Ideas from ArabicPod.net fro ISpeakHindi.com

I’ve been running the ISpeakHindi.com – Learn Hindi site for over 4 years now.  I am constantly on the look out for ideas to incorporate.  I have quite a list, probably enough to keep going for a long time.  But today I get an email from ArabicPod announcing that they have a new lesson: #432 Favorite Flower:

image

Clicking on the link takes you to the lesson on the site:

image

You can not do anything other than vote on the lesson without signing up.  Also, they have a random word on the right:

image

This would be an easy thing to do on ISpeakHindi.com to add a random word to the right.  It would be a good compliment to the master 4 Hindi words a day tool.   I was thinking of adding a random vocabulary question to the side as well.  Also, maybe other languages exercises as well.

Also from the list of lessons page: www.arabicpod.net/learnarabic/Intermediate there is this link:

image

Clicking on that gives you a list of countries and people that have Skype Ids:

www.arabicpod.net/communicate

image

Clicking on “View all Users” gives:

image

The one improvement would be if it could show their Skype status.  But I think this is only possible if the person allows for you to be on their friends list. 

Ideas that I want to implement:

  1. Add random word to the left side
  2. Add random vocabulary quiz
  3. Add random question quiz (take the questions associated with the lessons and allow for people to answer them.  It can direct them to the episode with the answer.)
  4. Add “Skype ID” to user’s profile
  5. Add a view that will let visitors see members based upon the presence of the SkypID.

Nurturing Leads

Email from Clate Mask, CEO of Inusionsoft, points out “it takes seven touches before a lead is ready to buy”. 

What is a touch?  Any type of contact including an email, instant message, phone call, mailing, directed tweet, directed Facebook message, or inLink mail.

How to touch without offending?  Clate suggests “putting yourself in your prospects’ shoes to determine what’s important to them. Then create content that educates and builds trust. Using this content, you can create campaigns that move prospects progressively towards the sale.”

Ask yourself why you got that first touch?  If you are a language learning site like ISpeakHindi.com then that first touch could be for a variety of reasons.  If the person is going to India in a few weeksand wants to learn just a few basic phrases, then it is a matter of giving them those phrases and information to help immediately to help with the trip.  The interaction with these people will be different than the husband that has married a Hindi speaker and has no immediate needs but a long term interest.  With the first, it must be an intense, focused interaction.  With the later, it will be a more diffused, long term interaction.

If you are a home inspector like Texas Certified Home Inspection then you could be a home owner wanting to get the home inspected in preparation of selling.  Or perhaps you are a home buyer wanting to get a home inspector.  These people want immediate information, and will probably want to be left alone after completing the sell.  However, some of the people looking for a home inspector might be real estate agents and will want to develop a longer term relationship.  Or perhaps a home owner interested in tips on maintaining a home.  These lend themselves to a longer more involved relationship.

But lets say you are an online woman’s magazine like Woman’s In Site.    A sale looks very different than for the home inspector.  A sale would be a repeat visit, more page views, signing up for the email list.  At least that would be the public sale.  The other side would be potential advertisers who see value in the audience and in the brand.

The key to getting that sale is to maintain contact through multiple “touches”.  The key to touches being welcomed verses avoided is to understand the context of the initial touch.  How to do that is the key.

What options do you have available?  First, where did the touch come from?  If it came from another website, that might provide clues.  What was the first part of your site that they accessed?  Where did they go next?  There are tools that will help you determine this.  Google is constantly doing this by tailoring their Ad Words based upon the content of the site and the information it gathers about the user.

Another option is to ask.  “How can I help you?”  “What are you looking for?”  “Why are you here?” can be answered through a survey.

Know why people are coming to your site.  Know which ones would welcome further contact and which ones would rather you left them alone.  And may you have the wisdom to know the difference.

Pay With A Tweet

Need traffic to your site?  Why not have people “pay with a tweet”?  People can get access to content on your site IF they “tweet” it out.  Pretty interesting idea:

www.paywithatweet.com/

Running Windows Live Writer on Ubuntu

Windows Live writer is a blogging client that is just wonderful to use.  Microsoft makes a lot of good software.  We complain about it being buggy, too expensive, not open, etc.  But there is a lot of value in Microsoft software.

Personally I use Ubuntu instead of windows and open office instead of Microsoft office.  But the user experience on Windows and MS Office is much better than what I have been running.  The thing about Ubuntu and Open Office is that they are free, good enough, and there is the potential of me actually getting in there an making some modifications and understanding the code.  This is something that I hope to do.  Also, my web host runs Linux and I thought it would be best to keep the OS the same (similar) between my web host and my desktop.

I have not found a blogging client that even comes close to what Windows Live Writer has in terms of ease of use.  Especially when it comes to adding images to a blog post.  I am currently using the WordPress admin screen to write this, and dealing with images is a pain, Pain, PAIN.  Say, I want to insert a screen shot.  I have to start my screen shot tool, save it as an image, upload the image, and insert it into the post.  This is a 4 step process that can easily take a minute.

In Microsoft Live Writer, I take the screenshot, it is in my clipboard (don’t save it as a file), then paste it into the Live Writer.  It manages the uploading and linking automatically.  Plus I can easily re-size (great when dealing with the huge files from my camera), add effects like drop shadow, and add a water mark.

Well, now we got that out there… enough to start a flame war, let me get down to my journey of using Windows Live Writer on Ubuntu.

The solution to most problems begin with a Google search:  “running windows live writer on ubuntu” should do it.

This brought me to: ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=877972 where I can see that there are others that feel just like me:

Run Windows Live Writer in Ubuntu Using Wine

Hi!
I want to use Windows Live Writer in Ubuntu, currently it is the only app due to which I have to go back using Windows. I have tried other Ubuntu blogging tools but none are as good as WLW. It is possible to run Office 2007 MS using Wine. Plz help me!
Reading through the post, it doesn’t seem like WINE will help.. though maybe a little wine would :-)  (WINE stands for “Wine Is Not an Emulator” and it is a native Linux implementation of some of the windows core components.  It allows for you to run some windows apps natively in Linux.  Wine on the other hand is a popular alcoholic drink that can help you develop a sense of detachment though Buddhist who are in search of detachment prohibit it.  If you get frustrated enough with getting WINE to work, an option is to turn to wine.  But I do not recommend this as it does nothing to solve your original problem.)
It seems that installing windows in a virtual machine like VirtualBox is one way to go about it:
The last user suggests using Flock – The Social Web Browser. flock.com/
But this has been discontinued…
Another thread looking for an alternative:
Recommend “ScribeFire” a browser add on www.scribefire.com/
I gave this a try, but it does not handle pasting images.  I must have the ability in Microsoft LiveWriter to allow me to paste images.
After doing some looking around, I can not find any other blogging client that allows for you to paste an image from the clipboard directly into the WYSIWYG/Visual editor.  They all make you upload a file then insert that file.  I want this to be handled behind the scenes like Windows LiveWriter, and there is nothing else out there that I could find that has this feature.
I can’t spend more time looking and figuring out an alternative.  I am in the process of installing Windows 7 in a VirtualBox and will install LiveWriter in this.  I am hoping that VitualBox’s shared clipboard will support images.   I will report back once I know more.

Microsoft Live Write Plugins

I have started to use Create Commons licensed photos on my ISpeakHindi.com lessons.  Here are some examples:

image image image image

image

I have been manually putting the attribution watermark on the pictures and the link back to the source of the picture.  Plus I have been using the creative commons search tool to find the pictures:

search.creativecommons.org/#

This probably means a few minutes of work for each picture that could be avoided.  At OpenCamp a wordpress plugin was demonstrated, but I use Microsoft Live Writer to write my posts.  And a Livewriter plugin would fit me better.  In a search for that, I found a lot of plugins for livewriter that look really good.  Take a look at this list: www.ampercent.com/useful-windows-live-writer-plugins/2695/

I could not find something that would restrict searching for creative commons photos.  There is a plugin for Flickr, but there are no options to search for creative commons.  The code is provided, so maybe this is something that I could add.

image

 

Do you use Microsoft Livewriter?  Do you know of a plugin for this?  What are your most useful and favorite plugins?

Team Viewer

Need to share your desktop or remote control somebody else’s computer to explain something or fix something?  Consider using Team Viewer.  It works  behind routers.  And it seems to work pretty well.  Plus it is free:

www.teamviewer.com/index.aspx