I'll be out of action on Monday, as I'm getting my electricity service upgraded from 100 amp to 200 amp. That means I'll be without power all day.

I do have a laptop, but the router won't work, so I won't be answering any e-mail. I'll spend the day writing the book.

Writing a new book means I have less to post about here - just letting you know. Every business topic I've thought of in the last month has found its way into the new book - it's not easy to come up with 60-80,000 words on something, so every snippet helps

I will try to get a little more up here, though - I like posting once a week or so (and preach that to others who have blogs, so I kind of have to practice what I preach.) It just probably won't be "writing" related until I'm finished with the book (around the end of June / beginning of July, I hope.)

I don't get too worked up over elections and politics and such. My wife is all into it, but I'm of the opinion that it really doesn't matter who is in office, and spending energy thinking about it is a colossal waste of time. And when it comes time to vote, I personally don't vote on issues - I vote for who I think is the most honest / better leader.

That said, I need to weigh in on something:

If a candidate wearing (or not wearing) a flag pin means anything to you, you are a moron. Plain and simple.

I can't be much more succinct than that. Ok, back to work.

I had posted awhile back about putting prices on your website, and I was prettymuch torn between putting prices up and not putting them up. I ended up with the conclusion that putting prices up was somewhat unprofessional. But you know, I recently found something else about putting up prices on a service-oriented site like mine

It stops requests cold.

I mean, cold.

Essentially, since I started writing the new book, I wanted to free up my schedule some. That meant trying to cut out the constant quote requests that are expecting to pay WAY less than I charge. Now, if I'm not busy, I don't mind quoting these at all (because I'll always convert a few.) But when I'm writing a book, I really don't have the time for that. So I figured I'd put my prices on my quote page - hopefully, that would satisfy the people just looking for a price without us sending three e-mails back and forth.

Well, I have to say, once I'm done with the book, I'll be taking the prices down. Because having them up stops almost all quote traffic.  Well, not quite all, but a good portion. Which is fine for now and for the next month or two as I write the book, but it's not really what I'm after here. I'll talk to anyone, and if they can't afford me, well, so be it. But I at least want the opportunity to pitch the job.

So, today's lesson is this: Prices on your website = HUGE traffic stopper (for a service oriented site, anyway.)