2.6.1 offers several improvements for international users.  Styling of the admin for right-to-left languages is much improved thanks to the efforts of the Farsi and Hebrew translation teams, and a mysterious gettext bug caused by certain PHP configurations is now fixed.  For IIS users, 2.6.1 fixes several permalink problems. Image insertion problems in the Press This feature experienced by IE users are also fixed. Of note to everyone is a fix for a performance bug in the admin where those with a lot of plugins would experience slowness on some pages.

Check out the full list of over 60 fixes to see if 2.6.1 has something to offer you.   A full diff and list of changed files is also available.  Download 2.6.1 and enjoy.

Just last weekend I bought something at the store and the cashier gave me too much change.  It was only 36 cents but I told him he gave me too much change and gave it back to him.  Later that same day when I was paying my greens fees at the golf course I found a golf club I had lost the previous week.  The golf club was worth a lot more than 36 cents too.

Was it karma?  Was some supernatural force looking after me since I had done a good deed?  Heck if I know.  But it’s uncanny how things like that seem to happen.  You do something good and something good happens to you.  It doesn’t always work out like that but things like that happen often enough that I notice.  And maybe that’s proof enough.

Don’t worry.  I’m not into “crystals” or any other New Age type of stuff.  I believe in luck but I pretty much believe people make their own luck for the most part by recognizing opportunities and taking advantage of them when most people either don’t see the hidden opportunities or are too lazy to act on their ideas.

This belief guides me to make a sincere effort to treat people fairly.  It’s always in the back of my mind that if I don’t treat someone fairly, it will come back to haunt me at some point in the future.  Granted there are jerks who try to steal from me and who make ridiculous demands.  And I won’t rehash the lying jacka$$ who basically started a smear campaign in a failed attempt to ruin my reputation and run me out of business.  Sometimes I’m not so nice to people like that but I’m not perfect.

It’s apparent by the way some people treat others that they don’t seem to care about “karma” and that’s fine.  To each his or her own.  What do you think?

Tags: Traffic, Websites

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I’m talking about boring copy from an appearance point of view. If your sales letter looks like a formal report, then it has a boring appearance. The whole point is to get the message read. The human eye is naturally drawn to things that stand out. And nothing stands out in a sales letter that looks like a formal report you’d hand in to a school teacher. You’re not trying to get an ‘A’, you’re trying to make a sale.

So how do you make the copy more visually appealing? Easy. Do simple things to emphasize the important points. Use things like highlighting, underlining, capitalizing, bold, italics, different fonts, bigger fonts, different color fonts, photos, handwritten notes, arrows, etc. CopyDoodles are great for handwritten notes, arrows, etc. I’ve been using them for about a month.

Those are all effective tactics for attracting the attention of the human eyeball. And once you have the reader’s attention, hopefully your copy is good enough to keep the reader’s attention long enough to convince them to buy or opt-in or whatever your particular goal is.

But don’t overdo it like many people do. I’ve seen sales letters where it looks like the whole page is highlighted. What’s the point? If everything is important, then nothing is important.

The best exercise I’ve ever done is finding sales letters written by copywriters known to be very good and typing them into my computer. Reading them isn’t enough. Typing them and using the same formatting provides much more insight into how the letter was written and you’ll learn more. Try it.

Take the same sales letter and split-test it. Use CopyDoodles (or some other form of graphical enhancements) on one version and not on the other. I bet I know which one wins.

Tags: Blogs, Websites

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Anyway, here’s what happened. I was at the gym yesterday. I’ve been working out most of my life and I’ve been a member of several gyms but not for the past few years. I just recently joined a new gym and got reacquainted with the same type of people who annoyed me the last time I was a member of a gym.

People use gyms in different ways. I go to the gym to exercise and workout…period. Ocasionally I’ll make new friends at the gym but that isn’t why I go. It’s obvious other people think of gyms as some type of social gathering place or even some type of singles club…but that’s not me. The worst are the ones who view the gym as a place to go lounge around for a few hours. Apparently they do this so they can tell people they’re a member of a gym and work out every day.

When I’m at the gym, I don’t stop moving. I mix it up. Sometimes it’s the machines, other days it’s free weights. One day I’ll get on the stair master, the next time the elliptical machine, etc. I can do 3 sets on 6 different muscle groups and 20+ minutes of cardio in an hour or less. I’m in and out. You don’t need to work out 3 hours every day.

The people who annoy me are the ones that slow me down. I wonder what the hell they are even doing at the gym. They go to the gym and sit on the equipment like it’s a La-Z-Boy recliner…and it really annoys me. Usually I just keep it to myself and go find another machine.

But sometimes there are people parked on several machines and I swear some of them are actually sleeping. There’s literally no movement for several minutes. So occasionally I’m “rude” enough to inquire as to when now might be a good time to either start working out or go home and quit taking up valuable space.

Actually I would say the rude ones are those who are inconsiderate of the fact that some people actually have a purpose for going to the gym but I digress so I won’t go there. But I really do wonder why some people even bother going to the gym. They don’t sweat. They do 3 sets per hour. And they walk around like zombies in Night of the Living Dead. It’s pathetic…and they’re obviously not doing themselves any good.

Maybe I’m being too hard on these people and maybe I’m not but they do annoy the crap out of me. So what’s all this got to do with an Internet business? Simple. There are lots of people claiming to either have a business or want to start a business but they’re all talk and no action. They’re just like the people who go to the gym and sit on the machines. It’s not doing them any good.

Somebody’s making money alright but in the gym’s case, it’s the owner of the gym and in the case of an Internet business it’s the people selling information, etc. You’re not going to magically get fit just because you have gym membership. You actually have to exercise. And you’re not going to get wealthy just because you went to some seminar or bought some information. You actually have to apply it.

You’re not going to lose 30 pounds overnight any more than you’re going to become a millionaire overnight. But if you have a purpose (or a goal), put forth persistent and consistent effort to achieve it, and track your progress, you will eventually reach your goal. Simple as that.

So who’s got any advice for handling these nimrods at the gym?

P.S. I’m not dead and I haven’t abandoned my business…actually quite the opposite…but I’ve moved in a slightly different direction for now which I’m not getting into at this point (maybe later) and that’s why I haven’t been posting for a few weeks.

Tags: Blogs, Websites

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Bringing the new theme directory under the WordPress “extend” umbrella allowed us to take advantage of all the infrastructure that has already been built up to support WordPress.org. If you’ve browsed through the plugin directory, you’ll feel right at home in the new theme directory.

We’ve gone through great lengths to make this as painless as possible for theme authors. You don’t need to know anything about Subversion (our back end magic takes care of all that for you), just login with your WordPress.org username and password and go to the upload page. From there you upload your regular theme zip file and we take care of the rest.

Once you upload your new theme we do a few automated checks for some of the requirements for each theme. If we find one that you missed we’ll provide you an error and description of what needs to be fixed. When a theme upload has been accepted we’ll send you an email and put it in the queue to be reviewed, to make sure we didn’t miss anything. After the theme has been approved you’ll get another email letting you know that the theme is now live.

That catches you up to where we’re at today. When you finish that theme you’ve been slaving over, upload it to the new directory and let us know what you think. Since so much has changed since the old theme directory we’re starting fresh from zero. If you’ve got specific questions or suggestions contact us and we’ll do our best to get them answered.

We’ve prepared a brief video tour of 2.6, if you have 3 minutes and 29 seconds to spare, it’s worth a watch:

If you’d like to embed the tour video in your blog, copy and paste this code for the high quality version:

<embed src="http://v.wordpress.com/mARhRBcT/fmt_dvd" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="640" height="385" flashvars="blog_domain=http://wordpress.org/development/2008/07/wordpress-26/&width=640&height=385"> </embed>

And here’s a smaller version, 400 pixels wide:

<embed src="http://v.wordpress.com/mARhRBcT/fmt_std" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="400" height="250" flashvars="blog_domain=http://wordpress.org/development/2008/07/wordpress-26/&width=400&height=250"> </embed>

Here’s a more textual overview of what’s hawt in 2.6:

Post Revisions: Wiki-like tracking of edits

With the power of modern computers, it’s silly that we still use save and editing metaphors from the time when the most common method of storage was floppy disks. WordPress has always respected the importance of your writing with auto-save, and now we’re taking that to another level by allowing you to view who made what changes when to any post or page through a super-easy interface, much like Wikipedia or a version control system.

This is handy on any blog in case you make a mistake and want to go back to an older version of a post, and it’s super handy for multi-author blogs where you can see every change tracked by person.

Press This!: Post from wherever you are on the web

A few months ago on my blog we started a conversation about the posting bookmarklet in WordPress and which systems we should look to for inspiration, like Flock, FriendFeed, Facebook, Tumblr, and Delicious. From these suggestions and the Quick Post plugin by Josh Kenzer, we developed a Press This bookmark you can add to your toolbar that provides a fast and smart popup to do posts to your WordPress blog:

For example, if you click “Press This” from a Youtube page it’ll magically extract the video embed code, and if you do it from a Flickr page it’ll make it easy for you to put the image in your post. On my blog I’ve been experimenting with using different categories and the in_category() function — such as video, quote, aside, et cetera — to create a more tumblelog-like format.

Shift Gears: Turbo-speed your blogging

Gears is an open source browser extension project started by Google that developers like us can use to give you features we wouldn’t normally be able to. There are a lot of things we can do with Gears in the future, but in this release we’ve stuck to using what’s called a “Local Server” to cache or keep a copy of commonly-used Javascript and CSS files on your computer, which can speed up the loading of some pages by several seconds (they just pop right up!). You can install Gears for Firefox or Internet Explorer, with support for Safari and Opera pending. WordPress works just fine without it, you just get a little extra juice when you have it installed.

Theme Previews: See it before your audience does

Now when you select a theme it pops up a window that shows the theme live with all your content, instead of immediately making it active on your site. This is great for just test driving themes before making a switch over publicly, and it is also helpful when you are developing a theme and need to test it but don’t want everybody to see your ongoing mistakes development.

Here are some of the smaller features and improvements in 2.6:

• Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
• Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
• Bulk management of plugins.
• A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
• Plugin update notification bubble.
• Customizable default avatars.
• You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
• Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
• Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
• You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
• Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.
• Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
• A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
• Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.

Developer Notes

WordPress.org had over 75 people contributing code to WordPress 2.6. In addition to the core commit team we had contributions from Dion Hulse, Austin Matzko, Otto42, Benedict Eastaugh, and pishmishy. AaronCampbell and Marco Zehe provided more than a few patches. Back among the top code contributors is Jacob Santos. Alex Concha continues to have WordPress’ back. Joining bug reporting and gardening elite are hakre, Simon Wheatley, mtekk, and Matty Rob. Finally, congratulations to our Peter Westwood on your recent wedding! I’m also proud to announce we’re adding a new core committer to the team: Andrew Ozz (azaozz) has been a huge help to the core team this year, particularly around TinyMCE and making the WYSIWYG something that works for you, not against you.

Because of the new capabilities to make WordPress a clean SVN checkout, plugin and theme authors should do their best to handle forms and posts through WP rather than trying to post to their files directly, here’s a quick Codex article about how to do it using our forward-compatible APIs.

Upgrading

2.6 is pretty much identical to 2.5 from a plugin and theme compatibility point of view, so upgrades from 2.5 should be pretty painless. The 2.5 branch will no longer be maintain so everyone is encouraged to upgrade. Our standard 3-step upgrade instructions apply to this release. There were at least 1,984,047 downloads of the 2.5 series, the fastest growing release we’ve ever had, and I think all of those people will find 2.6 adds a level of polish that really makes WP a pleasure to use every day. (At least I do. :))

Easter Egg

There have been rumors and allegations that there was a so-called “easter egg” added to 2.6 early in its development. These rumors and allegations are completely false!

The same concept applies to an information business. The Internet might be a great new media enabling you to literally reach the world instantly…but at the end of the day it’s just another media, another way to generate leads or make sales. The fundamentals of building a successful information marketing business have not changed.

The media used has changed over time (direct mail to telemarketing to fax to email) and new obstacles emerge over time like the lists of people who don’t want calls from telemarketers, don’t want broadcast faxes, don’t want “junk” mail delivered by the postman, and soon probably a list of people who don’t want “junk” email delivered to their electronic inbox. The playing field changes constantly but the fundamentals do not.

So what are the fundamentals? Well, you need a widget to sell (or to give away if you’re using a two-step process). Then you need traffic. You could use PPC, SEO, banner ads, etc. but traffic is essential because if nobody visits your “virtual store” then you won’t sell any widgets.

Third you need to convert the traffic into leads and/or sales. What good is all that traffic if nobody buys a widget? Conversion hinges on copywriting aka “words that sell.” That’s a broad topic but it involves an attention-grabbing headline, an irrestible offer, and often a guarantee that takes the risk out of buying. There’s a lot more to it than that but that’s a good start.

There’s more to conversion than copywriting though. The only way you’ll know which sales letter or lead-generation ad (aka “squeeze page”) is most effective is to test and track the results. Test headlines, prices, offers, bonuses, etc. to see which combination of variables produces the best results. You can use a free tool like Google Website Optimizer for testing. If you’re not testing and constantly trying to beat the “control” then you’re making a mistake.

Finally, you don’t want to find a customer to make a sale. That’s a short-term strategy. A better strategy is to make sale to find a customer. Then you can maximize the lifetime value of that customer by offering other products and services through upsells, cross-sells, etc. It’s exponentially easier to make another sale to an already satisfied customer who’s already predisposed to buying from you than it is to constantly be looking for new customers who don’t know you and have no previous relationship with you.

If you want more detailed information on the fundamentals, check out Jim Straw’s Power Tools for Entrepreneurs. Jim has been making money offline (and now online) probably since before Ben Hogan figured out the “modern” fundamentals of golf…so I’d say Jim is well-versed in the modern fundamentals of making money.

Tags: Domain Names, Testing & Tracking

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Christine has accomplished quite a bit so far in life.  She ran away from home at 16 to become a model in New York City.  Six months later she talked her way into college without a high school diploma.  She didn’t care for either fashion runways or college so she became a Bhuddist monk.  At 24 she broke her vows.  At the age of 25 she got a job with Microsoft despite the lack of a college degree. At 27 she decided to become a millionaire.  Ten years later she had made over $10 million and consulted to 700 companies in the Fortune 1000.  And she retired at 40.  I’d say all that qualifies her to write the rules for renegades.  What do you think?

Remember, she doesn’t even have a high school diploma proving once again that formal education is over-rated.  She says an MBA is optional, but a GSD is essential.  GSD stands for “gets stuff done.”

She started her first company on the spur of the moment while she was a contractor at Microsoft.  Something happened such that Microsoft could no longer pay them directly so 300 contractors were called into a big meeting to announce the change and encourage the contractors to become employees of Volt Technical Services who would then pay the contractors (forgive me if the details are not exactly correct but that’s the basic idea…it had something to do with taxes).

Of course Volt takes a percentage off the top of all the contractor’s wages and makes a killing.  Quickly doing the math (as Christine did), if Volt makes $10/hour for each contractor, they make $3,000/hour (300 contractors x $10/hour) which is $24,000/day assuming an 8 hour day and $120,000/week.  And all they really have to do is handle the payroll & tax withholding.  How hard can that be?  Not much work for $120,000 per week.

Christine realized this, recognized an opportunity, and more importantly quickly acted upon it.  She stood up in the middle of the meeting and announced she had a company providing the same service and would take a smaller percentage of the contractor’s earnings than Volt.

She had no idea how she was going to accomplish any of this, but she would figure it out as she went along.  After the meeting she passed out her email address, made a phone call to register a corporation, rented office space, and outsourced the payroll to another company.  By the end of the next day she had 35 employees.  Her plan was to take 5% less than Volt.  So if she made $9.50/hour for 35 contractors that’s a bit less than $350/hour, $2,800/day, $14,000/week, and $900,000/year.  She created a business on pace to gross nearly $1 million/year in little more than 24 hours.  Not bad.  Sounds like a classic reptile brain.

That little excerpt is from the first 10 pages of the book.  There’s plenty more and like I said I haven’t even finished the book yet.  I recommend you read it.  You’re bound to get some good ideas.

Tags: Domain Names, Monetization

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“Robert, this is one of the best guides to getting more traffic and general SEO that I have received. Fred has a great site, and the advice he gives is top-notch. You did a great interview. I encourage all to get this - it really cuts through the ‘hype’ of SEO and traffic issues.”

If you need more proof, read the post Fred made last week: SEO: #1 & #2

In this intervew, Fred & I cut though all the crap and tell you in plain English how we rank #1 & #2 in the most popular search engine for this highly-competitive search term. You can do it too. All you need to do is follow the simple plan we share in the interview.

Click Here to Download the SEO Interview

Tags: Video Products, Traffic

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Over the weekend I read Broken Windows, Broken Business by Michael Levine. The title is based on the Rudy Giuliani’s clean up of New York City when he was mayor in the 1990s. In a nutshell, the theory is that if there are broken windows in the buildings of a neighborhood, it sends a message of tolerance. And if the broken windows ar not cleaned up quickly, the neighborhood will decay and more serious and violent crimes will become commonplace.

It all starts with a single “broken window.” Giuliani and the NYC police chief implemented a strict “zero tolerance” policy on crime. Even simple things like jaywalking were not tolerated. Many ridiculed the policy and said it would never work but within a few years, the violent crime rate in NYC had dropped dramatically. Giuliani’s policy was widely praised for this success. (The authors of Freakonomics attribute another factor the drop in violent crime but that’s not the point here.)

Levine argues that the “broken windows” theory applies to any business too. He cites several examples of companies, like K-Mart & American Airlines, that tanked as a result of “Broken Windows Hubris” which means they failed to address (or in some cases even recognize) the broken windows in their businesses.

This is not only about large, behemoth corporations. The author cites bad customer service as the “ultimate broken window.” And that applies to an Internet or Information Business too. Levine talks about expectations vs. realities. Any customer of your business has certain expectations…most of them reasonable and some not so reasonable. But if you fail to at least meet those expectations, your business is headed for disaster. That means in some cases employees or you (if you do your own customer service) can be the biggest “broken window.”

There’s even an entire chapter dedicated to the Internet. Of course simple things like broken links are considered “broken windows” but on a larger scale a website might be the first (and only) exposure a prospect or customer has with your business. If there are “broken windows”, the likelihood of losing that prospect or customer for good are increased…and the worst part is that you probably won’t even know it. For example, if someone is looking for contact information or FAQs, they should be easy to find.

It’s a short, easy-to-read book (162 pages). I recommend you march on down to the local public library and check it out like I did.

Tags: Success, Create Your Own Products

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