Job Posting: Online Marketing Manager - Atlanta

Published
by
andrewknight
on June 8, 2008
in Astral Brands and Ecommerce
. 0 Comments

I have an open position on my team at Astral Brands:

Astral Brands is seeking an Online Marketing Manager to manage specific online marketing programs – including paid search, natural search, e-mail and affiliate marketing – for its Health & Beauty brands. (Aloette, PurMinerals, and CosMedix)

Health & Beauty Products Paid Search
Direct the overall strategy of the paid search marketing program, and manage over 100,000 keywords on the three major search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Health & Beauty Products E-Mail Program
The Online Marketing Manager will need to direct the strategy of the e-mail programs for the Health & Beauty Products brands. In addition, the Online Marketing Manager will need to write up the Creative Briefs, make content and design recommendations, work with the executive team on the approval process, and QA the final emails that come through. Each brand will have a minimum of two emails per week.

Health & Beauty Products Natural Search
The Online Marketing Manager will need to optimize the content on the current web sites, as well as write the title tags, meta description and meta keywords for all new pages. In addition, the Online Marketing Manager will need to oversee a copywriter responsible for writing and posting specific content pages on each brand.

Health & Beauty Products Affiliate Marketing Program
The Online Marketing Manager will need to direct the strategy of the affiliate marketing programs for all web sites, and manage Performics on a day-to-day basis. The Online Marketing Manager will work with the executive team to make recommendations on exclusive affiliate promotions and other ways to boost affiliate traffic.

Job Requirements:
- Bachelor’s degree in Marketing, Business, English, or related field.
- 4+ years of experience managing online marketing programs.
- Experience in the beauty industry is preferred, but an interest is required

To apply send a cover letter and resume to: onlinemarketing (at) astralbrands dot com

Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Summit

Published
by
andrewknight
on June 7, 2008
in Astral Brands and Ecommerce
. 0 Comments

I was in Austin last week for the Social Commerce Summit hosted by Bazaarvoice. They put on a great show with a good selection of keynote speakers and client case studies. Sam Decker just posted a great recap of the event on the Bazzarvoice Blog.

I brought Bazaarvoice into Home Depot and really enjoy working with these folks. We just signed on at Astral for both Pur Minerals and Aloette. We should have Ratings & Reviews and Ask & Answer live in the next couple months!

Foundation #9: Your retirement is YOUR responsibility

Published
by
andrewknight
on May 25, 2008
in Purely Personal
. 1 Comment

I am counting on absolutely nothing from the federal government during retirement. If they figure out how to save social security it will be a nice bonus but until then I am not counting on it! :)

This post had to follow foundation #8 because it is one of the great examples where the numbers are dead simple but behavior always gets in the way. Saving for your retirement is really very simple you need to just DO IT! I recommend people put 20% away for retirement and here is how I suggest you do it

Step 1: If you have a 401k availiable, contribute up to your company match.

Step 2: Max out your Roth IRA, which is $5k in 2008.

Step 3: Increase your 401k contribution so that the total of all 3 steps equals 20% of your total income. The max 401k contribution for 2008 is ($15,500).

So let’s have a little fun and play with some numbers to see what kind of nest egg you can have with 3 simple steps:
Start contributing: 25
Single Income 50K:
401K 3% = $1500 + $1500 company match
Max Single Roth: $5k
Additional 401k %: 4% / $2,000
Yearly Retirement Savings: 20% / $10,000
40 years @ 10% = 5.3 Million!

Start contributing: 25
Household income 100K:
401K 3% = $3000 + $3000 company match
Max 2 Roth’s: $10k
Additional 401k %: 4%
Yearly Retirement Savings: 20% or $20k
If you start this at 25 and grow it 40 years @ 10% = 10.6 Million!

Start contributing: 30
Household income 150K:
401K 3% = $4500 + $4500 company match
Max 2 Roth’s: $10k
Additional 401k %: 7% ($11k)
Yearly Retirement Savings: 20% or $30k
If you start this at 30 and grow it 35 years @ 10% = 9.5 Million!

Notice how the 100k income that starts 5 years earlier will outrun the $150k income! Starting earlier is key but either way you will have 10 Million! And the real kicker - half of that is not taxable as a reult of the Roth contribution. I did not start maxing out my 401k and Roth IRA until a few years ago and it was one of the few financial regrets I have!

Let’s take a different angle. Maybe you don’t have access to a 401k. As long as you make less than $99k (single ) $156k (married) you can contribut to the Roth IRA. If you did just that, the numbers would look like this:

Start contributing: 25
Single Income 50K:
Max Single Roth: $5k
40 years @ 10% = 2.6 Million!

With just the Roth you can have $2.6 million at retirement that is TAX FREE! A 4% draw on $2.6 million equals $100k a year TAX FREE! So the bottom line in all this: you need to find $416 in your monthly budget to max out your Roth IRA and fund your retirement. This is right around the average car payment in America!

Foundation #8: 80% of personal finance is behavior 20% is knowledge and the numbers

Published
by
andrewknight
on May 24, 2008
in Personal Finance
. 0 Comments

All the personal finace foundations build on each other - #8 continues with the concept that personal finance is much more about behavior than it is about the numbers. Figuring out the basic principles that put you on the right path to financial success is the easy part! It is following through with the behaviors and habits that is the hard part. Most people know that contributing to a 401k is a good idea but so many don’t follow through with the behavior to make it happen. How many people this year blew right past April 15th and did not fund their 2007 Roth IRA? How many people spend more than they make? If I had to pick who was to be better off financially: a CPA with bad financial habits and a recent college grad with good financial habits I am always going to pick the recent college grad! You can’t make up for bad habits with better financial knowledge.

Foundation #7: Live Almost Debt Free

Published
by
andrewknight
on May 23, 2008
in Personal Finance
. 0 Comments

We have had a little bit of a hiatus on the 10 foundations of personal finance that I started writing about last year but I wanted to finish it off. So here is #7!

I started listening to Dave Ramsey in 2006 but followed many of his principles before I had ever heard of him or the daily radio show. Dave’s view of debt is spot on: You will never find financial freedom or success if you continue to have “payments”. Credit is so easy to come by today, (although it has tightened up recently) that it is easy to pile up all kinds of stuff on credit from cars to clothes to even air conditioners (heard that on the radio today!)

Like Dave Ramsey, I subscribe to there being only one kind of debt that is part of a solid financial plan: mortgage debt. This is the “almost” part of living debt free. With that said, you need to be smart about your mortgage debt. The banks will approve you for well over what you can afford. Remember, the banks are looking to maximize profit not look out for your best interests. It takes a lot of discipline to not spend what the bank will approve you for but in the long run it is one of the most important financial decisions you can make. In my view your mortgage should not exceed 2.5 times your house hold income. Why does that number work?

Household income: $50k
Purchase Price: $150k
Downpayment: $25k
Mortgage: $125k
15 year Mortgage Payment + Taxes ($1250) & Insurance ($500) @ 6% ~ $1200 month
Monthly Take home ~$2900
Housing to Income ratio 40%.

You might balk at the 15 year mortgage but I can’t emphasize how important that is. Forget the interest savings for a minute, the number one reason to go with a 15 year mortgage is it will force you to keep your housing purchase within your means! I have had a mortgage for 5 years now on two different houses and both have been 15 year notes. If you start out with a 15 you will never miss the 30 :)

The 40% housing to income is on the high side but if you have yourself on a budget you should be able to swing that. Dave Ramsey recommends 25% and that should be the goal but up to 40% is ok with a household income of $50k

If you double the numbers they look like this:

Household income: $100k
Purchase Price: $250k
Downpayment: $50k
Mortgage: $200k
15 year Mortgage Payment + Taxes ($2500) & Insurance ($1000) @ 6% ~ $2000 month
Monthly Take home ~$5400
Housing to Income ratio 35%.

In addition to the 2.5 times rule I also like to use the rule that your down payment should be half of your household income. Again, it forces you to make a housing purchase you can afford.

Astral Update

Published
by
andrewknight
on May 23, 2008
in Astral Brands and Ecommerce
. 0 Comments

So far the new job is going well. I have been busy getting up to speed on all things cosmetics and skin care which my family and friends find highly amusing! We just launched the new Pur Minerals website last week:

PurMinerals.com

It is a custom built Ruby on Rails eCommerce platform!

If you have not tried Pur Minerals head over to PurMinerals.com and order a starter kit. All the women in my family have converted! We also have a free shipping promotion for Memorial Day right now!

Wedding Video’s on Vimeo

Published
by
andrewknight
on May 23, 2008
in Purely Personal
. 0 Comments

We have posted a few wedding video’s on Vimeo.

The Rehersal Dinner DVD slideshow:

The Ceremony:

Our First Dance:

Andrew & Crystal’s Wedding…

Published
by
andrewknight
on May 23, 2008
in Purely Personal
. 0 Comments

This post is a little late but 5 weeks ago Crystal and I finally tied the knot! After being together over 9 years it was about time ;) We had an amazing weekend and everything went really well. It was great to spend time with lots of friends and family that we don’t usually see. We don’t have the official photos from the photographer yet but we do have lots of friends & family photos on Smugmug.

Here are a few favorites:

The ring was a little bit of a tight fit! :)

The wedding party:

Blogging updates…

Published
by
andrewknight
on May 23, 2008
in Purely Personal
. 0 Comments

It has been rather quiet around here. No good excuses other than the wedding! :) Time to get some posts going here!

Switching Webhosting to Steadfast.net

Published
by
andrewknight
on March 8, 2008
in Technology and Web Applications
. 2 Comments

After a short stint with Dreamhost I am moving over to Steadfast Networks for hosting my sites. I really liked the Dreamhost control panel and getting my sites setup and configured was easy but the server I was running on was sooooooooo slow! The billing disaster in January also did not help things! So I headed over to Web Hosting Talk to read some of the reviews and look for a new host. The hosting business is full of “fly by night” kind of folks so it was important to get some objective 3rd party opinions. The wealth of information on WHT is awesome! I decided to go in a different direction and look for a smaller well respected company that does not offer 1 million Terabytes of space for $10 a month. After reading the reviews I settled on a shared hosting plan from Steadfast. So far I have been really impressed.  The sites are much faster and the support tickets I submitted were handled almost instantly with 100% resolution! For a simple blog like this speed is not all that important but when you are playing around with a resource hog like Magento it makes a big difference!

I just switched the DNS so we should be live on the new server shortly!

Leaving Home Depot

Published
by
andrewknight
on January 27, 2008
in Astral Brands, Home Depot and Purely Personal
. 2 Comments

I just updated my LinkedIn profile so I thought I had better get a post up on the blog!

After two and a half years I am leaving Home Depot this Friday to be the Director of Ecommerce for www.astralbrands.com.

So who is Astral Brands?

” Astral Brands is an innovator in the creation and management of consumer lifestyle brands with a business offering that is focused on two core sectors: Astral Health and Beauty and Astral Foods (featuring gourmet food items and large-scale perishable shipping). The Company was established in 1978 and operated as a public company until it was acquired and privatized in 1999 by Christie and Robert Cohen. Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, Astral Brands has 350 employees in North America”

I am going to be heading up the Ecommerce operations for the Health and Beauty division:

www.aloette.com
www.purminerals.com
www.cosmedix.com

I now have Cosmetics to add to the lineup of Snowboards, Gardening Equipment, and Tools on my resume! I start on February 4th!

Craigslist Rocks!

Published
by
andrewknight
on January 14, 2008
in Personal Finance and Web Applications
. 0 Comments

I started using Craigslist when I was in Burlington but had limited success in buying/selling as the community was pretty small. You had a lot of college students using it so the apartment and furniture threads were pretty active but that was about it.

When I moved to Atlanta I quickly realized that the size of the Craigslist community here is HUGE. I have had great success in selling stuff on the Atlanta Craiglsist board and have actually found myself using it a lot more that Ebay. There is something to be said for how simple they keep things. It is easy to post, does not cost anything, no shipping to deal with, and people pay you in cash! Compare that with the hassles of Ebay and you can quickly see why Craigslist has taken off. I still use Ebay for niche items that don’t have mass market appeal but for most items it’s Craiglist!

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