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Another Middle Finger From Zuck To The SMB’s Of The World.

x-ray of hand

I’m no stranger to social media.

You might say “I’m ancient”.

In spite of being enrolled in Medicare, I operate double-digit WordPress and Zen cart sites and have probably half a million humans(?) following me on social media in the captive bird niche.

My target audience defined broken down by buyer persona: 

Does the mirror fog when you place it under their nose? Yes.

Do they have or are they thinking of acquiring a captive bird? Yes

Great make sure we acquire their email.

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Why Paypal Working Capital Should Be An SMBs Go To Lender

black and gold PayPal logos

Full transparency, my only relationship with PayPal is as a customer.

PayPal Working Capital was formerly Bill Me Later.

We’ve been using PayPal for 14 years and currently have three active accounts we use for selling online. 

Square is used for walk-in retail sales so we are able to separate Indiana cash and credit card sales for sales tax filing purposes.

Ironically 10% of all our online customers live in Illinois and now get a 10.25% discount from us as we are no longer collecting and paying sales tax in that state.

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Easy Hack For Getting Your Finances Under Control $20 At A Time

caliper measurement holding coins on top of financial journal with calculator on foreground

I wrote the following post in 2013 but never published it.

Six years later we are under the same precept.

Recently, we took it up farther than we ever should.

We moved our home and Windy City Parrot operations from the geographical center of Chicago to Lowell, Indiana a town of about 10,000 people surrounded by corn farms.

There’s only 5 stops light from one end of the main street (which we are on) to another.

We now have one lease instead of 2 and 4 fewer utility bills while eliminating 2 buildings to maintain.

Our State Farm vehicle insurance and business insurance dropped 50%.

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When Did Woocommerce Stop Offering Support

I am sharing this Woocommerce support thread because it is troubling.

 

Spoiler alert – I paraphrase “this as expected but there is no documentation”

 

Obviously, I question “how would one know what to expect – when there are no instructions, knowledgebase articles or documentation on the subject?

 

Woocommerce support  is so out of touch, I’m sent a WORDPRESS document and told to figure it out

 

When I click the View link on my test site, I am redirected to the Shop page on the front end of my site. (This is as expected.)

 

When I click the Edit link, I am redirected to the user’s profile in the admin area. That’s where I would change a customer’s address or any other information.

 

We do not have documentation on this. It piggy-backs on the WordPress User system. Here is more information on that:

https://codex.wordpress.org/Users_Screen

 

I’m building my first Woocommerce store possibly migrating my 17-year-old ecomm store that does mid 6-figures

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Why You Don’t Know Jack About WordPress Migrations

Computer specialist working in a bright office

We are migrating our WordPress blog to a new host.

We will add the Woocommerce plugin and then migrate all the data from our current zen cart ecommerce store to the new woocommerce store

 

my short list is

 

https://getflywheel.com/pricing/

https://pressable.com/pricing/

https://www.greengeeks.com

https://www.dreamhost.com/website-builder

https://www.a2hosting.com/solutions

https://www.inmotionhosting.com/wordpress-hosting-promo?

https://www.siteground.com/speed

 

I didn’t see pricing on hyve.com

 

I may go with 2 hosts because we have 4 

‘hobby” sites that are really small but our current site gets 100,000 page views/mo and I like dedicated servers.

 

Flywheel is cool (I thought) because you can build your dev site on your desktop for free and when you’re ready to go live you can just push it to their servers  – no muss no fuss,

 

They also have something called “Blueprint” which maps out any number plug-ins that you use on a regular basis.

 

They (the plug-ins) can be added to any new site with a single click

 

Stay tuned

 

I’m old enough to have a Medicare card

 

Yet I Lord also over a dozen websites on three hosting platforms.

 

I make my living in have done so from e-commerce for 15 years.

 

Have 400,000 social media followers because of my expertise in captive bird husbandry.

 

I still have a thirst to learn something new every day.

 

My day gig is WindyCityParrot.com, which has been around since New Year’s Eve 2002 when my wife Catherine launched it.

 

Since then I’ve built dozens, maybe a hundred or more websites.

 

You get the picture. I know e-commerce.

 

3 WordPress hosts – reviewed 

For a convoluted set of reasons, our current eCommerce platform is a hybrid WordPress/Zen Cart.

 

This combination is not working on a number of levels especially for SEO.

 

There are many reasons for it but I’ve suspected several which I’ve recently confirmed.

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Why I’m Gifting SCORE a Holistic Marketing Evaluation

woman social media

 

Editor’s note:

 

When it comes to digital marketing evaluations, I am a mercenary, some of you will need steel-toed boots to read this.

 

Endnote.

 

Prelude:

 

I’m dedicating this to Bill Herring, chapter’s 310 chair, who can now throw away his diagram.

 

I’ve been with SCORE for 5 months.

 

I’ve been the director of digital marketing for chapter 310, Valparaiso IN, since December 2019.

 

I have my own digital marketing agency.

 

I’m doing this pro bono in addition to mentoring for SCORE.

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