A short monthly business update this time, since a combo of medical leave and travel means that things are uncannily similar to where they were last month. For readers new to this type of post, these are my monthly updates of the behind the scenes thinking here at Planet HQ – focusing on my network of gambling sites. I’ll start with a quick health update!
My Health
Happy news here, I am well on the road to recovery after my sudden hospital stay. Today my stiches were removed, which is a nice milestone. I also got the lab results from the piece of lung they removed while fixing me up – this was healthy on every measure, which is really nice to hear! This week has been my first full time (well, almost!) back in the office, and by next week I feel like I’ll be back firing on all cylinders. The biggest ongoing hassle is having to inject my stomach each evening with an anticoagulant, ugh. Funny how the fear any future lung surgery keeps me disciplined in this area…
SNG Planet Spanish
The biggest single casualty of my absence was the Spanish project. Which ground to a complete halt. This is now back underway, all the pages are now on the site (though unpublished) and the tiresome task of linking them all to the homepage and category mains – and to each other – is now underway. Next week we plan to bring things together with some technical work and geo-targeting. The targeting is more complex here, since Spain has its own sites, there are many US Spanish speakers and some of the Central / South American countries have certain site bans (no Titan in the Caribbean for example + Party are pretty picky these days!).
We do already geo-target the English site, though there is plenty of room for improvement here. For example, if a German visitor lands on an English page I should be letting them know we have a DE version of the site… and so on. Once the ES is running we should be able to use the work we did there to improve this area.
Tablets / Phones
I really wanted to be testing some of the poker sites on ipads / tablets this past month and have not been able to do so. With a lot of smaller things queued up to complete, it now looks like this will happen in August.
Small aside here. I need an iPad for this task… and got really damn confused by this topic! How many versions and memory sizes can there be for one simple product? should I get the newest one, or a mini? Do I need to try one with 3G or will wifi be ok? Is the retina-display a must-have? Would it be worth waiting for the inevitable next version??
I did narrow it down in the end… some kind of small lesson here though: I have the cash, want the product – yet the choices have stopped me going ahead with the purchase – can’t be good business.
Getting Back To Writing
Writing is my single favorite business task. I have been struggling with it since my break. The words are flowing just fine once I am working on a piece. It is just the inspiration for getting started or choosing a topic which is missing. I actually never thought this could be a problem area. Anyway, there are plenty of topics on my list, and both SNG Planet and the Bonus Club network of sites will be seeing some great pieces published over the next couple of weeks.
Have to admit that I do sometimes consider becoming a full-time writer again from time to time. A stress-free life doing something I enjoy… might be a case of the grass always being greener of course!
This update came out a little disjointed really. I’m back full time, fighting the good fight and will be full of inspiration, news, big project plans and more ideas than it is possible to implement with next month’s update.
Until then, GL at the tables!
Mark
Submitted by Planet Mark on Fri, 07/19/2013 - 13:07