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So I have had my iPhone for a little over 3 years now.  I’m sold.  Not a fanboy by any means but I don’t see my self moving to another phone in the foreseeable future.  Not until someone knocks the iPhone from it’s throne of awesomeness.

AT&T on the other hand… Let me say the positive things first.

Rollover. Rollover was great when I was in a plan that was close to my usage.  I had to upgrade from the 400 minute plan and I was looking for a 600 or 800 but no. The next level up was 1400. Well it was cheaper than the overage charges. Barely.Umm what else?  Yeah, I can’t think of any other positives.

I have never felt like I was getting a good deal with AT&T.  But this post isn’t meant to be a rant on AT&T’s crappy service and lame billing.  Really it’s not.

So here we go.

Verizon just announced that they will be selling me an iPhone selling iPhones.  I’ve got a month to decide where I’ll be getting my iPhone4.  If it were today it would be Verizon.  No contest.  But I hold no animosity towards AT&T even though I want to.  It was just a business decision. A legalized monopoly if you will.  I can’t really blame them for that, if I had the chance I would have probably done something pretty similar.

But I was thinking about it, what would AT&T have to do to convince me to stay.  Here goes.

To keep me as a customer AT&T would have to offer me:

• a 500-900 minute range plan for under $60
• Keep my huge mass of rollover minutes that I’ll never use on my current plan.
• UNLIMITED texting
• current data plans are fine but I want tethering without an extra charge
• family plan for as many iPhones as I want
• Basically I want my total bill for 2 iPhones and one other phone to be under $150.  Right now I’m paying more than that for 1 iPhone and 2 regular phones.

If AT&T won’t give me that I’ll take whatever Verizon is selling because I’m just sick of feeling screwed every time I look at my bill.

Related articles

• Should I Get an AT&T iPhone or a Verizon iPhone? (icemanbaldy.com)
• Will the iPhone Crush Verizon’s Network? [IPhone] (gizmodo.com)
• COMPARISON: Verizon Vs. AT&T iPhone (AAPL, T, VZ) (businessinsider.com)
• What’s the Difference Between the Verizon and AT&T iPhone? (pcworld.com)

So what’s your take? What would it take to convince you to get in iPhone on AT&T?

1 year ago I started my own made up diet/weight control program.  Basically it was just this: No eating after 6:00 PM.

That worked well for about 3 months. I slowly lost about 10 pounds.  Then I plateaued. Until August I didn’t lose any more weight.  Not until I tried a handy little iPhone app called LoseIt.

LoseIt helps you set goals and track calories intake and burn.  In the next 3 months I lost an additional 12 pounds.

Then came the holidays.  November was hard but I managed to only put on 1 pound with Thanksgiving.  Then came Christmas and the New Year.  I managed to put on all 12 of those pounds in just under 2 weeks.  I didn’t even have to try.  They just magically appeared.

So. Now the resolve. I work at MonaVie during the day (fantastic place to work by the way) and MonaVie just launched (today) a new weight management product. And I have a 1 month’s supply. So I’m working really hard and avoiding all those things I’ve pigged out on during the holiday.  I’m only 2 days in and I’ve already lost back 3 of those regained pounds. So if you happen to see me wavering in my resolve please give me a little encouragement.  I’m really Jonesin for an EMV right now.

So I think I get Tumblr now.  Pretty sure.  Not positive but pretty sure.

I have setup Tumblr to feed to my regular blog. Wait, let me back up…

Since I installed WordPress a while ago I have been looking for a good way to post a simple image from my phone to my blog.  I installed the WordPress iPhone app and it lets me post but there’s not a simple way to just upload a photo and shout some short message about it.

Then when I started looking into Tumblr I could see that that was one of its strong points.  I thought to myself “if I could just get wordpress to do “that…”  And then I thought about it some more.   “Hmmmm RSS.  Been messing with that lately, I bet I could make that work…

So last night I took 20 minutes and setup RSS on here and added my Tumblr feed and presto. There are.

So that kinda sums up what I have done with Tumblr.  I’m sure there’s more to do with it but I haven’t got to it yet.

What do you do with Tumblr?

Related articles

• Do I need Tumblr? [George Emsden] (ecademy.com)
• Review: Tumblr (macworld.com)

So my son just started blogging. Real blogging that is.  He’s had a BlogSpot blog for quite a while and has been fairly casual about it but he writes pretty good posts.  I recently added adsense to some of my sites and he’s excited to be able to earn a few extra dollars the same way.  So we setup his blog tonight and he has been copying all his posts over from his old blog.  So far he says he really likes WordPress compared to BlogSpot.  Can’t agree with him more.  I can’t stand BlogSpot.

Tomorrow I’ll show him how to setup analytics and adsense and he’ll be on his way.

So please take a minute and check out his blog (www.jonathancurtis.com) and don’t forget to support him by visiting a sponsor or two.  He’ll be thrilled to see his site getting traffic and earning a few cents.  And don’t forget to check back to see his updates on his stories he’s writing.

So I have been working in SEO for about 10 years now.  That’s Search Engine Optimization to all you non-techies.  Basically it’s what makes a website show up at the top of the list when you google something.

It’s funny I have done SEO for countless websites and I haven’t ever really done it for this website.  Why? Because honestly I don’t care who comes to my site.  In fact, I would prefer that I didn’t get tons of traffic because I don’t use my website to make money.  Lots of traffic would actually cost me more  money.

But lets say just for fun that I did want lots of traffic.  What are some things I would do?

1. Content.  I would pick a theme and stick to it on my blog.  If you notice this list of categories over there on the side, I don’t really have a central theme.  But if I wanted to make money here, I would.  I would also do some things to make visitors want to stay here once they got here.  Good articles, videos, products reviews, links to my amazon affiliate products, etc.

2. Links.  The way Google knows that your website is important is by other sites linking to you.  That’s pretty fair right?  So how do I get people to link to me?  I would do several things.  Send out regular PR to online pr sites, get all my friends to link to me, post comments on relevant blogs linking back to me, probably create a couple sister sites that are loosely but not 100% related and have them link back to me.

3. Freshness. I would dedicate a few hours each week to adding new stuff to my site.  Google loves new content. Google loves new links.

4. Social Media.  I would make sure I am actively participating in related discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc.  And I would definitely keep my profile on those sites updated.  Again, just a couple hours a week.

So how does someone that hasn’t been doing SEO for years tackle this?  Until now it has been by hiring someone, throwing money at Google Adwords blindly with fingers crossed or by finding a mentor.  Now there’s finally a solution for the DIYer.  Enter DIY SEO from Main10.  Here’s a nice little program that knows where you should do each of these things and can walk you through it all. One step at a time.

If you have a website that is intended to make money (directly or indirectly), go check it out. It just might be the solution that you have been looking for.

A Friend asked me the other day what I would do if I had been challenged to make $1000/day.  I think he was half expecting a short answer.  And I tried to figure out how to put it into 140 characters or less.  Not that it was on twitter, just that 140 is a nice round number.

Well I couldn’t. So I am attempting to do it in a blog post.  Here goes.

Step 1 – Find something that’s worth $1000/day. I have chosen a business.  Mine is a plan for a scalable online SaaS (software as a service) that will be sold not by me, but by resellers looking to offer something solid on a very flexible pricing model.  I have run the numbers over and over on this one and I see it being quite a bit larger than $1000/day.  I started with about 25 business ideas that could have easily sucked up as much time and effort as this one.  Only 1 or 2 of them even approach this one in terms of monetary potential.

Step2 – Learn as much as possible about managing a business that can pay me $1000/day.  I have resorted to blogs, LinkedIn, and Twitter.  I have found some of the more expert people in various aspects of what I need to do.  I read A LOT from these guys.  And I’ve learned a lot about how I want this business to run and how to market it.

Step3 – Don’t go alone.  I started this out with 2 partners.  We have kept each other on track when it was most tempting to give up or take the short way out. I  think attacking something like this alone is a stupid idea. Don’t do it.

Step 3 – Create a solid plan. I have spent the last year and a half building this thing.  We started out with 2 solid months of planning. Sometimes for several full days each week. (one of the advantages of being unemployed at the time) We analyzed the competition and anything out there that remotely touched our sphere.  I might also add that I have been working in this technology for that last decade.  Part of being able to create a solid plan is to follow one of Warren Buffett’s rules “stick to what you know”.

Step 4 – Be flexible. We have stuck to our plan but not been so blind as to not recognize when we had something wrong and needed to go back to the drawing board, or white board in our case.  We have made major shifts to the project.  But (and this is the most heartening part) our overall strategy has not changed. The marketing and industry we are targeting is evolving into what we need it to be.  Had we launched a year ago, we would probably have not been well accepted because the market wasn’t ready for it.  Now I’d say it has almost been perfectly primed.

Step 5 – Don’t give up. We’re still not done but we’re approaching the completion of version 1.  We have thought we were close before.  We even thought we were done at one point.  Thinking this would have been done toward the end of 2008 and still not having it done by mid 2010 could really suck the spirit out of a lot of people.  I think having the right partners has made us be able to keep going.  Did I mention the importance of having partners?

So I guess there isn’t much else I can really say without showing everyone what this project is.  Well, I’m not ready to show it off.  And I’m not really sure when it will be.  Don’t worry, once it’s ready, that’s all you will be hearing about.  Just stay tuned.

And keep in mind that this isn’t what I would tell everyone else to do, this is just what I have chosen to do.  For some people I would say the best way for them to make $1000 per day is to go to law school and work their way up in a law firm and get to where they can charge $250/hour and work 4 hour days.  That’s just not me.

Good luck.