One of my favorite features of blogging is the ability for even the non-techie small business owner to get a professional and functional website without the hassel of learning html/css/php or waiting around for a web designer to bump your project to the top of the To Do list.  That’s why I love when I find super functional themes that anyone can use like the Thesis Theme.

I’ll thank my favorite social site Twitter with this find. Someone sent a tweet about about a new blog post and when I went to read the post, I knew this theme was a keeper from first glance.

I am in the process of installing the Thesis WordPress Blog Theme to the new blog of a client. I’ll keep you posted how I like it.

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

Thesis Theme Review

I love it when people get results! Here is the exact email I got from someone that is part of one of my online business groups. Pay It Forward, after you read his story go visit Even Better Consulting and bookmark him. Leave your story and url in the comment section here below and I’ll visit your site and return the favor

…………………………………………………………………

So yesterday Kristen asked me about how my website traffic was coming
along. I explained that traffic has been very low b/c I havent
started any traffic campaigns yet. I just got enough “cornerstone”
posts up to make the website worth looking at.

Then I looked at my Google Analytics account this morning…

I got over 100 unique visitors yesterday! I have been averaging
around 5 visitors/day since beginning my business. For me, 100
visitors in one day is like…amazing.

I started “stumbling” through the numbers to figure out what happened…

If you remember Kristen said that she “Stumbled” my website after
giving it a look last night. Meaning she bookmarked me on the site
called StumbleUpon (http://www.stumbleupon.com/). When Kristen did
that…it (darn near) immediately shot almost 100 visitors to my homepage.

What does that mean? Social bookmarking drives traffic!

This gives me a real shot in the arm. I realize that this traffic may
only be a short pop, but it gives me hope. It PROVES to me that I can
get this thing off of the ground if I keep working. I’m encouraged.

Kristen you are more than welcomed to use this “testimonial/story” as
you build your biz. Incorporate it any way you wish. I’ll even
create a small video for you to use if you wish. Yes…I know how to
do that. Ha!

And for anyone else who would like to “Stumble”, “Digg”, or
“Delicious” me…there is a “Share It” icon at the bottom of all of my
pages. Just click it and choose your social bookmarking site of choice.

Thanks so much! Keep going.

Alzay

http://www.EvenBetterConsulting.com

………………………………………………………………..

p.s. that wasn’t a bribe or anything… just hoping everyone who is in the same boat and just needs that little nudge of help will band together to help eachother along the way.

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

Moms Business Coach Success

One of the biggest advantages of using the internet heavily for business is the number of multi-tasking “tools” that are available to people.   Everyone has their preferences and their own tools that work best for their niche. But since I was asked the question, I’ll give you the list of my internet tools that I personally use.

First, my foundation, my Internet Browser.

I started using FireFox about 6 months ago and I never looked back.  I do also use FLOCK on occasion if I am doing heavy social networking, but I really love all the functions I have built inside FireFox to get the most of my work time.

Tools

Once I installed the FireFox browser that took a non-techie like me about 4 minutes I was then excited to see their extensive list of “add-ons“.

Here is the list of the add-ons I personally use:

• Alexa Sparky
• BetterGmail
• Clipmarks
• FireFTP
• LaterLoop
• Rankchecker
• ScreenGrab
• SearchStatus
• SEO for FireFox
• Shareaholic
• Socialmedia for Firefox
• Squidoo
• Stumbleupon
• TwitterFox

Above is a picture of what my browser actually looks like on the top.

What do they all DO?

Alexa Sparky

Gives you simple Alexa Data in your Toolbar
BetterGmail

The best Gmail grease monkey scripts in one plug in
Clipmarks

Instead of copying and pasting links, Clipmarks is like adding a pair of scissors to your browser, letting you capture exactly what you want others to see (text, images or video). Your clips are saved on clipmarks.com and can easily be syndicated to FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook or other sites. You can also post anything you clip directly to your blog (supports WordPress, Blogger, Typepad and more) or send it directly to friends or co-workers via email. Clipmarks also gives you a way to help the environment by printing only the parts of a page that you need. By printing just what you need, you’ll save ink, paper and trees, thus making a contribution to a cleaner environment. Your clip collection is accessible from any computer with an internet connection, including your iPhone, Blackberry, or other mobile device.
FireFTP

FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers.
LaterLoop

LaterLoop actually is the one of a couple add-on that I use that is not listed on FireFox. I just found it about a week ago and am excited about learning how to use this tool. The biggest plus to me is marking something for the ability to read it later or read it offline. I’m still playing with it, but it came highly recommended.

Rankchecker by SEO Book

Want to know where your website ranks in the search results? The Firefox Rank Checker extension allows you to easily check your website rankings in Google (US and international), Yahoo, and Microsoft Live search- enter your URL and your Keyword and it will give you quick results of where you are in the page ranks. No more sifting through 10 pages of search results searching for your website!
ScreenGrab

Screengrab saves entire webpages as images…
SearchStatus

Display the Google PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete ranking anywhere in your browser, along with fast keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info and more.
SEO for FireFox
Shareaholic

Do you spend a whole lot of time looking at things on the Web, and end up finding piles of things that you want to share with other folks? Tired of copying and pasting endless URLs? Shareaholic allows you to share, bookmark, and e-mail web pages quickly via a wide array of web 2.0 social websites without cluttering up your browser! Shareaholic currently supports: digg, del.icio.us, facebook, foxiewire, friendfeed, google bookmarks, google reader, healthranker, kaboodle, magnolia, mixx, myspace, pownce, reddit, simpy, stumbleupon, streakr, truemors, tumblr, twitter, ycombinator, bzzster, etc. * Shareaholic was the Grand Prize winner of Extend Firefox 2, a Mozilla sponsored contest for the best Firefox addons
Socialmedia for Firefox
Squidoo

Official Squidoo extension update for Firefox 3.0
Stumbleupon

StumbleUpon discovers web sites based on your interests, learns what you like and brings you more.
TwitterFox

TwitterFox is a Firefox extension that notifies you of your friends’ statuses of Twitter. You can set the refresh timing and a small box will pop up on your bottom toolbar when tweets are refreshed. This also gives you three tab settings for all your tweets, those that are directed to you, and one for direct messages.

One more add-on that can be useful is the Internet Explorer tab with the IE add-on. Especially if you want to do quick checks on how formatting looks in different browsers.

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

My Internet Browser

Online Marketing for your home based business can be a time consuming process and trying to complete with millions of other online businesses can become disheartening.

However, there are ways to simplify your online marketing or “get more bang for your buck” with your efforts.

I have had a MyBlogLog account since March ’08 and have seen a fair amount of website traffic stats from people finding my site from the network. So, I decided to put a little more effort into learning how to use this free resource and here is what I found. Please note this is an introduction to MyBlogLog. Like all tools and resources you can get into heavy details but this is high level, beginner application stuff.

What is MyBlogLog?

Easy way to define MyBlogLog is by the Wiki:

MyBlogLog is a social network for the blogger community that is based in part on interactions facilitated by a popular web widget that many members install on their blog.[1] Bloggers sign up for free accounts on MyBlogLog and can initiate a blog community for one or more blogs they author. Other registered members can subscribe to these communities, effectively bookmarking them for future reading and sharing them with their own contacts. Bloggers can then display widgets on their sites which show MyBlogLog online community members who have recently visited their page. These widgets also contain links to visiting members’ community pages, and are one way in which users connect with one another. All members can see certain basic information about how many people visit their blog, what links they clicked and where they come from. Members may also view more extensive information about traffic on their site for a small monthly fee.

One more side note: Yahoo has acquired MyBlogLog and I think that offers good insight not only into the uses of the site but as an indicator of how Yahoo views social networking potential.

How do you use MyBlogLog?

When I originally joined MyBlogLog I thought it was only a way to see who visited your site in a nifty little widget in my sidebar.  However, I have recently learned about the various other “powers” of this tool when used the right way.

Visit MyBlogLog and when you select the “Join/SignUp” button you will be given the below screen.

That’s right! You are seeing it right, you can simply sign in with your Yahoo ID since they are owned by them it does make sense.

The benefit of using your Yahoo ID is you will find when you hop from one blog to another it automatically recognizes you, as long as you are signed in to your account.  I’m sure you have seen a blog that has the MyBlogLog widget on the sidebar that shows the latest visitors and once you have your own MyBlogLog account, Voila! You will show up there too!  It’s an easy and fun way to see who is actually visiting your website.

Adding MyBlogLog Recent Visitor Widget to Your Blog

If you have a blog, and a MyBlogLog account you can create the above widget and customize the colors and options to fit your own theme, well, as long as it fits one of their seven color options.

For the Self Hosted WordPress Blog, this is sooo easy by simply adding the WordPress MyBlogLog Recent Visitor Plug-in.

If you don’t have a Self Hosted WordPress Blog you can follow the instructions that will fit your blog set up by following the instructions on MyBlogLog.

As you may have noticed by now, I am a big fan of conversational marketing. So, how can you use this as an effective, community building tool?

Now that you can see WHO is visiting your blog and it’s not just an IP address in your web stat counter you have a couple options to take it a step further.

If the person leaves a comment, return the favor and visit their site if they leave a site url in the comments as most do.

Or as Pixelhead suggests: “If the person does not leave a comment, but shows up on your widget, click on their avatar and either: leave them a message on Mybloglog or visit their site and leave a comment. Mybloglog requires you to add them as a contact before you can leave them a message on their profile page. In the message thank them for visiting your site and I would suggest making a comment about their site after you have visited it of course.”

Your MyBlogLog Profile

When you login to your MyBlogLog profile you will need to add your blog under “My Sites and Services”

VERY IMPORTANT:  You also have the option to add your RSS Feed- take the opportunity and add your Feed both your original feed and your feedburner feed!

Once you have your blog settings created and the system works on your screen capture move along and click on the “ADD SERVICE” option.  This is where you can add all your other social networking and make your own mini-powerhouse!

Add as many of your accounts as you can, and if you don’t have an account with one of the options, make one.

Connect with Cyber Friends

If you are interested in using social networking to create a group of followers and grow your network you can use this site to help you connect the pieces. You can find your fellow cyber friends with these easy steps:

1. As I stated above add your profiles. They make it easy for you by even making the list and providing the initial part of the url for you, all you need to do is enter your personal username for that account. So go pull up that spreadsheet I told you to make earlier and just copy and paste. It took me about 10 minutes to populate all the fields.

If you took my other piece of advice on trying to keep your usernames the same or similiar then MyBlogLog even has a button that you can click that will search all the sites for you using your common username and populate the fields for you.

Privacy Note: At the bottom of the screen you will see that they state “Account information you share on this page will be used to retrieve your publicly-available updates from those sites for re-distribution across MyBlogLog.com and Yahoo!. Public updates are also available to third parties via an RSS feed of your profile as well as the MyBlogLog AP”

2. At the bottom of your profile page you will see the link for the “friender”

You will have a few options under different tabs. The image above shows the “connector” tab. This tab shows all the services that I added to my profile and what other friends interact on what service with simple Green X’s. This means that they also have an account with that service.

If you want to connect with that person on that service simply click the Green X.  You will then get a blue check mark in that square to show that you have connected there as well.

For anyone that has created multiple social networking profiles you will see how powerful this is. Instead of wandering aimlessly and searching and adding one here one there, boom, you can create a very solid network very quickly.

Now, in addition to the “connector” tab you have the “friender” tab. Click on the “Find my Friends” tab and you will see all the cyber friends that you can simply click a button and add to your network.

The downfall of this tool, as all tools and resources have potential downfalls, is the ability to have those people that don’t really care about you or your blog or your business and just want to make as many contacts as possible and get a really big number in their profile or worse use it for spam or porn. I can’t make them stop but I think the advantage of easily connecting with like minded people outweighs this potential issue.

One more important feature: I BELIEVE, I saw a post somewhere, and now I can’t find it (don’t you hate when that happens?) that when anyone you connected with updates any of their services you are notified automatically.  I’m going to experiment with this one a little bit because obviousely, if that is true, then that has a great potential- like if you have 300 connections and you make a blog post and it updates your Facebook and MySpace page and notifies all 300 of your connections that you made a new blog post.. all automatically… are you catching my drift on the potential here?? So if you know about this feature or see another post about it, please leave a comment.

Blog Traffic

Depending on your blog you may have little traffic or a few thousand visitors a month, that’s the honest truth about blog traffic. While you can do your best to stimulate and promote your blog, you never know if readers will catch on or not. However, using MBL can help by performing a couple easy and fast steps.

Utilize the Search Box

• Enter your keyword or blog topic and see what other blogs are closely related to yours.
• Click on the profile avatars of members that show up and add them as contacts after you visit their sites and determine they are a good match to network.
• Click on the communities that show up for the search term, and join the communities.
• Visit the sites and join in the conversation on these blogs by making meaningful comments. This will result in visits to your blog from both the site owner and visitors to the site that may like your comments.

RSS Feeds

Take the work out of tracking your MyBlogLog account by subscribing to your own RSS feed in your reader or adding the RSS feed of those in your community you like. RSS has so many great opportunities that many people haven’t even started to use. But, for more traffic and backlink potential you can add your MBL RSS feed to RSS directories. And by the way, you can add the RSS feeds to your community members as well because they are all in one place in your profile.

Tools

If you are a serious blogger with multiple blogs then finding your real community and connecting with your readers has big potential.  Here is a great option for you, and I’ll be honest I just found this but can’t believe the potential it offers. MyBlogLog Tools by SoloSEO. This company has created tools that specialize in MBL that allow you to:

• Compare your visitors
• Compare your communities
• Compare your communities between contacts

I mean really, talk about getting to know who your contacts are!  Why keep spending hours and months on what I call “hopeful marketing” when you can have the people that actually have the same interest and you already know like you delivered to your inbox?

Analyzing

Back in your profile, under your sites you will see the option for “statistics”.

They will provide you with a piece of code for you to copy and paste into your blog template.  Once you have it in place and it can start tracking your site details.

In the future that link will bring you to a page showing you some great details and insights into who is visiting.

The FREE option will only give you the top 10 results but you will see each tab with it’s own tab and they provide you with the link details of where your readers came from, what they viewed and where they clicked. They also provide a summary of how many readers and pageviews you had.

Upgrade to MyBlogLog Pro for $3.00 a month via PayPal and you will have access to real time stats and longer lists. I find the stats in the free version fine for my needs.

Summary

Like I stated in the beginning, this is a general overview of MyBlogLog to further your home based business reach and kick around the idea of conversational marketing, but I hope it now helps you see the potential for using this site is much greater then you expected.

Using this as a way to build your community and further your online home based business reach can be cheaper and faster then more conventional methods of marketing.

If I missed an important beginner point, please feel free to leave a comment.

Additional MyBlogLog Resources:

MyBlogLog Blog

TopRankBlog Interview with MyBlogLog CEO

MyBlogLog on Social Media Marketing Explained

home based business

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

Your Personal Guide to MyBlogLog