As far as biographies go, this was one of the better that I’ve read. McCullough has a way of painting the scenes the way a fiction writer does. Perhaps partly due to the vast collection of writings by and to John Adams, you really get a sense of how things unfolded for our country in its infancy.

It took me a bit less than half the book to really get into it, but the history was interesting enough that I didn’t want to abandon it. I’ve never had a passion for history, but in my “old age” it’s intriguing to me now (maybe because I won’t be tested on it). I’d say this book has renewed an interest in the early days of our government, and I may pick up a few of McCullough’s other books on the subject.

Other books by David McCullough

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You see places on TV and they look so beautiful. But then you go there, and standing there yourself it’s not as beautiful as you thought it was.

Snow isn’t like that. It’s beautiful on TV, but it’s completely breathtaking in person. I never thought I’d be so excited about something like this.
-Kathy

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Click here to download this free report – The Genesis Guide for Absolute Beginners (PDF – 1.4 MB)

Static sites are OK, as long as you don’t have to do much updating. But let’s face it: they’ll make you seem old. It’s rare for me these days to find clients who don’t want updates, and it can be annoying and time-consuming to have to be on the hook to make those small changes in a word here and there.

These days, I always look to WordPress first, and I recommend you do the same.

Why WordPress? Isn’t that for blogs?

Back in the day, people jumped on WordPress because it was a new and useful tool for blogging. You can easily set a blog up, add new posts, and manage your content really well.

But it’s not only useful for blogging. In fact, you don’t even need to use it as a blog. Your whole website can just be created as pages. The best part about it is that once you create the website using WordPress, your clients can have their own login information and be able to edit the pages themselves. And they don’t need to know HTML to do it.

It’s all built for you

In addition to giving the maintenance back to the client, there are also myriad features baked into WordPress or else easily added. A search feature usually comes stock. Want to add some social media hooks? There’s a plugin for that. Want to be able to manage some ads? That’s already been built; you just install it.

If you can think of it, it’s probably been built and is most likely free.

You don’t even need to design it yourself. You can find tons of free themes, or you can buy even better WordPress themes that you just install.

Do you SEO?

A big buzzword these days is SEO. If your site isn’t “optimized”, you’re told you’ll have a hard time getting people to find your page. To an extent that’s true, and Google is by far the biggest traffic generator to all of my blogs. It can be daunting, but WordPress has ways to almost teach you good SEO practices.

And there are even plugins for SEO. In a later post I’ll talk about this a bit more. My point is WordPress can help with yours.

You should use a framework

The problem with WordPress, though, is that there’s so much there that it can be nerve-wracking to make sure you get everything perfect. That’s why there are frameworks.

Good frameworks are designed with your best interest in mind. They organize your code so it’s easier for Google to read your site. They strip out the unnecessary stuff and give you some pretty slick enhancements. Simply, they make your WordPress site even better.

Better frameworks provide better ways of doing things, like using custom menus and better SEO customization.

The best frameworks do all that, give you amazing themes to make your site really pop, and make it really easy to customize your site any way you want.

The framework I use: Genesis

When I build a site, I always install the Genesis Framework, from the folks at StudioPress. They understand internet marketing in and out, and they have created a WordPress framework tailored to people who want to get their site noticed and visited.

I wasn’t sure about wanting to buy a framework when FindingMyFitness was new. But I did, just to see. I wish I took a screenshot so I could show you, but my traffic literally instantly tripled the day after I started using Genesis. I’m not trying to exaggerate when I say that Genesis took my site to the next level.

Beyond the framework itself, they also have 40 or so eye-popping themes to choose from that will meet whatever design you’re looking for. Want something minimalist? Try the Minimum Child Theme. Are you working on a site for an artist? Try Landscape. Want a sort of quirky theme? Vintage could be the theme for you.

Or maybe you’re building a website for a local business. Regardless of what you need, StudioPress has you covered.

Further reading

If you’re intrigued by the idea of WordPress frameworks, I have a PDF for you. It’ll teach you all about building a wordpress site using frameworks. It’ll teach you how to set up a framework in a WordPress site, how to fix your site’s SEO settings for prime Google-ability, how to add widgets and plugins, and more. It’s a really comprehensive PDF, and it’s yours for the downloading. No signups or email addresses required!

Click here to download The Genesis Guide for Absolute Beginners (PDF – 1.4 MB)

If you have any questions, please feel free to drop them in the comments or drop me a line. I love talking about websites and WordPress, and I’m always willing to help! And I’d love to see what you end up creating! Links in the comments are welcome!

I have one question for you: what’s the biggest challenge you face when creating a new website?

photo credit: wilhei55

Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. Thanks for supporting the site!

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Maybe you’re looking for some Secret Santa gift ideas. Gift cards are a pretty hot item as well. You can spend a lot of time on these “deals for today” type sites (woot.com and the like), but you run the risk of not finding the right present for family members on your list.

In this economy, too, people are looking for Christmas gift deals all over the place. I had forgotten about this one spot I use often and felt like I should share it with you. In fact, I just bought some books for Christmas and got 8% cash back on it.

Online sales have gone up this year, and were even almost 30% higher than Black Friday. People are looking for deals online, and I’ve got just the place for you.

(If you’re already sold on it and don’t want to read more, just head on over with this link and sign up!)

Get paid for the shopping you were going to do anyway

It’s called Ebates, and quite simply you get cash back for making purchases you’d make anyway.

It almost sounds like a scam, but it’s not. If you use the website I’ll tell you about as your starting point, you can find great deals at over 1000 stores you already shop at. Then you click the link with a savings code and you’re sent to the site you would have gone to anyway.

For example, let’s take the books I picked up. I go to ebates.com and look for my Barnes and Noble store. When I click on the name, I get redirected to www.bn.com. That’s where I would have gone anyway to buy these books, only know they know I came from ebates (because of a cookie on your computer, nothing troublesome – every site in the world uses them). Whatever I buy from Barnes and Noble, I get 8% cash back.

It’s really a simple explanation

Here’s how I think this works. A lot of online retailers give people affiliate commissions for sales. Amazon, for example, gives me a small commission when you buy something via a link from my site. It’s the same exact thing.

The guys who started ebates had a great idea. They decided to partner up with online retailers to get affiliate commissions when people go to their sites via ebates. The folks at ebates give some of that affiliate commission to you, the consumer, as a way to keep you using the site. You get money, ebates gets money, and the retailers get the sales. It’s just mutually beneficial marketing.

You can save a lot of money by getting it back AND get some free stuff in the process

To save extra money, I also had a coupon for Barnes and Noble. So I bought my stuff and got the 8% cash back, but I also was still able to use the 20%-off coupon I had gotten in the mail. Sure, using the coupon makes me get less money, but all of the discounts together work really well together.

Plus when you sign up for ebates, you get free stuff right away. If you sign up for ebates, you’ll get a free $10 gift card as a bonus. You can get one for Barnes & Noble, Target, Home Depot, and more. Just for signing up for your free account.

I don’t want to sound more spammy than I already do, but I need to mention again that ebates is FREE.

Why I’m encouraging you to sign up

I try not to support stuff on my blog that I don’t think is worthwhile, and I’m definitely not in it for the money.

There are two reasons I’m encouraging you:

1. There’s no real reason not to use ebates. It’s exactly what it says it is: you get money for buying stuff you’d buy anyway. It works, and you save money (in the sense that they give it back). I’m all about saving money. If you’re using a cash back credit card, you’d get even more back (but most of the stores on ebates give you way more cash back than your credit card would if you just went to the actual store)
2. I do actually get credit if you sign up using my link and end up buying $25 worth of stuff eventually. I don’t get money every time you buy, so it’s not one of those pyramid schemes. I’d just get a small ($5 I think) commission if you sign up to use ebates and make a purchase.

I want to be clear, though, that I like it so much I wouldn’t even be offended if you didn’t use my link to sign up. Obviously I’d love it if you used my referrer link, but if you don’t want me to get credit, just go to www.ebates.com and sign up.

So there you have it! You can finish your shopping from the comforts of your own couch and get some money back for your trouble!

Have a Merry Christmas, everyone!

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I don’t know why it’s one of the hardest things for me. Probably because I’ve never really maintained one, and getting momentum is often hard. You know what old Newton said.

I know God doesn’t give us extra credit for reading our Bibles regularly, and I know it’s more for me than it is for Him, but I really want to wind down 2011 in His word every day.

On FindingMyFitness, I’ve talked about making health and fitness easier by automating it. Finding ways to have to think less about doing a task so it becomes easier to actually complete it.

Not to cheapen Bible reading, but I think that’s what I need to do here.

Enter YouVersion.com

A while back I downloaded YouVersion Bible to my phone. It’s really helpful for finding verses while on the go, and it even has a way to “read” while driving because of the audio Bibles that come with it.

The other day they sent me an email with five different reading plans for Christmas, and I just really like that idea. I can sign up for one and either read it on my phone (it’s part of their app) or read it online.

Check out their Bible reading plans here.

Once Christmas is over

The plan I chose ends on December 26th, but I don’t want to stop there. I have a plan (a mental one, not a phone one) to read the Bible next year specifically for information regarding fitness and nutrition, but I also want to pick a year-long plan I can read each day as a small 5-10 minute devotional. This app has a lot of those as well.

Another thing I like is they have ways to remind you. You can sign up for email reminders or post about it on Twitter and Facebook and have your friends remind you. I’d love it if my phone would remind me, but I don’t see that option at the moment.

I didn’t expect this post to turn out to be a commercial for YouVersion, but I guess I really can’t recommend it enough if you have a smartphone (they have iPhone, Android, and Blackberry apps). It’s useful on the web too, but it’s much more convenient on your phone.

So there you have it. Automate your Bible reading by finding a plan. All you need beyond that is the discipline to actually do it (and that’s the hard part)!

God bless you guys,
-j

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What I’ve Done

Since the last update, I finished the course emails and even added another two emails to the series. I decided that when I write a post this early on that could be interesting to everyone (cornerstone content), I’m going to add it to the series. There are currently a total of 8 emails in the series.

I also contacted a couple bloggers to see if I could write them guest posts for their own blogs. There aren’t any candle or craft blogs in the MDBP, but I did find a couple that deal with parenting and approached them with a couple ideas (candle-making as activities with kids). So I’ll be getting my first guest posts out there pretty soon! The first one has been submitted to Perfecting Parenthood and will get run mid-November.

I’ve still got the bad habit of checking my stats every day after I do something on the site, but this time things finally are paying off. Out of 7 visitors, 5 were from search engines. I’m on page 1 of Google for more than a couple of the major search terms I’m going for! Because of my previous searching, I also know that OurCandleMaking.com is the only blog that has the info people will look for.

We had our first list subscriber yesterday too! That’s more exciting that I thought it would be. I want to email that person and give them a free candle or something.

Oh, we also shot our first video.

What I’ve Learned

One thing I’ve learned that I didn’t expect at all is that reaching out to other bloggers not even in your niche is an excellent idea. In talking to Alex of Perfecting Parenting, I got an idea for my first candle-making ebook! It’s an idea I would never have thought of on my own, and in talking to a few people about it, it could be lucrative (well, as lucrative as it could be, I suppose).

Honestly I think one of the major factors in getting listed higher up in Google (aside from making sure I do really good research for my posts) is being listed in high-level blog directories. Alltop and BlogCatalog both list OurCandleMaking, and I really think that made a difference.

Finally, this month’s biggest lesson is in using reddit. I’d used it before with not really much success, but I think I figured out the problem. There are two important things you need to know to use reddit effectively:

1. Find the appropriate category to post your links in. There’s no really good way to do that. You could search for things related to your link and see where they’re getting posted, or you could look through them all to find the right one. Just like you’re blogging to a niche, reddit is so big you need to post links to a niche as well or no one will see them.
2. Engage in the reddit community. Don’t just post your own links. In fact, you should be posting many links that are not your own for every link you post that is your own. Leave comments on other posts. Answer questions and build up a reputation that people will trust. Only always dropping your own links in there won’t get you many visits.

Following my own advice, my secrets to success post got me nearly 500 visits in one day and a few subscribers. Before that, I had only gotten 200 visitors in a month. Obviously that’s going to taper off, but it was a pretty cool boost.

What I’ll Do

Before the next update, I will have the video edited and uploaded. I need to write other cornerstone content to link up to some static pages, and I’m going to write another guest post.

On the business end, though, we need to make some candles to sell. I don’t know if I’m going to meet my goal of having candles sold at Rostov’s by the end of November because I don’t have any money to invest in those supplies until we sell some of the candles we’re currently working on.

I’ll also continue with my reddit strategy and also work on other link-building strategies to improve that Google ranking.

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Time for the mid-month MDBP update!

What I’ve done

I’m not sure what happened, but I got incredibly pumped one day to knock out a bunch of stuff for the site.

All of the lesson emails for the “how to make candles” course have been written. I ended up adding an extra lesson to the course, so I have 2 more articles to write. There are 7 lessons in all, and it’s all free. I’m really happy with it. By the end of the lesson, my readers will know all the basics and have made two kinds of candles. That is far more than any other candle blog I’ve seen.

While writing the lessons I got some great ideas for monetizing. Since the blog is about making candles, and I’ll sell my candles there too, I am going to offer my readers a storefront. This will be great for them because (hopefully) I’ll be one of the top blogs for candle making, so there will be a large number of potential customers. It’ll be great for me because they’ll pay me a monthly subscription to sell. I may offer a free tier, a monthly tier, and a lifetime tier (maybe 3 years’ worth of subscriptions). A site like Shopify might be good for that.

I also started to create a Facebook page for Our Candle Making. Special Request: please visit the page and “like” it so I can get the 25 likes I need to get a “normal” URL and not just the string of numbers. Thanks!

Most of my readers will be ladies, and my sister is probably the key demographic. She is ALL OVER facebook. I think that will be important. It’s very crude at the moment, but I’ll finish it by the next update. I also created a Twitter account you can follow.

I started brainstorming videos as well. The first video will likely be on making a watermelon gel candle. Bought some fragrance the other day!

What I’ve learned

In trying to find places to promote the candle blog, I am really having a hard time finding active forums and blogs to comment on. I’m learning that I need to be more creative in the promotion of the blog. I have a few ideas, like buy some product from a couple of the more internet-social companies, review it, and then ask them if I can write some guest posts.

What I plan to do

Before the end of the month I’ll finish the course emails and plan out at least one video. A friend at work just gave me a Flip camera, so now I have no excuse!

Kathy and I will also start some production on candles to sell. We found some candle making supplies for not much money. Selling just a few of the candles we’ll be able to make will pay for it.

I also want to have a prototype or a few to take to the local coffee shop. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here before, but I am going to try some soy candles with scents of coffee flavors that Rostov’s makes. It’ll incorporate their beans into the candle design, so I think they’ll really like it. Maybe they’ll order some before Christmas!

Ps> You may have noticed that this post has a lot more links to the blog than usual. That’s intentional. I did some keyword research to get some good link text. Jayzilla’s been around for a while, so we’ll see if it makes a difference.

-j

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Not a whole lot of visible progress on the blog still, but I am working on it behind some scenes.

The $1MBP community is getting pretty big as well. Corbett asked us to use #mdbp when we post to Twitter, and Carolyn started a forum for us to share each other’s links. I think that’s a pretty sweet idea.

What I’ve done

Since my last journal entry, I’ve completed two more lessons in my e-course for a total of three.

I am also promoting links for people. I’m posting a few links to StumbleUpon and Twitter, and I may start using Reddit as well. I’ve had some success there before.

What I learned

I learned when I started my mailing list for FMF that it’s not fun to be playing catch-up throughout the first round of autoresponders. I’m not going to do that this time. The course will launch when the responders are done.

What I plan to do

I currently have six lessons planned for my mini e-course, so I will write the other three by the end of October. I’ll launch the course when I start writing the sixth one.

I will continue promoting at least two posts for every one I offer up.

I also plan to write at least one new post every two weeks until I finish the e-course.

-j

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What I’ve done

The blog I picked to use for this $1M blog project ($1MBP henceforth) is one that I had already set up. It qualifies though because I haven’t really done much, and it hasn’t made any money yet.

I’ve written 5 or 6 posts already, all before starting this TT project, and I’ve had one person link to it (because I wrote a review of their product).

I have also been thinking about autoresponders and have created my list on Mailchimp. There are even a couple partial emails in there.

Yesterday I set up Clicky. Here’s the link to the stats page.

What I learned

I haven’t learned much so far that I didn’t already learn from FindingMyFitness. One thing I’m going to do differently is wait until I have at least 5 of my autoresponders done before promoting the list. Since that’s something I want up pretty much at “launch”, it’s got to become a priority.

I’m definitely looking forward to learning a ton by following Corbett’s project and interacting with the other bloggers who are going to play along as well.

What I plan to do

Between now and the next time I post a journal update (hopefully 2 weeks), I want to have at least one more post written. I haven’t decided on my schedule, and I also have to catch up on Corbett’s posts about the project.

That next post I have planned is going to get turned into my first autoresponder email.

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His goal is to create a blog that earns $1M over its lifetime.

He’s going to describe the process and be very public about it. Since professional blogging is something I’m interested in and would severely help us to be able to go on more mission trips (and also give more), I’m going to follow along.

The blog I’m going to use for this project is OurCandleMaking.com. I’ve talked about it here before. It’s going to fill a huge hole in the candle making niche.

I’m not looking to make a million dollars with this project, just looking for more freedom.

The other reason I like using that blog for the project is because Kathy and I will be able to work on it together. I’d love to be able to make it a bilingual blog.

There’s a category on Jayzilla now that will be my “public journal” of the process that Corbett says is really handy. This is the first post.

Follow along if you’d like!

-j

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