Another cartoon created by creative genius  Matthew Schmoll. 
If you have an idea for a future comic or would like to submit your own BlueFur cartoon let us know in a comment.

TGIF, everyone! It’s time for another whirlwind tour of the blogosphere, so let’s see what people are chatting about this week.

Moo-moo-mooing his way to the top is John Cow. Sometimes, you just need a break from munching on the same cud out in the pasture. After trudging through the blogging game for a while, you may run out of post ideas and you won’t know what to do or where to turn. Thankfully, the beef is bringing the goods with 6 blogging burnout cures. The last suggestion may surprise you.

Derrich is in the process of opening a bar in San Antonio, but he’s been having some trouble coming up with a name. After much deliberation, he’s decided on something rather clever: ReTox Bar. ReTox is clearly a play on “detox”, except, well, it’s telling you that you need to “tox” again. This is definitely a name that sticks. Check out the funky logos he has going on too!

Marisa is a wife, mother, and grandmother. Over at her Dandelion Patch, she has discovered an activity that she describes as a boy thing. It’s the thing that boys do when they’re alone in their rooms. It involves their bodies and it’s something that a mother may not want to see, even though we all know that nearly every boy does it. Don’t worry, the link is totally work safe.

The self-proclaimed root of all evil John Chow discloses what has been his biggest online income killer. Even though he’s pulling in over $10,000 a month on John Chow dot Com alone (not to mention the cash he rakes in through The TechZone), he has suffered a huge hit to his online income because of this evil thing, costing him hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost income. The worst part is that there is absolutely nothing he can do about it. Can you guess what this income killer is?

RT Cunningham from Untwisted Vortex reminds us that while quality content is absolutely integral to the success of a blog, grammar, spelling, and punctuation are equally important. You’ve got to proofread. You’ve got to make use of that spell checker. You’ve got to dot your I’s and cross your T’s. Now if only we could convince John Chow to do that.

Well now you should have a unique business model, a concise business plan and a clear understanding of your target market. So now your ready to start selling, but how?

Selling is really a numbers game. If you connect with 100 customers of those 100 depending on the product 1-10 will buy or be interested in buying your product or service.

Here are the steps I would go about to start selling:

1. Have a basic understanding of the product or service I want to sell. Do not get hung up on knowing every single exact detail on the product or service. Later if you get asked something you don’t know you can always find out and get back in touch with the perspective customer later.
2. Create a list of people to contact that fall into the target market for my product and service. For example if I am selling to Soho start-ups I would go to the local city hall and request a list of new businesses in my area.
3. Design a follow-up email that explains as simple as possible how to find out more details on my product or service. My email would not be more then 3 lines and include a link to our site. I would create this before contacting people to ensure that when I am calling that I can send the details right away.
4. Turn off all distractions, lock the door and set aside a straight hour or two to do calls. This is very important to do your calls in clumps. This keeps you in a groove and ensure that it really gets done. Make it a contest with yourself and see how many sales or emails you can send out each day and see if you can do better it each day.
5. Write down all details and do what you say you will do. After you hang up with a customer be sure write down all the details. Do not write (or type) while you are the phone as you will most likely miss what is said or not sound professional. If in your call you said you would send an email, call back or send a brochure then be sure to do it that day.

These are the basics of selling. I will do a follow-up next few week with tips on how to develop your sales skills.

Bonus Tip - When talking with a customer try and do less talking and more listening. Instead of talking and talking and talking and talking. Engage your customer with questions about them.

Tomorrow is the big day. The huge day. The day where Homer and the rest of the Simpson family grace the silver screen in their feature film debut. The Simpsons Movie will undoubtedly be a huge success and I will definitely be watching it.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, about a dozen 7-11 convenience stores in North America have been converted into Kwik-E-Marts, complete with official signage out front, Apu behind the counter, and the employees of the stores get to wear Kwik-E-Mart uniforms. Not only that, but there is a bevy of official licenced promotional products that have been taken directly out of the show, like the Squishee (slurpee), Krusty-Os cereal, Radioactive Man comic books, and Buzz Cola. Many of these items can now be found on eBay.

It’s clear that the partnership between 7-11 and the Simpsons Movie has been great for all parties involved. The Simpsons Movie gets a whole lot of extra exposure, getting people to climb over one another for a box of Krusty-Os, whereas 7-11 stores get customers that they may not otherwise have captured. Even the stores that have not been fully converted into Kwik-E-Marts have enjoyed an increase in business as a result of this promotion.

Did you get caught up in Simpsons mania? Are your sipping on a Squishee as you read this post?

An interesting topic was posted over at the domain tools blog about how the post office could route mail based on a domain name. Right now if you were to send a letter addressed to the Prime Minister (without an address) then it would make it to our Prime Minister. If that is possible then one would think it would be possible to route mail if you were to put a domain as the address. It’s not possible today but with some technology it could work.

Imagine if you were to be given a first.lastname.mail domain and then anyone who wanted to send you a snail mail letter could address your mail with just your domain and it was delivered to you based on your whois.

If you moved it would not matter because you would only need to update your whois and the mail would then begin to route to your new location.

I can see something like this working. What do you think?

New versions of WordPress come out all the time, but many bloggers are hesitant to take the plunge each time, because of several fears. Your blog might explode and get regurgitated out the other side as a jumbled mess. You might lose out on some of that fantastic content that you poured your heart and soul into. You may forget to deactivate a plug-in, rendering a not so favorable result. It’s also a pain in the you know what to have to go through the upgrade process every couple of months.

And it was with all of these things in mind that the WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plug-In was created. The plug-in doesn’t exactly walk you through the upgrade process; it does it for you.

Here is what WPAU does:
1. Backs up the files and makes available a link to download it.
2. Backs up the database and makes available a link to download it.
3. Downloads the latest files from http://wordpress.org/latest.zip and unzips it.
4. Puts the site in maintenance mode.
5. De-activates all active plugins and remembers it.
6. Upgrades wordpress files.
7. Gives you a link that will open in a new window to upgrade installation.
8. Re-activates the plugins.

The plugin can also can be run in a automated mode where in you do not have to click on any links to go to the next step.

To download the plug-in, go here. You can thank John Chow for letting me know about this.