Erich Stauffer

Blog

  • What Meetups Mean to Me

    In January of 2005 I started my first Meetup called Indy Game Dev. One person joined and together we started to code a game. I didn’t know how to code a game. I had just graduated college with some Computer Science classes where I had to make a few small games in Visual Basic.NET, but I didn’t really know how to make a game.

    We started out meeting once a month, and then weekly at his house in Noblesville. He didn’t even have his own computer so we had to use the computer in his mother’s bedroom. I researched gaming engines and different programming languages, but we ended up going with a type of game similar to the NES game, Shadowgate.

    We had agendas and a group logo. We created the first screen in the game and started working on the story line, but then that’s when things started to fall apart. In April of 2005, Meetup began charging group owners a fee for hosting a group and the bottom sort of fell out as far as my desire to make games. What I realized is that I didn’t want to make games, I wanted to learn how to make games. Once I did that, my interest level was gone. My partner continued the group and the game for a while after I left, but I didn’t really start going to Meetups again until three years later in 2008.

    A Brief History of My Career

    I worked full time for the last two years I was in college and then immediately after helped a friend start a computer repair business on the side while continuing to work full time. It was during this time that I started going to Meetups, but I didn’t start going again until I left that job I had through college, started my own business, and got a new job in IT in October of 2007. This is when having a day job and going to meetups felt like I was living a double life. During the day I was a computer technician for an IT company and by night I was a web designer wanting to learn more about Adobe products or PHP.

    Through web design and SEO work, I was introduced to the world of affiliate marketing and started making money that way too. Eventually my web design customers started using me more for their technical needs and I began acting as their outsourced IT firm, or simply, their “computer guy.” Eight months after doing IT full time, I became a business analyst at a mid-sized, regional bank. By August of 2011 I was making enough from all of my side ventures to go at it alone so I quit my day job and went full time on my own. That’s when I really started to take advantage of meetups.

    Why Go to Meetups?

    To Socialize

    When I worked for other companies I was around other people all day long. We had meetings. I sometimes got to go places on the company’s dime. Some of these times were good. Most of them were not noteworthy. However, once they were gone, I started to miss that in my life. Sure, I met with clients occasionally, but for the most part I stayed in my office at home. While my family is a joy to me, there is a certain need to go beyond that and meetups can help with that. I wouldn’t go as far as to say I’m lonely, but there is a certain amount of Edward Norton’s Narrator that goes through my head when I visit a group for the first time.

    To Form an Identity

    What consistently meeting new people does to you is to help define who you are. This is partly because of the amount of times you have to explain who you are and what you do to new people, but also because simply by going to a particular group, you are associating yourself with that type of person. I’m currently a member of 16 meetups: Affiliate Freelancers Indianapolis, Affiliate Summit Indianapolis Meetup, AgileIndy, Central Indiana Entrepreneur’s & Vendors, Coaches, Consultants, Authors, Speakers & internet marketers, Esri Dev Meet Up Group – Great Plains, Geeks with Swag, Indiana Small Business Networking, Indianapolis Lean Startup Circle, Indianapolis Marketing Group, Indianapolis Search Engine Optimization & Internet Marketing, Indy Cowork, IndyDevHouse, TechLunch, Verge, and the WordPress – Indianapolis Meetup Group. I recently spoke at the affiliate marketing group, which gives me credibility with the speakers group, even though I already am a consultant.

    To Learn

    While I have been encouraged to get my masters and have gone back to school for Microsoft, A+, and Network+ certifications, meetups allow a different type of continued education in a wider array of fields. They are also the fields you’re most interested in learning about, or else you probably wouldn’t have signed up or gone to the meeting. Even though I’m profitable with affiliate marketing I still learn things from my affiliate marketing group, but a better example may be the Agile Indy group I attended last night. I had no idea what Agile was, but I kept hearing it and seeing it so I wanted to find out more about it. I wanted to learn. I can’t say I’ve gone to a traditional classroom much with that mentality. If you’re interested in what Agile is, review the Agile Manifesto or visit David Christiansen’s blog, Technology Dark Side. Speaking of affiliate marketing, David makes $2000 a year from advertising Rally Software on his blog. Rally sponsored last night’s meal, which brings me to my next reason.

    To Eat

    Most meetups either serve food or meet at a restaurant where there is an opportunity to eat food. If you enjoy breaking bread with your fellow man around a topic you love, what better place than at a meetup. The early Christian church would call this their communion time, while the modern church might call it “small groups”. What are meetups, if not small groups of people, passionate about a topic? One exception to “small” may be Verge Indy, which currently has 1,280 members and regularly has to limit members to their events at Developer Town. Most meetups who serve food serve pizza and most of the time it’s free, but there’s no such thing as a free lunch so be prepared for the corporate sponsor to pitch their goods to you. Don’t worry if you’re not interested, maybe one day you will be. Maybe one day you’ll be the sponsor.

    To Travel

    You probably can’t just walk into Miles Design or Allegient‘s offices, but that’s exactly what I did when I attened Joomla Indy and Agile Indy, respectively. While Joomla Indy isn’t an official meetup, it still meets regularly, in-person, around a topic, which is what meetups are all about. Tonight I’ll be attending the Lean Startup at Green is Good off 86th and Zionsville Road and the Esri meetup at Harry and Izzy’s on Illinois Street, downtown Indianapolis. When I was a business analyst I got to visit the Greater Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce’s board room once, now I’m visiting new board rooms every month.

    To Network

    If you’ve ever been told that you need to get out of comfort zone to grow, meetups are a great way to do that. Most of the people at the meetup I attend, I don’t know before attending. In fact, it’s actually rare for me to know someone there at all. However, once I’ve gone once, I do at least recognize them and can start to get to know them. Networking is a natural result of getting to know other people and meeting new people. Sometimes business cards are passed around and sometimes they are not. Meetups that are specifically setup to network don’t seem to be as popular as ones that are setup around a specific topic. What makes Verge so popular is that it brings together inventors, startups, and venture capitalists with those interested and willing to help. The energy there is intense and the barriers to entry are low. There is no fee for most events, food is provided, and those attending get the chance to pitch and network with others. It’s a great mix.

    To Succeed

    Whatever you’re trying to accomplish, there is probably a meetup out there to help you do it. Whether it’s meeting like minded people for encouragement or collaboriation, or learning from others who have paved the way before you, meetups can help you become a success. As Eric Willke, agile adviser and speaker at Agile Indy said, “Know you can succeed,” and to that I add – “and you will.”

  • Sales Insight from Google Analytics Service Providers

    Google Analytics’ Service Providers listing can give you insight into who is visiting your website each month.

    I was showing one of my client’s their web statistics for the month via Google Analytics and discovered that there was some useful information that I hadn’t been sharing before. When I showed them the Visitors section I drilled down through Network Properties to show them the Service Providers. While Google may have intended this to show Internet Service Providers (ISPs), if a company has a T1 or other type of prosumer connection to the Internet, the name of the business will display instead of the ISP. What that means is that the client now has a view of some of the businesses visiting their site and how often.

    For those with an active sales pipeline, information like this can be invaluable. Who better to sell to than those who have already been visiting your site? In the case of the client who helped me discover this, they found out someone at a major corporation had been viewing their web site regularly. Now, it could be anyone at that company and it could be for any number of reasons, but what it does indicate is that your web site has something they keep coming back for. When we reviewed the history of that company, they had visited almost every month for the past year. I’ve since started emailing out this page specifically as part of my monthly hosting report.

    Too Much Information?

    Depending on the amount of traffic your web site has, you may need to use the filter at the bottom of the listings (not pictured). You can either include or exclude words by using the “containing” or “excluding” drop-down, respectively. Use ‘pipes’ instead of spaces or commas to search or exclude multiple terms. For example, to exclude the most popular ISPs, you would write something like this:

    verizon|comcast|road runner|embarq|sprint|bellsouth

    Advanced Filter

    For a more advanced Service Providers search, try the Advanced Filter. Click “Advanced Filter” next to the search box, which brings up the dimension “Service Provider” with the condition “Containing” and a blank value. That much is the same, so here is the ‘advanced’ part. If you want to contain one or more values (remember to use the pipes) and exclude others, add a second dimension for “Service Provider” and choose excluding and your search value.

    But wait, there’s more. As you may have noticed, you can also add a metric for Visits, Pages/Visit, Avg. Time on Site, % New Visits, Bounce Rate, and Goals. When used together with Service Provider, you can seek and sort the visitors by number of visits, number of pages, and so on. This is a potentially very powerful sales tool and one that should not be overlooked in your web analytics.

    IP Exclusion

    If you want to exclude your own business or your webmaster’s business from Google Analytics, which can sometimes skew your data, use the IP exclusion feature. To do this, click on the “Edit” button for your site on the main profile page. On the “Profile Settings” page, scroll down the page until you see the box named “Filters Applied to Profile” (below goals). Click on the “Add Filter” link, and you’ll be taken to the “Create New Filter” page. Once there, put in the IP address(es) you want excluded and then click “Save Changes”. This will keep your business from being counted in Google Analytics. If you’re not sure what your IP address is, just Google, “What is my IP?”

  • Choose Your Time

    I wrote this in one of my notebooks back in 2008 and recently re-discovered it while doing some housekeeping. Apparently one or more of my children had taken it to draw in, but after reading what I wrote I thought I’d share.

    Ironically, words are the most powerful weapons or tools that we have, yet they are used most carelessly, wasted most often, and sometimes not said at all.

    Words have power.

    Once spoken or written down, words take on a life of their own.

    Then I start to offer the reader (myself) advice, each one longer than the first:

    Speak what you want to happen.

    Write down your goals, your plans, your loves, your life.

    Speak the words out loud. Talk to yourself when you so that when you talk to others you can speak with authority. You know it to be true because you spoke it so.

    Then a bit of opinion-as-knowledge sharing:

    Those with bad luck have it because they pronounce it every chance they get! Those who want change, who have hope, speak change and preach hope.

    Choose your words so that you can choose your life.

    The next page reads with a slightly different tone, but on a similar topic:

    Yes, we are being tested. The question is, will we pass?

    Who speaks words? Who hears or reads words? Who is affected by words? Why do we speak, hear, understand, and be affected by words?

    People. People is the who. People is the why. Words are the what. They are a medium. The point is people. The purpose is people. People who use words change the world, one person at a time.

    I close with the following paragraph:

    We write down our goals and we begin to speak them out loud and we begin to do what our God has asked us to do and then, alas! A roadblock. A problem. What is this?! We followed the steps. We did what you asked! What did we do wrong? God is allowing us to be tested to see what may happen if we were granted what we asked for. The question is, will we pass?

    It wasn’t long before I would be tested – and then I was tested again, and again – and will continue to be tested until the day I die. I believe that this whole time on earth is a test of our mettle, our personality, and our faith. Like the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30), we have been given opportunities here on earth during our time. How we use this time is up to us.

    Here’s Mathew 25:14-30 in full:

    The Parable of the Bags of Gold

    14 “Again, it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his wealth to them. 15 To one he gave five bags of gold, to another two bags, and to another one bag,[a] each according to his ability. Then he went on his journey. 16 The man who had received five bags of gold went at once and put his money to work and gained five bags more. 17 So also, the one with two bags of gold gained two more. 18 But the man who had received one bag went off, dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money.
    19 “After a long time the master of those servants returned and settled accounts with them. 20 The man who had received five bags of gold brought the other five. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘you entrusted me with five bags of gold. See, I have gained five more.’

    21 “His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’

    22 “The man with two bags of gold also came. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘you entrusted me with two bags of gold; see, I have gained two more.’

    23 “His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’

    24 “Then the man who had received one bag of gold came. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. 25 So I was afraid and went out and hid your gold in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you.’

    26 “His master replied, ‘You wicked, lazy servant! So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed? 27 Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest.

    28 “‘So take the bag of gold from him and give it to the one who has ten bags. 29 For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. 30 And throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’

  • How to Differentiate from Competition on the Web

    As recent as the late 90’s just having an IT department set you apart from your competition and gave your company an edge, but by the early 2000’s it wasn’t enough anymore. Every business worth its salt had bought computers, built networks, and setup servers. IT had gone from a luxury to an appliance.

    In the late 2000’s the same sort of shift occurred in web design. First, just having a website gave you an edge, then it was SEO that put you on top, now it’s social media, community involvement, being human and transparent, or content marketing. Web design and SEO are now standards – it’s what else you do that sets you apart.

    How to Set Yourself Apart from Your Competition

    If having a great website and search engine optimization are now the new baseline, then how will your company stand out against the competition? The smartest people in the room are saying three things:

    • Humanize your business.
    • Consider your community.
    • Create great content.

    Humanize Your Business

    Mimi Henderlong of Threadless says, “Staying human creates loyalty,” and part of being human is making mistakes, “Mistakes are OK! Even can bee good.” International advertising firm, gyro, says that people don’t buy from businesses, they buy from people. Consider telling a story about someone who works at your company and make your customer the hero. Be as transparent as possible. Share what your company believes in and why the employees do the things they do. You may have heard that people don’t care about what you know until they know how much you care, but as Simon Sinek says, “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” Start with why.

    Consider Your Community

    Threadless is a community-powered ecommerce website that is highly engaged with it’s community, partly because of Mimi’s work, who believes there are four core values of a healthy community:

    • Benefit – What is the benefit to the community? Why does someone join a community?
    • Influence – Do users have influence? Do they know what to do?
    • Belonging – Do they feel like they belong? Do they know what to do?
    • Empowerment – Ambassador programs, elevate members, badges, camps, events

    Create Great Content

    “I don’t care about what you care about, but you should,” said Merlin Mann of 43 Folders when talking about priority. Merlin is passionate about helping people do more with their lives by doing less things that don’t matter and focusing on doing things that are great. If you focused less on the email that comes in every 4 minutes to the project you’ve been trying to complete for the last 4 months, do you think you could complete it faster? Is the project really a priority if you keep checking your email? Does the project even matter? Merlin Mann says, “If you say ‘yes’ to everything there’s no time to make something great.” And great content is one of the primary things that will set your company and yourself apart from your competition.

  • Custom Maps

    How I went from being a map blogger to a map maker by just realizing that I love to make custom maps for myself and others.

    I always thought of myself as an urban planner anytime I encountered something while driving that didn’t make sense. I used to wish I could change city streets the way you can in Sim City or Sid Meier’s Civilization.

    When I worked for other companies I’d make maps of where people sat, where restaurants were located, or branch locations. I was rarely, if ever asked to do these things. I just did them.

    As a business analyst, I created many intricate spreadsheets to turn data into usable information that could be shared. Our output was often compared to a map, maps being Edward Tufte’s standard of visual simplicity and design. When I visualized spreadsheet data, I was really making customized maps.

    As an IT worker, I created intricate network diagrams of all of our client’s computer setups, which were really just customized maps.

    When I finally came to realize that making maps was what I was most interested in, I learned that it was also the lens through which I viewed the world. I created maps in my mind to help me understand the world.

    This past weekend I attended The Combine in Bloomington, Indiana. Merlin Mann of 43 Folders was the headliner. Before I left I created the map you see below:

    It’s nothing special, just some information from a schedule laid over a Google Map screenshot. The reason I’m showing it is because no one told me to make it, I made it for myself to use at the Conference. I made a map so that I could better understand the material. It’s the same thing I did when I was a business analyst in the banking industry. I made maps of information so executives could make better decisions. In IT I made maps of information so that problems could be solved faster and so everyone could be on the same page as to how a system was setup. No one argues that the United States is located in between Mexico and Canada because maps tell us this is true. Maps make data obvious. They tell a story. They matter. And I care about them. That’s why I like making custom maps.

    Map Design Resources

    For those interested in map making design, you might enjoy reading Gretchen Peterson’s blog. Gretchen also wrote GIS Cartography: A Guide to Effective Map Design. I’m currently in the process of learning TileMill from MapBox, but may also try MapTiler.

  • Apps and Services to Find Your Phone or Mobile Device

    Have you ever lost your phone or laptop? It’s a horrifying feeling. Thankfully there are some things you can do about it before it happens to you.

    The following apps or services will help you find your smartphone or notebook if they are lost or stolen. They can also be used to find the person using them if you’ve lost them – whether or not they want to be found.

    Some of these are free and some are not. Whichever one you choose, it must be enabled before your phone or laptop is lost – and you must understand the security risks you’re taking to make your mobile devices more secure.

    Platform Device App or Service Description Price
    iOS iPhone Find My iPhone Displays your phones location on a map. Must use from another Apple device Free
    Android Smartphones Where’s My Droid Text the phone to get its GPS or Google Maps location via text. Free
    Android Smartphones LookOut Security and Antivirus Antivirus, Phone Locator, and Data Backup app. Free
    Android, Blackberry, iOS, OSX, and Windows Smartphones, Laptops, and Tablets GadgetTrack Find your mobile device and see who’s using it. Takes and sends pictures of it’s location. $19.95 per year
    OSX and Windows Laptops LoJack for Laptops Remotely locate, lock, and delete the data on your laptop. Service is guaranteed. $39.99 per year
    Windows Laptops Laptop Cop Remotely locate, lock, and delete the data on your laptop. Requires police report to enable. $49.95 per year
    OSX Laptops Hidden Find your mobile device and see who’s using it. Takes and sends pictures of it’s location. $15.00 per year

    The Hidden app, whose name itself makes it hard to find, got notoriety when a blogger posted pictures online of the man who allegedly stole his Macbook laptop (below), but for Android, Blackberry, and Windows users, GadgetTrack does something similar. Hidden is only for Mac operating systems, OSX.

  • Online Local Directory Bookmarks

    We believe that businesses are a vital part of their community and should be listed on as many directories as possible to help the members of those communities have the most information to make the best decisions and find the right company for their needs. We believe that adding your local business to this local directories list is not only to earn your business more exposure, but will help you better understand what your customers are looking for so that if there is something not already listed on your website, that you might add it when editing your web design. Examples of information collected included: hours of operation, pictures and/or video of your business, payment methods accepted, parking information, coupons, services, and products. Some local directory web sites may ask how long you’ve been in business or whether or not you’re licensed. Some are free and others cost a fee.

    Here is the complete list of local business directories we use to market your business online: (more…)

  • Backlink Bookmarks

    This is a list of sites I use to backlink from for myself and my web design, SEO, and social media marketing clients:

    Social Bookmarking Sites

    Social Networking Sites
    • Facebook – necessary socially, but doesn’t help much with SEO
    • Google+ – more effective than Facebook
    • Twitter – can be used to display Facebook posts for SEO reasons
    • YouTube – most effective, but requires the most effort
    Online Classified Ads

  • Nook Color Rooted

    I had a call last week where the customer asked me to help them root their Nook Color. We used the instructions found here. It requires purchasing a MicroSD card and having a way to read it on a PC, Mac, or Linux computer. She had both so we got started.

    I did a little research first to determine that what she wanted was a simple root, not to boot from a new operating system like Honeycomb. To make it simple to understand, the process uses a temporary operating system boot to change the files on the Nook and ‘unlock’ it, which is what rooting is.

    Because the customer’s Nook Color was on version 1.3 we had to do both ManualNooter-4-5-18 and ManualNooter-4-6-16. It’s okay, you just do 4-5-18 and then 4-6-16 right after. As long as you follow the generous poster’s instructions, everything should go fine, but there is always a risk you could ‘brick’ your device rendering it useless. The customer understood this risk and chose to do it anyway – and she was then able to download any app she wanted from the Android Market.

    The customer’s Nook Color had a nice pink, leather cover that I had to take it out of to access the MicroSD slot. If you’re looking for Nook Color covers, check out Nook Share, which highlights a wide range of Nook covers, cases, and accessories.