Green & Nutty Pty Ltd

By now all Australian business owners making use of PayPal should have received an email about the gathering of business information for Australian PayPal accounts with transactions over a certain (unspecified) level as a part of the Australian Anti-laundering Legislation. When you reach this level they will limit your account until you provide the additional information.

Since writing Blog 4 Cash I have been thinking a lot about writing in general. This time last year I was 90% of the way through writing my first book and have spend the proceeding year procrastinating over it. Simultaneously, this week I have been day-dreaming over how much more writing I can complete on my train ride to and from Melbourne for Business Mums Conference in a few weeks time.

Government policy has more implications then those who write it seem to consider. One such policy resides in the hands of the ACCC when it comes to product claims and labeling. There are matter within my Australian soap nut business that I take very seriously as making false or misleading claims about your product or what it is made up of is not good for long term business reputation.

I think it's time to put Telstra's fault reports on speed dial. However, that would only be useful if the phone line worked.

This is the third fault in six months (and I assume this one is related to the rain). Again, ADSL works but the phone line has ear shattering interference.

It's Telstra - what standard should you expect?

Urgent notice to those people who I anticipated having business/personal communications with this week!

We will not have email, telephone or facsimile communications (and perhaps power for a time) in the coming days due to a significant tree fall overnight. This will include today, Monday 24 November and Tuesday 25 November 2008.

If your call is urgent then please contact me directly on my mobile telephone 0404 034 569 within Australia or +61 4 04 034 569 outside Australia.

Thank you for your patience during this time.

For those not in the know I have been on a road trip over the first couple of weeks of the month and spent the subsequent weeks getting over a wicked virus. I have blogged, in an offline mode, over that time and have finally got most of it up. Here are the links to the backdated posts and articles for you to have a cuppa over.

Road Trip!
Melbourne Zoo
Parenting Irks
Accommodation Review
Warrnambool – a place I love
Ickle Kids
My Geeves!
Green & Nutty heads to South Western Victoria
Accommodation & Adventures

Search engine optimisation (SEO) and site rankings are really a kettle of fish unto themselves these days. Being a marketer who went on to study in Information Technology I am suprised at how many people out there boast to be specialists in SEO.

In order to take a closer look at what is going on behind the scenes I have spend the last 24 hours monitoring guru.com for SEO requests. I have been in touch with some of the businesses putting out SEO requests and have also used their 'project' to understand the skill set of the person offering the solution.

My findings were that most SEO providers ability to understand the true scope of what they acronym means was very sadly lacking. To match, we have almost 36% of those 'employers' that I surveyed not understanding the full scope of SEO either meaning that they were really not qualified to make a good service purchase unless one of their bidders 'enlightened' them to the simple fact that SEO is a two-edged sword. You can have the most 'optimised' site internally but unless you spend time looking after the externals also then you may still fall on your sword.

Most of the bids that I have been given to review included only internals such as and is not just internals like 99% of bidders were bidding on implementation of meta tags and robots, robot tags, html clean ups, site map installation as well as being a loyal provider of optimisation updates and ranking reports.

Another odd project I found was of an 'SEO expert' that wanted to farm out the internal work of clients and not only did he desire the above things but he also wanted the selected supplier to provide 'integration/optimisation themed pages'. Now I am not sure what this person actually means as depending on where you put the emphasis it could mean several different things. My best guess is that he's looking for someone who can build content managers which are optimised for crawling that can have templates overlaid to meet the clients needs.

Other things that are missing internally has been the 'accessibility' approach also. I mean, how many of us who do web development actually take the time to put in our alternate text and descriptors. We all know that some search engines love them, right? Ah, but those extra three seconds of typing may mean I miss something too. Just check out my site closely enough and you will find that it is not up to strict XHTML standard let alone having the appropriate meta data in place.

Now, putting my marketing hat on I wonder what businesses actually understand SEO to be? Clearly a large percentage of businesses posting projects on Guru did not. In the most simplistic of terms it includes a marketing approach to getting your site noticed and linked to in a manner which brings in the keywords that you want you site to be high hitting with. But do marketers know how to achieve this? I'd hope so with the nature of marketing education being increasingly loaded with conferences on 'Search'. But time will tell and some clients will still not be able to see the trees for the weeds in that process.

In relation to this I was interested to find that only 8% of SEO jobs were posted in marketing and 92% were in technology. It would be interesting to see whether this becomes more balanced over time as marketers get their heads around what search is really about. So last night my little Alexa site ranking tool told me that my personal web site ranked in at #19 million and a bit, globally speaking, after my big web site reorganisation leading to a huge number for 404's. . Today, it is at #3, 201, 472. I did just one thing to make this happen, without spending a cent, and it wasn't anything on any of my web sites. If you are interested in doing this for your own business then it may be worth contacting me at the office to find out more.

Finally! I have finished reestablishing Baby Steps Resources as a taxonomy driven web site (on the most part). Hopefully people will now be able to easily find the Green Cleaning Resources as well as the more recent Recipe Section.

I know that I am overdue for engaging a new Virtual Assistant when I have become bored with my email.

I have hit my limit early tonight and really an left now to waiting to hear back on other 'speaking engagements' whilst in Melbourne at the end of the month. Other than that, all business and personal correspondence is all stitched up. What a refreshing change!

However, these past few weeks have also near drowned me in email which has led to my boredom, email became work rather than play for the first time in a long time which is somewhat sad really. However, I have peaked in the last two weeks at 1500 emails a day (across several accounts) which, I guess, explains it.

So, I am on the market for a new VA starting from January 2009. I would like to be able to pay a fixed rate (lower than award) for 40 hours work per week. I do not have a full-time load so they would be welcome to take on other clients also during those times. They would be required to filter email, summarise the more important ones, reply on my behalf for the less important (RTFM) ones and would need to be able to take phone calls for up to three IP-based phone lines (which are usually extremely quiet anyway). They would also need to be capable diary managers, have excellent liaison skills and be able to learn from a wiki rather than calling me.

If you know anyone who would fit the bill please let me know.

So, how do you tell of a morning whether your day will be productive or not? And how accurate is your outlook when assessed in hindsight? The last couple days I have decided that I have had to change the metrics by which I measure my likelihood of a highly productive day and perhaps go for an attitude tune-up as well.

The days where I anticipate that 'anything that can go wrong, will go wrong' (Murphy's Law) are the days where I am awoken to the need to deal with a child who is doing something less desirable like eating last night before's leftovers for breakfast when it was aside as a base for the following dinner. Or that one of my children had decided to glue our playing cards together, not just one set but four. I look at the single minute used to extract myself from bed, identify exactly what is going on and deal with it; and use it as my metric for the likely shape of my day.

Bad metric.

This morning was one of 'those' mornings and by all accounts my day should have gone downhill from there. Unbelievably, thing have been incredibly productive this morning with the dishwasher and washing machine on before breakfast (always a good sign). All children fed at a reasonable hour, Green & Nutty's shipments are all prepared for courier collection and plenty of time to get onto the tasks of business management, homeschooling, finance management and housekeeping.

I have also learnt the virtue of computer and internet time in the late morning for the boys as it means that by lunchtime they are needing to get active and a more than willing to help with household tasks as well as their outdoor learning projects. They get to have some fun whilst I get onto any urgent business matters and maybe find the chance to blog about what we are up to across our home and homeschooling lives as well as in our business domain.

So now the questions remains for me as to what the new metric for whether I am going to have a productive day should be?