This script determines the featured image for each post, wraps a link to the post around it, applies some CSS styling, and then drops it into your RSS feed. The result is a clean and simple way to put your featured image into your RSS feed and increase click-through rates to your website.

//Featured image in RSS
//PHP code created by Jeremy Knauff, of Designed by JK

function featured_image_RSS( $content ) {
    global $post;
    if( is_feed() ) {
        if ( has_post_thumbnail( $post->ID ) ){
            $output = '<a href="' . get_permalink( $post->ID ) . '">' . get_the_post_thumbnail( $post->ID, 'medium', array( 'style' => 'float: left; margin: 6px 10px 0 0; border: 1px solid #957643; padding: 3px;' ) ) . '</a>';
            $content = $output . $content;
        }
    }
    return $content;
}
add_filter( 'the_content', 'featured_image_RSS' );

Enjoy!

In my opinion, there’s something particularly beautiful about a dark business card; it seems to exude class and luxury—sort of how the American Express Black Card did before they started handing them out like Halloween candy. Add a little bit of spot UV, foil stamp, or a die-cut, and you have an almost guaranteed show-stopper.

If your business cards are in need of a make-over, browse the collection below for inspiration, and if you need a top-notch graphic designer, contact me. Then head over to PrintPlace.com to have your new business cards printed inexpensively.

I’ve been using WordPress for about eight years, and throughout that time, I’ve realized there are a handful of plugins I rely on for nearly every project.

1. JetPack
   This is really a plugin on steroids, offering over two-dozen modules, ranging from email subscription/notification, spell, style, and grammar checking, statistics tracking, automatically post content on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, Open Graph integration, URL shortener, and much more. JetPack was developed and is regularly updated by Automattic, a leader and major contributor to the WordPress community, so you know it’s reliable.
2. Facebook Page Promoter Lightbox
   If you don’t have a Facebook page associated with your website, you need to get one because it’s another channel to promote your website content as well as sharing useful info that might not be the right fit to publish on your own website. I first used this on one of my personal websites and found that it helped drive a steady increase in traffic to my site while consistently adding new fans to my Facebook page. Today, that particular page gets about 100 new fans per day. Think about the power that brings when you can publish a post, followed by sharing it with tens of thousands of fans on your Facebook page. (Who in turn share with their friends.)
3. Internal Link Building
   This is a great tool for reducing bounce rate and keeping visitors on your site longer, directing them to your most important content, and helping the search engines find content they wouldn’t otherwise find. I also use it for affiliate linking; for example, a particular keyword will automatically link to the appropriate vendor, like Go Daddy. The beauty of this is the links are dynamically generated so if you ever need to change them, you can do it from one screen.
4. Contact Form 7
   Every website needs a way for visitors to contact you. and Contact Form 7 gives you the tools to create your own highly customized contact forms that can be implemented anywhere on your WordPress website.
5. Search and Replace
   It’s not glamorous or sexy, but neither is going through a website post by post to change the same thing. Just last night I had to change an affiliate ID throughout an entire website. With a few keystrokes, every single post was updated in a matter of seconds and I could go back to spending time with my son.

How about you? What plugins can you simply not live without?

I’ve spent the last 20 years fighting for the biggest, nastiest companies, but now I fight for people like you.

Really? You spent two decades helping giant Fortune 500 companies trample over individuals and you suddenly decided that you want to trade in your plush $400/hour job and fat expense account so you can help people who have no money fight legal teams with virtually unlimited resources in the off-chance that you’ll get a settlement? When you spend more than three seconds analyzing the claim, it is shockingly preposterous.

I’ll concede that a few lawyers may have experienced something that changed their world view. Hell it happened to me. (I was never a lawyer, but my beliefs and priorities did change drastically over a few years.) The thing is, very few people significantly change their beliefs, so they generally are not going to believe it when someone else claims to have done so.

If you spent your entire career as a kick-ass, take-no-prisoners corporate lawyer, be that. Own it. Be the best damn corporate lawyer anyone has ever seen and make tons of money doing it. And if you do experience a major paradigm shift, then own that and drop the corporate lawyer story in your ads—it won’t appeal to the people you’re trying to reach unless they understand and believe your motivation for changing paths. That’s not something you can convey in a 30 second radio ad.

Manually adding attributes to an existing website is a nightmare task; I know, I’ve done it. But a few lines of PHP in your WordPress functions.php file will automatically add these attributes to your links, both old and new, with no further effort on your part. The snippet of code below is something I created to add the previously mentioned attributes to all of my Amazon links, but you can modify it to add, change, or delete anything your want. Simply paste it before the closing ?> tag in your functions.php file and upload that file to your theme folder.


//Amazon affliate nofollow and blank
//PHP code created by Jeremy Knauff, of Designed by JK

function amazon_nofollow_blank($text) {
$return = str_replace(‘<a href=”http://www.amazon’, ‘<a target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.amazon’, $text);
return $return;
}
add_filter(‘the_content’, ‘amazon_nofollow_blank’);

If you’re prepared, you can enjoy goodies that even the Easter Bunny can’t bring—and that’s new customers for your business.

Easter, like Halloween and Thanksgiving, gives you the opportunity to tie your marketing to a holiday theme that is enjoyed by almost everyone, and you won’t even have to hunt for ideas! Here are a few…

Hold an Easter egg hunt

If you run a retail business, you could hold an Easter egg hunt on your property. A few dozen plastic Easter eggs will cost less than $20, and you can stuff them full of a variety of candies along with your business card, or better yet—coupons for your business.

If your business is strictly online, you can still hold an Easter egg hunt, you’ll just have to do it at a public location like a park or beach, or you could partner with a retail business and use their property.

Getting the word out is the easy part. You can post flyers anywhere that parents are likely to frequent, as well as using your own direct mail and/or email list. Anyone who has kids know that every parent is ALWAYS looking for a nearby event to entertain their kids.

Hire the Easter Bunny

An easy way to bring families to your business in droves is to have the Easter Bunny in full costume on site. You’ll have a captive audience because the parents will be standing around while their children wait in line to meet the Easter Bunny, so it’s the perfect time for a captivating product display or demonstration.

Launch a new product

Most people see at Easter as a fresh start and a time to welcome change. Make the most of this feeling by introducing a new product or service.

Send an Easter-themed direct mail campaign

Direct mail will usually generate a 1%-2% response rate, but with an Easter themed piece in April, the response rate can climb significantly. You can expect even better performance if you skip the traditional postcards or brochures, and instead send dimensional mail. In this case, an Easter basket full of candy along with a personalized note and marketing materials will do the trick. Dimensional mail has a higher cost per piece, but is more likely to reach your potential customer instead of being intercepted by a gatekeeper, and it often makes a greater impression, which means a higher return on investment.

Fortunately, there are only a few things that can cause the visual editor to stop working, so fixing it is just a process of elimination that usually doesn’t take long.

• Clear your browser cache with a hard-refresh by hitting ctrl+f5.
• Check whether one user or all users are affected. If it’s just one (or some, but not all) then the issue is often a setting on the user profile. Uncheck the check box that says “Disable the visual editor when writing” and that should resolve the problem.
• Disable all plugins and see if the visual editor works. If it does, then one-by-one, reactivate them, checking again after each one. If one of your plugins is causing the conflict, you’ll either need to upgrade it to a more current version, find a replacement for it, or simply live without it.
• Temporarily switch themes to an unmodified theme that ships with WordPress, such as Twenty Twelve. If this solves your problem, there is something wrong with your theme that you (or your developer) must fix before your visual editor will work.
• If you haven’t solved the issue by this point, you’re probably about ready to throw your coffee cup across the room. Don’t do that; it will result in a big mess, upset coworkers, and after-hours anger managements classes—also, you’ll still have a broken visual editor. Instead, backup your wp-admin and wp-includes folders, and upload a fresh version of each, downloaded directly from WordPress.org.

I hope that helps, but if you run into this or any other web or print design projects you need help with, feel free to contact me. I’m always happy to work with new clients; even on small projects.

About a year ago, I purchased a domain for a project I planned to launch. This November, I finally designed the website, wrote and published numerous articles, and even set up a Twitter profile and Facebook page. The one thing I didn’t do was create a custom username for the new Facebook page because you need 25 fans before you can create a custom username, and I wanted to wait until I had a decent amount of content before seeking fans.

The first lesson learned from this little fiasco; anytime you buy a domain, make sure to also set up all social media profiles for it and start seeking followers/fans immediately. In fact, before even selecting a domain, you should make sure the social media profiles are available. It will have a dramatic impact on your branding.

So I started off with the default Facebook page username (e.g. www.facebook.com/pages/Your-Page/259493130844671) until I reached the necessary number of fans, but when I tried to create a custom username (e.g. www.facebook.com/YourPage) I learned that someone had beat me to it. (It was available when I first purchased the domain.) Since you can only change the username once, I took my time in deciding how I wanted to handle it. I considered all sorts of variants of the name, but couldn’t come up with anything close enough to the domain I was using it for. Eventually, I stumbled upon Facebook’s form for handling Trademark violations, filled out all the necessary info, and eagerly waited for the situation to be resolved in my favor. It wasn’t. In fact, I received nothing more than a form letter stating that usernames were assigned on a first-come first-serve basis. I guess Trademark only applies to large, multinational corporations. To hell with the little guy.

All hope was not lost though. There was absolutely no content or likes on the page I wanted, so the owner clearly wasn’t using it; however, Facebook claims that usernames are not transferable. Challenge accepted! I visited the page and posted a message asking the owner if he would be interested in selling the page, and received a reply the following morning—”sure.” Now I was back on track! He accepted my first offer, so I sent a payment via PayPal, and within minutes, he granted me admin rights and removed his own. I was now the sole owner of the Facebook page with the username I wanted.

I approached the next step with a bit of apprehension, as I had to merge the two pages. Remember, my page had hundreds of likes and posts, but the page I just bough had the username I wanted. This was my first time doing this, and a single mistake could result in losing all of my content and likes. I must have read over the instructions a dozen times each step of the way. In the end, it was probably just paranoia on my part, because it was pretty simple and there were plenty of prompts along the way to make sure you do everything right. Per Facebook’s instructions:

I have two Facebook Pages for the same thing. Can I merge them?
Yes, you can merge duplicate Pages so long as they represent the same thing. Please note you can only merge the Page with fewer likes into the one with more likes. To do so:

1. Go to the Page with more likes. This will be the one you’ll keep.
2. From the top of your Page, click Edit Page 
3. Select Update Info
4. From the left sidebar, select Resources.
5. Click the Merge duplicate Pages link. This link will only appear if you manage two Pages with similar names.
6. A dialogue will show Pages you manage that qualify to be merged. Select the Page(s) you wish to merge. If you’re merging Pages with a location, they must have the same address information.

Merging Pages combines all your likes and check-ins, but all other content from the Page with fewer likes, such as wall posts, photos and its username, will be permanently deleted. Content on the Page with more likes will remain unchanged, except for the addition of likes and check-ins added from the Page with fewer likes.

The Page with fewer likes will be removed from Facebook and you will not be able to unmerge it.

There was a certain amount of nervousness in my stomach when I clicked the final “merge” button, especially since it mentioned that the username would be permanently deleted, but once the page finished loading, everything worked out exactly the way I wanted it to. All of my content and likes remained, and I had the username I wanted.

This won’t work in every situation. Some people will hold on to a page they aren’t actively using no matter what, while others may have a brand and a strong following on their Facebook page, so it wouldn’t make sense for them to give it up for any price that you’d be willing to pay. In any case, it never hurts to ask. You just may be surprised at the outcome.

Thorough planning and preparation can produce amazing results.

To most kids, a large part of the excitement of Christmas is getting up early to find stacks of presents sitting under the tree and tucked in their stockings. While they all know the story about Santa and his reindeer flying around the world to deliver toys to boys and girls everywhere, few give a second thought all the work he and his elves put into building these toys, not to mention tasking care of the reindeer, maintaining his magical sleigh and probably shoveling lots and lots of snow. That is 364 days of tirelessly working to prepare for an event that takes place just one night each year.

Are you putting anywhere near that level of preparation into your marketing, or are you like most people who get a marketing idea and just run with it? I’m a big fan of running with an idea and adjusting it as I go, but you still need to prepare. Some basic questions you should ask your self before moving forward are:

• Do you have goals that you can measure? Santa knows that he need to deliver toys all the kids on the “nice” list and coal to the ones on the “naughty” list. That’s pretty straight forward. What are your goals and how can you measure them?
• Do you have the manpower to accomplish your goals? Santa has team of elves with a work ethic that’s hard to find these days, and they all know exactly what they need to do. Can you rely on your employees? How about if your marketing really takes off and you have a sudden and dramatic influx of new business? Will your staff, vendors, manufacturers and shipping partners be able to meet the demand?
• Do you have the budget to accomplish your goals? Santa knows how much it will cost to build the toys he needs, feed his reindeer and even put a shiny new coat of candy apple red paint on his sleigh, so long before Christmas Eve, he knows if he’s on track financially. Have you accounted for any potential costs that may come up for your marketing? An unsuccessful marketing campaign is bad, but a successful one that you can’t afford to continue is even worse.

Speaking of the elves…

You can accomplish far more with the help of others than you ever could on your own.

Santa could never build enough toys each year for kids all around the world without the hard-working and loyal elves by his side. Likewise, you will never achieve as much on your own as your could by working with others, because they can offer a different perspective, much needed motivation or perhaps advice on challenges they’ve already overcome. Believe it or not, people actually enjoy helping other people – they key here is “helping” – not doing everything for you. You need to come to the table with specific and well thought out questions. Don’t expect much if you ask something ridiculous like “How can I get rich on the Internet?”

A great example is Aaron Wall’s SEO Book, a membership-based community. Unlike the countless free communities out there, the focus is on quality; the monthly fee keeps the riff-raff out. Instead you’ll find people who are 100% dedicated to succeeding online, and while there are certainly a fair amount of new comers, the community has a tremendous number of extremely experienced Internet marketing professionals who are always willing to share their knowledge.

You should handle your business the same way. When I first started out, I didn’t, and while I still accomplished quite a lot, I could have achieved a lot more and done it much more quickly had I put more time and effort into the human aspect of business. Fortunately, I realized this quickly started connecting with more people outside of my company, and along the way, I’ve met some great people who I feel have become pretty good friends. They’ve helped me in countless ways and I hope they feel that I’ve done the same for them. I believe that you can achieve whatever you want in life as long as you help others achieve what they want.

If you’re still trying to be the proverbial “island” I highly recommend changing course and connecting with others; but remember, it’s not about what they can do for you, it’s about what you can do for each other.

Have laser-like focus.

Santa knows exactly what his core business model is; making and delivering toys to all the good little boys and girls around the world. He doesn’t offer show shoveling, dog walking or firewood chopping services along the way. Instead, he sticks to what he does best, and as a result, no one can accomplish what he does. Well, maybe the Marine Corps Toys for Tots program comes close, but that’s a different story; my Marines rock! The point is that when you focus intensely on your core business, it makes it easy to excel at it, equally important, it makes it easier to market your company.

Never underestimate the value of your list.

Thanks to the song Santa Claus is Coming to Town, everyone knows that he’s making a list and he’s checking it twice. You should be too, because a quality list can be one of the most valuable things in your toolbox. You can use a program like Act! to build and maintain a list of prospects, clients, vendors and other contacts, and a service like Aweber to deliver your message to them, and it’s relatively easy to share data between the two. The more detailed your list is, the better. For example, if you know your clients buying history, you can quickly and easily send them a message about new products that they might be interested in. Amazon has this process fine-tuned to near perfection.

When it comes to building your list, don’t be tempted to take short cuts. Buying one is always a bad idea because 99 times out of 100, you’ll end up with an list full of invalid addresses, and the few valid ones are unlikely to even be in your target market. To make matters worse, since they didn’t sign up for your newsletters, you will make a bad impression by emailing them.

You should treat your list like solid gold; be careful who has access to it, keep it up to date, don’t abuse it and don’t share it. At first, your list may not seem very impressive or useful, but as it grows, you can easily find yourself in a position where a single mailing can create tens of thousands of dollars in revenue at the press of a button.

Giving is good for others and for you.

Face it, we all love to get things. Gadgets, valuable advice, even a glowing testimonial from time to time. But don’t forget to give, too. And not just out of reciprocity, and not with the expectation that you’ll get anything in return. Give just to give. Contrary to what some people may think, business is not a zero-sum game. Sucess begets success. When I succeed, I hire more people and buy more products or services from others, which means those people become more successful, and they can hire more people and buy more products and services from others. It’s an endless cycle where everyone wins.

Besides, it will make you feel better, which usually helps you get better results out of both your work, and life in general. It also creates good will, and people will be more likely to help you achieve your goals. Another side benefit to helping/teaching others is that it helps you to sharpen your own skills.

Think back to when you first got started. For me, I found a relatively quiet search engine optimization forum that was frequented mostly by old SEO pros who had been in the game since before meta tags mattered. I knew web design, but didn’t know the first thing about SEO. Fortunately Morgan Carey and many of the other members there were more than happy to point me in the right direction, and before long, I was helping the other members there. I was able to apply that knowledge to drive quite a bit of traffic to my website, while developing a reputation as an expert and bringing in more clients.

And for any small business owner, what Christmas would be complete without a mad dash for some last minute profits before the height of the festivities?

You’re probably wondering “Is it even worthwhile to ramp up my marketing during the Christmas Season with so many people focused on holiday parties, shopping and travel?” The answer is “Absolutely!”

A well though-out out marketing plan can transform your December from a slow and possibly dismal month into one that breaks old records and sets you up for a rocking new year. Here are a few ideas to get you going…

Don’t be Afraid to Say Merry Christmas

In today’s politically correct world, everyone is afraid of offending someone, but is that really justified? In my opinion, it’s ridiculous, but it turns out that statistically speaking, at least in terms of email, people actually respond better to the phrase “Merry Christmas” than they do to “Happy Holidays.”

Send Out Dimensional Mail

Dimensional mail always works better than traditional mail, but it can have a tremendous impact at Christmas time because a promotional item and your company’s literature wrapped in festive wrapping paper with a bow on top is sure to be received and opened by your prospect rather than intercepted by a gatekeeper.

This is a sure-fire way to get noticed, remembered, and more often than not, make direct contact with a decision maker. The key is laser focus on a small, very specific list of prospects because your cost per piece is going to be higher than traditional direct mail, but your response rate is going to be higher – often exponentially.

Offer a Christmas Sale

Sales and discounts can often be counter-productive pricing strategies unless there is a very valid reason behind them. Fortunately Christmas and the end of the year are very valid reasons to hold a sale or offer a discount – just make sure it’s seasonally-themed so that everyone understands the reason behind it; more importantly, they understand that there is a limited window of opportunity to take advantage of your special pricing.

Hold a Christmas Party

Most companies hold some sort of holiday party but fail to use it to really promote themselves. A good way to do this is to hold a raffle where the winner will receive certain products or services for free. This is a great way to showcase some of your offerings to all of the attendees without coming off as being overly self-promotional.

Be sure to invite clients, AND prospects. It will give them a chance to meet and talk about your products or services, which will help build your credibility.

Send Gifts to Your Clients

Everyone wants to know they’re appreciated – especially your clients. Sending them a gift is an easy and relatively inexpensive way to do that while staying on their mind and setting yourself apart from the competition.