Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

You may have noticed after upgrading to Wordpress 2.1 that even if you have the settings to full feeds for your RSS subscribers, they would receive a [more] link if you use the tag when publishing the article.

A few months ago I started applying code to my larger posts because my blog homepage would take too long to load if I published a few of my characteristically large articles (2000+ words) in a row. The more tag breaks the article down on the front page and visitors to the blog have to click the read more link to go to the full article.

Previously if you published full text feeds and you used the more tag it didn’t affect the feed, but with the upgrade to WordPress 2.1 it did and would look like this:

Full Text Feed Plug-In

Blaine Moore today told me to install a new plug-in that fixes the problem, which I just did.

The plug-in is called Full Text Feed from the folks at CaveMonkey50.com.

I suggest if you also want to offer full feeds to your readers and you are running WordPress 2.1 or above that you consider installing this plug-in. As I have written about before, it’s most important that your blog is read, and full feeds makes this as easy as possible.

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I just checked out the news from AWeber, the company that handles my email lists and newsletters, about the new features they are launching soon. The list includes:

AWeber Upgrades

• Completely new design: Theme colors that don’t get in the way of getting work done.
• Button colors: Green is good, red makes you pause before doing something potentially bad.
• Menu navigation: Get to any page in your account with a single click.
• Reports & Statistics: Hover over any graph to see specific subscriber numbers and rotate pie charts to get a better view.
• Drag and drop to reorder follow up messages.
• One click to turn click tracking on/off without reloading the entire page.
• Currently active list and change list option is more visible.
• Search leads displays faster and paging thru hundreds of subscribers is faster.
• Web form creation wizard steps you thru creating a new form for your website.
• Bookmark any page and when you login later you’ll go directly to that page.

You can read more here: AWeber: Easier & Faster Sneak Preview.

Sounds like there might be some nice Ajax injected into their control panel, which is great news. In particular the ability to reorder emails quickly is something I appreciate. While the current AWeber system is nice and easy to use, it’s a bit clunky and there are lots of inefficiencies. To be honest though I’ve never come across an email autoresponder system that is truly efficient, which is funny given the core function - sending emails - is so simple, yet the amount of options involved in running an autoresponder service makes things quite complicated.

I’m going to rely on AWeber more and more in the near future as I build email lists for different things, so it’s very important that Tom and his team are focused on updates, it shows me that they are not sitting back and resting on their previous successes.

Beginner Newsletter Advice

My mother is about to launch her first email newsletter to augment her counselling business in Brisbane. She is not very technical so I’m not sure she will ever be able to add newsletters to AWeber herself, so will probably pay someone to do it for her (or bug me about it!).

I gave her some advice that I will pass on to you too now if you are a beginner email list builder.

Before even starting, sit down and consider the who, what and why. You want to know exactly who you are attempting to attract with your newsletter and what they get out of it from you. You also need to know why you even need the newsletter in the first place - have a clear idea of what the newsletter does for you in your overall business strategy.

In my mother’s case, she wants to build a profile in the relationships counselling area and create some form of community with her newsletter and eventually a blog too. She has much grander plans, but I told her to focus on the baby steps today and see how the market responds to what you offer first. Right now she is focusing on writing the first newsletters in her email sequence, which is definitely a good place to start while you work to find someone to handle the technical implementation for you.

If you are just getting started in online business and are about to build your first email newsletter then AWeber is something you should review when doing your research (try GetResponse too). Check out my review of AWeber to help with your decision.

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The recent series of articles I wrote on blogging as a business model sparked a few queries about how I have gone about outsourcing the writing of my blogs. In the article I talked about how it is important to move away from being solely responsible for content output, otherwise you limit your potential for growth and are effectively self employed.

SmallBusinessBranding.com Case Study

Over a year ago I purchased the blog SmallBusinessBranding.com (SBB) from Michael Pollock. When I first took over ownership of the blog I began writing the content myself, doubling my writing commitments since I was also writing to this blog, Entrepreneurs-Journey (EJ), at the same time.

I had a lot of difficulty writing to two blogs. Each time I wrote an article for SBB, I realized it was appropriate for EJ as well. I went from writing one blog 100% of the time to dividing my output across two blogs, and I knew from experience running two businesses at once would end in weakening both sites (see my business timeline for the story of the English School I was running [badly] as a second business). I decided to come up with a solution to keep SBB running without me as the author, since I wanted to devote all my writing output to EJ.

After asking for suggestions in my forums and brainstorming, I decided to bring on one or two bloggers to write for SBB. My initial plan was to advertise for the bloggers and test them for a month. If they proved dedicated I would offer them revenue share of income generated by SBB - I was thinking something along the lines of 50%. I was going to do some number crunching first to work out how many posts were done vs how much they would get paid, but this situation never eventuated.

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This is the first time a fellow blog owner has asked me for a review via the ReviewMe service, which makes for an interesting way to introduce yourself to another blogger. So first off let me start by saying hi to Collis Ta’eed, the owner of North x East, and thank you for the review request.

I wasn’t sure how to handle this review since I’m inclined to look at blogs from two angles - as a user/reader of the blog (I’m not as good at this) and as a “coach” or “consultant” to help the blogger produce a better blog (my brain defaults to this view). Both views are very interrelated given it’s the job of the consultant to know what the user wants. I have trouble switching off the strategic brain sometimes and can’t always sit back and just read a blog for the sake of reading it.

When you first visit North x East you will see it has what I like to call a smart design. Minimalist works and Collis did a great job focusing attention on the content with very little clutter. The design is a WordPress template (blog.txt), but it’s one I’ve never seen before, which goes to show how much variety there is now in WordPress templates - you can find something unique and well thought out without expecting every other WordPress blogger in the universe to already use it.

To describe North x East you can simply read the three keyword phrases presented on every page of the blog. They do the best job I’ve ever seen explaining what a blog is about.

Those three phrases are:

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I spent some time yesterday in my jet-lagged state going through mail built up in Brisbane while I was away in Canada - that’s real normal mail, not that fancy electronic stuff we use nowadays.

I have a pile of newsletters and audio CDs from Perry Marshall’s Renaissance club that accumulated over the last six months.

I don’t know what it is about Perry but I like his style a lot more than most Internet marketers, probably because it’s more down to earth and he writes like I write. He rarely puts on a hard sell for anything he does. Although he doesn’t push himself as a copywriter (he’s generally considered the Google AdWords guru), his copy is clean and again, down to earth, and I tend to follow his copywriting style as a template for my own.

Most of the Renaissance club newsletters are about using the web for direct marketing and general Internet business stuff. Perry has the whole formula for marketing a business online down to a tea - run adwords for traffic, use a namesqueeze, demonstrate expertise to make sales and zero in on the ideal customers so they come to you rather than you going to them.

If you would like to join Perry’s newsletter (it’s paper and comes in the mail once a month, usually with an audio CD too) you can check out all the details here -

Perry Marshall’s Marketing Letter & Renaissance Club Newsletter

It’s still the cheapest way to get a copy of his Definitive Guide To Google AdWords ($29.95 as part of the welcome package for joining the Renaissance Club) and if you ever plan to do anything with Google AdWords you have to have this book - it’s the Pay Per Click bible.

Advice On Defeating The Google Slap

There was a section in one of the newsletters on the Google Slap that I want to share with you. If you don’t know already, the “Google Slap”, as it has been labelled, was an adjustment made to Google AdWords that penalized people who used a landing page with little content. It really hurt a lot of people using namesqueeze pages because they suddenly had to pay stupid amounts per click when previously it was pennies per click.

Since then Google has continued to slap advertisers whenever their system determines the site you are sending traffic to has little content.

Perry included an excerpt from an email communication with Glenn Livingston, who had some great tips for beating the Google Slap.

I summarize the tips here for you:

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