How to make a bootable clone of your Mac.

Backing up your computer is a must when so much of our lives are contained on our computers. You should have your important documents backed up on other sources but having a complete clone of your system is the best insurance to protect your data. When that terrible day comes and your Mac dies you can be back up and running with all your applications, settings and data in under 5 seconds with a bootable clone of your Mac..

1. External hard drive. Get a cheap external hard drive. Get a 500MB drive or bigger. It’s like $110 to $200. ( NOT Western Digital) I’ve had three Western Digital’s and all have failed. G-DRIVE is what I have. It’s a solid drive.

2. Partition the hard drive in two. You can partition your hard drive so that you can run time machine on one half and keep your bootable clone on the other half. You are just splitting the hard drive in 2 so there is to separate hard drives. Half is for -time machine half is for your bootable backup. Here is How to partition a hard drive on the Mac.

3. Make a Full system clone bootable backup of your Macintosh Get SuperDuper then followed the directions to make a complete fully bootable backup of your Mac. SuperDuper is by far the easiest to use software to backup your Mac. There are other programs out there some for free but SuperDuper is the most comprehensive.

When it asks you where you want to put your bootable backup put it on half of the hard drive you just partitioned and call it your backup clone.

How to use the backup in an emergency?

• Plug in your external drive. Go to System Preferences, select ‘Startup Disk’, select your external Backup, press Restart.

OR

• Plug in your Hard disk and Press Option-Command-Shift-Delete during startup. This will bypass the primary startup volume and seek a different startup volume such as the external one.

My favorite project so far is xs650chopper.com, a motorcycle blog that does over 90,000 unique visits monthly- and over half a million impressions a month. A site which I am founder & editor. The site is 90% user generated content and is monetized by selling advertising directly to businesses. The site is 100% bootstrapped and was grown organically using guerrilla marketing and search engine marketing. The business is profitable and I’m currently working to add additional income streams.

Here’s how I described the site:

” Over a quarter million XS650s in 40 different variations were produced by Yamaha between 1970 and 1985. The XS650 big twin, in America and worldwide has developed a cult following for good reason. At the heart of the XS650 is a indestructible engine. The best parallel twin ever built.. Tough durability, classic look and abundance of cheap parts make the XS650 the perfect platform to build a KILLER Chopper.”

Here are some interviews I’ve done with talented bike builders:

• xs650 cafe racer “The Hornet”
• The Fong-bros-cream XS650 chopper
• Interview with Hugh on his Rephased Yamaha xs650.

Here’s some picsof my Motorcycles.

“The easiest, most straightforward way to create a great product or service is to make something you want to use.” Rework by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson-BaseCamp

When you “scratch your own itch”  It’s as simple as that.

I have more ideas than I could ever possibly pursue. The problem isn’t the idea. The problem is in executing.

Ideas are not worthless. However, Execution is where the value is created.

What is Behavioral remarketing?

Retargeting helps companies advertise to website visitors who leave a site without a conversion — this is about 98% of all web traffic. This is done by displaying ads to the prospect as they surf the internet.

Retargeting is only serving banner ads to people who have shown at least some amount of interest in your site. This makes retargeting a smarter buy compared to other display ad campaigns as it focuses on your site’s engaged userbase.

Behavioral re-marketing works in a few ways:

1. A prospect visits your site and leave
2. They visit your site and add products to their shopping cart then leave;
3. Go through purchase process but stop somewhere and abandoned their shopping cart and fallout of the purchase process.

You can then pay per click for these people as they search and browse the web (ads will be shown in search or content network).

And that is how Behavioral remarketing works.

I had my first experience of seeing retargeting in action in the wild. Performable.com is a Y combinator company that does analytics for marketing. I visited their site and after lurking around I ended up on YouTube watching a music video. The above ad by Performable was retargeting me. Cool.

I thought that this would be a perfect retargeting case study to analyze given the fact that it’s a marketing analytics company.

Here is the marketing funnel break down:

1. A prospect visits your site and leave.
2. On YouTube watching a music video. A retargeting ad pops up for Performable.com.
3. Ad address a specific call to action. ( This is where you can get creative)
4. Click ad and end up on landing page with e-mail capture.
5. Put into a e-mail auto responder.

Here is the landing page that Performable.com presented me with.

I have listened to Andrew Warner do interviews on successful tech entrepreneurs for over a year and a half. It’s so awesome to have someone as passionate about business as Andrew to listen to and filter out the noise. I’m already super passionate about business but after listening to one of Andrew interviews I’m ready to make stuff happen.

If you’re interested in online business and entrepreneurship and don’t know about Andrew and Mixergy you have to check out some of his interviews.

Here is how Andrew describes the Mixergy Mission “ I want to show you that the best way to grow is to learn from a mix of smart people who are willing to share their expertise and experiences. The Mixergy Mission is to infect you with a passion for business and then help you build your business.”

My two favorite interviews are:

• mixergy.com/mailfinch-paul-singh-interview

Paul Singh is the founder of MailFinch, the company that helps you send direct mail. All you have to do is upload a PDF and they’ll take care of the rest: printing, mailing, contact management, campaign blasts, drip campaigns and more. He also runs a business consulting company called Results Junkies.

• mixergy.com/icontact-ryan-allis

Ryan Allis is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of iContact, the leading global provider of email marketing services to small and mid-sized businesses. He is also the author of the book Zero to One Million,

Both Ryan and Paul are super scrappy entrepreneurs which is one of the reasons I dig their interviews so much. In both interviews Andrew is able to pull out solid nuggets of info.

VW TDI-svo -2000 Volkswagen Jetta TDI Greasecar

I have been running 80/20 biodiesel in my Volkswagen for over two years now.  Sometimes I switch back to regular diesel when 80/20 is more expensive than regular diesel. I also added a small amount of acetone to every other tank of gas.  The acetone acts as a solvent and cleans the lines and combustion chamber. Acetone is the main ingredient used in most fuel additives it’s just cheaper to buy a pint of acetone and make it myself.  I’m currently getting around 55 MPG.

I’ve been researching going a step further and turning my diesel into a full grease car. The diesel engine was originally designed to run on peanut oil and most diesel engines can be run on vegetable oil as long as the oil is heated.  There are a number of companies that build complete kits to add the additional fuel line and fuel tanks needed to run a straight vegetable oil fuel.

Unlike biodiesel, which is produced by chemically modifying vegetable oil so that it can be used in a diesel vehicle with no modifications, SVO requires a second fuel system for the vegetable oil in addition to the standard diesel fuel system.I have put together a parts list and plan the conversion but have been putting it off until I have a permanent residence where I can mix and recycle my own fuel.

Diesels designed to burn standard diesel fuel need some modification to burn straight vegetable oil: VW Jetta TDI to burn straight vegetable oil.  The oil could come from used fryer oil recycled from restaurants, or vegetable oil from various crops.

• The vegetable oil must be heated to about 160F before it is pumped through the injectors — this is to lower its viscosity to about the same as standard diesel fuel.
• The engine must be started and run on regular diesel until the engine internals and the vegetable oil are up to temperature — so converted cars have a diesel tank and a vegetable oil tank.
• At shutdown, the vegetable oil in the fuel system must be purged and replaced by standard diesel fuel in preparation for the next startup.

One man’s trash is another man’s fuel.

There are many different choices to make in designing an efficient home filtration system. Excellent, comprehensive home filtration systems are available from Greasecar, but many people elect to build their own.   I plan to build a two tank filtration system with heating elements and a electric pump.

There are several links to TDI Greasecar design:

fullcirclefuels.com
Greasecar Vegetable Fuel Systems

and

Convert VW Diesel to run on Straight Vegetable Oil

In the Autoblog Driveway: 2003 VW Jetta SVO (Straight Vegetable Oil) – Autoblog

Bio Fuels Forums – Powered by vBulletin

Fred’s TDI Page. TDIClub.com. VW TDI Enthusiast Community

TDIClub Forums – Powered by vBulletin

Pictures of TDI Engine – TDIClub Forums

Wouldn’t it be great if you could test ads using heatmap technology and analytics.  It would be cool to test different ad copy, colors and banner ad designs.

With adwords you can constantly test and iterating your ad copy. And by doing so, you get a much better conversion, quality score and lower ad cost. Although, you can test banner ads in a similar manner using A/B testing a heatmap of how a banner ad is performing would be awesome.

www.crazyegg.com does heatmaps for Web analytics.

I’m sure anybody is doing anything with ads and heatmaps.

That’s the situation I’d like to get myself in soon.

A good marketer can make something valuable out of thin air just like a great developer creates value out of lines of code. The marketer and the developer are climbing up opposite sides of the same mountain. A good marketer can reposition an entire industry. A good developer can turn an ordinary idea into an innovative game changer. A good marketer can make an entirely new economic ecosystem.

Marketing is the engine that drives commerce. Just like there are hundreds of different coding languages there are hundreds of subsets of marketing disciplines. Marketing strategies like SEO, PCC, SEM, copy and direct sales etc. etc. The rabbit hole goes pretty deep. At some point you have to stop reading all of the books and blogs on 10 ways to do X and actually make something happen in the world.

The openness from those with experience is what makes the startup community online so awesome.

Intense!