AdesBlog.com

Top commenters for June were: Rajaie AlKorani, Rice Blogger, Blog for Beginners, Eva White, Platform Beds, PS3, SEOrious Results, Marketing Man, PPC, and Dining Tables.

Thanks guys for being part of AdesBlog’s community!

P.S Why you should comment on AdesBlog? Well, there are many reasons, but one of the practical reasons is SEO for your blog. For example, try searching google for SEOrious Results (one of the commenters above), see any familiar blog in the results? (yes it’s that powerful ;)

Obviously it works better for new blogs that are competing in the niche market or in niche keyword targeting.

Yaro Starak’s online course on blogging - Blog Mastermind seems, was a success. Blog Mastermind is a series of 27 lessons created by Yaro, in order to teach people how to become professional blogger and start earning steady income from blogs. Lessons come in text, audio and video materials. It’s a 6 month program, with one lesson a week for 27 weeks.

Yaro’s first group of students has already graduated, and he has put up some testimonials (actually a lot of testimonials) from them on his youtube page.

Second intake for Blog Mastermind is going to open sometime in July. So, if you want to join, you have to be on the lookout. I say you have to be on the lookout because the first intake was open for a limited period of time only. And during this registration period, all seats were sold out.

I was wondering, why he has to close the registration when he could make more money? Obviously, the more people sign up, the more money he makes. And since, the course costs $77 a month, I thought he could make huge money by allowing more people to sign up for the course.

His reason for limiting the number of students for the course was to keep the number of students just enough - not too big, not too small. So that, he can pay enough attention to each student and help them with their questions. Thus, keeping the quality of the course high. At the end, I think his strategy paid off. Now, as you can see from the testimonials, there are a lot of satisfied students. (At least somebody cares about the quality! And not just wants to rip off people’s hard earned money. Hats off to him for that.)

Who is this course for?

I think the people who will benefit the most from this course are the ones who have just started a blog (or wants to start a blog) and who have yet to take his/her blog to the next level. By next level I mean, where you have a high traffic blog and earning if not steady, at least some amount of money from your blog.

So, if you are interested to be part of next july-intake, check http://www.BlogMastermind.com from time to time for the announcement.

P.S Here is a blog post on Yaro’s blog that lists the full contents of the program.

Just finished reading Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround by former IBM CEO Louis V.Gerstner. He was the CEO of then struggling IBM during the period from 1993 to 2002. Since the book was written by Gerstner himself (not some ghost co-author) it was an interesting read, I quite enjoyed the book.

As you can see from the graph to the right, during his tenure at IBM Gerstner did a good job. When he retired in 2002, IBM’s share prices were ten-fold higher than when he joined IBM in 1993.

Turning around huge organization like IBM is not an easy task, and as Gerstner says the most difficult part was changing the organization culture.

The book generally covers the events from his recruitment to his retirement. However the events do not follow strict chronological order, it’s written more like a story - telling important ones and skipping some. His strategies were mostly bold, clear, open, well communicated to everyone and most importantly based on common sense. Here is one such example from the book, excerpt:

Over the prior decade, IBM had amassed a large and important fine-art collection, most of which was stored in crates out of sight from anyone. Some of it did show up now and again in a public gallery in the IBM tower on 57th Street in Manhattan. We had a curator and a staff who maintained this collection. In 1995 the bulk of it was sold at auction at Sotheby’s for $31 million. Unfortunately, the sale was condemned by many people in the art world. For some reason, these people felt that it was fine for IBM to fire employees and send them home, as long as we kept some paintings in a gallery in New York City for people to view them occasionally.

As he writes in the book, there was a lot of resistance in the organization when he was implementing various strategies e.g discontinuing nonperforming products, selling of non-core businesses, changing the organizational structure from regional to product based, changing the organizational culture from “inside-out” to “outside-in” i.e customer oriented etc.

So, the book talks about how and what Gerstner did to overcome these resistances and successfully implement his strategies. Thus saving the Big Blue.

I highly recommend the book if you are interested in strategic management. This was not meant to be a full review of the book. I just wanted to give you a brief overview of the book. I hope you found it helpful.

I have been in web design business for 6 years now. Over the years many things has changed. Some of the major changes in the industry include:

1. putting behind the 90’s designs that had a lot of colorful and flashing texts (thank God for that!)
2. putting behind the flash frenzy and choosing usability over fully-flash based websites (flash websites are now used for certain type of websites only i.e portfolio, restaurant..etc). Remember how every website on the net was a flash website few years back? Even the corporate sites were using fully-flash websites then.
3. shift from HTML based websites to CSS based websites, thanks to softwares like Dreamweaver that makes this transformation easer. And to organizations like W3C for pushing for the implementation of these new, better standards.

   However the transformation is still not 100%, most of the sites now limit CSS usage to text styling only. I guess that’s because of the difficulty in CSS design, because CSS is more like a programming than web design to many web designers — who got used to WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) way of doing things like in photoshop.

4. and now, shift from static websites to CMS based websites, thanks to CMS systems (including wordpress) that make it easy to build such database driven websites. Good thing about these systems are almost all of them are free.

How does it affect Web Design Industry?

So far, the effect on the web design industry has been only positive. When the flash was introduced by Macromedia and got a huge popularity by everyone. It affected web designers in a positive way. Because now web designers were able to charge a lot higher for their works. (As you know flash websites cost more than double of what normal HTML sites cost).

Similarly, now that the blogging is a huge hit, it too brought a huge opportunity for web designers. Because, blog and design goes hand in hand. Due to huge demand for blog designs, many web designers now have turned into pure “blog designers”. I personally find it easier designing a blog than designing a website. That’s because blogs will usually have the same pre-defined sections (i.e categories, archive, blogroll…etc) most of the time.

Future of Web Design

Few years back I thought in the near future (i.e now) web-design industry will be made irrelevant by big players like Microsoft and others who are interested in internet technologies, who I thought will make it easy for anybody to design a website. I thought people would be able to design websites just by dragging and dropping.

But now, after a decade, web design industry is more relevant than ever. Was I wrong in my prediction or is it just not time yet? We see that there is already some transition from custom web-design to using ready-made templates. But that transition doesn’t really affect web design industry, because, those templates still have to be customized by web-designers for the people who have purchased them. So, they will still be referring back to some freelance web-designers or web design companies to customize their templates.

And even if in the event that there will be some drag and drop technology to create websites in the future. I am sure not everyone will want to use them. Because businesses want to be unique i.e they don’t want to have the same website like their competitor.

Conclusion

I think the web design industry will stay as long as the current HTTP based internet technology stays. Because the current internet technology needs websites to be run in the way they are running now i.e through hyperlinks, and that require web designing. So, unless some other “new internet technology” replaces the current one, which will change the way we interact (maybe we won’t need websites anymore in the future, who knows) the web design industry is here to stay.

No it’s not some angry guy showing a finger [pic to the left], if you look closely it actually says “blog” in hand-sign-language. Creative huh?

If you like the t-shirt, you can get it… where else if not at threadless.com. Here are some people who have already purchased it and took photo of themselves wearing it.

mmmhh should i get it?

Author info: This is a guest post by Alan Johnson, the author of The Online Business Handbook.

If you are interested in reading about something, you can rest assured that the information you are looking for is just one click away. If you want to talk to someone, all you have to do is pick up the phone, even if that person is miles away. All of these advantages do however come with one important drawback: people expect instant results nowadays and that is simply wrong.

Instant Riches? Not Unless You Win the Lottery!

If you are interested in instant riches then you can simply waste your money and buy a lottery ticket (I’ve never bought one and that is not about to change, I absolutely hate the “lottery” concept). But if you are ready to get your feet back on the ground then you might as well start by understanding that looking for instant riches is not the way to go.

It’s easy to say that you want to be rich but, in most cases, you are not ready to deal with that much money. Just take some lottery case studies as examples and you will definitely understand that getting your hands on too much money without being ready to handle it can and in most cases will ruin your life:

Take It One Step at a Time!

If you are serious about being successful as an online entrepreneur in the long run, you have to understand that chasing after shortcuts or after instant riches is never the way to go. A person with such an attitude will still be chasing after something which simply isn’t there years from now, while a person with at the very least a small trace of common sense will take things one step at a time and gradually work towards achieving a certain goal.

While having challenging long-term goals is always recommended, you have to take things one step at a time and divide everything into smaller and more manageable goals if you are actually interested in getting there. If you prefer living in denial then I am afraid that taking things to the next level will simply be impossible.

What Will It Be?

The choice is yours and only yours to make. You can either understand that you have to wait until you are on the right track and then continue working towards making sure that things remain that way or you can live in a fantasy world and wait until an inevitable reality check ends up changing your way of thinking.

The right decisions are always the hardest ones to make and, the same way, they easy way out is, in most cases, not the best one. Nobody can stop you if you want to continue living in denial, but you have to understand that you will be the only one at fault for the fact that things never seem to be working out in your favor or for the fact that you never seem to “catch a break”. What will it be?

Best wishes,
Alan Johnson