John Hasson

This will be kinda introspective (had to look that up to make sure I was using it right).  Ok, so I have a bunch of internet projects.  Some are successful and some are major flops.  But I have a pretty decent system for going from idea to implementation to profit (or loss).  At this point it is really just a matter of copying it over and over to scale things.  [and no it isn't a huge secret. pick a niche, research, build, test, repeat until you have success (or fail) and move onto the next one].

This puts me in the spot of looking to hire.  I have been watching and learning from others who outsource outside the US.  There are horror stories and success stories.  If I hire outside the US, I don’t have to worry about office space, extra taxes, employee benefits, extra taxes (did I say that one already? ).  But it also means that I will have a significant amount of turnover (not too bad if I have everything documented rather well) but still something to deal with.  As far as hiring in the US, I’ve thought of taking someone who is honest, smart and hardworking and just training them in the skills they will need.  Trust and smartness are way more important then skills (you can learn what you need in this business).

Thats where I am at.  Hire someone?  Keep writing computer programs to do things for me?  Hire someone to write my programs to do things for me (plus all the other cool stuff I do)?  (Some things can’t be done automatically — but lots of repetitive things can)  If I do hire someone, do I hire local, mid west us or foreign?  Hire someone local who I can trust and teach them what they need to know (or pay for their training)?  I don’t expect to have an answer right away, I am still mulling things over.  Feel free to offer advice.

PS.  I haven’t forgotten about that free PPC app.  I work on it while I am flying in a plane (which only happens twice a week).

Tags: Advice, Personal by John Hasson
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Seems that everyone is doing an office tour.
Amit has his new place in florida
Zac has a blog post showing lot of people’s offices…

• Chad
• Mark
• Ian
• Jeremy
• Shawn
• Jim

Paul showed off his new house.

So… I can give into peer pressure. Here is my house/office:

Tags: Affiliate Marketing, PPC, Pay Per Click, Personal by John Hasson
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We were riding back from dinner at a really fancy restaurant. Neil was about as impressed with the fancy food as I was. On the way back to the hotel in the H2 Limos provided by elite retreat somehow we got on the subject of AMEX cards. A few us us all had the Business Platinum card, but Neil was pressured into whipping out his black AMEX card. A few of us passed it around (it really is made of metal for those wondering). I took a quick look or two at it and then handed it back to him. Then I told him the number, the name and the expiration date. Neil took it all in stride and said yeah but you didn’t get the security code. Oh thats easy I said, lemme see the card again. We all laughed as Neil put the card back in his wallet, safe from my eyes.

Neil, not to worry, I have since forgotten the number..

Tags: Elite Retreat, Personal by John Hasson
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My father is an adjunct professor there teaching business classes. I was telling him about my latest project (just launched into beta yesterday) as well as a bunch of other stuff that I do about making money online and just general business and marketing stuff that I do. During this conversation he asked me to come as a guest speaker for his class. I figured.. why not.

Then he tricked me into wearing a suit and tie.. at least I looked good. His class had around 10 people in it. I rambled on about PPC, researching your market, networking, funding sources, gave some ideas that I haven’t even started like a comparison site about products made by “green” companies, marketing spring break vacation to facebook users.

I started about how I made connections with people and how important it was to actually care about people. People can generally tell when you are just being nice to be nice vs actually caring about you. Then talked about how I found ideas and products that I could market online and so on. Somehow we got into funding. Venture Capitalists/Angel funding vs self funding. (I pick self funding when possible) Next we talked about very (and I mean very) basic concepts of Search Engine Marketing/PPC–buy low, sell high–basic. Then I talked about how I took the way I played MMO’s in the past and then I took those same concepts of find the best way to be successful at the game and applying them to my business life. Thus making work be the same as fun for me.

It may have seemed a bit dry, one kid was in the back talking to someone during about half of it. Everyone else seemed bored. It looked like just three people were actually listening. Did that give me a 30% conversion rate?

Whenever talking to people I wonder… Should you start with I make $XX,XXX a week/month to get their attention? Maybe I’ll do that in the future, but to me that always seemed to be a little too “look at me, how awesome I am” and I am not really trying to go for that right now.

Tags: Personal by John Hasson
1 Comment »

1. .Mac seems like a rip off
   (I don’t use it, but if I could point it to my own server for storage and so on… that would rock)
2. Command + C vs Ctrl + C and all the other shortcuts I have to relearn
   (yes I know there are ways to make it mimic windows, but I figure I should learn it the right way)
3. Resume From Suspend Is a Crapshoot
   (fixed with a perm hibernate hack–but still annoying)
4. Hibernate not easily accessible
   (fixable within the command line, but it should be a choice)
5. No good native development IDE
   (I really like Visual Studio 2005, haven’t find anything close on the mac, I run it via parallels)
6. Installing new apps could be a little more obvious
   (I have it down, but many others don’t seem to get that sometimes you copy it to apps, other times you just run a package, or sometimes you have to open apps in the finder first to copy it…..)

That is about it. If I want to play a windows game, I just reboot into XP and am fine. Other then that I am in OSX/Parallels XP 100% of the time.

Hints for windows users

Command+Tab for switching apps
Command+~ for switching windows within the app
Ctrl+F4 for switching all windows within all apps (I am not making this one up)

But why not just use the fancy Expose window thingy?   With 30 windows they are too small to really pick the one I want quickly.

Tags: Advice, Personal, Uncategorized by John Hasson
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Well I am not sure what they are thinking, but I am going to be a speaker at Affiliate Summit West 2008 :). I am pretty excited.

I sent in a simple proposal to talk about PPC marketing since that is what I do. My proposed session title was “Which PPC Engines Work And How.” It was going to be a nice presentation probably with power point slides

They contacted me and asked if I would “be interested in leading a roundtable discussion for the “Ask the Experts” General Session? This is an environment where attendees will sit at a table to chat with you, and 8-10 of these discussions will be going on concurrently.

Also, there is no presentation involved – you’d be answering questions and talking about your respective issues informally.”

Frankly this was awesome! I just have to relax and answer questions and discuss PPC and so on informally. So… I’ll be there

On a side note, it looks like most of the speakers have titles like CEOs, Founders, Presidents, Owners and so on. I picked “Affiliate” as my title since I think it fit best I’m just a regular guy who has figured some things out well and am still looking to learn and grow more.

My thanks out to the Affiliate Summit people for giving me this opportunity.

Tags: Online Moola, Personal by John Hasson
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You’re at a social event. You say/do something really stupid. You catch yourself and think boy, that was dumb; but it is too late. You are still thinking about it the next day and how you could have done better/differently. Right here is where you need to stop.

1. You can’t change it
2. 99% of the people that heard/saw it have forgotten about it because they are fretting over the stupid thing they did.

This is not a license to be a tool. It is a thought process to help you stop worrying so much about the past and dwelling on mistakes. Everyone screws up. The trick is to not spend a bunch of wasted energy worrying about it. If it was wrong, remember not to do it again and move on with your life. Don’t worry so much about what everyone else might be thinking. In short get over yourself

Tags: Personal by John Hasson
2 Comments »

I’m coding up an app right now and realized I was hungry. Not wanting to waste a bunch of time I went for a pair of hot pockets. We have a full size refrigerator/microwave upstairs, but all the dishes are downstairs. No way I’m going all the way downstairs for plate to microwave a pair of hot pockets. Here is where the important college tip comes in:

I grab my oldest daughter (she is currently 7) and explain this important tip as I flatten the box and put the pizza pockets in their crispers and on the box (now a plate). She thought I was joking. Even when I put the finished plate in the microwave she asked me if I was serious. As you can see from the picture I’ve already eaten them. Remember. Do anything to avoid dirty dishes. Cardboard plates are reusable, recyclable and easy to clean.

Tags: Personal by John Hasson
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I’ve been married for just over 9 years now. I’ve got a friend who likes to joke about how I am stuck with my wife for eternity since I’m Mormon; and he found out that we are married forever and not just “till death do we part.” He is sooo looking forward to the parting at death (he jokes). But it got me to thinking about my wife.

I’ve only had to go into Surgery a twice since we have been married. One was for Laser Eye Surgery and the other was for a completely destroyed (ripped out of socket–very painful) shoulder accident. Both times she was right there taking care of me. I don’t mean throwing a box of cereal at me once a day… I mean she was “waiting on me, anticipating my needs” taking care of me. Even though I was grouchy throughout the ordeals she just shrugged it off.

When I have the opportunity to work from my home office she will bring me up one or two home made meals a day. She doesn’t ask if I’m hungry, she just does it. I usually am out of town traveling, but when I am home for more then a week she will go out of her way to prepare my favorite meals (and make extra).

We have 3 children–all girls and all pretty (IMHO). She will spend hours going through their clothes every season change (3-5 times a year) and organize all their outfits to make sure they have matching outfits and clothes.

She does all the grocery shopping, all the laundry, all the trash duty…she even feeds MY cat.

She does the dishes, cleans the kitchen, sweeps and vacuums the floors. Makes Dinner for the whole family every night.

She decorates the house for each holiday.. not just Christmas and Halloween… every holiday.

AND… she is hot. I am sure there is a lot of other things she does too… The point is: This is a woman I can spend eternity with.

Tags: Personal by John Hasson
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This is a bit off topic, but I am so proud of it I am posting it.

I made this on December 21st. When I was using my elite MSPaint skills for the last blog post, I saw this picture and remembered how proud I was of my VERY FIRST EVER snow sculpture.

It took me about 6 hours to make. Most of that time was packing snow in blocks and stacking them so I could actually make the sculpture. The sculpting part was less then an hour. And the light post is not crooked because it melted.

Tags: Personal by John Hasson
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