Browsing Tag

wordpress

10 Themes and concepts for YOU to blog on

This is essentially a list of some ideas which have been sitting on my iPhone for a while. I’ve even gone as far as crafting 3 drafts which have been drafts for over 6 months. To that end, I would like to share these blog project concepts for YOU to use. Below are the ideas for you to blog on.

Can sales grow a market? – A concept of how sales activity can influence not only a single entities execution in the market, but actually GROW a market. This could be any functional group – marketing, customer support…
Marketing as Geography – What are the common themes and areas of expertise shared across discipline.
Business Travel Best Practices – Would be cool to have some very bTravel oriented lifehacks. I bet other people would dig this as well.
How do you explain social media to friends? – What is your elevator pitch when explaining social media. Can you get it narrowed down to 140 characters?
The 3 differences between product management and product marketing – plus or minus 2.
Share YOUR 3 Favorite blogs no one knows about – Who, Where and Why
The current state of X is unsustainable – Business practices, political activities, environmental actions…..
My favorite country to visit is XXX? Business travel or vacation destination, you don’t even have to have been there, just explain.
Share 3 wordpress template authors: Finding templates are a bear, who do you like? let folks know.
Is business blogging effective? How do you see this phenomenon? What are the key metrics to track? Is the ROI really the return on influence?

If you find one of these useful, consider linking back to spatially relevant as I would like to see what great ideas you share.

March 23, 2008 by Jon Gatrell

The Lazy Bloggers way to efficiently managing content

I know we are all enamored with widgets, social networks and alike, but it can become just a bunch of WORK! So I spent the weekend overhauling my tools, blog and networks to make it just a little easier. So to save YOU time, I’ve put together some insights I received from the let’s say – at least the last 7 days of work.

Tools

The right tools for the right job, not just relevant to carpenters, appears to be good for bloggers as well. I’ve been watching folks use tools on twitter, like [tag]twitterific[/tag], I’ve been playing with my bookmarking sites and just seeing how it might best be coordinated. My previous content management strategy very much had a herding cats feel to it. Here are some of the tools which I’ve centered on based on input from other folks:

Shareaholic – a single firefox plug-in which manages all of my go forward social networks. No more crazy toolbars or additional buttons – a single drop down! Needless to say, Firefox is a must have tool.
Feedburner – Yes, I know everyone knows about [tag]Feedburner[/tag], but did you know the Pro tools are FREE now? Each tab now has new cool stuff you can use, not just for optimizing your feed, but also your site. There are a whole bunch a goodies in there for you – Feedburner, not just for RSS – a single interface to Optimize, Publicize and Monetize (I’m not monetizing, but I guess I could go for the $.04/mo I might get) and Troubleshootize.
FeedFlare – I know, it’s part of feedburner, but it’s so cool because it replaced my previous WordPress plug-in for bookmarking and I think my site is faster, just because of this.

Your Friends and Your Networks – Your TIME

Managing networks, bookmarks and actively participating is a bunch of work. So I QUIT! Sorta anyhow – I’ve centered on only a handful Facebook, del.icio.us, Digg and StumbleUpon (I only kept stumble since it’s a lightweight commitment). Last but not least – Twitter, I’m not sure why I like this so much, it is just fun – I think because it is [tag]iPhone[/tag] friendly and not that much of a commitment – getting the theme here? Social Media-Life Balance

Intelligent Design

Since I’m fundamentally a lazy cat, I really needed to step back and think about how I wanted my online experience to evolve. So I found myself just getting way into the constructs of understanding relationships, what smart folks do online, (this requires a bunch of reading) and what I really want to do with my spare time and why. So I mapped out goals, systems, tools and traffic patterns to understand where I should focus on delivering reasonably meaningful content to the marketplace and I realized I had an accidental architecture. I had bits of mediocre content flying all over this Arpanet.

So what did I do? I decided to literally diagram where I am, where my readers are spatially on the web compared to where I am and weighted “objects” on benefit, effort and a totally subjective cool factor. Yes, I think everything can be put into model. Once I did that I figured out my haphazard hairball or spaghetti online existence just wasn’t what I wanted. So where did I start? My blog and worked out from the brand nucleus.

Usability: Your stuff has to easily navigated to be read! That’s right, I didn’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about what goes where and why is something is on my blog until now. Guess what – there’s less clutter and in just the short time I’ve been re-designed, I’ve had more subscribers than any other single day! Clean is good.
Consistency: This is as much about content, as it is about the frequency, so I automated a few things with behind the scenes posting automation/replication. I still need to clean things up a little, but Twitterfeed and the WordPress plug-in Postalicious will be making my life just a little easier and establishing a reliable flow of content, I would like to read. I think I still have a little recursive content, but I’ll have that fixed by Wednesday.
Necessity – Only use things that add value. If a widget doesn’t derive benefits which you can PROVE in your analytics, then its got to go. You know what there’s an interesting side benefit- less widgets = faster site.

This is what I have for now, I’ll keep thinking about it and if you have ideas or recommendations let me and my readers know.

January 12, 2008 by Jon Gatrell

WordPress Upgrade

So I originally wrote a very short upgrade post on my upgrading to WordPress 2.3 and declared it a CRAZY success, the good news it went well, except it wasn’t install and go. I did how ever prove that nothing is un-doable with a little patience. So my recommendations:

1. Actually backup your database: I spent 30 minutes worried, that I was essentially in a do over mode. I had the exported the XML file, but that’s not all that’s necessary. So for piece of mind, do it.

2. Follow the instructions: I deactivated all the plugins, but reactivated them all at once. It took me a while to realize that my google site map doesn’t work. So I’ll find a new one.

3. Not all tagging systems are importable, but you do get a tag cloud.

4. You may need to edit your template to show associated tags and remove whitespace from some random include file I have already forgot – sry. Bring your logic and php skills team.

So I have two minor questions:

1. Anyone know of a conversion tool for SimpleTags, a plugin for Technorati tags?

2. So should I display my tags in a post or just in the cloud?

I’m still a very please wordpress user, since their instructions were correct and they have created a true productized upgrade. I was able to clean up some of my categories as well.

October 24, 2007 by Jon Gatrell