Just Released!

This amazing deal on premium web design assets brought to you by Impressto.com.  This bundle is priced at only $30 and available for a limited time.  It includes tumblr and wordpress themes, UI packs, vector packs, typefaces and some really cool goodies.

Some of the contributors included are Grooveshark, Wijmo, Chris Spooner, Nick Pettit, Galen Gidman, Derek Bender and Mike Rogers.

3 months FREE to Grooveshark

Premium WordPress Theme by Chris Spooner

Tumblr Theme and Food Vector Pack by Derek Bender

FREE download of the must have book Running Lean

and sooo much more!

They even were nominated for a CSS award for the creative use of web fonts and new CSS elements.

Get it while you can!  http://bundle.impressto.com

We even got some premium freebies to give away {see below}.  Just shoot us an email or share this post!

As a way to give back to the industry and introduce the game changing creative storefront community, impressto has decided to get together with some amazing web designers, developers and companies to offer a killer web design bundle. They will be giving it away for FREE to one lucky person every week until the launch on June 6th. Just sign up and tweet the page to enter.

The bundle will include wordpress themes, tumblr themes, icon packs, vector art, typefaces an ebook and some crazy coupons.

Some of the contributors included will be Nick Pettit from Carsonified, Derek Bender of Videroo, Onur Oztaskiran, Umar Irshad, Mike Rogers and much more!
Jump on early and take advantage of this cool deal!

Impressto.com is planning their launch at The Front End Design Conference in Tampa, FL on July 22nd.

I get this question from people of all the time. If you are just starting a business, wanting to have an identity online or just looking to find an easy way to manage your own website.

My favorite solution is the wonderful WordPress.  I’m sure if you are reading this you have heard of it and want to know some easy tips to get started.

1) Purchase a domain name.

My advice with this can go a few ways.  It really depends on what you are looking to achieve with the site.  Is it is for a business? Purchase a domain similar to your business name.  If it is for a personal brand? Try to get a domain with your name in it.  For personal brands don’t forget the growing top level extension .me!  Remember, buying a domain name is like buying your real estate online.

Places to buy domain names (I may or may not be an affiliate of some of these)

1&1 domains

Domain Sale! $7.49 .com at GoDaddy

2) Hosting.  This is the place where you control the storage of file, manage email accounts and much more around the domain name.  These companies provide space on a server for you to easily manage your web content.

Check out:

Hostmonster.com Only $5.95 per month

$1.99 Web Hosting at Godaddy

Rackspace.com

I use webfaction and love them!  But it has a more difficult control panel and I wouldn’t suggest it if you are new to setting up a website.

3) Install WordPress.  WordPress.org is the official url for the web software.  There you can download the latest program, read and ask questions in the forum and find out about new features and updates being worked on.  I strongly suggest that you use a hosting company like bluehost.com or godaddy.com because they have made this extremely easy. All you have to do is login and go to your Control Panel all the way down and click in on the WordPress logo.  It will ask you where you want to install it and I suggest installing it to the root.  Which is your main domain.  Not /blog or anything else.  This will allow you to control the content on the actual domain you just purchased. If you do not use one of these easy hosting companies, you will have to create a database on your hosting as well as a MySQL user to have access and privileges.  Things just get confusing from there.

Once you have installed wordpress.  Your hosting company will give you a username and password.  Usually by default it is username: admin password: letters and numbers.  The way you access this is by going to your wordpress admin path.

If you installed it on your root domain it will be www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin.  If you installed it on any sub paths it will be located where ever you installed it plus /wp-admin.

This will take you to your control panel for the entire wordpress site.  NOW YOUR READY TO GO!

4) Set Up.  Looking at the screen you will see a navigation on the left.  It will be dashboard, posts, appearance, plugins…etc.  This will be how you navigate through the different sections of your control panel. I suggest trying to create a “new post” first just to become familiar with the pages and how things work.  It’s really similar to Microsoft Word if you are trying to edit your posts.  WordPress has made it very easy.  You can embed videos, images and even music by just clicking the icons.

5) Appearance.  This is where you can adjust the look of your wordpress page.  Click on theme.  They give you a couple default themes to start with which are basic.  To find different ones you can click the tab “install themes”.  Then type the some preferences and search through the different styles.  Also,  if you want some really cool themes and would like to get a bit more in depth check out woothemes.com, themeforest.net.  Here is a link from Smashing Magazine to find cool free wordpress themes Click Here.  To install these third party themes you simply click upload and select the zip file of the theme on your computer.

Ok.  Now you have a good start.  I hope this helps answer some questions.  If I didn’t answer your question, please feel free to reach out to me at derek[at]makemealive.com or @makemealive_dk

Everyday is a chance to learn something new!

Do you know a young entrepreneur that eats, sleeps, and breathes business? We’ve put together a holiday gift guide for these workaholics that’s sure to put a smile on their faces!

Smarter, Faster, Cheaper

For the bookworms like me. Every businessperson is constantly striving to get a leg up on the competition. There’s no better way than continuing to learn, especially from those that have been successful in their endeavors.

Tickets to a Business Conference

Conferences are some of the best places to meet like-minded business mentors. However, some of these conferences can be pretty pricey!

Magazine Subscriptions

Who doesn’t love a good magazine. This also goes hand-in-hand with staying ahead of the competition. These are some of our favorites.

Apple’s iPad

This is such a great product for those business people that always on the go.

Action Method

Entrepreneurs are constantly juggling multiple projects and wearing many different hats within a busy. Help them stay organized with Behance’s fool proof organization system.

A Loan!

Or just a donation. Many people are bootstrapping their businesses and could always use a little more capital! Crowd sourcing financing has been extremely successful for many companies. Find one that you’d like to help on IndieGoGo.com.

A Flip Video

The easiest way to document and share, the trials and tribulations of staring a business.

A Vacation!

Although they probably won’t take one, getting away from work and clearing your head for a few days is a great way to recharge your batteries.

Over the past few months, we’ve been hard at work on our latest joint venture with Digital Propaganda… TheMiniPrinter.com! Today all of the hard work paid off, as we finally launched the new site!

We met with Bobby Bharwani, the owner of Digital Propaganda, a few months back to discuss ways to increase DP’s online presence. While the DP e-commerce site was being developed, we decided to start developing niche printing websites to target specific demographics. The first of which would be TheMiniPrinter.com. All of us had noticed an increasing demand in smaller “profile” or mini business cards. This trend was especially big in the Creative Industry, including Designers, Photographers, and Marketing Reps that want to stand out.

After deciding on the first few products we would roll out, we focused our attention on the marketing for the company. We knew that we wanted to have the community involved in developing the brand and create a grass roots following. To get the Creative community involved we created a Design a Mini Tee Contest. The idea for this contest was to allow designers to create and upload their Mini Printer T-Shirt designs. After they submitted their designs, they would have their friends vote for their shirt. This way the designers would help drive traffic to TheMiniPrinter and increase brand awareness. At the end of the contest, the two shirts with the most votes would be printed in a limited edition run and available for sale. The winners would receive a free shirt with their design on it. We love T-shirts and like to think of them as walking billboards!

Next we decided to create a Social Media contest and thought Twitter would be the perfect place to gain immediate recognition. We knew we had to give some incentive to get people to promote the brand. So we came up with the idea of running a Twitter hash tag contest and giving away a FREE AppleTV to one lucky winner. In order to increase or followers, participants had to follow @theminiprinter and send out a Tweet using #theminiprinter. We installed a widget by TweetGrid to populate all tweets containing #theminiprinter on the Twitter Contest page.

As I’m writing this, I was just informed that #theminiprinter is a trending topic in Orlando, Fl! Woohoo.. it’s working! Stay tuned for more updates!

Flavors.me launched early this year and has felt positive growth instantly.  The site was developed by HiiDef Inc. which is an incubator startup for a few other creative web projects and founded by former Vimeo exec Jonathan Marcus and David Marcus.

The majority of users utilizing the internet these days, as a social platform, have multiple profiles from various sites.  The issue is that, to manage and stay relevant to the users, they have to go to the different services to update and stay connected.  Flavors.me is a solution and the ultimate goal in the social platform to create one internet presence, which spans and pulls together all the social services.

So how has Flavors.me positioned themselves for instant success?  Simple,  they solved a common problem and created a solution for potentially millions of people.  The site is extremely simple and a user can create a beautiful presence in 10 min. “CODE FREE!”  They are not adding to the problem with more social platforms.  They are simply utilizing existing API’s to create an organized social presence for any user, without the constraints of not knowing HTML/ CSS.

Of coarse there are plenty of other sites out there that pull your web presence to one place. But nothing this slick and simple and your end result is really cool.  Unlike other similar services out there, Flavors has created a platform that is scalable to cover the complete other side of the social profile management issue.  Hint, sites like threadsy.com

Flavors.me launched early this year and has felt positive growth instantly.  The site was developed by HiiDef Inc. which is an incubator startup for a few other creative web projects and founded by Vimeo exec Jonathan Marcus and David Marcus.

Find my Flavors… http://flavors.me/derekkohn

For those of you that don’t know, Digg.com is a news site that is populated by it’s users. It works like this, users submit stories to the site and have the rest of the community vote on their story in order to achieve higher rankings within the site. It allows the community to decide what stories are most important and deserve to be on the front page of the site… or does it??

Yesterday one of Digg’s users, LtGenPanda, published an article accusing the site of manipulating the popularity of the front page stories. On October 15th, Digg published a blog regarding their top secret algorithm and the tweaks they were making to it. These new “tweaks” have drastically changed the stories that are appearing on the front page so much so, it peaked LtGenPanda curiosity. He started playing around with their API and found that someone had created dozens of fake accounts, in order to get Digg’s publishing partner’s stories to the front page to boost the Digg referrals that those sites get.

This news comes just one day after Digg announces they will be cutting their workforce by 37% and Chas Edwards, Digg’s Publisher and Chief Revenue Officer, announced his resignation. This is third time the company has downsized over the past two years. The company also lost their CEO, Jay Adelson, this past April. On top of all that, the company has been struggling with a major decline in traffic due to the disappointing site overhaul.

I fear, if Digg has manipulated their algorithm to help it’s publishing partners, then this is the last straw for the company. The basis for this site is the democracy of news, let the readers decide what is most important to them. Digg users will feel betrayed, if LtGenPanda’s findings are accurate, and ultimately stop using the site.

Do you think this is the end of Digg?

Problem: DELAYED

This past weekend my fiancé and I  flew jetBlue to NYC. On the way there, everything was smooth sailing, even though we were flying through Tropical Storm Nicole. We even arrived 25 minutes early! On the way back however, our flight was delayed for three hours! When we first arrived at JFK the flight was still on time. Then it switched to a 30 minute delay, then an hour, then two hours, and so on. Needless to say I was getting pretty pissed off! One of jetBlue’s employees came over the loud speaker and informed us that while they apologized for the delay, it was out of their control. The plane was there and on time, however it was an international flight and Airport Authority had it stuck in Customs. Eventually we were able to board the plane.

Resolution: Free Movies & Vouchers

Once on-board, a comical flight attendant apologized for the delay, cracked some jokes, and informed us that they would be showing three premium movies for free. A small conciliation for sitting in airport for five hours… but it did put me in a better mood. The movie choices included: Knight & Day, Prince of Persia, and Karate Kid… being the ninja that I am, I had to go with Karate Kid! As soon as the movie started I forgot all about being delayed. Nice misdirection… jetBlue = Houdini! The staff sincerely apologized again upon landing, indicating to me that they did actually care. I hadn’t really thought any more about the situation until this morning when I received the following email from them.

“We’re sorry that you did not experience the high standard of service we aim to provide every JetBlue customer. Please accept our sincere apologies and this flight credit for the inconvenience you recently experienced with us.”

Conclusion: Satisfied Customer

I’ve always loved jetBlue! I mean what’s not to love… they have the most leg room, tv’s for everyone, super comfortable seats, and very affordable flights! Was I pissed off that I didn’t get home until 2am?? Of course, but I also understand shit happens and in this case it was out of their hands. jetBlue handled the situation like customer service pros and here’s why…

1. They kept us informed of the problem. You need to let your customers know what the problem is and what’s being done to fix it.

2. The staff acknowledged the inconvenience and sincerely apologized. When your company makes a mistake or a customer isn’t completely satisfied, say “We’re sorry.” A simple apology can go a long way.

3. Knowing the passengers were not pleased, they took our minds off the problem by switching our focus to a free movie. The flight was delayed and they couldn’t do anything about that. Instead they gave us something for free. Everyone loves free!

4. The fact that jetBlue followed up with an email apologizing again and issuing me a $25 credit shows me that this company honestly does care about their customers.

The way that jetBlue handled this situation took me from an angry customer that would’ve complained to everyone about being delayed, to a happy customer blogging about their excellent customer service! Good form jetBlue!

Holy SUPER busy Batman!

Over the past few months we’ve made some major moves and can’t wait to share our new projects with all of you! A lot of people have been asking us what we’ve been up to lately, so we decided to go ahead and update everyone…

We started this year off with the mindset, “Just Do It!” We had all these great ideas and just needed to approach them with this all or nothing attitude to get them off the ground.

The first of which, was our printing company called Alive Prints. We were headed into our third year with the company and had learned a ton! In the first year we were kind of flying by the seat of our pants and were in desperate need of some organization. So, we packed up our home office and made the move downtown. Having an office in the heart of Orlando, was one of the smartest moves we made. It allowed us to be closer to the majority of our clients and gave us opportunities to meet a ton of great people.

Next we took a long hard look at our business model and realized that we needed to change some things. Billing / Invoicing was the main department that needed a major overhaul. We couldn’t function with our current set up, as we often found ourselves constantly extending credit to clients and racking up a huge accounts receivable. So we decided to implement a payment upfront policy and made the switch from Quickbooks to Freshbooks. For those of you that handle the books at your company, do yourself a favor and checkout Freshbooks. We needed to make it easier for our customers to pay us. This is CRITICAL to your business. If it’s difficult for client’s to make payment, you’re going to find yourself chasing down payments. It took us about two months to knock out the accounts receivable. And we did run into some resistance regarding the payment upfront policy. However, the clients that objected to this policy were the ones that had these HUGE outstanding balances! So we kind of took care of two birds with one stone… eliminated problem clients and cleared out A/R.

With the new policy in place, and the magic that is Freshbooks, we were able to focus on sales and development, instead of billing and payments. With more time being spent on sales we some really impressive growth in our numbers! Every month we were constantly developing new business and increasing our bottom line. Soon we started to notice with all this increased growth we were running around like chickens with our heads cut off! We had hit a point were it was either time to hire more people, which financially didn’t make sense, or team up with a larger print company.

So….. we decided to team up with a 10,000 square foot print facility called Digital Propaganda. After a few meetings and some negotiation, we came to an agreement that worked for both parties and we couldn’t be happier! They took over all the production, billing, payments, and fulfillment, and put us in charge of online marketing, sales, and development. This allowed us to dramatically free up our resources to work on other projects.

While working on Alive Prints, we were also developing our online creative marketplace, Impressto. While brainstorming on a website for the printing company, we noticed a void in the creative industry and decided to scrap the print site. Instead we wanted to focus on developing a community for Creatives where they could interact with each other socially and buy / sell their work! We dove in head first… started designing mock ups, hired a programmer, and pushed full steam ahead! After a few grueling months, we were ready to have some beta testers take a look at it. After about two weeks, we asked the testers for their feedback. It became clear that we were onto something but needed work on the overall design and navigation. So we went back to the drawing board and are proud to announce that we just recently finished the redesign!

Now we are hard at work on putting the finishing touches on it! We are hoping to launch by Nov. 1st… so stay tuned!! While the site is under construction check us out on the interwebs….

http://impressto.tumblr.com

http://twitter.com/impressto

http://facebook.com/impressto

That’s it for now! Keep checking back for updates on our progess!

Most businesses or startups are always sizing up the competition, striving to do it bigger and better.  Or when starting a business and entering an industry, you look into your barriers of entry and analyze what they do and how to be better.

Stop doing that!  Who wants to see the same things regurgitated over and over again, packaged in a different box?

What are aliens? First of all, some people don’t believe they exist and that’s a whole other conversation I really don’t want to get into.  But really, they are mysterious, maybe advanced and some say threatening.

That is what you want to be to your competition.  The most important thing about it is, by doing this, you create a loyal demographic that is intrigued by what you do.

Instead of focusing on your competition, think of ways to develop your business that will intrigue and attract your demographic.  For instance, if you are opening a sandwich shop, go to your demographics homes and businesses and give out free samples.  That is just a small “non lazy” guerilla marketing tactic that is so obvious.  If the food is good people will absolutely become customers.  If it’s not, tell them to be honest and you can find out right then. Even try giving them a competitors sandwich verses yours and do a taste test.  Start a blog about fun sandwich recipes.  The list goes on…

I just want to applaud Dominos for utilizing customer interaction through the web and transparent marketing to bettering there pizza.  That is how you better a brand.  Check this out! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AH5R56jILag

It is important when marketing your business or your self to be “the alien” in your industry and not just trying to fit in.  Stand out and be heard!

Posted by derekkohn.com