I’m using aweber’s very cool blog broadcast to email feature.

And something that looks very much like rss_item_title is a substitution word. Meaning, aweber sees it and substitutes something for it. The most common one is “name”.

Well — it seems to substitute quite nicely in the body of the message, but not in the subject — at least not fully.

I was hoping you’d be able to see something more interesting than just “Thirty Day Challenge Journey” in the email title. What fun is that?  Variety is the spice of life (besides, it adds interest and intrigue…)

And — it will teach me to check my emails that I send out. I DO, after all, seed my own email on my email lists (something I highly recommend that you do.)

Alright — INCREDIBLE embarrassment on this end.

(In addition, I am using the blog editor from Flock — see, there is something 30 DC related in this blog post! I was worried for a second.)

Are y’all using the blog editor? What do you think?

How about the cool blog-to-email feature, if you have aweber?

Leave a comment, let me know!

Tags: aweber, autoresponders, blog feeds, blog to email, 30DC, Thirty Day Challenge

Things have crept to a near-halt in pre-season, though 30DC’ers note that there are still 5 boxes remaining to be opened in the pre-season “calendar.”

Sunday night’s pre-season show was shifted to tonight, Monday night,  July 21.

Since Ed’s promise of a heavy FriendFeed week was just before he acquired his new iPhone.

I fear Ed has gotten lost in Monkey Ball.

Any of you have the new iPhone?  What’s your favorite application?

Tom Beal says his favorite application isn’t an application at all, but a “To Do” list (program?) that is tailored to the “Getting Things Done” methodology.

Meanwhile, the start of the official 30 Day Challenge, August 1st, is just 10 days away.

You can almost hear the engines revving.

Tags: 30Day Challenge, FriendFeed, iPhone

Ha!

I had to carefully follow what Ed said and did in the video.

Quick notes:
After you sign up — EVENTUALLY you will want to add friends.
I imported my FB friends — but I don’t think that’s what Ed
had in mind! (yet).

To get to the place where you include your shared items
from Google Reader, click on the “spice up your feed”
link under the friends tab.

But guess what? Right now I can’t even figure out how
to get back to seeing that link!

That link, though, gives you the page where you add
in the feeds from the various social apps that you belong
to. For instance,  shared items from Google Reader. Or
your youtube account. Certainly your twitter account.

I’m not quite sure how you go about subscribing to a
particular person’s FriendFeed feed — Ed suggests that
you sub to his:  http://www.friendfeed.com/eddale

When I went to the 30DC room –
http://www.FriendFeed.com/rooms/thirty-day-challenge
it did ask me to subscribe, and I did.

I created a room for my fellow teammates (check your
twitters, guys!).

Just to confuse everyone (including myself, because it
looks like FF took my “nick” from an earlier attempt to
sign up, and did not use nextday or, what I thought I
had put in, nextdaycopy.

So… to subscribe to my friendfeed:
http://www.FriendFeed.com/numbers

Who knows.  Maybe it will be like domain names someday
and be valuable.

Why numbers?  Cuz I’m a numbers junkie.  I like testing
and tracking and refining so that people can get the
maximum on their conversions.

Latest success?  Getting more people to confirm their
opt-in on a double opt-in list.  Not only higher percentage,
but also did so faster. :)  The person I did this for was
quite pleased.
Cheers!

Live JoyFully!

Judy Kettenhofen, Profit Strategist/Copywriter
NextDay Copy

Tags: friendfeed, tracking. autoresponders, double-optin, numbers, ed dale, 30 day challenge, facebook

UPDATE — The blog looked terrible — see below as I explain a pitfall in blogging from flock. The tags (I thought I put some in there?) didn’t seem to “come across” — at least, not in wordpress’s “tags” field — and the links open in the same page short of going into html mode there’s no easy way to change that in the flock blog editing environment.

So this is very cool.

I blog from flock — the blog post gets created, it goes out on an RSS feed and then aweber picks it up and sends out the post to my “tdclite” list.

I feel like I’m creating a traffic infrastructure. Hmmm…maybe, more like, information infrastructure.

So — hot announcements:

1/ Google and Yahoo are going to be able to start indexing (at least partially) Flash files. This is HUGE news, and will have far-reaching implications. Remember when the search engines couldn’t index pdf files?

So, one of the headlines reads:

Adobe Provides Flash Technology to Google and Yahoo for Better Indexing

What? Adobe doesn’t like Microsoft?

2/ Just learned, from Russell Brunson, that Clickbank is planning to handle physical products later this year. (Maybe e-junkie and others are eating into their business?)

3/ Ed Dale discussed Google Subscriptions in the 30 Day Challenge lessons — more information to come (I hope) — else I’ll be digging through the developer documentation.

So, you might wonder — since this puts YOUR reccommendation in position #4 for the Search Engine Results Page, what happens if there are more than one subscription has a recommendation?

Well, that happened to me today.

Though I didn’t realize it, the labels to the right of the link are the “subscriptions”.

You can see this by clicking on the “Manage my Subscribed Links”

Now, I thought I had subscribed to the “unix man pages” and was actually looking for the unix “sort” utility. But I hadn’t — and MOST of the responses weren’t what was looking for — but my fault! (Maybe. I’m surprised Google didn’t adjust for my searching preferences which would have heavily weighted sorts for programming.

Okay, and finally…

4/ (or, a message from our sponsors?)
Nearly four years ago a landmark launch occurred. Michel Fortin wrote the copy. The product broke records by selling over $1 million of product within the first 24 hours (a record since broken, many times. For instance, Harlan Kilstein broke it with a letter that pulled in over a million in a matter of hours.)

The update of this product has been eagerly anticipated.

The product? John Reese’s Traffic Secrets. Version #2.

This will be a great launch to watch and to learn from. One of my clients has looked at the first video and felt it was something they’d have to buy. Personally, I liked the 2nd video much better, especially in the last 7-10 minutes. There’s some killer infomration about using twitter.

So — click here to check out the videos.

And I’ve started an email list to talk about the launch, and you can sign upfor that here!

Incidentally, Josh Anderson had some great advice for John about hosting his video — and his advice should save Reese thousands of dollars. You can find the advice here — I seriously, seriously recommend that you grab Josh’s valuable information and put it into a file with all your video information.

So…I’m at the end of this blog post and here 2 things that I’ve noticed:
1/ there’s no place to set the links to open in a new page (!) — and what blogger wouldn’t want that?

2/ the visual editor looks very different than what i see in the “preview” screen.

The ability to go ahead and link to images and include them in the post is cool, though, and the pics show up right in the wysiwyg (?) editor.

This blog post brought to you by:
flock
images by SnagIt

P.S. One of these days I’ll get the “sociable icons” up on my blog. If you liked this post — please Digg it and please Stumble it! Thanks!

Live Joyfully!

Judy Kettenhofen

Tags: flash, clickbank, google subscriptions, 30 Day Challenge, hosting video, traffic secrets, John Reese

I love to organize information (as opposed to other things, like my house.)

So when a number of people made suggestions about what to use for Screen Capture on a thread on the 30 Day Challenge Forums asking for the information, I decided to organize it.

The problem is …

Organizing it would suggest putting it into a nice, tabular format … a table.

Have you ever notice that, of the various things you can put into a post — one of them ISN’T a table?

Arrrrgggghhh!

So, what are my choices?

I decide to create a spreadsheet in Google Docs.

So, I put all my information into the spreadsheet, discovering the mysteries of how to insert a link into a cell in the spreadsheet (it’s like this: =hyperlink(”www.google.com”;”search the web”) — I didn’t find a handy button on the toolbar to do it — though I’m sure there must be one, shouldn’t there ?).

Now what?

Well, I can put an image into the post. Alas, that means the links aren’t clickable. Now you CAN, in html, make parts of an image clickable — I’m sure you’ve seen this — it’s called an “image map”, and there are handy tools for making them. That’s how those “clickable” USA maps work.

And there isn’t going to be a simple way of putting an image map into an image in a post on a forum.

Okay! I’ll…put the table into a post, here, on my blog.

So I export the table to html.

Google gives me an html PAGE.

Not quite what I wanted, but what the heck. I’ll just save the page and copy the html into a blog post…right? Wrong.

When I save the page, not only is over half the page css, but it ALSO links to an external stylesheet. Ugh.

Okay…so, I grab the external stylesheet contents and put them into the html document.

But wait!

Doesn’t css need to go within the <head></head> tags?

Maybe not. Not sure. Hmmmmm…doesn’t seem like a problem I want to tackle right now.

What’s simpler?

I can share the spreadsheet — everyone can view it.

It’s almost like an automatic webpage! (And remember, it’s free…I don’t have to have anything but a Google account to use Google Docs.)

So…here’s the spreadsheet.

So, I’ll put the image in the post.

Oh…image? I forgot to say — yeah, I did capture an image earlier in the process, using SnagIt! (From Techsmith, the same people who bring you Camtasia).

Now, if I was clever, I’d put the image up on Flickr or something. I haven’t ever done that before…hmmm…well, not going to do that today. I’ve spent too much time on this project (which doesn’t bring in any direct income) already.

Of course, the whole issue of putting something up on Flickr rather than your own site is … who gets the traffic?

Anyway … here’s the image…

Now, remember, you can get to the spreadsheet with the clickable links.

(BTW — with 5 different toolbars open at the same time, it was really difficult to scroll to the bottom of the “image insertion” dialog here on Wordpress.

Well, I guess I gotta go twitter — didn’t do any yesterday. I did notice Tony Blake is now following me. (Waves at Tony — “Hi!”). He prolly is following everyone on his forum . If you don’t know Tony, Tony’s a great guy and been around the Internet for a long, long, long time — running one of the 3 premiere Internet Marketing forums on the Internet. (Others are the Warrior Forum and Michael Green’s “How To Corp” forum (sorry, don’t have a link at the moment.) Tony just re-vamped his forum to make it web2.0 “cool”.

Well, gotta go finish this off…hope this has been valuable and informative for ya…Let me know — leave a comment. I look forward to hearing from you!

Live JoyFully!

Judy Kettenhofen, Profit Strategist/Copywrter

NextDay Copy

The typical answer is: Make Flock your default browser.

Actions taken:

1. When I installed Flock, I set it as default browser
2. I also used (in Vista) the Start Menu to go to “default programs” (you should note that there are 2 different things you need to set in “default programs“)
   • “Set your default programs”
   • “Set a file type or program with a protocol”

In fact, if you go into detail, you can discover a number of things where a particular browser can be chosen for. But let’s not get distracted … Let’s get you up and running as quickly as possible.

The 70,000 Foot View Of The Solution:

The basic solution (and it’s okay if you don’t understand this — I will explain! This is just to let everyone know where we are going — AND, if you’re advanced, you can go ahead and act on the information quickly, without going through a lot of detail.

The solution is this:

At the command-line, you have to run the flock browser with a certain option. Assuming that the computer knows where to find flock, (it’s either on the path, or you are executing the command from where flock exists) the command is

flock.exe -silent -setDefaultBrowser

Generally, it’s not on the path, which means that you would want to find the directory (folder) where flock.exe is located and executed there.

WHEW!

Okay, newbies — still with me?

I’m going to show you what you need to do on Windows Vista to fix the problem.

Let’s go.

So FIRST, you want to open up the start menu

Here are a couple of other options that won’t completely work for you — one is using the control panel:

And the next is, using the “default Program” function — though you can go fairly deep, and it might very well be possible to solve the problem — but it’s … well…messy. So let’s take the easy road!

Now, notice that flock is our default browser, according to Windows:

If we right-click on the “default browser” to pull up the context menu, you’ll notice the options are not very interesting. Selecting “Flock Options” brings up the preferences/options dialog that you find at the bottom of the tools menu:

Because of this, we want to find a “more interesting” version of Flock, using the search function at the bottom of the start menu…with the search, just type in the characters of the file or program you are looking for… Don’t type a carriage return, though! That will close the start menu along with the search and you’ll have to start again!

When the search function (1) finally finds Flock (2), we again right-click on it to bring up a very different context-menu…and we want to select “properties” (3) from the menu…

This brings up the “Flock Properties” window … which is actually a shortcut — which is PERFECT — because that gives us the location of the Flock.exe file…

The arrows show you where the file location is, and also points out the quotes that surround the location (also known as a pathname) — follow the instructions I’ve included in the picture– copy and paste the location:

What i’ve done is opened Wordpad and pasted the command I mentioned at the very beginning of this article. But I was missing the pathname, to make it complete. Now that I have the location (pathname) — Now I just replace the “flock.exe” from above with the pathname…

If you can’t read that — it turns out to be:

“C:\Program Files\Flock\flock\flock.exe” flock.exe -silent -setDefaultBrowser

(Which is the location of the flock browser application (flock.exe) on my computer…it may be somewhere else on yours…so do check!

Now, the next thing to do is use the nifty windows shortcut to bring open the “run” window.

This is done by finding the “windows” key — on my keyboard it’s 2 keys to the left of the space bar and has the “wavy” windows logo (looks like a flag or a banner blowing in the wind.

Holding down the Windows Key and clicking the letter “R” key brings up the run dialog box, that looks like this:

You can see the text box, and all you have to do is paste the command from your wordpad or other text document into the “Run” window, followed by a carriage return…

And that should do it! It surely did solve the problem for me in all but 1 of my applications!

After you do this … check it out on the applications you were having a problem with and see if that doesn’t fix the problem!

Hope this helps you….

Jude Kettenhofen

]]> http://nextday-copy.com/30DC/?feed=rss2&p=7 http://nextday-copy.com/30DC/?p=4 http://nextday-copy.com/30DC/?p=4#comments Thu, 19 Jun 2008 19:28:56 +0000 nimda-wp http://nextday-copy.com/30DC/?p=4 This is the theme of a thread started on the 30DC forum.

This is someone new to the 30 Day Challenge who has gone through all the lessons, has installed and configured all the apps and wants to know…well, I’ll let him put it in his own words…

I was wondering if there was any advice from past participants on ways I could use my spare time to prepare, outside of what has already been covered in the tutorials

I can guarantee you that this is not the experience that most people are having with the 30DC — and it’s in no way typical. In fact — it’s the first time I’ve heard this question! (Although I’ve heard some people say that they’d like Ed to go faster.) So if you don’t find yourself with a surplus of free time — don’t worry! You are in the vast majority — along with me!

And here’s an important “meta” lesson: there are lessons going on all the time. Not just the formal “pre-season lessons.”

But even the pre-season lessons are taught on multiple levels — there is something in the lessons for EVERYONE. It’s difficult for me to imagine that someone could go through each tutorial and not learn something … including veterans.

Notice?

Notice what the 30 Day Challenge veterans are doing?

Many of them are sopping up every single bit of Ed that they can find — all the formal lessons; Ed’s weekly sessions, and running off and finding even more Ed.

Now the poster on the forum thought maybe it would be good to go off and learn about SEO and PPC.

That would not be a good move. Because whatever he learned, it wouldn’t be what Ed taught — or what Ed is teaching, or what Ed is going to teach. It’s easy to chomp at the bit, wanting more, more, more.

The answer, as one of my teachers, John Carlton, would say — is by “going deep.”

Remember I said that Ed is teaching at many levels?

Well –so as to not blow away the newbies, some of the more advanced lessons are not being taught explicitly. You kinda have to “read between the lines”.

I would also say that Ed is (imnsho) teaching some deeply moral lessons.

About living (family) and enjoying life (playing guitar) and being a “good person” (giving back) and even making a better world (form teams).

(And a lot about Macs. If Ed needed the money, he could hit Apple up for an Aussie Evangelist postion, I think.)

What do you do when you have, and have the ability to make, so much money that money no longer is the primary issue?

Clearly, one of the answers to that is by “giving back.”

But you don’t have to have achieved Ed’s success to “give back” — or to give at all.

Each of us have things we can contribute — and, in the spirit of building the community, that contribution is important.

Yes, all those lessons — you can learn some great stuff from Robert Cialdini’s “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.” You can learn them as “tactics”. But they work a whole lot better when they permeate your life and your business — and where you become, like Jay Abraham says in his “Strategy Of Pre-eminence” — your client’s trusted advisor.

I’m thinking that some of the newcomers might benefit from some of the lessons from TDC 2007. For instance, lessons about using the forum.

And someone created a nice mindmap of the 2007 Challenge — I’ll be posting a link here in the blog…so stay tuned!

(And….feel free to comment, and feel free to click that big orange button up there and sign up for this blog’s RSS feed. And/or you can sign up to my “TDCLite” list here I’m going to be setting my RSS feed to go out to my list — so you may not need to sign up for the list — unless you want to get some of the additional gems and late-breaking broadcasts (that are more wordy than I can fit into my twitter: http://www.twitter.com/nextday )

And, if you are new and haven’t quite figured out what you do when you click the orange button — be sure to check out the new lessons Ed has put up — the 3 part “lesson 6″ — on Google Reader.

If you haven’t joined the fun yet…you can start right now by going here!

‘Til next time –

Live JoyFully!

Judy Kettenhofen

NextDay Copy

]]> http://nextday-copy.com/30DC/?feed=rss2&p=4 http://nextday-copy.com/30DC/?p=3 http://nextday-copy.com/30DC/?p=3#comments Tue, 17 Jun 2008 06:46:42 +0000 nimda-wp http://nextday-copy.com/30DC/?p=3 Well, that’s where we are…in the beginning.

Well, not quite. We are 2 weeks and 2 days into “Pre-Season” for Ed Dale’s Thirty Day Challenge (TDC or 30DC) 2008!

And Ed has 17 videos on ThirtyDayChallenge.tv already (Okay, he DID create some of them before the formal start of “pre-season”…)

But there are 5 lessons up already! Five!

When asked about the amount of time people need to follow along, Ed said “1 hour a day.”

I’m not sure if he meant that for both pre-season AND the actual 30 Day Challenge. For sure, 1 hour a day during the 30 Day Challenge proper — which will happen during August this year.

You should definitely join in the fun — your knowledge of the Internet will grow by leaps and bounds! And you might even make some money! One participant from last year says that he can attribute a quarterly increase of $250,000 in sales directly to last year’s challenge.

I did the 2007 Challenge and I made a little over $8. I obtained a #4 listing in Google for my target phrase which had about 29,000 competing pages. This got me about 100 visitors a day to my blog!

Having a #4 listing in Google was a thrill!

C’mon along…and we’ll do it together! Join us here!