Day 42

Log: 10:15a - 5:15p -- 7 hours.  Pass.

I'll evaluate everything later.

Right now, I have a new obstacle to overcome, it's threatening all goals and needs to be handled ASAP -- MySQL & re-installing the blog.

Setting up the Port

Easy route first -- hostgator reinstall + copypasta... if that doesn't work, mySQL port.

EASY ROUTE HAS FAILED.  I can go that route but it is going to require ANOTHER support ticket to unsuspend the website itself.

You'd think support at hostgator would've unsuspended the account, the user access, AND the website, but you gotta cut them a break...  this site is old, been down a long time, and is a minor sub-server account... they probably don't see this a lot or know what to even do on these old "setup in '08" host gator baby packages.

Anyways, I need to get that unsuspended before I can move forward AT ALL, since wordpress config settings are set up using the DOMAIN NAME!

"Note:If you have subdomains set up on your current primary domain, or your primary domain's site uses a CMS like WordPress or Joomla that uses specific configuration file settings, then changing your domain name may cause issues with accessing your site. Please contact us if you have any questions or problems."

But wait... If I port it, it won't work either!  Think about it.  The settings will still be fucked up unless i route the whole domain over too.

What if I use Network Solutions' DNS servers + advanced DNS settings to just make www.naturalcuresforinsomnia.org go to the same server?

I would have to install oldsite to the main web directory.... but this could work...

DO NOT PORT -- Thinking this through, this could end up wasting ENDLESS hours upon hours of time.

Even if I port, there could still be a number of problems I run into.  What if the SQL versions are different?  Or the PHP is setup on an older 2007 version?  Or 100 other problems?

The right way to go is to have HostGator setup on Hostgator and to port manually over.

The ALTERNATIVE solution is to dig the HTML out of those php files and manually extract the raw source of what I need.  As I will lose all the CSS that came with the blog and will have to redesign the salesletter from scratch, I WOULD RATHER NOT GO THIS ROUTE.

Hostgator ticket #3, here we go... dammit... lol

Domain Name Forwarding

I am going to want to point the domain to the other domain.  I do not want my customers to have to goto 1 web server which then re-directs them to another website.  That is expensive for me and will lose people in the process, not the best way to handle at all.

Unfortunately, it looks like Network Solutions WILL NOT do this:

"lease note, in order to use Web Forwarding, Network Solutions must host the domain name."

So I need to figure out if I can do it with GoDaddy.  If I can, then I need to transfer the domain over to them.  This is not important enough to work on now.

Also stumbled upon this:
You may already be doing this, but if not, what you want to do is set up a 301-permanent-redirect from the additional domain to your main domain. 

Domain transfer

Requested my code from Network Solutions and bought transfer on GoDaddy.

Gave Dad the heads up to keep on the look-out for it.  I can always request again at GoDaddy, they email network solutions asking for their URL.

This way I can forward the domain and also I won't have to deal with Network Solutions changing DNS settings at a super slow speed.  GoDaddy has shown they get those DNS setting changed very fast, so that way I can get my old site up sooner.

Back to the Rest

Goals for last week were:

-Buy and setup HowToCureInsomnia.com
-Create wordpress on site (on actual URL, not IP) & install SEO plugin RIGHT AWAY before salient.
-Get the main salient blog established and get the video and opt-in on the front page.
-Have the front page opt-in (aweber) lead to the core content video (the pre-cursor to the adv series)
-Setup the sales letter to be the logical next step from the core content video to sell the advanced series, from there next logical step will be to buy advanced series.

Goals for this week are the same, plus I want to get the portfolio setup + any additional content like top 10 remedies (week 2 goals).

At this point, let's just see how many of these I can take out.  We'll start with setting up the URL and a Salient webpage on it.

Okay, I simply set howtocureinsomnia.com to the same name servers.  And yes, totally normal to have multiple domains pointing to the same nameservers.

http://forums.asp.net/t/1480087.aspx?Two+Domains+pointing+to+same+NameServers

Since I have to wait for the URL before I can start installing, I am on testsalient1 ... user jcmo pass standard short

Putting Content in the Header

I'm starting to suspect that there are good reasons they are not making it easy to put whatever content you want in the header.

If I'm going to reverse engineer it, I need to put in salient code that salient takes and converts into HTML, which is going to be tricky.  

On the flipside, I can look at the post-converted code and simply input that into the header.

Unfortunately, this is easier said then done...

Basically the result is that it just doesn't come out working the same way in the header.

This leads to questions like am I using the right class?  Am I missing a css ID code?  etc... and while I can play with all that for days... I have to start wondering, should I be using Salient at all?

It would seem that using a more "all purpose" theme with Visual Composer would make putting a simple video and opt inside a full screen header (or any "top of the page" element) much, much easier.  

And I got to wonder about all this code.  Salient looks really nice but I'm seeing tons of code, and this worries me if lesser tech computers are even going to be able to see this site and if slower computers can even load it quickly.

Got it

So I just needed to use the greater code for the entire "Row", which is given away by a <div id="fws_(random code here)" ...>

http://howtofixinsomnia.com/testsalient1/

See code (or just use notepad file in cure-inomnia/Web Themes folder).

<div id="fws_563fd38aba1a0" data-midnight="dark" data-bg-mobile-hidden="" class="wpb_row vc_row-fluid vc_row standard_section   " style="padding-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; "><div class="row-bg-wrap"> <div class="row-bg   " style=""></div> </div><div class="col span_12 dark left">
<div class="vc_col-sm-8 wpb_column column_container col no-extra-padding instance-4" data-padding-pos="all" data-has-bg-color="false" data-bg-color="" data-bg-opacity="1" data-hover-bg="" data-hover-bg-opacity="1" data-animation="" data-delay="0">
<div class="wpb_wrapper">

<div class="wpb_video_widget wpb_content_element">
<div class="wpb_wrapper">

<div class="wpb_video_wrapper"><div class="iframe-embed"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bz9luyOsGIc?feature=oembed&amp;wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="" data-aspectratio="0.562962962962963" style="width: 557px; height: 313.57px; opacity: 1; visibility: visible;"></iframe></div></div>
</div>
</div>

</div>
</div>

<div class="vc_col-sm-4 wpb_column column_container col no-extra-padding instance-5" data-padding-pos="all" data-has-bg-color="false" data-bg-color="" data-bg-opacity="1" data-hover-bg="" data-hover-bg-opacity="1" data-animation="" data-delay="0">
<div class="wpb_wrapper">

<div class="wpb_text_column wpb_content_element ">
<div class="wpb_wrapper">
<p>Test</p>

</div>
</div>

</div>
</div>
</div></div>
Hide this content.

So now it'll take some tweaking and some more tweaking to perfect, but there's a lot ahead of me anyways.  For instance, the video itself talks about going to naturalcuresforinsomnia.org.  I'm going to need to edit this video, which means cracking out the old hard drive.

I'm also going to need to redo some of the voice-over and copy, basically I need to make this video similar to Ed Dale's or any other marketer urging people to opt in to get instant access to the video.

I've also never sold the advanced series before.  That's going to need to be reviewed as well.  You could setup the old funnel for now, but i'd rather sell the advanced series from the beginning.  This question has to be answered.

In Conclusion

In conclusion, I will need to adjust the goals for next week.

-Buy and setup HowToCureInsomnia.com - 

Done!

-Create wordpress on site (on actual URL, not IP) & install SEO plugin RIGHT AWAY before salient.

The URL is done, so I can actually do this now, this can get done this week.  This can all be done in 15 minutes or less.  Installing Salient will be done immediately after, again, this will only take a few minutes

-Get the main salient blog established and get the video and opt-in on the front page.

This is where the goals change...

NEW Goals:

-Find old video editing files, folders, raw video-editing-format files from Magix, etc.

-Install Magix Video editor

-Remake the video to say "fill in your information on the opt-in box you see on this page"

-Have the front page opt-in (aweber) lead to the core content video (the pre-cursor to the adv series)

NEW Goal:

-Setup front page opt-in to lead to core content video page with Aweber.

-Remake anything on that video that mentions "Advanced Series for free" ; "Opt-in" ; "naturalcuresforinsomnia.org" ... etc

-Setup the sales letter to be the logical next step from the core content video to sell the advanced series, from there next logical step will be to buy advanced series.
NEW Goal:
-I will need to review the advanced series before I can sell it.  Make sure it doesn't say anything about it being free or it being a sales pitch for mastery, etc.
-If it's shitty or I don't feel at liberty to sell it, I have the option of selling it ALONG WITH Mastery, making a stronger sales letter and allowing me to go out and start making money and proving the new funnel concept works before I break up the products to deepen my backend.  I ultimately MUST make the funnel sell advanced series at a $20-100 price point so I can then sell the Mastery course at a $200+ price point.  That's how this business is going to make money -- although I will need the data to support that, I'll need to test selling at different price points.

What I accomplished today:
-CLIMBING WALL #1 -- Getting the old site to be set up for porting over (via Host Gator hosting and copy pasta from there); thus avoiding countless hours of pain with MySQL / php.
-CLIMBING WALL #2 -- Coding the header to host my video as intended since Salient isn't setup to actually put any damn content on the header.  Main work done here, just a matter of tweaking now.
-CLIMBING WALL #3 -- URL re-direct wasn't going to work with Network Solutions so I got out ahead of that goal by putting in the request now to switch to GoDaddy
-HowToCureInsomnia.com Setup -- now it points to my server and everything is set and ready for quick install -- future design work will take place on the core site, no more test sites.
-Re-eval of goals and direction as explained above.

Not a bad day, just always gotta be huge obstacles to overcome out of no where...

Day 39

LOG: 5p - 6p

Lost it today.  Closed a deal that turned out to be rental equipment and just lost it.

Did alright though.  Hit call goal, found a warm, etc.  The day could've gone considerably worse.  A 4 size isn't the end of the world, and this is probably my largest size average for the week regardless.

---

The Old Content LIVES!

Hostgator finally gave me my site back, I of course downloaded right away, and now I am uploading to the amazon ec2 server, I should probably stick a copy in s3 as well.

But it's a ghost, though

Spent a while trying to reactivate my site... realized that to do this, I need my old database... exporting it is easy enough, but to import it I need to use the mysqldump ... and there's like... parameters and stuff...

Going to need to make a call whether it's worth my time or not... after all this is a complete re-make, not sure if this is necessary, could end up taking a few hours.

That's it for today.  Sarah's reading :)

Day 38

While being another great day at LEAF, the challenges of the second half of the day -- between, mainly, what I now believe to be the worst ALR move I've ever played backfiring on me and my level of moral integrity and a lapse in judgment resulting in a joke gone terribly wrong... I've just lost the focus, drive, intensity, values, and strength to push hard right now.

I know that's all more lies, but I don't care.  I fought harder and stayed outside my confort zone in the face of huge problems enough today.  I'm sick of fire fighting.  I'm done today.

Day 37

LOG: 5p - 6:45p

Great day so far... fought my way through a tough morning and kept fighting harder into the afternoon to get to size 5, and the result is the first LEGIT completion of the ROARS ritual.

Back to design work today... for starters, I need to install the full salient.

Funnel Theory

First, here's what im thinking for the funnel order and strat:

Home page is the video and opt in.  If they scroll down, they get the rest of the site's content.  Since it's full screen, scrolling down isn't automatic.

If they opt-in, they get the killer video I made -- from there, there will be two options:

1. Scroll down, read sales letter (again, not automatic.)

2. Click button that pops up on side of video, which will be the "second slide" on the slider bar, which will be my sales letter converted into a video, which will have it's own buy now link that will pop you to the bottom of the page.

3. If they buy, they are on my customer email list and are taken off my main mailing list, where they get free mastery content every week, each piece with it's own sales pitch on Mastery.

4. If they don't buy, they are on my standard list where they get free content from advanced series and maybe some mastery stuff, each piece with it's own sales pitch on the advanced series.

Design Work

So, the "page header" on the home page is how you get the full page effect.

From there, I edited the menu at the top to be transparent and smooth by going into the Salient tab and then the "Header" setting.

From here, it should honestly be VERY straight forward as far as what to do.  It's actually amazing how easy it was and how good it looks.  Good purchase.

http://howtofixinsomnia.com/testsalient1/

How to Create FTP Users... again..

Creating a user for FTP... repost since I forgot and never actually posted:

Creating a new user on an EC2 instance is pretty simple. For example, to create the user 'bret', type:

> sudo adduser bret
> sudo passwd bret

Here's what it will look like:

You might want to create a user and restrict their FTP access to a specific folder, such as /var/www. In order to do this, you'll need to change the user's default home directory:

> sudo usermod -d /var/www/ username

In this specific example, it's typical to give the user permissions to the 'www' group, which is often associated with the /var/www folder:

> sudo usermod -a -G www username

Master User:
user: htmlftp
pass: amazon standard

ulg... all these users not working... anyways... for now it's tempdel and password is olaa.  Finally worked, and installed everything.

Day 36

Log: 5:30pm - 6:30pm

Having a hard time today... between James getting fired and Rich being all over my stats I've been trolled pretty hard.

Today I still do not have access to either the website or hostgator, so I won't be porting anything over.  This gives me the opportunity to focus on design work.

For now, think SIMPLE.

VARIOUS DESIGNS:

http://themeforest.net/item/salient-responsive-multipurpose-theme/full_screen_preview/4363266


DESIGN I WANT:

http://themenectar.com/demo/salient-one-page/

After playing around for a while to figure out how to get this "full page height" feature, I more or less figured out that my boot-legged version of salient is simply out of date and that is why it does not have it.

You can actually see the option in the page header settings right here, and I do NOT have this feature comparing side by side... i imagine this is in row settings as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrIlw4-brCg

Very cool feature on there about particle affects... might be a great way to entertain viewers while the video is going.

Also, looks like my <div> hack for the opt in has a problem -- the video doesn't scale and so the opt in box will end up overlapping on smaller pages...

Bought Salient.

Obviously, I need the newest version of Salient / Visual Composer (which comes with Salient) to get access to the features I am going for.

http://themeforest.net/downloads

User: jcmont
Pass: standard

NOTE THIS:

"Salient v5.5 separated Visual Composer into a plugin and it is no longer automatically built in - this means when you activate the theme you'll have to still install the Visual Composer plugin via the admin panel. It is included still with the theme and no purchase is necessary, just head to the "install plugins" link in your admin panel located in the "appearance" section to install & activate. Cheers!"

Okay, that's all for tonight :)

Day 35

Review of last week:

Average calls per day: 64 [Goal: 70]
Hours on ROARS: 10.83 [Goal: 10]
Average size per day: 4.55 [Goal: 5]

Better week, things are headed in the right direction.  

Review of OCTOBER:

Average calls per day: 54 [Goal: 70]
Average hours on ROARS per week: Undetermined [Goal: 10]
Average size per day: 4.1 [Goal: 5]

October was a ramp up month and I was trying to figure out what I was doing and how to do it.  Rituals failed and were re-written, schedules were adjusted and honed, word was molded. 

October's ROARS Goal:
-Website  and sales funnel 100% setup

This failed -- the website is setup, however the domain and sales funnel were not setup.

November

November's New ROARS Goals based on October's Achievements:
-Domain & funnel setup pre-product (nov. week 1 goal)
-Product setup, everything works successfully and it's ready to be sold (week 2 goal)
-Google analytics setup
-old URL NaturalCuresForInsomnia.org setup as redirect
-5 backlinks made on places online that drive traffic, and I want to see SOME organic traffic coming in from those links on analytics.

Nov. Week 1:
To achieve this week (mostly today, obviously)

-Buy and setup HowToCureInsomnia.com
-Create wordpress on site (on actual URL, not IP) & install SEO plugin RIGHT AWAY before salient.
-Get the main salient blog established and get the video and opt-in on the front page.
-Have the front page opt-in (aweber) lead to the core content video (the pre-cursor to the adv series)
-Setup the sales letter to be the logical next step from the core content video to sell the advanced series, from there next logical step will be to buy advanced series.

WEEK 2 I will work on the portfolio (the other content), like top 10 remedies, RLS, Apnea, w/e.  I'll do the main design stuff and flesh out the rest of the website then.  Week 1 is pure funnel & functionality.

Today

LOG: 7:30am - 4:15pm
8.75 hours

Linking URL to server w/ DNS -- link to Elastic Load Balancing or a single image?

First obstacle to overcome -- Domain name -- turns out to be much harder than anticipated.

The tutorials on doing this are by default for S3.  I am not interested in hosting with S3, I am hosting with EC2 as it has much more functionality.  Therefore, I need the "Web APP hosting tutorial".

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/gettingstarted/latest/wah-linux/web-app-hosting-intro.html

The problem I ran into when trying to setup the domain is that amazon is not setup to link a domain directly to an EC2 server.  It can be done, but doing so is kind of missing the ENTIRE point of using AWS to begin with.

AWS is all about making MULTIPLE EC2 servers, but you ONLY PAY FOR THE ONES YOU ARE USING -- hence I have a few servers to handle lots of traffic but I only pay for one since the others are turned off most of the time, they only turn on if the first one is maxing out capacity on traffic.

So, what you want to do is set up a load balancer.  The DOMAIN URL links to the load balancer, so the traffic hits the load balancer which then routes to one of the servers.  In my case, it'll only be one, but the point is I can add more seemlessly.

PROBLEM: just to run, it costs $18 a month, on top of the $30 / month I already use on the instance, and I don't have any use for it yet!!

http://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/pricing/

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/gettingstarted/latest/wah-linux/getting-started-create-as.html

However, I finally am really starting to understand how to scale my website when the time comes.  You essentially take your instance, set everything up, then make an image of it (an AMI) the same way you'd make a disc and then make an .iso file to image it.  Then you can burn as many CD's as you want... in this case, you can use an AMI to make as many instances as you want.

And you use the load balancer to control it all -- the load balancer sees your current instance at 70% and rising so it automatically uses your AMI to create a copy of the instance, and then it redirects the extra traffic to the new one.  Once traffic dies down, it terminates the instance it created.

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-instances-and-amis.html

IMPORTANT NOTE!

MY SERVER IS NOT SETUP TO BE DUPLICATED CORRECTLY.  

WORDPRESS AND SALIENT MUST BE INSTALLED ON CORRECT DOMAIN NAME:

INSTALL BY GOING TO HOWTOCUREINSOMNIA.COM ; NOT BY GOING TO 52.11.177.228

IF YOU SET UP ON THE IP AT ALL YOU WILL EXPERIENCE PROBLEMS LOADING PAGES, CSS FILES, EVERYTHING.  IT CREATES LONG LINKS ACROSS THE BOARD IN THE CODE PER THE URL IT IS CREATED ON ONCE IT IS SETUP.

So this is all for later... how do I set up a single static EC2 Website?

All you do... in Route 53, you goto the record sets, and change the "A" (a being link, like <a href="">) record to this: howtofixinsomnia.com. A 52.11.177.228... which I got held up on because I didn't understand that I didn't need an "alias" like they make for Elastic Load Balancers and Static S3 sites... I just needed to edit the value to the elastic IP... that's ALL!!

GAWD. I got off track on learning everything and anything related to this.  It's important for scaling later, and yes, this is the WHOLE point of using AWS to begin with... but man... what a loss... 4 hours and due to it being scatter focused the size today will either take a hit or I'll "NA" it due to the learning factor.  But either way, the goals of this week are getting away from me quickly.

It'll take 24-48 hours to see the change with my DNS since I took the liberty of deleting the old name servers and making new ones in my various attempts to get this done.  So I really hope howtofixinsomnia.com is going to that Apache page in a few days.

/end rant /begin lunch

End of Day

So, what was done today:

-Figured out how to link domain and static ec2 instance (and explored how to scale up and link domain to the scale with AMI's to create instances with an ELB)
-Solved PROBLEM -- creating wordpress / salient on the IP vs. on the URL.
-Bought HowToCureInsomnia.com ... still pending... work will continue on http://52.11.177.228/testwp1/?page_id=14 until then.
-Learned how to use the Visual Composer in salient and how to design pages.
-Found code for placing a video with an opt-in to the right side, used <div>'s to size everything.
-Contacted Hostgator about actually unsuspending my access to my content, not just my account, so I can actually port over the content into a design.

Honestly, not a bad day.  The main things I needed to accomplish today were done, and now I have everything I need to finish up the design work and get the funnel finished with a straightforward port.

While I'd like to have made it further into the design process, it's nice to have a strong understanding about how everything works and to know how to switch over from static to scaling once the site starts getting traffic -- so I know I'm doing things the right way and can move forward with full confidence and a good understanding of the basics.

Day 32 -- Thursday the 29th

This day I failed.  The reasons why don't matter (TROLL CATCHING here  -- justification is begging to be heard, don't let it), all that matters is I push harder in the first week of november, I need this month to excel so I have a strong december, as november is typically a good month for me and december is typically where the issues start.