Article Marketing Blog from The Phantom Writers

We were completely offline from the early morning of May 1st 2009 to the afternoon of May 16th, 2009.

The reason we were brought down is completely documented on third-party news websites, most notably Domain Name Wire.

Our domain registrar was Parava Networks, located at 10-domains.com. Parava it seems was in violation of its contract with ICANN, which led to ICANN pulling Parava Networks accreditation on April 9th.

This prevented us from being able to update our DNS server data, after our server migration in April of 2009.

Before this started, I had about a dozen gray hairs. I swear that during the last two weeks, I had hundreds of hairs go gray…

It was frustrating. Everything was primed for the move, except I could not update my DNS server IP settings.

More than three dozen websites that I own and manage went offline, and I could not find a way to get them back online. Parava Networks referred me to ICANN every time I tried to get support. ICANN referred me back to Parava Networks for support. And round and round it went. After about the fourth pass of completing the circle, I gave up on a quick fix.

So on May 5th, I launched mirror domains for The Phantom Writers and Links And Traffic, at http://www.thephantomwriters.org/ and http://www.backlinksandtraffic.com/

I put out press releases noting the existence of the mirror websites for my customers who were looking for me. But, press release or not, not everyone went to Google to try to locate me when my website came up dead.

Bounced emails, led to customer chargebacks, because they assumed I had gone out of business. I can’t blame them for thinking that I had gone out of business, although I was trying to let everyone know what happened.

My press release for thephantomwriters.com was ranked #5 in google for my domain name by May 8th. My press release regarding the absense of linksandtraffic.com was ranked #3 in google for the domain name by May 9th.

On May 10th, I sent out a mailing to all of my customers, whose email address is already recorded in our database. That email was issued through our mirror domain at thephantomwriters.org

Most people understood the nature of the situation. But I did receive one angry phone call from a fellow on May 11th, who insisted that I was lying about the situation and that it was obvious that I simply had not paid my bills. He criticized me for more than ten minutes about how I should just pay my bill and get back to providing my services. Wow! What can you tell a guy like that?

Over the course of our first down week, I went through the website to fix all links that I had hard-coded to resolved to thephantomwriters.com. I had all of the links cleansed by the weekend of the 10th, to enable anyone navigating my website from thephantomwriters.org to be able to reach any page they wanted to reach.

During the week of May 10-16, I worked to duplicate my email subscriptions on a safe .org email address, so that I could resume my article distribution service, in the event that I could not get the dot com back online. That took a lot longer than I had anticipated. After three 14-hour days, and several five- or six-hour days - just on this task - I still have not completed the process, although I am about 80% complete for the .org email address to be able to continue services in the event of another .com downtime.

I received my first bit of good news on May 12th. ICANN decided to push all of the 36,000 domains that were registered at Parava Networks to Hover, which is a domain name registration reseller for Tucows.com.

On May 13th, I received more news that the process of migration had started.

Of course, I was one of those people caught outside the normal process… because I was not able to update my whois records before the move to Hover. Silly me, I had put all of my whois info pointing to an email address at thephantomwriters.com, which was down at the time, due to its incorrect DNS data.

Those domain holders who had correct email information were moved on May 13th and 14th.

Those of us who did not receive service on May 13th and 14th were told to contact Hover directly on May 15th. I contacted the support email address Friday morning at 6am, and I was finally able to speak with the customer support manager on the evening of May 15th. I finally had access to a domain registrar account, that actually permitted me to make service updates. Yipee!

On the afternoon of May 16th, the whois data finally proporgated through the system, bringing all three dozen of my websites back online.

We lost 16 days of revenue from our websites. We also lost further.

Domain News Wire announced on May 15th that Parava Network customers were noticing that they had been cheated - the extra years they had purchased on their domains were not in the whois records, once their websites were transitioned to Hover.

I have not yet done a full accounting, but I was cheated by Parava Networks also. All of the websites that I make real money with had been registered to at least 2010. But when I got into my Hover account, all of my primary domains are coming due in the next four months!

Thank God I did not buy years in advance!

I also know that I lost control of one domain altogether. Although I had paid for it since 2006, only the 10-domains whois reflected that ownership. It was not a primary domain, but one that I had held for future use. So the loss of it is merely irritating. When I went to ICANN regarding this domain which has since been sold to another party, ICANN recommended that I should either sue Parava Networks for my loss, or I should try to buy back the domain from the current holder of the domain.

Terrible solutions both. ICANN pulled Parava’s accreditation, because Parava was not paying the domain registration fees to ICANN. So what makes ICANN believe that my suing Parava would accomplish anything more than me wasting attorney’s fees to get a judgement that could never be collected. And the current domain name holder wants $450 for the domain - it is just not worth it at this point.

Someone had suggested that this is what I get for utilizing a no-name domain registrar. But I was not the highest-tier customer doing business with Parava Networks. The following websites were also part of the Parava Networks portfolio:

• MutualFunds.com
• Bachelor.com
• Consulting.com

My thought is that if some of the big boys can get caught by a rogue domain registrar, then I should not feel bad for having been ensnared by the same web of deceit, as delivered by Parava Netwoks.

It was noted during this process that even the snail mail address of Parava Networks from its whois, came back as “address not found”. Wow!

Lessons Learned…

* Never again will I keep all of my whois records in one location.

* Never again will I rely only on two Domain Name Servers. When I look at domain registrars, an integral requirement of my using them will be that I can have four domain name servers attached to a domain, then I will have all four filled, two pointing at one dns server and the other two pointing at another dns server. (This has not yet been implemented, but it is on my agenda of “things to do”.)

* Never again will I rely on only one doorway for my primary websites… I am keeping thephantomwriters.org and backlinksandtraffic.com online. Both of these sites will eventually present a different view of the primary domains, then both will receive their own linking and promotion. Think of them as Split A-B testing at the domain level.

* I will always keep my domain name registrar and webhosting company names in my Google alerts, so that I can see problems before they blow up. If I had Parava Networks in my google alerts, I could have prevented this mess, since the warning letters to Parava by ICANN were documented in early March, and other people pointed of the DNS errors in the Parava Networks whois database at least six months in advance of ICANN pulling the plug on Parava Networks. This nightmare was preventable, had I simply added my domain registrar to my Google Alerts list.

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I am glad to finally be back, operating where people have come to expect to find me.

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Bill Platt - owner of thephantomwriters.com and linksandtraffic.com

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2008 was a rough year for us here at The Phantom Writers.

For the first time in seven years, I had felt that the company was growing on a trajectory strong enough to justify adding new staff to our services.

In March or April of 2008, we set off on a new course, bringing a strong focus to our article ghost writing services, and we added staff to help us weather the growth that was sure to come from this decision.

In April, I had added a new person to our staff - who I felt was key to our long-term success. After a lengthy training period, I felt strong enough in my new virtual staffer to let that person stand on his own two feet and take a larger management role in the company.

It never fails… I always put too much faith in the wrong people… And it frequently comes back to bite me on my not-so-shiny butt… (I could not help the Futurama reference… Well, I could of, but I chose not to…)

So, as the summer season was reaching its fever-pitch, I had noticed some article orders started coming in a bit more slowly… It was here where I made my first real mistake of 2008… I assumed that we were seeing some backup due to service volume… I did not stop to realize that my new management superhero was falling down on the job…

At a certain point, I was so confident in my superhero that I did not check in with him every single day… I changed to weekly contact with my virtual manager. This was mistake number two…

Mistake number three was made when I let daily contact progress to weekly contact by phone, to twice-weekly contact by email.

I felt the business was running smoothly, and I could work on those website improvements and new services that had been in the back of my mind for a number of years… This was mistake number four… Expanding my reach, while my superhero was still unproven under fire…

August was HOT… Real Hot… Business was growing at a pace that I had not seen in a number of years… One of my customers brought to my attention that one particular job was overdue… I contacted my superhero and was told that the job was in the pipeline… My fifth mistake happened here… I took the explanation at face value, without chasing the people trail…

I could have saved myself right here, but I failed to do so…

I noticed that my mails were not being answered promptly from my superhero, so I called on the phone and kept getting the answer machine… My antennae should have gone straight up, but I was simply irritated at the lack of communication… This was mistake number six…

My summer full of mistakes was brought to an eye-opening shock on Sept 6th, 2008, when I returned to the office from a out-of-town speaking engagement… The customer who had enquired previously about an overdue writing job had called again… I contacted my superhero to see what the problem was… And I was told in a very non-challant voice, “Oh, I quit you three weeks ago…”

Wham! Shovel to the face!

Finally, I began to understand the error of my ways… I was simply trying to grow to quickly, and I lost sight of the details of what had made me successful for seven years…

A six-pack of mistakes had led me into a corner in which there seemed no way out…

I started counting articles that were due to customers… The number of articles that customers were waiting for numbered in excess of 180 articles! OMG, I was in trouble…

So I tried to find my trusty shovel, so I could dig myself out of the mess I had gotten myself into…

When I started looking at who my writers were, I realized that I did not know who they were…

At the beginning, I had processed the writer’s applications and sent them to my superhero… Each week, my superhero sent me a payroll report and I paid our writers…

When I started contacting writers to help me with our backlog of articles… I ran into the same old song and dance that I have always experienced with writers…

• Some take the job, and when the due date comes, the promises roll off the tongue, but in the end, we realize that the work was never started at all…
• Some writers bitch moan and groan about how you are asking for too much work for too little money (although I was paying writers double the rate of many of my competitors), and then they start trying to play the hostage game with the work that they had completed, trying to force an agreement to increase their pay, before the work was even delivered and reviewed…
• Some writers won’t take critique, and therefore scream a bloody fit if you ask for rewrites or edits…

Because I did not have the master list of writers in my own hands - mistake number seven - I was contacting writers who had already been terminated, just rubbing salt in old wounds… And pissing off loads of people, unnecessarily…

After three weeks of the trials and tribulations of trying to figure out which writers I could employ, I simply gave up on trying to figure out who was going to write the articles… and I began writing those articles myself…

I am just one guy, doing the best I can… I simply had too much work on the table that needed to be completed…

Pissed off customers started becoming customers who demanded refunds and processed chargebacks against me… Honestly, I cannot blame them…

I did not get into business to rip people off… I got into business for myself to offer an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay…

I have always held myself in great esteem, because I have always run an honest business…

But, I was caught between a rock and a hard place, trying to get the work done, but not having enough hours in the day to complete the work in a timely manner, nor access to the kind of reliable manpower that I needed to get the job done more quickly…

When I really started to hurt was when clients who had ordered ten, twenty and thirty articles started processing chargebacks, when most of the work had already been completed in full. Now I was being backed into a corner that was costing me money, because I was giving money back on jobs that had mostly been completed…

In one case, 16 of 20 articles had been written, but the customer demanded and paypal obliged with a full refund…

Now, I was losing money hand-over-fist. By January of 2009, my saving had been fully depleted…

The recession came and started putting pressures on my business, the same as it put pressures on everyone else’s business also…

And then my dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and he asked me to assist him with doctor’s visits and the such…

When it rains it pours…

Seven costly mistakes in the summer of 2008 put my business on the road to struggle, after six years of continuous growth… In 2008, my final yearly sales numbers finished down for the first time in history…

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction…

In order to slow new orders for our ghost writing services, I started raising my ghost writing prices… I did not want to kill the service, but I did want to slow its growth, so that I could get caught up…

After seven years of business, I finally know beyond a shadow of a doubt where the breaking point is for pricing article ghost writing… I know what number I need to go to, to completely throttle the business model…

My range in acceptable pricing is about $300 per article… When I have a lot of extra time to do writing services, my prices come down towards the price point that most people find attractive… When I am swamped with new business, I can easily accelerate the price upwards again to slow the flow of business to a respectable and easily achievable level.

I know now exactly where the price points are for me to break even with no profits, to where I can conceivably charge for my services at a rate that is very attractive to me - without breaking the spirit of my customers completely.

I never really thought of raising and lowering the price on something to compensate supply and demand on any service I offer, until the fall of 2008, when I realized my back was against the wall…

The worst part about the 2008 experience was that I was so overwhelmed with work at a certain point, that I stopped answering my phone or replying to requests from new customers. For more than two months, I was forced to only take phone calls and emails from long-time customers… I know I lost business doing that… But at the time, I literally did not have the capacity to take on new clients…

So, It is Over… 2008 is gone… and 2009 is come…

We have throttled our prices on article ghost writing back to the level that most people find acceptable and profitable. We are priced just a few dollars over where we were in May of 2008, when I was basically selling article ghost writing services at my cost, so that I could attract more article distribution customers.

Yes, we are priced a bit higher than in May of 2008, but that is because we were not profiting at all on that work in 2008… I had priced ghost writing at cost to attract new clients… And then the storm hit and the chargebacks came, and then I was losing the cost of development and the sales that came in to pay my costs.

So, be forewarned… Our ghost writing prices will fluctuate up-and-down over the coming years… And that should be construed as a reflection of our workload at the time you ordered the ghost writing to be done. Our bottom-line price is $65 (volume price) for article writing and article distribution as a package deal.

If you land one day and see that our prices have gone up, keep in mind two things:

1. Our article writing prices are bound to go back down at some point in the future; and
2. A higher price per article is mostly a reflection of our workload at any one time.

In Conclusion…

We have finally caught up on our backlog of work, and we are once again offering article ghost writing at a price most people can afford. So check out our ghost writing service and see for yourself why it is a benefit to you, to have me - Bill Platt - write your articles for you.

Thank you for your time today, and I will look forward to speaking with you soon.

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Bill Platt - owner of The Phantom Writers.com 405-380-7038

As our domain was moved to a new server a couple weeks back, we were experiencing intermittent 403 errors. It was frustrating, and hopefully it did not scare too many people away. Those errors have stopped popping up on this domain or any of our other domains.

Now that the errors are behind us, we have started programming new improvements to our program. I like to think of this website being like fine wine - it only gets better with age.

We are reaching new newsletter publishers and webmasters with each passing week. And with that, we are finding audiences for more of your articles on more popular websites.

Do remember that the publication of your articles rests more on the quality of your articles’ message than any other factor… Although I have to tell you… There have been times where I threw together articles just to get something new on the market… And with those articles, my expectations were not high… And yet, those articles found publication in some really large newsletters and on some very popular websites.

You never know really. I wrote an article two weeks ago that I thought was among my best, and I am still waiting for a major publisher to pick it up. That does not mean that the article has not been published, because it has been published on dozens of websites. It simply has not been published on any of those sites where I was hoping it would be published. Odd yes… But that happens from time to time… To be honest, I suspect that the reason this one article was not picked up in those very special websites, is because my previous article was the featured article on those websites the week before…

Yes, sometimes a good article will fall through the cracks, because major publishers don’t like featuring the same author two weeks in a row. So my options are two:

1. Redistribute the article at a late date - this has worked before with other articles that we had thought would generate better results.
2. Or next time, distribute the article under a pen name - yes, I write under several pen names. Interestingly, one of my pen names has higher rankings in my website than I do.

There are so many nuances to this business that it helps to have an expert in your corner. That is where we come into the picture… We are experts in the article marketing business… And we will be happy to serve you and your articles as well.

Bill Platt - owner of The Phantom Writers