photo credit: Marcus Vegas

I just wanted to personally thank all of the people who subscribe to Cliqpreneur by either RSS or email. The number of subscribers broke through a plateau yesterday, and it’s directly due to all of you that are reading as the blog grows.

The best way to give you content you want to read is to ask. So…what topics would you like to read about? Helpful hints? Case studies? Book reviews?

Comment below or send me an email, and I’ll work your requests into upcoming posts.

Thanks again for your support

Post by Bruce Hill on Cliqpreneur.com

Cliqpreneur Subscribers Rock!

photo credit: TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³

Adding images to your blog posts captures your readers attention and adds visual interest. However, finding appropriate images has a been a bit of a chore until now.

The Photo Dropper plugin for WordPress finds blog images for you on Flickr and then inserts them into your post with appropriate attribution.

The installation instructions are standard for most WordPress plugins. If you get confused, the details are listed on the site. I did have some initial problems with the plugin returning the images, but the issue resolved itself after I logged out of WordPress and logged back in.

Before I installed Photo Dropper, I was manually searching Flickr for blog images. I would download them to my desktop then upload them to my site via FTP. Photo Dropper does all this work for you and saves a ton of time. The site does recommend you verify the license:

You should always check the specific CC license on the source page before posting since you’re ultimately responsible for adhering to the license.

Other than that, using this plugin is a snap.

I highly recommend this plugin if you use blog images in WordPress. You’ll save time and grab your readers attention to boot.

Post by Bruce Hill on Cliqpreneur.com

Blog Images Made Easy - A Photo Dropper Review

If you follow financial news, you may have read or heard headlines like “UBS upgraded Google today from a neutral to a buy.” There are lots of factors that go into valuing companies, but one tool is particularly useful for evaluating and growing blog traffic. That tool is called period over period analysis.

What is period over period analysis?

Period over period analysis is simply comparing a time period to the same time period in the past. To continue our Google example, the company reported $1.5 billion in profit in 2005 and $3.1 billion in profit in 2006. That ’s period over period improvement (big time!). You can also look at shorter time periods like quarters, months or weeks. For example, compare January 2007 to January 2008. Analysts really get excited when a company consistently shows period over period improvement. Period over period improvement for 27 months in a row indicates that management know how to run a profitable business.

Evaluate your blog using period over period improvement

Relative to a blog, you might look as RSS subscribers and compare January 2008 to January 2007. If your blog is really new, you might compare Wednesday of this week to Wednesday of last week. Has your readership grown? Did it decrease?

The key to using period over period analysis is to understand what was different between the two time periods. Here are a few things (metrics) you can evaluate to see what’s going on:

• Posting frequency - more vs. less
• Post length - short vs. long
• Social media activity
• Quality of your posts
• Time of day when your posts were published

I would recommend looking at any metric you feel is important to your blog traffic.

Take action to increase readership

Next, you should create an action plan based on the insights you gain from evaluating your blog period over period. For example, if your readership grew when you posted less frequently but the posts were longer, you should consider writing that way more often.

Did morning posts increase readership more than late night posts? Try scheduling your posts to publish in the morning (even if you finished them at 2 am the night before).

Did a particular post topic strike a chord with your readers? Try giving them more content on that subject.

Your goal should be to show consistent period over period improvement in your blog. By consistently targeting period over period growth, your blog will gain momentum and traffic. And best of all, your readers will be getting the quality content they crave.

Summary

• Use period over period analysis to evaluate your blog
• Choose time periods and metrics that help you understand your readers
• Create an action plan that tailors your content, style and post frequency to your readers
• Target period over period improvement to build momentum and grow readership.

In the end, it’s all about giving your readers what they want: quality content. Period over period analysis is one approach to identify what you do well on your blog and what could be improved.

What other methods do you use to understand your readers?

Image by epak

Post by Bruce Hill on Cliqpreneur.com

Wall Street Can Help Your Blog

Yesterday’s post about outsourcing was directly related to the struggles I am having developing content for my new website. Today, I have a little twist on the same theme…how to overcome writer’s block.
My efforts to write the intro page for the new site were being met with massive writer’s block. Honestly, I can barely call it writer’s block since I’m barely a writer. Let’s just say I was getting nothing accomplished. Worse still, I’m feeling stressed because I won phone consultation time with Rosalind Gardner and I want her to review this site. What to do?

To overcome my writer’s block, I decided to change topics. I had a list of subjects I wanted to cover on the website, and each topic was easily a page by itself. Since I couldn’t get in a groove on the opening, I decided to try one of the detail topics.

Lo and behold, the words started flowing…and flowing…and flowing. I was amazed. I could have easily written 3 times that amount, but I had to stop somewhere. So what happened?

There were two key factors in the the burst of productivity: I picked a topic I was more comfortable with, and I was telling a story. I knew the storyline and the facts intimately, because the story was from personal experience.

Pretty easy, right?

If writer’s block has you stalled, try these simple things:

• Change topics - Even if you must write on the difficult topic, writing first about a subject your are more comfortable with can get the creative engines started
• Tell a personal story - Making a point by drawing on personal experience is easy because you lived the story, and it’s powerful because your experience lends credibility.

You’ll be amazed at the results.

Image by Justin Russell

Post by Bruce Hill on Cliqpreneur.com

Content Site Case Study - How to Overcome Writer's Block

Have you ever been sitting up late at night working on your website, PPC campaign, or autorepsonder sequence and things are just not flowing? Have there been other times when the work takes no effort and everything seems simple? The answer to both these questions is ‘yes’, but did you take note of what you were doing when you were ‘in the zone’ and when you were not?

I’ve clearly identified that writing content is not one of my strong suits. I know what I want to say, but I’m not very good at writing it in a compelling way. I can get the work done, but I struggle big time. Unfortunately, my content site project relies on my unique experience, so I have to write content.
You should also pay attention to those tasks that you excel at and those that you struggle with. Why? Because when your online business grows to any size at all, you will want to focus on the things that you do well and outsource the things that you do poorly.

When you focus on tasks that are clearly not your strengths, you become the bottle neck in the productive process. Like it or not, you are your own worst enemy. By focusing on your strengths and outsourcing work to people that are strong in other areas, you leverage your time, skill, and energy.

Obivously, outsourcing costs money, and in the early stages of your business, the expense may not make outsourcing practical. However, pay close attention to those tasks that you would outsource if you could. Those will become opportunities for outsourcing when the opportunity presents itself.

Image by jonny.hunter

Post by Bruce Hill on Cliqpreneur.com

Outsourcing Is Smart

I work on multiple computers and constantly have to save files to transfer to another computer later. I have a USB Flash drive, but I’m afraid of losing it and the information stored on it. What to do?

Firefox is my primary browser, and I’m always on the lookout for useful plugins. On one of these plugin hunts I found Gspace. In simple terms, Gspace uses the file space provided with a Gmail account for file storage. The interface looks like this:

The directories on your local computer are in the left panel and the files in Gspace are in the right panel. The blue arrows between the two panels copy files in the indicated direction. In the bottom right, it indicates my used space is 105 Mb while my total space is 6,396 Mb. Another nice feature is that you can use the space in multiple Gmail accounts if you have them.

From a functional perspective, Gspace sends an email to your Gmail account with the file attached. To avoid cluttering my inbox, I set up a label, ‘Gspace’, and a rule so that the incoming emails would be marked as read and tagged with the ‘Gspace’ label. Bear in mind that file space taken by Gspace is less available for Gmail.

Here’s everything you need to use Gspace:

• Firefox Browser
• Gmail account
• Gspace plugin

All in all, I’ve found this a handy little plugin for Firefox. If you want to give it a try, you can go directly to the site here: Gspace.

Post by Bruce Hill on Cliqpreneur.com

Gspace - One Very Cool Tool

I recently wrote a book review for Moonlighting on the Internet by Yanik Silver. This post delivered a lot of traffic to Cliqpreneur, so I wanted to analyze that result a bit to see if we gain some useful insights. Let’s take a look.

The original post was made on January 15, and I submitted it to Sphinn, StumbleUpon, and Digg on January 21 and 22. As of this morning (February 2), the traffic broke out like this:

• Google - 48%
• Sphinn - 19%
• StumbleUpon - 11%
• Digg - 7%
• Other - 15%

The Google traffic surprised me, so I did a search for the main keyword phrase that was generating the traffic. To my surprise, my post was #3 behind Amazon and Affiliate Classroom. Check it out:

Given that placement, it’s no surprise that Cliqpreneur was getting so much search traffic from Google. Unfortunately, this great result was short lived, and the listing has dropped so far down in the search results, I cannot find it quickly. It is interesting to note that my Digg of the post still sits in the last position on page 1 on Google.

So, what are the takeaways? Here are some of my observations:

• Timeliness of the post - Clearly, not a lot of people had written reviews for the book, and Cliqpreneur got some exposure and traffic from being one of the first
• Keywords in the title - This is pretty obvious. Keywords in the title and in the beginning part of the body help search engine results.

From looking at the results in Google, I might have been able to draw a few more readers if the first sentence had been more broad and compelling. For example, if I had removed the words “newbie to beginner”, more advanced readers might have clicked through. However, since Cliqpreneur targets people just starting their online business, people that clicked through to read the post probably found it relevant.

What insight do you draw from the the traffic generated on Cliqpreneur by Moonlighting on the Internet?

Post by Bruce Hill on Cliqpreneur.com

Blog Traffic from Search Engines - A Mini Case Study

Photo editing tools can have a steep learning curve as well as a high price tag.

When updating the look of Cliqpreneur, I needed an editor to create the new header image. However, I didn’t want to spend any money on software (if I could avoid it), and I didn’t want to spend more time learning the software than getting the image edited. My only previous experience editing images has been cropping and re-sizing.

Image Editor Selection Criteria
I had three criteria for the photo editing software I would use:

• Easy to learn and use
• Good set of features
• Free (not shareware)

Paint.NET - Review by CNET
I searched for photo editing on Download.com and then filtered by free license and found Paint.NET. The CNET reviewer rated it 5 stars out of 5 and had this to say:

If all you want is a quick image retouch, Photoshop is overkill. Paint.NET, on the other hand, is an open-source freeware editor with all the essentials, including tools to crop, rotate, resize images, adjust colors, and create collages.

Paint.NET supports common image formats–JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, and others–but not high-resolution RAW files. There are enough basic and intermediate effects and features to keep image-tweakers happy, though the red-eye removal tool is notably weak; those images may require manual attention.

Unlike most free image editors, Paint.NET supports layers and has an actions manager. The pleasing interface boasts semitransparent windows for ease of use.

Version 3 fixes many old quibbles, including a convenient thumbnail manager for handling multiple image editing, and improved program graphics. Paint.NET is far more advanced than Microsoft Paint, and given its free price, it’s a must-have for anyone needing to fix images.

The user reviews were also good, and there were a large number of downloads.

Paint.NET - My Experience
I downloaded and installed the software, and then started creating the header image for Cliqpreneur. From to install to an edited image took about an hour including searching through the Help contents to learn what the heck I was doing. Adding the slight gradient to the right end of the header took the longest to figure out.

I will say that the text editing feature could be improved. The software allows you to add text to a layer, but once you’ve left that tool or layer, you cannot go back and edit the text. Your only option is to delete or clear the layer and start over. Also, there are no special effects that I found that you can apply to text like shadows, reflections, etc. You might be able to apply other tools to the layer to get the same effect, but I couldn’t readily see how to do that.

Paint.NET - Summary
All in all, Paint.NET has a good feature set, is easy to use. While it is free, they do accept donations to support future development if you feel so inclined (I did). One final note: there are additional plugins available for Paint.NET in the support forum that extend the tool set of the software.

You can get Paint.NET from Download.com or directly at http://www.getpaint.net/.

Post by Bruce Hill on Cliqpreneur.com

A Great Free Photo Editing Tool

Yep…you’re right. Cliqpreneur looks completely different.

I’ve been working diligently to update the look of Cliqpreneur and make it more professional. I also changed a few elements to get some additional space and make things clearer. There are a few more changes I would make if this were my only project. However, I need to get started on the content site.

Let me know what you think, and I’ll try to incorporate suggestions in the next major overhaul. I look forward to your feedback.

Stay tuned.

Post by Bruce Hill on Cliqpreneur.com

Same Cliqpreneur, New Look

It’s time for the rubber to meet the road. I’ve researched my next site and decided to start a content site on a topic that is near and dear to my heart.

I’ll document my progress on Cliqpreneur. I’ll share my successes, insights, frustrations and failures. Hopefully, this case study will enlighten my readers as well as provide personal motivation by documenting my progress publicly.

I’ve already gotten a few things out of the way:

• Registered four versions of a domain name which I will ultimately test using the process I described in the post A Better Way to Choose a Domain Name.
• Got hosting with GoDaddy.com . Cliqpreneur is hosted with 1&1 Internet, but in the spirit of experimentation, I chose another hosting provider. There are other providers that I would like to try, and I will post a review when I have a few more companies to compare.
• Installed WordPress on one of the domains. I decided to use WordPress as a content management system for the new site due to my familiarity with the application.
• Redirected all the other domains to the domain hosting the site.

The next step in my process is to start putting together the content. Since the site will be based on my unique knowledge and experiences, I will write all the initial content. It should be interesting to see how long content development takes, since I am not a great writer or typist. I suspect some people could execute this part of the plan in 50% to 25% of the time it takes me.

For my next post in this series, I’ll outline the steps in the process as I envision them right now. Obviously, the steps may change as I proceed.

Last but not least, I am setting a target date of February 15, 2008 to go live.

If there are any specifics you would like to see as part of the case study, please comment below and I’ll try to cover any requests.

Stay tuned.

Image by emdot

Post by Bruce Hill on Cliqpreneur.com

Content Site Case Study