“When you come to the edge of all the light you have known, and are about to step out into darkness, Faith is knowing one of two things will happen – there will be something to stand on, or you will be taught how to fly.”
“Jonathan Livingston Seagull” by Richard Bach

LEARNING TO FLY!

In the 1930′s and 1940′s, there were numerous women’s magazines.  Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping were two of them.  They showed women in the role of the day – housekeeping.  They suggested the number of times per week the home should be dusted, scrubbed, organized, and otherwise kept spotless.  They suggested ways to look good when the “man of the house” arrived home from a tough day at the office.  In short, those magazines and their publishers set up an impossible regimen of expectations for their readers.

Many of us know women who have spent much of their lives trying to live up to the model housewife role prescribed by those magazines.  The trouble is, many of them have (or had) dreams of their own, like wanting to write, or to travel, or to participate in the freedoms only men then enjoyed.

Today, any of us can achieve our dreams.

All too often, however, we are still denied our destiny by the expectations set by others.  We are bombarded by messages—online and offline—that insist we follow their example, their guidelines, or their models.  We allow our dreams to wither and die—waiting in line for their turn to blossom—never receiving the water of encouragement needed to grow and bloom.

What about your dreams?  Need some encouragement to help you “think outside the box?”

• Begin by spending time with others who have already achieved their dreams.
• Leave your naysayer acquaintances behind. 
• Read inspiring biographies. 
• Pick up a copy of “Think & Grow Rich” or “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.” 
• If you haven’t yet learned to “fly,” read “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” or “Illusions” by Richard Bach.

As Jonathan says in the book,

“Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you.  All they show is limitation.  Look with your understanding, find out what you already know, and you’ll see the way to fly!”

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Silent Killer of Customer Conversion

Your goal for website visitors is to make a purchase, complete a lead form, sign-up for an email list, make a phone call, or conduct another measure of engagement.

Your web marketing efforts, no matter how effective at drawing visitors, will struggle endlessly if your website is not effective in converting visitors to your desired goals.

Research suggests “hidden friction” is lethal to website conversion.

What is web marketing conversion?

Simply, website conversion means visitors are clicking where you want them to click and reading what you want them to read.

Friction is interference in the conversion process and often undetected. Marketing Experiments highlights seven website conversion killers. We’ll look at three of them.

1. A Misguided Eye-Path
   A Web page’s eye-path is the natural way in which a visitor’s eyes move through a Web page.
   
   

   A Misguided Eye-Path

2. Under-Emphasized Calls to Action
   Does your site drop the ball when it comes to designing a simple button?
   

   If a button’s primary goal is to elicit a click, it should be emphasized using size, shape, and color, in the main eye-path, and most importantly, look clickable.

3. Difficult Color Combinations
   Make sure you select high-contrasting colors. Choose dark text on light backgrounds.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

Good web design goes beyond creative logos and clever categories. We must develop our websites from the viewpoint of our visitors.

Ready to dig deeper into understanding how to increase the conversion rate on your website?

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“At the core, open source is about freedom – it’s the freedom to run the software for any purpose, it’s the freedom to be able to get under the hood and modify any code you want, and the freedom to really do whatever you like with the software. So, celebrating that on a day when America also celebrates its freedom seemed great.”

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If an outlier, by Malcolm Gladwell’s definition, is someone that exists and acts outside the normal experience, then an inlier would be one who exists and acts as part of it.

I  propose we refer to an inlier as someone in a mainstream user base … the majority … someone who is, statistically at least, like most other users.

By this definition, social media adopters to date are not inliers. They are not the rule, but exceptions to it.

This has been my argument and purpose for building a learning community and question-answer site around social media and digital marketing.

The rest of the country, not Silicon Valley, New York, Boston or Austin, doesn’t Tweet, blog, check-in or post. via What Inliers Think About Social Media | Social Media Explorer

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I never expected WordPress to have the growth it has had, its beginnings were very humble. I think the reason WordPress has been successful, however, is because people have found themselves empowered to create beautiful blogs and websites without having to learn a ton of technology. The entire team behind WP is dedicated to making it as easy to use and elegant as possible. Full article

In the article Matt mentions the WordPress Showcase – a little something to get your creative energy flowing!

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Learning Requires Skilled Instruction & Practice

Have you ever taught someone to drive? Remember how difficult it was to explain what you knew by instinct—like making a left hand turn? Or when to begin braking at 60 m.p.h. as the stop sign looms ahead?

My daughter cried, “But how do you know that? I’ve been riding with you all my life. You think I’d know how to do this by now!”

Learning how to use WordPress is similar.

The gap between knowledge of and knowledge how is often wide.

Knowledge theory defines how to do something as procedural knowledge. Procedural knowledge is largely subconscious; best taught by demonstration and best learned through practice. It focuses on how to obtain a result.

“I know I can watch videos or read a book, but that doesn’t seem to work for me. I need someone to show me.“

You can Google “how do I make my WordPress site look like I want it,” and yet the instructions are not so much instructions as they are tips and tricks for people who already know the basic procedure.

Asking other people is effective because they can respond to requests for clarification and physically point out where to click and what to type. This approach works best in a user group, yet patience often wears thin after 10-15 minutes for one or two tasks.

I remember my white knuckled grip on the armrest when my daughter was learning to drive. (Not to mention the tension of repeatedly stepping on an imaginary brake!) In time, we commissioned an instructor who was knowledgeable, experienced and patient who taught her the basic procedures.

If you are serious about learning WordPress, hire us for patient and gifted WordPress training and coaching. We let you get behind the wheel and do all the driving.

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Our clients tend to fall in one of two categories—they have an online presence, yet are frustrated with social media marketing hype; or they are overwhelmed and uncertain about how and where to start.

We believe your website is a critical component of social business marketing.

You need your site to impress people, create impact, convince clients, convert visitors, increase sales, and pay for itself.

Is your website meeting customer expectations?

• Are buttons linked to each social network prominently located on the website? This is one of the easiest ways to let people know where to find you online.

• Are there social sharing buttons on your content—news items, blog posts, e-books, white papers, industry resources, yada, yada, yada? Make it ridiculously easy for people to share your content!

• Take a look at the website analytics. (You do have measurement tools installed, right?) Are social networks driving traffic to the website? If so, what are the top landing pages? If not, consider how to better drive traffic to the site through social networks.

If you are not where you want to be, we can help.

For several years, we’ve been offering website reviews to clients who want to know exactly what’s not working with their website or blog so they can fix it and get better results for their business – fast.

They’ve loved the results. You will too.

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With the default installation and using 7 of the 8 settings below, WordPress is about 90% there, as far as search engines go. With a couple of SEO plugins (or SEO -aware themes), you can get to 95%.

1. Make sure your site title is descriptive.
2. Make sure you have changed the tagline from “Just Another WordPress Blog” to a description of what your website is about.
3. Install and activate Google XML Sitemaps and All in One SEO Pack (or WordPress SEO by Yoast) plugins.
4. Set your permalinks to something that includes %postname%; we use /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ for the majority of our clients. (Yes, our site is set at something different. Like most of you, we jumped straight to Appearance when we started and learned the best practices later in the game.)
5. Create categories for what you’ll be talking about on your site. Remember, these are general topics; specifics are best as tags.
6. Edit your About page (or Sample Page). Make sure it’s either about you or just delete it. Remember that all content on your site will be indexed.
7. Delete the first default post (Hello World!) and comment.
8. Change the name of the default category from “Uncategorized” to something more descriptive about your site. (Refer to step 5.)

There’s not much to the list, right? When you get through step 8, you’ve hit the 95% mark. To get to 100% (or at least 99%), you also need to adapt how you write your content.

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So how do you—a coach, a therapist, a speaker, a consultant, a real estate agent—promote your services to customers who need you?

Your head is filled with ideas and innovative possibilities; enthusiasm and motivation runs through your veins.

“I need a website. Who knows a good (and cheap) web designer? I know exactly what I want.

My website should:

• have my favorite colors on it for branding
• include a little introduction, like a YouTube video
• explain what the customer needs to know about my profession
• include an About Me page, and outline my services
• be built on WordPress because it’s free.

Unfortunately, too many small business owners—list in hand—run into the arms of someone offering cheap and affordable web design and believe they have found the perfect solution.

In the best case scenario, three or four weeks later the site is online. Yes, you’ve got a pretty website and everything on your list is there. The problem? Your list was incomplete.

Think about it. Your website has a critical role in your business. And it’s not just to sit on the internet and look pretty.

A strategic web designer coaches and guides you on how to use the super, cool, fabulous WordPress technology and put your website to work.

Consider these business opportunities and roles your new website can provide:

• Relationship builder
• Sales manager
• Event manager
• Traffic generator
• Automated marketing machine
• Search engine optimization (SEO) manager
• Advertising manager
• Statistics manager
• Blogging manager

All good websites come from a good plan. If you want to create a good and solid website which addresses business roles, you need a good and solid plan—ideally, before you start shopping for an affordable web designer.

I know it’s hard to do, and I know it’s addicting to tweak the colors, fonts and other design elements. But it’s time to turn to the old paper and pen. That’s right; I want you to actually write things down.

On a piece of notebook paper, or whatever is lying around, describe your site. Take five to twenty minutes to come up with a purpose for your site.

• What 5 things do you want your target market to know about?
• Who is your target market, by the way?
• What are the top 5 skills you could pass on to your clients?
• What 5 subjects/topics are you an expert in?
• What 5 subjects/topics do your clients dome to you for?
• If you were to ask your target market what they want to know more about, what 5 topics would they include?

Understanding what you want to present on your site helps you organize the information. Your WordPress site is organized by several different methods. As you layout your website on paper, how you want to help the reader find the information you have is critical to your website design.

Before you get to the graphic elements of your site, take the time to discover what you have to say and who you are talking to.

If you need help along the way, let us know. Our mission is to ease your WordPress related stress, make you feel like a technical genius, increase your profits, get known and attract clients.

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