From John Chow to ProBlogger we have seen more and more people becoming Guest Blogger’s. The advantage to the host blog is that they get someone that might be subject matter expert to add something profound to there online community. The advantage to the guest is that they usually get a bit of traffic and maybe some new community members of their own.

You may see some guest blogger’s here on our own blog in the coming weeks. We are talking with several blogger’s to see if they are interested in adding to our community.

I found an interesting site that helps blogs and guest blogs find each other. The site called Guest-Blogger.com allows you to sign up and either post your blog or find blogs to be a guest blogger at. As a guest blogger you are given the option to communicate with the host blog owner and then you can start a conversation on if there is a match. I think this is an interesting concept and have signed up to see how it works.

Is there any blogger’s you would like to see be a guest on our blog?

This might come off as a little too fundamental for any gurus in the audience, but remember that this is Marketing 101, not 421. The Four Ps, as they have come to be known, are the basic building blocks of marketing. They make perfect intuitive sense and they seem like something you may know already, but far too many people focus on only one or two aspects of the marketing cycle, largely ignoring the other, equally important components. What are the Four Ps, you might be asking? Well, I’ll tell you.

According to E. Jerome McCarthy, there are four main activities or components to the marketing cycle. As you can probably guess, they all start with a P.

1. Product: This always comes first. This is the actual good or service that you are looking to sell, and what you should be focusing on is how it best suits the needs of your potential customers. Is your product actually useful? Easy-to-use? How is it better than what your competitor is offering?
2. Pricing: What is your product worth in the marketplace? We all know that the price of any given item can sway customers one way or another, and at the same time, you have to find that delicate balance between supply and demand so that you can arrive at the price that brings in the most profit. Set the price too high and you’ll get fewer customers. Set the price too low and your margin becomes negligible. It’s all about balance (and attractiveness).
3. Promotion: This is the “traditional” part of marketing that most people think of when the term comes up. This includes everything from advertising and publicity down to the one-on-one interaction between a salesperson and a potential client. Contests, for example, are a form of promotion.
4. Placement: Also referring to distribution, this is how you get the product to the customer. Are you going to have a strictly online store wherein you ship the product to your customers, or are you going to set up a brick-and-mortar storefront where customers can come and physically visit you? When it comes to a physical store, this also refers to where you place a particular item relative to other items. Top shelf? Bottom shelf? Its own table? Etc.

Only by addressing all four Ps can you successfully market (and profit from) your product, whether it be a good (like a music player) or a service (like web hosting).

We have received our eighth Tshirt submission in our Tshirt contest. What do you think?

 

 Remember there is a cash prize for winning so submit your entry today.

After a long discussion internally of how to proceed we have decided to use Trac for the time being. For those not aware of what Trac does, it is a software that allows you to manage software projects. It does this using subversion, a wiki and ticketing system.

We decided to test Trac on a small scale and purchased a test account from hosted-projects.com to see how it will work in the end and if Trac will work for our needs. Based off this test we are now working on building our own Trac server. We will update you in the blog when it is 100% online and ready to go.

We will most likely be offering Trac hosting either as a free service or paid as well based on this test. It is a very niche market but I think as time goes on more and more developers will be designing using Subversion.

On a side note if you have ever installed Trac the install instructions really need to be reworded so that it makes sense. The install instructions are horrible on the Trac site.

You might be living in a different time zone than your primary audience. You might have a spark of inspiration in the middle of the night, but you don’t want your posts to crowd together with a big span of “dead air” in between. What can you, as the mindful blogger, do? Thankfully, within WordPress, you can set it so that any given post can go “live” at any given time. This can ensure that your posts are reasonably spread out over the course of the day. If you’ve got your hands on some juicy embargoed information, you can set it so that your highly informative post goes live the moment the embargo is lifted.

How do you do this? Well, when you’re writing (or editing) a post that has not yet gone live, you’ll notice that along the right sidebar, you have a series of pull-down menus that you can adjust. This is where you set the category for the post, customize the post slug, and so on. One of these options is the Post Timestamp. Here, you can set whatever time and date you want, and the post won’t go “live” on your blog until that time. The last thing you do is click on “Publish” (not on “Save”), and everything will take care of itself from there.

I found this feature particularly useful when I went on vacation earlier this month. I was going to be away from internet access for nearly a week, but readers of my blog were none the wiser, because I had pre-written a number of posts that were slowly published over the course of that week. It was like I never left.

I had some fun testing out the new iGoogle today and decided to build my own Gadget while I was testing it out.

The process was not as hard as I thought it would be. The Gadget is just a list of links but looks good in my iGoogle. You can see a sample of it to the right.

If you would like to add ours you simply need to click on the button bellow.

Want to create your own?

• You can see our source code for our BlueFur Gadget here.
• Next you can test your Gadget code (bottom of the page).
• Once you have tested it you can upload your Gadget here.