BlackBox Technologies New WordPress Theme

We just completed a new theme at BlackBox Technologies for our own website. We’ll be offering the theme up for others to use soon but are still working out the details of how the “theme” part of our business will be working so keep your eyes open. We will also have a couple of add on’s which will be available with the theme. In the mean time, stop by, check it out and let us know what you think. If find any bugs or tweaks let us know on the contact page.

In addition to the theme and it’s related add on’s we’ll be providing a technical support forum and web knowledge base to go along with our service.

BlackBox Technologies is a web presence company specializing in content management, design, social media, SEO and online marketing. With services and product lines of business, BlackBox is there, with their strategic alliances, to provide end to end website and online marketing needs for companies of all sizes.

Community Crush

Community Crush is a site which provides a platform for small to medium sized communities to discuss what is happening within their communities, share information and keep up to date with what is happening around town. Content is driven by users so each community can determine how their community site shapes up and what they talk about.

Community Crush is currently in Beta with six active communities and more coming online shortly. Individuals interested in opening their community can request their community on the home page.

Community Crush is owned and Operated by BlackBox Technologies.

Visit Community Crush at http://www.communitycrush.com

Wendistry

Wendistry identifies and grows the most memorable, engaging, and powerful brands for small business.

Building a company is a demanding journey full of twists and turns, dead ends, and lost compasses.

Wendistry leads business owners and entrepreneurial executives through the demanding “where do we want to be?” decisions.

Whether you are just filing your DBA, or have been in business for years and are just realizing the need for an accurate market position…

Site Changes with VSEllis.com

I haven’t been so much a lazy blogger lately but rather a very busy one. I have been working on revamping my site from the ground up. Old content will get ported over but the look and feel will change dramatically. I’m also going to make an effort to inject a bit more of my personality into the site. The overriding concept will be the same but more clearly defined and I’ll begin talking a great deal more about technology and reviewing relevant products and services while continuing to pontificate ideas and how to make them work. If I’m successful, we’ll learn to tie all of those things together in a way that allows our ideas to go from fleeting thoughts through execution to sustainable if not heavily automated businesses and projects.

Stay tuned, I’m planning to launch over the weekend so things will be a little haphazard until Monday but it should be fun.

TLADictionary.com

This post is a bit of a “cheat” but I wanted to let you know about a new site out there you might find useful, tlaDictionary.com.

Shameless disclaimer: This is mine, and is a random idea I had so I just threw it up there. Maybe someday I’ll think of a way for this to generate a little revenue but for now it’s about being useful.

Every business, industry, market, … has it’s own language, often made up of a significant portion of three letter acronyms (TLA’s). Just talk to someone in the military and you’ll get an earful in every sentence, in fact, they might make up the entire sentence. Since TLA’s only make sense if you know the TLA already and understand the context in which it is being used I thought a reference for nothing but TLA’s might be useful. Any industry, business, whatever.. as long as it’s three words, er… letters.

Of course, there are so many of them I don’t know and didn’t want to create all the definitions for so a Wiki seemed the perfect answer. 30 minutes later I had downloaded and installed MediaWiki and dropped in a handful of TLA’s to get it started.

Use it, add to it, update/improve the definitions at will. Most of all, link to it and get people there so they don’t have to be lost anymore when someone starts dropping TLA’s they don’t know.

GeekBrief.TV

I really admire people that chase their dreams and find a way to set out on their own while doing so. A couple of months ago I ran across GeekBrief.tv, a clever podcast (in HD to boot) hosted by Cali Lewis and became an instant fan. I’m a geek at heart after all and always have been so “shiny, happy, tech news” is a good fit. The podcast covers gadgets, tech news and (dearcali.com) tech “help.” The show is about 4 minutes well spent, 4-5 times a week, and I have discovered several good links, technologies and even spawned a few ideas from things I have seen on the show.

What impressed me most was that Cali and Neal are able to do this full time (yea! no day jobs). One of their dreams is to take the show on the road hitting all 50 states in 50 weeks which they plan to begin early this summer. If you want to learn more about that visit bigtrip.tv where you can stay updated on their preparation for the US tour. While checking out bigtrip.tv I noticed that they were looking for sponsors by utilizing the script/idea from the once infamous milliondollarhomepage, selling pixels to sponsors. So, in the spirit of good karma and wanting to help them chase their dreams as I do mine, I decided to carve out my own little 10×10pixel plot and would encourage you to do the same.

Check out the show and support the cause.

To all of you who are visiting via paidbypixels.com or geekbreef.tv, or icali.tv welcome to vsellis.com where we explore, develop and execute great ideas for fun and profit.

If you happen to be in the Dallas Area and would like to join Wendi and I, we’ll be at the Dallas World Camp the weekend of 3/29, Cali and Neal will be speaking there as will the founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg.

MyWorkTools.com

If you read my blog with regularity you know what a big fan I am of quality tools that make our lives easier when starting up businesses. It’s very easy to get caught reinventing the wheel when there are often templates and tools available that can provide, at the very least, a good starting point if not a huge leap forward. Wendi McGowan over at Wendistry turned me on to MyWorkTools.com, a collection of tools, templates and other useful widgets for helping you analyze, plan, execute and do whatever else you need to do to your business or idea. Whether you are looking to do a market analysis of your idea, build a business plan or (gasp) a financial analysis, there is likely to be something useful here for you.

Even if you don’t find exactly what you need you can likely find something that will help you generate ideas and understand what you need to figure out.

So don’t spin you wheels reinventing them, head over to MyWorkTools.com and check it out. My only gripe is that the site can be a little tough to navigate to find exactly what you are looking for but the search function seems to work reasonably well.

P.S. Some of the tools/templates are free some are not.

37 Google AdWords Secrets

Building a business is tough business, even in the on-line world. Unfortunately, as we are looking for resources to help us learn how to grow our businesses on-line, we are faced with an overwhelming number of options and it can be difficult to tell the good from the bad. As a part of the “Net Generation,” actively online since about 1994 (but partially on-line since 1990), I have seen a lot of “Net” things come and go. The internet has lowered some barriers to entry for entrepreneurs but also created new learning challenges requiring new skills to remain competitive. I am still learning everyday and have yet to feel even the slightest degree of complacency with it.

One of the common learning challenges to internet-entrepreneurs is that of on-line advertising. In particular, the now ubiquitous pay-per-click (PPC) advertising such as that which Google has popularized is flooded with competition and pitfalls. There are a lot (and I mean a LOT) of publications, e-books, websites and other sources which promise to teach you how PPC works. My experience so far has been that some of those resources are useful and some are total junk often set up only to sell you something. So be careful! I read all of these publications with a healthy degree of skepticism but occasionally find some that are useful and worthwhile.

You can easily spend a lot of money on useless information but you can spend even more on your PPC advertising without getting much if anything in return if you don’t know what you are doing. The point is that PPC works, and we need to learn how to make it work for us, but it isn’t as simple as putting up and ad and “they will buy” any more than you can just put up a site and expect a million visitors to find it. Advertise without direction and watch your wallet shrink, do it right and watch it grow. It’s like anything else, constant learning and applying yourself will pay off.

So how do we learn from good resources while avoiding the pitfalls of the bad? The simple answer is do your research. In my continued pursuit to bring to you tools and information that are worthwhile I’ll mention the first of the PPC e-books I’ve found that have been well worth the cost. I’ll preface the rest of this by telling you that I have actually been using the suggestions in this book and it has kept it’s promises. “37 AdWords Secrets” by Roger Hall is a collection of (surprise) 37 techniques for improving your Google AdWords performance. Roger is a Google Certified AdWords Professional and his e-book sells for $37 or about $1 per “secret.” I have been using the techniques in Roger’s book for over a month and have seen the performance of my own AdWords campaigns improve making the book a bargain at that price. Whether you are selling your own stuff or an affiliate marketer selling someone else’s product, this book will easily pay for itself. When you buy there are also several follow on bonuses that will come after your purchase which are also quite useful (and free). If you want to try before you buy there is a “5 Secrets” primer which is free and can be found here. If you would like to purchase the full 37 Secrets you can click on the link inside the free “5 Secrets” e-book or download it here.

You don’t have to go alone. There are more tools to come but if you do ANY on-line advertising, 37 AdWords Secrets is a great place to start.