Lets set one up for our new Meedeeah domain name that we setup yesterday.

Step One: Open a web browser and go to http://twitter.com

You’ll see the following login screen. Since we don’t have a login yet let’s click on the sign up now button.

On the next screen you’ll be asked for your login information. Sign up as follows…

Once we click the sign up button, a confirmation e-mail message will be sent to the e-mail account we signed up with. Click the confirmation link to complete the signup process.

Step Two: Setup your profile.

Login to your new account and click on the settings button in the top menu.

Click on the profile tab and fill in your unique information.

Step Three: Final Setup

Now you are almost ready to start communication with the world.

You have a 140 characters…

Tomorrow we will make our profile better by creating a unique custom background, and then start following some people.

Then we will start tweeting.

Stay tuned…

But what if you have a common name like mine. There are thousands of John Richardson’s around the world and all facets of that name have been used multiple times. As a blogger for five years, I have quite a bit of traffic to my site, yet I fall on page three or four on Google when searching for my name. I tell people all the time to search for “goal setting” instead of my name to find me.

In any type of web presence, an easy to remember domain name is a must. It should be as short as possible and contain keywords that match your business or niche. It should be a dot.com if at all possible. Having your name available is a huge plus. But what if your name or keywords aren’t available in a dot.com name?

You do have some options…

1. You can purchase a dot.org or dot.net or if you do video a dot.tv. The problem with these names is Google tends to rate them lower than dot.coms and most people will not remember the other extension.

2. You can buy a domain with three or more keywords. For example, if we wanted a unique name in the social media niche we might come up with socialmediaadventure.com or socialmediagrandadventure.com to use on our sites. The problem with these names is they are long and somewhat hard to remember. The longer a name, the more apt they are to be misspelled. The other problem is they do not lend themselves well to a login name.

3. You can use fewer words and use dashes to separate them. You might find social-media-adventure.com is available when the no dash version is not. The problem with these is that people can’t figure out what character is a dash and you may have a conflict with another web site.

4. You can make up your own custom name and use this as your domain name. Names like Google, Viddler, Flickr, are some popular variants of this idea. While you can get a rather short name this way, you will probably have to tell people how to spell it and most will not contain a keyword. The good news is, you will not need a URL shortener for Twitter.

Here is where a dictionary comes in…

Lets take a look at some popular keywords and their pronunciations in a popular online dictionary. These sound out words are all currently available at GoDaddy.

social = soh-shul

media = mee-dee-uh

adventure = ad-ven-char

millionaire = mil-yuh-nair

social media adventure = social-media-adventure

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For our 12 Week Adventure we went with MEEDEEAH.COM

Meedeeah will make a great login name and is only eight characters long. It is a sound out word and is instantly recognizable as replacement for media.

Over the next few weeks we will setup a blog and other social media using our new domain name.

Question: What alternative domain name would you choose for your niche?

Over the next Twelve weeks, I want to take you on an adventure through the amazing land of social media. We’ll discover Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and end up in the emerald city of Wordpress.

Along the way, we’ll meet some amazing people who have created impressive businesses, raised money for compelling causes, and created unique niches that never existed before.

Take a look at the video above and then get ready for adventure.

I’ve been pitched enough faulty products, unworkable MLM businesses, and million dollar get rich schemes, that I am skeptical about anything that seems too easy or doesn’t require much time and effort.

Yet… what if someone handed you a cool new product and wanted you to endorse it… would you have enough faith to do it?

This is what heavyweight boxer George Foreman faced when his boxing career was coming to an end. A small little kitchen appliance company wanted him to endorse a little two sided electric grill and put his name on it.

The company gave George a sample grill and wanted him to use it. But George, just put the grill on the back shelf and never bothered to try it. He though it was a gimmick. The company called month after month and George just brushed them off. It wasn’t until George’s wife pulled the grill off the shelf and gave it a whirl, that she realized what a great product it was. “George, you gotta see this,” she said.

She told George how easy it was to use, and that he should give it a try. After months of ignorance, George finally tried a hamburger on it. It cooked quickly and both sides were done at the same time. It turned out juicy and full of flavor. George made a decision right then and there that would change his life forever. That day the George Foreman grill was born.

This little grill took off slowly, but with George as the pitchman, it soon became a household name. Almost everyone has a George Forman grill of some sort and we all have George’s wife to thank for the discovery. The George Forman Grill became the best selling electric appliance in history.

Yet without a stroke of luck, George Foreman, would have left that billion dollar product on the shelf. It begs the question…

Do you have a billion dollar product or idea sitting on a shelf somewhere?

A great way to explore your options is to pick up George’s new book, Knockout Entrepreneur. He gives a great outline on what it takes to be successful through the analogy of a heavyweight fight. He tells you who needs to be in your corner and what obstacles you face in your bout. It’s a great read, and if you are a blogger, you can get his book (and others like it) for free through “Book Sneeze.”

I highly recommend the book to anyone starting a business, especially the guys who love boxing. He’ll take you round by round and help you take on the world.

In each case you have to imagine Doing the action and then putting a huge red circle with a slash through it.

Imagine saying to yourself all day… I can’t have ice cream, I can’t have ice cream, I can’t have ice cream…

What are you really focusing on… Ice Cream.

The definition of diet is…

A selection or a limitation on the amount a person eats for reducing weight: No pie for me, I’m on a diet.

Instead of focusing on what you CAN’T have… why not create a diet checklist of what you can have.

As you partake of each healthy item throughout the day you can check it off the list. This way you are focusing on eating good food, and the great items you’ll get later in the day.

Make your checklist enticing with adjectives that describe your food in a positive light.

Breakfast: Warm aromatic oatmeal with ripe red strawberries

Snack: A sweet ripe banana

Lunch: Delicious Turkey Sandwich with a flavorful side salad

Dinner: Amazing Apple Glazed Chicken Breast with sautéed mushrooms.

If you stick to your checklist, you’ll eat great food and stick to your calorie goals. You’ll be thinking in a POSITIVE manner all through the day.

Here is to your checklist success!

Question: What Items Would Be On Your List?

I personally would like to see a few things included that will make this one of the most revolutionary products of all time.

For iBooks to be a success they should have…

1. Clear and Easy To Read Fonts. This should be a no-brainer but Apple has used a different font technology in the past that has resulted in slightly blurry text. This can be hard on the eyes after a short period and I truly hope they research this thoroughly before releasing their first book. Give us a choice, but make them razor sharp.

2. Full Color. As much as I like the e-paper technology of the Kindle, I think Apple can blow this one out of the water with easy on the eyes color backgrounds and contrast levels. Give us parchment, paper, and other smooth textures that give us a sense of the real book. Give us full screen and highly tested contrast and brightness levels that will allow us to read for hours at a time.

3. Sound. Give us the option of ambient sound effects to set the ambiance of the chapter we are reading. If we are in a forest, give us birds chirping and leaves rustling. If we are in the city, give us traffic sounds and distant conversations. This feature, will be used to great effect by some people, but others will HATE it… so please Apple… give us a way to turn it OFF.

4. Video. Give us interactive video clips. This can be huge for how-to books. Imagine turning a page on your iBook and having a video clip open up with someone showing you step-by-step how to complete a project. Imagine a fiction book that takes place in New York. Give us a video clip of the area to set the stage for action that will take place in our minds. Video will truly set this device apart if it is done right.

5. Voice Activation. Say turn the page and have the iPad turn the page for you. This simple addition will make all sorts of hands free activities possible. Imagine putting the iPad on your kitchen counter in it’s holder and having Rachel Ray take you step by step through her latest recipe. Just say “Turn” when you are ready to go on, and the onions you are chopping won’t get all over the screen. This will also keep the touch screen much cleaner during normal reading.

6. Note Taking. Give us a simple command to have the iPad record our voice for note taking and annotation. It should also be easy to highlight and save passages for later review using bookmarks, and be certain to allow at least some cut-and-paste for blog excerpts and quotations.

These are six things I want to see in this new device. How about you?

What features would you like to see in Apple’s new iBook reader?

Here are three quick ones that come to mind from my life experience.

1. Savings Plan. Save at least 10% of what you earn.

2. Set Long Term Goals. Write them down and plan action steps to complete them.

3. Faith. For me, faith in God is so very important. Everything else revolves around it.

These are three that would be at the top of my list. What about you?

What Items would you include on a Success Checklist?

I have always been a big proponent of creating to-do lists. You write down the tasks of the day and check them off as they are completed. Yet a full scale checklist might go a little further. A checklist might list all the steps in a task. It might list the mundane things we take for granted. It might save us from taking shortcuts or forgetting a take-for-granted item.

Have you ever gone on a trip and forgotten your cell-phone charger or electric razor. A travelers checklist can easily alert you to these things before you leave. Do you ever have to give presentations? A presenters checklist can help you remember the little things like laptop connectors and memory sticks that can help you avert disaster in front of hundreds of people.

I think we can come up with some creative checklists that can help us on a daily basis. They will need to be flexible yet all encompassing. They need to have room for additional steps along the way.

I’ve ordered Atul’s book and I look forward to applying it to my daily routine.

My question today: What specialized application would you want to see a checklist for?

DM Employee. You are Fired. Clean Out Your Desk. You Will Be Escorted to the Door at 4pm.

Could this happen? I’m sure it has and will probably become more popular in the future. Heck… you could lay off a whole department with a @company-department tweet.

But one thing I know for sure… you can now quit via Twitter.

CEO Jonathan Schwartz of Sun Microsystems did it yesterday.

And he did it with a Haiku…

Financial crisis
Stalled too many customers
CEO no more

While his resignation wasn’t unexpected, quitting by Twitter was a first by a major company CEO. But it isn’t surprising. Jonathan was the first CEO to start a blog.

So now if you want to quit and let the whole company know about it, just send a broadcast tweet. Just be aware… there is NO undo button!

This week, the bar was raised considerably. Brian Gardner, the founder of StudioPress, has come out with a significant update to his line of professional Wordpress themes. It’s called Genesis, and the concept is simple. Make a structurally sound “parent” template and do most of the design work in “child” templates.

This dual design concept has a lot of advantages. The basic framework has lots of flexibility with 6 different layouts so you can find a look that matches your content. The parent blog engine comes complete with custom widgets for Twitter, featured pages, and a lot more. Once you get your parent site setup you can just add or modify a child theme to get the look and feel that you want.

Going forward, this will make it a lot easier to have a sophisticated blog design that doesn’t require a lot of background coding. Most all of the changes can be accomplished via the framework dashboard. Child templates will also have a control panel for added flexibility.

Currently if you have a complex Wordpress design it can take days to change templates to update your site. With Genesis, all you will need to do is update your child template . The main structure will stay the same.

I have wanted to update Success Begins Today for over a year now, but the changeover has been a somewhat daunting task. I haven’t been able to find a two or three day period to recode everything. With Genesis, I can spend the time on the upgrade and have a site that will be much easier to customize in the future.

If you are an accomplished Wordpress designer and want to develop a custom design with Genesis and use this blog as a showcase, let me know via the contact sheet or by direct message on Twitter (@success2you).

I am taking bids for a killer new look and I think Genesis will be the way to go.