I LOVE WORDPRESS!

As a small business website developer I’ve seen a lot of content management systems over the past few years including the humble notepad to Macromedia’s Dream Weaver to the more flavoursome web publishing systems like Expression Engine. But honestly WordPress in it’s current evolution is BRILLIANT!

Using WordPress I can create a site in under 2 minutes and have it ready for my clients to populate with their information. Here’s a quick video that shows how easy it is to use WordPress. I LOVE IT!

And there you go, a website created in under 2 minutes. How cool is that? I LOVE WordPress!!!

You Need To Know This
Now as I mentioned in the Video you need to know a few things before you REALLY start to enjoy the power of using WordPress for your website. You need to know

• How to backup your Wordpress site
• How to keep your WordPress site updated and
• What plugins to use to keep it safe, secure and add cool functionality

Now you could go online and spend hours researching all of these things or you could just attend a 1-day workshop with a WordPress Guru.

Enter The WP Guy – Tony Cosentino

Tony Cosentino is The WordPress Guy for small business. His website is The WP Guy and contains a tonne of useful and orgainsed information that will help you get started on Word Press.

He is also having a workshop on the 16th of December 2010 that will help you get you up and running quite quickly. You can then use the period over the Christmas Break to hone your WordPress skills and be ready to launch your website in the new year.

Tony tells me there’s only 10 places available (he likes to keep classes small because it allows him to deliver more personalised 1on1 training) so make sure you REGISTER NOW!

Good luck with your WordPress endeavours!

AJ~ (@ICT_GURU)

I seriously love Twitter Chats! I learn so much from them and get to hang out with some cool people that might end up doing business with me. One of the chat’s I attend is #blogchat and basically it’s a meeting of some really cool bloggers from around the world sharing their insights and wisdom on everything and anything to do with blogging. It’s PURE GOLD!

This week I asked a few of the Gurus what is the best piece of advice they would give to someone who was thinking about starting a blog and this is what they came up with:

See what I mean, PURE GOLD! Thanks to all the Gurus that helped me share the wisdom.

#Blogchat is on Monday 11:00am-12:00pm EST in Australia or Sunday 8pm-9pm CST in the US.

Will I see you there?

ICT Guru~

p.s. Are you a blogger? What’s your best tip for someone thinking about starting a blog?

Uber popular social media site Facebook launched in February 2004 and a mere six years later it has over 500 million users. Imagine though if it had existed years ago…

The Australian Federal Election 2010 is upon us and I’ve just seen a video of Tony Abbott, leader of the oposition party being quizzed on his plans for an alternative broadband solution. When asked about this policy his response is “I’m no Bill Gates here, and I don’t claim to be any kind of tech head”, and when pressed further to explain if he knew what “Peak Speed” was he replied “…again if you’re going to get me into a technical argument then I’m going to loose it.”

Is it really technical?

So here’s the thing Tony. Maybe about 10 or 15 years ago technology infrastructure could be considered amongst general society as purely technical concepts but we’ve come a LONG way since then. These days technology is interwoven into society that it is a critical part of our day to day lives and it’s EVERYWHERE! As a small business technology coach I find your perception of what is technical and what isn’t technical is severely skewed and slightly annoying.

The peak speed question relates to the maximum speed achievable based on the capacity of the network. Think of it in terms of cars on a freeway. More lanes means more cars and greater traffic flow i.e. more data flowing through at a higher speed. In a debate about technology, the idea is to convince people that you have the better infrastructure and this involves knowing how it will benefit Australians. You don’t need to know the technology specifics. Again bit like explaining how a car works – an engine burns a combination of fuel and air which drives the wheels. That’s not technical is it? Wouldn’t an average person understand that?

The alternative

Now onto Labour’s National Broadband Network (NBN) plans. I watched a Current Affair a couple of weeks ago when they interviewed the recipients of the new NBN in Tasmania. MY GOD I was stunned. The program featured a young couple who were thrilled with the new speed, stating they loved the ability to download movies a lot quicker and play online games and get rid of their phone line. We’re shelling out 43 billion dollars so that people can download movies quicker?!? You’ve got to be kidding me…

The program did feature a business owner’s perspective of the NBN. A physio therapist who could now go out and visit a patient, video them and then come back to their office and send the video onto a specialist for further examination. Sounds great but you can currently do this already with our existing network without spending 43 billion dollars on an upgrade.

NBN is meant to be fundamentally important to business growth in Australia as it provides much needed infrastructure to allow us to leverage technology better to save time and money in our business, but it’s being sold as “quicker movie downloads” and “play online games”. I was seriously confuzzled.

I needed to clear things up so last week, when I had breakfast with the Federal Minister for Small Business - Dr Craig Emmerson, I asked him exactly why the NBN was being touted as a business solution yet being rolled out into regional areas that wouldn’t maxmise bang for buck from day one. His crowd pleasing response was “Tasmanians are special people” and then he followed up with the proper answer that it needed to be close to the exchange and regional enough to measure the overall impact of the new technology on people’s lives. Which is a fair call but then he said something that really drove it home for me. He said that no one really needed to build the Sydney Harbour Bridge but they did and people used it. Touche`

So to summarise, in the red corner we have Tony Abott, a potential leader of a country who doesn’t understand the difference between technical and non technical items in a society that technology is so tightly intergrated into; versus the blue corner, Gillard and Co, who are building a network critical for business but selling it as a pleasure tool. Oh and then you have Conroy floating around somewhere screaming digital murder at Google and wanting to filter everything.

Anyone want to buy a bridge? Slightly used…

ICT Guru~

I hope you’ve enjoyed our “Top 10 Mistakes Small Business Owners Make Online” series. Having a website for your business is one of the greatest marketing assets you have as it has the ability to market your business 24/7 to a wide variety of audiences, including those outside of your personal reach. The thing is though that you’ve got to spend time and effort making this marketing asset work for you. This is where BLKMGK Go-Live comes in.

Go-Live is the culmination of my 14 years experience as a website developer and I’ve put together the best tips and tricks to educate you on how to build and promote your own website in 3 weeks. It’s a really cool course. Here check it out:

So if you want to avoid making all of the “Top 10 Mistakes Small Business Owners Make Online” and want a little help in doing so, check out BLKMGK Go-Live now! Can you afford not to?

For the last two years usually every meeting that I’ve had with a potential client they always ask the question “Does BLKMGK do SEO?” and my response is always “We do practical SEO” and then I go on to ask them what their understanding of the term “SEO” is: “Being #1 on Google so that people can find our business ”.  Ahh bless them! Somewhere at some point in time they’ve heard   some bright spark talk about getting your website to have a number one listing in Google but the sad thing is that this bright spark doesn’t go on to tell them how much hard work goes into FIRST, getting the listing and SECOND, maintaining it! Say for example you shell out $$bigbucks$$ for a SEO package and then you managed to get ranked as #1 in Google. If someone else shells out $$bigbucks$$ to do the same thing then you’ve got a problem. Or worse and quite common is the way Google changes their ranking formula and all of a sudden you’re both knocked out of being #1.

Here are 3 keys to succeeding at SEO:

1. Get technical. Set up your site with appropriate search engine optimisation tags. Focus on your page titles, key words and description. Key words are gold in the SEO Game.
2. Develop a consistent message. Tie in your content on the website to those same page titles, key words and description so you develop a consistent message throughout your website.
3. Promote, promote, promote! Have your website address on everything. Business cards, email signatures and other promotional material.

There’s heaps more stuff to do on SEO, which is why the experts charge so much when doing it properly. If your budget doesn’t quite stretch to getting one of these experts, focus on the above three techniques to help you get better result from your website.

Good luck!

ICT Guru~

Technology Coach

BLKMGK ICT

p.s. Want to avoid making this mistake? You need to check out BLKMGK Go-Live our 3 week online course that tells you exactly how to build and promote your own website. The best bit is that you don’t have to write any code! It’s a fantastic course so if you’re serious about doing your website properly Sign up for BLKMGK Go-Live now!

Not measuring the result of any of your marketing efforts is sheer madness yet most small business owners forget that their website is part of that marketing mix. They’ll often shell out $$bigbucks$$ for ads in the newspaper or tv or radio and measure those results to see if they get more customers but they’ll never bother to check their website statistics.

The beautiful thing about measuring your website statistics compared to the other forms of advertising is that you can easily see who’s checking out your website and find out lots of things about them. No I’m not talking about their name and address or anything seriously private like that! I’m talking about useful information like where in the world your website visitors are coming from,  what times during the day or week are they visiting your site and what are they typing into the search engines to find your site. This information is GOLD!

Imagine if you could read the minds of your customers to find out what they were thinking in order to sell more to them? Start reviewing your website statistics now!

Good luck!

ICT Guru~

Technology Coach

BLKMGK ICT

p.s. Want to avoid making this mistake? You need to check out BLKMGK Go-Live our 3 week online course that tells you exactly how to build and promote your own website. The best bit is that you don’t have to write any code! It’s a fantastic course so if you’re serious about doing your website properly check out BLKMGK Go-Live now!

Imagine if you wanted to buy a car. Would you go into a car yard that had no cars? Hell no! But what about a car yard that had really dirty cars out the front? Perhaps…but most likely you wouldn’t. Well that’s exactly the same result you are going to get from your website if you don’t keep it up to date. Potential customers will go elsewhere if they feel your website is not up to scratch and in the digital world this can happen in a matter of seconds with a single mouse click to deal with a business that is up to date.

The most common complaint I hear from potential clients about keeping their website up to date is a time factor. They are so busy working on the operation of their business they just don’t have time sit down and update the website but this decreases online credibility.

What we tell our clients is that the best technique for achieving results in this area is to block out a period of time every so often where you sit down and update your website (or get an admin person to do it for you!) and then stay committed to that time. Think of it like organising a meeting with your website.  You don’t have to update your entire website at each sitting, just think about what more have you got to offer visitors to your site since the last time they visited? New products? New services? Specials? A technique that works is having a “Latest News” section and keeping that up to date.

Commit to updating your website so that when potential customers are looking for your products and services they feel confident they’re not buying from a car yard that has dirty cars.

Good luck!

ICT Guru~

Technology Coach

BLKMGK ICT

p.s. Want to avoid making this mistake? You need to check out BLKMGK Go-Live our 3 week online course that tells you exactly how to build and promote your own website. The best bit is that you don’t have to write any code! It’s a fantastic course so if you’re serious about doing your website properly check out BLKMGK Go-Live now!

This one comes from Steven Cooper (@katmatcreations) who is a fellow Technology Guru and I must admit this is one of my pet frustrations as there is no REAL reason for a business to be using a generic email account such as @hotmail, @gmail or @bigpond when they’ve got a domain name and a website set up.

Common responses I hear from potential clients are usually along the lines of “but it’s on a different system so I don’t want to mess with that, I’d rather just stick with what I know already.”

See the thing is in the digital world it’s a matter of credibility. You have to develop this consistency in your entire online message so that people feel comfortable buying from you. Having a website with a domain name yourbusiness.com and then having your email address as businessname@hotmail.com implies that you are still an amateur and afraid to commit to doing things properly in your business.

For our clients we always set up domain name email addresses such as info@business.com or name@businessname.com and then we offer our clients some options:

1. Teach clients about the webmail interface for their email addresses (just like going to hotmail/yahoo/gmail and checking their mail online)
2. Forward all emails from these official accounts to the personal generic email accounts so that they don’t have to keep checking multiple accounts
3. Update their existing email clients such as OutLook to access these official accounts and store email in separate folders.

There are no excuses anymore so get your official email addresses sorted!

ICT Guru~

Technology Coach

BLKMGK ICT

p.s. Want to avoid making this mistake? Check out BLKMGK Go-Live. We’ve spent a fair bit of time putting together this online training course that teaches you how to build and promote your own website in just 3 weeks. Subscribe to the ICT Guru email list and you’ll hear more about it. Don’t worry we hate spam just as much as you do so your info is locked down for our eyes only.

When you use traditional advertising media like radio, tv or newspapers ads you know there’s a good chance that people tuned in will see or hear your ad, but what happens on the internet? How do people tune in there?!? Well if you’ve set your advertising up right it’ll be the same people looking at your website that just saw/heard/read your ad on the radio/tv/newspaper, but you’ve got to set everything up right first.

One of the biggest mistakes I see from small business owners is forking out $$bigbucks$$ to build a great website but then they don’t spend time or effort in trying to promote the website to anyone. It’s like planning a massive birthday party for all you friends and family but forgetting to invite anyone to it!

Simple tips like including your website address on all your brochures, business cards and even your email signature goes a VERY long way to driving traffic to your website.  What about including the website address on your voice mail?

A really good technique to keep people visiting your site is to send out and an email to all of your clients or customers and ask for their feedback on the website. Even if you’ve had it up for awhile, people can go back there and have a look at what you have to offer them or they’ll tell you what they don’t like about your website and it’s up to you to fix it. Start promoting now!

Good Luck!

ICT Guru~

Technology Coach

p.s. Want to avoid making this mistake? We’ve got something very cool coming up. Subscribe to the ICT Guru email list and you’ll hear all about it. Don’t worry we hate spam just as much as you do so your info is locked down for our eyes only.