Once you load up the website, you are provided with two buttons and a lot of white space.  Just click anywhere on the webpage and start writing.  When you are done, you can either save your thoughts to the pen.io website or save it as a .pdf file.

Go give it a shot at pen.io/zen/ and let me know if you like this very simple way to jot your thoughts down.

So, to start things out I dumped about $100 into StumbleUpon to run ad stumbles for my free marketing eBook. To stretch things out a ‘bit, the daily account budget was also adjusted to $5 per day.  For the particular webpage I was promoting, that equaled out to about 100 daily stumbles. 

So, how did I do? I received 2,283 ad stumbles and a little over 150 natural or "free" StumbleUpon visits. 

StumbleUpon can generate real traffic.  If you pay for 100 stumbles a day, you will get 100 people stumbling across your content on a daily basis.  The only problem is the amount of time they stay there on your website.  I would say it is highly doubtful I converted many new RSS subscribers or fans via this method because the average time they spent on the page was around 5 to 15 seconds.  I have learned though that to run a successful advertising campaign on StumbleUpon you have to keep the goals really simple.  Grab their eyeballs, give them a goal and hope for the best.  You don’t have a lot of time to waste as these visitors seem to jump to the next link very quickly.

Hope this helps others out who might want to try StumbleUpon out as an advertising option, but wasn’t sure if it was really worth it or not.  I would say as long as you have a big enough budget to make a dent, give it a shot.  Just make sure you have a plan or a goal in mind.

Coe’s Quest is the YouTube web series I ran across when I was looking for a way to do more inside of the game of Minecraft. He has a very pleasant tone about him and his videos are not filled with cuss filled rants just for the sake of cussing.  Not that I have anything against adult language – but I have been even able to show my two nephews an niece the videos without worry of having to cover their ears every two seconds.

Here is the first video – just to give you a sample of how neat this series of videos is:

You can learn more about Coe’s Quest from coesquest.com. I hope you find it as useful as I have when it comes to navigating around the world of Minecraft.

At it’s core, Stella is a web developer’s tool for monitoring and debugging websites and applications. Stella will monitor your website or apps for slowdowns and outages.  Add that together with the handy bookmarklet and it has never been easier to check up on website performance.

After running the free test on mitchelaneous.com, I got the result: "Not bad. It’s on par with most sites". My response time was 927 milliseconds and my page size was 50.77 KB.

The free plan will allow you to have 1 public monitor and unlimited email notifications on or about your website (and checks it every 10 minutes).  If you need more monitors, then you can sign up for one of the monthly billing options. 

Overall, I would say you should at least play with Stella and see if it is a service you would like to use.

In a nutshell, split testing is a method of marketing where you compare two different versions of the same thing, and then you determine which was more successful at reaching your goal.  For example, I might have two different layouts for this same article, but one looks one way and the other looks another way.  I would split test to see which one people seemed to like more – then do more article layouts like that.

Here are best split test related add-ons I found for WordPress:

SES Theme Split Test

This plugin lets you set up two different templates with differences that you think might increase conversions, serve these different templates up to users, and track their activity using custom segments in Google Analytics.

Headline Split Test

This plug-in allows you to enter an alternate headline for every post on your blog. The headlines are then randomly alternated on your website until a certain number of "headline views" has been reached. At that point, a "winning" headline (as determined by the number of people that have clicked on each headline to date) is determined and that headline is shown going forward.

Ad Injection

Ad Injection injects any kind of advert (e.g. Google AdSense, Amazon Associates, ClickBank, TradeDoubler, etc) into the existing content of your WordPress posts and pages. You can control the number of adverts based on the post length, and it can restrict who sees adverts by post age, visitor referrer and IP address.

Do you know of a great all in one split testing tool for WordPress? If so, hit me up and let me know.  I would love to test it out.

Now, you might say, "Why do I need to change the colors of my folders?".  Well, by color coding your folders or folders inside of folders, you can more easily find the things you are looking for and create a more organized desktop environment.

Here is a little more about using Rainbow Folders from the developer:

When you’re exploring a directory which contains lots of subdirectories in Windows Explorer you can easily commit a mistake, e.g. by clicking the folder’s icon which has a similar name to the one you really wanted to go to. With the folders marked with the colors of your choosing, you won´t make any mistake and after some time you’ll be clicking the right folders by impulse.

This has to be one of my favorite desktop downloads, because I really love to organize things.  I hope you get some good use out of it too.  You can pick it up over at aionel.net.

Everyone is a Marketer brings you some of the most popular advice, suggestions and tips I have shared with you in the past year all together in one convenient spot for you to download.  Within the 22 chapters, you will be able to learn really simple marketing techniques that anybody can use.  I do not care if you are starting out on day one of your business or day 141, I have suggestions and help here that can do anybody who reads it some good.

Go learn more about the eBook and download it (in the handy PDF format).

• Get the Free Marketing eBook for Beginners!

I would also love to hear your feedback too.  So if you have any reviews, thoughts or your own marketing tips you would like to pass along – be sure to send them my way.  I might even publish them here for the world to see.  This holiday season, I know we are all looking to save a buck or two – so let me give you this eBook for free.  The only thing I ask in return is you let me know what you thought of it once you’ve unlocked all the marketing secrets that are within the pages.

Modules in Drupal let you extend, build and customize the core functionality of this content management system powerhouse.  Chances are if there is something you would like to do with Drupal, somebody out there has written an add-on for it.  If not, it is pretty simple to dive in and write your own.  Here are 5 of the most installed Drupal modules out there in the wild today.

Views

This tool is essentially a smart query builder that, given enough information, can build the proper query, execute it, and display the results. It has four modes, plus a special mode, and provides an impressive amount of functionality from these modes.

Token

Tokens are small bits of text that can be placed into larger documents via simple placeholders, like %site-name or [user]. The Token module provides a central API for modules to use these tokens, and expose their own token values.

Pathauto

The Pathauto module automatically generates path aliases for various kinds of content (nodes, categories, users) without requiring the user to manually specify the path alias. This allows you to get aliases like /category/my-node-title.html instead of /node/123. The aliases are based upon a “pattern” system which the administrator can control.

FileField

FileField provides a universal file upload field for CCK. It is a robust alternative to core’s Upload module and an absolute must for users uploading a large number of files. Great for managing video and audio files for podcasts on your own site.

Administration Menu

The module renders all administrative menu items below ‘administer’ in a clean, attractive and purely CSS-based menu at the top of your website. It contains not only regular menu items – local tasks are also included, giving you extremely fast access to any administrative resource and function your Drupal installation provides.

Drupal is a slick and very extendable content management system worth checking into.  These modules show that Drupal may even be one of the easiest CMS scripts out there to hack around with to get the website you really need.  To learn more about Drupal, be sure to check out Drupal is the Best CMS You Never Used.

While working on a new eBook, I needed an easy way to get Microsoft Office Word 2007 to export my writings as a PDF file.  After doing a little searching around, I found an add-in that will do just that.

This simple download allows you to export and save files in the PDF format in Microsoft Office 2007.

This download works with the following Office programs:

• Microsoft Office Access 2007
• Microsoft Office Excel 2007
• Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007
• Microsoft Office OneNote 2007
• Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007
• Microsoft Office Publisher 2007
• Microsoft Office Visio 2007
• Microsoft Office Word 2007

You can download the add-in here.

After you install this download open the document you want to publish and then, depending on the program you are using, select Save to PDF from the Office or File menu.  Hope this comes in handy for anybody else looking for an easy way to save files from Microsoft Office Word 2007 to the PDF format.

Building and hosting successful forums on your website can be a lot of hard work.  Just like you would do if you were building a house, you have to build your forums with a good foundation.  Here I have for you seven different successful forum rules you should keep in mind when you either set up a forum script, or look to redo some of your forums to make them easier for users to navigate through.

Here is my general advice for anybody out there looking to start their own forums.

1. Enable Really Simple Syndication
   You want to give people as many routes into your forums as they need.  Making sure your forum has an RSS feed gives your users one more way to keep up to date on what is happening on your forums.
2. Use an SEO Friendly Permalink Structure
   You have to have a good permalink structure to keep the search engines happy, when they are crawling over your forums.  Use page paths like "this-works-great" rather than "index=conversation2".  By using a better permalink structure, you will get ranked a little higher in search results.
3. Only Make the Forums as Complex as You Need
   Do not go overboard adding a new forum category for every wild idea you think people might want to talk about.  Only create a new category or sub-forum if there is a real need or desire for it coming from the people who use your forums.
4. Find Good People to Help You Moderate Conversations
   Once your forums have been up and running for a while, you might look towards the community you have created for people who will help you enforce the forum rules, and keep the forums active.
5. Set Some Basic Rules for Posting
   From day one, you should have a basic list of rules for people to follow.  My best advice for this situation is to keep this list somewhere where everybody can see it, and keep it simple.  If you get too complex with your rules, nobody will read them.
6. Help Feed the Discussions
   Stop in daily and see what conversations you can reply to, and try to find topics of discussion that might get more people to come by and post their thoughts, ideas, feedback or solutions.
7. Link to Your Forums from Other Places
   You need to work hard at getting new links to your forums.  You can do this from your website (if you have one) and other like-minded websites that might share the same general discussion point of your forums.

Have another rule of your own that I might have missed?  Makes sure you leave a comment and share it with the rest of us.  Learn to take care of your little community,  and make sure their needs are being met. Also, always welcome feedback, because if people care enough to complain – it means they want your forums to succeed.