I believe one of the main characteristics of a good blogger – or a good writer of any kind – is a high level of curiousity and enthusiasm for the world.  A person who moves through her life saying “WOW! Amazing!” is going to find a whole LOT of things to write about, whereas someone who’s always complaining about how terrible things are – not so much.

Here are the highlights for me, for the week of May 24th, 2010:

1. Dave Navarro, TheLaunchCoach.com. Dave is my hero in so many ways. I think he’s brilliant, and every freebie/giveaway, purchased product or email I get from him is brimming with useful information. No fluff. No patronizing, skeevy Internet Marketing language. Just good stuff that makes you feel like maybe – just maybe – you actually could make a go of this web business of yours. And that’s pretty outstanding. So do yourself a favor now – sign up to get on his mailing list, and you’ll get access to the best free gifts I’ve ever seen anyone give away on their website.  If you’re feeling really spunky today and want to buy one of his products, go for his “Creating Products That Sell” and “Building a Responsive List” workshops. You can buy them separately or save a little dough and buy them together. Be prepared to have your mind blown with all the ideas Dave will spark in your entrepreneurial brain!

2. Will Young, British Pop Star.  No, this has nothing to do with the Internet, other than the fact that I’m really enjoying watching Will’s videos on YouTube. Will Young was apparently the very first winner of “Pop Idol” (the UK version of our “America Idol”) and he’s a HUGE star over in Europe. I had never heard of him, and I’ll bet most of the other people watching him perform on the American Idol finale this week had never heard of him, either. If you can ignore the sappy Idol montage footage happening in this video, and just focus on Will’s performance, I think you’ll really like him, too.

Note: I had embedded a video in this spot, but unfortunately YouTube yanked it down for some reason, so you should go and find Will Young videos on your own – you won’t be sorry!

Yes, I realize I just outed myself as someone who watches American Idol. I may pay for that in the comments on this post, but it’s worth it to be able to post this Will Young video here.

3. My new ScanSnap scanner, used in conjunction with DropBox online storage and file sharing. I’ve been using DropBox for a few months now – to share files between multiple computers and with my subcontractors – and I LOVE LOVE LOVE it. Basically, DropBox is set up so that when you save a document on your computer, it will also appear in a little “box” on your colleague or subcontractor’s computer…whoever you’d like to save that document with.  It saves SO much time now that I don’t have to email files to myself and to other people. I can just say “It’s in Dropbox” and we’re done.

And as of tonight -  I can use Dropbox with my newest all-time-favorite-EVER gadget, the ScanSnap mobile scanner, and I’m well on my way to eliminating my paper problem. And for those who know me well, you know I’ve ALWAYS had a paper problem – I’m drowning in it all the time. This nifty scanner lets me load up my document (even multi-page docs), hit ONE big  button on the top of the scanner console, and it zips the page through and turns it into a clean, readable PDF file in about 30 seconds. You can even create searchable PDFs, so that everything you scan is searchable and findable whenever you need to look for it. It even does BUSINESS CARDS in about 15 seconds each.

The whole scanner is also about half of the size of a shoebox, so I can chuck it in my backpack and use it at a coffee shop if I want to.

Yes, this little baby is pricey, but I’ve only been using it for 3 hours and I already consider it a piece of equipment I cannot live without.

That’s it for Beth’s Amazing Things for this week – next week, you can look forward to a review of ODesk, the best outsourcing resource no one’s every heard of.

In the meantime, please share your Amazing Things in the comments here!

For an explanation of RSS feeds and why they’re important for bloggers, please download my special report – “7 Ways RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Can Help You as a Blogger”, as well as some other cool freebies from my library.

Why set up Feedburner?  Here’s a few reasons:

1.  Using Feedburner will assure that more readers consistently read your posts. If a reader signs up for email update, they are much more likely to read a post if it comes into her inbox than if they have to return to your blog to check for new posts. That increases your readership and gets you new fans.

2.  It’s a free, low-hassle way to get your mailing list started. You can use the email addresses of people who have signed up for your Feedburner list in other ways, including emailing them about promotions, new product announcements and events.  And when you’re ready to move to a more robust email marketing tool (my favorite is Aweber), you can easily import your Feedburner subscribers into that tool, too.

3.  Feedburner helps you track your readership. Use your Feedburner statistics in conjunction with another traffic tracker (Google Analytics is a great one) to find out how many people read your blog. Set goals for yourself – how about 1000 subscribers by the end of this year?? You can do it!

4.  It’s an automatic way for you to advertise every time you’ve put up a new post. I’m a fan of linking your blog to other email and social media tools, using these feed-based services. That way you don’t have to run all over the Internet yelling “New post! New post!” each time your publish something new. Feedburner sends out new posts automatically to all your email subscribers, so all you have to do is write and publish. Cool!

Ready to get started? Go to Feedburner, set up a username and password (or use a Google login if you already have one – Feedburner is now owned by the all-powerful world of Google). Then “burn” your new feed by entering the URL or the feed of your blog. You’ll want to visit the “Publicize” tab in FB after your intial burn…..that way you can turn on email subscription capability and grab the code for your new opt-in for so you can add it to your blog.

To use Scribe, right now you need to be using self-hosted Wordpress, but I understand they are developing another version, including a very-soon-to-be-released web-based version that you can use with any blogging tool.

If you’d like to try it right now and you’re using Wordpress, here’s how it works -

1.  Sign up for an account with Scribe (they have a free trial), then install the Scribe plug-in on your Wordpress blog.  Don’t forget to activate it in the plug-ins area in your Wordpress dashboard.

2. Pick a blog post (or static page) that you think could use a little SEO help.

3. Write a page title and descriptions for your post, using the All-in-One SEO Pack Wordpress plug-in.  Don’t have it? Get it here.

4. In the upper right corner of your post’s Compose screen, you’ll see a little box that looks like the image on the right. Click on the blue Analyze button and get ready for some magic.

Scribe will take a few minutes to analyze your page content, page title and page description.  Once it’s finished its analysis, you’ll see a pop-up box that gives you a ton of information on how to maximize the search engine results for that post.

5. This pop-up box gives you specific recommendations for how to change you content, add hyperlinks, modify tags, and maximize keyword usage.  It even gives you a rating on how you did – 100% if you a fantastic job, lower percentages if you’ve got some work to do. Take the recommendations and implement them! This advice does you no good if you don’t put it to use!

6. Repeat this process for more posts and pages – you get a certain number of Scribe evaluations with each level of service, so you can buy the level that’s right for you.

Click here to find out more about Scribe.

NOTE – You may not be ready for Scribe right now.  Or you may not be a Wordpress user right now. Either way, if you need a more general description of how to tackle the Search Engine Optimization world, I highly recommend Naomi Dunford of Ittybiz.  She’s got a great product called Ninja SEO School that I think it an excellent introduction to SEO. It’s not overwhelming, she’s a great teacher, and she’s funny, to boot.

Full disclosure – I am an affiliate for both of these products, but I truly would recommend them both even if I wasn’t! I know everyone says that, honest to goodness, it’s true.

Wordress has a terrific import process that makes it pretty straightforward to move all of your posts, images, comments, etc. over to a new hosted Wordpress blog.  This is possible from any of the other popular blogging tools – Typepad, Blogger, Drupal and Wordpress.com.  It took me about five minutes to export my blog from Typepad and import it into Wordpress.  Slick!

I’m still working on cleaning up some little things (including my RSS feed), so bear with me for a few days while I get the house in order.  And let me know your thoughts on the new look!

For hosted Wordpress (Wordpress.com) users, you can do a backup of your whole blog by going to Tools => Export in your Wordpress.com blog dashboard. Then click on “Download Export File”. That will give you the backup of your content (posts, pages, authors, etc).

For anyone using the self-hosted Wordpress (Wordpress.org), I recommend installing this plug-in, which will do an automatic daily, weekly or monthly back-up of your database.  Once the plug-in is installed and activated, go to Tools > Backup to configure the options for when you want to have the back-up done.  It gives you the option to have the back-up mailed to you automatically, which I think is pretty slick.

In Blogger, you can do an export of your blog (which is also useful is you want to switch to Wordpress, not that I’m HINTING or anything) by going to Settings > Blog Tools > Export Blog.

If you’re a Typepad blogger, go to “Settings” once you’ve clicked on the blog you want to back up, then click on “Import/Export” > Export.

If you’re using another blogging tool, ask tech support or do a quick Google search for the words “export” or “Backup” and your blogging tool name, and you’ll likely find a way to do a backup.

Once you’ve run an export or back up and you have the exported file, make sure to save it somewhere safe (preferably on an external hard drive, if possible).  I recommend backing up about once a week.  That way if something awful happens, you never lose more than one week’s worth of posts.

Something else to think about – don’t use a fly-by-night hosting company if you’re blogging with a self-hosting blogging tool like Wordpress.org.  I recommend Bluehost – they are incredibly reliable and very Wordpress-friendly.  Yes, that is an affiliate link, but I use Bluehost myself and love them, especially their very knowledgable customer service, which has saved my butt more than once when I’m backed myself into some weird technical corner. 

This year, we should all be thankful for blogs that don’t disappear!  Do your backups!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

This tool is also completely web-based, which means it works with any operating system.  Try Picnik and have fun with your photos!

I especially like the fact that two weeks ago Typepad ran a survey regarding templates among all of their customers.  They compiled the results and then used the customer responses to develop and publish all the new template choices.  Great customer service is one of the reasons I don’t mind buying Typepad’s low monthly fee for my blogs.  They answer my questions and listen to my suggestions – gotta love that. 

This is the symbol  for RSS, which stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. You may also hear folks using the term “feed” or “web feed”.  You can use RSS to keep up with the overwhelming stream of online information we’re trying to wade through every day.

As useful as feeds are, they can be a real pain to explain to my clients.  XML? Feed aggregator? Huh? I can see my students’ eyes glazing over.  After searching for a truly plain English explanation to use, I found this video, appropriately titled “RSS in Plain English”, which was produced by Common Craft Productions.  It’s the best explaination of feeds and RSS that I’ve seen, and it’s fun, too! Take a look: