Vladimir's Blog

10 Online Services for Tracking Keyword Rankings in Search Engines

Vladimir — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 22:38:37 +0000

Here is the list of all online services that I know of which you can use to track your keyword ranking on Google.

If course there is also ManageWP (with Business package) which is one of the most affordable ones and comes with whole range of other goodies as well included in the price.

If we can’t do that, then we ought’a go broke

Vladimir — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 02:04:26 +0000

At the age of only 31, Steve Jobs has already been able to express his fascinating vision, luckily documented for all future generations in the series of videos now available on Youtube.

It's an amazing example of how to build the fanatical corporate culture through nothing more other then strong motivation of every individual involved.

At 13:30 watch and learn how to create a company. "World does not care about our internal struggles", Jobs said.

Meaningful Gamification

Vladimir — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 16:21:28 +0000

Gamification has been one of the hot Internet trends lately.

If you are not familiar with the term - Gamification is a process of taking game mechanics and bringing it to businesses that are otherwise boring.

There is a lot of talk about Gamification and it seems that every new service nowadays has some form of it implemented. This Ted Talk suggests that 50% of all innovation and 70% of top global 2000 apps will be gamified by 2015.

The guy is all excited about it, but I cringe in horror. Why?

Since Stack Overflow started using badges, and then companies relying their entire business on gamification (Foursquare) we can see others more and more trying to forcingly add the layer of "game" to their products which in more cases then not, fails miserably. Games are all about the joy of playing them and these companies and their expensive consultants think they can just use a template score/reward/badge system and slap it onto their product and then move onto the next feature request?

This makes me angry as I am an avid gamer, and I love all kind of games. I have played almost every good video game since 1985. I have a collection of around 50 board games. I've created and coded the first MUD (Multi User Dungeon - things people played before MMORPG's came) on our University, then proceeded to play this game tirelessly with my friends both night and day time.

I've recently came upon two Gamification views that I agree with. Scott Nicholson is the board games expert and knows a thing or two about games.

This guy is onto something too.

For the sake of all of us, but mostly for our children's sake, I hope that the games in the future will not be degraded to the level Zynga does in the present.

40 million minutes

Vladimir — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 15:33:20 +0000

This is, more or less, how much every one of us is expected to live.

More than a few times I can remember minutes lasting like an eternity. For example when holding my breath. Or when I was watching my daughter being born. So looking at the number from that perspective, it really seems a lot, with plenty of spare time to be bored even.

Yet when I remember that I lived almost 19 million of those minutes already, it does not seem that much. It would be cool if I had 19 million memories to associate with those minutes spent, but I don't.

I think everyone should know there is still long way to go but also be aware that they are getting closer there. It is never too late to start thinking about doing something good and leaving some kind of a legacy.

One of my favorite Pink Floyd songs is called "Time".

Things are good. Actually, great.

Vladimir — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 19:58:21 +0000

In case you are wondering why it took one month for this blog post, it's because things were doing really good. Great, actually.

Two days ago I became a dad to a beautiful baby girl, Petra. As my friend says, I am no longer the son, now I am the father. I have witnessed the birth and it's the kind of experience I would recommend to all future dads.

We started preparing for this about a month ago, buying all the things for the baby's room. Gosh there are so many things you need, and you have no clue about them.

At the same time I was approaching the high point of my professional career so far, with the launch of the ManageWP startup. 18 months of hard work, considerable investment in money and time and we finally pulled it off. The launch day is here, but I can be relaxed knowing that the team did a great job preparing for the event.

I want to be spending more time with my family, and knowing that everything is set up and running fine at work means a lot for the peace of mind. Becoming profitable after the pre-order month does help too.

In about a month from now I will be visiting my estate on the island of Brac to prune the olive trees. We got 18 trees, and this gives us about 50-60 liters of pure olive oil every year. I often think how lucky I am to have this. I know that no matter what happens I will always have this priceless sanctuary to go to when I get older.

All pieces started to fall into the right place at the right time.

What should we write about next – WordPress plugin

Vladimir — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 23:37:23 +0000

After a long time here is another plugin from our brewery. This one is really handy.

"What should we write about next" allows your users to quickly leave feedback at the end of your posts.

The idea behind this plugin is very simple - allow your visitors to leave a quick feedback about what would they want to read next on your site.

This improves interaction, gives you topic ideas and makes your visitors feel useful. It's a win-win plugin.

We originally used it on ManageWP blog but I decided to share it with WordPress community as well.

Click to visit What should we write about next plugin.

Funny how as soon as I've put it here I started getting suggestions like write about what sports you play. You can't be serious you want to read about that ? :)

We have liftoff! ManageWP pre-order launched!

Vladimir — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 20:44:40 +0000

I am happy to announce the launch of ManageWP pre-order. Go ahead and secure your 30% discount during the pre-order by signing up now.

In the back

It was almost 30 hours of non-stop work to get the things done in time for the launch date (oh, that sweet start-up launch crunch time). And it also took 18 months and a crew of more or less 10 people around the whole world, to offer this service I am so proud of at this moment.

This exclusive picture shown below depicts the dev team moments after the launch (of course taken with a mobile, as nobody remembered to bring a proper camera - we did have the champagne though :)

I am proud of the whole team as they made ManageWP what it is today - truly a unique platform that helps thousands of people around the world save their precious time. Thanks team and thanks WordPress for building something great!

Smart Youtube becomes Smart Youtube PRO with TONS of New Features

Vladimir — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 10:48:12 +0000

I am happy to announce the launch of new version of Smart Youtube, one of the most popular video embedding plugins for WordPress.

The version brings so many new features that I had to change the name to PRO (but the plugin remains free).

Here are just some of the new features of Smart Youtube Pro.

Added support for Vimeo, Metacafe, Liveleak and Facebook videos
New, much better, sidebar Widget support
Extract Video thumbnails to show in your excerpts on categories/archive pages
Show video in Colorbox
Now parses http:// and httpv:// videos just the same
Option to autoplay only the first video on the page
Plugin localization support

Check out the plugin page for more details.

If you like the new plugin, please give it a 5 star rating.

ManageWP has a fresh look, pre-orders start on Tuesday

Vladimir — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 22:34:37 +0000

I am happy to announce that we just launched a new look for ManageWP.

The new look will be followed by the start of pre-order this Tuesday, December 6th. Sign up now to receive a 30% off your subscription prices during the pre-order period.

How to redirect WordPress homepage to admin/login form

Vladimir — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 17:07:11 +0000

If you are building a WordPress site where all the action is happening in the back-end, you may not need the front-end at all.

In this case you'd want all visitors coming to the website to go directly to the login/registration form.

Here is a simple way to redirect all front-end requests to the back-end.

1. Edit your theme's index.php and add these two lines to the top:

header("Location: ".get_admin_url());
exit();

2. Save the file and then remove all other theme files.

It basically tells all requests to redirect to the admin URL. Since, index.php is the only theme file "alive" this will also redirect 404 requests.

How to use Twitter as an effective testimonials tool

Vladimir — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 17:18:20 +0000

Favorites!

Use "Add to Favorite" to select any tweet that speaks nicely about your service.

Then simply link to your favorites as a basic form of testimonials. Here you can check out ManageWP testimonials which is an automatically generated Twitter page containing tweets we fave'd.

Taking the idea step further you can integrate the live tweet feed of favorite tweets on your website. One of the ways of doing is with a simple script like twitter text.

Check out an example of such integration on Rapportive buzz page.

Neat, isn't it?

Do NOT fail at customer support

Vladimir — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 17:27:43 +0000

As I use more and more startups, I witness many forgetting the importance of user support, to the extent that it hurts.

This post is to promise myself that my startup won't suck at user support.

Startup stage

It seems by definition that the smaller company is, the better support they will have. This is mostly true thanks to the fact that in this stage you will usually get support directly from the founders.

And nobody gives better support than people who gave all their life's energy into creating something.

Developers and other people who were with them from the beginning also tend to give great support as they are very passionate about your product.

So usually there is no problem with support at this stage, unless you are so busy with your startup that you completely forget to offer support in the first place.

Growth stage

So over time, as the company grows, the magic of founders talking to early adopters slowly becomes a support annoyance that needs be taken care of. Checked in the list of things to do.

Trouble starts at the moment you start hiring dedicated people to handle support.

In most cases these people will have nothing to do with your startup, and their primary motivation, at least in the beginning, will be only the salary.

This is the moment when you need to lay out the base for user-friendly support for the time that may come in the future, and this is where most companies fail. They get too busy with growth, marketing, acquiring new customers, developing new features. I am sure it is very hard to resist.

Late stage

So what happens at the end is that the company engages in outsourcing support to third world countries, where they can get massive resources for low price.

What matters is to close every support ticket, as this gives a perception (albeit a wrong one) that the job is successfully done.

How the user feels is often neglected.

This is of course bad for the business, as the product/service is sold and used by living and breathing beings and not meaningless robots.

Support is at the core of every business

Good support goes a long way. Bad support will cost you your business.

But it seems that handling support was never solved in a scalable way. You simply can not clone the founders.

Here are some random tips to make your support team better:

Have multiple ways of people contacting you (email, tickets, twitter, forum, contact forms, more the merrier).
Don't wait for users to contact you, actively engage in getting feedback back from them, especially in the early stage
It's easy to go crazy when asked 1,000 times the same question. Treat every user as your first. Because it is usually their first time contacting you. If you can't do that, then you should not offer support at all.
What ever you do, be polite and courteous. Imagine you are helping a granny in your neighborhood.
If the user is still not sold on your product, never point them to the documentation in order to resolve a support question. Do what ever you can to make them feel comfortable using your product: make screenshots, draw diagrams, go on Skype with them, dance if you need to. Referring the potential user to the documentation is like a car salesman telling the buyer to check the user manual when asked about the engine. Remember that user guides are made for people who are already your customers.

Automatic SSH login with Putty

Vladimir — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 17:31:35 +0000

If you use Putty to connect via SSH to your websites often, you might save a lot of time by automating the whole process through few simple steps.

You will need PuTTYgen which you can download here
Start it and click generate to generate a random key
Enter a pass-phrase for the private key (I recommend not skipping this step, but entering something simple like a three digit number). Save the file.
Copy the generated public key (that's the whole content of the box beginning with ssh-rsa ...).
Log into your server, and edit the file ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. Paste the public key you copied previously.
Start Putty, load your session. Go to Connection->Data and type in your login username
Enter Connection->SSH->Auth and browse for the Private key file you saved previously
Go back to Sessions, and Save the changes

That's all. Next time you open your session all you have to do is type in the three digits passphrase you used before and you will be logged into the server.

I use SSH about 10-20 times a day. This procedure saves about 20 seconds of time. So I am saving 30-40 hours of my life yearly thanks to it. Makes you wonder...

Intelligent ramblings of mr. Clarkson

Vladimir — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 17:41:44 +0000

Image from one of my favorite Top Gear specials, the North Pole Expedition

I am talking of course about Jeremy Clarkson, the Top Gear presenter, and his book 'For crying out Loud'. For most of the time I find Clarkson simply ingenious.

The man is gifted with a unique talent to see through complicated things, and present them in a simple manner.

Although there are some things I don't agree with him his book is a perfect read for a vacation.

Does this quote leave you indifferent?

"We can call civilised countries those that have nuclear submarines and do not have a death penalty. Which leaves Britain and France. Which is about right."

Simple but possibly lucrative WordPress related business idea

Vladimir — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 19:58:26 +0000

If you are a web development company specialized in WordPress development and can't find leads for development here is a business idea I will call 'WordPress for Startups'.

Subscribe to updates from sites that promote new startups.

Since WordPress is the most widely spread web publishing platform on the earth, chance is that they will need a WordPress plugin that will bring their application closer to WordPress users.

That's where you kick in offering a development of such plugin at a reasonable cost. This won't be too complicated in most cases and by the time you finish two-three deals you will have a framework for building plugins for startups.

On the business end of things, you need to hunt down your first deal like a predator. Next time you approach a startup you will have a a reference to show which will make things much easier.

With so many new startups every day, you may end up having 1-5 deals a day.

Then up-sell them on a corporate blog. They need to have one, so why wouldn't you create a customized WordPress theme to match their new site.

Startups need this badly, they just don't have time.

Here are a couple of sites to hunt for new startups.

www.killerstartups.com
www.go2web20.net
www.listio.com
www.feedmyapp.com
www.ziipa.com

Bonus: If you already have a startup that other startups might want to use (like project management, invoicing, server/resources management, etc..) you could also benefit from directly contacting new startups. It's like a free list of leads.

Would you give it a try?