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judi knight

Quickly Enhance Your Online Presence with About.Me

Most of you know, I am a big proponent for getting yourself a WordPress website. If you have a business, it is essential to have a place of your own, where people can find out exactly what you do and why they should work with you. If you don’t have a job, but are looking, then it can be a great way to set yourself apart from your competition and showcase who you are and what you do in a way a resume can never do. But if you haven’t got a web presence yet or, if you do, but want to have another place online to put your profile out there so that you or your business comes up in a Google search, check out About dot me.

About.me lets you quickly build simple and visually elegant splash pages that point visitors to your content from around the web. It is an easy and free way to have a web presence, where people can find you or your business and where to connect with you on various social media sites. If you already have a website, it is still a nice thing to have because it can come up in a Google search and connect with a link back to your website. Take a look at my About.me profile and then give it a try yourself.

 About.Me screenshot for Judi Knight

 

About.me provides an easy interface with several templates and examples to help you with ideas. Upload a background and a photo, write your bio, add your social media sites and you are good to go. I’d love to see what you come up with!

Your Blog is a Mirror, a Beehive, a Teacher…(Day Eight of Big Dog Series)

Amy is a Soul Caller and she has a gift. Read her posts and you will see why I asked her to be one of our Big Dogs. Amy has not been doing this online thing long, but she has been doing it exceedingly well. You can too!

Your blog is a mirror, a beehive, a teacher . . .

Your blog will change your life

By Amy Oscar

Just so you know: I’m not an ‘expert blogger.’ At least, not in the realm of website development, marketing or SEO. However, because of the nature of my day job – I write angel stories for a living – I am becoming pretty well-versed in the miraculous.

So today, I’d like to talk about a miracle: your blog.

Though we’ve never met, I already know a few things about you:

1) You want more:

More light – and by ‘light’ I mean, illumination, information, and also, awareness.

More love – and by ‘love’ I mean, connection: friendship, a deepening of family ties, a feeling of belonging, and of community.

More life – and by ‘life’ I mean, vitality, health – your vital, expressive chi, the life energy that moves into and through and out of all that is.

That’s why you started a blog.

2) You want to give – desperately, achingly. You want to be of service, to be generous, to reach out to others; you want to donate energy, ideas and money to the causes you care about. You want to offer your wisdom, to teach from your experience, to uplift and help others.

That, too, is why you started a blog.

3) But at some point – perhaps, right now – you are going to come to a point where, in order to continue blogging, you have to make a leap across some edge of fear, self-doubt or uncertainty: a moment when you find yourself standing at the edge of your comfort zone.

This is where blogging and soul work meet – and a blog becomes a workshop in self-awareness and empowerment.

You see, your blog isn’t just some neutral, formless page out in cyberspace: it’s a projection of your consciousness, an externalized, virtual room hung with mirrors.

It’s a world of light and shadow, conjured out of your own imagination. As such, like all projections of the psyche, your blog is going to test every personal edge you’ve got.

It will remind you how afraid you are to let people in; how shattered you are by criticism; how orgasmic you get when someone you admire offers praise. Your blog will walk you straight up the plank of enlightenment and invite you to plunge in.

This is a good thing. In fact, it could be the best thing that’s ever happened to you – but only if you stay the course, and open to the lessons that your blog will, inevitably, present.

There’s an entire book in this, and one day, perhaps I will write it. For now, I offer up this list – because bloggers (and magazine editors) love lists – to inspire you to consider what your blog might teach you.

What my blog taught me. [click to continue…]

Manifesto: Unfettered, Unfaked and Unbound

Last weekend I attended a three day workshop Creating Irresistible Presence by Sarah Robinson of Escaping Mediocrity. I was viscerally attracted to this workshop  when I saw the headline, Unfettered, Unfaked and Unbound and then I read that Sarah was not only a business coach but also trained as a Shakespearean actor. Back in the day,  my husband got a theater  degree and spent a year traveling with the San Francisco Shakespeare Company. He always talks about how valuable his acting training has been to him in his business life.  Hmmm. . . I thought to myself  there might be something here for me.

You see,  according to Sarah,

Whether On Stage, On Screen, Or Online, What People Pay Attention to Are Bravura Performances Built on Presence.

I totally get this.  I know that unless you are willing and able to give it your all and put yourself out there people don’t respond. I know this from experience. It really takes being able to be in your own skin and be yourself. No taking the middle road so as not to offend. This plays out big time in whether people read and interact with what we bloggers write.  So if I knew that why did I feel like I needed a transfusion?

I have been so focused on teaching people to use WordPress lately that I forgot to put myself in the equation. And teaching WordPress is such a minor part of what I am passionate about yet you would not know this from reading my posts from the last six months. Where is Judi? Where did she go? Well after last weekend she is back. I can’t hideout and play it safe, not if I want to do the work I am passionate about. [click to continue…]

Great Line Up of Speakers at WordCamp Savannah

The WordCamp Savannah is happening next weekend August 20-22, and it includes ME! I was already excited about taking the New Tricks Team to their first WordCamp experience. This will be my fourth WordCamp but the first one where I am a speaker. Here is the line up of speakers:

Speakers

WordCamp Savannah will bring together a variety of speakers including both visiting WordPress experts and local WordPress practitioners. We’ll be posting speaker bios shortly, but so far, here are some of the confirmed speakers:

  • Matt Thomas, SCAD alumni and designer for Automattic.
  • Caila Brown, SCAD Radio General Manager & District Print Art Director.
  • Mark Jaquith, lead core developer of WordPress and independent consultant.
  • Andrew Nacin, committing core developer of WordPress and Google Summer of Code participant.
  • Jane Wells, user experience designer for WordPress.
  • Daryl Koopersmith, contributing core developer of WordPress and Google Summer of Code participant.
  • Ptah Dunbar, contributing core developer of WordPress.
  • Sheri Bigelow, Happiness Engineer for wordpress.com.
  • Anthony Bubel, Happiness Engineer for wordpress.com.
  • Matt Mullenweg, co-founder and benevolent dictator for life of WordPress.
  • Lisa Sabin-Wilson, author of WordPress for Dummies and BuddyPress for Dummies.
  • Sara Cannon
  • Dan Cannon
  • Judi Knight ( Here is a link to the presentation)

I will be speaking on using Social Media Plugins that you can use on Websites to help you with using your site as the hub of your Social Media Marketing. In the meantime here are some things you can do to get your social media game rolling.

This is a smaller WordCamp and offers a chance to really have some face time with a lot of well known people in the WordPress Community and to meet and mingle with others. It is only 25.00. How can you lose?

New Tricks Coaching Delivers Page One Google Listing in One Day.

By Maureen Nolan. . . . My new website was designed and created by Judi Knight, of New Tricks. Judi also designed my new personal avatar and gave me marketing refocus by creatively branding  my Atlanta ADHD coaching practice to be Your Attention Coach. Judi is fun to be around during idea and web design, an experience enhanced by her unique and stimulating office environment – I hated leaving her and the loft atmosphere after the job was over. Judi has since then created the New Tricks Academy and she started a group called Catapult ( “It is our duty to Catapult each other to Greatness”) that is held in her loft office once a week. Judi’s gathers her  clients together in this stimulating work environment where we learn the new tricks of web marketing and business development. It’s important to have this kind of business follow through to teach the mechanics of web marketing. In one meeting alone, I learned how to get my web site to come up #two on the first page of my focused Google key word search.   Thanks Judi.

Maureen Nolan
Your Attention Coach

New Tricks For Florist Blog Sites

drawing for flowers Florist Website Design has been dominated by old school design of the  on-line floral groups, FTD, TeleFlora and 1-800 Flowers. Now florist’s have a wonderful opportunity, with the new technologies available with social media and content management websites, to beat out their competitors in showcasing their finest work and specialties on-line.  These technologies can be used to increase revenues from business activities they love to do, large parties and wedding for example  and decrease their reliance upon the marketing provided by FTD, Telefora, 1-800 Flowers and other on-line ordering companies. With the new web tools and increased use of Internet, people can now easily Google a brick and mortar florist to order flowers from any city in the world. They can place their orders directly to a real person. This allows all of their budgeted money for an arrangement to go into their flowers and florist and delivery, cutting out the portion to the unnecessary broker. Check out this Business Week article, Is the Bloom off at FTD?.

In Atlanta, there are so many FTD, Teleflora and 1-800 Flowers sites and they all look essentially alike. The Florists Websites relying on these company templates have been lured in  by easy and have become complacent maybe thinking a more personalized site would be too expensive or hard to maintain. Not now with WordPress Florist websites being able to be a regular business site with built in blogging ability all ready for Social Media Marketing Opportunities. Now you can post those professional photos your bride sent to you right on the site in a couple of minutes, showcasing the beautiful work that you did. The pictures of those  roundy moundy’s from the Teleflora and such sites cannot compete with your being able to post beautiful examples of your favorite and more profitable work. Then you can send those posts out to Twitter and to FaceBook where more brides and event planners will be searching for options. Florists who use this new design and website technology have a huge advantage as their sites stand out from the crowd and are more personal representation of the shop and its unique qualities. People buy from people they Know, Like and Trust. These new Florist websites are able to build that in like a window into their shop.

New Tricks designed a WordPress website for Candler Park Flowers last March and by Mother’s Day they had sixty new orders from out of town than they had the year before all saying it was because of the website.

Want to know more? Here is Part One of the presentation by Dene Shepherd of New Tricks for the November 19th Floral Meet and Greet sponsored by Carlstedt’s Atlanta and Linda Knight McCarter. Beautiful flowers donated by Associated Farms were given out as door prizes throughout the night to the delight of all.

Social Media Marketing for Florists

View more documents from NewTricks.

Part two of the presentation was given by Judi Knight of New Tricks.

Florist Web-Site Make-Over Tips

View more presentations from NewTricks.

Time for an On-line Makeover?

New Tricks was busy marketing this week on the premise that if we do our networking, and workshops in November then our December will be as busy as we want it to be. We had a great time at the Ga. Coaches Association round table meeting and the North Fulton Express Network Luncheon of the American Business Women’s Association. Good to see old friends and make some new contacts as well.

Here are our slides from both Dene’s and Judi’s presentations. The Coaches didn’t get to see Dene’s talk on Googling Yourself and other Online Marketing Tips. But both of the talks are on this Slideshare.

For those attending the workshop we are offering a free consultation on your on-line presence. We can do this by phone or in person so drop us a line or give us a call and we will get you on our schedule. We are limiting this offer to the first twenty people to respond.

Get Yourself an On-Line Makeover

View more presentations from NewTricks.

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