Information Sells

At WordCamp in New York, Matt Mullenweg listed the Top 10 Plugins for WordPress, measured by the volume of downloads. The list isn’t really surprising, but it is instructive. If you want to know what other WordPress users find useful, take a look at these plugins:

10. cforms
9. wp-polls
8. WP Automattic Upgrade
7. wp-cache
6. wp-db-backup
5. WordPress Stats
4. Nextgen-Gallery
3. Google-Sitemap-Generator
2. All-In-One-SEO-Pack
1. Akismet

They can all be found in the WordPress.org Plugin Library

You Know You Can Do Anything

Outsourcing is today’s buzzword.

If your ability to pay your mortgage has flown to India, outsourcing is a bad word. If you have freed up a few hours a day to spend on growing your business instead of packaging your orders, outsourcing is a good word.

It’s all in the context.

Have you ever said something like, “I tried WordPress, but it was too complicated,” or maybe “I’m not a techie. I need something easy,” or even “I can’t learn that stuff.”

There is a world of difference between saying, “I know a little HTML, but my time is better spent mastering Photoshop than building a web site,” and saying, “I can’t… [blog, draw, do math... fill in the blank] because I’m not [smart enough, tech-savvy enough, good enough ... fill in the self-put-down].

Writers, artists, photographers and other product developers sometimes assume that technology is so far removed from creativity that they will never master it. But the truth is that you don’t have to know everything; you don’t have to master everything; you don’t even have to move beyond a glancing acquaintance with some things. You can certainly outsource the mundane, day-to-day tasks that keep you from your core purpose.

But…

There is always a but…

When you decide to let some stuff slide, be sure that decision is based on what is best for you and your business. What is best and what is easiest are not always the same thing.

Here’s a story I have, sadly, run across too many times. A busy entrepreneur needs a web site with a shopping cart, so they hire someone to create it. That’s reasonable. The business owner takes a quick look at the final product and then turns the day to day operation over to someone else, either the designer or a webmaster. The business owner believes she is “outsourcing” by not getting bogged down in technical details.

Skip ahead a few months or maybe even years, and the entrepreneur decides to change the cart’s payment method, or add a blog to the website, or update the template. The problem is, the entrepreneur was “too busy” to oversee the technical stuff. She may not know the log in ID or the FTP password. In fact, she may not even be the registered owner of the domain or the web site! The business owner, in short, may find herself locked out of her own store because she gave the only set of keys to an ex-employee who left town to join the circus.

That isn’t outsourcing. That’s giving away your power.

The web designer may have tried to get the business person to sign up for the hosting package, only to be told, “You do it, I hate that stuff.” The webmaster may have forwarded the email from the hosting company containing passwords and other account details, and the entrepreneur, faced with a stew of meaningless acronyms, deleted it from an already full-to-bursting inbox.

Eventually, the web designer probably shrugged and said, “It’s not my job to save you from yourself.” The designer is not a villain in this piece.

In the bricks and mortar world, you don’t have to be a locksmith to safeguard the keys to your door. In the online world, you don’t need to be an engineer to run a website.

Whether you are on the street or on the web, knowledge is power. Don’t throw yours away.

Photo by mishox Released under Creative Commons License

The next version of WordPress, version 2.7, is scheduled for release in Novemeber. It looks like there will be some very cool new features and refinements to the Dashboard. You can see a demo here:

http://www.centernetworks.com/wordpress-27-demo

Have you wondered if you can make money selling your photos online though stock outlets?

For most people - even good amateur photographers with good quality digital SLRs - making money by selling pictures to a stock photo service is a dream rather than a reality. Beginners often have their photos rejected simply because they don’t know the rules. Just as you would do in any other area of product development, research your market before rushing in. Know what sorts of pictures are in demand and then take those sorts of pictures. If you have talent, good equipment, and the willingness to research and learn, stock photography can become another revenue stream in your online business.

Here are 7 Tips to Help You Get Started:

1. Think like the user, not the photographer. Many speakers turn to iStock Photos when they are putting together a new PowerPoint presentation. Often, they want a simple photographic metaphor for an idea. For instance, if you are searching for a picture to illustrate a talk about the power of social media, you don’t want the same old tired handshake or spider web. But you might be interested in a picture of a distressed, brick wall spray painted with a relevant slogan.
2. Learn to use Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. Not only will they improve your photos, they can be used to add text to photos, create montages or panoramas, or clean up backgrounds by removing things like overhead wires.
3. Get model releases. When you submit a photo with people in it to a stock house, you will need a model release from every individual in the photo. “Every individual” really means every individual. Your picture of happy strangers frolicing in the surf in Hawaii will not be accepted unless you have the happy strangers’ permission to plaster their faces all over the world (with no compensation to them).
4. Take commercial, rather than art, photos. Designers frequently need good, clean pictures of every day household and office items. You may not feel particularly inspired by a shot of a tape dispenser - until the payments start rolling in! Shoot from several different angles and submit the whole series to your stock house.
5. Hide brand names and logos. Stock photos are royalty free - so there should be no ancillary rights to anything in the picture. If you take a picture of a pair of Nike sneakers - use Photoshop to hide the Swoosh. A Coke can can say “Cola,” but it cannot say “Coca Cola.”
6. Create all white backgrounds. Designers want to be able to drop the picture into a layout without tweaking. If your background isn’t invisible, your photos won’t be purchased.
7. Submit your work to many different stock photo resellers. Different companies have different audiences and specialties. You’ll often have a photo that is turned down by one company bought by a different company. Diversity will work in your favor.

Photo by Capt Kodak Released under Creative Commons License

HOW TO BUILD A WEB SITE FOR YOUR BUSINESS - PART 4

Web domain registrars are in a low-price competition with each other. The basic service they offer - registering your domain name - is not the sort of thing that builds high margin, repeat traffic. So, to keep the cost of domain registration low while still turning a profit, registrars will try to upsell other web services to new clients.

There is nothing shady or unethical about this. In fact, the upsells probably subsidize the extremely low cost we currently pay for domain registration. The problem is, registrars are usually not very good web hosts or email providers.  The all-in-one packages they offer will hobble your business.

When you take the first step to getting a web site - be aware of the difference between a web host (the company that rents you server space for your web site) and the domain registrar (the company that makes sure your domain name is unique).

To get the job done right, these will be two different companies, doing two different jobs. It is a little bit more work for you at the start, but it will save you hours of work, and possibly hundreds of dollars, to get it right from the start.

REGISTRARS

GoDaddy.com is an excellent choice for registering your domain name. They offer low prices and reliable service. They will also offer you email accounts, web hosting, blogs, various privacy options for your domain registration, etc. Stay away from all the add ons. Just buy the $6.95 domain registration and move on to selecting a web host.

WEB HOSTING

There is an acronym for the services you want in a web host: LAMP. That stands for

• Linux
• Apache
• MySQL
• PHP

That configuration is ideal for most web sites because it gives you access to low cost/no cost server operating systems (Linux and Apache) to keep expenses down, while still offering database capabilities. So many web applications, like WordPress and Joomla, require PHP and MySQL that you are tying your hands behind your back if you host your site on servers that do not use them.

While there are hundreds of low cost web hosting companies around, BlueHost or HostGator have very good reputations. Both offer Linux servers with PHP and MySQL, both have Fantastico for one click installation of complicated programs like bulletin boards, blogs, and shopping carts, and both offer unlimited domains on one low priced account.

Don’t get wrong footed when you start out. Your investment in GoDaddy’s limited web and email programs will either hamstring your service or go to waste. As soon as your business begins to grow, you will dump them like a pair of old shoes.

OTHER POSTS IN THIS SERIES:

1. How To Build A Web Site For Your Business Part 1
2. Add On Domains and Parked Domains
3. Fantastic Fantastico

Photo by Sammis Co Released un Creative Commons License

Sadish Bala, the creator of the theme Palaam, which is used on this site, ran a contest last month, offering one of his beautiful Premium Themes for free if you were using one of his excellent free themes. The rules were a little more complicated than that, but basically Sadish looked at blogs using his themes and picked four winners.

I am tickled beyond words that Information Sells was one of the winners.

I love Sadish’s work, I admire the amount of effort he puts into supporting his users (and most of us never pay him a penny for either the theme or the help), and I respect the quality of the code he writes.

If you want your blog to look great and work great - use one of Sadish’s themes.

UPDATE: In my excitement, I forgot to acknowledge the other winners. My apologies. If you want to see some beautiful blogs, check out the other winners - and congratulations to all!

1. Wilson’s Words and Pictures
2. Information Sells
3. Virginia Breeze
4. Chocolate Fingerprints

Because We Need To Be Heard

Your marketing must tell your buyers in the most straight forward way why they should buy. Your copy must answer the question, “What’s In It For Me?’

You know that. You’ve read it a thousand times. So why is it so hard to do? Because you haven’t had the chance to practice often enough to hone your talent.

Great copywriting is an art, of course, but it is also a skill. You can learn through study and practice. If you write every day, you become a better writer. If you practice recasting your writing to find the hidden benefits, you’ll become a better salesperson.

And if you study, you’ll discover some trade secrets that might make the job easier.

Back in 2006, Brian Clarke, of CopyBlogger, wrote a post about the two most important words in blogging: “you” and “because.” When I was re-reading it today, I was struck by his examples of the effectiveness of the word “because.” Look at this:

The power of because has actually been documented by social psychologist Ellen Langer, as told by our old friend Robert Cialdini from the Blog Triggers series. Langer performed an experiment where she asked to cut in line to use a copy machine.

She tested three different ways of asking, and recorded the results:

Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine?

60% said OK.

Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush?

94% said OK.

It appears that giving the “reason why” of because I’m in a rush boosted the effectiveness of the request immensely.

But here’s the kicker:

Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies?

93% said OK.

The trigger word “because” is so powerful that it didn’t really seem to matter that the “reason why” provided was something you might expect to hear from a four year old child.

That is so astonishing I have to repeat it: 93% of people already using a copier said OK to the request to cut in line when Langer asked because she needed to make some copies!

If you want to sell, when you write your copy, don’t just tell your buyers to buy, tell them to buy because.

Photo by aoifecitywomanchile Released under Creative Commons License

Complaint Department

No one admits they are in favor of bad customer service.

You’ll never find a business person who says, “Pleasing you is worth about $4.37 on a $500.00 sale - so you get 2 minutes - and no more - of my time.”

You will find thousands of people who say that Customer Service is Job 1.

Is it?

What does customer service even mean? Is customer service having your call transferred to voicemail because only one person in a small office can give a definitive answer to your question and that person is out sick today? Or is customer service having someone just take a stab at answering your question?

Customer Service is anticipation. It is not just knowing the right answers - it is knowing the right questions. Good customer service begins long before any questions or complaints arise. It is built in to your products and communication; it is part of your training; it is valued, recognized and rewarded.

A business that offers good customer service doesn’t have to tell its customers that it offers good customer service. If you really put customer satisfaction at the center of your mission, your customers will tell you how great your service is. They will tell their friends how much they enjoy doing business with you.

We all recognize lousy service when we see it. Do we only recognize great service when it corrects a disaster? What does good customer service look like, day to day?

Photo by John Weise. Released under Creative Commons License

A Slug Headed For Trouble

Do the words “Page Slug” make you think of something slimy and unpleasant? Or maybe they sound more like a well deserved jigger of scotch taken to celebrate a finely crafted post? Well… no.

“Slug” is actually an old printer’s term.

Back in day, when we were drunk with the smell of printer’s ink, a printer’s slug identified where a book was printed. More recently, in book layout software like InDesign, a slug will carry information, such as title and date, in some non-printing meta code.

Today, WordPress has adapted this usage to refer to “Page Slugs.” They are the part of the post/page URL that appears after the domain (and date or category when present). The permalink URL of a WordPress blog is highly customizable, and your blog’s set up may differ from Information Sells. But if you click on the title of this post, and then check your browser’s address bar, you should see something like “ghostleg.com/blog/2008/09/stop-bad-slugs”. The page slug is “stop-bad-slugs”.

Now look at the title of this post. It is similar, but not identical. Why the difference?

Readers notice the title. You want readers to be so intrigued by the title that they click through to the post. So you try to make it clever, catchy, and still keyword rich. (Good luck with that).

What Google sees is the slug.

Here’s the problem: Google is never intrigued. Google is cranky and thinks you are trying to cheat with every keystroke. To drive a stake through your cheating heart, Google invented “stop words.” If you use a “stop word” in a search, Google completely ignores that word, as though you’d never typed it at all. If Google doesn’t see a word, there is no value in using it in your Page Slug.

If you are concerned with Search Engine Optimization, WordPress has handed you a gift. The ability to customize permalinks means that your page slug and your post title - two vital areas for SEO with conflicting needs - can differ. You can add adjectives and adverbs to lure your readers while ruthlessly stripping away stop words to appease Google.

Page slugs can be customized by hand (the permalink is displayed on your edit screen, directly below the post’s title) or you can use various SEO plug-ins to do the work for you automatically. Whichever method you use, get in the habit of examining your page slugs for stop words as well as keywords before you publish your post. (You really shouldn’t change the permalink after you publish.)

Photo by Chim Chim Released under Creative Commons License

SEO School Is Back In Session!

If you are a follower of Naomi Dunford’s IttyBiz (which I most enthusiastically am!), you may have heard about her ebook, SEO School: How to Becoma an SEO Ninja.

The original version of the ebook included email support from Naomi, so she limited the number of books sold to the number she legitimately felt she could support. When the book was pulled from circulation, there was much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, because it really was Just That Good.

Also, Naomi came in for some rather unpleasant abuse because she didn’t let everyone in on the deal (well, boo hoo!)

Anyway, SEO School is now back on line, available for all, without the support, in a new, updated edition.

Go look at the list of people who endorse this book: Brian Clark of Copyblogger, Dave Navarro of RockYourDay, Havi Brooks of The Fluent Self - how can you go wrong? If you are looking for a simple to understand, yet absolutely useful introduction to Search Engine Optimization, SEO School is the book you should read. Really.

Border Collie At Work

Blogs, like working dogs, need a job.

If a herding or hunting dog doesn’t have a task, they’ll assign themselves one. And it may not be a job you particularly want them to perform. A bright, hyper-responsible shepherd might drag everything you own - including underwear - out onto the lawn in order to keep an eye on it while you’re gone. A bored lab might rip apart the sofa, just to have something to carry around. It might make you want to scream, but they are just doing what they live to do - a good day’s work.

Does your blog have a job it was born to do?

Is it selling your services? Advertising your store? Educating your clients? Delighting your readers with helpful tips?

Or is it telling the world that:

• You’re too busy to care about your customers needs (rarely updated)
• You’re too scattered and undisciplined to trust with a project (no focus)
• You’re just dragging yourself through another day at the office (no spark)

Your Blog Wants To Work For You

Hello, World! Want Some Help?

Like an inquisitive border collie who wants to meet the world head on, greet every task with a yelp of anticipation, and give you 110%  effort, your blog is working all day, every day. It can answer questions, outline procedures, offer contact information. Every post can teach, inform, delight, invite, respond, request, refer.

Have you given your blog a mission?

Would you read your blog if you just stumbled across it? Will new readers find a reason to come back?

If you find that blogging is a chore, or you are stuck and don’t know why you even started the damn thing, it may be time to take a deep breath, clear your head, step back and ask yourself, what one thing should your blog accomplish each week?

• If you want to make money blogging - can you do a better job positioning AdSense ads?
• If you want to drive traffic to your web site - are you writing about things your customers want to know or are you just posting inventory lists?
• If you want to find students for your classes - are you teaching on the blog, so readers can form a bond with you even before they sign up for a class, or are you posting a calendar and turning away?

You don’t have to be a prize winning author to be a good blogger, although you do have to communicate clearly. Taking the time to proofread and correct mistakes shows respect for your readers.

When your blog has a purpose, you’ll discover another trait it has in common with the border collie: the spontaneous leap for joy to celebrate the satisfaction of a job well done.

Photos:
Border Collie & Sheep by statico
Released under Creative Commons License

Border Collie (sheepdog) peeking through Fence by imjustcreative
Released under Creative Commons License

Hardware for Jib

There’s nothing like a swooping high to low shot to add excitement and professionalism to a video. Hollywood film makers use cranes for these shots - which, of course, are far outside the budget of most independent videographers. Many professional videographers use a less expensive tool known as a jib, but even these can still cost several thousand dollars. A jib is basically a very long, carefully balanced extension arm that keeps the camera level with the horizon as the shot moves smoothly from high to low (or low to high).

Tom Benford of Videomaker.com has posted a detailed video (slightly more than 20 minutes long) that will walk you, step by step, through making your own jib with everyday hand tools and a few simple hardware store purchases. The whole set-up should cost around $50.00 and take an hour or so to build.

Cool! I want one!

Do you want to sell more of your self-published books? 

Then you need to be listed on Amazon. Until recently, that meant you had to use a service like Lightning Source to slip in through the side door via Ingram or you had to pay for the privilege by buying a “distribution package” from one of the subsidy presses or you had to list your books in Amazon Marketplace through Amazon Advantage or one of the other Amazon seller programs.

Now, there’s a simple, low cost way available to any author or self-publisher: use Amazon’s CreateSpace publishing/printing service. CreateSpace, Amazon’s answer to Lulu, isn’t a subsidy publisher in the same way that BookSurge, Amazon’s other publishing venture, is.

CreateSpace requires no upfront expense - even for an ISBN number. No books are printed until they are ordered, saving you - the publisher - the expense of shipping, stocking, and warehousing in advance of sales. The flip side to this is that CreateSpace also offers very little in the way of handholding or guidance for novices. They state their submission guidelines for the book block and the cover, and then leave you to figure out how to meet those guidelines.

And let’s be clear - the guidelines are technical, not editorial. CreateSpace will make you a published writer - they don’t even try to make you a good writer. You can submit a manuscript rife with spelling errors, howlingly bad word choices, and the sorts of grammatical mistakes that will make your 7th grade English teacher disavow all knowledge of your existence. As long as the margins are OK and the fonts are embedded in the PDF, CreateSpace will print your book. 

Amazon Listings Make Money

Here’s the profitable part - CreateSpace will give your book automatic entre into Amazon’s main catalog. Whether you use your own ISBN under your own imprint or list CreateSpace itself as the publisher, you book will be listed and sold by Amazon, eligible for free shipping and all the other Amazon perks.

Amazon’s reach will make you money - but first they’ll make some for themselves. Under the Pro Plan upgrade (free until the end of the year), each book with 110 pages or more will have a base price of $0.85 plus $0.012 per page. You set the cover price for any amount you wish - and Amazon will keep 40% 

So - for a 150 page book the costs would look like this:

• $0.85 base price
• $1.80 for 150 pages ( at $0.012 per page)
• $2.65 per book - total printing cost

You decide to sell the book for $14.95. Amazon keeps 40% of that - or $5.98

You make a $6.32 royalty on each book sold. 

Now you may be tempted to subtract $2.65 (the printing cost) from $14.95 (the cover price) and say, I’ll sell it myself on my own web site and keep $12.30 per book! I’ll sell it in the back of the room after my seminars! I’ll sell it on eBay! And so you should. You should sell your book everywhere and anywhere you can. But understand this - Amazon is where buyers, who do not yet know that they want your book, will discover your book and buy it.

Last year, Ghost Leg concentrated our book sales on in-person events, web sales, and third party sales on Amazon. Our books sold steadily in every venue except Amazon, where sales were slow. As an experiment, we decided to take advantage of the free Pro Plan upgrade at CreateSpace to reposition a few books on Amazon.

Our Amazon sales have increased 5 fold in just two months. Not a bad trade off for a smaller percentage of the gross.

Adobe Creative Suite 4

Adobe Creative Suites 4 is available for pre-order. Thank goodness I dithered for six months trying to decide whether or not I could afford Adobe CS3- and if I could buy it, which version I should buy. Otherwise, I couldn’t look forward to another six or seven more months of vacillation. Instead, I’d have to torment myself for buying too soon.

For purchases of $600 or more, I want to be sure that

1. I’m buying the right things, and
2. I’ll get a few years use from the product

I would love to have the latest version of Adobe Acrobat Pro and probably also Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Flash, and InDesign. The problem is, they aren’t bundled together.

Considering the chaos in the financial markets, I see two paths going forward:

• Since the world is coming to an end next Wednesday and there is no point in saving for a rainy day, spring for the full, $1,800.00 complete edition with everything but the kitchen sink (although it’s possible that the kitchen sink is part of the extended version of Photoshop…)
• Since none of us knows where the economy is going, sit pat with Adobe Acrobat 6 and Photoshop Elements 5

Maybe I’ll compromise and buy the new Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 .

Adobe drives me crazy - I really want the whole magilla. What about you?

The Irresistible Plug In

What’s the truth about plug-ins? Are they the fastest way to cripple a WordPress blog? Or are they the essential ingredient that makes WordPress blogs so useful?

The answer - as you probably guessed - is both! A bad plug in can take down your blog. Even a good plug in can go bad and suddenly render your blog invisible.

Ah, but those good plug ins are irresistible…

Plug ins (which WordPress likes to spell “plugins”) are tiny add-on bits of code that extend the ability of your blog to do something cool (what geeks call “functionality”).

For instance, if you want to add Google Analytics to your blog’s code, but you don’t want to copy and paste the script into every single relevant template on you blog, you’d look for a Google Analytics plug-in to do the work for you. And you’d be in luck, because there are so many to choose from.

As the 18 pages of results for “Google Analytics Plugins” above demonstrates, finding just the right plug-in can be difficult. Be prepared slog through apparently unrelated plugins while you do your research and comparisons. When the task seems overwhelming, try doing the search on Google (instead of WordPress.org). If you want to confine your search just to WordPress.org, so you can quickly check comments and download history, use Google’s Advanced Search option and confine the search to the domain “http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/”

What Plug Ins Can Do For You

You can divide plug-ins into several major categories. Some will improve your blog’s SEO. Some will improve your readers’ experience. Some will make the day to day management of your blog easier. Some will improve your blog’s appearance. And some will enable your readers to recommend your blog to new readers. No two blogs need the exact same set of plug-ins, but most blogs will benefit from a handful of plug-ins in each of these categories.

SEO

Although WordPress is pretty well optimized for SEO right out of the box, you can always improve the default installation with one or two SEO plug-ins.

• Google XML SiteMaps will automate the odious task of writing a Google sitemap
• All In One SEO Pack and Headspace2 will both help optimize your titles, tags, and keywords for maximum SEO

READER EXPERIENCE

Better navigation through your blog means better internal linking. And better internal linking is something both Google and your readers will appreciate. Try adding a Recent Posts widget to your sidebar or a Related Posts plug in to your posts. There are lots of plug ins that will do the job, so read the reviews before you decide. And don’t hesitate to disable one and try another. Here are a few I like:

• Similar Posts and WordPress Related Posts both add links to other posts on your blog with suggestions for related reading.
• Breadcrumb NavXT helps readers find their way about your blog. Some themes have breadcrumbs already built in.
• Search Suggest makes WordPress’ default search much more useful by suggesting similar terms, instead of returning a “No matching posts” result, if a reader mistypes or misspells a word.

SITE MANAGEMENT

There are two parts of blog maintenance you don’t want to lose control of: your RSS feed and WordPress updates. Automate them!

• Feedburner Feedsmith will integrate all your feeds into your Feedburner account. Readers will be able to subscribe more easily, without the confusion of dozens of sidebar chicklets.
• Wordpress Automatic Upgrade will guide you through the nerve-racking process of safely upgrading your blog. Considering how frequently WordPress issues upgrades, this plugin is essential.

APPEARANCE

Eye candy may not be as important as content, but the best blogs are a feast for the eyes as well as the mind. Take advantage of plug-ins for photography, text formatting, and anything else that specifically relates to your niche.

• Lightbox2 and NextGen Gallery are must have plug-ins for photo blogs
• TinyMCE Advanced adds more options to WordPress’ somewhat limited Visual Editor.

BOOKMARKING, SHARING, SOCIAL MEDIA

There are so many plug ins for social media that I don’t even know where to start in recommending a few. You’ll want to use those that are most relevant to your readers. For instance, you might want to add a Subscribe to Comments option to your RSS feeds. You’ll want to enable Digg, StumbleUpon, and Delicious recommendations, in both your feeds and your posts. Be sure to closely check both the “Optimize” and “Publicize” features in Feedburner. To avoid sidebar clutter, consider an all-in-one typ plug-in such as

• Share This
• Add To Any

Photo by imjustincognito Licensed under Creative Commons