Initially it was put down to a bug within WordPress 2.5 but, I can assure you it isn’t.  If you receive the “Category not updated” error message, you’ll want to check out these simple fixes:

1. Ensure you don’t have a blog post or page with the same title slug as the category you’re trying to create
2. Check that you don’t already have a post tag assigned to a post with the same named slug

For those of you who may not know what a slug is, in a post or page, it’s called a permalink but in simple terms, it’s the link to the post, page, category or tag and looks something like this …. www.yourdomain.com/this-is-the-slug … and yes, the slug has dashes in the link.

To check whether you have a post tag with the same name, go to Posts and then Post Tags.  There you will see all of the post tags you’ve used within your blog posts.  If you find you have a duplicate name, now is the time to choose.  Is it more important to use the name for the tag, category or blog post title.

Interestingly, if you create the category before you create a tag with the same slug, WordPress will allow it.  The issue is if you try to create the category later on or, modify an existing category.

Sure hope this helps someone.  If I get enough “confused” readers, I may do a video explaining the reasons you might get a “category not updated” error message, since I feel your pain!

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I insist, if anyone finds that five page Best Seller book, please send it to me.  Then and only then will I accept that it’s “possible” to build a list and make money with a blog which has five blog posts on it.

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I won’t repeat his full post here because you can read it at his blog.

The logic behind what he says will still be ignored by the majority who market online

Why?  Because in their view, the bigger the market, the more sales they are likely to make.  But, when I see this kind of marketing, it signals “ameteur” all over the site and sadly, this same mistake is made by experienced marketers as well as newbies too.

You take the weight loss industry, a target market John Reese mentions in his blog post, in 2007, Marketdata, Inc., stated that the annual total spent on weight-loss products and services reached $58 billion, a clear indication that this is a big and growing market.  If you read some of the articles about starting up a new business online, you’ll probably read things like “weight-loss is not a target market and neither is Internet Marketing.”

Well, I say these writers have a point, especially if you want to focus on organic traffic to get more sales.  But, by targeting a smaller segment of that marketing, you could have yourself a winning online business.

Take Lisa over at Flat Stomach Exercises, whilst her site isn’t strictly about weight-loss, she has captured a segment of the weight-loss market … those who want to get rid of the tummy bulge.  Most people understand that to lose tummy bulge, you need a combination of a sensible diet (eating habit rather than rabit food and low fat nonsense!) and exercise.  Lisa combines the two and has a #1 spot in Google for the term “flat stomach exercies.”  Now she can talk weight loss to these people!

I hope you’re getting a picture of what I’m trying to hightlight here.

Had Lisa attempted to go for the weight loss market, her site is unlikely to have made it to the #1 position in Google or anywhere near the first page.

When newbies and experienced marketers alike get less than satisfactory results in the search results, they give up.  Fortunately for some of us, we listened to the likes of John Reese and instead of running from a particular market, we simply targeted a smaller segment within that market and by doing this, we can now shout “Bingo!”  Wow, and I didn’t even gamble.

Seriously now, if you identify yourself in this or John Reese’s post, dare to be different than 95% of the market and go for a smaller niche or segment.  This might be all you need to recession-proof your business and save it from ruin.

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In 2010 and beyond, if you want to be noticed, you’re going to have to make more noise!  In other words, your videos are going to have to stand out and be heard as well as seen.

If you want to stand out from the crowd, you have to make your videos viral.

To be viral, your video has to be different – short (less than 3 minutes is best and 15 to 30 seconds even better).  If relevant, make your videos funny, unique, interesting and, I would add to this, inspiring.  In other words, you have to engage your audience enough that they consider your video worthy of sharing with their friends via email, social networking sites such as Twitter or Facebook or even on their own blog.

Avoid making outright ads though.  I have a few of these and I can tell you from experience, they do not get as many clicks as the other videos I make.  Also, if you want to share your videos on as many sites as possible, you really ought to take heed to this advice since some video sharing sites, free or paid, will not accept videos that are just outright ads.  Remember, people are searching for information and not sales pitches.

If you want to solicit comments on your video, engage your audience by having a conversation with yourself  and asking people what they think.  You’ll be amazed at how people respond to being asked to participate.  That said, though, I would moderate my comments because some people are just mean online and there is always one whose aim is to put down other people’s videos in order to promote their own.

And remember to add some interesting Tags to your video and, spice up the thumbnail.  YouTube for example creates a default thumbnail, but you can go into your video profile page and change it.  I admit that sometimes I’m lazy and just don’t bother, but a picture paints a thousand words and often people are more attracted to the images than they are the title.  But whilst we’re on the subject of the title, optimize it!  Use relevant keywords but make the title catchy.

You can literally be duped into spending thousands of dollars learning how to make the most of video marketing online, but here’s a resource that I highly recommend if you want to capture a bigger share of the YouTube Traffic … YouTube Secret Weapon by Julie Perry and Paul Colligan.

I literally spent hours one evening looking for a good reasource on how to optimize my video marketing campaigns online and was about to go to bed disappointed because the only courses I could find were about $2,000, when someone on Twitter (Zeb Olsen), put out a tweet about YouTube Secret Weapon.  After reading the sales letter, I didn’t waste any time to purchase and I would say this course sits in the top 5 courses I purchased in 2009.

Video marketing is cheap, it’s quick and, the results are fast.  With sites such as SlideShare and Animoto, you don’t even have to purchase video cameras or expensive screen capture software if you don’t want to.  It’s true, I have it all but I’ve been collecting since about 2005 when I first purchased Camtasia screen capture software, but for right now, video marketing is my top method for getting traffic besides blogging.  But it’s also true, I like to talk!

Check out Julie Perry and Paul Colligan’s YouTube Secret Weapon course and make it your aim in 2010 to do more than make videos and upload them to video sharing sites … make viral videos.

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I’m sure you’ve had all of the emails suggesting you buy this, that and the other before 2010 if you want to have the best year ever but this isn’t one of those blog posts.

I just want to encourage you to “take out,” meaning “kill” one giant at a time in 2010. 

It’s fine to buy the mega expensive courses and kid yourself that you’re going to nail this Internet Business thing in 2010, but let me take some of the financial burden away from you … “decide which giant you’re going to kill first and then go for it with focused energy.”

Yes, I’m talking about being a “Giant Slayer” in 2010 and if the tools and services you’re going to buy are not going to help towards killing that giant, leave it where it is!

At the end of 2006, I asked myself, “who do you want to be known as, Trish?”  I looked at people like Alex Mandossian who was known for Teleseminars and direct response marketing, Craig Pirrine, list building etc and I realized that what I’d been doing was dabbling and getting nowhere.  At the time, I was building blogs for friends and getting clients by recommendation but blogging just didn’t seem “sexy” enough … I wanted to be like one of the big guys with Internet Marketing Muscle.

Anyway, by the end of 2006, I came to my senses and decided to build my consulting business around blogging and I was amazed how doors just started flying open.  I even ended up doing some work with Alex Mandossian which, I would never have dreamed possible.

At the end of 2007, I decided that we had to get more of our finances in order and my husband and I focused on debt managment like credit was going out of fashion.  Our focus on being out of debt has moved us forward in leaps compared to the situation we were in.

And this year … I was determined that my husband would be in good health.  On Christmas day, my husband sat down and ate Christmas dinner with my loud family after months of running away from even myself and our daughter because of the loud ringing in his ears.  I had made a declaration at the start of 2009 that he would not go into 2010 with this ailment.  For those believers in Christ, you can watch the video on my Getting Maximum Results site once it’s up.

I don’t care how many emails you’ve received today telling you it’s the final deadline before that great discount is removed, if you don’t decide to slay a giant in 2010 with focused energy, you’ll get to the end of it and wonder where the year has gone and why you have such a big hole in your bank account with nothing to show for it.

I’m not discouraging you from buying, but if you do, ensure the kit includes the catapult and the stones that will take off that giant’s head!  That’s all it took for David … He picked up five stones but he only needed one!  Why?  As far as David was concerned, that giant’s head was his even before he swung that first stone. 

If you know the story of David and Golliath in the Bible, you’ll know that once David took out the giant, the Philistine army who had plenty of mouth when their leader was in charge dispersed in fear.  So, when you take out one giant, you’ll find a whole load of other issues come tumbling down too.

Not much of a blogging blog post today folks, but I hope it’s encouraged you to become a Giant Slayer in 2010.

Blessings,

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One of the questions I’m frequently asked is “how do I write a blog post so it gets noticed?”

The second thing to consider is that no matter how beautifully your blog posts are written – they could sound like prose from Shakespeare – if they are devoid of keywords, you’ll find it harder to get free search engine traffic.  The search engines aim to serve up the most relevant information to searchers on the internet and most people use keywords intentionally or unintentionally when searching but if there is no keywords either in your article or an anchor text link to your article with the relevant keyword, it’s going to be impossible to find you.

You do also want to add keywords to your posts without what is called keyword stuffing, making your article look and sound artificial.

For now though, let’s look at the 5 ways in which you can ensure you write better blog posts to please both the search engine spiders and your human readers:

• Try and include the keyword in your title.  This truly is important because this is the first thing the search engine spiders see when they come to view your web page – and each blog post is a separate web page to the search engine spiders.  If using the keywords in the title say using WordPress, you can use the All in One SEO plugin, which will give you the option of writing a more appealing title for your human readers and then using a manual override for the search engines.
• Use keywords in your headlines that are relevant to your topic.  It will help the search engines find your article and encourage potential readers to click on the link to your post.
• Inject some human life and personality into your blog posts.  I read some blog posts and feel as if I’m reading a dissertation or thesis.  If you write as though you are addressing one specific person, may be a friend, then your writing is likely to flow better and sound as though you really are interested in writing about the chosen topic.  And it’s okay to use “I” instead of “WE” MBA’ers!

  Someone asked me this question a few days ago … “should I write in the first or third person?”  And, my answer is always going to be first person when writing blog posts but that doesn’t mean it’s the correct answer, I just prefer both reading and writing in the first person because it brings authenticity which is hard to deliver when writing in the third person.

• Use relevant links in your blog posts and where possible, link your keywords – which could be an actual word or phrase.
• Break your blog article into sub headings and/or bulleted lists.  This really does help the reader skim if they prefer but also removes what can feel like an arduous task out of reading longer posts.

Hope you found this list useful,

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It’s cheap, in fact free and, it will help you style your blog posts in a way that is appealing to your readers.  With this text editor, you can change the color, style, and size of the font and, it will enable you to add tables to your blog posts without having to code it.

I remember when WordPress upgraded to 2.5 and those of us using Semiologic at the time were so disgruntled because the we had been spoilt with a text editor that functioned in similar ways to Microsoft Word.  Other WordPress users weren’t so fortunate but the upgrade to WordPress 2.5 was supposed to be an enhancement to the text editor but for us Semiologic users, we felt as though we had been relegated to the third division especially when I spent about an hour one day, hand coding a table my client wanted adding to their blog.  Such a frustrating waste of time.

Fortunately, I soon discoverd the TinyMCE Advance Text Editor plugin which is now widely used by WordPress bloggers and I love it because it’s functional.

Watch this video to find out how to use the plugin and, how to install it if, you’re not familiar with adding FTP.

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I never listen to radio these days, but the stereo in my car isn’t working at the moment and this morning as I tuned into Radio Bristol, I heard Graham Torrington talk about the new Home Business Report that was released today and he got my attention.

I live in Bristol, UK and we are apparently second only to London in the number of people running their business from home, as people are moving away from the workplace for better work-life balance and to cut costs during the recession.

Whilst it wasn’t news to me to hear that there was a rise in the number of work from home businesses,   I was shocked at the figures:

• In the UK, of the 4.5 million small and medium-sized enterprises in the UK, more than 2.1 million of them are home-based businesses
• Home-based businesses have a combined turnover of over £364 billion?
• Over 60% of new businesses are started at home whilst people are working a 9-5 job
• 5M people work from home in the UK

One of the freelancers at Radio Bristol said how much he noticed the increased number of people in the supermarkets during the day and often wondered “don’t these people work?”  Well now he knows … many of them work from home.

But the question that was really being asked was “is 9 to 5 outdated and should companies be more flexible?”

I think the issue for many people lies not so much in their job being 9 to 5 but what happens before and after and more importantly, during the 9 to 5 period.

People have to take into account commuting time, taking their children to School, daycare or wherever, collecting them at the end of the day, petrol costs and, many other things I’ve not listed.  But my biggest concern for why I HAD to get out of the corporate world (and I was a manager) was what I will call the “potential integrity gap” that was missing for me.

Employers tell you what skills they expect you to have for a job and, they are not interested in any other skills or potential that could effectively be useful.  The attitude is very much, “don’t show me it until we ask to see it” kind of thing.  And in my view, this is the difference between being passionate about your job and going through the motions of your job.

I worked for Direct Line Insurance in the claims department many years ago and when I started, it was a young dynamic company and there was room for creativity and personality input.  By the time I left some 8 years later, it felt as though even the way you said “Good Morning” was scripted.  I once heard one of the managers challenge a member of staff for giving out the wrong information and the staff member said “I thought …” to which the manager shouted across the floor, “you’re not paid to think!”

And I could go on about a friend of mine now, a qualified solicitor (lawyer) working for a company in Bristol who treat their staff – qualified, trained or otherwise – like battery hens … “we put in the system and you must produce.”  And by system, I’m talking about call centre systems where everything you say and do is managed by stats and you need no personality or skill to be a manager any longer because all you do is look at the stats and give a scripted response to productivity … “your call stats are low.”

But I digress.

Working from home can be hard work, especially initially when you’re not quite sure exactly what you want to do.  And often both family and friends see you working from home as an opportunity to call and chat or invite you out to lunch for hours on end and they will forget that you are “‘Working” from home and so, it’s up to you to remind them!

It is however very rewarding and, if you’re passionate about what you do, it really is the motivator that get’s you out of bed in the morning and keeps you going with a task even when you hit roadblocks.

So, if working from home is something you’re serious about doing, don’t let the hard work element put you off.  Do your research, speak to people who already own a business and doing it successfully and then start small, but start, even if it means being one of the 5 to 9 workers as they are now called … those who work on their home based business after working hours.

We’re almost into 2010, and the last thing you want, is to let another year go by without you taking some major steps towards your dream of running your own home business.

I want to challenge you to go for it and, if you’re still unsure where to start, grab a copy of Timothy Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek.

All the best in your new ventures,

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However, I listened to the likes of Dave Taylor, who suggests you should comment on other blogs about four times per week, and some months back decided I would make more effort to post more comments.  Now, I’m going to highlight my results …

Initially, the response was poor to say the least.  I didn’t really get much traffic and if someone contacted me via my online form, it was to ask me to join their group so they could suck out my brains or, the best one is, they wanted to know whether I built blogs for free!  I won’t even comment on this one.

Anyway, over a year ago, I changed my comment strategy and the results have been nothing short of amazing … Within a couple of weeks, not only did I attract 3 new clients just from my blog comments, (and I assure you, I was only doing about 1 a week),  I got better quality comments on my own blog.

Basically, these readers are “noticing” my comment on other blogs and then coming over to my site where they invariably leave a comment that doesn’t just say “nice article,” they’re asking questions or adding to the conversation after reading my blog posts.

But what did I do…?

I actually only made one very small change …

Instead of using my name “Trish Jones” (that’s me!) in the comment form, I used “The Blogging Queen,” which has become my brand name, thanks to Alex Mandossian.

Now I started getting attention!  And the people who now come to my blog as a result of reading my comments are more than just browsers who want to see what they can get out of me for free … they’re contributors!  And, I had been posting comments on some high authority blogs and I knew that these readers were serious – not necessarily about blogging – but they were serious about business … in my view a huge difference.

So if you’ve been posting good quality comments to other blogs and not getting noticed, get yourself an online pen name – one that will get you attention – and see if people don’t notice you.

Be aware though that some bloggers don’t like pen names if they sound salesy and so things like “Get More Leads” is unlikely to get your comments approved.

To your online success,

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I’m convinced that the myth of putting up a one page site to sell a product has permeated the very marrow of our bones that when it comes to blogging, we think the same thing is true.  The reality of it though is that even if that was the case many, many years ago, it certainly is far from the truth today.

If I consult with a client that isn’t very technical but just gets on and writes, I always have the assurance that that person will go on to build a successful online business.  Why?  Because even if that person just keeps writing, they are a) giving the search engines something to work with and b) there are a myriad of ways that we can repurpose the content after tweaking and refining it if necessary.

Giving the search engines something to work with

Each time you publish a new post on your blog, so long as you have the appropriate pinging software installed, you automatically tell the weblog services or, update services as it is called in WordPress, that you have updated your site, inviting them to come take a look and see what’s new.

If the article you have posted relevantly matches what a searcher is looking for online, your post or page will appear to them in the search results and, if the url and description look enticing enough, they will click on the link to read more.

But, it’s not just about putting out a load of articles … no one wants to buy a dry boring book and likewise, no one wants to read a dry boring blog!  You have to appeal to your readers by giving them solutions to the problems they are looking for and, in a way that encourages them to keep reading and, other bloggers to link to your article.

Getting other bloggers to link to you is like “word of mouth” marketing and, the more links you get from quality sites, the higher your search engine rankings are likely to be.

Repurposing Content

Repurposing content is a great way of “squeezing the juice” out of one piece of content.  If you create 30 blog posts (articles) but you’re now struggling to come up with more content, go over all of your blog posts and see whether you can publish them in another format.

Here are 5 ways you can reuse or repurpose content once you’ve written it:

1. Rework your blog posts and submit it to article directories.  See Steve Shaw’s article on how to rework your blog post to make it unique.
2. Make a podcast (audio post) from an existing blog post and submit it to iTunes, Odeo or the many other podcast sites.  If you don’t have the necessary recording equipment, you can consider using Audio Acrobat which allows you to make your recording over the telephone.
3. Create a video from your article and upload it to the free video sharing sites such as YouTube.com and Google Video
4. Turn your article into a press release and then submit it to the relevant press release submission sites.  You’ll find more information about this at www.prweb.com.
5. Open up an account with HubPages.com and rework your content for your hub.  Building hub pages can get you great backlinks to your site due to the amount of exposure you’ll get from other hubbers.  You must however write good quality articles … articles that get read!

I’m feeling myself wanting to go off into a little rant here about people who want to make it big online just because they have a blog with a few articles on it but, I’m going to reserve my “major” rant for another day.

All I will say for now though, is stop the crying and create content people want to read, watch or listen to!  If you think about providing a solution to a problem, it’s going to be easier to write good quality content … solve people’s toothache, headache, backache or insomnia and, they’ll love you for it.

I perosnally don’t know of any book which made it to the best seller list with 15 pages (though I’m not saying it’s impossible) so why on earth do people think they can become an overnight success with 5 to 15 blog posts!

Time to start writing and repurposing!

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