I went out to dinner with two of my friends, Elisa Southard, (author of “Break Through the Noise“) and Barbara Santos, (author of “Practice Aloha: Secrets to Living Life Hawaiian Style” ). We had a grand old time. We were celebrating Barbara’s birthday, (Happy Birthday Barb!), and Elisa asked us if we had seen the video of these people who work with the Great Whale Conservatory, saving a whale, and she emailed it to us. I got a kick out of the fact that as we were talking, Elisa could get on her Android phone and email us a link, and look things up, like books we were discussing and other things in conversation. This is how modern life has evolved with technology today. The video is amazing and I just had to share it with you. It made me cry when they cut the humpback whale free from all these yards of netting it had gotten terribly tangled in and the whale was near death. It seemed to know they were helping it, and once free it put on a heck of show for them which seemed like a thank you to me and to them. This made me […]
Is Twitter dying or dead? Why Biz Stone the founder has left the company
Will twitter die? Is twitter dying? What do you think? Who is really using Twitter today? When Twitter started, I seriously thought it would never catch on, ( but I also thought DVD players would not replace VHS, so I definitely can miss the boat big time.) Now wherever you go, any conference, any “Internet Marketing” type of gathering, you are told to use twitter and other “social media”. I even signed up and have been using Tweetdeck, since Tee Morris taught a class with me at the San Francisco Writers Conference on Social Media. (Update: Tweetdeck was absorbed by Twitter and they run a different program and interface with it now). Another tool that many people use that is a paid option is Hootsuite, they do offer a limited free program as well. Part of my philosophy about working online is to try to minimize distractions and stay the course on what you are trying to accomplish. So it was with great interest that I read this article about why the creator of Twitter, Biz Stone has left the company. Why Biz Stone really left Twitter. By FastCompany-2011 A few items jumped out at me. The majority of Twitter users, […]
Google Plus One, or Google+1, How to add the button on your website.
Google plus is DEAD. I have been working online since 1998 and I am here to tell you, Google needs to stop trying to be a social networking site. So many attempts and so many failures. This entire article I wrote is now defunk. It is is still good for just setting up a google ID, but that it is it. 1. Get a Google account. Click here to start a Google account. 2. Set up a Google Profile. Click here to set up your Google Profile. 3. Set up the Google Plus 1 button on your website. ( Never mind this, Google Plus is dead).
What is a gravatar, and how do I get one?
Many people ask me how to get a gravatar, or really they ask me this, ” How do I get one of those photos that will show up next to my name on other websites”? Many people do not even know what a gravatar is. A gravatar is an image you select , that is attached to whichever email you select, when you sign up for a gravatar here. http://en.gravatar.com/. This image to the left of me is a gravatar I custom created. I was just using my headshot, but I noticed many places I left a gravatar, left no way of knowing who I was or where I could found. I took one of my images and just added my business name on top there, and now I use this as one of my gravatars. Another nice thing with gravatars are you can have multiple emails and images attached to each email, so you do not have to have the same image all the time. What do you use a gravatar for? Well if you are online much, you problally have a business, a book, a product or just yourself that you would like to promote or have known […]
10 Ways to Make Your Website Sticky, CWC Berkeley Branch, May 15, 2011
May 15 2011 California Writers Club, Berkeley Branch “10 Ways to Make Your Website Sticky” How can you get readers to come back to your site again and again? How do you engage readers and encourage loyalty and comments? So you have a website or a blog, now what? How can people find you? What are they looking for? How do you build up regular readers or followers? What are some good ideas to promote yourself online? These are just a few of the topics Linda Lee will be discussing with us in her presentation. Discover some easy and fun ways that you can “build your tribe online” and keep your readers coming back for more.
WordPress broke my site after I updated, why does it do that and what caused it?
Dear Linda, My website broke after I updated WordPress! Why does that happen? How annoying. Why is WordPress such a fuss budget? My friend was just telling me all her photos stopped working on one of her sites (she has something that switches them up) they simply disappeared and she had to reload them all. Signed, Upset WordPress User Dear Upset, I am 95% sure it was not WordPress. It was one of your plugins. Many people think WordPress “runs” everything you use when you are working in WordPress, but they don’t. This can be confusing. Sometimes clients call me and say, ” I need to call WordPress, they need to fix this.” There is really no where you can call, it does not work like that. Here is why. WordPress is what is called an “Open Source Project“. Everything you see from the documentation to the code itself, was created by and for the community.Which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it. (More than most commercial platforms.) It also means you are free to use it. As in the entire set up is completely FREE. This also means the only customer […]
Email Marketing Programs. Why you need one to make money online.
Why do you need a professional email management program to make money and succeed online? I will tell you my story. When I started online in 1999, I hated spam, I hated email from” internet marketers”, and I resisted all advice to start building an email list. I got very annoyed at people sending me email trying to sell me things. As time went on, I watched people I knew whom I knew personally who had started online around the same time as I did start to make a lot of money, One of my mentors who had actually helped me learn how to build my first website using Xsite Pro is now an online guru, and multi-millionaire. He never spams people and when he sends me emails, I read them. Needless to say, I have had to rethink my approach to email marketing. I now realize I must build my list. Your email list is literally your gold. No matter what you do , author, teacher, life coach, editor, writing coach, sales, consulting, offering products, small business, non profits, it does not matter, your email list will be where you are guaranteed to make money or sell your product. […]
How can I set up a strategic system or tweet plan where I am not creating more work for myself?
Kim Edwards is writing an article for the Independent Book Publishers Association, and she sent me some interview questions. One of the questions was: “How can I set up a strategic system or tweet plan where I am not creating more work for myself?”. This is a great question for me because I just recently started using twitterfeed. This is a tool that has greatly increased my traffic, (doubled it from the day I started using it!), and saved me so much time. If you are using Facebook and twitter and Linkedin and not using this tool, run don’t walk to sign up now. Did I mention it is FREE. I would pay to use this. It does take about 30 minutes to set up correctly. Well at least it took me that long because I felt a little confused about the feeds and I did not get a confirmation message after filling things in and I kept trying to check it and was not sure how to do that. Sometimes when I find myself feeling like that online I discovered it pays to leave it and go back. When I checked back later it was all there to see […]
Big and Glossy Website Design Trend
I have been designing websites now for 5 years. I still get many compliments on my primary website. I find this interesting because that site is not a WordPress website. I created it using Xsite Pro, a website building program that I really love but do not use nearly as much. 80% of my business is now building WordPress websites. On my Askmepc-Webdesign site, people tell me they like how easy it is to find what they are looking for. I am sure they find the traditional layout familiar. (Read my article on how people read a website here). I also always have build very “clean” and clear websites. I hate clutter online. We have enough coming at us already to be overwhelmed by a website. There is trend now for oversized big glossy looking websites. Some of the things I like about the trend is most of the time they are easy to navigate. The big buttons are helpful and there are usually clear and oversized directions given, (such as “click here to purchase”) which I think is helpful for many people. Some of the things I do not like: They can feel impersonal They are too “internet marketing” […]
How to get rid of and remove the Lizamoon virus fake “Windows Stability Center” virus
Fake Windows Stability Center Trojan. How to get rid of it. Virus security software calls itself “Windows Stability Center” LizaMoon SQL injection: To continue the story from a few days ago. My daughter was doing a search for her term paper, and when she did the google image search, this virus came up. This fake security software calls itself “Windows Stability Center” and is known as the LizaMoon SQL injection: Windows Stability Center Trojan. We killed the process and got out of the window, and thought all was well, since she never clicked anything or downloaded anything. Well she continued her research the next day and did a google image search again, and the message keeps popping up in Firefox, but not Internet Explorer. So I am not sure why that is happening other then she is finding many infected websites in image search. So now we are not sure what is up and when I did some research on how to tell for sure if you are infected and how remove it, I was finding this topic all over the map. There were many different sets of directions and opinions in the geek community. I suppose they all may […]