As a web developer who constantly deals with domains and emails being transferred, I’d like to set a standard guideline on how one should manage their domains and email in order to maintain autonomy and control over your own material, while eliminating the chances of losing domains through silly administrative mishaps.

1. ALWAYS keep a public email with hotmail, gmail, yahoo etc., and check it regularly.
   Occasionally you may drop a domain name altogether, or stop working for a company, or cut partnership with a company. That means, your old email at john@oldcompany.com is no longer accessible to you. Regardless of what email you use as a primary email, you should always keep one email address active through a large public email platform such as @hotmail.com, @gmail.com, @yahoo.com etc. By having one of these emails as the core email, you have 1 email address that you can ALWAYS fall back to. I have my email at @jeffkee.com and on @synchronous.ca, but I always keep my @hotmail.com account active.
2. ALWAYS keep your domains under your name.
   It is not a good idea to let somebody else have control over a domain name. Not even your web designer should have complete ownership and control of your domain. Your domain is your property. Worst case scenario: If you have a fallout with a web designer, and the guy decides to screw you - you’d have to basically pay him whatever ransom he requires to regain your domain, OR go through a lawsuit to recover a domain (if it is an option - based on how your company is registered, it may not even be possible). If you’re curious how your domains are handled, visit WHOIS for domain lookup information. Some domains are privacy-protected. But you can still see which registrar holds the domain information. Contact this registrar to make sure that your name, as well as your primary email (as mentioned in point #1) is listed on the WHOIS contact information. Otherwise, you can be in big trouble later!
3. ALWAYS use your public domain email as your domain contact email.
   On my registration for www.jeffkee.com, there is a contact email address. It would be foolish to have this email entered as anything other than my @hotmail.com account. Why? If I lose any other domains, I lose the key point of contact to manage this domain. Let’s say I registered my email from @synchronous.ca as a contact email. Imagine in 3 years, I got rid of the @synchronous.ca domain after I re-brand. Then, the important domain related emails (especially renewal reminders) will still be sent to the @synchronous.ca email, when I don’t even have that account anymore. For that reason, your key contact email for any of your domains should be a @hotmail.com, or @gmail.com type of an account that will NEVER disappear. This way you make sure that you always maintain contact and control over your precious domains!

Hopefully this gives everybody a clear guideline of how to best manage your email addresses and your domains.

If you have questions about the best way to set up your email addresses on a private domain you just obtained please check out my other post about using Google Applications and Gmail as your primary email and collaboration system.

The economy is sliding downhill, the stock markets have crashed, unemployment rates go up, and banks are going down (or belly up). Everybody seems to be slowing down in business - realtors are not selling homes, and those owners who do manage to sell are doing so at a reduced sale price. GM and Ford are finding it hard to make ends meet, and… well. You get the idea.

Rough times, and money is harder to find. Let’s look at some of us who are making some good money in this bad time in history. Maybe we can get some ideas!

5. Bankruptcy Lawyers

I don’t think I need to explain this one, do I? Bankruptcy has been going up around the world, including in North America as well as European nations. France is a nation known for its love for fine dining and wining, yet French restaurants are feeling the pinch of bankruptcy. Check out the Google Trends for the search term “Bankruptcy Lawyers”. It’s been rising the last few months it seems.

4. Divorce Lawyers

Tough economic times mean more strains on marriages, and we all know that financial problems are the number one cause for divorce. Divorces involve lawyers. They’re getting lots of business with all those households that are going into financial crisis.

3. Online Fraudsters

According to Symantec, online fraudsters who steal and abuse credit card information and bank account details will make $3.3b this year. That’s a lot more money than most financial institutions will net in profits this year.

2. Loan Sharks in HELOC

HELOC stands for Home Equity Line of Credit, and it refers to a loan that is made with your home equity on the line as collateral. If you default on your HELOC, the loan company can then take your home and sell it off to mitigate their losses in debts. But this in turn, obviously, becomes a huge asset to the loan sharks. In most default and foreclosure cases, chances are, the homeowner will lose a lot of money to the mortgage investors. Foreclosure rates in the US have been going up since late 2007. Of course, if property values drop down a lot more, then perhaps the resale of a foreclosed home may not return all of the money owed anymore.

1. Somali Pirates

This is my favorite one. Forget all the other lucrative recession-time opportunities listed above - check out the Somali pirates. They’ve been more active than ever, hijacking cargo ships full of goodies all over the high-seas. They made $150b this year. That’s a hell of a lot more than what Ford and GM are going to make this year. Sounds like the most lucrative gig on the list right now!

With advancement in mobile email technology in iPhones, Blackberries, and of course, laptops, the world of emails is evolving too. And Google is definitely on top of things, once again. Nearly a year ago my company, Synchronous Design & Marketing, switched to the Google Apps platform for our email and collaboration. We have not looked back since, and the productivity and accessibility is simply amazing.

Most hosting companies do not provide an IMAP platform, and the most common email method is POP3. Even worse, a lot of small businesses opt to simply forward their corporate emails to their hotmail or gmail accounts and reply from those addresses. The downside of using POP3 on your hosting server is that webmail access is often cumbersome and awkward (using CUBE mail or Squirrel Mail etc.) and if you have several computers, you have to delete emails or mark them as read emails on multiple platforms, and that includes your handhelds. With an IMAP platform, however if you read the email on your computer, it will be marked as read on your iPhone as well as your webmail platform.

Putting all this together is the Google Apps solution. This is how you activate Google Apps.

1. Visit https://www.google.com/a/.
2. Sign up for either the free or the Premium edition, as it fits you. You need to have a domain, or sign up for a domain on the spot.
3. Verify domain ownership.
4. Configure your MX record on your domain (this is through your web hosting company).
5. Configure your computer, iPhone, Blackberry, etc.

Using the Google Apps platform, your Mail Exchange record (MX Record) is updated so that all emails are routed go ghs.google.com, or a similar address. The emails are hosted on the Gmail platform, BUT using your domain natively. So even though you are on the gmail platform, you are still natively sending emails from your own company domain.

Using this set-up, you can have IMAP access to your emails from all devices, as well as advanced gmail access if you need webmail access while you’re on the road. As a matter of fact, I find myself often using the gmail platform on my portal at http://portal.synchronous.ca (you won’t be able to log in - you must be an employee) rather than Mail on my Macbook Pro. It’s fast, easy to use, well organized, and clean.

Other benefits of using Google Apps as your email and collaboration solutions are these:

• You get a calendar on the Google Apps platform which can be shared (or not shared) between employees, and synchronized to your desktop calendar (such as Outlook, or iCal)
• You get the Google Docs platform, on which you can do word processing, spreadsheets, and more. No more confusion on who has the most recent file of that proposal document. You work on it together online. And the functions are so robust, you won’t miss Microsoft Word or Pages.
• SalesForce is the most popular CRM solution on the market, and Google and Salesforce are partners. They offer an integrated CRM/Google Apps solution that integrate seamlessly with each other. Visit http://www.salesforce.com/googleapps/ for more details.

Using the Google Apps platform, we have achieved ease of use, time saving, easy collaboration and data sharing, better synchronization, and most of all, relaxation. It just works.

Over 2 years ago I was working for Bell Mobility, at a fixed hourly rate of $17.21, with a comfortable benefit program as well as 37.5 hours a week guaranteed unless I wanted less. For those of you who know me well, you can obviously picture the lack of balance - currently I own and operate a design & marketing company out of Vancouver, BC (Synchronous Design & Marketing), and I take my own fate into my own hands. No benefits, no guarantees. I love this environment however because it constantly challenges me and I have no complaints.

That being said, the corporate world does give you some valuable insights into business, finance, and human relations, and I would still go through it again if I had to do it over again (although just after a year, I hated it so much I quit without a back-up job). For young people who want to become independent business owners and entrepreneurs, yet do not have the funds or the ideas to start upon, I would actually recommend going through a corporate job for the experience of it. Learn what you can get, and then leave.

My specific job function was a call centre agent, and for the most part I worked in the business/corporate account department. I was the asshole on the other side when you call 611 and then press 0 on your cell phones. And then I would go onto explain why that extra charge IS a valid charge and you still have to pay it, or give you some lame excuse to why we’ve raised the System Access/911 Fee on your cell phone bills. Now out of my defense, I was one of the best agents for troubleshooting phone problems, billing errors, and also troubleshooting our own customer management systems that we used to handle inquiries.

This job obviously involved plenty of conversation with customers, as well as interaction with colleagues as well as obliging to corporate standards and guidelines. It was interesting and educational while it lasted.

1. Memorizing your workflow or training is not always the best thing.Memorization of cell phone plans, billing details, pricing etc. was discouraged at Bell. Of course, there are some items that you memorize after a while (price of Caller ID etc.) but the truth is that the pricing for those items, the conditions etc. can differ from many different account types, and trying to memorize this all during the training course was a ridiculous goal, not to mention unnecessary. The truth about these plan details and what not is that they tend to change from time to time as well. We had an internal knowledge-base system similar to Wikipedia, with all current and past details of different products and services that we were encouraged to refer to. This may increase each call time by a small amount, but it drastically reduced training time as well as margin of error on account handling.

   The same applies to my current profession as a design & marketing guy, who constantly works with PHP code. It’s a given that I probably have tonnes of PHP commands and syntaxes memorized, but I don’t try to memorize it. All I need is to be aware of what is possible, and when the time comes to use it, I look it up on the PHP official website to verify, or look it up on Google for application examples. Some people that know how much I code may assume I memorize most of my functions but that’s far from true.

2. Rules ARE bendable depending on your people skills.In my work environment there were always disputes about pricing, contract extensions and what not. As much as there are corporate guidelines on the eligibility for perks and discounts for certain clients (based on length of business, length of contract, average monthly revenue and past promotion records etc.), there’s always a margin to it.

   Some clients would call in all ready for an argument and complaints - some people just seem to have an issue with corporations overall, and preserve that left-wing attitude that makes them view corporations as the “enemy” or something of the sort. When these guys call in and start an argument from the beginning, there was no way I would budge and give a discount, or make a one-time adjustment. I would hold my ground and did not give a shit if it escalated to one of those “supervisor” calls (and they’re not always the actual supervisors - just more experienced agents specializing in escalations).

   On the other hand, if a person calls in with a happy jolly tone, the last thing I feel like saying is “Sorry ma’am, that is a valid charge as per your service agreement.” or “That offer is no longer available on your account.” To avoid any potential arguments, and to keep the conversation civil, I would just let it go and turn a blind eye. Besides, the management is not capable of checking all the discounts and adjustments made, so small amounts could just fly. It was simply the margin of error that the corporation had in mind anyways.

3. Sales pitches, and mirroring personalitiesEven in the customer service center which is set up to wait for inbound calls, we had a fair bit of sales quotas to meet. For example, when a person calls in, and we notice they are using some text messages but does not have a text messaging bundle, we can offer it and try to get him/her to add it to the account. These are small sales in amount but sales nonetheless, and throughout my career I became better and better at naturally spotting the clients’ needs, offering the right product in the right tone of voice, and getting the sale.

   What also helps is to always mirror the personality of the person you are trying to sell. If it’s a rowdy businessman calling in with some ego, your tone of voice would match, and the choices of words as well (”You got that right sir!!!” in a up-beat tone, kind of sucking up would do the trick). If it’s an older female who is about to stick a golf club up your bum if you say one wrong thing, you want to keep things very fine-tuned (”Yes, that is correct ma’am.” in a polite tone would be suitable). There are many different archetypes of people based on personality, age, ethnicity and what not, and over time I obtained some natural feel on how to respond to different people. And this is a continuous learning process for me - to keep learning and polishing my skills for sales.

Time management is one of the issues that I always try to get to the bottom of, and I always emphasize it. But it seems that often times I lose my discipline as well, and I look back at some days in which I spent too many hours doing unproductive stuff, in a very unorganized manner. And while I sit in front of my computer, I often end up jumping from one task to another, which is a major pain in the butt.

I’m implementing a new initiative for myself to make the most out of my time, and that is to label every single business-related (and some non-business-related) task into my calendar and try to adhere to it. Of course, things come up - having to go to the store to buy something, or the bank, etc. And those variables are a given, but with a schedule written out fully, I am much more likely to follow the routine more than anything else.

For example, I used to just have it in my head, “I’ll do Ted’s ads, and then code for John tomorrow.” That’s not good enough for me anymore - it will all be written down in my calendar to the very hour, including lunch breaks and gym breaks. This is a new thing I am starting as part of my productivity increase plan. I don’t expect to ever achieve 100% adherence. This is more of a self-encouragement and disciplining measure so I don’t waste my time. I am much less likely to sit around or goof off if I have it written in my calendar to perform a certain task between certain hours.

I’ll keep you all posted on how this goes!