Webinar starts tomorrow!

January 25, 2010 By

This is a quickie blog post to remind you that tomorrow the price of my Great Groundhog Day Integration Extravaganza webinar will go up from $69 to $99, so if you were thinking of buying (even just for the recordings), now’s the time.

What will I be integrating? And what’s a “webinar,” anyway?

Well, a webinar is a teleclass, but you can also watch me demonstrating stuff live on your computer screen. You don’t need to download anything or have special fancy software installed — just go to the webinar link (which you’ll get as soon as you sign up) and you’ll be able to watch my screen (as webinar host, I also get the option of turning on my webcam and showing you my actual face, which I probably won’t because, honestly, it’s highly likely that I’ll be wearing pajamas. But you can always hope, right?).

And the “integration” part refers to getting several important parts of your online business to work smoothly together. In this case, I’m talking specifically about AWeber (for emails to your customers/visitors), E-Junkie (the shopping cart that handles sales and affiliate commissions) and PayPal (the actual payment processor). And, of course, the WordPress site that brings them all together. Your WordPress site, that is.

I’ll be giving live demonstrations of several common “I need these things to play nice with each other” scenarios, and answering your questions. The class will include two one-hour live sessions (both recorded and sent to participants) and a followup guidebook (showing you step-by-step screenshots that you can follow along with while listening to the audio recordings).

If you’re not ready for the whole webinar experience yet, that’s perfectly OK. You can hang out here on the blog, where I’ll be posting some followups to this post about adding audio clips to your website this week. Or you can call me up during my Open Office Hour on Thursday, or leave a comment here with your question.

It’s all good.

Filed Under: Announcements Tagged With: , , , , ,

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 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 do I create a customized PayPal payment button?

June 10, 2009 By

When I demonstrate how easy it is to add a PayPal button to your website, I’m commonly asked this question:

I want a button that matches the colors of my website. But PayPal only lets me have one color (yellow) and two text choices (“Buy Now” or “Pay Now”). Can’t I customize this somehow?

Why yes, yes you can. I’m about to show you how. And you don’t need to hire a designer or buy Photoshop to do it.

Here’s one of the basic PayPal buttons (it’s a real, working button for my Website Wish Kit):

You can change the size a bit, or remove the credit-card logos, but there’s not much customization available beyond those basic tweaks. So, what if the traditional PayPal golden-yellow clashes terribly with your website color scheme?

1. You head on over to a free button generator like CoolText (yes, it’s completely free). You play with colors, fonts, and size. You snag yourself a great button or three.

2. You save the button(s) to your computer with CoolText’s handy “download image” link, or right-clicking (on a Mac, Control-clicking) on each image and selecting “Save Image As” from the pop-up menu.

3. You give your button(s) a home online by uploading them to your WordPress Media Library, or if you don’t use WordPress, to a free service like Photobucket. Here’s Photobucket’s FAQ on “How do I upload an image?” Other free services include Flickr (owned by Yahoo) and Picasa (owned by Google).

4. You copy the unique URL (web address) of your button image, now that it’s got a permanent home. Here’s Photobucket’s tutorial on “Linking Basics” which shows you how to get the address (you want the option called “Direct Link.”

5. You log into your PayPal account and start creating a button (click on the blue “Merchant Services” tab at the top of the screen and then click either “buy now” or “add to cart” to get to the main button-generating screen).

6. You paste the URL that you copied in Step 4 into the field labeled “use your own button image” (you’ll have to click on “customize appearance” to see this option). Don’t worry if “buyer’s view” stays blank. It will still work.

Continue through PayPal’s button-generating process, and paste the HTML code into your website just as you would with any PayPal button. Here’s a real, working PayPal button that uses one of the custom designs I created with CoolText:

7. People visit your website and pay you! Of course, it helps to have something to sell, fans who visit your website, and clear language on your site that describes your offering…but this post is just about the buttons.

Go have fun creating buttons! But don’t let choosing the perfect font and color get in the way of installing that first button. If you need more help with PayPal, you can ask me a question or leave a comment here.

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