Be in charge of your website and domain name!

Quite often, website developers will have control over a client’s domain name.  They may have registered the domain themselves “as a service to the client”.  In the worst case scenario, the developer registered it in their own name rather than the client’s name, and the developer therefore owns the domain name.  More often, the developer will register it in the client’s name but never give the client access to the domain account.

What happens if your web developer gets hit by a truck?

Do you even know how to access your domain to move it if you needed to?

Do you know where your website is hosted?  Do you have access to the hosting account?  You should.  You need to.

If you’re not in control of your site and domain name, then they’re under the control of someone else.  Is that a good thing?  No, it’s not.

Contact your web developer today and inform him/her that you want access to everything — that, after all, it’s your website, not theirs.

Do not use “fluid” or “floating” or “dynamic” page sizing.

All three of these terms mean the same thing.  Fluid page sizing is where the width of the web page is allowed to expand to fit the size of the browser window, no matter how large that window may be.  This is a bad idea for at least a couple of reasons:

(1) on higher resolution monitors, it spreads text across a very wide space making it difficult for the eye to follow a line of text, and

(2) variations in screen width from one computer to another makes it impossible for the designer to actually “design” the layout of the page and know what it will look like.

Pages should always be created to a fixed pixel width.  It should be noted that some designers will adamantly disagree with this rule.

Four steps to a better website, and better marketing.

Awareness – you must be aware of the importance of your site to your business, of what constitutes an effective site, and be aware of current online marketing trends.

Commitment – you must commit to having a really good site, and to spending however much money you can to your online marketing efforts, and to making that money count.

Implementation – you must stop thinking and talking about it and actually do it.

Vigilance – you must not then do what most businesses have done in the past; build a website, then promptly forget all about it.  You must have an active and ongoing marketing program, and monitor its effectiveness constantly.

Some marketing gurus are suggesting that email marketing is “old school” and no longer very effective.  Others maintain that it’s as effective as ever.  I’m not going to argue either position here (though I tend toward the latter one).  But if you’re going to do it at all, here are the raw basics:

• Messages must only be sent to “opt-in” recipients (people who have signed up for your email list, or otherwise given explicit permission for you to market to them).
• Messages should be short, not more than 200-300 words in the message body.  The “less is more” rule applies here.  The longer the message, the less the probability that most recipients will read all of it (or maybe any of it).
• Messages should be frequent.  How frequent?   The correct frequency will depend on your audience and the nature of your business and your content, but mostly it will depend on the agreement you have with your subscribers.  If they know they’re signing up for daily messages, then daily is OK.  But don’t ask them to sign up for a weekly message then hit them with something every day — they won’t like that.  In any case, once a month (or more) is too seldom; you’ll lose continuity with your subscribers.
• Minimize the number of images in your message.
• Never put critical information inside an image.  Sometimes, for various reasons, images will not display to the recipient and your information will be lost.
• Your messages should contain interesting and useful information (much like blog posts).  If your message content is 100% sales pitch, you’ll lose audience pretty quickly.  Use a website landing page for your “pitch”, with a link from your email message.

Stay tuned — I’ll have more on this subject later on.

Make sure the text in your site is written by a writer and edited by an editor.

Maybe that writer is you.  Maybe not.  But good writing, proper grammar and punctuation, and correct spelling are extremely important.  “Writing for the web” has become a separate subject, and a number of books have been written about it, because many of the rules of writing for the printed page do not apply to writing content for a website.  The number one difference is that people don’t like to read lots of words on computer screens, therefore the essence of “writing for the web” is brevity.

If you are personally charged with writing content for your website, and you know you’re not a good writer, then hire someone who is.  Remember that there are people who are professionally trained as copywriters – if you’re serious about your site, hire one of them.  And remember that graphic artists, web designers and programmers are seldom good writers (and before all my artist and programmer friends start throwing tomatoes at me, I will acknowledge that, yes, there are exceptions to this).

There is no such thing as the future.  The future is an illusion.  What we have is a now, followed by another now, followed by a long series of nows.

We do not suddenly accomplish something.  Rather we have a series of accomplishment now moments.

We do not suddenly become healthy or unhealthy.  Rather we have a series of healthy or unhealthy now moments.

When we have created and experienced a long-enough series of a particular type of now moments, it can result in goals being met, resolutions fulfilled, bad habits broken, etc.

Now is the only moment there is.  Now is where creativity exists, where decisions are made, where thoughts and feelings occur, where it’s all happening.

There is no other time.

The preceding is my adaptation of some thoughts from the book “Managing Thought” by Mary J. Lore.

Highly recommended.

Get it on Amazon.com.

Or visit Mary’s website at www.managingthought.com.

When you’re trying to impact your audience (which of course is why you’re speaking in the first place), remember that what you say is not as important as the way you say it. Your words are not as important as your delivery.

“What?” you say.  “How could that be?  My words are my message; my words are the reason I’m giving this speech!”

A number of studies have shown the following:

10% of effective communication is words.

40% of effective communication is vocal variety (how you use your voice to express meaning)

50% of effective communication is body language (how you use movement and gestures to express meaning)

Of course your words are important, and, yes, they are your message.  But your message can be completely lost if it’s delivered in a boring or uninspiring way.

And this is true not just for “giving speeches”, but for any kind of interpersonal communication.

How well can you use your voice and body to express yourself?

Running a business isn’t very difficult or complicated when you get down to the basics.

All you have to do is buy some stuff and sell it for more than it cost.

That’s really all there is to it.

Except for a few million other details.

– author unknown

• The first video was uploaded to YouTube on April 23, 2005.
• By June 2006, more than 65,000 videos were being uploaded every day.
• YouTube receives more than 2 billion viewers per day.
• Every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.
• The United States accounts for 70% of YouTube users.
• Over half of YouTube’s users are under 20 years old.
• One billion videos are watched on YouTube every day.
• Average watch time per video is 3.5 minutes.
• You would need about 1,000 years to watch all the videos currently on YouTube.
• YouTube is available in 19 countries and 12 languages.
• Music videos account for 20% of uploads.
• YouTube uses the same amount of bandwidth as the entire Internet used in 2000.

Planning a seminar, workshop, or other business education event, and wondering how you will get people to show up?  Or maybe you’ve already had an event, and wondered why more people didn’t show up.  After all, it was a really good event, with really worthwhile information that would have been very helpful to all those people who didn’t show up.

Here are some reasons why people don’t attend educational events:

• They don’t want to change.
• They don’t see the value.
• They don’t have the money.
• There is a time conflict.
• They procrastinate and miss the event.
• The event content doesn’t apply to them (their problems are different).
• They don’t want to share, or “open up”, in a public forum.
• They don’t believe that new information could possibly help them.
• They fear learning something new because that might cause them to succeed.

You should attempt to address these factors when putting together the marketing program for your event.  Some of these factors, such as time conflicts, you can’t do anything about.  But you can consider the rest of them, and ask yourself if any of them might apply to your target audience.

Design is about communication.

There are three components of website design:

• Aesthetics (the visuals — usually handled by artists)

• Content (the words — should be handled by professional copywriters, but seldom is)

• Function (how things work — usually handled by programmers)

It takes all three of these components, in appropriate measures, to create good communication.

Small people talk about other people.

Mediocre people talk about events.

Great people talk about ideas.

What do you talk about?