2008 December | CarmelBaird.com

Archive for December 2008

My 2009 Wish List, Wish #1

I ask my family for their wish lists at Christmas time, Birthdays, Anniversaries and for the year ahead. Sometimes i can make a wish for the year ahead happen, sometimes not.

I’m starting my online wish list for 2009, today is the first on that list.

This wish relates to the time over Christmas when my computer was turned off.

When I got around to checking on my email inbox, there were nearly 3000 emails waiting for me and my first wish is the result.

2009 Wish #1

There is one thing I would like to see happen in 2009 and that is…..

When you are on someone’s list and you take up an offer from them that you need to sign up for, you then go on that particular list. You are now on two of their lists. If another offer comes along that interests you, you sign up and now you are on a third list and so it goes on.

I have not taken up offers simply because I just don’t want to go on another of that person’s lists and get yet another email.

Three lists equals three emails, etc. etc. etc………..

Hey! with all the technology today, would it be possible when an offer is going out to all their lists, that they have a mega list, so their subscribers only get the ONE email not three!!! And……..

The testing of headlines/subject lines…………

There are times when they send two or three different subject lines, same email content and this can happen every day with different messges each day……..big turnoff, good reason to hit the link at the bottom of the message.

The ‘ooops’ emails too get a trifle boring, I know everyone makes mistakes and no one is perfect but… when you can almost predict 100% who will send you the ‘ooops’ emails and when, well, come on fellas!

With Twitter have such an impact during the latter part of 2008, in 2009 there could be less emailing.

Maybe there could be a return of the ‘real’ newsletter, not daily maybe bi-weekly, weekly, fortnightly.

At the moment, when you sign up for a newsletter, with a few exceptions, it is just an excuse to send you offers to buy someone’s stuff or promote a JV, like so many others are doing.

I could go on but I won’t, that’s enough for my #1 wish for 2009.

The short of it….

When you are emailing to all your lists, get yourself set up with a Mega List, will save you time too

Instead of doing the Subject line test with several emails, run a poll, they are very popular at the moment, get your subs to vote, rate etc.

Don’t do the ‘ooops’ emails unless they are really an ‘ooops’

Give me a real newsletter (if you don’t know what they are, go find out)

Take advantage of Twitter

Well that’s #1, I let you know #2 in a couple of days.

Till then, take care

Cheers to you from me

Carmel

Posted in Email Marketing

2008 Handing Over To 2009, May It Be A Great Year For All!

Image by Christopher Chan via Flickr

This is the last day of 2008, in less than 24 hours (for me anyway) it will be next year, 2009.

Why is it that we always associate New Year’s eve and New Year’s Day with a new beginning?

When a year has been not so good, many of us seem to breathe a sigh of relief at the stroke of midnight on the 31st December and start to look forward to better times.

When we are going through a bad trot, you know we could pick a day, any day and do the stroke of midnight thing, breathe the sigh of relief and start a new period in our lives. It’s all in our state of mind, fresh beginnings can happen, we just need to make them happen with our ‘new start’.

I have much to give thanks for, my life in 2008 has been good, sure like everyone, some rough patches but all in all I am fortunate, I live in a great country, Australia, in a beautiful part, South East Queensland, have a wonderful family and friends, I do have so much to be thankful for.

Online I am fortunate too.

The biggest curve in existence is the learning curve on the Internet. All the tools, resources, the how to’s, what is the latest gizmo, gadget, the trends, what’s in, what’s out, what’s coming, what’s gone. It all helps keep the brain active, sometimes too active.

This year I’ve found what I really enjoy doing online and I have been learning as much as I can about that.

I admit I’m a bit of a tool junkie. Pity we can’t have ‘garage sales’ on the Net . Sure you can if you have purchased something with the resale rights but many of the other tools, you can’t.

(not sure what you call them in your country, but you advertise in the paper and have everything set out in your ‘garage’ with the price on little yellow stickers and people start turning up at 5.30am to get the best of the worst, I’ve never had one but my sister did, had one that is and never again).

As the state of the Net changes, so do the tools and resources we need.

While my computer has been turned off during the Christmas break, I have taken some time and cleaned out cupboards, didn’t have a garage sale, bagged the stuff and took it to the charity bins. Very cleansing!

Now that my computer is turned on again, I have tidied up my desktop and found inside folders, tools I will never use again.

Mind you, there is nothing wrong with them, some were in the expensive line too, but as the Internet has moved along the curve, these tools have stayed back in their time and unless this jolly curve starts to bend back, these tools will never be needed for the job they did again.

I’ve decided to ‘bag’ up these tools (who knows, maybe one day the curve will bend back) and put them into folders for the years they belong.

Then I’m going to put them into Dropbox http://www.getdropbox.com/ (not a charily bin as such).

Dropbox is a place where you can add your files and then access them no matter where you are or what computer you are on.

Not sure if that’s the right place, but has the same cleansing feeling as the Charity bins only they stay with me, just outa sight.

Anyway that’s the plan, gotta have a plan

I hope your break was enjoyable and you got to spend time with those you love and if Santa came, hope he was kind to you.

May 2009 be kind to you too, I would like to wish you all the very best for the coming year, may you have good health, peace and prosperity and….lots of it!

Take care

Cheers

Carmel

Posted in Internet Marketing

Export And Importing With WordPress. Very Easy!

Well, I have had a win. May not sound much to some but after losing three WordPress sites and having to start over, had I done this before I would still have them.

Let me explain.

I had built several sites with a WordPress installer. Now at the time this was great as all the plugins etc were there in the installer and it only took a very short time to have the blog set up and adding content.

After learning how to transfer a WP site to a new web host, I decided to do just that with these sites.

Well, lost the first one, blamed it on the operator. I then transferred another site, not installed originally with this installer and the transfer went without a hitch.

Long story short, every site installed with this installer would not transfer over, there was always a hitch. These sites had page rank from #1 to #3, so not only lost the content etc but the page rank as well.

Okay, sad story over!

My win! I have successfully transferred another of these sites. Not the downloading and uploading via FTP, backing up and saving databases etc just simply exporting and importing via WordPress.

I used the Export option on the original site and saved it. You find Import and Export under Manage in the versions pre 2.7 and in the latest version of WordPress that’s 2.7 it is under Tools.

Quote from WordPress.
This is what happens
————————–

“When you click the button below WordPress will create an XML file for you to save to your computer.

This format, which we call WordPress eXtended RSS or WXR, will contain your posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags.

Once you’ve saved the download file, you can use the Import function on another WordPress blog to import this blog.”

————————–

I still had to point the DNS to the new web hosting, (mine, that was the idea), installing via Fantastico, adding the plugins etc and configuring the site and then simply going to the Import option, selecting WordPress from the various options and finding the export file on your computer.

Before importing the file, make sure your new WP site is set up the same as the old one.

So apart from the setting up of the site, that was the only time consuming part, it went very smoothly.

It still takes time to download and upload the files via FTP, only thing is, you can do other stuff while this is happening, whereas, the setting up, plugins and configuring etc needs you to actually do the tasks.

At least I have the content on the new web hosting and all’s right with the world, at least, the changing websites over to new hosting world.

Take care

Carmel

Posted in Wordpress

WordPress 2.7 Good To Go!

The long awaited version of WordPress, 2.7 is out and normally I wait a week or two when a new WP version is released befor upgrading but I like many others have been looking forward to this one.

So, I held my breath and clicked a few buttons.I had heard from a few people that they had a few tiny hiccups but they got them sorted without too much fuss and most importantly, loss of data.

Since I found the WP automatic upgrade plugin, updating to newer versions had not been a problem for me. I could do it manually but why get dishwashing hands when you have an automatic dishwasher, or drive a manual car in a city, when you have an automatic.

Well I’m happy to say that it all went swimmingly, no problem except the auto activating of the plugins that worked fine in the previous version, didn’t work for me this time. But that may have been something I did or didn’t do.Will check on that when I upgrade another site.

If you thought the upgrade to the 2.5 version was different, then this one is different again and will take a little learning as to what new features are there and what is available.

There are some great features by the look of it. As I have the WPQueen’s WordPress Bible, Leanne was kind enough to send through the upgrade to her ebook for the WP 2.7 version. So I will have that to refer to. Have had a quick look through the ebook and as usual, Leanne has been very thorough.

For those of you who stayed away from upgrading manually or even with the automatic plugin or if you paid someone to do it for you, well, I’m happy to say, it is a breeze now. Did you ever do the automatic upgrade for a plugin? That was one of the best things the powers that be at WordPress, had done. Made upgrading plugins a snip.

Well, I’m happy to say, that is how you will upgrade to the newer versions from now on. It’s just clicking an upgrade button and there will be the latest version.

And I though the WP Automatic Upgrade plugin was the bees knees.

There is another cool feature, you can arrange the dashboard for how you use WordPress, take only what you use for your dashboard, no more clutter or excess.

There is another feature with the plugins, haven’t tried it yet but from what I understand, we won’t have to FTP plugins anymore either. It will be all done through the dashboard.

I love the WordPress platform, it just keeps getting better and better.

Catch up again soon

Cheers

Carmel

PS I’ll upgrade this site tomorrow, getting past my bedtime now.

Posted in Wordpress

Focus, At Times Not The Easiest Thing To Do, But Sometimes Off-Track Can Bring Good Things!

Tomorrow will be head down and you know what up. I am so far behind with nearly everything.

I started a course and have been trying to get to a stage where I can upload just about everything to catch me up. I must admit I did start this later than the others and there is so much article writing involved.

Re-write PLR, write from scratch, find images and get it all set to load up on the site.

I have a lot of articles submitted to EzineArticles, on various topics and I wish someone had told me in the beginning to use pen names for each topic…..why?……because of……the RSS feeds.

But then again, maybe RSS feeds were not the ‘done’ thing back then like they are now.

Anyway, not to worry, I know now and so do you.

To help solve this little problem, I have found a website and problem ‘solvered’.

This website is called Dapper, http://www.dapper.net/ (no affiliation) that will take your content and create an RSS feed for it.

So you can go into Dapper, bring up your articles from EzineArticles and select the articles in a particular topic and then get your RSS feed for them.

To find your expert author URL it will be something like

http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=yourauthorname

Dapper will do other things but so far I have only wanted the RSS feeds from my own articles but you can get an RSS feed for Youtube or any information on the web and not just RSS feeds there are several options to choose from.

There is a bit of a learning curve but the site has video tutorials along the way to show you how to do it all. And….like many things programmy, it is intuitive, once Dapp figures out what you like and how you like it, you will find it much easier to work with.

You know, this is what happens so often when working on the WWW. You start, well I start, working at something and then I need something else to help with that, go looking and so often, find what I want but then need to find out how to work that and so what I started out on gets put behind a trifle. Sure I’ve learned something new and have possible a new tool to help but the focus, that word FOCUS has been shifted sideways.

So, this all started because I needed RSS feeds for this course I’m doing. Now I have them and can get on with the catch up. I know probably in the next day or two, there will be something else to take my FOCUS off what I have to do, but if it means a new helpful gadget or program, then…….I’ll let you know about it too!

Catch you later

Cheers

Carmel

Posted in Wordpress

My Take On Quick Websites For Flipping, Report!

What is a blueprint? Apart from being the latest buzz word in IM it is,

“a type of paper-based reproduction usually of a technical drawing, documenting an architecture or an engineering design. More generally, the term “blueprint” has come to be used to refer to any detailed plan.

Well, a detailed plan is what you will get with this special report by non other than the WPQueen, and no detail has been left out.

Here is a blueprint for setting up WordPress sites, getting content on them immediately, all with free resources I might add and you can have sites set up very, very fast.

When you set up these sites you have a few options, mini sites to make you dollars, sites to flip on eBay or for those domains that have been purchased and then parked, a way to get some revenue coming in from them.

I have flipped many sites now and really enjoy the setting up of the site and using WordPress to do that but one of the most time comsuming areas is getting content, content that will update automatically and be relevant and up to date. This is also a good selling point as the buyer doesn’t have to work the site if they don’t want to or are not sure of how to post to the site etc.

This report shows you step by step just how to do this and do it so quickly that the sites can be set up in about 30 minutes if you simply ‘do the easy to follow steps’.

I can’t get over how detailed this report is, everything is laid out with instructions and graphics. Links to everything that you will need, so easy to get, no searching.

I must admit, I was expecting this report to be 10, 12, 15 pages, nope! it is 51 pages of excellent value.

When I set up a site to flip, it usually takes me about 8 to 10 hours to complete, after reading this report, I can see myself setting up flip sites in about maybe, an hour to start and as I get more organised (which won’t take long following Leanne’s steps) about 30 minutes.

Also, I can see how incorporating what Leanne has set out, into some of my niche blogs, the updating will be cut to a minimum. There were several areas I wasn’t too sure about with WordPress and now those puzzlies have been solved, thanks to the detail that has been put into this report.

Also if you have never flipped a site, everything you need to know is included in the step by step process, right down to what to put into the emails to the buyers. All the tiny details that have been left out from other ebooks and reports that I’ve purchased. Even training sites that I’ve joined to learn all about site flipping, haven’t had any where near the detail that this report has.

I’m not going to tell you how much it is, but I can assure you, you will get a very pleasant surprise, just go over to the site and see for yourself. Be a risk taker , get the report, the information can be used for all your sites too, not only sites to flip.

Posted in Website Flipping, Wordpress