Monthly Archives: November 2007

PayPerPost Bloggers Losing Pagerank

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TechCrunch reports:

If participating in PayPerPost wasn’t questionable enough morally before, today it’s now a poisoned chalice as Google has commenced punishing PayPerPost bloggers by completely removing their page rank.

This story hits close to home, both as a blogger – and as an Orlando resident – where PayPerPost is HQ’d. I’ve never really seen the benefit – except to advertisers – to use any good will and influence I’ve built up on my sites to push products on my audience that I didn’t believe in. And while IZEA, the company behind PPP and other Social Media Marketing efforts tries to balance their commercial interests with social awareness, Google’s move against them was warranted, in my opinion.

Paypal to offer Virtual Credit Card numbers for one time use

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Between your Personal Paypal Account, and the Business Account + Debit Card is a new product that Paypal is going to be offering – single use Mastercard Numbers, to use on sites that don’t accept Paypal. I also see some good uses for this in the personal security arena where the value of a non-reusable CC number sitting in a vulnerable database becomes crystal clear.

Open Document Format Wars

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It seems that the Open Document Format, the native format for Open Office.org and contributed to by the Open Document Foundation, as slammed this week – by the ODF – as being too proprietary, and that the corporate backers (such as Sun who adopted the format for its own Star Office package) were more interested in killing Microsoft Office than TRUE Interoperability between Word Processors and the other office productivity tools.

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Know your value, and then Ask For it.

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To invoice my clients, I use an application called Fresh Books, formerly called Second Site – at least that is what it was called when I signed up. I’ve been a customer for about 2 years or so. I signed up as part of a move to organize my freelancing and provide better service to my clients. Plus I needed a brain dead easy way of sending out invoices – something quickbooks sucked at.

They contacted me yesterday to inform me that I am the top performer “Days to Receive Payment” in your category of “Web Design and Development”. And they wanted to ask me, how do I do it?

As my “How Web Sites Are Built” pre-sales document explains, I tend to be upfront about payment. My billing practices are pretty simple actually, and were forged in the 4 years of frustration I felt during the early days years of my consulting practice.

  • If the project is a flat rate, and is under $500 – The client must pay up front.
  • If its a flat rate, and greater than $500, then a retainer must be paid up front – generally 50%. Larger projects (greater than $5000) can be done in thirds, if the client’s budget requires it.
  • If I’m billing hourly than, payment is due when services have been rendered. Basically when the code is in production.
  • All other bills are due 7 days after they are received. Fresh Books lets me know when my clients view their Invoices, an indispensable feature.

But it doesn’t stop there.

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