Sometime last year I was approached by Vasakronan, Swedens largest property brand with a property portfolio valued at SEK 80.3 billion. Being a market leader the felt their digital presence had to reflect that position. Their question: What do we do? As always I teamed up with Caroline Karlström and accepted the challenge to answer that question. In this project I took on the role as both head of strategy and concept as well as actually delivering the top level designs of the new Vasakronan that Britny later implemented and refined.

This is what we did. Parts of the new Vasakronan digital brand presence

The new Vasakronan.se runs WordPress!

Me and Caroline started the project with an analysis phase and analysed their existing presence, the traffic to their site, the content, the design and the site structure. We interviewed representatives from Vasakronan as well as their clients and potential prospects. We also performed an extensive technical analysis of their technical platform. Their brand presence online was running on Episerver, one of Swedens most common content management platforms and the front end was about three years old. It was classical site with tons of sections and also some flash content.

The old Vasakronan.se site.

On top of that the site was connected to their back end, partly built on Sharepoint. Already from start I felt that there was no need for this complex set up. If you also include the fact that Vasakronan intended to lead – not follow, then I also thought we needed to look at modern platforms such as WordPress.

Once we’ve passed the analysis phase, it was clear that there really was no need to run Vasakronan off Episerver. Instead we decided to give WordPress a try. WordPress would, beside the fact that the platform is free, give Vasakronan the ability to adapt to the world outside, fast! WordPress has got some 20000 developers devoted to making sure the platform is up to date. Future branding is all about making sure you stay on top technology instead of being dictated by technology due to the fact that you’re stuck in a slow developed platform. Vasakronans ambition moving forward is also to be a part of that community, meaning develop new plugins and functionalities that other brands can make good use of.

A new brand plattform needed to be digitalized.

Part from the fact that Vasakronan’s digital presence was a couple of years old another important fact was also that they we’re redesigning their brand language. Not their logo – but their tone of voice, their graphical expressions, colors and how they worked with images. This was a challenge.

Parts of the Vasakronan brand manual that we had to digitalize.

Their new brand language was classical yet bold, however it was clearly developed to be used offline. I’m personally a big fan of simplicity and there was something in that brand presentation we were handed that struck a chord inside me.

The new Vasakronan.se – on brand!

The challenge to bring this stuff online was something that made me smile. After some tweaking back and fourth I felt that I had nailed the graphical concept quite well. It was fresh, clean, usable and on brand.

Great content and simplicity is the new black.

Until now Vasakronan had been working quite a lot with SEM activities. However, their SEO presence was nothing to brag about. In order for this to change I developed a concept that was based on how blogs work. Basically, the content bloggers pushed ends up further down the site structure as more content is being pushed.

An example of how content from the first page is being pushed down in other sections

Considering the website analytic part of the project pointed in the direction few, if any visitors, were interesting surfing the Vasakronan website, instead people landed on one page, clicked one or two pages to get what they were there for and then left, I felt we needed to simplify everything – the site structure, the navigation, the amount of pages and way you search for new properties and of course also the design.

Simplicity was something we kept on striving for all through the project

Yet we also needed people to actually find Vasakronan. There’s of course tons of traffic ending up on Vasakronan via typed url’s or a search for Vasakronan. But there’s also a huge potential in attracting people through generic search. In order to establish a broader and better presence on Google we decided to make better use of Vasakronan’s customer magasine ‘En bättre värd’ (A better host).

Making sure content is spread over multiple platforms to do good for the brand.

On the old site this magazine was published once a month as a PDF. Fine, the PDF attracts Google spiders too – but the content is not very readable online. This magazine was packed with quality content that will do a great job when the spiders comes crawling. Said and done. We established a section called Inspiration & lägen (Inspiration and locations) where the magazine is now portioned in smaller bits over time – just like a blogger would publish it.

iPhone and iPads. What should you do?

If you ask around I think most agencies out there will tell you that you must have a site for mobiles and one for iPads and other tables. I beg to differ. My point of view is that the visitors you have will visit your brand from different devices but that doesn’t mean they’re interested in learning new ways to navigate depending on which device they use today.

People should not have to learn new navigations from one device to another.

This is why I, when I started to design the site, aimed to create a design that would work on your desktop computer, your laptop, iPad and ultimately the smartphone of your choice. Of course it’s important to make sure you’ve thought about mobile sites and apps too. I don’t think there’s ever a need for a specific app or mobile interface to browse the generic content on Vasakronan.se if it’s built and designed right.

Trying out how content could be swiped in potential future apps.

However I definitely think there’s a need for apps that gives landlords, tennants and other target groups the ultimate way to access information and nurture their relation with vasakronan. For these needs we of course designed extra proof of concepts to make sure we didn’t launch anything that could not be developed further.

Now it’s time to put the concept into action – we need more pro’s!

Brands like Vasakronan hire me to make change happen. My assignment usually includes a strategy phase, a concept phase and a visualisation phase. With a set of different tools such as strategic and technical analysis, problem definition, conceptual and creative develoment and prototyping I help brands, in this case Vasakronan, to establish a communication platform. It’s extremely important to deliver the conceptual and creative concepts without having to think about your own organisation – this is why I do not recommend having an agency that delivers both the concept and the implementation – it usually ends up being something that agency makes money off suggestion.

In this case me and Caroline together with different freelancers delivered a concept that focused on creating the best possible solution online for Vasakronan – now it was time to find the best fitted consultant that could take our concept and implement it. In order to find that consultant we, together with Vasakronan, selected five agencies. After having heard the agencies present themselves we also asked them to present how they were to implement the concept we had delivered for Vasakronan. Britny, Swedish kick ass web agency that I’d been working with before, delivered a fantastic presentation. It was clear that both their creative department and technical department understood why we’d chosen the solutions we had and how we intended them to be implemented.

The listing of properties – the concept brought all the way by Britny

Said and done – Britny and Vasakronan came to an agreement and they started working on the implementation of our project. From our side Caroline left the project and I stayed on board to secure that the concept we’d delivered would be treated right. It was also important to make sure the kept to our technical strategy when using WordPress as the content management system. We’d built in tons of strategical and graphical executions that only made sense if you’d built them into WordPress the right way. The team at Britny did a fantastic job when taking our concept further. They treated it with great care. I especially found it rewarding that their lead designer, Daniel Stridsberg and head of tech Fillip Wastman, embraced the design platform I had initiated and nurtured it well. Except for Daniel and Fillip the team consisted of Iyob Mesfin, Jonas Rogert and Jonas Eriksson all equally important.

The result?

Vasakronan has managed to revamp their online presence in a magnificant way. The new site is easier to use, we’ve taken away all second level menues we’ve could, the design is on brand and may I say so – ground braking in terms of sitting on top of a content management system, it’s like nothing else and differentiates Vasakronan from their competition and it works like a charm on any platform. Knowing what they’re up to behind the scenes I’m proud to say this is one of the projects I’m most pleased with during 2011! But then again – that’s what I think

Thank you Britny for sticking to our guns. Thank you Vasakronan for daring to be different!

Rock on!

The other day a friend of mine brought H&M’s global website to my attention again. Back in 2006 I was one of their consultants until I more or less lost the assignment due to the fact that I told them what the didn’t wanna hear – Your website sucks! Of course I was wrong and they were right. After all, they’ve been awarded time after time at major advertising shows (Thanks to among others to me and the team I worked with back then) so why wouldn’t they know what they are doing.

This is exactly where the problem start for most major brands – at ad awards like Cannes Lions, Eurobest, Clio and others where people with no understanding for how to build an online presence beyond Adobe Flash and cool animations take these monsters to new heights. Back in 2007 I was also a part of building these kind of platforms for major brands but behind closed doors I constantly tried to convince my clients that sticking to these worn out technologies was nothing but stupid.

Let’s take a look at couple of major players and have a quick look at their online presence.

The Online Nike Store

The online store belonging to the worlds leading sports brand. All built in Flash…in 2010

Nike has always been among the first brands to adapt to change. Back in 1999 when I took part in pitching them into Framfab they were even heading the pack.

At first glance it all looks great. The site design is inspired by blogging with that clear and present left hand menu hanging there. But once you start looking deeper it’s a mess. The entire store is built in flash which is just plain stupid. To Nike’s defense I’ll ad that they launched the store in this costume around 2005 when Flash was the hottest thing around. However that’s not the case…since 3 years back. Until a couple of month ago the first page on Nike.com was also dressed in Flash but now they’ve changed that.

Nike.com is filled with fantastic content that people would love to get their hands on. Take Nike+ as an example, a fantastic running community that would have been spread engaged people hundred times more if they’ve built an open platform that allowed the community to truly contribute. However, today the Nike+ site like most of the other sites is locked up deep down in custom made solutions that doesn’t make it easy for people to speed the brand.

The adidas digital presence

As you might know I was working with adidas for a full 8 years. During those years I Creative Directed and took part in launching 59 global digital advertising campaigns for the brand. I also took part in developing their global site and their intranet.

In 2006 we launched the adidas global campaign for the World Cup held in Germany. Around this time I started to raise the question about leaving the flash platform. All results pointed in the direction that Flash, that was and is a wonderful platform when it comes to creating cool rich media sites, didn’t meet any of the demands that the users had. People came looking for products, videos, TVC’s, exclusives and more – but they did not want was to load heavy content, use unique navigation, not being able to bookmark specific pages or share specific content with their friends.

I continued to work with adidas until 2008 but never managed to convince them to leave the flash platform. Instead they listened to another agency that managed to talk them into rebuilding their global website with flash as the main tool. In 2008 they launched the new adidas.com, the same site you’ll see today and it was already in 2008 a step backwards, today it’s more of an artifact that they instead should burn on a disc and give away to Wikimedia as an historic time stamp.

The Rolex Global Brand Site

The Rolex site. I full on Flash site that demands a state of the art computer and broadband connection

Oh god how I loved this full-screen flash site when it was launched in 2007. It was state of the art and even though I started to abandon working with flash sites at the time I still felt that this served Rolex purpose. Now 3 years later I’m on the contrary sure it serves no purpose at all.

The thing with these sites made entirely in flash is the fact that they don’t do anything that cannot be done in HTML and frankly they can’t do some of things you can in HTML 5. The most important thing though is that when you build things in flash you’ve gotta cater for the SEO/SEM manually by customizing the platform.

A Car Site – Volkswagen

Volkswagen has since 2007 been going with flash all over the place. It was a bad decision then and still is.

I just took Volkswagen as an example. Every car brand seems lost in flash and big ass animations when you visit the campaign sites. Kind of strange since all we want is tons of short videos and photos of the cars. After all, we’re supposed to make a decision to buy a 50000$ car based on this information…

The Global H&M Site

The global H&M site all built in flash back in 2006. It takes you 4 minutes on an ok connection to even reach the right information.

I don’t even know where to start. It’s just plain stupid. The H&M site uses flash but in a way so that it could all have been built on HTML4 technology. There’s simply no logical reason at all why this site should work like this. I took part in launching Viktor & Rolf in 2006, Kylie in 2007, Summer of Surf and more for H&M years ago. Back then we had discussions where I told H&M they should throw the entire platform out and get new technology in. That was of course not appreciated and as we ended up being forced into creating flash sites we decided to drop H&M as a client in 2008.

The Microsoft Web Site

These guys got their first page covered in an animated Silverlight banner even thought they announced the wouldn’t continue develop this platform. Say no more… (Updated, just before I was about to press the publish button they actually removed the Silverlight technology from the first page)

Microsoft are strange. They more or less have the same site they had back in 2001 or something. They’re stuck with Verdana and a monster of a site. I bet that somewhere in that big ass company there’s a manager responsible for the site saying things like “It’s just to much information, we just cannot change this site” I say 85% of it is shit. Throw the site away and start off fresh!

So, why does’nt worlds best brands get online communication right? There are of course lots of reasons but I want to share 5 thoughts on the subject.

Old management

This is of course the number one problem. The guys and girls that are running these brands have in most cases been brought up in their business life before the Internet existed. This means they’ve learned how the world of communication works without the now most important component – The Internet. Having these people lead your brand Is like hiring an architect that doesn’t know 3D or CAD. They simply don’t know better.

The Ad Award problem

So, most of the people who manage these brands most likely send their stuff to ad awards. And most ad awards juries in the world are filled with advertising people who don’t give a damn about results. They go for the four F. Flash, Fun, Friends and Finalists. This means Flash as in sound and cool animations that more or less looks like the TVC the jury people love to see. Fun as in games, crazy solutions and humor. Friends as in awarding agencies and foremost people they know from start. Finally finalists as in – if another award show awarded the contribution, something must be right.

Stuck in technology

Most major brands have invested in huge content management systems. Interwoven, Sharepoint, SDL, Polypoly and Episerver among others. These systems were built by consultants aiming to lock you in and they were built for old web thinking. Many editors and many pages. Now when suddenly you wanna change technology or change how your digital presence is built up, these brands have to change their strategy entirely. This turns IT managers and brand managers into people afraid of change since that would mean they threw 1 million Euro on something useless. Thinking like that is of course wrong since were living in uncertain times where you don’t have a clue what’s right or wrong in 3 years apart from the fact that you will probably be wrong. Sticking to open source products and constantly iterating your online presence is the solution.

Wrong consultants

Most web agencies and advertising agencies out there have staffed their companies with people who can do wonders with Flash and .Net based platforms. Then suddenly you’re supposed to have people on your team who can rock PHP, MySql, Ruby, Python, Cassandra, Java, Jquery and other technologies that most IT departments hate on top of that.

Brand managers not understanding technology

Some of you will think I’m plain stupid. A brand manager shouldn’t need to understand technology. But I have different opinion. Personally I’d always prioritize knowledge about technology over knowledge about brands since all brand will be built on technology in the future and the wrong decisions from a digital point of view will have a greater negative impact on the brand compared to non technical decisions. After all, the world is filled with consultants who really know traditional branding while the other breed is hard to find.

Last but not least – CEO’s that just doesnt get it.

I’ve written a long post about these dinosaurs before. Go read it ››

So, if you’re heading a brand or a company. Here are 7 things you should do asap to get your brand moving into the digital future.

1. Never let an advertising agency steer how you do digital communication

Always initiate projects with the digital communication aspects first. It’s not very hard for offline activities to support online when they’re planned. The other way around thought is practically impossible.

2. Leave Flash. Leave Silverlight.

From a user point of view (based on how people really use the Internet) the is nothing, absolutely nothing, that motives the use of these technologies.

3. Change platform from your propriety platform.

The sooner you move all your digital assets to open sourced and MySql based ones such as WordPress, Drupal or others, the better!

4. Make sure you socially integrate the spreading of your content on most major social platforms.

Start by checking up on Brian Solis and JESS3 Conversation Prism. Video, Sound, Events, Documents, Live Streaming, Podcast, Images, Social Networks, Intranets, Extranets, CRM. It’s all to be found there as I wrote about the other day.

5. Provide people with true values

Once people end up on your site they are there for the products. They don’t wanna play around with games and shit. Products and services, that’s what you sell. If they’ve found you, your advertising has done the job – start selling!

6. Search should steer everything you do

Face it. People Google everything so make sure your platform is built to lure the Google robots into bed.

7. Don’t fear loosing your job.

Only fear doing things that doesn’t do any good for your brand. That will most surely get you a new one of you have one of those dinosaur bosses!

Go change now!

About two years ago I frantically started writing on this blog post. Then the sheer length of it got the best of me and since then it’s been stuck in my unpublished library. Now I thought it’s time to give birth to this baby even though most of it was written about two years ago, before Facebook got big, the iPad and more.

When you read it – remember I pushed publish to share the love, not the excellent writing.

This post covers how you start and run a company practically for free.

The post will guide you all the way from day one until you’re up and running and need to consider things like sales, advertising, process support, crm, intranets, extranets etc etc.

I spend about 1-2 hours a day reading about communication, advertising, social media and innovations through my Netvibes account. What’s truly amazing is the fact that almost every day a new service is launched somewhere in the world (mostly in the US) that replaces the old way to advertise, communicate with clients, run projects, process customer data, run your IT systems, keep track of your finances etc etc. And what’s even more amazing is that all these new services are practically always available free of charge or at least only for a small fee.

So I thought why not spread this knowledge to my blog readers and especially you out there who are running a company or thinking of starting one. Here are some ideas on how to think when setting up a future brand.

So, here we go – How to run your small business without loosing your pants (or the money in your pants that is)

The development within the ‘so-called’ web 2.0 services has now gone so far so it’s possible to run your company practically without any in-house IT systems. Even a larger company could without problems move everything they do online at practically no costs at all.

When you sum it all up it’s time for companies to reevaluate how to do business. Social networking and long tail services are taking over.

So, what if you were to run a company today? What’s the formula? How can you run a business without paying a dime for technology and getting social attention at the same time. Once you got that business idea of yours ready to go. Then it’s time to tell the world. And don’t worry, if you haven’t got one, there’s even resources online that give away business ideas for free.

0.9 Before you start

First thing. In terms of costs, there are two things you should prioritize over everything else and that is: 1. Broadband – get the fastest connection possible. And make sure it’s down and upstream. 2. Get a really good computer. Choose a Mac. Not because I’m against PC but because it’ll support your creativity and once it’s up and running, you’ll never have to restart it again. It just keeps running and running.

A good friend of mine told me “We’re changing our tag line. But in order to know which one to use we’re putting out Google Adwords campaigns for 10 of our finalists. The one that generates the most traffic, that will be our choice”

1. Business plan, marketing plan and a key note presentation.

Whatever you do. Make sure you put it on paper. Putting things on paper forces you to choose carefully. Put whatever you’ve written into the hands of friends and you’ll get great feedback on what you need to fine tune. Do you need inspiration? Visit slideshare.net or Scribd and then get going.

2. Register a domain.

IMPORTANT: Register your domain with the company where you intend to host your website.

IMPORTANT 2: Unless your fancy with code – don’t register with a hosting company that doesn’t have support for auto installers. I personally recommend Bluehost.com. But if you’re a Swede you might wanna check Binero out.

There are of course some other alterantives like Active 24, Bust A Name, Miss Domain and SEDO.

3. Forget expensive software.

Don’t buy software. They’re expensive. You’ll have to buy updates once a year. Instead use online softwares. Most companies need Email, Word, Excel and Powerpoint. For that I recommend Google Apps instead. Some companies may need graphical design tools. Well, then use Gimp or something like Splashup for graphical design.

Inside Google Apps you’ll provide your employees with Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Sites. On top of that Google Apps is integrated with Salesforce, something I’ll explain more about under CRM.

Gmail — Offer custom email addresses to your organization with up to 25 gigabytes of storage for each account, search tools to help people find information fast, plus instant messaging and calendar tools built right into the email interface.

Google Talk — Your users can call or send instant messages to their contacts for free — anytime, anywhere in the world. File sharing and voicemail is included, too.

Google Calendar — Your users can organize their schedules and share events, meetings and entire calendars with others. Your organization can also publish calendars and events on the web.

Google Docs — Co-workers can create documents, spreadsheets and presentations and share online files without having to keep track of multiple versions of the same attachment. And it’s all compatible with Microsoft Word.

Splashup is a powerful editing tool and photo manager. With all the features professionals use and novices want, it’s easy to use, works in real-time and allows you to edit many images at once. Splashup runs in all browsers, integrates seamlessly with top photosharing sites like Flickr, Picasa & Facebook, and even has its own file format so you can save your work in progress.

Forget expensive phonecalls.
When it comes to calling, you should of course make sure you have a regular phone number. But when you do, consider IP telephony. Messenger, Rebtel & Skype

Forget conference call systems
Campfirenow and since some time back Skype allows you to hook up 5 screens at the same time.

Forget finance systems
Blinksale, Freshbooks and Billings.

Many of the other sites I’ve written about can be used dependably of where in the world your company resides. But when it comes to financial applications, you really have to find and use a local products.

Blinksale is perfect for anyone in the US who needs to invoice clients for services or products sold. Basically, if you need to send invoices, Blinksale can work for you. What’s really cool also is the fact that if you’re using some of the other online products like Basecamp and Highrise (that I’m writing about below) the Blinksale also makes it easy to import and invoice your clients and customers without having to re-enter their data into Blinksale. Finally, is also has a fine API if you wanna integrate it into your own cloud.

4. Intranet and internal processes

Once your team (or you) are set to go, you may wanna set up the processes that you need in order to run your business. Let’s start with the internal stuff.

Intranet (or actually Intranet 2.0)
Let’s make sure you get an intranet that is alive and kicking. There are a couple of ways you can solve this by putting it all online. Here are three suggestions:

Use a wiki. Wetpaint is an online community where anyone can start their own wiki. Choose from a set of templates and you’re set to go. Of course you can make sure all your content is private. Another alternative is PBWIKI, used by Citigroup and at&t among others.

Use Facebook. Ah, I know what you’re saying. Stupid. But actually not. Facebook with all it’s application makes up the perfect intranet. Just make sure all your employees are set up with a Facebook account and then start a group. Make sure the invites are personal and the group private. Then your’re off. Chattsupport, documents, videos, forums, etc etc etc. Perfect.

Use your own Facebook – Ning. This place was founded in October 2004 to give everyone the opportunity to create their own social networks for absolutely anything. Today Ning powers the largest number of social networks on the Internet.

Finally. My own favorite. Use Yammer. Yammer is like Facebook and Twitter combined and it’s set up in seconds. This is the shit if you wanna create an Intranet 2.0 for your company.

Now when you’re done with the internal stuff, obviously you can use all those three examples to create an extranet towards your best B2B clients.

5. Project management.

Forget Microsoft Project Manager. What you need is a great group collaboration software. And Basecamp is exactly that. As they say themselves: “Basecamp takes a fresh, novel approach to project collaboration. Projects don’t fail from a lack of charts, graphs, stats, or reports, they fail from a lack of clear communication. Basecamp solves this problem by providing tools tailored to improve the communication between people working together on a project.” I’ve been using Basecamp in tons of projects and it’s a killer. Not for free, but not far from it.

6. Sale support & CRM

Many companies spend millions on getting their CRM and customer support systems in place. Stupid.

First. Let’s get a little bit 2008 when it comes to customer support. Don’t believe your IT department when they wanna throw a heavyweight system that makes your budgets explode. Instead, use something that is free, something that positions your company as new thinkers and at the same time caring. Use Get Satisfaction for example. Get Satisfaction is a direct connection between people and companies that fosters problem-solving, promotes sharing, and builds up relationships. Thousands of companies use this neutral space to support customers, exchange ideas, and get feedback about their products and services. Get Satisfaction is open, transparent, and FREE. Head in there and register your company. Who knows, maybe it’s even up there and people care about it…or the other way around. In that case, make sure you claim it fast and start supporting your customers.

What about CRM? Yep – no need to buy expensive software here either. Two places where you can get exactly what you need: Highrise and Salesforce. These two online CRM platforms provide Easy-to-use Web-based CRM solutions for sales, service, marketing, and call center operations that streamlines customer relationship management and boosts customer satisfaction. Salesforce is probably my number one recommendation as it is seamlessly integrated with Google Apps. On top of that they’ve already created a slick integration into the iPhone that let’s your salesforce access critical customer information instantly through the iPhone’s familiar touch screen format.

Lately however I’ve gotten more and more fond of Bantam Live that combines the power of Yammer with a typical CRM thinking.

7. Your website

So, the time has come to become public and show your ideas online. If you’ve done what I told you too and gotten yourselves a domain at Bluehost.com. Then it’s easy as one, two, three. There is a beautiful thing called Simple Scripts. It provides you with auto installations of the most common open source content management systems out there. WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Geeklog, Mambo, Xoops…the list goes on.

My recommendation is WordPress. WordPress is originally a blog system that lately is being used more and more as a web content management system. Developers all over the world are adding drag and drop plugins that enable most things you would want on your website. And when it comes to designs, you have about 5000 free templates to choose from. The last couple of month more advanced templates such as Thesis and stuff Woothemes and has been released for a very small price. By using Bluehost auto installer you don’t have to care for anything in terms of configuring databases and emails on forms etc. It just works. All for the price of $6.95 a month…including hosting. Practically FREE.

If you feel you wanna get moving with WordPress. Here’s a guide I wrote some time ago on how to create a WordPress blog that rocks the world.

Once you’re done with the website and your posts and articles pile up, it’s time to burn your feed. Make sure you register your blog/site with Feedburner.

Why a Burned feed is better than a not-burned feed?

• Publicize your content and make it easy for people to subscribe.
• Optimize distribution so that your content is properly formatted for all of the major directories and can be consumed by subscribers wherever they are.
• It allows you to analyze your traffic to learn how many subscribers you have, where they’re coming from and what they like best.

If you’re planning to sell your products online.
Not to worry. Let PayPal handle the payments. If you are planning to sell tons of products, then let Amazon Webstore handle the whole thing. Cost? $59.99 per month. Ok, maybe not free, but a whole lot cheaper than a multimillion dollar system. And I assure you, the Amazon Webstore will work like a charm. If you’re Swedish, then head over to ebutik.se and you’ll be up and running before you know it. Costs for ebutiken? Practically the same as Amazon Webstore.

Oh, and if you’ve set your site up in WordPress you could actually build your site on Thematic and then use the child theme Simple Cart powered by the great plugin WP E-commerce and start selling your gadgets for even less.

You might wanna consider checking who’s the visitor to your site.
Then time has come for another FREE product. Google Analytics. Log on, register and implement on your WordPress driven site. Google Analytics will ask you to submit a site map that makes it easier for them to crawl your site, but not to worry, there is a FREE plugin for that as well. An alternative to Google Analytics is MINT. However, that requires a little bit of technical skills, but it might be worth it.

If you’re this far into the post and have gotten your website up and running. Make sure also to check out Google Webmaster Tools. There’s a lot of goodies there.

8. Company videos and photos?

Maybe you should pay for an expensive solution to make sure there’s now glitches when your clients visits your website. NOOO, open a Flickr account, place all your videos and photography there. This way you’ll make sure you pay nothing for a fantastic streaming and storing solution. Something you normally pay at least a couple of hundred thousand dollars for normally. Cost? $24.95 a year! And oh, I forgot. If you got a hacker in your organization, you can easily use the Flickr API and create your own video and photo applications. Finally the beauty of this is that you can use a simple drag’N’drop plugin to showcase both the photos and the videos on your site and at the same time everyone who think your company is the shit, they can send these things further. By using Flickr you also make sure you have a presence in more than one place. Social networking! Obviously you can also do exactly the same with your videos on YouTube, but maybe it’s easier to place them all in one place.

There is however a new Danish player in town since a couple of weeks back. They’re called 23Video. Their business idea is pretty simple. Build your own video portal, host as many videos as you want and pay no more than 675$ a month. Splendid idea for you who wanna host your own stuff.

Whatever you do, you should make sure that you spread those videos outside your own or the network you choosed. An excellent product that I’ve written about long time ago and was reminded about in the comment field of this post is TubeMogul. TubeMogul lets you spread your content over tons of video sites and you’ll get a great overview of how it’s performing.

Let’s move on. It’s time to put that business presentation of yours into action.

9. Creating banners and TV commercials?

Of course you should run banners and TV commercials. But SEO, affiliate programs and Adwords is the shit.

Hiring an agency will of course give you the best results. But, let’s say you’ve just started, since you already spent about $10 on Flickr your pockets are empty. No worries. Now that Google features TV ads on their websites it’s easy to head over to Jivox or Spotmixer and start putting that wonderful piece of your together. Once you have created that wonder ful piece of your’s head over to Videoegg or Google TV ads and start spreading the words.

When it comes to creating your own campaigns and banners you should also consider placing competitions on sites like 99 designs. You’ll get great stuff while paying close to nothing. Look, Robyn does it.

10. Search Engine Marketing – SEO/SEM

Oh, this is probably the most complex thing you can put your mind to. First of all, before you even start you gotta get a shitload of traffic in order to experiment with it. And once you got that valuable traffic you are probably to afraid to try and you won’t make use of your SEO knowledge anyway. But luckily there’s people who can point you in the right direction – Aaron Wall, the founder of SEO Book.com. Of all the books and all the sites I’ve read on SEO marketing when I started writing this post, SEO Book.com was one of the best. Some time ago though Google published their version of a SEO book, and that one is of course free so I’d recommend you try that one first.

Apart from reading up on SEO at home I do recommend you to start following Nikke Lindqvist, Jesper Åström and Simon Sundén. Three friends of mine who shares their ideas through their blogs. Nikke and Simon in Swedish and Jesper in English.

11. Marketing

When I say marketing most people start thinking about sales people, advertising, events and getting articles about your product into newspapers and TV channel. Well, you can do without all of these channels. Think about it – ever seen an ad that sells Google?

What you’ve gotta do is get into Google Adwords, learn about affiliate marketing and get down with Facebook ads. There are of course tons of services out there. But if you become good at these three you’re almost there. If you then on top learn to master social media you’ll end up in those traditional newspapers and TV channels sooner or later anyway. Once you’ve got a database with clients you should get going with MyEmma or the better one – MailChimp. Two great email marketing services that will kick but.

12. You know what….I don’t have any energy left to finalize this post.

I just thought it was important to get it out there. So in order for you to get hold of nr 12 you’ve gotta learn how to do it by yourselves

Go get em!

ps. Feel free to share more ideas and tricks in the comments of this post!

I have gotten the question over and over again from people, organizations and brands: “How do we start a blog the right way” – I’ve decided to put my advice into writing.

Some of you might think this post is unnecessary. Other people have written about this already. I thought so too until I started searching for good posts on how to set up a kick ass blog and learned most things written on the subject either covered the tool or the actual writing but not actually leading you to do it the right way I think there’s room for another post on the subject.

The purpose of this post is sort of a combination of two things that I hope will lead to the following:

1. Make sure agencies cannot charge big money for setting up your blog. Setting up your personal or branded blog is to me a democratic right and should be free and accessible for anyone who has something to share.
2. I think more people should start a blog. It’s good for you. It’s good for the democracy. It’s good for the world.

Here is the essential guide on how to start and configure a blog that will rock the world:

1. Buy a unique domain name for your blog and preferably do it at the same place where you intend to host the blog

Personally I’ve followed WordPress own recommendations and used Bluehost.com to buy my domain name and then installed a WordPress blog with their simple script functionality. It’s a 3 minute process from registering that domain until your blog is actually up and running and accessible from anywhere in the world. It’s a wow feeling!

Of course you can pick any hosting facility but if you’re not into setting up databases and shit – make sure they have some sort of simplified way of setting your blog up.

2. Why a WordPress blog?

The famous WordPress content management system

There’s of course different blog systems but if you want the best I’d say you should go with Matt Mullenweg’s WordPress. I think most professional bloggers today would agree with me and the stats speaks in favor of me. WordPress is the most used blogging platform (and in many cases content management system) in the world and as a result you cannot find any system that gives you more themes and more plugins.

Matt Cutts who’s responsible for Google’s search engine even says there’s no better tool in the world if you wanna make sure your website is being watched the right way by Google’s spiders.

3. Don’t design your blog. Find a theme that you think suits your needs and tweak it.

Theme is another word for design. WordPress separates functionality from form in the most beautiful way. Swapping between different designs is easier than saying hello in Swahili. What’s even better is the fact that there’s tons of great designs out there for free. However if you intend to turn into a mighty blogger you might look already now look into a paid theme. Woothemes and Themeforest has some sweet themes for any kind of business.

Personally however I prefer the Thesis theme by Brian Clark over at Copyblogger and Chris Pearson. The sweet thing with Thesis is that it can be customized into infinity with hooks and customized functionality. Another advantage with Thesis is the fact that it’s more or less perfectly prepared for Google and other search engines. Once you’ve decided on a theme – upload it with a FTP software of your choice and ad your own logo and style to it. Personally I use CSS Edit to tweak the style sheets but any old CSS tool will do.

4. Set up your WordPress blog right

Once you’ve set up your blog you can login to your domainname.com/wp-admin with your login information. Take some time to get acquainted to the left menu. Later when you start to write you will use the Post menu to start blogging. Of course you can set up a couple of pages too but the actual blogging will be done by adding posts.

5. Change the link structure

Setting the right permalink is one step closer to success

You don’t want to use the original set up in WordPress when you’re going live. This will decrease the Google traffic. Instead head into the menu settings called Permalinks found under ‘Settings’ and change the permalink structure from http://www.ronnestam.com/?p=123 to /%postname%/ . There are some different opinions out there which structure is the right one. But I’ve found over time that most people tend to recommend this one.

6. Make sure your blog pings the right blog search engines and portals

Google, Yahoo, Technorati, Swedish Knuff and a lot more sites out there are listing and indexing blogs. WordPress has got this sweet functionality that lets you automatically update these blogging portals once you’ve posted something new. There’s of course different ideas on how to do this. But I’ve decided to share my personal PING information here.

Just ad the ‘code’ below to start updating search engines etc

Copy this information below and enter it into your Update Services option that you’ll find under Settings/Writing

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://ping.weblogs.se/

http://blogmatcher.com/u.php

http://coreblog.org/ping/

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php

http://ping.myblog.jp

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/

http://xmlrpc.blogg.de

http://1470.net/api/ping

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

http://nyligen.se/ping/

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://rpc.twingly.com/

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

Copy the ‘code’ above and paste it into the bottom field under the section Writing in settings. This way you’ll make sure your content is visible to the important search engines online.

7. Choose your title wisely

You’re almost done configuring the settings. The last thing you might wanna do is setting up the title of your blog. You’ll find that under General Settings.

Choose this one carefully as you shouldn’t change this one later. Once you’ve earned some page rank and you’re up to speed you don’t wanna make Google angry by messing with this one since it actually sits on ever single post from now on.

8. Download and install the following WordPress plugins

Find and learn how to use an FTP software. That’s important for anyone who wants to keep a website updated. For bloggers it’s essential since WordPress plugins and themes are the corner stones of a good blog. Others have written great stuff how to choose the right FTP for PC or Mac so I’ll leave that part to them.

The essential plugins that I think you need to install for your blog however – that I’ll share here. All your other needs can probably be catered for if you search for WP plugin and whatever you want either on Google or in the WordPress plugin library. Hell, you can even turn your blog into an E-commerce with the right setup.

These are the WordPress plugins I think you should make sure to start with:

Aksimet
Activate the Aksimet plugin to take care of SEO spammers, bots and trolls. No need to download this one – it’s inside WordPress and waiting for you!

Disqus or Intensedebate

The Disqus plugin let’s people join the conversation

Install a commenting system that treat your conversation right. This is what Disqus and Intensedebate does. On this blog I’ve had Disqus making sure visitors can interact the way the want. Lately however I’ve grown more fond of Intesedebate and only weeks ago I activated that on my Whisky blog in order to try it out. I think maybe I’ll switch on this blog too soon. One advantage with one of these plugins over how WordPress treats comments is the fact that you gain a small social spread over other networks. The biggest advantage however is that people can choose to login and comment with Facebook connect, OpenID, Twitter accounts and personal Disqus or Intense Debate accounts.

WP Super Cache
You’ll do fine without this plugin until the day you do something really really right. Let’s say for example that you end up on the first page of Digg.com, the online social newspaper, then tens of thousands people will swarm your blog for blood (your post that is) and only seconds later your server will crash. WP Super Cache takes care of this and turns every page in to static html pages that lets people ride rodeo over that blog of yours without falling off. You need WP Super Cache.

The All In One SEO Pack or the HeadSpace 2 SEO plugin
Same here. If you’ve gotten Thesis as your theme then move on to the next bullet. If not this plugin is essential. SEO is an art form many people have yet to master. But using the All In One SEO plugin will at least give you the right tools. [updated] Simon Sundén suggested I should ad the HeadSpace2 plugin as an alternative (in his mind better). So now I’ve done that. Thanks Simon!

Tweetmeme Retweet Button
The Tweetmeme retweet plugin is what places a small Tweet This button along every blog post. Just like the green little thing I’ve got on top of this post (press that one please). Sometimes you’ll write posts that people love. Then Tweeting that post is the fastest and simplest way for them to show their love. Other people that might land on your post will be more eager to read through your post if it has been tweeted many times. It’s like a quality mark. Make sure you’ve got an own Twitter account to go with this one since it will earn you followers over time if it’s your ID that is being retweeted.

WP FollowMe

By using the WP Follow Me plugin you’ll get a nice little bird watching over your blog
Make it easy for people to follow you on Twitter. This plugin places a badge to the right (or left if you want) on your blog that makes following you easy.

SexyBookmarks
In the bottom of every post on my blog you can see a set of buttons that lets you share my blog posts easily over your personally preferred social network.

I’ve decided to go with the plugin Sexy Bookmarks. I like the functionality and the tone of voice. However before I started using this one I had the plugin Share This taking care of business and it did a good job to so I’ll give that one a shout too.

PingPressFM
Allows you to spread your wonderful blog to 10+ social networks via Ping.fm.

Google XML Sitemaps
In order for Google to be able to list your blog the right way you should install this plugin. This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.

WP DB Backup
Last but not least. If you keep on writing every week or maybe even every day you’ll sooner than later end up with some kick as quality inside your database. WordPress usually don’t break down but we all know of Mr Murphy. That’s why you need to perform a back up every now and then. Don’t rely on your hosting service, even these guys mess up (trust me I’ve been through it a couple of times) that’s why this is best done with WP DB Backup. Then make sure you got Dropbox or something to place your personal backup in the cloud since we all know Mr Murphy will probably put your computer on fire otherwise.

Redirection
Manage all your 301 redirects and monitor 404 errors with this little plug.

WP Cforms
Make sure you don’t write that email of yours as it spells out since that will only award you with tons of spam. Instead write something like: nameATdomainDOTcom. Most people will get that. Also remember to inform people about your social presence on networks like Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Fan Pages (don’t use Groups), Skype, Slideshare, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr and more. It’s also a good thing is always to post an extra page where you use the plugin WP Cforms to let people get in touch with you through a classical form. Personally I’ve also written my phone number on that contact page. Talking to people is after all very nice!

9. Time to start writing that blog post of yours?

I wont tell you what, how and why to write something. Other people have given great guidelines on that before me, both on style and SEO parameters. My only advice would be – find your own voice. Writing like other people will never get you anywhere.

However, once you’ve written that post of yours remember a few things:

Tag your content with relevant keywords.
Keywords will serve both Google and your readers with information. On top of this there’s some sweet tag clouds you can use to make people crawl your blog for more.

Ad the post not only to one category but to many.
By creating a set of categories that is relevant to your blog (not more than 15 though) you’ll help your readers to find the right posts later when your blog is filled with wisdom.

Remember to make use of that added SEO functionality
You’ve got a set of tools that came along with Thesis or The All In Once SEO Plugin. Use them! This means writing a specific header for Google. One that will earn you more readers (hopefully). Don’t worry – it won’t show up in your post.

Edit the URL of the blog post.
Make sure it’s relevant, SEO optimized and not to long.

Preview before posting!

Post at a good time of day.
I’ve written a longer post on the Social Viral Spiral that covers this subject.

10. Spread the love

Pick a series of social networks where you spread that love of yours further. Facebook and Twitter being the obvious ones. But don’t forget about all the rest. Think about what your content is all about and where people might be interested to read it – seed it there!

On top of this you should also remember to change the RSS feed into something like Feedburner for example. It gives you more control over it and you’ll be able to track your engagement.

I know tons of people link like crazy to other blogs in order to get higher rankings on different blogging portals. Personally I hate this. You should of course link to content that is of great importance to your blog. But linking to tons of blog posts only to gain traffic – that’s spam according to me.

11. How do you know your blog is doing good?

People tend to set up blogs and then they’re tracking the stats while wondering why nothing happens. Here’s a few pointers that might help you on the path to blogging heaven.

Comments and trackbacks
Once you’ve pressed publish your post is out there. This means it’s all out there. The entire world can now interact with you. Since you’ve opened up for comments (blogs are all about conversation) you’ll have to be prepared to actually respond to what people are saying about your brand. Trackbacks will also show you other blogs and sites linking to your content. Make sure you follow them to interact and praise fans or defend your standpoint.

Statistics
Ever blog should have a Google analytics account set up. That’s sort of hygiene. It will teach you a lot about your online presences and turn you into a professional blogger.

However for daily and even hourly stat reads I’m using Mint. It’s not free but at a low cost you’re getting a quick overview of where people are coming from and what they’re engaging. Seeing that traffic build up only minutes after a blog post turns you on – I promise. That’s the energy you need to keep on writing.

Is your content engaging?
Personally I’ve set up a Postrank analytics account that gives me a good idea of whats actually happening after I press that publish button. Postrank is a tool that measures the online engagement with your content. No engagement = not a good post (or at least no one else thinks so) Lots of engagement = you did something right.

Track your brand online!
Last but not least – remember to track your brand online in order to engage if people pick up and comment/debate that post of yours. I’ve written that guide on how monitor your brand online before.

Now it’s all up to you – I’m looking forward to reading your posts!

It makes me warm to see that companies out there are starting to utilize the possibilities that comes with social media. IKEA has definitely understood how to make good use of web-TV as they started their own IKEA.SE/TV where you are invited to upload your own interior decoration tips.

What’s even better is the fact that they’ve stuck to blogging standards when they have designed the whole thing and not fallen into the trap of trying to do something new and different. According to BuiltWith they’ve used Ruby on Rails to create it. However, I do recognize a lot of plugins, so it wouldn’t surprise me if WordPress or something similar was stuck in the bottom of the whole thing.

Jacob Nielsen, famouse user interaction dude from Denmark once said: “People spend most of their time visiting other sites”

Thanks Reklamfeber for pointing this one out.

In pursuit of easier readability, visibility of links I’ve tweaked a theme called Prisa 2. Hope it makes it easier to read my blog.

Good night.