Click here to view the embedded video.

A domain name is the name of your website, like YourBusiness.com.  There are many sites where you can register a domain name, but be sure to use a company with a good reputation.  GoDaddy is one of the biggest companies.

I have a reseller account for GoDaddy since I register lots of domain names for my clients, since I can get them cheaper that way.  You can use that if you like, since I have my prices set lower than if you go directly through GoDaddy.  GoDaddy is still providing the service and support and the control panel and everything is identical, but you pay less.

If you want to register your domain for less than GoDaddy, go to BestSiteNow.com.

Decide what you’d like your domain name to be.  If your business is primarily local, where people come to your store, you probably want to try to get your business name as the domain name, to build your brand.  For instance, if your business is “Joe’s Cakes”, you’d probably want to try to get “joescakes.com”, or if that’s not available, add your city name, such as “joescakesbaltimore.com”.

If most of your business will be done online and your primary focus is to get people to your website, you might want to try to get a domain name that contains the keywords people might be searching for online to get to your site.  For instance, let’s say I had a business called “Todd’s Shoes” but I primarily sold the shoes online, and they were discount shoes, I might think of what people would be searching for who would be looking for what I offer.  So I might try something like discountshoes.com, cheapshoes.com, or if those aren’t available, toddscheapshoes.com.

Don’t be too surprised if the first domain name you search for is not available.  You’d be surprised how many domains are already registered.  But keep searching and you’ll find something that’ll work.  Sometimes they’ll offer to let you “backorder” domain names.  Don’t mess with that, it’s a waste of money.  It just means someone else already has the domain name you want and, if by some small chance at some point in the future they failed to renew it, you might have a shot at getting it.  But it’s not going to help you right now, and likely the domain will never become available and you will have wasted that money.  So I don’t recommend using that “backorder” option.

Once you find a domain you like, there should be a button to Continue or Checkout.  Be prepared to be upsold on tons of different add-ons.  You most likely don’t need any of them.  And if you decide later that you do, you can always add them on later.  For instance, they’ll try to sell you hosting.  If you’re hosting your website somewhere else (and I’d recommend it), you don’t need to buy hosting from them.

So skip past all that stuff.  You can choose the length of your registration.  If you’re not sure if this is the domain you’re going to use long term, or not sure if you’ll be doing this business more than a year down the road, you can choose 1 Year.  Otherwise, I’d recommend going with multiple years.  One reason is that some people feel it has a positive influence on how sites like Google view and rank your website.  Registering your domain for multiple years usually indicates you’re more serious about your business and likely to be around long term.  There is some debate about this and I’m sure it has minimal impact, but it’s just something to keep in mind.

When you’re on the checkout page, it’s good to look over things to make sure you didn’t accidentally add something to your cart that you didn’t mean to.

You’ll need to create an account if you don’t already have one.  One step a lot of people overlook is the step where you create your login name.  By default it’s just a bunch of numbers (which is your customer ID), which you’ll never remember, so it’s best to create a custom login ID.  Most of the other stuff they ask for is pretty standard.  One exception is a call-in PIN #.  This is just a 4-digit code that would be hard for someone else to guess, so that if you need help and call in for support, they can verify that you are the owner.  You don’t want anyone else messing with your domain names, so it’s good to set this to something hard to guess.

Other than that, just follow the instructions on the screen and go through to checkout.

Congratulations, you’ve just registered your domain name!

If not, you probably realize you’re potentially losing a lot of business since more and more people start their search for local businesses online now.

If you do have a website, can people find it when they search for you online?  And are you paying too much for your website?

I’m excited to finally be able to tell you about a new service we’re offering that solves these problems.  It’s called Ezw3:  The Easy Way To Get Your Business Online.

I’ll share with you what lead to the decision to start this service.

I’ve been doing web design for around 12 years and started my own web design business about five years ago.  For the majority of that time, almost all of my clients came as referrals and they were located, not only all over the country, but all over the world.  The only websites I set up for local businesses were for personal friends.  It’s just the way it worked out.  I found a couple niches that I worked in primarily (mostly websites for internet marketers and real estate investors).

However, I have always had a desire to help small businesses, especially the really small ones, to get their business online.  I am entrepreneurial by nature and appreciate the unique challenges of running a small business.  I love going in small local shops and stores.  It’s the small, privately owned businesses that make a town unique and give it a certain flavor.

Personally, I hate seeing the big “box” stores come in to an area because of the harm it does to local businesses.  Not only that, these stores make every town look the same and take away the uniqueness that different areas would have otherwise.  Granted, we all have to shop in them sometimes, but I still hate to see them take over a community and make it look like everywhere else – commercial and generic.

So for many years I wanted to be able to provide websites to small businesses because it can give them an edge and help level the playing field somewhat.  It gives customers a different impression of your business when they see you have a website.  It gives you more credibility and shows you’re serious about your business and are doing what you can to make sure it sticks around.

I’ve noticed with myself and other people I have talked to that people are using the phone book less and less to find local businesses.  More and more people just go to Google and search for the business or category they’re looking for.  If you’re not listed, they’re going to contact someone else.

You may be wondering why, since I have wanted to offer websites to small businesses for many years, that I didn’t do so.  The answer, frankly, is that it didn’t make sense from a business standpoint.  It took quite a bit of time to set up a new website, especially from a design perspective.  Because it took a lot of time, that meant the price would have to be at a point that would put it out of reach for many small businesses.  Sure, I could probably have thrown something really simple together, but I don’t like setting up a website if it’s not going to look good.

So there just didn’t seem to be a way to offer websites to small businesses that would make sense.  I wanted it to be within a certain price range so that any business owner could afford it.

So what changed?

Well, simply put, new technology.

I came across a platform I could use to build websites where a lot of the really tedious, time-consuming parts are automated.  Specifically, I’m referring to WordPress.  It started out as blogging software, but now is used for websites in general.  Many businesses now use WordPress to manage their website.

Not only did this make it possible to simplify the setup process, but it opened up many other new doors.  For instance, there are many plugins and other tools freely available for WordPress that do pretty much anything you can think of.  In the past, if you wanted some of these features on your website, you would have had to hire a programmer for hundreds or thousands of dollars, but now many of those things can be incorporated into your site using free plugins.

Another great advantage is that it eliminates or at least greatly reduces the need for paying a webmaster to make updates on your site.  In the past, when you got a website you often had to pay someone a maintenance fee to go in and make small updates to your website, even if it was just changing a few lines of text.  Now, with WordPress, you can login and easily make changes to your own website.  If you can send an e-mail, you have all the technical skills you need to edit your website.

So this new technology made it possible to streamline much of the setup process.  On top of that, we could put together some really nice designs that provide the basic framework for a website, but still offer a lot of flexibility so that each site can be customized.  That way, we’ve been able to eliminate much of the tedious, time-consuming tasks that traditionally went into setting up a website.  Now we can give clients a number of layout options to pick from and then most of the work is just putting in the text and other content that you want on your website and getting it optimized so people can find it in the search engines.

What this means is that we can now set up a professional, nice looking website with state-of-the-art features in a fraction of the time it would have taken in years past.  While we could have just used that to our own advantage, we decided to pass along the savings so we could do what I’ve always wanted to do… provide affordable websites to small businesses.

I noticed in my local area (Salem / Roanoke, Virginia) there are a handful of web design companies, and I think they do great work.  I’ve seen a number of websites they’ve set up and some are very impressive.  Honestly, I’m not trying to cut into their business.  But they’re building completely custom websites from scratch, which means you end up with a completely unique website that looks great, but with a high price tag.  And it has to be that way for those type of websites because many hours go into building them.

What we realized is that not everyone needs a site like that.  Many of the small businesses don’t need anything super flashy, but just need a place to put information about their business so people can find them online.  Not to say these sites don’t look nice, because they are very professional.  But they’re not quite as flashy as some, and they don’t need to be.  And besides getting the website up and running, we also optimize it for search engines so that it’s more likely to show up on search sites like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. when people search for you.

So I’m very proud to present… Ezw3 – The Easy Way To Get Your Business Online!

Just in case you didn’t figure out the name, the “EZ” part is an abbreviated form of “easy” and “W3″ is short for “WWW” or “Worldwide Web”.  So again, it’s the easy way to get your business online, or on the worldwide web.

Ezw3 is an affordable web design service for small businesses.

Our official launch date for the site is June 15, 2010.  However, in the meantime we’re accepting a few beta testers who would like to get a website set up for their business.  This will just give us a chance to run through a few sites and iron out any wrinkles in our processes and make sure we haven’t set the prices too low.  We’re going as low as we can with them and may have gone too low, depending on how long the average site takes, which we’ll only know after setting up quite a few sites.

You might wonder how this Ezw3 service relates to Serve Sense, LLC, the web design business I’ve been running for the past five years.  Well, Ezw3 is just a service provided by Serve Sense, LLC.  Serve Sense will continue to provide custom web design services, audio editing services, search engine optimization, consulting, and everything else we have been doing all along.  We will have different team members focusing on the Ezw3 service, which specifically focuses on websites for small businesses.

So if you need a website for your small business, come visit our site or give us a call and we’ll help you get your business online affordably and easily!

Are you already trying to do web design from home but struggling?

Do you know very little about web design but you’re looking for a business you can run from home?

I’ve been running a home-based web design business for years now and it finally dawned on me that there are lots of people out there that would love to know what I’ve learned the hard way.

I’m not really sure why it took me so long to share my knowledge.  For years, I’ve had people ask me what I do for a living and when I tell them I work from home doing web design, they immediately turn green with envy.  I almost hesitate to tell people sometimes because most people get jealous and I don’t really intend to create those feelings.

But it’s understandable.  I mean, I don’t have to deal with traffic on the way to work, I don’t have a boss, I can take the day off if I feel like it, I can take time off to travel, when I take a break I can do pretty much whatever I want.

So yeah, it’s pretty nice.  But it’s not all peaches and cream.  While I feel like the downsides of this business are much better than the downsides of working for someone else at a regular job, I feel like people considering starting this kind of business should be aware of everything they’re getting into, the good and the bad.

There are so many things when you’re starting out that you just don’t know.

I know one of my biggest challenges was trying to answer the question of “How much should I charge for my services?”

But there are lots of other important questions, like:

• How do I find new web design clients?
• How do I deal with non-paying clients?
• How can I handle the fluctuations in income?

Then there are other things you may not have thought about, such as:

• What are the hidden downsides of working from home?
• How can I avoid working myself into another job where I can’t take time off?

And really, this is just the tip of the iceberg.  There are just so many things I wish I had known when I started out.  I spent a lot of time and money on the wrong things.

I made it through the tough times, but it wasn’t easy… and a lot of people simply don’t make it and have to give up on their dreams and go back to working a… gulp… job.

I actually had a job offer recently, and I wasn’t even looking for a job.  It was a tempting offer, but I had to turn it down because I wasn’t willing to give up my freedom.  For me, the freedom this business provides me is what has me hooked.  I don’t want to have to ask someone else’s permission for a day off.

Hey, it’s my life, it’s my time.  I want to choose how I spend it.  In my opinion, working at a job is nothing more than compensated slavery.  No thanks.

So I’m working on compiling some of the secrets and things I’ve learned the hard way so I can share them with you.

I need to know how much demand there is for this information though before I devote too much time to it.

So you’ll find a spot below where you can enter your name and e-mail.  I’m not going to spam you or anything.  By submitting your info, you’re just letting me know you’d like to learn the secrets of running a successful home-based web design business.  Plus, you’ll be first to know as soon as I get some of the stuff done.

Just enter your name and e-mail to receive priority notification when some of the information is ready:

Well, I was in the same boat recently.  I’ll briefly run through the things I considered before upgrading, and my thoughts on Windows 7 after upgrading.

I currently have one laptop running Windows XP, one with Windows Vista, and a desktop with Windows 7 (which I upgraded from XP).

First of all, let me just say that Windows Vista made me reluctant to upgrade to Windows 7 because I was afraid it wouldn’t be any better.  I strongly dislike Windows Vista.  I’ve been a Windows user since version 3.1 and to me, Vista was the most disappointing version in a long time.  I wouldn’t even own a computer with Vista if it hadn’t come pre-loaded on my wife’s laptop.

It’s not that it didn’t have some nice features, if you could get past the user un-friendliness.

To me, using Vista feels like stepping onto a strange alien planet.  It looks a little bit like the world you’re used to, but overall feels very cold and foreign.  And that feeling never went away with more use.

So I was very reluctant to jump on the bandwagon and upgrade to the newest version of Windows.  It’s not that I’m afraid of change or anything.  I generally like having the newest version of software.  But that’s because the newest version is usually an improvement.  To me, Vista didn’t feel like an improvement.  Rather than a step forward, it just felt like an awkward step sideways.

Because of this, I stuck with using Windows XP on my two work computers, a desktop and a laptop.

However, things changed one day when I ended up with some malware on my computer.  It was one of those programs that uninstalls your anti-virus software and puts this fake anti-virus software on your computer, along with a bunch of viruses.  It scans and tells you it found these viruses and can get rid of them – if you upgrade to the paid version.

Man, I hate those things.  I’ve had that happen before.  I don’t know how they got under the radar of my anti-virus software, but they did.  In the past I could usually trace it back to some website I visited.  Usually it’s when you’re trying to find something for free online or you’re searching for something and click the wrong link and end up on some shady website with popups that look like Windows alerts and you click one on accident or before you realize it’s fake.

But this time I have absolutely no idea how I ended up with this junk on my computer.  I was just working and all of a sudden I noticed some new icon in my system tray and discovered it’s some “anti-virus” software that I never installed.

Well, after fighting with it to try to remove the software and viruses for a couple days, I finally gave up and decided to do the only sure-fire way of getting rid of viruses:  Re-install Windows and chose the option to format the hard drive in the process.

But what really bugged me was that I had no idea how I got this harmful software on my computer.  My computer and anti-virus software just let it get installed on my computer without notifying me in any way or asking me if I wanted it to happen.  That’s not cool.

So then I thought about how Windows Vista does this thing where when you try to install something new on the computer it does this lightbox effect things where the whole screen grays out and you have this warning on the screen saying something is trying to install on your computer and it asks you if you initiated it.

At first it was very annoying.  You think, ‘Of course I did, I just double clicked this install file.’  But if you’ve ever experienced what I was describing above, with something getting installed on your computer without your knowledge, you understand why this is there.  It suddenly becomes worth it to have to confirm all those times you’re trying to install something for that one time when there really is something malicious going on.

Now that feature actually sounded nice.  Of course, I still wouldn’t want to go with Vista.  But I had a friend I trusted who had installed Windows 7 and said he really liked it.  And I had talked to someone who said 7 still had a lot of the security features that Vista had, but that it was a little bit less intrusive.

Since I was going to have to start over with a fresh Windows installation anyway, I decided to go ahead and upgrade to Windows 7 so I could hopefully avoid this situation in the future.  It’s incredibly frustrating to lose several days of work because of a stupid virus on your computer.  So my main motivation behind deciding to upgrade was the additional security that’s built in to Windows 7.

That was my reason, but you may be looking at upgrading for other reasons.

To be honest, I can’t really think of anything I can do now with Windows 7 that I just couldn’t do with Windows XP.  That may change in the future if new software is not supported on older versions, but at present that doesn’t seem to be the case.  To me it seems like most of the changes are just little things here and there that either look or work differently that are supposed to make certain tasks a little easier.

But for me, again, it was the additional security that’s built in.

So if you’re thinking about upgrading, what do you need to know to make your decision?

Well, one of the biggest things is whether your computer meets the requirements for Windows 7.  The requirements could possibly change with future updates, so I suggest looking the page I just linked to, or just go to Microsoft’s website and make sure they’re still the same.

Currently, here are the requirements:

• 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
• 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
• 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
• DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

If you’re not too savvy technically, that may sound like Greek to you.  So I’ll show you how to find some of those details.

Let’s look at the first item, the processor.  It needs to be at least 1 gigahertz (GHz) speed.

To find out what your computer has, click Start, then Right Click on My Computer.  This will make a little menu popup where you can select Properties.  Like this:

That will bring up a dialog box where you can see some information about your computer.  It should look something like this:

Ok, the info you need is down in the bottom right corner.  By the way, these instructions are for a Windows XP machine, but the steps are pretty similar on Vista.

There are several pieces of information we can get on this screen.  You can see my processor says it’s “AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3200+”.  That doesn’t really tell us the speed of the processor.  It does tell me it’s a 64-bit processor.  That’s not a requirement for Windows 7, but it does affect some of the other system requirements, which we’ll get to in a few seconds.  But the next line is what tells me the speed.  It says “1.99 GHz”.

Basically that means 2 gigahertz.  The requirement is 1 gigahertz, so I’m good to go there.

The next item you see there says “1.25 GB of RAM”.  This is where it gets a little tricky.  The requirement for a 32-bit processor is 1GB, so I’d be fine with that.  But for a 64-bit processor, the requirement is 2GB.  So in that case, I wouldn’t be ok.

I remember when I bought this laptop that it said it would work as 32-bit or 64-bit and it’s currently running as 32-bit.  So I probably would be ok as long as I installed it as 32-bit.  But honestly I probably wouldn’t upgrade this laptop without first putting more RAM in it.  It would be just barely over the minimum requirement, which would probably mean it would run slowly.  I’d suggest having 2GB if you can.  Of course, you have to make sure your RAM can be upgraded.  They often have a limit on what they can handle and it’s possible you may not be able to upgrade it.  But unless it’s really old, it can probably handle 2GB or at least 1GB.  If you’re not sure, you may want to have a local computer expert take a look at it.

The next item is available hard drive space.  That’s pretty easy to determine.  You can close that other box that’s open if it’s still open.  Go to Start -> My Computer, then click on your main hard drive (you normally will only have one).  usually it’s (C:).  In the bottom left corner you’ll see some details about the space on your computer.  It’ll show how much free space you have and the total size of your hard drive.

Here’s what it’ll look like:

What you want to mainly look at is how much Free Space you have.  The requirement for Windows 7 is 16GB for a 32-bit processor or 20GB for a 64-bit processor.

In this case, you can see I have 34.4GB available, so I’d be ok as far as that goes.

If you don’t have enough free space, but you have a fairly large hard drive, you may be able to free up some space by deleting stuff you’re not using anymore or by putting things onto CDs/DVDs, an external hard drive, or USB flash drives.  Just don’t delete anything if you’re not sure what it is because you don’t want to delete something your computer needs to operate properly.

The things that usually fill up your hard drive the fastest is stuff like pictures, videos, and music.  Those are the kinds of things you might want to back up to other types of media instead of your hard drive.

So that leaves us with one other system requirement to check:  “DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver”.

To be honest, I don’t know of a sure-fire way to tell you to check that.  I’ll try to point you in the right direction though.

You can go back to the screen I took you to first, by going to Start -> then Right Click on My Computer and choose Properties.  Once the System Properties box pops up, there is a tab at the top called “Hardware”.  You’ll see it in one of the images above.  Then click the button that says “Device Manager”.

What you’ll want to look for is “Display Adapters”.  There should be a little plus sign next to it (+) that you can click to expand to see what you’ve got in that category… Like this:

If you don’t see anything here about “WDDM”, you can try right clicking whatever display adapter you have and choose Properties and look around there.  However, in this case, on the computer I’m showing you these screenshots from, I can’t find anything that indicates whether or not it meets this requirement.

On the computer I upgraded, I had the standard display adapter that came with the computer, but then I also had a new graphics card I had installed a little over a year ago.  It looks like after upgrading to Windows 7 that the standard display adapter isn’t working properly.  I didn’t really notice it much because I had the newer graphics card, which is what my monitor is plugged into.  However, if I were to plug a monitor into my old graphics card that came with the computer, I might have problems.

Fortunately, Microsoft makes a tool that will check to see if your computer meets all of the requirements.  It’s called the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor and it’s free.  You just install this software and it checks to see if your computer can handle Windows 7.  So you can run that and see what it says.

You might be asking, if there’s a tool that will just tell me if my computer is compatible, why would I go through the steps of checking all this stuff?  Well, it’s good to have an accurate picture of how well your computer measures up to the requirements.  As I mentioned before, on this computer I’m using in the examples, it technically meets some of the requirements, such as for RAM, but I can see that it just barely passes and I would probably want to put some more RAM in it before upgrading so things don’t run slowly.

If your computer just barely meets the requirements, you might not see any overall improvements by upgrading to Windows 7.  Instead, your computer might run slower, even if it does pass the requirements.

But even if you’re sure your computer meets the requirements, I’d suggest you run the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor tool from Microsoft because it not only checks to see how your computer measures up with the basic requirements, it also checks anything else you may have connected to the computer, such as external hard drives, cameras, printers, etc. to make sure they will work on Windows 7.

If there aren’t Windows 7 drivers available for those devices, you may run into problems.  So it’s wise to plug in all the devices you currently use with your computer and run the Upgrade Advisor to make sure everything is going to work if you upgrade.

On the computer I’m using in these examples, I couldn’t determine whether the graphics adapter met the requirements or not, so I ran the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor.  It indicated that my graphics adapter would be ok, but that I’d have to run Windows Update after installing Windows 7 to make sure I have the latest drivers for it.  It said it wasn’t sure if certain devices would be compatible or not, and there were a couple things that might have issues.

It’s definitely worth running this tool before upgrading if you possibly can.  It will give you a heads up about any potential issues.  It seemed pretty accurate in my case.

Aside from the technical requirements, there are other factors to consider with upgrading.

Personally, I really like Windows 7.

It has some of the built-in security features that Vista had, but it doesn’t have that cold, foreign feel to it.  Windows 7, to me, seems warm and inviting and pretty easy to use.  It looks nice and there are a lot of really subtle differences that don’t just jump out at you, but when you discover them, they make life a little easier.

For instance, there is a little area at the bottom right of the task bar called Aero Peek where you can put your cursor over it and it instantly makes all your open windows invisible so you can see through to your desktop.  You can click it to essentially minimize them all if you need to do some kind of work on your desktop, like clicking an icon.  Then you can click again it maximizes them all again just how they were.

This article is getting too long to go into all the new features, but you can find all the new Windows 7 features here.

If I have time, I’ll write a separate article about some of my favorite new features in Windows 7.  But as I mentioned before,so far I haven’t come across anything in Windows 7 that I just absolutely couldn’t do in Windows XP, at least that I’ll actually use.

But if you look through the features in Windows 7 and have reason to upgrade and your computer meets the requirements, and the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor doesn’t find any problems with you upgrading, I say go for it.

I do really enjoy Windows 7, and I didn’t find it hard to use.  If you’ve used Windows Vista, you shouldn’t have any trouble adapting.  Microsoft took some of the good features of Vista but made them more user friendly.  If you’re currently using XP, you still shouldn’t have much trouble.

I tend to not read instruction manuals or go through tutorials unless I’m just absolutely lost.  I didn’t go through any Windows 7 tutorials or anything before using it and I was able to figure out most things just fine.  There were a few small things that threw me at first, and I did look up some tutorials on Microsoft’s website to figure out how they worked.  But it wasn’t a big deal.

Anyway, that’s my take on it.  If I have time and you’re interested, maybe I’ll post something another time about some of my favorite new features and how to find your way around the things that have changed.  So just post a comment and let me know if you’d like that.

For now, I’ll just mention one item.  The task bar has changed quite a bit.  In previous versions, nothing really shows up in the task bar unless programs are open, and when they are, it has the name of the program.  Here’s what I mean:

In this case, I have two programs open, Outlook and Internet Explorer.  If I close them, there’s nothing there but the Start menu.  In some cases you might have something called a Quick Launch area with some small icon.

In Windows 7, it looks more like this:

In Windows 7, by default you don’t have the name of the program, just the icon that represents it.  And no more “Start”; it’s just the Windows logo.  In the above example, I only have 3 programs open but you see quite a few more icons than that.  Those aren’t all standard.  By default the first two items are there – the one that looks like folders, which is for Windows Explorer, where you can view files on your computer, and the second one, which is for Windows Media Player.

The other items, Firefox, Outlook, Dreamweaver, CuteFTP, and Photoshop are all items I have “pinned” there.  I use them on a daily basis, so rather than having to view my desktop to double click the icon, or go to Start -> Programs, etc… I can just click the little icon down there.

What threw me for a loop at first, though, was how to tell what programs were actually open.  It’s actually quite simple, but for some reason I didn’t notice it at first.  If you look at the above image, there are 3 icons that have a little glossy square around them:  Windows Explorer, Firefox, and then a weird little image to the right (I had the Control Panel open when I took the screenshot).  Those are the programs that are open already.

So that’s the only difference between when those programs are open or not.  One thing I really like about it is that I can put the programs there that I use often and they’re always in the same order.  In Windows XP, they’re in whatever order you opened them in.  This way the program you want is quick and easy to get to.

Now let me show you what happens when you have multiple windows open for a particular program.  In this case, I have Internet Explorer open with 3 different pages pulled up in different tabs.  If I put my cursor over the Internet Explorer icon, here is what I see:

If I put my cursor over the middle one, for instance, it would show me a full-size preview of that page.  I would also get a little “X” in the right corner of the little thumbnail where I could close that tab if I wanted.

That’s how you get to a particular window if you have multiple windows open of a program.  For instance, if you had 2 Microsoft Office documents open that were minimized and you wanted to get to a particular one, you’d have to put your cursor over the Microsoft Word icon and when the little thumbnails pop up, you’d click the one you wanted.

So that’s one thing that’s pretty different from Windows XP.  Vista had something kind of similar, but this is still different from that.

If you don’t like it, it’s possible to change it back to the way it was in previous versions of Windows.  There was one project I was working on where it was a pain to switch between things that way and I put it back to the classic style, but I decided to go back to the new style for everyday use.

Well, I think I’ve given you some things to think about and hopefully pointed you in the right direction regarding upgrading Windows 7.  I definitely like Windows 7, but I’m not planning to upgrade all of my computers to it anytime soon.  It’s just not necessary right now.  They’re working fine and there isn’t any major advantage other than better security, so that’s my take on it.

What about you?

Are you thinking about upgrading to Windows 7?  If so, why?

Have you already upgraded?  What do you think of it?

There are lots of ways to generate traffic to your website, but today we’ll just discuss one method:  using YouTube and viral videos.

What exactly is a viral video or viral marketing?

Well, just like a flu virus, it’s something that gets passed around.  Obviously with the flu, it’s not such a great thing.  But when it’s your marketing message, you want that getting passed around as much as possible.

The idea with viral marketing is to make something that really grabs people’s attention and entertains them in some way, to the point that they feel the need to share it with their friends.

So then you’ve got lots of people passing around your marketing message for you, reaching far more people than you might have been through your own marketing efforts alone.  Once it starts spreading, it’s all free publicity.

There are various types of viral marketing formats.  It could be an e-mail that keeps getting circulated, or an e-book, etc.  But let’s focus on videos.

Videos on the Internet have really exploded in recent years.  Many people spend more time watching videos online than they do watching television.  Sites like YouTube are extremely popular and many people spend hours each day watching videos and passing along their favorites to their friends.  Popular videos can receive millions of views in a fairly short time period.  Clearly, there is potential there for lots of exposure.

What makes a video viral?

In a nutshell, it has to be entertaining and unique.

As to what is entertaining, that varies from person to person, and the type of things one person would pass on to their friends, the next person might not.

Videos that get passed around might be funny, odd, shocking, provocative, sad, thought-provoking, surprising, and so on.  But it also has to be at least somewhat unique and has to stand out as something that’s worth remembering and sharing.

The best way to get an idea of what types of videos are viral is to stop and think about what your friends have sent you.  Have your friends told you you need to check out such-and-such video on YouTube, or have they sent you an e-mail with a link, or posted a video on Facebook?

That’s the kind of stuff to pay attention to.  Then stop and think about why people are passing it around.

Another place to look for ideas is commercials from “The Big Game”.  Yeah, you know the biggest football game of the year that everyone watches.  I’m not using the actual name of it because it’s trademarked and they don’t allow anyone to actually mention the name.  That’s why stores and places usually just refer to it as “the big game”.  Kind of weird, I know.  And I’m not sure who all that applies to so I’m just being on the safe side.

Half of the people just watch the game for the commercials.  Which ones stand out in your mind?  The things that make those memorable and make you talk about them with your friends are the things you need to include in your video if you want it to be viral.

For me personally, the videos I usually hear about, as well as the ones I usually pass along to friends, are funny videos.

Sometimes the videos were not even intended to be funny.  Sometimes the person shooting the video was serious, but something about the video is funny to other people.  Sometimes it’s funny because it’s just really odd or unusual.  Sometimes it can even be annoying.

Examples of Viral Videos

Below are a couple examples of videos that have been passed around a lot.  These are ones friends have told me about and that I’ve told others about.  Oddly enough, these are both for furniture stores, and they are both commercials.

A lot of the viral videos being passed around are not actual commercials, but are just entertaining in some way. If they are intentionally made to be viral, somewhere the person’s website or business name is mentioned, maybe at the end of the video.  But these are actual commercials.

My assumption is that the first video was not necessarily created with the intention of being passed around on the Internet, but the second one was.

Flea Market Montgomery

This video is both funny and annoying.  You find yourself with the song stuck in your head the next day.  “It’s just like, it’s just like… a mini mall”.

As of this writing, this particular video has had over five and a half million views!  Talk about exposure!  And it’s really more than that because other people have put the video in their own accounts and have lots of views as well.

I really don’t know what that’s done for this business.  I’ve heard they have done really well but I really don’t know.  I do know that the guy in the video has been on national TV as a result of that commercial.

I do know I’m not going to drive to Alabama just to go to that store.  But what if they had a website?  Who knows, if they listed their website in the commercial I might have gone there just out of curiosity.  And if their website was well done and their prices were good, I might have even clicked around to see what they had.

I really don’t know if they had any idea that video would be viral when they were shooting the commercial.  One way or another, it definitely has the whole poor-quality local commercial feel to it.

Red House Furniture

This video was intended to look like an amateur local commercial.  And it does have the real employees in the commercial.  But it was made terrible on purpose.  The guys that made the video are doing something similar for some other small local businesses.

Again, I don’t know for sure what impact this has had on the business, but I’ve heard they have done really well.  As of this writing they’ve had well over 2 million views.

They were smart and included their website address in the video.  They don’t actually sell any of their products on their website, but they do sell t-shirts that are related to the video.  That’s a great idea.  Many of the people watching the video and passing it around are going to be teenagers, who would be interested in buying a t-shirt that they find funny.

How To Do It

As you can see, a properly executed video can get millions of views.  That can mean quite a few people will be seeing your name, brand, or website.  But how do you convert those views into dollars?

Well, as I mentioned earlier, you’ll want to mention your website in the video.  It should be clearly visible on the screen, spelled out so there’s no doubt about the spelling.  Along with just listing the website address, you need to give people a reason to go there.  Just knowing what your website address is doesn’t mean they’ll go there.  You might get a few curious people, but if you give them a solid reason to visit your site, you’ll get a lot more.

It could be that you have more videos like this one there, or maybe something they can get for free, or maybe you don’t tell them specifically what they’ll find but make them curious about what they’ll find there.

You’ll want to put a link to your website anywhere else you can, such as in the info section about the video and about you.

However, having your website address in the video itself is really the most important step because if it really does become viral, other people will often copy the video into their own account or playlist, and then people won’t see any links you put in your account, but only the video and whatever is in the account of that person.  Also, some people will post it to their blogs and things like that, so unless your website address is on the screen in the video itself, you’ll be missing out on a lot of exposure and you won’t get the full benefit from your video being passed around.

Now, I think you can probably see the benefits of having a viral video that people pass around for you and spread your marketing message to all their friends.  However, you need to be aware of a few things if you’re going to give it a try.

First of all, it’s hard to predict what will be viral.  Sometimes things you’d never expect to be viral get passed around like crazy.  Then things you would think would get passed around aren’t.  I wouldn’t recommend investing a lot of money into something purely on the hopes that it will become viral.  Not unless you really have a solid plan and you’ve run it by a lot of other people first.

Keep in mind that just because you think something will be funny doesn’t mean everyone else will.

Also, don’t go overboard with the sales message.  Unless the entire thing is meant to be a commercial, such as in the examples above, then the marketing part of the message should be pretty short in comparison with the video.  Maybe it would just be a few seconds at the very end of the video where you mention your website.

If you study some of the videos that have been passed around the most, you’ll find that many are not high-quality, professionally recorded videos.  Many have a very amateur nature to them.  So you don’t necessarily need to invest a lot of money into recording your viral video.

You might be able to just get a simple camera that can record video, such as a Flip camera, which makes it easy to not only record the video, but also upload it to YouTube.

You might need to do a little editing of the video.  If it’s really simple edits, you might be able to do this using software that’s already on your computer.  For instance, Windows comes with Windows Movie Maker, which has some pretty nice basic features for editing video.  Some of the features might seem kind of cheesy, but who knows, maybe that’s just what will help make your video viral.

Have you enjoyed this article?  You can leave comments below.  Also, I’ve included some additional resources in case you’d like to read more on this topic.

Additional reading on this topic:

TubeTraffic:  Discover the Little Known Secrets of Getting Free Traffic From YouTube

Viral Video Research

One simple little mistake knocked me off of the front page of Google and basically killed my site as far as the search engines were concerned.  In fact, it wasn’t really anything I did wrong, but one thing I didn’t do that caused these problems.

It started when I decided to install WordPress on the main site of my business, ServeSense.com.

Don’t get me wrong, that wasn’t the mistake, but that’s where the problem started.  Just so we’re clear, I’m a firm believer in WordPress.  It has changed my business.  In fact, soon I’m going to write a post about that in more detail.  But suffice it to say for now that I love WordPress and use it every day.

So what went wrong?

Well, I always used to install WordPress manually, by uploading all the files via FTP, creating a database and database user and password, then running the install script.  However, this time I decided to go the easy route.  Not that the manual route is hard, it just has a few more steps and I’m all about saving time where I can and wanted to try this other route to see if it really would make it easier.

The easy route I’m referring to is by using something called Fantastico.  And again, I’m not knocking Fantastico.  In fact, now I use it to install WordPress whenever I can.  It speeds up the process quite a bit.  But if I’m not mistaken, when I installed WordPress on ServeSense.com with Fantastico, I believe it was the first time I did it that way.  Fantastico is just a tool found in most cPanel installations that makes it easy to install quite a few different open source applications, including WordPress.  Even if you’re not very savvy when it comes to web stuff, you can probably install WordPress this way.

The Danger of Installing WordPress Through Fantastico

While Fantastico is nice and saves a lot of time, there is one significant difference when you install it this way.  In fact, it’s the only difference I’ve noticed.  As far as I can tell, everything else is the same.  But this one difference that I wasn’t aware of at the time is what caused these problems for me.

There is a setting in WordPress, under Settings -> Privacy that allows you to choose whether or not you want search engines like Google and Yahoo to be able to follow links on your site and index your site in the search engines.

When you install WordPress manually, you are given a choice of whether you want search engines like Google to be able to see your website.

Here’s what that screen looks like:

Ok, see that little checkbox that I have the red arrow pointing to?  Well, as of this writing, you don’t get that option in Fantastico.

While WordPress has that option pre-checked by default, assuming you do want your site to appear in search engines, Fantastico, for some reason, assumes you do not want your site to appear in search engines.  I have no idea why, since I’m sure most people do.  But by default, when you install WordPress through Fantastico, it’s as if they uncheck that box for you.

It’s not like it’s impossible to change or anything.  It’s a quick, simple fix (I’ll show you how in a few seconds).  But that’s assuming you know it did that.  In my case, I didn’t realize that.   I had always installed WordPress manually before that and the default setting was to have your site show up in search engines, which is what I wanted 100% of the time, so at that time I wasn’t even familiar with the options panel where you change that.  But believe me, I am now.

So if you’ve installed WordPress through Fantastico, here’s what you need to do.

Just go to Settings -> Privacy.

Here’s where to find that:

After clicking on Privacy, here’s the screen you’ll see:

See that red arrow?  It’s pointing to the default setting if you installed WordPress through Fantastico.  Obviously, all you have to do to change it is select the first option that says you’d like your blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines and then click Save Changes.

Very easy, assuming you know you need to do it.

But in my case, I didn’t realize Fantastico had set it up that way.

So months went by and I noticed my pages that were previously in the #1 spot on the first page of Google for certain keywords were no longer showing up there.  They kept dropping lower and lower until they were no longer on the first page at all.  And even the listings that appeared didn’t look right.  Instead of the page title and excerpts from the page like Google usually shows, all that showed up was my business name and the URL of my home page (instead of the page that was optimized for my keywords).

Obviously I was wondering what in the heck was going on.

I looked at my pages and I did notice one problem that I thought might have been the reason.  Before I switched my site over to WordPress all my links included www. (as in http://www.servesense.com), but after installing WordPress, the www. was missing.  As far as users are concerned, it’s not a big deal.  If someone types in www. in the address, WordPress just redirects them to the non-www. version.  But it’s better not to have those redirects going on if you can help it.

This isn’t normally much of an issue, but I had an existing site with existing pages indexed by Google and Google had indexed them all as having www. in the URL.  Now all those URLs were redirecting elsewhere (to just http://servesense.com – without the www. in the URL).  So that’s easy enough to fix.  You just go under Settings -> General and you can add the www. and then all your links include www.

So I did that and things just continued to get worse.

I don’t actually remember how much time passed (months, though) or the exact sequence of events, but at some point along the way I had a client come to me with this exact same problem.  He was using some of the web tools Google provides for webmaster and it was telling him there was a problem with his robots.txt file on his new site.  I took a look at his site and within a few minutes found the problem of the privacy setting and fixed it… problem solved (for him).

I talked with him a little and found out he had used Fantastico to install WordPress.  So now I knew to watch out for that.  But it didn’t click that I had used Fantastico on my own site.  Since then I’ve installed many WordPress installations for clients using Fantastico and one of my first steps after installation is to go into the privacy settings and make sure it’s set to be listed by the search engines.

However, for some reason, I didn’t think to check my own site for that setting.  In fact, I forgot that I even installed it through Fantastico.  So today I was thinking that my site needs some work.  I’m always getting my clients’ sites setup where both users and the search engines love them, but my own sites are often neglected.  I was just going to install a plugin for myself that I install for my clients that generates a site map and notifies the search engines so they can properly index the site.

Well, I have to give thanks to the developer of that plugin (Google XML Sitemaps).  I installed it and it gave me a message at the top of the page that said my privacy settings are currently blocking the search engines.  My jaw dropped.  Could I have had my site set to block the search engines for the past however many months, after checking that setting almost daily on clients’ sites?  Yes, yes I had.

I clicked Settings -> Privacy and there it was staring me in the face.  Obviously I quickly corrected this and sat there for a few seconds in disbelief.

In a way, it was a relief.  I was wondering why in the world my pages had been dropping out of Google ever since installing WordPress.  I knew if anything Google should have liked my site more.  So I was really puzzled as to why that was happening.  Now I had my answer.

Just in case you’re interested in what exactly this setting does on a technical level, it does a few things.  It adds a “nofollow” meta tag, it generates a virtual robots.txt file that returns a “Disallow: /” (which tells search engines not to index anything at all on the site), and also disables the pinging function that normally notifies pingomatic that you’ve updated something on your site.  For a little more detail, here is the WordPress page that explains the Privacy SubPanel.

So that’s what happened to me and why it happened.  Besides all the pages that were previously getting great ranking dropping out of Google’s search results entirely, the pages also show no Google PageRank anymore.  I’m curious how long it’s going to take for things to get restored.  The site has been around for a number of years, so I’m sure that will count for something.  But I also unknowingly had it blocking the search engines for months.  So we’ll see what happens.

I decided the first thing I’d do after fixing this setting and generating a sitemap is to write a new post so the search engines can get pinged and hopefully Google will start indexing my site again.  And what better topic to write about than how this happened?  Hopefully it will help someone else who is wondering why Google suddenly stopped liking their site after installing WordPress.  As I mentioned, it has nothing to do with installing WordPress, but just using Fantastico to install it.

Did you enjoy this article?  I’d love to hear your comments.

A good email autoresponder system should do two things primarily:

1. Give people a way to get more information from you automatically (without any work on your part)
2. Give you a way to contact all your prospects, customers, or clients at once by sending only 1 e-mail

Aweber does those things well. They make it easy to create an e-mail mailing list and create code you can put into your website to allow people to sign up to receive more information, whether that be in the form of a free report, newsletter, etc.

And whenever you want to send out an e-mail to your entire list at once (called a “broadcast” e-mail), Aweber makes this very easy.   They also include Spam checking so you can make sure your message won’t be mistaken as Spam.

While there are some services that may be a little cheaper, you have to be careful about who you use for an email autoresponder service.  One important factor is deliverability.  What I mean by that is basically whether your e-mails make it through to people’s inboxes.

An e-mail autoresponder / follow-up service sends out many thousands of e-mails every day from their server and all the major e-mail service providers (like AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Verizon, Comcast, etc.) want to know why all these e-mails are coming to their users.  They try to do their best to protect their users from Spam (junk mail) and when they see lots of messages coming from one server, their immediate conclusion is that it’s likely Spam.

A good e-mail autoresponder / follow-up service usually has people dedicated to doing nothing other than maintaining good relationships with these e-mail service providers and Internet service providers.  If there are complaints, they have to handle them.  If a particular user is getting lots of spam complaints, they may put restrictions on the user’s account such requiring the user to use e-mail verification (double opt-in) on all their mailing lists.  This protects all the other users of the autoresponder service.

I’ve used some e-mail autoresponder services that didn’t focus enough on maintaining good relationships with the different e-mail service providers and they would get blacklisted by a particular e-mail service provider.  Let me give you an example of what this means and what impact it has.

Let’s say lots of AOL users complain that they’ve received Spam e-mails.  AOL looks into it to see where these e-mails came from and lots of them are traced back to a particular server on the Internet, probably all from a certain IP address.  From AOL’s perspective, this looks like whoever owns that server is a Spammer, blasting out junk mail.  But in reality, it may be an e-mail autoresponder service.

Let’s just make up a name for this autoresponder service.  We’ll call them XYZ Autoresponder.  If XYZ Autoresponder had maintained a good relationship with all the major email providers such as AOL, then AOL would know why so many e-mails were coming to them from XYZ’s server.  In reality, it’s not just one user sending out all these e-mails, but it’s lots of different users sending out the e-mails.

So if XYZ Autoresponder service didn’t have a good relationship with AOL, AOL is going to assume it’s a spammer and they will add XYZ Autoresponder’s server to their “blacklist”.  What this means is anytime an e-mail comes to AOL from XYZ’s server, it is automatically rejected and whoever it was sent to will never see it.

This is a serious issue because it means any user of the XYZ Autoresponder service who tries to send out an e-mail to their mailing list wouldn’t be able to reach anyone on their list using AOL.  This could potentially be hundreds or thousands of people on your mailing list that you’ve worked hard to get there that you can no longer contact.

So e-mail deliverability is very important.  If you go with a company that doesn’t have the resources or knowledge to maintain good relationships with all the major ISPs and e-mail providers, there’s a good chance your e-mails won’t make it through.  And if you’re e-mails aren’t making it through to people, what’s the point of sending them?

Aweber is one service that I’ve never had issues with when it comes to e-mails getting through.  Of course, you have to be careful with the wording you use in your e-mails so they’re not mistaken for Spam, but that’s a topic for another day.  So you have to do your part, but you need an e-mail autoresponder service who will do their part as well.

All in all, Aweber has been very reliable.  Their pricing structure has changed, which I’m not crazy about, but they’re still reasonable.  Their service, at least as of this writing, starts at $19/month for up to 500 subscribers.  Then it goes up from there depending on how many people are on your list.  The good thing about it is that if you’re properly monetizing your list, the more people you have on your list, the more money you should be making.

While there are several autoresponder services that are decent, I feel like Aweber is about the best when it comes to e-mail deliverability, and that’s really one of the most important things.  So for a while now, they’re my top pick when it comes to an autoresponder service.

Sign Up for Aweber