I was just reading the introduction from Robert Kiyosaki’s excellent book “Before You Quit Your Job” (see left) and one of the headings struck me as being a little odd: “Anything Worth Doing is Worth Doing Poorly”.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for producing quality work all the time. But sometimes it’s better to have your 2nd or 3rd draft as your product, rather than waiting until the product is perfect. There comes a time when you have to say “it’s good enough“. Don’t worry what your mother taught you, in business near enough is often good enough.

Kiyosaki uses Microsoft as an example for just getting a product to market that isn’t perfect but is good enough to partially satisfy the demand. You then work on improving the product and put out an updated version. Now Microsoft isn’t the best example, in my opinion, because you could argue that it crosses the line between good enough and just plain shoddy (just look at all the bugs in Vista), which you never should do. I think Wordpress is a better example. It’s now up to version 2.7.1. Each of its versions have been pretty good, but the next has almost always been a bit better than the previous. Imagine if they didn’t release the product until at least version 3 – the world would certainly be a poorer place.

There are many examples, but all of them lead to this truth:

There comes a time when you have to stop developing and start marketing.

If you wait until your product is perfect, you risk missing your window of opportunity. You risk another company coming in and grabbing the market share you easily could have taken. That’s a whole lotta money that will be in your competitor’s pocket rather than yours. You had the brilliant idea, you found an effective way to solve peoples problems, you deserve to profit from that. But you can screw it up by being a perfectionist, just as you can by being sloppy.

Have a look at your websites “under construction” or books you are working on. Is it good enough to go to market? Good enough to go live? Is it time to stop researching and start writing? Time to stop learning and start doing? So what are you waiting for? Get cracking.

For today’s article, I decided to take a break from my usual format and point you in the direction of 5 recent articles that I think will greatly help you improve your presence online:

8 Essential Apps For Your Facebook Page

If you have a facebook page (see my previous post for why you should have a facebook page), I highly recommend you use some or all of these applications to improve your connection to your readers.

7 Myths About Blogging

Diane is an experienced blogger and author (ok, they’re kinda the same thing lol) who has helped many people break through barriers to become successful bloggers. She is actively involved in Jack Humphrey’s BlogSuccess training center and is someone worth listening to. This article is particularly useful for beginner and intermediate bloggers.

9 Ways to Improve Your Writing

This article is short and to the point. It has some great tips that you can use to become a better writer.

10 Ways to Put Your Content Before More People

I think this is one of those articles that changes the way you think about writing. Paul suggests you focus on getting your content out there more than getting traffic to your site. Of course it depends what you are trying to achieve, but in many cases, I think his approach is sound.

12 Easy Mistakes That Plague SEO Newcomers

This is obviously required reading for anyone beginning in SEO (Search Engine Optimization). More advanced/experienced people may still get value from a glance over this. Particularly note point 9 (ignoring non-Google search engines).

I hope you find these useful. Until next time.

If you are just starting to market your product or services online, I highly recommend you focus first on building these properties:

Build a Blog

Running a blog properly can build your authority and promote your brand like nothing ever. I recommend posting as often as you can, as long as the quality doesn’t suffer. Regular, quality posts give people a reason to keep coming back to the site. A blog can also be thought of as an eNewsletter that people actually read because they can subscribe to the feed and receive the new posts when they are published… you know what, just head over to the Friday Traffic Report for this great article on why you should run a blog. Jack explains it better than I could, maybe because he’s one of the recognized blogging leaders.

As you can see from my archives, I’m a huge fan of Wordpress and recommend you get a self hosted wordpress blog. I use Godaddy for hosting (get good discounts here). I also highly recommend you spend the money to get the Thesis Theme. I’ve tried using the free templates and customizing them to suit and even though I’m fairly good at CSS, Html and Php, I’ve wasted so much time that is worth a lot more than the $80 or so that Thesis costs. I’ll be changing this blog over to Thesis in the next few days and I wish I’d done it ages ago when I first heard of Thesis.

Twitter

If you don’t have a twitter account, go and sign up now for free at twitter.com. It’s ok, I’ll wait … Now you’re back, we’ll go through why you just did that…

Twitter is a powerful social communication medium. People can follow you and receive your status updates (140 characters per update). It is the best tool available now to easily keep people up to date with what you are doing, your take on the world and resources you think people can use as well as interact with your audience, find new resources and get ideas for new articles. Don’t go and post what you had for breakfast; no-one wants to know that. Think who your target market is and only write tweets that they would find useful.

Feel free to follow me @mikehaydon on Twitter and let me know, so I can follow you too.

Facebook Page

I’m assuming that you’ve got a Facebook Profile. If not, get one for free here.

A Facebook Page is like a profile except for 2 important differences:

1. A Page has “fans”, not “friends”; and
2. Pages are indexable by the search engines.

The difference between friends and fans is that friends have to be “accepted” by you, whereas anyone can become a fan, meaning your facebook profile can be used for what it was intended – keeping in touch with your friends. I don’t think I need to emphasize how important the second point is.

Go here to setup a Facebook Page. You should setup a page for each facet of your business, each brand or each niche. There is no limit on how many Pages you can setup, but remember that the more Pages you setup, the more work you’ll have to do interacting with your fans and keeping the Page up to date. See here for an example.

Once you have these setup, you’re on your way to great visibility online. Regularly update these sites with quality content and watch your presence soar.

Sometimes life gets you down, but no matter how bad things seem, there is always a bright side. Good can always come from the worst misfortunes. Take Nick Vujicic for example: he was born with no arms or legs, but just have a look at his take on life in this video:

Let him inspire you to get back up and keep going strong. If things are going great for you right now, be thankful and then realize that if Nick can achieve what he has without any limbs, how much more can you accomplish? Nick Vujicic has brought hope to millions. Let this video inspire you to be the best that you can be.

Keep going strong. You’re worth it.

Following on from my recent list of useful Worpress Plugins, I came across a plugin that seems to greatly improve the ability for your readers to interact with your site. Check out this video from the creators of IntenseDebate:

You can get it here.

I’ve tried other comment plugins, like disqus, but this beats them hands down IMO. You can see it in action below. It’s better than disqus because your readers don’t need to be signed in to comment, which is important to me. It was easy to install/customize and I had no problems importing my comments.

Unfortunately, the CommentLuv, Delink Comment Author and Ajax Edit Comments plugins won’t work, so take that into consideration. I think that the features that come with IntenseDebate (like being able to branched reply to commentsoutweigh losing those plugins, but maybe that’s just me.

I think Twitter is a great medium for communication, if used properly. It is great for getting your take on the world out there. But seriously, no-one really cares what you had for breakfast or the fact that you just dyed your hair. I came across this video which pretty much sums up my thoughts on Twitter:

The best way to use Twitter, in my opinion, is to be consistent in your Tweets. Consistently try to add value. Don’t tweet just to see the sound of your voice. And don’t try to pretend you’re a celebrity. You aren’t. Even if you were, no-one cares that you’re going to bed now or you’re just getting up.

What caused this explosion of people being boring? I think it’s Twitter’s line “What Are You Doing?” – It’s just asking for trouble. I think it should rather be “What are you doing that someone else might care about”.

Use Twitter, but think before you tweet: will this tweet help someone or are you genuinely communicating with someone? If not, post to Facebook

Get Simpleology
Get Action Machine

I use a couple of tools to manage my time – Simpleology and Action Machine. On Simpleology, I brainstorm the things I need to do each day and go through the daily target praxis. Once I’ve done that, I move my “to do” list over to the Action Machine program, set the estimated timers and away I go. Using the two tools in this way, I’ve greatly improved my efficiency. How do you keep track of your time?

Do you ever get tired of plugins not working with the latest update of wordpress or find yourself wondering whether there are any plugins that might improve your blog? I know I do. At the time of posting this, I’m using Wordpress 2.7.1 and I’m fed up with having to hack my code to make things look right and do what I want. It just takes too much time that could be spent on actually helping people. So, here is the fruit of my research: 36 great plugins you should consider utilizing, plus a few at the end that I couldn’t get to work for me. I’ve listed them in alphabetical order.

1. Akismet

Sure this spam filter comes standard with Wordpress, but if you’re not using it… well, that would be a mistake IMO

2. Better Blogroll

This improves Wordpress’s native blogroll, giving you more formatting options, including the ability to add images.

3. Bookmark Me

Gives you a widget for your sidebar to allow easy bookmarking of your site. See my sidebar under “Spread the Word”. There are 39 bookmarking services listed along with a couple of other options.

4. Breadcrumb NavXT

This plugin makes the navigation element you see in this post just above the title of this post. It has a number of useful features, but also a “core” plugin that’s just a no-brainer.

5. Commentluv

This creates the option box you see below the comment box. If checked, it goes to the the website your reader put in the comment box, looks for the latest post, if available, and inserts a link to it. Try it for yourself. For best effect, use the “dofollow” plugin (see #7).

6. Delink Comment Author

This plugin is useful if someone puts a nonsense or offensive web address in the comment box, but have otherwise written a useful comment and you’d rather not delete the comment. Don’t use this if you’ve got Keywordluv installed – it changes the author’s name.

7. Do Follow

Simply put, this removes the “nofollow” attribute from comments on your blog. Nofollow will still work in your posts and widgets. While this may be an invitation for more spam, Akismet will catch most of it (just moderate the rest), and your readers will generally be more keen on commenting on your blog.

8. PHP Code Widget

If you want to use php in your sidebar without hacking sidebar.php, you should use this plugin. It works in the same way as the text/html widget, but runs php as well.

9. Feedburner Feedsmith

This enables easy integration of your Feedburner feed into Wordpress. You DO have a feedburner feed… don’t you? If not, get one. It makes your feed more universally accepted and is free. Feedburner is also owned by Google, so there’s another way for Google to notice your work.

10. Global Translator

You have the choice of 4 translation engines and 20+ languages. Your reader can click a flag representing their language and have your blog translated into that language. Not being fluent in any other language, I can’t speak to how good the translation is. It also optionally integrates with your Google XML Sitemap (see #12), presumably making your site more visible on foreign language search engines.

11. Google Analytics for Wordpress

This makes it super easy to include your Google Analytics code in your blog, without editing footer.php. Why use Google Analytics? It’s the best free site traffic analysis software out there at the moment.

12. Google XML Sitemap

Automatically create a sitemap compatible with google, yahoo, msn, ask, etc.

13. Maintenance Mode

When you’re doing upgrades to your site and you don’t want to make your readers feel like they are on a rollercoaster, with menus flying everywhere, pages disappearing, then reappearing, etc, you should set this plugin to “enabled”. You can activate it and just have it sitting in your admin area until you need it. It will display a page to all visitors apologizing for the delay and giving an estimated time of completion, which you set.

14. Mybloglog Widget

Create a widget in your sidebar which can help you build a community around your blog.

15. Nofollow for Posts

This is handy for those few times you want to nofollow a specific link in your post. Just check the box that says “NoFollow”. This only works if you are using the Visual (WYSIWYG) editor in Wordpress. If you write your posts in html code, don’t worry about getting this.

16. No Self Pings

This should be called “no self trackbacks”. It stops trackbacks from your posts to other posts on the same blog. It just keeps things cleaner.

17. Optimal Title

Anyone serious about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should consider installing this plugin. It changes your <title> tag from “Mike Haydon | How To Be NoFollow Free” to “How To Be NoFollow Free | Mike Haydon”, which tells the search engine that your keywords are more important than the name of your blog (which it almost always is).

18. Ozh Admin Drop Down Menu

This is a cool little plugin that turns the Wordpress 2.7+ menu into a drop down, which saves time in reloading pages. The settings are accessed from the plugins menu (a little unusual). I recommend checking the box that says “Shrink top level links down to their icons” for even easier use. You should also set the menus to “break” on more than 10 or 15 entries: you’ll have lots of entries in the Settings menu and you don’t want to have to scroll the page looking for them.

19. Photo Dropper

You can easily search for and insert photos from Flickr, together with the proper creative commons licensing code, using this plugin. I have a fuller review here.

20. Popularity Contest

Set the importance of views and work out what are your most popular posts. There are also lots of options to display the results, like down the bottom of my blog, where I have “Most Viewed” and “Most Commented” posts. You can also have, eg, most popular in xyz category, etc.

21. PostRank

Creates the widget you see to the right titled “Top Posts”. I’m not entirely sure how it calculates popularity, but it’s another cool way of showcasing popular posts.

22. SEO Friendly Images

This automatically inserts correct Alt or Title tags into the <img> code, based on your post title, or other settings you choose. An easy way of SEOptimizing your images.

23. SEO Post Link

Wordpress creates the permalink for your post based on the title you give it. This plugin takes out the unnecessary words (as defined by you) like “the”, “and” & “a” to keep your permalink shorter. This is useful because if it’s too long, the permalink can get cut in half when someone sends the link to a friend and the search engines may also have difficulty processing it.

24. Share This

Adds an icon/link to allow your readers to easily and quickly bookmark your post to from within the post. It also allows posting to myspace/facebook as well as emailing to a friend. There are others out there that do the same job, but I like this one. If you’re already using something like this (try it at the bottom of this post – hint: it’s the green button with “share this” next to it ), you probably don’t need to change over.

25. Smart Update Pinger

“Ping spam” is when you keep pinging your RSS feed, even when you haven’t posted anything new. It’s not good and can get you banned from places like Technorati. Unfortunately, Wordpress is set to automatically ping even if you edit your post. This plugin takes care of that and only pings when you have a new post. It automatically imports your current ping list.

26. Subscribe to Comments

This creates a checkbox underneath the comment box that enables the commenter to be informed when others comment on the post. It’s a great way to build a conversation between your readers.

27. Tweet This

This is one of the ways you can harness the power of the emerging phenomenon known as Twitter. It creates an icon at the end of each post which lets your readers easily post the story to their twitter account. It has lots of different icons to choose from and you can also add some of the major social bookmarking tools as well.

28. Twitter for Wordpress

If you want to add a feed of your latest twitter posts to your sidebar, I recommend this plugin. Easy to use and customize.

29. Wordpress Database Backup

With a few clicks, backup your database of posts, comments and settings, so if anything happens to your site, you won’t lose all your years of hard work. It emails the backup to you and also has a nifty automatic backup schedule. I consider this plugin essential.

30. Wordpress Gravatars

Sure Gravatars are now a part of Wordpress, but this plugin allows you to choose between Gravatars, MyBlogLog Avatars (like on this site) and OpenAvatars as well as a number of other options. I can’t get the author post avatar to work satisfactorily (inserts your gravatar in the first paragraph of each post), because it keeps squashing it and I can’t find the code to stop it. Otherwise, works well on all the themes I’ve tested.

31. Wordpress Mobile

With the number of people surfing the net on mobile platforms like the iPhone or Blackberry, you should consider installing this plugin. It creates a simpler version of your blog that is more easily readable on these platforms. It automatically recognizes when a reader is using a mobile platform and serves the simple version. It doesn’t change your content and will still display pictures in posts, but it removes all other graphics and only has essential text navigation links.

32. Wordpress Related Posts

Basically, this creates a list of related posts based on tags and inserts them at the end of each post. ’nuff said

33. WP-Email

This makes a button which links to a form that enables your readers to email the post to themselves or a friend. It’s a bit of a hassle to install, but I think it’s worth it. You’ll have to change the code in one of your core files (See post by MichaelH here). See the usage tab here for how to position the icon.

34. WP-Print

From the same developer as WP-Email, but less troublesome. This plugin gives the reader the ability to print your post without printing all your navigation, ads, headers, banners, etc, while making sure your copyright notice is intact.

35. WP Ajax Edit Comments

Isn’t it annoying when you write a comment, hit the button and then realize you’ve made a mistake or want to say something extra. Using this plugin allows your readers to edit their comments for a short time after they’ve posted them. Cool, right?

36. WP Grins

This creates the clickable smilies you see above the comment box on my blog. They’re just cooler than having text smilies aren’t they?

Broken Plugins

Two plugins that on the surface work, but are currently broken to the level that I couldn’t work out how to fix it are:

WP-Cache

This caches fine, but when someone comments, it breaks the blog and displays an error message. It wasn’t the theme, because I tried it on the Classic theme. I think it would be very useful for a high traffic blog when fixed.

Simple Tagging

This is the new version of the classic “Simple Tags” plugin, which apparently doesn’t work past Wordpress 2.5. This may work, but it wasn’t playing nicely with the tag pages (they showed up blank, even though the admin interface said the posts were tagged) and wasn’t compatible with my current posts. Means a whole lot of work going back retagging old posts for not much benefit.

—–

I hope this review helped you. If you have any further suggestions or you think another plugin does a better job or is easier to use than any of the ones listed above, please share in the comments. The list above is by no means exhaustive, but should represent a good starting point. There are others I have heard of, like podpress, that would most likely be useful and are highly recommended, but not having used them, I can’t comment on them.

My internet has been out of service for two weeks due to hardware failure by the company that maintains the phone lines. I eventually figured out how to use my cell phone as a modem, but it’s dialup speed and has a cap of a few hundred megabytes, so I can only access essential information. At first I was upset because I couldn’t do much work (and that took forever), but this time has actually been a time of real growth and understanding for me. I know, it’s always the way – you’re forced into a situation and then something really good comes from it and you come out glad you went through the experience.

So I’ve had time to think about my business strategy, where I could improve, be more efficient, outsource, automate, etc. Of course I couldn’t check the latest metrics because they were too large, but with 7 years online marketing under my belt (though for 6 I just treated it as a hobby), I have a fairly good grasp of my stats and what affects them.

Only my closest friends know that I am really passionate about health and fitness, reading any books (digital, print or magazine) I can get my hands on and working out 5 times per week. My wife (then girlfriend) studied physiotherapy at university and even though I was also studying law, I often attended her classes as well, even participating in the discussions. “Who cares?”, you may ask. Most of my internet marketing efforts have been focussed in the fitness niche, but I have always used aliases and pen names. If you’ve looked into building muscle or losing weight, you most likely have read some of my material (not ebooks – I haven’t published yet).

Why was I using aliases? That’s the very question I’ve been asking myself these last two weeks. I couldn’t come up with a convincing argument other than I don’t look like one of the muscle monsters that grace the covers of so many magazines (though I’ve put on 30kg of muscle in the last 5 years). I figured that people wouldn’t listen to me unless I had pictures of myself like Tom Venuto or Sean Nalewanyj (two of the big authority figures in the online fitness industry), which I don’t yet. I’ve come to the realization that my poor body image (I’ve always been thin) doesn’t stop me helping my friends to achieve great results, so why should it stop me being myself and helping the wider community? People listen to “me” when “I” didn’t even really exist, so I don’t expect anything will change. I never fabricated my alias’s stories, I just left them out.

I have the knowledge, resources and track history to help people live healthier lives and achieve their weight goals, so I’ve decided that I’ll keep the same work up, but I will build my own “authority” and “trust” up in the fitness industry by using my personal name. There’s so much mis-information out there, people who just want to sell products or services without caring whether or not they are helping anyone. I want to help people live better, healthier lives. Sure I’ll be making money (a guy’s gotta eat ), but only if by doing so, someone’s life is changed for the better.

In view of my change in directions, I’ve created a logo of sorts….

What do you think?

I know I’m not alone in not wanting to send people a link to http://www.example.com/recommends/this?aff=xyz&tid=95&id=42 (don’t bother going there, I made it up ). So I use free services like tinyurl.com and hopurl.com to make them easier to handle.

However, last week I was in the middle of promoting a major product launch and I found out that the main referring url I was using went down yeah, I was mad. But I guess that’s what you get for using a free service controlled by someone else. So I decided to do something about it.

There’s lots of paid options out there, but I figured it should be simple code, so there must be a free version that you could host on your own domain. Eventually, I found it (free, but with recommended $10 donation) at get-shorty.com. It’s an easy 3 step process to setup. If you want to redirect from your domain level (eg http://example.com/246234), as opposed to a secondary folder (eg http://example.com/redirect/24523), you’ll need to edit a small amount of code, which is explained here.

It’s all behind a password protected admin interface, so you don’t have to worry about people using your site without your permission to redirect their links. It also has a visit counter (essential) so you can see how much traffic each redirected url is getting.

I registered a new domain with separate hosting and set up get-shorty on it. So now I don’t have to worry about losing my commissions when everyone’s hitting the major url shorteners