Annie Kolatkar » WordPress

Iduplicate – What it can do for you

AnnieK — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 19:52:41 +0000

If all your marketing needs were met in an instant, what would that do for you? Would you suddenly become an expert or authority online? Would you have more money? What would having more money do for you? Would you have more freedom? Would you be able to support more causes and become a philanthropist or make new relationships?

The Iduplicate team is constantly finding, evaluating and testing the latest methods for you to leverage the internet so that you can save time, energy, money and becoming highly effective at what you do. They don’t just spout theory…they create real time results. I personally don’t have the time to be searching through Google search results looking for tools and about pages to learn how to reach a wider audience.

Another cool feature is that they have experts that will be on their forums answering questions that pertain to your business and how you are using social media for internet marketing. People, in the form of global alliance members and the Iduplicate team, will be a tremendous resource for those who know how to network for their projects and business needs.

Just imagine accelerating your business growth by tweaking your business plan to include the vast marketing resources from Iduplicate so that you don’t have to waste time stumbling around the internet looking for answers. Imagine watching easy to use videos that teach you step-by-step how to use and harness the power of WordPress blogging, Twitter, Facebook, eZine, Stumbleupon, and more.

For these reasons, I am using Iduplicate. It’s worth your consideration.

Up next…Leveraging the internet

Share and Enjoy:

Metadata Blog Description – The long and short of it by WebsiteGrader.com

AnnieK — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:01:00 +0000

What I really wanted to say…versus…what I have to say in 150 characters or less. Are you one of those people, like me, who love to talk? It has to be the Irish in me; I could go on forever! Thank goodness for rules and guidelines about how to set up these blogs to optimize them. A quick test at Website Grader will help you do just that. When you get your report which analyzes your website –from meta tags and headers to domain info and Google rankings, you will have a better idea of how well the global market will find you.I know you are all curious about what I really wanted to say, so here it is:
Annie Kolatkar is a small business mentor, social network and affiliate marketing consultant and opportunity educator (make money! save money! woohoo!); on the brink of discovery as an author of “children’s books for adults” and travel memoirs; oil painter of 30 years, art instructor, digital photographer, website designer and graphic artist; gourmet chef, recipe generator, traditional foods observer, Weston A. Price follower, healthy baby advisor, amateur: nutritionist, homeopath and herbal healer; world traveler; daughter, sister, cousin, wife and mother of a daughter with Down syndrome; keen on rightful and positive thinking, critical thinking, forgiveness, happiness, love and peace. In a word: eclectic! Join me for thought provoking, stimulating, exciting posts.

I got a gentle slap on the hand from WebsiteGrader for that 777 character description.

“Who am I as a blogger?” is what the search engines want to know as succinctly as possible. They want the boiled down reduction sauce of 777 characters in 150.

Here’s what I did next: I did some Q&A on myself, but first I made an Irish Coffee:

Q: What does the long version tell people?
A: Well…I’m going to write a blog about lots of things that are unrelated.

Q: What have people always said about you?
A: They’ve called me an ‘unconventional woman’.

Q: What are you really going to talk about?
A: The pillars of PitchIn.com

Here’s what I entered on the Metadata Description box in the optimizer:
An unusual blog, by an unconventional woman, covering a myriad of subjects under the umbrella of health, wealth, education and charity.

115 characters not counting spaces. 135 counting spaces. Woo-hoo! I did it …AND…I didn’t go and try to squeeze in more adjectives until I hit 150 characters. I have five keywords I am happy with, namely: woman, health, wealth, education [and] charity. The search engines are happy; websitegrader.com is happy and I am feeling the effects of an ounce of Bushmills Irish Whiskey in San Diego’s finest Ryan Brother’s Coffee Roasting Company’s roast “Peru”. It almost sounds like my coffee drink needs a new name! Anyone…?

Share and Enjoy:

WordPress Theme “Vertigo 3 Column”

AnnieK — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 06:00:52 +0000

The lovely design of this site is based on Brian Gardner’s Vertigo 2-3 column layout. I downloaded his design, unzipped it, opened up the images file and opened the blank logo and header templates into Photoshop and reworked the logo using one of my own oil paintings. I created a color palette of colors to match the rose and then wrote down the hexadecimal numbers for the colors I wanted on my website, so I could go in to the WordPress CSS script which controls the colors of the font, background, lines, hyperlinks and more and change Brian’s original colors. Formerly, this is something I would have asked my tech savvy husband to do for me, but I thought, “Hey, there are octogenarians out there on the web blogging about how they set up their own site, so if they can do it, surely I can too!” Here are some tips on changing your CSS style sheet so you can customize your site.

From your WordPress leftside bar click on Appearance. Next, click on Editor which will open up the CSS style sheet notes. It is wise to have a back up of this info so that if you accidentally change anything, you can reload it and fix your mistakes. So, select all (Control + A) and then copy (Control + C) and then open up Notepad or Wordpad and paste (Control + V) the contents into the new document and save it as CSS.txt.

To change the background color: look for this text:

#wrap {
background: #f0dbe6;

The pound sign (“#”) is the symbol that precedes the hexadecimal color number. In my site, the pale pink background is # f0dbe6. Usually a background is color coded black (#000000) or white (#FFFFFF). You can always look up hexadecimal colors at this website that will help you with picking colors: Color Scheme Designer. All the colors are noted in RGB with the hexadecimal next to it. You can explore this cool site and get great ideas for creating your own unique color scheme.

To change the navigation button hover color: look for this text in the CSS script:

#nav a:hover {
background: #495944;

Tip: Look for universal color changes. If you are replacing a blue color with red, everywhere you see the blue hexadecimal number swap it out for red’s number. Look up each color number you come across in the style sheet and then look at the original design. Chances are that you will begin to see a pattern of everything that needs changing. Also, make sure that if you are, for example, swapping out hexadecimal color #445566 with #CC0077 that you make a note of it. If you need to back track, at least you know where you went wrong.

Not all CSS scripts look the same. Not all sites are going to be easy to make tweaks to, but if you look for one simple thing to change and have success with it, keep going and before long, you will be an expert in manipulating your web site’s creative color look and feel.

Share and Enjoy: