Mentioned Resources:

blogtechguy.com
Yaro’s Twitter
wordpress.org

CLICK HERE & PRESS PLAY

CLICK HERE & PRESS PLAY

Seen those websites with cool striped background? Well, you can make your very own here: Stripemania – Striped background generator — here’s another one that’s not as capable: Striped Backgrounds, and a third one Stripe Generator – ajax diagonal stripes background designer

Four background makers to ensure that all the visitors to your website are impressed: Dotted Background Generator, Seamless Pattern Background Designs (the best), Tartan Designer – Tartan Maker – Tartan Background pattern generator (scottish kilts anyone?).

When you click on something and it loads slowly, you often see one of those spinning thingies that means it’s loading, be patient — well, you can design your own one here: Web Script Lab » Ajax Loading Gif Generator and here Ajaxload – Ajax loading gif generator

This one I use absolutely all the time — generate badges that you can put on a website to spiff it up and make it look cool Web 2.0 Badges – Useful collection of stylish web 2.0 badges and badge generator.. And when you need buttons that look just right, I use Buttonator to make them for myself,

Need a logo for the website? Here’s several online generators: web 2.0 Logo Creator Online. Design and Create Free Logos, Web2.0 – Logo Creatr (love this one), Logo Maker : Web 2.0 Stylr.

Not just for kids! When you need a graph, go here: Create A Graph. If you prefer to work on your desktop, you can download this XML/SWF Charts > Introduction

Need to color your website? Here’s several pallete generators: slayeroffice | tools | color palette creator v1.6.1 and Color Combinations Tester – Combo Tester – ColorCombos.com.

That’s it – if you have any that do a better job, or a different job, let me know in the comments.

Most people are not like me.

“Well duh!”

But what I didn’t fully realise was how unlike me people were. You’re all a bunch of wackos! Freaks!

I discovered this when I actually bit the bullet on a task I knew I was going to hate but had been told by so many respected webpreneurs I had to do. Testing.

‘Oh God! He’s going to talk about testing. Disengage brain‘

Hey – I know – it’s boring as hell. But you HAVE to do it. It’s the way I went from massive credit card debt to writing crap like this for a living. This stuff is golden.

I am not going to tell you how to do it, you can suffer that yourself, but I am a complete convert to it now after seeing the smallest changes take my various websites from loss to crazy profit with the change of a sentence or graphic.

The human brain is a very strange thing and instead of trying to guess what turns a surfer into a customer, won’t happen, you have to give your traffic various scenarios to click ‘buy’ and then go with the winning setup. And guess what? You then test that!

Take a look at google’s free website tester – website optimizer – great for testing one page against another, it’s all you need, but if you really want to start testing the smallest of changes I highly recommend Visual Website Optimizer – very easy to use and a breath of fresh air to anyone that usually inputs all that code manually.

When you start seeing your conversions go through the roof, trust me, testing will no longer be boring.

Related articles:

• A/B Testing With Visual Website Optimizer (appreaders.com)
• 7 A/B Testing Resources for Startups and Solo Developers (mashable.com)

CLICK HERE & PRESS PLAY

www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2ux9fiGDx8

The final result? My best advice? Don’t. Specifically, you don’t.

I’ve spent years, literally, learning the fine art of SEO (search engine optimis(z)ation), if they had a degree in it (they probably do) I’d have a doctorate, and I wish I’d never started.

It’s a bloody nightmare. The degree of accuracy required combined with the mind numbing tasks involved means it’s a full time job, which means your real business suffers.

If you’ve got the resources – outsource it. Find some sallow faced, short sighted hermit to put everything in place and then change everything again when google or yahoo change their algorithms. You. You concentrate on the business.

If you’re skint then just do the basics. Go to google’s ‘webmaster section’ and put a day aside just to get your head around the concept and the basic rules. Follow these rules as you add content to your site and you’ll be 80%’ish of the way there. To get 100% of the way just takes too much time.

The one thing that you can do to tip the odds in your favour, if you haven’t got a small army of SEO hermits, is to boost the quality of your content. Google’s (etc) one and only job is to ensure that their users, the searchers, find the most relevant results for their search.

If your content (blog posts are best) is good then web2.0 will link to it. When you have 10′s, 100′s, 1000′s of twitter/bebo/facebook/digg/mixx/delicious links pointing at your post google is going to think you’re relevant to something. Along comes the google spider and, if you’ve learnt the SEO rules, decides that your content is relevant to a given topic. Bang! Job done. Next time someone types in a phrase relevant to your site you will now be found higher up the search results – because your content was good.

• Concentrate on your skills and talents and reflect those in the content you post.
• Let surfers easily link to it via web2.0.
• Make sure you follow SEO basics
• Write some more quality content

hiremyparents will soon be releasing its ‘Luddite’s Guide’ series to members and readers of the blog. A completely free guide to getting the basics right for your website and getting the traffic it needs. Come back often for updates, or better yet, subscribe via email or RSS for news on its release.

PS – please make a comment or web2.0 me to practise what I preach.

Related Optimising Your Website Articles …

10 SEO Tips For Clients | Add Site Pro

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of optimising your website to make it more visible to the search engines, so that it appears higher up in the results pages, for your chosen keywords. If you’re going to outsource your SEO …

Tips on how to blog to optimise the SEO of your website

So this blog post gives some quick tips and advice for SEO-newbies into how blogging can be used to optimise the SEO of your website, making sure it has the best chance to go viral (and be found). Some SEO basics. – Google loves content …

Related articles …

• Are We Connected.com: “The BEST way to share content on Facebook” (mikemueller.posterous.com)
• How to Optimize Images for SEO and Readers (wordsellinc.com)
• Small Business Search Engine Optimization (ronmedlin.com)

If you’re one of our members then you’ve probably noticed a few changes around the hmp site. It was good before but now it’s the best. And this isn’t an idle boast. We’ve listened to our members, we’ve combed the web and we believe we have brought together the very best resource on the web for anyone looking for a flexible life with a flexible income.

• Our job board now has over 600 flexible jobs on it, growing daily.
• Our new ‘Extra Income’ section shows the very best in instant income opportunities from around the web – vetted by our members
• The Library now has over $250,000 worth of courses, guides and software available for our members to download …and sell!

Combined with our expert panel, our member useable social network and customer service second to none we are ..the best!

Here ends the lesson.

Related Flexible Life / Flexible Income Articles …

Life and Style | The Independent UK – Poll shows ’18% of would …

However 30% said they lacked the necessary support from their senior manages and colleagues, with just 10% currently practising flexible working. Orange UK spokesman Martin Lyne said: “Businesses need to address this demand or they risk …

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Telecommuting and flexible hours can work well and increase productivity and morale at the same time, always a plus, but whether or not you can have flexible hours or work at home first of all depends on what you do. …

Can someone help me find a real work from home job with flexible …

4 Responses to “Can someone help me find a real work from home job with flexible schedule?” STEVEN F says: March 17, 2010 at 5:41 am. IF there are any real work at home jobs, the effort required to sort them out from the scams is … If you are thinking that it is time to create some extra income from the internet, congratulations. Currently you have JavaScript disabled. In order to post comments, please make sure JavaScript and Cookies are enabled, and reload the page. …

Flexible Income Options No Longer ‘One Size Fits All’ – Retirement …

In today’s economic environment, consumers have an overwhelming need for flexible annuity solutions.

Related articles …

• One in five male workers wants to take six months paternity leave (telegraph.co.uk)
• Nanette Fondas: Peaceful Revolution: Everyone Is Talking About the Work-Life Equation (huffingtonpost.com)

Here are the things you need to know about how iPhone and Android have changed mobile advertising and why you, as a job seeker or marketer, need to make the call now.

Your customers are on more than one carrier – A complete mobile marketing strategy must consider reaching audiences subscribed with all the various mobile carriers (e.g., Verizon, O2, Orange, Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile).

Marketing begins and ends with numbers – The mobile marketing platform has lagged behind the web in terms of the ability to provide advertisers with critical metrics and control to measure and optimize their ad campaigns. Expect Google’s acquisition of AdMob to have tremendous implications for mobile advertising. AdMob serves ads for more than 15,000 mobile sites and applications worldwide and openly shares the mountain of actionable data they are collecting. AdMob has announced that it is supporting the Palm Pre/Web OS phones, demonstrating their cross-platform capabilities.

You don’t necessarily need to have an app – A recent WhitePages and MediaVest study showed that advertising performance is just as strong on the mobile web as it is on an app. The downside of apps is that consumers need to upgrade to get new versions of the apps, while a mobile site can simply be updated. A mobile site does not necessitate the consumers to do anything for it to update, all the burden is on you, the marketer, and that is good. As long as mobile carriers can scale their 3G networks to meet demands, the future of wireless is very likely to go back to the mobile web.

Location demands persistence and endurance – While location will be a key driver in the future of mobile advertising, the mobile industry will need to overcome a few challenges in order for location-based marketing to truly take off. One, the popularity of applications requires persistence and the ability to run more than one application at a time (Apple needs to wake up on this one). And two, battery drain from frequent GPS/location requests and poor cell tower coverage.

A different call to action – The key to the success of any marketing campaign is to make it easy for the consumer to react. For one, easy click-to-call actions have been seen to have contributed to +5% conversion results for advertisers.

If you want to learn more about how to reach your audience via mobile marketing I highly recommend Mobile Marketing Leadership. Only for those with a bit of cash to spend I’m afraid but definitely the No1 resource out there for this growing market.

Related Mobile Advertising Articles…

Mobile Advertising, Apple and SDK’s …

Second, how about those that have the ability to “turn on” the advertising revenue stream for the developer? Well, mobile advertising networks such as AdMob, Quattro Wireless, 4INFO and Millennial Media are the poster children here. …

Apple Staffing Up For Mobile Advertising Blitz

Apple now hiring an “iPhone advertising SDK manager.”

Mobile advertising research shows WinMo performs better than …

Smaato (a mobile ad optimizer and mobile advertising company) has revealed its…

To become an expert takes hard work and experience. It can involve study or the honing of practical skills. It demands high standards of work. But after all this effort will you be perceived as an expert? If you feel you’ve earned the mantle of expert but are not recognized as one, here are nine ways to start establishing your reputation.

Publish a book or series of reports
The internet has made this much easier. You can now create an ebook that can be downloaded without having to involve a publisher. A well-written book or series of reports will establish your reputation as an expert in your field.

Publish a newsletter
Set one up on the internet and distribute it to your customers. This is an excellent way to regularly keep your name in front of your prospects as an authority on your subject. I personally use aweber for distribution and find it very robust.

Write press releases
Used correctly these can gain you a lot of positive publicity. Make sure the press release looks like newsworthy information and not like an advertisement.

Write Articles
By publishing information packed articles, you’ll soon enjoy the status of being seen as an authority on your topic. This can lead to joint ventures and many other exciting opportunities that you would have never enjoyed otherwise!

Create a website
Set up a user-friendly website that will appeal to customers and you have expanded the reach of your reputation. Keep it timely and informative, and people will continue to return to your site. If you don’t know how to set up a website stay tuned I’ll be releasing part one of my ‘idiots guide’ (literally) later this week.

Join associations
If you are a member of an association it will enhance your credibility. But don’t just be a member. Be an active member. This will build your reputation among your peers and lead to useful introductions. Membership can have many benefits, and it will certainly keep you up to date in your field.

Networking
You can boost your reputation and influence by speaking to the right people. Keep your name in front of your prospects. Organize mutually beneficial ventures. You cannot predict what may come from a contact so make as many as you can.

Public Speaking
Even speaking to a local group of people can establish you as an expert and get you referrals that may lead to a wider audience. If you are not sure you can speak in public, preparation and rehearsal are the keys to success. Make sure your presentation is aimed at the right level, follows a sensible sequence and will not sound like a dry textbook-like monologue. Write your main points on small cards so you are not relying solely on your memory and start in front of a small audience.

Teach workshops or seminars
If you have knowledge that people would like to tap into you can pass on your expertise. If your presentation is well planned you will be seen as an authority in your subject. You will also meet people who are likely to recommend you to others. If you are teaching a hot topic you will also be gaining a useful income stream.

Any of these methods will start building your reputation as an expert. Use them all correctly and you will gain the sort of reputation that will have potential clients approaching you without having to seek them out.