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Dot Com Pho returns to Happy Pho for another excitement filled episode. This time we had seven people showed up to dine on a variety of Pho dishes (mostly consumed by Chef Aaron Koo AKA the new Stephen Fung). To makes thing even more happy, Michael Yurechko discovered that Happy Pho had wireless Internet access (not in the restaurant but nearby).

This episode of Dot Com Pho celebrates the heroes of entrepreneurship. Evan Carmichael came up a great idea for trading cards featuring famous entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurs were selected by 33 famous bloggers (of which I am one). The bloggers were asked to name their favorite entrepreneur. That entrepreneur is featured on the front of the card and the blogger who selected him is featured on the back.

All process from the the sales of Entrepreneur Heroes trading cards goes to Kiva. They will use the money to help entrepreneurs in third world countries. The Entrepreneur Heroes trading cards goes on sale in April. Pre-order your packs today and save 20% off the regular price – only $3.95 per pack of 5 cards instead of $4.95. There’s free shipping if you order three packs or more. In addition, you’ll receive a limited edition hologram gold Steve Jobs or Woz card for every three pack pre-order. There’s also a chance to win a baseball signed by the Woz. Watch the episode and then go buy some cards!

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

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Dot Com Pho – Entrepreneur Heroes Edition

The online auction is nothing new. If you’re looking to score a deal on a new Nintendo Wii or maybe a used digital camera, heading to a place like eBay isn’t such a bad idea.

One of the newer developments in recent years is the penny auction, giving you the opportunity to buy an iPod for pennies on the dollar. Quite literally.

Taking a slightly different approach to this concept is Bid on Cash, the website that serves as the subject of today’s review. As its name implies, you actually bid on cash prizes.

Getting into the Game

Getting started with Bid on Cash is a very quick and painless process. First, you’ll need to fill out the user registration form, which really only asks for a username, email address, and password.

From there, you’ll need to confirm your email address and you’re pretty much ready to go. There is a section to fill out the rest of your personal profile, but you don’t have to do this right away. You will, however, need to spend a little cash to buy some bids.

So, How Does It Work?

In case you’re not familiar with the penny auction system, you need to buy bids (a dollar each) that you can subsequently spend on the various auctions. Each time that a new bid is placed on a prize, the cost of the auction goes up by a penny and the countdown timer goes up for a set amount of time.

As you can imagine, the auction ends when the timer runs out. The key, then, is to get in the last bid, hoping that no one else puts down another bid after you. The difference with Bid on Cash is that you are, well, bidding on a cash prize of varying value.

The prizes seem to start at $30 on the low end, all the way up to about $400 on the high end. If you figure that each dollar spent on a bid results in one extra penny in the value of the auction, then Bid on Cash needs to get at least 30 bids ($0.30 value) to break even on a $30 auction.

Look at the list of closed auctions, it seems that they’re currently falling pretty far behind on that goal. Most auctions are ending at below the break-even mark; I saw a $100 auction end at 11 cents. In effect, Bid on Cash lost $89 there, not including the other costs involved in running the site.

BidJames is Your Automated Sniper

While you could spend hours on end staring at the main page of Bid on Cash, eyeing the auctions that are soon drawing to a close, you can set up an automated solution instead. That solution is called BidJames.

This virtual assistant, so to speak, will automatically bid on the auctions on your behalf. You activate his services, tell him the bid range and the number of bids to use, and he’ll do the rest. As you can imagine, you can burn through the bids pretty quickly using a system like this.

Getting Extra Free Bids

You can buy additional bids for the site in packs of 20, 30, 50, or 100, but there is no incentive to buy the larger bundles. It always works out to a dollar a bid and, from a business standpoint, I recommend Bid on Cash provide more of an incentive to “players” to buy the larger bundles.

If you don’t want to buy more bids, you can earn some free bids by referring your friends. When someone signs up and buys a bid package using a referral link, you get 10 free bids and the referral gets one free bid.

The Penny Auction for Cash

You probably shouldn’t expect to get rich from Bid on Cash. It can be a fun game, perhaps, but it can get very expensive at a dollar a bid. Also, like all the other penny auctions on the Internet, you do run into the possibility of fraud and deceit. I received five free bids to do this review and, well, I was always outbid. I saw others win auctions at much lower totals.

CLICK HERE TO BID ON CASH

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

Originally posted here:
How’d You Like to Bid on Some Money?

Are you in the mood for some videos? My collection of odds and ends from surveying the Web this week came up heavy on the videos. Nevermind the stats that people have been viewing fewer videos online lately, according to comScore. I bet we can edge that number back up with this blog post alone!

At SMX West last week, Jennifer Lopez of SEOmoz and Dana Lookadoo of Yo! Yo! SEO interviewed a handful of attendees with a series of five questions. I was honored to be asked to join in, though completely petrified at the prospect of being stumped on camera. Note the visible sigh of relief as I answer each question. Otherwise, it’s super entertaining to hear these notable Internet marketers’ answers!

One of the featured interviewees in the video above is Ian Lurie, who, among other things, is the blogger at Conversation Marketing. On his blog, Ian takes a cue from Lindsay Lohan, who is suing E-Trade for using a character named Lindsay in their Super Bowl commercial. To avoid Ian’s litigious wrath, avoid all words that contain the letters “I”, “A” and “N” in succession. Thankfully, my name squeezes through the censors by a hair!

Ready for another video? Bruce sat down with WebProNews while at SMX West to talk about everything SEO under the sun. Attracting links, driving conversions with social media, the inner workings of local search, the effect of page speed, and optimizing for personalized search are all on the agenda in this 20 minute interview. If you’ve ever wanted to pick Bruce’s veteran SEO brain, watching this interview may just scratch that itch.

Microsoft Advertising released a whitepaper on the effectiveness of digital advertising for brand campaigns. Microsoft’s research proves a connection between the amount of time a user spends with an online ad and that user’s interaction with the brand, including visits to a site, pages viewed and time spent on-site. Not bad to have this research at your disposal when a client wants to know “Why SEM?”

While we’re on the subject of ads, Huffington Post has compiled a gallery of Google ads that bring on the lolz. Looks like eBay’s the market leader for auctions on virgins, lost children, and wives. I believe it. (Susan thinks this issue was addressed years ago, but stay on the lookout for AdWords oddities!)

Next video! What is the state of the Internet, you ask?

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.

After weeks of hyping an upcoming product that would revolutionize the Internet forever, Cisco announced it was upgrading its routing system to “CRS-3″. SiliconANGLE gives us a recap of industry analysis, and from the look of it, no one’s all that impressed.

The jet packs are here! The jet packs are here! Thanks to Martin Aircraft’s persistence, for just $86,000 you may soon be able to have your own personal flying device. Just a matter of time before hover crafts and sky highways, I tell you! [Yay, we're finally in the future! --Susan]

If you lost your iPhone, would you consider it a tragedy? Ever cuddle up with your iPhone before bed time? According to a survey of 200 students, 75 percent of iPhone owners have an inappropriate relationship with their phone. That’s crazy talk. I mean, just the other day my iPhone and I were at lunch and you’d never believe what we saw a Nexus One and its owner doing! In public!

Susan’s posted her SES New York liveblogging schedule and we’re both excited to hear what the day 3 session Spotlight on Fashion: Blogging for Style will reveal. Here’s one real-world example of fashionable tech: a Vivan Tam designed digital clutch. It matches so well with my pretty, nifty things aesthetic.

As does IdeaPaint. Talk about nifty! IdeaPaint is paint that lets you dry erase. Make every surface in your home or office your creative drawing board — literally! I’ve ordered up the free sample and will let you know once I try it out!

Here’s another special offer worth sharing around. Search & Social Spring Summit is coming up in Tampa, Florida on May 3 and 4. Susan attended last year and found the intimate event to be one of the best search marketing conferences she’s ever attended. The team at Search & Social wants everyone to be able to enjoy this high-quality educational experience, so they’re offering a 15 percent discount on the conference pass when you use the discount code for Search Engine Journal readers. I guarantee every penny is worth it.

If that wasn’t enough, it just so happens that Tampa is #44 on The Daily Beast’s list of America’s craziest cities! Did your city make the cut?

After you’ve found the answer to that question, take a moment to answer a few more in the name of feeding the hungry? FreeRice asks you questions, and for every one you get right, 10 grains of rice go to the World Food Programme. You can even pick your category: art, chemistry, English, geography, languages and math. To be honest, it’s so much fun you might actually forget it’s for a good cause. [The language options are good to see how much high school French you remember. Surprisingly, I can still tell my ils from my nous. --Susan]

Here’s another warm and fuzzy. As Susan noted when she shared this with me: zombie elephant! The elephant baby that zoo staff believed had died in its momma’s womb made a surprisingly lively entrance into the world this week. May you grow humongous and prosper, little pachyderm!

And for your final video I present a little story we can all relate to:

Where the heck did that come from?! Have a great weekend!

Friday Recap: Pop-Up Video Edition was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.

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Friday Recap: Pop-Up Video Edition

guest post by Kelly Diels

warning: there are lessons and even actionable advice in here, but it is buried inside a story. I write stories because I love you and don’t want to bore you and because if you laugh then chances are that you’ll remember the educational bit, too. There’s actual research that this works – it is not just because I am in love with bloviation but hey, tomato tahmahto.

I have big love for tech. You could not pry my dishwasher out of my house without bloodshed and death, most likely yours. And the internet? Don’t even get me started. I want to french-kiss the web. In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s my job or at least my blog’s mission statement.

Still, I’m more of install (or pay someone to install) and hope-it-works kind of gal. I want the fuss without the muss.

And I have this theory about tech: some key pieces of hardware and software make a huge difference and everything after that amounts to tweaks and hacks. But the good tech, like a great love, (initially) inspires awe, affection, and respect and make your life much better on a daily basis. You think: how did I ever live without you, front-loading washer? We wasted so much time.

And then, after the infatuation fades, you get on with your happily functioning and newly-enhanced life and start taking your love, machines, shockingly-white-whites and programs for granted.

I like it like that. I like low-maintenance relationships (don’t tell anyone) and I LOVE that electricity just works and I don’t have to think about it. I like finding the right things, that work, and let them do that in the background. Nearly invisible function is hawt.

WordPress is one of those key pieces of tech that made a big difference in my life. It is like a long distance lover. I don’t quite understand it and I should probably spend more time with it but damn I like it a lot. It does me right, mostly virtually.

Actually, let’s be honest: I LOVE WORDPRESS. My blog is my boyfriend. I adore it. I spend all my time with it. Because of all the fabulous people who love me up in the comments, my blog sates my unabashed lust for attention – which, in turn, has started saving me from terrible IRL relationship decisions.

(Wordpress is saving the world from needy girlfriends. Someone call the Nobel Peace Prize Committee.)

So the thought of someone getting their sweaty, malicious hands on my boyfriend blog and doing dirty things to it makes me nauseous.

It happened to a friend of mine, Kelly Livesay. One of her blogs was hacked and posts and theme modifications deleted.  It happened to journalist Helen Mosher. If you Google her name, the first search result is now “Cheap Viagra Online”. This is not – perhaps obviously – what she intended for her blog. It happened to Robert Scoble, who lost two months of blog posts and gained a very serious sense of personal violation.

And that sense of violation is exactly the prompt for this post: the movie The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo completely FREAKED ME OUT (capitalization absolutely appropriate and required).

Do you know The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo? It is the first of a trilogy of books by Swedish author Stieg Larsson who completed this epic series and then promptly dropped dead. It is a gripping book and it almost killed me, too. I read it in five hours.

And then I got my hot little hands on the movie. Lisbeth, the main character and dragon-wearer, is one tough chick. You don’t want to mess with her. She’ll hack you.

Because that’s what she does. Lisbeth is a freakishly talented hacker. She works as an investigator and conducts her investigations from the convenience of her laptop. She gets into your computer and reads your naughty e-mails, your work memos, your sexts, your bank statements, your browsing history, and then uses that information as she sees fit, for her clients, or herself.

And if you’re on her side – I mean, who doesn’t want her to catch the lady-killing villain? (the villain) – then you’re with her, all the way, as she uses her scary powers for good.

So: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Wrenching read, haunting movie. Great entertainment, especially if you’re looking for a new reason to become deeply paranoid about all the ways people can screw with you online.

Robert Scoble’s not kidding when he says that he feels his virtual house was burgled. Thanks to this paranoid movie, I now feel his paranoia pain and I’m deeply worried about my boyfriend blog.

Still, I don’t  understand the point of hacking blogs, so I asked my friend Dave Doolin (Website In A Weekend), who knows Serious Stuff about WordPress, code, programming and How Things Work.

Kelly Diels: What’s the point of hacking a blog? Why would someone want to break into a blog and make it say BUY VIAGRA! instead of just building a sex blog to sell Viagra?

Dave Doolin: Honestly, I’m not really sure, but I’ll hazard a guess: it’s cheaper to spray spam by the trillions than it is to create your own site and work at building traffic. It costs next to nothing to hire people to send a e-mails, so even a really tiny conversion rate generates profit.

Kelly Diels: So how do we keep hackers out of our blogs? On your site, you recommend that bloggers change “Admin” to something specific and then delete the Admin user, so I did that, and Amanda Farough told me to make a unwieldy, ridiculous password that is actually a sentence with random capitalization and characters.

Dave Doolin: Yeah, those two things are a good start. You do want a long, complicated password. The other thing that everyone should do is read the WordPress Development Blog and Other WordPress News. They’re both in your dashboard, and they’ll keep you up to date on the latest hacks and security threats.

(I studiously ignore those two boxes in my WordPress dashboard but now, as of right this minute, I’m going to pay attention.)

And, now that I’m paying attention, I checked in once again with Amanda Farough, who is my designer/developer/chief-cupcake-sharer/coder-extraordinaire. She takes care of my site, because, as I mentioned, I like my tech to work but I’m not really inclined to make it work myself.

Kelly Diels: So, Amanda, what are we doing to keep my site secure? And by “we”, I mean you. What advice do you have for bloggers to keep their blogs on the unhacked side?

Amanda: Here’s my security short list:

1. Change your .htcaccess to protect your database name and password by adding the following line of code: deny from all. In the event of someone hacking your blog, they won’t be able to determine where your tables are, protecting you from losing everything.
2. WP-DB-Backup is your new best friend. Get it emailed to you once a week or, if you’re really paranoid, once a day (note: Dave Doolin said we should do it once a day and I heart paranoia. That’s totally where I’m living right now. Thanks, Dragon Tattoo conspiracy). Don’t trust your server or your email server. Save copies of the database to your local drive as soon as you get the email. That way, you’ve got two copies: one on your email server and the other on your local drive.
3. Update Wordpress every single time you’re prompted to. These releases are the blogger’s equivalent to driver updates: they fix holes in security, functionality, and usability. If you’re running 2.8 when we’re on 2.9.2, then run that update. You’ll be glad you did.

And that – according to my friends in the know, because trust me, I didn’t know – is the short story of how to keep your blog safe and out of the sweaty, dragon-tattooed hands of malicious hackers itching to delete your hot copy and sell us sex aids in your name.

WordPress Security Summary:

• Get rid of your Admin user account
• have a long, complicated password
• keep up to date on WordPress tips and news by reading WordPress
  Development Blog and Other WordPress News
• BACK IT UP, baby
• Protect your database name and password
• UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE

 __________________________

Join the Dragon Tattoo Blog HUNT - an internet wide scavenger hunt tied to the feature film launch of bestselling book The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Win great prizes – free movie tickets, books, movie soundtrack, posters and more. To join the contest, start at the beginning of the HUNT by visiting www.dragontattoofilm.com/contest for full details and the first clue. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is in theaters near you starting March 19th.
THE NEXT CLUE:

This site explores everything Apple, but don’t tell Steve Jobs because this weblog is officially unofficial.

Kelly Diels writes for ProBlogger every week. She’s also a wildly hireable freelance writer and the creator of Cleavage, a blog about three things we all want more of: sex, money and meaning.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Blog Security: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Scares Me Into Taking It Seriously.

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Originally posted here: 
Blog Security: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Scares Me Into Taking It Seriously.

In the Internet marketing industry, we’re all constantly pushing ourselves to learn more and grow what we know. It’s not unlike what you want for your own children — education and opportunities that build a foundation for future success.

Turns out the search community is interested in sharing just such opportunities with students, a.k.a. the future of the world. Right now Google, Bing and the White House are all running contests and programs for children and young adults that promote learning and education in fun and creative ways. If you think your child might be interested in taking pictures, developing software or code, or hearing the President deliver the high school commencement address, check out the following opportunities.

Earth Day Photo Contest — Open to Students of All Ages

Contest: Youth ages 5 and older are invited to submit their original photos which celebrate Earth Day. Entries will be divided among four age groups: 5-10, 11-13, 14-17, 18+.

Prizes: The grand-prize winning photo will be displayed on the Bing home page on Earth Day, April 22. The winner of each age group will get to go to the Microsoft Campus and attend a Bing editorial team meeting. Also, first, second and third place winners will all receive an HP Pavilion desktop and monitor and a digital photo software package for their school.

And there’s more! Each day during the voting period, Bing will donate $5.00 for DonorsChoose.org to the first 20,000 people who vote. And voters get to designate what classroom projects will benefit from the donation. Everyone truly wins!

Entry Period: March 29-April 11

Voting Period: April 13-19

Web Site: http://earthdayphotocontest.com/

Juicy Ideas Competition — Open to College Students

Contest: Eligible college students are invited to answer the question “How can you use data to help your community?” by developing a software application. This contest is open to college and university students within a 50 km radius of Google offices and datacenters. Teams must consist of three to five students.

Prize: The grand-prize winners will receive an Android-powered phone and an all-expenses-paid trip to Google’s Mountain View headquarters.

Entry Period: March 29-April 11

Web Site: http://juicyideascompetition.appspot.com/

Summer of Code — Accepting Applications from Mentor Orgs Now

Program: Every year Google funds a three-month student mentoring program, pairing students with organizations to work on a coding project together. Student developers partner with a group running an active open-source software project.

Who Wins: Everyone involved! Students gain exposure to real-world software development situations and a resume-worthy experience in their field of pursued interest. The mentor organization gets to bring in and identify new developers. And more open source code is released for anyone to use.

Application Period: Mentor organizations may apply by March 12. The student application period opens March 29.

Web Site: http://code.google.com/soc/

Race to the Top High School Commencement Challenge — Open to Public High School Students

Contest: Okay, so this one’s got nothing to do with search, but it’s definitely a student contest. And the White House’s marketing efforts are worth learning from. Public high schools are invited to submit an application of four essay questions focused on personal responsibility, academic excellence and college readiness. To supplement the application, a school can also submit a two-minute or shorter video as well as data on attendance, graduation rates, and other key indicators.

Prize: President Obama will deliver the commencement address to the winning school’s graduating class.

Entry Period: February 19-March 15

Voting Period: TBA – The White House and Department of Education will select the six finalists. The public will then be invited to vote for their top three choices on the White House Web site.

Web Site: http://www.whitehouse.gov/Commencement

Attention Students & Parents! Search Contests & Programs that Pay Off was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.

Originally posted here:
Attention Students & Parents! Search Contests & Programs that Pay Off

Anyone who’s been involved in web development for any length of time has likely encountered the Developers VS Users situation. It’s a mistake that can often lead to expensive problems down the road. So what exactly is the problem? And how can you spot it–and solve it–before it derails you project and causes you to make a costly mistake? Here’s how…

Most developers became developers because they want to work on and build cool stuff. Like everyone, they want to build things that gain the respect of their peers. This aspiration is where the problems get started. Unless you happen to develop for an extremely technical audience, users don’t want cool stuff. They just want stuff that works and makes their life easier. For example, let’s say a developer wants to build a weather dashboard with real time satellite video feeds, an AJAX module that show the latest temperature, barometric pressure and wind speed/direction, the sunrise/sunset times, and tidal data. A regular user, on the other hand, just wants to know “is it going to be sunny or cloudy and do I need a jacket or umbrella today?”

We’ve seen several examples of this played out in public in our little tech-bubble-blogosphere in the past year:

• Google Wave: Google wave is cool. It doesn’t solve any problems that any real people have but it does a lot of great things that developers get excited about. It includes embedded video, sound, and chat from multiple users that a user can enable playback from… Yeah, I was saying just last week how I wished I could do that. The only useful thing I’ve ever seen done with Google wave is the Pulp Fiction movie (1000% NSFW).
• iPad: When the IPad first came out, I (like many others) complained that it was an oversized iphone with less functionality. However what we missed was that it really wasn’t for us. The iPad is for regular users, not developers or techno weenies. In other words, people–in fact, most people– want an internet appliance that just works. They don’t want to have to deal with nonsense like registries, print drivers, patches, updates, and so on. Why does everyone have a refrigerator in their house? Because it’s easy to to use! You plug it in and go. Imagine for a minute if you had to play with the evaporator driver or download and install a thermometer patch update every week. Your refrigerator “works” because 99% of the time it just does its job without any fiddling.
• Google Buzz: Google assumed that everyone wanted to share all of the stuff they are doing, reading, and looking at with people they talk to. Because many Googlers have become victims of their own hubris, they assumed everyone is like them, wants to be like them, or should be like them. However when the realities of everyday life entered the equation, in the shape of something like an abusive ex-husband, it was a condition that didn’t exist in the artificial utopia of the Googleplex. Google failed to test the program in the real world and instead relied on the developer’s vision of what the users wanted. The result? Failure.

So how do you recognize when you are in this situation? If you, your developer, or anyone on your team makes these kind of statements, chances are strong that you are on the wrong path:

• Can’t the users open their eyes and just read? The answer is right there in front of them.
• The users need to use a little common sense. We can’t keep dumbing down the world for them or we’ll end up like (insert tv/movie/pop culture reference for stupid people here).
• They use the term UX to mean user experience or UI to mean user interface in common everyday speech and would feel comfortable using it when speaking to the CEO or board of directors.

What can you do to prevent this kind of mistake from ruining your project? Here are some ideas:

• In most cases, developers don’t make good team/project leaders. They carry with them the bias of wanting to be cool, respected developers. If you have or can find a developer who has a proven track record of placing user needs above cool programming features, ignore this recommendation.
• User testing: find someone who is not involved in the project or, even better, get a NIF (non internet friend) to try out your website. Put them on the homepage and ask them to try and do what your primary goal is, whether that’s to create a gift registry, put something in a cart and checkout, find a specific piece of information, or something else. Whatever it is, ask them try and do it. If you can video tape them, that’s great; otherwise, watch without interacting and take notes.
• Test different options. Use services like Crazyegg or Google multi variant testing to try out different options. See where users are and aren’t clicking then make adjustments based on data not on intuition. (disclosure: Crazyegg is an advertiser here)
• Don’t make changes because they are cool, neat, interesting, or stroke the ego of your developers. Make changes that solve problems people have. This is one of the biggest complaints I have with Wordpress as a platform. They coddle developer’s whims instead of addressing real problems like security.

At the end of the day, you and everyone involved needs to understand that, for your project to succeed, it needs to solve a problem users have first and foremost. Stroking the ego of the CEO, making the marketing department look clever, or making a developer feel stimulated are not real goals.

Advertisement: Ezilon.com Regional Directory – Check to see if your website is listed! #5

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Developers VS Users

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Developers VS Users

I had to take my wife to a doctor’s appointment today and decided to hit up the Apple Store in Oakridge Centre since it’s just across the street from the doctor’s office. I generally enjoy going to an Apple Store. It alway amazes me that Apple would need such a big store to sell such a small line of products. The formula seems to work however. Apple stores are the most profitable stores in the world, with average sales per square foot of $4,500. The flagship store in New York does almost $1 million a day.

The best thing I like about the Apple Store is you’re free to stay and fool around with the Macs, iPhones and iPods for as long as you want. They even have nice “One to One” tables where you can sit your but down in front of a Macbook Pro and work away, which is exactly what I did.

During my hour at the Apple Store, I tweeted on Twitter, check my Gmail, chatted on Instant Messenger, changed all the Mac homepages to John Chow dot Com, added my RSS to all the Safari browsers, sent out 46,000 emails and made $1,500. And then it hit me. This truly is the Dot Com Lifestyle. As long as I have access to a computer and the Internet, I really can make money from anywhere in the world.

In many ways, making money from the Apple Store is even better than making it from the office at home. For one thing, the Apple Store has blazing fast Internet!

Another bonus of running my business from the Apple Store is you get to make fun of all the “geniuses” at the Genius Bar. Don’t ask them what the stock symbol for Apple is. They don’t know.

*In case Apple is reading this. I did not use your Macs or store network to send out 46,000 emails. I just use your Mac to connect to my Aweber account. Please don’t ban me from the stores!

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Making Money From The Apple Store

Bloggers have a distinct disadvantage.

When someone hires an expert in — oh, let’s say marketing — that expert can dispense the same information she did for the last client.

And the client before that one. And the one before that.

Not bloggers. Blogging is about breaking down everything you know into bite-sized chunks so that people can learn it all over a period of time. If they look back through the archives, they can often see the entire breadth of your knowledge.

Then one day, your well runs dry.

This is a scary moment for any blogger. It’s not like running out of inspiration or having writer’s block. This is when you’ve said it all. Your blog contains absolutely everything you know.

And let’s be fair — it’s a lot of knowledge. But you simply don’t have anything new to say.

What do you do?

Go get yourself some new knowledge

I’m always amazed by how few people continue to educate themselves on their topic after they’ve become an acknowledged expert in it.

Hey, everyone knows me as the number one guy on naked mole rats! Clearly, I know everything there is to know!

But as an old coach of mine used to say, you’ll never know everything there is to know in your field of expertise, and there’s always something new to learn. People make new discoveries and innovations every day. You have opinions about those innovations. You agree or disagree with them. You try them or manage to take them a step further.

Of course, if you don’t find out what those discoveries and innovations are, you don’t have anything to say about it. No wonder you’re stuck for posts.

Actively pursuing new knowledge about your area of expertise has a side benefit: it provides more value for your clients. You may find the inspiration for a new ebook or web course to help newcomers understand and benefit.

New knowledge could be the next big thing for your business — if you go out and find it.

Doctors are one of the few professions actually required to update their knowledge of their field of expertise continually. If a doctor doesn’t know the latest innovation in surgery, his next patient might die from the lack of that knowledge. That’s a huge incentive for the doctor to always be learning and for the patient — and the medical board — to insist on that continual education.

No one is going to force you to attend conferences or read books or take courses, but you’ll be much more respected as an expert if you continually update your knowledge. Your client’s life may not be on the line, but their business, their financial goals, and their happiness probably is — at least, their happiness with your products and services.

Where can you find new knowledge?

Well, you may not have heard about this gizmo called the internet, but it’s pretty handy for that sort of thing. It seems silly to mention using the internet to upgrade your knowledge on an online blog, but shocking numbers of people don’t use it for this particular purpose — even those who practically live online.

Libraries are an awesome (and free) resource for new knowledge too, and so is your local bookstore. Go pick up some new literature and get someone else’s perspective on what you do.

Magazines and trade journals, of course, are terrific for more recent innovations and information. Find ones that focus on your area of expertise and stay on the lookout for new ideas that sound interesting or innovative. Once an article grabs your attention, go do some independent research on that topic and find new resources to pursue.

Actively pursuing new knowledge won’t just make you a better businessperson — though that’s reason enough right there. It’ll also pretty much guarantee that you’ll never run out of blog topics ever again.

About the Author: For new knowledge that makes you a better businessperson — and that helps you hit the bullseye of success for your freelancing career, check out Men with Pens — or better yet, grab the RSS feed here.

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What Do You Do When You Run Out of Knowledge?

A Guest Post by Mark Hayward.

What the hell am I supposed to write about, I own a {insert your small business here}?

Really, who cares about your flower shop, bike shop, auto parts store, or coffee house?

Answer: Your customers certainly care.

We all know by now that consistent small business blogging can drastically improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and overall web presence. Additionally, a small business blog can increase your opportunities to interact with (and highlight) your customers and provide an additional occasion for you to share your expert knowledge.

Unfortunately, nothing stops a would be small business blogger faster than a perceived lack of time, and the frustration that comes with a lack of ideas to blog about.

While I can’t help you with your time issue, I can provide you with nine tips for creating more small business blogging ideas:

1. Keyword Tool

One of the best semi-secret sources of the more savvy small business bloggers are the free keyword tools that are available like Google Adwords and Wordtracker. If you are not familiar with searching for keywords, essentially you type in a word or phrase related to your small business and the tool shows you what people (your potential customers) are searching the internet for. You can easily get hundreds of new blog post ideas from a couple of keyword searches.

2. Your Backstory

Potential customers want to know about you and your business, it’s a cornerstone of trust building. One of the best ways to familiarize your customers with your business is to blog about your backstory and personal history. Backstory topics could include any of the following:

• Who you are?
• Where did you come from?
• Why did you choose your business location?
• What is it that makes you passionate about your small business?
• What have you done in your life that makes you unique?
• What struggles have led to the creation of who you are today as a business owner.

3. Customer of the Day

Presumably, if you are running a semi-successful business, you have customers coming in on a daily basis. If you are struggling for post ideas, why not make your customers the focus of your blog one or two days per week?

Not only will you get almost unlimited post material, but since customers like to feel special and appreciated, blogging about them is a great public relations tool. You could even give the participants an additional ten percent off of their purchase for their willingness to participate. Featuring your customers and telling their story gets them excited about your business and can help to establish a customer based community around your blog.

4. Create Resource Posts

Resource posts are great because they are fairly easy for you to put together and people love to read scannable and easily digested information. Ideas for small business resource posts might include:

• Top ten selling products in your store and why.
• Five reasons you love your business
• Twenty best ways to {insert business specific information here}.
• Eight reasons why customers loveÖ

5. Answer Customer Questions

Your customers have questions and you have expert knowledge. Do not take your knowledge for granted. If there is a specific set of questions that customers seem to ask on a daily basis then turn those queries into individual blog posts.

6. Tutorials

Similar to answering questions, tutorial posts that are specific to your industry (e.g. teaching customers how to change a flat tire, make better coffee, repair their fishing rod, etc.) might be a common task for you, but could really provide value your customers. One simple way to liven up tutorial posts is to add video or photo which can help enhance your instructions.

7. Mind Mapping

If you are not familiar with mind mapping, you can read Darren’s terrific mind mapping articles here, here, and here.

To create small business blog post ideas with mind mapping, draw a square in the center of a piece of paper and write the name of your business in the square. Begin jotting down ideas as you work out from the center. Do not stop to think, over analyze, and critique just get your ideas down on paper and you can refine them later.

8. Comparison Post

Take two similar items in your business and do a side by side comparison of the benefits, cost savings, and overall value of each. Own a bike shop, why would I buy a Cannondale over a Trek? Or, own a flower shop, what are the similarities and differences between roses and sunflowers?

9. Day in the Life

Many small business owners find it difficult to write about themselves. But your daily activities are truly unique and blog post worthy.

• What is a day, a week, or a even a month in your small business life like?
• Do you get up at 5:00a.m. and work until 10:00p.m.?
• What are you doing during the workday at your small business?

10. Your Suggestions

We have gotten you to nine tips for creating more small business blog posts and now it’s your turn to help get us to 10, 11, 12…. 100 suggestions. What are your tips for creating small business blogging ideas?

Mark Hayward hates the snow and cold! Luckily, he owns a small business in the Caribbean. Mark is passionate about helping other small business owners avoid the online mistakes he has made. You can follow Mark on Twitter @mark_hayward and you can subscribe to his RSS Feed for weekly small business social media marketing tips.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

9 Tips for Creating More Small Business Blogging Ideas

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9 Tips for Creating More Small Business Blogging Ideas