Please excuse the title of this blog post. It’s actually directed at yours truly. Recently I’ve been experiencing difficulty focusing, and a definite decrease in motivation. It happens to the best of us - go to work every day, do yo’ thing, and come home. It gets monotonous, even in the framework of an exciting, ever-evolving career such as online marketing. For me, specifically, it was because I had to take care of three emails that I did not. Want. To write. And every day I came into the office, I saw the judging, saddened eyes of my co-workers. (Attention co-workers: It’s actually me, not you. Self-judgement goin’ on here. I was just using you to judge myself. You would ...

To have a website without images is like having toast without butter (God forbid). But finding nice images that you can use without any legal issues is like finding a spec of dust in space (if that's difficult). Well, fret no longer! Here are five free image sources that you could consider using. Just be sure to use them according to the instructions on the sites (and see below about how we hold no responsibility for how you choose to use images): sxc.hu  This site is rich with high resolution, beautiful images. You need to sign up in order to download pictures but it's worth it. Flickr ...

Calvin Sun at Tech Republic wrote a very thought-provoking post about project management lessons he learns from the Titanic disaster. I agree with almost everything Calvin wrote but there are yet more lessons I learn from the stories Calvin brings. Here is what I learned: 1. Based on the standards of the time there actually were enough lifeboats on the Titanic. [caption id="attachment_4654" align="alignright" width="163"] Do we at least look smart? (photo by Keith Williamson on flickr)[/caption] At the time, the amount of lifeboats necessary per ship was based on the ship's weight. In retrospect, that is obviously a terrible way to calculate how many lifeboats are needed per ship. ...

Clients are constantly challenging me. And it’s good. If I’m being honest, I may sometimes find it aggravating, but it’s good, because it helps me focus and think critically. And critical thinking is the backbone to SEO success. If you don’t know why you’re doing something, you shouldn’t be doing it. Have you ever heard of The 5 Whys? It’s a problem-solving technique innovated by the good folks at Toyota in order to determine the underlying causes of technical issues with their cars. While there was a bit of criticism as to its practical application for Toyota itself, I think it definitely applies to online marketing in general and SEO specifically. Online marketing is not one-dimensional; it’s both a science and ...

I would like to thank the nice people on the Internet for providing so many custom reports for me to borrow without doing an iota of work, in particular Eric Siu of SearchEngineWatch and Avinash Kaushik. I’m a lazy schlub. And I’ll be the first to admit it. If everything in my life could be completely automated, I would be a happy person. Wallace and Gromit style. Happily, my sheer, unadulterated inertia actually contributes to my professional development. If I couldn’t copy-paste my work, it would take longer and the end product would be less. And while each client has his or her specific goals and objectives, certain basic concepts apply to all of my ...

There are two questions we are periodically asked: What are the differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org?  How do I choose which one to use? First let me tell you in general the main benefits of each. WordPress.com WordPress.com is really, really easy to use. Yes, you need to learn how to use it but it's so user-friendly that with almost no technological background, you could have a wp.com blog up and running within minutes. And then you could spend the next couple of days playing around with the functionality and themes it offers and you're basically done. WordPress.org Unless you're really comfortable with technology, you probably won't be able to get a WordPress.org site up and running by yourself. Although it is relatively easy - a ...

About a year ago, WordPress added a feature that made it ridiculously easy to embed content from various sites (like YouTube, Slideshare, Vimeo) into WordPress sites. How to embed media in WordPress in a second If you want to embed, for example, a YouTube video in a post, all you do is paste the URL of the video into the editor, unlink it and save/publish. See our ultimate guide to embedding HTML and iframes in WordPress on WPGarage for more info on how this works. The problem is that it doesn't seem to work 100% of the time. Luckily, there's ...

RSS feeds allow people to subscribe to get updated about your site or blog's newest posts, usually via tools called feed readers (Google Reader is a well-known, free option). This is a nice feature, but like all things web we want to be able to measure this metric too and know how many people are subscribing, and how they are using the feed. Feedburner is the only tool available that allows you to measure the number of people subscribed to your feed. It also allows you to offer people an email subscription option, which automatically sends them new posts by email if they subscribe to that option. In order to ...

illuminea college is offering an amazing course through which you'll learn all the basics you need to know in order to get a website up and running using WordPress. Why Wordpress? WordPress is an open source Content Management System (CMS). Basically this means that regular people like you and me can, relatively very easily, build and tweak websites that are cool, clear, professional and unique. What is the course exactly? When: Starts Feb. 15, 2011. 9:30am-1:30pm Tuesdays for 8 weeks. Where: Our office in Jerusalem What: Here is the course outline: HTML CSS How do websites and internet work? (And how to get mine to work) Familiarizing yourself with WordPress part 1 Familiarizing yourself with ...

Read part one here in order to learn how to buy a domain name. Step II: Time to start mapping You own your dream domain! Don't leave the domain provider site yet. Here is how to change the Nameservers in name.com. Click on the cute “Account” man button at the top of the page: You’ll arrive at a page like this: Click on the info button of the domain you want to map to. You’ll get a pop up page and on the right it says Nameservers with a list under it. To the right of Nameservers it says “edit.” Click on that button. ...