For the last several days, I have been diligently working to update and rebuild all of my Act On Your Dream! website.
This is one of my favorite sites and I was dismayed to see how much I’ve neglected updating and adding new information to the site. That’s something I plan to remedy in the coming weeks.
This morning, I was editing the Delicious Tag Cloud page and noticed that there were tags for things I’m no longer interested in and others that I no longer promote.
It’s been awhile since I’ve really worked with Delicious.com (used to be del.icio.us) and I realized that I had several dozen bookmarks that I needed to delete and others that needed to be edited to remove tags that were no longer appropriate.
It was a fairly easy process and I was reminded why I like Delicious.com more than the other bookmarking sites.
Do you use bookmarking sites to share your bookmarks with others? When is the last time you took a look to see if you’re showing what you want to share, now?
It took maybe an hour to update over 200 bookmarks and to winnow them down to less than 200. They make it easy.
I received an email this morning from Technorati telling me about a new service they have just introduced: Twittorati.
It combines the top bloggers with Twitter and currently ranks the top 100 blogs, as welll as tweets and tags.
I find it interesting to have a list of the top 100 blogs and there are a few that I’ve never seen before, so eventually, I’ll look at them and see what I can learn.
They say that other blogs will be added in the future. I wonder what Twittorati can do for those of us who aren’t even close to being in the top 100.
I haven’t had time to think about this, yet, but wanted to pass the word along and see what you think about this new service.
This turned out to be an interesting morning. I just spent several hours doing something that wasn’t even close to being on my to-do list, but it worked out well.
It started out innocently enough.
Brian Hawkins left a comment and I went to visit his blog. I was reading his Extreme Ezine Makes The Grade post and it reminded me of Twitter Grader.
I had been there sometime in the past, but never really paid a lot of attention to the site. I’m somewhat leery of sites that tell us how much our sites are worth and how we rank for whatever they’re covering.
This morning, however, I stopped and really looked over my profile page.
One thing I noticed is that the link next to the “Full Name” label is a link to my Twitter profile. That certainly makes it easy to follow someone.
When I visited the page, it turns out that I am the Twitter elite in Murphy. I’m the only one listed on the page. I guess that’s one of the benefits of living in a small town.
It’s also one of the benefits of listing your town and state in your Twitter profile, if you live in the USA. I’m not sure how it works if you live elsewhere.
It also is a good opportunity for others who live in Murphy to establish their presence by starting to use Twitter regularly.
I found a list of 50 people and visited each of their Twitter profiles. I think I followed about 20 of them.
This is a good way to find other proficient Twitter users in your local area and to meet the ones with similar interests.
But the twisting path I followed this morning continued along to places I’d never seen.
One of the Twitter elite from Asheville had just joined a Twitter Group for Asheville, NC and I went to take a look at the group.
When I noticed the #asheville hashtag code for the group, something clicked.
If you’ve been following my blog for the last few days, you’re already aware that I’ve been looking at ways to use Twitter to promote what’s happening here in Murphy, NC. I’ve been experimenting with the #MurphyNC hashtag.
So, I read the FAQs at TwittGroups and decided to create a group for Murphy.
There was only one thing to do before creating the group.
In December 2007, I created a half-dozen communities on Ning.com, but closed all of them in June 2008 for reasons I won’t go into here. Suffice it to say that it really pays to read the terms and conditions of a site before putting a half-year of effort into it.
When I was fully aware of the terms, I resurrected one of the communities for Squidoo Marketing and have been enjoying sharing with others in the community for the last six months.
One of the other communities I’d started was for Murphy, NC. This morning, I checked to see if the subdomain I’d previously used was available. It was, so I reopened the community.
All of this took a few hours and it opens the door to much more work in the near future, but part of this was already in my plans for this year.
I’m not going to do anything with the Murphy community on Ning until I line up one or more businesses to sponsor the site. For the last few years, I’ve been promoting the area and some of the businesses for free, but it’s time to stop doing that.
As soon as I’ve lined up at least one sponsor for the site, I’ll start rebuilding it.
This time, however, there will be more tools thrown into the mix, including Twitter.
If you are in Murphy, NC, and you are a Twitter user, come and join the group for Murphy.
If you’re not in Murphy, you may find that Twitter Grader and TwittGroups may be tools you’ll want to try out, especially if you’re promoting a local area.
As with all experiments, part of this may prove to be worthwhile and part may be a waste of time. I won’t know for sure until I’ve worked on it for a few months.
Recently, I told you about the Holiday Special for purchasing an annual subscription to Site Build It! Until midnight on December 25, 2008, you could buy one SBI subscription and get one free.
That offer has been extended until January 5, 2009. When it expires at midnight on January 5th, that will be it - no more extensions.
Do you know how many people want to work at home and create more options for increasing their family finances?
According to a recent Harris poll, 72% of American households are thinking about starting a home-based business. You are not alone.
But, how do you get started without wasting time, effort, and money?
There are a lot of people who say they know how to build a successful home business, but how many of them are really succeeding? Are they giving (or selling) you good advice? How can you be sure?
Thousands of people have learned how to build a business where they can work at home and increase their income by following the proven training that is included with Site Build It!
Now, I’ll be the first to agree that what works for one person may not work for another. I’ve read lots of websites, ebooks, and reports and I know for a fact that I’m not interested in doing what they advise. I want to build my home business and do the things that interest me, not necessarily what interests the authors of those books and reports.
I’m sure you feel the same way.
You want to build a real business that is all about something that interests you.
One of the great things about Site Build It! is that it includes a self-taught e-business building course that includes clear step-by-step video instruction and all the tools required not just to “learn,” but to actually build a profitable, evergrowing e-business.
Anyone can say build a website or start a blog, but how many of them offer a time-tested course that thousands have followed to build their online businesses - in many different countries and niches?
Still, even though many have followed the course and have achieved success, it doesn’t work for everyone. Nothing does.
What happens if you try it and it’s not for you?
Ask for a refund. It’s just that simple. Your success is guaranteed, or you get your money back. If you decide that this isn’t for you and you ask for a refund, you’ll get all your money back in the first 30 days and a pro rata refund after that for the remainder of your annual subscription.
Don’t miss the extended holiday special buy-one, get-one-free offer.
After midnight on January 5, 2009, this special offer will be gone.
Don’t you owe it to yourself to try and see if you have what it takes to build an online business of your own?
Site Build It! will not do the work for you. This isn’t magic. It’s a business. You’ll have to do the work, yourself, but SBI offers the education and tools that will give you the best chance that I know of to build your online business.
I’ve been doing this for years, and I owe a large part of my success to what I’ve learned as a very happy Site Build It! customer.
Why wait?
Isn’t 2009 a good year to start building your independence and diversifying your income?
Right at the start, I want to say that I absolutely hate all the hype and commotion surrounding product launches in the Internet marketing field. I subscribe to lots of blogs, mailing lists, and follow quite a few marketers on Twitter. Today, I’ve been inundated with messages for Instant Banner Creator.
To be honest, I was prepared not to like it, but I thought I should check it out to see for myself.
The main reason I chose to do this, instead of just ignoring it, is because I respect the owners, John Merrick and Soren Jordansen. Soren has gone out of his way to answer questions I had a few years ago and he has always been responsive to my questions and suggestions. I’ve earned a bit of money promoting his traffic exchange, Dragon Surf, over the years, too.
Instant Banner Creator Review
Yes, you can use Instant Banner Creator for free, but there are some advantages to upgrading. When you first sign up, you’ll see several OTO pages (one-time offers). The first offers a life-time membership (at a pretty good price if you’re going to be using this tool a lot). The others offer discounted memberships.
Once you get inside the site, everything is well laid out and easy to use.
Tutorials
Instant Banner Creator offers two sets of tutorials. You can choose to watch video tutorials or download a written tutorial with screenshots in PDF format.
I did not watch or read either tutorial before starting, but I’ll download the PDF version right after posting this review.
Creating a banner
As you may know, I live in an area where I’m surrounded by broadband Internet access about three or four miles away, but I’m still on a very slow dialup connection. I was expecting a frustrating experience.
When I clicked the link to create a banner, I got what I was expecting.
The first time, I had to endure an excruciatingly-slow download of the available banner templates. I’m sure it is much faster if you have broadband, but I went and did something else for 10 or 15 minutes while the graphics loaded.
Once they were cached in my browser, however, the system was nice and responsive.
On many sites, when I’m downloading lots of graphics, the servers time out and the pages don’t load. There were no timeouts nor errors when using this tool.
I was disappointed with the quality of the banner templates. Most of them are dull and uninspiring, even most of the templates that can only be used by upgraded members.
Another thing that I did not like was the fact that the graphics don’t show their exact height and width, something that I think would be very important.
I didn’t find a banner template that I liked, so I went into the do it yourself section and created a simple two-toned gradient graphic template and used that as the basis for creating my first banner using this system.
I didn’t see any clipart I liked, so all I did was add some text to the banner.
The text editor offers lots of fonts, and you can easily select the size and color of the text you want to use.
If you don’t have the tools for working with graphics and/or you don’t have the talent and experience, I think you’ll find this tool to be pretty easy to use.
For my first banner, I used a large font to show the name of the product, and a smaller font for the call to action.
When adding the text to the graphic, I did not see any tools to help space things properly on the template, i.e., I didn’t see any tools for centering one on the other. So, i just eyeballed it and centered them approximately.
The programs I normally use (Photoshop and TypeStyler) offer precise alignment tools, but perhaps for most uses you really don’t have to be that accurate.
After placing the text on the template, I could drag it around until I was satisfied with the placement and then click a button to have it added to the graphic. There is one level of undo if you don’t like it.
When I was done, I saved the new banner. At that point, the system told me the link I’d need to use to show the banner somewhere. Graphics can be stored on their site or downloaded to your computer and uploaded to wherever you want to store them. The benefit of storing them on their system is you don’t have to FTP the files around or pay for the bandwidth.
I chose to leave the banner on their site.
The system then gives the option of linking to a target destination, and, since they offer an affiliate program, I chose to link to my affiliate page. When I entered the URL and clicked the appropriate button, their system gave the complete link for showing the graphic and linking to the destination page.
I choose to open off-site links in a new window or tab, so I added the target code to the HTML they provided.
Now, it’s a simple matter of copying and pasting that code anywhere I can put HTML.
Like so:
I think you’ll agree that I’m no artist. Even though I have the professional tools and have been doing graphics for over 20 years, I don’t have the artistic and design talent to make the eye-popping graphics that a professional artist can produce.
Still, in just a few minutes, I think I have a serviceable banner and it is hosted and ready to go.
The banner graphic they host on their site after I saved it does not look like the banner shown above. On their site, the text is centered more-or-less and not truncated on the right as it shows here. I downloaded the graphic and it still looks right. Hmmm. I wonder if this is a problem with the CSS design for this blog. I don’t think it is, because the other banner shown a few paragraphs lower looks fine. Let me test that. I’ll get back to this later, in the comments. This center column should be wide enough for a standard 468×60 banner.
I think anyone with a modicum of talent can produce banners that get the point across, but if you want the best, hire an artist to create them for you.
While I’m unimpressed with the banner templates, I give the system for creating and hosting them a big thumbs up. I think just about anyone can work with this system and create banners you can use just about anywhere.
Of course, I’ve just scratched the surface of what this system can do. You can upload your own templates and clip art and use the system to create a new banner with different text. So, even free members aren’t limited by what’s available.
I decided to try creating a button.
Creating a button
Again, there was a very long wait while the template graphics loaded in my browser window. Once they were cached, everything sped up, again.
This time, I liked some of the graphics, especially some of the templates that are available only to upgraded members.
I’ve already described the process for banners, and it works pretty much the same for buttons.
Here’s a button I put together in a few minutes. It’s hosted on their system.
It’s not great, but it’s not bad, either.
Again, an artist could do much better, and many talented amateurs could, too. Here’s an example of one of the banners an artist designed for promoting the site:
For the rest of us, Instant Banner Creator does a good job of creating and hosting the graphics we need.
I’m giving the button creator a big thumbs up, too.
Headers and Footers
I didn’t have much more time for looking at this and decided to see what the header graphics look like. These header (and footer) graphics can be used as part of your template for creating websites, and I’m sure they can be used on most blogs, too.
Again, there was an excruciatingly long wait as the header graphics loaded. Once, again, however, when they were cached, everything sped right back up.
I played with a header, but didn’t save one.
One thing that is a big difference between the banners and the headers is that I loved most of the headers. They are beautiful. I think that’s one of the best parts of the system, out of the parts I had time to look at.
Even the free headers were very nice.
If all you want to do is create a header and footer for a new website, that would be reason enough to join and use this system.
Animated Banners and Peel Away Ads
I did not try the animated banner or peel away ad creators.
While finishing this review, I did start loading the large peel away templates, and most of the ones I looked at are beautiful, in stark contrast to the very low-quality banner templates.
I do plan to give the peel away ads a try when I have more time. When I do, I’ll talk about it in the comments to this post.
Conclusion: Thumbs Up
Yes, there was a lot of hype about this all day, and yes there are several OTO pages to go through, but I believe this system is sound and very useful. Toss in free hosting and bandwidth, and what do you have to lose?
If you plan to use this system a lot, pay close attention to the OTOs, because you can save a lot of money over what you’d have to pay with a regular monthly subscription.
Of course, I’m using my affiliate links to link to the Instant Banner Creator and I’ll earn a commission should you decide to upgrade. You can, too.
Unlike many of the tools I’ve looked at over the last few years, I feel good about recommending this service to you. Free or upgraded, it offers a valuable service to its members, and the owners are honorable, reliable, and helpful.
I have no doubt that Soren and John will be adding more features to this site over the coming months.
Hopefully, they’ll add some better banner templates, especially since that’s part of the site’s name.
Congratulations to him and the entire team at EzineArticles.
Over the years they have risen to the top of the article directories through hard work and innovation. They have earned the right to celebrate this milestone.
Why can’t active sign-up forms for AWeber mailing lists be added to Squidoo lenses?
Is there a solution?
Today, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this subject, because the ability to add AWeber subscription forms to my Squidoo lenses is very important to my plans for next year.
I don’t believe there are any unsolvable technical problems stopping these two companies from working together.
It is very easy to add active AWeber subscription forms on other sites. They provide two easy-to-use methods: Javascript and HTML forms. You can see an example of the HTML version of a subscription form on every page of this site, right below my photo in the right column. You can see an example of the javascript version of a sign-up form on the Subscribe page on this site.
In both cases, I accomplished what I wanted in just a few minutes.
Unfortunately, I’ve been looking for a way to do this simple task on my Squidoo lenses for months. I thought I found a solution last week, and it worked very well, but it is being killed by Squidoo.
I just created a new lens with an open letter to Tom Kulzer, CEO and founder of AWeber.com, and Seth Godin, Founder of Squidoo.com, asking if they can find a way to work together to make it possible for us to do something that I believe will have a relatively easy solution. I also emailed each of them and invited them to view the lens.
You are invited to come read the lens and express your opinions:
Perhaps this isn’t a technical problem. Maybe it’s just a lack of motivation on the part of both companies to develop a solution. I don’t know.
Tom and Seth, I hope you’ll find a way to make this happen.
While it may not be important to the vast majority of Squidoo lensmasters, it is important to some of us - possibly many of us. I believe it may be important to many AWeber customers.
I’ve added a couple of polls to the lens and I invite everyone who reads this to come and voice your opinions and help spread the word to others who may want to combine the power of the services AWeber and Squidoo provide.
As I wrote in my last comment on that thread, I leave tips on some very useful sites, such as thefluffanutta’s SquidUtils.com. He provides an outstanding service for Squidoo lensmasters and I’m happy to leave him a tip when I think about it.
I’m going to leave the PayPal donate button in the right column of this blog, whether or not it gets used.
On the other hand, I removed the TopSpots list yesterday.
After two months, with thousands of visitors and no nibbles, I simply deleted it. *Poof!*
I’ll still use that service to advertise this blog on other blogs I like, but won’t be offering it here.
In general, I don’t like to have paid links on my sites, and this was the only one where I was doing anything like that. So, even though I was playing by all the rules I know, it never felt comfortable for me.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with TopSpots, but it just doesn’t feel like a good fit here.
Last week, Lewis Smile added a comment to the post and told me my dream was answered. Today, I finally found enough time to see what he was talking about.
Update: Before you get too excited about this, I’ve learned that the folks at Squidoo are working to defeat this “trick,” as it is being called. This means that any AWeber sign up forms on our lenses will stop working at any moment.
Please see the comments on this post for more information.
I purchased his report for only $7.00 and downloaded it immediately.
Being the frugal person that I am, I looked at the source code and saw that the form was actually a javascript widget that was powered by Clearspring.com.
Immediately, I grasped the concept. Lewis was using a widget as an intermediary between the Aweber javascript, which won’t work on a Squidoo lens, and the lens itself.
I joined Clearspring, but after a few minutes of looking around, I decided it would take longer to work out the details for myself than it would to purchase the report, download it, read it, and put what I learned to work.
If the report had been $47, or $27, or some other higher amount, I’d have learned how to do it myself. But, for a report that costs only $7.00, it was a no-brainer to just buy it.
As someone who earns his living from affiliate marketing, it pains me to send you to such a valuable site without using an affiliate link, but the information here is too useful not to tell you how to get it for yourself - even if I’m not earning anything from it.
Sigh.
In just a few minutes, I bought the report, downloaded it, and read it.
My initial thoughts were correct. I probably could have worked it out for myself in an hour or two, but Lewis has done an excellent job of telling you just how to make this work for you.
I went to Aweber.com and added a new sign-up form for my 21st Century Affiliate Marketing blog. I use Aweber to manage email subscriptions for what I post to this blog, as well as a growing number of mailing lists I manage for myself and for my clients. I wanted to create a new form that I would use only on Squidoo lenses so I’d be able to track the source of new subscriptions.
That took maybe 10 minutes to do.
Following the instructions in Lewis’ report, I copied the code I’d need and proceeded to the next step - create the new widget on Clearspring.com.
Even though I’d not done anything but look around Clearspring for a few minutes, I found his instructions extremely clear and easy to follow.
It took maybe 20 minutes or so to create the new widget and another couple of minutes to add it to my 21st Century Affiliate Marketing lens on Squidoo.
(If I had broadband, it would have gone much quicker, but slow dial-up is still all that’s available here where I live.)
I didn’t follow all of Lewis’ instructions on creating the widget.
He advised us to hide the “get and share” links at the bottom of the widget. While I can see reasons for doing this, I don’t like to ever use code on a site that hides the text by making it the same color as the background.
Plus, I don’t mind if someone gets that widget and puts it on another site. I’m not sure why anyone would want to do it, but I’ll take all the subscribers I can get.
It took a total of maybe 45 minutes from the time I bought the report until I had an active Aweber sign-up form on my lens, and that includes downloading and reading everything.
Lewis has done a remarkable service for us by providing such clear instructions.
Now, all I have to do is add this Clearspring.com widget to the other lenses where I syndicate this blog.
Then, over the next few weeks, I’ll be doing the same thing for other mailing lists I manage through Aweber.com.
This has come at a particularly fortuitous time, because I am in the planning stages of setting up quite a few new mailing lists and Squidoo lenses. Lewis’ method of adding a subscribe form to a lens will make what I plan to do much easier and probably more effective.
I have been thinking about adding polls and surveys to some of my sites, but haven’t had the time to research how to do it best.
Serendipity favored my efforts this morning when I read on Matt Mullenwag’s blog that PollDaddy Goes Automattic.
He announced that all the blogs hosted on WordPress.com now have PollDaddy features enabled and a new plug-in for WordPress has been released.
I just installed the plug-in on this site and this is my test post to see how well it works.
It took only a few minutes to sign up for free at PollDaddy.com and set up my profile there.
I have been wanting a way to create polls and surveys and to show them on my websites and blogs. Creating a poll with PollDaddy is very easy and there are several ways to link to your poll and/or embed it in your site, including javascript, a direct link, and a tag to use with the WordPress plug-in.
Here’s my first test of using a PollDaddy poll using the plug-in:
This is just a simple poll asking if you are a Squidoo lensmaster. It allows comments and I chose to moderate the comments before they are published.
I’m sure I’ll come up with better polls in the future, but I really love Squidoo and I like meeting new lensmasters and catching up with all the lensmasters I already know.
One thing I’m seeing that I don’t like is how the format of the poll changes as my blog page loads. At first, the answers are neatly lined up, but after the page loads completely, they change and no longer line up.
Are you seeing that, too?
It looks, to me, like I’m having a CSS conflict between this poll and one of the widgets I have on this blog.
You can compare what the poll looks like on this site with what it looks like on the PollDaddy site: Are you a Squidoo lensmaster?
Have you wanted to add polls and surveys to your sites and blogs? What tools are you using to accomplish this?
John Dilbeck 
