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. Entered a bunch of words that describe what I do. I created 5 different clouds in different shapes. Why 5? Because MOO oh! MOO! I’m so in love with it – they can print different cards in one order. If you order 100 cards, you can make every card unique or you can split it all up like I did and have 20 cards in 5 designs. Gotta love technology.

At the end of it all, here’s the result. I opted for the mini cards because I thought they were cute and would be a great conversation starter – and boy were they ever! The choices too made great conversation since sometimes people chose what they wanted

Here’s another reason to love MOO the quality is absolutely fab. The card stock is heavy and rigid. I’m getting ready to order another batch this time I want to try no graphics only text with tips on them e.g. “Make your site mobile friendly. Try MobiPages” or something like that haven’t quite thought them all out yet.

If you need business cards, I highly recommend MOO. They may be a little higher than say Vistaprint or other online printers but it really isn’t that much more if you consider the design flexibility and the results will wow you. You’ll get a 10% discount too if you use this link. Try it.

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. If there was text I could add them otherwise I just left the space blank so I can use AirSketch to illustrate my points later. I created a bunch of blank slides with headers and saved them all to Photos.

Step Two

Next in AirSketch, I loaded the photos as the background and saved them in the correct order of my presentation.

Step Three

When it came time for class, I used the share desktop feature in my conference room, opened the browser and loaded AirSketch into it. Now, I am ready to display each slide and free to annotate, draw, illustrate to my heart’s content. Loved it!

Even though my conference room has the ability to do white board, I find it a million times easier to draw on an iPad using a Stylus than trying to draw with a mouse. It’s also more natural, like teaching in a real classroom except you’re writing on the iPad instead of the chalk board.

More Reasons To Love It

You can get pretty creative, fun and even polished and professional if you want. Drawing Pad app is not required. I used it because I wanted to create slides while away from the computer. The key is AirSketch and the ability to share your desktop in your conference room. If you are teaching in a real life classroom you will need to hook your computer up to a projector.

There are other neat features in AirSketch too like import PDF’s so you can essentially load your slides into the app and draw/annotate on it as you present. You can change the colors of your pen, there are 5 pen types to choose from and you can undo – great feature. I messed up in my annotation during class once and just hit undo.

Watch A Demo

My drawing skills aren’t the best so the ‘slide’ may not be up to par for some of you but you can certainly load up professionally created graphics as your background.

What It Costs

AirSketch cost me $9.99. There is a free one but with very limited options and Drawing Pad was $1.99 definitely so easy on the wallet and worth every single penny. What more, the freedom to step away from the computer is hugely liberating. Highly recommended if you teach a lot of webinars or love doing recorded videos.

It’s very flexible. You can change the colors, size, add text all on the fly. Below are some placeholder images generated. Check out, bookmark and use Placehold.it.

“Deep Linking is making a hyperlink that points to a specific page or image on a web site instead of the home page”

A real live example is in the paragraph above. I just deep linked to Wikipedia so you will land on the exact page explaining this term. You may not even think twice about it when you’re on blogs and other people’s site. You may even be actively doing it because it helps make your content rich and relevant.

Deep linking is also good to establish usability. The last thing you want to do when creating content is to frustrate readers and make them search for the page or item you’re referring to. People expect logical continuity when they click on a link.

As an affiliate, I always love it when marketers allow me to use deep links to their content and still cookie my referral. It makes me want to talk about that program, their content and link to their stuff everywhere in all types of content I create – videos, blog posts, reports, tools, landing pages etc.

In short – deep linking is good for you and your affiliate.

Many shopping cart and affiliate systems have this feature. Off the top of my head, 1ShoppingCart, Digital Access Pass, Delavo they all offer this. In this post, I’d like to focus just on aMember.

Traditionally this is not a feature that it supports. The good news is, this is not very difficult to do if you have a geek working with you. He (or she) can whip up a quick script to do all that.

Another way is to use our RSSBrander plugin because it comes bundled with this very script. Big hint – the plugin also a lot cheaper than paying a developer to write custom code for you

Once you have installed the script (included in RSSBrander), you can now tell affiliates you now support deep linking. Here is an example how they would craft their affiliate coded deep links.

Assuming your jump script is installed here:
http://yourmembersite.com/jump.php

The page affiliate wants people to land on:
http://yourblog.com/123/some-cool-post/

Affiliate’s ID: 987

The link affiliates should use:
http://yourmembersite.com/jump.php?r=987&u=yourblog.com/123/some-cool-post/

So in reality, the affiliate needs to save this portion:

http://yourmembersite.com/jump.php?r=987&u=

Then append the URL of the page they want people to go at the end. Pretty neat side perk of the plugin.

Learn what else the RSSBrander can do for you.

What attracted me to it is

• The headline, guarantee, opening text, PS suggestions. You won’t believe how much I struggle with these
• It can work with my existing theme (or most themes)

Pre-Written Copy Suggestions

The moment I got my hands on it, I ran a quick test and managed to cobble up a landing page in 15 minutes. Obviously, I’d need a lot more time when writing a real opt-in or sales page. However, I can already see how much it will speed up this process for me. You need to understand that for me, writing a sales page even a simple landing page is like asking me to jump off a cliff. The result – big time procrastination and that’s never good.

With copy suggestions, the plugin helped me start and re-start my thought process as I work through the different sections a landing page should address. It is like a little nudge to keep me going. That is just as important as getting started – to keep going until the task is done.

Works With Any Theme – Really?

Next thing I did was test the landing page on several themes. I ran it on a Builder child theme and a Genesis child theme since these are almost the only themes I use anymore.

Overall, the landing page performed consistently. The features and benefit bullets, testimonials box, guarantee box, order form, order button and credit card icons all worked nicely on every theme. The page width adjustments also worked well. So did the font headings.

Here are some screen shots of the same landing page on three different themes without doing any kind of style sheet editing at all.

Visual Elements

On my first use, I completely missed visual short codes that’s built right into the text editor. Using it, you can simply select a block of text and tell it to style the text as an attractive highlighted box or button. Really love this feature.

What Could Be Better

Like everything else, there are a few things I’ve noticed. Perhaps because I build so many WordPress sites so it might be I’m extra critical.

• Page width – you can edit the page width of your landing page which is awesome but the most narrow you can specify is 800px. A little too wide for my tastes. I would like to see options down to 650px or even custom defined.
• The video player is set to autoplay by default. It would be better if the user can define this.

What It Does Best

I’ve only ever worked with three other sales letter themes/plugins. Optimize Press, Premise and MarketerCMS. Even so, the encounters have been brief and in the capacity of a developer, not writing copy – with the exception of MarketerCMS. I’m certain, sitting in the copywriters seat would influence my outlook on all three greatly.

When it comes to features like landing page layouts, opt-in form integration, funnels, SEO, membership site integration and pretty graphics – Optimize Press, Premise and perhaps even MarketerCMS will win. They are more fully featured.

And that brings me to the point, WP Sales Letter is somewhat in a sub-class of its own. As it is at time of writing, it does one job really well – get you writing your sales copy as well as thinking in a structured, step-by-step method to make sure you’ve covered your bases.

This makes the plugin ideal for those who are perhaps a little – or a lot – intimidated with the idea of writing copy. After all, it doesn’t matter how pretty a sales page looks if it is not finished, it sells nothing.

If you are a seasoned and very experienced copywriter, this could still work very well for you by making the process go faster.

The other great thing going for it is the fact you can keep your existing theme and you won’t have to set up a brand new WordPress site just so you can use a sales letter theme – that doesn’t make sense at all to me.

The Bottom Line

The plugin is perfect for me. I’m a developer not a copywriter. It helps me keep my thoughts and ideas focused. If there are a few things that don’t play well with the theme, the developer side of me can fix it up quick and easy.

If you’d like to see a real life example of a sales letter created using WP Sales Letter, check out our RSSBrander plugin page. The only thing I tweaked was adding bullets which I needed to do anyway because the theme doesn’t support bullets.

WP Sales Letter is also very affordable. Certainly something to get when working on an existing site where a theme change is not possible or desired. Keep in mind, this is the first release. As with any software I’m sure improvements are worked out as we go so I consider this a worthwhile addition to your toolbox.

What Is Google Plus (Google+)?

Just as the announcement of Google Voice excited the business community, the introduction of Google Plus (Google+) had business entrepreneurs eagerly awaiting details. Google+ is Google’s version of Facebook, a social network that they hope will do for social networking what Google has done for search engines and what Google Chrome still hopes to do for web browsers. Although Google Plus is currently available for personal accounts, with
Google Plus for business coming in the next several months, you can use your personal profile to become familiar with some of the features that may be available to businesses.

Google+ Features

One of the main ideas behind Google+ is simplification and streamlining. You’ll still be able to hook up with all your friends and find out what everyone is doing; Google+ just hopes to make it easier, with ideas like “circles,” essentially groups within your larger group of Google+ friends. Just as in real life you run in different circles, you can focus on particular groups of friends in Google+.

A similar feature, Huddle, serves as a sort of online conference call, allowing you to get all your friends on the same page when trying to come to a meeting of the minds for things such as which movie to see or where to meet up. Since sharing information has become a big part of social networking, the Sparks feature of Google+ actually pulls news items and videos that it thinks will suit your taste and delivers them to you to analyze and share.

Google+ and Business Possibilities

It shouldn’t be too difficult to see the applications for business and business communications. Your company could set up business Google+ pages that allow you to create Circles of anything from potential business partners to new clients, that allow you to share new innovations and news about your company with others who are linked to your Google+ page and much more. At some point there may be a way to integrate your current business VoIP system with Google+ technology. You may even be able to have business VoIP conference calls while visually communicating in a Google+ Huddle.

As is usually the case with new internet technology, the possibilities are only limited by your imagination. Whether your business is a successful or growing business, you’ll want to stay tuned to the launch and progress of Google+. Start thinking about all the applications it has for your business communications and use your personal Google account to get a sampling of what is on the horizon for your business.

What features and capabilities would you like to see in Google+ for your business?

Months later, I bit the bullet and made the effort to switch hoping this time the developer would have fixed it already but no such luck. It’s a long story but it interfered with the way Firefox windows would open. In my desperate search for a replacement, I found Rainbow. At first, it didn’t seem like what I wanted – guess you just get so used to one tool you know but today I am so glad I stuck with it.

I love how it shows you the color code as you hover your mouse over the color you want. This is really helpful when you’re trying to make sure the color you are using in your stylesheet is the same as the one you want to use. It’s also kinda cool to watch the color changes as you move your mouse.

Color picker

The other neat feature is the Color Analyzer. Love this. Really handy when you’re developing a new theme or re-designing a site and want to mimic the colors on a site you like. You simply visit the site, then tell Rainbow to analyze and it will pull up a set of colors and the codes used, the frequency in percentage each color is used on the site. You can even save it. Very nice.

Analyzer results

You can get Rainbow from Firefox Extensions Directory for free.

When I got an Android phone, one of the first apps I installed was the Google Reader app. I thought it would solve my problem but alas it did not. I found myself opening the Kindle app more than any other. I’d almost given up hope of ever reading RSS feeds again until the day I decided to check out some Chrome Extensions and found Feedly.

How can you possibly believe an app can change your reading preferences? I scolded myself. But try it I did. I can’t explain it, but I’m reading my feeds again! Not only am I reading I look forward to reading them every chance I get.

At first I thought perhaps it’s the way Feedly displays the articles. In an attractive manner that I can quickly scan the headlines and snippets – much like a digital newspaper instead of a huge mass of unreads that look too much like email (yuck). Maybe the association with email caused an instant shut down in my brain who knows.

One feature that I love is I don’t have to open a new tab to visit the site in question. Among the most annoying things are publishers setting the RSS feed to excerpt only. That forces me to go to their site to read. This really sucks on a mobile device. Even on a desktop I don’t like it.

With Feedly, you can preview the entire article without leaving. Yeah maybe it is that. I don’t really know but either way I’m learning to enjoy my feeds, discovering new tips, tricks, keeping up with what my friends are doing online all over again. Hopefully this will continue.

I now have Feedly installed on the phone, Firefox and Chrome and it is free. It does look like there could be a premium upgrade in the horizon though. In the mean time, I’m happy to enjoy great content once again.

Well the client is finally ready and we just did a backup and restore process. WOW. It rocks!

One of the things I was most worried about was the images because the client has a ton of images. In the past, what I would do a direct copy of the database then go in the database to search and replace. While that worked, it’s easy to miss things.

With Backup Buddy, the process was seamless it did everything and I was done in minutes.

The process was simple.

• I did a full backup
• Clicked the Restore/Migrate button to download the importer script
• Downloaded the backup
• Uploaded both the backup and importer script to the new site
• Create a mySQL database on the new site
• Ran the importer script
• Then, simply followed the instructions through the 7 steps. Even though there were 7 steps they wasn’t really anything I had to do other than to paste the database info. The ‘steps’ were – to me – more like stop, read and understand what’s happening then proceed.

This experience also gave me a wonderful idea for productivity. It’s a wonderful way to package and sell turn key sites as well as a super easy way to pump out basic template based sites for clients. The verdict, this is one tool I highly recommend you have in your web design toolbox. Get It.

Before we brought the Fivespot home, the guys at Best Buy advised us to get a Geek Squad install pack with it because he claimed it is known to be rather tricky. Now me being the geek said no. Tricky? Pfft! That simply means a good challenge. Bring it on!

When we finally had it fully charged and ready to go, I hooked it up and was soon rocking and rolling without much problems. We were pretty satisfied.

Connected With No Internet Access

Then, we went on a nearby short trip to a friend’s place, whose house we had never been to. We thought we’d try the Fivespot out on the road. And that was when we hit some snags. It was not the signal by the way. We just could not connect – at all. Actually, it would connect but Windows will complain we are connected with no Internet access. Well how could that be? The signal was strong, the battery is good the wireless signal was also strong.

Thinking back to the first day, we used a direct USB connection – not wireless. You see, the Fivespot is capable of doing direct USB – which limits Internet to only one computer or you could turn it loose using Wifi which allows up to 5 devices to get online. As a result, I dug out my cables, hooked it up and voila! We were online.

Narrowing Down The Problem

This told me it has got to be something to do with the wireless setup. I tried the wireless again later. Let me tell you, I worked for a long time and tried everything. Nothing was out of the ordinary as far as Windows is concerned. This really stumped me and by then I was beginning to wonder if it was a mistake not getting that Geek Squad add-on. My husband was also reaching a point he was ready to take it back to the store.

Finally, I decided to review the settings on the Fivespot itself. Like any router or modem, you can type a local IP address into your browser while connected to the device and be able to bring up a settings page. So I entered http://192.168.0.1 into my browser and brought the settings page up and literally went through each setting one by one. The good thing is there is a little indicator on the page that tells me if I did the right thing to connect to the Internet or not.

Watch The WAN Mode

Turns out it was the WAN connection mode. We had set the WAN connection mode  on Auto Connect (Domestic Only) and we changed it to Auto Connect (GlobalAccess Mode). Once I had that figured out, we have been connecting everywhere without problems.

• We used it when meeting with local clients – for discussion and training sessions
• We took it on a business trip connecting everywhere we stopped. One hotel wanted us to pay $10 a day for access, no thanks! We have our own. That was a great feeling.
• Once, I even hooked my computer up so I could continue to work while our home ISP was down for hours on end.

Besides business use we have also hooked up tablets and 2 laptops to it while traveling with the kids. And by the way for you Mac users – yes I do use it on the Mac – no problems at all.

Overall, we love this thing. The ability to connect whenever, wherever is great. Speed is also OK I’ve not had a huge issue. I also look forward to taking this out of the country as the Fivespot wireless mobile hotspot is supposedly able to do that.