One Creative Introverts Effort To Take On The Extroverted Marketing World…

Welcome to day fourteen of 365 Days Of Marketing And Me… this brings us to the end of the second week… and I can’t believe that I’m still dealing with a technical issue that started way back on November 28th… when the traffic on my host’s analytics stopped matching the traffic that shows up on every other analytic tool… accept for the one that pulls from the host that has to do with monetization…

This has been going on for so long that it seems like technical support has given up on me… switching reps constantly having to start from the beginning and having to argue that I understand how things are “supposed to work” only to have them not listen to me when I explain that something different seems to be happening… because… the number used to match on all of my analytic apps…

They keep insisting that it’s a filter issue where their numbers are the most accurate and these other apps are just tracking my visits when fixing the page… but that’s not the case because my IP is blocked from those readings… plus… it would be one thing is one app read 32 readers and the other said 45… I can see them weeding out double-dippers… or other oddities… but when one app reads 32 and the other reads 250… the number of visitors that I’m used to… I can’t help but think that the higher number is more accurate… especially since I’ve been pulling the higher number for the past three years…

I’ll give you one guess as to when I think the problem started…

Last night… I spent about an hour… reconfiguring my DNS files to remove one of the three services that are involved in this three-way dance… to make sure that my content host and domain name server are communicating properly before adding the most important… but optional monetization service… which again… worked perfectly before renewing my domain name seemed to start to throw all of these DNS errors… with the hope being that… once the content host and domain name server are communicating properly… then we can get the ad placement service back in the mix…

At the end of the day… I was successful in my efforts… and everything between my content host and domain name server seemed to be fixed… I just had to wait for the 72-hours that it takes to propagate DNS changes… I felt confident that this approach would work… and decided to take the afternoon off from all of the behind-the-scenes work for this site… only to sit down to write this post and find that The Wicker Breaker was offline…

It turns out… while I was relaxing for the first time in months… a customer support agent who was supposed to get back to me five days ago noticed the changes and switched everything back… bringing back all the errors… 36-hours into this propagation process… then they ask me in an email why I made the changes I did… before informing me that he changed things back…

This email sent me into a bit of a meltdown… because now I have to start this 72-hour propagation process all over again… for the tenth time since I noticed the problems… thankfully… my somewhat newly adopted dog was down by my feet sleeping and calmed me as I started to curse and scream at my computer screen… she’s not an official emotional support animal… but that is one of her roles in exchange for always having me around to ease her separation anxieties…

With her help… I was able to get everything back to the state it was yesterday after emailing support to let them know what I was doing… which is probably something that I should have done that in the first place… but since I stopped hearing from anyone it seemed like I was on my own… I’m guessing they only checked because the changes I made must how thrown flags on their end to lead them to check in on me…

Oh well… whatever it is… we are where we are right now… and I’m hopeful that this will soon be figured out…

And with that… let’s dig into today’s assignment…

Up above… I mentioned my dog… because… according to the 356 Of Marketing Book… it’s Dress Up Your Pet Day… and to calm myself while I was all fired up… I stepped away from my computer to dress up my dog in the hoodie that my sister bought her for Christmas…

I’m not sure if she really likes wearing clothes because she’s so easy going… but she does look cute in her little hoodie… and our interaction while putting it on was enough of a distraction to get me back on track and calm… for when I returned to my computer to resolve the issue enough to get back to work…

And here we are…