I was inspired a few weeks ago by David Risley from a post he did called, “Weekly Project: The Coming Wave, and Crushing It.” With this post, he gave an update to his readers on what is happening and what is going on. I too thought it was an awesome idea and decided to implement it myself.

So, from time to time, we will be giving you an update on what is going on with us. And to be honest, I am getting tired just thinking about all of the things we are doing.

The New Blog For Profit

I actually remember the exact date. It was just January 7th when we launched the new design, look, format and cleaner Blog For Profit. Because I wanted to get it out the door before my guest post appeared on John Haydon’s blog, “How to Optimize Your RSS and Email Subscriptions on Your Blog”, we stayed up until the wee hours of the morning.

When Clay and I started talking about redoing the look of BFP, we decided to do just that, really redo it completely. Of course, the first thing we had to do was to get BFP over on our own Premium WordPress Framwork, Headway. I had a lot of people ask me why I wasn’t moved over to Headway yet and I had to give them some lame ass excuse. But it really was the correct one. You all know the story, “the cobbler’s children have no shoes.” Seriously, we have been so busy with Headway and trying to get caught up with client work, my own stuff had to be put on the back burner.

Now that I am on Headway myself, I have to say, Headway is just freaking amazing. I will talk more about where we are heading with Headway below.

We also wanted a completely new look. If you remember, the old design had a “Home Page” and Blog format. The home page seemed a bit too busy for me and others made the same comment too.

That is why the content is the first thing you see now with BFP. No longer are we using the home page look. What we have done however, is to include a box right at the top where we will feature from time to time different products we are offering. This area will be devoted to our own products and not affiliate products we might be promoting.

I was also blessed to have on board with us an outstanding graphic designer, Mikhaela Craig. Mikhaela did just an amazing job with our new banner. She also did all the graphics for our ebook/workbook, Kick Your Blog in the Butt.

What I can tell you about the new look is we have seen an increase in traffic, readers and subscribers. Our subscribers have increased by at least 800 since we released the new look. What is exciting about all of that is the fact our community is growing. Commenting has increased as have the number of you taking the conversation to twitter. To all of you, thank you for your continued support of BFP.

Contributing Editors

I hope you have also noticed the number of contributing editors we now have on board. We are thrilled with the people who have taken the time from their own busy lives, businesses and blogs to be contributing editors here at BFP.

This was one of my goals for 2010 and within the first month of the new design, we have on board with us an amazing group of people. Each has agreed to contribute at least one post a month and so far they have been awesome.

What is even more exciting is the comments these post have received. And also exciting is the fact you are getting to read other views on blogging and social media here in BFP. Not just my own ramblings. In the next week or so, I will do a post introducing you to each one of them.

Guest Posting

Another one of my plans for 2010 was to guest post myself on at least one other blog per month. Two if I can swing it. So far for 2010, we have been right on target.

In January, I was honored to be on John Haydon’s blog. And this month, I was a guest blogger on David Risley’s wonderful blog where I wrote, Twitter is Great, But Take The Conversation Back To Your Blog.

If anyone would like me to contribute a guest post on their blog, please let me know.

I feel it was important I do what I tell others to do and guest posting is one of those activities I tell everyone they should be doing. In addition to my own guest posting, we are always looking for guest posters for BFP. You will see more of those from time to time.

Best practice tip: If you guest post, make sure you spend the time to engage with the readers of your post when they make comments. In other words, reply to comments on your guest post. All of those who are contributing editors here on BFP do just that. Another reason they are here too.

There is a lot more I could tell you about what we are doing at BFP, but let’s save that for next week.

Upcoming Product Launches

While I am not going to give you specifics. What I can tell you is that we have some exciting stuff coming in the next few weeks and even in a few months. Michael Martine and I are working on a new membership site/product/course to be released sometime this spring. If our mindmap is any indication, it is going to rock.

We are also joint venturing with a couple of others on at least two other projects. Each to focus on a different niche. But each a natural fit to what we have to offer. I am excited about both of these offerings too.

More to come soon on these too.

Headway

What can I say. We launched Headway back on July 31st and it has been an amazing ride ever sense. What we have strived to do is listen to our users and make improvements and come out with new features as we can. A lot of what you are going to seen in the soon to be released public 1.6 version has come from your input and desires.

Here is a brief list of the new features in Headway 1.6:

• Skins API
• Leafs API
• Live Custom CSS Editing
• Visual Editor Safe mode. If a leaf messes up a page and renders the visual editor unusable, all hope it not lost. You can access safe mode by going to the Headway Configuration page then the developer tab.
• Custom copyright text option.
• Ability to change the more link text inside the Headway configuration page.

Changes for Developers:

• All leafs now have the class headway-leaf instead of box.
• You can now add custom fonts to be used in the visual editor.
• Elements can be added to the scope of the visual editor. Simply, you can tell the visual editor to style custom elements. (Documentation coming soon)
• If you use or prefer Yoast’s breadcrumbs plugin, Headway will now deactivate its own breadcrumbs and fall onto Yoast’s plugin.
• We also made it so the Headway search engine optimization settings disable themselves if it detects that All In One SEO pack is active.
• Many Headway functions have been rewritten to avoid confusion and be more maintainable.
• PHPDoc in most of the core function files for Headway.

Overall Changes:

• All of Headway’s options were moved to its own module in the WordPress admin. This just means that it’s all grouped under a section called Headway. Frankly, we were sick of the word-wrapping. Oh, and we wanted an icon
• Configuration page switched back to a tabbed layout.
• Save button moved out of the Headway menu, moved to the bottom right again.
• New linking drop-down on the menu. Save and Link was moved here. Also, the linking options that was formally in the leafs panel is now here.

There is more and what is amazing, Clay is already planning out what will be in version 1.6.5 Headway and its development is not going to rest on any of the previous versions. We plan to continue to innovate and bring you new features, fixes and changes as they are developed. It is our goal to make Headway the best it can be for you.

That is it for now

I promise next week I will try to not be so windy with this post. But, we had a lot to tell you and decided to just get it out of the way. If any of you have any questions or want to give us any input on anything, drop me an email at grant@g2webmedia.com or leave your comment to this post.

Once again, thanks to all of you who take the time to read BFP and for being part of this, your community. And thanks to all of you who are using Headway. We could not have had the last 7 months with Headway we have had if not for you.