Home Wealth Project
Extensive Research On How To Build Wealth From The Comfort Of Your Own Home.
The Smart Videomarketers Handbook
Nov 10th
In Depth Guide To Using Video To Increase Sales/conversions. Full Setup Details For Beginners And Experienced Marketers Looking To Use Video Marketing.
The Smart Videomarketers Handbook
Win 91.3% Of All Your Sports Bets Following Smart Money!
Sep 14th
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The Complete Idiot’s Guide to WordPress Is Smart Reading for all Bloggers
Aug 28th
Many people do not want to admit to their weaknesses, and sometimes they find ways to make light of their foibles–or at least enjoy a comedian’s light satire. Jeff Foxworthy once joked how being a redneck means “a glorious absence of sophistication.”
So imagine how refreshing admitting to a lack of glorious WordPress sophistication can be with a book like The Complete Idiot’s Guide to WordPress by Susan Gunelius (@susangunelius). You can say, “Yes, I don’t know much about one of the most widely used content management systems around.” But one read will give you the sophistication you want and the courage to implement what you’ve learned. That’s what I gained after receiving a review copy in the mail.
Learn the WordPress essentials from a designer’s perspective
The book covers the basics, essentially explaining the significant difference between .org and .com versions of WordPress, as well as how categories, pages and tags are used. The book’s best guidance is a result of Gunelius’s reliance on Web designers’ experience. For example, she recommends the plugin All for One SEO by Joost de Valk, a Web designer favorite in the blogosphere.
As a result, the explanations are technical enough (including webpage coding references) without requiring you to be a Web designer to appreciate the information. Now, this may be somewhat expected, since available e-commerce and website WordPress templates can be installed with minimal coding experience. But in showing what you can do with a WordPress blog, Gunelius gets it right.
Gunelius also inserts paragraphs that breadcrumb (that is, track back) to related material. The book is well structured and illustrated so you can jump around to segments as needed. Sections called “Least You Need to Know” summarize just enough to jar your reading memory from the last time you picked up the book.
What you will learn reading The Complete Idiot’s Guide to WordPress
- How to create policies regarding comments, privacy, and terms and conditions of usage
- A few words about CSS and HTML
- How to manage feeds and subscriptions
- The subtle differences among categories, pages and posts, as well as managing hierarchy and navigation
- How to use links and polls
- How to insert advertising into your blog
The books also approaches many topics with do-it-yourself determination. You can learn how to install WordPress.org into a host, even though many hosting services also offer WordPress.org as part of their packages. I think this makes the book a solid value – so much is said about starting sites without having to know Web design code, but it’s still important to understand the role that code can play. Plus the book makes customization possible. (Think of it as learning how to add a custom header on a Mustang you have long wanted to customize.)
Tips for growing traffic are grounded in realistic expectations. If you are used to reading make-money-with-blogging-overnight come-ons on the Web, you’re in for a welcome treat with this guide. The suggestions are sage ideas to manage your blog once you have it set up. You may find other opinions online, but few will be as well crafted as Gunelius’ recommendations.
The SEO chapter is short, but serviceable in getting your content prepped for the search engine gods. A subsequent chapter on Web analytics is bare-bones and brief, covering standard definitions and installation. But its placement (wisely separate from the SEO chapter) emphasizes its importance in understanding blog content performance beyond keywords and how bloggers can adapt their promotion plans.
If you are new to blogging, you’ll gain a lot from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to WordPress even if you decide to use Blogger, Joomla or another platform instead. If you’re a WordPress user already, you’ll gain new insights that will take your content to the next level.
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to WordPress Is Smart Reading for all Bloggers
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
GoalsOnTrack – Smart Goal Setting Software
Aug 11th
GoalsOnTrack is a web-based tool that allows you to set goals and sub goals, manage tasks, build habits, keep goal journal, visualize your goals with vision board, etc. High conversion rate with loyal long term customers
GoalsOnTrack – Smart Goal Setting Software
The Smart People Are on Twitter and Other Online Strategies
Jun 16th
By now all of us – or at least most of us – know that we need a website and that the question is what we should do with it, not whether it should exist. Yet I meet small business owners, almost weekly, who don’t have websites and are still deciding what to do about it (if anything at all). On the flip side, I also meet business owners who have brochure sites—the kind of Web presence that never changes, never shares and never connects. It is better than having nothing. But in a world that seems to crave more and more connection, adding something more than just directions to your website is important.
Sure, it is easier to build a brochure site and forget about it (been there, done that). But the bottom line for small businesses is this: We cannot afford to miss out on the opportunity to connect with our people (target market) on their terms.
So where are they? Online? On blogs? On Facebook? On Twitter?
To know where your clients are, you have to know who they are and this includes
- what they like
- where they shop
- how they spend
- what they like to do
- the kinds of things they talk about
If you can put yourself in their shoes (which is easier when you are a part of the market you serve), then you can figure out where they are and what they like — and cater to it.
Hubspot.com recently released 100 Awesome Marketing Stats, Charts & Graphs. This report is a synthesis of marketing data from sources like BlogHer, MarketingSherpa, Comscore and Ad-ology. They say that their sources used original data and research to support their conclusions. In other words, Hubspot did the heavy lifting and consolidated what they consider to be the key online marketing information into one place. The list gives some insight into where people are online and what they are doing.
A few things stood out to me.
1. Millions Are Online
There are a lot of people online (75 percent of U.S. adults) searching for products, local stores, news, advice and more. As small business owners, our products, our local store, our news and our advice should be online too. But it needs to be relevant and put into a language that connects with the reader. In other words, our news doesn’t matter unless it’s important to our audience. How you say it makes the difference.
2. Most Are on Facebook
Chances are that if your people are online, then they are probably on Facebook (93 percent of U.S. adult Internet users). You may want to get that fan page up and give your (potential) clients a chance to “like” you and connect.
3. Email Still Matters
Email is still the preferred way of sharing content. It is the top activity that people engage in online and the top way they share information (Slide on page 95, Chadwick Martin Bailey, September 2010)
4. The Smart People Are on Twitter
I am not trying to be funny (well, a little). Hubspot referenced a report from Edison Research that highlighted the education level of Twitter users. It seems that in comparison to the general population, they are more educated and early adopters who are ready to test and respond to the latest products and services. The Twitter community (21 million) is not the large volume that the Facebook community (152 million) is, but they are educated and focused, making Twitter the perfect place for business networking and relationship building.
4. You Need a Web Home
You need a place online—a website, a blog—that your Facebook and Twitter accounts can send people to. You need a spot that adds value to your clients and gives them a reason to remain connected to you before, during and after purchases. And you need to own that space, build it up and strategize around it (your website).
We have to work to do. But with the right advice, the right tools and a consistently applied strategy, we can get it all done–and get results.
The Smart People Are on Twitter and Other Online Strategies
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
Smart Money – Make A Living From Betfair.
May 22nd
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8 Ways Smart Phones Have Changed Business
Feb 18th
With each passing year, businesses must change their approach to accommodate the rapidly changing elements of modern technology; television is fading and social media is on the rise, our approach to productivity has been totally rewired, and — perhaps most prominently — smart phones and tablets are taking over the world.
Here are eight of the ways that smart phones have revolutionized our conception of business.
1. Email and Response Times
Email has done a lot to change the way we think of business communication, and likewise, smart phones have done a lot to change how we think of emails.
While it was once standard to let emails pile up consistently and create responses in batches, instantly checking your messages has become something of an expectation for serious businesspeople. As such, the expected response time for any urgent message has decreased from “one to three business days” to about “two to twelve hours.”
2. Increased Attention to Social Networks
Social networks have already ramped up in popularity and importance for businesses. However, thanks to the constant attention users pay to their smart phone social networking apps, this medium has become the single greatest source of word-of-mouth traffic.
3. Affordable Mobile App Alternatives
A typical suite of productivity software for a computer will run you about $50 per license. For smart phone apps, the quality is shockingly similar but the price falls in the $3 to $10 range. Additionally, many companies provide free “light” versions that are supported by mobile ads.
There are tons of mobile apps available now for all platforms- something that has come with the evolution of cell phones. The interactive IG below (I can’t embed it, but click it it to go to the interactive version).
4. Easier Travel Opportunities
Going on business trips has never been easier. Not only can you find plane tickets and low hotel prices at a moment’s notice, but you can find your way around the new area with ease thanks to mobile maps and GPS navigation utilities.
5. Mobile Advertising Has Taken Off
Mobile ads pay for a huge portion of app developers’ time. The reason, of course, is that businesses have found that these often seen and clicked ads can be very lucrative when appropriately targeted and placed.
6. Increased Telecommuting Opportunities
Ten years ago, the idea of working entirely from home for an outside employer existed but was very off the beaten path. Now, thanks to modern technology, cloud computing, and devices like smart phones, telecommuting positions are being offered by a large chunk of major companies.
7. Lowered Technology Costs
It used to be that equipping a road warrior for mobile business cost thousands of dollars. Now you can grab a smart phone for as little as about $100 with a contract, and the price of these devices is only decreasing.
8. Less Dead Time
Businesspeople can now continue to be productive regardless of their location. A bus ride commute means a chance to catch up on emails and reading, business trips won’t create huge lulls in production, and emergencies can be tended as they crop up.
It can be something of a challenge to adapt to a world being created by smart phones.
However, for businesses and consumers alike, this whirring-fast, brilliantly intelligent modern technology will save time, effort, and money while introducing an impressive array of new opportunities on its own.
View full post on Business Pundit
Five ingredients of smart online commerce
Jan 5th
While it might be more fun to rant about broken online forms and systems, we can learn a lot from sites that aren’t broken as well.
Consider the Ibex store. Here are five things they do that make them successful online:
- They sell a product you can’t buy at the local store. This is easily overlooked and critically important. Because it’s unique, it’s worth seeking out and talking about. Just because you built a site doesn’t mean I care. At all. But if you build a product I love, I’ll help you.
- They understand that online pictures are free. Unlike a print catalog, extra pictures don’t cost much. Make them big. Let me see the nubbiness or the zipper or the way you make things.
- They use smart copy (but not too much).
- They are obsessed with permission. Once you sign up, you’ll get really good coupons and discounts by email. Not too often, but often enough that my guess is that they make most of their sales this way. 25% discount on a product just like a product you love–just before Valentine’s day? Sign me up.
- They aren’t afraid to post reviews. Even critical ones.
No site is perfect, of course, and I hesitate to tell you that this one is. I’m sure there are glitches and your mileage may vary. But the checkout is simple and the customer service, while not trying to be Zappos, is pretty good too.
Penguin Magic, I just realized, follows all five of these rules as well. While the site is very different in look and feel (and has a different audience), they’re using the same principles.
The amazing thing to me is that none of this is particularly difficult to do, yet it’s rare. The state of the art of online retailing is moving very very slowly.
View full post on Seth’s Blog
Book Review: The Smart Swarm
Dec 30th
For being at the top of the food chain, humans aren’t terribly evolved. Give us a complex situation like, say, a credit meltdown with a zero accountability, and we drape a TARP and hope it will just go away. Individual humans just aren’t good at making hard decisions in complicated situations.
That said, a smart, carefully tuned group of us could be. Ants, which aren’t too smart as individuals, do it. Bees do it. Even educated humans do it, given the right circumstances.
A smart swarm is “a group of individuals who respond to one another and to their environment in ways that give them power, as a group, to cope with uncertainty, complexity and change,” according to the National Geographic senior editor Peter Miller, whose book The Smart Swarm: How Understanding Flocks, Schools and Colonies Can Make Us Better at Communicating, Decision Making, and Getting Things Done dives into the dynamics of how large groups function in nature. Miller uses the relatively new science of understanding flocks, schools, and colonies to make his points about how smart swarms operate.
This “science of collaboration” is relevant to business, especially considering how much the Internet has boosted human collaboration. Ants in a colony assign just the right number of workers to each job every day—can you imagine the competitive advantages of having similar flexibility in your own company? Miller explains how businesses use the mechanics of the smart swarm to optimize manufacturing, routing trucks, networking phones, and more.
Content
Each of The Smart Swarm’s well-written chapters features an example from nature—insects, fish, birds—to illustrate principles, or defining features, of a smart swarm. Miller peppers in knowledge from a span of other fields, too, including economics, political science, government, computer science, mathematics, robotics, physics, and even The Lord of the Rings. Each chapter also includes a case study; subjects include Boeing, the Iraqi municipal government, and the CIA.
Between the introduction and conclusion, the book has five story- and example-rich chapters:
• Chapter 1 explores how ants optimize changing conditions, followed by a case study on how gas supplier American Air Liquide uses a computer system with an ant-based algorithm to save it an estimated $20 million per year.
• Chapter 2 demonstrates the necessity of diversity of knowledge and friendly competition in a smart swarm using honeybees, Best Buy, Boeing, and a small town in Vermont.
• Chapter 3 uses the electric grid, termites, national intelligence, and Hurricane Katrina to illustrate how smart, adaptable networks work.
• Chapter 4 uses flocks of sparrows, caribou and animation in Lord of the Rings to explore how individuals each play a subtle part in keeping their entire group on course.
• Chapter 5 explores what triggers peaceful swarms of locusts to go into mass destruction mode and create a plague; it applies examples to crowd disasters in Saudi Arabia and the Phillippines as well as market bubbles.
What do you get out of all this research, case studies, and examples? A handful of principles that define a smart swarm, including:
• Individuals aren’t smart, but the colony is. A smart swarm self-organizes “from the bottom up, as the result of interactions among many parts.”
• A smart swarm distributes group problem solving through individual interactions. Miller uses the beach as a way to illustrate this. If you go to beach, you find a space for your towel that’s a comfortable distance from everyone else; if you look at crowded beach from aerial view, it’s a mosaic of evenly-spaced towels. Also, if a couple of people stand up and stare into the water, then a couple more do it, pretty soon everyone will be staring into the water in a collective state of alarm.
• The more choices a smart swarm has, the better it performs. A smart swarm made up of individuals with a diverse skill set leads to more choices. Assuming the group is structured right and given an appropriate task—necessary for it to be a smart, not dumb, group–friendly competition of ideas will let the best strategy percolate upwards. The smart swarm will then execute that strategy.
• Smart swarms are self-healing: “In an ant colony or a beehive, many individuals can fail to perform their jobs and the system still functions just fine, because many other individuals, sensing something different in their surroundings, adjust their behavior accordingly,” writes Miller.
Thoughts
Thanks to increased global interdependence and lightning-speed communication, business and government are itching for a model to replace the old hierarchical one. The Smart Swarm points us in the right direction.
This wasn’t clear to me at first, because each chapter in the book is so rich with examples and diverse stories that I had could only ruminate the book’s deeper implications after stepping away from it for a while. It’s a challenge to pick through and grasp everything. I can’t help but think there must be a better way to make each of Miller’s principles more accessible on the first read, eg. listing the principles in bold before the beginning of each chapter.
That said, the Smart Swarm was effective in that it introduced me to a whole new vocabulary and idea set around collaboration. I started reading the book with a preconceived notion that individual experts are the smartest problem solvers; the Smart Swarm cured me of that.
It’s also very well written. Miller includes reams of quotes, references to books, research, and case studies to make his points. He clearly did his homework; his writing integrates everything smoothly.
The Smart Swarm provides relevant, quality information that everyone in the Information Age should know about. For that reason, I recommend it to everyone, with a caveat—it helps if you’re a close reader.
Disclosure: We received a free copy of The Smart Swarm.
View full post on Business Pundit
The Smart Swarm: A Fun and Engaging Way to Learn About Bugs and Business
Nov 7th
Every now and then, I receive calls from publishers asking me which books I would like to review for you. Some of them I turn down. But when I heard the title The Smart Swarm: How Understanding Flocks, Schools, and Colonies Can Make Us Better at Communicating, Decision Making and Getting Things Done, I quickly said yes and asked them to send me a copy.
I’m interested in this topic because the crowdsourcing trend has been playing itself out on the Internet as technology allows us to collaborate. I’m also wondering how the concept of crowdsourcing, collaboration and sharing affects concepts of intellectual property. We’re swiftly moving from an environment of rugged individualism to collaboration. And I’m curious to see how this book brings those concepts together.
Get ready to “bee” entertained
I could tell this was going to be a fun read because the chapters have “bug” names like Ants, Termites, Honeybees, Locusts, etc. But the content of each chapter is really a business problem and the lessons these “swarmy” community-based bugs can teach us on how to solve them.
The first story is of Southwest Airlines assessing how they board planes. Should they stay with the unassigned seating policy or not? Is it faster? Will it harm their brand if they switch? To find the answer, Southwest looked at how ants organize themselves.
Swarm reels you in by getting you interested in a familiar business problem, and then takes you into the world of scientists and researchers who study bug colonies and how they solve similar problems. Throughout the book Miller asks us to think about what we can learn from this research. Where does it make sense to abandon our command-and-control hierarchies for some of the strategies that our bug buddies have been using for millions of years?
Swarm combines business and science to get us thinking
I didn’t read anything about Peter Miller (not even the bio on the book jacket) before reading the book. I wanted to get a flavor for the book and for what was being offered before applying the filter of who the author is and what they are bringing to the party. I was also running a personal experiment. I wanted to see if I could guess whether the book was written by a journalist or by a subject matter expert. I guessed journalist and I was right.
Peter Miller is a senior editor at National Geographic. No wonder the science was so much fun in this book. Miller does a fantastic job of bringing bugs to life. He does this early on in the Ants chapter by referencing the movie Antz to give those of us who know nothing about actual bug behavior a reference point, then leading us from what we know to what we might not know.
Miller brings that same level of characterization, personalization and storytelling skill to the business problems addressed in the book. This is the main reason I enjoyed this book so much–and that I think you will, too.
Lessons from the swarm
From ants: “Instead of trying to keep fine-tuning a system so it will work better and better, maybe what we really ought to be looking for is a rigorous way of saying, OK, that’s good enough. Maybe a smart way to face the unpredictable.”
From bees: “Seek a diversity of knowledge. Encourage a friendly competition of ideas. Use an effective mechanism to narrow your choices.”
From termites: Indirect collaboration involves people making changes to a shared structure, which inspires others to improve it even further. Then the structure becomes part of the creative process. Think of brainstorming or open-source collaboration as an example.
Read Smart Swarm for fun and learning all at once
I’m all about learning how to do something. But every now and then, what I really crave is educational entertainment. Think of Smart Swarm as watching the Discovery Channel in your head. It’s digestible science paired with practical business problems you can relate to. Pick up Smart Swarm and what you’ll get out of this wonderful read is a satisfying mix of knowledge and creative ideas. Not only that, but you’ll also pick up some interesting tidbits for your next cocktail conversation.
The Smart Swarm: A Fun and Engaging Way to Learn About Bugs and Business
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
