You’ve heard of the 6 degrees of separation I’m sure. It relates to an experiment during the 60s and 70s in the US where Stanley Milgram set about to prove that anyone was literally only 6 people away from contact.  The experiment had some success but only mildly. But let’s not let the facts get in the way of my story.  After all, the web and LinkedIn didn’t exist then.

Two weeks ago my husband and I were watching a movie on TV and the lead guy reminded me of Clint Eastwood. I wondered if it might be his son.  I googled the guy to find out information about him and wasn’t able to ascertain if he is related or not (different name and no mention of his parentage) however one of the google links led to a LinkedIn profile of the guy. And would you believe he was connected to me – 3 levels down!  I immediately sent a request to connect to him direct and introduced myself to him and why I was writing. He accepted 2 days later!  Amazing.  Who knows if it will lead to anywhere but now I’m connected to a Hollywood movie star.  woo hoo!

Ever had one of those weeks when everything you try seems to turn out wrong? Well, some things anyway. I’ve had one of those weeks and I want to share about it to help you prevent any of the problems I’ve had.

Let me outline what problems I was having:

1. Login problems for a client’s blog – it just wouldn’t view the wp-admin login at all and kept coming up with error messages.  Research via google finally told me to look for ‘white space’ in the wp-config.php file. That means empty lines or spaces that shouldn’t be there. I got rid of every empty line and space I could find, saved it and uploaded and voila!  I could log in again. whew!  That was the easy fix!
2. My family blog – I had files all mixed up on the server from a few years of trying out different things so decided to remove them and then do a reinstall of WordPress to a new folder – I was just basically tidying up the files on the server as it was getting full.  However the new installation just wouldn’t take and I ended up with a blank screen – you couldn’t view the blog at all.  I removed that folder and created a new one and started again. Same scenario. I was stumped.  Further if I added /wp-admin/ to see if I could log in I would just get gobbledegook on the screen – no dashboard at all.  Investigations on wordpress.org and google seemed to indicate my server might be full (it wasn’t) and/or that WordPress hadn’t installed properly – I would need to do a manual install.  ughh!
3. I upgraded another blog that I run for my husband and his mtb racing team to wordpress 3.0 and experienced the exact same problem as no. 2.
4. I accidentally deleted a couple of files from my business blog when thinking I was logged into my family blog (see no. 2) and didn’t stop it in time.  Checked blog and it seemed ok and I wrote a new post to it this morning but when I went to view the blogpost once published the site produced an error message and I could no longer access the blog or view the posts.  I had to call in help from a friend who specialises in this type of work to fix the problem. Reinstalling the wp-admin and wp-includes folders in this instance did not solve the problem.

If you manage one or several blogs then it’s important to have some backup systems in place. I don’t just mean having a backup for your blogposts (you should have that without saying and if you haven’t then login to your blog immediately, go to the plugins section search for the wp-backup plugin and install it – then activate it) but I mean a back up of your actual wordpress files too.

Fantastico which is in my control panel online does not seem to have the option to reinstall or repair WordPress – only to do a new install or remove an existing one.  That’s been fine for most of the time but I’ve had 4 blogs this week (one client, one voluntary and 2 of my own) that have had problems and all of them when I’ve done an upgrade to 3.0 or attempted to change something in 3.0.  Not sure if that means there’s a problem with that version or I’ve just been unlucky this week.  But I did not have copies of the original files – only the edited ones I’d been playing with at some stage.

That means having to do a manual reinstall of the program and the version I’m using is no longer available for downloading from wordpress.org.  So then I had to consider downloading the 3.0.1 version and printing off the instructions for the manual installation.  However, I already had databases set up as they are existing blogs so I wasn’t sure how much of the installation process I could ignore or should take notice of?

If I’d had a clean copy of WordPress 3.0 I could have reuploaded the wp-admin and wp-includes folders in the hope that would fix the problem. I do know enough to keep a copy of the wp-config.php file and not overwrite that one – that’s the file that holds the database, login and username information.

So, what did I do? I looked through my various blogs (I own several) and found one I believed to have clean copies of the wp-admin and wp-includes folders and copied them over to the folder of one of the blogs I was having challenges with. I then proceeded to upload those folders by FTP to the web and waited for the results. Would it succeed or wouldn’t it?

What lesson have I learnt? To make sure that every single WordPress site I manage or own, that I do a full download of each of the folders and files that are installed online and keep them safe (and backedup) in case I need to reupload them at any time.  Having the posts backup file (xml) isn’t enough.  And if you have the tgz backup file, then you need to know how to restore that file.  In the meantime I’ll go back to what I was doing – manual installs of the latest wordpress files in the hope that they’ll become visible again.

… unless you do something to let people know you exist.

I  have recently taken on some new clients – all of them requiring websites to promote their new businesses.

I love doing this type of work.  Setting up a brand new site, giving them an identity or brand and helping them to let others know they exist.

But their level of knowledge or expectation vary considerably.

There are those who really put the research in, know exactly what they want and in what order and then are ready to do the promotions and marketing as soon as the site is ready. They’re raring to go and can’t wait to take over the site (by the way, did I tell you I build CMS sites so that clients can have the control?).

And then there are those who have a loose or vague idea of what they want. They’ve heard if they build a website they can make a lot of money but they have no idea what it will take to get them from their idea to the reality of that goal. There’s a lot of information missing inbetween and I have to try and draw it out of them:

• What will their domain name be?
• What information will be on the website?
• What will the site look like (colour, number of pages, style, etc)
• How are they going to promote the site?
• Do they want to write articles, have a blog or newsletter, build a subscription list?
• Do they know who their competitors are?
• Why do they think they need a site?

And the list goes on. These clients are harder to service, or should I say more challenging?  I still enjoy the work but I wonder if they really understand what’s involved, other than having a website up one day and then they’re expecting the money to come in a few days later…

I frequently feel like I’ve shifted from webmaster to business coach as I try to get them up to speed on the information they should be providing me with.

If the content is there and they know what they’re talking about, they will get an audience… eventually. But they need to spend time networking online and offline, letting people know they exist and understand their topic well.

If no-one knows you exist they are not going to find your website, except by chance.  The site needs to have worthy content and if your name is not well known, then no-one is going to be searching for you by name at all. Only by topic and you’ll already have at least tens of thousands of sites to compete with out there.

And if a logo is all you want on the front page, well I’m sorry but that’s not going to work for you – unless you’re Coca Cola or some well known brand.  No-one wants to click on an image to see what’s behind it, unless they already have some idea of who you are and what you do.  All sorts of nasties live on the web and they won’t know you from Adam, so why would they want to click on a logo or image if they don’t know what you do or what your site is about?

Apart from that, search engines need text on the home page of the website – how can they catalogue and list your site if they have nothing to work with?

So, if you’re looking to get a website – that’s just the seed.  It needs to be planted, nourished and fertilised in order to grow and develop so that your site becomes an integral part of your business.

Oh, and if you’re a website virgin, then here is what you need to get started:

1. A domain name – that’s the address people enter into the web browser to find your website.
2. Webspace – you need to pay for webhosting to get webspace. Your webhost will help you get the domain name pointed to your particular webspace so people can view your site after entering the URL or address into the browser
3. Website – this is what is built to show up on your webspace at the address you have for your site.

And that’s just the beginning. Next there is content, images, logo, decisions to be made on how people will contact you, what email addresses you might use, what your site will look like, what colours you will use, how you are going to promote the site so that people will visit it, how often it will be updated and so on.

Once that is done the rest is up to you – the website owner.  You need to be networking, meeting people, speaking to people, adding your web address on all your printed material, in your email signature block and anywhere else that people might see it. After that, they will come…

I’ve recently joined another forum (why do I do this??). I must be a forum junkie or something

Anyway, my heart went out to many there who are seeking work online but don’t know where to look, how to start, or what might be real versus a scam.  I posted a very long item on the forum but thought that the information would be useful outside of the forum so it was more public as well. Here seemed a good place to post it.  Your comments are welcome!

Hello everyone, I’m very new here but have been reading through the threads and contributing where I can.  I’m hoping that the advice I give here will help many of you who are seeking jobs or online businesses.

As you know it’s so very easy to get taken in by scams these days. So easy for people to set up a website, make it look impressive and make it sound
like they know what they’re talking about and that they have experience on
their side. Unfortunately it’s all too easy to hide behind a website and
you don’t get to see the real person for what they’re worth.

Whatever your skillset, research becomes a very necessary skill you need to
hone and develop.  Because the internet allows people to remain ‘invisible’
and only show what they want to show (there’s both good and bad in this)
then it’s important for you to check out who it is you’re planning to work
for or do business with.

There are some things you can do to help you:

• When you visit a website and you’re not sure of its longevity – has it only been around 6 months or 6 years, there is a way to check.  Visit the Wayback Machine and enter the URL.  It’s interesting to see how sites have progressed and matured over time. http://www.archive.org/web/web.php  If the site has only been around a month then you might need to tread carefully.
• Investigate the head person or the contact person for that business.  Do they show up on the web much or are they a non-entity?  Have people discussed them at forums and is the feedback good or bad?  If that person is really business savvy chances are they will have a profile at linkedin.com and have a website of their own. There may be articles written by them or about them or they may have shown up in newspapers and magazines online.
• If you’re looking to go into business with someone, or register with a
  business that requires you to pay a membership or subscription fee, then again make sure you research the company or person first.  No business opportunity is that urgent/important that you have to sign up today.  If the opportunity is good it will still be here tomorrow and next week, or even next month, so take your time to research and consider.
• Compile a list of pros and cons for joining that company or running that business.
• Look for discussion forums online that relate to that industry and if the forums are free (most are), then join it and hang around for awhile. Get to know the people and how they conduct themselves.  Let the industry speak for itself via the forum(s).  There are many board forums like this one, oryahoogroups.com has tons of forums there on almost any topic imagineable.  Ning.com does too.  And there are others so the research is worth doing.
• If you’re not sure what kind of work you’d like to do, make a list of your skills and abilities and then start doing searches on those skills and abilities. Google will show up all sorts of things – the adwords of people selling their services or products, lists of forums, websites and all sorts of other things relating to those items. This research may well open your eyes to possibilities you hadn’t considered before.

Who am I to tell you this? My name is Kathie Thomas and I’ve been in
business for over 16 years.  I began as a homebased secretary BEFORE the
internet so was well placed to adopt this ‘new’ technology when it entered
my country (Australia) back in late 95.  I was online early 96 and had my
first website by April that year.  My business has grown with the internet.
These days I’m known as a Virtual Assistant.

I get a lot of people (mainly women) emailing me, writing to me, phoning me up, just to make sure I’m a real person before they decide to join my VA
network. Others write to me for advice because they’ve seen my name on the web in lots of places and consider that I am well known in my industry.  I
get women from other industries seeking advice simply because they know
I’ve worked on the web for a long time and they want to know what they
should or shouldn’t be doing and what to look for.  It doesn’t matter that
they might be planning to do something different to what I do, they just
recognise that experience counts and they want to benefit from that.

There are always great new opportunities out there and once you’re in that frame of mind, they will keep showing themselves up.  I often get approached by people, mainly from the US, because their business is reaching my own shores and they’re looking for someone to join up, sign up, become a distributor or something along those lines and because I have a huge network of people I know, I’m an ideal target for those approaches.  Some I look at with interest, others I turn down immediately. But I only
get approached because I have a web presence and am visible to many.  Which brings me to my next point.

All of you can have your own website at no or very little cost to you.
There are services out there that are free such as blogger.com,
wordpress.com and similar.  Whilst these are known traditionally as
blogging tools you can create static pages instead of posts.  Why not set
one up in your own name and add your profile, almost like an online resume.

Don’t put in personal information such as your home address but do make it
easy for people to contact you if they need to. Anyone in business usually
has a contact form, or email address and a phone number for easy access.

If you have topics you’re passionate about and if you have good writing
skills, then use that site as a platform to share your knowledge – you
never know who might see it.

A good example: one of my daughters is into horses in a big way. She’s
almost 26 now.  3 years ago she got an email from someone who had been
reading her blog about the horse studies and work experience she’d had in
the industry. It kept showing up in their Google searches on the topic.
When she contacted me to find out if I thought the email was a scam I told
her ‘no honey, that sounds very real, you better call them’. She did.
Turned out to be a local Technical College of Advanced Education and they wanted to engage her as a teacher for their Equine Studies course. She’s now been teaching for them for 3 years. No, she didn’t have a teaching degree but the college recognised she had the experience and skills for the topic and they agreed to put her through a ‘train the trainers’ course. She’s now studying for her teaching diploma part-time while teaching at the college.  She’s making money she didn’t think she would be making as the industry is low paid but her passion outweighed her desire for a high income.

So, if you want to stand out and get noticed, start creating an online
profile for yourself.

While on that topic, it has been documented by the media many times now
that prospective employers can research their employees by checking places like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter and so on.  What does your profile online say about you?  Is there anything you wouldn’t want a
prospective employer or business partner see? Best you get it cleaned up
now – before that time comes.  What you put on the web is there forever and
it pretty darned near impossible to get removed so take care in your online
presence – always.

Sorry for the long post but I hope this information helps someone here.

All the best to you in your searches!

A variation on a US cell phone hoax has been targeting Australian email addresses advising the mobile phone numbers will be made public next month and if you don’t want to be charged for telemarketing calls you had better contact the DoNotCall Register online.

Interesting things to note – the email gives no references to back up the information, nor do they include a date which would make the message obsolete once that date had passed.

If you receive the email, do us all a favour and don’t pass it on. It is a hoax and deserves to be trashed, like all other hoaxes.

If you want more information then read here.

I don’t know about you, but if I email someone with a request for advice, a quote, or something else, I kind of expect a response acknowledging they’ve received my email.

I don’t mean an autoresponder and I’m not into using the read receipt option (a whole other story there) but a response email that just lets me know it has been received and read, and they’ll get back to me with an answer later.

Whether we like it or not, society has become one that requires quick answers and quick fixes and email has helped produce that expectation.

While I’m not expecting service or product providers to drop everything at my beck and call, I certainly don’t expect to wait 4, 5 or more days for a response – usually if I’ve enquired about something it means I’m looking for that thing now and would like to know if it’s available, doable, achievable, deliverable.

If I don’t hear back from the person I emailed within 2 or 3 days I email them again and then if I still don’t get a response I ring them up.  Result is they think I’m nagging them or something.  Huh?  Am I in the wrong?  I don’t think so.

I know if a prospective client contacts me for some work to be done they don’t wait around very long for an answer.  They go off to the very next VA business they can find to get the answer they’re looking for.  So even if I don’t have an answer on the spot (I need to research for some information for example), I will at least email them a reply letting them know I’ve seen their email and will get back to them very soon with an answer. What do you do?

Australian business operators are being targetted by scammers with fake Yellow Pages advertising faxes.  If you have been approached and are worried about the legitimacy you should ring Yellow Pages on 13 23 78 to report it.  From my own personal experience, Yellow Pages always works through their sales people on the phone and in person.

A couple of things for you to look for on the fake fax – the logo is upside down and there is a UK address at the bottom of the sheet.

Some addresses they claim they working with:

yellowpage-sydney.com
yellowpage-queensland.com
yellowpage-tasmania.com
yellowpage-perth.com
yellowpage-melbourne.com
yellowpage-westernaustralia.com
yellowpage-victoria.com
yellowpage-southaustralia.com
yellowpage-nsw.com

Do you spend considerable time trying to stop spammers joining your forum? Or do you simply just let them join and then ban them on their first spam message?

It’s hard to know which way to go.  Either way, there is time spent on filtering these online pests.

I recently came across a site called Stop Forum Spam and you can enter the ip address of a new member to see if that same person has been registering with multiple forums over a short period of time. I’ve found it’s taken the guesswork out for me and I can ban them straight off. I usually include an email message with the rejection message with any I’m not sure about banning, i.e. if there’s not sufficient evidence that they might be a spammer, just so I’m not rejecting anyone genuine, but for the most part, it helps me determine the spammers from genuine members.

I host/manage a memorial blog for a well known speaker here in Australia who recently passed away. As a result I’ve been moderating the comments on the blog.

A week or so ago I noticed a comment from someone I know personally but was posted by someone else. I let it publish because I assumed she had a support person doing it for her – and perhaps they didn’t know how to post it from her address.

But then I saw that overnight someone else had done exactly the same thing using the very same person’s name so I went through all the past comments and found that these two people (I will now refer to as spammers) had copied and pasted parts or whole comments and then posted with their own links.  I went back and marked both comments as spam and deleted them.

If I didn’t know this particular person personally chances are I probably wouldn’t have picked up on this new spam trick and would have let the comments be published.  You need to be ever vigilant with comment posts to blogs you own, or blogs you are managing for other people.

Yeah, me too. And what about thanking a client for something special? You meant to but it slipped your mind and now some time has passed, it seems almost irrelevant or an after thought.

How would you like to fix that problem? You don’t even have to go to the shops to buy a card or a postage stamp or anything, you can do it completely online. You would? Hoping you would say that.

Introducing my newest service…

As a distributor for Send Out Cards and also as a Virtual Assistant, I’m in the unique position of being able to set you up with an account and then help you create your lists and set up the sending process on your behalf.

What can I do for you?

• Create your account (there are three types available – Retail, Wholesale and Entrepreneur packages)
• Sort and import your Contact list or database
• Set up reminder services for birthdays, anniversaries or anything else you may have in your calendar
• Create and send personalised cards using your own images or the many thousand already available with Send Out Cards
• Create and maintain Campaigns for you.

You know personally what it means to you when someone takes the time to send a card to you expressing their thoughts and feelings. Now you can do the same without having to go to the shops to find the right card, write in it and then take it to the post box. It can be done completely from your computer – or mine if you want me to handle it on your behalf. Imagine… you never will forget a birthday again!

Why not try out a gift account on me and see how it works or give me a call and I’ll walk you through the process. +613 9754 8310 or email me.