So the site probably looks really bizarre right now. I’m FireReadyAiming this redesign.

The previous design was over 4 years old and quite dated. This new version will be more fun and hopefully better in all ways.

If you have any brilliant ideas design or functionality, share them please!

-Blake

Thanks for reading. BlakeImeson.com V2.0 is a post from Blake Imeson

A guy I met while at college pinged me on Facebook and asked:

I was looking at starting a small graphic design/ website design company and was wondering if you had any pointers or tips on the best way to start, and how to develop a client base. I was thinking about starting by bidding for freelance jobs but it looks pretty intimidating.

It is a great question and one that I feel I can give some good insight into.

I started doing consulting when I was a sophomore in college. I got to know an alum that was speaking on campus and he learned of my budding interest in SEO/Web Dev. He connected me to a Pilates Studio in Pittsburgh (dang that was a great SEO link hehe); they were just starting a new studio and needed a website. They took a chance on me and hired me to build them a brand new site. I was determined to succeed with this trust placed in my unproven abilities.

Fast forward a few months and word had gotten around to my friends, family, professors, fellow students, alumni I connected with…that I was doing SEO consulting and web development. It’s amazing once word gets out how many people start coming to you interested in having you do a project for them.

How to Get Started

So here is what I recommend to get started freelancing.

Don’t be afraid to jump into a project that is a little outside your comfort zone. I have taken on projects knowing I will have to learn new stuff in order to succeed. Sometimes the best growth and the most learning comes from putting yourself into a corner. It may be a bit sadistic, but sometimes you should purposely put yourself into challenging situations. Don’t go crazy with that idea but sometimes you need to push yourself.

I would say the best way to get clients is to approach family/friends first. They hopefully already trust you as a person (if not a designer/developer)

Secondly, non-profits are a great way to build experience, albeit for very little (if any) money. While at college there were a few non-profits for whom I built their websites. This didn’t pay anything but it gave me three very important things:

1. A portfolio item
2. Experience working for a client
3. Confidence – by far the most important of the 3

The third way to get clients early on is to watch for small businesses that need help. Approach the owner and tell him you are a starting out in the graphic design/web dev field and would he be willing to allow you to build him a site, design a logo, etc. With this last option you have the best chance of getting paid. You could even give the owner a guarantee that if he isn’t happy with it he doesn’t have to pay you. A bit risky but if you are confident of your skills then this could be a good strategy.

I need to write a follow-up post on why business owners should take a chance on budding professionals. It really can be a great thing for both parties!

So anyone want to hire my young friend just starting out? I have high hopes for whatever it is he ends up doing.

Thanks for reading. How to Get Your First Clients as a Young Web Developer is a post from Blake Imeson

Basically, if a “recent post” link in this widget was from the “Tools” category (for instance) then it could be styled with a CSS background image or a color specific to that category.

I ended up modifying this Recent Posts plugin. (In enhanced-recent-posts/includes/plugin-class.php line 161)

Here is what I ended up using:

116

<a class="<?php $category = get_the_category();  echo $category[0]->category_nicename; ?>" href="</pre"></a>

Here is what it then looked like when the code worked it’s magic:

<a class="tool-category" href="...</pre"></a>

This WordPress function for getting the category was very helpful.

Have a better way to style links with CSS by category? Bonus if there is a plugin already doing this.

Thanks for reading. Style Links with CSS by Category – WordPress is a post from Blake Imeson

I’m on a workation right now (this was last week, just got around to publishing now). Yep, I am sitting poolside in sunny California. (no jealousy)  This has been a glorious week of exploring the San Jose/Los Altos/San Franciso area. The work part of this vacation comes every morning when I get up before 6 a.m. to get a 3-5 hours of work in before the rest of the family wakes up.

This freedom is why as long as I am still blessed to be able to make my living as a small business owner / consultant I will.

No entrepreneur lets a moment of respite go to waste, so on this vacation I finished reading Crush it! by Gary Vaynerchuck. It was a terrifically motivating book and a worthwhile read for any entrepreneur. It could be summed up in, find out your passion and figure out how to make a living with it. Now the “how to make a living” part is very much how to make the internet work for you.. So it was right up my alley :)

Gary Vee emphasized the importance of:

• Embracing your DNA
• Building your brand with transparency and authenticity
• Blogging / generating content
• Getting involved in Social Media
• Being passionate!

So after an enjoyable read I did some soul-searching about, what I am really passionate about?

My conclusion was that what makes me tick is helping people use the Internet for business. This takes many forms but usually revolves around:

Web development, Web design, Internet marketing, blogging, Social Media, SEO, WordPress, graphic design, branding, analytics, etc.

I leave you with one of my favorite insights from the read…

“Your Blog is for communicating the essence of your brand”

Have you read Crush it! and did you find something valuable in it?

If not, what was a recent business book you read that you would recommend?

Thanks for reading. Finding Your Entrepreneurial Passion is a post from Blake Imeson

Here is where you can download Texter.

Here are the scripts that I used:
 

10{Tab}ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM{Enter}
20{Tab}ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM{Enter}
20{Tab}ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM{Enter}
30{Tab}ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM{Enter}
30{Tab}ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM{Enter}
30{Tab}ASPMX4.GOOGLEMAIL.COM{Enter}
30{Tab}ASPMX5.GOOGLEMAIL.COM{Enter}

Please let me know if you are using this and if you have found any other cool uses for Texter!

Thanks for reading. Quickly Add MX Records for Google Apps is a post from Blake Imeson

Every year the Internet collectively goes berserk for one day. I figured this year I would try and catalog some of it as it happens.

What follows is my log of the festivities. Happy April Fools Day!

(I will update this post as the day goes on)

6:00am – YouTube from 1911

6:10am - My friend Chantilly got engaged :)

6:10am – Hulu goes back in time.

6:40am – Google is hiring Autocompleters

6:44am - Gmail can now be controlled by your body!
Update: Looks like Google Docs is the same.

6:47am – The Pirate Bay won an auction for eBay itself.

7:30am – Woke my wife up and asked her if cats were allergic to Jelly Beans. I told her our cat had a few of them.
7:45am – Asked my wife if cats can get like babies do when babies have carrots and turn orange. She then sees…

8:10am – Envato announces a new 3D marketplace.

9:10am – Hootsuite releases “Happy Owls” – a more positive app than Angry Birds.

9:32am – Flickr has changed their logo to have an “e” in it. Rebranded as Flicker.

9:37am – Kodak has a new app to expunge your ex from photographs.

9:39am – Seth Godin unveils an awesome new startup named whItespAcelInks. (I’m even linking to them on all of my whitespace)

9:43am – Do a Google search for Comic Sans and Helvetica.

Please comment below with ones as you come across them!

Here is a good compilation post on Google tricks SERoundtable.

See a collection of WordPress April Fools

Newegg sold eggs.

A news anchor was tricked into licking an iPad

Google also now offers advertising on blimps!

Thanks for reading. An April Fool’s Journey | Watch the Internet Lose its Mind is a post from Blake Imeson

I recently got the idea to have all my external links to Wikipedia have a little “W” icon next to them in order to indicate that the links went to Wikipedia.

The solution I came up with is to use some CSS and Regular Expressions to automatically add the image to any URLs that have http://en.wikipedia.org/ in them.

Here is a link to Wikipedia. (if you are not viewing my blog on a modern browser like Chrome/Firefox this may not work)

Here is an image in case you can’t see.

/* Wikipedia */
a[href^="http://en.wikipedia.org"]
{
padding-right: 15px;
background: url("/images/wikipedia.png") no-repeat scroll right top transparent;
}

You can download my little “W” icon at http://www.blakeimeson.com/images/wikipedia.png

I am sure there may be a more elegant and versatile solution to this, if you know of a way to do this better please comment below!

Thanks for reading. Style Wikipedia Links Automatically – CSS and RegEx is a post from Blake Imeson

A client needed to import her RSS feed into a MailChimp campaign but the image wasn’t showing up. Here is how I finally got it to work.

MediaRSS

You first need to make sure the feed (yoursite.com/feed usually) is correctly bringing in the first image. I used a plugin called wpRichFeeds (view plugin author site) which adds the enclosure information to your feed in WordPress. This is basically plug-n-play.

MailChimp Code

Then with some creative MailChimp RSS merge tags I got it to work. This is what I used:

<a href="*|RSSITEM:URL|*"><img src="*|RSSITEM:ENCLOSURE_URL|*" alt="" width="300" height="200" /></a>

I hope this will save some people the aggravation of trying to get MailChimp to automatically pull in blog post images from an RSS feed.

This post also helped me get to this point, RSS email: include post thumbnail image from WordPress RSS feed

Please comment if this helps you out! Any tweaks?

Thanks for reading. MailChimp – How to Add Images to RSS feeds in WordPress is a post from Blake Imeson

Spaghetti making Blue Widgets (Heading)

Weaving my keywords naturally into a heading, in this case an h2, can be a positive ranking factor. While not as important, I have also done the same thing with the H3s as follows…

Page Title for Blue Widget

If you notice the title of this page is: <title>Blue Widgets that Make Spaghetti</title> That is what will show up in Google for the link for this post.

Spaghetti making URL?

You will also notice that the URL for this post has the keywords contained within the string. In WordPress this is accomplished by changing the permalinks to something like: /%postname%/

http://www.blakeimeson.com/blue-widgets-make-spaghetti

Blue Widget Content

The fourth ranking factor that I will mention is that by weaving the keywords that we are trying to rank for like, blue widgets, into the content in a natural way, this post will appear more relevant for our chosen keyphrase.

These have all been on-site factors for ranking. The most important off-site factor is getting people to link to this post with our keywords linked like: view Blake’s post on Blue Widgets that Make Spaghetti

So apologies for this awkward looking post on blue widgets that are able to make spaghetti. Not sure there is such a thing, comment if you know of one. ;)

Thanks for reading. Blue Widgets that Make Spaghetti is a post from Blake Imeson

Ever wanted to see how prices for an item on Amazon have changed over time? Eh, maybe not but a new Chrome Extension does just that.

It is called theTracktor and here is a screenshot to show what it does:

I installed it because I am going to be buying my second Canon Powershot (Great camera!) in the next 2 weeks and the price recently dropped and I wanted to see how the price has been changing over time.

Tracktor will also let you sign up to get email alerts of price changes.

Enjoy and watch Amazon prices fall!

Thanks for reading. Track Amazon Price Changes Over Time > theTracktor is a post from Blake Imeson