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Gobbledygook be gone

Pascal — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 06:33:50 +0000

David Meerman Scott has updated his Gobbledygook Manifesto and it is so worth a read. If you are tired, as I am, of “next generation” this, “robust” that, “flexible” such and such, or “world class” stuff, or even “turnkey” thingy, then be sure to read this manifesto.

This short manifesto exposes the overused, mean nothing, catch phrases lots of marketers love to abuse.

His solution is simple, and should appeal to all marketer (yeah, right, one can only dream):

Whenever you set out to write something, you should be writing specifically for one or more of the buyers that you want to reach.

Surely, to do this, you don’t need any catch word, you don’t need any gobbledygook! Be honest, be direct, and you’ll be more effective. Address your potential customer problem in words she would use, not any kind of “ground breaking user friendly best of breed extensible” nonsense!

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Home business Carnival #20

Pascal — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 05:40:30 +0000

The latest edition of the Home Business Carnival is up at Simplify This. Thank you Sanjay for hosting this edition!

As I mentioned last week, I’ll be taking a break for while. If you want to host the carnival, here’s your chance!

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5 on the 5th: worth a read – April 07

Pascal — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 06:52:11 +0000

Here’s a new edition of 5 on the 5th, a highlight of the best, but off-topic submissions to the HomeBusiness Carnival.

Susan reignites the debate on Full vs. Partial feeds. No questions for me, the debate is settled, unless you have something I can’t live without, then you may get away with partial feeds, otherwise, you won’t last very long in my feed list. 3 strikes and you are out! That is, 3 excerpts that don’t grab my attention, and BAM!, you are out. In fact, I only about 1% of my hundreds of feeds have made the cut.

Need Viral Marketing advice, look no further.

To have something you never had:

Have you ever had the amount of money you want to make? (Not hardly, I had huge goals)

Why do you think you will ever have it, if you keep doing the same things over and over and have never gotten the results you wanted previously? Adding, “at some point, you will have to take action to change your results”.

Read the rest of the story.

You are staying on top of your Books, right? Matt Inglot explains how you can.

I kept the best for last: Attention Mapping: The 10-Point Exercise.

The difficult part about designing for attention isn’t deciding what to talk about—it’s deciding what not to talk about. Because you only get a potential customer’s attention for a few seconds (if you’re lucky enough to get it at all) you don’t have luxury of rambling. You have to cover your key points with both speed and strength.

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Take back the Web

Pascal — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 08:33:26 +0000

Today was not a good day for the internet. First I read Seth’s post, then Kathy’s sad and upsetting story directly. Then countless others…

This is just plain and simple not acceptable behavior. Period.

Brad nails it when he says:

Kathy’s story sealed it for me – reputation and trust are at a tipping point and are an issue that is going to have to be dealt with in 2007.

I agree.

And before someone mentions it, no, censorship is not the solution here.

Seth once said:

Have you ever noticed that people you know are far less likely to cut you off in traffic, curse at you, or steal your parking space than treal strangers seem to be? There’s a reason: Anonymity is the enemy of civility.

(From Small is the new Big)

Maybe it’s time we bring civility back, don’t you think?

Kathy, hang in there! We are here to help.

(crossed posted from my other blog)

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Home business Carnival #18

Pascal — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 05:27:22 +0000

The 18th edition of the Home Business Carnival is now up at HomeBusinessWiz. Barbra did a great job at putting the best contributions together in an interesting format. Way to go, Barbra!

Next week, the Carnival is back here, at Start a Side Business. The theme for this edition: Downside of working from home, and what to do about it. I look forward to receiving your contributions!

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Upgrade to WordPress 2.1

Pascal — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 09:57:22 +0000

Last night, I upgraded to WordPress 2.1. I was expecting the worst, so I very carefully did a database backup (using an export from phpmyadmin), did 2 backups of the files, and followed the instructions carefully. I must admit I did skip the part about disabling the extensions, and that save some time.

Instead of doing an update in place, I created a copy.

For that I renamed the old site “sidebusiness.biz” to “sidebusiness_2.0.biz”, and very quickly created a symlink so that the web server (still pointing to sidebusiness.biz) would find the files in their current location (now sidebusiness_2.0.biz).

mv sidebusiness.biz sidebusiness_2.0.biz ln -s sidebusiness_2.0.biz sidebusiness.biz

Then I created a copy named sidebusiness_2.1.biz.

cp -arv sidebusiness.biz sidebusiness_2.1.biz

That’s where I proceeded to do the upgrade. Essentially remove the files mentioned in the instructions, copy the new files I had downloaded earlier, checked that everything looked ok, and then it was time to make the switch.

Just remove the symlink to sidebusiness_2.0.biz and create one that points to sidebusiness_2.1.biz

rm sidebusiness.biz ln -s sidebusiness_2.1.biz sidebusiness.biz

And finally, on to the database upgrade by going to http://example.com/wordpress/wp-admin/upgrade.php.

That was really easy. For users, the site was down less that 15s!

Then today, I experimented with the new static home page.

That is also very easy. First I created a Home Page (with the content I wanted) and a Blog Page (left blank). Then under the Options>Reading of the admin, I selected “Front Page Displays a static page”. Then selected my newly created Home Page for the Front page, and my new Blog Page for the Posts Page. That’s it. It worked the first time around. Amazingly well done, WordPress Team!

Now, to make it a bit more interesting, I created a specific template just for the home page as I’m guessing I’ll be doing a few customizations just for that page. Easily enough using K2 as the base, that was surprisingly easy to achieve.

First I duplicated the page.php from the template directory and added the following at the top.

Template Name: Home Page */ ?>

Then edit that template page to suit my needs. Mostly removed the post title for now.

Then in the page I created for the Home Page, you I assigned that new template (“Called Home Page”) using the Page Template Control on the right side on the Edit Page page. And voila!

One last thing I found useful. To test whether your are on the new home page, is_home() does not appear to work, but is_page(‘Home’) does (“Home” is the Title of the page I created for the Home Page).

I love the Auto Save and the Static Home Page! I’m not sure I understand how the new Visual editor is supposed to work, but I’m fine with the Code Editor

Let me know what you think of that new home page! May need some more work…

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Home Business Carnival, 3rd edition is up

Pascal — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 00:47:20 +0000

The third edition of the Home Business Carnival has just been published by Wendy of eMonsAtHome .

The theme of this new carnival is “balancing home business and home life” and Wendy has done an outstanding job at categorizing and outlining the very best submissions in a muti-page post: Work life balance, an exhaustive Post.

The next edition of the Home Business Carnival will be hosted here, at Start a Side Business with at theme of “pricing strategy and getting paid”. We’ll cover things from pricing your products to accepting payments on your site to collecting from bad payers to banking… Submit your articles up to 9/28 at Blog Carnival.

If you’d like to host an upcoming carnival, drop me a note.

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Announcing a new Home Business Carnival

Pascal — Fri, 19 May 2006 06:30:02 +0000

Today, I went out looking for a Home Business Carnival, but could not find one. So I created one! The home page for the carnival is at hosted here at Start a Side Business and entries can be submited at Blog Carnival.

I purposefully kept the rules simple and I will try to fit as many entries as possible.

Posts and articles should be about home based businesses, or of direct interest to home based business owners
Post should be original (not a reference to an other post, with just a few added comments)
Post should be informative. You’ll get more benefit from being seen as an expert on your topic than by putting out an outright sales pitch.
Submit post before the last Thursday of the month, and the best posts that meet the rules will be posted

Tell your friends, tell your customers, spread the word. This is not a competition, and everyone will benefit from sharing their unique expertise and knowlege.
Here’s your chance to get maximum exposure and be one of the first to participate in this new Blog Carnival, so submit your entries to the Home Business Carnival today!

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Analyzing ‘Side Business’ trends with Google Trends

Pascal — Tue, 16 May 2006 09:01:42 +0000

A few days ago, Google released Google Trends. Basically, this is tool that can help you analyze how many people searched for a given Search Term over time. Where it gets really valuable is that it provides the ability to display several results when the search terms are separated by commas. Of course, this not meant to be very accurate data, but is good enough for researching trends. I just wish you could at least get some ideas on the scale. It would not need to be super precise, but I would love to know whether I’m looking at 10s, 100s, millions, etc. You can get a sense of scale by using a keyword tool such as the one from Overture to get recent montly data. Since Overture does not include Google searches, a good rule of thumb is to multiply Alexa’s number by 3 to get Google’s numbers. (you are still within the same ballpark anyway).
They have data as far back as 2004 (so that’s about 2 and half year or so).

After testing a few general queries (try “google, yahoo” for example. It may not be the one you think on top. And since we are having fun, try to add msn to the mix), I figured it would be of interest to some of you to find out how “side business” compares with other terms.

The first one I tried was Side Business vs Home Business.

side business home business

Oops, clearly, no contest here. Clearly different playing field. Given the fact that most side businesses are done from home, the discrepancy is quite stunning. My best hypothesis so far: people may not think of it what they do at home as something “on the side”.

Then I refined my search parameters and found something quite peculiar. I compared “side business,sole proprietor, online home business, internet home business”.
side business sole proprietor online home business internet home bus…

One way to explain to explain the similarities, at least one that I find satisfying, is that an Online Business is a perfect business for a Side Business. It is something you can do from home, something you can do part time so that it won’t intefere with your regular job, and something that does not require a lot of initial investment. And finally, a sole proprietorship is the simplest business structure, and is a good way to get your feet wet without a big commitment.
What’s intriguing though, is the divergence in 2006. All 4 had been almost in locksteps for 2 years, and suddenly things start moving. And I have not come up with any explanation that makes any sense. I’m interested to hear if anyone has a theory.

Are you ready to start lifting that blue line upward?

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CSS Reboot

Pascal — Tue, 02 May 2006 07:43:24 +0000

It was time for a redesign, or as www.cssreboot.com would put it, it was time for a reboot. I like the previous look a lot, but I could not make everything work as I wanted to, so hopefully this new layout will accomplish that. The new theme is based on the latest k2 for most of the logic, and graphics elements by Will Rossiter of Willr Webdesign (I could not find a link, if you read this, Will, let me know where I can link to!). I’m grateful to the k2 team and to Will!
Let me know what you think!

And let me take this opportunity to get back on topic. Like here, where I could not get the previous site template to suit what I was looking for, when starting your side business, once you realize something is not working as expected is the time where you need to step back, analyze why you got started on a certain plan or program, and figure out if these reasons are still valid today, or if they ever made sense. Then act decisively. There is no point in throwing good money (or time) after bad. If you were wrong, admit it, move on and try something else.

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New version of Search Everything for WordPress

Pascal — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 06:52:50 +0000

As part of making your site or blog easier to navigate, and helping people find what they are looking for, having a good search function is key. If you use WordPress, there is a new version of Search Everything available. This WordPress extension supplements the basic functionality by letting people search comments (either all or approved only) as well. And if you use attachments, it can search those too. I’m not sure when you would use this, but you can also let people search for the content of your drafts.

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Housekeeping notes

Pascal — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 06:50:35 +0000

There is still quite a few things before I can be satisfied with the site (I chose not to say “done” because I don’t think a web site is really ever done, just ready enough that you want to go live with it, and then you keep tweaking, and tweaking, and … need I go on?)

Anyway, I selected this stunning template from William B Smith and I’ll be tweaking it a bit to accomodate some of the things I want to incorporate. Also make sure I get the necessary plugins setup in wordpress, so you may see at times that the site doesn’t quite look right to you. That must mean that I’m busy futzing with it.

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Upcoming articles

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Upcoming articles

Pascal — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 06:36:50 +0000

There is quite a bit of material I’m planning on covering over the next few months, and as there are only so many hours in the day, and I have a full time, very fullfilling job as well, this will take some time.

My main empashis will be on starting a side business, that is something you can safely do on the side, while you have a “real” job. Just to keep it safe. But who knows, just maybe, you’ll hit something bigger than you thought, and could do that more than nights and week ends.
Some of the topics I am planning to cover, somewhat in this order (but I’m also going to be opportunistic about what to cover as I run things that interest me, and I hope some of you will find interesting as well.

So here goes:

Starting a site and getting it published on the main search engines
Basic SEO without spending a fortune with what seems to be questionable outfits
Monetizing a site (hey, everyone’s doing it, so why not you as well!)
Getting customers to pay you
Finding a hosting company to serve your needs
Getting the best domain
Creating a company (registration, type of entity, taxes, basic accounting, etc…)
Managing your business while keeping your job
types of businesses
How best to leverage yourself

Anything else you are struggling with? Leave a comment on leave me a note.

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Housekeeping notes

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Please Excuse the dust

Pascal — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 09:26:51 +0000

As we get settled in. Give us a few days and bear with us!

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