jeffreyharmon.net

This is an example of an article that we use at FamilyLearn. We built this one to Optimize the 50th wedding anniversary keywords:

Given the escalation of divorce rates in recent years, a 50th wedding anniversary in 2007 represents a true accomplishment. According to recent statistics compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau: “About 52 percent of currently married couples had reached at least their 15th anniversary in 1996, and 5 percent of them had reached at least their golden anniversary (50 years).” Making it to 50 years is a pinnacle that only few couples attain.

“Over that period of time a couple builds a legacy that can’t be measured in material possessions, but rather the lives they have touched through their union,” says Donna Pilato, Entertaining guide for About.com. More than golden anniversary mints, a 50th anniversary gives family and friends an opportunity to take a ride down memory lane and honor a very special couple.

When Barb Sasaki of New Jersey started planning for her Turner parents’ 50th wedding anniversary party for July 2007, she wanted to craft the perfect festive environment. Invitations were sent to family and friends. The big party was decorated with gold while sound of once popular 1957 music filled the air. She even convinced her dad to make his famous homemade wine. Guests were each greeted at the “sign in” book with their own labeled photograph of her parents. Barb went all out. Still, she wanted a 50th wedding anniversary gift idea that would represent the legacy of the lives her parents had touched over those 50 years.

It was with the “guest book” that Barb really got imaginative and pulled her 21st century cards. She discovered a website called MemoryPress.com where she could create a 50th wedding anniversary gift book, add her favorite memories and invite family and friends to contribute to the book from their own homes. The book blossomed into 143 pages of photos and memories contributed by family and friends. “It was the highlight of their 50th anniversary party! We used it as the guest book. Everyone wanted to sit down and look at it! My Mom and Dad were both brought to tears when we presented it to them and Mom told me the other day that Dad has read it cover to cover 8 times now in the 6 weeks or so since the party and cried every time!”

Barb realized that giving her parents memories was more valuable than gold or a perfect party. The Internet, via MemoryPress.com, made celebrating a 1957 couples’ lives with the memories and photos of family and friends as easy as email.

Match.com and eHarmony.com help people fall in love online, now MemoryPress.com is helping couples celebrate their lives online as an unforgettable 50th wedding anniversary gift. MemoryPress 50th wedding anniversary books can include everything from the couples 1957 love story to drawings by their grandchildren. Why not? After all, it’s 2007.

I helped Neal write this article today.

Share This

Today we finally added another book to the MemoryPress home page.

We hope that we will soon win out the keyword “family history publishing” in searches on Google, Yahoo, Live, and Ask.

So this means that I need to get as many people as possible to link to this new URL: http://memorypress.familylearn.com/family-history-publishing

Once we get the keywords for the five books we have figured out, then we will begin added others to the homepage.

Share This

I just read a good post by Guy Kawasaki. He gives 10 things to avoid when trying to promote your company online.

I decided that he must know what he is talking about because websites that make you re-type your email address, don’t let you use usernames with “@” symbols, give you unreadable confirmation codes, and don’t work unless you are on internet explorer DRIVE ME NUTS! If you are learning internet marketing you should read these.
Yet I don’t know if I agree with Guy on is his veryt “do not”: Enforced immediate registration. When we released iMemoryBook in November we started out with a very nice system that allowed you to dive into and create your book without registering. You could create an entire book and it was just saved in your cache. Yeah, we thought it was the greatest idea ever. An incredible 30% of traffic landing on beta.iMemoryBook.com were going right into the online bookmaking application! They would play around, even get started on a book, but then they would forget to click the red call to action: “Save this book” (after clicking “save this book” they would move into the registration process. Because iMemoryBook is so new, many people come to the site, love what they see and then say, “I will do one of these books later.”

Unsatisfied with the registration rates, Ben and I decided that we wanted to experiment with asking for their email before we let them in. PhotoBucket has been extremely successful with this technique and is now gaining 80,000 new visitors a day! The idea here is that when a potential customer comes in for a visit, “just taking a look at our system”, we can continue to keep in contact with them by Email until they are ready to create their iMemoryBook. We want an email list. We also decided that our email list is going to be fun and helpful. We will NEVER generate an automatic newsletter. Each one will be handcrafted to be exciting and interesting.

So to the dismay of Neal, Dwain, and Paul–who had spent an enormous amount of time creating the online bookmaking application so that you didn’t need to be registered to use it, we are now testing the “forced registration”. Thus far conversion rates have tripled! I think it is working well.

Other Possibilities:
I am still not certain we have done it just right. I sometime wonder if we should add an opt out option at the bottom of the registration that says: “No thanks… I just want to look” like Screenit.com? Here is a screen shot (screenit needs a makeover):

The funny thing is that I have never registered for Screenit, but I have used them dozens of times to learn if a movie meets my standards. Perhaps we should create something like zohowiki, a link that says “log in as a demo user”. Here is another screenshot:

Zoho once did this with ZohoWriter(like MS Word but online) and sheets but now it is gone. I wonder if the “demo” user wasn’t working. I thought that they must work, that is what got me to start.

What I like most

I lean to this option because it would give our potential customers the chance to see a book that is full of content. Currently when you start an iMemoryBook there are no photos and they are very generic. I like the idea of them being able to view, edit, and play in a book that has already been started. It might help them catch the vision.

Two Problems

I see two downfalls with the Zoho’s demo plan: 1) This option could possibly make it harder to get emails so that we can follow up. I can see myself, very interested in the service, but because I have now seen the system I don’t have any reason to register because I am not planning on making a book today. It is very important that we have an email to follow up with periodically. 2) Our demo books would have thousands of users on them at one time, I can see that causing a collaboration nightmare.

I am not sure how we will have our registration page in the end. It will take a lot of testing to learn which way is best. If you have any suggestions I would love to hear them.

Share This

A while ago I wrote a little report on Amazon’s new ad system ClickRiver.

Today we received a gift in the mail from ClickRiver, the new pay-per-click ad system for Amazon. They gave us “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation“ by Lynne Truss (I wonder if they noticed that every time I write it is a grammatical and punctuation nightmare). The book is Amazon’s way of saying “thank you” for FamilyLearn’s participation in the BETA release of ClickRiver. How fantastic is that!

I can tell they are working very hard over at ClickRiver. We can all learn a lesson from this gift.

Share This

Creating an appropriate post to Wikipedia will take you some time. Here is how I did it.

Everything begins with research:

1. Register with Wikipedia and study their suggested readings (takes about 30 minutes):
   

   The five pillars of Wikipedia
   How to edit a page
   Help pages
   Tutorial
   How to write a great article
   Manual of Style

2. Find and read about other companies related your company. Note what you like about the articles and what you don’t like. I am a very visual person so this helped me more than the tutorials.
3. You can learn the basic write up language for Wikipedia in a short time, but I suggest that you snatch an article that someone else has already posted and then click “edit this page” and copy out all their content. You can now use this content as a template for your posting. Replace their text with your text, their images with your images, and their links with your links. In the end you will have created a well organized article.
4. Properly site any content you use.
5. External Links: You can link them to official pages on your website, your blog, and recent articles about your website. These links are very valuable so choose them carefully and make sure that they are appropriate to the cause of Wikipedia.
6. Don’t sell ANYTHING. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. The greatest danger of writing your own article is that you are partial to your business. Be careful.

Each post you make is just the beginning. Over time others will refine your article and correct your mistakes.  Please comment if you have had experience with Wikipedia.

Share This

Today I read an article by Draco Draconis on Self Publishing. He talked about Kevin Kelly’s article on lulu and blurb. I really wanted to comment on Draco’s blog but he has made it just about impossible to write anything unless you know him personally. I suppose in the end I was just hoping for a link from him about iMemoryBook 2.0

I especially liked Draco’s mention of what is happening in the self publishing industry:

“…people start out by ordering one copy of a personal book, they quickly come back for more. Ordering 50 or more copies is not uncommon. Furthermore, once people discover how easy it is to make a book, they make a lot of them. Maybe several a year.”

We are finding the very same thing. The iMemoryBook has taken some time to get going. Virgin products are always difficult. Even my oldest brother was telling me how many projects he wants to do but it just feels like it is going to take so much commitment, funny enough he hasn’t even done one book yet, when he gets started I think he will change his mind. iMemoryBook is so easy to use.
I have now created or am creating over 7 book projects, from a baby memory book to my sister’s wedding memory book. It is addictive and feels like you are accomplishing something good for your posterity.

Share This

Ever get frustrated that you don’t have a simple system to edit (i.e. crop, color, brighten, redeye removal…) your photos? Perhaps you don’t have $600 to buy Photoshop + 40 hours to invest in learning how to use it. Maybe you are like me, taking dozens of photos per month just to let them sit on your PC, waiting for when you have time to organize and edit them. If this is you (and you have not heard of Google Picasa) then you are going to thank me for this blog post.

Over a year ago Neal told me about Picasa. I downloaded it out of curiosity and was thrilled when it automatically found and organized every photo on my computer. Picasa found photos I didn’t even know I had. I have yet to find such a simple system for editing, printing, emailing, and preparing my photos for my iMemoryBook projects.

For example, here is a photo of me fighting to catch the garter at my friend’s wedding. You can see that the photo is dark and barely viewable (I am the one in the middle. I did catch it:)

Here is the same photo after 10 seconds of editing in Picassa:

The difference is night and day and it didn’t take more than 5 minutes to learn!

Getting Picasa:

Click here to download Picasa to your computer (it takes less than a minute).

After you have downloaded Picasa, let it go and find your photos on your computer. (If your photos are still on your camera just click import in the top left corner and go get them).

Using Picasa for your iMemoryBook:

• Select all your best photos for your current iMemoryBook project (hold down CRTL to select more than one.)
• Click “Add to” in your bottom tool bar.
• Select “New Album”
• Name your album: “My Personal History Photos” (This example is if you are creating a personal history)
• Continue to add photos to this album until you have all the photos that you want.
• Select your photo album in the “library” and click “Export” in the bottom right side. (I usually export photos to my desktop so that they are easy to find)

Great. You are almost done.

• Log in to your iMemoryBook account.
• Click on your “Photos” tab in your book.
• Click “Upload Photos”
• Click “browse” under “upload multiple photos” (this is the best photo uploader I have ever used)
• Select ALL of the photos in your newly created picasa album.
• Click “Open” and wait for your photos to upload.

Your done!

You can also use Picasa to create CDs, blog entries, and order prints from over 10 different online photo stores.

Picasa is FREE and considered one of the best bargains ever.

Share This

iMemoryBook is currently one of just a few companies running on Amazon’s EC2 limited BETA server system and Amazon’s S3 System. Using EC2 and S3 means that iMemoryBook can handle virtually unlimited growth.

This means that when iMemoryBook takes off we will not get crushed by all the traffic. I will leave it up to Duane to explain a little more about the technical end of iMemoryBook.

Share This

On Wednesday the 15^th of this month, we released the brand spanking new iMemoryBook! Everything you need to collaborate with family and friends to turn your memories and photos into a beautiful book.

Here are 10 reasons why iMemoryBook is the best Christmas gift ever:

1. iMemoryBooks are about you, about mom, about anyone – You can make an iMemoryBook about almost thing or anyone.
2. iMemoryBooks are unique - When was the last time you had someone give you a hardbound book about you?
3. iMemoryBooks are collaborative – Your entire family can work on an iMemoryBook at one time. Everyone from their own home internet connection.
4. iMemoryBooks last forever (or at least a very long time) - For generations to come your posterity will be able to learn about who you are.
5. iMemoryBooks can’t be destroyed – House-fires? Floods? Natural Disasters? Terrorists? Kids or Siblings? Not to worry. Your memories and photos are now perpetually secured on multiple servers.
6. iMemoryBooks are completely customizable – Your Cover, Your Memories, Your Book. There are literally 10s of thousands of combinations to customize your iMemoryBook. No two iMemoryBooks look alike.
7. iMemoryBooks can be big or small – Your iMemoryBook can be 5 pages long or 460 pages long.
8. iMemoryBooks are quality – These are no cheap PhotoBooks. Your iMemoryBook will be professionally bound with a double-fan adhesive, library binding.
9. 10. iMemoryBooks will lift you in the most difficult of times - “God gave us memories, that we might have June roses in the December of our lives.” -James Barrie
10. MemoryBooks are affordable: The system is FREE to use. You only pay when you publish.
    Our publishing pricing structure is simple:

• $1 per color page
• $0.15 per black and white page
• Hard bindings starting at $12 (i.e. Leather and other premium quality covers are more)

Share This