The software development world is enticing, with its profit potential and product over work leverage. It's also not for the faint of heart and is littered with carcases of badly designed products produced by poorly prepared developers. Don't make shoddy products. If you want to join the game, do so as a game changer. Become a contributor. Make something good.

I noticed a client making a fatal email mistake: sending email to several recipients. It only takes a half dozen or so to increase your spam rating significantly (on conservative systems). Those kinds of email are going to fail often, because it looks like spam. I have seen a message fail, marked as "likely spam" with as few as three carbon copied recipeints, because the sender also scored high on the spam meter with things like an image signature, spammy looking content and links to a commercial website.

Step 1: create a checklist of all software. If it's got an icon or a directory or is installed (check programs under Control Panel), list it and find an install source, preferably a disc with a license.

Step 2: backup the whole stinking disc. I like free cool tools like Clonezilla. It's not exactly stupid proof. But, you can create an image to a USB drive that you can go back to if you need to reinstall the computer just like it was right before you reinstalled Windows.

Selling something? That requires you have a product with an offer that induces people to take action. That's your job. My job is showing folks how to generate interest and traffic. I'm pretty good at that part.

Get 25 likes (fans, friends, whatever you want to call them) as soon as possible.

This allows you to reserve a name, like Facebook.com/Tekany so it's easy to get folks to link to the page.

Right now, your page can be shared with all your friends by going to the page and choosing to share it. After you get those friends to "like" the page you can reserve a vanity URL by going to facebook.com/username.

When someone searches, and finds your group amongst a list of other search results, they can click "join group." The admin must accept the applicant. facebook.com/groups will help you start and perhaps provide some information on Facebook groups.

Google has a business listing feature, any local enterprise should use immediately. It shows up when folks search for a business name or keyword associated (strongly) with your business. You can list your business at Google using their online listing feature.

Beginning this month, I'm going to hold a Q&A session which is open to anyone. Add your question to this blog post as a comment and I'll consider it for answers. If I choose not to answer your question, I will address it. So, please share!

The theme this month is online stores, but it's a free for all. So, ask anything you like.

Questions already selected for answer(s) this month:

You will have a lot of services enabled over the course of your internet presence. All this stuff can easily become overwhelming. The easiest thing to do is create a schedule and a disciplined list of tasks. I'm going to work on creating a practical tutorial on this process this week. I hope you'll have time to review it when I post.

Often, people make the mistake of starting with the design of a website and jamming the content into the design they pick. We tend to work around this backwards method of site design by first creating a template or framework for the site: colors, logo, fonts, etc. We try to make it as fluid and as flexible as possible, giving the website administrators tools to update content with as little technical encumbrance as possible. However, whenever possible, we try to get the website administrators to engage in the content creation process.