Heroes and Villains

As our nation pauses to reflect on the events that occurred a decade ago, we are reminded of the qualities that define us as humans and leaders.   Standing up in bravery during a time of utter chaos is not an uncommon.  The heart of humanity does tend to pull together time and again, so history has proven.

The tragedy of that event will never be forgotten by anyone who was alive that day.  For some, the tragedy was much more personal due to the loss of loved ones and family.  For others across the globe, the act of terrorism was celebrated, to our horror.

On Facebook, my nephew wrote this comment:

“The sadness and outrage inside me is just as much then as now. The question in my mind goes unanswered, why? I’ll never know the answer. If there’s a lesson to be learned from this it might be…don’t take life for granted, don’t just live the day like it’s any other day.”

There are no answers for acts of violence and terrorism.  In and of itself, terrorism is a cowardly act because the perpetrators hide in the shadows and congratulate themselves on a job well done while the innocent suffer the consequences and grief.  When they later take “responsibility” for their actions, it is nothing other than crowing inane justifications for their insanity.  This has been my opinion since long before the historic events of 9-11 and my feelings were galvanized on that day.

Disregarding politics, Mayor Rudy Guilani rose to the top of the list of leaders whom I observed  that day.  His intentions were pure as he motivated his constituents to help each other recover during the crisis.  Apparently, he was among those who impressed talk show host, David Letterman, during that time.

The civilians on United Flight 93, who took fate into their own hands and diverted the plane away from its intended target, acted without regard for their own lives as they protected our nation from further devastation.  We can only imagine how it felt to be forced to make that life or death decision and, God willing, none of us will ever have to confront such a choice.

On this day, and everyday, remember the lessons of 9-11, a nation unites to keep the memories of those who served and protected us by taking a stand for the greater good during a devastating tragedy.

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I’m Not Really a Waitress …

When I launched my wordpress website design business a few years ago, my enthusiasm for helping people make money online caused me to develop a business model for myself that involved a lot of personal time with my clients.  They seemed to appreciate the level of service that I offered for reasonable rates and it was fun for me to learn about the various businesses people were trying to bring online.  I’ve never had to advertise.  My business has grown solely by word-of-mouth and referrals, which is no accident.

Lately, it seems like new clients have expectations that exceed their budgets.  It remains true that my all inclusive wordpress website design and consulting services are rare and I totally understand what it feels like to not know how to do what needs to be done where skills are lacking.  Wherever possible, I extend myself to help out.  I”m recently reminded that the speed with which I isolate and resolve problems seems to be projecting the idea that , because I make it look easy, it is.

I can’t count the number of times that I’ve heard a new client tell me that they don’t want to know how something works and that is why they’ve hired me.  I also can’t count the number of times that clients have protested my resistance to continuing without additional compensation.  A handful have been presumptuous enough to question why it would take so long to do.   Excuse me?

With all due respect, if you don’t know what it takes to get something done and you don’t want to take the time to learn how to do it yourself, don’t challenge the person who does know how to do it when they tell you how long it will take to do what you need to have done!

I like living with the belief that all people are reasonable and that they are also willing to parlay a little give and take in our business agreement.  Recently, a handful of  new clients and prospects have come my way who are much happier with the “take” part of the equation, however.  These same people have had no qualms expressing their opinions about wordpress website design services that I should deliver for free or at an unreasonably low price when the simple truth is that they don’t want to pay fairly for the services they are requesting and they are upset about the fact that they are unable to convince me that I should perform those services within their limited budget because they are low on cash.

For those of you who are reading this and are feeling a twinge of guilt about making similar demands of your website services professionals, please ask yourself these questions:

1. If you wanted to buy a luxury car and couldn’t afford it, would ranting at the salesperson change the facts?
2. If that sales person felt sorry for you and went the extra mile to find a financial program that lowered your monthly expense, would you blame them for the fact that the payment was still out of your reach?

When I chose an entrepreneurial career, I was happy to leave my IT Executive role behind in Corporate America because I was weary of leading teams whose contributions to the company’s success were repeatedly diminished by some top-level executive who viewed IT as a necessary evil.  It would seem that I’m growing weary of explaining to new clients and prospects that the skills and knowledge that I’ve gathered throughout my professional life are worth much more than a waitress’ wage.

Yet, referrals keep coming in from my large base of previously satisfied clients.  Several times a week, new business comes in through my website at http://virtuallymarj.com.  Generally speaking, life is good and I enjoy working with the many nice people on my client roster.  I also enjoy taking on a good challenge now and then so I guess I’ll continue growing my wordpress website design business  and keeping it fun by choosing to work with clients who are willing to take advice, understand the value that I bring to their efforts and are willing to pay fairly. 

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Skype Outage – December 22, 2010

Like most online entrepreneurs, Skype is a staple of my business and one of my first logins everyday after having my 2nd cup of coffee.    Today, I was relieved to learn that the problem is not related to Skype hackers or phishers … a rising trend on Skype.

After being unable to login through the client interface, I immediately went to the website to assure myself that my account had not been compromised somehow.  I was able to login and verify my account there, although that capability has since gone down.

While I was logged in, a brief visit to the support page revealed that Skype was aware of the problems that people were having with logging in.  I followed recommended steps to remedy the problem, which included shutting down my home network and resetting the routers.  I guess that should be done periodically anyway so, even though it didn’t solve the Skype login problem, it wasn’t a complete waste of time. 

This is probably quite an embarrassment for Skype in the advent of their upcoming IPO.  For the rest of us, we can breathe a sigh of relief that our Skype accounts have not been hijacked by the hackers and phishers who prey on Skype users.

Don’t Should on Yourself!

A wise man with whom I worked during my earlier years once came up with a profound New Year’s resolution at our annual marketing support meeting.  The entire group laughed out loud when he said his resolution was to never say “it should work” again.

There does seem to be a resurgence of people not thinking through the answers to questions that are asked.  Responses like this are pointless:

“It should have been there by now.” or “That should have worked.”

Normally, a long explanation about how the process is supposed to work follows comments like these.  All kidding aside, it almost seems like an assumption has been made that I wouldn’t have done something simple, like checking my spam folder or reading instructions.  As the support person drones on about how their process works, I’m thinking, “If your system worked the way you’ve described it, I wouldn’t have picked up the phone to find out what was wrong.”

Communicating is such a critical component of business.  Whether it is written or verbal, our phrasing has a lot to do with how the other side of the conversation receives our responses.  We need to empathize with the caller and, above all, treat them professionally.  Without our customers, we have no business.  This applies to ALL business models … assuming the business is legitimate.

Even though this may sound cliché, there really is no such thing as a dumb question.  Entrepreneurs who are operating a truly customer-facing business must learn how to respond appropriately to their customer’s questions.  Here are some suggestions for improving your customer communications:

1. Smile before picking up the phone.
2. Establish set time frames during work days for taking calls to ensure minimal disruption..
3. Draft agenda topics for scheduled meetings and allocate time limits to the topics.  Distribute the agenda to all invitees in advance of the meeting.  Be flexible to requests to alter or rearrange the agenda and time frames.
4. Don’t make customers wait more than 24-hours for a response to their email or voicemail.
5. Set “office hours” so your customers are respectful of your personal boundaries.  Inform active customers of your vacation plans.   If you have a dedicated business line, update your announcement to reflect any extended time away from your office so potential new business doesn’t think you are non-responsive.
6. Ensure that you understand your customer’s problem statement before suggesting a solution.  They’ve been immersed in it long enough to determine it is a problem.  Sometimes you must back them up to the beginning so you can be of better assistance to them.
7. Remain calm and be empathetic.  Understand that your customer may have struggled for hours before calling you and that they could be tense as a result.
8. Set expectations properly if your customer’s issue cannot be handled during the call.
9. Publish an FAQ page on your website and refer people to it first.  Whether you have a product or service, if you’ve been in business a while you know what questions are most frequent.
10. If your product is digital, prepare documentation that assumes the least amount of knowledge while making it complete enough for advanced users.

Most of this blog’s readers are aware that I have a service business and that one of my services is WordPress Website Development. Many of my clients are unfamiliar with the software and part of my service fees include one-on-one training.  I welcome client calls because I love teaching people things that will make them feel more self-sufficient and confident with the products and services they have purchased from me.  Because I also enjoy the clients with whom I work as people, I have to monitor the gab time with some of them because we have so much fun just talking.

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The Proposal …

In my business, potential clients sometimes ask for me to submit a detailed proposal that outlines deliverables and costs for milestones on a project.  This usually follows a lengthy phone conversation.  This is not an unreasonable request but preparing these proposals takes time that cannot be spent on other business activities and exposes details about my strategies and methods so my quandary is what level of commitment to ask of the prospect in exchange prior to delivering the document.  Although it is part of doing business, nobody likes paperwork.

When I launched my business, I submitted detailed proposals without a second thought.  However, I modified my approach after a potential client failed to acknowledge the receipt of the proposal and ignored my requests for follow-up and negotiation until he contacted me to share a listing he had placed on a freelance site which was a verbatim copy of everything I had written in my proposal.  I was shocked.  He seemed pleased about the fact that he had sourced the project at a lower rate than I had proposed.  He has returned with new requests since then but I’ve declined.

My proposals now include a time limitation for pricing and a copyright notification that is intended to discourage prospects from using my content to shop their projects around.  In spite of these measures, there still are people who promise to meet with me after the proposal is sent, fail to return calls or emails for a while, and send a cryptic email saying that they “going another direction” with their project after a couple of weeks.  This is disappointing … and suspicious.

This isn’t a sour grapes post.  I certainly don’t expect to win every contract but I honestly don’t know how to handle prospects who leverage my copyrighted content to shop around for better pricing.  It is a bona fide conundrum.

These are the possible solutions that I’ve come up with:

1. Withhold the delivery of all proposals until a mutually agreed to meeting time where we can walk through and discuss each point/price.
2. Charge a flat fee for preparing and delivering detailed proposals and estimates that covers the cost of my time.
3. Propose only an hourly rate for all projects in the future and track time, which is a big headache for me.
4. Join the Circus and escape it all. 

Well, the last one isn’t really an option but it is fun to muse about sometimes.

Step Away from the Computers!

We are all aware of the value that our digital tools bring us.  Our technology expedites information delivery, allows us to follow our social networks, makes calling from anywhere possible, and provides on-demand entertainment.

Based on this quote from researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, we are actually depriving ourselves of much-needed mental downtime that ultimately may be affecting our learning capabilities.

“Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories,” said Loren Frank, assistant professor in the department of physiology at the university, where he specializes in learning and memory. He said he believed that when the brain was constantly stimulated, “you prevent this learning process.”

Perpetually Plugged in People

There are armies of mobile application developers who are hard at work creating new productivity tools and producing games to entertain us in between tasks.  I am not a Luddite.  I use mobile technology for both business and pleasure but it does seem possible that society is becoming enslaved to its mobile devices.

Entrepreneurs benefit greatly from the advanced technologies availed by multimedia mobile devices but these same advantages have potential to introduce stress, which can have a negative impact on our overall business productivity.  While we want to give our customers the impression nothing matters more to us than our business, we are of no use to customers if we are burned out.

Reboot Yourself!

All of our technology needs to be rebooted periodically to clear memory and cache.  The same is true of us humans.  While it is easy to assume that browsing the internet, checking email, or playing a brief game is a break, these activities don’t remove our technology chains nor provide our brains the breaks they require to renew our creative juices.  Regardless of our professions, most of us are tethered computers throughout our work days so taking a break on another computer isn’t really a break, is it?

During a keynote speech, Harvey MacKay suggested that the most productive time that he spent was time spent looking out his window.  He went on to explain that he was both resting his eyes and refreshing his imagination.  This “stuck” with me.  In situations where there was no window, I hung a photograph of a beautiful place upon which to fix my gaze.

When I am confounded by a bit of code for a wordpress website development task or unable to come up with fresh ideas for a new branding strategy, leaving my office for a stroll along the ocean shore totally renews my perspective.  While I am away, I am not thinking about the work task.  I am enjoying the salt air and interacting with people around me.  I also leave my mobile device in the car while I am at the beach.  There is nothing so earth shattering that it cannot wait for a few hours.  Relaxing in a chair with a good book (with REAL pages!) or doing a crossword puzzle is another method that I use to get away from bright LCD screens and computers.

So, whether your thing is shopping, cerebral pursuits, or nature, do your favorite things and leave the mobile devices at home so you can clear your mental cache and attract new ideas.  You will return to your tasks and I guarantee you will feel better and be more productive.

Website Copyright: It Matters!

Last week, a colleague, who also is an RSS email subscriber to my site, told me they had copied a recent post and published it on their site.  Because I also had helped them set up one of their blogs and coached them a little, I presumed that they meant they had syndicated my content using a WordPress plugin that had been recommended.  However,because they said the word “copy”, it seemed like a good idea to ask a clarifying question.  The subsequent conversation felt a little awkward and I am still trying to determine if they were simply naive or if it was something else.

What is a Web Copyright?

Every WordPress Website theme that I have created or customized includes code which places a default copyright in the footer.  Summarizing an article on this topic that I read on Smashing Magazine, the same laws that protect printed copy also protect internet content.  Since April 1, 1989, all published content is “automatically” copyrighted and it is not available for use in the public domain throughout the lifetime of its creator plus 70 years.

An idea cannot be copyrighted so, if something you’ve come across on the internet spurs a new post for your site, you are not breaching copyright law.  You are allowed to cite excerpts from existing web content without crossing the line but you cannot replicate articles in their entirety without specific permission.

You also must have the permission of an author before you translate their content to another language.

The “fair use doctrine” is a doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as use for scholarship or review.  It provides for the legal, non-licensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author’s work.

Website Owner Responsibilities

As I was researching this topic, I was enlightened on a topic that may be confusing.  Web content is OWNED by the person who creates it.  In other words, comments are owned by the commenter, not the website owner.  Copyright law implies that you cannot alter content that is not owned by you and this may include removal of links, which is something that I have done myself.

This little nit will be covered in a terms and conditions statement on my website so that people who choose to comment about my posts are fully aware of my policies regarding links in comments.

Bottom Line:  Blog Posts are not like Daylilies

In the patio garden behind a house where I used to live, I frequently gathered up Daylily volunteers from between the cracks in the retaining wall and replanted them in the garden bed where I actually wanted them to grow.  That they were interested enough in survival to cast off volunteer plants any place that roots could take hold impressed me.

Bloggers are no different.  We publish our content and send it out on RSS feeds, hoping to acquire new readership and engage our audience in such a way that they will tell their friends on the social network.  We’re honored that you want others to know about our work, believe me.

Some of us put real research time into creating what we believe will be valuable and accurate content that we hope will be helpful to our target market.  The whole idea of spending time on a blog post is to build authority for the business niche that we are endeavoring to grow.  We want to help you but we don’t want to write your blogs for you.  I make no apologies for saying that out loud and will happily engage in discussion about it with anyone whose opinion may differ.

Copyright Resources

Some very helpful people have directed me to authority sites on plagerism and copyright protection for my reference. Here are those links, should you also have an interest:

• www.plagerism.com
• www.copyscape.com

Zoom in on Zettabytes

Most of us don’t think twice about what is involved in maintaining the platforms the Social Networking and Social Bookmarking potpourri of sites that we use each day in our online businesses.  These days, the focus is mostly on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.  Other useful sites are LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Flickr, MySpace, and Last.fm … to name a few.  Then there are he multiple free email accounts we have.

When it comes to our home computing environments, we unconsciously manage disk space every day.  If we have self-hosted blogs, we look for and choose hosting vendors who permit us to have unlimited storage for our websites.  Yet, we take the storage of our Tweets and posts for granted.

Every piece of content must be stored somewhere.  In the early days of email, I was part of a group who studied email etiquette with interest.  We discussed computing capacity issues, like storage, too.  A friend of mine, who worked for EMC, wrote a fascinating white paper about the exponential growth of data storage.  Her predictions have been exceeded by mounds and mounds and mounds of data.  None of us foresaw the advent of micro-blogging in 1985, let alone text messaging on a cell phone! 

Recent research by IDC revealed that our digital universe grew by 62% during the last year alone.  The stunning amount of storage online at the time of the study was 800,000 petabytes, a measure better described at this link.  In short, it is one million gigabytes.  By the end of 2010, it is predicted that there will be 1.2 zettabytes online.  A zettabyte, incidentally, is roughly half a million times the entire collections of all the academic libraries in the United States.  Whew!  And I’m worrying about a few gigabytes around here. 

Computers and the internet have made our lives easier, much more public and availed methods to get income online for some of us too.  Pages upon pages of material sifted and listed, categorized and presented for our reading pleasure with a few keystrokes and a button click.  Since our content is cached and stored online indefinitely, one begins to wonder if our content will outlive our grandchildren.  Who can say?

Most Memorable Mother

It’s Mother’s Day in the United States.  This is a holiday reserved for the women who gave us our lives and, if you are as fortunate as me, the person who believed in us so much that we knew we could never fail.  Today, I will tell you some of the most memorable stories that I have about a remarkable woman who was my mother, my mentor, and my friend.

My mother was born in 1926, which means she grew up during the depression.  She was the oldest in a family of 12 children and, because times were difficult, her father expected her to quit school so she could help earn money to feed the family.  Mom didn’t honor that request for she knew it would inhibit her future possibilities.  At the age of 15, the same year that World War II began, she left her family and moved into a girl’s home so she could finish high school and make something more of her life.  Her courage and focus were quite admirable.

Perhaps one of the bravest things that my mother decided to do was to have a career other than being a homemaker.  I know this doesn’t sound amazing at all these days but, during the 50’s, this was not popular.  Many of  the suburban housewives whispered among themselves about how she was neglecting her duties as a mother and a wife.  Some of those women even prohibited their children from being friends with my sister and me but, in my eyes, nothing could have been further from the truth!  Mom and Dad explained that she was going to work so we could have greater oppotunities.  Her working created income opportunities for me around the house, which taught me to be enterprising, industrious and responsible.

Mom took a job as a secretary, which was about the only position that women were allowed to have at that time.  Within a couple of years, she was promoted to the position of Wholesale Buyer which caused a bit of conflict within the secretarial pool. My mother loved what she did, and she was quite good at it too.   Twice a year, she would travel to New York City and negotiate large purchases for her company.  I got to tag along with her a couple of times.  Having the chance to see her at work was nothing short of inspirational.  She was well-respected and a tenacious negotiator.

One of the fondest memories that I have of her is a reaction she had to an editorial in the local paper.  Some man had written that women should not work outside the home and, if they did, that they should stick to “jobs for women” and stay out of the more challenging business roles because men were better suited for those sorts of positions.

Mom had a fit!  She went straight to her typewriter and prepared a response that was published by the paper.  This created quite a stir in the family, since she had used her married name on the letter.  I will never forget listening in on a debate between my mother and grandfather, who was unhappy that she had used “his” name on such a controversial subject.  She stunned him to silence when she retorted, “It’s my name too!”   In that moment, she taught me that it was OK to stand up for what you believed in and be who you are, regardless of the circumstances.  Remarkable!

I’m chuckling as I write this … and experiencing a little emotion too.  I miss my mother very much. 

Although Mom didn’t always agree with my ideas as a youth, she never told me I was wrong.  In the truest sense of the word, she mentored me by discussing the pros and cons, just as she would with any adult.  Those conversations always ended with her telling me that she trusted my judgment, which was empowering.  I got to test my strategies and, if something didn’t work out the way I expected, she never said, “I told you so.”  She would offer her advise and recommend solutions but it was always up to me to decide what path to choose.  That was her greatest gift to me.  Over the years, her strength became my will.

Her independent style and tireless encouragements are factors that still motivate me today.  Her belief in me allowed me to rely on my good instincts, which has been the basis for every decision that I’ve made in my career.  She taught me to disregard the nay-sayers and follow my own path.  This is  something you will feel in many of my articles and it is one of the primary reasons that  GetIncomeBlog.com was launched in 2008.

Whether I am writing about following your passions or shutting out the noise around you so you can try something new, my message is always the same; Believe in Yourself first.  It isn’t always comfortable to follow the road less traveled but, if you believe in yourself and your abilities, the pot holes on your path are never so deep that the axle will break on your carriage. 

Mom’s resilience never ceased to amaze me.  Up until the day she went into a coma, a week before her death, my mother’s mind remained sharp, she never doubted my ability to succeed, and she was a good friend to me.  I was blessed to have her in my life.

So, this one is for you, Mom!

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PLR WordPress Websites … Turn Key or Not?

PLR Websites are a tool used by internet marketers as a way to get your site online quickly, complete with content.  If you’ve ever worked with them in the past and have an interest in learning the underlying technologies that make a website work, the instructions and a little time are more than adequate.

Everyone working on the internet must be aware of the rising popularity of WordPress.   If you aren’t, feel free to contact me to learn more about how you can leverage this amazing software for your websites, beyond the traditional blog.

Under the Covers

WordPress Websites require knowledge of more than simple HTML to set up correctly.  WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS) that uses databases for content storage and PHP scripts to access that content for presentation on a website.  Learning how things all work together can be a rewarding journey if you like knowing how things work.  If you have limited experience with technology and become impatient when things don’t go as expected, your project can be less than fun.

The whole idea of PLR is that you can purchase content, slightly modify it, and put it up as your own.  This permits the ability to begin creating a web presence with a minimum of effort and can also save on expense of hiring someone who can adequately translate your vision into a functional website for a product or service launch.  If your goal is to monetize a site quickly and you lack the base technical skills you need to read into the instructions,  you are likely to be confounded by a PLR WordPress Website purchase.

PLR products will give you all of the information that you need about installation, usage and reselling privileges.  There are some generalized guidelines but PLR products do have differences so reading the license for your new software is advisable.

WordPress Database and Security Matters

A simple WordPress installation creates 11 tables, at this time.  WordPress requires that certain things are set up in order for the software to operate correctly.  These specialized data are stored in various tables within the site database.  The list of items includes a site URL and blog URL, if it is different.

While reviewing the installation script for a recent project, I saw that the PLR Product had altered the standard WordPress Installation script, apparently in an effort to bypass the need to make these changes in the database.  All things being equal, uploading the database export to the destination database on my client’s servers was easy.  As I analyzed the data that was stored in the tables, however, I realized that the instructions lacked very important information for truly owning the site and its data.

Another observation that I made about the setup script was that it didn’t follow secure WordPress Website installation practices that have been recommended for more than two years.  As we are all painfully aware, website security is critical … especially if it is a source of income for you.

A new user of WordPress, who may have been misled into believing it is a one-click install would not have known what to look for, let alone how to change it.

WordPress Setup

No one that I know puts up  a website, WordPress or otherwise, just for the sake of having a website alone.  At least I hope not!    The whole idea of having a website is that you want traffic to your site so you can share some specialized knowledge, build authority in a niche or campaign about products and services that you might be offering.  Once again, knowing what settings affect the visibility of your new WordPress website are the key.

The PLR software package that needed to be installed did not have the privacy settings nor ping list optimized for broad access to the new site.  Indeed, the website was up as predicted but nothing in the installation instructions addressed these critical and necessary changes so it could be found through organic searches and paid advertising campaigns.

The Virtually Marj Service team uses standardized procedure for optimizing settings, as well as a standard list of plugins for analyzing and improving traffic to the site.  This is our “secret sauce” so I won’t be laying all of that out for you here but if you’d like to know more about that, you can contact me.

To PLR or Not to PLR, that is the question

PLR Products are a great way to jumpstart your business and website and it is wonderful that people take the time to create them.  As with all business decisions, choosing the “right tool for the job” is an important step along the way.  As for PLR WordPress Websites, they are not recommended for people who do not have the underlying skills to read into the instructions or who don’t have staff to make them work properly as a business building tool

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