New Years Day is treated like a reset button by many. Rather than setting a resolution, I urge you to set an Intention. What’s your New Year Intention? Please share it here!
Yearly Archives: 2010
Is your blog hiding?
I recently found a website that had a blog. But I didn’t know that at first. Because “Blog” was not a menu item. Well, it was, but it was a second-level menu item, buried at the bottom of a number of other items. The parent menu item was “Tools”. So I guess I found the blog only because I was curious about what “Tools” meant.
Your blog should be front and center, on your Home page. It’s the most important single part of your website. It’s the part that establishes your credibility as someone who knows what they’re talking about. It’s the part that brings people back to read more. It’s the place where you can let people know your latest thoughts and opinions. It’s the place where they can find interesting and useful information. It’s the place where you can develop relationships.
Don’t hide your blog.
This is a guest post by Tom Harris. Visit his awesome and amazing website here.
How to write to your dream persona
What’s a persona?
In marketing, it’s a description of the characteristics of a person who fits an idealized profile. It’s your ideal customer or client. It’s a description of the type of person you’d most like to be able to talk to, and to influence. In blogging, it’s the type of person you’d most like to have as a loyal reader of your blog.
Who is that person? Are they young, old, male, female? Do they have a certain income level? Certain interests? Certain hobbies? Do they work in a particular industry?
Going through the process of describing this “dream person” will enable you to write more effective blog posts. Identifying the persona of your ideal customer allows you to talk to that person. Doing that is much more effective than trying to talk to the world in general.
Describe your ideal customer (your dream person) as best you can. Then just write to that persona, and that persona only. Never mind everybody else; they’re not nearly as important. Write about the things that would interest that person(a), that would touch their emotions, that would be interesting and useful to them.
You may end up with several distinct personas that you want to write to; that’s OK. You might want to give them first names, and write to Bob on Mondays, and Fred on Tuesdays, and Susie on Wednesdays.
If you do this, you’ll find it much easier to come up with ideas for blog posts, and it will be much easier to craft an effective message.
This is a guest post by Tom Harris. Visit his awesome and amazing website here.
Where to host your blog – even if you know you want wordpress
There are basically two hosting options for WordPress blogging software:
1) Host it for free using wordpress.com.
2) Find a hosting provider and pay a monthly fee (this is called “self-hosting”)
Option 2 is the best choice by far. Here’s why:
- WordPress.com free hosting does not allow you to use any custom or commercial themes; you can only choose from the limited number of themes they make available. (a theme provides the “look” of your blog)
- You cannot modify themes in any way.
- WordPress.com free hosting does not allow you to upload plugins (plugins provide various optional useful features to WordPress).
- You are not allowed to sell ads on a free WordPress.com site.
- With WordPress.com free hosting, you have no control over your blog site; you must live by their Terms and Conditions. Your blog is not really yours, and they can shut it down if they don’t like something that you’re doing.
- The default URL for free hosting is “yourdomain.wordpress.com” rather than “yourdomain.com”. This means that you’re using someone else’s domain rather than your own, and you don’t really “own” the address. Furthermore, Google will not recognize the site as belonging to you, and you will get no search engine ranking benefits.
The only advantages of free hosting with WordPress.com are:
- It’s free.
- It’s stupidly simple to set up a site, and there are no maintenance or technical considerations.
These “advantages” are not worth the price you pay in other areas.
Self-hosting provides the following advantages:
- You can use any themes that are available from any source.
- You can have someone modify your theme to change the look and functionality of it.
- You can upload any plugins you want to add functionality to your site.
- You have full control. You can do whatever you want with your blog, because it’s yours. Nobody can impose any of their rules on you.
Considering that self-hosting costs less than $10 a month, this is an easy decision.
Hosting companies that offer WordPress hosting provide very simple installation processes and good support. Check out www.bluehost.com.
This is a guest post by Tom Harris. Visit his awesome and amazing website here.
HaPpY BiRtHdAy tO YoU?
I just popped over to say Happy Birthday to several of my friends on Facebook
. What if on birthdays instead of just saying the traditional Happy Birthday – we shared one thing that we love about each person? What about you, are you up to it?
Why should you even have a blog?
There are tons of reasons to have a blog. Here are a few.
It Gives Users a Reason to Come Back
If your website content never changes, visitors will read what they want to once and leave and probably never be back. But if you’re writing new content all the time, they have a reason to come back. And if your content is interesting, they may even become loyal readers (and fans).
It Gives You a Reason to Create New Content
Once you’ve established a blogging habit, you’ll want to keep doing it (the definition of a habit, after all). If you don’t have a blog, adding new content is difficult and may involve redesigning your site. Blogs are simple; they manage themselves. All you have to do is to keep pouring content into them.
Blogging Helps You Think and Improves Your Creativity
By disciplining yourself to blog frequently, you are making yourself create new ideas, think new thoughts, and explain things in new ways. Blogging will keep you out of mental ruts. New ideas will emerge, and you may even find yourself changing or redefining your business model.
Google Loves Activity
Did you know that Google gets bored easily, and if it finds nothing new when it checks your site, it probably will stop checking? But did you know that Google sees each new blog post as a separate page, and more pages and more content equals more attention from search engines? Want to get found? Write more stuff, and do it often!
This is a guest post by Tom Harris. Visit his awesome and amazing website here.
Confessions of a CityVille addict
…I mean player, no wait, it’s market research.
…and it really is! Think about it, you show up in town, the new kid on the block and you are given a chance. You have limited energy, resources and experience. What do you do? You start with what comes easy. Watch, wait, learn and see what happens. Pretty soon you have a few more resources, a little more energy. It starts to make more sense.
What’s that? You just gained experience in launching something new. With a little guidance along the way.
I started playing CityVille the day it came out. Why? Because if a company like Zynga has figured out how to get millions of people to give them a little bit of money for playing an online game (and for those of you who think it’s silly – remember the old-fashioned thing called an arcade?) It’s like that, you just don’t have to leave your home. That and the fact they have made a pretty lucrative business out of it – makes you want to find out what they have going on.
I had heard that CityVille was going to be similar to the Sims (which I never really played). I was intrigued, and being in the social media space I figured I’d give it a try.
There may be some people who become very enthralled in the game. That would never happen to me, of course not. I won’t make people wait to leave to go to an appointment because I have to harvest my corn to stock my shoppes. That would be just crazy.
Then something interesting began to happen. My strategy which in the game was get as high a population as possible and fill up every square plot of land with a business started to cost me more energy than I had at any given time. So I started to as myself which home resulted in the most amount of rent with the least amount of energy? Which business had the most return on my goods, the bakery which is 40 coins for 10 supplies, or the flowershop which is 95 for 25? What about franchising? This got me questioning what the algorithm is that CityVille is using to calculate how often the population in your town will turn over your shoppes. Sounds a bit like business, doesn’t it?
That still doesn’t help me when my eggplant is ripe and my energy is gone.
I guess they figured out how to get you to come back every day, didn’t they?
What if you had a consumable product or service that had your clients coming back every day for more.
Silly – or brilliant? You tell me.
Looking for a gift to give this holiday season?
Case Study
We highly recommend the Musings of Tom Harris on CD.
Hello, I’m Tom Harris, Speaker, Author, Storyteller, Motivator, Marketing Coach, Business Consultant, Cat and Dog Lover, Singer, Entrepreneur, Book Addict, Student of Nearly Everything, Explainer of Complexities, and Creator of Cool New Ideas.
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Allan Curtis just poked you…
Excuse me, he did what?!
Facebook my dears, is place of opportunity and exploration, and a place devoted to making and maintaining connections. One of these methods, as odd as it may sound, is by “poking” a friend. Perhaps this has historic value from real life where you walk around hoping to find a friend occupied so you may startle them with a poke thus cementing your friendship, or maybe it’s just that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has an odd sense of humor.
How do we do it?
If you have facebook’s old layout, on someone’s page, look below their profile picture along with “View photos of so-and-so”. Upon clicking the button, the person when they next log in will see that you have “poked” them (shown on their home screen). With new facebook, the poke is an easily clickable button with a finger pointing on the upper right side of someone’s profile page.
Now I can do it, what do I do with it?
That, my friend is up to you. Experiment with the poke, maybe you’ll start a poke war, but hey, every time the recipient clicks “poke ____”, they’re thinking of you.