Zen Habits with over 26,000 readers has published a e-book called “Zen To Done”. Zen To Done takes some of the best aspects of a few popular productivity systems (GTD, Stephen Covey and others) and combines them with the mandate of simplicity. It makes things as simple as possible, and no more. Zen To Done is a simple system to get you more organized and productive, and keep your life saner and less stressed, with a set of habits. ZTD teaches you:

The key habits needed to be productive, organized, and simplified … and no more than that.
How to implement these key habits … tips on forming a habit.
How to organize these habits into a simple system that will keep everything in your life in its place.
How to simplify what you need to do.
Minimal ZTD. Also includes an even simpler version called Minimal ZTD.

Dozens of readers have written comments about how ZTD has changed their lives, made them more organized and less stressed, and has worked better than other productivity systems. It’s definitely worth a try.

Source: Get a Copy Now

Global Translator is a free and open source Wordpress Plugin which is able to dynamically translate your blog in the following thirteen different languages: English, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Greek, Dutch.
The number of available translations will depend on your blog language and the translation engine you will chose to use. The most powerful features which Global Translator provides are:

Double Translation Engine System

it has the ability to provide the translations by using both Google Translation Engine and Babel Fish

Search Engine Optimized

it uses the permalinks by adding the language code at the beginning of all your URI. For example the english version on www.domain.com/mycategory/mypost will be automatically transformed in www.domain.com/en/mycategory/mypost

Fast Caching System

a built-in cache is provided in order to reduce the online connections to the translation engines

Fully configurable layout

you can easily customize the appearance of the translation bar by choosing between a TABLE or DIV layout for the flags bar and by selecting the number of translations to make available to your visitors

Pricing: Free
Requirements: WordPress 2.0+
Source: http://www.nothing2hide.net/blog/wp-plugins/wordpress-global-translator…

If you’re having trouble bringing in a sustainable income online, it might be because you’re emulating approaches taken by people who got in early on a particular model. The problem is that the nature of these models makes it difficult if not impossible for new players to achieve the level of success they want.

The key to avoiding this kind of frustration is to see where things are going and become an early-adopter in the next big wave of the commercial Internet. Of course, even if you’re already doing well, it never hurts to take a look forward, right?

This free Teaching Sells report from 10-year online marketer Brian Clark is your guide to what’s coming next, and what some savvy online entrepreneurs are succeeding with right now. Here’s What You’ll Learn When You Enroll in the Teaching Sells Training Program (All Five Courses are Included):

• Course One: Multimedia content strategies that result in valuable paid courses and a sustainable business
• Course Two: Detailed marketing methods that work without wasteful spending on advertising
• Course Three: Tools and techniques for producing dazzling interactive content that creates happy repeat customers

• Course Four: Multiple business models to choose from in order to best achieve your revenue and lifestyle goals
• Course Five: Easy instructions for building airtight interactive learning environments and membership websites
• Plus: Forum access to instructors and a step-by-step methodology to build your first paid interactive content site.

Source: Get Free Teching Sells Report Now

Many bloggers are unconsciously making it hard for new visitors to decide to stick around. They’re not selling themselves, nor are they selling their blogs.

If marketers behaved in the same way, nobody would ever buy anything and we’d all live like Zen monks! (Though maybe that’s not such a bad thing…)

In this post, I want to explain how you can use lessons learned studying how marketers sell products to convert more new visitors into loyal readers.

Selling the maker

Just as a company invests millions of dollars into its brand image, you need to emphasize the qualities of the person who makes the product. You!

A blog might promise to provide life-changing advice and suggestions, but for this promise to be effective, the visitor needs to trust that the author is worth listening to.

While personal information about your interests and your family is important (it helps show visitors you’re a normal person and not some kind of scam artist), many bloggers forget to sell themselves.

Use your About page to tell visitors why you’re worth listening to, and why the content you create is likely to be of a high quality. Here are some questions you can answer — though you want to filter out answers that don’t help to sell you.

• How long have you been involved in the field you’re writing in?
• Do you have any formal qualifications relating to the topics you write about?
• Has any of your writing ever been linked to by a popular blog visitors are likely to recognize?
• Has something you’ve written ever been very successful on social media?
• Can you demonstrate that you have a passion for what you write about, even if you don’t have formal qualifications? For example, you might not have had a story published, but what if you’ve completed NaNoWriMo five times? That’s worth mentioning.

When a company markets a product it often markets itself alongside the product. By doing one, you’re doing the other. If you think of your blog as a product, you need to emphasize the strengths behind the maker of that product.

Don’t be afraid to sell yourself. People are used of it. It might seem like boasting to you, but it’s the kind of information readers are hungry for. They want to know that you’re a capable and trustworthy source of information.

Selling the product

When companies sell a product, they don’t focus on its innate qualities alone. Instead, they focus on ends: what the product can do for you. People aren’t interested in an iPod just because it’s an iPod. They’re interested in what it can do for them (and what it will allow them to do).

New visitors approach your blog with the same mindset. They ask themselves: what will I get out of reading this blog? What does it have to offer me?

When selling your blog to new visitors, you need to convince them that it has something to offer. You should start with your About page. This stuff needs to go at the top, right above where you sell yourself.

• What does this blog offer?
• What kinds of people will benefit?
• Why is it worth reading?
• Has your blog been very successful on social media?
• Has is been linked to by a popular blog?
• Have you written for other well-known blogs?

All this information engages new visitors and helps convince them that your blog has something to offer. You can take your answers to these questions even further.

What can you offer?

You can convince new visitors of the worth of your blog outside of your About page, too.

Showcasing your most popular content (or what you think is your best content) helps to do this, because it puts your best selling points right under the noses of each new visitor. Just like a store will put the products it most wants to sell in the front window, giving lots of exposure to your best stuff will draw people into your blog.

Tag-lines can also be an effective place to sell your blog. In a sentence or two you can make a statement about what your blog has to offer and who it’s written for. You can also do the same thing with a little ‘About’ blurb on your main page (but I don’t think this is ever a substitute for a dedicated ‘About’ page).

Packaging is key

Even if you don’t have a budget for design, it’s worth investing as much time as is needed to finding a really nice theme for your blog.

Brands pour millions into packaging. That’s because decades of studies and focus-groups have shown that packaging matters. People will judge your product by the care that’s taken in the packaging it comes in.

Luckily, when it comes to finding a quality theme for your blog, you’re in the right place :-).

And remember: don’t be afraid to experiment. Try new themes, re-jig your About page, add new selling points to your blog and refine existing ones. Don’t feel obliged to stick with something just because it’s what your readers are used to.

Unless your blog is growing at a cracking pace, change is the only way you’ll be able to breathe new life into your blog’s growth.

Thank you Skellie for Writing this amazing post on Blog Perfume

Smashing Magazine has released a fresh, clean, user-friendly and playful Wordpress theme “Dilectio” to Smashing Magazine readers. Dilectio comes from the Latin Language and it means “love, solicitude, esteem”. It’s a rather atmospheric theme and to achieve this effect Design Disease started the scratch from with something that might be identified with this kind of feeling. The element they are talking about is the rounded shape that is repeating randomly, creating a beautiful and original rhythm. Design Disease has created “About this Blog” area just to give this identifiable element that a site needs, an area that many will remember.

Pricing: Free
Requirements: -
Source: http://wp-themes.designdisease.com/2007/12/21/dilectio…

The current default WordPress administration area is functional, but OrderList felt it could be improved. Would you like to have a new look for your WordPress adminstration area? WordPress Tiger Adminstration looks really nice and improved the usability. The author didn’t want to touch the XHTML framework of the admin, but instead relied on the power of CSS2 to manipulate the presentation. The whole package has been wrapped up into a single plugin. Just install and activate. The new design will be immediately visible. Take a look at the following screenshots, you would like to install this plugin immediately.

Pricing: Free
Requirements: -
Source: http://orderedlist.com/wordpress-plugins/wp-tiger-administration/

There are hundreds of plugins and services which can provide statistics about your visitors. However skeltoac found that even though something like Google Analytics provides an incredible depth of information, it can be overwhelming and doesn’t really highlight what’s most interesting to me as a writer. That’s why Automattic created its own stats system, to focus on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface.

Installing this WordPress.com Stats plugin is much like installing Akismet, all you need is to put in your API Key and the rest is automatic.

Once it’s running it’ll begin collecting information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page. Less is more.

Finally, because all of the processing and collection runs on their servers and not yours, WordPress.com Stats plugin doesn’t cause any additional load on your hosting account. In fact, it’s one of the fastest stats system, hosted or not hosted, that you can use.

Pricing: Free
Requirements: WordPress 2.1+
Source: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/

Quick Online Tips is a popular blog regularly publishing Technology news, smart blogging tips, useful computer software and Web 2.0 services. The content presented in simple to understand English language, is targeted to the people interested take their blog to a new high, learn secrets of blogging success and monetization and want to keep updated about breaking technology developments and buzz of the blogosphere. This blog is published from India, with regularly updated content for an international audience.

Regular readers of Quick Online Tips have been on the rise. The current readership is 13000+ active daily RSS feed readers, who get instant updated headlines in their newsreaders. There are around 1000+ daily email subscribers who get a daily newsletter with latest articles. Are you one of them?

Source: http://www.quickonlinetips.com/

Michael Whalen is a site owner of Whalesalad. He loves building web applications, Django, CSS, and his beautiful girlfriend Elan Zelenka. He has decided to pack his custom made WordPress theme up and release it for free to every one out on the interwebs. The theme is called Elixir, he is releasing it in 5 exclusive fruitalicious colors, including a cool blue, lime green, smooth purple, bright orange, and of course the original pink you see on Whalesalad.

Pricing: Free
Requirements: -
Source: http://whalesalad.com/2007/07/23/elixir/

There are a lot to learn from FreelanceSwitch which has gained over 17,500 subscribers within 3 months. FreelanceSwitch has released a official FreelanceSwitch Ebook called How to Be a Rockstar Freelancer.

The book covers everything from getting started to expanding your business. Written by Collis & Cyan Ta’eed - the founders of the site - it’s packed with new information, advice and insights not covered on the blog.

The book is available now as an eBook for $29 and will shortly be on Lulu as a paperback.

Source: Click here to view more details