1) Make sure your website provides value.

I am starting with, what I think, is the most important step you should consider when building or re-doing your website.
People go online for a number of reasons.  They go online to research a potential purchase, to seek solutions for a problem they’re having and to be entertained.  If your website provides all three; products, information, and entertainment then you’re in tip top shape.  The good news is your content can provide both the information and the entertainment and when written well, can also inspire purchases.  Here are a few ideas to provide value for your customers and prospects:

• How to articles, guides videos, and audio
• Use videos and audio if you can
• Case studies
• Workbooks and reports
• Interviews with experts
• Product reviews

2)  Make your website interactive.

As the internet continues to grow and evolve it’s becoming more important to create a community around your business. To accomplish this you want to engage your visitors and customers.  This can be accomplished in number of ways.  You can:

• Provide a forum
• Post surveys or polls
• Enable visitors and customers to review or rank items.  For example a “How valuable was this article?”.
• Inspire comments and feedback
• Host contests and sweepstakes
• Publish video and audio content as well as written interesting content.

3)  Make sure your website is easy to navigate.

It takes a visitor from 5 to 10 seconds to make a decision about whether they’re going to stay on your website or click away. If your site is laid out nicely, with products and services, information, and content easy to find then people are more likely to stay – the longer they stay on your site the more likely they are to make a purchase or to return again.

To make your site easy to navigate consider:

• Keeping your site simple.
• Keep your pages uniform with the same options and appearance.
• If you have a lot of content, great!  Use drop down menus and organize your content by topic for easier access.
• Offer a search function where users can search for products, services, or content topics quickly and easily.
• Provide a way for users to easily go back to previous pages.  A back key is an option however if every page has the same options and drop down menus, including the ability to quickly return to the home page, a visitor will always be able to find what they need.
• Test your website’s appearance on different browsers to make sure every visitor has a good experience.

4)  Make your website easy on the eyes.

Ever visited a website and the text was so small or the colors so incompatible that you couldn’t focus on the content?  Readability is critical to a selling website.

Make sure:

• Your colors are easy on the eyes,
• Your graphics are complementing your content
• Keep formatting like underlining, bold and italics to a minimum.
• Spacing between sentences and paragraphs is adequate
• Font size is large enough for people to read and font is easy to read

5)  Give them a soft sell.

People expect to be sold to and they’re looking for it – they’re wary.  Instead of hitting website visitors with a hard sell, provide information, solve their problems and show them the benefits of your products or services.  They’ll be much more receptive and appreciative.

Creating a website that sells requires a structured approach and a desire to create the best experience possible for your visitors.  Once you’ve created your website, consider testing it and asking associates, friends and family for their opinion.

So whats new?

Photoshop Elements new features include:

• Easier access to your media files so you can access the files from anywhere.
• Creating public or private galleries you can share. You get new templates regularly delivered to the software.
• With just one click you can select specific area and apply incredible effect. All that with just one stroke.
• It also allows you to automatically combine multiple shots of the same subject to easily remove unwanted/distracting elements on the picture.
• More sophisticated backup feature. Now elements will back up your photos/videos automatically so no scheduling is required.
• You will also be supplied with tutorials, seasonal artwork and themes directly in to the software.

Premiere Elements new features include:

• Using alpha channels to extract your moving subject from a solid color background and replace it with a different video clip or picture to achieve interesting Hollywood style effects.
• Effortlessly create instant movie using any theme. Premiere Elements will edit your best clips with music, transitions and effects.

Many features that were available already in previous versions have been enhanced .
It’s probably better if you go ahead to adobe website to check all the details. By the way if buy or upgrade before September 29th you get free shipping.

Adobe Elements Page

Using his blog (just one blog) and his hobby, Yaro brings in a steady $10,000 to $20,000 each and every month. Okay, now that’s not bad at all.

In this free video he gives out many of his secrets about the system he calls “Conversion Blogging” which combines a blog with an email list to create consistent income.

I know you’ve heard this type of stories too many times but let’s not be mistaken here. His conversion blogging system is not your usual story of creating a blog and sticking Google Ads on it - he’s taken a much more business focused approach.

If you are curious about what you can learn in the 32 minutes long video, here’s a few of the many subjects he addresses.

• Why blogging is the only Web 2.0 marketing tool you will ever need.
• Step by Step on how Yaro uses his blog to build a MASSIVE email list.
• How just a blog can turn you into the respected authority in your market.
• What techniques Yaro uses to translate his hobby into a steady income.
• How you can replicate Yaro’s techniques using just one blog and get rolling in minutes.

I saw the video and I loved it because it’s meant to be a marketing hype but rather just a very down to earth and practical presentation.

I guarantee you will enjoy this video just as I did and learn something that may change your own internet business.

Grab a drink, relax and

watch this video.

No more guesses and no more estimates. I am talking about keyword research for your website and your adwords campaigns.

Without any prior notice google began to share their long time secret numbers of their search volumes. Until now we were left with expensive services like Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery which only made it easier for us to guess the numbers. Now when Google is sharing more search data with us it is completely changing the whole game.

When using the Google Keyword Tool we used to get only the green bars indicating popularity of a specific key phrase. Now you can get actual numbers of approximate search volume for the previous month and approximate average search volume which is an average of the search volume in the recent period of 12 months. See picture below.

In my opinion this will have a major impact on keyword research as now we have some serious numbers to work with.

It will be very interesting to compare the results from google with the other services although the purpose of those services wasn’t to get the exact number of searches but rather to estimate an interest in certain key phrases.

I would love to get your opinion on this topic.
Please leave your comments below.

I should mention that you get the entire book (all 278 pages) with no strings attached.

Most of you are probably familiar with sitepoint.com but for those who aren’t sitepoint is a book publisher and online resource with focus on the web design and web development community.

99designs.com is an online marketplace where graphic designers compete for the posted projects. If you are good with photoshop, illustrator or similar app and you have some creative skills this is a great place to earn a few extra bucks.

Anyway to make it short here’s the link where you can download the book.

The Photoshop Anthology: 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks & Techniques.

Enjoy.

Apparently, Bertelsmann a major German publisher announced plans to sell a printed single volume version of the most popular articles from Wikipedia.

There’s a huge debate about the copyrights and whether the writes who participated in writing for wikipedia should be paid for their work. I am not a lawyer nor in the position to judge so I don’t even think of trying to say who’s right and who’s wrong. I rather have a question for you.

Would You Buy Wikipedia In Print?

I can speak only for myself but I believe there are many others thinking the same thing. Why would I pay for something that is easily available for free? Some may suggest the book will only include a selection of the best articles making it more interesting but I say, so what? I search wikipedia only for the articles I am really interested in not for the most popular once. Another thing is try to search the book for articles and try to search wikipedia online. It’s a no-brainer.

Bertelsmann announced the price of the book is expected to be 19.95EUR (about $32 U.S.) and to me that seems to be a hefty price for something you can get for free.

That’s just my 2 cents to this whole buzz.

1. First of all update all plugins you use on your blog to the latest stable version. Follow the plugin’s update instructions.

2. Once you successfully updated your plugins go ahead and backup everything. And I mean everything. This is not the time to get lazy an confident that nothing bad can happen. Backup all your wordpress files using FTP and backup all tables in your database. I used phpMyAdmin to create a full backup but you can also use Wordpress Database Backup plugin to easily create your database backup. This is very important because if something goes wrong with your upgrade you can always restore your website using your backups in just a few minutes.

3. Now that you have your back covered login into your wordpress admin and go to plugins. Deactivate all plugins you see there. This will protect your new blog from any incompatibilities with your plugins.

Now you can proceed with your wordpress 2.5 upgrade
You’ve done all the necessary steps to ensure save upgrade so now you can proceed to the real thing.

Here’s how I did it.

1. I logged into my blog through FTP and deleted everything except these files and directories.
Files: .htaccess, robot.txt, wp-conf.php
Directories: /wp-content
You might as well have some other files and directories there. Keep those. If you made hacks to your wordpress files in the past you will have to redo them once finished with the upgrade.

2. I uploaded the new files except the /wp-content directory.

3. Now I uploaded all files in the /wp-content individually to the server. This way I avoided overwriting my customized files and directories (like themes and plugins).

4. After all the files were in place I went to http://www.domain.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php and followed the instructions on that page. This will upgrade your wordpress database.

All done. Now all you have to do is to check your blog to make sure everything is fine and to login into your wp admin and re-activate your plugins. Make sure you activate them one by one while checking your blog after each plugin activation. Some themes might need some correcting.

I hope these tips will help you with your wordpress upgrade to the lates 2.5 version. I highly recommend upgrading because I like all the new features as well as the new admin look. It definitely makes my blogging more fun.

Good luck.

“The software is basically done and stable, and could be released today, but we’d like to incorporate feedback from a wider audience before making it available …” says the founding developer Matt Mullenweg.

Wordpress 2.5 is sporting some major updates including multi-file upload, built-in galleries, gravatars, one-click plugin updates, tag management, full text feed and faster load times. Probably the most noticeable will be the newly redesigned administration with customizable dashboard.

If you can’t wait to get your hands on the new wordpress 2.5 you can take a sneak peek at some screenshots on the wordpress blog.

Although the widget doesn’t look bad and you can choose color matching your theme it really takes a lot of space and considering the average click through rate (CRT) is 0.02% it is really not worth keeping it.

The blogrush widget was located in the far right column and as you can see the archive list took it’s place which I think you will appreciate so much more.

Can Blogrush work?

I think it could work for you if you are able to get hundreds of active referrals and to generate millions of credits but unfortunately my blog is not at that stage right now.

Will I ever use blogrush again?

I might but I don’t think it will happen anytime soon, if ever.