Information Sells

I’ll be interviewed today on The Savvy Seller’s Tips from the Top Podcast. We’ll be discussing my new eBook, Blogging with WordPress. If you haven’t bought the book yet, but are thinking about it, you should listen to this short (15-20 minute) podcast live today at 11:00 AM PDT, 2 PM EDT. I’ll be mentioing [...]

Tags: podcast, tips from the top

Does your business use a FAQ? OK – let’s reword that. Could your business use a FAQ? Sure it could. Enormous amounts of time are spent answering the same questions over and over. Good Customer Service demands that we don’t say, “I AM SO SICK OF THAT QUESTION! READ THE %$#@ TERMS!!!!” Instead we politely [...]

Tags: email, gmail

You can’t get away from GMail. Since it was introduced about 4 years ago, GMail has changed the way email is accessed and stored. There were certainly online email accounts before GMail – and it’s not like HotMail, AOL, or Yahoo mail were difficult to use. But GMail just did so many things right (including [...]

Tags: email, gmail

If you are new to screencasting, the acronyms, abbreviations, and file formats can seem overwhelming. Once you understand what they mean, they can make your work easier.

Tags: screencast

Lately, I keep seeing forums and blog posts where sellers are arguing with buyers. Where is the profit in that? What do you get when you win a fight with a customer? An ex-customer. Feel better now? Do you know the cliche about Customer Service? Rule #1 The Customer Is Always Right. Rule #2 Sometimes [...]

Tags: customer service

You already know how important first impressions are – but what is the first chance you have to impress your buyer? Is it the sales page? When they receive the package? When they open the box? The first time they pop the DVD in the player? The old saying is wrong. It’s not that you [...]

Tags: packaging

Objective observers pretty much agree – You Tube quality stinks. When quality is critical – or even minimally important – an embedded You Tube video has been the very last choice. Lately, however, You Tube has been experimenting on site with higher quality video. You may see a small link underneath a video saying “Watch [...]

Tags: quality, Video

What goes into the price of your product? Materials, certainly. Time and labor. If it’s destined for the shelf of a bricks and mortar store, you probably factor in breakage, returns, shelf wear, maybe theft. Overhead. What else? One factor, often overlooked by product developers, can turn into a nightmare, chipping away at profits while [...]

Tags: support

Blogging With WordPress has officially been released. The deadline for the half price special has been re-aligned with the release of the book, so that folks ordering through the official download link don’t feel screwed. If you pay with PayPal and order through the official download link before 6:00 PM tonight, Pacific Time, I’ll send [...]

Tags: ebooks

When you think “search,” you probably think of Google. Then maybe Yahoo or MSN or… what? Well, according to what I read in Bill Myers’ Tip of the Week today, the Number 2 search engine in the world is … You Tube. Bill writes: According to ComScore’s August 2008 search engine rankings, YouTube is now [...]

Tags: search engines, You Tube

If you enjoy the posts here on Information Sells, I think you’ll enjoy my new eBook, Blogging With WordPress. About 25% of the content has previously appeared on the blog – and about 75% has never been published anywhere before. The PDF ebook has 81 pages describing everything from installing a WordPress blog on a [...]

Tags: discount, ebook, wordpress

This is a true story. A friend of mine produces a one hour webinar that teaches internet sellers how to market their business. She wants to do a class on newsletters, and she invited a well-known, easy for beginners to use newsletter company to be her guest. They declined. Well, that’s annoying – but the [...]

Tags: fear of success, newsletter

Great speakers are great writers. If you want to learn to communicate, there is no better teacher than Winston Churchill. You can find MP3s of some of Churchill’s most famous speeches on the web. Churchill is a master of rhythm and repetition: “We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we [...]

Tags: language, rhetoric, writing

Does perfectionism hold you back? Many product developers struggle with the idea that a new product must be perfect before it is released. Naturally, we all want to be as good as we can be. But there is a difference between doing the best job you can and perfection. Practice improves performance. Your next product [...]

Tags: perfectionism

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. [...]

Tags: plugins