You’re putting together a new website and everything is in place except for one thing: your picture. You begin to question whether you actually have to have a picture at all, particularly since you never seem to get around to getting the appointment made at the photography studio. You go back and forth with yourself about whether you need a professional portrait made, or whether a snap with the digital camera would do. Meanwhile, as the battle rages on in your mind, you still don’t have a picture on your site.

As the web becomes more and more social, having a picture on your site becomes more and more important. Letting others see who is behind the site, letting your visitors know there is a real person involved goes a long way toward building the know, like and trust factor. But does it have to be (or should it even be) a professional portrait?

Does it have to be a professional portrait? No. Definitely not.

Whether or not it should be a professional portrait depends upon whether you have anyone around who can take a decent picture of you. With digital cameras offering 8, 10 and up megapixels in resolution, there’s no reason why you couldn’t have someone take a great picture of you for free.

Most important, however, is that the picture actually look like you! The real you!

This is the picture I use here and everywhere else the web asks me for a picture of myself. It is not a professional portrait – it was taken in my kitchen by a friend using my digital camera.

The best advice I ever got regarding taking a picture for my site was this: “Go take a shower, do your hair, put on your face and get dressed – do whatever you would do if you were going to meet a client in person. Then, smile and have someone take a picture of you. You want your picture on your site to look like the person they’d meet in person.”

This is the real me – at least the me that would show up to meet you in person. (It is not the me that sits here in the office in her pajamas, hair in a cock-eyed ponytail on top of her head, though. That me might be a tad too ‘real’ for publication. LOL)

Remember to smile! Big!

I remember when I was standing there waiting for my friend to take the picture, I was concentrating on smiling, but not too much. But when I looked at the picture, my face was almost deadpan. So, I smiled bigger, and that was better, but still not great. It wasn’t until I smiled so big that I felt silly that I got this picture, which is finally the right amount of smile to put on the web. Smiling is important. You look friendly, approachable and it helps build that ‘know, like and trust’ factor.

Whether you take the picture yourself or have one taken by a professional, remember to reduce it’s size before you put it on your site. You don’t want people to have to wait while all those megapixels take their sweet time to display. A resolution of 72dpi is just fine for the net, and a picture 200 by 300 pixels is probably big enough for your site.

It’s a good idea, too, then to use that same picture everywhere on the web that asks for a picture of you. It helps build recognition for you and makes setting up profiles on all those social media and social networking sites easier, too.

Every time a client asks me which mailing list service I recommend, I always respond, “AWeber.” It doesn’t matter to me how much of a “newbie” a client might be – I still recommend AWeber.

I’ve said over and over again, “AWeber gives you the most bang for your buck. They have the best email delivery rate in the industry, and while you might not need all the features they offer right this minute, you will want them sooner than later. While going with another service right now might save you $5 a month or so, you’ll lose subscribers later when you decide to move because your service doesn’t offer the capabilities you’ll need as you grow.”

It’s not just a personal preference that applies only to me. It’s a recommendation from someone who’s been there, done that, tried using other services only to bump my head time and time again on the brick wall of not having the ability to do what I need to do without a lot of hoop jumping or crazy work-arounds.

In a nutshell: It’s a matter of being poised for success.

As I mentioned the other day, Problogger is beginning a free tutorial series on Monday called 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Challenge, (and yes, I recommend you sign up!) Last Wednesday, Darren posted a great example of why I recommend AWeber by showing how he’s able to track conversions for email newsletters. Go on and read it – I’ll wait.

Knowing what works is important – you know – so you can do more of it. Being able to track conversions is one important way of knowing what’s working in your efforts to get people subscribed to your list. If your mailing list service only allows you to setup one opt-in form per mailing list, or worse yet, only one opt-in form period, you’ll never know which of your list building efforts is the most effective. As a result, you could be spinning your wheels and not know it.

If you have a Feedburner account for managing your RSS feeds, it’s time to pack your bags and move over to Google.

Google has owned Feedburner for awhile now, but there’ve been no major changes required or put upon us. Now, however, we have to move our feeds over to Google officially by February 28, 2009, or they’re gonna do it for us. Now, normally, I’d be thinking, “Hmmm…do it myself, or you’ll do it for me? Ok – go ahead – do it for me!” But not this time.

Why?

Because the feed address will change when the move is complete, for one. And I want no delay in getting it changed on my site because I don’t want to give anyone trying to subscribe any unnecessary problems. And for two, if there are any problems along the way, I want to know about them immediately, if not sooner.

So, how do you move? It’s pretty easy, really. Just log in to your Feedburner account, and you’ll be met with:

Moving to a Google Account is easy.
Take the plunge now!

Your FeedBurner account “[yourloginname]” and all of your feeds should move to Google. Why?

* FeedBurner’s new features will only appear in Google Accounts.
* AdSense for feeds only works with Google Accounts.
* Burned feeds will work only if they’re hosted on Google.

Please note that FeedBurner’s Site Stats features are not supported in Google Accounts. We encourage you to try Google Analytics for website traffic statistics.

Move my account now

Go ahead and click the ‘Move my account now’ button…it’s your only option, really. You can then safely close your browser as the message you’ll see says. It really will continue to do the move on its own. You’ll get an email when it’s done.

If you don’t have a Google account you’ll be asked to create one. Just follow the instructions on the screen.

When the move is complete, your feed address will have changed from http://feeds.feedburner.com/YourFeedName to http://feeds2.feedburner.com/YourFeedName. Though the email you’ll receive tells you that your old address will redirect to the new address, go ahead and update it wherever you’re using it now, while you’re thinking about it. At some point in the future, I’m sure they’ll dispense with the redirection, and then your feed will stop working and you might not remember why. Just handle it now and be done with it.

For most of you, the only update required is in your FeedSmith plugin. You just need to give it the new address. (Go to your WP Dashboard, click Settings -> Feedburner and update the address on that page. Make sure to save your changes.)

If you specifically offer RSS subscriptions via email as a separate link on your site (I do…see the subscription box on my front page), you’ll need to log in to your new Google Feedburner account and get the updated code for that and update it on your site.

If all this has left you a little dazed and confused, and you’d like some assistance getting your feeds moved and updated, contact me – I’m happy to help.