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It's one of those days when my brain has turned to mush and even simple client work is turning into one drama after another so let's just breeze through a whole bunch of things in today's column rather than concentrating on just one or two items of interest.

Learn to look beyond the end of your nose
Did you know that where I live in Australia is in the middle of some disastrous flooding? Hundreds of miles of roads and railways are damaged, bridges are down, over 120,000 homes are without electricity and many are flooded. From what I've seen that hasn't been getting a lot of press in the United States.

Now the fact that the press in the US isn't saying much about it doesn't bother me much but it should bother you because you will have missed the bit about the economists who are suggesting that this disaster is going to have a major impact on the world economy. You see the State that I live in supplies over 50% of the coal used in the world's steel mills and coal production has ground to a halt and probably won't start again for weeks.

So why should you need to know about that? Well it will have a trickle-down effect and ultimately have an impact on your bottom line. That means that you need to know when things like this happen so you can have a little bit of warning.

If your local media can't be bothered to keep you up to date on what's happening in other parts of the world ... things that could have a major impact on your bottom line ... then start looking outside of the United States for news sources that will keep you informed. Britain's BBC website is a good place to check each day because they tend to take a world view of the news rather than wasting time on lurid stories of missing pole dancers.

Freebies
Yep freebies can be good ... hey if it's free then it's got to be good ... right? How else can you build your business in this industry without freebies? Well don't forget that there's no such thing as a free lunch and many of the tools we use and we think of as being free actually come with a hidden cost.

And it's not just the tools we use that come with a hidden cost ... lots of free templates that we see offered around the place often have links and even malware hidden deep inside the code.

Lots of us like to use free WordPress themes for some of our projects but before you go looking for your next free theme it might pay to think again because you never know what might be lurking in the code of many of the free WordPress themes that are being offered online.

To see what nasties one person found in some of those free WordPress themes head over to wpmu.org and look for the January 12 entry with the title "Why You Should Never Search for Free WordPress Themes in Google or Anywhere Else" . It's all a bit scary really.

Need some CSS tools?
I know that I was late to jump on the CSS bandwagon ... and I'm still not convinced that a site built with CSS will outrank a site built with tables but lots of people do believe that it does and undoubtedly CSS is the way to go.

So here's a site that offers some links to 10 online CSS tools. Head over to webm.ag (yes that is the correct URL) and do a search for '10 useful online CSS tools' and all should be revealed.

You might also find the 100 CSS tips and tricks at sixrevisions.com to be of some use too. If you're like me and trudging through setting up all the CSS you need for a website to be something of a pain you might find a few useful shortcuts in there.

Landing pages
There was a time when everyone knew that if you really wanted to make money in this business you sent your surfers from your free site or gallery to a landing page before giving them a link to your sponsor. Landing pages were supposed to help pre-qualify your surfers or give them somewhere else to go if they really didn't want to head for your sponsor.

Landing pages are also important in mainstream marketing and a lot of people who market via Adwords use landing pages to get potential customers excited about what they're offering.

In the past we've always had some good results from landing pages but our last mainstream landing page bombed so we've been looking to see what we did wrong. We got lots of clicks through to the landing page but almost no one went on to take the next step to the page where they could actually see the range of items that we were selling.

So we've been looking for some clues to show us what we did wrong. While Steve was out doing some research into landing pages he came across an article that you might find interesting if you want to try your hand at building a landing page or even tweaking the landing pages you've already built.

You will find "The 3-Part Landing Page Formula That Always Works" at blog.kajabi.com ... I don't guarantee that it will give you all the answers but it does make for some interesting reading.

And now I'm going to jump back into a day that's getting crazier by the minute. I just looked at my diary for today and found that I have two appointments that I had completely forgotten so I had better get my skates on.