How to Find Out Which Platform a Blog or CMS Uses
October 22, 2009 by Russell Hall
Filed under Articles, Newbie Help, WordPress
Have you ever visited a blog or website and been curious or needed to know which platform they are using to generate the website?
Here's a brief tutorial on how to easily find out.
You can try it out on the page that you're on right here on The RussRave. If using Firefox click on the "View" tab in the top left hand corner of your browser.Then select "Page Source" from the drop down menu of the "View: tab.
You'll see the html source code page display on your screen and somewhere towards the middle or top of that page you'll see the blog/CMS title like this
<title>The RussRave</title> and immediately under that you'll see ,…
<meta name="generator" content="WordPress abc" />
Where you can see "generator" content ="Wordpress" means that the site is built on Wordpress. If it was Joomla or Drupal you'd see wording indicating that platform as the content generator.
If you're using Internet Explorer you still click on the "View" tab in the top left hand corner of the browser and then select "Source" from near the bottom of the drop down menu.
Hope that's of some use to you. If you have questions or comments please feel free to leave a comment,… for which you'll get backlink credit to your own blog via the CommentLuv plugin I have installed 
Cheers,.. and have a great day.
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Giving Too Much Free Stuff Can be Bad For Your Business
September 26, 2009 by Russell Hall
Filed under Articles, Newbie Help, internet marketing
I try to keep my subscriptions on other people’s lists to a minimum. For the simple reason that I like to remain as focussed as possible on objectives and tasks, and the thing is that getting inundated with emails that are all clambering for my attention isn’t a good thing.
Presently I have hundreds and hundreds of emails unopened in my inbox even though I had it down to under 10 just a couple of months ago. So although I intended to go through and read many of them I’ll now just be bulk deleting the majority simply because they’re probably no longer relevant.
But the thing I really wanted to talk about is when you get on someone’s list and that person or marketer is really worthwhile and has good content and good supportive material that you would find useful,.. but then they start sending you invitations to get even more free stuff (lots of it in fact is very good,..and surprising that such good bbooks and programsare actually free). The thing that I’m saying is negative is the fact that these freebie offers are coming in every 2 or 3 days (sometimes more) and what I’ve noticed is that many of the offers are enticements for me to sign up to a new list with which the original marketer is affiliated (that’s good for him because he gets the referal commission,.. many of which are ongoing under micro-continuity programs) but it just means that you start to get more and more emails from other marketers that eventually end up being so intense that you just have to opt out of a whole bunch of lists.
Personally,.. I think that any marketer loses credibility and also reduces his or her own effectiveness by spreading themselves too thin over too many programs. Wouldn’t it be better to say focus on two (maximum 3) programs within a particular group that you really believe in and just totally focus on them. Write articels around them, blog about them, tweet about them, comment on them etc etc. That way you don’t end up aggravating people with endless offers with "this is the answer" connotation and thereby eventually lose credibility and just creat confusion (and mistrust?) in the eyes of your subscribers.
I’ll admit that I’ve personally been a bit slack in promoting what I believe are two of the very best programs for internet marketers to get involved with. These particular guys are the real deal when it comes to proving a track record of results that are totally free from all the typical guru hype and BS that abounds on the internet.
I’ll be featuring more about these two marketers shortly,.. but for now I just felt that I should make a point about being barraged by way too much free content. If you’ve got good free content to give to your list,.. then my recommendation is to limit it or drip-feed it to them so that it can be received fairly and given more serious attention too. I think we’re all getting a bit fed up of the "get in quickly" "this closes at midnight" "act before this dissapears",… I for one am just sick of seeing all of that even though it’s true that scarcity does motivate people to act,.. there are better ways of doing it.
Have a great day!
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Nerd Blogger Strikes Again
September 10, 2009 by Russell Hall
Filed under Articles, Newbie Help, WordPress
What is it with these geeky guys that think they can come along and introduce a whole bunch of tricks, and cool techniques that will turn plain old WordPress installs into awesome Internet Marketing and Blogging power machines?
I was right in the middle of developing some pretty neat plugins that would flat out transform the basic IM abilities of WordPress that I was planning to charge $97 for and I reckon that would have been good value.
But along comes that brilliant (and very annoying) nerd genius Robert Plank and he creates a website loaded with videos in which he shows anyone and everyone how to turn their WordPress blog into a freaking Ferrari featured machine! He completely blew my plugin development plans out the window and then goes and adds even more features that anyone can start to apply right away using his insightful nerdy knowledge for which he’s becoming famous (read "infamous").
So I figured,.. what the heck…. if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em, so I decided to feature Roberts "Nerd Blogger" here.
Get in now while the price is still low,…
…..to your WordPress and Blogging success!
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www. stands for work, work, work!
August 15, 2009 by Russell Hall
Filed under Articles, Momentum, Newbie Help, Web2.0, internet marketing
It never ceases to amaze and intrigue me how many people embark upon some kind of Internet venture or other and then expect some kind of magical "Internet" formula to kick in and start rocketing them, their product(s), cause or business to dizzying heights of success.
Never before has any other form of new media had this kind of phenomenally mesmerizing effect on so many people,.. I mean, we must be talking "millions" of people here that have this kind of expectation that they fully expect will come to fruition close to as they’ve imagined it or even better.
My observation is that it’s the Internet itself that’s responsible for creating this kind of "lemming like" mass hysteria. Certainly there have been many very successful Internet marketers that got involved in the "early days" of the mid to late 1990’s and made an absolute motza in online sales. Added to that is the next generation of Web1.0 marketers that followed in the steps of their mentors and also did very well indeed.
However,.. you’ve got to remember that back then it really was the early days,… kind of like the California Gold Rush where anyone who could afford a bucket, a pick and a shovel and was prepared to do a bit of digging could strike gold without too much effort, but as is the case with all gold rush experiences,- once the mother-load vein has been farmed, the hard and the smart work begins in figuring out the best ways of finding new tracts and even better ways of using leveraging to get it out.
So there’s a kind of echo that’s still ringing out loudly in the ears of lots of folks out there that "thars gold in them thar hills",.. the hills of course being the "Internet",.. and to be plainly factual about that… it’s a fundamentally true statement. The problem lies in the fact that there is still a misconception that striking it rich or making more than enough to sack your boss is an easy task that can be achieved within the first 90 to 180 days online.
I’ll be the first to say that YES,.. it is entirely possible to achieve those kind of results. I personally know of several "new comers" that in the past 2 to 3 years alone have achieved astonishing and consistent results from a virtual standing start, but the thing that distinguishes these people is that they all worked really hard and really consistently to get to where they are now. It seems that those that have broken into the good money have all established some quite stringent work practices and routines that have allowed them to achieve their success!
In my opinion, anyone that has a plan to buy some kind of "business in a box", "turnkey website" or start hawking around the same old rehashed PLR e-info that everyone else has, is just kidding themselves about ever being able to become financially independent or even replace their income online.
What about Web2.0,… doesn’t that make the whole task so much easier now?
My quick answer,… "no way Jose". Don’t get me wrong, I think that Web2.0 and the evolution thereof is a fantastic thing,.. but it needs to be basically understood and then a working and/or marketing strategy has to be created around that which then needs to be RELENTLESSLY worked on until the results and the networking power becomes activated enough for it to make any real difference.
Whilst many people have already figured out which elements of the Web2.0 network they need to be working that will be most suited to their marketing or promotional objectives, there are just as many and more that have not or haven’t even got a clue. The point here is, that with so many new Web2.0 sites starting up (many of them are very good too) it’s impossible for you to have a profile and be active on every single one of them (or even half of them) unless you had a team of diligent and objective focused virtual assistants working for you. At the moment, most people tend to to using a combination of *blogging (including commenting on similar niched blogs for exposure and some backlinks) *Facebook, *Twitter, *Youtube/Metacafe, *Linkedin, *Friendfeed (now owned by Facebook), *Squidoo, *Hubpages, *Forums, *Article submissions. However, to put in the required time on each of those on an average daily basis not only requires a clear schedule to be drafted,.. but several hours each day just to keep such a network alive! I take my own example and say that whilst I’m not afraid of hard work (most of which I really enjoy anyway) and long hours, I just cannot keep up with the demands that my "Web2.0 network list" requires,- well certainly not to the level that would be considered as suitable or consistent enough for me to be satisfied with.
If you’re one of those people that’s been led to believe that simply by setting up a Facebook profile, a Twitter account, a Youtube Channel and a WordPress blog that you’re now on the "network" and you can just occasionally post and tweet content as you feel inclined and the whole Web.2.0 machine will kick in and do the rest, then you’re just a time bomb waiting to go off. A time bomb of frustration, disappointment and debt (yes it costs money to start an online business and stick with it,… for some poor uninformed folks… that’s WAY too much!).
Yes,.. WordPress is great,.. and the search engines and Google love Wordpress sites and blogs because they’re typically very reliable resources for street-level knowledge and information that people are looking for. But it depends on your content.,- if that’s not consistent reliable regular content then you can forget about it having any real impact on your site’s or blog’s performance from a ranking perspective. Sure you can get the best SEO expert in the country to tweak your blog with all the latest plugins and do keyword analysis and make sure your posts, categories and initial content are full of all the keyword rich content, but if you don’t continue to back that up and keep the snowball rolling you’ll soon find yourself scratching your head and relegating your blog to the "could’ve-been-great" graveyard where 80% of blogs all end up.
It’s kind of interesting that in the offline world, a common international statistic (in capital driven economies) is that 85% of businesses would fail within the first 5 years and 50% would fail in under 2 years. Is it then any coincidence that those figures are not only echoed online but also amplified? I was visiting Darren Rowse’s blog at http://www.problogger.net/ this week and noticed that he had a poll running in his right sidebar. The poll asks whether you have a blog and for how long you’ve been blogging. I found the results very interesting and they just confirmed my anecdotal evidence that I’d assumed had been the case for some time. Considering that Darren’s blog has a very wide readership and attracts what I would consider a very broad spread of "typical" bloggers and IM aspirants, I thought that his poll results (spread over 5,075 voters at time of this post) represented a reliable slice of the blogging and blogger perspective.
You can go and see for yourself (just take the poll and click "View results" to see) that the first 3 categories represent over 50% of the voters. Those categories are 1) "I don’t have a blog". 2) "Less than 3 months", 3) "3 to 6 months" and the total number of them being 2,610 is therefore 52% of the total voters. So therefore we have a clear indication that more than half the people either "preparing to start a blog" or having "started a blog" get to a period of about no more than 6 months before they either give up or kind of continue to limp along without realizing the goals that they started out with. Even if that assumption isn’t entirely correct, then one thing is clear, and that’s the fact that only 28% of bloggers have been active for more than 18 months. I wonder how many of those 28% of bloggers have achieved the successes and objectives that they started off with? I’d like to wager that it’s quite low and that only a small proportion of those blogs could be considered as being truly successful or mainstream fixtures!
I’m coming to my real intended point in this article which is that most people (probably 85% to 90%) embark upon their internet venture wearing rose colored glasses and expecting some magical Web2.0 formula or Internet phenomenon to sweep them up to success without actually having to break much of a sweat. When I look at all of the successful online marketers and professional bloggers they all appear to have one thing in common,.. they work their tails off in order to achieve and maintain their successes. For sure, all of them are applying outsourcing and Virtual Assistant practices (some on huge scales) in order to get their results,… but the common fundamental ingredient and theme is there,… it requires WORK,.. "www. work work work" in order to achieve online success and any kind of niche domination.
I read recently that Rich Schefren (you can Google him to discover he’s a much respected and very knowledgeable online (and offline) businessman), brought up the topic at one of his recent seminars at which many of the the Internet’s top marketers and performers were present,.. and that topic was along the lines of ,.. How realistic is it to believe in the notion of the "Internet Lifestyle"? (That "lifestyle being,… sipping Margaritas on an island resort while your clickbank and Paypal accounts keep churning out the dollars for you). The combined consensus of the delegates present was that that lifestyle (on a permanent or semi permanent basis) was a myth and didn’t really exist. The reason for that is that it takes work (and some genius strategies) to get there,..and it takes work to stay there…even if you do take some time off for a long "holiday",… the work is always there waiting to be attended to or waiting to be pumped to the next level if you want to keep the kind of dollars rolling in that your business and lifestyle now demands!
Here’s my advice to anyone that’s in that early starting out phase (for me its a "re-starting out" phase). You need to identify your best or most productive Web2.0 network sites to focus on, which you can do with research, and a bit of testing (if you have successful competitors or know of any like-styled businesses, watch what they’re doing). Then make a schedule for posting content to those sites and stick to it (make it realistic,.. but make sure its really regular). If you can afford to outsource some work to a VA (Virtual Assistant) then do that, but if you can’t just make your plan and stick to it. That will mean performing some routine daily tasks (write them down in a schedule) even though you might not feel like doing them,… and you WILL feel like you’re talking to yourself for the first 2 to 3 months (or more) whilst you’re getting little response or comments to you blog post, articles & Tweets etc. The thing is that during this time many people are watching and waiting for a time when they feel it’s a safe and reliable proposition to enter your "conversation" and become a part of it. The problem for most people is that they don’t have a clear and committed objective and they just come to a grinding halt once their enthusiasm has faded away (usually within the first 3 to 6 months!).
In conclusion: if you’re not prepared to put some real work into building your online presence and creating a groundwork of trust and credibility then you should stop dreaming and wasting your time on every other out-of-the-box get rich program that comes out because although some of those programs can provide you with good ideas and information and tools,.. the main ingredient needed is YOU,… putting in the work.
I’d love to hear your views on this and perhaps if we can get some conversation happening it will provide some worthwhile support for our readers and also encourage me to post more articles going into more detail on this topic.
Until next time…. Cheers,..and have a great day!
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WordPress Videos for Beginners
August 3, 2009 by Russell Hall
Filed under Articles, Newbie Help, WordPress
I can still remember what it was like trying to get my first blog started,… frustrating!
After I’d paid someone to help me install WordPress on my server because ‘ftp’ was still a foreign language to me, I just sat there looking at a single page with a defaulted Kubrick blue header and text underneath that said,…
"Hello world"!
"So what’s next" I thought, "what am I supposed to do now to make this look like a blog and function like a blog?"
Even though I searched Google up and down for meaningful tutorials, all I got was a bunch of forum links with comments by what seemed to be coding boffins talking a foreign language. There were’nt any beginner video tutorials back then but if there had been I think I would have gladly paid a hundred bucks for them.
But nowadays things are different, and video tutorials are the big thing at the moment and so it’s not too hard to find someone somewhere offering a video tutorial or two. The problem with that is that many of them are hard to follow and they don’t offer the full picture on how to get started from A to Z and include all the necessary components relating to ftp and hosting as well.
So that makes me very pleased to introduce a really worthwhile and very affordable solution where you can get over 30 WordPress Video Tutorials for beginners that will take you through every step you need to know in order to set up your own functional blogs.
This video series is currently only $17 for the entire set of videos that are clear and easy to follow at your own pace. Once you’ve downloaded them you don’t have to be bothered with streaming videos that are either too slow or that just freeze up your computer screen.
I was going to release these at $47 which would still be great value,.. but then I decided on $37,..and now for a limited time I’ve slashed another $20 off and you can pick them up for just $17 for the whole set.
Check out the full details here on my seperate sales page; http://russrave.com/wordpress-videos.html
To your success and blogging enjoyment,
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Newbie Help at Hand
July 19, 2009 by Russell Hall
Filed under Articles, Newbie Help
Recently I’ve been reading a lot of blog post comments in which newbies are crying out for real help because they’re getting sick and tired of being fed all the high promising BS crap that’s been fed (and continues to be fed) to them which promise the world and then delivers nothing but frustration and disappointment not too mention even more debits on their already overburdened credit cards. I recalled myself how difficult it was just 3 short years ago to get my head around all of the issues and opportunities. Especially the basic stuff like using ftp, edit html, creating a web page, a landing page, a blog, a video etc. Now all of that is so second nature to me and I can virtually do it all in my sleep. That led me to thinking about how much I could help so many newbies get on top of this whole internet marketing and Web2.0 craziness that seems to change weekly and is so hard at times to keep up with.
I’ve already set up a tech-help department "WP-TechPlus" which provides regular hands free monthly support for anyone running a WordPress blog, and there may be many readers that could find such a service very worthwhile. However, they’ll be other readers that either can’t afford that kind of service and would prefer to do it themselves if possible.To that end I’d invite anyone with a question or problem regarding WordPress or even standard html pages, ftp, mySQL or anything of relevance to speak up and ask for assistance. I may later on start a forum for that purpose, but for now you can either leave a comment under this article or submit a message via the contact form on our Contact page (see link in footer).
Apart from that, I’ll be featuring more articles and information on anything that I feel could be worthwhile for newbies to be considering in order to get ahead and make a success of their Internet efforts.
As mentioned earlier in this article, there are a lot of programs and products on the market and continualy being released that are just completely useless and will do little more than waste your time and your money but on the other hand there are some programs and products that are excellent and will definately get you the results you desire when you apply the methods and principles. I’ll be dedicating a seperate page to review products and programs that I consider to be really worthwhile so that readers can get an insider view of what they’re all about, including the positives and the negatives from an objective perspective. I won’t be reviewing anything that I think is a waste of time,.. and I’ll be up front and tell you that I won’t be reviewing anything that I am not an affiliate of or that I haven’t already bought myself. One thing I can promise you is that I absolutely WILL NOT EVER review or promote any product or program that I don’t believe in or that I think is just garbage presented in fancy e-covers and flashy sales pages. So,.. yes I will make money from purchases made via my links on reviews made, but I will NEVER promote anything just for the sake of an affiliate commission or because the product is "high ticket" and offers the juciest pay outs,… such as is found with many $997 and $1997 products (most of which are complete garbage!).
One thing I will be doing with my reviews and product recommedations will be to provide readers with a special incentive to use my links to access the products and programs by way of giving something of extra value myself,..I’m not sure exactly what those incentives will be but they will be worthwhile and hopefully considered as being irresistable offers!
I’m looking forward to helping all IM newbies, newcomers and freshmen as much as possible with future content and support. In the meantime, if you have a question (I don’t care how trivial or "stupid" it may seem) just drop me a line,… you’ll find I’m a very approachable guy and I will always give you a reply!
Cheers,… and here’s to your unbounding success!
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