The Jared Holland

This guy…

This guy right here….

Jared Holland

is officially ….

A FULL TIME GRAPHIC DESIGNER!

I’m working at a screen printing shop in Paducah, Ky.  The store is called Action Sports and they do shirts, jerseys, banners and all kinds of other stuff for local schools.  I really didn’t expect to be busy when I first got the job.

Most people say stuff like “oh, we have a lot of work for you” and then it just never happens.  This guy was serious.  I couldn’t be happier.

The only down side to the whole thing is going back to using a Windows based PC to draw things.  I’m slowing getting over that horrid fact.  It isn’t too bad, I still have my macbook to keep me happy at night.

This past week has been so cool though.  I’ve drawn…baseball team banners, team logos, boy scouts of america stuff, a goldfish, a chicago skyline, a baby foot, color guard stuff, softball stuff, old school white sox logo, jesus shirts, business logos, and all kinds of other random things.

I can feel that I’m going to be working for this guy for a long time.  I really like the atmosphere at work.  I like how it’s cool for me to just throw head phones on and work on my projects.  I also love how I don’t have to get my back all out of whack and that they respect that.  I couldn’t ask for a better job.  I wish I would of found this place when I was living in Lone Oak.

Leave some comments people! Don’t waste your time spammers, I don’t approve your comments.  I know your slick tricks to get a backlink from my site. You’ll get yours some day assholes.

Peace.

I have been getting geared up for running my own business.  I have the perfect solution to anyone who doesn’t know a whole lot about computers to be able to edit their own website.  I have my own client area setup already and I’ve shown it to one client so far.  She just loved it. She told me that opening Dreamweaver on her computer was absolute hell, but working online is much faster for her.

You can see my client area here, but you don’t have a login so you can just check out the login screen.  I played around with the colors some, but finally just decided to go with the black.

I think having this client area will be my ticket to getting more customers under my belt.  It does have fees, but it isn’t that bad considering the time savings for me and money savings for my customers.

In other news, I haven’t received even one phone call from my ad running the Metropolis Planet.  It has only been in there one time, but still … I thought I would have at least some interested parties.  After my ads run, through the rest of the month, I’m going to have someone at the Planet write up an article about my new business.  Having friends who work at the newspaper come in handy when starting a business.

I’m now positioning my client area as the selling point for getting new customers.  I have looked up some statistics about search engine traffic and businesses to throw at people.  I made some flyers too, but I haven’t done anything but put them into a folder to stay crisp.

I think just signing into my client area will be enough to sell someone on having a website.  I can literally design anything, any complexity and allow the client to edit the text, images and video without screwing up the site. It also updates using FTP so the edits are instant for the customer and they can see what they just edited.

I’ve been meaning to write a post on here for like a week….could ya tell??

One more thing.  I went to Harrah’s Casino here in Metropolis yesterday for the first time in my life.  It was fun, I guess. I got a free meal and a coupon for another freebie buffet.  I won like $7 on a slot machine and cashed out.  I wasn’t trying to loose money yesterday. They gave me some paper that said they were going to send me a $100 coupon to play on my next visit.  I saw 2 people from Metropolis the whole time I was in there.  It’s like a totally different world, very different from Metropolis.

Until we meet again…PEACE!

JHollandWebServices.com

This will be the home of my portfolio, a list of services, list of clients and contact information. I have to get it going soon since I’m going to be placing an ad in the Metropolis Planet in the coming weeks. Everybody has class tonight so I’ll probably work on a design for it. I might even get it online.

&

LastTwoMinutes.com

This one is just an idea for now. I wish more ideas came to me like this one did. I’ll be releasing details in the coming weeks when I get time to sit down and think about it more. Even if I never do anything with it maybe some big marketing company will want it someday and pay me handsomely for such.

I did this website for family friend and hopefully it’ll turn into more work for me.

I-24 Antique Mall

I’m using all the money from it to push my business into the realm of a real business.  I’m looking into applying for my Illinois DBA (doing business as) what-nots.  I shopped around last night for cheap business cards and finally decided to go with 123Print.com because they had a good price for 500 cards ($31.18 shipped).  I still have business cards from the last time I thought I was going to do this web thing full time.  I don’t want that to happen this time, I’m looking to succeed.

My target audience is going to be local businesses with websites that look like the 90’s style sites and new businesses that I think I can convince to get online.

How do I convince them to get a website?

I don’t know why I ask myself questions I can’t answer.  The business cards will help a lot when I’m talking to people and telling them what I do.  I’m thinking about getting some brochures printed, but on the other hand I’m thinking about just doing some ads in the local paper.  The only draw back to that is, I haven’t filed for my DBA yet so I would have to advertise under my name and not the business name…which is, by the way…

J. Holland Design

I don’t think I’m going to start a separate website for this, I’m just going to use this blog and post sample work as it comes along.  As it stands right now I have 3 clients. Everyone has to start somewhere, I’m just glad to have 3 under my belt. It’s 3 more than I had a year ago, that’s for sure. I think convincing people that you can deliver what they need to succeed online is tough, because they don’t know what they need to succeed.

I plan on using this blog and future articles trying to explain what you need to succeed online, not just locally, but nationally.

Wish me luck.

After 2 days playing around with Google Adwords we’ve decided to stop it for a while until I can do some more keyword research.  The first day I just advertised on the content network and we got like 12 clicks and 90,000 impressions. The second day was Google Search ads only and we had 22 clicks with 1,500 impressions.

Check out the screen shot below:

(I’m posting all the information because I don’t know if I should or should not show this to people. Deal with it Google.)

I’ll update my blog when I get some more interesting information about my trial runs. I’ve been reading Digital Point Forums trying to get a feel for problems before I waste money finding out myself.

Peace.

I had to put this on here. I know at least one person reading my blog will appreciate this. It took me a minute to get it, but it made me laugh even harder cause it was on a code snippet website.

If you don’t get it, click here and enjoy.

I was bored this morning and flipping through my Google Account info when I found a new feature, public profiles.  I filled out some stuff, that really they should know anyway and got verified.

http://www.google.com/profiles/thejaredholland

I guess when people search for my name in Google now it will show a picture of me instead of “Jared Holland football player stats”, etc.

Google is quick!  This is what it looks like. Finally, Jared Holland the football player will pay!

Last night I passed out hard watching South Park on my macbook.  It was the first time my computer was actually completely dead to the world.  It’s just now back up to 44% battery.  Oh well, shit happens and people pass out.

Visitors to our online stores are down big time, so I guess this week we’re going to launch some Google Adwords campaigns on it.  Selling stickers online is just so saturated that you have to pay $1.50 – $2.00 just to show up when people do searches.  I might have some targeted at people searching for certain words and then some just running across the web network.  We’re just going to do text ads at first, since I hate making little web banners.  It’s just so stressful.

Oh…  Jradville is back online using wordpress back-end.

Enjoy your Sunday. Fuck Monday.

Good day to you sir.

I’ve been planning to sit down and write a blog post, it just hasn’t happened yet.

Life seems to start with one problem and snow ball into multiples.

I have been working on our sticker store (99centsticker.com).

We now have a facebook page with almost 100 fans, only 5 of the people I actually know personally.  I added the facebook widget to our website today so people will hopefully see that and add themselves.  I’m also playing around with the ads on the site and trying to get our ‘bounce rate’ down.

It’s a work in progess, a slow progress, but we’re getting there.

I’m waiting to get the login info for the metro chamber so I can fix some html / css issues on there website before they have a membership drive.

To say that I’ve been busy is an understatement.

I’ve been staring at my computer for 10-12 hours a day easy.  I say that because my eyes hurt like a sum bitch.

What have I been working on you say?

http://www.10dollartshirts.com

This is just a random shirt that I want to make for myself.  I have some more ideas floating on my brain too.  The website is a work in progress.  I’ve been trying everyday to get us to the point we can advertise and be ready to ship shirts.  Today I scoured the internets looking at the top 100 or so websites selling ‘funny tshirts’.  Most of them have multiple websites all linked together so they will get you to make a purchase somehow.

Guess what?

We have multiple URLS bitches!  So, that idea got thrown into my madness today.  Right now, www.10dollartshirts.com is my main focus, but we will be rolling out some other domains we already own.

peace out.

I woke up this morning and forced myself to create something.

It’s blue. It’s simple. It’s Sunday.

Click here to look at it.

I’m working on a design for an area MMA group too, but it has me stumped currently.  It’s a work in progress..

I did some playing around in photoshop with it, but then just decided to start with the CSS and I’m just not happy with it.  Pleasing myself isn’t easy.  I know I suck and I try not to suck.  The design I made today is a ‘cookie cutter’ style site.  Nothing fancy…no words in fact.

$65!!!!!!!!

Yeah right.