Thanks to small businss guru Matt McGee, I was lucky enough to be interviewed for the most recent issue of Inc. Magazine for a article titled “How to use Multimedia for Business Marketing”

They asked how we used Flickr to help build our company’s brand identity by posting photos of our cakes & cupcakes. We started using Flickr back in late 2005 and found it a great success in helping generate conversation and interest in Pink Cake Box. However, more recently we’ve focused more on You Tube and Facebook. We’ve found these channels generate more traffic and conversions. And as a general rule, we like to keep our social media strategy limited to a select few sites to help make best use of our time.

Thanks to Le Foie gras (I’m sorry I don’t know his/her name) WP-PHPLIST now has Internationalization support for the following:
* en-US
* en-UK
* fr-FR

The admin panel isn’t done yet, but the key user-facing pieces are completed. Download the latest version here:

WP-PHPLIST

A few weeks ago I introduced a new page on Pink Cake Box that allows fans to see the most popular cakes of the day.

The cakes are chosen based on the number of views for that day combined with the age of the cake. In other words, newer cakes are given a bit more weight to account for the fact they don’t have as many external links:

It’s interesting to see which cakes are consistently popular. This 13 year old topsy turvy cake is consistently in the top ten. Similarly this sweet 16 cake is also usually in the top ten.

As a next step, I think it would be interesting to create a rating system to allow people to rate cakes. That could then be another factor used to determine the most popular cakes of the day.

Pink Cake Box is offering chance at a free cake up to $500. All proceeds raised from the raffle will benefit the American Cancer Society. For brides, this is your chance to get the cake of your dreams from one of the top cake decorators in the United States (at least that’s my somewhat biased opinion but checkout their cake gallery to decide for yourself).

You can purchase your Raffle Ticket here.

If you do not want to enter the raffle, but still want to help you can visit our Pink Cake Box team page to make a donation.

Thanks,

Jesse

I’m excited about the latest project I just finished up for Pink Cake Box. The idea for the project came from Matt McGee’s Small Business Search Engine Marketing blog. (Sidenote: Matt’s blog has some of the most actionable advice for small businesses - check his small business marketing section for great SMB advice.)

The idea is to use Google Maps as a vehicle for displaying one’s product. On Matt’s blog he originally profiled a lawn care company in PA who implemented the idea for their lawn care customers. Matt followed that post up with another implementation by a florist in Anaheim CA.

I figured this would be a great idea for our cake company. It could help visually depict our delivery radius and also help us showcase some of our cakes/cupcakes. I explored following the traditional user-created content approach for google maps (called Google My Maps) but that meant manually maintaining data that is already available on our website.

So I took another route - I created a wordpress plugin that automatically pulls data from our existing blog posts. I setup two custom fields for every post - “Lat/Lng” and “Venue”.

If the “Lat/Lng” field is populated, the plugin will automatically extract additional information from the post and display it on the map based on the latitude and longtitude coordinates:

We even placed a marking in Denver, CO for a cake we created while taping for the Food Network Cake Challenge. And I expect to create another marker in California for another televised cake challenge as soon as we are contractually allowed to talk about it ;) Also, I added functionality to link directly to items on the map using the post id. So for example, this link will take you directly to the Food Network cake in Denver.

The one downside of this approach is we don’t get the SEO benefits of using Google My Maps. Google My Maps can show up in Google Map search results. But the advantage of having this tightly integrated with our blog is a great timesaver and outweighs the cons of not having the map show up in google map search results.

The spirit of the wordpress plugin model for developers is obviously not centered around money. I had two main motivations for releasing my plugins to the public. First off, I wanted to use the plugins as a vehicle to help promote our small business. Secondly I enjoy creating things and watching other people benefit and use them.

Now creating is fun, but support is another story. The support process can be times time consuming and sometimes thankless. I initially kept up with the support requests, but now turn people away due to time constraints and other priorities.

So today I was thinking about ways the wordpress community could continue to encourage development and support of existing plugins.

I think the Top 1000 WordPress Plugin Authors list by W-Shadow is a step in the right direction. Recognition is a powerful motivator and I think the WordPress community would benefit if we continued to recognize the contributions of plugin authors in meaningful ways…

For example, how about rewarding the top 10 plugin authors with some prize? Even something like a wordpress t-shirt would probably go a long way to helping encourage more plugin development and support.

Just my thoughts…

Unfortunately I’ve been too busy with school, work and cakes to really put much work into my plugins.

However, I’m happy to announce that WP-PHPList now supports widgets! This was perhaps the most requested featured for the plugin.

And the best part is I didn’t have to do any work to add this feature! Credit goes to Rob Z at Web Geek Blog for widgetizing the plugin.

Click here for the WP-PHPList Plugin Page

Thanks Rob!

Today we released a new Twitter application on Pink Cake Box’s wedding blog.

The application is called SweetTweet and lets you send birthday cakes and cupcakes via Twitter.

With a lot help from a fantastic photo slider tutorial from Jesse Janzer, we created a slick photo viewer to allow users to easily select a cake to send via Twitter. Jesse put together a great tutorial and his wife is a fantastic wedding photographer in Utah.

We also need to thank Aravind Ajith from the Design Superhero for his free twitter bird icons. My design skills are poor at best and his twitter bird icon helped add some level of graphical sophistication to the application.

You can try SweetTweet for yourself here.

Ron has put together a code example explaining how to add additional fields to the PHPList plugin. Thanks Ron!

Thanks to a referral from Matt Mcgee, Anne had the opportunity to share some experiences about the power of social media and the web for helping grow your business.

Her article appeared in the magazine Small Business Asset magazine which is targeted at small businesses. Hopefully her story will help inspire other small businesses to help jumpstart their Internet strategy.