Martin Malden

Welcome to Create an Awesome Home Business!


Here you will find products, services and step-by-step processes that will cut through the jargon and help you to grow a profitable Internet Marketing business.


All in plain, simple English.


Contact me if you have any questions. Or explore the site through the search box or links in the sidebars to the right. To your success!

I’ve Moved Everything to GMail – Here’s Why

September 2, 2010

I’ve been using Thunderbird as my email client for ages – years – and I’ve always been very happy with it. But last weekend a wave of emails containing the JS/Redir virus starting hitting me (and they’re still hitting me now). AVG spotted the virus (which was good) but couldn’t get rid of it (not [...]

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Thesis 1.8: More Intuitive SEO but a Missed Opportunity

August 30, 2010

Thesis 1.8, released last week, brings some nice new functionality and a missed opportunity. Affiliate alert: I’m an affiliate for Thesis, which means that if you buy it by clicking one of the links on this site I get a bit of beer money. See my disclosure for more details. I discussed Thesis in more [...]

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Thesis Tips: Design Options Site Layout

August 26, 2010

The site layout controls on the Design Options page in Thesis offer the ability to completely change the layout of your site whenever you want. You can select the number and positioning of your columns (content and sidebars) and choose your page framework (full-width or page) just by selecting a few options. When you use [...]

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Thesis Tips: Post Images and Thumbnails

August 24, 2010

Images add hugely to the visual appeal of a post and help to keep site visitors engaged. And if you’re using the Teasers option (magazine style layout) for displaying posts on your blog page, Thesis will automatically resize your post image to fit into the Teaser box. The Post Images and Thumbnails section on the [...]

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Thesis Tips: Custom CSS Stylesheet

August 19, 2010

The Thesis Custom CSS Stylesheet is the tool you use to build on the colours and fonts you set up in the Design Options screen, to make your WordPress site uniquely yours. Keep in mind the point I made in the article on design options: in order to keep your site coding as efficient as [...]

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Thesis Tips: Design Options – Colours and Fonts

August 17, 2010

Although I’m focusing primarily on the Design Options screen in this article I do have to refer to the Site Options screen occasionally. Please read carefully in those parts as the names of different sections are quite similar and can be confusing The Design Options screen gives you point and click control over a wide [...]

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Thesis Tips: Thesis-OpenHook Plugin

August 12, 2010

The first thing I do when I create a new installation of Thesis is install the Thesis-OpenHook plugin. One of the most powerful features of Thesis is the custom-functions.php file. It enables you to move different elements of your page around and add bits and pieces wherever you want. But if you’re not a PHP [...]

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Opportunities All Around, If You Just Look

August 10, 2010

A while ago I wrote an article in which I said that you almost certainly know more than you think you do about working online. And that once you realise that, you’ll suddenly find a whole bunch of business opportunities opening up. I described one in the article. So this week I saw another example [...]

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How to Syndicate Your Blog Posts

August 5, 2010

I saw a question today asking how to syndicate blog posts most effectively, so here’s how I do it: Very simply, I set up a TwitterFeed account a while ago. This takes the RSS feed from my site. Within my TwitterFeed account I set up services to Facebook and Twitter (both require verification). TwitterFeed takes [...]

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A Really Simple (and Good) Shopping Cart for WordPress

August 3, 2010

I needed a shopping cart for WordPress but I couldn’t find anything that was easy to implement, didn’t slow down the site and would be easy to teach a client. My client’s requirements were straightforward: an on-line shop that was an integral part of their site, selling a small range of merchandise (rugby shirts, polo [...]

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1 Easy Way to Improve Cross-Browser Compatibility

July 29, 2010

For those who build websites by hand (rather than on a platform like WordPress or Joomla) one of the hassles is making sure your sites render consistently in different browsers. Internet Explorer is notorious for screwing things up, mostly because in the past they’ve never adhered to the W3C standards. That said, IE8 is better [...]

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Internet Marketing Basics for Small Businesses

July 27, 2010

I’ve been lucky enough to pick up two new contracts recently for web design services for small companies in a totally non web-related industry. And, in both cases, the current providers have been giving a poor service. Understandably, their customers (my new customers) are totally unfamiliar with the web and the basics of promoting a [...]

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Persuade Readers to Stay Longer Without Locking Them Up

July 22, 2010

Bear with me while I set the background… A little over a year ago I wrote an article setting out how to install and manage widgets on WordPress. Two weeks later, WordPress released version 2.8 which completely invalidated my article because they changed the way widgets were managed. So I wrote an article on widgets [...]

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How Not to Do Business Online

July 20, 2010

Renewing an existing subscription should be the simplest possible of online transactions, so it’s amazing how consistently AVG manage to screw this up. I have two PC’s, both currently running AVG Internet Security. I moved to AVG from McAfee because it doesn’t slow down the PC performance as much. But two things where McAfee was [...]

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3 Timeless Tips for Internet Marketing Newbies

July 16, 2010

I’ve been lucky enough to pick up a nice new contract, setting up and maintaining websites for a group of 6 restaurant/bars here in Hong Kong. As a result I’ve had a frantic week and I haven’t had time to research and produce my normal second article. So, instead, I’ve spent some time looking back [...]

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Do Better on Google: Speed Up Your Site Load Time

July 13, 2010

With Google now including site load times in the factors it uses to rank sites for the natural search results, a recent article on the SEOmoz blog giving 7 ways to speed things up caught my attention. Some of them I was already using but one that I wasn’t was Gzip compression, so I dived [...]

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