Just want to say Word Press makes even major updates pretty easy.
I just followed their instructions and had no problems.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress
I really like all the new features in the write post page. The Dashboard is really nice, too.
Hooray for Word Press, good job.
Update: one small bug. I use Firefox and the windows where you insert links and pictures won’t work unless my WordPress address (URL) in the settings menu has www. in it.
I think that an email campaign is a wonderful way to build your business.
You could do it the easy way and hire me to design and run your campaigns or you can do it yourself.
Either way an email marketing blitz is inexpensive and can still be one of your most effective marketing tools.
There are some important rules for starting any email campaign
Your own list of customers and visitors who have asked for your newsletters are by far your most valuable resource. These are your core business. Very few, if any, lists that you can buy will give you people who are specifically interested in what you have to offer.
The main goal of a newsletter is to get people to actually receive, open and read your email. This is called deliverability. The best chance of this happening is to have recipients who want and have asked for your information.
One of the best ways to get your visitors to sign up is to offer them a gift. It’s pretty easy to offer something to download like a great report, helpful tips or perhaps an ebook that you have written or purchased the distribution rights to. These gifts can be presented as very valuable even though they don’t cost you anything or very little.
Another way to go is to give away something that costs you more. One of my customers Melosleep tried a limited time promotion where they gave away a free sample of their product to anyone who filled out a form. The freebie sites passed their offer around and in a very short time they had a huge amount of requests. It was expensive, but they built up a very large in house mailing list quickly.
A huge list can also be another expense as most web hosts will limit the amount of email any one account can send in order to keep the spammers out. For example this site is limited to sending 100 emails per hour max. There are programs like PHPList that will limit how many emails that it sends an hour, but if you have tens of thousands of names it would take weeks to send one newsletter.
In that case you probably need to use a commercial email sending (or hosting) company. A company with a good reputation so your email doesn’t get blocked even before it gets to your reader as being from a spammer.
Tomorrow - Opt-In only
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I have a page on my site with some of my favorite site designs that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of designs that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these site designs, they all look good and are clear and easy to use. The graphics are good, but not overpowering. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of the sites are not in English and I still know what they are about.
The newest one is called Tennessee Winter.
I probably should have written about this site earlier but now that winter is over I can look at the snow as a beautiful thing. It’s just hard to do that when you’re shoveling it.
This site looks like a winter wonderland. I even like the moving snowflakes script. It adds to the effect of the site and since it not used for something critical like navigation it won’t be missed even if the visitor has JavaScript turned off.
All of the navigation is in plain text with the main navigation right at the top. The current events are on both sides of the content in two different formats (text and calendar) so they won’t be missed.
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Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
Newseum.org is an online museum of the news which is currently building a seven-level museum on Pennsylvania Ave in Washington DC.
They have online a trivia quiz from the interactive museum of news. There are three levels: intern, reporter and editor, and if you don’t answer fast enough, it lets you know.
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I attend a networking lunch every month. It has been a great experience and I have gotten several new customers from the group. I have done this by sharing information, by offering some practical free advice that most everyone can use without otherwise using my services. The main advantage of these kind of events is just letting this group of people know that I am willing to help people and more importantly that I am not there just to take advantage of them.
One of the sayings of my group is that we don’t want to do business with you as much as we want to do business with your rolodex. These business people are not going to recommend me to their valuable contacts unless they trust me first and believe that I can offer something valuable and worthwhile to them.
I read an article by business coach Stephanie Ward which talks about treating all of your networks this way. It’s some very good advice. There is no better promotion that a referral from someone other than you who will sing your praises. It doesn’t have to be someone that you intentionally network with. People will trust these recommendations more than any commercial. That’s also why having a good testimonials page on your site is so important.
There are many people who you network with other than those that you meet at networking events and you should treat them all that well.
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I have been reading Dennis Gaskill’s (aka Boogie Jack) newsletter for almost 10 years now. Even though I have only emailed him a couple of times over the years I feel like he’s a good friend. He provides his readers with good free information including web design tutorials, free web graphics, search sngine optimization and some great words of comfort and wisdom as well.
I thought his site had gone away and was very happy to report last January that he had returned. While reading his newsletter last night he reported that his business has “fallen off” due to something bad happening from outside of his site. He didn’t say just what it was yet, but asked if his readers would spread the good word about his site.
I’ve enjoyed reading Dennis for years and I think you will too. So drop by his site and sign up for his free newsletter if you like what you see.
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Internal links in your site, that is, links from one page in your site to another page in your site can be almost as valuable as links coming into your site from the outside.
I have been experimenting with different ways to do this and they have all been working well. Word Press gives you some wonderful tools for this.
For example the new menu items on this blog like the “tour my blog” section and the “random links”.
To make the most of these links it’s best to tell the visitor what your linking to, so instead of just “click here” or some other dribble that makes your site look like it’s stuck in the 90’s use a link like…
my “random links” menu item is helping to revive old content on my site.
One of the best sites for this is Wikipedia. In case you haven’t noticed they rank pretty well for just about everything. There is a great post on e-consultancy.com about this subject
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I have a page on my site with some of my favorite site designs that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of designs that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these site designs, they all look good and are clear and easy to use. The graphics are good, but not overpowering. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of the sites are not in English and I still know what they are about.
The newest one is called Sheridan Oregon.
This is a site about, well, Sheridan Oregon. You can easily tell from the site that this is an area that features wine, lumber, wide open spaces and easy living. The purple and tan (colors that I use myself) are easy on the eyes. They are colors that goes well with the grapes that are their feature product.
The navigation and content is in plain text. The navigation is right at the top of the page in plain sight, but the font could be bigger without hurting the look of the site.
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Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
Most all of you have seen Google Earth where you can view a satellite image of just about anything and even overlay a map to see exactly where you are.
Google just launched Google Sky where you can just sit in front of your computer and explore the Universe. What a wonderful educational tool with our Solar System, Constellations, and much more. Also a great fun site to visit on a Friday or any day for that matter.
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I was speaking to a friend the other day and he asked my advice. It seemed that he could not be found for the particular search term that he fancied and one of his competitors who had a site that looked very amateurish was on the first page of Google for that term.
I asked him what the search term was and asked him if he had done any keyword research on it. He said no. I decided not to go into why he would want to be found for a search term that no one was searching for and to have a look at his page.
When I saw his page the problem jumped right out at me. He had a well written first page with lots of plain text that told his story well and good text navigation, but no where on any of his pages did he have the actual term that he wanted found for. It’s so simple that many people overlook it.
I explained that if he wants to be found for this search term he needed to have those exact words on his page, preferably in the headline. For example, if I want this site to be found for something like web design or maybe something less competitive like web design Pittsburgh and didn’t have those words anywhere in my pages it wouldn’t happen (see what I just did there).
He placed the words in his headline of his first page and once in the main text and within three days he ranked near the top of the search results, above his competitor. He was ecstatic, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it was a search term that practically no one actually searched for, so it wasn’t going to help him much.
I’ll wait a bit and call that the next lesson.
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