I don’t have to sell you on the benefits of using WordPress as a website. Heck since you’ve made it here I’m sure you’re already using it for yourself and some of your clients, even.

You’re likely already getting people asking you to help them setup their websites or you’re aspiring to get clients and build a get living designing WordPress websites for clients.

I’m sure you also know the ‘old way’ of doing website design isn’t working anymore. You already know that business owners want WordPress. They want to do their own ‘quick site updates’ and they want one of the most popular CMS website and blogging software programs of all time – WordPress.

YOU can be the answer for them. You already have some WordPress skills you’ve been putting to good use, now it’s time to take it to the next level…  Word Press Designer School!!!! 

During the judging, each business owner comes in and presents why they are the best.  So the judges hear lots of cliches and euphemisms. “We are a world class infrastructure company taking it to the next level” and the like. Read the rest here on Lisa’s blog and see ALL THE WORDS AND PHRASES YOU SHOULD NEVER USE!

Mike Volpe

We researched this and we have 9,000 customers and we’ve looked at all of them and how many of them and how much business they get and how often they blog. And the interesting thing here is that blogging even just once a week helps you attract more people to your website, get your business found more and helps you drive more business but the more you blog the more business you get even up to multiple times a day.

And that was the part of the finding that was really surprising. We just reanalyzed all the data and actually if you go to stateofinboundmarketing.com,  the whole report is actually right there but yes, all the data really says is that the more you blog the more business you get.

And if you look at our own growth over the years, we started by only blogging once or a twice a week, five, six years ago today we blog about three times a day and we’ve seen business grow that entire time and the business that we attribute directly to the blog grow the entire time.

So the good news about this is that it’s not something that really plateaus after a while. It’s something that if you keep doing it it can have more and more of an effect.

Yes, so I would say three blogs a day but only if you have the capacity to write three good blog articles per day. So don’t just do more for the sake of doing more, the quality is to be there.

We were lucky to have a Secret Service inside connection, so after our meetings, we were able to tour the West Wing, everything except the Oval Office (he was in it), Rose Garden, basement of White House itself, first floor of White House and then out the front door!

We were there when the AP erroneously reported a bomb had exploded in the West Wing. As if the experience could have been any more unreal!

Well, my title here at the office is chief amazement officer here at the company and that’s what we try to do. We try to be amazing. The people at work here, we try to amaze our clients and we try to teach them how to be amazing to their customers and clients.

“Good” is average, good is satisfactory, good is okay and I can’t see many people getting fired up about spending their hard earned money at a place that’s just okay when they have lots of other choices they can go to. The best companies are simply just a little better than average but the key is they’re better than average all of the time that’s what makes them amazing. So amazement is within the grasp of everyone because think about it how hard is it just to be a little bit better than average?

We do it all the time. We’re just not always aware of it and then once we do it we’ve got to keep it going. And we’ve got to think, “This is the way it has to be all of the time every day every moment day in day out.”
Well, it’s more of a mindset than anything else. It’s not that tiring. Let me ask you a question, you’ve been to Nordstrom’s? Their people do what every other department store does it’s just their consistent about it and that’s really what makes the difference. Okay so maybe they’re a little better than average on each and every interaction. They’re friendly, they’re knowledgeable. They’re allowed to do certain things that other department stores won’t allow their employees to do. They’re allowed to – if you’re in the men’s you know, I’m a guy, so if you’re in the men’s suite department, they’re allowed to walk with you over to the men’s shoe department and if you’re with your wife or your girlfriend I’m allowed – actually I’ll be with my wife. You got to be careful.

No, but if we’re with my wife and she decides she wants shoes that same salesperson that was in the men’s suite department can go over to the woman’s shoe store and why not? Why shouldn’t they be allowed to do so? It’s little things like that that make a difference.

Yes and in fact, we have a fairly new product that’s part of the Carbonite suite called Carbonite Currents. And Currents is like a recent’s folder that cuts across all your machines. So for example I work on my office PC, I work on my home PC. I have another PC at my vacation house and I have an iPad that I travel with. And Currents it’s like in Windows you open up your recent’s list and the most recently used file is at the top.  Currents works like that but it works across all your machines. So if I’m working on a file at the office and then I go home, that file will be at the top of the Currents list. So I don’t file open, I just go right to Currents because the most recent thing I’ve been working on is right there at the top of the list.

So, if I do some more work on that file at home and then save it, it’ll still be at the top of my list and those changes will go back and reflect themselves on my computer at the office. If I’m sitting on the train and I access a file from Currents on my iPad and I make some edits to it and put it back, those edits will be synchronized across all my machines. So, that’s kind of part of the suite of tools that you get when you’re a Carbonite subscriber.

It’s free and if you’re a Carbonite subscriber, there’s nothing extra. And in fact right now, even if you’re not a Carbonite subscriber – you just go to labs – it’s a product of our Labs Division. Just go to labs.carbonite.com and sign up absolutely free.

Hear the rest on School for Startups Radio

And a report on Indian Startup Ecosystem by WorldStartupReport.com

“Look everything has changed the economy will be different forever, not for a short period of time but forever. And regardless of your position or your title or what you think you do, you are now a salesperson.”

They will be the most protected group of people whether you work for an organization or you work for yourself. You have to go out and sell your product and your services. I was saying in that book that there’ll be high unemployment. The only way to get a job is to sell yourself, the only way to get a raise is to sell yourself, and that book was basically saying, “Hey the world this weekend became a salesperson and you got to learn the skill now.”

Well, for little guys like us that are scrapping and out there punching and shoving and trying to grab our piece every day, this economy – when you have this much uncertainty – I’m not going to go into the bank thing with you but when you have this much uncertainty – we’ve had uncertainty now for four five years.

This uncertainty will not go away because the moment things get better everybody – when you wake up in the morning you have to confront that there’s $17 trillion of debt that this country never had. That has exploded and everybody with just a dash of intelligence – that has to be confronted.

So that makes consumers and buyers of your products and services or even if you’re trying to get a job or a better job, it makes people uncertain. It makes them cautious. So that’s what I mean, the economy is different because we’ve never had this level of uncertainty since maybe The Great Depression.

And that means you have to be selling – you see a lot of companies going out of business right now because they went to the lowest price and that didn’t allow that company to work and then they failed. Or you see people in the middle class right now, falling off the edges into poverty. Why? Because they don’t make enough money, they don’t save enough money. There is no money for them to invest and so they fall off the edges when you see market conditions like this.

Hear the rest of this great interview on School for Startups Radio!

Lisa Samples

Twitter parties are virtual parties that happen on Twitter and people follow a hash tag that’s usually branded for the party. So maybe, it’s Bob’s Movie is your hash tag just or Movie Buff or something that people can follow on Twitter. And we use special programs like Tweet Grid and stuff like that so that you can see people who are talking about that specific subject. And then you follow the host which would be me and then we would ask questions, give out information, really it can almost be anything.

A lot of times we do giveaways and have great prizes that are brand-sponsored and it helps teach people about the product. It’s an organic conversation and it can be used for various purposes. You can use it almost like an online focus group where I’m going to ask people what’s their favorite thing about a comedy movie. And what’s your favorite movie that you’ve ever seen. And we’ll get talking about movies and then we’ll start narrowing it down as the party goes on. It’s usually about an hour until finally we are talking about the brand. And generally the people do that. I don’t do that – I just lead them in that direction.

Yes, there’s lots of different ways to invite people. Usually Twitter is a really great way to do that. And you just tweet about it and usually give them a link to where they can learn more about the party itself. And I always try to include directions on how to participate because most people are clueless to that kind of thing. And I also give them a tool, a link where it will make it much easier for them so they won’t have to do anything except for they’ll see everything right there. And we use Tweet Grid for that mostly.

I have personally on Twitter under my Twitter name Lisa Samples, I have roughly 32,000, 33,000 followers. But the panelists those are other people who usually tweet with me.  I mean combined it’s easy for us to have over 100,000 different followers. And then each of our followers see the hash tag and they join in and the next thing you know, you’re getting millions and millions of impressions.

We start advertising usually two weeks in advance. We can do it up until one week anything short of that and it gets a little bit tougher because then you’re just relying on people who see the hash tag and join in. But at least two weeks in advance is perfect. At the day of the party just seeing the hash tag, you’ll probably get about 25 to 40% of your audience that way.

To hear the rest of this great interview click here.

So I started saving all the money I could, and I actually saved enough. Starting out, I had like $12,000 in it, which at the time that was a chunk of money for me. To be able to save that up in only a year making less than $20,000 a year I thought was pretty good, and it worked. I opened the door with really no money left. They never say that’s your best approach to business but it worked. So with the last $500, I bought some inventory – luckily it stayed fairly steady from day one. But by the time I opened the door, I started renting the place. Luckily people came in – I guess I had known enough people in this town that when I opened they came.

His first place.

Certainly, I didn’t have the confidence to think this is a no brainer. I guess I had enough confidence in it to think it’s got a good shot. It’s just like any business, you got your own niches in the bar business. So I was thinking along the lines of a local place that folks in the service industry would come to, but my main clientele, still today, is musicians and artists, people that don’t have a whole lot of money to pay for a beer but want to go out and hang out.

So I guess based on the fact that I felt like there’s room for a place that’s more of a – for lack of a better term, a county bar, on some level it was right. It did work, and now I’ve been open 18 years, probably seen 40 or 50 bars open in this town since.