WordPress – The Jewel of the Internet

March 18, 2011 By Christine

Over the past couple of years the Internet has changed out of all recognition.  Where, not so long ago, Microsoft, Yahoo and Google ruled the ‘cybersphere’, now social media sites and connected ‘self managed’ websites dominate.  Where webmasters controlled development of the content of websites for companies large and small, now users have taken over the content management reins.

Right now Facebook, Groupon, Living Social and other relatively new socially oriented sites are making all the news but WordPress is also quietly revolutionizing the net.  And that benefits all of us!

WordPress is a powerful, intuitive, highly customizable and extensible web development technology that is open to and usable by ‘everyone’.  WordPress is ‘Open Source’, and open source is now more than just a credible alternative to mainstream software; it is rapidly becoming ‘the’ mainstream.  The benefits of ‘open source’ are huge.  The development of the product is rapid as so many developers can get involved in its growth, and just as important for the users of ‘open source’; it’s free.

So in a very few years, WordPress has grown from just a blogging platform into what it is today… the best web development environment on the web that incorporates the best of everything else out there.  WordPress is easy to learn but has a depth of features that means users and developers alike will never outgrow it.

A WordPress site is unlike a regular website developed in a product like Dreamweaver or Frontpage in that it is multi layered ‘out of the box’.  There is nothing ‘flat’ about WordPress;  it is ‘cloud based’ and ‘dynamic’ through and through.

With a traditional website, the development environment is installed onto the developer’s computer.  The development software will be the Mac version, or the Windows version, or even the Linux version.  The site will be developed locally and uploaded to the web.  Changes will be made using the software installed on the developer’s computer but only when the developer can get to the project… and that sucks for the company whose website is vital for their business.  They need to be able to make changes, update prices, replace an image or video, replace personnel  or any number of other ‘adjustments’ to their online presence… and they need to do it in real time.

WordPress is an environment that doesn’t care what operating system you use.  It doesn’t care whether you are Mac, Windows or Linux based.  All it cares about is that you have a browser and an Internet connection, because WordPress is not installed onto your computer; it is installed onto your website! So you log into the development environment through your browser.  You update and enhance your site in real time and from anywhere.  You could be sitting on a train and need to update some time sensitive information.  No problem for WordPress.  Just login through your iPad, Netbook, Laptop or Droid phone. It’s that accessible.

WordPress creates a footprint that the search engines are attracted to because whether you have a small brochure site or a massive content oriented eCommerce and Blogging site, the multi layered aspects of WordPress come into play.

Every WordPress website is sitting atop a powerful database (MySQL) that is indexing the content as it’s created and WordPress is signaling the web that new material is available.  WordPress provides you the tools to ensure that the new content gets to the top of the search engines by allowing you to customize what the search engines actually see.

WordPress provides the tools and the environment to create simple websites or extremely complex sites and WordPress is ‘open’; which means that developers can and do create new programs (plugins) that enhance the power of your site without you having to pay substantial fees for that added functionality.  Plugins can do pretty much anything from adding a secure contact form to a simple eCommerce system, from a simple slide show to sophisticated photo galleries.  You want a ‘Yellow Pages’ style directory of all of your associated companies or contractors on your site?  No problem for WordPress as the underlying database handles it with ease.

It doesn’t matter what size of site you want.  It doesn’t matter that you may not need the power of WordPress right now.  What matters is that you want to grow your business and you don’t want to have to recreate your website in a year or two when you business has grown.

WordPress is a ‘social media connected’ technology that will insure you against the future.  It is future proof as it will remain state of the art and upgrade along with all of the changes that are happening in the ‘cybersphere’.  It’s an amazing product that is free and always will be; which is why I call it ‘The Jewel of the Internet’.

Filed Under: Marketing

10 Reasons why WordPress is your Personal Publicity Machine

May 13, 2010 By Christine
  1. Traditional websites were effectively brochures on the web.  They looked nice, had a certain amount of information but were static.  By contrast a WordPress Website and Blog is a living thing.  It is designed from the ground up to radiate ‘I’m here!’ to the search engines, social media sites and blogosphere.  It’s a connected technology that communicates with the world.
  2. WordPress has unlimited capacity to grow.  Unlike traditional websites, WordPress sits on top of a database (MySQL) which handles the web pages and posts, organizes and collates the images, videos, brochures and documents.  It is highly extensible through themes and plugins.There is a development community out there that create add-ons to WordPress enabling it to undertake just about any task.  WordPress is almost infinitely expandable and extendable.  You’ll never outgrow it!
  3. WordPress lives and breathes Search Engine Optimization.  Every page and blog post you create with WordPress is designed to attract attention.The URLs  (page addresses) are editable to provide descriptions of the content on the page.  Where you call a page ‘About Us’, your URL can read‘wordpress-training-consulting-development-blog-writing-seattle’;which offers a stickier phrase for the search engines to catch hold of.Search engines cannot read what is in an image so WordPress gives you many ways to describe an image.  You can create a caption, a pop-up message and a full description so your images become part of the search engine optimized content just as much as your posts themselves.You can add keywords and tags to posts and articles, and those tags get indexed by Google as well as the article title (long description as mentioned above) and content.

    You can create excerpts of your pages and posts.  These are summaries that are picked up by the search engines, are easy to enter and very effective.  The short answer is that WordPress is a great environment if you want your content to be found.

  4. WordPress is a Content Management System where you as a developer, administrator or author can make fast updates to the site.  No longer will you have to wait for your developer or Web Master to change a picture, update some prices or post a new article.  All of that can be done by you.
  5. Dynamic Content, Dynamic Updates, Dynamic Home Page. WordPress can pull in content from different places, feeds and resources; combining it all onto your page or post.  Pages and posts can be scheduled to appear when and where you want them to that your website is always fresh and alive.  Search engines begin to ignore static sites.  There is nothing static about WordPress.
  6. WordPress and Niche Marketing. Chris Anderson’s book ‘The Long Tail’ revealed how niche marketing has become main stream.  Through the unlimited capacity of the Internet… digital marketing and distribution has encouraged niche markets to thrive.The main body of sales comprises the best sellers.  The major retail stores have to hold inventory that has to sell in numbers to justify the cost of the ‘shelf space’ Therefore the market has traditionally limited itself to a relatively restricted number of products; effectively ‘The Hot 100’, The blockbuster, The top 10,000 book titles etc.  But that has all changed.  What ‘The Long Tail’ revealed is that the market is much bigger and more varied than people imagined.  As ‘search’ became more effective than advertising and display, niche products could be offered and found as easily as the latest Lady Gaga CD.  Although individually, sales down the far end of ‘The Long Tail’ may only be in single digits, the combined sales of all of these niches actually rivals that of the best sellers.  The Long Tail is a market of niche products and we can all be part of it.WordPress is the perfect vehicle to develop and promote niche products.  Niche products by their very nature are targeted to small groups.  These groups seek out products and services that are unavailable in local stores but are available online.  And nowadays, the more unique the product, the less competition for search engine key words and phrases.If you have a niche product, a WordPress website and blog is the perfect vehicle to ‘open shop’ to a market searching for you.  Product descriptions, testimonials, blog posts and articles, embedded videos and case studies are all a few clicks away.  Every time a new article or product is posted, the blogosphere and search engines will be ‘pinged’ and the market will grow.
  7. WordPress integrates with Social Media. WordPress is designed to get you up and running fast.  Once you have your products and services on your WordPress website, visitors can interact with you!If you post an article or case study, visitors can leave comments or questions.
    Customer Service becomes transparent and interactive as customers openly discuss good or bad service and you can respond quickly, honestly and directly.

    Social Media links and tags can be incorporated into your posts which makes it just a simple click for a visitor to bookmark an article or offer… or to share that offer with his/her Facebook friends.  The effectiveness of the Social Media Links cannot be over emphasized.  Let’s say you post a case study on how your business resolved a problem for one of your clients.  Soon after someone else has a similar problem and searches a solution.  Your case study pops up and they call you… but not only that; they also share it on their Facebook and click the Twitter link.  That Twitter link gets shared with their 120 followers, a few of whom ReTweet the link to their combined 10,000 followers.

    Because WordPress  makes it so easy to share and integrate with other social media sites, your message can get out there quicker and further than you ever dreamed possible.

  8. The WordPress Dashboard. Developing a traditional website can be a tricky business.  You need to learn a system like Dreamweaver or Frontpage.  You have to know how HTML and FTP works.  But the WordPress dashboard presents you with every tool you need to create an effective website and blog in a clean and intuitive manner without having to be a web developer.The Dashboard features:a.  Blog Posts.  Using the in-built text editor (essentially a word processor with full formatting) you can create posts and articles and allocate them to a sophisticated set of relational categories.b.  Media.  WordPress makes it a breeze to upload images, brochures, PDFs, PowerPoint presentations and more to its media library.  It automatically files these away giving total access for inclusion in your websites and blogs.c.  Links.  Here you can create links to all of your favorite sites or indeed pages within your own site.d.  Pages.  WordPress Pages are created the same way as Posts but are more like traditional web pages; although  they have the bonus of Parent/Child relationships and dynamic content.

    e.  Comments.  Here you can monitor and moderate and respond to the comments visitors have made on your site.

    f.  Appearance.  Comprises a set of tools to change, update and configure the appearance of your side including themes, widgets and more.

    g.  Plugins.  There are thousands of plugins that have been developed to extend the features of WordPress.  These range from simple slide show presentations, contact forms, photo galleries, statistic packages right through to highly sophisticated eCommerce systems.

    h.  Users.  WordPress is multi-user and here you can create new users with varying degrees of access and security.

    i.  Tools.  A set of tools including the facility to import and export your whole WordPress site along with images, video and other content

    j.  Settings.  A complete set of tools to configure your site for the outside world.

  9. The Value of FREE.  Not only is it one of the best web development and blogging systems available on the planet at any price but being free it allows you to experiment and learn without risk.  It allows you to interact and develop without the worry of cost.  The value of free extends way beyond monetary value.  It empowers you to express yourself in an open and expansive way.
  10. Blogging beats Advertising and WordPress excels at blogging.  You can unleash your creative self and if what you have to say is worth hearing, the world will find you and listen.

Filed Under: Blog, WordPress Resources Tagged With: , ,

The Value of FREE

April 14, 2010 By Christine

There is a lot of confusion over social media networking/marketing.  If you partake, are you networking or marketing?  Is Twitter a social media networking site for individuals and social groups or is it used by businesses for marketing.  The same goes for Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Biznik.

The answer is yes to everything.  All of these sites are used and abused by individuals, businesses, pressure groups, politicians and more.  As a tool becomes available it gets used and when it’s ‘free’ it gets used by a lot of people… as it should.

To say ‘No Business Should Be Involved in Online Social Networking’ is just plain wrong.  It should be used in combination with social media marketing.  Biznik (a business oriented social media site) is a prime example of how to combine social media networking WITH social media marketing.

Biznik has the mix of networking and marketing in balance.  Businesses can shamelessly promote and market their latest offerings while benefitting from the SEO that is inherent in the system.  They can write articles that increase the awareness and understanding of the business environment they inhabit.  It is right for businesses to be involved in both social media marketing and networking.  Done right, networking instills trust.

Biznik members (both paying and free) have the opportunity to evaluate other members’ products and services through their promotions and profiles; as well as getting an understanding of the ‘person’ behind the business through their articles and posts.  The benefit extends outside of Biznik too.  You don’t have to be a member to find a product or service that is on offer through the Biznik environment. Just go to Google/Yahoo/Bing and search for what you’re looking for.  If a Biznik member has written about it in an article, their profile, promotion, event or post… chances are it’ll be on the first page of search results.

Bizniks are encouraged to hold networking events and workshops, both physical and virtual (online).  Hundreds of Bizniks meet every week in coffee shops, hotels, meeting rooms, convention centers and in ‘the cloud’ (webinars, chat rooms, conference calls, Instant Messages and more).

Many people (including me) have 2 Facebook accounts; one primarily for family and friends and the other for business connections.  Just because Facebook is the number one social media site doesn’t prevent it from being used for business. You cannot ignore the vast communities that have grown out of these environments.

The same holds true for virtual online worlds.  Take ‘Second Life’ for example.  Second Life is an online game where you create an avatar (a virtual representation of yourself) and wander around a virtual world making friends and interacting with others.  You can earn virtual money and engage in business activities.  That virtual money can be exchanged for real money but can also buy online (virtual) products and services.

Second Life is a virtual world built around social networking and big business has gotten involved big time.  Major companies have bought virtual real estate and ‘set up shop’ in this virtual world.  Reporters wander around interviewing virtual people; Dell, IBM and others have virtual office buildings and stores.  In the world of FREE, there’s always business and networking ensues.

The great thing about FREE is that there is no risk.  If it doesn’t work what have you lost?  You try it but understand what you’re doing but good content and participation is vital.  The old maxim of garbage in / garbage out still applies.

Marketing has shifted focus considerably over the past few years. There are plenty of business people who were marketing their services effectively but are now finding the effectiveness of that marketing has diminished due to the nature of the researching and buying habits of modern customers.

Those business people who ignore (or are unaware of) promoting their services through interactive online communities will find that what they knew about marketing has lost a large degree of relevance. An advert in yellow pages says a whole lot less than a well written blog post with a series on comments from happy customers.

The business owner has to, as never before, think like his customer. What is the customer searching for, where is he searching, how is he making his buying decision and what are his existing customers saying about him.

Google has created a multibillion dollar company built around FREE.  It has huge data centers around the country constantly scanning for new content; indexing and updating its results so that you can type in what you’re looking for and have results immediately presented.  You can choose from sponsored links and search results.  You can click on a website or a blog post and more often than not, will see Google Ads appears that are relevant to the search results.  You need to be part of those results… and the social media / blogging environment is the best way to get there.

The good news is that all of this technology to get you noticed is free.  Biznik, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg etc are all free.  You can often upgrade your membership and get additional features but at the very least you have to be part of them.  They have SEO clout by their expertise and sheer presence on the web which in turn gives you additional clout.  Develop good content, regularly update and you’ll move up the search engine ladder.  Network and market well and you’ll continue up.

So do those 15 to 60 minutes per day actually turn into business?  You bet they do.  Just think how Google and Yahoo have changed the whole business map.  Who really goes to the yellow pages or buys from TV ads anymore and who will in the future?

The next generation business community will comprise of social media participants with iPhones, iPads, Netbooks, Apps and Smartphones who will search and buy, network and market using what to them is just free and available!

Just think about what Craig’s List has done to the newspaper classified ads business. You need something for you home, or you need a job… go to Craig’s List… you don’t buy a newspaper anymore or place a classified ad.  You go to Craig’s List.  And Craig’s List is free.

Free is a multibillion dollar that is growing every day.  Free generates income from a small percentage of people who buy products and services related to the free offer, directly or indirectly.

So whether you want to pay for the service or go for the free option, the key is get participate now.  The world is changing fast and as both a consumer and provider, you have to get on the social media bandwagon.

Filed Under: Articles

Recession Management with CRM Software

March 22, 2010 By Christine

Despite the pressures of an economic recession this year, along with indicators reporting technology spending taking a downturn, the market for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is expected to continue steady growth. One of the reasons for this is that a CRM system can be a valuable tool for companies to leverage to turn the trend.

In a recession, CRM can be viewed as a Company Recession Management tool, providing ways for companies to guard against the typical pitfalls of recessionary thinking. In fact, the value of CRM has recently been proven by AMI-Partners, a research firm specializing in market intelligence for small and medium-sized businesses. Their research shows that companies with CRM systems out-perform those that don’t by over 140% higher revenue per employee. With this level of performance, CRM is clearly a must-have during a recession to get more out of every staff person.

Our research and case studies reveal exactly the same as the market research so to illustrate this I’m going to describe the experiences through one of our CRM clients.

Our client, which I refer to as XYZ Corp, had a good business but was running their prospect to client processes through a series of Excel Spreadsheets, a homemade Access database, Large White Board, Outlook and Paper Forms.  It worked up to a point but failed miserably when it came to managing the relationship and following up.  The system even managed to lose track of jobs resulting in forgetting to invoice.

We came in and backed up their entire system.  We exported everything we could out of the Access Database and Spreadsheets, and then installed the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system.  Next step was to import all of that data into the CRM system and create a system to manage it.

We created relevant User Defined Fields so that every prospect could be ‘profiled’ correctly.  So in addition to collecting Name and Address, Phone Number etc, we also entered details of: Service Required, Date of Inquiry, Source of Inquiry (Web, Word of Mouth, Yellow Pages etc), Sales Representative, Detailed Description of Job, Special Instructions, Date Job Required and a more… Every inquiry, every prospect became a potential customer whose relationship was going to be managed.

Once the details had been taken, often a site visit would be scheduled.  This would simply involve a mouse click in the CRM system to match a scheduled time for the prospect with the appropriate XYZ Corp representative.  The CRM system manages the schedules of all Staff Members and as well Company Resources.  A Company Resource can be a Board Room, Vehicle Work Bay, Computer or anything else that can be booked or time/service allocated.

The next step was to send out a quotation.  This would go directly from the CRM system, and a copy would automatically be saved to the Prospects CRM record.  At this stage an Activity Plan would be activated to ensure that follow up was scheduled.  This could be that an email was sent 2 days after the quotation, followed by a phone call.  A week later and information package could be sent by mail.  The CRM system automatically scheduled all of these events to take place.

Incorporating this practice saw immediate results.  More prospects were turning into clients but we wanted more.  So if a prospect hadn’t ordered after 30 days despite the follow up and nurturing, the CRM system would flag these prospects for a Special Offer.  This offer usually took the form of a letter which regretted that XYZ Corp had not managed to win their business for whatever reason, so perhaps they would like to go onto a special Standby Program whereby if they made use of the service with 48 hours notice, an additional discount of say 25% could be offered.  This pulled more of the prospects in!

By taking meticulous details of the prospects from First Contact, we were able to analyze key data such as where the leads were coming from.  With the click of a mouse, XYZ Corp was able to see the Return on Investment from General Advertizing, Networking, Direct Marketing, Bill Boards, Advertizing on Buses, Sign Writing on Vans and more.

At the end of first month after installing the system, we looked at their Prospect to Customer conversion ratios and then did the same after 12 months.  The figures speak for themselves.

Month 1:

  • Total Inquiries:  111417.61
  • Total Unconverted Inquiries: 79151.61
  • Total Orders: 32266.22
  • Percentage of Converted Inquiries:  28.96%

Month 13:

  • Total Inquiries:  99302.01
  • Total Unconverted Inquiries: 44875.34
  • Total Orders: 54426.67
  • Percentage of Converted Inquiries:  54.81%

The automated follow up processes definitely secured more business but invaluable data was also being stored.  XYZ Corp began to understand its customers much better.  If there were any Customer Service issues, the Customer Service Rep. had the whole relationship in front of them through the CRM system.  They could see every communication, what products or services were purchased, how much was paid for them, who sold them, what add on products were bought, which fitters/technicians provided the service and so on.

The key to long term relationships with your customers is to know them well and provide excellent service.  CRM systems are available to all businesses, large and small.  Companies that are not utilizing CRM Software are losing business.  Period.

Filed Under: Customer Relationship Management Tagged With: , ,

Maximizing Profit through CRM and Networking

March 22, 2010 By Christine

Although the term CRM is now synonymous with software it is a concept that has been utilized for decades by companies that operate customer centric policies.  It basically involves the processes and methodologies employed in managing the relationships between the company and the customer.

Customers are fickle creatures. They want to be looked after, nurtured, and made to feel special.  A typical customer’s basic instinct is to be loyal.  It’s like any relationship.  It may not be everything you want but it’s familiar and comfortable.  But just like a relationship, if you ignore and neglect your customers, they may get a roving eye… and your competitors are always out there trying to snap them up.

If you only have a few customers, it’s possible to remember and manage them with a minimum of technology.  Provide a good service, keep track of their orders, call them every now and again to see that they’re happy, send them thank you cards and so on.  That’s effectively customer relationship management.

But what if you have ten customers, fifty?  Will you remember every aspect of every transaction?  Will you remember to follow up on every call?

The purpose of CRM software is to enable you to manage multiple customers personally.  To automate processes that ‘touch’ your customers on a regular basis and then to remember every instance of every conversation, email, appointment, or transaction of any kind.  All of these transactions are stored directly in your customer’s unique record so that your total relationship with that customer is always available.

Good CRM systems feature ‘Activity Managers’, which can automatically create a sequence of tasks and events.

Let’s say you meet a bunch of people at an event who express an interest in your service.  You’ll enter them into the CRM system and then apply an ‘Activity’ from the Activity Manager Library.  A typical activity (series of tasks and events to be posted to the client’s record) would be:

  1. Do immediately:  Send an email to express how happy you were to meet the person
  2. In 1 day:  Send a flyer or brochure of your services by mail
  3. In 3 days:  Make a phone call to reconnect and confirm that your flyer was received and is there anything more you can do at this time.
  4. In 10 days:  Send eNewsletter (and add to monthly newsletter mailing list)
  5. In 21 days:  Invite to your own network meeting
  6. And so on…

Multiple activities can be created and applied to existing customers, new prospects, network partners or anyone else in your database.  The whole series of events is immediately applied to the customer record and the system updates all the relevant task lists, to-dos and appointment schedulers.

No matter how many customers or prospects you have, the CRM system will be managing the relationship, sending out reminders and thank you cards, scheduling phone calls, remembering renewal dates and so much more.  And all of these events and transactions will be neatly filed against the individual customer records.

Good CRM systems offer full synchronization with portable devices like your PDA, Blackberry, iPhone or Windows Mobile device.  Synchronization works both ways so that if you’re at a meeting and enter an appointment into your Blackberry, it will synchronize and update your CRM system.  If you constantly use Microsoft Outlook to schedule appointments, then it too joins the party and synchronization becomes a 3 way process.

CRM software has evolved over the years to accommodate new technologies and methodologies.  It used to be the preserve of big companies but nowadays, highly intuitive but hugely powerful systems are affordable by the smallest of businesses.

In my experience, a fully utilized CRM system typically increases business by over 30% because it encourages you to treat your customers the way they expect.  Where, in the past, you may have neglected to follow up, thank, send out renewal applications, cross sale and up sale notifications, special offers, anniversary cards, newsletters and so on, your CRM system will methodically churn out personalized materials and your customers will continue to love you and do business with you.

CRM software has become an incredibly important category.  How well you know your customer will determine how much business he or she will do with you.  As Sir Francis Bacon once said, “Knowledge is Power”.  That knowledge can be contained in your CRM system.

Filed Under: Customer Relationship Management

Marketing is not just American for selling!

March 22, 2010 By Christine

When I went to marketing school, one of the first lessons concerned the circus coming to town.  It’s a great story!

If the circus is coming to town and you paint a sign saying, “Circus is coming to Fairgrounds Sunday,” that’s Advertising. If you put the sign on the back of an elephant and walk him through town, that’s a Promotion. If the elephant walks through the Mayor’s flower bed, that’s Publicity. If you can get the Mayor to laugh about it, that’s Public Relations. And, if you planned the whole thing, that’s Marketing!–Author Unknown

Times have changed but the principal remains the same.  In a Web 2.0 world, you still need to advertise, promote, publicize, and do your PR but there are new tools AND new challenges out there!

I’m sure you’ve heard the expression “you only get one chance at a first impression” but that warning should be doubly heeded in business.  Let’s say you’re going to a BizNik network meeting to promote your new business to a room full of BizNiks.  You’re a little short on funds, so you decide to get your nephew (who knows a bit about computers) to create some business cards for you.  He can use a template on Microsoft Publisher and print them on your inkjet printer.

You know you should have a website so you Google search to find a hosting company that’ll register and host your site for next to nothing and has tools to build the site in under an hour.  Great! So that’s what you do and you’re on the web!

You have your details and email address on your business card:

Email:  tommyljonesenterprises@hotmail.com.
Website: www.tommyljonesenterprises.com. 

So off you go to network, talk about your business and hand out your cards.

1.      Your business card is obviously home made because the ink ran when a drop of coffee splashed on it.

2.      You’ve gone for a free email account because it’s easy to setup and costs nothing but says nothing about your business but too much about you.

3.      Your point and click website is bland and formulaic.  It says little about what you really do but says an awful lot about what you don’t do!

Every business, whether small are large, has to portray its identity. If you hand out business cards that look like you designed and printed them yourself, what does that say to your potential customers? Is that how you’ll work for them?

The moral of that story is be professional at what you do best and get professionals to work on your behalf with the other stuff.  Your amateur ‘first impression’ will linger long after you come to your senses and present yourself professionally.

Preparation, Preparation, Preparation.

Don’t waste that first impression!  When it’s gone, it’s gone!

Marketing is about creating a comfortable and reassuring environment for your potential customers.  Once you achieve that, your products and services will sell themselves.

We don’t all have access to an elephant to parade through town but we can all create our own mix of marketing components.  The following details how to get your show on the road!

1.      A comprehensive website that is tailored to your services and clearly addresses the needs of your potential customers.  It should have a clear navigation system with easy access to what you do.  Contacting you should be just one click away.

2.      A website video.  No amount of text compares to actually seeing you.  Many potential customers will prefer ‘check you out’ before actually meeting you face to face… so why not let them meet you through a video on your website?  You can say a lot in 2 minutes about what you do and who you are.  Once you have the video, link it to your BizNik profile, create a YouTube page, put it on MySpace… then link it all together.

3.      A consistent business identity is essential.  Wherever your name appears, it should be consistent with other materials.  You should have a recognizable logo which appears on all of your marketing materials; website, truck, store front or forehead sticker! (ok forget the sticker)

4.      High quality business stationery.  Everything you pass out should be professional.  It shows intent to your customers and it reflects on you.

5.      Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software. You cannot hope to remember everyone you meet so when you get a business card,  enter it into a system that will remember for you.  Follow up is vital in the marketing process.  A good CRM program allows you to keep track of all your customers, prospects, appointments, tasks, emails, and events.  It will also synchronize directly with you Blackberry, iPhone or Windows Mobile device.That gives you real time access to marketing ‘intelligence’.

6.      Get some marketing training.  Marketing is about the mix  of events.  Remember the circus story and you’ll realize that marketing is not just an American term for selling.

One final tip.  Nothing beats word of mouth marketing.  Impress someone and they’ll tell a couple of people.  Appear unprofessional and provide a bad service – they’ll tell everyone they know!

Filed Under: Marketing

WordPress 101 – Part 5 – SEO

March 22, 2010 By Christine

It’s great to have a WordPress website but in order to make it really work for you, you have to get found and that’s where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in.

In developing your website with WordPress you have already made great strides in getting noticed because WordPress is built from the ground up to be found.  Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo love WordPress sites.

So what can you do to enhance your visibility?

First thing to do is make sure you have a good theme.  There are thousands of themes available free of charge and some are very good but some are not.  Even the really good ones are sometimes badly supported or not optimized for the search engines.  My recommendation is to go for a tried and trusted premium theme.  They cost from $40 to $100 but its money well spent if the design works, can be customized, is well supported and is designed with SEO in mind.  Remember, your website is your shop window to the world and you only get once chance at a first impression.

Of the free themes that are customizable and have good SEO, I would recommend taking a look at the ‘Pixel’ theme or ‘Painter’.  There are many popular premium themes like ‘Thesis’ which are well supported with forums where users can discuss development, plugins and customization.  My favorite themes are those from StudioPress as they cover all of the prerequisites for support, customization and Search Engine Optimization as well as having an excellent support forum.

Every time you update WordPress or add a new blog post, it sends out a signal (Ping) to the search engines.  By default WordPress should be set to Ping but it’s worth checking that Pinging is switched on.  You’ll find a sub-menu (within the Settings menu) called ‘Discussions’ in your WordPress Dashboard.  You should ensure that the ‘Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.) ’ option is checked.  If you do not wish to have specific articles or posts ‘pinged’ then you can override this option on individual posts.

Permalinks

Just about the most important aspect of searching is what’s displayed in the web page or post URL (URL = address of the page or post).  You want it to be descriptive and reflect what people are searching for.

By default WordPress displays categories, pages and posts in a database oriented way.  For example, you might have created a page called ‘Healthy Recipes’ but when you see the URL in your web browser it will show something like:

http://www.myhealthydomain.com/?page_id=662

The same goes for posts and categories.  You might blog about a particular nutritionist and title your post ‘meet Mavis Stewart’ only for the URL to show:

http://www. myhealthydomain.com /?p=2406

This does not help the search engines to find these pages and posts so we need to change the settings in Permlinks.

From the Settings menu in your WordPress dashboard, goto Permalinks.

You’ll see a list of Common Settings.

The default is something like:

http://www.myhealthydomain/?p=123

There are various options but I like ‘Month and name’ which looks something like:

http://www. myhealthydomain.com/2010/03/sample-post

You’ll see under Custom Structure that you can create your own parameters but for SEO the month and name option is perfect.

You’ll see that instead of the page ID there is something that is far more descriptive… and that is the ‘slug’.

Pages, posts and categories automatically have slugs created for them but you can override those slugs with your own more descriptive variety.  So we’ll look at ‘slugs’ (I hope you’re not squeamish).

Let’s go edit the Healthy Recipes page.

You can change Permlinks / Slugs either by editing the Page or Post or using the Quick Edit function.  We’ll choose Edit.

You’ll notice at the top of the page, just under the page title, it shows something like:

- Using default Permalink settings:

Permalink: http://www.myhealthydomain.com/?page_id=662 [Change Permalinks]

- Using Month and name Permalink settings:

Permalink: http://www.myhealthydomain.com/healthy-recipes [Edit]

By changing the Permalinks to ‘Month and name’, the URL already looks more friendly to the search engines.  You can glean a lot more from ‘healthy-recipes’ than you can from page_id=662… but of course you can be even more descriptive.

Click on [Edit]

This opens up the ‘slug’ for editing. Instead of ‘healthy-recipes’, let’s change it to ‘healthy organic vegetarian recipes’. Then click OK.  You’ll notice that WordPress automatically replaces the spaces between the words with a hyphen.

Let’s do the same with the example post.

By changing the Permalink settings, the URL for ‘Meet Mavis Stewart’ will have changed from:

‘http://www. myhealthydomain.com /?p=2406 to:

http://www. myhealthydomain.com /meet-mavis-stewart

Edit the Permlink to something like ‘nutrition-for-health-and-wellness-mavis-stewart-bio’

Remember, what you’re looking to achieve is to emulate what your potential visitors will be search for.  The Search Engines know that people don’t search for ‘meet mavis stewart’ but might be looking for nutrition for health and wellness.  It’s your job to be creative with the page and post slugs.

Once you have the right Theme and your Permalinks and Slugs are in order, then it’s time to start Blogging.  Search Engines love blogs and are constantly crawling the web for new content.  Blog posts get found fast.

As you will have read in earlier articles, Pages are for static information like About Us, Mission Statement, Contact Us etc., whereas Posts are for dynamic information… articles, travel-logs, knowledge bases and more… information that is always changing, growing and evolving.  Posts are organized in Categories.  See article on Posts and Categories to learn how to best organize them.

Once you have written your blog post or article, re-read it.  If you’re using dynamic content within the post, ensure that the links are active. For example, you may be embedding a video from YouTube into your post.  If that video is not yours, check regularly to ensure it’s still active otherwise broken links will start to creep into your site.  Bad news for SEO.

Use Keywords in your Post titles and within the articles themselves but remember to use phrases too.  Many visitors will search for a product or service by description and location, so when you blog, ensure that you include all the keywords and phrases that make your post attractive to the search engines.

You might write an article about local Farmer’s Markets.  Include descriptive phrases and keywords so that people looking for say a (Farmer’s Market in Springfield, Ohio specializing in organic produce or preservative free / hormone free milk), will find your article.  Title your posts well and constantly check that all pages and posts are working.

When you’re actually editing or writing a blog/post always use the ‘Excerpt’ feature below the post itself.  This is a way to describe or summarize your post.  Don’t just take a paragraph from the post itself as search engines don’t like seeing the same content repeated.  Write something unique for them to find.

Link to other sites and get other sites linking to you.  If you are discussing a specific topic (like farmer’s markets), put a link to external farmer’s market resources or a Wikipedia article.

You can further optimize blog posts using SEO plugins.  I recommend ‘all in one SEO pack’ which can be downloaded from the WordPress.org resource site.  Goto to their Extend menu, then plugins and search for SEO.  This plugin allow you to optimize every post as though it were a unique website.

WordPress features a Blogroll or Links menu.  This will be discussed in a future article but it allows you to create a menu to link with other sites.  You should use this and get other site to link to you in return.

There is a lot more you can do to enhance your visibility which will be dealt with in a future (advanced) article but if you carry out these fairly simple processes, you’ll be amazed at the difference it makes.

Filed Under: WordPress Tutorials

WordPress – Opening the Floodgates to the Open Source Revolution

March 4, 2010 By Christine

The thing about WordPress (and other open source products) is that we’re still just scratching the surface of a wave that is changing the world.  Open source software and the whole ‘cloud computing’ paradigm are having a profound effect on the industry.

Open source software is now more than just a credible alternative to mainstream software; it is rapidly becoming ‘the’ mainstream.  Budgets have taken a massive beating and for many, developing a website, hiring a graphic designer, buying Adobe Creative Suite or investing in any other commercially available technology has become just too expensive and too darned complicated.  But open source software answers all of these issues because it’s powerful, intuitive and ‘free’… and how can you compete with free?

WordPress is at the forefront of the ‘open source’ revolution because it epitomizes all that ‘open source’ stands for.  It empowers anyone to become a true part of the social media phenomenon.  With WordPress, you can develop a fantastic website and blog; you can maintain it yourself, you can accommodate many contributors and vast quantities of materials; you can incorporate or share with an amazing assortment of social media sites such as Facebook, Biznik, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter and more.  You become part of a global community that is expanding every day.

By utilizing WordPress, and 3 additional open source products, anyone with a little training and a lot of enthusiasm can get online with a site that they couldn’t have dreamed of just a few short years ago.  The combination of WordPress, NVU (for HTML), Gimp (for graphics) and Filezilla (for transferring files) is a one stop shop to building professional, multi-user, multimedia websites and blog without any develop costs.  And for many, WordPress and a well chosen theme is all they need.

You have to understand that WordPress is not just a ‘free’ alternative to the commercial products.  It may be free but it is way better than just about anything available; which is why it is so widely used by major corporations and government bodies alike.  ‘Paradigm shift’ is an overused term nowadays but it is completely apt for what’s happening in the whole ‘cloud computing’ / ‘WordPress’ development culture.

The individual is empowered like never before because he or she has access to exactly the same tools as the richest of companies.  And when the penny truly drops, books, training, consulting and ancillary services will sell by the bucket load because the only cost in getting online (for websites, blogs, databases, eCommerce systems and much more) will be the cost of learning.

From my experience, many total novices learn enough in just a few hours to appreciate that by using WordPress, they can be empowered to do something that they would have previous thought of as ‘extra-ordinary’.

The acceptance and integration of Open Source software and WordPress into mainstream business is becoming more significant every day. Hundreds of millions, if not billions of instances will find their way onto people’s browsers.  Cloud computing (viewing and processing through a browser) opens the door to everyone.  It doesn’t matter whether they are using a Windows laptop in a coffee shop in Seattle, a MacBook in a glass office block in San Francisco or a Linux netbook in Nigeria.  They all access the web, have equal access to WordPress and can benefit from all that free ‘open source’ software offers them.  All they need is a way to learn how to use it.

Filed Under: Open Source

WordPress 101 – Part 4

March 3, 2010 By Christine

Video is everywhere on the web.  There are a number of video sharing sites that allow you to upload video and share with the rest of the world.  The most popular of these sites include YouTube, Viddler and Vimeo, of which YouTube is by far the most visited.

WordPress has a number of facilities that allow you to incorporate video into your site but it really makes sense to upload your video to a sharing site then embed the video into your site.

There are many advantages in using YouTube to host your video.  For one thing, it has huge search engine magnetism.  You can search from within or from outside YouTube and if you’ve described your video well, you should get found.  Another benefit is that it converts many video formats into the most popular format on the web… namely ‘Flash’.  When you take a video, whether it’s from your cam-corder, digital camera or smart phone, it will save the video in a particular format.  That might be an .AVI file or an MP4 but when you upload to YouTube (and the upload process is very simple) it converts to ‘Flash’.

Once uploaded, your video can be shared with the millions of people who visit every day.  But a feature that you may not be aware of is that once uploaded, your video (and pretty much any other video on YouTube) can be embedded directly into your website.  And it’s fully legal.

Let’s visit www.youtube.com and search for a video that’s already online.  Dilbert is a popular ‘strip cartoon’ that parodies the workplace so once on YouTube, search for ‘Dilbert Internet’.

You’ll see an amusing ‘video’ which you might like to share.

There are 2 ways to embed a video from YouTube into a WordPress Page or Post.

The first involves copying the ‘embedded’ code; which we’ll describe first so you’ll see how the process works.

Most of the video sharing sites have an ‘embed’ option to embed the code of the video onto another site.  With YouTube, this is on the right of the video itself.

The code will look like this…

<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/JoU9GrgEyhw&amp;amp;hl=en_US&amp;amp;fs=1&amp;amp;”&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/param&amp;gt;&amp;lt;param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/JoU9GrgEyhw&amp;amp;hl=en_US&amp;amp;fs=1&amp;amp;” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>

You’ll see that the code includes the size of the video; which can be adjusted for the area you wish to place the video.  Changing the width and height adjusts the size of the video displayed.

So, copy that piece of code and head back to your WordPress Dashboard.

In Article 1, we created a Page called Philosophy… so let’s edit that page now.

You’ll see that you have 2 tabs on the top of each page… First tab is labeled ‘Visual’ and second tab is ‘HTML’.  We want to paste the code we copied from YouTube into the HTML tab.

Once open, scroll down to the bottom of the HTML page and paste the code in.  Now click onto the Visual tab and you’ll see that a video placeholder shows where the video will display and the size of the video.  Click on Update (or Publish if you are creating this page now).

Check out the page live and you’ll see the video you just viewed on YouTube, live in your page.  It’s actually still be hosted and played on YouTube but displayed through your WordPress page.

The second way to embed that video into your WordPress Page or Post is simpler but actually does the exact same thing.

Go back to the YouTube page and you’ll see above where you grabbed the Embedded Code, there is an option to copy the URL (or address of the video).  Click in the text box that displays the URL, highlight the text and copy it.  It will look something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoU9GrgEyhw.

Now go back to your WordPress Dashboard and create a new Page or Post.  On the second line of the icon bars, you’ll see a button showing a strip of film.  This is the ‘insert/edit embedded media’ button.  Click the button and a popup window will appear.

From the popup window:

  • Type = Flash
  • File/URL (Paste URL that you copied from YouTube)

Dimensions should automatically appear although you can manually adjust them.  The ‘constrain proportions’ check box will keep the aspect ratio of the video intact should you wish to resize the video.  Change either Height or Width of the video and the other will adjust automatically.

You’ll know it works when you see a preview of the video in the popup window.

Click the ‘Insert’ button and it’ll appear in your Page or Post.

It really is simple to create a video to introduce your business or to just upload a family video.  YouTube makes it easy to upload and share, and WordPress makes it easy to include directly into your website and blog.

Videos can also be displayed in the side bars on your WordPress site by embedding the code into Text Widgets.  Widgets are the subject of my next article.

Filed Under: WordPress Tutorials

WordPress 101 – Part 3

March 3, 2010 By Christine

Posts and Pages make up most of the content in WordPress. If you’re wondering how you add content to the side panels, headers, footers then stayed tuned for the next article on Widgets. So in Article One, we created a series of Pages which would hold the static content of our site. We also learned how to upload and insert a picture into a page. The next step is to make pages actually do something more than just show pictures and information, so let’s go back to the ‘Contact Us’ Page.

Open your WordPress Dashboard Menu and click Pages. The Pages we created previously should be listed. If you haven’t done so already, create a Page called ‘Contact Us’. Otherwise just click on the Edit option for the ‘Contact Us’ Page.

Let’s list a few ways to make contact so start by thanking your visitor for his or her interest.

Type:

“Thank you for your interest in our services. You can contact us in a numbers of ways.

By phone: (555) 972 5555

By fax: (866) 555 9722

By email: info@mydomain.com”

Now it might be that we would like to create a link on the email address so that by clicking on that link, the visitor’s email client will automatically load. To do this, highlight the text of the email address. When you do that, you’ll notice that a couple of the icons (buttons) on the main icon bar become focused. These are the Insert/Edit Link and Unlink buttons. So now, with the email address highlighted, click on the Insert/Edit Link icon. A popup window will appear requesting a Link URL. If you were just linking another page to this page, you would go with the “http://” prefix as is defaulted in the popup. But for email addresses, you should prefix with ‘mailto:’… so where you see :http://” in the ‘Link URL’ box, replace that with ‘mailto:info@mydomain.com’. At this time, don’t change anything else in the popup. Click the Insert button to activate that link.

Once you have completed updating your ‘Contact Us’ page, click the ‘Update’ button (or Publish button if you’re creating this page for the first time) to publish your contact page.

Once published. Check the page in a live browser window to see how the page looks and behaves. Clicking on the email address should launch your default email client.

Now for many websites, a contact form is a preferred choice to just entering an email address… and with a little add-in called a ‘Plugin’, WordPress makes this so easy, ‘even a caveman could do it’. And with WordPress you can definitely save 15% (100%?) or more over traditional websites.

Plugins are little programs or files that enhance or add to the functionality of WordPress. There are thousands of them and most of them are free. Visit www.wordpress.org then go to the Extend section… you’ll see a menu that gives you access to all the ‘plugins’ (and ‘themes’ for that matter). We’re going to look for a ‘Contact Form’ plugin. My personal favorite, for its functionality and simplicity of use, is called ‘Contact Form 7’… so from the ‘Plugins Menu’ on the WordPress.org site, search for ‘Contact Form 7’. Select it and download it.

Note: There are several ways to find and install Plugins but my preference is to download them to a ‘plugins’ folder so that I can keep a library of my favorites for future use. Plugins download in a ‘zipped’ format and also get installed that way.

Once downloaded, go back to your WordPress Dashboard and you’ll see a menu choice ‘Add New’ on the Plugins Menu. Click on ‘Add New’.

You will see the ‘Install Plugins’ menu in the WordPress main window. Select ‘upload’.

Browse to where you downloaded the plugin, select it and click ‘install now’.

Once installed, click ‘Activate’.

Most plugins create a link that will take you to the website of the ‘plugin’ creator. There you’ll find full instructions on how to use the plugin. Many also create a new menu choice on the Dashboard. Contact Form 7 creates a mini ‘control panel’ for the plugin in the Tools Menu. So before integrating this contact form into your ‘Contact Us’ page, let’s visit the ‘Contact Form 7’ page in the Dashboard ‘Tools’ menu.

You’ll see at the top of the page a snippet of code to paste onto your page or post. Under that is a page of ‘code’ that creates the contact form ‘fields’ (the information you want to gather from your site visitor), and under that you can insert the email address where you’d like the completed contact form results to be sent.

For now, just copy that snippet of code from the top of the page. The code is actually ‘

Your Name (required)

Your Email (required)

Subject

Your Message

’. Now go back to Pages and click ‘Edit’ to edit the ‘Contact Us’ page.

You should have already entered some contact information so under that, enter some additional text:

“Please complete the following form and we will get back to you as soon as possible”.

Now paste that snippet of code:

Your Name (required)

Your Email (required)

Subject

Your Message

.

Click ‘Update’ to update the page.

Now try going ‘live’ and check out the form. Fill out the details of the form and click ‘Send’. You should now be receiving an email from yourself.

Thousands of Plugins are available and can extend WordPress in a multitude of ways. There are Plugins for slideshows, photo galleries, eCommerce, Paypal, and much more more. We’ll be going into greater depth on Plugins in a future article.

Filed Under: WordPress Tutorials
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