Writing a book is a lot like starting a new business. The most successful of books have been researched and planned long before a single word gets written (or typed) on the page. Some authors spend years researching or planning before jotting down a single word. Indeed, the best selling authors have realized a simple truth – writing a book is a lot like starting a business. Here are 4 tips that every author should know before writing that next best selling book.

1. What is your book’s purpose

Businesses have mission statements. Books have a purpose. Knowing the goal of your book will not only help the writing process but also help you sell the book when it is complete. If it is a business book, will it be selling a brand or product? Are you looking to make loads of money, have the book become an extension of your brand or (hopefully) both? What is your end goal?

2. Who is your customer?

To be a successful author, you have to know what solution you are providing to your readers. If you are writing a business book, is your customer the CEO of a major corporation or the engineer? Think about your specific reader and know what they will be taking away from your book.

3. How are you going to execute?

You’ve thought about the end goal of your book and now it’s time to think about how you are going to make it happen. Technology is wonderful and has offered the opportunity to self publish your work. Are you looking for a quick way to publish your book or do you want to work with an established publisher? There are pros and cons to each type of publishing so consider this question well before moving forward.

4. Are you ready for the hard work?

Working on the book doesn’t stop when the book is written. A book is like a business – it is a continuous process. You will need to devote a lot of time and effort after the book is written to help market it to your target customers. Imagine if J.K. Rowling just wrote Harry Potter and walked away? Her success as an author came from devoting a big portion of her life to working on the marketing and press behind the best selling series. Sure, you may not have a theme park based on your book one day but every successful author knows that a book is a part of him or her that never ceases to exist.

Understanding the amount of work that goes into a best selling book will help you to evaluate and prepare for launching your book. If you want to be successful, realize that writing a book is a lot like running a business. The level of time and energy you put in will determine what you get out of it.

One day you’re in the #1 spot on your favorite search engines for your keywords and terms. Within days, you start to witness something that makes your heart find refuge in your stomach – not only are you no longer top on the search engines results page (SERP) but your website is falling quickly down the site rankings, or worse, your website is no where to be found. Regrettably this happens to even the best of websites but first you need to figure out what happened and fix it fast!

Being SEO Clumsy

Mistakes can happen when your working on your website. During redesign or even simple updates, coding errors can occur that leave your website with less than desirable content for search engines to feed on.

Link Structure Change

Problem:
If you are redesigning your website and change the link structure, the search engines are following a road that no longer exists. Simply removing the .html from the end of your page links can cause the search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc) to get lost finding their way to your awesome content.

Solution:
Have your website developer verify that your HTACCESS file is redirect the old links to the new links. This is sort of like providing the search engines with a “change of address” card so they now where each of the corresponding pages now resides.

Temporary Redirects

Problem:
The person that is working on your website decided it would be a good idea to hide certain sections of the website while it is being worked on.

Solution:
Your robots.txt file may have a coding error that is keeping the search engines from all pages on your website. Recode the file and resubmit your website to the search engines (if you were no longer being indexed).

Website Coding Errors

Problem:
Your website was being indexing wonderfully until your web designer or developer added some nifty code to give your website more pizzazz!

Solution:
Run the W3C Markup Validator on your website to find any error codes and fix them. Also look at your code and see where your content shows up. If your code is 6 pages long and your content shows up on page 6, work with your website developer to move any extra code to external files to raise the content.

Being SEO Naughty

The other side to the SEO coin is being naughty and practicing the dark arts known as SEO Black Hat Tactics. This is when you use tactics you shouldn’t, hope you don’t get caught and the search engines figure out your little scheme anyway.

Once you employ black hat tactics, such as white text on a white background, you can kiss your rankings goodbye for anywhere up to a year. If you are lucky, you have not been permanently banned or blacklisted, which will give you a chance to obey the SEO laws and employ SEO white hat tactics. Afterwards, it may be as easy as resubmitting your website but I’ve heard stories of companies having to negotiate and beg Google and the other search engines to let their website be indexed.

Ultimately, it is up to you to keep on top of your website’s performance and SEO strategies being deployed. Stay within the rules of the search engines and stay diligent in the health of your website to protect you, your company and your overall brand.

Writers block happens to the best of us. We sit down in front of a computer and wait for the creative inspiration to flood our senses once again. If only we were able to will the creative writing side to come out upon demand – writing would be so much easier. However, frustration floods out senses when we hit that brick wall and it is even worse if you are blog for a living.

Writing is about passion, so how do we let go of the pressures of writing and allow our passion to flow from our brains to our fingertips? You need inspiration and you need it fast!

Here are 9 creative tricks that have worked for bloggers:

1. Scope out magazine covers – Looking at other people’s inspiration helps fuel our own creativity. Look at magazine covers in a topic that you are writing or are passionate about. Don’t copy their work but rather let it inspire you to let go of your inhibitions by writing down ideas that come to mind when looking at those magazine covers.
2. Take in opening sentences of books or articles – The first line and the last line of publications are usually the most powerful. Find a blog, article, magazine or book that peaks your interests and flips through it without thinking. Read.
3. Read a work of art by your favorite author – Put your writing block aside and just pick up a book that drives your emotions. The topic can be totally unrelated to what you want to write about but once your emotions are open, creativity can flow. Writing is feeling.
4. Scribble quotes and passages down on paper – Repetition is the mother of invention. Take what someone else wrote and just write it down. You will be surprised how one of more words will jump from the page and grab your attention.
5. Look through quotations and sayings – Everyone loves good quotes as they stir emotions and passionate feelings. Read some quotes on a topic near to your heart or by your favorite celebrity/author.
6. Let music drive your writing – Some write with the music on and others with the music off. Take a few minutes and turn yourself away from writing and towards music. Close your eyes and let your mind soar.
7. Build relationship with your readers – Read comments that have been left on prior blog posts or solicit feedback from your readers. What are they talking about? What are they passionate about? What can you help then with? Use the questions they pose to inspire your next blog post.
8. Remove distractions – Close that door in your mind and forget about other people’s opinions. Write from the heart first and then write for your readers. You will always have critics on everything you write – but if you write for yourself, the screams of critics turn into whispers and you will build relationships with people who share your true passion.
9. Find your passion – You can never go wrong in writing when you find something you are passionate about and want to share it with the rest of the world. Passion helps break down the writer’s block and makes it less of a chore to write. When you write from the heart, as well as the mind, you will find less restrictions and your writing will sing like never before.

If you are a small business owner or entrepreneur, then your online brand is crucial to your business. Unfortunately, many companies and business people forget that it takes a lifetime to build up their reputation but only a few seconds to ruin it. Here’s one surefire way to alienate your customers online while killing your brand.

Don’t Communicate!

Your customers and peers want to know what is going on when there is a change at your company that impacts their business. Keeping them in the dark is not a smart business move and there is no excuse for not communicating.

Exhibit A – Good Company, Bad Communication

Imagine you have your website hosting with what is supposed to be a great company and on day all 7 of your websites and 3 of your blogs go down. Now, I’m not talking error pages – just a nice white page that greets your customers.

First, you wonder if it is something you did and try to call the web hosting company to find out how to fix it. As their 800 customer service number rings busy in your ear, you start to realize the problem is bigger than something you could have done. No problem – they have a live chat on their website. You click the link that says, “Open for Live Chat” and get an error message that they have closed all chat channels.

What??

With your head spinning, you make your way over to their Twitter account. (Which you had to guess because it wasn’t on their website.) There you find only 1 tweet ever posted, 7 months ago and it tells you, “embracing twitter, more exciting news to come, stay tuned….”.

With no phone, live chat, Twitter or any other way to contact the web host company, you use Twitter Search using their name. Lo and behold! Hundreds of tweets are flooding the page with more coming in every second. It isn’t just you! It’s everyone and it’s a major outage!

Twitter comes to the rescue – but only through the communication of other customers. You start to see quotes from technical support that only a handful of lucky customers were able to get before the system went haywire stating that it is a PHP issue and could take up to an hour to fix. Then someone else posts a link to recent web host hacker issues, including those on your own web host.

Customers Communication Better Than The Company

All the communication that should have come from the company is sent through other customers that went to work scouring the Internet or were lucky enough to have their call answered before the web host took the phone lines down. With just one tweet, your web host could have given you an acknowledgment of the problem, estimated time of recovery and even a link to current news to help you better understand the situation. Instead, their Twitter account sat idle while their customers – the ones paying them to do the work – took it upon themselves to stop working and help others.

Surely, within an hour, your websites come up and everything is running smoothly again. What? This couldn’t happen to you? Think again! This happened to me just this week with Bluehost.com!

Missed Opportunities

1. Using an already existing Twitter account to communicate the issue – 30 seconds of their time
2. Using Twitter to keep customers abreast of the hacker issues – 30 seconds each tweet

The expense of their lack of communication probably cost the company 10% or more of their customers. Depending on how many websites each of those clients maintains with this company that could be hundreds of thousands of dollars of lost revenue.

End Result

Alienate your customers through lack of communication equals unhappy customers who will not only pull their own business but will tell everyone in their social media circles why they should stay away from your company.

With thousands and Twitter friends and follows, it amazing we get any work done these days. Whether you are keeping tabs on your local social media guru or your favorite global news station, too much Twitter is a bad thing.

You may laugh but humans are not meant to multi-task. So, with the entire Twitter information overload, here are 5 ways to help you put on those tweeting mental breaks.

1. Stop following people who flood your Twitter stream with tweets about the music they are listening to or check-ins to their local bank. Music streams and check-ins have their own social media networks to stay up to date with those people if you wish. Remove anyone that does not add value to your life or work.
2. There is no urgency behind tweets. If your friend is tweeting directly to you, it is stored in a separate area so you can read it at your leisure. If they really need you, they will call or email you directly.
3. Sort through the noise with applications such as Hootsuite and Tweetdeck. Use the built-in filters to only show those areas that are of greatest interest to you.
4. Set up a tweeting schedule. Many applications, such as Hootsuite, will allow you to set up your tweets to be sent later. This way you don’t have to be logged into Twitter every hour of the day to stay in contact with your friends or followers.
5. Allow for time with your real life friends and family. Shut that phone off and log out of your computer to spend some quality time with the people you know in real life. It won’t kill you if you don’t check into every venue on Foursquare while out with the kids!

The rumors are false. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not dead. SEO has just morphed into a new line of strategies and organic white-hat tactics. The best practices have gotten a bit of a face-lift but the core is still the same. That’s what makes the following 7 SEO strategies completely useless.

1. Search Engine Submissions. If you’ve hired a SEO company that is charging you to submit your website to 1,000 top search engines, then you need to fire them. First, there are only 3 top search engines and having them index your website is totally free. The search engines have very advanced search engine algorithms (programming) that jump on the new content like a pack of hungry wolves. All you need is a XML Sitemap, which provides the search engines with a table to feed from, and let the spiders do their work.
2. Keyword Stuffing. This is different than quality keyword density. In the former, you are alienating the meta tags and content to make sure your 99 keywords are found. Search engines have gotten wise to this and now use a number of other parameters to determine the quality (not quantity) of your keywords. Google, Bing and Yahoo! completely ignore the keyword meta tag today.
3. Reciprocal Links. Link sharing was great in the 90’s and even into the early years of 2000, but reciprocal links are now dead. The search engine algorithms are wise to content farms and low quality links from irrelevant sites. One-way links from relevant (same industry or topic) websites are now golden.
4. Linked in Footers. If it looks like spam, the search engines are going to feed it to the dogs – not spiders. The lower links are in the overall coding of your website, the less value is placed on them. Quality links are always found in header navigation (not using JavaScript) and footer links can also devalue other links on your website.
5. URL Blog Comments. Please stop commenting on people’s blogs with your link in the comment box. The search engines have devalued these links and it really ticks off blog owners.
6. Duplicate Content. I saved this one for last because it is the biggest problem on the Internet. Content scraper and writers have truly abused the copy/paste method of content distribution that the search engines created the Panda algorithm to penalize you. Be original and you can’t go wrong.
7. Duplicate Content. Wait! Did I just say that? Well, it needs to be repeated. Duplicate content is not only useless but it is harmful. Never make the Panda angry.

Avoid these 7 outdated and time-wasting SEO strategies and you will start to see an increase in your search engine rankings (SERs). There are so many white-hat SEO tactics available to ensure you are climbing the search engine ladder organically and naturally. With white-hat SEO strategies, you not only protect your website so that is can maintain its level of quality but also increase your position as an authority in your given niche.

How important is Google PageRank?

Almost every client that comes to me for SEO consulting and planning states that one of the highest ranking items on their list is to increase PageRank for their website or brand and every time I can’t help but laugh a little. It’s nothing against the client but rather in response to the importance so many people place on Google PageRank. That energy could be better spent on other aspects of their visibility and online success.

What’s Google PageRank?

“PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page, used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is referred to as the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_pagerank)

Wow! That’s a mouthful! But what does it mean?

The PageRank is a great computer program that weighs the importance of your website in relation to other websites and then gives it a numeric value of importance from 0 to 10 – not important at all to the holy grail of all online content.

Does Google PageRank Matter?

Yes and no. Confused yet? Let me explain.

PageRank really has no value anymore as not many people pay attention to it. This ranking also no longer has as much weight in how you are displayed in the search engine results page (SERP). Therefore, Google PageRank does not matter.

There is one small sidebar to this statement though – one instance in which Google PageRank does matter.

If you have a PageRank of “0” then your Google PageRank does matter. In this case, it means that you don’t exist at all. You have either yet to be indexed in the search engine or there is something on your website that is stopping the search engine from properly indexing your content and webpages. In this case, you need to figure out what is going on and fix it immediately.

How do I increase my Google PageRank?

Although I have already stated that PageRank isn’t very important these days, it’s still important to some people to increase this number. I hear you and I am here to help!

• If you have a PageRank of 0 – First, check your website for technological errors that may prevent it from being indexed. Next, submit your website to the Google, Yahoo! and Bing search engines. (Just search by the search engine name and add “submit url” to find the submission pages)
• If you have a PageRank of 1 or above – The search engine knows your website exists so now it’s all about increase your website’s importance. Start link building with quality and relevant websites to see your Google PageRank increase. It will take time but remember that you want both quality and quantity links – relevancy is everything!

Search Engine Indexing Ranks Supreme

If you want true success online, spend your time and energy on getting higher search engine ranking (SER) then PageRank numbers. Successful websites use both high quality content with a solid link building strategy to increase their online branding and visibility on the Internet.

How important is Google PageRank to you? Do you use it as part of your success metrics?

Most businesses have two important questions on their minds: “What is social media?” and “Why should I care?” To truly understand and embrace social media and the social web, Time To Get Social created an awesome video entitled “What the Hell is Social Media?” to highlight the answers to these questions in the most unique and engaging method.

Social Media Video Highlights

What is social media?
Social media is “an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos, and audio.” In other words, it is a simple way to describe the millions of conversations people are having with each other around the globe every day, week, month and year.

Why should I care about social media?

1. Social media is now the top online activity, beating porn and personal email.
2. Because 2/3 of the World Wide Web population visits social networking websites.
3. All the time spent on social networking websites is growing at 3 times the overall Internet rate – accounting for 10% of all time spent on the Internet.
4. The online and social media world has become the most influential source in helping consumers make their purchasing decisions.
5. Millions of people are constantly creating content for the social web.
6. The next 3 billion consumers will access the Internet from a mobile device such as a smartphone.
7. Facebook is now the operating system of the social web.
8. Because Twitter believes it will have 1 billion users by 2012.
9. One way of marketing is no longer an viable option.
10. Because almost in all cases, social media is free.

There are thousands of free WordPress themes available online and each blogger or website owner has their favorite. Being a search engine optimization (SEO) consultant and experienced web developer, looking through all the inflated code each free theme brings is blinding and, quite honestly, frustrating. When a friend of mine told me his website was designed with the WordPresss Thesis theme, I not only took the opportunity to learn more about it but even try to break it.

Will it allow web designer and bloggers to be as creative as they want to be with their design? Does it kill the SEO on the website or blog? Is it a web developer’s worst nightmare with inflated code? Take a deep breath and let’s answer those questions.

Thesis Design Capability

Not only is Thesis a beautifully laid out theme but it also puts the design controls in the hands of the blogger. Out of the box, this theme gives the administrator a section in which to change design options such as site layout, post images and thumbnails, teasers, multimedia box, comments, javascript, fonts, colors and more! Just expand any of the areas you need to change and with a single click, you can change your blog from having 2 columns to 3 columns. Don’t like the look fo 3 columns? Just click again and change it to 2 columns!

The best part about the design options is that you don’t have to be a designer or web developer to change fonts, navigation menu rollovers colors, or layout display. All the tools you need to make changes exist with a click of a mouse.

SEO Friendliness

The Thesis site options area allows any user to easily update crucial search engine friendly information such as document header, title tag settings, meta tag information, feed URL, scripts, tracking, tagging, categories and more! Customization is available at your fingertips to tailor the theme to your SEO goals.

The Thesis theme also installed SEO friendly fields throughout your WordPress install. When posting a new article, SEO field become available to tailor the title and meta tags for that specific post. No more duplicate meta tags throughout your website or blog.

No Inflated Code

Web coding is not a pretty site and it is even worse when you get a free WordPress theme that looks pretty but has horrible coding. Themes with inflated unnecessary coding is a cause for disaster as you never know how well it will work with plugins, widgets or even the next release of WordPress.

Inflated web coding is also a huge problem with search engine optimization. If you print out the code for your highly rich content website and it is 6 pages long, with the content showing up on page 5, then it may not be search engine friendly (SEF). Coding should never push content to the end as search engines want to get fed right away when indexing your website or blog. Thesis decreases code inflation and brings the content higher to the top for search engines to find it.

The customizations don’t stop there in the WordPress Thesis theme. Administrators have access to the custom file editor to make more coding changes to the PHP, CSS and HTML of the website. Even if you aren’t a web developer or coder, if you know the changes you want to make, just head on over to the Thesis theme’s free support section and message boards. Another CMS developer or blogger is always willing to help out those in need.

Ultimately, the Thesis theme is the best theme currently on the market if you are looking for a WordPress CMS theme that is not only robust but user friendly. Sure, it costs $87 for a personal license and $164 for a developer’s license but it is well worth the money for the amount of functionality included. Check out the WordPress Thesis video tutorial online for yourself and try it out with their 30-day money back guarantee. There’s nothing to lose!

Do you currently use the WordPress Thesis theme? What are your thoughts?