aimed at people who are interested in writing, self-publishing/print-on-demand and internet marketing for their books (in print/ebook or audio format).

That is a great niche, there are thousands of people struggling to get their book written, published and sold. I know the pull of books very well myself.

Joanna has self-published her print book using print on demand, and also e-books, along with marketing via clickbank, so she has practical hands on knowledge of what she writes about. She also has created an online course called Author2Zero which teaches people “how to use Web 2.0 tools to write, publish, sell and promote your book”.

You know already what I am going to say … yes, Joanna is an Authority Blogger

The content of the blog is great, and Joanna has a great personality that comes across very well in text (as you would expect!), audio and video. While the video is not “slick”, and on occasion lighting and audio suffer a little, I actually think the character of them is an asset and warms you to get more engaged rather than putting you off.

In terms of promotion, the site is currently No 6 on Australia’s top writing blogs. This score is based on Google PageRank, Alexa and Technorati scores. Essentially, if Joanna gets a bunch more links then she will be able to top that list.

First Impressions

Colours are fighting for attention

My first impression was that the red dominates. Spend too long reading and you might get a migraine I guess this pushes people to subscribe to the feed, heh.

"Noisy" layout

The layout is also very busy. There are literally hundreds of links per page - far too many choices without giving clear demarcation and some sense of content hierarchy.

Choose what you want the visitor to do next, then work your layout to support that focus.

As it stands the visitor might well get so confused they do not hang around, I imagine this is reflected in the bounce rate statistics.

You will want to guide visitors to

1. Read
2. Subscribe
3. Buy

At the moment the clutter will cause the first goal to be hindered - prioritize the content, and put everything else to the background apart from your subscription box (providing a clear call to action) and also give your Author2zero product banners space to breathe.

Recommendations

I have three big recommendations for this blog, and combined they underscore a key lesson in any kind of market.

Packaging is as important as content.

1. Change the colour scheme so red is used only to draw attention to specific focus areas rather than as a block colour. Right now the background dominates, and the colour combinations used in the content cause confusion rather than attract. If you look at my blog, I use spot red for very important locations, and orange as a general “look at me” colour. The rest of the scheme is very much in a supporting role. Make the content come to the fore, the background should, well, be in the background.
2. Simplify layout and use graphics and HTML boxes to differentiate, clarify and segment the content to add more legibility and context. Right now the layout is “noisy”. When the visitor is given too many choices they make no choice at all. At the moment rather than being helpful the layout is inhibiting the visitor. You need clear sign posts, and remove the clutter. Reduce the categories down to seven as a maximum, lose the Tweets and the tag cloud.
3. Build links by offering viral blog content resources and networking with other bloggers and writers. You already do a good job of networking, and offer some great free content. What you need to do is turn those around to your link advantage. Repackage some of your already written content and put those to work as series or big resource potsts, then promote promote promote in social media. Also create a writing competition where folks can win copies of your books. Anything to bring the links in to boost your link count and traffic, and in turn grow your PR, Alexa and Technorati scores.

As it stands the vast majority of your links go to the homepage, which is not going to help with your search traffic as you want topical, keyword focused deep links as well as general domain linking for good long term growth.

I would also grab the variation of your domain without “the” (”creativepenn” versus “thecreativepenn”) as some people will instinctively write it without as well as with.

You do not need to throw away your branding. In fact I would suggest the DIYThemes Thesis Theme for WordPress as your base theme, with your existing header would be an excellent evolution rather than a radical departure. This will also give you the advantage of an excellent framework that will make full advantage of the links you grow.

Summary

Right now the content is great but being let down by usability issues. These are easy to resolve, either with the help of a great designer or simply by moving over to a customised Thesis Theme install.

Any wannabe book writers should definitely check out the site!

What do you think? Please share your feedback for Joanna in the comments …

Your Free Subscriber Download!

This text has been taken from the article Creative Penn Blog Critique. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

Every year I get questions from people asking how they can fight the “summer slump” where traffic droops over the summer months. Also, who does not want more traffic any time of year, right?

So this year I came up with a plan.

Starting 1st July until the end of Summer, I will be posting tips, tutorials and exercises over at the Authority Blogger Forum. For your part I will want you to share your traffic generation questions, experiences, results and thoughts so we can all make the techniques and tactics even better.

Here is the best bit for you. Anyone who participates will get all the resulting content compiled into an ebook that you will be able to download absolutely free. To qualify for the ebook you just have to take part. This could be:

• Asking questions
• Trying out techniques on your blog
• Helping answer questions
• Adding ideas
• Bug fixing and typo killing
• Answering polls
• Taking part in experiments
• Tweeting and voting
• Or anything else that adds to the over all experience

If you think this might be something fun and worth a try, head over to the forum now - more details will be added there as we get started.

Comments are closed on this post, let’s take all the discussion to the Forum to keep it all together

Your Free Subscriber Download!

This text has been taken from the article Summer Traffic Blog Project. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

Everyday Guide First Impressions

Wow these blog critiques have been popular lately - I hope you are getting as much out of them as I have fun writing them

This critique is for Althaf Ahmed who runs a site called Everyday Guide which he described in his email to me as “an online repository of mini guides”. He also has the .net version of the domain which is due to be merged with the dotcom.

What are these “mini guides” you might ask? Good question, I am glad you raised it. Here are some examples:

• How to start a home business
• What is a blog
• How to start an internet business

Essentially this site aims to be an “everything for everyone”. A particularly tough nut to crack!

This means

• Not being anything in particular
• Not having any specific target audience
• Not providing a deep experience

and it also means going up against the big hub sites, wikipedia, Squidoo …

Now this approach can work. You can get social media traffic by creating DiggBait, and you can get links and search traffic through linkbait. Just be aware of what it is you are creating. Essentially a traffic vehicle, and some ad opportunities.

My recommendation though is to tweak the strategy somewhat. Will return to that in a second. Let’s get some general impressions down first.

First Visit

Now if you go visit the site, I am sure you will agree that the first thing you will be struck with is that you are unaware of what the site is about. It seems to be about a lot, and then not very much. This is because, as regular readers will remember, we need to offer some sort of orientation.

• Where am I? - People need to know where they are, and might not even be entirely sure how they got there. You might be dropped into a deep page from a search result or blog link, or might have clicked a homepage link in a social media profile, or some other random occurrence. You can not guarantee the visitor will have been given any context.
• What can I see/do? - Navigation is not enough, and in fact more often than not in blogs you are overwhelmed with options. Too many choices is as bad as too few. Your popular content in the sidebar is good but too low down the page to get noticed.
• Why should I care? - The old chestnut of WIIFM - What’s In It For Me? Give the visitor a benefit, or even better a problem that your site solves. Individual guides might well solve a specific problem, but why would they return?
• Now what? - What can we do now? What should we do next. Always have a next step!

Reading Experience

The content quality varies, as does tone and style, which gives an impression of no single voice or personality, while the about page says there is only one person behind the site. Either make it a multi author blog (preferred) or a single author blog with a single voice.

My preference for multi author is because I know your future plans involve really growing the content, and this is your best route to that. If you go single author, you need to put more of “you” into it. Make it more conversational, provide picture and more detail about you.

Individual Articles

A lot of the content is quite “thin” and does not entirely deliver on the promises made in the headlines. This is a similar problem to the content you find on article marketing sites and ezine directories, where the content is simply “enough to meet quota”. Do not fall into the trap of search fodder, create truly valuable resources and you will get far more links, word of mouth and social media votes.

Way Forward

Here is how I suggest you progress:

1. Select an under served niche rather than go up against Wikipedia
2. Target that niche’s specific audience rather than “everyone”
3. Provide the very best answers for that audience’s specific problems - ask them what they need to know
4. Approach advertisers who want to capture the attention of that audience
5. Network with the leaders and personalities of the niche to grow awareness of your site

Essentially, rather than be “everything to everyone” become something specific for a specific group! You will gain by

• Grow links, search and traffic traction
• More profit with no “ugly adsense” downsides
• Easier to create content ideas

Not only that, it gets better!

When you attract a specific audience with something truly useful to that audience, you can grow a subscriber base of people who want to hear from you. I can not underline enough how powerful this is.

It is only a slight change from your strategy, and in fact you can split off content into sub-sites or their own domains.

• Starting a business
• Getting healthy
• Gaming
• etc

All it needs is to really get inside the mindset of each audience and give them what they would most respond to.

Over to you

What do you think of Everyday Guide? Please share your thoughts in the comments …

Your Free Subscriber Download!

This text has been taken from the article Everyday Guide Blog Critique. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

Spiritual River

Patrick Meninga, aka skinnyninja to forum members, won this blog critique in the Blogger of the Month competition. If you would like to win a blog critique or Authority Blogger membership there is still time to win the June prize, you just need to participate in the forum by being friendly, asking excellent questions that spark discussion, or answering questions well.

The blog is called Spiritual River and is about addiction, or rather I guess is more about sobriety by being more spiritual.

By using the Thesis Theme, many of the techy things you need to do are handled already, so in terms of SEO and having a good web framework, this is well sorted. Patrick has used a basic Thesis install and added a custom header and some adsense for monetization.

There is nothing wrong with the base Thesis look but you get better results by properly skinning it to your own, unique appearance. You should avoid looking like every other Thesis install on the planet! That said, the header looks good.

Another issue design wise is it is not very obvious for a first time visitor what they are being offered. You must communicate where the visitor has arrived, what they can see and most important, why they should be interested. This is fundemental, as a confused visitor is not likely to hang around.

Put some text in the header, a benefit focused statement, such as

“How to achieve sobriety through spirituality“

(although having just read that back, you might find a phrasing that suits your audience better!).

A key part of your differentiation is that you are a person who has been through it. You have been there, done that, and lived to tell the tale. I often say to my coaching and Authority Blogger clients that “you are your secret sauce”, and here it is especially true. The people in your audience will likely have well-meaning experts telling them what to do but someone on the exact same wavelength, just a bit further ahead of the them on the path, will be a valuable person to know.

Keeping that in mind, you need to personalize a little more. Your about pages are excellent, but even better would be a small about box with your image in it right in the sidebar. You can link to your main about page and bio from there.

As well as this, engage the reader more in a conversation. If you go back over your recent posts, most end with a statement. Switch that up and instead end on a question. You will see wherever I write I normally end with a question of some sort, it is rare that I do not. Something like “What do you think? Please share in the comments …” works a treat.

The key to getting comments is to spark the conversation using questions that have no right or wrong answer. Everyone has an opinion, but not everyone dare answer a question in case they end up looking dumb or worse. So make a good, welcoming environment, where people feel safe to respond, and also make sure that people know they can be anonymous as much as they need to, because it is a sensitive niche.

If people do not want to comment you still need to engage them. Really push your contact form as a place where people can interact with you. Ask questions and ask them to ask you questions. Some of my very best content ideas are simply questions I have been asked by readers and customers. These are beyond precious.

As well as reaching out to readers, also reach out to other bloggers. This networking will help you boost your link profile (although you are already doing pretty well in that) and help you raise your referral and search traffic. It might also lead to profit opportunities.

This can start with Twitter connections, and guest posting, which can also lead to paid writing gigs which is something you mention on your site.

If you are serious about getting paid writing opportunities then you need a service page and to mention this in your sidebar, about page and when you guest post. You could list experience/appearances, how to book you for writing and the kind of work you do. Of course you do not have to stick to only writing on addiction sites. You have a particular frame of reference that would allow you to write personally on many subjects and a writing ability that would allow you to write on topics that you have not personally experienced but could research. After all, I have written about rehab without experiencing rehab or addiction!

Consider the related subject areas you can connect to:

• Spirituality
• Self help
• Health
• Life Coaching
• Hypnosis
• NLP
• etc

All of those are topics that you could expand to or network with but also when you look over those again, they are all areas where there are products and services that can be reviewed or joint ventured. You could make advertising deals, affiliate commissions or partner to develop products.

When you look at your blog as aimed at an audience rather than a subject, your opportunities expand.

Speaking of which, I am not sure how much money you will be making with Adsense, but consider getting sponsor ads (Thesis allows you to add a column easily) as I imagine rehab could be a high paying niche, but also look closely at making money via affiliate and your own products. For the affiliate side, because people in your audience will be vulnerable, you need to be even more open and honest in your recommendations, but there is a lot of potential there. I know that rehab leads are worth a lot of money, and are not as ugly as Adsense

Finally work hard to show your subscription options and provide a call to action that shows why someone should sign up. Why should they subscribe? Also provide subscription links under your articles as this is where someone who has enjoyed your content will want to see them.

What do you think of Spiritual River? Please help Patrick by adding your feedback in the comments …

Your Free Subscriber Download!

This text has been taken from the article Spiritual River Blog Critique. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

Next Tuesday Darren is joining me on the telephone where I will be asking him YOUR biggest questions about blogging, traffic, subscribers and how he makes so much money - and you can join us online.

Windows users will be able to listen live from your computer speakers, no phone necessary. Due to scheduling issues and time zones the call will be at 11am UK time, which while fine for the rest of the world is early for our USA friends, but even if you can not make the call live, if you sign up below you will be able to still ask your question and get access to the recording and transcript after.

Last time I did a teleseminar it was over subscribed and people got locked out, so make sure you get in quick to avoid disappointment.

So sign up now in the form below!

Get Access to the Call, Replay and Downloads Here:

Your Free Subscriber Download!

This text has been taken from the article Join Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett on a Live Call. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

Free Pursuits is a blog about “Lifestyle Design”, or How to Live the Good Life Without Being Independently Wealthy or Retired

• Find the flexible career you were meant to have
• Manage your career to maximize your happiness
• Make time for and pursue the things that really matter to you

What this means for you is a blog packed with content guiding you towards living the life of your dreams. Of course what this means for Corbett as a blogger is he is pitting himself up against Mr 4 Hour Work Week, Tim Ferris and the fantastic Non Conformist, Mr Chris Guillebeau.

This is two challenges in one:

1. Most people do not know what “Lifestyle Design” is (you need to do some keyword research to find what people are really looking for and build lots of content around those items)
2. Those people who do know what Lifestyle Design is probably turn to the learned gentlemen mentioned above.

Now all is not gloom and doom because in Corbett’s favor he has a great blog. Let me briefly outline some of the good points:

• Well set up (WordPress + Thesis)
• Nicely designed and usable, if not a vast departure from the default Thesis look
• The content is well written and clearly readable.
• Good emphasis on reader benefits, including running a survey to get insights
• Beginnings of some peer-outreach

In fact this all makes my job of critiquing much harder. You can’t see this but I am shaking my fist at the monitor, heh.

So the blog is on good foundations, what is the answer to the aforementioned challenges?

Differentiate!

You must move past the template, both visually in terms of Thesis, and also direction as compared to the rest of the niche. How are you different?

First with the design, while it looks great and a lot of people would love to have a blog that looks as good, the niche is competitive and dominated by strong, well positioned personalities. You need to stand out from the pack by offering something richer, more impactful and most of all, yours.

As always the strategy, once you have moved past infrastructure, is to decide, and to effectively communicate, your positioning. What is your uniqueness, remarkability, or brand?

When you are not the first, not the biggest, and not the most well known, in any niche, you need to find ways to stand out on your own and cut through the fog.

One way I like to approach this is by using the following fill-in-the-blanks phrase:

Unlike other Lifestyle Design Blogs, Free Pursuits ___________, which means for you __________.

The first part of the phrase identifies how you are different, the second part answers “so what?”.

You could be different by painting yourself green, but that doesn’t mean anyone should necessarily care

After you can answer this in a compelling way, then you can translate that into action.

Audience Focus

Your first port of call when differentiating outside of yourself is your audience. After all it is these folks you are aiming to serve. At present the blog aims to capture pretty much everyone interested in lifestyle design. This could be a tough struggle, better to focus and grow outwards.

For example David Hobby writes a photography blog, but instead of all of photography he focused on photography lighting using inexpensive strobe lights. Now he is a world renowned photography rock star

So what part of the overall audience can you most appeal to and help?

• Beginners
• Advanced
• Freelancers
• Travelers
• Wealth-focus
• Spiritual-focus
• Productivity folks
• Cubicle escapees
• Passive income dreamers
• Silver surfers
• Eco-living
• Families
• … the list goes on

You will find if you focus on a sub-group then you will have more content ideas rather than fewer, plus nobody will be in competition and therefore everyone will be much more willing to help, link and comment.

Multi-Author

Rather than fixate on one smaller group, you could go the other way and make your blog (and you have a great name for this) into a multi-author blog. Think of your blog as Techcrunch or BlogHerald for the lifestyle designers maybe?

You could even bring in the existing lifestyle design personalities for regular or guest posts.

Grow Your Community

Of course the logical extension of a community of bloggers is a community forum, membership site or social network. This kind of connection and interaction is practically designed for lifestyle design and nomadic lifestyles as very often the old face to face networks become strained and a virtual socialization takes its place.

Perhaps Free Pursuits could be the biggest community for the lifestyle designer?

• You need to drive more people to comment using in-content call to action
• Post polls
• Drive people to comment with questions in Twitter
• Draw people over from forums and Facebook
• Find out where people hang out and interact there

In particular you will want to look in social bookmarking sites for what was popular previously.

Once people are on your site you need to keep them around, and there are two main ways your site is ideal for this

1. Build a real email list now, not Feedburner but with a service like Aweber - this will enable you to send out interactions and alerts, along with free reports and other exclusive content. It also allows people to reply and know they will get a human being.
2. Create series posts on “big ideas”, and perhaps collect them into reports that you can give away

I also find conversions much better when I use an obvious email form rather than a sign up link.

Sell the Dream

Any lifestyle blogger needs to remember that the majority of the people reading will not make the full leap. You need to sell the dream, give vivid pictures, video, audio. The full multimedia life stream. Use flickr, youtube, twitter so people can live your life via proxy. Show Don’t Tell.

This is also

1. An excellent way for your audience to get to know you better
2. A way to introduce other prominent folks from the niche and network with them

Consider a blogtalkradio show? I imagine Webinars/Teleseminars would be a huge draw (and profitable if you wanted to charge)

Fix Real, Compelling Problems

So we have talked about how you can stand out, and we have briefly looked at community. Both of those are going to aid you getting more visibility and traffic, while branding your site.

The biggest impact you can make though is if you take the overall “dreamer” aspect of the niche and turn around and solve real, pressing problems for the people who really need to make a change.

Interact with your audience, on forums, in social media (particularly Twitter and Facebook) and find out the real challenges that people are coping with and can not find an answer to. Once your audience grows, make it obvious and easy for people to send you their problems.

Most of my best content ideas are from consulting clients or reader questions. You can not top the inspiration and good feelings that come from actually helping people with real issues.

A great example for how to gather reader issues is over at CopyBlogger … sometimes how people do something is more instructive than what

One of the problems with “Your guide to lifestyle design” (other than “what’s that?”) is the “That’s nice dear” effect. You know, when you tell someone something really cool and they just smile and say “That’s nice” rather than get as excited and passionate about it as you are?

So work out the real problem your blog solves on a macro level and for each post aim to solve a problem on a per-article basis also. A real problem that people can solve with your help. If possible use the exact phrasing that your audience uses.

Summary

Free Pursuits is an excellent blog and has been given a great start, and is now ready to be taken to the next level.

Check it out now.

Over to you - what do you think about Free Pursuits? What would you do differently? Do you disagree with what I have said here? Give the benefit of your thoughts in the comments …

Your Free Subscriber Download!

This text has been taken from the article Free Pursuits Blog Critique. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

We talked about lots of interesting stuff in this fun interview, but there are definitely some strong lessons for all of us contained in this interview.

Play the interview

Download the MP3 here.

As promised, here is the download link to all the cool stuff mentioned in the call

Your Free Subscriber Download!

This text has been taken from the article Interview With Naomi Dunford and Sonia Simone. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

Wow! I knew this Social Media Success Summit was generating a lot of interest, but when I had the idea to hold a competition to win tickets I didn’t realize how much it would take over my Twitter stream and test my web hosting to the limit!

Hits according to cli.gs

Every time it was retweeted there would be another spike of dozens of people arriving simultaneously - so glad I switched to a more robust hosting service!

At the time of writing the summit is very close to selling out the available seats, so the lucky winners are getting an even better deal than we originally thought.

If you have been on the fence about signing up to grab your own seat, you had better get in quick.

Thank you to everyone who entered, either through spreading the word on Twitter or through writing some excellent blog posts.

Before I announce the winners, I need to give a shout out to the runners up who did such a great job in their writing. Starting with a pretty unorthodox entry …

• Beth wrote a song with the Summit presenters in the lyrics
• I liked the story here
• Cindy wrote an excellent and persuasive entry
• Brandon’s entry was articulate and well written
• I’m always a sucker for a non-profit, but the winner just edged this one out

If your entry is in this list then get in touch and I will sort you out a consolation prize

So, who won?

Charles Bohannan with his impassioned plea

For example, I’ve been laboring on this blog for 8 months now. I’ve gone from scared, skeptical newbie to committed, confident blogger, and I’m proud of my progress. Every morning at 4:30 I roll out of bed and start another day of writing killer flagship content, and I love it.

But writing is not enough. Despite my content efforts, my blog barely makes a blip on the blogosphere radar. Why is this? Because I don’t have social media strategy! [And I need one, Chris.]

RANDOM TWEET WINNER:

http://www.random.org/ - #218

Well done Tracy - there were well over 1,000 Tweets of the #smsuccess message!

Now before those of you who did not win gather your pitchforks and start lighting torches and march on Garrett Towers, there is still a chance to win a ticket. Charles has stated in his post that he will give away his spare ticket on his blog, so I suggest you hold him to that promise!

Thanks to everyone who entered and joined in the fun

Your Free Subscriber Download!

This text has been taken from the article Social Media Success Summit Competition Winners. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

… a web magazine for people who love web tools and apps. There are new and exciting applications being developed all the time. We sift through the abundance of technologies available to you, and help you find the most useful tools.

Right away you might be thinking this puts them right up against such web power houses as TechCrunch, Mashable, Scoble and every other tech blogger out there. And that is true to an extent.

The way that UsefulTools is differentiating is through focus. By sacrificing the news, gossip and editorial, and aiming just for the review slice of the pie, they will stand out. Also, and this is just my hope, they will avoid the echo-chamber and TechMeme chasing behavior of some of the other blogs out there!

On with the critique …

Cool Design

Sleek, modern design, but aimed at large screens

As you can see the design is very modern, very web 2.0, and therefore very niche appropriate. Perhaps this is an educated gamble, seeing as the audience will be skewed more high-tech, but as you can see from the above screen grab, the design is built for larger screens and 1024x wide monitor users will get an unnecessarily cramped experience without use of the scroll bars. Something easily rectified as the design does not need this extra space.

Again in the header, sidebar and all the above the fold navigation really, space has been wasted in the aim of achieving lots of luxurious white space. Now, designer types might disagree, but I am calling it waste from a marketing and audience perspective.

Alternative layout

Using my mad photoshop skillz I mocked up an alternative layout that emphasizes for the visitor an answer to “where am I?”, and brings up useful navigation, without moving the ads further down from where they already are. In fact the whole thing is brought up because the header is now more narrow. You might find this too cramped but I am sure a compromise solution is possible.

Visitor Retention and Community

An even better use of space would be to show a more compelling sign up box. As it stands the RSS is almost timidly suggested along with an easily missable twitter follow button. Even though the audience is likely to be high tech, you should not overlook email as a subscription option, and for this kind of review site an email digest, perhaps weekly or less often, could well be popular. Email newsletters provide another advertising opportunity also, which should be investigated.

While we are on the topic of subscriptions, we should look at the fact that subscriptions are ignored apart from the top few pixels of the screen. If you want visitors to keep coming back then this is a mistake. Put a call to subscribe right under any content the visitor might read, especially under the reviews.

• How can they subscribe?
• Why should they subscribe?
• What will they miss if they don’t?

It is good that comment subscription is offered. This helps create a discussion in the comments and return visits, rather than people saying their piece and never returning.

Right now though comments are not very inviting. Rather than “No Comments”, try a call to action again. Perhaps “What do you think? Make a comment …” or “Add your comments here”.

Also in the content, ask questions, invite feedback, prompt a response. Many of the articles are stated as review fact. It’s not, it is an opinion, and you can use your opinion to invite reader opinions. Is there a way that visitor opinions can be highlighted or even factored in?

While the site is purely about reviews, you should provide the opportunity for reader reviews, surveys, polls, and perhaps competitions (win application licenses?) - you need to work additionally hard to create community because you do not have the flexibility of different content options that your competitors do.

The twitter feature in the sidebar is very cool, but not immediately obvious and potentially a place for abuse - how will you stop inappropriate or spammy content appearing? Is it possible someone could push malware to your users via this?

I am expecting any trending topic will be a magnet for spam and worse. Perhaps beginning with Wolfram Alpha …

Traffic

Again, because your site is all about reviews, you need to focus your search keyword traffic toward that audience. This means as well as prominently (and repeated) mentions of the product names, you also need to mix in mentions of product categories, and especially well placed keywords in titles.

I notice the homepage does not contain much in the way of keyword content. You might be anticipating the reviews doing all the heavy lifting, but I would move your about box up with a sprinkle of well-chosen search terms, and put some keywords in the homepage title.

Do keyword research to see if there are apps that people are searching for a great deal. There is no reason why you can’t review “classic” apps to bring in traffic, you could even mark them as such.

Consider creating an award for the best examples, along with an attractive graphic. You can then offer press releases and such to get links back and a little buzz - this could even be placed on the winners site. If you ask for user input for an annual award there can also be traffic generated through nomination and voting.

You need to do a better job of interlinking your content. Right now you are relying on categories and tagging mostly, but you need to include a related content plugin, and use in-content links.

Links are going to be vitally important. Guest posting and linkbait ought to be good ways to get those links, with specifically product name anchor text being key.

While I understand the site has done pretty well in social media so far for what is a brand new site,  you can help this along by adding social voting buttons on the individual review pages. The biggest potential for a site such as this will be either scoops and exclusives, or bigger, more authoritative roundups of the best apps in a particular category:

• Top 100 Best Applications for Small Business
• 20 Must Have Blogging Tools
• 97 Best Productivity Apps on the Web

With the cool thumbnail images and great design, I am sure you should do well with this kind of linkbait.

You already have all the ingredients so it would be a case of mixing them up and re-serving.

Usability

As mentioned above, you need to make it plainly obvious where the visitor has arrived, where in the site they are (the crumb trail navigation and numbered paging are good but inconsistent - to the point of vanishing and reappearing).

Keep in mind what the site will be like when you have hundreds of reviews, perhaps start planning a better search, more granular categorization. Most frustrating, for a review site, you have no sorting. People will want to rank the search results with the best to the top.

The bigger Twitter image further down the sidebar does not click through to the site’s twitter account, many usability studies have shown big images get clicked a lot, so try to not have a big image that might be confused as a button that goes nowhere.

Make it easier to find the place to submit sites for review. A simple solution would be to have an about page and contact page. It’s odd to find a site that lacks these. You also do not have an advertiser page - how does someone get in touch to place an ad?

Summary

This is an extremely focused niche play, in a highly competitive area. A great deal of effort will be required to truly break through and stand out, but the design and content so far suggest that UsefulTools has a good chance of achieving a good slice of the audience.

Over to you, dear reader. What do you think of the site? Would you visit? What would you change? Are there elements you particularly like? I know you have opinions, so please share in the comments …

Your Free Subscriber Download!

This text has been taken from the article UsefulTools Critique. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

Now you have the exclusive chance to win two valuable seats to the event for no cost!

Update: Contest Closed

[See the winners announcement here]

I am not bragging when I say that the line-up is an all-star cast (well… maybe a little).

Presenters include bestselling authors and social media marketing experts such as Gary Vaynerchuk (Wine Library TV), Darren Rowse (Problogger), Mari Smith (Facebook guru), Jason Alba (wrote the book on LinkedIn), Ann Handley (MarketingProfs), Brian Clark (Copyblogger), Denise Wakeman (BlogSquad). Oh, and me.

Sessions include:

• How to Create a Mega-Following and Mega-Sales With Social Media Marketing
• Building a Loyal Facebook Following for Increased Profits
• How to Grow and Engage an Audience on Twitter
• Using the Power and Reach of LinkedIn to Grow Your Business
• How to Productively Engage in Social Media Marketing
• Five Reasons You Need to Be on Twitter (and Tools to Help You Manage)
• Social Media Start Up: 3 Key Tools to Build Your Social Media Marketing Plan
• How to Attract Tens of Thousands of People in Mere Days
• Using Social Bookmarking for Improved Traffic, Links and Visibility

Go here to see the full details of all 11 sessions …

This event does not require any travel (no hotel, rental car or wasted time). You simply attend sessions online and meet the experts and network with peers from the comfort of your home or office. Pretty cool, eh?

Contest Prizes

There are two prizes:

1. Twitter Prize: Valued at $497
   One ticket to Social Media Success Summit 2009
2. Grand prize: Valued at $1,693.90!
   Two tickets to Social Media Success Summit 2009 (one for you and one for a friend)

PLUS

• A social media marketing consultation with Michael Stelzner (Michael will spend an hour with you, helping you get your plan in order)
• A site-critique by me (I will identify actionable steps you can take to improve your blog)
• A copy of the Problogger book by Darren Rowse and me
• A copy of the book Writing White Papers by Michael Stelzner

Just think how your business or online efforts could be boosted by this package. Just the consult with Michael is priceless; he after all put this whole summit together.

How to Enter

Step 1: Enter for Twitter Prize

Simply post a Tweet on Twitter using the button included here, or simply copy and paste the below Tweet message. This automatically qualifies you an entry into the prize draw to win a free seat at the summit. You may tweet up to 5 times between now and 21st May 2009. The tweet must contain “#smsuccess” to qualify. We will select the winner randomly on the 22st May 2009.

The Tweet:

Win a FREE ticket to Social Media Success Summit 2009: http://cli.gs/Grq8RX #smsuccess

How to Win the Grand Prize

To win the grand prize, write a blog post (no longer than 1,000 words) explaining why you want to win a seat at the Social Media Success Summit 2009. Have your post published by midnight 21st May 2009 (GMT). So we are notified about your post you will need to leave a trackback on this blog post or comment with a link.

Remember the grand prize includes two summit tickets, social media consultation, a site-critique and two awesome books, so it is well worth getting your friends on board. The more friends who enter the more chances you have of getting a seat yourself :).

Good Luck!

UPDATE: Already purchased a ticket?  No problem. If you win, you get your money back and free access to the summit!

The winners will be selected by Mike and I and announced right here on this blog on the 22st May 2009.

Update: Contest Closed

[See the winners announcement here]

Your Free Subscriber Download!

This text has been taken from the article Win Tickets to Social Media Success Summit 2009!. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

Answer this question and you could make yourself so much happier and successful, ignore it and you could be making yourself and those around you miserable.

This is something I have been pondering since my recent trip to SOBCon. Something strange happens when Terry Starbucker and I get together. It seems we have an unwritten rule that all our conversations must in some way fix the world. This was one of our many short but deep conversations.

Why is this question important to you and your productivity (maybe, life)?

Find Your Purpose, Discover Your Joy

In striving to succeed, day to day or for long term goals, we overlook what comes naturally to us. It’s easy to dismiss what we find easy, natural and fun. Many of us are raised to believe that work should be hard.

“No pain, no gain”.

Sorry, but that is rubbish.

There is no rule that we should suffer. No law that you can only spend your days waiting for a whistle to blow at 5.30pm.

Do What Comes Natural

If you look around, you will find the people who are most happy in their work and lives are the people who are in flow. They do what comes naturally. You might say they have a “gift”, or you might just think they are happy that their work is what they love to do. Or perhaps they don’t work, and they spend their leisure time doing whatever brings them the most joy?

My Mum is a natural at nurturing people. She nurtures regardless, whether people want nurturing or not. So she has spent most of her working life looking after people, from special needs schools to residential homes for people with learning difficulties. The times when she has deviated from being in a caring role she has been miserable.

Nobody that knows my mother would ever think of her not trying to help, comfort, or simply feed someone. It’s in her nature that if there is not someone around who needs some care she will go looking. That’s what she does.

Now we should not be tricked into thinking that people are given one role in life and that is what they have to stick to.

My Dad has had three careers, and excelled at all of them. His first career as a printer he did to please his own father. What seemed to suit him best though was when he was rescuing folks from fires and mangled cars.

Knowing he was constantly putting himself at risk scarred us all witless. I still can’t understand what malfunctions in a persons brain that allows them to run into danger when everyone else is screaming away in the other direction, but we are all proud of him that he did it, and did so well at it.

My brother stuck to an office job for a long time until one day he couldn’t take any more. Next thing we knew he had moved down to London and enrolled at a guitar institute. Rocking out in front of huge crowds of adoring, sweaty music fans is what brings him joy, and he is visibly more at home now than he ever was.

All of them do, or did, what came naturally to their personalities. They didn’t just get handed their dream role of course, and it took my Dad thirty some years to find his purpose. The point is there is something you are meant to be involved in that just fits.

Finding What You Were Meant to Do

• What brings you joy?
• Can you identify something in your personality that is “so you”?
• Are there things you find yourself doing almost subconsciously?

These are potential candidates. You might not see the traits as fundamental, or obviously lead to a career or income, but they will hint at what you are meant to be doing.

Liz Strauss is a natural connector. She connects people and it just happens when she is around. For Liz it is not “doing”, it is “being”. Through her career I am sure whatever her role on paper, I bet she has been connecting people. Of course she would create something like SOBCon.

For many of us, I think deep down we know what we are meant to be doing. We just fight it or fear making the changes necessary to go with it. My brother spent many years in a job just paying the bills. He was in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing. He was good at his job and conscientious, but it was hardly his ambition.When he is on stage rocking out his guitar he comes alive.

Others, like myself, find it a little harder to discover what we are meant to do.

Until I left school I had planned to be some sort of cartoonist or illustrator. I quickly realized though that while I liked to doodle, I didn’t like it enough to put in the hard graft to be good enough to earn a decent living. At the same time I had decided I could not afford to go to University either. I was “good with computers” and decided to do that.

What you are good at is not necessarily what you are meant to be doing. I learned that the hard way.

In fact, in a way, I discovered something I found really really difficult was what I was meant to do. Perhaps, like me, you will work out what you were meant to do by process of elimination?

For the first half of my life I was painfully shy. To fix this I took a teaching course. While the course did not actually tell us how to teach, it did force us to speak to groups. For me this was like an arachnophobic type person going to the zoo to hold a tarantula, I am still shy but not half as bad as I was. The best part was it seemed to enable some kind of dormant circuit in me. I teach, that is what I do.

Standing in front of groups and talking to them is now something I do with alarming regularity, and I find it intimidating and nerve wracking. Considering my deep seated terror might suggest that I have this teaching stuff wrong, but actually that is just one type of teaching you are seeing. In fact through my blog, social media, articles, books and in person, I am teaching all the time. That is what comes naturally to me and what is like breathing. So obvious I miss it. I learn, process, and teach it back.

Remember I enjoyed doodling? I get to use that part of myself in my teaching, either directly with whiteboard doodles, or indirectly by adding cartoons or creative layouts to my articles and materials.

When I write I can get into the flow. Time seems to distort, my brain turns to sweet mush, and the words just arrive on screen. Programming was never like that for me, I am a darned good programmer, but it was always an effort that would give me brain ache.

That’s the key, it’s not just what you are good at, or what people expect of you - what do you do automatically, easily, and would do regardless?

There are so many opportunities now to utilize your whole self, you do not need to overhaul your life if you don’t want to. People outlet their creative side by blogging, tweeting, photography and, a recent discovery for me, scrapbooking. You can even earn good money if that is important.

Once you know what your nature is then you can choose how you express it. The most important thing is to delve into the deepest folds of your brain and work out how you were programmed, what kind of mission were your circuits built to do?

While you are thinking about your answer, check out Terry’s article on the same subject.

Your Free Subscriber Download!

This text has been taken from the article Just Like Breathing?. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

• Huge traffic potential
• Free (just need to spend time)

This is drawing in more and more businesses who want to extract these benefits and learn the best practices. Unfortunately we are also seeing an influx of the less open and authentic business types who only want to extract money from your wallet, any way possible.

Check out this charming conversationalist

Social Media is not just a new bull horn for the loud and abrasive sales types to use to make our ears bleed some more. If you go against what people want and need then don’t expect to get great results.

Join the Social Media Party

So how do you get good results for your business without becoming an obnoxious blowhard?

• Listen
• Respond
• Provide interesting conversation
• Monitor what people like
• Provide more of that
• Be yourself, or at least a human being

Funny, that’s almost exactly like what you would recommend if I asked you how to behave at a party, right? And this is the point. Just because you are working online, with software tools, does not mean good behavior goes out of the window.

In fact, because you are online and do not have the nonverbal cues to provide context to what you are saying and doing, it is even more important to be aware of the human element and show that you are real. You need to do this with the whole package, from your avatar and screen names, through to using smilies and obvious humor in your messages. A couple of times my humor has been a little too dry and caused me some problems. If in doubt, don’t say it!

Don’t be a Wall Flower Either

At the other end of the social media scale are the people who sit on the sidelines and do not get involved. If this is you then your results are going to suffer just as badly as the person who barges in and tries to take over. Really there is nothing to be afraid of, join in. You will find most people are kind and generous, the ones who aren’t you don’t want to get to know anyway.

One way to ease into the scene is to get someone you know and trust to introduce you to conversations. This can be done easily and openly using retweets or just engaging you in conversation. In Facebook and other networking sites it can be as simple as inviting you to groups.

Free Social Media Success Audio Class

If you would like to learn more about how to use social media in your business, download this free Social Media Best Practices audio class that Mike Stelzner, Denise Wakeman, Mari Smith and I put together as a thank you for folks who sign up to learn more about our Social Media Success Summit. You just need to enter your email address to get it.

Your Free Subscriber Download!

This text has been taken from the article How to Really Use Social Media Marketing as a Tool For Business. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

Many new Internet marketers obsess over Google pagerank believing it to be the route to rising in the search results, where in fact pagerank is just one of many factors involved in your search engine ranking and, most misleading, what you see in the Google Toolbar is very inaccurate anyway.

People look at Wikipedia and think they rank so highly and so often because of pagerank, or perhaps because they have a gajillion links, but there is another powerful element we can overlook if we are not careful.

Once relevance, links and keywords are taken into account, the true engines of search engine success are now believed to be “Trust” and “Authority”. But what do those phrases mean in this context, and how do you get more of the good stuff?

Read on!

Authority Leads to Google Authority

You know I am all about promoting authority in your blogging. Authority in general means that people trust you to supply expert insight. The good news is that authorities trusted by human beings are also trusted by Google.

“If a site is an authority in your industry, you can bet that it will be for Google as well. So if you’re a web designer, a link from Smashing Magazine or A List Apart helps, as a lot of other web design sites will be linking to those sites, thus causing those sites to be ‘hubs’ in the web design space.”
– Joost De Valk, Yoast

Authority in a search context takes into account all the elements of a site then determines a grading on the spectrum from completely authoritative through to no authority at all. The more authoritative and trusted your site, the better you will rank.

In fact, being an authority in Google’s eyes is a game-changer. The rules are quite different for authorities and authorities can get away with much more gray and risky behavior than other sites.

There are many factors that directly influence your Google authority including the domain (a .gov is going to be more trusted than a much easier to gain .info), quantity and quality of links, plus traffic elements.

Dear Google … Who Do You Trust?

Perhaps the most important element is this factor of who is linking to you. It is believed that Google has a whitelist of trusted websites. While it is unlikely you will get onto this hallowed category yourself, inbound links from the websites that are already on the white list will give you a certain boost in the search engine rankings.

“Trust is the reason some websites can rank highly for competitive search terms purely by publishing a page targeted to that search term. Sites like Wikipedia and the BBC don’t need to worry about building links to pages because Google has so much trust in the domain that they rank in the top few results, seemingly without having to work for it.”
– Patrick Altoft, BlogStorm

The problem is all of this is very unscientific, based on observation and guesswork, and the only people that really know what is going on work for Google, and unsurprisingly they are not talking.

I should also point out that, while we often use “Authority” and “Trust” almost interchangeably, Google almost certainly sees the two factors as separate. We have way more influence over our authority than we do our “TrustRank“, in fact as far as trust is concerned the best we can do is improve our “degrees of separation” from those we suspect are on the search engine’s white list.

That all said we can still take some educated guesses as to which elements of your site and content will drive up the authority factor and in turn help you gain those all-important search results. Plus the more authority we accrue, the more likely we are to get linked to by the trusted few.

Let’s take a look at some of those now, starting with the negatives, then leading to the positives:

Negative Trust Influences

What can you do to your own site, or could a competitor do to you, that will nuke your trust and therefore rankings?

“I always think that links have a positive or negative value. Let’s say the BBC gives you a +10,000 and a spammy blogspot link gives you a -100, you still have a positive 9,900 score. The problems occur when the BBC get hit with a link selling penalty, if your backlinks have fallen into negative equity things go south quickly.

Get caught selling links and your link value could shift from a positive value to a negative value, so I re-visit my clients links monthly and check out what’s happening to the sites that link to them”
– David Naylor, Bronco

• Buy and Sell Links - First is if you are obvious in your link buying, don’t expect to last long in the search engines. Mr Cutts is very keen on tracking down and destroying sold links. There are even some sites that are so “dirty” in Google’s eyes that a purchase in the right place and right time can nuke you over night. Don’t believe me? Ask the right people at the right conferences to show you the evidence. That’s all I am saying
• Bad Neighbors - If your links are not paid but still associate you with the seedier parts of the interwebs, don’t be surprised if you are seen as guilty by association.
• Comment Spam - Leave the spam up, get it indexed, and watch your results rocket to the bottom. It’s the “broken windows” theory of SEO.
• Unnatural Growth Patterns - Google will look carefully at your link growth for any signs of unnatural acquisition. This isn’t to say that if you get on the front page of Digg and garner 20k visitors and as a result, 100 fresh links that you will be penalized. What is likely though is they will take a closer look if your brand new domain arrives out of the gate with one page of content and 10,000 links overnight.
• Lack of Link Diversity - Are your links coming from friends and your own sites or are they arriving naturally because your content is awesome?
• Thin or Spammy Content - Duplicate, scraped or feed content, or spammy gibberish is likely to get marked down. As you would expect, Google is aiming to promote the highest quality. They will use human checks, algorithms and watch the behaviour of their customers to see if what they are delivering meets expectations.

So the first element to emphasize is make your site evolve as naturally as possible!

“You can manufacture authority with a very intelligent link building campaign but more often than not it’s the natural growth of the site and links with other sites in the same industry that gives Google reason to trust the site.”
– Patrick Altoft, BlogStorm

We have looked at negatives, but what could be positive trust signals?

Traffic

Let’s get the most controversial potential factor out of the way right now.

Traffic might be a quality signal. It seems a fairly obvious one as a human being, but what about to Googlebot?

“My #1 SEO lesson is simple: get the technical details right, and then start making sure you get as much traffic from other sources than Google as you can, and your Google search traffic will rise along with it.”
– Joost De Valk, Yoast

We know that Google track click-throughs from some search results pages, but could Google also be using Analytics, FeedBurner and toolbar data to get a sense of traffic also?

• Quantity - Are many people visiting the site?
• Growth - Is your traffic growing organically?
• Consistency - Does your traffic go from zero to thousands then back again with no discernible reason?

Google of course knows what is going on with their own search engine, so if they place undeserved trust in a site for a certain search result they will get good feedback from user behavior. Another hint might be Brand Search - If lots of people are looking for your brand then that is likely a good sign. It makes sense that if people are searching for BMW then the official BMW site should appear.

“People who only think about search marketing often forget the branding aspects of blogging, it’s really important to get a decent design and logo, people will remember you and thus search for you more, and link to you more.”
– Joost De Valk, Yoast

Links

I feel on much safer ground suggesting links as a trust influencer.

• Directories (like Yahoo! and Dmoz) - Some directories are trusted, others are not. Key is if they are editorially controlled or free-for-all. It’s the one type of paid link that Google likes.
• Authorities - Here is that whitelist mentioned earlier, but we can only guess who is on it:
  • Old Media (Newspapers, TV, Radio)
  • New Media (Wikipedia, Google Knol, Social)
  • Social Voting & News
    • Digg
    • StumbleUpon
    • Reddit
    • Mixx
    • Propeller
    • Delicious
    • MetaFilter
  • Social Networking
    • Facebook
    • MySpace
    • Twitter
    • Answer Sites
    • Yahoo Answers
    • Mahalo
    • Answers.com
    • Yahoo Portal
    • MSN Portal
  • Authority Blogs
    • Problogger
    • Kottke
    • Library Blogs
    • Copyblogger
    • Search Engine Journal
    • BoingBoing
    • About.com Blogs
    • USAToday Blogs
  • Companies
    • Microsoft
    • Apple
    • Sun
    • Oracle
    • Adobe
    • IBM
• TLD - Links from easy to acquire domain endings are not going to be as trusted as those where you have to jump through hoops. Domains TLDs like .Edu, .Gov and Ltd.uk
• Other Link Factors
  • Theme - Is the subject of the domain on topic or irrelevant?
  • Strength - Is the linking site strong or untrusted?
  • Diversity - Is there a large variety and diversity of domains, or a few home grown reciprocals?
  • Age - Are the linking domains as old as the internet or brand new registrations?
  • Location - You want a variety of links but sidebar or footer links are unlikely to be as trusted as relevant in-content and in-context links.
  • Anchor Text - Google will want variety in anchor text, and for the anchor text to be on topic. Balance relevance against looking unnatural again.

“I’d rather have four moderately successful pieces than one single very successful one. It’s going to get you a more natural link profile from different sites over time to different parts of of your site as opposed to one tidal wave focused on one page. ”
– Michael Gray, Wolf-Howl

Domain

As you have seen above, the domain itself can send some signals that influence trust, and we are not just talking about spammy-keywords-separated-by-hyphens either! Google does look at domain registrations.

• Age - Older domains earn trust by just being online longer, especially with a single owner and consistent content.
• TLD - As above, the harder to get domains, especially if you have to prove your identity, will be given a higher trust.
• Registration Period - Has your domain been registered for the long haul or could it be offline any moment?
• Registration Details - Real registration details versus proxy or fake details?

Your Site

You want your site to be able to not only “pass” a hand review should Matt Cutts come visiting, but also give anyone who looks all the positive vibes possible.

• Content - Is it meaty, original, high quality? Could your information be found anywhere?
• Privacy and Contact Info - Do you have the kind of information a top-class ecommerce site would provide such as Privacy Policy and so on? Looked at the other way, do you look like you have something to hide?
• Usability and Accessibility - Can the average visitor navigate your site with few issues? What about someone with a visual or physical accessibility need?

“The more competitive or dirty the market you play in, the more you need to up your authority game and reassure your visitors and search engines alike that you are legitimate and here to stay. I am sure the bar is much higher for our credit cards site, than say, Dog Guide.”
– Ryan Caldwell, College-Startup.

Look at your stats:

• Load Time - Does your site take an age to render in a web browser? People like fast loading sites.
• Time on Site - How long do people spend on your site? Do they look at one page then go away or do they browse around. The longer and more in depth the average visit, the better your experience is going to be and therefore the higher trust level. Think about it the other way, if your site was so bad it looked toxic, what would the average visit behavior look like?

The big question that Google wants to answer …

• Does Your Site Add Value to Web?

Summary

If you look over the above list you will see the main things your site needs to convey is:

1. Natural, organic growth based on sound promotion behavior
2. Valuable and unique content tailored towards people rather than search
3. A solid foundation and human-centered design

As a handy reference, check out and keep this Google Authority MindMap …

Click to View or Download

Take a long look at your site and ask yourself if you are sending good or bad trust signals in all areas.

Anything I have missed or called wrong? Please add your thoughts in the comments …

Your Free Subscriber Download!

This text has been taken from the article How to Grow Your Google Authority. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

Social Media Marketing Survey Results - Free Report

Social Media Marketing on your to-do list? If so, you will want to read this report!

If you think there is no ROI to Social Media, or that it is just for kids, check these snippets out:

• 78.1% were aged 30-59, median age? 40-49
• Around half of marketers found social media generated qualified leads
• A rise in search engine rankings was reported by more than half of participants

You will also want to check out the free online class linked on page 10 of the report: “Achieving Social Media Marketing Success.” featuring Mari Smith, Denise Wakeman, Mike Stelzner and me

Grab your free copy of the report here

Your Free Subscriber Download!

This text has been taken from the article Social Media Marketing Survey Results - Free PDF. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

You might have seen I have been planning a webinar in aid of my favorite charity. Details here and more here. In a nutshell, the idea was to put on a webinar stuffed with valuable information, and in return you would donate money to the charity. A win-win.

When I asked the topics you would be interested in, the overwhelming top result was “Growing Traffic and Audience” (see results here), so that is what the webinar will be about

• Attraction - Attracting visitors
• Retention - Keeping more of those visitors long term
• Conversion - Converting more visitors into subscribers

Sound good?

When I asked for your timezone the results were as follows:

Which Timezone?

So I have selected Thursday, March 26, 2009 16:00 UTC, which translates as:

• London GMT/UTC at 4:00:00 PM
• New York EDT/UTC-4 12:00:00 Noon
• Chicago CDT/UTC-5 11:00:00 AM
• Los Angeles PDT/UTC-7 9:00:00 AM

BUT there will be a recording, and PDF downloads after the event should you not be able to make it live.

If you want to join us for the webinar then your next step is to donate (how much is up to you) via credit card or PayPal.

An email will be sent to you confirming your donation and will contain a link to sign up for the webinar details. If you have already donated, just get in contact with me and I will sort you out.

Know you will be contributing towards a great charity (more details of the charity are on the donation page) and helping yourself gain more traffic, subscribers and long term fans

Donate now and reserve your place in the webinar!

Your Free Subscriber Download!

This text has been taken from the article Want to Grow Your Blog Traffic and Audience?. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

Sometimes people are even kind enough to be polite and offer suggestions for how to fix things, rather than just tell me all the bad things I am and where I can shove my blog.

Fear of feedback is just one of many reasons why we can all aim for perfection to the point where we don’t get anything meaningful done. In fact the majority of people are kind and open to ideas, and are willing to overlook issues with presentation if the content resonates with them.

With this in mind I present to you my first video about how imperfection should not hold you back and in fact can be a good thing.

Well, I say first, in fact it was the culmination of much swearing and throwing things, hence the worried look on my dogs face.

As always, feedback in the comments is very welcome

Your Free Subscriber Download!

This text has been taken from the article The Art of Getting Things Wrong. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com

I just got back from Social Media Congres in the Netherlands where I presented on this subject, and I think the subject is so valuable it needed to be shared with you, your friends and colleagues. So hit up the slides on slideshare or download as a PDF.

Business Blogging Slides at Slideshare

• Download Business Blogging Slides as PDF

Of course, as always, if you have questions or thoughts feel free to share in the comments.

Your Free Subscriber Download!

This text has been taken from the article How a Blog Can Grow Your Business - Slides + PDF. © 2008 Chris Garrett chrisg.com