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Tag Archive: bricks and mortar

A Makeover for Bigg Success

Written on September 21, 2009 by George Krueger & Mary-Lynn Foster in Uncategorized

paint If you’re one of our regulars, you probably immediately noticed our new look. With the help of the great people at Headway, we’ve gotten a makeover!

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Hear George & Mary-Lynn discuss today's topic on The Bigg Success Show! Click the purple player to listen while you read: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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george Most people may not be surprised to hear me say this, but I’ve never had a makeover, Mary-Lynn.

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marylynn You’ve never gone to the make-up counter for the “before” and “after” thing, huh?

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george
Oh, well now that you put it that way!

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marylynn Well, I’ve certainly had my share of makeovers. From long hair to short. Back to long. Then to medium length hair.

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george If I had hair, maybe I could do that! Another popular makeover is a home makeover. Here’s the way ours works. I move the furniture to a new spot per Mary-Lynn’s order. Then I generally move it back to where it was originally per Mary-Lynn’s order!

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marylynn You can paint your rooms to give them a new feel. And for you, George, you just clean off your desk so you can see it again!

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Planned remodeling

In the retail business, there’s an unwritten rule that you should remodel your store about every seven years.

Your web site is your online storefront whether you’re in the retail business or not. There's a rule of thumb in web design that you should update your site every two years.

Whereas you might spend tens of thousands of dollars to remodel your bricks-and-mortar store, it costs relatively little to give your virtual store a makeover.

You don’t have to make drastic changes. You can add new tools or highlight things in which your site visitors might be particularly interested.

For instance, do you have a great resource page? Is it highly visible on your home page?

Do you publish a newsletter? Is it easy for your visitors to sign up?

Why the change?

We’re almost at the two year mark so we felt it was time to remodel. The look is different but the overall feel is not.

Another reason is that more people are accessing our site via mobile devices. Our old design wasn’t very friendly to these devices. You had to scroll through a lot of extraneous information to get to our post for the day.

Thanks to our graphic designer, Liz McMillen, we have an updated logo. It incorporates our tagline – Life on Your Own Terms – into Bigg Success.

Making Headway our Theme

We also had planned to upgrade to a premium WordPress Theme anyway. Our friends at Headway came out with their fantastic product at just the right time. (In the interest of full disclosure, we are now an affiliate of Headway.)

We do business with people we know and trust. Grant and Clay Griffiths certainly fit that description. They’ve done a great job with Headway and we expect it to be a bigg success.

Other people we know and respect are using the template too. There’s nothing like social proof! Chris Cree, Michael Martine – a.k.a. Remarkablogger – and John Haydon are all using Headway now for their blogs.

Headway makes it easy make updates to any site as it continues to evolve. It is easy to customize without having to know code. That’s a bigg time saver for any business owner looking to upgrade his or her site.

They have a great support forum that is both informative and robust. Clay and other Headway users do a great job of responding to technical and design questions.

Your thoughts?
Check out the “before” if you want and compare it to now. We'd love to hear your thoughts on the new design.

Do you like it? Any suggestions?

You can leave a comment, e-mail us at bigginfo@biggsuccess.com or leave a voice message at 888.455.2444 (BIGG).

Thanks so much for visiting the new Bigg Success site today. Please join us next time when we’ll discuss entrepreneuring your personal finances. Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

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(Image in today's post by ratnesh)

2 Comments

Social Media and Karaoke Night

Written on July 30, 2009 by George Krueger & Mary-Lynn Foster in Networking

karaoke Karaoke Night. Some people love it. Some people hate it.

Some people sing. Some people make fun of the people who sing.

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Hear George & Mary-Lynn discuss, not karaoke, today's topic on The Bigg Success Show! Click the purple player to listen while you read: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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george It makes me think of that time, Mary-Lynn, when you were still in radio and we ended up at Karaoke Night with one of my favorite bands of all time, Cheap Trick.

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marylynn Yeah, I had interviewed Rick Nielsen, their lead guitarist, on my show that day. He arranged for backstage passes which was awesome. After the concert, they invited us back to the hotel bar to hang out.

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george It just happened to be Karaoke Night. A woman attempted, and I’m being generous here, to sing Pat Benatar’s Hit Me with Your Best Shot. Robin Zander, Cheap Trick’s lead singer, made a face I’ll never forget.

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marylynn I kept hoping someone would sing one of their songs, but that never happened. It was still a fun night!

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Enough about karaoke. That’s just one half of the topics for today’s post.

We talk to a lot of people about social media. A lot of people in the bricks-and-mortar world are trying to get it. And like a lot of things that are new, it seems complex.

So let’s see if we can take away some of that complexity by comparing Karaoke Night to social media. We’ll look at three things we need to make a successful Karaoke Night and apply those to social media. It comes down to 3 P’s:

Place

With karaoke, we usually think of a bar or a coffee shop. Someone has to organize it and promote it.

In social media, the place may be a blog or a site like Facebook or Twitter. They organize and promote their place so people will come there and hang out for awhile.

People

Karaoke wouldn’t be much fun if there was no one there. It’s the people that make it interesting. Similarly, Facebook and Twitter are great places to be because there are so many people there.

Performers

If no one ever sang, how much fun would karaoke be? It’s fun because of the variety of talents and interests displayed. You learn about people by the songs they choose to sing.

In social media, everybody can be a performer. Of course, there’s the blogger or podcaster. There are people who leave comments; they’re performing, too.

Every tweet in Twitter or status update on Facebook is just like singing a song at Karaoke Night.

They’re both networking

Karaoke and social media both bring people together with something in common. They both allow people to show off their talents and interests. They both allow you to meet new people. They’re both an opportunity to share experiences and build relationships.

If you pick the right song when you karaoke, everybody will sing along. If you share something people find intriguing or useful, they’ll share it too. Do it enough and you might just become a celebrity with your own group of fans!

Can you think of other ways that karaoke is like social media? Share that by leaving a comment below, calling us at 888.455.BIGG (2444) or e-mailing us at bigginfo@biggsuccess.com.

To connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, etc. visit our About Page.

Thanks so much for reading our post today.

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We’re going to continue talking about social media tomorrow. We’ll look at some new research to discover if social networking can help you live longer. Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

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Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file:
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(Image in today's post by fensterbme,CC 2.0)