As coach and team parent for our kids’ sports teams, we learn quite a bit about parents and politics — If you have kids in youth sports, you know what I mean!

This week some parents’ behavior (not showing up at all or showing up really late to practice) got me thinking about business and all the opportunities for learning, success, and sales that get missed.

Why do you miss these opportunities?

• You don’t take action
• You don’t show up

Often, an opportunity to create success is right in front of you and you miss out simply because you don’t take action — or you think, “I’ll do it or follow up on that later” and then forget all about it.

Read More About Siezing Opportunities

After my post on how to add the official Twitter Widget to your WordPress site without a plugin, several readers emailed me and asked me to explain how to add the Facebook Like Box to their WordPress site.

Now, Facebook doesn’t give you too many customizing options … They wan to make sure that no matter what it is always obvious it is a Facebook widget and that their brand is promoted.

With that said, there are a few options for adding a Like Box to a website, and the method below is probably the easiest and the one we choose to use for our clients.

For the record, we don’t use the like box, we prefer to just use the like button.

Here’s step-by-step instructions (with screen shots) on how to add the Facebook Like Box to your WordPress website or blog:

Learn How to Add The Facebook Like Box

Entrepreneurs of the Information Age have had to adapt their marketing strategies to suit the times.

It used to be that advertising was the bulwark of marketing, but that has changed with the lightning fast development of the king of all Information Age technologies, the internet. Now, one of the staples of your marketing strategy is the development, sharing, and selling of content.

You may have heard or experienced firsthand that generating quality content in blog posts, articles, videos, reports, ebooks, audio files, DVDs, teleseminars, webinars, and so on can revitalize your marketing by helping you.

• Expand brand visibility
• Establish expert status
• Build backlinks
• Increase website traffic

And if you’ve been doing any of that for any length of time, you may have run into a common problem of content marketing — the problem of supply.

Learn The 4 Steps to Creating an Endless Supply of Content

Presenting your brand consistently across all marketing platforms is a critical part of transforming your business into an extraordinary brand, and social media branding is becoming more important every day.

As social media sites continue to grow in popularity, often the very first interaction a person has with your brand is through a site like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, or Pinterest.

With social media you present your brand in different ways – the two most common are in the written word and the visual design.

Learn Why Start-Ups Fail With Social Media Brand Design

Brian and I LOVE WordPress, so much so that we only build WordPress websites … more specifically custom child themes for the Genesis framework.

Needless to say and we spend a lot of time researching, training, reading, testing, watching, asking, tweaking, and learning all about it so we can answer your questions and provide you with all the information we find!

While we’re here to answer your questions, we also know the crazy-smart guys and gals at Automattic who created (and continue to create) WordPress know way more than we do — well, because they created it!

So here’s a list of some awesome WordPress resources you may want to check out by the creators WordPress:

Get a List of Free WordPress Training Resources

With a custom email newsletter and/or announcement template design, you will stand out from inbox crowd of boring free templates.

One of the worst marketing decisions a business owner can make is to go with the free, unbranded, lame, ezine templates provided by your email marketing service provider with a smaller version of your website header slapped on it.

Why? The majority of all account holders also use the free templates, meaning it’s highly likely that another person who does exactly the same thing you do is using the exact same ezine template … and that’s really bad for branding and brand recognition.

If you approach your ezine the right way, your ezine will create profits, credibility, and opportunity for you and your business.

Your email newsletter will help position you as an expert in your industry. It will also help you establish credibility and trust in your market, build relationships with your audience, and stay top of mind with your prospects and referral sources.

Learn More Email Marketing Tips

You can do some networking while sitting behind your computer or hiding behind your smart phone, and you can build strong relationships over time in the digital world of social media … but no online medium beats meeting someone face-to-face, in-person and making a genuine connection.

To accelerate your connections, your relationship development, and your networking results, you’ve got to put your smart phone down and get out from behind your computer!

You need to get out and meet people. You’ve got to let people know who you are, what you do, how you’re different, and who you serve. No one will hire you, buy from you, or refer others to you if they don’t even know you exist!

Learn More ABout Live Events and Their Impact on Your Success

Whether you are a small business owner, an entrepreneur, or a service professional, I bet that when it comes to marketing, you’re feeling more than a bit overwhelmed.

I’ll also bet that even though you may be an expert in your niche, you probably don’t feel like an expert in keeping your marketing pipeline full of new customers.

And being overwhelmed and insecure about your marketing can be dangerous if you don’t learn and plan.

I have seen it over an over. One person or business devises a marketing piece, such as an advertisement, that breaks new ground. People are going, “Wow,” that ad or strategy is converting leads into sales like gangbusters, and everyone else in that market is scrambling to catch up.

Unfortunately, the next thing that usually happens is that others try to copy the successful ad for their businesses, but they don’t adjust the ad to fit their marketing or their focus. Naturally, placed in the wrong context, the ad or strategy fails. Driven by panic rather than purpose, by uncertainty rather than an understanding of one’s audience, and by ignorance rather than expertise, the imitation of the original ad or strategy will just look like drivel.

The result is failure–money and time wasted, and prospects lost–all for a marketing piece that was copied instead of thought out, planned, and targeted.

That is why I want to put you in the driver’s seat of your marketing by sharing 3 things you need to think about before you turn the key on your next campaign…

Learn How to Create Marketing Materials That Work

A HUGE thank you and thunderous applause goes out to Nicole Shoots, Kathy Sacks, Jeff Mask, Jordan Hatch, and the whole Infusionsoft team for an amazing event. Infusioncon 2012 was definitely an event to remember with juicy content, coding tricks, marketing strategies explained, and pure inspiration for a sold out crowd of business owners and entrepreneurs.

Another HUGE thank you goes out to those awesome business owners I was fortunate enough to meet, and to all those who attended my breakout session on How to Create a Website That Works When You’re Not Working. I had so much fun sharing my insights with you and I have LOVED getting all of your feedback!

While personal relationships, integrity, customer services, and customer care were strong themes throughout the event, so were marketing automation, email marketing, and leverage. I learned from the speakers, from the vendors, and from the other attendees. But there was one thing I that I got the most clarity on, and that is …

Get More Wisdom, Tips, and Insights From Infusioncon 2012

“WordPress Security Starts With You!” This is a comment I tell every client during our WordPress training sessions and can’t overemphasize how important this is in maintaining a WordPress website. I tell our clients the following every time:

1. Ensure that your home/office network uses secure passwords and WiFi is encrypted.
2. Make sure that your operating system, all software, and browsers are up to date.
3. Maintain backups of your website and always update WordPress & plugins.
4. Always use strong passwords and never use one password for everything.

My instructions have been directly reinforced this week by two events within the WordPress and online world.

Learn More About The WordPress Update and The Mac Flashback Virus