Google Custom Search

Today’s screwing around with the search results and lack of customization in search in Wordpress took me to all kinds of interesting plugins to change what you use to search Wordpress. For the most part none of them really matched what I was looking for by default. It did however bring me to a little side project that Google has worked in previously called Google Custom Search. I spent a bit of time looking it over while taking calls at the day job and I have to admit I am intrigued. While I am not fully sure it is exactly what I need as a search solution for Wordpress there is a good chance it is a step in the right direction.

Of course with how my mind works it got me thinking. A custom search engine could have countless possibilities if done right and Google is just giving it away (or charging at a low price for a few extra features) for what is quite an amazingly well put together out of the box search solution. I’m going to have to play around with it more when I get back from vacation but I have to say I’d be surprised if this didn’t find it’s way into one of more of my projects that pop up this year.

Vote No On Bill – SB 3353

I was recently informed from The Performance Marketing Association that there is a bill coming up for vote in Illinois this year that is going to try to enforce an ADVERTISING tax on marketers online. They are basically attempting to impose sales tax on anyone who is advertising a product and sends them to the person selling it.

Basically anyone who has any sort of affiliate tax is going to get hit with sales tax beyond what both the customer and retailer get hit with. Let me get this straight:

• I don’t take the money from the customer.
• I don’t deliver the product to the customer.
• I don’t know who the customer is.
• I ADVERTISE the product.

But I’d be having an additional sales tax ADDED to my already taxed income from online referrals? Not only this but anyone I work with out-of-state would likely end contracts in IL as that is exactly what happened in New York, North Carolina and Rhode Island when they imposed the same tax. The entire tax they will try to take out will become non-existent by removing the ability for online marketers to even work with companies looking to advertise their products as they will stop working with anyone in the state to avoid the tax.

SB 3353

Amends the Use Tax Act, the Service Use Tax Act, the Service Occupation Tax Act, and the Retailers’ Occupation Tax Act. Provides that a retailer or serviceman is considered to be (i) maintaining a place of business in the State and (ii) engaged in selling personal property at retail in the State if the retailer or serviceman solicits business within the State through employees, independent contractors, agents, or other representatives. Provides that a retailer or serviceman is presumed to be soliciting business through an employee, independent contractor, agent, or other representative if the retailer or serviceman enters into an agreement with a resident of this State under which the resident, for a commission or consideration, directly or indirectly refers potential customers, whether by a link on an Internet website or otherwise, to the retailer or serviceman, if the cumulative gross receipts from sales by the retailer or serviceman to customers in the State who are referred to the retailer by all residents with this type of an agreement with the retailer is in excess of $10,000 during the preceding 4 quarterly periods ending on the last day of February, May, August, and November. Provides that the presumption may be rebutted by proof that the resident with whom the retailer or serviceman has an agreement did not engage in any solicitation in the State on behalf of the retailer or serviceman that would satisfy the nexus requirement of the United States Constitution during the 4 quarterly periods in question.

If you are an Illinois resident and are against this bill

Email Your Senators at the addresses below:

Louis S. Viverito

viverito@senatedem.state.il.us

James T. Meeks

senmeeks@sbcglobal.net

M. Maggie Crotty

crotty@senate.state.il.us

Susan Garrett

ilsenate29@sbcglobal.net

Mike Jacobs

jacobs@senatedem.state.il.us

Jeffrey M. Schoenberg

Schoenberg@senatedem.state.il.us

Chris Lauzen

admin@lauzen.com

Bill Brady

bill@bradyforillinois.com

Randall M. Hultgren

district48@senategop.state.il.us

Matt Murphy

senatormattmurphy@sbcglobal.net

Template to e-mail Senators

Subject: I oppose SB 3353 - internet referral nexus bill

Sincerely,

The Undead Are Online.. In Style

I’ve been working with Zach of Blue Tide Productions for the past month to map out and have him create a new layout for BuyZombie. As of yesterday the new theme is up and running. While I run a multitude of sites it’s clearly the most active of my sites and as it gets the most attention I felt it needed a website that didn’t look like it was straight out of the 90’s. OK it wasn’t that bad but if you had seen the old layout you know exactly what I mean.

Features

• Visually the site looks spectacular: It has a clean layout, is easy to navigate, and has a featured section
• Communication wise the comments were broken in the old theme. So as there have not been new comments in months we upgrades to Disqus to allow not just standard comments but being able to comment with Facebook and Twitter as well.
• Speaking of communication we also made it easier to connect with us on social networks, RSS following, and by e-mail!
• As there are more guest posters on the horizon there is also now an author box at the end of each post with a bit more information about the author of each post.

A Little Social Networking Goes A Long Way – BuyZombie On Facebook

Last night I was looking at my fans on BuyZombie’s Facebook Page and realized I was at 81 fans. 81 seemed like such an uneven number and triple digits sounded like the best thing to have so I decided to ask on Twitter if there was any zombie lovers out there who wanted to follow the site in a new area. The results were overwhelming as within an hour I was able to break 100 fans! Social media can have an amazing response when you are friends with your readers and part of the community.

I have no doubt that it helped that I had a bit of a support from the author of Breathers – Scott Browne, the wonderful horror blogger BJC of Day of the Woman, and the geek favorite Seres Victoria. (All of you, and everyone else who Re-tweeted I GREATLY appreciate it!)

Last night did not involve video games, movies, or reading. At least not all night

So I’ll start with the obvious, if you are a reader of this site I have switched over to using Thesis. While it is VERY clearly still on the default settings there should be changes coming over the next few weeks-months on this site to make things just a little more pretty.

At any rate aside from the Thesis install I was busy on a few other things.
For my friend Erin I helped install, modify the theme, and install plugins on:
Little Shop Of Zombies so she would have a central website for everything zombie related that she’s doing. I got to play with a couple of new things with wordpress as well. The first of which was Zazzle Store Gallery which lets you include a Zazzle store on your site. As this was something I wanted to test out anyway I was glad I had a time to play with it in advance though now am not quite as happy with it as I originally had hopes I would be. Second was the ability to incorperate an Etsy store into your web page so she could have pages as both shops.

Also while playing with plugins I updated the contact pages on the following sites to use Contact Form 7 which I have to say is currently my favorite Contact Plugin:
StuartConover.com
Little Shop Of Zombies
Buy Zombie
and other 3 projects I have in the works.

On top of the contact plugin on the above 3 I also installed the rough draft of the theme on 2/3 of the 3 above projects. The first of the 3 is down to just needing art and an updated about page while the second two need both of the above as well as a few other settings tweaked. Still, progress is being made!

…and some people think I’m lazy.

Or, A Guide On How To Alienate YOUR Customers

Now this news is actually from last month. I somehow missed it last month when Engadget reported that this was happening but it was pointed out to me last night and I’m nothing but annoyed with the idea. I don’t care if you are lazy or enjoy not having 10,000 books around your place like myself or enjoy ‘being green’ but the eBook (and for myself the Kindle) has been a boon. I live in a condo in the city. I do NOT have room for a library. I enjoy having 1 decide that I can have all of my books on. So let’s take a look at what happened here.

Step #1: Embrace new technology, for this example let’s go with I don’t know- The eBook. Simon and Schuster was one of the first major publishers to not only embrace the idea of a digital book but actively encourage it’s use.

Step #2: Build a community and loyal readership. Kindle digital novels outsold physical books over this last Christmas. Sales overall are UP on digital copies. People enjoy them.

Step #3: Delay ALL digital copies of the novels you publish for 4 months after a hard cover comes out. I don’t get it. Are you worried that there will be less of a profit margin over the hard cover? You don’t have paper your printing on to cause that AND you can always jack the price up $5 on release for 4 months. That’s the concern is that they believe consumers will believe a new book is only worth $10 regardless of the media and sales will go down. I think I just addressed how to take care of that. Mark it up at the beginning. It’s NOT unheard of. Maybe you are worried about piracy? HELLO. DIGITAL COPIES OUTSOLD PHYSICAL COPIES OVER CHRISTMAS. Sorry. Bad excuse.

I’m pretty sure step #3 is the one anyone who has a business going should learn to avoid. Seems kind of like a practical idea.

The whole thing just gives me a headache that as a consumer I cannot get the novel I want to read on release date because you are purposely holding it back. I don’t care if you mark up the price to start with. It’s acceptable if that’s what you want to do. Just start doing it now not before the outrage that will ensue because of doing this and trying to do a markup later. I don’t know who in your marketing team pushed this idea and who agreed to it but they should all be fired. This is one customer who is not happy.

Blogussion Releases Their Thesis Theme For Sale

While I was a bit town on writing a plug for Blogussion’s Thesis Theme (personal reasons and nothing you need to know about,) I cannot deny that Alex really knows how to put together a well designed and laid out theme. So aside from being built on the Thesis Framework (which you need to run the theme) this has built in a ‘few’ useful features. The main ones to throw out there would be:
* Color chooser
* Logo manager
* Ad management
* Widgetized header and footer
* Admin panel controlled “big navigation” menu with dropdown menu options

While this is just the tip of the iceberg there are quite a few more worth checking out as well. If you haven’t seen Blogussion’s page you should really check it out to get an idea of what you are getting with the theme itself.

If you haven’t seen the theme yet head over to the sales page by Clicking here to view more details

If you have seen it why don’t you:

Buy Zombie Is Now PR4

Google started the year off nicely by giving Buy Zombie a long overdue Page Rank update to 4. While none of my other sites have gotten a Page Rank update with the last round, none were penalized so I can’t complain in the slightest! I haven’t been working the marketing angle on any of my sites in quite some time so any positive change is just a very welcome and surprising bonus!

With all of the organization I’ve been doing the last couple of days this is just an added little bonus to help motivate me into launching my upcoming projects as well as working on new changes to the ones I currently have in place. Thank you added motivation!

This Is How To Entice People To Market For You

While affiliate marketing always helps to encourage people to sell your product, something about being able to make money, there is another way. If the product you sell is something that people want and doesn’t cost you quite a bit you can offer it to them for free.

So what StandOut Stickers are doing is offering free custom stickers made up for you in turn for advertising their site. While stickers aren’t useful for everyone, quite a few niches being able to sell or offer stickers in a promotional manner is a huge deal. Being able to get a test run done for free and if they work out having them ready to use immediately is priceless.

So if you are looking to have custom made stickers purchased head over to StandOut Stickers today! If you are looking for doing some cross promotion with them check out StandOut Sticker’s Blog!

Thesis – The Theme That Does It All

This one is going to be short and sweet since if you are into blogging and use Wordpress at all you know what Thesis is, if you don’t I’ll probably be doing a write up on it once I’ve had some time to fully sit down and play with it.

So as many of my close friends know I have about 10 projects in the works at various stages of development. Recently I’ve decided on a few of them that Thesis might be the perfect extra bit of originality to use in a theme to get things up and running. I’m still playing with the framework that is provided in hopes I can use this to actually make something decent- we’ll see.

I am going to attempt to use it on two sites initially: A central company homepage as well as an online store/front end for a Zazzle shirt site. We’ll see how it all comes together and I’ll let you know as I make progress.