I recently discovered the following site that should be a great help: Hexadecimal Triple Color Codes. This easy to use site allows you to find any 3 digit hex color code by grabbing the x axis information (rg) and following it with the y axis (b).

I know, it sounds like a simple question, but someone who doesn’t know what an SEO professional does is likely to get screwed by some con man looking to rip him off. Most people will do a few minutes of research and find out that people who help others with SEO exist to help others climb in the search results of the search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc.

Last year, I wrote an article about how to work with SEO consulting companies, but after the events of today, I wanted to riff a bit more.

Last night I was contacted by the representative of an SEO company who was looking to help another company with their site’s optimization. He wanted to advertise on one of my sites and I quoted him the price. In response, he told me that the budget was tight and offered me a price that was 11% of our rate. I told him that I couldn’t do it, and got the following response:

If you really don’t want to accept $200 for the couple of minutes of work it takes to put up a[n advertisement], then that’s your decision.

Well no, I don’t want to take $200 for an ad position that is worth $1800. Does he expect to buy an $100,000 Porsche for $11k? It was simply a ridiculous request, and as someone who works consulting people on website optimization, he knows full well the value of advertising; it is not about the time it takes to place the ad, but about the value of the ad itself. The NY times could place a full-page ad on page 2 that I design, which would take 5 minutes of their time, but that position would probably be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. People simply AMAZE me!

What to Look for in an SEO Company?

Start by looking at their website. This is usually the fastest way to write off an SEO company. After getting an email from the guy, I decided to swing by his website to check it out. He was smart enough to never mention the URL of the company that he was trying to advertise, because I would have shared the following with them.

His website consisted of 3 pages: Home, Services, and Contact Us
The “Contact us” page didn’t work. The other pages were missing meta tags for keywords and description. By spending less than a minute on the website, I would have told anyone interested in hiring them for SEO to RUN! If the company you’re looking to hire isn’t fully search engine optimized themseves, why would they know how to help you any better? There is of course, more to SEO than simply adding META tags, however, on almost every occasion, when I find that there is some SEO that is doing a poor job, it turns out that they skip their own tags. It is a good screen to use to cut out the crap.

How do you Check Someone’s META Tags?

This is very simple, even if you know NOTHING about making websites or HTML. Just go to the menu bar of your browser and enter the VIEW dropdown — you’ll find either “Source” or “View Source”. When the source page opens up, you’re going to want to look for the HEAD tag, which is simply the word Head surrounded by brackets. Somewhere after the head tag and before the BODY tag, you’re looking for tags that start with META NAME.

Here’s an example of what the Meta Tags look like:

<META NAME=”KEYWORDS” CONTENT=”SEO, META TAGS, search engine optimization”>
<META NAME=”DESCRIPTION” CONTENT=”This is a description of the page using keywords”>

If you don’t see anything resembling the code above on their pages, then you know it is time to run.

Summary:
Had the customer of the company that contacted me, done the above before hiring the firm, they would have seen that they were not cut out to consult on SEO. If you don’t practice what you’re slated to preach, then you shouldn’t be charging folks for your services. Additionally, you don’t want to insult potential partners by offering them 11% of their going rate, because that might lead to a blog post about your nonsense . . . luckily for them I’m a nice guy and never mentioned them by name.

Unfortunately, I’ve been informed that Lunarpages has dropped the ball, bigtime!

According to my client, Charles Feldman of TheFeldmanBlog:

I had this once before where the site was down, remember, and I left messages on their 24 hour line but they never got back to me…same this time. And last time, when I called during the week to complain, I , of course, got a voicemail for the manager who also never returned the call.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but that’s not the type of service I’m looking for in a host. Sadly, it seems, reality doesn’t match up with the company’s promises. The following comes directly from the front page of the Lunarpages website:

There are thousands of web hosting services so why choose Lunarpages? When comparing web hosts it is important not only to consider a price difference of a dollar or two. Although we offer more data transfer and storage resources then you will likely ever utilize, we prefer to focus on something much more important, reliable web hosting and great customer service. Above all we take care of you personally and attentively with 24-7 award winning customer support. It’s all about making sure your website and email remain online and you are happy. It’s not just technical support to us; it’s about caring for people since 1998. Phone us any time and become part of the rapidly growing Lunarpages web hosting family. We are rated #1 in the world. Call us now and find out why.

Notice the text in bold (we bolded it to highlight) . . . doesn’t really match what I’m hearing from my client. The 24 hour customer support seems to be nothing but a voicemail system . . . WOW that’s revolutionary 24 hour support! I’ve called several times over the past 24 hours - particularly late night and early morning, and have not gotten a person on the phone. Isn’t that what 24-7 customer service means to you?

Hopefully someone at the company reads this and works to rectify the situation . . . either way, I thought it was important to let you all know so you can make an informed decision when considering this host.

Photo Credit: Control Panel by Tim Dorr

To be honest, I’m not much of an email marketer in the first place, and I’m guessing that if I had a more advanced platform, I’d likely be further on my way.

Shopping for a New Mailing List Solution

One of the most important features that I need in a mailing list solution is a software package or web-based system that will allow me to directly input data from my own forms. Most packages that I’ve found don’t allow it.

A Look at AWeber

Sadly, one of the most highly recommended email marketing software solutions I’ve found, AWeber.com does not have an API that allows this. Their package has EVERY other feature that I could want, including:

• Autoresponders
• Unlimited Campaigns
• HTML Email Templates
• Email Deliverability (NOTE: I’ve heard from a few people that their delivery rate is WAY higher than most other software)
• Blog Newsletters
• Email Web Analytics
• Subscriber Management

Essentially, they’ve got everything I need, and the price is decent ($19 for 0-500 subscriber and $149 for 10,000-25,000 where I fall in), but that API issue is going to keep me away. The only other downside I’ve found is that if you have multiple lists, duplicate subscribers count twice for their pricing schema. It isn’t a huge deal, but we often create lists that are subsets of our master list for marketing purposes and this could
end up costing some real money.

Is PHPList the One?

I haven’t found another web-based piece of software yet that does everything that AWeber does with an API so I can use it with my forms, so I’ve been hunting for server based applications instead. I hope to find something soon . . . there seems to be one called PhpList that has some promise, but I haven’t fully gone through and tested it yet.

Does anyone have any mailing list software suggestions? If you’ve read the post, you know what I’m looking for . . . let me know what you’ve got!

I got the email from Christopher Elliot of MSNBC first thing Thursday morning (he sent it to me 4:30am that day - the day of my flight), and he wanted to discuss what I went through. Unfortunately, I got back to him too late for his deadline, but I was told that he’d mention my story and link to the blog post I wrote about it . . . I haven’t seen anything yet! Any updates, Christopher?

I was also contacted by Jen Haley of CNN. Jen was writing an article about travel insurance and decided to get in touch. The article just went live on the CNN site and I thought I’d share it with all of you.

So . . . check out:
Protect your cash if travel plans get canceled

Why does anyone care?

Well, I happen to be one of the 100,000 plus passengers affected by these cancellations, and there is a big difference between what American is saying on the news and what is happening in reality!

American is Ignoring Their Customers and Leaving them Stranded!

Upon hearing about the issues American is having, I started calling the airline early this afternoon, in hopes of figuring out what to do about my flight tomorrow. I was able to get through customer service, but when I got to the digital announcement that tells you how long the wait is, the line went dead.

This happened over and again - 7 TIMES TOTAL!

Annoyed, I thought I’d be clever and call the corporate line for AMR, the parent company of the airline. When I reached someone, they told me I’d have to speak with customer service, and that they’d connect me. I got someone after a 20 minute wait and was told that they could not handle the situation; I would need to talk to some desk that is dealing with the issue. When they transferred me to this desk, the hold music came on, and after 4 minutes, the line went dead! I called back and told everyone I spoke to what happened, and was told that there was NOTHING that they could do, and that they would put me back to that number. Again the line went dead as they tried to connect me.

Note that I’ve done this on multiple phones, and it is not the fault of my cell phone, home phone, or other line . . .

Finally, at around 3:14pm I got an automated phone call from American (I signed up for such messages through the website) letting me know that my flight tomorrow was, in fact, canceled.

I thought I’d give it another shot and called the main reservations line . . . after sitting on hold for 24 minutes I finally got someone on the phone! He asked why I was calling and I explained to him who I was, what flight I was on, and that I wanted to make arrangements to get on another flight.

The agent (never gave me his name, unfortunately) proceeded to explain that they were experiencing cancellations because of the FAA. I responded that the cancellations were happening because American never did their job in the first place with inspecting their fleet properly, and the agent snapped back that it wasn’t American’s fault, but the FAA’s.

I didn’t want to get into an argument, so I asked him if we could figure out how to resolve the issue with my canceled flight.

He told me “you have two options: we can refund your ticket or put you on a flight Friday afternoon” (instead of Thursday that I needed). I began to ask about getting a ticket on another airline when he cut me off and started to re-explain that I had two options. He then kept talking about how the airline was taking care of things, but would not allow me to get a word in. I tried to speak and he kept talking over me. This went on for well over a minute, but the agent NEVER allowed me to get another word in - he just kept talking.

Finally, the line went dead . . . he hung up on me!

As I write this blog article, I’m sitting next to my phone on speakerphone . . . I’ve been waiting for 1:32:15 (almost 1.5 hours) to get someone, and it doesn’t seem like it will be happening ANY TIME SOON!

So . . . when the American Airlines spokesman goes on CNN and other networks to tell everyone that they are taking care of the people that they stranded (screwed over), don’t believe their lies!

I’m not being taken care of! I’m being ignored! I will certainly do my best to avoid American from here on in thanks to this spit in the face!

UPDATE: 5:44pm THEY JUST HUNG UP ON ME AGAIN!!!
Just after publishing this article my wife managed to reach someone at American Airlines on her phone. She had been on the phone waiting for 26 minutes when the agent called . . . meanwhile, the time I’d been holding on the other line had reached 1 hour, 35 minutes.

She handed me the phone and I pointed this out to the agent, who said, “well, I’m on the phone now, so what can I do for you?” I thought I’d hang up the other line as I finally reached someone . . .

I told the agent that I was calling about a canceled flight, but before going forward, I wanted to find out who I was talking with. I asked for her name and she told me it was Margie. She then repeated the question, “what can I do for you?” I explained that I was hung up on by the previous agent and I just wanted to make sure I had a written record of who I was speaking with. I asked for some kind of identifying information like her Agent ID # or call center info, and she responded telling me “all calls are recorded, so we have a record of your conversations.” I told her that I appreciate that, but I wanted to have it for my own information . . . we could then discuss the problem I’m having. Suddenly, the line went dead, AGAIN! I was once again hung up on!

UPDATE 6:12pm - My wife just got someone from American Airlines on the phone again . . . and the didn’t hang up! Miracle of Miracles!

He was VERY NICE and helped my wife get a refund for our flight. They weren’t able to get us on a direct flight to replace the one that was canceled . . . he let us know that there were flights on United, but they couldn’t verify whether or not we’d get on the flight. Without that guarantee, we could arrive at the airport and sit for hours waiting to get some kind of verification. Instead, we decided that the only prudent course was to get a refund (note - we had already purchased 2 tickets on Southwest for $1006 immediately after the last hang-up) for our 2 tickets for $318.00.

After it was all said and taken care of, the agent (Ron Moore - PF), explained that what we had been through was uncalled for and that American did not put up with that kind of behavior. He apologized profusely, and I must say, did a FANTASTIC job. He did tell me that anyone who hangs up on a customer would typically be fired (if they found out about it), and additionally, if someone refuses to release identifying information to a customer (Margie), they are disciplined.

Unfortunately, Mr. Moore’s fantastic customer service does not make up for the horrific experience that we’ve been through in trying to handle this situation with American Airlines.

We’re now out an additional $688, and supposedly must wait at least 60 days to get refunded the $318 we initially paid for our tickets. So . . . until that happens, we’re out a grand total of $1321.00 for a $318.00 airline ticket!

So . . . What are you going to do about it American Airlines?

UPDATE 8:39pm - I JUST GOT A CALL FROM THE AMERICAN AIRLINES AUTOMATED PHONE SYSTEM AND WAS NOTIFIED THAT MY FLIGHT WAS REINSTATED!
ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME!??!?!?!?
After going through everything I’ve gone through today (hours on hold and hangups), setting up a refund with American Airlines, and spending over $1000 on a replacement flight, I get a call telling me the flight is back on . . . what the hell would you do?

You’re living your life when all of a sudden you realize you’ve become a slave to routine and the mundane. In most cases we ponder our existence for a while, only to return to the grind moments later.

I’m not sure about most people, but I have these moments every few months or so. In these times I realize that I have so many things that I want to accomplish and learn, yet I become overwhelmed by the sheer amount of different things that pique my interest.

Here’s a small sampling:
Learn a language, travel, read, take more photographs, get into better shape, socialize, etc.

When I stop to smell the roses, I realize that one of the things that is holding me back is the television. I just get caught up in the mind-numbing blur of the stories, dramas, documentaries, news, and various other crap filling the airwaves.

It is not that I don’t want to watch that Seinfeld episode for the 10th time, I just think that I’m wasting away my life doing it - and so are you!

Television is not evil, and people who quit TV aren’t any better than the rest of us, but it would serve me and the rest of you well to stop watching and smell the roses more often. Maybe if we did, we’d have more time to do all of those things that we really want to do other than being glued in front of our plasma screened, high-def TVs.