WordPress is the choice of many small business owners for their website. If they’ve been around the block with different themes, most have landed on Thesis for WordPress or maybe competitor Headway.  I’m a Thesis guy and I discovered it by way of Brian Clark at Copyblogger.  Chris Pearson and Brian Clark recently split paths and Brian moved to working with StudioPress and it has officially merged into a new company under Brian’s leadership.  You can read about it here, if you are interested.

It sounds pretty exciting for the Copyblogger team and I’m happy for them.  I had not been keeping up (surprise, surprise) with all the news on this front and was taken back.  I see some of the picture now and while it doesn’t change my loyalty to Thesis it does make me wonder about the long term.  As a scout for my small biz readers, I’ll keep informed and let you know if there’s a reason to migrate. We’ll try StudioPress out on a site or two down the road and report back, too.  But at this point, I don’t see myself moving away from Thesis as it works wonders, is pretty intuitive, and has an amazing support forum.

Some of the official news from the above link:

About Copyblogger Media, LLC

Joining Brian Clark and myself [Brian Gardner] in this new venture as partners are Sean Jackson (creator of Scribe SEO), Tony Clark (co-creator of Teaching Sells, Third Tribe, and a new WordPress product called Premise), and Sonia Simone, Senior Editor of Copyblogger and co-founder of Third Tribe with Brian, Chris Brogan, and Darren Rowse.

As a full-fledged new media company, Copyblogger Media, LLC will have multiple lines of business, including online education and live events. But the thing that caught my attention was Brian’s vision for a suite of software tools, specifically for the WordPress space. As you may know, Brian Clark no longer works with Chris Pearson and Thesis, so there was a missing part.

Also in that news announcement was a new product that I’ve been planning to try: Scribe, an SEO platform for content optimization.

Engaging content makes the difference online, but unless you also spoon feed it to search engines, you don’t benefit from profitable, targeted traffic. Scribe makes SEO simple by providing powerful tools for finding the right keywords, optimizing content for search, and building quality links.

Finally, in the news post was a hint about something else that’s coming soon from the new Copyblogger Media empire :: a new WordPress tool called Premise.  This promises to help you with conversion optimization, or, as we simply say — improving your website sales.  How do you move people along a path, encourage them along the different paths they might take on your site, and get them to buy?  It appears that Premise will answer some of that and we’ll be eagerly watching. We’re still huge fans of Copyblogger and the now expanding team.

We’re sad that Thesis is no longer tied to Copyblogger and profiting from Brian Clark’s ideas and vision, but we’re sure that Chris Pearson will continue to provide a rock solid product in Thesis.  You can read more about why we  like Thesis by clicking here.

Circtistic creates unique holiday ornaments from touch-sensitive circuit boards.  They also create custom designs and business cards from the same material.  If you are looking for a special ornament that will get oohs and aahhs from the family and kids, take a look.

Design Principal, Thomas Smith, shared some of the areas where they’ve been working on their sales.

From Thomas:  “The biggest issue we have run into is how to demonstrate the product on our website.  We have set up at small shows and have no problems selling the ornaments when someone has them in their hands and experiences their unique interaction.  I have posted demonstration videos on YouTube that I link to our Facebook fan page, which has helped traffic to some degree.  The best way to experience the product is picking it up and it starts flashing on contact…95% of the time there is a wow factor from the potential buyer. “

Laine Cunningham is an author and professional speaker on native cultures and ways.  It all started when Laine Cunningham spent six months camping alone in the Australian outback.

She has been featured in MSNBC, Women’s Day, and the Sydney Morning Herald and a variety of other media outlets.  She identified these three challenges for Sales Rescue Team members to take a look at. 

From Laine: My top challenges:

1.  Finding a way to have more detailed information on the workshops and seminars to interest people without ending up with a messy website.

2.  Driving “buyer” traffic to the site:  Organizations who will want to book the speaking engagements/workshops/seminars.

3.  Finding ANYONE who does publicity work who actually has connections in my field (metaphysical/self-help). This doesn’t sound like it’s web related but that means I’m having trouble getting the right kind of media contacts to go to the website.  I have had some very small successes and have been quoted in national name-cache outlets (MSNBC, Psychology Today, some women’s mags) but those are all coming through separate efforts.  I don’t know how to get shows to consider my website as a resource when they need a talking head or a quote.

]]> http://www.salesrescueteam.com/2009/10/review-laine-cunningham-author-and-public-speaker/feed/ 5 http://www.salesrescueteam.com/2009/09/review-its-in-the-stars/ http://www.salesrescueteam.com/2009/09/review-its-in-the-stars/#comments Mon, 28 Sep 2009 04:19:38 +0000 TJ McCue http://www.salesrescueteam.com/?p=221

It’s In The Stars is a personalized keepsake gift company. They have loads of positive testimonials from real customers. The site has good energy and a positive design. The director/owner paints a pretty clear picture of what areas she’d like help on. Right out of the gate, Elizabeth demonstrates she knows and cares about her customers.

“My best sales (and that’s not many) have come from publicity appearing in magazines and newspapers. Unfortunately that is not often possible to achieve every quarter, let alone every month.

The LoveStars (30-35 pages) and BabyStars (45-50 pages) bound reports are unique, personalised gifts that are ideal for anniversaries, birthdays, Christmas, dating couples, engagements, Mothers Day, new babies, Valentines Day and weddings. Overall, 83% of my customers are women, with most buying BabyStars but a fair number of women buying LoveStars overall. Curiously, we still get a lot of men who buy the LoveStars reports – perhaps they have run out of romantic gift ideas and want to please their partner with a tangible gift that literally says something about their relationship!

According to the stats, the vast majority of visitors come to my site looking for a free monthly horoscope. They can read that, and are invited to sign up for the free monthly horoscope which contains additional information, the 2009 annual forecast, a 10% birthday discount on any report, and to receive special offers and surveys. I have grown my email list organically.

I sell my reports through my website and also through 20+ gift websites in Australia, New Zealand and recently, the UK. After each report, I send my customer an online survey to fill out. To date I have 60+ testimonials – I had one customer tell me they’d bought their report after recognising the name of their lecturer in New Zealand so she knew they were genuine customers. I hope you can help me!”

– Elizabeth Ball