It’s amazing how many self-employed people hit the wall with their web sites.

Procrastination, delay, and stall become words of the day. Or week, or month(s).

It’s not the difficulty of setting up a shopping cart, or trouble deciding between two typefaces, or a hang-up with javascript  that’s putting the brakes on the site.

It really comes down to that deep inward cringe that so many of us who have a hard time with marketing and promotion feel, when we’re promoting ourselves.

If we’re artists, or in a service business, so often the thing we’re trying to sell to the world is the product of our own unique gifts, our innermost, most sacred self.

And often, although we may have studied and cultivated skills and techniques for years, that gift at its core is something that just “happens.” It’s our magic. Our own secret mojo, gifted at birth.

People in this predicament, including myself, seem to get hung up on three things. One is, how to put our magic into words. Just saying “I’m a web designer” or “I’m a business coach” doesn’t nearly cover it. But how in the heck do you articulate your own gift, the thing that makes what you do special—something that you don’t quite understand to begin with?

The second is, how do you convey it in “buyer-centered” terms?  Once you’re figured out the “who,” “what” and “how” of what you do; once you list the problems you solve and the results you provide—you’ve got to write about it. With marketing syntax. Persuasively.

And then there’s packaging and pricing. Do you break your services out into packages? Charge by the hour? By the project? How do you price it?

All of this is not only incredibly difficult, particularly when doing it for yourself, but it can also feel very risky. You’re putting a very intimate and often vulnerable part of yourself out there, in public, for anyone with a web browser to see. And, you’re asking people to connect with you, to want what you have to offer, and to buy it.

What if they think you’re stupid? What if no one wants it? What if no one comes? What if your old college roomie, now CEO of a megabucks corporation, reads your personal, sincere, non-business-speak little web site and thinks it’s the most ridiculous thing ever?

So many of my clients—and myself—get hung up somewhere along this path. “Oh, I don’t like writing,” so many clients have remarked. But it’s not really writing that they hate. It’s writing marketing copy about themselves that drives them half mad.

What can you do to get out of the swamp?

First, admit that it’s not the javascript, the font, or the shopping cart that’s hanging you up, but your own confusion and—yes—pain.

Then, ask for a little help.

Call a friend. Or two or three. As them to tell you what your magic is. Take notes.

Then, turn to a professional to help shape your notes into finished copy. Marketing guru Robert Middleton has an amazing array of marketing knowledge in his Marketing Club (first month free, with complete access to workbooks, articles, audio programs and coaching calls). If you need a detailed, step-by-step roadmap that covers everything from formulating what you do in buyer-centric terms to writing articles, promotional copy and emails, Robert is your man. I’ve been following and using his info for years, and I am an affiliate.

Mark Silver is an amazing business coach with a spirit-centered practice. He offers freebies, workbooks and classes that can put you in touch with your own inner “big picture” and ease the pain of trying to communicate it.

Work with your designer. Many web designers and web coaches, whether they know it or not, have become experts at helping clients over this hurdle. Give yours a call.

And finally, don’t get hung up on perfection. The web is a very fluid medium. What you write today, you can change tomorrow. So get something up now, even if it’s not perfect. Your clients will be glad you did. Really.

There’s just been some big news for bloggers and other Internet writers this month. The FTC has decided that “bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service,” or face a fine of up to $11,000. That’s a sizeable incentive to come clean about paid product endorsements, paid reviews, free products, and affiliate marketing. (For those who don’t know, an “affiliate” receives a percentage of the sale price when someone buys a product or service online using one of their special tracking links. For example, as an Amazon affiliate, I receive a small percentage if you go directly to Amazon from one of my links and purchase something. )

I think it’s wonderful. Affiliate and other paid relationships have long been a gray area on the Internet. As a reader, I want to know someone’s relationship with a product they’re touting. As a writer, I feel scuzzy and sleazy if I don’t disclose my own relationships.

This has always felt a little weird for me, since most of my colleagues and peers have never disclosed. For years, I ducked whole the issue by refusing to affiliate at all. Particularly since the amount of money that an affiliate gains from any one sale is often minuscule.

But then two things happened. First, I noticed that I was recommending the same products over and over to my clients. They were products I had rigorously researched, tested, compared, and used. So I wasn’t being fully dispassionate, anyway. Some products are simply better than others.

Second, a couple of clients actually asked me to send them my affiliate link before they purchased products I’d recommended—because they out-and-out wanted me to get my “cut.” It was a revelation to me that, far from diminishing my credibility, being an affiliate sometimes enhanced it.

Now, I’ve got a special page on my site on which I list all of my affiliate relationships. They also happen to be all of my favorite, most used and trusted Internet tools and services. Full disclosure… it feels so good.

What do you think about this issue, whether as a blogger, consumer, or product rep? I’d love to hear from you.

Does your site feel boring, outdated, and passé… because you’re sick of its colors? Do you want to revamp it, but don’t know how to go about choosing new ones, or even whether to try?

It’s worth the effort. Your web site has ten seconds to make an impression. Color is a plays a critical role in that decisive moment. And color is not only how people get drawn into your site, it’s how they recognize and remember it to come back.

Color Provides the Visual Cues that Are Key to Having a Memorable Site

Do you need a designer’s help to get started picking a great color palette? No! Here’s a simple worksheet for choosing a complete color palette for your site.

1. What feeling(s) do you want your business to convey? Express this in a minimum of three, and a maximum of six, words.

2. Does your business currently use distinctive colors—in its logo, business card, storefront, etc.—that “must” be used in your web site? Add it, or them, to your potential palette now.

3. Think about warm colors (yellow-orange-red-brown) as opposed to cool colors (green -blue-indigo-violet-gray). For example, blue is a frequently used in business because it creates a sense of calm, trustworthiness, solidity and confidence. However, it is “cool” rather than warm. If one of your chosen adjectives was “warmth,” or if you have a “people” business, blue might be better used as an accent rather than a major component of your site.

Red, the quintessential “warm” color, conveys vitality, health and playfulness. But it also can imply a sense of urgency and alarm. Many colors are ambiguous in this way, with meanings and associations which vary from culture to culture. Keep in mind any strong color associations of your potential audience(s). An excellent short article by Rob Mills on how color communicates meaning is here.

4. Right now, choose a “draft” palette of 5 or 6 colors (a palette is a collection of 3 to eight colors that work well together). You can use swatches from the local paint store, colored pens, a scanned image which contains the colors you want, Photoshop—whatever you feel comfortable with. There are some very helpful online tools as well. I like Adobe’s Kuler, and Color Scheme Designer, both free. (And yes, this should be fun!)

5. Consider contrast. Bright, strong, and dark colors work well for headlines. Very light colors make lousy headlines, but can make wonderful backgrounds. You can lighten or darken some colors on your palette for the sake of contrast. Getting stuck? Browse sites you admire, and observe how they have used warm and cool, light and dark, bright and dull.

6. Check for readability. Is your color vision normal? Approximately 15% of the general population have some kind of distortion in the way they perceive color. There’s a good visual simulator of various kinds of color blindness here. Your site needs to be legible for these folks. Modify accordingly!

7. Will people be printing out your web pages? If so, use dark type on a light or white background for the printable versions.

8. Now, let’s get down to business. It’s time to finalize at least two strong colors which can predominate on the site. Designate another one or two that can be used as accent or background colors. It’s better to have too few than too many colors—designer Roger Black, for example, gained international fame for his distinctive magazine designs using just black, white, and red, period.

Once you’ve done the right-brain choosing, and the left-brain tweaking, you’ll have a color palette that you can use on any site or template. Still aren’t satisfied? Try one of the online palette-creation sites mentioned above. Or, look at photos (travel photos are especially good), paintings, or design books for more ideas. The book Living Colors: The Definitive Guide to Color Palettes Through the Ages, is a particularly good source—authors Hope and Walch have extracted gorgeous color palettes from the art and décor of many ages and places, which can all be adapted for the web.

But above all, have fun. Color appeals to a primal part of us, and its meaning and impact can’t be fully explained. So savor the inexplicable. If you’re enjoying it, chances are your site visitors will too.

Have you experimented with color palettes, or found a really helpful color-picking tool? I’d love to hear from you.

When I wrote about augmented reality the other day, I was assuming that AR was still a short way in the future. I was wrong! “Collaborative annotation of the physical world.” That’s what Marshall Kirkpatrick describes in his October 2 NY Times blog. And it’s here, today, right now—if you own an iPhone 3GS.

Several augmented reality iPhone apps have been released:

DA Transit, for finding rail, light rail, and subway information in the U.S. The company notes that the information is available via various interfaces: superimposed on the video screen above stops, on a map, or as a listing.

Cyclopedia (web link)(iTunes link), an app which selects any of the 65,000 Wikipedia entries that have been geotagged (encoded with locational data), and then uses your own location, a compass orientation, and a range setting to superimpose this information onto your iPhone screen.

Wikitude uses location information from Wikipedia, from the international review site Qype, and from Wikitude’s own info entry interface at Wikitude.me. These bits of information, including your own and others’ notes on a place, appear in “bubbles” on your iPhone screen as you look at nearby objects.

Another app, from Layar, has just been submitted to Apple for review. It’s currently available on Google’s Android phone, but is not, in Kirkpatrick’s words, “mindblowing.”

And a side note. Here’s one forecast I didn’t make the other day: will the new immediacy of user reviews bring back customer service? If every business has to, in effect, post a placard in their window listing customers’ reviews and reactions, perhaps a new era of caring and service will commence. We can hope!

Further note: for very good ongoing coverage of trends in augmented reality, check out the “Augmented Reality” category on the blog ReadWriteWeb.com.

I just read a speculative article on Mashable.com about Apple’s rumored tablet computer … a light, slim, Kindle-like standalone screen that could be drawing tablet, computer, internet browser and e-reader rolled into one. Maybe phone, camera, videocam, ipod and bread-slicer as well. It’s exciting as hell, but also maddening, isn’t it? Trying to keep up with new technology, I mean.

There’s the coolness factor, of course. (I tell myself frequently that this should be a minor consideration.) Closely related to coolness, for me anyway, is the little-kid-loves-colored-lights phenomenon. And then there’s the money thing. Can this gadget/software/etc. help you make more money? As a businessperson, does it help untether you from the many demands of running your own show? Make your life easier? Allow you to do things you never did before?

Some technologies entirely transform the way business is done. The web itself, for example, back in the early ’90s. People who figured out how to use it, early and well, made a ton of money. Remember Netscape? Ebay? Paypal? Google’s IPO? The founders of these now-giants cleaned up. And many of the early adopters, like the ones who figured out how to sell things on eBay while the rest of us were barely cranking up our copies of Netscape 1.0, also made fortunes.

This is still going on today—the revolutionaries and the early adopters reap amazing benefits. Then the rest of us straggle along trying to imitate their success. And eventually, that early success turns into a formula which others try to sell. Take blogging, for example. We’re not all Chris Garrett, or Darren Rowse. But how many of us have bought e-book after e-book, trying to make our blogs as successful and profitable as theirs?

I call this the Magic Ticket Syndrome. I would love to find a Magic Ticket to instant fortune and prosperity. Wouldn’t you? Innumerable folks find their own Magic Ticket by selling what purports to be your Magic Ticket to a profitable online business or blog—getting rich through publicizing your business/product/site/self, or being on national TV, or writing killer landing pages, etc. etc. I’ve got at least a dozen of these things in a “to read” folder on my desktop. I’ll bet you do too.

And then sometimes a technology comes along that really can help your business. For example, a client of mine manages vacation rental properties. Yet she herself could never travel, particularly during the summer, because of the logistics of collecting rents and deposits from renters and potential renters. A typical web-based shopping cart wouldn’t work for her, because her payment amounts always varied according to which property was being rented, for how long, in what season, how many people, etc.

Solution? I researched online invoicing software and services, and after extensive testing, suggested an online invoicing software called FreshBooks. Now, my client and her potential renters come to an agreement on dates and location, she emails a link to a custom invoice, and the renter pays online via credit card before arrival. No more checks, no more hassles with foreign exchange. And for her, no more being stuck in the office.

After seeing how smoothly FreshBooks worked for my client, I gave it a whirl in my web development business. I used to hate invoicing. Hate it. I’d procrastinate weeks before sending out my old MS Word invoice template. This handy little tool, however, makes invoicing—dare I say it? Not only easy, but almost pleasurable. And, it offers value-added statistics that I used to have to track in a separate Excel spreadsheet. So now my invoices get sent out on time and my cash flow has improved. Simple, huh? (In fact, in the interests of full disclosure, FreshBooks’ proven track record, speed, reliability, and responsive support have met all my stiff affiliate criteria. So yes, I am a FreshBooks affiliate and will make a minuscule amount of money if you click these links and decide to become a paying customer.)

I came across another business using this technology in a different way. WPhelpcenter.com offers technical problem-solving services for WordPress site developers. You describe your WordPress issue or glitch over the phone, they ask some questions, then give you an estimate. If you decide to have them do the work, an email with a FreshBooks invoice link appears in your inbox a few minutes later. As soon as you’ve paid, the guys at wphelpcenter are ready to start working. Again, simple.

Is this bit of technology a Magic Ticket? Nope. But does it enable business owners to be happier and more productive? Yes and yes, for my property manager client and for me. Does it elegantly facilitate a web-based business model that might otherwise be unfeasible? In the case of WPhelpcenter.com, yes.

Invoicing software isn’t exactly super-cool. Nor does it totally revolutionize the way business is done. But it’s useful. And it’s just one of dozens or hundreds of such products that appear with astounding regularity these days. How can we possibly keep track of them all, let alone figure out which ones will truly be helpful, let alone transformative, in our particular business?

March 2010 postscript: I’ve started a free weekly tips sheet to–one usable, bottom-line-enhancing tech tip per week. Sign up here: http://creatingwebsuccess.com/free-stuff/

And if you’d like to go one better, and give your business and your bottom line a shot in the arm of motivation, inspiration, and practical steps you can take right now to jumpstart your business, check out my new product, 99 Ways to Use Social Media and the Web to Grow Your Business, Reach More Clients, Sell More Products and Services, Make More Money, Make Your Life Easier, and Change The World!

So let’s forget the coolness factor for the moment. Is there a new piece of software or technology that helps your business work better, differently, more easily? I’d love to hear about it.