Egg decorated without following instructions...

Last night we sat down at a friend’s dinner table with 6 kids to decorate Easter eggs.

Fancy Ukranian Easter eggs (also called Pysanky eggs).

To make them you take raw eggs and decorate them with wax and then dip them into colored Easter egg dye. By dipping into a sequence of colors, you can create fantastic patterns.

5 of the kids and I had never done this before. There’s quite a bit of technique to master. You use a tool called a kistka, which is a tiny brass funnel attached to a dowel, to drip beeswax onto the egg. To melt the wax you hold the kistka in a candle flame. It’s tricky to get the wax flowing just right. I had a lot of trouble getting a steady flow. I felt a bit like Charlie Brown trying to write with a fountain pen.

There’s also the matter of the dyes. Certain dyes work well before and after other dyes. Other combinations simply turn your whole egg black.

So what’s the point of all this?

Of the eight of us decorating eggs, only on person actually read and followed the instructions.

She copied a pattern from the instructions, and dipped the eggs in different colors in the exact right order.

Now, she’s not a particularly artistic person, certainly not an egg decorating expert. But she blew the rest of us out of the water.

Eggs decorated by following directions!

This is the power of following step by step instructions.

And you don’t have to be an expert to get “expert level” results. That is, as long as we define expert level results as being an order of magnitude better than your immediate competitors. Of course there are thousands of people who are true pysanky experts. A novice following instructions can’t hope to compete.

But still. Her eggs rock because she followed instructions.

This is a tactic I’ve followed in my own business, whenever I can.

It’s one thing to know the general ideas behind something, but another to have step by step instructions that get you from where you are to where you need to be.

It’s also why I try hard to document things as I do them, to make my own instruction sheets for my future forgetful self.

I’ve been working these past few months on a few different sets of “detailed instructions” for a couple of important areas for your small business or non-profit.

One relates to brick and mortar businesses. It’s about getting more people onto your newsletter list when they’re making a purchase.

The other is about how you can put up a simple mobile-friendly website for all those millions of people who are doing most of their online research on their mobile phones.

I’ll let you know as soon as they’re available.

Do you know those people who stand on busy street corners handing out leaflets? They drive you nuts, right?

But you never see them in quiet residential neighborhoods, do you?

There’s a reason.

If you’re trying to communicate with people, you need to go where the people are ( that’s a link to my own guest post on a popular blog).

Small businesses get this concept when it comes to retail space, but sometimes we miss the point when it comes to our online marketing.

We build a website and a social media presence in the blind hope that if it’s interesting enough people will show up in droves. And then we get frustrated when all that effort doesn’t seem to pay off.

There’s a way to fix this.

How? You go where the people are. In this case it means you write for other people’s websites instead of your own.

It’s called “guest posting,” (which you probably already know) and it’s kind of like taking over for the leaflet guy when he takes a lunch break.

You see, busy websites require a lot of content. And that usually means that the website owner will welcome a well-written post that his or her audience will appreciate.

You’ve probably already heard of this concept. There’s a lot of buzz about it right now. It’s a great way to get new people to click through to your own site, and to get links to your site for search engine optimization purposes.

Of course, there are a few tricks to doing it right. These have been explained in various guest posting guides (I like this Guest Posting Guide from Chris Garrett, which is both thorough and cheap).

But for a lot of small business owners, the biggest problems are coming up with topics and figuring out what other websites might be interested.

I recently got a great insight on how to solve these problems from Jon Morrow at guestblogging.com

Jon’s trick is to think laterally. Get out of your own niche and make a connection to some other niche. This has two big effects. One is that it puts you in front of a new audience. The other is that it gives you something new to write about.

For example, if you own a bed & breakfast you’re probably sick to death of writing posts about great things to do nearby. In fact, you’re probably so sick to death of this topic that you haven’t even gotten around to writing very many posts about it!

But try giving things a twist. Approach a wedding site with an article on “5 Tips for a Country Wedding.” Or a gardening magazine with a piece on how you grow your own flowers for your guests for your entire high season.

If possible, connect your business to one of the Big Three evergreen topics: Money, Love, and Health.

The essence of guest posting is that these articles are much more powerful if they’re on someone else’s high-traffic site than they ever could be on your own.

If you’re not sure how you would write articles relating to your business, take a look at http://guestblogging.com/quit-blogging/. On this page Jon Morrow asked his readers to share their business niches and he went through each one offering ideas for articles and places to publish them.

If you have questions, ask them in the comments. I’ll be happy to answer them.

[A live, in-person class on Orcas Island]

If you’re like most people, working on your website is intimidating. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Anyone can learn to maintain their own website.

It doesn’t matter whether your website is hand-coded, built in Dreamweaver, iWeb, Macwebsitebuilder, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, or some other system you can’t pronounce. There are always going to be little changes you need to make, and these all become MUCH easier when you know a few foundational skills.

Let’s compare maintaining your website to maintaining your house. You might not want to know how to move walls around, or even how to fix your oven. But you should be able to…

Hang pictures and curtains (image uploading, formatting options)

Paint the walls (change colors)

Rearrange the furniture (adjust padding, margins, typefaces, etc)

Wash the dishes (keep things up to date)

You don’t need to know structural engineering, home building, etc. You don’t need to …

And unless you want to get into designing sites yourself, what you really need to know is a subset of HTML and CSS. A few powerful techniques can get you out of a lot of sticky situations, and you can leave the rest to the experts.

In this course we’ll take a practical hands-on approach, building from the true basics. Everything will be based on real tasks (on fake websites), so you’ll learn by doing.

We’ll cover topics like changing text, adding formatting, changing pictures, uploading files, adding forms (like e-newsletter signup forms), etc. And we’ll dive into certain advanced areas, such as using padding and margins to make things line up the way you want them (because this can often be the difference between an attractive website and one that’s distracting and hard to read).

We’ll also talk a lot about the mistakes you can make, and how to turn them into part of your learning process instead of letting them terrify you.

By the end you’ll have a good idea of what you can fix and what you shouldn’t touch. Just like knowing the difference between moving a vase on your kitchen counter and moving the kitchen counter. Or between moving your toaster oven and moving your real oven.

The class meets for six weeks on Wednesdays, April 14 to May 19, from 9am to 10am at the Funhouse. It’s $100, or just $75 if you’re a Funhouse member. To sign up email krista@thefunhouse.org or go to http://www.thefunhouse.org/current-classes and click on “register in advance” to fill out the registration form.

A laptop is helpful but not required.

Call me at 298-2869 if you have questions.

This solution should still work with Google’s new (2010) asynchronous code snippet. I haven’t tested it, though.

If you’re doing frequent work on your website, there’s a good chance your biggest visitor is the person who greets you in the mirror every morning.

So?

Image by striatic via Flickr creative commons

So if you’re not excluding your visits from Google Analytics, you’re creating some crazy data.

Now, it’s a given that your analytics data is never perfect, but if you’re throwing it off by 1, 2, 5 or 10%, you’re not doing yourself any favors.

Luckily, there are several reasonably easy ways to remove your own visits from analytics.

I’ve got my favorite, which I’ll share here. It’s not the only way. For example, you can exclude by IP address. This works well if you’re always connected from the same place (like work). It doesn’t work too well for me, though, because not only can I not figure out my IP address, but I’m often working from home or coffee shops.

My choice is to exclude my visits based on cookies I set in my browsers.

Three steps:

1. create a filter to block your visits.

2. create a special web page to set a cookie in your browser (not as hard as it sounds).

3. visit that page in all the browsers and from all the computers you use.

Ready to dive in?

Watch this video, then open the sample html file and download the screenshots.

If you need a refresher on the settings they are:

1. name of your choosing
2. custom filter
3. exclude
4. dropdown to “user defined”
5. pattern of your choice: no spaces or quotes/apostrophes
6. not case sensitive
7. add your profile to right hand box
8. save

If this was helpful, please share it using your social media tool of choice. You might also want to sign up for my newsletter in the sidebar.

Questions? Ask them in the comments!

You already know that having a good Facebook Fan Page can be an important way of connecting with your visitors. Becoming a fan is less intense than signing up for your newsletter; it’s a low-key commitment. And one of the biggest benefits to you is that if a fan shares something you put out on your fan page, all their friends will see it. This can bring big benefits.

So what’s the right way to get people to sign up as fans on your page?

There are three typical ways people invite visitors to become friends.

1. They just use a little fb graphic like this one:

Simple Facebook graphic

2. They use any one of a number of fb graphics and also include the call to action, “Become a Fan.” Sometimes this is graphical, sometimes text.

3. They use a Facebook Fan Box.

The Facebook Fan Box for the Seadoc Society

What’s a fan box?

It’s a live feed of the most recent activity on your fan page, plus a selection of your fans, with pictures…

And as you can see, it comes with a “become a fan” button.

Note: The image on the right is shrunk down from the real size.

So what’s so great about using a Fan Box?

1. It looks like Facebook.
2. The button is just like buttons they’ve clicked before.
3. They get to see your most recent post. This proves there really is content there and they’ll see a benefit from signing up.
4. Social proof of the number of fans, with pictures. Again, it’s just like fb, but the fan box is on your website.

Of course, when you’re showing off your content in your fan box, you’ll want to make sure it’s actually good. And you might not want to show your fan count if you’ve only got three fans.

Here’s how to get a fan box:

Just go the the Widgets page at http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/index.php

The fan box on the widgets page

If you’re logged in, you’ll see a list of pages you administer. Choose whether you want to show your stream, fans and Facebook logo, then click the button that says “Other”

Add your facebook fan box

Then just copy the code Facebook gives you and paste it into your web page.