Last year we tested live online courses and taught over 100 people to use cPanel, PHP and do online marketing. One of the barriers we had was with the software we were using. The software required you to call a long distance number to listen to voice portion. This cost anywhere from $3 to $5 depending on where you were calling from (free if you have VOIP). I believe this was preventing more people from taking the training because we had close to 300 people sign-up for the courses and just over a 1/3 of them attended.

I have finally found and been testing a new software that provide voice built in to the software. This means there is no cost at all to attend the course. From our community polls you can see we are working on developing the courses you as a community want. I have put together a schedule for the following 3 months. I will try and add a few weekend webinars in a few weeks depending on the success of our first few courses.

When is the webinars happening?
Monday, March 31, 2008 through  May 26, 2008 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM PST

Where is it happening?
Online (you will need a computer with speakers and port 1935 open).

Registration
To register for the free webinars view the schedule.

As a website owner you have work to be done and need to find the right person to do it. As a developer or designer you want to find new customers. Our community has these 2 types of people visit it daily. Does it make sense then that we provide a job board?

It would not take that much to add a job board and I think it would bring value to our community. As a job poster you would sign-up and be able to post a job for free. Developer and designers would be able to apply to your job at no cost to them.

What do you think?

USB flash drives are relatively inexpensive these days, but they can’t carry around all that much data. On the consumer level, most thumb drives top out at about 8GB, but what if you want to carry around more data than that? There are external hard drives, but in order to gain access to a large capacity, you typically have to opt for a 3.5-inch external drive. These usually require an outside power source, making them less convenient to use.

Alternatively, there are 2.5-inch external hard drives that can be powered by just a USB connection, the same connection that you can use to transfer the data. The downside of this format, typically, is that they cannot hold nearly as much data as their 3.5-inch counterparts. Buffalo has found the perfect middle ground with the MiniStation TurboUSB portable hard drive. It’s a 2.5-inch external drive, but it can hold up to 500GB of data. That’s a lot of 1s and 0s!

The MiniStation TurboUSB isn’t much bigger than a deck of cards and it does not require an external power source. The USB cable itself can wrap around the perimeter of the device, so you don’t have to worry about losing the cable either. It costs more than a USB flash drive, but at $329, the Buffalo drive isn’t all that expensive either, especially considering that you can fit half a terabyte in your shirt pocket.

Congratulations to this weeks geek Rinko. This weeks questions are…

This weeks questions are…

1.   Who is this?

2.   Who is this?

3.   Who is this?

4.   Who is this?

5.  What do these people all have in common?

Now that we have generated some traffic to our site by posting our site to forums for review it is time to quantify that traffic. Our hosting does include awstats, webalizer and analog stats but these programs are all fairly average for showing stats. This week we will focus on adding Google Analytics to our site.

Google Analytics is a free and powerful stats software. To use Google Analytics you need to sign-up for an account. Once you have done that they will provide you with code to put in to your page. To do add the code to your site you can use file manager to edit each page and paste the code at the bottom of  your pages and save them.

Once all your pages have the code in them you can begin to view your detailed stats.

For those who have a blog, instead of pasting the code into each page you can use the Google Analytics WordPress plugin.

If you get stuck let me know in the comments.

So far we have covered a lot of material and discussed some laws of branding. There are more laws of branding to cover in up coming posts. For now it is time to pull some of what we have talked about together in an example of how you can create a well branded company.

This example will be based on a flower shop. Everyday in towns all over the world flower shops are opening and closing. Besides a select few most flower shops do a horrible job of branding.

Applying the law of expansion and the law of contraction to the business model we will limit the new flower shop to one flower. For this example I will choose the flower to be daisy’s. Choosing one flower will allow us to limit the amount of stock, create buying power with growers and specialize in that one flower.

Using the law of the word we will own the word happiness. To do that we will have a whimsical logo of a daisy with a smiley face on it. The target market for our product will be men who wish to make their significant other happy. Our tag line will be ‘bring home happiness in a box’.

Using the law of publicity and the law of advertising we could find a spot outside of a high traffic commuter area (like a Sky Train) and hand out one daisy to men as they head home. Each daisy would have a tag with the shops tag line, website and phone number on it. Doing this at various commuter areas once a week will an excellent way to market and create publicity.

How do you think a business like this would do?