This font is super sick, it was designed just for programming. Take a look

http://www.ms-studio.com/FontSales/anonymouspro.html

Also released a new design from Marketcake for Wolf Storm Media

Since starting Marketcake I have gotten many new clients that are interested in work. I realized that my current invoicing setup was WACK. I switched to FreshBooks and it’s BOMB. Basically does everything I could ever need, plus more.

I’d highly recommend you check it out, right now i only signed up for the free account to see if it’s worth it, and it definitely is IMO. The one feature that it didnt have which was somewhat weird is theres no 50% deposit option, which is important when youre doing web design and you want the client to put half down to start, then you design it, and then make the final deposit after. This is easily fixable however by adding a -50% line item and adding to the notes “this deduction signifies your final payment. When you pay the first 50%, the line item will be removed and your remaining balance will be due.

Check out some of the screen shots. It sends extremely professional looking invoices too.. I dig it a lot.

custom header

I have some freaking awesome news related to my designs, I’ve started to team up with my extremely good buddy who is very talented and we are tackling tons of sites together. I figured it was time to completely rebrand my company, so… I’m working on a new portfolio site. Im burned out on caffiene right now from working non stop. It’s a work in progress, still working on some things (as of July 31st, 2am). I’m working on coming up with something for the header that incorporates an asian feel, but sitll remaining crisp, trendy, elegant, smooth, classy… organic.. technological. Tricky set of adjectives to work with, but it will come in good time. If you see anything you think should be changed or have any creative ideas just drop me a line!

http://marketcake.com

If you can, PLEASE LIKE MY PAGE below! I know ‘liking’ stuff on facebook can be annoying but this is my company that I passionately stand behind 100%, so if I have helped you at all in the past with anything, or you dig my work, or this blog or anything else, it would mean a lot if you did

Back to work~

So I just got a new fully loaded MacBook Pro 17″ and a 25″ monitor to go along with it. This is HOT.. definitely worlds better than a PC, and I used PC for like 15 years hating on macs until I actually got one (go figure lol). It’s just way more solid in general, no stupid registry.. going back to PC and it feels like a house of cards. Everyone says the downside to Mac is it’s forced and not extremely customizable (at the benefit of it’s security and solidity), but in my opinion I haven’t come across a single thing I couldn’t customize with bash or some other script, program, easy edit. I have spent the last week or so finding all my favorite shortcuts, tweaks, and so on.

I thought I’d share these with you … Plus give you some other tips about programs if you hadn’t heard of them already. Leave any additional tips you know in the comments!

First, my favorite hotkeys:

⌘+, (comma) Open preferences of current program. I use this hotkey probably the most, and it’s definitely up there on my favorites
⌘+Shift+4 (and 3) If you do 4 it will do a selective screenshot and save it ans a png to your desktop. Just drag an area after you hit it. If you do 3, it will take the entire screen.
⌘+F3 Show desktop. Allows you to edit files on desktop, then click to return to your current application setup. I don’t like to have things save to my download folder by default, so I put them on the desktop. It makes it easier right after I download something to delete it.
⌘+Option+I If you have multiple files selected and want to see the total file size (without having each ‘get info’ window open separately for each file), hit this.
Control + D This is the same as window’s ‘delete’ key (forward deleting rather than backwards deleting). The full size mac keyboard has a second delete key, but if you have the short keyboard and are used to the ability to delete what’s on the right of the cursor, this is for you.
⌘+Space This is for spotlight, although I often times hear words and I’ll want to know what it means, and spotlight hooks right into the dictionary app, so you can basically use the dictionary in one click rather than going to dictionary.com.

Misc. Tweaks:

Repair Disk Permissions: Go to Apps > Utilities > Disk Utility. Then hit the little icon that says repair disk permissions. Mine found like 200 errors. Do that once a month
Toggle hidden files in finder: This one I googled and I set up an automator script, but the site isn’t working. if you are interested let me know and i’ll post it up. it works in the open dialogue box, but not in Finder. This script makes it work in finder.
Adium Duck Icon: Adium is the hotness, except I hate that stupid green duck at the bottom… to change the default adium stupidass duck dock icon, download any of these. My favorite was this one.
Chrome Buttons: By default when you get chrome mac, several key features are hidden by default. hit View > Always show bookmark bar to show your quick bookmark bar,  then hit ⌘+, to bring up system preferences (see I told you that was useful), and under ‘Toolbar’ check both checkboxes to show the Home button and the two control buttons on the right that let you easily access your downloads, saved passwords, etc.
iTunes file copy: This one isn’t really a secret most of you have prolly turned it off, but go to your settings in itunes and make it so it doesnt make a duplicate of every file you add into the itunes folder. this is just asinine as if you’re music collection is 20gb… it wastes an extra 20gb duplicating files.

Programs …
Here are some of my favorites. I have tried a LOT of different ones.

Transmission – This is by far the best torrent app I’ve found. Better than uTorrent, and the other random ones I can’t think of.
Coda – Another one that’s no secret. I like it better than Bbedit, textmate, textedit obviously, etc. Textmate was good except the way it color coded my files was completely wack (80% of the reason I use it for easy viewing). For example on php file types it only highlighted ‘if’ statements… pretty much useless.
YummyFTP – I’m kind of a nazi about having my things work efficiently. I loved FileZilla on PC, but on mac its severely lacking 2 things I use most. 1 being quick connect so that when I open the program I can connect to any one of my  hundreds of sites with one click. On Mac it forced you to open a dialogue box then click.. then click again. 2nd, it didnt allow right click immediate focus. you had to left click then right click a file to edit it on the server. 3rd it didn’t allow folders to be always at the top … YummyFTP does all those things and much more perfectly. Far better than cyberduck, fetch, filezilla, and a few other random FTP clients I’ve tried.
Little Snitch – Best firewall ever!!! Get this… extremely recommended. Thats all I can think of now.. I’ll add more as I think of them

Whatup guys! I have been so awesomely busy lately, I have mad clients now that have a lot of design work that needs to be done and we have a great mutual business relationship. I liked affiliate marketing but it wasn’t satisfying enough for me. The stress compared to the level of gratification just wasn’t paying off, even on great profit days. I have my private affiliate marketing projects that I have set up with independent friends and deals, as well as a few SEO projects that all run in the background and generate income. As far as media buys and full on PPC or PPV, I put that on the backburner for now, I have MUCH more fun doing design work. Sure I don’t make $500/day anymore, but I learned to let that go. I’m still optimistic about some real estate stuff I am learning, so that’s always there for larger incomes. A lot of the people I’m working with are real estate masters so my networking potential for that is huge. In the meantime though I’m working on building a killer portfolio. The original stuff I had is okay, but I think it’s really starting to take shape. If you have any C&C let me know It’s kind of weird, literally in the last 2 weeks since I moved I have had quite a few solid pieces of work added. Unfortunately some of them are private so I can’t put them in my portfolio. The logos are the main things that are new, the rest is some older stuff.

Right now I live in San Francisco in The Marina, about a 5 minute walk from the Golden Gate Bridge, the beach, Alcatraz, and the science museum which is an incredible building.. This building is HUUUUGE… you can’t really tell from the pic though:

this pic looks too good to be true but this is literally right down the street from our house

Ciao!

I found this bonsai tree nursery right near my house, so my friend and I decided to go check it out. He literally had like 300+ bonsais and he nurtured each one.

Here was his most prized one.. its 65 years old and is the only one that exists because that part of china was destroyed.
This one is so rare its not for sale, and thats saying a lot considering his 2nd best one was $5000 and didnt even compare to this one.

Here’s mine

I haven’t had time to post much lately, I spent a week in Panama City, FL for spring break, and then almost a week and a half in Nashville TN with my buddy Nathan. Nathan is trying to convince me to go to Tokyo in a week or so, which is actually almost working except I really need to do my taxes cause I’ve been putting that off.

I realized over the last year… the ball of energy, thought patterns and ingrained mental pathways has slowly made it’s way to the more negative side as opposed to the positive side it was a year ago. I think secluding yourself for work would do that to you … :p  I realized it when I came back from my vacation and lay in my bed in retrospect, and thought about how ever so subtly during my vacation I was wanting something other than what was right before me. Not in a major way, but just in a very deep, subtle and elusive way that would slightly tint the flavor of my experience instead of being in my natural state of happiness, light on my feet.

As such, Since I’ve been back I’ve been devoting hours of my time each day to changing my thought patterns through long introspective and meditative walks along endless streams, mountains and fields out here (I actually have this sick video on my phone of this 50 foot high waterfall I climbed to, I will try to upload it).

It has really been beneficial in that I’ve started to see old patterns emerging that I never noticed before, blind spots per se. It has allowed me a higher vantage point to notice things that I never did before.

Anyway, I’m working on two projects right now that I am going to devote all my time to, instead of spreading myself too thin. Food is beckoning me.

Oh yeah, and if anyone needs to outsource an iPhone/other smartphone app, contact me on aim at: Solar. My buddy’s company has very good reviews, and I know when you’re searching for people to outsource smartphone apps it can be quite difficult to find non-sketchy people who turn your app into a bag of rice.

PS. If you have an iphone, download the game Uniwar… and also plants vs. zombies. Both those games fucking rock my world.

Hey guys,

Just briefly, I’m officially moved out of CA right now. I’m hanging out in SC with my buddy rock climbing, bouldering, hiking, camping, etc. All that good outdoorsy shit that attracts girls that need to shave their legs.

My wonderful business partner and I are working on an offline/online business, and this is going to be epic. It could be what my entire marketing ‘career’ has led up to. She is a super great person, with tons of knowledge. Having started a few companies herself, and having done nothing of the sort myself, there are a lot of valuable things I can learn from her. She is eloquent with her tongue too (muahaha). If you talk to me on AIM or something I can tell you about it if you’re interested.

In the meantime I have a few things running that are making a little bit of cash but I don’t really care about them — This is going to be fucking EPIC, and I spent like 100+ hours programming the backend, only to realize it needs to be more efficient and it must be done over in a more streamlined way. Good thing that came out of it was I learned an entire programming language in the process :] PHP is the shit… everyone always told me I should learn it, and up to a certain point in my career I had never needed it so I put it in the back of my mind. Now that I’m quite good at it (or at least I could do what I need it to do… not at the level of making the next wordpress or anything though).. it is THE best thing ever. So many problems I had before that I thought were ‘unsolvable’ … problems I didn’t even look into solutions thinking there was just no way, turns out are easily solvable by PHP. Here is a VERY awesome tutorial section, although to actually learn it you gotta write some of your own scripts.

We have tapped only a fraction of the market share, and made a substantial amount. All that’s left is to work out all the many kinks and then release the floodgates of this extremely targeted, wonderful traffic .

Time for more sushi.

Music for your orgasmic reading pleasure…

I hadn’t intended to post anything until I got home, but there has been an idea floating around in my head for some time that I wanted all the noobies I’m talking to to know. I’ve gotten a lot more comments and hits from various places, ready to get into this marketing game. I’m getting a lot more questions on aim and so on, but I wanted to say this…

I held off on posting this because I couldn’t figure out the best way to say it, but I was having a conversation with my buddy and he said it perfectly, and this is what he said. It sums up what I was thinking just perfectly:

I feel the same way.
Once you are profitable in this industry.
Marketing as a whole.
There’s so many projects that you can run.

THIS is very important. So important. When you start everything is overwhelming for sure, you don’t know where to begin. There’s that feeling like what if I start this and it’s a waste of time and I don’t learn anything because I made the dumb mistake of choosing the wrong route, simply because I didn’t know better.

That… is completely incorrect. When I first started all this, I read for 16 hours straight for like a week straight just absorbing and learning. I distinctly remember reading something, then actually building the landing page/tracking method/campaign… then reading something else which was BETTER… spending another day redoing the exact same thing in a different way, different trackers, different lander styles. This must have repeated 5 or 6 times, and THEN I read a post about wordpress and did the entire thing over AGAIN. From the outside it looks like an entire “wasted” week because I just went in circles, and at the end of the week I still didn’t have any finished item. Let me tell you though, I have used every single one of those things I have learned at LEAST 100 times since then, in the past year, even if it wasn’t that time.

That is the meat of this post, and why I feel it’s so important. Everything you’re learning here interlinks in ways you can’t  even begin to comprehend when you’re first starting out. The first thing you learn, whether it’s ppc, ppv, media buys, seo, etc, is going to seem like the hardest thing ever. The second thing you learn will be hard too.. but after that you start to get a bigger picture and have a lot of ‘ah-ha’ moments.

EVENTUALLY, you will get to a point where your understanding is so all-encompassing that you will have tons of different projects on your plate. More than you will be able to handle! You will ‘actually’ be thinking outside the box. Right now, since making this post yesterday, I had 2 more opportunities come up that are insanely amazing. Big time Travis is in a Maserati amazing. It would be something I couldn’t even SEE in the matrix of life though, had I not known all this other interlinking stuff.

Just keep that in mind when you’re learning… and look forward to the point you WILL reach when you will start to get a massive -flood- of ideas, opportunities, people wanting to network with you, and literally so many chances to succeed. Many of them will fail, but when one fails, 3 more will popup. It’s the most exhilarating thing ever :]

I’m off to buy my shoes now

Hey yo!

I just got this comment so I felt the need to force an update

“Where’s the update? You still going to ASW? Still doing media buys?”

I haven’t posted in some time due to being massively scattered lately, knee deep in projects. I’ve sort of reached my breaking point for living in seclusion working on my business (lol). My business did definitely double or triple, but  at the cost of my sense of humor and overall zeal (temporarily!). Let me just say if you ever decide to do what I did, it’s a great idea.. but don’t go longer than 2 months. The first 2 months in seclusion were VERY beneficial, but now being on my 4th or 5th month, I don’t even know, it’s more than what my socially-requiring being can aptly handle.

Let me recap you on a few of my plans and expect a better update soon when I feel inspired.

> Affiliate summit west. FUCK YES. I’m counting down the days.. I’ll be in vegas 16th through 20th. I already have a few networking parties I plan on going to, media buys coach as well as ppc coach meetups. If you want to meetup, I can give you my sexy business card. Just AIM message me: ‘solar’, and we can exchange numbers. I don’t get texts after my iPhone was stolen so don’t bother sending them or they’ll disappear into the void, where all the lost socks you have go. Expect a big post about this. I’ve never been to a marketing conference before so I’m looking forward to it.

> After ASW I’m going home for a month to visit my family and hang out with my bro’s. One’s the lead role in a play so I gotta see that, and the other is like on 40 varsity sports teams so I have to see him pwn a few n00bs on the field there. During this time I will have a lot of time to make a better post. Change of scenery always helps.

> Real Estate. My business partner Lee who has been doing real estate 6 years has recently gotten some good juicy contacts, and is helping me to learn the ins and outs of flipping houses. This looks like a great supplement to marketing which has no face-time, and real estate which is all face-time.. something I enjoy. My current big project is related to real estate and is what I’ve been working on non-stop the last week or two

> After I come back in February from my hometown, I’m moving to South Carolina to live with my buddy for some snowboarding, hiking, camping and so on, and also help him with his startup company (which is looking promising so far). I offered to give him a hand and just relax for a bit. After that I am possibly moving to Texas for real estate, we will see.

> More media buys, PPV, PPC. In the last month I’ve had 2 very solid campaigns running $500 or so adspend a day but my server got DDoS’d, I had to change some things around and now it’s not the same. I’m going to work on scaling that to several other traffic sources and trying to get that up. It’s definitely a winner.. I stole $2k in revenue from him in 2 days and got attacked that night. Liquidweb is the fucking bomb though, and did a good job mitigating it. Let me say though that prosper was the one that screwed it up.. the attack on the server itself was handled easily, but all the traffic from the botnet was giving prosper hundreds of clicks a minute, and was overloading my VPS. Because the VPS is uncapped, it actually took down several other sites as well. Oops :p

Anyway Im’ma head to the store and pick up some new shoes for ASW, the ones I have now have been reduced to holey cloth bandages wrapped around my feet like a traveling sage.