Wizard's Place

Archive for March, 2010

A friend and client from Australia, Tim Mooney, contacted me today about a page he needs added to his website and a little SEO work he would also like to have updated.

I always enjoy his wonderful aerial photography. Mostly he does real estate related work — you know, expensive property views — in and around the Sydney, NSW, area, but he also shoots fantastic scenery, including a lot of spectacular coastline views.

To me Australia has always presented some of the most spectacular scenery on the planet. I am always keen to see what Tim has captured recently.

You know the one that begins, “How do you fit five Elephants in a Volkswagen?” Well, this could very easily turn into an elephant joke too but it’s actually true.

I spent most of my growing years in Ontario Canada. At one point I lived in the City of Owen Sound on the south west shore of Georgian Bay. It’s biggest claim to fame, I suspect, was its status as home port for the ferry that operates every summer from Tobermory (The Tub, at the northern tip of the Bruce Peninsula) to Manitoulin Island (that big piece of land hear the northern shore of Lake Huron).

That’s pretty much all Owen Sound is known for except, perhaps, one other thing; its nickname: “The Asshole Of The Elephant“.

Now, to many, that may seem offensive, and I apologize to the weak of heart, mind, or spirit. No offense is meant and a nick name is, simply, what it is. I’m not big on putting asterisks, or other characters, to pseudo-hide some of the letters. If you know what the word is it really doesn’t matter if it’s partly hidden or not. It’s just a word!

The interesting part of all this, and why it’s no joke, is where the nick name comes from. Here is a map of southern Ontario:

It shows several of the key cities scattered across the province; Niagara Falls, Toronto, St. Catharines (where I was born). Owen Sound (in red) is a little left of center. Their politics probably runs that way too, but that’s a post for another day.

Nothing is generally perceived to be out of the ordinary until you turn the map 90 degrees to the right and the discerning eye may begin to pick up the outlines of a familiar silhouette; a trumpeting elephant. And just look where Owen Sound is located!

Oh, and for those who are just dieing to know, the answer is: “Two in the front, two in the back, and one in the glove compartment.”

The Amazon affiliate program is fantastic and the astore opportunity is without equal on the ‘net, however astores don’t allow for much personalization and you can’t take advantage of things like blogging or niche content for SEO.

Free blog sites are okay and some of the free website hosts will allow astores but you are at the mercy of their “deal” changing without notice. Sometimes sites ban commercial use altogether (sorry folks, an affiliate monetized site is commercial!) and often those that do allow it will require an expensive commercial upgrade at some point. They get you hooked and then, if you are successful and don’t want to change, they get your money.

Even good deals tend to leave you out there pretty much on your own. The Internet can be a lonely place!

In conjunction with MSMOsites website community (http://msmosites.com) I have created a structured website, based on the WordPress website engine, that provides a home page, an astore page, an about page and an integrated blog. The site is installed and configured for you. There is no installation or setup fee and no contract period. The site rental is just $3.99 per month. You can cancel any time you wish.

You can add additional pages, easily add your Amazon astore iframe code to the astore page (see image to the left), and add widgets and other ads to the sidebars. You can have different sidebar content on each of the four included pages and the site will support other affiliate ads as well. Learn more here:

http://msmosites.com/astores/

This is a solid starting point, and a great base upon which to grow, for anyone seerious about building Amazon (and Google or eBay!) affiliate revenue streams. The website is not free but it’s eminently affordable. If you are not prepared to spend a little you probably aren’t committed enough to do what needs to be done anyway.

Oh, and one more thing: I provide tech support and marketing advice (by email) without charge to anyone renting one of these Amazon Affiliate Astore websites.

WordPress is no longer just a blog. It’s a powerful, feature-rich, website engine and content management system. It allows almost anyone to create a multi-page website and, with a little training, to use it effectively.

I’ve been so impressed with this product that I’ve been converting many of my own websites, including this one, to WordPress. Additionally, the WordPress Multi-User (WPMU) package is an excellent way to deploy multiple blogs and/or websites with a single, central, management panel. It is ideal for the entrepreneur who can see the value of a website business but doesn’t know any HTML or other web coding. With WordPress YOU DON’T HAVE TOO!

The key is to get the right information, the right products, and the right training, so you can get started right. And there’s the rub. The Internet abounds with advice, ideas, products, and offerings. You could literally spend the rest of your life researching, trying to figure it all out.

That’s where I come in. I’ve put together a package the gathers together everything you need to get started and backs it all with my many years of web design and marketing experience so you know you will be starting right where you should be.

I’ll teach you what you need to know to run your own website business, offering and hosting WordPress websites. I’ll set up the hosting server with WPMU, the multi-user WordPress core engine, and teach you how to use it. I’ll install the necessary plugins and a selection of ready WordPress themes that will allow you to immediately begin selling personal and business blogs and websites. I’ll teach you about domain mapping and more.

But more than that I’ll be there to help. Initial training will include telephone sessions, videos, web-based documentation, and email. After that telephone and email contact will be available. You will have a business of your own but you won’t be alone.

You can start your own website business today! CLICK HERE!

Over time old adages often get misquoted thus changing their intended meaning. “Money is the root of all evil” is an example of a meaning changing misquote that leads many people to the wrong idea. The original, “The love of money is the root of all evil“, referencing greed, is the real deal.

In a similar way, “You usually get what you pay for” has been simplified over the years to “You get what you pay for” leaning many to believe that anything that is free of cost is also without value. Nothing could be further from the truth!

Although there are many things that are free, and pretty much without value, there are also many, many, good things that can be found that have no price tag attached. In the area of software several excellent examples come immediately to mind:

• LINUX is an excellent free operating system for PCs.

• Open Office is a world class office productivity suite.

• PHPBB is a top quality discussion forum package.

• WordPress (and WPMU) is a free blog/website server.

• Pegasus Mail is a powerful, secure, email client.

These packages are prime selections for replacing such mainstream offerings as Windows, MS Office, Outlook Express, and others, and each one is absolutely free.

There are many great free (or inexpensive) offerings in the software world. Don’t feel you need to spend lots of money, or be tied to the well known brand names, in order to get quality. In fact, many times the better product is also the free one!

There are hundreds, indeed thousands, of old WordPress themes around. Most of them are free. A lot of the old themes were designed before many of the new WordPress features and functions existed. Some of them contain what were completely new concepts at the time which have since been incorporated into the WordPress core system albeit in a somewhat different way. The long and the short of it is that many old themes just don’t work — or don’t work completely — with the current WordPress structure.

Dan Therrell is a good friend of mine who owns a web services company called Zfish (formerly Blue Mullet Web Services). Over the years we’ve collaborated on a number of projects. He recently came across an impressive free theme called Notebook Chaos which he decided to use on his main Zfish.com site.

Immediately upon installation Dan discovered that the theme didn’t work the way he was hoping. Pages weren’t functioning as expected and some content wasn’t showing up where planned. It wasn’t that the theme was broken. It was just that it was coded in such a way that a number of typical (today) WordPress concepts either weren’t included or they were hard coded into the pages so they couldn’t be adjusted in the usual fashion from the WordPress management Dashboard.

I was fortunate enough to be talking to Dan about another matter at about the same time as he had added this theme to his site and he asked me to have a look at it. I found it to be made up of clean code that was easy to edit and between us we sorted out the things necessary to make an old theme work on a current WordPress installation. And sometimes the results are really worth the effort!