Letter From the CEO
Getting Serious About Business
by Robert Pritchett
We keep exploring opportunities for eCommerce to help offset what it costs to provide macCompanionfreely to you on a monthly basis. We have had some success with Google Ads and our links to Amazon.com, as well as links in our Bazaar to LinkShare affiliates.
This past month MPN, LLC was blessed with being accepted into Apple Online Sales program for Businesses. It took about 2 months of processing and hoop-jumping to get approval to become an Apple Business Agent. I’ll be sent one of those little Apple Product Professional pins for also having jumped through the online education hoops from Apple. We can now “sell” Apple products on our site to businesses, now that we are registered as an “Apple Product Professional”. Why bother? That just jives with our real company name – Macintosh Professional Network, LLC and helps round out our “All Things Macintosh” banner.
I was pleasantly surprised to discover that a few other macCompanionStaff also have gone through the online Apple Sales Training education before I did. On the list of over 1,851 participants, I’m sitting around 17 as far as having the most points gained in getting trained this season.
We can give businesses a 5% discount on purchases if they go to our Bazaar and take advantage of the coupons posted there. For us to get credit for the sale and help pay for the overhead associated with publishing macCompanion, it is important to use the Agent ID # AA071624when going onto the Apple Business Agent Store link on our website.
The “Apple” Experience
One thing that struck me while going through Apple’s online training, is that Apple emphasizes the experiential aspects of computing and focuses on “pain points” and how Apple can fill the needs of overcoming those bad experiences by delivering an integrated support and element solution to the prospective customers, whatever career environment they may be in today.
I really wish you could listen to the video presentations, the documentation the sales staff are supposed to learn from on each Apple-based product, whether hardware or software. Apple does a great job “selling solutions” to Apple Sales.
The key to the “Apple Experience” is how the parts and pieces all fit into a clean integration. It isn’t the “one trick pony” stuff competitors push, whether hardware or software. Apple “controls” the computing environment by providing soup-to-nuts solutions to all aspects of computing.
Let’s offer a metaphor that I used years ago while being a missionary for the religious organization I am blessed to be a part of;
Many computer environments are like pianos that consist of either black keys or white keys or perhaps only use one part of the keyboard because the other parts are not available to them.
Apple is the concert piano of computing. It offers the whole keyboard. It is up to us to learn how to play that piano, so we can go beyond playing the Chop Waltz and perform works by Mozart, Chopin or DeBussy.
Of course, if you go to the left side of our website at http://www.maccompanion.com, you will also be able to go to the Apple store through our website, if you are an individual and not a business and when you purchase products, we get something like 2% of each purchase.
Other eCommerce Efforts
Also on our website, we “sell” mineral supplements that make water wetter and help deacidize the human body called Extreme X20and X20 Blastfrom Xooma Worldwide. I’ve been using Extreme X20for about a month now. These are cold-water teabag sachets that contain around 70 minerals that help neutralize bad stuff that accumulates in the human body. Ever heard of acidosis?
We just started another experiment in online Ecommerce with the Ominex Experience. You can register on our site to obtain anywhere from 100,000 office products for businesses, breakroom foodstuffs, educational institutions, janitorial services and even governments, with free shipping over $50 USD per order. They can also get online printing services. Pricing is claimed to be better than from brick store environments and includes original rebates, offers and give-aways direct from manufacturers. No-obligation registration is free on our website. All credit cards are accepted on this Ominex secure site.
Exposure Activities
Besides participation with Tim Verpoorten on the highly popular Mac ReviewCast and the 1-year anniversary that occurred in April where we helped give away lots of prizes in celebration of that milestone, we have also been raising our visibility by being interviewed by Tim Robertson and Chad Perry on MyMac.com at http://www.mymac.com/showarticle.php?id=2319.
Daphne Kalfon, our Music specialist for macCompanion, was also interviewed on MyMac.com at http://www.mymac.com/showarticle.php?id=2329.
Why do macCompanion as a monthly magazine?
Tim and Chad are much further along the Mac Evangelist evolutionary scale with MyMac.comthan we are here at macCompanion. They did the “magazine route” and gave it up, because by the time a magazine gets published it is quickly out of date and in many ways, becomes irrelevant by the time it reaches readers. They suffered through the “3-day-a-month storm” for years, as it takes so much time to gather content, format it in readable form, post and publish it – and I was almost swayed by their strong suggestion to “just drop it” and go all-electronic and only post articles online, as those article get submitted by our staff. Than I read comments from readers about how MacWorldand MacAddictwere getting less and less significant even as more and more folks were joining the Mac Community and didn’t think they were getting what they paid for.
http://www.thinksecret.com/news/0604magazines.html
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2006/4/17/3622
http://www.mcelhearn.com/article.php?story=20060418102551586
Well, I had to think more than twice about this. Yes, it takes lots of effort to get interesting content out to you, the reader. No, this isn’t just a “hobby” (thus the eCommerce activities). Yes, podcasting and vidcasting are a lot more enjoyable to do than publishing a monthly magazine. Yes, many of our current staff and former staff members have spun off in those directions and are being successful there. Yes, we would like to be able to pay our all-volunteer columnists and reviewers. Each technology has its own challenges.
Effective content is what matters
What I think sets us apart from the plethora of Mac-focused information online (see http://www.macsurfer.com) is that we don’t just put the blinders on and only do Mac-based stuff. We realized early-on that like us, the majority of readers also use non-Mac systems and we do reviews that show apps that work on both Mac and non-Mac platforms. We do book reviews that are related to the industry and not just for the Mac. We tend to be inclusive and not exclusive, which probably tends to turn off the so-called “Mac Zealots”, but is embraced by the majority Mac environment that has to live and co-exist in a non-Mac world. We “get it”. And Apple “gets it” too, now that they have allowed non-Mac environments to co-exist on the new Mactel systems in real-time and not just in a Microsoft-only Virtual PCenvironment for the masses.
I think what really convinced me that we are going the right direction with macCompanionand will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, is what one commentor said about magazines. He called such reading activity as “on-the-pot training”. I love that kind of “bathroom humor”!
You can download our PDF, print it out and read it away from the computer screen. That kind of flexibility is what we provide as we continue to learn and earn, along with you.
Keep telling your family, friends and associates about us here at macCompanion. We’d like to get readership up beyond 3 million page views per month. We’d like to be able to say, “billions served”. Your word-of-mouth efforts makes that happen more effectively than any other kind of advertising could do. Keep spreading the word!
So we are moving from hobby-mode to serious business and want to help reduce your headaches by helping you use the aspirin of the Internet – Apple.
