Anyone can come up with a solution, whether you consider yourself creative or not. But a key without a lock is useless as is a lock without a key.

If ever there were a secret to business success and productivity, this would be it: state the problem you believe you’re trying to solve in the form of a question before you even consider looking for an answer/solution. It may take several, dozens, or hundreds of questions until you find the right one. At some point that question will replicate the sound of a light bulb being turned on.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, it’s much easier to find something if you know what you’re looking for.

Whether your problem is finding the type of business you’d like to start or creating a healthier diet plan, the solutions to those problems must begin with questions.

Remember that annoying person at the end of the conference table in your meetings? Mike or Mary would continuously ask questions, some “stupid”, some straight-forward, some brilliant. Looking back at that meeting, the huge trap they referred to as their mouth was responsible for pushing everyone in new directions and really made us think before suggesting “let’s make a website for it” or “let’s put one of those giant inflatable gorillas on the roof”.

If your question was “how can we get the attention of passerbys?” a giant inflatable gorilla on the roof could be the answer. But chances are the initial question was something to the effect of “why are sales so low?”. Continuously rephrasing that initial question will eventually lead to the heart of the problem and the solutions will present themselves on a buffet platter.

Our server’s been pissy for the past little while. So we scrambled to call our host to have them fix it.

My internet was down for about 10 minutes. So I called tech support to see why it was down.

We’ve been bred to expect perfection.

Demanding accessibility is one thing, having patience is another.

Boy, we’re pushy.

You may have heard of Matt Coddington. He recently joined the YGG forum, is quite a successful internet entrepreneur at the ripe old age of 22, and owns a website that entered the blogging world like, well, like a bat out of hell. He asked us to write a review of that website, Net Business Blog.

I’m not sure if there’s a formula to calculate the age of a blog as to the age of its blogger much like dog years, but Net Business Blog has done in less than 2 months what usually takes the typical blogger a few years.

Net Business Blog is about how to make a living online. Through its rampant growth spurt it’s already on the heels of similar mega-blogs such as John Chow, Problogger, and Shoemoney, among others.

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About once a month I like to send an e-mail or give a ring to customers to ask them how they’re last bit of service with me went and if there’s anything else that’s cropped up since that I could help them with. You wouldn’t believe how much extra business a simple phone call or e-mail like this can bring in.

As I am preparing to do this myself, I figured I’d remind all of you to do the same. Drop everyone a line and ask ‘em how they’re doing. Find out if things are running smoothly and if not, be a superhero and save their day. If things are good on both ends, just shoot the breeze and build on your relationship.

It only takes a minute - open your e-mail app right now and get on it. Come back and post comments about the responses and extra biz you generate.

This is a paid review

We have the Oscars, Cannes, Clios, Grammy, and hundreds of other award ceremonies that we see each year. For many industries these awards represent the highest level of achievement, and whether you admit or not, can be the primary motivation behind your actions at times.

There’s always been an argument in the ad industry between those that enter hundreds of campaigns into the awards each year and those that ban their agency from entering at all. No matter which side you choose or industry you’re in, there’s no question that having a gold Cannes Lion or Oscar on your bookshelf and resume takes you to a new level.

You may have received a trophy at a spelling bee when you were a kid, or an award at the golf tourney you were in last year. Chances are somewhere in your house or office is a product from a company like Crystal Occasion.

Crystal Occasion is the first company to request a review from us through ReviewMe.

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Usually anything that comes from the mouth of an athlete is destined for the blooper reel. If not, it’s a composition of umh, and, ah, and, umh, did I mention ah?

I’m sure “the Great One� aka Mr. Wayne Gretzky had similar moments in front of the camera, but this one classic quote from him hit me today.

As simple as that may sound, I think it’s a really powerful quote for entrepreneurs. Much like every young go getter, I’ve got a board full of ideas that are waiting to be brought to life, and I never really thought about them the way this quote makes me think.

We all spend so much time planning our big business idea, worrying about the details and how little capital we have to work with, and finding the right developer to build it for us, and on and on and on…

It seems the business world has always been described as hit or miss. Either your idea will fly off the shelves or plummet into the clearance bin.

Apply Gretzky’s quote to that ideology and you start to see it a different way. Every single idea that’s executed with passion and good intent is a hit. The key word there is “executed�, a shot that has been taken.

The internet and media has brought metrics into the forefront and created a false set of standards that all of us compare our businesses to. If you don’t get a million unique hits or a million sign-ups your website is a failure. Bullshit.

If your website is an idea scribbled on a post-it note, then it’s a failure/missed shot, simply because you didn’t make the attempt to the hit the net.

No matter how small you have to start or how little you have to work with, attempting the shot as soon as possible should be your goal.

As you’ve probably learned, it’s impossible to predict the future and whether or not your shot will hit the net, but at least you’ll see how close you come to hitting it and be able to adjust your approach to turn on that goal light on the next attempt.

Who’s the cat that won’t cop out, when there’s danger all about? YGG. Right On! They say this cat YGG is a bad mother… SHUT YOUR MOUTH!

We signed up for that ReviewMe program way back when and never got an offer. They finally update our Alexa and Technorati rankings, BOOM!, we’re in the same league as Shaft. That would be of course if Shaft were number 3 on Today’s Best list, but he’s not, now is he?

Alright, that’s the end of me trying to tie an era before my time into this egotistical post.

So we’re going to give this a try and see how it works out. You’ll see a couple review posts popping up over the next week or so. We’ll let you know they’re reviews so it’s not shady or anything.

Some people don’t mind these posts, others hate them. To the latter, can you speak a bit louder? We can’t hear you over the sound of a handful of one dollar bills fanning by our ears. ;)

1) Don’t provide any telephone support

2) When they’re forced to use chat support in their browser, make them wait for 45 minutes to acknowledge their presence

3) Make sure the support rep can barely understand English and is fluent in copying and pasting prewritten responses

4) If you can’t help the customer, blame others and make them call them

5) If your customer manages to find a phone number for the company, make sure every employee in the office refuses to help them, directs them to the chat support that they already wasted half their morning on, and refuse to refund a single cent from the monthly fee they were charged only two days ago

6) Celebrate the loss of a customer and see the effectiveness of blogging in how quickly the true face of your company is shared with the public.

Thank you Reseller Zoom, really, I appreciate all your support. MediaTemple, here I come.

For future search result optimization and those that missed the subject of my anger, let’s throw in an alternative title, “6 reasons why you should never use Reseller Zoom”.

I had composed this list a few weeks ago. As a sign of what’s to come with copyright enforcement, every single video I had bookmarked has been yanked off of YouTube since then. Hopefully these will last at least a few days.

This list ranges from the 70s to present day, and each song that made the list was ranked by it’s lyrics, energy, and memorability.

Pamela over at Escape from Cubicle Nation had created a list of her top entrepreneurial songs back in October, and surprisingly enough, I chose 10 different songs than her.

Please feel free to suggest other songs that you find motivating in the comments and maybe we’ll put a second version of this list together down the road.

A few of the music videos were not available, so some of them are either the original music with a homemade video, or a re-recorded version.

Anyways, here are the Top 10 Motivational Songs for Entrepreneurs:

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Design Meltdown mentioned an appllication yesterday that was new to me. It’s called Community Server and seems to be heading in the direction that my original post stated.

Community Server is a content management system that allows you to combine blogs, forums, photo galleries, file sharing, Wikis, etc… What makes it different from Joomla and the other popular CMS apps is the way everything is integrated. It features a single login and the navigation and style stay consistent across the site.

Telligent is the name of the company behind the app and they have quite a few large clients using it: Xbox Forums, MSDN, The Hive, and BET.

Unlike WordPress, Vanilla, and the other popular platforms, Community Server is built on ASP .NET, not php and mySQL. That alone might make it difficult for it to reach a larger audience.

A few of the sites Design Meltdown mentioned that use CS were quite nice. BlogMailr, FX Best Practices, and Channel 9, integrate a blog, forum, and other sections, somewhat seamlessly.

So why haven’t I spent the past several hours planning for YGG’s conversion? A few reasons.

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