I upgraded to WordPress 2.1 and my old template sucks. It doesn’t work any more for some reason. I’m gonna have to see what’s wrong with it. It might be some of my plugins or extra stuff I had in the navigation.

Until then we’re using the default WordPress template. I know it’s not pretty but at least it works That’s the important thing!

I’m busy working on the new SEO Tutorials videos site. We’ve got a bunch of videos up on Youtube already and plan to launch the site for free members in the next week or two.

- Ben Fitts
Custom Card Guy

Popularity: 7% [?]

Ok, so you have a web site. You track your visitors.

You can obviously go to Google and signup for their analytics program. You can get free stats on your web site.

But what about tracking visitors and their clicks? You want to split test your sales page and find out what works best? Find out what text works best?

Check out Crazy Egg. My buddy Jack recommended me to check them out.

What you can do with Crazy Egg that is really cool is you can put their little tiny javascript in your web page. Then they track your web site for you, but what they do that is really cool is they track which links people click on and show you a heatmap!

Now with Analytics you can do the same thing but you have to go in and manually change each link. You’ve got to put a little tracking code on each link so you can see which one gets clicked more often. With Crazy Egg you get that information without having to change each link. All you have to do is put their javascript at the very bottom of your web page before the closing body tag. It can be any web page, it doesn’t have to be a blog.

Right now Crazy Egg is free to join. They do offer some paid membership levels which allow you to track heavily trafficed websites and to setup more test campaigns. I thought it was such a great deal I paid for the $19.95 membership level right away without even trying it out

My guess is they may have to get rid of the free membership at some point, so you should signup now before they decide to get rid of it.

I don’t make any money for referring you to Crazy Egg. I just think it’s an awesome tool to help you grow your internet marketing business.

- Ben Fitts
the custom card guy

Popularity: 10% [?]

As a part of mixing my personal blog and my professional blog you’ll occasionally get messages like this one about Ipods and cell phones. I hope that’s ok?

I recently bought an IPod and a new Samsung Blackjack cell phone. Both these pieces of technology cost me a few hundred bucks so I wanted to protect them. I don’t want them getting scratched up and beaten up. A friend recommended this product to me called ShieldZone.

These guys invented this thin material to protect helicopter blades. They call it the invisible shield. Then one day they got the idea to apply it to a ipod. It’s see through, in fact it even makes the ipod “shiny”. Yet it is super strong. You can’t tear it, you pretty much have to cut it. When it’s on your ipod you can beat your ipod up with your car keys and yet it won’t bear a scratch mark. It is really kind of amazing stuff. Don’t believe me? Watch the videos of demonstrations they’ve done. They take two ipods and put them in a paper bag along with some car keys. One of the ipods is protected, the other isn’t. Then they shake the bag vigorously. Needless to say when they come out the one ipod is covered with scratches. The protected one looks brand new.

The only bad thing about the shield is that they are die cut with a laser to fit your equipment. So they have little holes where buttons go, where the headphone jack is, etc. You have to apply the shield yourself so it can take a couple of tries to get it to align right. In fact i might even suggest buying 2 so you can feel free to remove it and try it again.

ShieldZone also makes invisible shields for cell phones, that cover the cell phone screen and unprotected areas of the phone. They even had one for my Blackjack (which was difficult to apply, the ipod one was much easier to apply.)

I highly recommend these guys.

These are not an affiliate links, just a product I think is awesome and you guys should check it out.

- Ben Fitts
Custom Card Guy

Popularity: 8% [?]

WordPress 2.1 Ella came out yesterday and one question people have asked is, “How hard is it to upgrade my WordPress blog?”

Well I’ve put together a video and stuck it up on YouTube for you guys. Upgrade WordPress Video is now available and shows how to upgrade your blog step by step.

As long as you are on one of the 2.0 versions of WordPress you shouldn’t have any problems upgrading to 2.1 by following the steps outlined in the video.

Get the upgrade WordPress video here.

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 7% [?]

Just announced yesterday… The release of WordPress 2.1 code named “Ella” after one of my favorite jazz singers Ella Fitzgerald.

Some things that look interesting are…

• Updated Admin interface to load faster
• Autosave to save your posts while writing
• Rewritten mysql code so the whole blog runs faster
• New version of Akismet Blog Spam filter
• More Ajax to make the interface much better

There is a ton of new features. These are only just a few of the features that I’m excited to try out.

Expect an upgrade to Home Business Blogs soon! The upgrade path doesn’t look easy, so there may be a bit of downtime while I convert the blog. I’ll try and record the WordPress 2.1 upgrade process so you can see a video of it, and we’ll make it available on YouTube and Google Video for download.

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 9% [?]

Send Out Cards announced an exciting new product for distributors last week!

Ever hear of GoToMeeting? GoToMeeting is a tool that allows you to watch your computer screen and see exactly what the person on the other side is doing.

What makes this great for Send Out Cards is that one of the best ways to grow your business is to do demos with people. You setup a Gift account for them and allow them to send a few cards to try the system out for free. In the past you did this by telephone and you couldn’t see what the other person was doing.

BUT now you can do it via the computer while you talk to the person on the phone. You can actually give them control, so that they can send a card and you can walk them through it while watching their computer screen. You may be in Florida and they may be in Washington but you can see their screen.

What’s even better is you can also use this as a tool to train your new distributors. You would do a 3 way where the new distributor introduces you to their prospect. You then take control and start the demo. You give the prospect control so the prospect can send their own card and try out the service.

WOW! What an awesome new promotional and training tool. AND it’s free. No extra charge!

I’m so excited to be a distributor with a company that offers free tools like this to help me grow my business.

- Benjamin Fitts

Popularity: 16% [?]

So the past couple of weeks I’ve been doing some social networking… Like the MyBlogLog stuff you’ve seen. I’ve been working on my personal sites, and trying to share people a little bit about myself and build realtionships. I’ve also gotten caricature logos of myself done for several of my web sites. I’m trying to build my brand.

So I’m a greeting card guy, right? That’s my main business is my custom greeting cards. I’ve got a ton of custom cards I’ve made and I can make more on the fly. So I decided that what I’d do is I’d put them up on a photo sharing web site like Flickr. Then I’d join a bunch of other flickr photosharing groups and put my photos out there for people to see how great my cards are.

Here is my first photoset of 13 custom greeting cards. Most of these were done by me, but a few were samples given to my by other distributors on our team.

What do you think?

I especially like the photo ones where it’s my photo on them. One of those just helped me close an account that plans to send 3000 cards at a time!

- Ben Fitts
The Custom Card Guy

Popularity: 14% [?]

Have you seen the new version of Blogger yet?

If you haven’t been to blogger recently check it out. They have a lot of new features such as a new interface for customizing your blog. They even include features for adding in adsense widgets into your blog so you can make money from it.

One feature I really like is that the blog now updates instantly. No need to “publish” your changes. Now its super easy to update my blog.

If you already have a blog, when you login to your Blogger control panel you’ll have an option on the left hand side to upgrade to the new Blogger. It only takes a few minutes and all your blogs will be upgraded.

Check it out!

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 8% [?]

Are you a MyBlogLog user yet?

If so, make your way over to my profile and make sure to add me as a contact. I’d also appreciate it if you joined my “Home Business Blog” community. I only have 5 members so far and that’s puny!

In return I’ll gladly reciprocate and add you as a contact as well as join your communities. In this way we’ll both be helping one another expand our MyBlogLog network. That’s how social networking works. We help one another expand our networks. It isn’t who we know, as much as who our friend’s know!

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 10% [?]

Look over in the right hand navigation bar. See that little widget that says Recent Readers? It’s got pictures from recent visitors to my blog. That’s part of the tools that come free when you join the MyBlogLog community. My buddy Jack recommended it to me.

Basically just click on the bottom where it says Provided by MyBlogLog. That takes you to MyBlogLog. You can also click on any of the user’s names, and it will take you to their profile where you can see information about them, find out what their blog’s are, what their interests are etc. It’s a cool new way to meet other bloggers and find some new readers for your blog.

They also have tools that allow you to track your visitor statistics on your blog… track the most recent links to your blog, etc.

Jack said they were just bought by Yahoo so we’ll see what happens, but this could be a great new way to go out and promote yourself.

What I did was I setup my profile, and started putting in information on the blogs I run. Then I went through the communities and started joining and many communities on topics that were similar to my blogs. So far I’ve had a half dozen new friends and several of them have visited my blog.

Simple, right?

Just like Myspace or friendster or whatever but only for bloggers.

Plus the tools like the statistics tracking for your blog are pretty cool.

Try out MyBlogLog today (it’s free.)

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 9% [?]