John Hasson

My daughters had some friends spend the night last night. So.. that made one male (me) in a house with 7-8 girls. Needless to say I left early this morning to get out.

We have a full family pass to Thanksgiving point here in Utah so I figured I’d stop by their “gardens” to have a look and see what it was like. As I got there I saw Segways… The gardens are pretty big.. 50+ acres I think. So I figured.. why not. I have never ridden a Segway and 50+ acres is a lot of walking. $20 later and 3 minutes of training and I was off.

Segways are awesome. It was an absolute blast zipping around the trails and taking in the smells of flowers, nectar, dirt and trees. About an hour later I had seen pretty much everything and ran around the park again taking pictures on my cell phone.

Pictures follow…..

All these were taking pretty quickly while riding the Segway with one hand.

You know the funny thing… Most groups I saw were 2 girls and one guy. The girls were obviously mother and daughter looking at ideas for wedding photos and the guy looked like he was just there cuz he had to be.

This really *is* a moth

And just for fun, here it the WP gallery of these photos…

Tags: Advice by John Hasson
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“You know what I can’t figure out? How is it that all these stupid neanderthal mafia guys can be so good at crime, and smart guys like us can suck so badly at it.” – Michael, Office Space

Here it is. Smart people sit around being smart and thinking up all sorts of cool ideas and projects and so on. They have all these great ideas for making money, curing cancer, w/e. But that is just it. They think about it too much.

The secret to success is getting off your rump and actually doing something. Sure being smart and having good ideas helps a lot. However without actually doing something with your great idea you won’t ever succeed.

Most smart people think and think and think about great ideas. (Some are really good ideas and a lot of the ideas are garbage–but don’t tell them that ) The point of all this is: don’t sit around brainstorming all day. Brainstorming is good for a while, but eventually you need to actually try things.

You will fail. A lot.

But with each failure you are closer to success.

Here is another poop related analogy.

Kid 1 is put in a room filled with poo and a shovel.
Kid 2 is also put in a room filled with poo and a shovel.
An hour passes.
Kid 1 (is smart) is sitting there bored and wants out. “It is just a bunch of poo. I am wasting my time.”
Kid 2 is covered in poo and smiling brightly and digging all over the place. “With all this poo, there has to be a pony in here somewhere.”

Now eventually kid 2 will figure out there is no pony. (But if there was a pony how dumb would Kid 1 feel?)
Summary

• You actually have to work to make things happen (or pay someone else to do it for you–but this is also work)
• Don’t get in analysis paralysis (over analyzing things so much you never try things
• Stop reading all these blogs and put together a campaign and test, test, test.
• You can come back to read mine though

Tags: Advice, Affiliate Marketing by John Hasson
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Ok here is my secret.

I have a picture which illustrates this concept.

1. Pick a niche
2. Build a community/site around it
3. Pick a bunch of keywords and relevant ads — illustrated below
4. Submit them to a bunch of different PPC engines — illustrated below
5. See what sticks — illustrated below

Tags: Advice, PPC, Pay Per Click by John Hasson
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Dayparting is the fancy word for when you say you only want your ads shown at certain times of the day or that you want to pay more during some time periods and less during others.

I’ve got a campaign running entirely on google’s content network. I scrapped together a quick chart of conversions and mapped them out by hour of the day.

You can see the the spike in the afternoon and the drop in the early mornings..
All times are MST and 1 = 12am (if you are getting confused by the numbering on the bottom.)

Here is how it was converting at this time. Since this was on the content network I had my bids relatively low. 15 cents per click. These stats are for the 7 days before I did the Dayparting adjustment.

Based on this I adjusted my min bid to 5 cents a click and used Dayparting to increase it up to 15 cents per click for the times when I would get the most bang for my buck.

So for everyday I’ll be bidding 5 cents at low times, 10 cents from 8am to 3pm (plus 10pm to 11pm) and then 15 cents at the premium time (3pm-10pm)

So far pretty boring right?

Now look at the stats for the 7 days after Dayparting.

Do you see it?

Lower Cost, Higher Conversion Rate, Higher CTR, and so on.

Long story short I just made adjustments to show the ads to people who were likely to convert. The only thing that went down were clicks and impressions (which makes total sense since I am now showing the ad to more qualified people) This resulted in a 35% increase in conversions and a 46% drop in cost per conversions, this is a good thing.

Tags: Advice, Online Moola, PPC, Pay Per Click by John Hasson
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I spent a few months with VMWare Fusion and then Parallels on a BootCamp Partition. Both work fine, but I like Parallels better.

Both products have a free trial. I started with VMWare’s Fusion since I use VMWare’s server products and am pretty happy with them. Install was easy, it didn’t take long to get my bootcamp XP partition up and running in Fusion. When setting it up I ended up creating a SMB share on my XP system and then accessing it via OSX to get at my windows files–I didn’t see any other solution for accessing my windows files easily while Fusion was running the bootcamp image. Every now and then I would get screen artifacts from Unity (makes the mac and xp windows all part of the osx desktop). And kept messing up on my Command+C vs Ctrl+C when switching quickly between OS’es.

Well my 30 days was nearly up, time to try parallels. Install was just as easy. Paralells had just a few things that made it come off as more polished. It already gives me a share on the mac desktop pointing to the Bootcamp image while Parallels is running. The Coherence works about the same (I still get screen artifacts occasionally), and Parallels automatically maps Command+C to Ctrl+C for me (great for when I forget to switch). I ended up buying Parallels primarily because it seemed to integrate with Mac just a little better then VMWare’s fusion.

At this point I would make a cool table to show things mapped out.. but here is the summary:
Parallels has better OSX integration (great for Visual Studio), but VMWare will let you play Quake! You decide which is more important for you

Tags: Advice by John Hasson
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All attendees were picked up by a stretch limo.  We arrived to the brand new Intercontinental in style.  My room was on a high floor in the corner, we had beautiful views of San Francisco.

The night before things started we had a networking cocktail, I made a lot of friends and met a lot of nice people.  The small group atmosphere really adds to things.  I only had to remember 35 people

Day 1, We had an excellent breakfast provided.  Then we started the event.  They had a nice non-disclosure form we had to sign.  Everything shown was off the record and not to be released.  No live blogging was allowed.  No video was allowed.  No recording was allowed.  No pictures were allowed.

Excellent speakers.  Excellent.  Having things “off the record” really opened things up. We were sharing our ideas and suggestions pretty openly.  I am sure we all held something back–there really isn’t enough time to share everything

I can’t provide details on what we learned since we had a NDA and it was all off the record.  I can say that I will be going again and that I learned a lot, made some new friends and was very impressed by the whole event.

Jeremy and crew did an excellent job putting this event together.  They deserve a lot of credit for making this happen.

If you want to know more you can call me (contact me via the “Talk To Me” widget on the right and I can give you my phone number).  I won’t be sharing things that are under the NDA but I can expound on some things that I am not willing to put here in a public blog.

Tags: Advice by John Hasson
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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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I started using twitter at Affiliate Summit West 2008. But I didn’t really start using it till after that. I used it via SMS for a while (imagine having your cell beep every 3 minutes with a twitter update…). Then I moved to just web. Finally I got it to work via IM (the gtalk wouldn’t work with my google for domains account, but it did work with the fresh jabber account I made for it)..

So.. when I use twitter now, it is pretty slick. It more or less is like a chatroom for me. If I see someone I know talking to someone I don’t know I can follow them right from IM w/o even going to twitter’s site.

And somehow I have it setup so when I log out of IM it sends new messages via SMS, and when I log back in it turns SMS off automatically. (Maybe it just does that automatically )

So.. thats how I use twitter. I usually have it on, so a @johnhasson twitter will usually get my attention pretty quickly.

Tags: Advice, Affiliate Summit 2008, Twitter by John Hasson
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One of my brothers recently is out of college and on the job market. (Anybody need a Mechanical Engineer?) I have some friends at places like Raytheon and Lockheed I am going to try and put him in touch with but first I had a look at his resume….

I won’t post it here, but I will post my suggestions:

–Begin:

Couple of things:

1) Put Your name and Address and phone number (all the contact info) at the top
2) It is ok to use a larger font (especially when you are starting your career) It fills up the page better and makes it easier for old people to read it (just not stupid large )
3) Try and be more specific in your work experience.. Use specific terms and examples
A perfect example is in your computer skills. Don’t put just Microsoft Office. Put Microsoft Word 2000/2003/2007, Excel 2003, etc.
Why you ask?
Because many recruiters are lazy (and many times do NOT KNOW the industry they are targeting for) they will just put in keywords and see what resumes float to the top. Then they skim them in about 10-15 seconds to see if it matches what they want. Then it goes into a stack to be looked at by someone who might actually read it. — Make it easy for them by putting specific details so it will trigger the searches.
4) Don’t put bilingual. Put Fluent in German (or something along those lines where they know you speak German. bilingual is way to generic)
5) When you decommissioned the *** put cool stuff you did (leave out grunt work, but try and emphasize anything you did that was cool)
6) Nothing cool? Mention other projects you have done on your own.. like your helicopter experiment. better yet, if you have a website about stuff like that it is good to put that in.
7) Name the Resume FirstnameLastnameResume2008.doc (Not FMLResume) The first will stick out more.
Put “Willing To Relocate” not “will relocate”
9) The goal of a resume is to make them interested enough in you to pick up the phone and call. Then you have to make sure that who you are matches the resume.

Bad Example:
Manager At Things, Inc. – Managed office and helped keep things in order.

Good Example:
Lead Manager At Things, Inc. – Increased measurable productivity by 10% through employee moral programs which resulted in lower turnover. Saved $13,000 in new hire training expenses.

They both say the same things, but the second one draws a picture in the reader head and gives them facts and numbers they can use. (Note your numbers and facts had better be accurate I find that MANY people exaggerate on their resume. And many people expect you to. But I NEVER exaggerate (and recommend you don’t). When people realize that I am NOT exaggerating (usually during the interview when they try to find out what a person exaggerated on) it moved me to the top of the list pretty quickly.

Normally I would say put education after work experience, but since you don’t have a ton, you did right by putting education at the top.

–End:

Sound advice? Or am I going to destroy his career?

Tags: Advice, Job Search, Resume by John Hasson
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