I had been taught that it was important to work hard at what you do. Be the best you can be in any position that you’re in, and to be respectful and ‘professional’.

Respect is one thing.

But what I’ve learned over the years is that being professional isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

It’s kinda like being a politician at work. Constantly trying to sell yourself as this person who is trust worthy and reliable.

Who wants to be limited to those two words? Sounds pretty boring to me.

Sure, trust worthiness and reliability are great things, and I’m not telling anyone to back out of things they’ve promised they would do.

But why not let your personality come out in your work?

Take a chance.

Be the same reliable worker that your boss expects. Respect your boss, but if he’s done something that you think is wrong then tell him.

Don’t turn every one of your work emails into some boring professional mess. Add some flare. Add your personality. Tell a joke. Anything!

Just don’t be dull.

At the same time deliver.

At the end of the day if you deliver on your promises, do great work, are timely and respectful of everyone (not just your boss) then you’ll get noticed.

Even if you’re not as ‘professional’ as the guy who writes all of his emails in corporate speak.

People will be drawn to you. You will succeed. And you won’t have to be worrying so much about what political correctness.

Ways you can be less professional and still get respect:

1.  Wear more colour and push your wardrobe just past your comfort level.
2. Send emails that are more conversational. Write a bit more like you would speak to someone.
3. Send links to your coworkers with great information but comment on them using your personality.
4. Decorate your office or cubicle with some ‘eccentric’ items that display who you are.
5. Add a nickname to your email signature (Eric “the hammer” Sloan).
6. Get over yourself – I think this is the most important one… don’t take yourself so seriously!

Open up a bit and everyone you deal with will thank me.

Have an opinion? Let it out in the comments below.

I suppose that most anyone who looks through the dredge of free WordPress templates could have told you that, but I’m here to say that most of the good looking ones are crap as well.

Why?

Because they don’t convert.

You have to ask yourself: “What am I going to try and do with this website?”

Is the answer to make money? Sell stuff? Build a following? Build authority?

Or is it to post updates for your friends to read while you’re traveling to California?

If it’s the latter then go for it. Stuff yourself full of free WordPress themes and let your WordPress installation reach all of about 1% of it’s potential.

If on the other hand you actually want to accomplish something with your new found blog/website, then you’re going to need some customizations.

Some flare.

“But the free themes look so good and get such great user reviews”

True, some of them are worth their salt, but I’d say I could count them on one hand.

Most of the free templates that people rave about just look nice and shiny on the outside. Once YOU start building a site with them, they start looking like boring anyone can do it sites… because anyone CAN do a site like that.

And people are smart.

They can see your free template a mile away, and what you’re telling the world is that you have no personality.

You get what you pay for

I’m not saying that you have to go out and spend 10 grand on a fully customized website either. All I mean is that some care and attention needs to be put into a few aspects of your site each and every time you want to create a blog.

This isn’t 2007 anymore (*Gasp!). You can’t just fire up a blog and expect the masses to come pouring in. There are literally MILLIONS of blogs out there vying for attention.

You have to be different.

What to look out for

• You need to customize your banner
  This doesn’t mean that you’re changing the font colour or the logo. I mean you need to make the ENTIRE banner area look unique. Look at TylerCruz.com. He’s gone and gotten his face turned into a cartoon… not something you see every day.
• You need to have an easy sign up process
  After all, you want to actually build a community here. A simple RSS or newsletter signup is a MUST. If it’s not on your site then you’re already wasting time. If you own ANY site that doesn’t have an RSS or Newsletter signup on it then go change that right now.
• Link colours that don’t suck
  Link colours can make or break an affiliate site (so this mainly pertains to them). If people glaze over your links then you’re hooped. Then again if they are too bright or bold they may seem to intrusive. Classic old blue seems to work pretty well if you ask me.
• Nothing going on on the homepage
  If you’re building a site for anything but a blog, you need to have a clear call to action above the fold on your homepage. So many times I’ve seen small companies build a small WordPress site with a template that has rotating images on the homepage of all of their BLOG articles. Are you a blog? Put your content up front. Are you trying to sell a product? Put your product up first!

In the end a little customization goes a LOOOONG way when it comes to setting up a new site. Figure out what you want people to do when they visit your site, and focus on that.

Had any experience with free WordPress themes? Love them? Hate them? Leave me a comment below.

My first post in 2012 will be the start of a sequence of posts called “Found Advertising”. I’ll bring up some cool ads that I’ve seen and talk about how the concept can be applied to your advertising.

First up, Direct TV’s Roadside Ditch commercial.

Telling stories with your marketing is powerful. Adding humour makes your stories even MORE powerful.

Direct TV understands this concept very well as evidenced in their new commercial Roadside Ditch. (Below)

Check it out and let me know what you think.

So how can you use this concept in your advertising? You don’t necessarily have to use video.

In fact, you can apply stories to any website simply by changing the tone of your sales copy. Instead of simply telling people about your product, why not tell a story?

This story can be fiction (like the commercial above) but should never be false. What I mean by that is, don’t create a story about yourself or your company that isn’t true. Instead, create a story about a potential customer’s struggle that your product solved. Direct TV did this in the above commercial – even though the struggle was a fictional one.

Stories connect your product to your reader

A well written story can help your potential customers connect with your product. They can imagine using your product and you can incite an emotional response that links your product to the solution.

Try brainstorming 10 different situations where your product can be used to solve a problem.

Instead of using the basic problem that your product solves (our sunglasses protect your eyes from the sun) be more specific.

“Don’t look squinty at the beach! Our sunglasses let you keep your cool in all situations”

Or add some cheesiness with a dash of humour:

“Don’t get caught checking out that cute girl on the street, our sunglasses help you stay discreet”

Once you have your situations, turn them into a more elaborate story.

This technique can be used on landing pages, affiliate campaigns, pretty well anything, and it’s very powerful.

How can you use this technique in your marketing campaigns in 2012? Let me know in the comments below.

There’s lots of talks about 30 day “tests” to build habits in your life so I won’t get into it here (click here for an article if you haven’t heard about it).

So for the next 30 days I’m going to be trying out a new morning routine. It involves a few steps that I often neglect in my day and I think I will have more productive days and be a healthier person as a result.

Creating a new routine

My first new morning routine will be to eat/drink before I do ANYTHING else.

Sometimes I don’t eat or even have a coffee until 2 in the afternoon. I just plain forget. I get in “work mode” as soon as I wake up and everything else takes a back seat.

This has to change. It’s unhealthy and I’m sure that I’m getting a harder afternoon crash as a result.

So after a coffee, some almonds and yoghurt and a huge glass of water the next thing I want to do is be outside for 5 minutes.

Before my computer even comes on.

Why? Well hell, why not? I’m lucky enough to have a gorgeous deck looking out over a gorgeous city but instead of appreciating it I usually hit my RSS reader and my emails before anything else.

No more. 5 minutes of fresh air will wake me up, give me more perspective and not rush my morning so much… Awesome. I can even combine the first step with the second so this is perfect.

Next up is to do business development for 30 minutes before I even read my morning emails.

This is important to me. I try to get 30 minutes of biz dev into my day every day, but sometimes it gets pushed to the end of the day when I’m out of energy and enthusiasm.

By pushing this task to the beginning of the day (even before I check email GASP) I’ll make sure it gets done, and by the end of 2012 my business will be miles ahead of where it is today.

That’s it! I think that these small changes will make a huge impact on my day to day efficiency.

I’ll push hard to not miss a day this entire month and by then it should be a habit.

Do you have a morning routine? Let me know in the comments below.

It’s hot on a cold morning.

It wakes you up a bit.

It smells like pure awesome.

It’s difficult to make it right, but it’s worth the effort.

I started my love for good coffee only about a year ago. I have drank coffee for  most of my adult life, but it wasn’t until I had really great coffee that I was able to tell the difference… and was never able to go back.

I mean, I’ll drink shit coffee. You know those bags of coffee you get in hotel rooms and it takes 1 minute for the $20 machine to make? That’s pretty bad coffee.

But I’ll drink it.

I guess it’s kinda like sex. Even bad sex is good… but great sex is better.

Now that fall is here though I’ve come to miss my Pumpkin Spice Latte from Starbucks.

But instead of caving in and going for a terrible espresso drink from the ‘bucks I decided to make my own.

I actually wrote about it on my new cooking blog here.

So welcome back pumpkin spice latte! I missed you.

I’d say that this site has gone through a number of incarnations over the years but nothing has really stuck.

Why? Well I guess because I’ve always tried to make the site something that I’m not really interested in.

I’ve tried to get an audience that I don’t really care to speak to.

And finally I’ve tried to write about things that I don’t really care about.

So here it is… the new Eric’s Estimate. The final Eric’s Estimate. The REAL Eric’s Estimate.

So what are my thoughts?

• Affiliate marketing is awesome (but most people do it the wrong way)
• Coffee is one of the greatest things in the universe (but most people do it the wrong way)
• Copywriting is something I want to learn more about (because I do it the wrong way)
• Split testing for some reason makes me all warm and fuzzy inside (but most people do it the wrong way)
• I love to create websites… new ones… interesting ones… not boring it’s all the same ones.
• I like talking about the brain… in fact, I love the fact that my brain is the one talking about my brain.
• I love wine… pretty much all kinds… except the shyte kind.
• I like flowers… and even though I am a man I don’t think there is anything wrong with that.
• I like to dress well and eat well
• I feel that cooking is something like dancing, everyone should learn how but still do it in their own way
• I’m trying twitter again.

That’s it for now. Leave me a comment… or don’t. It’s up to you.

I know it’s been a while, but I wanted to drop a quick note about hosting plans and what I’ve found to be the best ones.

First up, I love hostgator. I host everything I have with them, and in fact it’s the first hosting company that I recommend whenever I need to setup a friend with a website.

Hosting these days is pretty cheap as it is, but you can actually find a bunch of hostgator coupons around the web. The best site that I’ve found with hosting coupons is http://www.ahostgatorcoupon.net. There are always updated coupons and I’ve never run into a coupon that didn’t work.

Go check ‘em out and let me know in the comments below how you make out.

Cheers!

Basically, it was an article about how to quickly get the extra cash out of your Google Adsense account and I wanted to give an update on how everything went.

I ended up not putting in as much effort as I would have liked, but I built out one of my domains to the point of getting no. 1 in Yahoo for a specific keyword.

This keyword doesn’t bring in a ton of traffic, but it does net the site somewhere around 20 bucks per month through adsense revenue now.

The site that I used was not this one, nor have I made any significant adsense revenue from this site.

What was my goal?

The original goal was to hit the 100 mark (I was about 40 bucks short) by the end of January 2010. That gave me 44 days and it ended up being a bit too ambitious for how much effort I was willing to put in.

How did I do?

Well, at the end of January 2010 I had somewhere around $79 in my account.

At the end of February I almost hit the mark at around 96 bucks, and in March I finally hit the mark in adsense revenue giving me my first Google cheque!

How much work was it?

Well, to be honest it was a breeze. I grabbed a 6 pack of beer and dumped a ton of content onto the website in about 4 hours and that was it. In about 2 weeks I had ranked for some keywords and started getting the traffic.

I used wordpress to post the articles over a period of time. So in other words the site posts a new article every day without me having to do anything! In fact, from those 4 hours of work I STILL have articles being posted once a day on that site.

I think that the revenue will continue to grow slowly. This site will definitely not be a money maker, but it’s good enough to bring in around 240 bucks a year… and that’s like 12 cases of beer that I can drink to make 12 more sites!

Grab a beer or a margarita and toast Cinco De Mayo!

I don’t want to write a long post because I have to go drink beer, but check out more info here.

Be safe, and party hard!