Business
Robert Steele – Open Source Answer to Everything?
Robert Steele was the keynote speech to kick off the first day of Gnomedex. He made a very interesting speech, although it was a lot more political than I was expecting. Essentially, he is a big believer in open everything, and he addressed a lot of our political problems to make the point that openness would solve the problems.
He talks about the power of the blogging community to influence politics, and how blogs can help take the country back. Steele is a big believer in OPEN. Open source is one thing, but Steel’s major focus today was open government. He even talked about open spectrum….why are we selling spectrum? Open government. Open networks. Freedom to create by all. Open everything.
We’re about to see end user driven innovation.
The traditional media isn’t doing their job, so it falls to bloggers. It is easy to think of blogs in a very limited sense. A form of publishing and that’s it. What Steele is saying is that blogging really does serve a world purpose. It is publishing brought to the masses. To you. To me. It gets us out of the top down arrangement of the media, where most of us are readers who consume the writings of a few reporters, usually corporate in nature. Today, we can all be writers and publishers.
Whether one agrees with Steele or not, the overriding point is that the populace insisting on open communication and then using the medium of the blog to serve as open intelligence is really a key component of the answer. Have something to say? Get out there and blog about it.
Coming back to open source, it is usually thought to be free code, free software. But, the philosophy behind it is larger than that. It is freedom of use, freedom of thought. And Steele’s point is that this philosophy taken out to the world situation would solve all kinds of problems. He has a point, although I think Steele is a little too utopian in his views and, like too many in the political realm, he tends to use hyperbole to get attention. When he began speaking, I was thinking “what is this, a damn soap box campaign speech?” But, it got better.
Perhaps we, as internet publishers, play a larger role in the world than some would have thought. What do you think? Do you think a blog is just a form of publishing, suitable for family updates? Or do you think it could serve a larger purpose in the world scene?
Getting Tickets for Tradeshows Through Flight Miles
Since I am traveling this week, something came to mind. Actually, it came to mind some time ago but I thought to talk about it here today. And that is the use of flight miles to make attending tradeshows and conferences more affordable.
I am traveling to Seattle this week, and I had to pay for the ticket. Now, I got a decent deal on it through Hotwire.com, coupled with my hotel. However, I am flying Delta. Delta isn’t exactly my favorite airline. They are trying to cut so many costs that they are just short of using duct tape to hold the wings on. But, I had to actually PAY for that ticket.
On the other hand, Delta (as you may know) is the primary partner airline for American Express. My wife and I have been using American Express for personal expenses for some time. Our trip to Russia last year was done using flight miles. It dawned on me this year – why not have an Amex for the business? I spend a lot of money on various things for the business, so flight miles would add up fast.
With Delta flight miles, it takes 25,000 flight miles to earn a round trip ticket within the United States. 50,000 miles to get a round trip international fare. So, yeah, it can take some time to build up. Some purchases will get you double miles, and they often give you big bonuses at the beginning. But, the way I look at it is that I am spending the money anyway – why not get something for it? Plus, it also helps you consolidate expenses.
There are other cards that earn you flight miles, but I think American Express is a little more service-oriented. And they should be considering they are charging an annual fee and an interest rate which will bury you alive. Yeah, definitely do not use this card if you are not able to pay off the balance in full every month. Their interest rate is pretty high. You want to use this card for the perks and the flight miles, not to bury yourself in debt.
So, check it out. Attending conferences is a good way to keep in touch with what is happening in your field. But, that usually means business travel expenses. You might as well do what you can to make it more affordable.
WP-ContactForm with Departments
WP-ContactForm with Departments is a modified version of WP-Contactform by Ryan Duff. I created this plug-in because I needed a contact form in Wordpress that would allow users to select a department and have the emailed message sent to a different email address depending on the department they chose. WP-ContactForm is a nice solution and I figured it’d be best to modify it to suit my needs.
Installation
Installation is dead easy:
- Download the plug-in.
- Un-zip
- Upload the wp-contact-form folder into your plug-ins folder.
- Activate the plug-in inside of the Wordpress admin panel.
- Go to Options -> Contact Form and define your options.
- Create a page with the necessary HTML comment. See below.
Usage
To insert the contact form onto a page, you include the HTML comment:
<!--contact form-->
The plug-in will automatically replace that with the contact form.
To set up your departments, enter them into the departments field. The format is ONE PER LINE, and:
Department Name=>Email Address
So, let’s say you have a Sales department and a Newsletter department. Your delartment list would look like:
Sales=>sales@yourdomain.com
Newsletter=>newsletter@yourdomain.com
Save your options and the contact form will display a dropdown with your departments listed.
Download
Wordpress EasyFeeds Plug-In
EasyFeeds is a simple plug-in which will allow you to display the contents of any RSS feed inside of a post or page inside of Wordpress. The output will be a simple unordered list with no formatting. You can use your own site’s stylesheet to style the list as you see fit. The plug-in uses the Wordpress built-in feed reader.
Installation
Installation is dead easy:
- Download the plug-in.
- Un-zip
- Upload easyfeeds.php into your plug-ins folder.
- Activate the plug-in inside of the Wordpress admin panel.
- You’re Done!
Usage
Inside of any post or page in Wordpress, use the following format to insert a feed:
[feed:http://www.urltofeed.com]
That’s it! The plug-in will detect that string and pass the URL to the feed into the feed reader and replace it with the list of headlines.
Download
Wordpress Plug-ins
In the process of my own working with Wordpress, I have developed a few plug-ins to get various things done. Below are the plug-ins. I will release them as they are ready for prime-time.
EasyFeeds
Provides a quick way to show headlines from an RSS feed in your pages or posts
WP-ContactForm with Departments
A modified version of WP Contact Form that supports multiple departments with different email addresses
Ultimate Guide To Running Your Business From Anywhere
One of the beauties of running an internet business is the ability to work from anywhere. Additionally, recent reviews of the 4 Hour Work Week, by Tim Ferris, has created renewed interest in the idea of being able to run a business from anywhere. One of the things he talks about in his book is the ability to not only reduce your work time, but to travel a lot and run the business from afar. So, get a laptop and an internet connection, you’re good to go, right? Well, not always.
Running a business means you need to use a lot of different types of software. And sometimes it is hard to make the data completely portable. Many of us have more than one computer and that leads to issues with synching data between multiple machines. Myself, I have a desktop machine in my home office. I also have a notebook computer. I like to be able to work as much as possible on either computer without really having to pay attention to where my data is and if I have the most up-to-date version of a particular file on the computer than I’m using. You try to multiply that problem out among hundreds or thousands of computer files – and you’re screwed. Sooner or later, you’re going to overwrite something and lose some of your work. It sucks. I’ve done it.
So, we want to live on the go. Not necessarily “on the run”, but definitely not tied to a particular location. Or even a particular computer. The great news is that the technology is there today to make this really easy. In some cases you might need to fork over a little scratch. However in many cases, you don’t. So, read on…
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Summary and an Offer of Help
This is the sixth of a six part series on how to get your small business website off the ground.
OK, the last five posts have walked you through the basics of getting your business website off the ground. I decided to write this series for one primary reason: I saw a need for it. I have seen a lot of business sites that are wastes of time. And at the same time, I have seen that there seems to be a sense of misunderstanding and confusion on how to get the ball rolling. To so many small business owners, the idea of running a website seems daunting. You are very busy and don’t really have the time to deal with all that geek talk out there on how to do it. So, you do the best you can with the knowledge you have and hope for the best. The end result is that you have a business site up there that is underperforming. It might bring in the occasional lead, but nothing like what you had in mind.
And the worse part is that it is easy to get lost in all the chatter. There are a lot of blogs like WebbyOnline that talk about how to promote your online business or make money on the net. However, at least in my opinion, it’s not often that somebody just sits down and lays out the basics. Instead they talk about the latest and greatest, and what’s new – leaving in the dust the majority of small business owners that just want a site that works without spending their entire lives making it happen.
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Essential Steps to Web Traffic to Your Business
This is the fifth of a six part series on how to get your small business website off the ground.
Yesterday I discussed the most important aspect there is in terms of online promotion of your business website – communication. I also mentioned the importance of content on your business site and that a blog is an ideal publishing medium to get that done. That’s the theory behind it all, however when you get specific in terms of the internet, there are obviously a ton of more specific ideas for promotion that one can use. All of these mediums all only serve to increase the communication and the reality. In effect, you’re doing the same thing at all times. You just might use a variety of mediums to get the job done. Let’s look at some of them.
Search Engines
No doubt that search engines are very likely to be the #1 source of web traffic to your business website. In order to get into the search engines, you need to have something there for them to index. That’s where your content comes in (again, I can’t overemphasize the content). Search engines (especially Google) love blogs, especially when they are updated often. So, post as often as you can. And make the posts meaningful using keywords that people are likely to use when searching for solutions. Make sure to use those keywords in your title as well as in your content. The TITLE tags and the HEADER tags in your page are very important in terms of how your site is going to get indexed in the search engines. For example, if you run a local car repair business, you know that visitors from other areas of the country are not very likely to make you any money. So, you want your site’s TITLE and HEADER keywords to reflect the kinds of keywords that will bring in your target market. Let’s say your car shop is located in Tampa, FL. People looking for car shops in Tampa on the internet are most likely going to enter something like “car shops in Tampa”. It is very important, then, that you put the city into your site’s title and in keywords, along with other suitable keywords. If you do that, your car shop is very likely to appear in front of the sites of other car shops in Tampa which forgot to put the word “Tampa” in their site’s title.
On a related note, I usually do not recommend anybody hire one of these catch-all search engine submission services. Some of them are legit and will do good work, but the majority of them (in my opinion) are total wastes of time and will just take your money. Search engine optimization (SEO) is another great example of the 80/20 rule. Most of the optimizations needed to get decent search engine rankings can be done easily, and it will get you 80% of the way for 20% of the effort. The SEO pros (if they are real pros, that is) can do that other, more arcane, part of SEO and perhaps really get you higher in the search rankings. But, the simple fact is that the basic principles of SEO are anything but rocket science and I just don’t think you need to hire somebody specifically for search engine submissions. The really good ones will actually work with you to optimize your site. If all they do is advertise submitting your site into hundreds of search engines for a one-time fee, chances are they are just using some search engine submission software to mass submit your site. It isn’t targeted at all, and most cases you have little to no way to verify that anything was really done.
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How To Draw in Visitors and Make Them Like You
This is the fourth of a six part series on how to get your small business website off the ground.
At this point, I am going to assume that you have a business website that is online already. I am hoping that you have considered the topics I have talked about in the prior posts of this series in terms of designing your site around a single goal and getting your sales funnel set up. Doing it this way, your site can actually serve a purpose for your business rather than simply being out there as another one of millions of useless business sites.
Now that you have a site online, you want traffic. To do that, you need to promote. It used to be said that if you put it up there, people will come. That is not true. If you simply put the site online and cross your fingers, you’ll die waiting for the traffic to come. It would be like building a road out in the middle of the woods with no entrance or exit. It’s just there. Nobody is going to know it’s there.
The thing to think about here is what is likely going to draw in a prospect? Is a casual web surfer likely going to come to your site just to read about you and see your mug shot? Probably not. They have no REALITY with you and simply don’t care whether you live or die. That sounds brutal, but it’s true. The average web surfer has an incredibly short attention span and is borderline bored. Your job is to provide something on your site that they will care about and then convert them into a person that DOES have some reality with you.
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Getting Your Business Website Online
This is the third of a six part series on how to get your small business website off the ground.
OK, now you have a grand plan in place for using your business website to actually bring in business. Now you need to actually get the site online. The important thing to keep in mind here is that the site needs to be specifically set up in order to achieve your goal – a new prospect entering into your sales funnel. If the site simply consists of the usual corporate-speak, it isn’t going to work. Today’s internet reader is practically immune to that stuff.
Web Design
The design of your business website is very important. A site that looks bad or (at best) amateur is going to reflect badly on your business. A bad design says a few things to your potential customer:
- We are small time.
- We can’t afford a web designer.
Whether one would admit to it or not, a bad design will turn off customers. You take any business market and compare the effectiveness of a bad design to a professional design, and the pro design will outperform in almost all cases. This is not to say that you HAVE to go out and hire a professional designer to do your site. You don’t. But, again, it comes down to your in-house skill. If your skills in terms of graphic design or web design are not that good, you will be much better off to come up with the money and hire it done for you.
That said, web design is an important factor, not only for “curb appeal”, but in order to focus your visitor’s attention on the ultimate goal – entering the sales funnel. If you want the sales lead, for example, then your site needs to be designed such that it will almost draw the user’s eye into the big button to provide their contact info. This can be done through use of contrasting colors and through strategic placement of elements on the page. NEVER hide the goal from your visitor. If you want them to call you, your phone number should be obviously plastered on every page of your website.
I'm David Risley. I've been making my living as a blogger for over a decade. Blogging is my business and how I support my family. With this blog, I'm just gettin' REAL and telling you how this business works. 
