See An Ugly Duckling Website Transformed Into A Wordpress Swan... I’m wildly in love with Wordpress. It’s become my software of choice for publishing on the internet. You’ll understand why when you see the transformation it works on the first website I ever created.

Domain Extensions Determine Who Sees Your Website…Most people put a good deal of thought into choosing their domain name. But few realize that the domain extension needs to be just as carefully chosen. Here’s what a domain extension is and how it can affect your traffic.

No Matter How They Spin It, Cashgifting Is Still A Con..If you have an email address, sooner or later you’ll be invited to join in Cashgifting. This con is so seductive because it comes to you from an eager, well-meaning friends. Here’s the truth about this scheme, and resources for protecting yourself.

And take a second look at my tutorial on Backing Up Mozilla’s Thunderbird Email Program Is Fast And Easy With MozBackup. I’ve added additional instructions in response to a reader’s questions.

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Moving a simple Wordpress site shouldn’t be hard.  But all too often, my new clients started out with a service that promised "We do it all!" That is, they regsiter your domain name, set up a web hosting account and build your web site or provide you with a template to build your own.

This can seem like a good deal…at first. But then, my clients come to a crossroads. Their business is growing, but their web site is locked in to a service that can’t accomodate that growth.

In a recent case, moving the Wordpress site away from the original hosting company was like trying to wrestle a fish away from an octopus.  Among other things, they wouldn’t provide my client with access to her own Wordpress database.

I had FTP access to get all the files. And by installing a Wordpess backup plugin, I was able to get the database file. But without the user name and password, I couldn’t  install that database into the new wordpress on the new hosting account. And changes made to the database by the old hosting servcie prevented me from using the only work-around I knew.

Situations like this have given me a headache more than once. So I was delighted to run across a blog post titled Emergency Wordpress Access where Wordpress tweaker Yoast gives away a free script that solves this problem. It helps you get emergency access to the database by adding a new user admin account. You can download the file and see an illustrated explanation on his site.

Thanks, Yoast!

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Bonnie Boots publishes The Internet Wizards Magazine and this companion The Internet Wizards Blog to teach self-employed people and small businesses owners how to leverage the internet for advertising, marketing and promoting their business. To stay in touch with her, type your name and email into the subscriber box in the upper right corner of this page. You’ll be glad you did!

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Don’t Fall For Phony Offers To Renew Your Domain Names

Small business owners are often targeted by scammers offering to renew domain names. Here’s a "how to" explaining how to tell if a compnay that’s contacting you is honest or a scam artist.

See What Google Sees On Your Blog Or Website

 As a business owner, it’s critical that you know what Google is indexing on your blog or website. Luckily, this is easy to do. Here’s a "how to" explaining how you can see what Google has indexed on you, and why you should care.

 Don’t Let Bad Customer Service DOOM Your Small Business

Bad service shows up everywhere, in businesses large and small. But small business take a much greater risk when they treat their customers with contempt.

Bonnie Boots publishes The Internet Wizards Magazine and this companion The Internet Wizards Blog to teach self-employed people and small businesses owners how to leverage the internet for advertising, marketing and promoting their business. To stay in touch with her, type your name and email into the subscriber box in the upper right corner of this page. You’ll be glad you did!

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I was clicking on my keyboard ever so quietly, checking my email one last time before I joined them in the Land of Nod. A link in an email lead me to a website. The instant that site loaded in my browser LOUD MUSIC BLASTED FROM MY SPEAKERS!!

Startled from sleep, my husband jumped up, tumbling the shocked cat from the bed. They both hissed at me as I struggled to turn down my speakers and close my browser. None of us were happy campers.

Has this ever happened in your home? It’s happened so often in mine that I now turn the computer speakers off after dark.

It’s not unusual to enter a web page and find music blasting when you’re in Facebook or when you stumble upon sales pages put up by immature male marketers. But I’ve even been shocked out of my socks by blaring eBay pages.

People who set their web pages to start playing music or sound effects as soon as a visitor enters haven’t stopped to think that people accessing their site might be quietly surfing as they wait in a hospital hallway, or sit with a sleeping baby.

These morons assume they know your situation. And they make a decision to take control of your experience.

That decision flies in the face of every study I’ve read on how people like to use the internt. In those studies, one thing stands out. What the average web surfer wants most when they visit a website is CONTROL.

They want to choose whether or not they listen to music.

They want to choose whether or not they watch a video.

Take away their ability to choose, and they’ll choose to leave. But be assured, the very people that drive you away with loud, flashing, annoying sites will also be the ones who try to block you from leaving with an endless sequence of pop-ups.

Web site design is not about entertaining yourself. It’s not about showing off the new plugin or widget you just found.  Web site design is about creating an inviting atmosphere for visitors, even visitors whose taste in music doesn’t match yours.

The morons blasting music from their pages will never learn, but you will.  You’ll learn to treat your site’s visitors like honored guests, not like hostages. You’ll learn to think about what your visitors want, not what you want them to have. And you’ll learn that ultimately, giving people what they want is the best way to get what you want!

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Bonnie Boots publishes The Internet Wizards Magazine and this companion The Internet Wizards Blog to teach self-employed people and small businesses owners how to leverage the internet for advertising, marketing and promoting their business. To stay in touch with her, type your name and email into the subscriber box in the upper right corner of this page. You’ll be glad you did!

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Just thinking about creating a new product raises so many questions. What kind of product could you create? How would you make it? How would you sell it?

These are questions that made me stumble when I was starting out.

I’ve spent more than 30 years creating new products for all sorts of companies. I’ve written and designed everything from print books to craft kits. But way back when I was starting out, I was completely overwhelmed by the process of product creation. It seemed so complex and confusing!

But with luck and persistence, and a whole lot of help from more experienced writers and designers, I learned that there were basic steps to the process of creating a product.

I also learned that if I took the first steps, one by one, and actually worked on them, instead of just reading  about them, I was soon fully involved in creating a product!

These are the baby steps my mentors taught me to follow in planning the creation of a product:

1.Define your target. Know exactly whom it is you want to sell to.

2.Research your target. What age are they? Where do they live? What sort of products are they already buying? What is their average expendable income?

3.Make a list of items they are already known to purchase and enjoy.

4.Make a list of ways you could improve some of these products, perhaps by adding features, making it easier to use, simplifying it or explaining it better.

5.Make a list of resources you have available to you, ranging from your own personal experience and knowledge, to personal contacts you can call on, suppliers you know of, and anyone and anything else that may be valuable to you when you’re working on a product for this target market.

6.Considering the resources you have available, choose ONE item from the list of ways you could improve an already-existing product. Commit yourself to focusing all your attention on working out that one, single product idea.

Look around the room you’re in right now. Everything you see before you, every book and paper and pen, the computer you’re using, the chair you’re sitting on, the clothes you’re wearing, everything  is a product that began with these first steps.

By gathering pertinent information, brainstorming a number of product ideas and then committing to the ONE idea you have the time, the resources and the personal interest to develop, you’ve already completed the most important steps on the path to creating your own product.

Remember, using material and resources you’ve already created for your business is a great way to make your first product. If you’ve written a white paper or report, given a speech or taught a class, you already have the content you need for an ebook, a workbook, even a class presented as an audio or video!

If you want to spread your creative wings and make products to market on the web, my book, "Tapping Into Trends To Create An Endless Stream Of High-Profit Products"will inspire you to be your most creative, successful  self by showing you just some of the many ways I use the internet to make creative cash.

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  Bonnie Boots publishes The Internet Wizards Magazine, http://www.theinternetwizards.com and The Internet Wizards Blog at to teach self-employed people and small businesses owners how to leverage the internet for advertising, marketing and promoting their business. To stay in touch with her, type your name and email into the subscriber box in the upper right corner of this page.

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Are You A Hunter Or A Gatherer? …Trace your ancestry back to its earliest roots and you’ll find you inherited a tendency to be either a hunter or a gatherer. Find out what happens when a gatherer tries to engage in a hunter’s business.

Are You Hunting For New Business With A Prehistoric Website?…Is your web site so outdated in function and appearance that it’s nearly prehistoric? If so, here’s a suggestion that will keep you business from looking like a dinosaur to an audience of media-savvy web surfers. 

Why The Advice "Do What You Love And The Money Will Follow" Isn’t Working For You….If you’ve been doing what you love but the money isn’t flooding in to fill your bank account, you need to know there’s an unspoken flip side to that maxim.

I promise the funny illustrations alone will make it worth a visit.. The excellent articles are just the icing on the Cretaceous cake!

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Bonnie Boots publishes The Internet Wizards Magazine and Blog for self-employed professionals, small business owners and people with specialized knowledge that want to create their own products, and use Wordpress and the internet to promote and market their business. To stay updated on her doings, type your name and email into the subscribe form in the upper right corner!

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Note that your submission must be an existing event, not a theoretical one. But it doesn’t take much to create an event. Name it. Announce yourself as the sponsor. (That means you’re responsible for renewal information about your yearly event.) Then declare your event by sending out press releases and posting it on your site.

Of course, Chase’s doesn’t accept every submission. They look for “appropriate events,” They do not, for example, accept birthdays or other self-aggrandizing events. 

You’re more likely to have your event accepted by Chase’s if it applies to or would have importance for many people.

Declaring your own special day and having it accepted by Chase’s is a great way to bring attention and importance to your particular cause. As a side benefit, of course, it also brings attention to you, the sponsor, and traffic to your site.

Getting listed in Chase’s can be like winning the public relations lottery!

Chase’s Calendar Of Events, of course, is the book used by every newspaper, magazine and calendar publisher. Anytime you see a list like “Today’s Events: National Pie Month, Fire Prevention Week, Pain Awareness Day, that list was compiled from Chase’s Events Calendar.

As a newspaper columnist, I always had a copy of Chase’s Calendar Of Events on my desk. Looking up events is an easy way to spin a story idea, especially when you need 200 words to fill a small space just minutes before print deadline. So keep in mind that you never know where your special day or event will be noticed. It could be reported around the world!

The deadline to submit an event to Chase’s Calendar of Events is April 15^th. Events submitted and accepted by April 15, 2010 will be published in the 2011 edition. You can see full details by clicking here to visit Chase’s Calendar of Events.

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Bonnie Boots publishes The Internet Wizards Blog and The Internet Wizards Magazine for self-employed people that want to sue the magic of the internet to build their business and boost their profits. If you want internet marketing made understandable without all the hype and hard sell, you’ll want to add your name and email to the subscribe form in the upper right corner

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Last week I was considering attending a trade seminar for owners of digital publishing businesses, in particular because Corey Perlman will be one of the speakers. Perlman is well known for his book eBoot Camp: Proven Internet Marketing Techniques To Grow Your Business. He’s conducted more than 200 eBoot Camp workshops all over the world and is considered an expert at teaching small businesses owners how to effectively use the internet to market their goods and services.

Surely such an internet expert jumped on the Twitter bandwagon early and has been tweeting ever since, right? Wrong. When I checked on Twitter, he wasn’t listed.

I told this story to a new client who came to me in part because  he butted heads with his last business coach. That coach pushed this internationally known medical expert into doing daily postings on Twitter and Facebook, telling him “You must! All the experts do it.”

My client complained that he considered it a waste of time and an annoyance. “It puts me in a bad mood every time I stop to do it,” he complained. “And I can’t believe my business rests on something so inconsequential as tweeting.”

I told him I agreed. There’s simply no sense putting him in a bad mood once a day by forcing him to stop and tweet. Not when his time is so valuable.

I offered to put an assistant to work writing daily tweets for him, but this client is having none of it. He had Twitter shoved down his throat and now he’s through. And I’m fine with that.

As a business coach, my job is to find the most effective ways for each of my clients to market themselves on the internet.

With so many ways available, one tool or another isn’t going to make or break any business. I strive to guide self-employed people into using the tools they’ll enjoy most, because those are the tools they’ll use most often. And in marketing, persistence pays off.

If you’re forcing yourself to use Twitter because you’ve been told ALL the experts do it, give yourself a break. You don’t need to be Einstein to figure out that  if you don’t like using Twitter, it’s probably costing you more time and energy than it’s worth.

P.S. Perlman’s blog this week contained news that he’s now on Twitter. But I’ll be surprised if it’s the expert himself, and not an assistant, that’s texting in those tweets.

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Discovery Education is a site offering resources that help bring a classroom to life. But some of their resources, like the online Puzzlemaker, are just as well suited to bringing your blog or web site to life.

Puzzlemaker is a software tool that generates a variety of word puzzles ranging from word search and criss-cross to hidden messages, mazes and much more.

What could your do with Puzzlemaker to make your site more interesting?

If your bloging about or have a  web site offering health information, you could create a word search puzzle containing the names of various vitamins and nutritional supplements. A site that encourages kids to read could create a puzzle from the titles of famous books written for children. A business site could use industry-specific buzz words to create a criss-cross word puzzle.

I created a word search puzzle for The Internet Wziards by using some of my most-used keywords :

BLOGGING   
BONNIEBOOTS   
CREATIVITY
DIGITAL   
EBOOKS   
EBUSINESS
INTERNETWIZARDS   
ONLINE   
WEBMARKETING
WORDPRESS

…and Puzzlemaker turned it into a nifty puzzle titled The Internet Wizards Word Search.

You can download it in a PDF file here, print it out and solve it. (And if you get stuck, you can download the solution to the puzzle here.)

 Adding activities to your site is a great way to keep visitors entertained. They’ll stay on your site longer, and be eager to come back for another visit if they know there’s always something new.

That’s important because repeat visitors are more likely to become your subscriber and eventually your customer or client.

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Bonnie Boots publishes The Internet Wizards Magazine and The Internet Wizards Blog for self-employed professionals, small business owners and anyone with specialized knowledge that wants to use the internet to boost their business and build their profits. You can subscribe for free by using the form in the upper right corner!

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It’s boilerplate advice in internet marketing to say that there are three steps to product creation: find a market, find a common problem in that target market, create a product that offers a solution to that problem. Bingo. Boffo sales.

That’s fine advice, as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go far enough for people who are bubbling over with creativity. That advice is far too passive for creative people. And dare I say, it borders on boring.

Creative people aren’t good at linear, connect the dots thinking. Creative people are driven by inspiration and imagination. When a new idea possesses them, they feel compelled t to engage in the act of creation. So they write or paint or photograph or video and –gasp!—they do it all without doing their market research first.

That’s O.K. Because the fact is, the world needs creative people to see things in fresh ways and to create things for the sheer joy of creation.

Those creations, made joyfully, playfully, go out into the world and inspire us to dig deeper, reach higher inside ourselves. They remind us that laughing, singing, dancing and feeling deeply are much more important to our sense of aliveness than making the car payment or carrying the newest cell phone.

Products created after careful research have a place in the market. But only a place. There is a great deal of room left over for products created out of inspiration.

“The market” is multifaceted, nearly unlimited and truly insatiable. I can say, with some certainty, that if you are inspired to make it, there’s a market for it somewhere. Case in point—two recent publications aimed at a market termed “bizarro genre literature.”

The first is Shatnerquake by Jeff Burk, whose vision is a world populated by every character William Shatner ever played in movies and TV comes to life and tried to kill the actor.

The second is Pride And Prejudice And Zombies by Seth-Grahame Smith, in which Jane Austin’s feisty character Elizabeth Bennet stalks zombies while flirting with the arrogant Mr. Darcy.

Bizzaro literature, indeed! People don’t write books like this after careful market research. They write books like this because a wild idea grabs them by the throat, forcing them to skip breakfast and dinner so they’ll have more time to write.

And after they have written, they go looking for people somewhere that will want what they have created. They go looking, in marketing lingo, for a “target market.” And because the internet has connected us all, they can, if they’re industrious, find it.

So consider the advice of internet marketers who know that doing some research first is a good way to approach product creation. But don’t let it deter you from following your own imagination. Because out on the internet, there truly is a market for whatever you’re inspired to make.

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Bonnie Boots publishes The Internet Wizards Magazine for people that want to be more creative, make their own products and market on the internet. Join her by typing your email address into the magic box in the upper right corner and –POOF!–you’ll be on her mailing list! Related article by Bonnie Boots: Shatnerquake–Proof Positive That On The Internet, You Can Sell Anything Now, of course, you’re dying to read those books! Click the covers to see them at Amazon…. Shatnerquake Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance – Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!

Here’s some fun from Archie McFee, the wackiest toy store in the world. They have both Jane Austin and Flesh-eating Zombie action figures Imagine the fun of reading the book AND acting it out with your own set of action figures. Soon, everyone will be inviting you to entertain at parties! See the Glow-in-the-dark Flesh Eating Zombies Play Set here and see the Jane Austin action Figure here. If you want to spread your creative wings and make stuff to market on the web, my book, "Tapping Into Trends To Create An Endless Stream Of High-Profit Products" will inspire you to be your most creative, successful  self by showing you just some of the many ways I use the internet to make creative cash.

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