Setting up a blog on Wordpress.com is quick and easy. But once you get serious about wanting to build your own business, you will be interested in your own domain name.

Wordpress.com allows you to upgrade to your own domain for a small fee, which is a great feature. (OM4 also allows you to do this, but we don’t charge for it).

But some people want to migrate to their own domain on another host. And this is where it gets a bit tricky. It is very easy to move, but very easy to lose all your search engine indexing. So your traffic might take a big hit, and take a long time to recover.

Think about it - if you have a page indexed at mysite.wordpress.com, when that page goes off the air (because it is now at mysite.com), Google just rubs it out of the index.

Worpdress.com doesn’t offer you any way to redirect your subdomain site to a new domain hosted elsewhere.

However there is a way to migrate without losing your search rankings.

1. Buy your new domain mysite.com through your own domain registrar.
2. Have a look at what Google and Yahoo have already indexed for your site. Use the site:mysite.wordpress.com query in Google and Yahoo search to do this. You’ll need to keep an eye on this to notice re-indexing.
3. Pay $10 and upgrade to your new domain with Wordpress.com. Wordpress will automatically create redirects for all you pages at mysite.wordpress.com to mysite.com (for the technically minded, these are 302 redirects, not 301s). Wordpress.com will also update the xml sitemap for your site, showing the new domain name.
4. Now you have to be patient and wait for your site to be spidered and for the search engines to follow the redirects. Use that same query on site:mysite.com to see when your pages are re-indexed at the new location.
5. When the index for your key pages is complete, you can move your Wordpress.com site to your new home - perhaps you will download Wordpress from Wordpress.org to do this, or be moving your site to our platform. Either way you will need to use the Export function to get your site content in XML and import it to the new site. You will need to have a copy of all your media files (images, videos, PDFs) and migrate these yourself, as these don’t come with the export.
6. Don’t change the page slugs. Google now has mysite.com (and mysite.com/about) indexed, and this is exactly what the URLs are for your site at your new domain.

Your new site - mysite.com - is now operational on its new host, and your ’search engine equity’ has been preserved.

By enrolling in the Amazon Associate programme, you can place links to Amazon products on your website, like the link to Seth Godin’s book on the right.

When visitors click on your associate links and use the Amazon store to buy the products, you earn a commission. This is mainly 4%, but can be higher for some categories of product that Amazon wants to promote, or if you start to sell a lot of product for them.

This article explains how to enrol in the Amazon Associates programme and add Product Links to your Wordpress website: Amazon Associate Links

And if you haven’t read Seth’s book, buy it from Amazon today!

James is in the process of updating the server platform for Australian sites. This site is already upgraded, and the speed increase is really noticeable. Together with the Dashboard update, everything zips along.

 

Today we have upgraded all OM4 web sites to include the latest WordPress 2.5.1 features.

There are quite a few improvements. Some menu items have been moved, so you may need to scan your Dashboard for some menu items. For a full list of improvements, see this post.

We normally apply WordPress upgrades very quickly, however in this case a lot of testing was required to ensure that WordPress 2.5’s new features and changes were compatible with our custom modifications.

Here is a video showing an example of the new interface.

The Visual Editor is improved, and doesn’t mess up pages with HTML formatting. If you don’t have it switched on, go to your User Profile and tick the Use the visual editor when writing checkbox.

There is a new Media Uploader. It will let you upload multiple files at once. It also automates the right align / left align formatting (so no need to use HTML to set class=’alignright’, just use the option buttons when sending the image to the editor). You can still use the class=’alignright’ as well.

The Presentation menu is now called Design, and the Site Design options are under that.

The Sidebar setup has changed quite a bit. A lot of Wordpress users feel it isn’t necessarily an improvement. There is an article talking about how they work.

In practice, your upgraded web site should work fine. Like most things, you get used to doing things one way. If you have any questions on how it works, just ask for help.

We hope you enjoy the new Dashboard. It is easier and faster overall.

Access to the free site setup facility on OM4Tourism and OM4Business will be withdrawn for a period. Links will come down later today.

At the same time, we will be releasing a new set of paid packages to assist businesses go online using our platform. And I’m looking at an affiliate programme for premium services.

Our zero cost hosting policy will remain.

I’ll look at restoring access to the self managed setup in the future. For now we need to focus on the demand we have for our paid services.

A post on John Andrew’s JohnOn blog talks about Advanced SEO. This is spot on:

… as search strategy defines the opportunity pursued by the web publication under consideration.

The web represents a massive increase in the number of people most businesses can reach. And in general business is only scratching the surface of how they can find new customers and convert them online.

Search engines are a major gateway to those people. So figuring out how your business can participate in search is a strategy. Not a tactic. Day to day SEO is tactical, but don’t think that is all it is.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of those important edges where technology meets marketing. A pure technology view isn’t enough, just as a pure marketing view isn’t enough. SEO requires an understanding of both.

If you are a technologist or marketer and don’t use SEO strategically yet, time to start.

Even more so for business owners.

But if you are starting out, learn about keywords first. Then SEO. It will all make sense.

As the great philosopher once said, if you can’t be free, at least you can be cheap.

For many years Overture was a very popular keyword research tool. But it wasn’t that accurate, and it stopped being updated regularly.  Free, and very, very cheap.

But Overture is still used widely as a meaure of popularity.

Guys, we’ve moved on. Use old data and you miss out on important changes.

There are more accurate data available - even free. And a professional subscription to a keyword tool costs $30-60/mth.

Understanding keywords is much more important than is generally realised. And I think a habitual dependence on Overture can mean missing what is right in front of you. The world has moved on.

Apple’s launch of MobileMe is notable. Is it relevant for small business?

Hard to say, as it hasn’t been released, just announced.

But in a nutshell, no, it is not suitable for small business. Apple could (and probably will) address this in the future however.

I’ve discussed recently that we use Google Apps for our business mail and calendaring. For a whole bunch of reasons mentioned in Simplify your Email Life, so I won’t go into them here.

Apple say that MobileMe is Exchange for the rest of us. Curious. An individual is a lot further away from Exchange than a small business.

MobileMe is an extension of the .mac service, which has never been aimed at small business.

With MobileMe, Apple give us a new browser based email interface. But also calendaring and address book. Sort of like Google Apps.

Apple’s MobileMe service syncs to Mac Mail and Outlook. You also get integration with the Gallery features we have had in Mac, which make it easy to publish galleries of photos to the web.

It runs from me.com, which is a cool domain to be sure.

But it is not a small business application. Businesses want to run their own domain email, such as joe@joesdomain.com. And they need an easy way to manage multiple emails.

Have Apple addressed spam? One of the biggest reasons for going with Google Mail is the spam filtering. If Apple can do as well as Google on this front, then they will earn loyal users of their mail service.

Having used .mac and sync services for some time, I am sceptical that it will be a smooth experience to replicate data across iPhones, Macs and PCs.

And having stopped using desktop mail and calendar apps, I no longer see any reason to replicate information around. Just keeping my mail box and calendar in one place makes sense, all I want is to get to it from anywhere.

My guess is that once people start to use browser mail and calendaring on their iPhone, a lot more people will make this move.

One final thing from a comparative perspective - Google Apps is free. MobileMe costs around $99/year, per user.

The iPhone is a huge device for business, and I will get one when it finally arrives in Australia. It will let me run my Google Apps based mail and calendar.

One day, Apple might offer a small business oriented version of MobileMe. But we aren’t there yet.

MobileMe looks like an incredible consumer application, and I look forward to it thriving.

John Simmonds has recently joined our OM4 community, using the OM4 platform to take two of his businesses online.

John is Managing Director of newgenco, a private global resource exploration group based in Western Australia. And he has a recent interest in a Margaret River winery called Treeton Estate.

I interviewed John about his experience in taking his two businesses online with OM4. newgenco is live on a free OM4 community site. The Treeton website is under development.

Glenn: Hi John, can you give us a quick run down on newgenco and Treeton.

John. Much of my professional career has been in global mineral exploration and it has been clear for many years that the creative, new business side of the resource exploration industry does not function well. Too little money was and is being spent in finding the next generation of mines. Current returns on investment are unattractive to investors with a world of opportunity to invest in.

While completing an MBA in 2001, I spent time looking at how other industries manage their early-stage creativity. After looking at each component of business models from the venture-capital funded biotech, ICT and entertainment industries, I came up with a model that looked to be transferrable to mining exploration.

Founded in 2007, newgenco is the result. We have a critical mass of world class nickel explorers, willing to exclusively commit themselves as a team to specific areas of geography in return for a significant percentage of company equity. Born global, the company is about to sign its first alliance deal over North America with a major multinational corporation.

We realise that our success will be heavily dependent on our skill in alliancing – to access the people, technologies and capital that we need to grow. That means great communications and that is one of the attractions of the OM4 platform.

Treeton is a completely different story. My wife Helen’s uncle developed a vineyard and winery near Cowamarup (Margaret River) back in the 1980’s. David McGowan has done a fantastic job in building up the business and making some beautiful wines (the Shiraz is my favourite) on a sustainable basis. But the marketing side has let the business down. Helen and I were looking for a place to get away to in the country so the seed was planted. We are just finalising the details of a 50% buy-in. David and Corinne will make the wine and manage the property, Helen and I will get involved in the marketing. Particularly the online. One day we may build a house but for the moment, we are roughing it.

Glenn: What are your business objectives for your newgenco website? Are they primarily marketing related?

John: The number one priority for newgenco is to get our presence known in the global market. We are managing this very carefully. It would be too easy to make errors in introducing our very different business model to the world. The market here is the investment funds and corporations who will fund our activities.

Number 2, we need to attract the people we will need to make sure it all happens. The strategy here is built around thought leadership. We have some great people on board and nobody is taking a lead in our micro worlds. We plan to offer a high-interest blog site that will draw our colleagues together. This should bring us both access to high credibility people and interesting project leads

It will be a balancing act but we will be out in front.

Glenn: What was your experience of getting the website live?

John: Good. Very good. I had some experience of HTML from the early days of the dotcom boom. Enough to know that I could do it myself but not enough to be able to do it without planning. There is some great material on the OM4 client resources area. I did have to ask a friend (Andrew Duff of Innovation4) a few questions, but mostly I just took my time and played. The site is (at the moment) entirely my own work.

We plan to get better visuals over time but the key start is good integrated content, designed to inform and encourage all of the people you wish to engage with. When I took the beta site off the OM4 subdomain to our newgenco.net site, I was amazed how quickly and smoothly the whole thing worked. That has given me confidence for the Treeton site which needs to be more complex and complete.

Glenn: What areas were the most challenging?

John: Maybe simple things. Like getting my first image up. The differences between Categories and Tags. My first play with CSS rules (thanks Glenn) to tweak the style. Getting tables right is still beyond me. But I know that I could do it – just take the time to play. If you have a deadline, pay someone else to do it. But being able to do it yourself gives you control of the process.

Glenn: What aspects of a website are most important for a business owner interested in marketing online?

John: It has to be mostly the content. Having interesting things to say and then finding interesting ways of telling people what they would like to know. So for Treeton, for example, it is how we can be better than everyone else in Margaret River at engaging with the wine-interested public. And then making sales.

Visuals are great but so often they are a distraction. This is a complicated question: it really is getting everything right. I have theoretical knowledge on marketing but not practical. I am just going to have to keep tweaking and trialling different words, approaches, stories – to get it right. Which is where Google Analytics comes in because it gives me feedback.

Glenn: What are your plans for your Winery website? Will you be marketing that online?

John: Our aim is to have the online sales as the driver of our business. We will have sales channels at a number of selected outlets in Perth and later, perhaps the eastern States.

But whether the sales are in stores, restaurants, our cellar door or online, it is the integration of the online Treeton Estate with the real Treeton Estate that will drive sales.

So I will be paying to get the PayPal integration done next week, then the graphics (free, courtesy of the OM4 launch) and the content finalised, ready to remove the old site and on with the new in 3 weeks. It should be doable. And mostly by me – in my spare time.

Glenn: Any other comments you would like to make about going online?

John: For anyone thinking about it, just do it. Wordpress and OM4 do make it very easy. I am sure that the Blog School and Forum will come into their own for those wanting support. But the How To guides are already there. Just open a site and start playing.

Glenn: Thanks for your time John.

From Brian Armstrong I came across this quote from the Wall Street Journal:

The most compelling statistic of all? Half of all new college graduates now believe that self-employment is more secure than a full-time job. Today, 80% of the colleges and universities in the U.S. now offer courses on entrepreneurship; 60% of Gen Y business owners consider themselves to be serial entrepreneurs, according to Inc. magazine. Tellingly, 18 to 24-year-olds are starting companies at a faster rate than 35 to 44-year-olds. And 70% of today’s high schoolers intend to start their own companies, according to a Gallup poll.

… Without knowing it, we have been training a whole generation of young entrepreneurs.

I spent 2 hours yesterday showing my nephew how to choose domains and build an online business. 15, and fast on the uptake, you could see the ideas take hold. Why work for someone when you can work for yourself?