Did you know today was Lincoln’s birthday? Did you know that many states consider today a state holiday? Neither did I. I arrived at the DMV this morning to get my car inspected, and saw a sign that said “Station Closed”. DOH! You would think that President’s Day on Monday would be good enough, but apparently certain states use this as an excuse to get another day off.

In any event, here’s a quick history lesson..

The day before his 52nd birthday, Abraham Lincoln left Springfield, Illinois to become President of the United States. With the threat of civil war looming, he said goodbye to the friends and neighbors who had come to see him off. “I now leave,” he told them, “not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested up George Washington. Without the assistance of the Divine Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail. Trusting in Him who can go with me, and remain with you, and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell. (Reprinted from Our Daily Bread 2/12/2009)

Let us not forget this great president today on his 200th birthday.

He never did get back to Springfield, Illinois but he sure had a major impact on our country and our future.

Today, remember Abe and all the great things he did for this country.

Logged into my WordPress Dashboard today and saw that there was a new version of WordPress out. I usually wait to see if there are any new bugs introduced with a new version, but I was curious to try the new automatic upgrade process that was introduced in WP v2.7. And it works as promised, albeit a little slower than I expected. Upgrading this site took between 4-5 minutes.. I’d imagine that some of my larger blogs would take even longer.

Still, for people like me who manage 50+ WP blogs, the automatic upgrade is a godsend.. Fantastico worked well enough, but this saves me a few extra steps.

Ideally, you should always pay employees out of profits in your business.

To do that, you must have a profitable business. That creates a bit of a catch-22, but only temporarily. The catch-22 can be resolved by working in your own business if you don’t have a source for seed money.

To have a profitable business, you must have:

a) At least one product to sell.

b) A method of generating traffic to your product sales pages.

c) Effective sales pages for each product being sold.

You can generate the procedures to create products, generate traffic and improve sales pages in one of several ways depending on how much seed money you have:

1) You can develop the procedures yourself. This costs only time. It has a disadvantage though. Once it is profitable, it still may not be profitable when you turn it over to employees. Often employees are less productive than you are although that is not always the case. Sometimes employees will be more productive than an entrepreneur.

2) You can hire employees and assign them the task of creating profitable procedures. Only one of our staff has done this successfully, but it appears to be the absolute fastest way to a 7 figure income.

3) You can purchase procedures that are already proven and implement them in your business system. Our franchise program offers this option. We also plan to release our procedures independently from the franchise system soon.

Diego Norte is the creator of MuVar, the world’s most effective multivariate testing solution. MuVar completely automates the task of optimizing your sales letters for more sales. Check it out here: http://www.MuVar.com

Ryan McLean from Smarter Wealth is giving away a brand new Flip Mino HD to one lucky reader. This will be the easiest Flip Mino HD to win because barely anyone is going to enter meaning more chances that you can win.

The Flip Mino HD is the coolest gadget around. You can shoot one hour of video in HD (so you can play it on your plasma) and you can even edit your footage right on your device. This device is so small that it will fit in your pocket so you will never miss capturing a moment ever again.

To enter all you have to do is sign up for Ryan’s newsletter and post about the competition.

Check out all the details of how you can enter the Win a Flip Mino HD competition now.

There are perks to working for yourself. No annoying bosses. You make your own hours. Wear whatever you want (I’m in my bathrobe!). You control your own destiny. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

But there’s a downside to working from home that none of the “internet moguls” talk about.. Here’s what I did yesterday:

7:30am – Woke up
8:30am – Did 3 hours of actual work
11:30am – Did my laundry (no boxers)
12:00pm – Ran the dishwasher (no dishes)
12:30pm – Made lunch / Watched TV
2:00pm – Cleaned my bathroom
2:30pm – Ran some errands
3:30pm – Checked e-mail / Twitter / Facebook
4:15pm – Brewed some iced tea for dinner
5:00pm – Watched TMZ from the day before

So what gives? We got rid of our maid last month, and somehow most of the work has fallen in my lap, “because I’m home all day”.. The wife doesn’t understand that I’m actually WORKING at home. When she comes home, she’s tired from her long day, and even getting her to cook is a challenge.

I could just have my wife stop working, but then I’d lose my medical benefits. And it’s hard to get work done when she’s around. So I’m hiring another maid. And who knows, maybe I’ll having a chef come in a few times a week to make our meals! I can generate a lot more money if I can work uninterupted and focus on what’s important.

Search Engine Optimization is vital to the success of your blog! You can write the best content in the world, but if no one finds your blog, it’s worthless. As someone who’s been involved in the SEO world since 2003, I consider myself to be pretty well-versed in the art of SEO. And I must be doing something right, as my blog network generated ovre 300K pageviews in the month of January!

Joost de Valk, one of Europe’s top SEOs, spoke about WordPress SEO at the a4uexpo conference in London:

At almost an hour long, it’s a pretty long video.. But here’s the gist of what he’s saying:

• Use SEO plug-ins (Headspace, All in One SEO Pack, SEO Title Tag, etc) to rank better in the search engines.
• Manage your site structure – How to deal with potential duplicate content issues (date-based archives, tags, etc).
• Use a pagination plugin to replace the default “older/newer entries” links.
• Consider how you handle your internal linking, as well as dealing with moved/broken links.

Another great video on WordPress SEO is from Stephan Spencer at Wordcamp 2008 in San Francisco. He touches on some other points that I’ve never seen mentioned before, and you can watch the video here:

He spent some time talking about pagerank sculpting, a topic that’s gotten a lot of attention recently. He suggests that you nofollow your category and archive links. I haven’t found a plugin out there that does this, so I reached out to him to get his take on this. His response: “I know of no plugin. You’ll need to hack the template files. Sorry I don’t have better news.”

So I did some more digging, when I stumbled across this thread on the WordPress support forums. Otto42′s suggestion on there appears to have worked prior to WordPress 2.5.1, but recordinghacks has an ugly workaround at the bottom of that page. The solution is not for the novice WP user, and would need to be reapplied each time a new version of WordPress is released.

I have almost 50 WordPress sites, so this “hack” won’t really work for me. In Joost’s video, he made reference to his Meta Robots WordPress plugin. This plugin allows you to set meta tags to individual pages. Will this accomplish the same thing? I’m not so sure. As it is, my robots.txt doesn’t allow the bots to access the categories, archives, or tags pages.

But is that precious link juice still leaking over there? I just don’t know enough about how Google treats situations like this to say conclusively one way or another.

If you’ve got any thoughts on this topic, I’d love to hear it. Thanks!