• Tips on maximizing your ROI
• Real-life stories from entrepreneurs like yourself
• Case studies with real hands-on advice
• and more!

Along with this new kickstart to the economy, I’ll be relaunching several of my sites, including this one. I took a long time off from writing to give birth to a beautiful baby boy (he was born just before Halloween), and to move out of state (I am loving Oregon, thank you), and now it’s time to get back to writing! This site now features:

• A sidebar with the most popular posts, features, comments, and tags;
• A Flickr feed widget;
• A links section for me to share the stories I think will benefit my readers;
• Updated bookmarks to my favorite sites;
• and An updated look, courtesy of a theme by WooThemes that I modified for my own purposes. (If you would like your own custom-modified WooTheme WordPress theme, please contact me.)

Along with this relaunch, I am now dividing my posts into more places. The content will now be divided as follows:

• Small Business Essentials will have all of my business, marketing, sales, and other small business content.
• The NHG Consulting News blog will contain all the company, project and portfolio updates.
• The Web Technology for Entrepreneurs blog on StartupNation will feature all my technology posts.
• The blog at my new site, That PHP Girl, will contain all programming- and WordPress-related posts.

To stay updated, you can subscribe to the RSS feed of each individual blog, or follow the nhgnikole Twitter feed which reposts links to all my articles. I’m also working on some sort of newsletter or Small Business Mashup feed, but I’m not sure when I will have that ready.

So … Hello again! Welcome back! And let’s all get through this together with some solid effort and some outside-the-box thinking. If you are still in business or looking to start a new one, Congratulations! Small businesses truly are the backbone of our economy, and we can all make it through this together!

image by Wendy Piersall

For most people, purchasing a template for your site saves money through reducing programming and graphic arts costs.

For a developer, it may save money if you don’t do the artwork yourself, as you save yourself from having to pay an artist, but it ends up costly in terms of changing an already-designed theme around.

When I started out with this redesign project, I wanted to try a lot of new things—purchasing my first theme (instead of custom-designing) was one of them. The thing about purchasing a theme is that it has pros and cons. As I said before, one of the pros is reducing costs through skipping a graphic designer and/or decreasing your development time. One of the cons is that I am a perfectionist and I’m using someone else’s work.

Which gets me back to right now … I am basically going over every single page of this theme I purchased to make the code 100% up to my standards in terms of structure and functionality. While that’s nice for someone like me, what it means is that the project also took me twice as long as it would have, had I just written it from scratch, because I not only have to make it mine but I have to get inside someone else’s head to understand each section and function in the code.

To add to that delay, I am also experimenting with a new version of Wordpress (2.5.1) and new plugins (such as wpSEO and this Flickr Photo Dropper plugin where I’m finding all these deliciously random pictures for my posts), learning as I go, and having to reformat all of my old posts to work with this new theme and structure.

So, while I am getting closer, I am still working on it … and I will have a full list of add-ons, plugins, techniques and so forth when I am done, in case you feel crazy enough to spruce up your own existing blog.

Greater Lessons

What can the non-programming entrepreneur learn from this?

1. You may save on graphics costs by buying a template, but you may also end up paying increased development costs to get a custom site out of a template.
2. You have to watch out who else is using your template. I happen to be using one that is popular in the sports arena, so I am unlikely to find another business blogger using it. I like the theme, and it had Tom Brady on the demo, so I was sold.
3. Buying a template does not mean you are stuck with what you have. A well-designed template is modular and can be easily changed around to suit your needs. Also make sure the template you are choosing validates, or you will be spending a lot of time bringing the code up to par.
4. Quality templates are available for around $50-150 for the bootstrapping entrepreneur who is trying to get launched without a large cost upfront. I found some nice ones in the Revolution Theme family and over at BlogOhBlog. (I also found many, many bad ones which I will not be naming here.) For a bit more, you can find someone to help you tweak your purchased design to your needs.

photo credit: DeaPeaJay

I’m sorry if you show up on the site in the next few days and things seem out of sorts or they keep moving around. I’m building a new theme for the site and it might take a few days before regular activity is resumed. Stay tuned!

P.S. The ads are not real—they just came with the theme. And no, don’t worry, I haven’t changed my tune and decided to serve up ads (if you are seeing the new site with fake ads right now). They will be replaced by something else.

photo credit: ryanharne

To hear the complete series, follow these links:

• Marketing your Website #1 of 5: Focus on Content and Code
• Marketing Your Website #2 of 5: Participate and Network
• Marketing Your Website #3 of 5: Build Your Word of Mouth and Viral Marketing
• Marketing Your Website #4 of 5: Create Press and Write Articles
• Marketing Your Website #5 of 5: Sync Up with Search Engines and Online Tools

If you would like to download the podcast series directly, you can control-click (or right-click on a PC) these links and save them to your hard drive:

• Marketing your Website #1 of 5: Focus on Content and Code (mp3)
• Marketing Your Website #2 of 5: Participate and Network (mp3)
• Marketing Your Website #3 of 5: Build Your Word of Mouth and Viral Marketing (mp3)
• Marketing Your Website #4 of 5: Create Press and Write Articles (mp3)
• Marketing Your Website #5 of 5: Sync Up with Search Engines and Online Tools (mp3)

If you would like to download the podcast directly, you can control-click (or right-click on a PC) this link and save it to your hard drive.

Stay tuned to Small Business Essentials (perhaps by using the convenient subscribe buttons to your right, if you are viewing this at the website!) and I will update you weekly as each one is released.

If you would like to download the podcast directly, you can control-click (or right-click on a PC) this link and save it to your hard drive.

Stay tuned to Small Business Essentials (perhaps by using the convenient subscribe buttons to your right, if you are viewing this at the website!) and I will update you weekly as each one is released.

• The blog was once on a subdomain of my company, and now has its own domain.
• I started at infrequent posts, then went to 2-3 posts a week, and now am at 5-6 posts per week.
• The topics have changed as my voice has developed and my experience has grown.

I have thought a long time about what the purpose of my writing really is. It does not build my client list, so it’s not for promoting my business. (Although, in all fairness, I rarely promote myself on this site.) It hasn’t produced income for me. It hasn’t opened up new job opportunities. It has introduced me to a lot of really wonderful people that I have been glad to message back and forth with. It has helped me sort thoughts in my head and put them into words in a more focused way. Being responsible for posts on a regular schedule and extras such as the Carnival of the Capitalists has made my writing production more disciplined. So I guess you could say that blogging has been more of a writing exercise or a hobby for me for the past year, rather than an actual job.

This is where I got to the point of advertising. I have been debating advertising for a long time, and the debate had taken a new intensity since rebranding the site on its own. While having additional income for my efforts would be nice, there are many cons to putting ads on my site.

Advertising is a Distraction

Unlike linking to more content which would provide value to my readers, advertisements just take them to a place where they will be sold something. I suppose if these things are of value to them (what small business owner doesn’t need supplies or a computer or search engine services?), then that is not too bad.

Blogging is about Trust

For me, placing ads on my site would require very strict control over the content. I couldn’t use a program like AdSense because with small business content, those scammy work at home ads were bound to pop up. The only way I would feel comfortable hosting advertisers is if I had a strict system for selecting exactly which ads and offers would appear on my site. I would then not have to worry about the trust I have built being destroyed by unscrupulous advertisers. I would not accept things like link-buying or paid content, because without transparency I feel like that erodes trust.

Aesthetics are Important

If I didn’t care what my site looked like, I wouldn’t have paid an artist to design it or hand-code all the templates myself. I see so many blogs out there where advertising has just taken over, and it makes me not want to come back to that site. It is easy to do ads the wrong way, and have your site take a turn for the worse. Recently, on BusinessPundit (not to pick on Rob May, because he has no control over the advertising on that site), there were some talking ads that completely altered the experience of the site, and popups that showed up some time after that. I would want to keep my site as distraction-free as possible to make it a unique viewing experience.

Money Shouldn’t Drive Content

If you read a lot of the stuff put out by those internet marketers, they develop their content based on what will sell. They write posts based on Google popularity, SEO keywording, and other false ways of beefing up traffic. I’d never want to be in that situation, to be writing about what is popular just for the sake of increased advertising traffic. By writing for myself, I get to stay true and honest—to write for writing’s sake.

Evaluating my Peers

There are a lot of people that I respect and content that I value that does have ads, like Anita Campbell at Small Business Trends, Rob May at BusinessPundit, Guy Kawasaki at How to Change the World, and Darren Rowse at Problogger (the advertising juggernaut that teaches other writers to advertise!). There are also others that don’t, like Charles H Green at Trust Matters, Chris Anderson at The Long Tail and, well, Rob May at Coconut Headsets. (It is interesting to note that when he started writing for different reasons than he does at Business Pundit, and while he is writing for himself, the ads became less important.) Looking at their sites helps me decide what I do and don’t like, but it doesn’t help me with outside influence on my decision here.

Being True to Myself

I start out this year 2008 with a mission to never settle for less than 100% quality in everything I do here on Small Business Essentials. I continued this commitment by adding the links feed, extending my site to other platforms like Facebook and Twitter, participating in the business blogosphere, and creating (what I consider) to be original, valuable content. Somehow, the thought of monetizing this site through third part advertising diminishes that in some way. This may be only an internal perception, however—perhaps my own issues with money cloud my judgement of what is real in this case.

Limiting my Options

If I choose to not monetize the site, it makes me more actively seek out other ventures that would be income-producing. In this way, it is enticing to keep this blog as my writing playground and to use other means to expand revenue. (That revenue, then, would go back into funding this little hobby blog of mine.)

The Future of Small Business Essentials

I have decided to try a few hand-selected advertising items for the time being to try it out while I consider if this is really what do to. After about a day of thought on this subject, and as of right now, I am leaning towards removing them again and just continuing to write as I always have. I will give it a few weeks to make this decision though, and if the ads are permanent, I may have to do another site redesign to make them fit better with the site.

Thoughts?

I’d love to hear feedback on the ads as they are now, your blog/monetization strategy, the purpose of writing, or anything else for that matter.

Update

I’ve been contacted by the support department at Akismet, who say they have fixed this problem on their end. I am going to test that theory out today and see if it is true.

If you would like to download the podcast directly, you can control-click (or right-click on a PC) this link and save it to your hard drive.

Stay tuned to Small Business Essentials (perhaps by using the convenient subscribe buttons to your right, if you are viewing this at the website!) and I will update you weekly as each one is released.