I’m a passionate advocate of autodidactic learning, in other words, educating yourself.

Here is a quick tip that I use to keep learning about a niche I am passionate about. In my case it is WordPress.

In your case it can be anything you are crazy passionate about. My advice to young entrepreneurs is find something you are passionate about and become an expert within the subject.

I’ve heard you can generally read 5 good books on a subject and be an expert.

I think there must be an online equivalency. Perhaps it is following 5 of the industry/niche’s top blogs for a year. Any thoughts?

Ok, ok… so here’s the tip. Subscribe to an RSS feed for a Delicious.com tag. 

In my case I am subscribed to the popular bookmarks for WordPress. You can just use this URL to go to the popular listing for any tag on Delicious.

Use: http://delicious.com/popular/wordpress – just replace “wordpress” with whatever it is you want to learn more about or keep up with.

Next, just subscribe by clicking the RSS icon and get new items as they come in by using a feed reader like Google Reader. If you aren’t already, start using delicious to bookmark and tag things you come across. Then connect to me on Delicious and start sharing some good stuff with me!

Easy right? Tell me, how do you continue learning?

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1. Content Generation... Sell Picks and Shovels.

Got a sizable amount of awesome links to dump on you today. Crazy, mad, ridiculously busy, that has been my last few weeks. There. That’s my excuse for infrequent posts. :) Onward…

Seth's Blog: Things to ask before you redo your website – Great philosophical questions to answer for really anything you build on the web.

SEO

8 Ways to Target Keywords for Ranking and Usability | 10e20 – Very good summary of some important SEO concepts.

Web Design

CSS Sprites - Online CSS Sprite Builder / Generator – An easy generator to create CSS sprites to speed up your site. Google uses them like so…

Fresh Free High-Quality Icon Sets « Smashing Magazine – Grab some free high quality icons. I’m addicted to collecting these. Need any icons, just ask…

WordPress

300+ Resources to Help You Become a WordPress Expert | Webdesigner Depot – Good grief! This is an overwhelming, yet VERY helpful post.

How To Integrate Facebook With WordPress « Smashing Magazine – Talk about providing value! Smashing Mag never disappoints. I have been needing this info!

Themes

The Digital Business Card Wordpress Theme – Human3rror – I Break Stuff. 

Plugins

WordPress › Socialize « WordPress Plugins – Choose which social media icons to include on each post. Great idea.

WordPress › After the Deadline « WordPress Plugins – High quality spell / grammar checking tool for WordPress. Recently bought by Automattic, owner of WordPress. 

WordPress › RSS Cloud « WordPress Plugins – New tech to make delivery of your RSS feeds quicker. Similar idea to PubSubHubbub. (Whose name always cracks me up)

ShopperPress - Wordpress Shopping Cart Plugin – Another WordPress e-commerce plugin that looks promising. I wonder how it compares to WP-e-commerce or Shopp, among others.

Bonus

45 Brilliant Examples of Photo Manipulation Art | Noupe – fun post!

(Heads up: I’m hard at work on a huge post on WordPress plugins I’ve used)

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1. Shared Links – new WP plugins & more
2. Shared links and State of the Blog
3. Shared Links – from Grove

I have been doing some SEO analysis and critiques for some new clients lately. It is surprising how some mistakes can be so common with websites. Here are 8 things you should be doing to be on top of SEO.

1. Implement Google Analytics - involves putting a few lines of Javascript in a part of the site appearing on every page (footer is recommended)  This will really help with understanding where visitors come from geographically and how they got to your site. It can also integrate with AdWords. 

• Ease of implementation - Very Easy.

• Ease of implementation - Easy to verify. Depending on CMS, you may need to use a tool to create a proper XML sitemap file - that part may be difficult.

3. Prevent Domain Canonicalization issues – redirect http://sitename.com , http://www.sitename.com/index.php , http://sitename.com/index.php (may be .html , .asp etc.) all to http://www.sitename.com/  or http://sitename.com

Google could see each of these as separate sites and could lead to duplicate content issues and PageRank being diluted across multiple versions. You can also specify which version www or non-www for Google to use in Google Webmaster Tools.

• Ease of implementation - Moderate. Depends on how 301 redirects are handled on this server. Linux based usually use a .htaccess file while Window's servers generally require a tool such as ISAPI rewrite. Windows is more complicated.

• The title is the most important part and needs to be no longer than 65 characters (including spaces) The most important keywords are at the front of the tag and then at the back. You may always need a brand mention in the title due to credibility being important for CTR.
• Descriptions need to be no longer than 165 characters (including spaces) - The description tag is more important in terms of Click Thru Rate than SEO. (still weave keywords in naturally)
• Ease of implementation - Moderate. Research / writing is just time consuming. Implementation may be harder depending on the CMS.

• Ease of implementation - Very easy. (assuming you have Firefox)

• Ease of implementation - Difficult. (time consuming) 

7. Use Google AdWords – Identify long-tail keywords and run a global campaign and a local campaign. (if applicable)

This has the most obvious calculation of ROI. You can see how many impressions your ad(s) got and the click-thru-rate and then have a goal set up  (like requesting information) - when you see how many people clicked thru or completed a goal you can get a cost of acquisition.

• Ease of implementation – Depends. Easy- if you hire someone that knows what they’re doing. ) Moderately difficult – learn it yourself.

• Ease of implementation - Difficult. Putting the rel attribute on links is easy. Making a robots.txt file that is properly formatted is very important, otherwise you could exclude indexing of your whole site.

Bonus:

Use Website Grader Tool to get a quick SEO snapshot. Take with a grain of salt.

(this was modified and depersonalized from an SEO critique I performed for a client)

These links are coming to you at the end of my first week of classes. Thus starts my senior year at Grove City College. Eeek!

Still have been reading some great things online and found these awesome links to share.

Study Shows Small Businesses That Blog Get 55% More Website Visitors – further proof that business need to be blogging. SEO value alone is worth the effort.

Five Minute Upgrade – Writing Blog Post Titles That Grab Attention

13 Vital Tips and Hacks to Protect Your WordPress Admin Area

OfficeTab - Adds Tabs to Microsoft Office – make Word, Excel, PowerPoint better.

Free and Commercial Stock Photography Sites

(New) 27 Circular Social Media Icons in 3 Sizes

Themes

Jungleland WordPress Theme

KeKo WordPress Theme

Bonus

Send a letter online :: Snailmailr.com – Cool way to send a “real” letter to someone.

30+ Fantastic HDR Photos by Grey Jones – if you don’t know what an HDR photo is, you must check this out. Gorgeous!

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1. Shared Links – new WP plugins & more
2. Shared Links – More WordPress? Yep.
3. Shared links and State of the Blog

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2. Using Social Media to Promote Products

Via: Wired

So cool, I was forced at gunpoint to share.

This is a system that “combines the coffee table with a universal remote so that people sitting around the table can tap on a screen to change the channel, turn up the volume or dim the lights.”

It is obvious to me from watching my generation’s use of entertainment while at school, that the future is the “television” driven by some sort of multimedia computer.

TV shows are already hugely popular online. Movies are getting there, albeit in sometimes less legitimate ways.

A step in the right direction is the Western Digital WD TV HD Media Player that can be an interface between a hard drive and your TV screen.

Related posts:

1. Forget Mac Vs. PC… It is Browser Vs. OS

Latest helpful links I have come across since the last batch of shared links. Enjoy!

Twitter Tips for Beginners [VIDEO] from the amazing Darren Rowse (Problogger). This is actually more oriented for business use of Twitter. 

13 Tips For A Better E-Commerce Website

20 Nice Free Handwritten Fonts – it is amazing the fonts you can get for free!

SEOmoz | New Mozbar – I use SEObook’s toolbar but this may someday be a good alternative. Any opinions? (both are Firefox only)

WordPress Resources - 48 Resources, Tips, Tricks & Themes | Think Design – has some great WordPress dev. blogs ( I am subscribed to most of them) and tutorials.

Themes

15+ High Quality Free WordPress Themes Released in June-July 2009

Brownie WordPress Theme 

FreeStyle WordPress Theme 

Plugins

45+ Essential WordPress Plugins for Pro Blogging | Blog Perfume

WordPress › Quick Search « WordPress Plugins – suggests search terms as you type.

WordPress › Dashboard Notepad « WordPress Plugins – leave notes in WP backend.

WordPress › WP Pubsubhubbub « WordPress Plugins – New Google technology.

WordPress Plugin Competition Blog » Section Widget for your section-specific needs

Best Commercial WordPress Plugins: Ultimate Review List – two of the best WordPress E-commerce plugins are in this post.

Bonus Tool

Spam-me-not - e-mail link obfuscator – I use this to build mailto: links that are not easily scrapable by spam bots.

Please send me a message or leave a comment if this type of post is useful to you. Or is this unwanted content?

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1. Shared Links – Spread the Love
2. Shared Links – More WordPress? Yep.
3. Shared Links – from Grove

This fall is my senior year… wow, that went by fast! I know everyone says it, but it is very true.

Here is a glimpse of the “fun” classes I have lined up for the fall semester.

• Business Calculus (4 credits)
• Business Ethics (3 credits)
• Entrepreneurial Finance (3 credits)
• Public Finance (3 credits)
• Volleyball (1 credits)
• Total 13 credits (least amount I have taken!)

Hall of Arts and Letters (HAL) where I take most of my classes

As Business Calculus will be quite a challenge for me, this semester has one fewer class than I usually have taken. (V-ball doesn’t count hah)

I am hoping this schedule will allow me to keep developing Sparkplug SEO and continue working at full speed on client projects.

Best part is I’m done by 1 pm every day (again, not counting v-ball).

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1. Shared Links – from Grove

Here’s why you should get in the game:

1. Your customers are already on these networks, why aren’t you?
2. It is a few easy lines of code.
3. You will appear “current”, nay cutting edge.

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2. Social Media - Radically changing the way we communicate.

• 3 Forum Search Engines to Search 40.000+ Message Boards
• The Ultimate List of Basic SEO Resources for a Kick-Ass Start
• WooCamp Blog - WordPress

Themes

• Aubogasta WordPress theme

Plugins

• CMS plugins for Wordpress
• CMS plugins for Wordpress part 2
• CMS Plugins for Wordpress, part 3
• 40 Exceptional “CMS Enabling” WordPress Plugins
• 5 Fresh WordPress Plugins Ready to Enhance Your Blog

Bonus :)

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2. Shared Links – More WordPress? Yep.
3. Shared Links – from Grove