Rule-Breaking Is A Luxury of Success

This week I’ve seen several examples of ‘rule-breaking’ in marketing and social media. Minimalist business writer Everett Bogue has decided to turn off commenting on his popular Far Beyond The Stars blog. John Boitnott writes about how the New York Times breaks every ‘rule’ of Facebook Page management practice but has 700k+ ‘fans’. To top it off,  Seth Godin announced that he’ll no longer be publishing traditional books.

I’m sure there will be, perhaps already has been, backlash and copycats in equal parts.

But what these folks are demonstrating to me is the luxury that success provides. And success can really be defined as having developed an audience that transcends the platform – audience meaning real, product-buying, idea-sharing people – not just numbers of passive ’followers’.

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Set Up Your WordPress Site For Success – Online Webinar

The next online training webinar is scheduled for : Wednesday, August 25, 2010 from 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM (PT)
Fee: $10
The topic is: “Set Up Your WordPress Site For Success”.
Register for Set Up Your WordPress Site For Success - Online Webinar in Online Webinar - Details will be provided via email on Eventbrite

If you’ve got your WordPress site up and running, the fun is just beginning! This webinar will help you  make sure your site is an effective marketing platform for your business. Do you have all the right plugins and features in place to capture email addresses and encourage social sharing? How do you know who’s visiting and where traffic is coming from?
Learn how to get all the business features you need on your WordPress site.

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I Don’t Want To Blog – Is There Still Hope?!

I find that many people have heard that they ‘should’ have a blog, but worry that they are just not the blogging type, or don’t think they will have anything to say.

Is there still hope without a blog?

I would say ‘yes’. After all, a blog only works if you actually post to it and actively promote it. It’s no silver bullet and it does take time and commitment, and honestly, it’s not for everybody.

One of the main benefits to having a blog is that with well-written and targeted content it can attract search engine traffic quite easily. This is the main benefit you will miss out on by not having a typical, text-based blog. But search engines are not the only source of traffic. So while there are many benefits to having a blog, let’s consider some alternatives.

1) Re-think what a ‘blog’ means

The typical idea of a blog is a text-based site that you update at least once per week and ideally more frequently, with posts of several hundred words. But here are some variations on what a blog can be:

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How To Use The WordPress Gallery Shortcode

WordPress has an in-built image gallery feature which does not yet seem to be common knowledge even though it’s incredibly simple to use.

So let’s say you are writing a post that you want to include an image gallery in.

1)   Using the usual upload/insert image button, upload any images you want to include in the gallery BUT make sure to just click “Save All Changes” instead of “Insert Into Post.”

2)   If you want your gallery to have captions, make sure to fill in the Caption field when uploading your images.

3)   To display the images you just uploaded, simply use the shortcode:

 
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WordPress 3.0 New Features – ‘Twenty Ten’ New Default Theme

WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious” has now been officially released (as you may have noticed from the upgrade prompt at the top of your WP dashboard).

I’ll be doing a couple of posts about the new features – in this one I’ll be discussing the brand new default theme that you’ll find if you upgrade.

New Default Theme – Twenty Ten

WordPress - Twenty Ten Theme thumbnailTwenty Ten is the new default theme and it’s infinitely better than tired ole’ Kubrick. Twenty Ten serves as a demonstration of many of the new WP 3.0 features, making it much more functional and customizable right out of the box, but also making it a great framework on which to build child themes. Some of the new WordPress features aren’t obvious to the non-developer because they require adding some code in order to activate the features – Twenty Ten makes many of them visible to the ordinary user and provides a nice guideline for theme developers to understand and expand upon what’s now possible.  See the theme in action.

Here are some of the main new features that Twenty Ten demonstrates:

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