Addiction
September 16th, 2007Addictive behavior is something I do that removes my desire, without giving me what I want.
Books on Book Marketing
September 16th, 2007Here is a compendium of books on how to self-market your book. I have not read any of them, but they look promising, and have good reviews. The first one, in particular, 1001 Ways to Market Your Books, was highly recommended on a proprietary interview on book marketing by the famous online marketer Joe Vitale. It looks like an excellent place to start.
Publicize Your Book: An Insider’s Guide to Getting Your Book the Attention It Deserves
Plug Your Book! Online Book Marketing for Authors, Book Publicity through Social Networking
The Frugal Book Promoter: How To Do What Your Publisher Won’t
Over 75 Good Ideas for Promoting Your Book
The Savvy Author’s Guide to Book Publicity
The Complete Guide to Book Marketing
The Complete Guide to Book Publicity
Resources for Crafters
September 15th, 2007I have a number of clients who would love to make money from their crafts. I would love to know how to help them do this. But for now, I don’t. But I am a good researcher, and I have found the following links to other resources to help them.
The goal: Make money doing what you love.
The following resources are ones I found on the web this morning. I have not read any of them yet, but they look promising.
Books Listed on Amazon
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Web Articles
Starting a Craft Business 101 - First Steps to take when Starting an Arts and Crafts Business
5 Things to Know When Starting a Craft Business
10 Mistakes to Avoid Selling Arts and Crafts
Craft Shows Versus Web Sites selling crafts online marketing art
Web sites with information on a variety of individual craft shows, festivals and events
Getting Started Selling Crafts - How to Sell Arts and Crafts to the Public
A Blog on the Crafting Business
Talking about Crafts and Business of Crafting
An Information Product (eBook) About Making Money with Crafts
Looks like a winner!
Craft Business Tips - Crafting Business Secrets!
My Niche-Focused, Search-Optimized, Copywriting Secrets Realized Blog Post
September 15th, 2007Not. Can’t do that, right now. The desire to do all those things stops me from writing.
The irony is that the very essence of Web 2.0 is sharing information, and not, necessarily, worrying all that much about who is listening. And then, getting into conversations that interest you. Now, if you are smart (and want to), you can expand that into making more and more connections, and all of that. But if you forget the inspiration to just write, then you lose it.
This is an interesting thought about the success of blogging, and why a lot of my clients seem trepidatious about starting–Along with blogging making it technically easy to post new content to a website, it also set up a system of casual writing, where people could relax and just express themselves!
Cool.
Visualizing the Default WordPress Theme
May 24th, 2007After so very many descriptions of how to create WordPress themes–and after having creating a bunch of them–I decided to try to really try to understand how WordPress templates actually work. The greatest frustration for me, was that when designing a new theme, and formatting it with CSS codes, I realized that it was extremely difficult to determine which elements, classes, and id’s were responsible for which formatting.
References to the articles read are below. There were two key points that I had heretofore, through “messing around,” not been aware of:
- You can make an entire theme just by including a style.css file, and optionally, an images subdirectory. You need to tell WordPress which theme you want your theme to piggyback off of, by refering to the directory name of that theme. The syntax (within the CSS comment at the top of the style.css file) is: Template: theme-directory-name.
- It is highly recommended that one become familiar with the logic and structure of the default theme (Kubrik), as it has been thoroughly code-tested, and should conform to the best of the WordPress standards.
On the first note, I decided to create a style.css file piggybacking off of the default theme. At first, it just looked like this:
/*
Theme Name: CSS-Only Base Theme
Template: default
*/
It was interesting to go into the Presentation tab, and load that theme up. It was just a plain, raw HTML page, with almost no formatting at all. Then, I proceeded to style it based on my expectations. I was able to make a very attractive, simple theme. But what I also found was, I was having a very hard time understanding which elements, div’s, and id’s were wrapping which areas. Therefore, I created a file specifically to indicate this, based on all of the div’s and id’s in the default template. The file also indicates where the included modules (footer.php, header.php, and sidebar.php) begin and end. Here is the file:
I discovered that, using this visual guide, I was much more able to see what I was doing, and construct a clean and useful theme. And I also discovered, happily, that the structure of the default template is really quite simple. Using this visual guide, as well as basing my theme designs as much as possible off of the default template, I will be able to minimize the changes I need to make in the code. Where necessary, it will be better to comment out a piece of the template (or often, just to turn off its display using CSS). This approach allows me to make almost all the changes I need to in the CSS, rather than mess with the PHP files.
References (from the WordPress Codex site):
“Meta Optimization Service,” and Other Myths of Search Engine Optimization
May 15th, 2007There’s been a lot of lore spread about how web pages actually get found. I notice a good number of people have a vague—and usually incorrect—idea of how the process of search engine optimization (the art of getting your pages found by people using search engines) works, including the idea of hiring a “Meta Optimization Service”. Years ago, it was considered important to optimize for META tags, but no longer. Here’s a list of eight such myths:
- “Submit your site to the major search engines.” In fact, if you submit your site to some search engines directly—including Google—you’ll have a higher chance of being considered spam, than if you used other methods to get your site indexed.
- “Use tools that promise to automatically submit your site to thousands of different search engines.” The vast majority of the sites an automated tool will submit your site are pretty inconsequential, and at worst, could be seen as spam by the major search engines like Google, who are always looking for ways of avoiding indexing anything that looks like it was done by an automated process that could be the work of a spammer.
- “It’s good to trade links with other sites to build your search rank.” Actually, “link trading” no longer helps your page ranking at all. There are a good number of helpful linking strategies that a certified SEO can utilize, however.
- “Write pages that contain the words you want to be found on, and searchers will naturally find your pages.” This is almost as serious as the idea that if you just put up a web site, people will find you and call you. Without doing thorough keyword research on your topic—and basing it on the real data of what people are actually searching on, you’re likely to fail to get your pages found, unless you happen to be so lucky as to have a very narrow niche topic that’s generating a lot of interest.
- “The KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION meta tags are really important for search optimization.” Years ago it may have been helpful to hire a “Meta Optimization Service”. But since Google no longer pays attention to the KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION tags, they are of little use now. A trained SEO is able to embed good search keywords into your page in all the places it needs to go to get the highest result.
- “Cram every keyword into your KEYWORDS meta tag that someone might possibly search on to find your page.” In fact, if you cram too many words into your keywords tag, it will probably just dilute the potency of the real keywords you are targeting for your page.
- “Have all backward links point to your home page.” In fact, you need to be very selective in terms of where backward links (that is, links from other sites to your site) point to—they should be targeted to the specific pages you’re targeting.
- “All links to my site are good links.” In fact, if you’re not careful, links to your site might be seen as spam, if the search engine’s spiders don’t see them as coming from a valid, useful, and relevant page.
The idea of hiring a “Meta Optimization Service” is outmoded at this point. However, a professional SEO can optimize your pages without too much work, using current methods.
Green business is cool, but is it all about stuff?
April 26th, 2007
I am really inspired by the whole "green business" concept: let’s really get together and make the world a better place, by taking responsibility for the way we’re treating our world. The ecological movement is about becoming more and more conscious about our relationship with the rest of the planet, having an awareness of our actions.
But what I wonder is: Is it all about stuff? I mean, so much of what we talk about in terms of what is "green", is about stuff:
- How much stuff are we using?
- Are we using the right stuff?
- Where is our stuff coming from?
- Does our stuff have chemicals on it?
- Are we reusing our stuff, or are we just throwing it away?
- Does our stuff biodegrade, or is it just going to sit there for the next thousand years?
Not that this all isn’t important, because I’m sure that it is. Well, of course it is, but I just wonder–is sustainability just about stuff? I have a lot of other concerns that are equally important to me in how I want to see business evolve, such as:
- How are we treating each other?
- Are we having fun?
- Are we being of service? Contributing something of value to the greater whole?
- Are we growing, evolving?
- Are we financially thriving?
- How hard are we working? Does our business allow us to have fun and do other things, or does success necessitate total devotion of our every waking hour?
- Are we learning something new?
For me, all of this is equally important to how we are treating, or using, our stuff. And it is equally an important legacy to leave to our grandchildren, equally a critical part of the culture that we are growing, that we are learning how to be happy and play and share and grow. A lot of the "green" magazines or blogs I read are written by people who are really interested in advances in technology, such as biodegradable corn plastics, or vegetable oil-powered cars.
Maybe what I am feeling is that the growth in technology, like this, is not separate from the growth in inner human culture that I am talking about. Just as a mid-20th century mind would come up with disposable everything, the mind of the culture we are evolving into can come up with a whole bunch of much cooler stuff. But I want to emphasize that without pursuing the evolution of culture at the same time, I believe we will be hamstrung in terms of what we can accomplish in the stuff department, as well.
The great eco-philosopher Joanna Macy says there are three areas in which The Great Turning (as she calls it) will occur: "holding actions", such as tree sitting or protective legislation, that buy us time by preserving the beauty of what we have; developing new solutions, that help us live in more sustainable ways, and–equally as critical–changing and shifting our consciousness, or how we think about things. In that light, I would like to say that I think the "greening" of business should also include all of our efforts to consciously evolve our own culture into more humane, sustainable, and life-empowering ways.
Re-launched
January 29th, 2007Well, I am still working on the exact positioning of my new blog, I am re-launching it today!
Global warming, marketing, and doing the right thing
December 18th, 2006Robert Middleton has an excellent post on the potential role of marketing, and independent professionals, to do something really big in terms of turning the tide.
“What if you were the coach or consultant to someone who invented a battery that could run a car for a week? What if your support helped them develop it twice as fast?”
Link here.
Threadless excels in customer involvement
December 18th, 2006I was pointed to this site by a post by “Church of the Customer Blog”http://customerevangelists.typepad.com/blog/2006/09/the_facebook_le.html, contrasting Threadless with Facebook, who made a blunder that aliented thousands of fan-users by not listening to them in the development of their site.
Threadless sells T-shirts. They don’t produce anything without getting positive feedback from their users. They never have a flop. At the top of their home page, the most prominent thing is a big “PARTICIPATE”. You can go on and rate the T-shirts.
You can submit entries to be made into T-shirts. If you own an T-shirt of theirs and you don’t yet have a photo of you up there wearing that T-shirt, you can get a $1.50 credit for uploading a photo of you in the shirt.
Each shirt has its own, cool-looking page. One page I saw had a song about the shirt on the page (an mp3 you could play)!
You can rate the designs.
There are currently 42,669 photos of people wearning their shirts on the site!
These guys are really thinking about what works; what’s fun; what is visually appealing, but also useful.
