Have a fun and safe Labor Day weekend! Our team will be taking a break as well until Tuesday when we will start placing code in our scripts which we recently dropped into the new site.  Yesterday we revamped the Fees page to reflect the new structure we will be implementing.

One of our first members (Beta Tester) involved with building and testing the first launch of McBidz several years ago contacted me yesterday; it was good to hear from her. She was very excited about the new site from what she saw so far. This is the general theme among many of our members as we work toward the completion of the new McBidz. You will find that much of the feedback you have suggested has indeed been put into place with the new mega-site. Ease of use, free plans for many of our scripts, and banner advertising for businesses who wish to market to our members “McBidzers” will be available as well; something we were asked about constantly the first time around.

As a side note we have been discussing ways to lead up to the launch date for the new site. Some ideas thrown around have been to have a 45 day countdown clock on the splash page while our mascot “Chuckster” takes a tour down the East Coast, throwing Chuckster out of a plane (with a parachute of course) leading down to the last day of the countdown, a publicity “walk” from Charleston to Columbia, and my favorite holding a party in the Florida Keys with a McBidzers “only” invite. Maybe a combination of these will be involved? We will hold a vote, but I’m holding out for the party!

While out with friends this past week at the beach I was asked by no less than five people what McBidz was. They noticed our popular t-shirt I was wearing with the large “Chuckster” image (our mascot) on the back. I explained to them our new site in the process of launching leaving them intrigued and highly probable they will stop by and take a look see.

This was another form of marketing we have long since used, ”viral marketing” in which they will no doubt pass along our marketing message to their friends, family, co-workers, etc. Our first launch of McBidz used this technique extensively by placing our message where groups of people would get them talking about our site creating more “Buzz”. As mentioned before this form of getting the word out was much more successful than our usual radio and banner advertisements because this message is coming from people they already knew. As most of us realize we are much more likely to use a product mentioned to us by someone we know than by your typical advertisement that may be seen without recommendation. We continue to encourage our large group of McBidzers to use this effective marketing tool when socializing to further expand your fast growing community.

While developing McBidz our team has focused on affordability of use for our McBidzers. We wanted the site to be not only easy to use, a fun place to gather, but also easily accessible to the general user. To promote this concept most of our scripts have a free pricing structure as well as low priced “upgrades”.

To this end we are initiating banner advertising throughout the site to accommodate businesses who wish to advertise on McBidz. This banner advertising is vital to keeping the prices for the general members at the McBidz site as low as possible. When using the McBidz platform you will see new banners pop up periodically so be sure to check them out. We will screen these banners to be sure those who advertise on our site fit in line with the McBidz ideology. We will further offer long term contracts at low prices to keep our advertising revenue constant. Of course as membership grows so will our prices for these banners, so businesses are encouraged to lock in these contracts as early as possible for great prices.

After taking a week off our group is back to work getting McBidz ready for launch. Some of you may have noticed the big red “McBidzers” button that showed up on our splash page within the last several days. This is in preparation for dropping in our revamped “social network” script we will be installing soon within the McBidz site. This will be replacing our much used “Forums” for open communication amongst our McBidzers. While the forums were a great place to get to know each other it was more of a static page with no live interaction. Our new dynamic social network “McBidzers” will have video, live chat, and many more features you are used to using with popular networking sites like MySpace and Facebook.

After using several different submission services for my various enterprises over the years I have decided to include a submission service for our McBidzers on our new site. This service will be priced very affordable as all of our upgrades will be so you can use it monthly without breaking the bank.  You will find this link on the bottom part of the header (last link) on the toolbar under “Search Submission”.

I drew a smirk this morning when the recent service we had used for the first launch of McBidz “WorldSubmit” sent me an e-mail “reminding” me our yearly contract was set to expire. I usually just let these messages go to the trash bin and delete them, but their service was so bad and inexcusable (never responded to my e-mails) I replied why I was not going to use them again. I’m sure they won’t respond as they most likely get these all the time.

Just be assured when you contact us we will be here to support you throughout your McBidz experience. During our first launch I had to utilize the help of both my webmaster and team leader to respond appropriately to the questions (e-mails) we were getting in. Most of the time these were just questions on policies, prices, and setting up accounts; we rarely had negative comments as we answered all incoming questions daily within several hours. Now the site has grown enormously both in content and features we expect these e-mails to multiply significantly. We will never leave you hanging without following up on your questions/concerns. We want you to feel at home and be taken care of when you become a McBidzer; this is our most important policy.

After long discussions, feedback, and looking at the payment data from the first launch of McBidz we have decided on PayPal as the payment module for the entire McBidz business platform. Although Google checkout was an option as well on our previous website it was rarely used.

PayPal is the leader among payment options on the web. It not only is the most secure, but was widely used by most of our customers when upgrading on our website. Be sure to stop by the PayPal website https://www.paypal.com  and setup your account now if you don’t have one. You will need a PayPal account before you are able to use any of the upgrades which will be offered on the new McBidz.

Our splash page has been garnering more than several hundred hits a day now in anticipation of the new McBidz mega site relauch. Seems the word is spreading of the new site and our McBidzers are finding their way back to check on our progress.

I feel compelled at this point to let you know what is going on with the progress. Not only today, but seven days a week for the past several months we have been working long hours to get McBidz completed. At any giving time we are in conference calls, IM chat, text message, and phone calls with our team leader (based out of Virginia), our programmers here in Charleston, and a large firm in India oversees which is helping out with programming as well as design functions. 

As our customers see our splash page you may start to wonder if there is any work going on to get McBidz back up. A week after we went down for programming the new McBidz mega site was getting redesigned/reprogrammed from scratch. Over the next week we are taking a much needed break after finishing the new header/footer sections for the entire site this afternoon. Our overseas programmers handled the header (top navigation) and we finished up the footer (bottom section) of McBidz this evening. The site looks pretty good and we look forward to great feedback once we do get back online.

While discussing options for development of the new McBidz mega site we have decided to replace our popular “Forums” section with a social networking script like “Myspace/Facebook”. This section will be called “McBidzers” after the name picked up by users of McBidz and coined in the forums over the last two years. While the Forum section was very popular this new social networking script will bring a new level of interactive communication among the users of the McBidz business platform.