One of my few gripes with WordPress has been the absence of easy linking to pages and posts internally. Fortunately Aaron Woods has come to the rescue.

I’m not sure why I ddin’t find this sooner but if you are looking for a quick and easy way when writing a page or post to link to another page or post, try Aarons RB Internal Links Plugin for WordPress. It adds a quick and easy button to the WordPress visual editor which opens a window allowing you to quickly navigate though your pages and posts drilling down to the one you want to link to.

While I can see room for a few improvements Aaron did a great job and hopefully the functionality will eventually make it into the WordPress core. This is definitely the kind of thing that deserves to be there.

Updated: 2/4/2010

Quick Disclaimer: I personally have never released a WordPress plugin.

One of the beautiful things about WordPress is the sheer magnitude of plugins that add some truly amazing capabilities to our websites and most of them are free. It’s easy to overlook how much time and energy go into developing those plug-ins, not to mention the support many of them provide. To show that we don’t take free for granted and appreciate what those developers have done for us I’m trying to start a movement that I hope will catch on with everyone that uses even a single WordPress plugin.

On March 1^st, 2010 I’m suggesting that we all make a $5 donation to our favorite plug-in or plug-in developer.

//Update

UPDATE: I’ve been seeing good traction with this and alot of people in various forums, twitter, etc.. have said they want to participate so rather than leaving comments here (which you are still welcome to do) we’re encouraging people to tweet about it on March 1st after they make their donation. To make it easy to track here is some  suggested language and a hash-tag (#wppdd : WordPress Plugin Donation Day)

“I just donated to insert plugin name” #wppdd

Alternate ($ amount optional of course):

“I just donated to Plugin Developer to say thanks for the PluginName [insert short URL to plugin page or author]” – #wppd

“I just donated $x to Plugin Developer to say thanks for the PluginName [insert short URL to plugin page or author]” – #wppd

Let’s spread the word as much as we can bewtween now and March 1 and see what it takes to get a topic to trend on that day.

//End Update

Right now I’m pledging $100 to 20 different plug-in developers ($5 each) just to say thanks.

I’ll throw out as much link love, twitter love and any other love as I can to the top donors and at least a link to everyone who comes back to leave a comment and tells us what they did.

It just feels like the right time to say thank you to those who have given us so much of their time. Help me spread the word but letting people know, point them here, tweet it, whatever you can do. And remember the date is March 1.

If you would like a reminder add your name and e-mail below. Note I will NOT be using this form to add you to my mailing list (you can do that in my sidebar separately if you wish). This will only be used to send you 2 reminders, one on Feb 28th and one on March 1st to make your donation and come back to let us know who you chose and why.

If you were at the #smcdallas event with Chris Brogan this is for you!

Apologies that the audio isn’t 100%, it’s actually lifted from a flip cam video recording. I’ve done my best to boost the levels and compress the noise to acceptable levels. Also, the beginning is truncated. In other words, it’s not perfect, but you can hear the discussion and it’s good to listen to in the background while your doing “stuff” and might tide you over until someone comes out with something better.

Chris Brogan Speaks to the Social Media Club of Dallas (MP3 Download)

P. S. If you haven’t yet checked out my tutorial on Building the Ultimate Website Content Map take a look!

When you kick off your next webstite or perhaps even with the one you already have, focus on what matters and what will get you results (sales, leads, whatever…), not what won’t. Put another way, don’t focus on things that really just serve to distract you from the real work of building a business website. Definte your goal and stay focused on that end result.

I work with clients all the time that focus intently on aesthetic details while completely ignoring their content (hint, content is far more important), their online marketing strategy, …  Hire a designer, and let them obsess over aesthetics. I’m not saying you shouldn’t pay attention, just don’t let the wrong details consume you. Now…

5 Things To Stopy Obsessing Over On Your Website

1. Perfect Aesthetics: Hire a good designer and pay them well, I’m not saying aesthetics don’t matter but don’t go overboard with flashy elements. Let you designer do what they do but get on with doing what you do as fast as possible. There is little evidence (if any) that an aesthetically perfect webstie affects the bottom line. So do what you need to in this department then get on with what will affect the bottom line.  Note: I’m also not suggestion your site aesthetics should be anything other than professional, but “perfect” becomes an excuse for not doing other things.
2. Placing Every Element In The Right Place: In the beginning it’s easy to want to get everything placed just right but the fact is you don’t know what the perfect place is for anything until you test it. Make some assumptions, and apply best practices but it’s more important to just get it done and then start figuring out if moving something around will alter the way people interact with your site. Don’t get sucked into what you think you know. Make your best guess then test. You’ll likely find out how often assumptions can be wrong.
3. The Perfect Shade of… Whatever: a.k.a. “Can I get that button in cornflower blue?” Pick the colors you want and work with your designer to make sure you apply complimentary colors and accents. But nailing down the perfect shade is a waste of time. Most monitors will show your colors somewhat differently anyway and there is no way for you to control that as tightly as you would like. Dial it in, and when you are 80% of they way there move on.
4. Pages That Scroll Vertically: I’m regularly asked to design sites where people don’t have to scroll… vertically. If you worry about this don’t. Vertical scrolling doesn’t affect usability and there is almost no way to put all of the content of most pages “above the fold” for every browser/resolution combination anyway so don’t sweat it. You might want to make sure certain elements reside “above-the-fold” so don’t eat up a ridiculous amount of space with your header (most of the time) and stop worrying about vertical scrolling, it doesn’t really matter.
5. Making Things Work Perfectly In IE6. I really wish I didn’t even have to address this but 2010 is the year that IE6 finally dies! Several big sites (including YouTube) have announced that they are dropping support for IE6. While I realize some people will still have to use it because their company is still standardized on it but it’s time even for them to get on with a more up-to-date browser. The web browser is easily the most important piece of software on your computer so it should be the one that is most up to date. If you insist on IE6 support (because you want it or because you really have to have it) then expect to pay extra for the design work.

Remember,

Quality Content will get you much further than a flashy site.

Good marketing and language and copy-writing will get you farther than any particular color

Testing your pages, ad and other elements will get you much further than your intuition.

A lot of people that fancy themselves designers that aren’t and a lot of designers don’t really know the first thing about information architecture so hire the right person for the right job and get on with building your business.

This is the second of the two posts re:emails from Perry Marshall. See “Carve out Your Kingdom” for more on that.

The email from Perry that hit me hardest illustrated seven ways to create value where there is seemingly none. Creating value out of what we have can seem daunting but the following will spark a number of ideas for you. It seems so simple when you look at it but that is the brilliance of it (again, parahprased).

1. Transform Expertise into Profitable Training – between the ears of every company’s employees is knowledge and expertise that goes largely untapped. Realize that customers desperately needed to know what the support staff knows.

Assemble a training program and sell it to your customers.

2. License something you have to another company – For example, license the training system to another organization who may in turn sell it to other companies.

If you have any kind of real business, you probably have something you can license to somebody else.

3. Tollgate Joint Ventures – If you’re “only” a consultant or freelancer, but you have friends or clients who do have a “real business”: You can license their know-how to others and keep some of it in your pocket. That’s called a Tollgate Joint Venture. The essence of doing this is making it easy for the people on both sides. Be willing to do the legwork and make it easy and there’s little resistance.

4. Customer Re-Activation – Re-activating old customers is highly profitable, whether you do it for yourself or others. The customer you already have is much cheaper and easier to acquire than a new one.

5. Re-Niching or Sub-Niching a Product – You know the “Chicken Soup for the Soul” books? Those are the quintessential example. Chicken soup for the Chiropractor’s soul, Chicken Soup for the Preteen Soul, Chicken Soup for the Couple’s Soul, the list is endless.

You can probably do this too, even with products that have nothing to do with books. All you have to do is cater to the identity of your customer. Often the necessary changes to your product are minimal. This is also frequently known as “re-purposing.”

6. Selling Leads for Big Bucks – If you want to sell leads, all you have to do is find out what one is worth. If you’re any good at marketing you can get the lead for a lot less than it’s worth to your customer.

7. Knock Yourself Off – Google advertisers frequently occupy not just one but two, three, four positions on the page. One position is their original flagship product but other ads emphasize other things – different shapes and colors; one accents high levels of service, another goes for lowest price. Doubles their market share.

If you don’t follow Perry or are not on his e-mail list I strongly recommend signing up, I don’t encourage this often but he consistently provides value in his content, the free stuff. Even if you never buy one of his products it’s worth while.

Through all of 2009 I had 2 emails that sat in my inbox for the entire year. Not because I didn’t get to them, but because the content served as a constant reminder of what I needed to be doing and how I might do it. Both emails were from Perry Marshall. I reached out to Perry to ask permission to repost those two emails because I really wanted to share them with you. Unfortunately I never heard from Perry on the matter and don’t want to repost them without permission.

However, the concepts were so strong I wanted to share at least that with you. Everything is paraphrased (at least reasonably so) and the content is greatly shortened but you’ll get the idea. I’ll be doing this in two separate posts so look for the related post to this one tomorrow.

As you trek into 2010 I hope you will refer to these frequently, the ideas will serve you well.

1. In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king. Find the land of the blind and be their king.
2. Become a marketing maniac. Become obsessed with marketing your business and own it.

How do you go about doing that?

Find a niche that is your passion then look carefully at everything related to that industry. You’ll find plenty of them out there who don’t know squat about marketing. Look at every book, magazine, tv show (if they have them)… whatever. Then, become the marketing master of that industry.

The good news is you don’t have to look far, lot’s of industries have practitioners in them that are really good at what they do but horrible at business, marketing, technology… whatever.

Need ideas? (excerpted from Perry):

Every club you’ve been a member of…write it down.
Every political organization…write it down
Every job and career you’ve been in…write it down
Every subject you liked in school,
Every sport you played,
Every magazine you’ve ever subscribed to,
Every cause or religious organization,
Every hobby…

Now, go and be king!

I was recently bummed when I figured out that I can only import one of my blog feeds into my Facebook notes (I also wanted to import my personal blog scottismy.name and the feed from my Flickr Photostream). Fortunately, Facebook doesn’t really dictate which of your feeds you can import into  notes so the answer to my problems was in adding an aggregate feed rather than just a standard single  feed. Enter Yahoo Pipes.

If you haven’t discovered or played with Yahoo Pipes it’s a content aggregation tool. One of the features is that it will output a single feed from several others. While Pipes can do much more than what I am about to show you, my needs were fairly simple so it makes a good introduction to Yahoo Pipes. If you want “pipe” more than one feed automatically into Facebook Notes or some other app, Yahoo Pipes will work great. Let’s get stared…

1. Go To Yahoo Pipes, if you don’t have a Yahoo account you’ll need to sign up
2. Click on “Create a Pipe”
3. On the Left, select “Fetch Site Feeds” from under the “Sources” menu and drag it onto the screen
4. Enter the URL of the feed you want (note, you should add the feed url, not just the site URL to make sure you get what you want. If you are on a self hosted wordpress blog it’s domainname.com/feed/)
5. Click the + sign to add additional boxes for more URL’s
6. From the Left, select “Sort” under the “Operators” menu and drag it onto the screen
7. Set the first value in the sort box to “item.pubDate”
8. Sec the second value to “descending” to keep the newer posts at the top
9. Now drag the “knob” from the bottom of the “Fetch Site Feeds” widget from the bottom of the widget to the top of the “Sort” Widget
10. Drag the “knob” at the bottom of the “Sort” widget to the top of the “Pipe Output” widget
11. Save your Pipe (Save is at the top right)
12. Click “Back To My Pipes”
13. Click on the name of the Pipe you just created, this will bring up a screen with the results of the pipe you just created
14. Right click on the “Get as RSS” Icon at the top of the feed box. In FireFox select “Copy Link Location”, in IE “Copy Shortcut”

The end result of your new pipe should look like this:

1. Got to Your Facebook account
2. Go to your profile and click on the notes tab, if you don’t have one add it
3. Click on “See Older Notes” in the light blue box on the right
4. Click “Edit Import Settings” in the light blue box on the right
5. Paste in the RSS feed url you copied when we were back in Yahoo Pipes
6. Save and be done!

Facebook should automatically import your various content items (blog posts, flickr images, …) into your notes automatically.

He’re a quick video of the process in case something above isn’t quite clear. Note, the video has no narrative/sound. My video may not exactly follow the instructions above largely because I am already importing my feed but if you follow the instructions this should get you there.

There a number of simple techniques that can help you get better, more accurate search results when using Google. Most of the time we just type in the search phrase we think most accurately represents what we are looking for and the results are pretty good. But sometimes we don’t quite get to what we are looking for or need to narrow down the search results to more easily find what we want. The following list is 6 common and easy to remember search techniques to help you get better search results. This list is by no means comprehensive but will definitely make you searches easier.

Note: All searches are displayed inside of brackets but aren’t meant to be included in your searches.

1. Exact Phrase Search: This is probably the most commonly useful tool and if you haven’t been using it, you’re going to find it saves you a ton of time when searching. Simply put your search phrase inside of double quotes and Google will return results with that exact phrase. Example: Searching for [Scott Ellis] will yield slightly different results than searching for ["Scott Ellis"] (which brings up my main business site BlackBox Technologies as well.) The exact phrase search is particularly useful for proper names and longer phrases where you are looking for something really specific. You can also use this in slightly more complex searches by putting quotes around only a part of the search phrase. For example if you wanted to find out about [Philanthropy Groups Dallas] search: ["Philanthropy Groups" Dallas] to yield better results than without the quotes.
2. Search Within A Specific Site: Sometimes the search within a site just stinks. Google search will allow you to search within a specific site by simply using site:domain.com followed by your search phrase. For example: if you want to search for my posts about Flickr but can’t easily find them (I hope that isn’t the case but…) you can do a google search for [site:vsellis.com flickr] . I find this tip particularly helpful when looking for information in forum. In my experience most forums have horrible search. Combining this with putting your search phrase in quotes will usually get you to what you want much faster than reading a ton of thread titles, especially considering that people don’t frequently write meaningful titles for their forum threads.
3. Search Within A Specific Type of Site: Ever tried to find something on a government site only to find yourself thinking “no wonder everything the government does seems so inefficient?” Well, let Google take some of the frustration out by searching within a top level domain. Like the tip above search for [site:gov] (or org, or whatever) followed by your search phrase. So if you only want to know what the government has to say about paying late taxes search for [site:gov "paying late taxes"] and you’ll restrict search results to .gov (official) websites.
4. Search for A Specific File Type: Need to find an Excel template or some other specific file type? Just search for [filetype:xls] (or pdf, mp3, …) Try searching for [filetype:xlsx "invoice template"].
5. Exclude Terms: Perhaps one of the more useful techniques is to make sure certain things don’t show up in your search results. Simply put a – (minus sign) in front of the word you don’t want to include in your search. For example, if you wanted to search for information on [colts] but weren’t looking for the football team you could try search: [colts -football]. Note: if you use the hyphen as a dash (e.g. anti-virus) then Google is smart enough to know that you aren’t trying to eliminate “virus” from the search.
6. Search Exactly As Is: Sometimes you want a specific word exactly. Google will by default use synonyms which is typically good but doesn’t always give us what we want. So add a + (plus sign) before a particular term to search on that exact word(s). For example: If I search : [overhead view of las vegas pools] I also end up with searches that include “aerial view” which I wasn’t exactly what I wanted so I re-did my search for [+overhead view las vegas pools] and eliminated the synonyms in the search results.

The last tip is to remember that you can use these searches in combination for even more specific search results. So while Google search is generally pretty awesome the quantity of information continues to expand rapidly as do search engine optimization practices, meaning we have to get better about using the search tools available to us to make sure we are finding what we are looking for.

What search techniques do you use to make searching faster or easier?

It’s been recently announced that I will be speaking at the Optimization Summit in March. I’ll be conducting a full day WordPress workshop on Wednesday March 24th.

You can use my discount code : vsellis for a $25 discount.

If you are in Dallas or just want to come in for this event it’s going to be a ton of fun and we’re going to get a lot done.

Other great

speakers include:

• John Jantsch : DuctTape Marketing
• Duncan Alney : FireBelly
• Chris Boudreaux : Social Media Governance
• Erica Campbell
• Jay Ehret : The Marketing Spot
• Mark Juleen : The Marketing Nerd

The Twitter hashtag for the summit will be #optsum.

Favicons are one of those little branding things that really are a “small touch” but make the whole site look a little more polished and professional. And let’s face it, when you attach one to your site it just feels cool. I still grin every time I add one!

If you’re aren’t quite sure what a favicon is, it’s the tiny little icon that shows up int address bar next to the website URL you are visiting and in the tab next to the website name. It also get’s added to your bookmark bar if you book mark a site (in most browsers).

They look like this (the little red “CC:”) (this is the one we use on citycrush.com:

Fortunately adding a favicon is about as easy as it gets, you just have to know the few basic steps.

1) Create a square icon, you want a square image even if you logo isn’t square (you can put it on a white or transparent background). Just make sure the width:height aspect ratio of the overall image is 1:1. Start with a size that is big enough but you don’t have to start huge. (50 x 50 or 100 x 100 is great, if you have something bigger that is fine too). Create it as a gif, jpg, png, or bmp image.

2) Don’t get carried away with detail because much of the detail will get lost when you shrink it down to icon size. Clean and simple is best, it might be a simplified version of your logo (our is).

3) Go to the Dynamic Drive Favicon Generator (free online tool ).

4) Select Your Icon, click “Create Icon” and it will automatically create a favicon.ico file for you to download. (.ico is an icon specific file format). Dont’ change the name, favicon.ico is “the standard.”

You’ll now need to upload the favicon.ico file to your website. If you currently have one (perhaps a default that was provided with your site, theme, …) then just overwrite the existing favicon.ico.

If you don’t have one you’ll need to upload it and add some code to your website. If you are on WordPress or another template driven website you’ll want to add this to your header.php file inbetween the <head> and </head> tag. If you are on a static site (ew!) then you’ll need to add this between the same header tags on every page of your site.

assuming your favicon is in your themes image directory.