We’re proud to announce that we’re launching our first Marketing Intensive Workshop. Our new workshops are designed to help you understand the online marketing landscape and create strategic plans that help take your business to the next level.

Our first Marketing Intensive Workshop is entitled: Creating an Online Plan that Works. It’ll be an in-depth class where you’ll learn everything from branding to search and social media and how it all fits together. It’s a class for businesses that are serious about their marketing and want to create a detailed online plan that will help position them for future growth and lead generation.

You’ll learn what it takes to create a winning online marketing plan from start to finish. In this 3 hour class you’ll learn how to identify your marketing niche, establish a budget, understand your brand and your website’s role in a successful marketing plan, learn how to integrate social media, email marketing and much more.

Here are just some of the things you’ll learn at this class:

• Advanced online advertising methods
• Integrating social media into your plan
• Finding the niche marketing avenues to target your clients
• Analyzing and improving your website to improve ROI
• Learn your ROE (Return on Engagement)
• Find out some of the ways your competition is marketing to your potential clients online
• How to leverage your social media connections to generate leads
• How to use search and social advertising to target new potential leads
• How to get free media exposure for your business
• How to track your social “reputation”
• How to turn your customers into advocates
• Much More…

Attendees who qualify for the early bird registration will also receive a FREE website review OR search engine optimization report! (Both valued at $99) Our website reviews are a detailed analysis of the content on your site and your search rankings which will help you better understand what you can do to improve the overall customer experience on your site and generate more leads. Our SEO Reports help you understand where your site currently ranks against your competition. In addition, it helps to identify keywords and link partners that you can use to boost your search rankings. Seating is limited for this event so sign up today!

For our WordPress clients, we use a plugin called Resize at Upload Plus to ensure that any images that are uploaded are immediately resized to a manageable size. Using a tool like this is a practical solution when you are concerned about overall server storage for a WordPress blog that will be utilizing a lot of images.

Recently we ran into an issue with the plugin that is caused by a default limitation in WordPress.

“Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 67108864 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 4000 bytes)”.

An error like this would obviously prevent any photo from being resized after upload, but it also prevents the photo from completing the upload process.

The cause of this error is a default setting in WordPress. By default WP installs with a default memory limit of 32M. This is the maximum amount of memory that can be used by PHP. Some web hosts will pre-set this limit to something really low (like 8M) and some will not let you change this. However, in this case, if your web host allows you to change this here’s what you’ll need to do to increase this limit and avoid this fatal error:

1. Open wp_settings.php and search for “WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’. This will most likely be at the start of the file around line 13.
2. Change the default number for the memory amount allocated for PHP. I recommend 64M or 96M. In some cases you may just need to increase the limit slightly, but for WordPress sites that use a lot of plugins, you’ll want to increase this level more since there will be more of the PHP plugins that will be using that limit.
3. Save the file and upload to your site.
4. Try uploading the files again to see if this has solved the error.

Okay, I’m a big nut for security on my blog, so I just upgraded my blog software to WordPress 2.6. If you noticed my site down for a short period, that was the reason.

Since this is a new update, if anyone notices any issues, feel free to contact me at johnpwooton@gmail.com and let me know.

Big News!!! You can now post comments on my blog using video! Thanks to Seesmic.com. Last week, Seesmic released a plug-in for WordPress that allows you to post video comments on my blog. You can check out the plug-in by clicking here. Or feel free to leave a video comment down below!

Thanks Loic!

Yesterday SixApart, the creators of the popular TypePad blogging system released a Facebook application called BlogIt that allows you to blog simple posts and have the post published to your blog, whether it be through TypePad, WordPress, Blogger, Movable Type and more and have the title of the post added to Twitter, Pownce, and Facebook as a status update.

The purpose of the application is to enable the author the ability to share posted items quickly and to streamline the sharing process.

You can get more information by clicking here .

I just ran across a post on Search Engine Watch that does a great job of highlighting the different types of social media content. Since there is a little confusion with most businesses and consumers as to what is really classified as “social media” here’s a quick reference.

Wikipedia probably defines the term “social media” the best:

Social media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words and pictures. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and “building” of shared meaning, as people share their stories, and understandings.

See often we mistake social media as just one thing or concept when it is really a whole lot more. Social media mainly thrives on the social interaction between users. A few years ago the most widely adapted concept was to add a forum or a chat to a website to enable the communication between users, giving the user control over some of the content that was added to a website as well as facilitating the social interaction between users.

More recently social media has been embodied in “social networks” like Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, Orkut, LinkedIn and more. The idea of creating connections between friends, co-workers, colleagues and more creating what’s been called the social graph. Social media is those networks and more.

I say more because it seems that almost all new websites that have launched in the last two and a half years have had some form of social media. Delicious exists to allow “social bookmarking”: a website bookmark list that is public and accessible to consumers and tracks the general trends and popularity between new stories, websites, blog posts and more.

In fact, a major push behind Web 2.0 is the idea of social media. Web 2.0 embraces the concept that the internet has matured into something that can be utilized as a platform. Social media takes center stage in embracing this new era by enabling user generated content or UGC. User generated content puts the user in control of the content that appears on a website rather than just one or two webmasters. This is the principal concept behind many of today’s popular social media websites.

In general, here are the types of social media as defined by Search Engine Watch:

1. News Content – Time sensitive events and news stories. Through the proliferation of social bookmarking websites and RSS syndication technology, news stories are distributed, blogged, bookmarked and rated in a rapid pace. Businesses looking to track and monitor the daily flow of information that can affect marketing and online business can use a service like online reputation monitoring to help manage their reputation based on this information online.
2. Sensational/Entertainment Content – This includes things that are aimed at attracting attention to something online. This category is most like to include “viral marketing” – where an ordinary video, blog post, or story can be proliferate through many thousands of people in a very short amount of time. YouTube videos are a perfect illustration of this category. Often people will blog, email or forward a link to a YouTube video they find entertaining or interesting making the video popularity increase immensely in a short amount of time.
3. Resource/Educational Content -You noticed that I pulled something from Wikipedia. If you’ve done a Google search researching information in the past, you’ve most likely come across this website. Wikipedia exists to give the consumer the ability to create the authoritative content on a topic. This type of social media is a perfect example of user generated content and social media.

Social media can seem like a complex topic, but it’s more than likely that in the past you’ve engaged in some form of social media. Whether it be commenting on a blog or news article, asking a question or responding on a forum, creating a social network account, or even just creating an online account to share pictures with your family. It all is considered social media!

I just ran across this shot my wonderful wife got of me on Easter. I love it so much, I think it might just be my new headshot!! By the way, if you need a new headshot for business, resume, etc, give Erin Hession a call. She does amazing work!

I’ve been behind when it comes to upgrading my WordPress blogging platform. In fact, they just released their version 2.5 of their system and I was still on version 2.1.3. So, I made the leap and decided to upgrade.

For those of you who have not upgraded, it’s always a good idea to do so every now and then as the upgrade process is a great way to back up your blog files and database in case something happens down the road. Plus, they add new and exciting features into the newer versions that can easily simplify what you are doing.

The upgrade process was simple and I LOVE the new features. They integrated the "sidebar widgets" plugin into the system and a new plugin update system informing you of any software updates to WP plugins (although this may have already been in previous updates)

Also, the UI is dramatically enhanced. The posting process is a lot simpler with integrated functionality to add photos, video, audio and more to a post. And I am in love with the tagging system.

Here’s a few screenshots:

Okay, so it’s been a few days since my last post… don’t worry. I have a lot of great posts coming.

Erin and I just returned from a fabulous and memorable trip to Las Vegas for a photography convention. It was a lot of information crammed into the trip (especially on branding and promotion), but we managed to sneak in some time to see some great attractions.

I uploaded one of the videos I took from the Fountains of Bellagio to YouTube. Check it out below:

I follow a lot of different blogs. So much so that I don’t always have the time to keep up with them via Google Reader. But I ran across this post tonight and I thought it too good not to share. In this day and age, a lot of marketers focus on the SEO benefits of blogs and how search marketing is going to be a huge portion of incoming traffic.

I no doubt believe that there are various SEO benefits of blogs with company websites, but when it comes to marketing a blog itself outside of a company (ex: TechCrunch, Go2web2, Mashable, etc), there are other factors that come into play. John Chow talks about the concepts that make a blog memorable. It’s not about having a huge marketing budget that makes a website memorable (although it can be helpful in bringing in a lot of traffic). What really matters is a handful of factors including having the right design, the right concept, good content, and frequent updates.

It’s a great read, I just wanted to share it.