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The problem

Have your image, video, audio, and other media buttons stopped working? Are you clicking on them, but nothing’s happening? Is your visual editor showing html tags rather than a WYSIWYG interface?

Aha! You, my friend, are probably experiencing a case of too-many-page-revisions-itis.

How can you tell if this is indeed the cause of your non-responsive buttons and suddenly non-visual visual editor? Scroll down your WordPress editing screen: Does it end abruptly after the Page Revisions box heading, like this…

… when it should be looking more like this…

That’s a sure sign that you have too many page revisions in your database, which has thrown its metaphorical hands up in the air at your penchant for constant change and gone to sulk in the corner, leaving your editing page only partly loaded and partly working.

The solution

The solution is a two part one: First, you need to clear all your old page revisions out of your database, and secondly, you need to take steps to manage your page revisions to ensure this doesn’t happen again. Let’s look at each part in turn.

Part 1: Remove old page revisions from the database

Firstly, as is good practice when making any significant changes to your site, backup your database.

Then, do the following yourself or grab a geek and ask them to do the following:

Open phpMyAdmin, select your database and run the following command:

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = "revision";

This will delete all post revisions in your database. You can also tailor the command to only delete post revisions for specific pages if you prefer.

Part 2: Manage your page revisions

Even if you haven’t experienced the panic and confusion that can set in when your WordPress editing screen stops working as it should, I’d recommend doing one of the following to manage your page revisions before they do become a problem. Prevention, as the ubiquitous “they” say, is always better than cure, after all.

Option 1:
Add the following line to your wp-config.php file:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS',10);

Replace 10 with the number of revisions that you want the database to store for each page.

Option 2:
Install the Revision Control plugin to manage the number of page revisions for your site as a whole or on a page-by-page basis.

What stories are people telling about your business?

I’ve been pondering this question for the last couple of weeks. Us humans are natural storytellers: it’s largely how we communicate with each other. Plus, stories are sticky… we remember them long after the boring ol’ facts and figures have faded from our brains.

My ponderings all began with contact lenses. My husband and I get our contact lenses from a local optometrist. Every three months, like clockwork, they send us our lenses for the next three month period.

Usually.

See, this particular time, the person responsible for paying the optometrists’ account with the lens suppliers went on summer holiday. Said bill went unpaid. And, as a result, my husband’s lenses didn’t arrive.

The optometrist screwed up.

But we aren’t telling that story.

Yes, they messed up. It was inconvenient. But, whenever we tell anyone a story about these optometrists, we don’t dwell on this. It was a minor glitch.

Instead, we’re telling the story of Sheila, the receptionist, who after only meeting us once at our initial consultations, remembers our names and faces and prescriptions; who is always incredibly on the ball; and who on this occasion went out of her way to sort out the problem for us. We’re telling the story of how the optometrist provides really great service, sorts things out quickly when they do go wrong, and takes care of us and our eyes in a way that makes us feel like a million bucks even though we’re paying a third of what our previous Edinburgh-based optometrist (who never remembered who we were) used to charge.

What stories do you want people to tell about your business?

You can tell your own stories about your own business until you’re blue in the face. That’s marketing. If you take all the marketing material in the world at face value, every business out there is wonderful. According to themselves.

And people do buy on the basis of fancy schmancy marketing. No doubt about it. But people are also swayed, immensely so, by the informal stories that flow through the grapevine about you and your business.

These stories tell the truth about your business.

These stories can make you. Or they can break you.

What stories are people telling about your business?

We’re very excited to announce the release of our Featured Product plugin, an extension for the WP E-Commerce plugin. The Featured Product plugin, developed by Zorgbargle especially for Phenomenoodle, allows you to add a “Featured Product” widget to your sidebar. You can choose to either display one specific product or let the plugin choose a product at random for you every time the page is refreshed or your site visitors move from page to page on your site.

Visit our Free Resources page for more details and to download the plugin.

Head’s up, folks: WordPress 3.0 has just been released.

It represents a major update from previous versions of the software, so that means it’s time to upgrade your installation if you haven’t yet done so. You can do this quite easily from your WordPress dashboard, but please, please, oh pretty please remember to backup your site before you get all giddy on the excitement of a one-click update

For the most part, upgrades to WordPress 3.0 have been progressing smoothly, but some people have experienced problems. If you end up being one of the unlucky few to have bugs come a’crawling through your upgrade party, WordPress has been keeping a list of all the common issues and solutions with WordPress 3.0.

Business cards. The must-have fashion accessory for any self-respecting business person. Not only do they provide a practical means of exchanging contact details with others, but they are also a vital part of conveying your business brand to potential clients.

As such, woe betide you if your business cards are not thick and luscious and full colour and professionally designed to make you stand out from the crowd. And heaven forbid that you should pitch up at a networking event without any business cards. It’s akin to committing professional suicide. A cardinal sin.

Or is it?

Are business cards really necessary?

I’ve been conducting a little experiment for the past five months. It all started back in January, when the first networking event of the year rolled around and I realised that I had run out of business cards. I’d heard all the advice about how important it was to always carry business cards with me, plus all those dire warnings about how my business was sure to die a horrible painful death as a result of my ineptitude as a business owner who couldn’t even get the basics, like business cards, right.

But, I didn’t exactly have a choice. So I went along to the event unarmed.

And nobody noticed. Nobody cared.

When it came time, during conversations with people, for the business card swap, I simply said, “I don’t have any on me at the moment. I’ll email you tomorrow with my details.” No-one batted an eyelash. Only once did I encounter a gentleman who also didn’t have any cards with him. No problem – each of us wrote down each other’s details in notebooks that we had on us.

Of course, the possibility exists that my fellow networkers thought terrible thoughts about me or muttered to one another about me behind my back. But I don’t think so. Here’s why: That first networking event without any business cards was one of the most successful (in terms of connections made and business generated) that I’ve ever had. In fact, since I stopped taking business cards with me to events, I’ve felt a definite shift in how I approach networking and in how others relate to me.

The reason why networking without business cards has worked for me is because it has opened up a space for me to be more myself in networking situations. I love chatting to people, finding out what they do and why they do it. Formal networking with business cards makes the process very transactional. The point seems to be to swap details, collect cards, work the room. Networking without business cards, on the other hand, makes the process a bit more informal, a bit more social, and encourages genuine connections. I found I had far more in-depth conversations with people without feeling any pressure to exchange business cards.

When these conversations ended naturally and the time came when business cards would usually be exchanged, I took others’ cards and promised to email them. And followed through on my promise. It allowed for a way to renew the connection we had made the previous day, and I’m betting (even though this wasn’t the aim of the exercise) that I stood out in the minds of people that I met as a result, more so than just being a name on a card in a pile of many collected.

I’ve only capitulated once in the last five months, taking business cards with me to one event where I was the speaker. I needed a quick and easy way to hand out my contact details to people who came up to chat to me after the event. It worked – in that situation. But, following my experiment, I now know that the conventional wisdom regarding business cards doesn’t necessarily work for me. I now know that I can break some of the so-called cardinal rules and not only get away with it but actually prosper as a result.

What are your thoughts on business cards? Do they work for you?

Earlier this week, I wrote about making something your own, whatever that something may be. A song, an article, marketing copy, a product… it doesn’t matter. Making something your own gives it an edge and makes it stand out from everything that is similar to it.

Learning how to make something your own is a process.

For some lucky people, the learning curve is so short that it can appear almost non-existent. They seem to have been born with an innate knowledge of and confidence in who they are and a talent for effortlessly demonstrating this to the world.

For the rest of us, though, it can take time to get to this place. And to help us along the way we often look to role models – people who have walked this path before us.

Role models are great. Imitating them is a necessary and important part of growth. But, imitation can go too far: learning from someone else’s experience and applying their advice in your own way to your unique situation is helpful; copying someone else’s personality and morphing into them in an effort to become as successful as they are is not. In fact, it’s downright harmful to you and your success.

The scary thing is that this latter form of imitation is not necessarily intentional. And it often happens so subtly and insidiously that the person involved doesn’t realise that they’ve got themselves stuck in the imitation phase and not actually moved on to making the advice their own.

Case study: Big Name Blogger and her fangirls

A certain current Big Name Blogger (who shall remain nameless as this is not about her) has a very large following. And rightly so. She is fantastic and excellent at what she does. She’s successful and she’s quirky and cool. In fact, she’s successful because she’s quirky and cool. And she teaches other people how to be successful by being their own quirky and cool selves.

Oh the irony.

Let me ‘splain. What’s happened over the past year has been painful to see. So many wonderful vibrant women flocked to Big Name Blogger, all eager to learn from her. But, instead of becoming more of their own quirky and cool selves as both they and Big Name Blogger intended, they instead slowly but surely morphed into clones of Big Name Blogger’s quirky and cool self.

I used to read some of these women’s blogs, and watched as their writing style changed. Now, all groups have a certain vocabulary in common, and this one is no different, but the types of changes I’m referring to went way beyond simple group jargon creeping in. I’m talking about the rhythm and tone of the writing changing to match that of Big Name Blogger. I’m talking about such similar ways of expressing things that in some cases sentences will match word for word – not plagiarism, just an exceptionally ingrained way of thinking. There’s more, but I can’t figure out a way of explaining it without giving away who I’m talking about. All I can say is that it totally freaks me out.

You’ll notice that I said I used to read these women’s blogs. Yup, I ended up unsubscribing from them. What attracted me to these women as writers and business owners in the first place was gone. They were no longer vibrant and interesting. Instead, they became boring repetitions of what I’d read over at Big Name Blogger’s blog. They were no longer unique. Instead, they became pale imitations of Big Name Blogger. Like Coke, they changed the recipe, leaving out that secret ingredient in their awesomesauce that made them so fabulous in the first place.

The world already contains Big Name Blogger. She’s an essential and brilliant part of the world. But, the world doesn’t need more clones of her. What the world needs are more people allowing their own special brilliance to shine forth.

I hope these women remember just how amazing they are, and start to let the rest of the world see it. I hope it’s not too late.

Make the song your own

The American Idol judges sound like a stuck record after a while. Without fail, they keep telling the contestants to make each song their own.

Every. Single. Time.

It’s annoying. But they’re right.

A contestant may have a beautiful voice and the song may be pitch-perfect. From a technical standpoint, everything is right. Yet, the performance can still suck. Big time. If the contestant hasn’t made the song their own, the performance overall is lacking. It’s bland and boring.

So, what the hell does it mean to make something your own?

Back in the day (er, round about 2002), I was still working in the field of Occupational Psychology, lecturing at our local university. In the course of my work, I came across some ground-breaking research in my field that blew me away. It wasn’t exactly new research, but it hadn’t received much recognition. I wrote a paper summarising the research and its implications, hoping to submit it to a journal and spread the word about it.

Before submitting my paper, I spoke to one of my colleagues and showed him my draft paper. I was quite new to the department and didn’t have much experience in submitting articles to journals. What he said to me in our subsequent conversation changed the way I viewed not only academic research, but all ways of expressing oneself creatively, including (and especially) business.

The conversation went something like this:

Prof: So, this is a really excellent synthesis of the research in the field, Taryn. Really well done.
Me (preening): Thank you.
Prof: But, it’s not suitable for a journal.
Me (deflated): Oh….
Prof: You’ve told me what these other guys think. But what I want to know is, what do you think?
Me: Well, I completely agree with them. So, I think what they think.
Prof: Yes. That’s fine. And?
Me: ??
Prof: Even if you’re communicating other people’s ideas, and even if you agree completely with those ideas, there will always be something that only you can add – perhaps a new angle to consider, or an additional viewpoint. Whatever it is, there will always be room for your own unique expression to come through. Sometimes you may have to spend some time looking for it – it won’t always be glaringly obvious, but it will always be there. And it is up to you to find it, because that will make all the difference.

Who knew? University Professors and American Idol judges have more in common than they realise! Because of course what he was telling me was that, while my writing was perfect in a technical sense, it lacked that special something. I hadn’t yet made that article my own.

So, I went away and thought about what I thought, about what I could uniquely contribute even to a plain ol’ summary of existing research. And I found it. I rewrote the paper from the new angle, submitted it and had it accepted with only a few minor wording changes (I am the champion of long sentences, but even verbose academics draw the line somewhere, and I had to re-write a couple of paragraphs…).

Now, since you may not be familiar with the process of journal submission, let me just say that having an article accepted straight away with only minor changes represents nothing short of a miracle in a world where outright rejections are common. For the lucky few who don’t get rejected immediately, years of countless rounds of revisions follow. It’s a long and brutal process.

Yet I sailed through easily and smoothly. Thanks to my more experienced colleague’s advice, I rocked that article. And, during my short (yet, illustrious, I like to think!) academic career, I rocked a few more in exactly the same way. My success rate for journal submission, especially for a fairly junior lecturer, was exemplary.

Rock your business

This advice transcends the American Idol stage. It transcends academia. It’s applicable every time you write a piece of marketing copy for your business, every time you create a product, regardless of what form that product takes.

You can make something that is exactly like something someone else has already done. Or you can spend some time searching for that little something extra that represents your unique contribution to the world.

Whatever you do, you can make it your own.

Rock your business. Simon Cowell will be proud.

Blogs can be incredibly effective marketing tools for small businesses. There are two main ways to set one up, if you decide to take the plunge and introduce blogging to your marketing mix.

Self-hosted blogs

If you already have a website for your business, or are about to create one, the most obvious place to put a blog would be on your own website. Because you are hosting your blog on your site, this option is often referred to as a self-hosted blog.

To run a blog on your website, you need blogging software to power it. And the best blogging software out there is WordPress. I’m not just saying that because I’m a WordPress developer and set up websites for people using this software. Rather, it a case of me choosing to work with WordPress because it’s such an excellent product. WordPress has become very powerful over the years that it’s been around, and it can in fact power your entire website as a Content Management System, regardless of whether you have a blog on it or not. I often set up sites for people like this, with nary a blog in sight!

The WordPress software itself is free of charge, and to use it to set up a blog on your website, you will need to toddle along to WordPress.org to download and install it on your website. Some web hosts (like Hostgator) also offer an easy install of the WordPress software via Fantastico.

Either way, the process is fairly simple, although some technical knowledge can come in handy, particularly if you’re doing a manual install of the software. Please don’t let this put you off setting up a blog this way, though – as you’ll see in a second, having your blog on your own website has some very important benefits that far outweigh this small (possible) disadvantage.

Free blogging services

If you don’t have your own website, another way to set up a blog is to use one of the free services offered by the companies who develop blogging software. In this case, instead of your blog being hosted on your own website, it is hosted on the free services website.

WordPress offers this option at WordPress.com. The other biggie in this arena is Blogger. If you visit those sites, you’ll see that the process of setting up a blog there literally takes a few seconds: you fill in a brief form, and – voila! – you have a blog.

Now, in comparison to the first option with its extra technical knowledge requirements, this sounds like a Godsend. But… (why is there always a ‘but’?!)… because these services are free to use and so quick and easy to set up, they tend to attract two types of blogs: one is personal blogs, people’s online journals about what they get up to, and the second is spam blogs, also referred to as splogs (that’s probably the only funny thing about them!).

I’m a bit wary of throwing a business blog into that mix.

It’s fine if people already know you, like you and trust you, but for people who find your blog via a search engine query it can be difficult to distinguish your blog from the other thousands of blogs that all look exactly the same as yours – you’re all using the same free templates provided by the service for your blog design, so your business blog looks the same as a few thousand spam blogs and a few thousand personal blogs.

It’s not impossible to run a very professional business blog from one of these free services, but you’re sure starting off on the wrong foot and giving yourself a tad more work to do to convince your site visitors that you are, in fact, a genuine, legitimate business.

If you can, use the self-hosted option

All these disadvantages of the free blogging services fall away when you host your blog on your own website: you own your domain, and you can customise and brand the heck out of it (tastefully of course!).

In short, you’re in control over the impression that you provide to people finding your site via the search engines. It’s easier for you to demonstrate your integrity to them, and consequently easier for them to enter into a trust relationship with you.

[This blog post is based on a presentation I did for local businesses at the East Lothian Coffee Morning on 23 April 2010. You can download the slides from that presentation from the East Lothian Council.]

There’s a saying in the business world that people do business with people that they know, like and trust.

Cliché? Well, yes.

But clichés tend to become clichés because there’s often an element of truth to them, as there is with this particular one. But I think it’s worth unpacking this statement a little more, especially in the context of blogging.

To do this, let me tell you about a gentleman we know. We also like him very much. He’s a fun guy, has a great sense of humour and is very entertaining in social situations. He also (ironically, given what I’m about to say) has a good heart. The thing is, this particular gentleman is a builder, and while I don’t think he ever intends to screw his customers over, things always seem to be going wrong with his building projects. To listen to him, you’d think he was the unluckiest person on earth. The upshot of all of this, however, is that he lets his customers down. A lot. And, as a result, when it came time for my husband and I to do some building work to our house… well, despite knowing and liking this gentleman, there was no way on God’s green earth that we were letting him anywhere near the project.

We simply didn’t trust him.

If we look at our business cliché again, then, I think it’s fair to say that, while knowing and liking someone are important and nice to have, they’re not necessarily fundamental to business relationships. What is fundamental, however, is trusting that the person you’ve hired will deliver whatever it is that you’ve hired them to do.

Blog: A technical definition

A blog is a series of articles, known as posts published on a web page in reverse chronological order.

Great. That tells us what a blog is.

But we often forget what a blog does

When we focus on the technical definition, we lose sight of what a blog is really doing for us and our businesses. At the heart of it, a blog is a demonstration of our trustworthiness to potential customers.

Please note that this new definition of a blog assumes that you already possess integrity as a business owner. Blogs are good at showing us for who we already are.

How this plays out in practice

One of my blog posts on how to create a custom tab for your Facebook page gets an incredible amount of traffic from Google.

It’s one of the benefits of having a blog on your website – because you’re constantly adding to the content on your site, as well as adding to the number and variety of keywords on your site, your blog posts start showing up in more and more search results, driving more and more people to your little spot on the big ol’ web.

The thing is, all of this traffic – those hundreds, or thousands, or hundreds of thousands of visitors – is, in a sense, wasted if you’re not converting at least a percentage of them into paying customers.

Don’t get me wrong, blogging is fun. Heck, if you own your own business, most of what you do (bar those few annoying and boring admin tasks!) is probably fun. But fun doesn’t pay the bills. I tried, but unfortunately my bank manager didn’t quite see things my way.

At the end of the day, we’re business owners, and regardless of how much fun we’re having, we need a return on investment for our time and effort.

That return on investment comes from converting random site visitors into actual customers. And that conversion happens when your site visitors enter into a trust relationship with you. They know that if they throw money at you for a product or a service, you won’t let them down.

Your blog content helps this trust relationship to develop. For example, through your blog posts, you’re constantly demonstrating your expertise in your chosen field. It becomes very clear to your readers whether you know what you’re talking about or not.

Your blog comments also feed in to this trust relationship developing. Again, when you answer questions, it shows that you know your subject. But, just as importantly, your attitude towards your readers (who are your potential customers) is on show: Are you genuinely friendly and helpful when answering questions? Do you even bother to answer questions at all, or do you routinely ignore your comment section? I know it can be difficult to respond to every comment when you have a busy blog, not to mention a busy offline life, but it can make people think twice about hiring you if they feel that you may ignore them or that you’d treat them patronisingly!

On the other hand, if your interactions with your blog readers provide a clear indication of the fact that you do excellent work and treat your customers well, people will trust you, like you and get to know you… and do business with you.

[This blog post is based on a presentation I did for local businesses at the East Lothian Coffee Morning on 23 April 2010. You can download the slides from that presentation from the East Lothian Council.]

First things first: What is FTP?

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. As its name suggests, it is, quite simply a way to transfer files.

You’re probably quite familiar with the idea of transferring files and do this all the time: copying your document files from one folder on your computer to another, or copying your mp3s onto your music player, for example.

Well, FTP is very similar, except instead of transferring files between two folders on the same computer or to a device connected to your computer, you’re transferring the files to a completely different computer via the Internet.

In this blog post, I’ll walk you through the steps of using one particular FTP program (FileZilla) to transfer files from your computer to your website host’s server (i.e. the computer owned by your hosting company where the files for your website are stored).

What is FileZilla?

FileZilla is what’s called an FTP client. It’s a software program that must be installed on your computer, and which allows you to transfer your files quickly and easily over a secure connection.

FileZilla is not only easy to use, it is also free to use. Happy dance all round!

Step 1: Download the FileZilla software

Go to the FileZilla website and click on the button to download the FileZilla Client.

Once your download is complete, double-click on the file and follow the instructions to install the software to your computer.

Step 2: Connect to the computer where your website files are stored

Open your newly installed FileZilla program.

In order to access your website files on your host’s server, you’ll need three things: the name of the place where your files are stored (the FTP address), a username and a password. Luckily, these three pieces of information will have been sent to you in a welcome email by your web host when you signed up with them.

Here are some examples of welcome emails from hosts (with all the interesting information blurred, of course!). You’ll be looking for something similar in the email you received from your hosting company.

Once you’ve located this information, enter it into the three fields towards the top of the FileZilla screen, as shown below, and click the Quickconnect button to the right of these fields.

When you do this, you’ll notice a whole lot of action happen in the area just below where you entered your login information. Don’t be alarmed – this is good! It means that you have successfully connected to your web host’s server.

Step 3: Transferring files

Once you’ve connected successfully to your web host, your website files should now appear in the right-hand pane in FileZilla. The left-hand pane displays the files on your own computer. Each pane is further divided into two: the top half shows the directory listing, and the bottom half shows the files and folders within each directory.

The process of transferring files now resembles what you do when you transfer files between folders on the same computer – in other words, you locate the file on your computer that you want to copy by navigating through the folders in the left-hand pane in FileZilla, and then you drag it across to the right-hand pane and drop it into the folder in which you want it to be.

For the most part, you’ll be transferring files to the public_html folder on your host’s server. The exact location within this folder depends on the file you’re transferring.

As you transfer files, you’ll notice the transfer progress detailed at the bottom of the FileZilla screen, in addition to more scrolling information happening at the top of the screen.

Step 4: Disconnecting

When you’re done transferring files, disconnect from the server by clicking the button at the top with the red X on it.