additional Turnkey VPS, or purchasing a new Turnkey dedicated server ahead of time. That way, you can keep your sales flowing in and your customers happy.

Now, my chicken nuggets are calling. Until next time, TurnKey lovers!

The Cloud, and Cloud hosted applications are all the buzz today. Businesses are converting IT infrastructure into the Cloud every day – phone systems, virtual desktops, office servers, and lots more. But when your business is making that transition to The Cloud, why are there there so many options that look the same but with different names like “Cloud Hosting”, “Virtual Servers”, “VPS”, “Dedicated Servers”? Which is the best option for you business – and what is the difference?

First, the term “The Cloud” is among the most popular terms on the Internet today, but lacks an agreed upon firm universal definition. The Cloud is IT on Demand. The cloud is a scalable, reliable and cost-effective way of accessing information technology at any time from anywhere. The technology of the cloud revolves around the benefits of moving expensive and complicated IT out of your office into an efficient, scalable, and secure datacenter. So if you are looking to move your office server into “The Cloud”, you are looking to host the office server in a secure datacenter, and use the Internet to connect to it from any where, any time.

A Virtual Server (also called a Virtual Private Server, VPS, Virtual Machine, VDS, Semi-Dedicated, or Hybrid server) is the term used for the computer server and software that runs on the same physical computer server as other virtual servers and is functionally equivalent to a separate physical computer dedicated to the individual customer’s needs. A single high capacity server in a datacenter can host 10 or more Virtual Private Servers – such that each client has their own privacy, computer resources, customizable operating system and software. The virtual server model is a more power and cost efficient method and provides an easier to manage and generally more reliable computer server infrastructure than say hosting the same application on a typical server in your office.

A dedicated server has all the same benefits of the Virtual Server for privacy, and custom software, but costs more since you have all the resources dedicated to just you (even when the system is idle, its using up electricity, so your costs and efficiency aren’t as optimal compared to a virtual server). But the dedicated server does offer a high level of performance, and for a busy application (say a phone system that connects 500 employees across 3 regions of the country) you will find the dedicated server is your best value when you need the maximum level of computing power.

Cloud Hosting can mean just about any type of hosted solution in a secure datacenter. The more advanced Cloud Hosted solutions providers are offering a robust scalable network of servers that can provide redundancy and scalability that otherwise is not present in a single virtual server or dedicated server. You have to be careful when you shop vendors who use the term “Cloud Hosting” to promote using the Cloud to host your application or server. What you generally want is cloud hosting solution which offers you a ‘virtual machine’ in the cloud providers network, that offers some level of scalability, and redundancy. Some Cloud Hosted solutions providers focus on you developing a specific application and hosting just that application (not an entire server or operating system) on their cloud – this is a bit more complex and ideal for developers. For instance Amazon EC2’s web site states “Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.” SalesForce’s offering in the cloud called Force.com lets savvy businesses and developers write applications to run on their cloud platform, utilizing their proprietary system to gain scalability and redundancy.

TurnKey’s offering, TurnKey Cloud offers a full virtual machine ontop of multiple redundant clusters of servers which provides the cloud benefits of scalability and redundancy to let you install any operating system and any applications without having to utilize software developers to convert their applications to a proprietary cloud platform. If it runs on the server in your office, it will run in the TurnKey Cloud platform.

So what’s different between Cloud Hosting, versus a VPS or a Dedicated Server? The reality is they all do about the same thing but vary based on price, ease of use, performance and the ability to offer scalability and redundancy. Some hosting companies sell a non-scalable non-redundant VPS and call it a Cloud Hosting solution because its hosted over the Internet, and it looks attractive due to the lower cost. Companies like TurnKey, Amazon, SalesForce offer a true Cloud Hosting solution with scalabiltiy and redundancy included. So you have to look closely at the infrastructure utilized by your ‘cloud hosting’ solutions provider.

A VPS will be your lowest cost – easiest to use, option in most cases. If you need a lot of computing power, or resources (disk, network bandwidth, etc) – your costs can go double or more very quickly. The down side is your VPS resides on a ‘shared’ resource (that dedicated server that is split up between 10 or more other VPS clients). So there can be times when you have trouble getting all the performance you may need, and scalability is limited (you may be able to increase ram or bandwidth double or more from your initial machine, but costs shoot up quickly as you do so). But the VPS is easy to manage, you don’t have to worry about hardware generally since the server that your VPS is housed on will typically be a very high end server with built in redundancy. But it is still a single point of failure, which can have several hours of down time should your provider have to do maintenance.

A Dedicated server will actually be your best performer, and best value if you have a highly demanding application that needs a lot of computing power. You can have access to 24 or more cpu processors, and 128+ GB of ram if your budget allows – and it’s a lot cheaper than getting the same computing power versus a Cloud based Server. The downside is the single point of failure, and additional administrative efforts needed to maintain a dedicated server. Make sure you selected a dedicated server from your provider that includes management, backups, and guaranteed response times if something goes wrong.

A Cloud Server (Cloud hosted solution) – is going to give you best of all worlds – but at a price. You get the simplicity of a virtual machine to administer it. You get the ability to scale to very high capacity (even speeds faster than your average dedicated server), and you can even replicate to multiple servers and utilize load balancing for literally infinite scalability. The built in redundancy offers protection from single point of failure on hardware (since a cloud based server if the hardware fails, should auto restart on another node within a few seconds, picking up right where it left off) – but all this does come at a higher price. Typically 2x to 4x the cost of a traditional VPS, and if you need a lot of computer power, disk space, or bandwidth you really are going to pay a lot more for the privilege to have that level of redundancy and ability to scale on demand

So what works best for your business? Give your Service Provider a call – tell them what your application is, and your needs, and concerns – and they will help you choose the best one. At the end of the day, all 3 get you ‘in the cloud’.

If you are in the market for business web hosting, you probably already know how many options are out there. While large, established businesses may need a dedicated server to meet their needs, most small to medium-sized businesses find that a VPS or virtual private server is the best match. A VPS is a sub-section of a dedicated server. It’s a guaranteed amount of space that is completely isolated from the rest of the server. This means you get a private, guaranteed portion of a server without the risks of shared hosting (in which potentially hundreds of people are using the same machine) and without the expense of a dedicated server. At the risk of sounding slightly self-serving, TurnKey Internet’s new VPS platform is the best deal you’re going to find with some of the coolest new technology available! (including an iPhone app for mobile access!) But let’s put that aside for a minute and discuss the various reasons why VPS technology is a good choice for your business.

Potential for Growth

When you’re shopping for a hosting solution for your business, it is essential that you consider your business’ potential for growth. You don’t want to buy server space, get your website up and running and start selling only to exceed your server’s capacity. If that happens your site goes down. If your site goes down, you lose money! A VPS offers a large amount of space and allocated resources so your business can grow unfettered.

Support

Good VPS hosting comes with robust support. This means you always have a resource if you run into problems. If your site goes down, you have a real person to call. Make sure your VPS host has online chat support, a phone number and a ticketing system (TurnKey has all three). There are many hosts out there that do not offer 24x7x365 support. Often these hosts don’t own their hardware and are not reliable (if they can’t pay their bills, your business suffers). Do some research before choosing a host to make sure you will get the kind of customer service your business deserves.

Security

VPS hosting offers unique IP addresses alongside password protection, firewalls and security software managed by your hosting company (if you choose the right host). This means your data is secure, regularly backed-up and protected from potential attacks. A VPS is an excellent choice if you are concerned about data security.

Low Cost

If you are concerned about controlling business expenses (and who isn’t!?) a VPS is an extremely economical choice. You get nearly all of the benefits of a dedicated machine without the large monthly bill. Of course, if your business grows quickly and you find you need more resources, you can easily upgrade from a VPS at that time.

Cool Features!

If we’re talking about a TurnKey VPS, we’re talking about awesome features! One of the ways we set ourselves apart from our competition (alongside owning our own hardware, our track record of excellent service and heroic customer support) is that we bundle so many extras with our hosting plans. With our new Xen HVM technology, our VPS “paravirtualization” offers unprecedented performance (we also offer you the ability to compile and load your own kernel modules, for those of you who are interested.) We offer great control panels and support for many types of operating systems. Perhaps the coolest feature of all though is our new iPhone app for managing your VPS from your mobile phone! You can reboot your server, monitor usage, bandwidth, RAM and much more, from wherever you are! Come check out our VPS offerings and feel free to jump on Live Chat to speak to a representative if you have any questions.

http://turnkeyinternet.net/webhosting/turnkey_virtual_private_server.php

TurnKey Internet is no rip off. The web hosting company gets consistently high marks for service, reliability and up-time.

How did you find this blog post? Did you run a search for TurnKey Internet Scam? If so, welcome! You’re my target demographic. This is part three of my SEO-fu experiment. If you haven’t read the first two posts, you can find them here (1) and here (2). Today, the focus is you, the customer, and how you browse, search and read. Understanding how you do these things will help us figure out: how to help you find us; how to appeal to you when you do; and how, as a business, to navigate this weirdo short attention-span information culture we all find ourselves living in.

Many people (myself included) don’t always take enough time to evaluate the sources of their information. We may read a review somewhere that effects our opinion of a company without ever wondering about who wrote it. Our decisions are snap, our time is valuable, and once we pick a company, we will tend to stick with it. It’s easier to stay where you are once you’re there—I think that’s a law of inertia or something. But really, market studies show, consumers demonstrate brand-loyalty online the same way they do in a supermarket or clothing store. So get those customers in the door, and you’re likelier than not to keep them.

Information is power. The trouble is: there’s too much of it out there (information AND power, but in this context I’m referring to information). Often, the first line of text that appears under the Google search result link is all a customer will read before making a decision. As a marketer, it is my job to make that text count—to curate my information into bite-sized pieces without sacrificing quality. This is extremely challenging when, say, you have like eight things to communicate and only room for four. Surely in this equation there is an inevitable sacrifice of information quality—you just can’t always cram everything you need to say into tiny spaces. In this case, language can’t keep up with progress. But there is hope! One positive thing about Google’s indexing of every word of text on the internet, is that every word counts. So you may not be searching specifically for “TurnKey Internet Quality” or “Marketing Philosophy” or “Web Hosting Masters” but goll durnit, you’ll find us! Of course, you may never know WHY you found us (unless you actually read this post) but, point is, my SEO-fu got you here, despite your 2010 attention-span.

While you might think longer domain names are never the way to go, you might be surprised by some of the benefits. A more descriptive domain better represents your site content, and can be a great boost to SEO. It can also be more memorable, more readily available and less of a risk of copyright infringement. Before I go too much further, I should mention that it is always a good idea for your domain name to be the same as the name of your site. This is true both because it will be more memorable and because it won’t dilute your brand with multiple titles.


SEO Benefits

In a longer domain name you have the opportunity to pick two or three keywords that represent your company, your products or your services. Short might be nice for ease of typing, but it’s nearly impossible to find a short domain name today that will have anything to do with your company content-wise. If you’re willing to brand yourself with something nonsensical for the sake of brevity, great; but if you want your brand to reflect your company, longer just makes sense. In a world where search terms define traffic, naming your company with industry-related search terms is smart business. However, there are a couple of points to look out for.

• Make sure the domain name you choose is easy to spell. If it isn’t, then buy up all the misspellings of your domain and point them to your page. But really, it’s best to avoid hard-to-spell domains for the sake of clarity. Also, your site ranking is associated with your domain name so if you have multiple spelling variants, it could be lowering your numbers.
• Make sure your domain name is easy to pronounce. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: word of mouth is just as important today as it was 50 years ago. If your customers can’t pronounce the name of your website, they’re less likely to talk about it. I don’t have any scientific studies to support this claim, but I think it’s pretty solid common sense.

Easy to Remember

Sometimes a phrase can be easier to remember than a short made up word. It’s all about context and description. If your site name and domain are specific, descriptive and relevant they will also be memorable. Why not go all the way and make your domain name a complete sentence? As language-based creatures, sentences that mean something, stick. Think about how easy it is to remember song lyrics. Associate your title sentence with your site content and you will have the advantage of contextual memory coupled with all of the other advantages discussed above. Slam dunk.

The first step in driving traffic to your business website is to create a compelling  site that is logically laid out. Invest some time and money into creating a site that reflects your business philosophy and business goals. Make contacting you easy, and streamline the shopping and check-out process – the faster the process, the more sales you will make. Once you have the site ready, here are some techniques for bringing people to it:

• Brand your product and website consistently. Every time your brand makes an appearance, you are building your brand recognition. Keeping that brand simple and potent is the key to building your business. Don’t dilute the brand with multiple versions of your logo. Don’t dilute your brand with different website templates. Keep the look of your company consistent and it will get consistently recognized.

• Make your website trustable. Always make sure your content is well-written, authoritative and slick. You want to instill as much trust as possible in every single visitor you get because every visitor is a potential client. Keep your security software active and updated and let your visitors know you run a secure site. If they feel like their information is safe with you, they’ll be much more willing to spend money with you.

• Create strong business policies. Write up a solid company policy. Include return-policies, money-back guarantees, and a strong code of ethics. Display this information prominently in your website’s footer and refer to it in your advertisements. If you have a company newsletter (and you should—more on this in another blog post soon) maintain a stringent privacy policy and make it crystal clear to your subscribers how they can opt-out. Spamming is the number one absolute no-no when it comes to building consumer trust.

• Name each of your web pages with an SEO friendly keyword. Get your webmaster to title each of your pages accurately and with an eye towards the search engines. Internal navigability is critically important but in order for it to matter, people have to be able to find your website in the first place. Titling with keywords makes your website index-able and indexing equals traffic.

• Add as much value to your website as possible. There are many techniques for making your clients feel like they’re getting a whole lot out of their relationship with you. Affiliate programs achieve this while also helping you mobilize your traffic to build itself. Recommending links to other related content can also add value. Ideally, you want to cultivate repeat-traffic. If you serve as a kind of index or reference for your visitors, they’ll keep coming back for more. You can also offer e-books as a bonus for purchases, filling out surveys or joining your mailing list. There are e-books out there on pretty much every topic imaginable.

• Add a favorites or “bookmark this site” script to your pages. This one is pretty self-explanatory. If visitors can easily mark your website when they visit, they will be more likely to come back in the future. Make this as painless as possible.

• Add a “recommend this site.” Word-of-mouth is as important today as it’s ever been—maybe even more important as social networking makes us all aware of everyone else’s opinions all the time. Make it easy for visitors to recommend you to their friends and colleagues.

• Create a “what’s new” page, or a “recent news” section. This is especially important for large sites with a lot of fresh content scattered among many pages. You want to make it as easy as possible for your visitors to check out new updates. This is important for maintaining visitor interest and for maintaining visitor participation. It is well-known that traffic expands exponentially. Popularity builds on itself.

• Make your site SEO friendly. I touched on this earlier, and have written about it in several other blog posts. There are several SEO websites where you can learn all the dirty secrets for optimizing your site. Here is a brief rundown of the basics:

  • Title tags: These should be 60 characters, and include keywords.
  • Header tags: These are numbered from 1-7, and aren’t recognized for every search engine but, when they are, they’re important.
  • Keyword meta tags: Meta tags should be 15-20 words long (to avoid getting flagged for spamming) and should be as directly relevant to your site content as possible.
  • Text area key words: It is particularly important to include keywords in the beginning of sentences and higher up on the page, but keywords anywhere will be helpful.

• Submit your site to search engines. It takes a whole lot longer for search engines to find your site organically, so submit it! It can be time consuming, but submitting your site to each search engine individually will yield the best results.

• Keep on top of links and repair or delete broken ones. Dead links are a sure give-away that you’re not keeping your website up-to-date. Clean house regularly manually or with a link-checker. There are several free link-checking tools available online.

• Conduct periodic contests. Contests are an excellent way to build traffic. Everyone loves to win something, even when it isn’t worth a lot of money. The spirit of competition is a powerful thing. Make sure you keep a running tally of the rankings, visible to the public. If you run a contest over a few days or even weeks, you will keep contestants coming back again and again to check their standings. Contests that involve voting are especially effective. Voting gets people to involve their social networks. This can lead to a huge increase in traffic in a relatively short period of time.

• Keep content fresh. I know. I’m starting to sound like a broken record on this one, but I really can’t stress enough how important it is to keep your website current. Nobody is going to bother coming back to visit if there isn’t ever anything new to look at. It’s obvious. It’s true.

A new study has come out about adult use of social networks. Like with every other demographic, it’s going up. Though adults still rank well below youngsters, the late adopters are still adopting as the human race moves closer and closer to 100% virtual living. Okay, so maybe that’s a little grandiose. Just because something continues to grow now, doesn’t mean it is never going to stop. Still, there doesn’t appear to be any end in sight, according to the numbers.

89% of users still consider social networks to be primarily social, but business use is growing. The majority of social networkers have multiple accounts, some for business some for personal. Of course, younger adults have the highest percentage of use:

75% of 18-24
57% of 25-34
30% of 35-44
19% 45-54
10% 55-64
7% 65+

I was surprised to see that Myspace still ranks highest for usage, with 50% of all social network users. Facebook has 22% and LinkedIn has 6%, with 1% left over for YouTube. Among older users, privacy was of the greatest concern, but wasn’t keeping them from setting up profiles like it used to.

Yeah yeah, I know, everyone EVERWHERE is obsessed with Twitter, and for good reason. Twitter is fun, it’s easy to connect to tons of people and it’s SO hot right now. But, with the good comes the advertising. Along with being everyone’s favorite social media plaything, Twitter is also paving the way for the next generation in spamming. And, as the account holders with the most followers get wooed by the green, good people get jacked.

Help! My Tech Heroes Are Selling Out!

Every time I login to our TurnKey Internet Twitter account, I see another good tech person selling out. I know: who am I to talk? After all, I’m logging in to my COMPANY Twitter account, to SELL something. I shouldn’t really be splitting hairs here. But there is a big difference between a company account and a personal account; between a company network and a network of friends. Or there should be. There REALLY should be. Unfortunately, at this stage of the game, the line between personal and professional is woefully blurry. Drunk pirate anyone? While this might be good news for companies taking advantage of individual’s social popularity to market their products, it’s not so good for individuals taking advantage of their FRIENDS for monetary gain.

Companies are no dummies

Twitter offers an unprecedented forum for the bite-sized advertisement and tech gurus with thousands of followers offer an irresistible demographic. But I don’t follow those tech gurus to be advertised to, and I suspect you don’t either. I want my free information and I want it now! Which leads me to my next point…

Everyone’s In IT for the Money

The more I think about it, the more I wonder if the problem is more systemic. We have all gotten so used to this fancy-free exchange of information. We subscribe to feeds and streams left and right and consume them without a thought for the poor sap behind the tweets, endlessly and thanklessly churning out tech tips for our enjoyment. Surely tech gurus need to eat! If only we could all keep our professional lives and our private lives separate, but with this all-access-all-the-time technology… it’s a fat chance, sister.

So what’s the upshot? The conclusion I keep coming to is that free access puts the onus on the individual. It’s up to each of us to decide what we are going to share and where we are going to share it. Each of us has to weigh our friendships against our desire to monetize. We also have to remember that our input is valuable, as diluted as we might feel by the seemingly endless input of others. And, I think, we have to start valuing quality input more highly, and by that I mean, we have to start being willing to pay for it. If we aren’t, we have no right to complain about our tech expert buddy spamming our twitter feed with advertisements. The fact remains: if we value what he has to say, we’ll tolerate his spam. Probably. If enough of us stop following him, perhaps he’ll think twice about what he’s doing. Perhaps he will offer a monthly subscription to an ad-free version of his feed. Now THAT is something I’d pay for.