One of the greatest challenges in a multi-channel online marketing world (think Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.) is having enough of a base within those channels to actually make a splash. As the network grows, as the base expands, your value increases.

The opposite is also true. 

If you casually “play” online, you won’t ever see the value of the power of social media and online marketing. This doesn’t mean throwing money randomly at tools or agencies to “help your grow your online marketing”. It means truly embracing the future of marketing.

In a world of so many who inundate the online space with noise, how do you stand out?

To me, the entire challenge can be answered with content. Not just more content, don’t get me wrong. You can’t win the online marketing battle with just more pages than your competitor or more tweets/re-tweets than the next guy. Sure, you might win short term, but in the long run, the one who will stand as the winner is the one who over time has fed us amazing content. Good, chunky, stuff-we-couldn’t-think-of-on-our-own content.

Do you want your followers to grow? Say something worth while.

Do you want more likes on Facebook to grow your reach? Post something that is worth us sharing.

I would rather read 1 amazing blog post a month than 60 I could easily forget.

There are a thousand and a half posts/consultants/”experts” each day telling you what to do. In the end, though, value will always win over noise.

Once you provide value, your network will grow. People will flock to your online world because they can’t believe they are getting all this for free. They can’t believe they have found this gem and they will tell everyone else they know about it.

Once your network grows, you win.

1. I wanted to be able to type and also use handwriting for marking up as I’m a doodler.
2. I wanted to have access to my dropbox folder so I can read PDF’s that I’ve saved there, mark them up, highlight, etc.
3. I wanted to be able to share the final notes easily.
4. I wanted to have a great way of keeping my notes organized as what I have been using before this was 3 or 4 different notebooks spread around 3 different desks. Not optimal.

Then the reality hit that there were a ton of people NOT on Google+. The people who were active were people I was already following on Twitter or Facebook or other sites so it began to feel a bit redundant.  As well, I then had to re-connect with everyone and group them into areas that I think they would fit, try and remember why I had followed someone to begin with on Twitter, re-evaluate my “friends”; all-in-all a very time-consuming task.

It is no surprise that Plus is growing. With Google already having over 190 million active users, adoption is a no-brainer. There will be millions like me who are waiting to “get their invite” and be included in the buzz, but then what? Now with everyone having access, hearing reports of the base growing isn’t surprising. Again, no-brainer as they already had an active base.

For the general business owner or small business, this is going to be a tough sell. They are already trying to figure out how to use a Facebook page for marketing and quantify that into sales. How do you find time to blog, update your website, tweet things out, create content-rich newsletters with unique offerings, optimize your pages for search engines, keep your business running, an oh yeah, now try and wrap your head around another “must have” in Google Plus.

I’m still not sure how this is going to play out. Thoughts? Are you active on Plus and finding a great value in it?

I’ll stop ranting.

The out-source game is tricky. Finding the right partners to work with is, to me, the hardest part and the biggest gamble.

But how do you get a WordPress site? There are 2 different routes to take:

1. Let them host it – www.wordpress.com
2. You host it

If you let them host it (check out the steps here) you then are limited mainly by the domain name.

If you want to host it yourself, here’s what you need to do:

1. Pick a domain name. I use Godaddy.com [affiliate] for my domain names (not a huge fan of their marketing, but they do a great job with domain & SSL hosting) but you can use any number of services. Pick a domain name that is easy to say/communicate, ideally has keywords appropriate to your blog/industry and if at all possible, get a .COM.  Also, stay away from hyphens (-), just my personal preference.
2. Get a hosting account. This is the physical place your website will live. I recommend ICDSoft [affiliate] not only for their pricing but their support is unreal – and for anyone just starting off you need a lot of hand-holding. Sign-up your hosting account using the domain you already purchased.
3. Download the latest version of WordPress from www.wordpress.org
4. In the control panel of your hosting account there are 2 things to do:
   1. Create a database. There is usually a MySQL database area where you can create a database. Make sure to note the name of the database as well as the name and password associated with the database.
   2. Upload and extract the WordPress ZIP file you downloaded.
5. Navigate to your home page (www.yoursite.com/wordpress) and the install script will guide you through the rest.

It’s that easy! Now you can manage your own site, with your own domain name and you are off to blogging infamy.

Oh right, there is that pesky other task of writing good content…

While most users do expect to use a left navigation what I really found great about the “old” pages was the horizontal tabs that almost worked as a sub-navigation. Now all navigation items are in a row on the left. I actually find this to be a big disappointment as it’s harder to highlight the apps, pages, information that you really want people to see.

In keeping with the tab change we have lost the ability to force someone to a certain tab if they have not “like”d the page yet. You have the option of linking directly to a page/menu/app other than your wall so you could theoretically accomplish the same goal, but those who stumble on your site for the first time without clicking a link you had created will no longer be directed to that pre-like page. Huge loss in my opinion.

I hope the communication and interaction changes will overall make up for the fact that we have lost what I would consider one of the more important of functions the old pages had to offer…Facebook, please bring my tabs back!

Mozy and I had to break up. We had a pretty good run and I will say there was great potential for a long-lasting relationship, but things happen. Namely, this happened.

As in every relationship it’s the subtle things. From the announcement there is the causal line of “we’re replacing our Unlimited backup plan.” Replacing? With what? Oh, that’s right, you’re replacing it with a plan that just quadrupled my price each month. Yeah, thanks for that.

The entire reason I went with Mozy was the fact that for a low rate ($4.95/month) I had unlimited back-up and it all just ran in the background, no hardware to worry about. I don’t understand a business model where early adopters and believers get thrown aside with ‘everyone else’. Complete fail. I also don’t understand how they are going to compete as one of the other key factors for my choice was the price.

It was not the service.

In fact, I’ve been fairly unhappy with how slow the back-ups are and how inconsistent they are for Macs. For instance, I had Mozy loaded on my wife’s macbook and to this day it has never done a full back up. I have left it on for days so it could complete it’s task. No dice. I understand backing up gigabytes of data takes time, but there must be a better way around it.

My goal now is to find a solution that mixes Mac’s Time Machine functionality with a remote file storage system. I guess in the meantime I’ll be back to my hardware juggle.

Goodbye Mozy, party is such sweet sorrow.

• What store software will you use?
• How will you host the store?
• Will your site have an SSL Certificate installed so you can accept credit cards?
• How easy will it be to update your store or will you have to wait for your cousin to get to it?
• How will your store get found online?
• What features do you want and will all those features be covered by the software you have now installed?  What about in 2 months when a new “big thing” is happening on shopping carts around the world, how will you adapt

The list could go on and on.  Honestly, it’s more daunting than you think to host your own store.  Luckily, the folks at www.bigcommerce.com have come through huge with a complete e-commerce solution to have you up and running in minutes!

Big Commerce is a turn-key solution for an online store.  The beauty is that they (can) host the entire thing – including all the SSL certificates needed.  You could have something like store.yourdomain.com and direct it to your instance of Big Commerce for a seamless transition.  With a loaded set of design templates to get you started, customizing your store is a breeze.

There are a TON of features built right into the product, but a few highlights:

• The product was built with SEO in mind so the options are endless and the value is high
• Mobile-ready commerce
• Email marketing integration standard
• Social media marketing standard
• Tons of marketing and promotion options
• Full CMS integration
• Returns process handled for you

You can see for yourself, but if you’re looking for an amazing value (prices starting at $24.95/month!), you can’t go wrong.  Give it a whirl and try it out!  You’ll thank me, I promise.

At first glance I thought this was a cool idea.  The more I think of it, what exactly are we accomplishing?  Are we trying to snoop on others or “test” friendships?  Do we now need Facebook to decide the value of the friendship?  Maybe I’m over-thinking this, but it seems like an odd thing to add.  I can see this being really dangerous to some relationships, to be honest.  If you have a significant other, but they have more interactions with someone online, yaddi yadda.  It also seems like a further way to embed ourselves in our virtual relationships.

Anyone have other perspectives?  Like it?  Don’t?

I broke down and turned in the Blackberry Curve for an Eris.  I was up for a renewal so my $40 investment felt pretty good, though I hate long-term contracts, but that’s for another post.

My immediate reaction was that I had landed in geek heaven.  My Curve was a later model so this was a much needed upgrade.  It was so fast!  Great screen, smaller phone that felt like a phone and less like a brick.

I then received the software update to 2.1 which even boosted the phone faster as I was starting to notice some lag.

Over time, here are the things that eventually drove me to hand off the Eris to my daughter as a glorified MP3 player:

• As a phone, it sucks.  Plane and simple.  It’s slow, unresponsive and just sort of hangs there some times.  I primarily use this as a phone (imagine that!) so that one fact alone made it hard to hold on to.
• The battery life is so testy.  You have to make sure all your apps are turned off so as to not eat up too much battery, data synchronization is spotty as it also eats up the battery so that has to be juggled carefully.
• I hate typing on screens.  As a Blackberry fan and user I love the quickness of the raised-button approach.  I do know that over time I would get the screen typing better, but couple that with the fact that the typing reaction as slow and inconsistent and I was out.
• Overall I just need my phones to move faster.  Any lag and I give up.  Call me impatient or whatever, but I never had that issue with my older Curve so it’s harder to get excited about the “upgrade”.  I do know the iPhone is blazing fast in comparison so maybe I’ll have to give that a try as well.

While I miss some of the apps and the interface, I think I might just wait and try again with the Droid 2 when it comes out.

After stumbling upon join.me (created by LogMeIn) I was immediately impressed with how SIMPLE it was!  Download this packet and presto!  It assigns you a number that you can email or share and people can just go to that URL and they are on.  For those joining the presentation it’s such a clean experience as there’s absolutely nothing to install.

There are some icons on the top of the presenter’s page to chat, call, pause, as well as give controls to others.

Upon using for the first time with a few clients there were a few things that I found out as well as some ideas for the beta team to hopefully make note of:

• Navigating around the screen while on conference was great, but typing was unbearably slow.  In my presentation I had to fill in some forms to show functionality and there was a serious lag.  If you’re just presenting slides or clicking around, you probably won’t notice, but it was so bad I had to pause the presentation and type and then come back.
• I wish there was the ability to schedule a meeting.  Maybe there is a didn’t realize it, but from what I could tell, you basically started the program and received a number.  If you closed your computer and restarted the program you now had a new number.  What this meant for me was that I had to wait until everyone got on the phone and then give the number.  It would be better if I could claim a certain number and then release it when I’m done.
• It would be great if I could identify the area of the desktop that I want to share.  I typically have a good number of files on my desktop or alerts that show themselves on the screen and don’t want those to show up in the viewing area of the screen.
• I’m not sure how this program would work on a double screen as I didn’t try that but hope that it would only share one screen so you could take notes on another or run application, etc.

Overall, the experience was great and nobody really complained.  I especially liked it as it was FREE!  Hopefully that continues beyond the beta.

The conflict that I wrestled with (which prompted the creation of 2+ blogs in the first place) was whether I have a ‘personal’ blog as well as a ‘professional’?  How much do I want to divulge about myself to people I might end up working with?

My opinion is I want people to get the whole picture of me should they choose to follow me in my blog obscurity.  Of course I don’t want to jeopardize my family or privacy or whatever, but if that’s the case I shouldn’t be blogging or be online for that matter! I want this platform to educate, inform, give a sneak peek into my mind, and so I feel that sharing whatever is on my mind is relevant to my overall ‘brand’.One other reality is that I can try and run my online world as if Google and others aren’t archiving everything I’m doing, but I would rather paint the whole picture instead of someone piecing elements together of me anyway.  There are times when I will only post something to my facebook profile that is for my immediate ‘friends’ only, but those are typically family-sensitive videos or pictures.  Beyond that, what you see is what you get – at least that is what I’m hoping to do with the change.

When you do work with someone or get to know someone even at a professional level the lines blur as to personal/professional which is how I view this blog now.  You are cordially invited to enter into my world.  I just ask that we both treat this platform/interaction as a judge-free zone so we can actually accomplish the task of helping each other be better.

• For commenting, I highly recommend Disqus.  Plugin integration was very simple and there are some great options to manage from right within the options settings.
• Clean-Contact is a great contact us form that’s simple to use and set up.
• To help blog posts extend to the social world:
  • Auto Tweet allows your posts to auto-tweet when posted online. UPDATE: Actually prefer Tweetly Updater as I’m a bit.ly guy.
  • Can’t decide which network to allow?  Use them all with ShareThis!  I particularly liked the various options in terms of the tool set that you can use.
  • You can insert a TweetMeme button right at the top of your post so that option is front and center.
• I also am using Google Analytics to track my site traffic and Google Webmaster Tools (with the help of Google XML Sitemaps plugin) so that I can make sure my site is working as best as possible.

Hope that helps!

One major thing that helped shape the perspective that I have currently was living out of the country.  After 5 years in India (from 9-14) I can say I see things differently.  Not to say better, just differently.  I guess the realization I came to is that there are other ways of doing things.  This idea has been at the core of pretty much everything I’ve done to-date in my life.  At my core is an entrepreneurial heart that I get to use in various ways (whether self-employed or not depending on the season of my life) but what I enjoyed about this video is that I can pass on that love/passion for “the other road” to my kids and then see where it takes them.

I especially loved the thoughts on allowance.  I don’t want my kids to get into the habit of just expecting a “paycheck” but rather watch them grow their creativity and resourcefulness as we approach the concept a bit differently.

Your thoughts?

Plan B to the rescue. The issue was that I wanted to be able to post from my phone so I just downloaded the Worpress app for blackberry. The only thing I had to do was enable the XML-RPC option under Settings – Writing on my WordPress install.

Not a ton of bells and whistles but if you’re looking for a nice alternative to posting by email, give the WordPress app a try. This is my first post with it so I might have more thoughts in the comments section…

Are you using it? Anyone using the WordPress app for Android or iPhone who want to chime in?

I know this is a bit of a US perspective, but I think we thrive on efficiency and organization. If I can do it/think it/want it guaranteed there are others so let’s form a group and do/think/want together!

Where this gets interesting is in the area of faith/religion. There is a certain comfort that goes along with having a group to participate in the religious experience with. I don’t really want to get in to the whole “need for community” thing as I actually think that’s an entirely different topic altogether. What I mean is that I think we look for ways to organize as it makes things much simpler/easier. We can collectively each take a portion of the organization and do our part and then collectively as a whole we can move in an organized, efficient way. Or even better, let a bunch of people keep it organized and I’ll just show up…

I would dare say someone doesn’t want to join a church to “get organized”. I think what I’m trying to say is that I believe there are so many churches/communities/groups/etc. because there is something not completely connected with the fact that in and of ourselves we are complete with God. We don’t trust that. We feel like we need someone professional to tell us what we don’t know and explain stuff to us.

There is one primary issue facing churches all the time right now and that is the numbers are down. Across the board, around the world, the numbers of attendees are decreasing. Is faith decreasing? I don’t think so. Are churches not adapting quick enough? I don’t think so – there are more flavors of church around than ever before. So what’s the issue?

In my opinion, we’re fat and starved spiritually at the same time. We have God/religion wrapped up in this nice little organized package, but that organization is making us lazy, so there’s less draw to continue. We don’t have to worry about working on our marriage as there is a marriage retreat coming up and we’ll get the help we need (and if it’s not good, we can go to another church that has a better program). We don’t need to worry about really digging in to teach ourselves what the bible says or other truths that are out there for the taking as we can show up on Sunday and get fed (and, by the way, if we don’t like the preacher we can just go to another service or church in the area that we like better).

This is not just an issue for churches. Schools experience the same issues. With so much access to information but less ambition to work to learn, teachers are facing some real challenges. Parents look to schools to teach the kids and if they aren’t achieving, it’s the school’s fault.

What if we could take the organization and flip it completely on it’s head? What if we worked harder on learning about God, walking with God, and in doing so walking with others and less on just trying to stay organized? That could be a small group that you actually interact with, but that’s ok. It could grow to be a larger group and that’s ok too. The point is, don’t organize to be the people of God, be the people of God and let the organization work itself out. It won’t be pretty. It won’t be clean. It won’t fit on a Visio flowchart. But it worked for the early church and I believe it can work again.

Photo credit: gadl

Why?

You can tell there was great thought put into the site. Easy to navigate, clean design, style matches the restaurant (once I visited), but the coolest thing? It’s built in Joomla 1.5. Yes, they probably dumped some coin in the design and build-out of the site, but now that it’s up they are able to completely manage their own restaurant page themselves. Joomla means it’s open-source so they don’t have to pay anything for the actual software (CMS). So many restaurant websites resort to flash so they can be “fancy” or something. But here is a great example of a high-quality website with clean design and movement on the home page that THEY CAN MANAGE ALL THEMSELVES!

I don’t know much about restaurants, but I do know they never have enough money. This is a great example of not compromising on marketing efforts, but also how to stay competitive on a budget.

Kudos, Urban Solace! All other restaurants looking for an affordable website solution should take note…

Overall Thesis is an SEO-feature-rich  dream. Not only is the page code extremely clean, but for each post you can easily control the page titles, keywords, descriptions, and image alt tags all while posting your blog.

The more that I used Thesis, the more I kept thinking that I needed to write about some of the things I learned for people coming after me who are just venturing down this path. Here are some of my thoughts to hopefully make Thesis make more sense before starting but also a list of links that I have found along the way that really helped:

• There are so many design changes and site standards that you can make from the main Thesis Options area. You can choose how many columns, the size of those columns, the font-colors, font-sizes, fonts, and more. Turn off/on various features that are listed right there.
• I messed something up big time at the beginning because I just didn’t understand what was happening in the “Custom File Editor” section. There are 3 files in the drop down that you can change: custom.css, layout.css, and custom_functions.php. Initially I made updates to the layout.css as I was trying to update the layout – made sense to me. But this is the theme standard css file. So I went through and made all these custom changes to the layout.css file and then decided I wanted the columns to be bigger and ALL my changes were reverted back to the original. Turns out you’re supposed to update the custom.css and even with that you need to add “.custom” before what is in the layout.css if you want it to over-ride. Once I figured that out I was able to make a ton of changes by just adding them to the custom.css file and it would default to that one rather than the system layout.css. That was a few hours of loss to learn. I’m sure it’s out there somewhere, but it wasn’t very obvious to me.
• Probably the most valuable functionality for Thesis is the simple use of hooks. In your custom_functions.php file you can tell WordPress to include certain functionalities. You can tell it to NOT show something or to replace it with something else. You can even define (requiring some PHP) certain pages to show something on. This was always a major drawback for me in regards to WordPress. it seemed that if you used widgets you were stuck with them being on each and every page. With Thesis, you can control that a bit better. You can see a good list of hook references at http://diythemes.com/thesis/rtfm/hooks/ which was a real help for me to at least know what to call them. In general though there are 2 things that are required for each “hook”: 1) the call to bring in the functionality and 2) the functionality. For this blog I use a hook to accomplish the tags in the upper right. Here is what that hook looks like:
  • The beauty of this is that you can “hook” javascript and other functionalities allowing you to keep your page looking clean and friendly for the search engine spiders.
  • There are a lot of people out there who have some references you can look at in regards to more specific use, but in general if you understand that there is a call to a function and then a function is defined, that is your hook that you can build onto each page. There were some great examples on this page at www.keenerliving.com as well as a very good page on understanding hooks at www.sugarrae.com.
• There really aren’t any files to update on the server which was a bit of a shocker when I first started down the Thesis path. I was looking for some php files where I could re-arrange the site, but all that is controlled via the layout.css, custom.css and custom_functions.php pages. Trying to figure out how to “remove” items was a bit more challenging. For instance, I wanted to change my footer but couldn’t figure that one out. Finally ran across this blog which helped and even better, this one. There definitely are a lot of helps at http://diythemes.com/ for when you need to really get into it.

The only major down-side to Thesis is that it’s a premium theme, so you gotta fork out the $$ for it. Check it out here (affiliate link) if you’re interested in giving it a run! I highly recommend the theme and am glad to have that functionality in my back pocket now.

It was very simple to set up – simply give them an email and a password and you’re good to go. You can then create a new document and start diagraming. There were some nice features in terms of color filling, arrows and such, but the thing that really got me was how EASY it was to use. I was able to change/adjust as I ran into issues. Saving it as a PNG was simple and then I was able to import that file straight into my presentation.

This is a very useful tool if  you need a quick way to wire-frame a design or sketch out a process or figure out a site-map. I didn’t go beyond the free version, but from what I understand if you want to pay the premium pricing there is more access to retaining your brand, coordination between multiple users and more. Check out the comparison chart here.

Check it out!