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Take Advantage of Events To Promote A Product

Tuesday, February 28th, 2012
SXSW 2011

A couple of posts back, I showed you my business cards and mentioned we use MOO to print them. One of the things from MOO that I look forward to is their newsletter. It’s actually quite simply put together but because their products are so creative and colorful it just pops. Today, I received an email from them with the subject line “Going to SXSW? Remember your cards!” Smart! Not a new tactic of course but a great reminder for us marketers and even bloggers. Events are a wonderful reason to email prospects and offer your product again. More so if you know a large group of your customers know what the event is about and you know have attended in the past. Events make great content fodder for your blog. You can write pre, during and post articles whether you are doing or not. Events are good for affiliate marketing. If you promote business cards (like MOO), promotional products, tech gear, apps, checklists whatever that might help someone get ready for an event. Write about it, email about it, share it, hell write a short report and give it away. Some posting/report ideas: 25 things to pack when heading

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Here’s To The End Of Unread Downloaded Reports

Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012
Kindle It Send

When you opt-in to get a free report, do you read it immediately? I’m really curious to know so please share in the comments below. For me, the answer is no. I tend to grab it first and try to carve out time to read and give 100% attention to it later. Therein lies the problem. Later. Have you seen her? I hardly see her around at my place. The tragic end of the story is, piles and piles of downloaded reports in my hard drive, never opened. Some are even purchased! Uhuh, you can wag your finger at me. Then I realized something. It’s not that I don’t read. I read a lot. Nightly, sometimes up to 3 hours using the Kindle app on iPad. I know you can send personal documents to a Kindle via email but somehow I never noticed this option for the iPad until we purchased 2 Kindles for the kids. So here I was emailing myself all those paid reports, exploring options on Cloud Drive and stuff but still… What if the entire download process can be eliminated from the process? How can I push the latest issue of Jimmy D. Brown’s Traffic Fuel

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WordPress Widgets No Longer Drag-able

Monday, February 20th, 2012
Add widget in compatability mode

Here’s a chance for you to have a good laugh at my expense. Once while working on a WordPress site (something I do all day long), I clicked on Widgets to manage the different pieces of content for the site’s sidebar and home page. When the Widgets screen loaded, it looked really strange for some reason and all of a sudden, I could not drag and drop anymore. I’d been working on the site for several hours that day doing a ton of things so backtracking was going to be super hard. Still, I tried to do so but nothing worked! In a panic, I did the usual troubleshooting mental checklist, disable all plugins, revert to default theme. No drag and drop and the screen was still looking really awkward. This time, my all powerful tool Google didn’t have any good answers for me either. You know what? After a good hour trying to figure this out, on a whim I clicked on Screen Options up on the top of the Widgets screen, clicked Disable accessibility mode and voila! It all came back. This is one of those times I smack the forehead and go DuH! I simply could not

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WP-admin

A client contacted me last week to say she had lost the link to add plugins in the admin area on her WordPress powered blog. I don’t often sweat these things because 99% of the time they are easily solved. Sadly this one was not as obvious. As usual, the first few things I’d try are to disable all plugins, revert to default theme. That didn’t work. When that happens, you know it is a WordPress core or database issue. I’d even go as far to say there’s about a 99% chance it’s a database issue. Before I went digging in the database there was one more common solution to try that almost always worked. That is, create a new admin user or if you already have another admin user, log in as the secondary admin user then change roles of the original admin and change them back to admin. This sometimes ‘resets’ the permissions. In this particular case, it didn’t work and I actually had a feeling it won’t because both admin users were experiencing the same problem. This is a good indicator the database is somehow corrupted. At least the user tables were. Because of that, I went

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HotKeys For WordPress

Monday, January 30th, 2012
Crazy keyboard

Moving  your hand between the keyboard and mouse gets tiresome when you have to do it every few seconds. Thankfully when working with computer bound apps, there are plenty of hotkeys or keyboard shortcuts built in. The trouble with getting used to hotkeys – you begin to wish they were everywhere including web based apps. Which is why I really appreciate them when writing a blog because they help me focus. The longer I keep my hands on the keyboard busily typing away, the faster and more often I write. That’s a good thing when you’re working hard to push out posts regularly. Even if you aren’t the keyboard shortcut type by nature, give it a go just on WordPress and see if it improves your blogging speed. It might be clumsy at first trying to remember them but use them often enough, it becomes a habit you don’t hardly notice you’re using them. Here goes. Ctrl+A – Select All Ctrl+B – Bold Ctrl+C – Copy Ctrl+I – Italics Ctrl+U – Underline Ctrl+V – Paste Ctrl+Y – Redo Ctrl+Z – Undo Shift+End – Select text from cursor to end of line Shift+Home – Select text from cursor to beginning of line Shift+Left – Selects text

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3 Low Tech Ways To Deliver Audio Video Lessons Via Email

Friday, January 27th, 2012
Private video settings on YouTube

Audios and Videos are powerful and wonderful ways to learn new things. That’s probably why a lot of learning and information products out there are based audio visual media. If you’re thinking of selling your own learning product online, one of the simplest methods is to use email as the delivery mechanism. The bad part about email – you’ve guessed already – you can’t really send people audios or videos. So how are you going to accomplish the last step of delivery? In this post, I’m going to cover three out of the many other methods for simplicity’s sake. Besides, I really don’t want to scare you off with a bunch of high tech stuff that could go over your head. The ‘Click To Watch/Listen’ Method If your customer is using a modern browser that supports HTML 5, audio and visual will simply play when people click on the audio/video URL in the email. There is no need for you to build a web page but this is huge but. You can’t bank on that. Lots of people use outdated software and you really want something that will work no matter what they use. So, your best bet is to set up web

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How Do You Get Comments To Nest In WordPress?

Thursday, January 26th, 2012
Threaded comments

That is the question I came across not too long ago on a forum. It might seem like such a trivial matter to those more experienced WordPress users but really it may not be as simple as you think. This is why. Sometimes terminology gets in the way so let’s be clear what nested or threaded comments are. These replies to a comment that appear indented under the original comment. It is a great to help you and readers follow a conversation. WordPress integrated this feature into the basic install beginning version 2.7 so it’s been a while and many themes should have caught up by now. However, I know for a fact working with a lot of different people and installs over the years, some of us still use antiquated versions (dangerous) or use themes that are antiquated (just as dangerous). Knowing this, there are three ways you can turn on nested comments in WordPress. Turn It On No, I’m not trying to be funny. There are many many times especially on a site that has been around and using WordPress for a long time. You may not realize the feature is there when you upgraded and simply never looked at

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What Do Your Business Cards Look Like? Here’s Ours

Tuesday, January 24th, 2012
my-business-cards

Design, graphics *sigh* what can I say? I’m just no good at them and when it comes to business cards… let’s not even go there. In the past I’ve always opted for the uninspired plain old boring white card with a dash or color in the text perhaps and some cheesy art that the card printer suggests. I’ve gone as far as adding a photo to my cards and that’s about it. Then… I found MOO! I’d spend hours just admiring those beautiful cards. Take a look at these. Aren’t they gorgeous? Question is, can I the geek and just about anyone who is design challenged make such lovely creations? You see, one of my problems with business cards is, I do so many things within technology. How can I pack all that in a card? Seriously, it hurts when I have to tell people “I make websites” because what I do is way, way beyond that. I decided to try. There’s something about MOO that gives birth to inspiration. The grand idea – use word clouds. I headed over to Tagxedo. You can use Wordle too but I like Tagxedo better because you can make shapes out of your words.

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Air Sketch

After a long day this week, I decided to tear myself away from the desk but alas, there was preparation for our tech training class to be done. So, I pulled out the iPad, got cozy on the bed and fired up two apps. The Tools One of them – believe it or not – is an app I bought for my daughter. It’s called Drawing Pad. She absolutely adores it and despite my challenge with drawing and graphics I love doodling on it too. The other is AirSketch. This one is a work tool. AirSketch is essentially a whiteboard type application but it has a neat feature that allows you to broadcast your whiteboard locally so anyone in your office can just pull up a web browser, type in the IP address for the app and voila! Everything you draw or write shows up on their browser. It is so very cool. The How How can these two apps replace PowerPoint? Remember, I said I was not working on the computer but I still wanted something that look like slides. Step One Using Drawing Pad, I loaded a fun background and used a brush to write my slide heading.

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Screen capture with annotation

Sometimes the solution or the path to a solution is right under your nose. While on the job, one of my friend’s clients asked if she knew of a way to make the photos on her site be displayed it does on iPhoto. This posed a problem because my friend doesn’t use a Mac. There are screen shots all over the Internet of course but that’s still not helpful because from what I understand, there are several ways iPhoto displays them. I don’t have the iPhoto app installed and couldn’t help her either. There are many different screens within the iPhoto app. Which portion is the client talking about? When outsourcing, the old adage “A picture is worth a thousand words” is so true. Many times in classes, interviews, webinars, writing etc, my favorite advise is – “Don’t tell, show“. It’s not just for your sanity. It’s for your team’s sanity too. You can show what you mean by grabbing a screen shot or making a screen recording. Here are some tools you can use. Tools to grab static screen shots: Snagit Screenshot Captor SnapDraw Photoscape Tools to record screen videos: Camtasia (Windows and Mac) Jing (Windows and Mac) Wink (Windows) Capture FOX

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