I mean, I know that the Intertubes are not exactly the place where only saints and paragons of virtue hang out. After all, it’s representative of humanity, and humanity’s a delightful mishmash of the aforementioned paragons on one side, those with more dubious morals on the other, and everyday folks who like looking at pictures of cute cats in the middle.

But, when people who should know better – because they make their living online, or sell themselves as experts in business and marketing, for example – ignore the basics of ethical behaviour on the Internet, I start getting twitchy.

I’ve often thought that we wouldn’t need any laws at all if we all followed one basic principle: be nice to others. Nevertheless, because it seems people can’t follow such a simple precept, we have legislation to regulate behaviour on- and offline. Whichever way you look at it though, certain things are not ok. Since it seems that there have been a few prominent examples lately of people forgetting this, let’s clear this up for future reference:

The Shoeperwoman Saga: It is not ok to give your business the exact same name as a site that has already been in existence for two years. Using a hyphen in the name does not make it different, despite your assertions to the contrary. This is because it is especially not ok if you will be operating in the exact same market, thereby causing confusion amongst customers and site visitors. And it is definitely not ok to register the business/site name as a trademark, thereby effectively putting an end to the existing business if successful.

The Girl Geeks Gaffe: It is not ok to pick someone’s brain about an organisation they’ve been running for years, then set up a limited company with the same name, register the trademark and complain to Twitter that the woman whose brain you picked and who has been using her Twitter handle for a good few years is now infringing your trademark, thereby getting her Twitter username summarily taken away from her overnight. No, it is not ok to stomp all over the hard work someone has put into her organisation and its branding.

While the Girl Geeks issue has been resolved in favour of Morna Simpson, the original @girlgeeks on Twitter, the issue of the real versus fake Shoeperwoman is ongoing. In both cases, however, the reaction of the large group of fans and supporters of the two businesses was swift and severe. Like the saying about the world, the Internet is a small place and news of not-nice behaviour travels fast. It’s the quickest and easiest way to ruin your reputation online.

Now, the Shoeperwoman and Girl Geeks examples are obviously quite major. But minor infractions occur daily. By calling the following minor, I don’t mean to imply that they’re somehow ok. They’re not. Stealing is stealing. Let’s take a look at these:

It is not ok to use (watermarked) pictures from someone’s photography portfolio in your YouTube video without permission. In fact, it is not ok to use someone else’s pictures, period, unless they come with explicit permission for you to do so. And no, just because the pictures were published on Flickr or available via Google image search, does not change this. Still not ok, geddit?

It is not ok to take someone’s picture of themselves and use it in a forum or on your blog as if it was a picture of you. That’s both stealing and lying. And, more than a tad creepy. (Amber, the original Sheoperwoman, has had this happen to her on numerous occasions, so much so that a friend of hers coined the term Caughty doing a McNaughty to describe the behaviour!)

It is not ok to copy someone else’s blog posts and put them up on your site, even if you link back to the original author. Unless the person who wrote the post has given you explicit permission to do this, assume that it’s wrong.

It is not ok to steal someone’s entire site design and pass it off as your own, particularly if you’re supposedly in the web design biz. Yes, this happens. Seriously… sometimes I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

So, what have we learned here? Well, I hope it’s clear by now that, unless you have explicit permission from the creator of a piece of work (whether that be a blog post or photograph or graphic design or anything else) to use it, assume that you can’t. It’s that simple.

I should hope it’s also clear that taking someone else’s business name and business model and registering the trademark is also a big no-no. Instead of copying someone else, why not invest some time in creating something unique that you can truly call your own?

And when you’ve done that… hope like heck no-one steals the stuff you’ve worked so hard to create. If they do, though? Send them directly to this post. I’ll soon set them straight about what is and isn’t ok.

It’s not an unreasonable amount at all, but at that particular point in time, not really having earned very much yet from my own business, it may as well have been £250,000 for all that I could afford it. They didn’t offer the option to pay the membership fee monthly, unfortunately, or I probably would have jumped at that – just over £20 per month was infinitely more affordable than a lump-sum upfront payment.

In retrospect, I’m kinda glad that I didn’t scrape together the money to join the networking organisation. I’ve met many of the people who belong to it at other functions and they’re all lovely people, but the style of networking involved was too formal for me. I’ve decided to be at peace with the fact that I’m not a ‘magic minute’ kind of girl!

But I digress.

My experience with the whole heart-sinking, jaw-dropping, you-want-me-to-pay-what-upfront?! process isn’t unique amongst small businesses, especially not in the first few months of operation. Sometimes, finding a whole big chunka cash for something just isn’t feasible no matter how much you’d like it to be so. Smaller monthly payments, on the other hand? Perfect.

The weird thing is, I never thought to apply this to my own business at first – for some reason, in my head, a website was something you paid for upfront. In our case, we ask people for a 50% deposit at the start of a project, and 50% upon completion, which breaks things up somewhat, but which can also still work out to two large amounts.

I’m happy to report, however, that my brain finally came to the party and that we now offer a pay-monthly option for our web design services… the Monthly Marvin! (For some background on “Who on earth is Marvin?!” click here.)

There will still be a deposit involved, though less at 25%. And, as is usually the case with pay-monthly options, the total cost will work out a wee bit higher than if you paid upfront, though we’re not here to exploit anyone by charging exorbitant fees. What we are here to do, is get small businesses like you the heck onto the web so that you can start expressing your brilliance online and making those big dreams come true! I feel very passionately about this, and can’t stand to see small businesses settling for either no web presence or an inferior one simply as a result of a (too) high cost barrier.

Regardless of whether you choose to pay upfront or monthly, you’ll also have the option to add on our monthly maintenance package, which offers real-time backups of your site, regular WordPress and plugin updates, and free troubleshooting assistance in event of anything going wrong with your site.

You also won’t miss out on membership of our Noodle Bar if you choose to pay monthly. We’ll simply allocate your points on a monthly basis instead, and your discount rate will increase accordingly as well.

Any questions? Contact us, and we’ll be glad to answer them!

WordPress has just beaten Joomla and Drupal to win this year’s Open Source CMS Hall Of Fame Award. Those of us who work with WordPress every day know exactly how powerful the software is as a Content Management System, and it’s fantastic to see WordPress getting more and more recognition for this and moving away from being thought of as ‘just’ a blogging platform.

To find out how WordPress can help your small business reach its big dreams, contact us today.

The Noodle Bar ist wunderbar!

Although I refer to the Noodle Bar as a club, it doesn’t involve any membership fees. It’s a completely free service to Phenomenoodle clients that brings with it a whole lot of rewards:

• Discounts of between 5% and 45% on all Phenomenoodle’s products and services
• Noodle Points given on each purchase, which can be redeemed on future purchases
• Discounts on related services offered by our trusted business partners – Aviemore Business (Search Engine Optimisation), Caroline Von Schmalensee (Copywriting & Marketing), Steve Reilly (Photography & Filmography), and Freelance World (Accounting & Tax Advice)

My plan is to continue to expand the Noodle Bar even further over time, introducing more trusted partners as well as extra Noodle Bar member-only small business resources (ebooks, teleclasses, video and audio) – all with the aim of helping small businesses achieve their big dreams. I feel quite passionate about this

Click here to read more about how the Noodle Bar works.

Dear PHPurchase

I love you. Simple as that. I don’t remember how I came to find you, but I am very thankful for whatever fortuitous links led me to your website.

You see, I’d been about to give up on finding that seemingly rare and elusive thing – a WordPress e-commerce plugin that not only worked smoothly out of the box, but was also flexible enough to let me set up my store exactly the way I wanted to.

I’d tried the usual suspects (names won’t be named, but we all know who they are (and if you don’t, just look at the run-of-the-mill “top 5 WordPress e-commerce plugins” type blog posts to get an idea)). But they all suffered from at least one of these fatal flaws: bad or sloppy code and the accompanying nightmare that ensues when one tries to install and configure the plugin, inability to easily customise the look and feel of the store, and – the kiss of death – developers who couldn’t give a $h1t about their customers.

Now, not all WordPress e-commerce plugins are all terrible all the time… some of the ones out there do a halfway decent job (and their developers are nice folk). But I wasn’t looking for only halfway decent. I have high coding standards and very specific requirements, and I wanted that perfect plugin. I knew it had to be out there somewhere. My faith was strong, though I did experience a few speed wobbles along the way.

And then there was you, ticking all the boxes for what I wanted out of an e-commerce plugin. You’re solid, bug-free, flexible and configurable. You worked perfectly, first time. Your code is beautiful. Your developer, Lee Blue, is indeed a PHPoet. Plus, he was so quick to respond to my pre-sales questions (thanks to you being such a great plugin, I haven’t yet had to ask any more questions, but I know that if I ever do, customer support will be readily forthcoming and helpful). Added bonus: his surname is Blue, which is only my favourite colour of all time. It was clearly meant to be.

So, dear PHPurchase – thank you, from the bottom of my heart. I look forward to a long and happy relationship with you.
Love
Taryn

PHPurchase is not a free WordPress plugin. But it is seriously priceless… it provides incredible value for its price tag (a single site standard license costs $49, which is discounted to $39 if you tweet about it). Find out more about the PHPurchase WordPress e-commerce plugin here.

So many people have blocks when it comes to technology. For various reasons, people shy away from ‘tech stuff’, thinking they don’t have the knowledge or skills required. It can be a crippling place to be when you’re running your own business and a large part of what you need to do involves running your website and being online.

I hate the idea of people feeling powerless or not in control of their own website.

That’s part of the reason why I gravitated towards setting up websites for people using WordPress. It’s easy to use and gives people control over their own sites. I’m simply not the kind of web designer/developer who likes to keep her clients technologically disempowered so that every single little thing they want to do with their website has to come through me.

It’s also largely the reason why I’m in the process of releasing a range of ‘do-it-yourself’ guides related to various aspects of setting up and using WordPress to run a small business website. The first guide has just been launched, and it deals with the very beginning stages of setting up a WordPress-based website. Over the next few months, I’ll be releasing guides related to the other stages of the process, such as the design of the site, plugins, using WordPress as a Content Management System, integrating WordPress with social media, RSS feeds, Search Engine Optimisation, WordPress security, site optimisation, and site statistics.

(If you have any subjects related to using WordPress for a small business site that you’d like to see covered in addition to those mentioned above, please let me know!)

These DIY tutorials are written specially for people with minimal knowledge of technology (though people with more knowledge will benefit as well). Usually, when subject experts write tutorials they leave out huge chunks of assumed knowledge – I’m often quite surprised at how full of holes so-called ‘WordPress for beginners’ tutorials are! As a result, people trying to follow these tutorials often end up getting themselves into a bigger mess than they were before they started.

I’ve always been able to explain things to people really simply and in language that they’ll understand, bringing order to the chaos of confusion . I used to assume that everyone could do this, but based on feedback I’ve received over the years have come to realise that it’s a natural skill that I have, which can be put to good use to help people. I like to think of myself as a translator, from geek to good ol’ plain English!

It’s my sincere hope that these DIY WordPress guides provide value to you. As always, they’re one of the ways in which I aim to help small businesses achieve their big dreams .

Visit the DIY Resources page

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?

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.

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.

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.]