How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love to Blog

My apologies to Stanley Kubrick.

I was talking with a potential client the other day. They had been referred by someone else, so I asked if they had seen my web site. They replied “Yes, and you’re not going to get me to blog!”

I understand how much some people hate to write blog posts, people like me, for instance.

We all need to get past that.

The advantages of write blog posts on a regular schedule are huge. I know. I know. You don’t have time and you’re not a good writer and you have nothing to say and blah, blah, blah.

I don’t want to hear it. If you want to have any success at this stuff, you need to have a blog and you need to write on a regular schedule.

Google loves a “regularly updated” web site. You get points for not being stale. If someone is taking the time to update a site, it must be more valuable than one that’s not been touched in years. I love to blog.

If you have 5 posts written, publish one a day for 5 days instead of 5 all on one day. Google loves that too. I love to blog.

Google will come back and crawl your site more often if you publish more often. If nothing changes for a week at a time, why should they come back any sooner than that? I love to blog.

Every time you publish a new post, your blogging software creates a new page with that post on it. More pages equals more authority for your site. I love to blog.

On every one of those new blog post pages, you have a menu that links back to pages on your own site. More pages have more menu links that increases the number of internal links that your site has. I love to blog.

Every time you publish a new blog post, there are more words on your site. If those words are your keywords that you are trying hard to rank high for, then you will rank higher for them. More words equals higher rank for those words. I love to blog.

Every blog post that is interesting will draw in links from other people who are interested in it. More external links is good for search engine ranking. I love to blog.

There are probably other good reasons to write blog posts, but these are all I can think of off the top of my head on a rainy Friday afternoon.

Did you get my point? I love to blog! You should love it too.

Posted in SEO | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment: 2 Comments »

10 Tips For Effective Email Lists

Here are 10 tips for making your mailing list emails more effective and more likely to be opened by your readers.

1. Make the subject line interesting.

People are in a hurry, so even if they like you and want to read your email, they may not feel like it at the moment they see it in their inbox. If you make that subject line tempting enough, they will have the impulse to open it now.

2. Send when everyone opens their email.

People tend to read email first thing in the morning every weekday. That means that you should send your email first thing in the morning, maybe even 4am. That gets you in front of them when they are concentrating on their inbox.

3. Don’t send when everyone else sends their email.

Since first thing in the morning is when everyone else is sending email, you might want to try sending it in the afternoon, just to stand out. You might catch some attention for being out of the ordinary.

4. Don’t send email on the weekend.

No one reads email on the weekend. Well, I do, but that’s me. Most people are out living their lives and doing things in the real world. Never send email on a weekend. You will have no response.

5. Always include a call to action.

Why are you sending the email? Usually, you want the recipient to do something. Come to my web site. Check out my new product. Read my witty blog post. Tell them what you want them to do. Do that now. Click here for more info!

6. Be brief and easy to skim.

No one has time to read your entire email. They will tend to skim through it, so give it headlines that stand out. Make bullet points that are easy to read. Make it short and to the point.

7. Use [brackets] around an identifier in the subject.

It’s become a convention to put the list name or some brand identifier in the subject line of every email that you send. It should be short. It should have square brackets around it to set it apart in the list of email in the inbox. [Walton] is what starts all of my emails. You know instantly who it’s from and probably what it’s about.

8. Send both HTML and Text versions.

I know that you love those cute backgrounds and pretty colors, but some of us still prefer to get our email in plain old text. It’s easier to read. There are no formatting problems. You should always send email in both HTML and text formats, so each type of person gets what they want.

9. Write for your readers.

The subject of all of your emails should be on one topic and that topic should be the one that your readers are interested in. It’s nice to throw in personal stories or wander a bit, but if your readers want to know about a specific subject, tell them about it.

10. Send email on a regular schedule.

People like routines and knowing what to expect. You should schedule your emails to always be sent on a regular schedule. Some lists that I’m on send an email every day. Some do it twice a week. Others are every other week. I’m used to that and I read them when they get here. Don’t surprise anyone, or you might get ignored. Sending email more often if better than sending it less often. Twice a week is a nice balance.

Posted in marketing | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment »

New Promotion Page for Free SEO Book

I updated the landing page for the FREE SEO Book and revised the promotion in the sidebar.

I asked for my landing page to be reviewed and got some great feedback.

They pointed out that the story of how I beat Wikipedia for the word “survivor” was powerful and I should move that up a bit. I added a new image that points out the rankings on Google.

It’s really important to ask other people to review your site. Other people will always see things differently than we see things ourselves. That’s true for everyone, no matter how experienced or smart you may be.

This is especially true for copy. Having a proofreader review your copy is really helpful. Review it from the marketing point of view, did you hit all your marks?, and from the proofreading point of view, did you make any typos?

No matter what you write or design or post, run it by someone else first. It will ALWAYS make it better.

Posted in SEO | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment: 1 Comment »

How Did This Happen?

The photo has nothing to do with small business web sites, but I had to put it in here somewhere. I came home from running errands the other day and, as I approached my house, I saw this accident. My house is probably 100 yards from this scene.

Not sure what happened, but the Toyota was fishtailing, a witness said, and hit the side of the parked white Isuzu. I’m still trying to figure out the skid marks. The driver’s side wasn’t scratched, but why would roll over on the passenger side? Can we blame it on the floor mat?

Posted in other | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment »

How Do Email Lists Work?

I was asked by a client about how managing a mailing list with Aweber works. I’m sure that other people don’t quite understand what happens behind the scenes.

Aweber allows you to manage an email list. That list is really just a list of email addresses, with some information about each one. It’s like putting them all in a big bucket that they go into or jump out of any time they want, without any intervention from you.

How Do Email Lists Work?

Users can subscribe or unsubscribe any time that they want. From the user point of view, they start out by filling out a form on your web site (a “web form”) and submitting their name and email to Aweber.

They get an email that asks them to confirm that they are really asking for the subscription. If you didn’t do that confirmation loop, then anyone could fill out any form and subscribe anyone. This makes sure that the email address is real and that the person really wants to get your email.

They click on the link in the first email and that tells Aweber that they are real and give permission. They are then added to the list.

Every email they get from you will have a link to unsubscribe, so they have complete control over their subscription. This is required by law.

Everyone who is subscribed to the email list will get a copy of any emails that you send to the list.

There are two kind of emails that are sent. There are actually three, but we’re only talking about two of them now.

“Follow up” emails are sent on a schedule based on the date that they user signed up. You should have at least one follow up to welcome the user to the list. You set the number of days that each follow up email needs to be sent after the previous email was sent.

For example, the first “welcome” email should be sent “immediately” when they confirm. If you were to create a few emails as a training course, you set them to be sent at regular intervals.

You could have a 5 day training course and each email gets sent 1 day after the last one. You could create an email to be sent 14 days after the initial welcome email to ask if they had any questions or if they wanted to buy your new book.

The important thing to remember about these follow up emails is that they are all based on the day that the user signed up, so when each email is sent is entirely custom to that user.

“Braodcast” emails are sent to the entire list whenever you send them. You could write up something on Tuesday and send it then and the entire list gets it. These are what you would expect in a mailing list. This is like sending email to a distribution list on your own computer.

Strategies for what to write and how to send them will be in another post.

Posted in marketing | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment »

FREE SEO Book – The Care And Feeding Of Search Engines, A Simple Guide To SEO

If you want to know the easy way to do SEO, here’s the book for you, and it’s FREE.

I finally got my book on SEO finished. There’s now a page where you can find out more about it and download it.

It’s aimed at beginners, people who are afraid of the web and know nothing about any of this computer stuff. It lays out, in simple step by step instructions, how to optimize your site for search engines.

I’m giving it away for free for a while to build up my mailing list. At some point, I’ll start charging money for it, so don’t miss your opportunity to grab it now.

Click on this link to find out how to download your free copy:

The Care And Feeding Of Search Engines, A Simple Guide To SEO

Posted in SEO | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment: 1 Comment »

Lemonade – It’s not a pink slip. It’s a blank slate.

I heard about this movie, Lemonade. It’s about people losing their jobs and it turns out to be the best thing that ever happened to them.

When you don’t have a day job to worry about, and you’re desperate, with a lot of free time on your hands, it’s easy to make major life changes that you always wanted to make, but were too afraid.

“I got laid off and I’m finally doing something that matters.”
– Erik Proulx

The film’s creator, Erik Proulx, is an advertisement executive who knew little about filmmaking – but knew a lot about unemployment. Looking for work after being laid off for the third time, he turned to the Web and found people who were actually thankful that they’d been fired.

“I have to get people talking about how losing their job ended up being the best thing that ever happened to them,” Proulx said. “It’s really hard to see that when you’re in the middle of it.”

Proulx was in the middle of it, right along with his family and a mortgage. Still it was his wife who convinced him to follow his newfound passion and make his movie – even though it meant draining their savings.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/12/29/eveningnews/main6035381.shtml?tag=contentBody;cbsCarousel

Posted in business | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment »

The Secret To Magnetic Headlines That Grab Attention!

We live in a bungalow that was built in 1918, in the California Arts and Crafts style. It’s a “Craftsman Bungalow”. Since the walls are lathe and plaster, they didn’t want people hammering in nails to hang pictures, so they always put a “picture rail” on the walls.

It’s a thin strip of wood that runs about a foot down from the ceiling. It’s got a groove cut in the top so that you can put a double ended hook in the groove and hang a picture from the bottom end of the hook. Clothes hangers are also at home in the picture rail. If you get lazy, you could also just set pictures on the top of the picture rail.

It’s a very modern idea.

Typical Arts and Crafts Picture Rail In My Office

Geocaching is a hobby that uses GPS to locate small containers, called caches. Look up more information about it at www.geocaching.com. I have built some caches from mint tins using small magnets that to stick the tin to the back or bottom of metal signs or metal boxes. I ordered some magnets to build a bunch more of them to hide. When they arrived, I put the magnets somewhere away from my desk, because I have all kinds of computer things that might be harmed by the magnets. I hid them in a safe place.

100 1/8 X 1/8 X 1 Neodymium Block Magnets In a Plastic Bag

That was in August.

The urge to build them finally took hold and I decided to find the magnets and put them to use. I looked everywhere in my office, in my bedroom, the storage room, the back porch, and everywhere I could think of. At this point I should repeat the phrase “I looked” followed by a huge list of places in the house, but I won’t bore you.

I got depressed and gave up.

After a week of looking, hoping that it would come to me in a dream or something, I ordered another set of magnets. It took a day to fill the order, then a couple more days to ship them. They finally got here last Saturday. I got the mail about 4:15pm and there they were. I finally had my magnets. My life was complete.

The idea flashed through my head that now that I have these new magnets, I would probably find the old ones. Ha! Life’s like that.

No time to think about that because I had to get ready to attend an event, the 10 year anniversary of the Survivor TV. Now, being male, I have my wife pick out my clothes. About 5:00pm, she asked which shirt I wanted to wear. I didn’t care.

She brought me out one of my many Hawaiian shirts. Since I was working on my Mac in my office, she just hung it on the picture rail for me. “What’s this?” she asks? “What’s what? I’m busy.” She pulled something down from the picture rail.

It the plastic bag with my magnets.

After two weeks of looking, they were found less than an hour after I got replacements.

This chair grabbed me by my belt and wouldn't let me go.

Stories should have three parts, the set up, the conflict, and the resolution. Do you see those three parts in my story above?

Don’t just tell people facts. Tell them stories.

PS – I have one more story that has no point. It’s just funny and I wanted to use the word “grab” in the title.

I always wear Levi 501 jeans. Always. Of course, a wide leather belt goes with Levi’s 501 jeans.

My wife and I went out to a nice lunch today. It was pleasant weather, so we sat outside in the patio. The chairs were iron and had curves and doo-dads on them.

When I got up to leave, the back of my belt had been grabbed by the hooks on the chair. I couldn’t get up. My belt went into and out of, or around, the hooks in the chair. My wife had to unhook me.

The food was good.

Posted in marketing | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment »

The Secret To Selling Stuff Online
(How To Avoid The Crash And Burn)

There is no secret to selling stuff online. You already know how it works.

You just don’t believe it.

To sell stuff online, you need people looking at your site. The more people look at your site, the more stuff you sell. If you sell to 1% of the people who visit your site and you have 100 people a day see it, then you’ll sell once a day. If you have 10,000 people a day see it, then you’ll sell 100 times a day. Simple, right?

More traffic equals more sales.

How do you get that traffic? Either directly or from referring sites or from search engines. Those are the only ways that someone can get to your site.

1. Directly: They type in your URL because you asked them to, they saw a poster on a bus, or their friend remembered your URL from that craft fair that you attended, and told them about it.

2. Referring sites: Someone else dug your stuff so much that they threw up a link to your site. Maybe they blogged about it. Maybe they put it in their sidebar on their site. Maybe you are listed in a directory of awesome sites. Some site, somewhere on the Internet, posted a link to your site and someone clicked on it.

3. Search engines: Someone searched for a keyword or a phrase. Somehow, the search engines thinks that your page is a good match for that keyword or phrase, so they list your page in the search results. If you are the first one listed, or at least you are towards the top, and the description seems to be what that searcher is looking for, then they click on your link and end up at your page.

How to increase traffic in each way?

1. Direct – Pay for more posters on buses. Hand out your business card on street corners. Not the best use of funds and probably not going to be the greatest amount of traffic.

2. Write cool stuff and ask people to link. Link to other people’s sites. They’ll be compelled to link back. If you have good, solid content, then they might link just because it’s good, solid content. If you have content that makes someone say “Dude! Check this out!”, then people will link to it. Good headlines help. Lists are good. Bottom line is that if you post more content, there’s more chance that people will link to it. Chances are that some of it has to be good, right?

3. Search engines: Ah… This is where you can make things happen. Because we have a pretty good idea how search engines rate pages and sites, we have a fighting chance of making this method work for us.

Since there are books and seminars and web sties offering a huge amount of information on SEO, I’ll just give you the simple, distilled down version.

Internal optimization is when you make your site the best it can be for your keywords. Yes, the first step is to decide on your keywords. Then write pages based on each keyword or phrase. Use keywords in titles and links to other pages. Link to other pages. Make your keyword obvious on the site. When people look at your site, they should think “HUmm…That site is about (insert keyword here).

External optimization is an ongoing struggle to get more links to your site. There are nuances to which links are better or worth more than others, but if you just concentrate on getting links from other sites to your site, that’s all that matters.

How do you get links to your site? Leave comments on other web sites. Go to relevant sites and read their posts, then leave reasonable comments. Each comment should have a link back to your site. Post in forums with a link to your site in your “signature”. Every forum post is then a link back to your site. Write an article and post it in an article directory with a link back to your site.

You could always build a relationship with someone enough to ask for them to exchange links with you or to just link back to you.

You could ask people on your mailing list to link to you. Ask people to sign up to your list and mail them something periodically. If you give them cool stuff, then they will be aware of your posts and perhaps link to something from their own sites.

The take away from all of this is to post in your blog regularly and leave comments. More blog posts equals more content for users to link to and for search engines to point at. More comments equals more links to your site, so search engines give you more authority and higher search ranking.

If you’ve read this far, I’m going to give you the REAL secret to selling stuff online; perseverance.

Most people I’ve talked to about selling stuff online get all excited about it. They post 4 posts in the first week and leave comments on 10 blogs. The second week, it’s a little less. Two months later they’ve spent more time playing Farmville on Facebook than they have reading blogs and leaving comments. Their last post was over a month ago.

They get discouraged and give up. Frustrated and confused, they wander off, not knowing what to do next.

I feel your pain. You are not alone. Please leave me a comment, so I’ll feel good about myself.

The trick is to keep your head down and move forward. No matter how it feels, no matter how frustrated you are, keep moving forward. It will pay off after a while.

To give you the the most simple directions I can, if you want step by step directions, you should write a blog post at least once a week and twice would be better. Keep a schedule. Do it every Sunday and Thursday. No matter what.

Then leave at least 10 comments on blogs each week. This can be done in one big blog sitting or just write two a day. Search http://www.technorati.com/ for your keywords and see who else is talking about them. Read their post and leave a comment. Be cool and related to the topic. (I actually got a comment one time that basically said “I didn’t read your post, but I was wondering if you could help me with my question.”, which, of course, was answered in the post if they had read it.) Don’t be a jerk.

Is that too much to ask? Does that sound like it is doable? 2 posts a week and 10 comments a week. That’s all we ask.

Now, go forth and multiply.

Posted in marketing | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment: 1 Comment »

Hey, Dude. S’up?
(or We Are Building An Integrated Learning Environment For Internet Marketing To Launch In 2010)

I'm sorry for everyone who doesn't live in Los Angeles,
but this was the sunset on New Year's Day.

This is my New Year’s post, as required by the Federation of Internet Marketing Bloggers.

Looking back over the last year, it’s shocking to me to see how my goals for the business have changed. When I started out, I was a web developer, building small businesses web sites. That was working well, but it was, well, work. Find a client, sell a client, build a site, be done with it.

I was looking for more of a partnership with someone. I wanted to be able to share what I’ve learned about Internet marketing and building web sites with someone who would benefit from it. I have the tools and I needed someone who needed the tools.

Then I found Deborah at Mermaids Purse Sea Glass. She was a friend of my wife’s who needed some help on her web site. She had a product that was very cool, that people would buy if it was marketed well. At my wife’s urging, we built her a site.

I always thought that everyone was just like me and knew this Internet stuff, but it was all new and exciting stuff for Deborah. I was as excited to show her as she was excited to learn it. As I talked to her about strategies for selling her stuff on line, I realized that a lot of people want to sell their products on line, but don’t know how.

They want to avoid spending too much time or too much money on building and promoting their web site. They want avoid common mistakes. I get all of that. I can show people how to accomplish all of that. The light went on in my head.

I’ve been learning how to put together a training program, an “integrated learning environment” or ILE, so that I can easily show people how to do this stuff. The forum was the first visible part of that. Videos and audios and web pages and PDF files are coming. We’re working on the course outline right now.

The new year will see the launch of this new site. I’m still working on the details of it, but I expect it to launch at the end of February.

If you have any thoughts, suggestions, or feedback that you want to share about this idea, maybe what you’d like to see in it, please leave me a comment or send me an email with the form to the left.

And that s’up.

Posted in business | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment »

Christmas Residue

Christmas Day in El Segundo, CA.
''White and fluffy'' refers to the waves, not the snow.

On Christmas day, after reading Facebook status updates about how many feet of snow were falling in different parts of the country, my wife and I went for a bike ride down at the beach.

I wore my shorts.

And sunglasses.

It was a clear, sunny day and we could see North to Malibu and South to Catalina Island. The surf was up and the surfers were out. Waves were breaking in sets of four at 8 to 10 feet.

I love being alive on days like that.

The day after Christmas, some friends from out of town, came over to visit. Of course, we talked about “what you were up to these days”. I talked about building the membership training site so people could learn how to create a web site and promote their business on line and sell products if they wanted to.

One friend, we’ll call her Karen, because that’s her name, talked about a musical group that she plays fiddle with. They are working on a CD and she thought it would be good to sell them on a web site, but they don’t have a web site yet. They don’t have any real plans for any of that marketing stuff yet. They just like to play music. I have heard her play and I know that she’s really good at her music.

If they only had a web site…

I told her I could show her how to put up a web site. I could show her how to promote it. I could show her how to manage an email campaign. I could show her… She shook her head. She loves to make music, but all this marketing talk is overwhelming for her.

“I just wish someone could tell me, step by step, what to do.”

Wow. My eyes hurt from the lightbulb that flashed on over my head.

I keep running into that idea. People love to do what they do and they don’t want to know about how to set up web sites or domain names or mail servers. They just want to sell their stuff.

They need to know, step by step, how to do this Internet Marketing thing, so they can sell their stuff.

That changed the course of my plans a bit. Not a lot, but I think that the structure of the training should be a step by step guide or roadmap to building and promoting a web site to sell stuff.

It would only have enough technical information in it to give you the reason why you are doing the task at hand. You don’t love technology as much as I do. You’re a normal person, who doesn’t obsess over cron jobs running shell scripts.

You just want to sell your stuff.

I’m curious to know what you think. Does that sound like something that you would be interested in? Please leave me a comment below or send me an email in that form on the right. I really want to know what you want.

Thanks. I appreciate that.

Posted in marketing | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment »

Artist Blogging 101 – Remarkablogger

It’s possible to sell crafts or art on the Internet without being slimy about it. You don’t have to “hard sell” anyone. All you have to do is tell people about how cool your stuff is. Tell a story about it. Help people understand why your stuff is as cool as it really is.

You’re not lying. You’re telling the truth and helping people get happy. How can that be bad?

People who want to sell their art, or their crafts, or anything that they created with love and care, should read this article.

Desdemona

Process, Not Product
Whenever you create objects by hand, the thing to remember is that it’s not the object you’re selling at the end of the day… it’s the stories behind the object. What’s important isn’t the object, but the process. And there’s nothing better than a blog for documenting this process. A lot of creators learn in school about the importance of process, but when it comes to their web presence or to the business side of their work, they seem to forget this.

The object you create (the product) is a symbol of the process (the story) that went into its making. And it’s that story that’s really the important part. You might think the aesthetics of the object itself are the most important, but they’re not, simply because taste is so subjective.

How to Document the Creative Process on your Blog
On the one hand, what I’m about to tell you is really simple. Absurdly simple. What’s hard about it is remembering to do it in the first place. You have to have a “documentary” mindset. Here’s the thing: you don’t know what others will find valuable, so just document and let others sort it out for you. This isn’t complicated:

Take pictures as you work through a piece, and take notes about why you’re doing what you’re doing, and what is the story behind that.
Shoot video in the same vein. Better yet, if you can get someone else to hold the camera and ask questions, the better. Otherwise, get tripod.
Make a time-lapse video of you working on the piece (setting it to some appropriate music is a nice touch).

Write about what you’re going through, thinking, and feeling as create a piece.

Tell the stories of where everything comes from in a piece, especially the sourcing of materials and ideas.

Read the entire article at:
http://remarkablogger.com/2009/12/22/artist-blogging-101

Posted in marketing | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment »

The Forum Is Open

As part of the training site that is being worked on, we’ve built a forum to discuss this stuff.

Comments are nice, but a forum allows you to ask me anything and get an answer, as well as asking each other and building off everyone’s knowledge and experience.

The Forum is OPEN!

When the training site is complete and launched, the forum will be part of it, and as such, it will cost to be a member.

Right now, before everything is complete, we’re trying to build up the membership, so it is FREE.

If you join right now, it will be free forever. You will have a free lifetime subscription. Even after the training site goes up and it costs other people money to join, you will still have your free subscription to the forum.

You will also get a discount in the price of the training, when that’s offered as well.

There are not a lot of members yet, so there’s not a lot of conversation yet. Please jump on in and get things started. You can tell all your friends that you were there when it started.

If you have a question, I’ll be eager to answer it. Ask me anything about Internet Marketing, WordPress, Web Development, or Small Business. Ask whatever pops into your head.

Check out the Untangling the Web Forum.

Posted in free | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment »

How do I get more readers for my blog?

I stumbled upon this advice on “how do I get more readers for my blog?” and thought it was worth passing on.

Businesses should blog. The search engines love it and your readers love it. It’s hard to start out without many readers, but if you follow this advice, you’ll soon have readers.

The trick is figuring out what to give them.

Stuff Christians Like

“How do I get more readers for my blog?”

That’s a great question, it’s just the wrong one to ask first.

Want to know the right question to ask first when you find yourself with a blog and a hope that people will read it? Want to know the secret that I start every day on Stuff Christians Like with? It’s pretty simple.

Don’t ask “How do I get more readers for my blog?”

Ask instead,

“How can I give more to readers?”

The distinction is subtle, but I think it’s an important one. At the simplest level, a blog is just a gift exchange. People you may never meet from countries you may never visit, show up at your blog and give you the most precious resource they temporarily have in their hands – time. Whether it’s 30 seconds or 3 minutes, they offer you something really special, minutes of their day that they will never get back.

In return, you give them something.

Read the entire article at:
http://stuffchristianslike.net/2009/12/1-secret-ive-learned-about-blogging/

Posted in marketing | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment: 1 Comment »

What Matters Now: get the free ebook

Seth always seems to be in front of the people that seem to be changing the world. He brought together 70 people to share ideas on how we can turn things around, how you can turn things around and they contributed to this free ebook.

If you want to do business in 2010, if you want to be inspired in your own life, then you need to read this.

DOWNLOAD HERE

Now, more than ever, we need to shake things up.

Now, more than ever, we need a different way of thinking, a useful way to focus and the energy to turn the game around. I hope a new ebook I’ve organized will get you started on that path. It took months, but I think you’ll find it worth the effort.

Read the entire article at:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/12/what-matters-now-get-the-free-ebook.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Fsethsmainblog+%28Seth%27s+Blog%29

Here’s an excerpt.

G E N E R O S I T Y

When the economy tanks, it’s natural to think of yourself first. You have a family to feed a mortgage to pay. Getting more appears to be the order of business.

It turns out that the connected economy doesn’t respect this natural instinct. Instead, we’re rewarded for being generous. Generous with our time and money but most important generous with our art.

If you make a difference, people will gravitate to you. They want to engage, to interact and to get you more involved.

In a digital world, the gift I give you almost always benefits me more than it costs.

If you make a difference, you also make a connection. You interact with people who want to be interacted with and you make changes that people respect and yearn for.

Art can’t happen without someone who seeks to make a difference. This is your art, it’s what you do. You touch people or projects and change them for the better. This year, you’ll certainly find that the more you give the more you get.

Seth Godin is a blogger and speaker. His new book, Linchpin, comes out in January.

Posted in business | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment »

Get an Evergreen for Your Blog This Holiday Season

Get an Evergreen for Your Blog This Holiday Season

These kinds of posts should be about what your site is about. They should show your expertise on the subject. They should be the kinds of posts that are so valuable, so informative or entertaining or insightful, that people will want to read them for years to come.

If you could write THE definitive guide or explanation to the subject of your site, there will be links and tweets and traffic.

Think about what your subject is, what keyword you want to be know for, and write a really good post about it.

You’ll see the traffic.

The evergreens we admire for their longevity

The most obvious way is to write about a topic that never gets old. These are cornerstone reference posts, like ‘10 Ways to Build a Better Blog.’ These posts are evergreen simply because people always need that information.

The good news is that evergreen reference posts are pretty straightforward to write. Do a step-by-step summary of how to do something from start to finish, and you’ve got yourself an evergreen post.

They’re also good for defining something that’s often mis-defined. For example, I have posts bookmarked in my ‘Evergreens’ folder on “What Marketing Really Is.” And I refer back to them often, because marketing is a slippery subject.

There are downsides to these types of evergreen posts. You’re up against a lot of competition, for one. There are already thousands of evergreen posts on building a better blog or providing better customer service. There’s probably an evergreen post on 10 Ways to Do Absolutely Any Topic Imaginable.

If you want your evergreen post to be the one that gets bookmarked, you’d better make it really, really good.

Which brings us to the second downside: Evergreen posts often require much more work than your standard post. You’ll probably wind up putting in at least 5 hours — and probably more like 15 — making sure everything is well-written, entertaining, compelling, and that you didn’t make any mistakes.

You might also be putting some extra hours into in-depth research if your evergreen post is on a topic that’s difficult to understand.

Read the entire article at:
http://feeds.copyblogger.com/~r/Copyblogger/~3/0GUusIszMsk/

Posted in web traffic | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment »

A free Wordpress blog can really cost you

This article, excerpted below, lists 13 reasons why you should NOT have a free wordpress.com web site.

All of them are valid.

The biggest cost of Wordpress is the time it takes you to create a site and make it what you want it to be. The biggest downside to using a free service is lack of control.

I suggest that you try out a free site, (after all, it’s free), and learn the ropes.

When you are ready for a “real” web site, then get your own web host and install Wordpress. You can point everything on the free site at the new site.

With your very own web site, you have complete control of everything! Sell stuff! Publish what you want. Make it professional and compete with other businesses. Rock the world.

Final thoughts.

13 reasons why you should NOT have a free wordpress.com web site.

So basically what I’m saying is that it’s not a good idea to have a free website as your main home online. Whether you’re an individual or a business, get your own domain and pay for your own hosting.

If you already have a free Wordpress site, and it is your only blog/website, I suggest one of two things. 1) Buy a domain, install wordpress and start fresh. You can always direct people to your new blog from your old blog, or 2) Export all your content from your free site into a paid site, then you’ll have everything in one place. The sooner you do this the better in my opinion.

That said, blogging communities are great and should not be ignored. Having a free blog within a blogging community however, is very different than having a website all your own. Of all the free blogging communities around, I like Tumblr the best. Here is a list of some of the most popular blogging communities.

Wordpress is a blog application found at Wordpress.org
Wordpress is free to use. It’s called open source.
Wordpress is awesome. Smart people use it.
Wordpress.com is a place to be part of a blogging community.
A free Wordpress blog doesn’t make sense as your only blog.
A free Wordpress blog is a great way to learn the ropes.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.socialmediatherapy.com/2009/07/03/a-free-wordpress-blog-can-really-cost-you/

Posted in Wordpress | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment »

The Most Amazing Wordpress theme – Headway 1.5
(Part Two)

I responded to comment on the original post about Headway this morning.

Headway 1.5 Premium Wordpress Theme

Andrew wanted to know what it could “do”. That’s a reasonable question, so I thought I’d try to answer it.

I think the list of features, or the actual tasks it can do, is probably similar to other premium themes. The big “woah” moment for me was the visual editor.

I had an event happen a week ago that caused me to need to get a site up quickly, like from nothing, no idea or content, to functioning site in like 4 hours.

I could have copied an existing site, using my old handcoded theme and thrown it up, changed the colors and been done with it, but I used Headway.

It was easy to create the pages in Wordpress, then play with the visual editor to decide colors and layout.

I could add a wigetized sidbar, or 3, and put them where I wanted them.

I could control the width by click and drag to the width I wanted. Changing the width of the sidebay is usually going into the CSS file and guessing, then reloading the page, then guessing again. With this, I clicked and dragged until I was happy.

Of course the color pickers were easy and wonderful. You clicked on the element you wanted to color, and clicked on the color picker. That element was now that color.

I want to be sure I’m communicating this clearly. I like this theme, not because it “does stuff”, but that it does stuff in a visual editor. It’s value is not in what it does, but in how it does it.

You can select elements in a drop down menu and style them from there, but you can also just click on the area that you want to style to select it.

The visual editor is a bunch of “floating palettes” over the top of your page. You have to move the palettes around sometimes, to see what’s behind them on the page.

I also used Headway premium Wordpress theme to build my coming business site, You Can Sell Crafts. I spent less than two hours on that site. I’m not promoting that much yet and the products aren’t in place, so I just needed a quick and dirty site for now.

I like it though.

The SEO stuff is great. The transition stuff is great. I haven’t tried the image stuff yet, but I’m sure that’s all great too. Whatever, dude. All the other premium themes out there are great too.

What's totally awesome (I do live near the beach and have long hair, so I can say that without irony) is the visual editor.

It’s like building a site in Photoshop instead of BBEdit, where I usually work. You don’t even have to go to a settings page, save the settings, then check the page. None of that.

You are seeing the page as you design the page, on the page, without leaving the page.

I’ll even complain about the lack of control on absolutely everything. If something needs to be styled or added, but it’s not in the drop down to be selected, I can do it through the editor, by changing the style sheet manually, which is what I’m used to. No loss. No gain.

But, I’m telling you, this visual editor changed the rules.

Woah, dude.

Posted in Wordpress | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment »

God Has Given Each Of You

I was working on a video project for a church. They wanted a video to show at an “appreciation” dinner, where they feed all of the volunteers that work hard all year to make things happen and do thing to help other people, both inside and outside the church.

They wanted to open with this verse. I thought it was appropriate for anyone with a small business, regardless of your religious beliefs (and yes, I know you have them.)

“God has given each of you some special abilities; be sure to use them to help each other, passing on to others God’s many kinds of blessing.”
1 Peter 4:10 (LB)

Posted in business | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment »

How To Succeed In Business

The key is to just get on the bike, and the key to getting on the bike is not the confidence in knowing you will be successful if you do x,y,z. The key to getting on the bike is to stop thinking about “there are a bunch of reasons i might fall off” and just hop on and peddle the damned thing. You can pick up a map, a tire pump, and better footwear along the way.

Dick Costolo
Founder, FeedBurner

Read the entire article at: http://www.burningdoor.com/askthewizard/2007/03/too_many_companies.html

I read a lot of articles and ebooks about how to make money on the Internet. I can give you a lot of advice. I know a lot of stuff. We can talk and you would learn a lot from me. I have a fountain of information and I could really, really give you some great advice on how to make money on the Internet.

Or…

You could just do it yourself. The real key to making a business succeed on the Internet is to just do it.

Then, keep doing it.

The only people who fail at business are the people who quit doing it.

There are no magic bullets.

The Secret is: “Work your ass off”.

Gary Vaynerchuk

Read the entire article at: http://garyvaynerchuk.com/post/238372936/the-secret-2-0-watch-this-video-to-see-what-the

Posted in business | by Conrad Walton | Please Comment »