ContentRobot

One of the more frustrating aspects of this business is the impression that blogging is so easy, developers can bang out blogs in a few days. We expect that this is because you can sign up for a free blog at WordPress.com or Blogger and get up and running in about 10 minutes.

But if you are developing a business blog or one that is packed with features (newsletters, ecommerce, various plugins and widgets), you should throw that idea away now.

It is your business after all, and you want to put your best foot forward from the get-go. This means, that you really need to take the time to work with your developer to discuss branding needs, design wants, functionality, and more.

Your vision just may require a combination of custom design and programming that can’t be found off-the-shelve themes and out-of-the box software.

By doing this and not rushing to just “get something up,” you have a better chance at putting down a blogging foundation that meets both short and long-term goals. This also give you an opportunity to fully define why you are blogging and be ready to meet the constant challenges that come with it after launch.

So, you can’t wait to get blogging? We love your enthusiasm. Just remember that developers are not super-human - well maybe close ;). We promise that it will be worth the wait.

The ContentRobot team has added another conference to our schedule - this time it’s Web 2.0 Expo. We got an offer we couldn’t refuse … Free Expo Passes.

You can, too! Just sign up with the sign discount code webny08emp211 and you’ll also save $100 off the conference or get a free expo pass like us.

An Expo Pass gets you access into a full program of free events, sessions, and more. Use it to:

• Test drive the latest tools and technologies in a vibrant Expo Hall, featuring over 100 exhibitors
• Join your peers at selected networking events, including the Booth Crawl, after hours events, and Ignite NYC
• Hear keynotes from innovative and successful industry leaders, including Arianna Huffington, Dan Lyons, Tim O’Reilly, and more
• Take part in a variety of Sponsored Sessions
• Join in open discussions with the community at large at Web2Open, where you can participate in several “hybrid” sessions pulled from the conference agenda: Viral Marketing 2.0, Go REST with Rails, and Starting Up in Silicon Alley
• Connect, network, and share ideas in the Birds of a Feather sessions — relaxed group conversations, some after hours

Perhaps we’ll see you there!

ContentRobot once had a favorite host that we recommended to all our clients: Pair Networks. They were reasonable … wonderfully responsive … easy to use … Then …

A client’s blog was partially down, meaning you could see the site content but not the theme or the CSS. What happened? Where was the warning email that we were promised last time? Did they turn off services? Who could help us during this crises? ACK!

Then after 3 separate phone calls to find out what was going on, came this stellar response from tech support:

Sorry we don’t support WordPress and we can’t help you to get your site working …

Then our (now irate) client contacted Pair himself. He had to escalate the call to finally get the answers and resolution needed to get him up and running. (Yes, your site’s services were throttled and, no, you were not contacted correctly during this process.)

While we continued to politely ignore the banner ad on the Pair Networks control panel touting another (in our eyes, sub-par) blog platform, this blatant statement became a (sore) tipping point for us that we can no longer ignore.

We believe that hosts should support multiple major blogging platforms where clients have a choice (like selecting between a Windows or Unix environment). Is platform/application neutrality more appropriate for a hosting company? Should WordPress try harder to create relationships with hosts so their blogging software can easily be installed and supported?

Recently we extolled the virtues of WordPress’s Media Manager and its relative ease to add images to your posts. After upgrading several client sites to WP 2.5/2.6, we must say in practice that there is still work to be done here.

Our beef? WordPress relies on Flash to upload media. This means that you get a nice visual or “crunching” status bar, but downright unhelpful error messages. What issues have we encountered?

• Big images - you can’t upload full size images
• Resizing images - sometimes the resizer (placing small and medium images) will be completely ignored
• Image types - doesn’t like PNGs!

What can you do to minimize problems with the media manager? We suggest that you disable Flash with the No Flash Uploader plugin. Since installing it, many errors have been thankfully squelched.

We realize it’s a good start, but we look forward to the continuing evolution of the Media Manager.

The ContentRobot team headed to Boston on Monday to attend the Affiliate Summit East 08 Conference - Shawn Collins and Missy Ward know how to put on a show.

We had a great time meeting up with some friends, clients, and colleagues - and we even had time to make some new ones despite being there for only one day.

While we were happy to hang out in the blogger lounge just to mingle, play Wii, and affix stickers to our laptops; we actually took the time to share our WordPress expertise with anyone seeking some technical advice.

We even attended two seminars: Content the Kills and How is Social Media Changing Affiliate Marketing - and wanted to share some random insights:

• The affiliate marketing crowd is extremely tech savvy and they often actively seek online tools and techniques to drive interest, community, and sales
• The best way to encourage readership is to be consistent, open, entertaining, giving (takeways and teaching go a long way) to build trust and a following
• Be passionate with your topics and be in it for the long haul
• Web 2.0 is in full force - there are currently 80 million views on YouTube and 110 million blogs
• 56% of users now look to others for product information
• The ROI of blogging / social networking is still elusive, but you need to put value on the conversation and the process not just the clickthrus and conversions

Tools of the Trade

To be a great content creator, you must take advantage of the technology:

• Twitter - the popular micro-blogging/ social networking tool
• ping.fm - post to all your social networks (Twitter, Jaiku, Tumblr, Pownce, Facebook, hi5, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.) all at once
• ShareThis - share information (such as a blog post) via email, IM, and social bookmarking site
• MyBlogLog - display your photo/vanity profile on MyBlogLog-enabled sites
• FriendFeed - see the ripple effect of your network
• Technorati & Google Blog Search - find out what are people saying about you
  

Success Stories

Those looking for case studies for successful affiliate marketers were often encouraged to check out the following sites:

• Daily Candy
• FatWallet
• SheFinds
• Zappos

During the Social Media seminar, it was amazing to see the tweets flying back and forth - so much so that the moderator was able to field several questions from the Affiliate Summit twitter stream. We went from people who didn’t know much about Twitter at the Las Vegas show (a mere six months ago) to an impressive adoption rate since.

Our favorite sentiment of the day came from Chris Brogan (who was discussing the best ways to get into the conversations at Twitter), “Don’t just sit on the blanket, bring a bottle of wine to the picnic.” Be sure to give and give and give.

Blog.on affiliate marketers!

Custom Fields are great because they allow you to enter and display all types of information with your posts. We use that technique for quite a few of our clients. But if your site takes advantage of custom fields and you are still on WordPress 2.5 (or 2.5.1), you might have noticed a weird bug!

Every time you entered a custom field, it will save the same number of duplicate, unpublished posts to clutter up your database! You’ll also might see:

• Multiple drafts with the same post name
• They will have not have any post content
• Your permalink will have a -2 or -3 on the end of it when you go back and edit it again

Thankfully, upgrading to WordPress 2.6 actually solves the issue. If for some reason you can’t upgrade to the new version, you check out this WordPress post to help you patch the problem.

Our pals at FutureNow announced the availability of their newest book: Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer.

If you want more leads, sales, and profits from your website, then you need to test, test, test. Google Website Optimizer is all about testing, and this book shows you how to use that free tool to discover what is best for your site and your bottom line. Recognized online marketing guru Bryan Eisenberg and his chief scientist John Quarto-vonTivadar explain how to test and get more of your visitors to take the actions you want them to take: contact you, buy something, subscribe, or otherwise engage with your site.

• Learn to develop a testing framework and establish goals and parameters
• Determine how well your site calls visitors to take action and learn how to make improvements
• Discover the best approach for selecting and categorizing products
• Optimize your landing pages and revise your content with copy that sells
• Understand exactly which test works best for a given purpose
• Learn what you need to bring to the testing experience to reap the fullest benefits
• Learn how to design impactful tests in sales, lead generation, B2B, and B2C situations
• Get over 250 testing ideas based on all the factors that contribute to a site’s ability to convert online visitors

ContentRobot is also in the book! We collaborated with FutureNow on the popular Google Website Optimizer Plugin that allows you to test, test, test on your WordPress blog. You’ll find us on page 273 and a super-nice mention within the acknowledgments page.

Go and get your copy at Amazon today.

We have a lot of clients who are multi-author blogging. In fact, we think this approach is quite effective and believe every company should consider having more than one voice on their blogs.

With the launch of WordPress 2.6, they implemented a nifty feature - post version control. This means that when you go into Manage > Post in the back-end, and you make an edit, you’ll see a Post Revisions area.

This means that it:

• Saves a copy of a post every time you edit it
• Allows you to view (not edit) each of those copies (revisions)
• Displays any differences between any two revisions along with their timestamps

If you are ready for developing a multi-author blog (or have content that requires lots approvals), 2.6’s version control can help you out.

If you haven’t made the leap to WordPress - and its latest version - now may be a perfect time. We were impressed!

Chris Garrett, one of our favorite bloggers from across the pond, posted a story today about why WordPress is gaining a foothold in the business community.

Here are some of the highlights of this article:

• … The growing use of WordPress as a platform rather than as a blog. Many people are now looking to WordPress as a CMS or as a framework. (He note that even The Number 10 Downing Street new website is going to be 100% WordPress.)
• Companies are looking for a lower cost tactical solution. Rather than a long, drawn out, expensive project, they want something quick, nimble, efficient and effective. They know with a WordPress site they can be up and running, fast, and making sales in weeks rather than months.
• The charge is being led by sales and marketing functions, consciously avoiding official channels and especially the IT dept
• They are looking for “right now” solutions, but as most of us have seen, quick fixes tend to stick around, especially when the solution is found to be proven and beats other more complicated ones.
• WordPress isn’t just being used because it is cheap, it is growing in favor because it works.

With a few weeks of a-listers expressing their disillusionment with blogging, this is a refreshing piece. Like Chris, ContentRobot happily has not seen any downturn of interest for our WordPress expertise, even with the horrible economy. The business community will take over the next wave of blogging - hurray to that!

Dana twittered this morning: I have a dream that someday IE6 will just vanish.

This led to an interesting discussion, as ContentRobot contemplated what life would be like without having to deal with the most horrible browser on the planet!

This aging Microsoft mess (Internet Explorer 6 was launched six years ago!) causes much woe during development time. What do we deal with?

• IE6 is the absolute worst browser when it comes to supporting web standards
• We have to develop code just for this browser alone, so it will display a site correctly

This all seems like such as waste of time and effort (not to mention the loss of hair and the spouting of much foul language).

Don’t agree? Check this out:

• Remy Sharp offered a great analysis about when we should stop caring about IE6 (unfortunately he predicted 2010).
• We hadn’t realized that developers, including major companies like 37signals and Apple, have decided to just drop IE6 support.

C’mon all you IE6 users, it’s time to update to a modern browser (Firefox, Safari, or even IE7 if you must). Millions of developers will thank you.