Things have been slow around here since the end of the government fiscal, so what better time to step back and do some of that “working ON the business?”

My efforts in April were all about writing the e-book and promoting the DIY Strategic Planning Seminar on April 22. That was such a success that I’m going to offer it again on June 24, with a specific focus on small business. There’ll be another session in September for a non-profit focus. I’ve also been asked to do the talk for the Comox Valley Web Posse on May 13 in Comox.

Last week, I took a step back and did a fresh new marketing plan for my business. I used one of my visual planning model that has been successful for several clients: a graphic grid that shows the target niche (with brief demographic info), their needs, my services in response to those needs, the main communication channels, and my actions to-do list for each target niche. That’s a lot of information in one grid, and it took me almost two hours to complete. But there’s nothing like it for making a focused, purposeful marketing action plan, because in one glance you can see how various actions during the month are intended to connect with your target market, and deliver a clear message about what you’re giving them that meets a real need. Powerful stuff. And really, doing that in two hours is pretty efficient!

I’ve also been kept very occupied with “beating WordPress into submission” as I call it. I’ve wanted to provide the e-book online to people, but I want to know who is downloading it, for basic intellectual property reasons and so I can hopefully provide useful follow-up to people who are reading it. This desire led me down a rabbit hole of widgets, plugins, shortcodes and php functions… leaving me wishing I’d taken the blue pill and just hired a web developer. Next time, I WILL. The site isn’t exactly the way I’d like it, but it’s closing in on providing enough functionality for now. Here are some plugins I’ve found extremely useful over on Directis.ca, in case you’re into this sort of WordPress thing:

• Theme My Login (plugin) – allows your login and registration forms to look like your website, not like your admin interface. Also makes it easier to change the redirect page after a user logs in (so in the case of Directis, you go right back to the page you were viewing before you did the login form). This doesn’t work right for new registrations, but I’m working on that.
• Cimy User Extra Fields (plugin) – adds fields to your user records which show up on the registration form, to improve the kind of information you gather from registrants.
• WordPress Download Monitor (plugin) – controls access to PDFs and other downloadable resources, according to user status and roles (logged in or not, permissions, etc) as well as keeping track of download hits. Makes it easy to share PDFs on your site.
• Shortcodes – I should really type up and submit this to a WordPress forum of some kind. I found and modified some shortcode functions that allow me to set up certain text/html on a page, post or widget to display if a user is logged in, and have alternate text/html show if the user is not logged in. That was fun actually – I got to get creative with code! If you want to know how that worked, drop me a line.

Now, I don’t call myself a programmer, but when the time comes and the shoe fits, I can get pretty immersed in this stuff. I suppose I could pay someone else to do this, but while I was messing about with it I was also deciding on the fly how I wanted the site structured, etc, and making content as I went to match the writing style of the site. A developer can’t do that for you – at least, not for cheap!!

It’s been fun but tomorrow I’m going to get back to REAL work. I have three session plans to prepare for clients’ strategic planning sessions, and some press releases to write.