How to get your shopping cart and mailing list to play nicely together

January 18, 2010 By

Let’s say you’re off to a good start with WordPress. Maybe you’ve got some good blog posts, or you’ve come up with a few good ideas for products, and you want to spread the word.

Now you’re thinking you need an email list. And you’re wondering if you need a shopping cart. And you’re starting to freak out a little bit because suddenly your online empire has (or is about to get) a bunch of new moving parts, and you’re the one who has to juggle them and make sure they all work.

You’re not alone!

This is not easy stuff. And you probably don’t have an IT staff that can just take care of it for you. Right?

So what’s a solo entrepreneur to do?

Personally, I use AWeber for my email list and newsletter. I use E-Junkie to manage my shopping cart and affiliate program — both of which are hooked up with PayPal (Yep, those are totally affiliate links). I know lots of tricks to get these three buddies to play nice together.

And I’m here to help. I’m holding a free call about how to get these three services (or any two of them) to get along in the little online playgroup that is your business.

It’s going to be on Tuesday, January 19, at 11am (Pacific timezone). I’ll be recording it and sending the link to everyone who signs up, so if you can’t make it, you’re still covered.

Plus, everyone who signs up for the free call will get a $20 discount on the followup two-week workshop (regular price will be $69), to be held January 26 and February 2 in the same timeslot. The workshop will include a webinar, so you’ll have a visual demonstration of the tech tweaks I’ll talk about. Plus you’ll get a PDF workbook with screenshots and audio recordings. And if you wait and buy the recordings later, it will cost $99. There, you’ve been warned.

The free call will be info-packed and useful, even though I will mention the paid workshop. I’ll take questions, too. So this is a great chance to get free mini-consulting from me (normally limited to my Open Office Hour on Thursdays).

Just fill out this form to get the phone number and access code for the free teleclass. (If you can’t see the form, maybe because you’re reading this in your RSS reader, swing by my website sign-up page to fill it out.)

It’s going to be awesome!

Filed Under: Announcements, General How-To's Tagged With: , ,

How to spend your measly technology budget

December 11, 2009 By

First things first: If you have less than $500 to spend, go look at my list of tools that will let you build your online empire for free (and don’t forget to read the awesome suggestions in the comments).

Now, if you’ve got the $500 and want to know what to do with it, or you just want to know why I think you need $500 to really do a self-hosted website, read on. It’s time to look at some paid services to help you run your online business.

What to do with your first $100

OK, I said this in a previous post, but it’s really worth saying again:

Your first purchase should be a domain name.

This will cost approximately $10 per year. So if you have $20, you can either buy one domain for two years, or two for one year.

My recommendation: Your first $50 should be spent on one domain name. For up to 5 years. If you really want to (or if there are variations on the name, common misspellings, hyphenated versions, and the like), then use the next few increments of $10 to buy multiple domain names. Up to $100.

Just go to GoDaddy (although their checkout process is obnoxious, they’re cheap and reliable. Just don’t buy any add-ons or extras. You only want to spend $10 on your domain name, remember?).

If you’ve got more than $100, you can start planning for the next paid step (keep reading).

But for heaven’s sake, don’t wait until you have $50 or $100 so you can implement a complicated domain hierarchy. Just spend your first $10 on the first domain name as soon as you’ve got it.

No, your domain name doesn’t have to be perfect. You may well change it later (when you’re rolling in cash and can buy all the domains you want, that is). But start with something now. Your name. Your company’s name. Your goldfish’s name. Just register something already!

Now you can plug that domain into your free Blogger.com blog, which will instantly raise your professionalism score by twenty points. And carry on with your free online empire (or, I guess it’s now a $10 online empire).

The bare minimum: No safety net

So let’s say you’ve got more than $100. You’re ready to move beyond Blogger. You see someone like me, crazy enough to offer WordPress installation for $99. You think “Great! I can buy this and still have $1 left over!”

Not so fast.

First, do not spend your family’s grocery money on your website. Please.

Second, that $99 pricetag is not your total cost. Before I can install WordPress for you, you’re going to need the aforementioned domain name, plus a little thing called web hosting (that’s essentially renting space on a backed-up, secure server so that your site is accessible to the whole world).

And that’s the bare minimum. Figuring $10 for your domain name and $120 ($10/month) for web hosting, that brings us to $130.

A digression about the cost of hosting: You may have heard that it’s possible to get free hosting. There really isn’t any such thing, except for Blogger.com (which I discussed in my post about how Blogger is a perfectly valid place to build a website). So-called free hosts put ads on your site, ads over which you have no control. Don’t fall for that.

It’s much safer to simply buy web hosting, which you can get for less than $10 per month (often much less, but I use the $10 figure to calculate conservatively).

So, the thing about that $130 bare minimum? It’s pretty bare. You can spend $130 and have a working website, but you will have to totally and completely do-it-yourself. If you can, by all means go for it, but if you need any kind of help, you may find yourself panicking (or spending money you don’t have, or other inadvisable practices).

An annual technology budget for cheapskates bootstrappers

So that’s why I give the $500 figure. Yes, it’s a nice round number, hefty enough that you can feel really good about having saved it up, a number that you can speak aloud confidently (try it: “My technology budget this year is $500.” You may not believe it yet, but what if it were true?).

But mostly, it gives you a nice cushion beyond the bare minimum.

If you’ve spent $130 on your domain and hosting, you have enough of that $500 left over to do one or two of the following:

  • Buy premium services like AWeber (for mailing list management) or AudioAcrobat (for recording and publishing audio clips and files), each of which is about $20/month.
  • Upgrade your shopping cart capabilities by using a paid shopping cart service (my favorite, and the one I use, is E-Junkie, which starts at $5/month, but there are many others).
  • Buy a premium theme for your blog (any premium theme worth its salt should come with some amount of tech support, by the way).
  • Start a pay-per-click campaign with Google AdWords.
  • Hire a graphics wizard to design your logo and header.
  • Purchase a guidebook or do-it-yourself WordPress class that you can use as a reference as you build your own site.
  • Have someone like me install and configure WordPress for you since that’s a one-time task that you may not want to waste time learning.
  • Hire a tech-savvy VA for a few hours, or a business or marketing coach for one or two intense sessions.

And even $500 isn’t enough to do all of these things. You’ll still need to pick and choose carefully. You might notice that I didn’t mention web design at all, which is because truly custom design will cost at least $1000, and often much much more. You can do a lot with a highly customizable theme and a unique logo, though.

The bottom line is to think carefully about your support needs. And when you’ve figured out exactly how much support and training you’ll need? Double it.

And if I’m wrong, and you survive just fine on the bare miminum? Fabulous! Good for you! At the end of the year you’ll have $370 to spend on whatever your heart desires, and wouldn’t that make a nice holiday gift for yourself and your business?

Filed Under: General How-To's Tagged With: , , , ,

How to build your online empire for free

December 9, 2009 By

In yesterday’s post, I told you it’s OK to stick with Blogger.com, a free web-based blogging platform, if you weren’t ready to do the whole design-and-manage-your-own-online-empire thing.

Today I want to talk about the money part of the equation. Or really, the how-can-I-avoid-spending-money part.

I get asked questions about cost a lot. Mostly, “What will my online business cost to build?”

And I hate to tell you this, but… it depends.

Yeah, I know. The most UNhelpful response in the universe.

So I’m going to try to be a teeny bit more helpful and give a few figures based on my experience. Your figures, it should go without saying but I’m going to say it anyway, may be completely different.

But first, just to reassure the bootstrappers, the downsized, the laid-off, and the otherwise economy-stricken among us:

Yes, you can do it for free

You can totally build a complete online empire (yes, even one where you can sell stuff) for free. You don’t have to pay for anything, not even a domain name.

The tradeoff is that you are going to spend your own time and energy (since free means you’re not going to pay for help) setting everything up. This is a fine tradeoff for many people. And it may be fine for you. But you should know about the tradeoff before you plunge ahead thinking that free means easy.

My tools of choice for this path are:

  • Blogger to build your website. I mentioned this yesterday. Reliable, powerful, and free.
  • Feedburner (another Google-owned service) for managing a full-featured RSS feed, including email subscriptions.
  • Google Analytics for fancy-schmancy site statistics.
  • MailChimp if you want to have a mailing list with more features and more control (say, for a newsletter, an email list for your buyers, or an advance discount list). This almost obnoxiously friendly service is free as long as you have fewer than 500 subscribers.
  • PayPal for all your e-commerce needs. Technically PayPal does have a monetary cost, since they take a percentage of your sales, but there is no up-front cost since they only get paid when you do.
  • CoolText for creating buttons and snazzy doodads for your site. You don’t have to be limited to the standard yellow PayPal button anymore!
  • FreeConferencePro.com for recording conference calls, client sessions, or just yourself talking (an instructional audio, say).
  • TalkShoe for backup recording (use 3-way calling to dial into FreeConferencePro.com and TalkShoe, so you have two recordings of the same audio — this can save your skin) or to set up a live webcasted conference call (otherwise known as an Internet radio show).
  • DimDim.com for screen-sharing, webinars, and collaborative editing.
  • Jing for recording short (less than 5 minutes) screencasts.
  • Viddler for hosting and publishing those short videos (and why not post them on YouTube as well?)

Oh my goodness, that’s a long list. Longer than I planned. And I’m sure there are more tools out there — leave a comment to contribute your favorite!

The costs of “free”

Two important points before I hit the publish button:

  1. Please don’t fool yourself into thinking that free in monetary terms means there is no cost. There is always a cost. Time, energy, perhaps frustration, and limited choices are all real costs. And only you can determine what costs you are willing and able to pay. When someone else tells you what you should outsource and what’s worth paying for, that’s true for them. Is it true for you? You may adore doing the DIY thing and building “sweat equity.” Or you may not. And no one else can decide for you.
  2. This whole “building a website” thing is not a one-time project, so it’s not a one-time cost either. You may think that if you could “just get your website done” your business would be Ready for Prime Time. But I’ve worked with enough clients and built enough sites to say Trust Me: You will eventually want to make changes to your site. That’s why I like to emphasize the DIY aspect of website management, because I want my clients to be empowered to make changes to their own sites. But if you’re not a DIYer, you’ll need to have the resources to pay to have these inevitable changes made.

And that leads us to the paid path. The technology-budgeting stuff I started out with. That’ll come in the next installment because this post is quite long already and it’s time to go start making burritos.


Filed Under: General How-To's Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

How to change "posted by admin" in WordPress

September 16, 2009 By

All right, you’ve got your shiny new WordPress blog installed, and you’re ready to start writing. Congratulations!

You want to start getting your name and your Awesome Stuff out there. But you notice that when you write a post (or even when you check out the “dummy post” that WordPress gives you, called “Hello World!”), the byline says “posted by admin.”

How do you change “admin” to something more human? Like your actual name?

Simple. Here are three screenshots showing just how easy it is to make this tweak:

1. Go to your user profile

To do this, log into your WordPress dashboard, select “Users” from the left-hand navigation, then select “Your Profile” from the drop-down menu. You’ll see a screen labeled “Profile,” and a short way down the screen (you shouldn’t have to scroll) you’ll see a section called “Name.”

Oh no, you can't change your username! Fortunately, you don't need to.

Oh no, you can't change your username! Fortunately, you don't need to.

You’ll probably notice that you can’t change your username. But don’t panic! You don’t need to change your username to change that “posted by admin” text. Read on to see why.

2. Fill in your name and nickname

wp-userfill

Just fill in your name, and a nickname if you'd like your posts to have a signature that's different from your name.

You probably want to stick with your regular first and last name in the first two fields. You can get creative in the nickname field, though. You can identify yourself by job title, initials, super-short description, or pretty much anything else.

Although this field is required, you can change it yourself, as many times as you like (unlike the username field).

3. Choose a Display Name from the drop-down list

wp-userdisplay

Now you can choose a display name so your posts will be "posted by" YOU!

Now, after you’ve filled in the First Name, Last Name and Nickname fields, click next to “admin” to open a list of available display names (yes, I know, in this screenshot it’s actually a “pop-up” list rather than a “drop-down,” but the function is the same).

This display name list is automatically generated by WordPress based on what you put in the First Name, Last Name and Nickname fields (which is why if you click it first, before you fill in those fields, you only see one choice: the dreaded “admin”).

Notice that the auto-generated list includes these choices:

  • whatever you put in the Nickname field
  • admin
  • just the contents of the First Name field
  • just the contents of the Last Name field
  • First Name followed by Last Name
  • Last Name followed by First Name

Whatever you pick in this list is what your site visitors will see in that “posted by…” bit of text.

(There are other functions of these three fields, having to do with post titles, search engine optimization, and other internal code-y stuff, which we won’t get into today. For now, we’ll stick to what “Display Name” means to you and your readers.)

Now, “admin” is still your username (which means you’ll use it to login to your WordPress dashboard), but no one who visits your site will see you identified as “admin.” Instead, they’ll see a Display Name of your choosing.

Now you’re ready to post… and have your readers know it’s you!

Got a question? Leave a comment here and join the discussion!

Happy WordPressing,

Did you like this post? You can subscribe to get blog updates in your inbox or RSS reader!

Filed Under: General How-To's Tagged With: ,
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »