What do you think? What would an app designed to connect people to practitioners do? What functionality would it need? Or is there something that you as a practitioner (of whatever modality) would like to do with your cellphone that you have not been able to do?

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Click here to access the pre-training session.

The post Free Training: Getting What You Want From Feldenkrais appeared first on Emergent Somatics.

I have decided to give away one year free listings for those of you early adopters who want to join us now...just register and create your listing...including photos, a link to your website, list of your specialties...the location of you practice on Google Maps...whatever you need...

And no waiting for me or the Guild or a volunteer or anyone else to change or update your listing...you can easily and simply do it yourself whenever you want to or need to....

Feldenkrais Finder is an awesesome way to find a Feldenkrais practitioner on your computer, iphone or other smarthphone, iPad...you name it. It works on pretty much any device. Here is a short video on the project that explains how AWESOME it is: http://feldenkraisfinder.com/feldenkrais-finder-overview/

The post Feldenkrais Finder Is Now Live: Come and Grab Your Free Listing appeared first on Emergent Somatics.

Sound familiar? As many of you know, I occasionally create and promote conferences in the world of psychotherapy and work with many students of the late Milton H. Erickson. Many of them have similar fears about Erickson's work. More than one person has told me,

Personally, I think the Ericksonians are way off. Erickson's work has spread to the four corners of the world. He spawned countless modes of therapy such as Strategic Therapy, NLP, Solution-Focused Therapy, Possibility Therapy and his influence is felt by and credited by thousands of people all over the world. There are hundreds of people giving high-quality training based directly and indirectly on the work of Milton H. Erickson and an untold number of psychotherapist, coaches, psychologists and hypnotists using Erickson's work.

And in Feldenkrais community? The last time that I checked there were little more than 100 people training others to acquire the work. And, it would be hard to make the case that there are more than 1500 Feldenkrais practitioners in full time practice.

What makes the difference? Why has Erickson's work spread like wildfire and Feldenkrais' work largely languished in obscurity?

There are many factors to consider. The largest one in my view is that many Ericksonians have publicly recognized credentials that give them the right to have independent practices. That is, many Ericksonians are licensed by their respective state as psychotherapists, psychologists and the like. "Feldenkrais Practitioner" is a term that few people in the public have heard of, and the "licenses" as such, do not have any meaning in the larger world.

However, there is a larger point about the Ericksonian community that has not escaped my attention over the last few years: They write lots of books. In the online Erickson Conference that I organized and promoted last year, I counted over 87 books written by the 20 presenters! And that is just a small sample of Ericksonian presenters. I hesitate to guess how many books have been written by and about Erickson and methods that he has inspired. In a quick search on Amazon, I came up with 1400 different book listings. In the Feldenkrais world? About 200. (Just a quick perusal, my numbers are hardly scientific),

Writing books are important for many reasons. They are promotional tools for the author and the methods he or she is writing about. They keep ideas in the public eye. They keep people talking about ideas. And they establish credibility and authority.

I am not qualified to teach you how to write and publish a book on the Feldenkrais Method. But I recently attended a short, free, online overview of the process by my friend and colleague Bill O'Hanlon and I was thinking about Feldenkrais practitioners the entire time. If you think you have a book in you. And you want to get yourself and Feldenkrais ideas better known in the world, you might want to check it out. Click below to find out more:

Bill O'Hanlon on Book Writing and PublishingCourse ended!

We have some authors in the Feldenkrais community. Most notably and recently Anat Baniel. And others who have written books, but not recently, such as Ruthy Alon, Steven Shafarman and the late Jack Heggie, Yochanan Rywerant and Thomas Hanna. And some newer authors such as Lavinia Plonka, Alfons Grabher and others. But where are the rest? How will the Method get better known if it is not in the public eye? If YOU are not in the public eye?

Check out the training, if you have a few minutes. It will not disappoint. In fact, you may want to check out the style and presentation of the training as it could be useful as a way to promote your work, regardless of whether you write a book right now....

cheers - Ryan

The post Getting The Method (Your Method) Into The World… appeared first on Emergent Somatics.

I ended up staying with Bluehost for some of my hosting. Since I wrote the post below, I have had no problems with Bluehost. They seemed to have solved their hosting problems. At least for me.

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Every so often, I get clients and customers from my various business who ask me what hosting company I recommend. I usually do not have strong recommendations. I have used and continue to use a variety of hosting companies, such as Bluehost, Hostgator and recently, MediaTemple. Depending on what your needs are, there are many, many good hosting companies that you can choose from. But at this point, I am taking Bluehost, Hostgator and HostMonster off the list. I recommend that you do NOT use them for your hosting.

Why I am leaving Bluehost

Bluehost has been having reliability issues for several months. At least they have with my websites. At least 5 times in the last two months I have emailed their customer supporting asking them why one or more of my sites are down. To their credit, Bluehost customer service gets back to me quickly. And they usually solve the problem within minutes. But the stress of having my sites go down really gets to me. Many of my sites are not just blogs or online brochures. They are live, ecommerce websites selling a product, such as my online Milton Erickson Conference. If one of my sites goes down at a certain moment, say after an affiliate has emailed several thousand people, I can be out thousands of dollars. "Not cool" as we used to say back in the day.

From what I can tell about Bluehost, they went on a massive campaign to get more customers and simply ran out of the technological resources to deal with them all effectively. And, as I just found out from Bluehost's latest failure, they and Hostgator and HostMonster all have the same parent company and are using one massive data center in Utah. So when one of the companies are having problems, all of them can have problems. This is something I want to avoid. So, my next step? Slowly but surely I am going to start moving my critical websites off Bluehost and to a hosting company that is more reliable, such as MediaTemple.

Past Problems With Bluehost: Throttling

After publishing the post above, I realized that I forgot to mention the "BlueHost Throttling" issues. What is throttling? I used to have issues where Bluehost told me that one or more of my sites was using too many server resources and would be temporarily blocked or throttled. Essentially, the site in question would not load and not be seen by a user. This throttling would often be for just two or three seconds but would sometimes last for 30 seconds or more. I spent all kinds of time trying to fix the issue. I would optimize my WordPress installations, reduce unnecessary database calls and, god knows what else. I do not quite remember. However, in the end, I gave up and upgraded my hosting plans to have more server resources and thus not have throttling issues. This solution has worked for about a year. And it is unrelated to the recent issues with the Bluehost going down in general. But, I must say it added to the overall feeling of hassle that I have had using Bluehost and make it that much easier to move my sites and get away from them.

The post Is Bluehost Hosting Down? Probably. appeared first on Emergent Somatics.

I just received an email from a company on whose website I started a purchase last week. The email subject line read: "Is there anything that we can do to help?" They noticed that I had begun the purchase process but did not finish it. The email was an attempt to find out if they could help me with the purchase or if I had additional questions. Sending an email like that is a great way to kick-start sales and to diagnose if something can be improved in a lead generation, sales, or checkout process.

Are You Optimizing Your Checkout Process?

There a many factors that can be tested on a checkout process. And there is no one "right" sales process for online purchasing. Rather, you need to experiment and create tests specific to your company and industry. Here are a few things we have tested recently:

1) Number of fields. By decreasing the number of fields that needed to be filled in by a customer, we were able to increase the lead generation rate of a manufacturing company by an astounding 513%.

2) Reducing pages. By reducing the number of pages in the checkout process from 3 to 1, our client, an ebook seller, was able to increase its sales rate by 38%.

3) Anxiety reducing images. This is one of our favorites - a simple change that made a dramatic impact on the bottom line. We designed a test for a company that sells mp3 downloads. The test was simple. One page had a logo that read: "Safe Shopping 100% Guaranteed" (see the logo above). The other page did not. The page with the logo outsold the original by 180%.

Those are just a few examples of testing options. Your mileage may vary. Contact us for options that might work for your situation.

- Ryan

The post Optimizing Your Checkout Process appeared first on Emergent Somatics.

Why this customer keyword trend is important:

1) Intent. The more specific a phrase is, the more you can match your content to the intent of the user.

2) Ranking. The longer the phrase, the easier it is to get a high rank. It can take months to get a high rank for a short phrase. But fewer people are targeting the longer phrases. You can often get a top rank in days or weeks.

3) Higher Conversion. When people reach a page that gives them exactly what they want, they are more likely to take an action such as buying something or filling in a lead generation form.

Frequently, businesses get overwhelmed at the prospect of targeting these long search terms. Suddenly, they have gone from targeting a dozen or so keyword to hundreds or even thousands of keywords! How can anyone manage that?!

Process

The key is to manage the process, not outcome. That is, you do not specifically try to rank for each and every keyword. Rather, you find the root keywords and incorporate them into your websites and blog posts as naturally as possible, adding modifiers when and where appropriate.

Using the "Green Homes" example from above, you could create multiple webpages or blog post targeting specific searches such as "Green Homes in New Jersey" or "Green Homes in New York." And within those pages target some of the loner phrases such as "affordable green homes for active adults" or "smart green home architects" or whatever else is important to your business growth. As you engage in the process, you will be able to find what is working and what is not. Some keyword phrases will pay off in terms of new leads and customers and others will not. You will be able to keep refining your targets based on the feedback you are getting.

The post Keyword Searches Are Getting Longer and Longer appeared first on Emergent Somatics.

Twitter is a social media platform that some people - like me - use only grudgingly. No offense to all you twitter-heads. I like the platform, but I do not like to tweat very often. I find twitter to be a distraction and rarely useful for my information junkie needs.

That being said, Twitter can be an incredibly useful tool, and I do use it from time-to-time. However, I do not want to have to REMEMBER to use it, so I found a way to automatically tweat my blog posts using Feedburner. If you don't have a free FeedBurner account, I recommend getting one. The service is a great way to get people subscribing to your blogs and to keep them updated on what you are doing.

This blog post assumes that you already have a FeedBurner account and are going to use it to automatically add your new blog posts to your Twitter account. The set-up process will take less than five minutes.

Here is the lesson as a pdf: Tweat Automatically with Feedburner.

How To Tweat Automatically Using Feedburner

A short screenshot session on how to use Feedburner to automatically post your blog posts to Twitter. Feedburner is free. And it was purchased by Google last year, so you will need to log into Google to use it:

Pick Your Feed:

Click the Feedburner Option That Reads "Publicize":

(and try not to laugh at the tab that reads "troubleshootize")

On the left hand menu pick "Socialize"

And Now Click the Tab That Says "Add Twitter Account":

*Please note: You can post to more than one twitter account from one blog. And you can post from multiple blogs to one twitter account. See the end of this post for why you might want to do so.

Google takes you to Twitter where you can connect your Twitter and Google/Feedburner accounts:

If you are already logged in, you can just click "Allow."

Or you may need to log into your twitter account:

For now, leave the options as they are:

Check out the bottom of the page to see how your tweet will look:

My tweats are the "Default," they have my blog post title, plus Google's automatic URL shortener. Pretty cool, eh?

You are not done until you activate the service. My button says "Save." Yours will say "Activate."

Now, write a blog post and watch it show up on your twitter account!

You are now twittering automatically. Every time you make a blog post it will show up on Twitter.

Tweating to and from multiple blogs and twitter accounts

Above, I mentioned that you can post to more than one twitter account from one blog. And you can post from multiple blogs to one twitter account. Why would you want to do so? If you have a business with multiple people blogging, you could set-up one Twitter account for your entire company and have all of you employee's tweats go directly to that one twitter account. It would be a great way for fans of your company to keep up with everything that you are doing. Your employees could tweat to both your company twitter account and their own personal twitter account.

In my case, I have several blogs that are thematically connected. I have both of them automatically posted to the same twitter account. When people follow that one account, they get updates from both those blogs. My twitter account gets more followers and my blogs get more visitors. And because it all happens automatically in the background, I don't even have to think about it.

The post Automatic Twitter Updates Via Feedburner appeared first on Emergent Somatics.

I have noticed that many businesses and individuals are letting their webmaster or web hosting company register their web address. Bad idea!!

If you are establishing a new website, or a new business, it is critical, that you register the URL in your name. If you don't...then you do not own it!

Several times in the last few months, I have dealt with situations in which a client wants to change hosting companies or webmasters and the webmaster has refused to give up the URL. I'm sure my clients can fight the hosting company. And one is consulting an attorney. But the best thing to do is to register the domain you want yourself. Put it in your name. Pay for it with your credit card. That way, there will never be a question about ownership.

The post Register Your Website URL in Your Name appeared first on Emergent Somatics.

GoDaddy does not seem to have the best reputation. Occasionally, I hear people complain about their service and hosting accounts. Some people refuse to use them. But for low-cost, easy-to-maintain domains, Godaddy is my registrar of choice. I usually register my domains with Godaddy and then host the websites elsewhere.

If you are going to register a domain name via GoDaddy, make sure to do a search for "GoDaddy Discount Codes" on Google. You are likely to find many ways to save, 10%, 20%, 30% or more. One website that seems to have many valid discount codes is: FatWallet. I just used one of the codes listed there to register a .com for $7.49. It doesn't get much cheaper than that.

cheers - Ryan

(please note: none of the links above are affiliate links. I just wanted to share these resources with you.)

The post Godaddy Discount Codes: Never Pay Full Price to Register a Domain appeared first on Emergent Somatics.