‘Industry’ Articles
Written by admin on 25 April 2010
Hyenas fighting
In this business you can’t afford to be too sensitive. When you are putting yourself out there some things come with the territory. Whatever the product that you’ve put out–a blog, a book, software, a CD–if there’s a way for people to rate it, or comment about it, you should be prepared for those people who derive pleasure from trying to hurt the feelings of others. In a perfect world all people abide by the “if you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say anything at all” principle; but this is not a perfect world. In this world, people who don’t have anything nice to say usually want the world to know the not so nice things they think and feel, and given the opportunity, they will exercise their right to do just that.
It can be hard not to take insulting words personally. When we feel someone is unjustly maligning us or otherwise injuring our image or reputation we naturally want to defend ourselves, but sometimes the best way to deal with negative feedback is not to respond to it in kind. What that means is that you sometimes have to smile and say “thank you for sharing your thoughts” to someone who obviously was not trying to be helpful in sharing their thoughts. More often than not responding to intentionally malicious comments ends with you doing more harm to your reputation than the negative feedback that spurred your response to begin with.
How you represent yourself when being taunted is important. You don’t want to engage in a nasty war of words with people who leave insulting comments on your blog or who rate or review your product or service poorly just because they have that power. If you are trying to project a professional image perhaps the best thing you can do is simply delete obviously inflammatory comments, assuming the comments are left on your own site. Sometimes negative comments about you, your product, your service, your business are left in places where you have no control over deleting them. In that case you have to make a decision about whether or not it’s worth it to address the comments on your own site or sign up on the site where the comments are left and publicly defend your reputation. It is usually a better option simply to ignore the comments, especially if they are unfounded. If your product or service is good that will do more to establish your reputation than the rude comment of an angry individual who did not like the product or was not satisfied with the service. Most people are reasonable enough to be satisfied with a 99% favorable rating and not be too concerned with that 1% negative feedback.
Some people don’t like to delete negative comments because they are afraid they’ll be accused of only approving comments that make them look good, but this is not a question of deleting constructive feedback. It’s the destructive feedback that’s in question. Of course, what’s destructive will vary from person to person and depend largely on how sensitive your ego is or is not. You need to have some willingness to accept constructive feedback even if it sounds like criticism. After all, your readers or customers deserve to have their thoughts considered and respected. They add value to your life every bit as much as you add to theirs and you should want to know and be willing to hear if they think you have made a mistake or otherwise fallen short; but at the end of the day, you still have the power, on your own website at least, to delete comments that are outright mean and pointless and that do not add value to anyone’s life, but rather only give a dark feeling of satisfaction to the person who posted the comment.
Not everyone is going to have something good to say. Not everyone is going to love you, love your blog, love your product, love your service. You have to expect negative feedback and accept it as par for the course. You shouldn’t take it personally and launch a counter-attack.
Image of hyenas fighting photos8.com
Posted in Industry | No Comments »
Written by admin on 13 April 2010
To add new categories to your WordPress blog:
- Login to your dashboard
- Click on Posts
- Click on Categories
- Enter your category name into the Category Name input box
- Enter a category slug into the Category Slug input box. ** This step is not necessary. If you leave the box blank a slug will be automatically created based on your category name. ( A slug is the name of the page as displayed in the URL bar. For example if you visit http://www.antisocialmediallc.com/category/media-watch/wordpress-for-absolute-beginners/, the slug would be wordpress-for-absolute-beginners
- Select the parent category (leave this set to None unless you are creating this category under another category to make it a sub-category)
- Add a category description (This step is not necessary. The field can be left blank. The majority of themes don’t have the code needed to make the description display so even if you add a category description, unless you are using a theme that comes already configured to show the description, the description will not be visible.
- Hit the Add Category button
You should now be able to view your category in your categories list when you go to make a post. You might not be able to see the category in the user side category menu until the category contains posts. It depends on your theme and how it’s setup to display categories. By default categories will only be visible to users if they have posts in them.
Tags: categories, wordpress
Posted in Wordpress for Absolute beginners | 2 Comments »
Written by admin on 13 April 2010
How to add a new page
- Login to your Dashboard
- Click on Pages (menu on your left)
- Click Add New
- Give your page a title
- Add your page content
- Hit the Publish button
If you have a pages menu on your site you should now see your new page in the menu.
Posted in Wordpress for Absolute beginners | No Comments »
Written by admin on 13 April 2010
So you’re new to WordPress and want to add some information on your blog that will remain constant. Should you create a category or a page?
Answer: Page
Categories are like sections of a magazine. They are intended to hold regularly updating content that you want to categorize under a specific name. Pages are for content that is intended to remain static. Of course with the flexibility of WordPress you can use pages for content that will not necessarily remain static; but as a general rule, if you’re adding content to your site that’s meant to remain visible and unchanged, like an “about me” page or a “contact me” page, you do not need a category for it. How to add a page – WordPress
Let’s say you want to write a weekly restaurant review. Should you create a restaurant review page or a restaurant review category?
Answer: category
Because you will be writing weekly reviews instead of just one review about one restaurant you should create a category for your weekly restaurant reviews. It’s possible you might find a review plugin that works through a page that the plugin creates, but assuming you are not using a plugin, you will want to create a category and add your weekly reviews as posts that get saved to your restaurant review category.
Posted in Wordpress for Absolute beginners | No Comments »
Written by admin on 11 April 2010
Spammers these days have a new way of approaching their business. They think that bloggers are suckers with egos that need boosting. They try to butter you up with praise because they think that’s what you’re after. There’s a widespread notion that bloggers are people who are full of themselves and think their opinions matter. This new breed of spammer have decided that the best way to get their spam comments approved is by stroking the ego of the blog author. If you don’t have a keen eye for spotting bogus comments disguised as praise, take the extra second to check for links in your comments. Sometimes legitimate comments include links to the author’s site, but most of the time when someone simply wants to contribute a thought they do not ad a link to advertise.
Some butter-em-up comments from the trash
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I’ve just stumbled upon your site while searching for a tutorial on an related subject. Glad I did too. There’s a lot I like. Anyway, you’ve been bookmarked and I’ll be back soon.
I must say that on the whole I am really happy with this site.After reading your post I can tell you are excited about your writing. If only I had your writing ability. I look forward to more updates and will be returning.Thanks!
Has anyone used this site before. It looks great and simple to use.
Your post is fabulous – with a lot of updated creative furniture designs.I enjoy your site layout Where did you but the theme?
Thank you very much to share this information. It is very useful and informative.
It’s harder to tell if the comments are coming from bots or actual people who are paid 10cents for every spam comment they leave on a blog; but whatever the case, unless you don’t mind spam that makes as long as it makes you look good to new visitors, before you click approve, check the comment. It is usually easy to detect spam even when disguised as flattery if you’re paying attention. More often than not the comment does not fit the post. “Thank you very much to share this information. It is very useful and informative.” seems harmless enough, but when left as a comment on a page where no information was shared about anything, and when accompanied with a link to an external website, it is clearly spam.
Posted in Industry | 1 Comment »
Written by admin on 13 March 2009
We’ve dealt with all types of clients over the years. They come in all shapes and sizes and personality types. Some clients have no interest in knowing how something is getting done. They just want it done. Other clients ask questions within reason; then there are the clients who try to get too involved. Imagine you’re a doctor and you’re trying to treat a patient, but the patient keeps challenging everything you tell him because he read something in a book that was written by the US Surgeon General, and the US Surgeon General is the ultimate authority, according to the client, so if the US Surgeon General says X but you say Y then you must be wrong….
It is difficult to deal with clients who continually question every decision you make, go out researching on their own, discover some different method of approach used by someone else and ask you to change from your method to the other because they consider the source of the information they’ve found on the Internet to be more reliable than you. The best way to handle these situations is to avoid them by making every effort to gage at the outset how involved the client is going to want to get. A client obviously has a right to be involved in whatever project you’re developing on his/her behalf; but there’s a certain point at which some clients cross a line between reasonable counter suggesting and blatant questioning of your expert judgement. It is always better to avoid a client who will want to stand over you and watch to make sure you’re holding the hammer right as you pound the nail. It’s impossible to create under such conditions.
Posted in Industry | No Comments »
