By Jessica Albon
If you haven’t yet downloaded a copy of the free perpetual calendar I released earlier this month, check out the photo of it in use in my office, the download link, and what people are saying about it over on Andrew’s blog.
You can see for yourself how I’m using it, and be inspired to try it out for yourself. So far, it’s a month in and I’m still loving it. If you’ve tried it out, send me a photo of how it looks in your space 
.
By Jessica Albon
Image by turbidty
Like this wall covered in chewing gum (at Pikes Place Market), your newsletter’s been covered in icky, sticky garbage that’s obscuring the truth. Let’s scrape off the lies and learn what’s real, shall we?
Let’s get one thing straight before we begin: I believe YOU can publish a thriving, profitable, FUN newsletter. In fact, I believe ANYONE can publish a thriving, profitable, fun newsletter.
If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t bother publishing Newsletters in Focus. I would just continue to privately work with the people who could publish successfully. I don’t believe in giving people false hope, so when I share stories of stunning newsletter success, I’m sharing them because they’re almost always possible for YOU, too.
Because I believe you have what it takes to publish a successful newsletter, it really upsets me that you might have been led to believe one or …
By Jessica Albon
If you’re running a business that’s significantly slowed down, you may be thinking of throwing in the towel, even temporarily. If that’s your situation DO NOT let your domain expire. We’re talking about a $10 investment here, so keep it up.
Why? Search engines give you big points for a domain that’s older–the older, the better. Once your domain hits 3 months, Google and other engines start taking it more seriously. As it ages, that value only grows.
So, keep your domains. (And, you might even want to register them right now for some extra time.)
While you’re at it, keep up your site, too (even if you put up a page that says, “Hey, we’ve chickened out because of the economy and we’re not currently accepting your money.”) because keeping your site active will help you keep your search engine rankings you’ve worked so hard for.…
By Jessica Albon
Image by eyebiz
A long-time NIF reader, is getting ready to launch her blog (to which I intend to link, with her permission, when it’s ready). With oodles of experience as a programmer, and as a brilliantly creative gal, she dug in and worked to edit the template on her own.
Everything went swimmingly until it came to using CommentLuv (a plugin that automatically links to your commenter’s latest blog post) which was working, but not displaying in quite the right place. Now, like I said, she’s an uber experienced programmer, but she doesn’t know much about JavaScript, and she thought that that was where the problem was. She Twittered for help.
When we’d spoken by phone a few minutes earlier, I’d assumed she was right, and then, reading her Tweet, I realized there was something I hadn’t asked…
Whenever you notice …
By Jessica Albon
Image by juliaf
So, I’ve talked (and complained) before about how I’m rehabbing a 1960s house and how much fun it is. (Seriously, it’s usually a lot of fun.)
Today, though, when I was trying to fix this spot where the baseboard and the flooring weren’t willing to touch (apparently, the flooring has Cooties), I sliced two fingers open. So, now I have a bandage on the tip of one finger which makes typing awkward. (I’ve also slashed open eight of my ten fingers/thumbs in the last month. Clearly I need to be more careful…)
So, rather than type up something meaningful of my own, I wanted to point you to some articles/posts I’ve been enjoying lately.
Read this (about how no one will ever spend money again, unless, you know, the media is actually wrong [as if!]) and this (about how not getting paid …
By Jessica Albon
When my mother was but a wee girl, her mother, Blanche, fell in love with a gorgeous glass dining room table set. Glass top, iron base, with iron roses all along the side. Though Blanche was not an impulsive woman, she brought the table home.
When Frank (my mom’s dad) arrived home from his work as a typewriter repairman, he took one look at that table and roared: “What were you thinking? This table is crazy. The kids’ll put one milk bottle down on the table and it’ll smash into a million pieces.”
This was in the days of milk delivery, in charming glass bottles, of course. (My mother is old, isn’t she 
.)
Blanche either realized Frank was right, or decided it wasn’t worth arguing about, and so she took the table back to the store from which she’d bought it and returned it.
Years later, my mom …
By Jessica Albon
Image by asifthebes
Publishing a newsletter is hard work. Whether you publish weekly or monthly or quarterly, there’s research and writing, inspiration-finding, editing and layout to do.
And though the rewards are great, sometimes, that’s just not enough. You know I think newsletters are amazing–and you know I enjoy spending this time with you each week. I love the emails you send me. Your vote of confidence when you forward your issue, or recommend someone read NIF, that means a great deal to me. And, of course, the predictable Monday-morning *sales* boost isn’t exactly annoying.
But, sometimes I find myself wondering if I could put the time I spend on NIF to better use. I worry that I’ll run out of ideas, burn myself out on writing altogether, and start to be dreadfully dull.
Have you ever felt this way about your newsletter?
Because you might be considering …
By Jessica Albon
Did you expect the New Year to roll in, bright and shiny and full of new inspiration and promise? Have you been meeting up instead with sluggishness and resistance?
Perhaps you’re finding yourself, as Alicia Paulson writes:
This time of year is like some kind of no-man’s-land. So strange. I think it happens every January, that feeling that you’re revving your engines, ready to go, and still — nope. Spinning wheels in mud, somehow.
For me, this happens most often when I’ve decided the way the writing will go. That it must go my way or no way. And so I am left spinning my wheels in mud.
There’s really only one way out of this predicament. And that’s to shut off the car engine, climb out of the car, and wait for the ground to dry. Sure, you could call a tow truck or wedge something beneath the …
By Jessica Albon
Image by andreyutzu
Apparently, I recently neglected to celebrate an “important” anniversary: the anniversary of my home financing. My home loan has been huffy the last few days, heaving big sighs and refusing to speak to me except to accuse me of being forgetful and uncaring.
Think that’s just me talking crazy? Normally, I’d agree with you, except I’ve seen the mailer. See, this weekend Wells Fargo sent me a self mailer that began: “You may not realize it, but you have reason to celebrate! It’s the anniversary of your home financing.”
To which my first response is: You’re kidding, right? Who the heck celebrates the anniversary of taking out a rather large loan for a very long time? Of all the dates I have marked in my calendar, and no matter how many ways I try to make sense of this, I cannot understand why “Anniversary of Home …
By Jessica Albon
Photo by IrishFireside
It was a balmy summer evening and I was wandering through a small town in Ireland with three friends several years ago. When we were about a mile outside of the town limits, we came upon an old gated cemetery. Because it was still quite light (although it was after 10 p.m.), the atmosphere was anything but scary, so what was there to do but make things a bit scarier?
So, we sat under a big tree, and pulled the scariest stories we knew from our memories. Most of them, in any other environment, weren’t exactly scary. There was the one about the guy with the hook for a hand and the tale about the babysitter, and many others I don’t recall.
As it grew later and later, the fog rolled in, and the sky darkened. There was a full moon that night, and it cast …
By Jessica Albon
Vivien’s post on calendars for 2009 set me on the hunt for a calendar that would be perfect for my new office.
Unfortunately, I seem to have picked an exceptionally unpopular color scheme or something because I couldn’t find anything that was quite right. So, I did what any self respecting web designer would do–I made my own. And I packed it all into a pdf so you can have a copy too.
It’s a fabulous free download with the instructions in the pdf file itself. Just print it on cardstock, trim it, and hang it.
I’d love to see it in YOUR office, so be sure to send me pictures!
You’ll need the latest version of Adobe Reader to open the file.
By Jessica Albon
AKA: Why Twitter is Awesome but so Many Tweets Aren’t (Including Mine)
Many moons ago, I wrote a piece about telegrams and a potential “return to terse” (how horrible is it to quote yourself, I wonder…).
Since I got started Twittering over the last two weeks, I’m both delighted and appalled at just what you can actually do with 140 characters. Delighted because, hey, it’s kinda fun to pare something down to as few words as possible. Appalled because I find myself abbreviating great (gr8) and committing other “sins” of spelling and grammar all in the pursuit of shaving off a few extra letters.
And, as I’m practicing this new format of connecting with people, I’ve realized that though the medium might change, the formula stays the same. Unfortunately, that formula is often oversimplified as the oft-repeated: Content is King.
Of course, with crappy content, you’re sunk. But, in pursuit …
By Jessica Albon
Bet you didn’t know that Thrive Your Tribe isn’t the only company doing fabulous design work for WordPress based blogs, sites, and HTML email newsletters! But, since we do, in fact, have some wonderful competition, here’s why you would hire us instead of the other guys:
We get it right. Eventually.
Killer benefit, isn’t it? I mean, who wouldn’t want to work with a company that, sooner or later, stumbles on the gorgeous design that catches your eye?
Oh, right–most people! You’re busy. You don’t have time for endless rounds of trial and error. So, perhaps you do think it would be great to find a company that promises to get it right right out of the gate.
Unfortunately, at least 97% of the time, that’s not possible. In fact, most of our clients come to us with only a vague idea of what they want their site …
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