I wrote an open letter to John Millliron of Circuit City about 20 days ago concerning the poor customer service I had received on my Camera protection plan bought at Circuit City. A

A gentleman named Justin Brian from Circuit City executive office called me couple days after that regarding the matter. After talking to him for about 10 minutes on the phone and hearing the exact same excuses as Circuit City previous employees, I was fed up with their attitude and told him I want my camera back the way it was and I was done with Circuit City. Keep in mind I had given them my camera about a month prior to talking to him.

He then told me that if I don’t receive my camera in 2 weeks he will give me a new camera. Well, today was 17 days after that phone conversation and I still have not got my camera back. I called him this morning to ask him to live up to his promise and give me a new camera (of equivalent value to my previous one - nothing too crazy).  He didn’t answer his phone. Could hours after someone called me from Circuit City and told me that my camera has been repaired and will be shipped to the Circuit City store I dropped it off at.

So after 45 days I receive a phone call telling me my camera will be mailed back to the Circuit City store (not even my own address). It will be probably another week before I actually see my camera. Once more thy didn’t live to their promises. If two weeks had passed and I hadn’t received my camera I should have got a new camera, but instead they tell me to wait another week to get the repaired one.

My message to Circuit City: You Suck. Not only I will never shop there again, I will make sure no one that I know shops there. You cause nothing but headache, your customer service personnel are incompetent and rude, and your prices are no different than Best Buy.

Sometimes we need to jump start our forums buy paying forum posters to post some threads and replies. It is usually hard to find good forum posters for particular niches. Here are some tips that I have learned when looking for forum posters:

Don’t Use Mass Forum Posting Services

There are services out there (on DP and elsewhere) that offer mass forum postings. They usually have 10 or so forum posters on their payroll and will send them to post on your forum. They are usually not trained in your niche and will not produce quality posts for you.

Find 10 Good Individuals

Post a thread on DP or elsewhere mentioning that you are looking for forum poster in your particular niche and you are willing to pay certain amount/post. Other members will reply and you can always choose the ones that you think are qualified to post. This way you get much better quality posts and know every forum poster by person.

Be Willing To Pay Well

The amount of pay per post would be different for different niches. A movie forum pay/post should cost much less than a cancer forum pay/post. But If you want quality posts you should be willing to pay for it. Usually $0.25/post is a good average. I have paid as low as $0.10/post and as high as $1.00/post before.

Continue The Service Until Forum Is Popular

Have the forum posters post in your forum until it becomes popular with natural posters. If you buy the posting service for a week from 10 different people each posting 50 posts, you have more content by the end of the week. However after those 7 days the forum will go back to being dead and new natural members will not be generated. So hire 5 to 10 posters and have them post for at least a month.

In one my previous posts I talked about what a Limited Liability Company (LLC) is. I shortly touched on the advantages that an LLC offers for an entrepreneur. In this post I will examine the advantages of a Limited Liability Company for particularly an Internet Entrepreneur.

Limited Liability Companies are the most popular form of business structure chosen by internet entrepreneurs. It would have to be an exceptional case to start an internet company around a website or service as something other than an LLC. However some companies might change their structure to a S-Corporation in order to be able to go public.

Limited Liability

The LLC provides limited liability for its members meaning that the owner’s (member’s) assets outside the company are protected given that the company goes bankrupt, gets sued, or is in debt.

Pass-Through Taxation

When working for a large company (ex. formed as a C Corp) as an employee, you almost always pay taxes on your income. Your employer also pays tax on the companies earning. This is called double taxation. In an LLC you can file all your income taxes through the company on the same tax forms as your personal tax and you only have to count that income once.

So LLC protects you from being double taxed.

Simple Record Keeping

We, webmasters, tend not to keep any records - especially in hard copy format. In an LLC, unlike C Corps, you don’t need to hold annual meetings, and publish many reports. However, you do need to keep enough records to fill your tax forms and be able to defend them later.

Deductibles Expenses

At the end of each year you have to deduct your expenses from your earnings and pay taxes on them. You can deduct your own salary, and business expenses. Since you would be the owner you might be able to deduct your work related travel expenses (Blog Expo trip), cell phone bills (if you use it to give support), etc from your earning.

Today I added bullet images to the H3 tags on my blog. It’s a very simple process:

1. Open your CSS file
2. Find the line that has the “H3″ styling
3. Add the following code in there:
   background-image: url(images/h3bullet.gif);
   background-repeat: no-repeat;
4. Add some padding to make sure the text and image are not overlapping
   padding-left: 22px;

The best way to start your online presence/business is with a blog. Create a blog and get used to being a webmaster as supposed to only an internet user. Get your foot wet and start from basics. Even if you don’t know what to write about at least you will learn the basic ins and outs of internet world without having to do anything too technical.

To start a blog:

Register a Domain Name

I use GoDaddy. Registering a domain name costs less than $10 a year. If you can afford it, get a unique URL rather than a free blog hosted on blogspot and elsewhere. Those are great, but a unique address will give you much more credibility.

Get A Hosting Account

I use HostGator. You can find free hostings too, but nowadays you can find a good hosting account for small websites for about $8/month. If you use a different hosting provider than the place you registered the URL, you have to set the DNS of the address to point to your server.

Download and install

Wordpress. Wordpress is the most popular and powerful blogging software. The best thing is that it is free. Download it and install it on your server. If you can’t do this, simply ask people on the various webmaster forums and people will be happy to help you.

Start Blogging

In the beginning of your blog’s life its not that important what you write about. Just start posting and learn the basics of blogging and being a webmaster. Your posts will mature as time goes on.