If you haven’t heard yet Matt Cutts (Google’s SEO Spokesman) announced last month that page load speed is a big indicator in SEO now. I’ve taken that indication seriously and have been searching out some ways to optimize the performance of my blog and think you should too.

When assessing your blog, there are really 3 separate factors that play into it’s performance:

1. Number and Complexity Database Calls pages on your site are making: This performance issue is caused by code running on your blog that is reading and / or writing to the database. The only way it can be fixed is to identify code that is making too many database calls and eliminate it or get the author of the code to optimize it. Take it from me — database queries can be tricky and small changes to them can either make them run quickly or grind your server to a screeching halt. If a software vendor releases something without optimizing queries (which, sadly, I have been guilty of in the past as well) then they could be responsible for slow performance on your site. To optimize your site you absolutely *need* some kind of tool that will show you what calls are taking the longest and where they are located.
2. Script Execution Time: There are many different factors that can influence this one. Poorly coded software in your website, your server’s hardware or just your web server software settings.
3. Memory Management: This is possibly the most elusive problem of the three. This one could be caused by how much software is loaded by your website on page loads, poor software implementation or just software that is just crunching a lot of data.

When running WordPress, you can pretty much bet that the core code will be optimized and won’t drag the performance down — but your plugins and themes (which are written by 3rd party developers like me) can sometimes run afoul.

Over the last couple of months I’ve really been optimizing my own plugins (Pretty Link & Mingle) as to not contribute to the poor performance of blogs but many plugin & theme developers just haven’t gone through the extra effort to keep up with the ongoing effort of optimizing their plugins. And up until about a month ago, I was even flying blind when it came to all 3 of these factors on my own blog.

Luckily, as I’ve been optimizing my plugins and blog I’ve found 3 awesome tools that have been helping me to ramp up the performance of my blog (I’m still in the midst of optimizing my site) — and I thought I’d share:

1. WPDB Profiler — This plugin analyzes all of the database queries your blog is making, times each of them for you and tells you where they are occurring in the code. It is better than other page speed plugins because it breaks the queries down individually so you can see what plugins (or theme) are your biggest offenders. It is a bit unnerving to see all of this diagnostic data which appears after the footer of every page on your blog — but just know that non-admin users on your site never see it (I’m using it on this site — right now and you don’t see it do you?). If you see a large number of the same queries from a plugin or some really slow queries from a plugin then you may want to either disable it or notify the plugin / theme author to fix their code.
2. TCP! Memory Usage — This plugin absolutely rocks — it will show you first of all how much memory your page loads are consuming on your web host. For those on shared hosting this is a valuable tool as well because it will show you more about your php configuration and make recommendations based on it. It will show you settings that should be changed in order to maximize the performance and security of your blog.
3. Google Page Speed — This isn’t a WordPress plugin but is a FireFox Addon. This tool is awesome because it analyzes how long each element of your page takes to load. This will take into account for script execution time and general load time. It will make recommendations based on the bottlenecks it sees.

I of course realize that I have omitted the very popular wp-super-cache and wp-cache plugins from this list — which are also really great plugins for boosting your blog’s performance. I have them disabled on my site just because of many different compatibility issues between them and certain things I want to do — but they can bypass all 3 of the issues from above by just loading cached, static html instead of generating it every time a page is loaded…

Anyway, I really hope these tools are a huge benefit to you as you go about speeding up your site … I know I use them every day.

An amazing new plugin launched last weekend. Its called Formidable Pro and is hands down the best, most innovative and easy to use form builder for WordPress I’ve ever used. The author of this plugin is one of my good friends — Stephanie Wells over at Strategy 11 and has done a remarkable job.

I guess calling this plugin a simple “form builder” is a bit of an understatement — people with no knowledge of HTML, CSS or programming can create extremely complex forms with ease. In fact, you can script and build all kinds of user interactions on your site with Formidable Pro. Check out some of these features:

• Fully AJAXified Form Builder – This makes it dead simple to build any kind of form you want within seconds. With pure, drag & drop controls and in-place editing you don’t need to know the first thing about HTML or CSS to be extremely effective immediately.
• A Huge Array of Field Types – Build your form from these field types (with pre-defined input styles and validation): Text Input, Paragraph Input, Multiple Selection (check boxes), Select One (radio buttons), Drop Downs,Section Dividers, Phone, Email, Date (with a Javascript date selector), Hidden Field, Hidden User ID, Website/URL, Image URL, Scale (1 to 10 input), Dynamic Fields (dependent on other data in the field) and even File Uploads!
• Fully AJAXified Form Styler — You *have* to see this one to believe it — I’m not kidding, you have 100% control over what your forms look like. Not only can they be easily embedded in your site but you can use this graphical form styler to add whatever polish you want.
• Ability to Embed or Link Directly to Forms – Quickly send out a survey to your email list or post a poll on your website, no matter how you want to deliver it, again, Formidable makes it easy.
• Form Templates — These are pre-configured forms that you can choose from. Formidable Pro ships with 4 preset form types — a contact, real estate listing, bug/defect report and an address collection form — all of which are common types of forms. But you can create your own templates and use them to create forms instantly. Steph has plans to continue adding preset template types as updates come out.
• Statistical Reports – Once you’ve sent your forms out to your audience you can see exactly how many responded and the breakdowns for each of the fields in your form. This feature is especially effective when surveying your audience.
• Data Analysis and Export — You can view all the entries from your form and export them to csv.
• Setup Custom Displays to Showcase your Data Externally — Do you want to show the results of a survey or a poll? Quickly setup a custom display and you can show the results of your survey or form on your external website.

I just can’t wait to start sending out surveys now that I’m in possession of this killer plugin!

Really, the only downside I can see to this plugin is that it’s brand new — so I suppose there could be problems with it here and there (all though in my usage of it this week, I’ve seen no signs of any instability — it feels exceptionally solid). But I’ve known Steph for years and she’s literally obsessed over this plugin so I know that if there are any problems — even small ones they will be fixed lightning fast.

The other thing that’s really impressive about this plugin is that it is so inexpensive. The single website version is only $35 and for that amount you still get lifetime support and updates. I actually think Steph isn’t charging enough for this plugin — I’ve seen other form building plugins out there going for upwards of $200. And in addition to this, she’s got a 30 day money back guarantee.

Overall, this plugin is well thought out, feels extremely solid and is impressively powerful. I’m a Formidable Pro affiliate, but even if I weren’t, I’d still highly recommend it — I’m switching all of my surveys over to it next week. I’ll try to keep everyone here informed about updates to it and how it’s working for me though — so I can hold Steph’s feet to the fire …

Among all of your New Year’s Resolutions, there is one that you should pay special attention to.

No, it isn’t lose 35 lbs or stop eating Twinkies (my other goal for 2010), the goal I’m talking about is you taking your Online Business to new heights in 2010. Whether your goal is to make a million dollars online or you just want to make enough to cover your car payment, you should write it down, put together a plan and start working.

Don’t make excuses, there are plenty of ways to do something great online this year and make money doing it but they pretty much all involve the same strategies and tools. Whether you’re a blogger, affiliate marketer or have your own products — here are the strategies you absolutely need to learn and use in 2010 if you want to ignite explosive growth in your Online Business:

My Top 10 Online Business Building Strategies for 2010:

1. Give, Give, Give and Give More to Your Audience! – This is really the key to all success online — the more value you provide to your audience, the more your business will grow. By this, I don’t mean to completely “give the farm away” — people will generally just take advantage of you if you do that. I mean that you should give some of your best stuff away for free and go way overboard to provide value for things you charge money for.
2. Simplify … EVERYTHING – Don’t think about what you can add to your business — but what you can eliminate from it. The simpler your products are, the happier your customers will be and the simpler your website is, the more conversions you’ll get. The best way I’ve found to simplify a website is to identify the 1 or 2 actions that you want your users to take, get rid of everything else distracting your users and then re-design your pages so that those 1 or 2 actions appear in a clear, centralized location on your site.
3. Listen – You’ll never know what your audience wants unless you listen to them. I read all my emails, blog comments, forum posts and entries over on WPMingle — and I try to answer as many of them as I can. The reason? Well, first of all, I really enjoy interacting with my audience, but I also get my best ideas from this valuable feedback. You need to be careful with this one though … about 1-2% of any audience can typically be classified as very vocal crazy people … so don’t let these people with strong opinions necessarily determine how you drive your business. Instead, try to look for trends in your user’s requests — if you get 1 request for something then that’s one thing but if you get 100 requests for something else then you probably should do something about it.
4. Create and Sell Your Own Products — I was at a conference of bloggers a few months ago where the panel asked people in the audience to raise their hands if they had 50K or more visitors to their sites — about 10 people raised their hands. Then the panel asked this group how many of them were making $1,000 a month or more on their sites — only 2 hands stayed up! WHAT!? This completely floored me! I have a fraction of the traffic that these “big” bloggers have but they are only making a fraction of the money I’m making every month. Why? I promote my own products. If you want to make some “real” money online in 2010 then the best and fastest way to do this is by creating your own product to promote.
5. Become an Affiliate for Products You Already Use – Unless you already have a massive amount of traffic on your site, traditional Google Adsense advertising can be a waste of time. Revenue from promoting products and services can be much more lucrative for low to medium traffic sites. Most products and services these days have affiliate programs you can enroll in and make money every time someone referred by you makes a purchase. I would recommend using the following criteria to choose an affiliate product to promote: Do I use and love this product? Does this product offer a decent affiliate commission (I don’t generally promote products actively unless they pay out at least $25-30 per sale)? Does this product convert for my audience (you generally have to just test this one out — but some products will convert better than others depending on the audience).
6. Organize & Automate — I love Online Businesses so much because of this fact — you can structure your business to deliver products and services by way of completely automated processes. Setting up a system like this is much easier than you might imagine. There are many off the shelf software solutions and services that allow you to set systems like this up in a very short amount of time.
7. Yes, YOU NEED TO BLOG! — If your goal is to be invisible to Google and don’t want anyone coming to your website then a static, unchanging, brochure style website is great — but if you actually want to use your blog to help you build your business then you need a blog. A blog will give you an avenue to speak directly with your audience and really give you a forum for building your brand.
8. Become a Master of Non-Google SEO – What is non-Google SEO you say? By this, I mean concentrating on optimizing your presence on sites other than Google. You need to start thinking of YouTube, Flickr, and many other domain specific websites as specialized search engines that can bring your website attention. Often times these sites have simpler algorithms that will enable you to move up your rankings faster and more effectively.
9. Start tapping into the power of Pay-Per Click Advertising – SEO with Google can take some time, depending on your domain it could take months and at the end of the day, you don’t always have control over where your site shows up with Google. This is not true with Pay Per Click (PPC) — with Google PPC you can setup a campaign and within minutes you can have targeted traffic coming to your website. Just make sure your keywords, ads and landing pages contain similar ideas & keywords and that your landing page converts — remember you’re paying for traffic and so if people aren’t buying, you can start burning money really fast. If you start with a low dollar amount though and keep a close eye on it then you can always turn it off if your traffic isn’t converting.
10. Be Consistent – The more consistent you are when it comes to delivering your product and putting content on your site, the more your online presence will grow and your credibility will increase.

I’m going through and refining my business this week to work on these things throughout the year and I challenge you to do the same. I hope you’ll feel free to leave me a comment if you know of any other strategies that can help us grow our businesses in 2010.

This article will show you some simple steps you can take to increase the credibility of your site with a very low amount of effort. Today I came across this fantastic article by Daniel Scocco:

Time to Stop Using Whois Privacy?

His article inspired me to write about this topic and to extend his thinking a bit beyond Private Registrations.

Scocco’s argument is that using private registration on your domain names leads to less trust. This is 100% true but here’s another big reason not to use Private Registration if you ever plan to install an extended verification SSL certificate on your site you’ll have to remove the privacy registration settings (and trust me, that can be a pain in the butt).

One of the reasons privacy exists is that whois records are public and you don’t necessarily want your personal information out hanging in the wind when don’t use private registration. Since private registrations are no good for business sites I recommend that you create a special email address or email address alias for your domain name registrations (so that your main email address doesn’t get hit with spam) and that you don’t use your home address (so people don’t show up at your doorstep). If you don’t have a business address, go down to your post office and get a PO Box — you don’t necessarily need to use “PO Box” nomenclature on your address, just enter the street address of your post office then have your box number appear as the suite number.

Some other practices that will help to get you more credibility with Google, other services and your audience would be to do the exact opposite of what the spammers would do, right? So here are a few tips for you when registering your domain names and setting up your website:

1. Don’t use private registration — yeah, we’ve already talked about this.
2. Register your domain name for longer than the 1 year minimum – I’m not sure I’ve noticed extreme benefits from this one but I feel like it gives you a sense of permanence and credibility.
3. Use a unique IP address for your website — if you’re going to be using SSL on your site then you’ll need to do this anyway. You can still be on a shared or virtual server — just see if your web host can make this happen for you if you don’t already know how to do this.
4. Get a custom graphic design or a customize an existing template — Okay, I’m a bit of a hypocrite here since the graphics on my site suck — but I’m working on it! Web spammers would never spend the money to roll out their own custom graphics — it would be too expensive for them. And yes, you can get a graphic designer to create custom graphics for you if you’re using a theme framework like the one I use — Thesis.

Every little bit of credibility counts and so even if any of these suggestions don’t give you huge benefits immediately you should still adhere to them because they’ll pay off over time. The less you look like a web spammer and the more credibility you have with Google and your audience the better …

I’ve had a ton of requests from Pretty Link and Pretty Link Pro users to update and expand my video tutorials for these products. I’ve finally gotten around to recording the first of these.

Do you need help with:

• Getting started with Pretty Link on your WordPress Website
• Setting up Pretty Link Redirects
• Organizing your links with Pretty Link Groups
• Advanced Link Options
• Tracking Hits on your Pretty Links
• Pretty Link Global Options

Well, I just put the first 6 videos that cover these topics up today. You can get a hold of them by signing up for them on the following page:

6 Free Lessons on Pretty Link

If you feel like there’s a video I’ve forgotten, let me know and I’ll try to produce it and add it to this site.

I found this article yesterday and posted it to twitter — I thought it was so spot on that I wanted to add it here as well:

What Startups Are Really Like by Paul Graham

Some of my favorite quotes from (because I’ve seen these things in the startups I’ve been a part of) this were:

On Use of Time:
“Most hacker-founders would like to spend all their time programming. You won’t get to, unless you fail. Which can be transformed into: If you spend all your time programming, you will fail.” — DOH!

On Product Development:
“Now, when coding, I try to think ‘How can I write this such that if people saw my code, they’d be amazed at how little there is and how little it does?’”

On Product Development Strategy:
“It’s so important to launch fast that it may be better to think of your initial version not as a product, but as a trick for getting users to start talking to you.”

The more I work on my own products and the more I consult with businesses, the more I can see how true the open source mantra of “Release Quickly, Release Often” is in all areas of business as well.

Let me show you how easy it is to be up and running with Pretty Link on your WordPress website in 5 minutes or less!

Download (Right-Click & Select “Save-As”)

If you’re like me, you feel like you can tackle any project, get it done on time or before and with stellar success. Unfortunately, this attitude has brought me nothing but pain & suffering when doing work for clients. In the past, I always used to underestimate the difficulty of my projects and would convey that to my clients in the form of unrealistically small estimates on time and budget.

Luckily, I was usually on a team of highly motivated, competent people — so we were actually able to hit many of our deadlines but the products we were delivering weren’t the highest quality and I started to get burned out. However, when I endured a hellish project that ultimately ended up in failure I finally saw the light. I started to realize that these tight deadlines were not only consistently making my clients upset but were ruining my life — it was then that I realized that I needed to:

LOWER THE BAR!

Okay, by this I don’t mean that you should take advantage of clients or that you should be lazy … but that you under promise and over deliver. Make sure that when you estimate the scope of a project that you double or triple the number of hours you’d normally bid — so that you can account for any problems that you ABSOLUTELY WILL ENCOUNTER.

Clients don’t typically like seeing estimates for large figures so you’ll sometimes have to make small concessions — but if you aren’t up-front with your clients from the beginning then once you start the work, your life can become hell on earth and they will be consistently disappointed. Trust me — sometimes its better to just not get the job than to work off of an unrealistic estimate.

Don’t short-change yourself and do give yourself a chance to succeed by not pushing the envelope too much. Once the expectations and estimates have been set realistically and you actually come in under budget and ahead of schedule — you’ll look like a rockstar instead of a buffoon for blowing it! You’ll be happier and so will your clients.

So I just got back from BlogWorld Expo / WordCamp Las Vegas 2009 — it was awesome! Since it seems like everyone is talking about this event now — I just want to focus on my own personal experiences and things that I learned. Here are some of the highlights and takeaways from the event:

Day 1 (Thursday):

The 2 highlights for me on Day 1 were the “Internet Marketing for Smart People” Session and the End of Day Keynote from Chris Brogan.

The “Internet Marketing for Smart People” session was a panel by Sonia Simone (http://www.remarkable-communication.com), Chris Brogan (http://chrisbrogan.com), Brian Clark (http://copyblogger.com), and Darren Rouse (http://problogger.com). This session was packed and rightly so, there was some phenomenal information shared–it even had it’s own Twitter hash tag: #3tribe … The gist of the 3 tribe thing a reference to Seth Godin’s Tribes book. The panelists showed that there are currently 2 accepted tribes on the Internet now, those who feel its unethical to turn a profit on the Internet and those who fall into the get rich quick scheme mindset. The panelists were pushing the notion that there was a third, emerging tribe that wants to do well by the community, provide value and ethically earn a living. They also announced a new community around this subject (the third tribe community). Since I agreed 100% with the 3rd tribe philosophy — I want to be a member of it for sure.

Chris Brogan’s Keynote rocked. He talked about this huge shift in interpersonal communications due to social media and blogs.

Day 2 (Friday)

The big highlights for me on Friday were the session on building a loyal audience through Podcasting by Jason Van Orden (http://jasonvanorden.com and http://internetbusinessmastery.com), the Win or Die session in WordCamp by John Pozadzides (http://onemansblog.com) and when me and 9 others went to the Blue Man Group!

Jason Van Orden has the top podcast for the “Marketing” and “Internet Business” keywords. I’ve been a listener and a big fan of his for quite a while — so this session was a real treat. He diagrammed out not only how he writes and produces podcasts but how he promotes them. Some of the major take aways from this session were to re-purpose content and to push it to as many places on the Internet as possible. He recommended shooting video and then uploading it to a service like Tube Mogul or Traffic Geyser.

John Pozadzides’ session at WordCamp was a much more intimate setting — there were only about 20 of us who were there. John P. is the former CMO of the Layered Tech hosting company and is the current CEO of iFusion Labs that created the awesome Woopra analytics package. His message was basically that you’ve got to take no prisoners when it comes to your website — and some strategies on how you can do it. John P. has also been a user of Pretty Link Pro and talked about it at the end of his lecture as a way to aggressively market your site.

Later that night, I went to the JET Nightclub (at the Mirage) for a scheduled BlogWorld party and rounded up 9 people to go to the Blue Man Group with me. For full disclosure — I got the tickets for free from Partner Fusion who manages the Affiliate Program for the Blue Man Group. I have to say that I’ve seen the Blue Man Group before but trust me, it never gets old. I think that The Blue Man Group is by far the best show on the strip. One of the ladies in our party, Danielle Williams was actually called out of the audience to eat Twinkies with the Blue Men. Here are some pictures:

Oh, and if you ever wondered what is that crap that shoots out of their chests — it appears to be some kind of mixture of bananas and vanilla pudding or something.

Some of the other awesome people that attended the Blue Man Group with us were Brandon Dove (http://pixeljar.com), Bonnie Schroader (http://blogbonnieblog.com), Russ & Danielle Williams (http://russwilliamsdesign.com), Jason Van Orden (http://jasonvanorden.com), Ronjini Mukhopadhyay (http://theindianfever.blogspot.com), Drew Stronjny & Jennifer Boydstrun (http://jestro.com) … We had a blast!

Day 3 (Saturday)

There was an awesome panel on Saturday morning about the Money Making Potential of Continuity programs. On the panel was Tim Kerber (http://www.membershipsiteowner.com) and Ryan Lee (http://www.ryanlee.com) … This was possibly the most inspirational of all of the sessions I attended — these guys have figured out how to engage, provide solid value to and monetize an audience. They offered a ton of little tips & tricks — but the best part was when Tim started putting numbers up on the projector about revenue coming from some of his membership sites — it was off the hook!

That afternoon, I went back to WordCamp and attended an awesome session by Aaron Kronis (http://www.aaronkronis.com) on “Rockstar SEO” … He reviewed a lot of information that I already knew but also threw in several gems that will help in my SEO efforts in an ongoing basis.

At 7pm, I met John Pozadzides (http://onemansblog.com), Cali Lewis (http://geekbrief.tv) and about 10 other people for a photowalk. This was the first photowalk — but really fun. We got some great shots of Vegas — in many interesting and different perspectives than you’d normally think of. Here are Cali’s shots from the photowalk — I know you’re dying to see mine — I’ll post them soon.

Some Other Awesome People I Met

Leo Laporte — Okay, I briefly talked to him and shook his hand — he was very nice — it was cool.

Tracy Childers & Stu McLaren — these guys created the Wishlist Member plugin for wordpress and are really cool. I’ve been looking into it as a replacement for AMember so it was awesome to meet them.

Vic DaSilva — he’s the owner of uberreview.com and weinterrupt.com — really cool guy.

Shannon Yelland — She’s doing some really cool stuff over at seedtheweb.com

John Reece, Kevin Williams, and Cameron Gawley — I must have bumped into these guys 100 times at parties and on the Expo floor. They are doing some great stuff for the National Breast Cancer Foundation and are expert online marketers.

Take Away

I had no complaints about this conference — really inspired me to come back and take more action. For the most part, the speakers were great, it was a great environment for networking opportunities and I learned a lot. I’ll definitely be returning to BlogWorld next year — hopefully I’ll see you there!

In the 1.4.27 release of Pretty Link Pro there are some major refinements. The first of these refinements is the ability to set up multiple twitter accounts that your blog can post to. You can now automatically post notifications of each of your blog posts to however many Twitter accounts you want to simultaneously. This feature arose from my need to tweet posts out to 3 twitter accounts that I own — before I was auto tweeting to my main account @supercleanse and then re-tweeting to my other two. This was time consuming and kind of defeated the purpose of auto tweeting altogether.

In addition to multiple twitter accounts, we’ve optimized the page load time for users of the social media button bar, re-tweet badge and of Pretty Link. Many of the SQL queries were slowing down some of the page load times.

Finally, we made many back end changes to the system so that it will be able to accommodate some of the awesome new features we have planned next (some of which were revealed in this month’s survey). Enjoy!

UPDATE: Okay, so there was actually a significant bug that was released with version 1.4.27 — if you haven’t done it already go out and upgrade to 1.4.28 where it has been fixed! Sorry for any issues.

Hey, are you going to BlogWorld this week? It’s going to be held in Las Vegas on October 15-17 and apparently it’s going to be *really good* …

Let me know if you’ll be there so we can meet up.

There are already a few activities that are being organized after the conference that I’m planning on attending.

1. Thursday Night @10pm — There’s a photo walk out on the strip that I’m planning on attending. This one’s been organized by Victor Cajiao of the Typical Shutterbug Podcast.

2. Saturday Night @7pm — John P. from One Man’s Blog & Woopra has organized another photo walk that will be down on Freemont street in old Las Vegas … looking forward to this one a lot. You can read more about it on his blog.

Of course, I’m sure some fun stuff will come together for Friday night as well … but no matter what, feel free to contact me so we can hang out.

I’ve put together a survey to refine our road-map for Pretty Link & Pretty Link Pro. If you’re a user of either, please take 2 minutes and fill out this survey — you’ll be happy you did …

Pretty Link Pro Feature Survey – October, 2009

Does your blog, website or Internet Business really deserve to succeed? Well it depends on what you do with it–now doesn’t it?

Several years ago, a former boss of mine had a poster of Winston Churchill hanging on his door. It depicted Mr. Churchill pointing to you saying “Deserve Victory!” — underneath it, there was a large piece of paper that someone had taped that interpreted the meaning of the poster — it read:

“Our Business Deserves Victory”

Was that really true? Did our company deserve victory?

Well, unfortunately in the case of this former employer, the answer was a resounding no — the company itself had a badly flawed business model to begin with, didn’t have high enough margins and wasn’t listening to its audience–yet the perception among most of the employees was that the company still deserved victory.

Well, about 6 months after the poster went up the company failed — the market had spoken — the company was undeserving of victory.

Success in Internet Business Doesn’t Reward Slouches

My boss had it all wrong–in this poster, I’m pretty sure that Winston Churchill wasn’t saying “everyone deserves victory (even if you’re stupid, lazy and/or have no idea what you’re doing on a day to day basis to grow your business).”

This poster is actually all about accountability — it’s about Winston Churchill staring you down, telling you that “You need to do everything in your power to be deserving of victory!”

I think it was a brilliant marketing piece and must have been successful–it pushed the responsibility of winning the war to every individual citizen.

Who Decides If You Really Deserve to Succeed?

If you’ve got your own Internet Business then you know that just like the British in World War II, you are fighting a war every day. You’re fighting against competitors, time, Google and ultimately yourself … you’re fighting for higher rankings, more clicks, more leads, more sales. And just like the British in World War II, each Internet Business owner is responsible for his or her own success.

Of course, ultimately, only your market will determine whether you Deserve Victory or not.

So How Do You Become Deserving of Victory?

In order to be successful in Internet Business, you must live consistently live by a code. Here are the 4 fundamentals of what you’ll need to do to be deserving of victory:

1. Select a Good Market – Whoa there, how do I find out if a market is good or bad? Well, there are several indicators that can help you. Look at the keywords and number of relative clicks to gauge size of market (you can use google’s amazing keyword tool for this), and follow people from this market on twitter and become active in forums to find holes in the market and how passionate people are about finding solutions. If these seem to line up you can launch a blog or small product for the market to see what the response is. Even if there seems to be a great niche and you have a great idea, don’t count on it being successful — trial and error is the only constant in Internet Business.
2. Listen To Your Market — Yeah, uh, listen to your prospects & customers — novel concept eh? Well, from what I see out there, this is actually more rare than you’d think. Listen to your blog’s audience and/or customer feedback you get in any form and use it to drive your business. Sometimes this can be hard — such as when your market says it doesn’t care / like your product — that could be an indication that your time could be better served in another market.
3. Develop Your Business Around Your Market – The most successful online businesses craft their products and services around feedback from their customers & prospects. Who knows what will sell in a market better than the market itself?
4. Work Like a Mad Fool to Consistently Provide Value to Your Market — Look, Internet Business is a battle — if you don’t expect to have to work long hours consistently and sacrifice then you might as well give up now.

DESERVE VICTORY!

So, print that poster of Winston Churchill out, hang it on your wall and look at it every morning before you go into battle. Let him remind you that if you fail — you only have yourself to blame. If you get motivated to create value for your audience by listening to their needs then who knows, your market might just deem you victorious!

In the history of mankind it has never been easier to figure out who’s talking behind your back. Anything published on the Internet is available to the whole world — so you should be able to see it right? Well, many people still don’t realize just how easily you can find out who’s talking about you — in real time. This kind of tacit knowledge is vital for successful businesses in the fast paced world of the Internet.

I’ve been using several great tools to find out what people are saying about me for a while now. Its really cool when I can respond to potential customers who are having troubles — without them even contacting me first! I’ve been able to do this many times and it inevitably leads to a great relationship with these people. Its funny how confused they are when I contact them — they generally have no idea how I could possibly have seen their blog post or tweet.

You can find out when people are happy with you and when they are not — but either way it gives you the opportunity to build great relationships.

Here are 3 tools that I use on a consistent basis:

1. Google Alerts — http://google.com/alerts
   

   You can set up search terms into Google Alerts and Google will actually email you on a daily basis with any content it finds on the Internet about the search term. You have several options with Google Alerts, you can just grab an RSS feed or have it email you. You can set it up to update you in real time (as soon as Google sees something) or once a day. Typically this pulls information from any indexed websites on the internet so you can get a really good idea about what people are saying.

   I actually set Google Alerts to monitor my name “Blair Williams” but in my case, it showed me just how little people are talking about me … but I have learned plenty about the beautiful female character from Terminator Salvation named Blair Williams who apparently “Kicks Ass and is All Girl!” Luckily, my monitoring of “Pretty Link” has gone much better — naturally, the more unique the term you’re searching is to you, the more relevant the results … So if your name is John Smith, it may not do you much good.

2. Twitter Search — http://search.twitter.com
   

   This is a great way to search for what people are saying about you in real time on Twitter. Twitter search isn’t foolproof — some users aren’t even included in the search results (a problem I haven’t seen Twitter acknowledge anywhere — but my Twitter username: @supercleanse isn’t included in the search results for some strange reason) — but for the most part it ROCKS! I can type in “Pretty Link” and see any tweets containing that phrase within the last 7 days.

   Twitter Search is novel at best when used as a search engine for tweets — because who wants to sit there and refresh the search results all day. The real benefit is found when using Twitter Search within a tool like TweetDeck: http://tweetdeck.com/beta/ … In TweetDeck you can setup a feed that regularly updates the most recent tweets on any given search term.

3. Collecta — http://collecta.com
   

   

   Collecta is a brand new search engine — the first “real-time” search engine that I know of. It aggregates all kinds of information on the web as it happens and so it will show all of the tweets about a given topic, any blog posts, blog post comments, videos, or photos anywhere, anytime they are published!

   Collecta has a great User Interface — I just open a new window in my browser and get a few searches going. I leave it on all day … so if anything comes across, I’ll see it immediately. I still use TweetDeck a bit more just because I have to set everything up again if I close my browser — but hopefully soon there will be a tool that works with collecta.

I’m sure there are several tools I’ve omitted from this list — if you have any real-time search tools you like to use feel free to share … But hopefully these will help you to start monitoring your online presence.

Over the years, I’ve learned it can be hard to tell the difference between a Robot and Human … er … well that is, on the Internet. Pretty Link and Pretty Link Pro can now help you unmask those pesky robots clicking your links. There have also been several other features and bug fixes added in the last week that I’d like to update you on and give you a little bit of info about:

Robot Hit Filtering

This one has been a long time coming. You can now go into “Pretty Link” -> “Options” under “Reporting” and select Filter Robots. Robot Filtering will only work for new links — any robot hits that were recorded in a version of Pretty Link before version 1.4.21 won’t be able to be filtered. With that said, if you’re really wanting your old hits to have the ability to be filtered just comment on this post — if there’s a demand, I’ll post some code that you can run on your server to do this effectively. Another thing to know about the robot filtering is that it will eliminate the lion’s share of bots (like 99% of them) — but there may be a few that slip through the cracks — I’m working on some future enhancements that will close the gap on this — but for now, if you still see 1 or 2 bots in your hit list don’t be alarmed.

Pretty Bar Attribution Link

Another big one is that Pretty Link Pro users can now modify or completely remove their attribution link on the Pretty Bar (the one that says “Powered by Pretty Link”). This is a big one because many of you have been having to modify this link every time you upgrade — which is a pain in the butt. Now Pro users can just check a box to remove this link or enter their affiliate URL which will replace the default URL for that link. This is cool because Pro users interested in promoting Pretty Link Pro for a 50% commission can get exposure every time they share a link.

Public Link Creation

After launching the public link creation feature for Pretty Link Pro users a few weeks ago, I’ve had several requests for a few additions to it. The first was that the default success page (the page that the Pro user’s visitor will go to after they create a link) didn’t do enough for the visitor. Now that page has link URL, title and a row of social buttons so they can send the link to other sites like Twitter, Facebook & Linked In. If you want to retain your own branding on the success page, there are also several new shortcodes you can put on your custom success page:

• prli_public_link_url — this does the same thing as the original prli_create_display shortcode (which will still work) — but I think makes a bit more sense …
• prli_public_link_title — this tag will display the title of the link.
• prli_public_link_target_url — displays the Target URL of the link that was entered into the public URL creation form.
• prli_public_link_social_buttons — displays the social buttons bar that will allow your users to post this link to several different social media sites.

Unicode Support

I had several users complain that Pretty Link wasn’t handling international character sets very well. International characters weren’t being recorded properly in the database and so Pretty Link wasn’t working properly for them. Well, the database tables have been fixed so any new unicode (utf8) characters entered into the database will be correct (just so you know, any unicode characters previously entered into the database will still be incorrect — since they weren’t recorded properly the first time there’s no way for the system to correct them).

I’ve also altered the validation on pretty link slugs to include the use of utf8 characters. This means you could create a pretty link for your copywrite notice like this: http://example.com/© — this is really cool but should still be used judiciously because there are still many places where these types of links could be posted to that won’t recognize this as a valid URL.

Pro users also noticed that the automatic tweets weren’t showing utf8 characters and twitter comments coming in from twitter weren’t showing utf8 characters correctly. Both of these issues have been fixed.

Bug Fixes

In addition to all these feature enhancements, there have been numerous bugs squashed. There was one particularly nasty bug affecting a few Pro users that was fixed (I had some awesome help on this one from Clay Loveless of KillerSoft). In addition to this one there were bugs in the JSON decoding routines, database models and many other places.

I’m still in the process of updating the Pretty Link Pro User Manual to show all of these changes and exactly how to use them — but if you have any questions you can always post a comment or send me an email and I’ll see if I can help.

I just added (in version 1.4.18) a simple but extremely useful feature to Pretty Link Pro — the social network buttons bar. This feature will put a configurable row of social networking buttons on your posts and/or pages that use your Pretty Links!

To enable this feature, just go to your “Pro Options” menu item, click “Page and Post Options”, make sure Automatic Pretty Link creation is enabled on pages and/or posts, and then click the checkbox to enable the social networks button bar… Now you can configure which buttons to display and where to display them (above or below your page/post content).

I’m personally excited to start using this feature on all of my sites — you can actually see it on this post. While this feature is cool and very useful, it is only the beginning — you can expect to start seeing even more exciting enhancements to this feature very soon.

When I put the pre-launch version of Pretty Link Pro (PLP) out on the market at the end of July, I really didn’t know what to expect. Well, let’s just say the past month has been a wild ride. Scores of people downloaded PLP and I released a ton of fixes and new features. Seriously, look at how much has been added to PLP (above and beyond its already impressive feature set) in just the first month:

1. Automatic Tweeting of scheduled & XML-RPC posts
2. The Pretty Link Bookmarklet (for creating pretty links outside of your WordPress admin)
3. Bulk Editing / Bulk Deletion UI enhancements for the Pretty Link Management page
4. Public Link creation widget and shortcode (for site owners who want to allow their users to create pretty links using the website’s url)
5. The Quick Add Dashboard Widget
6. Alternate URL configuration (you can use a shorter version of your url)
7. Short URL auto-discovery for Posts & Pages
8. Randomized Keyword Replacements when using replacement thresholds
9. Slug & message customization for automatic post tweeting
10. URL Aliases for counting tweets that go to your blog post but are different from your pretty link
11. Many more smaller fixes & refinements …

Roadmap

Pretty Link Pro has rapidly become a solid and feature rich link management platform that many websites owners are relying on more and more every day — and it’s only going to get better! Here’s a small roadmap of some of the upcoming features will be available exclusively to Pretty Link Pro users in the coming months:

1. PrettyBar enhancements — I’ve had many requests for ways to make the Pretty Bar more customizable, more interactive and more helpful. Here are just some of the enhancements I have planned:
   1. 100% control of the HTML & CSS without having to modify files every time you upgrade PLP
   2. Tweet badge which can be optionally integrated into the PrettyBar (you’ll be able to get a tweet count on any link you create that uses the prettybar)
   3. Ability to modify or remove the Pretty Link Attribution link on the PrettyBar (PLP users are starting to manually replace the standard link I have there with their affiliate links — which I think is a fantastic idea so I’m making it easier to do so)
2. UI enhancements — there are a myriad of enhancements to the UI that are in the works right now. These enhancements will make creating and managing your links sooo much easier
3. Better website analytics compatibility
4. Group specific link defaults — you’ll be able to override the global link creation defaults depending on what group a link is placed in.
5. Firefox Pretty Link Pro Sidebar Widget — this will be a *huge* enhancement — since Pretty Link is getting more hooks into twitter and other social media platforms, you’ll be able to do many of the tasks you’d normally perform within your wordpress admin right from Firefox!
6. Many other smaller — but awesome features

And remember that even if you purchase PLP today, you’ll receive all of these future updates absolutely free!

Affiliate Program

Also, don’t forget that when you purchase Pretty Link Pro, you’ll automatically be enrolled in the Pretty Link Pro Affiliate Program … So you’ll get a 50% commission for every person that purchases PLP using your affiliate link (which you’ll get when you purchase)! This is great if you have an affiliate marketing presence, have clients that need Pretty Link Pro or just have friends that need it.

I’m pumped about all the activity that’s been going on surrounding Pretty Link Pro and the cool features I’m working on right now. Seriously, between the fact that this the best link management software in the world, you’ll get lifetime updates, there’s a 100% money back guarantee on it and there’s a generous affiliate program along with it — why don’t you just get Pretty Link Pro today, start using it to build your brand and make some money while your at it? Sounds like a no brainer to me.

I’ve been a big fan of Cali Lewis for a while now. I started watching GeekBrief TV after she was on another podcast that I’m a big fan of (TWiT). So, I was really excited to see her mention Pretty Link Pro on her awesome show! This is a link to episode 620 of Geek Brief TV that aired on August 28, 2009:

I just pushed another release today that I think clears up many issues that users were having plus I got 2 major improvements in.

1. The first is with the keyword replacement algorithm in Pretty Link Pro. When keyword replacements were turned on and a threshold was set of say, 3 keyword replacements per page, my algorithm was just replacing the first 3 keywords it saw. In this release I altered the algorithm so instead of replacing the first 3, it will now replace them in a more distributed randomized order. This feature request was from one of my users that noted some other apps that were doing this. I dove into the code and luckily my existing algorithm was such that it only took me about an hour to modify.
2. So, remember how I released the Pretty Link Bookmarklet yesterday? Well, I was immediately flooded for 2 additional features to be added to it. The first was that the title of the URL should be used as the name of the Pretty Link and the second was that people wanted a way to post this link to some of the social networks. In the 1.4.12 release today these features are available.

Here are some screenshots of these features:

Some users have been happy but some others have been a bit bothered that I’m pushing so many updates lately, well don’t worry too much … I’m just ramping up for the Official Launch of Pretty Link Pro on September 1. So get ready for some awesome new features to get rolled out next week — I’m working on some really cool stuff for the free & pro users alike!

The Pretty Link Bookmarklet is finally available! My #1 request from users for a while has been to make it easy to create Pretty Links outside of the WordPress admin — and now you can.

If you aren’t familiar with what a bookmarklet is, it’s basically a button that you can add to your browser’s toolbar that will do some action–in this case it’s creating Pretty Links. Bookmarklets are great because they are very simple, javascript based buttons that work in practically every browser.

The Pretty Link Bookmarklet is available starting in Pretty Link version 1.4.11. Here’s how you’ll go about installing it in your browser once you have version 1.4.11 or greater installed in WordPress:

1. When inside your WordPress admin, click the menu item: “Pretty Link” -> “Tools”
2. You’ll see a link named “Get PrettyLink” under the Bookmarklet section … you’ll want to drag that link to your Browser’s bookmark bar

That’s all you have to do to install it. Now let’s look at how you’d use the Pretty Link bookmarklet:

1. When you’re browsing the web and you find a page that you’d like to create a Pretty Link for, just click “Get PrettyLink” in your toolbar while on that page.
2. Pretty Link will automatically create the link for you and redirect you to a page where you can copy your newly created Pretty Link.

Here are a few screenshots of the bookmarklet in action (in Safari — but the same steps go for FireFox, IE, etc):

I’m currently working on some other ways to easily create Pretty Links soon — so it’s only going to get easier to manage your entire link portfolio from Pretty Link!

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve seen a great response to my new Pretty Link Pro plugin. I’ve been pleased with the success and I’ve been having a lot of fun interacting with my pro users.

Well, I’d like to announce some new features that I’ve rolled out in Pretty Link Pro this week:

1. Bulk Actions – Pro users can now delete and edit multiple Pretty Links at once.
2. Alternate Pretty Link URL – would you love to use Pretty Links in your twitter stream but your domain name is just too long? Well, now in Pretty Link Pro you can use a different domain name that you own for your pretty links on your blog.
3. Public Pretty Link Creation - Now with Pretty Link Pro you can roll out your own link shrinking service! You can now put a form on your blog in a sidebar widget or by using a WordPress shortcode in any Page or Post. Users have been requesting this one for a while and I’m excited that its finally here.

I’ll be working on some additional features over the next few weeks to prepare for the Pretty Link Pro official launch on September 1. I’ve got some really cool stuff planned.

Wow … it’s been a hard couple of months … I’ve been working feverishly to get Pretty Link Pro ready to push out there and it’s finally ready for people to download! You may want to go to the Pretty Link Pro website and check it out–it’s the best link management, tracking, sharing and automating platform available. Here’s a breakdown of some of the awesome features that this upgrade to Pretty Link has to offer:

• Replace keywords throughout your blog with Pretty Links
• Replace URLs throughout your blog with Pretty Links
• Rotate up to 5 URLs from one Pretty Link
• Split Test these URL rotations for a Pretty Link
• Setup Conversion Reports
• Import / Export Pretty Links
• Automatically create Pretty Links for each Post / Page
• Automatically Tweet each Post / Page when it is Published
• Display a Tweet Badge on Pages and / or Posts that contains the number of tweets that this page has received
• Display a Re-Tweet button on every Page and / or Post that incorporates your twitter handle & Pretty Link into the Re-Tweet

Along with these features, I’m providing:

• Premium Support (Premium Support Forum will be launching in August for now it’s via email/twitter)
• 30 day money back guarantee
• Lifetime updates on all the sites you own

Pretty Link Pro will revolutionize how you approach your business by allowing you to automate repetitive tasks, optimize your site with testing, see the results of your campaigns immediately, virally spread your links and by being able to replicate your sites — including all your links within minutes! I’m really excited about this release — please go check it out at http://prettylinkpro.com.

Pretty Link Pro is in Pre-Launch — I’ll officially launch it and start promoting it more on September 1, 2009. This means that people purchasing it from now until then will be able to get it with a $50 discount … so now is the time to consider making a purchase. You can get it at a discount and be on track to receive all the cool new updates to Pretty Link Pro in the coming months!

Are you ready to see some of the most powerful Pretty Link options in action? Well, this is the third and final tutorial on pretty link options — don’t worry you can come back next week to find a new tutorial on another section in the Pretty Link WordPress Plugin:

This is the third tutorial on how to use the Pretty Link plugin for WordPress. In this one I go over the Ultra-Cloak, Nofollow and Redirect-Type options. Next week I’ll finish up the link option tutorial series by showing you the pretty link tracking options and parameter forwarding.

Sweet — now we’re getting somewhere! If you still have issues, just drop a comment on this page.

Many years ago there was a traveler who journeyed from village to village, helping those in need of good SEO on their websites. He possessed un-imaginable SEO skills and a limitless powers to promote websites to the highest positions in the night sky. This traveler was no ordinary man, not only was he a master of the art of SEO but he was the chosen keeper of the “Google Scroll” which contained the secret to ultimate SEO POWER!

SEO was difficult for the traveler in the beginning

SEO didn’t always come easy to the traveler. When he first began the journey to get top rankings for his website he struggled. He went around the village and saw what some others were doing. Some of the other villagers had been taught by wise men living high in the mountains, near the Temple of the Search Engines and gave the traveler some advice. Some of this advice worked and some didn’t — he gained some success on his first website but never enough for the Bots of the Search Engines to take it to the top of the night sky.

One day the traveler overheard some of the other villagers talking about the “Google Scroll” and the secret that was written upon it. The villagers explained to each other that anyone who knew the secret on that scroll would be an unstoppable SEO juggernaut. Once he heard that a secret to ultimate SEO power existed he wanted the scroll more than anything else. He decided to set out on a journey to the Temple of the Search Engines where he would find this “Google Scroll.” The next day, he and several other villagers started on the long trail to the temple.

The Journey

As he journeyed the traveler noticed strange men trying to lead the villagers down unknown paths. These men were self-proclaimed “SEO Warriors” and claimed to already know the secret of ultimate SEO power — many of the villagers gave them all their provisions in return for the secret. The traveler noticed that these “secrets” would work for the villagers’ websites for a time but would almost always end in disaster — leaving them impoverished and without power to correct their mistakes. The traveler was wise enough to ignore these men as he continued his way along the path to the temple.

The traveler journeyed for several days until he could see the temple in the distance. As he walked, he noticed an old man lying on the ground along the side of the road. The other villagers seemed to be ignoring the old man but the traveler went to him and asked if he needed a hand. The old man stood and pulled the hood down that was covering his face — the traveler immediately recognized him … It was Master Oogley, the creator of the sacred algorithms of the Temple of the Search Engines!

Teacher and Student

Master Oogley and the traveler became fast friends — Oogley invited the traveler to become his student. Even though the traveler was still interested in seeking the scroll, this was an opportunity he couldn’t pass up. Oogley taught the traveler the unique title, unique header, and hierarchical website organization techniques. Oogley also taught him the way of the nofollow link, canonical link and most importantly, the way of the good content. Despite this instruction, the traveler was discouraged at first because he’d already learned all this stuff from the villagers — how would this help him now? When the traveler would complain, Oogley would just reply, “Patience, patience.”

After a long period of consistent effort, the traveler began to notice his website rankings beginning to climb — Oogley’s teachings were working! He gained confidence and continued with these simple, logical exercises on his website every day. It wasn’t long before several of the traveler’s websites had climbed high into the evening sky — people from the village even started to talk about them. The traveler was becoming an SEO master.

The SEO Master

Over time, the traveler continued to work on his craft — he helped himself and others to launch their sites. At night, everyone in the world could see his websites lighting the sky. He even started to accelerate the simple techniques taught to him by Master Oogley by using tools like WordPress and SEO Optimized WordPress themes like Thesis. It seemed that his powers of SEO were vast and almost unstoppable.

The Google Scroll

Just when the traveler had all but forgotten about the “Google Scroll” Master Oogley called for him. Oogley was preparing himself to pass on to the next plane of existence — Oogley told the traveler that he was to be the new keeper of the “Google Scroll!” Oogley then pulled a golden scroll from his pocket and handed it to the traveler. This was the moment that the traveler had dreamed of — to hold the Google Scroll in his hands. He opened it and was shocked to find that the scroll was completely blank! The traveler and Master Oogley had a good laugh because at that moment he realized that there was no secret after all–he had spent his life promoting websites in the right way.

Even though many years have passed since the traveler walked the earth, his websites are still among the brightest sites in the night sky…

This is the second tutorial on how to use the Pretty Link plugin for WordPress. In this one I go over the most customizable link option — the PrettyBar. Next week I’ll cover some more of the Link Options, what they are, how they work and how they can help you extend your online presence.

If you’d like to see me do a Tutorial on a certain topic or you have any questions or comments feel free to comment on this post.

Most WordPress Themes suck! I’m not kidding. I’ve tried hundreds of WordPress Themes (free and premium) and most of them look great at first … I’ll think a theme looks clean, beautiful and professional — then I install it, have a look under the hood and realize that it has fatal flaws.

This really makes me wonder how many people are slaving away on their websites and blogs all the while their site is dying a slow death because of a WordPress Theme that they think is fine.

When most people think about WordPress themes, they think of graphics. How good does the theme look? Will the theme make my business stand out? Will the theme help me feel good when people see my website? The fact is, none of this will matter if your theme is preventing your audience from finding your site.

It’s important to know that a WordPress Theme is much more than just graphics — themes are at the heart of how your customers and Google experience your website and it’s critical for your business to make sure this experience is excellent.

The main idea behind this article is to help you make a good decision when you’re choosing a Theme for your website. After suffering through these issues myself I’ve finally bucked up the money to pay for the Thesis WordPress Theme which successfully avoids almost every single one of these problems:

1. Not Widget Enabled — Widgets are dynamic blocks of code that usually appear in the sidebars of your Website. They make it possible to add polls, list recent comments, place ads, etc. If your Theme isn’t Widget enabled then you lose out on these features and if you want anything in your sidebars you have modify your theme’s php files directly (which we don’t want to have to do).
2. Comment Formatting Sucks — In the world of Web 2.0, comments are *absolutely* critical. It’s extremely important to attract comments to your blog posts and to start a conversation with your audience. If your Theme doesn’t do a good job of making commenting easy, showing avatars, or formatting comments then you’re site will be dead in the water.
3. No Comment Template At All — I downloaded some really beautifully designed free themes a couple of weeks ago and was shocked to find out that comments didn’t appear anywhere. A surprising number of WordPress Themes I’ve installed still don’t support Comments AT ALL!? Seriously, before you settle on a theme, at least try to comment on some posts and see how it handles them — because if you download one of these jewels, you’ll see pretty quickly that its not the theme for you.
4. Comments Not Enabled on Pages — Most themes show comments on Posts but some don’t allow the option of Comments on Pages. Even if the box is checked to “Allow Comments” on the Discussion tab when editing a page — these themes won’t show them.
5. No Landing Page Templates — I don’t know of a Theme in existence that does this out of the box. I always have to add custom pages to the theme manually later on — it would be a great feature for a theme to include some alternate page templates to use for landing pages.
6. Bad HTML Practices — Clean HTML is important for the performance and function of your site, not to mention how Google looks at your site.
7. Too Much Javascript Loading — Some WordPress themes love to load every Javascript library in existence and implement a ton of unnecessary Javascript. This can make your site sluggish or downright slow.
8. Poor HTML Formatting — Even some of the best looking free themes out there haven’t taken into consideration the formatting of text. Most of them have a bizzare way of handling bullet lists, <code> blocks and blockquotes. They don’t get line spacing at all and sometimes use bizarre colors and fonts for headers. Yeah, this stuff won’t kill you but it can make you look like an idiot.
9. Incomplete Header and Footer Templates — If your theme doesn’t have complete footer and header templates then many plugins won’t work. Case in point, I had to modify a theme last month so that the Google Analyticator plugin would actually work. Google Analyticator is great but the theme was missing some required code for it to put my tracking code at the footer of the site.
10. Bad SEO Practices — SEO is uber-important when marketing a website. Many WordPress themes violate every rule of SEO in the book … one of the most pervasive issues is their use of h1 & h2 tags as formatting elements rather than as guideposts to important titles. Unique and properly used H1 tags are one of the most important elements of your site that Google looks at. For Google to index your site properly you should have exactly 1 unique h1 tag per page and unique h2 tags for sub titles. The only theme I’ve ever seen that handles these properly is Thesis.

So now you’ve got a WordPress theme that does everything you want but may not look very good — does that mean your site is consigned to look like crap? Look, I know my site isn’t the most visually stunning website in the world (at the time this post was written I’m just using the default look & feel of Thesis) — but at some point it will experience a profound transformation which will make it look great too. That’s another benefit of Thesis — it enables you to easily customize your CSS & images to make your site look any way you want. You don’t necessarily need Thesis though — you can actually customize any theme — it just may take a bit more work.

As long as you have a good, SEO optimized theme and good content you can do very well with your marketing efforts — many people read blogs via RSS anyway so they won’t be physically visiting your site anyway. Maintaining a website is all about constant daily improvement so you can obsess about your graphics later — along with me.

The Pretty Link Plugin for WordPress now has an API (as of version 1.3.28) that Developers can connect with to shorten links using a user’s WordPress website.

Are you a WordPress plugin developer? Or are you developing a killer app for Twitter, Facebook or other Social media? It is now possible to give your users the ability to create short links with their own domain name (in addition to offering them with the options of Bit.ly, TinyURL, etc).

There are 2 ways that the Pretty Link API can be accessed:

1. As a Local WordPress API — there are a set of Pretty Link functions that have been defined and are usable by other WordPress plugin developers.
2. As a Remote XML-RPC API — there are a set of XML-RPC based functions that can be used by any other application that is Internet enabled. It doesn’t matter what language your App is written in, if it is Internet-based or a client app running on the desktop — you can now offer your users the ability to create short links on their own domains.

For more details about the Pretty Link API, please visit the Pretty Link API page here:

http://blairwilliams.com/pretty-link/api/

UPDATE: This video is out of date — please watch my new Pretty Link Intro Video
I’ve had a ton of requests to put some tutorials up on the site — here’s the first one. I’m planning on releasing 1 of these every week for a while. This one will show you how to install Pretty Link, create your first links and post them to Twitter.

Next week I’ll go a little more in depth about the awesome options you can set for your links in Pretty Link. Seriously, Pretty Link has many options that will help you build your SEO efforts, mask your links and create buzz for your brand.

Feel free to leave a comment about this video, if you have any questions about pretty link in general or if there’s a Tutorial you’d like to see. Later.

Okay, I know … Digg recently had a full revolt on their hands when they released the DiggBar … but trust me, there are plenty of uses for a Digg-Like bar on redirect links for those of us running WordPress based websites. In the most recent release of PrettyLink I created a new feature that I think is AWESOME — the “PrettyBar” … This is an optional bar that you can place at the top of the page you redirect your users to. This bar can have your look & feel, links to your site and encourages users to tweet/retweet your link to others! Here are just a few of the uses I came up with for the PrettyBar (off the top of my head):

1. Viral Twitter Campaigns – Use Pretty Links in your Twitter posts instead of bit.ly or tinyurl.com and use the Pretty Bar. Not only will you be able to accurately track these links in Pretty Link but you’ll have a built in way for your link to be re-tweeted.
2. Website Promotion – If you send out a lot of links, just think of the impact of giving the end viewer of the link a way to get back to your website! You’re effectively posting ads out on the internet that have a built in way for users to get back to your site. Even if only a small percentage click the link to your blog, it is better than nothing .
3. SEO Link Building – Imagine the possibilities of every URL you post to Twitter, Facebook, or wherever having an automatic link back to you! I mean you can link to news stories, youtube videos, whatever — and get some links back to you.
4. Sandbox User Comments – okay I haven’t gotten this feature fully completed yet … but soon, you’ll be able to replace all links in your user comments with Pretty Links with (or without) the PrettyBar. This will keep users tethered to your site for a while in a non-threatening way.

Here are some links I’ve already created with it:

http://blairwilliams.com/x0z

http://blairwilliams.com/j8u

I’m really excited about this feature for my own marketing efforts… Please leave a comment and let me know what you think of this feature!

One of the biggest mistakes that online businesses make is not to put a marketing website up until after they have they have their product, service, graphics or brand launched and utterly perfected. Well, those things are important but shouldn’t stop you from building your website today. It’s extremely important to get your website up and running sooner rather than later — even before your product launches. Because if you have no marketing efforts in place then you have no customers and if you have no customers then you have no money — and that is a sad place to be.

If You Build it They Will Come … uh

What a load of crap! I recently had a client show me growth projections for their product after it was to launch — it showed exponential growth on day 1 and they had no marketing site up! These guys obviously didn’t hit their sales projections by a long shot but once they started actively marketing they were alright. This just illustrates that there’s a big misconception out there among people who haven’t ever tried to promote a website that once you put a website on the Internet it is like flipping a switch and your site is immediately flooded with visitors lining up to buy your product — this is simply not true. If you think about it — there are billions of websites on the Internet, most of them clamoring for attention — why is anyone going to care about your little website when it launches?

The reality is that it takes time to build an effective website with a high volume of traffic — sometimes months, sometimes years. You have to give yourself time for the right Audience to find your site and for a community to come together on it. You have to have time to submit articles, get involved on other related sites, build reciprocal linking relationships, test landing pages, etc. You may have the greatest product, service or message in the world but if you don’t get any attention then your business will fail — and despite what any so called Marketing expert tells you, it takes a rock solid plan, a lot of hard work and some money to drive traffic to your site.

I attended a seminar a few months ago where a prominent blogger talked about the success he’s seen on his site. He started blogging in 2005 and before his blog hit its stride it only had about 30 visitors a day for 2 and a half years! He loved what he was talking about on his blog though and eventually it began building momentum. His blog currently sees hundreds of thousands of visitors a month and he makes his living from the community he’s established. Now that is an extreme example but it shows that you need to be patient, continue to improve your site daily and find ways to promote your site on the Internet.

Don’t Build a Website … Build a Community

Really, when you think about it — building a website doesn’t matter nearly as much as building a community of people around you that love what your doing — or at least have strong opinions about what you’re doing. This is why you want to launch a site that enables you to start the discussion with your audience.

Don’t worry so much about what people will say on your site … If you launch your site using Wordpress or any other CMS worth its salt you should be able to moderate any comments coming in. Trust me, I’ve launched sites dealing with very sensitive topics and it always amazes me how being sincere and helpful on your site can lead to some great comments when you’re targeting the right audience. It has been my experience that visitors to your site won’t comment on a post unless they are interested in it or are angered by it (you may have to moderate some of those) — so you won’t typically get as many negative comments as you think you will starting off.

Once you have a people who are interested in your message coming to your site and interacting with each other you’ll naturally see links and pingbacks coming back to your site from people talking about your site on Twitter, Digg, Forums or other websites. This kind of organic promotion is critical to your long term success — if your message is good enough for people to care about what you’re doing then they will promote you, how cool is that!

Build the Community First — A Case Study

A buddy of mine is consulting with a startup who has done it right. This startup will be selling a physical product that will help keep kids safe — so they have a message that people actually care about. They are still in product development right now but rolled out their marketing site several months ago. They now have hundreds of people who have commented on their blog, thousands of people on their email list, an active affiliate program with over 2,000 affiliates and are even generating revenue on their site by accepting pre-orders for their product. The crazy thing about this company is that they just used a template for the graphics on their site (and their blog is just the WordPress default theme), haven’t even established the final graphics for their logo — yet they’ve been generating revenue for months now — and their product won’t even launch until August!

If you’re waiting for your graphics to be perfect, your product to be complete, a “killer” flash piece for the front page or anything else — don’t. Get your website online today and start building your community now. No website is perfect on day 1 — its virtually impossible to get the message right and make it as effective as it can be instantly. What matters when launching a website is that you are committed to making daily, incremental changes based on the data coming in from your community (analytics, comments, surveys, etc) and you’ll have a killer website that actually turns a profit!

WordPress based websites are faster to setup, easier to maintain, easier to market and extend.

I’ve been developing websites for years and have used about every technology available for creating them. First of all, let me make a distinction — by “website” I mean any content driven website or blog — as opposed to a custom web application (I love using Ruby on Rails for functional webapps). I’ve used Perl/CGI, Java, Straight PHP, Mambo, Joomla, Drupal, Ruby on Rails and python to develop content driven websites for myself and my clients … these all inevitably result in disaster because I (the programmer) have to continue to maintain and update these sites over time. Also, the client usually has feature requests that I then have to build for them — these features cost them money and suck away my time.

About 2 years ago I started messing around with WordPress and have been deploying WordPress based sites ever since — because they are simply better, here’s why:

1. WordPress is SolidWordPress is the basis for thousands of high-traffic websites and is now a refined, well-tuned app for creating websites. It’s more solid than anything that a developer could create on a first try (yes, even me) because its been in the “wild” for years and has gone through many iterations.
2. WordPress is SimpleSeriously, who likes working through FTP, SSH or a programmer to update files on their website? No one. WordPress has done a better job of making it easy for non-technical people to update and contribute to a website than any other technology I’ve seen. It’s even made Theme & Plugin development really nice which is why there is a large and expanding number of them out on the web.
3. WordPress has an Unbeatable Feature SetSome of my favorite built in features are WordPress’s rich text editor (that I’m using to write this blog post), media uploader (which allows you to upload multiple files at once), dynamic RSS feeds, category management, tagging and comment management. This is a well thought out, cohesive environment for managing a website.

   But what if you want your website to do that WordPress doesn’t currently do with its built in features? I’d wager there’s a plugin built for it. You can replace the graphics on your website in no time with WordPress’s outstanding theme management or extend its feature set with a WordPress Plugin. There are plugins to help your Search Engine Optimization (SEO), release a Podcast, store all of your media files on Amazon S3, customize your login screen and even create shortlinks on your site (I wrote that one). Currently there are over 4,000 plugins and 700 themes that are listed at wordpress.org! If you want your site to look good and do a lot in a short amount of time, you can’t do any better than WordPress.

4. WordPress is Easier to MaintainWhat if you have a custom website built by a programmer … who then decides not to work for you anymore? You are screwed — the ramp up time for another developer to come in and reverse engineer his code could be enough to send you reeling. But if you base your site on WordPress, you can easily find another developer to work on it … most freelance developers and graphic designers out there simply can’t afford not to know their way around WordPress anymore.

   In addition to this benefit, WordPress has a built-in updating mechanism that pretty much puts updates on autopilot. Open-source developers around the world continually release updates to WordPress and its plugins for free — this is huge! If you hire someone to build your site, you have to pay them every time you need an update and you’re pretty much guaranteed that you won’t be commissioning developers to update your site with security patches. Let the WordPress developers do the heavy lifting–take advantage of their free work.

5. WordPress is Open-Source!Not only is WordPress the absolute best system to base your website on but it’s 100% open source and doesn’t cost anything (free as in free speech and free as in free beer). This is great for me since I feel like there are very few software providers that actually give me the flexibility to do what I need to do who don’t charge me an arm and a leg.

Does WordPress have any problems or limitations? Absolutely — it is an evolving application — but it is much better and cheaper than trying to get someone to build a content-based website from scratch for you.

Well, since the launch of my first public WordPress Plugin, Pretty Link a couple of weeks ago I’ve had an overwhelming and positive response. I’ve added several new features that the community has requested in my latest release. I really think that these changes are making Pretty Link the ultimate link shrinking / redirection / tracking method available (I’m using it in my own marketing efforts and love it). Here’s a breakdown of what’s new in the last few releases (up to the 1.2.5 release) of Pretty Link:

• User Interface Enhancements — I just added some nice javascript enhancements to make things easier. I had a few people tell me that they couldn’t see the calendar dropdown on the stats page (sometimes flash likes to stay above javascript pop overs) — this has now been fixed. I’ll probably be making more of these types of enhancements in coming weeks.
  

  A shot of some of the new enhancements

• Simple Link Sharing — Post your links to Twitter or share them via Email … these can be done from the new quick actions link list under each slug name on the main Pretty Link page:
  

  A shot of the new actions bar for each slug

• Awesome Click Tracking — You can now see information about each individual click on your site including: Operating System, Browser, Browser Version, Referring URL, IP Address, and even the remote host name.
  

  A shot of the new click tracking details

What do you think?

I seriously want to make this plugin great and I have several ideas for features that I’d like to add soon. Here are some of the possible features I could add to Pretty Link in the near future:

• Goal Tracking — say you have users going to a sign up page for your eNewsletter and you want to be able to see how effective it is. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could do that easily in Pretty Link? I’m needing this in my own efforts and that’s why I’m thinking this would be something useful to most users.
• Pretty Links Widget — I’m thinking that you could put a sidebar widget on your blog that would show all, a selected group or a randomized group of your pretty links. This could be great for Affiliate marketers who promote several different products.
• Download Click / Goal Data — I’m pretty sure this one will happen soon, I want to be able to download click data and stats to Excel so that I can analyze it more carefully.
• Link Names and Notes — In an effort to keep the interface simple I haven’t added a field for a name and description on the edit / new page of Pretty Link. I’m thinking that this may be important for the Widget feature and to generally keep track of links as users have increasing numbers of pretty links (especially if they’re using the randomly generated slugs).
• Link Filtering & Searching — This would allow users who have large lists of Pretty Links to manage them a little easier — they’d be able to search or filter them.
• Optional iFrame Redirection — Okay, now I know that Digg and several other sites that redirect but keep users in their own iframe have been taking a lot of heat lately — but this may make sense for some of us — on some links. I’m thinking this would be a simple bar at the top of the site the user is redirected to that would have your Blog name & subhead and a way to close it. Of course, this would be an advanced option on each Pretty Link and not turned on by default.
• Enhanced Reporting — Of course if goal tracking is added, there would have to be goal tracking (with calculated conversion rates) added to the stats page but I’m thinking about adding some other charts including a pie chart of Operating Systems and Browsers. If you have any other stats you’d like to see added to this plugin, please let me know.
• Pretty Link Groups — I’m not sure how helpful this would be — or if it would just be confusing but for some users it may be very helpful to be able to group pretty links.
• Click Geo Location — I’d love to do this one right now, unfortunately I haven’t found a really good way to do it technically in a 100% open source application. If anyone out there knows of a good solution, let me know.

I’d like to thank all of you who have gone out and given me a good rating on Pretty Link’s WordPress Plugin Page and have helped to promote this plugin — that kind of response is really fun to see. Please leave a comment if you have any suggestions or ideas on how I can make this plugin better … THANKS!

Recently, Skype launched an app for the iPhone for its free Voice over IP service. I downloaded it and installed it on my iPhone the other day and liked it quite a bit. My brother lives in a different city — since we’re both on the computer 24×7 and we work together we use Skype everyday. My brother has an iPod Touch and so of course he installed Skype and we tried it out — he could hear me but we couldn’t hold a conversation because his iPod Touch has no mic. Well, I did a little research and as it turns out, the same microphone accessories that work with the iPhone also work with the iPod Touch. Here are a couple of places you can go to learn about them:

This is a MacWorld article from a year ago that reviews different third party microphone adapters:
http://blairwilliams.com/y1x

This is a link to the Griffen Mic Adapter which was the #1 mic adapter MacWorld reviewed — I’m probably going to get this one, it’s only $19.99:
http://blairwilliams.com/8v2

The Apple iPhone headphones will also work with the iPod Touch 2G — This one should definitely work but costs $29.99:
http://blairwilliams.com/kzm

With this small cost (assuming you already have an iPod Touch), you can have yourself a skype phone that you can use anywhere you can get wireless Internet. Well, even though I don’t have an iPod Touch, I’m planning on taking advantage of Skype to help me keep my minutes down. I’ve got my Google Voice account and I’ll be using it to route calls to skype first and then my phone — since I’m around a Wi-Fi connection 90% of the time, this should help me at least conserve minutes.

A few weeks ago I started getting frustrated because I had to go into my apache config file every time I wanted to add a redirect link. I stopped using BudURL and TinyURL some time ago because my users have started to realize that they’re being tracked whenever they see a link from one of these services. I’ve talked with several other Affiliate marketers and they’ve been saying the same thing, “don’t put a tinyurl on your site.” Affiliates are always concerned with masking their URLs and with tracking so these link shrinking services seemed perfect for them… well, now users have caught on.

Last week, I started working on my own replacement for TinyURL, a WordPress plugin named “Pretty Link.” The thing that’s great about this plugin is that I can now generate ultra small urls that redirect wherever I want and hang off of my domain name! I’m also able to track clicks on these URLs and in future releases of this plugin more stats than just clicks in future upgrades.

I just released this plugin tonight and can be downloaded from the WordPress plugin directory here:

http://blairwilliams.com/download