WordPress Training Expert

Author: WP Training Expert

  • Using Flash Lite To Power Your Ads

    When most people think of advertising, they tend to think in more traditional terms of the word. This is natural, given that technology has advanced very rapidly in the past ten years, and most people can’t keep up with it as much as they’d like. While this technological advance has been going on, however, some things have remained constant in the world of advertising. Television ads and radio ads, for example, have remained as a staple of advertising throughout all the technological upheaval that the last twenty years have been. Aside from film and video quality getting better, the actual tenants of the advertising itself have been the same.

    However, when it comes to mobile marketing, it’s more important than ever to think outside of the box; given how new all the technology is that surrounds these devices. When people think “mobile marketing,” they often spend a lot of time wondering the best ways to convert traditional means of advertising onto a mobile format. While this certainly has its place and has been done with great gusto – the upswing in mobile commercials is proof enough of that – there are other ways to advertise specifically to mobile phones that don’t translate over into other devices.

    Flash Lite content advertising is one way of doing just that. You might be familiar with the program Flash that creates animations for computers – Flash Lite is the mobile form of this art. What many companies are finding great success in is using Flash Lite to create animated wallpapers and screensavers for mobile devices and using these to market their products and services.

    Flash Lite content advertising is a great place for startups to begin if they’d like to make a foray into mobile advertising but don’t have millions of dollars to spend on some of the more complex ways of doing so. A Flash Lite animation might cost a couple hundred dollars to produce, but then can be handed out to customers over and over again. Most who work with Flash Lite content advertising say that it’s one of the most cost-effective versions of mobile marketing that is available right now.

    Also, consumers are much more likely to enjoy having animated background on their mobile phones as compared to their desktop or laptop computers. Cell phones are still seen more as entertainment devices as anything else and consumers are more forgiving toward devices and apps that might be seen as “distracting” by computer users.

    So in the event that you are a startup company looking to enter into mobile marketing but you don’t have a limitless budget, consider looking into Flash Lite advertising. It’s a great place to start with mobile marketing that won’t break your wallet.

  • Internet Advertising For Your Business To Stay On Top

    If you have a business of your own, or you are just interested in making money online, then you need to advertise online. Perhaps you have been online searching for information on how to do just that, and you are overwhelmed by all of the choices. All of those options can be a good thing, or a bad thing. They’re bad if they make you confused and keep you from taking action. They’re good because they can fit in with virtually any business. Here are some things to keep in mind about internet advertising.

    What a lot of new marketers don’t understand is that traditional advertising can be quite expensive. So, when they are confronted with something that costs $20 or so, and can reach 1,000s of targeted customers, they balk at the price. Perhaps this is because they believe that all online marketing should be free. But the truth is that it isn’t.

    Don’t get me wrong, you can certainly get started with internet advertising for little to no cost. But the price you pay will be in the form of time. It’s up to you if you would rather spend money or time, but the general rule of thumb is that the more you spend, the less time it will take, and vice-versa.

    Internet advertising is flexible enough to fit into any budget, and you don’t need to invest a lot of time either, though there are always trade offs between the two. With so many choices, it can be hard to decide where to start. Guess what? It doesn’t really matter! Nope. It’s far better to get started and try your hand at it, than it is to wait around until you “learn everything”.

    That being said, it’s still important to take your online marketing efforts seriously. Sure, it doesn’t cost much, and is relatively easy, but you are trying to run a successful business. Therefore, you need to treat all aspects of what you do as if they will have an impact on your bottom line, and internet advertising is no exception.

    You need to be careful about which methods you try, especially when you are just starting out. There really aren’t any bad methods, but not all of them work well for all businesses. So, before you dive in head first, think about who your target market is, what makes your offer unique, and the best way to present your offer to your market. Doing these three things are just the start, but they will put you way ahead of all of the people who don’t do them.

    Regardless of which internet advertising methods you decide to go with, the key is to get started as soon as possible. Start now if you can. The sooner you get in, the sooner you will be able to reap the rewards of your efforts. If you ask those who are successful online, they will tell you one of the biggest differences between failure and success is taking action. What you do now will determine the future of your business.

  • Best Online Marketing Strategies Exposed

    Whether you are are all on your own or you own a big internet business, you will need to find the best online marketing strategy for your business. There are various elements to putting together an effective marketing plan. If you can do it yourself, great, but if you think you need some help hire a company to do the work for you.

    There are a lot of issues you need to keep track of in order to have your online business be profitable. Things like creating an effective marketing funnel and choosing the right product or service to sell.

    But the one biggest thing you have to do to have a successful online business is to use multiple sources of traffic generation to drive traffic to your website. This traffic will be your customers. No business, online or off, can survive if they don’t have plenty of customers.

    One of the first things you need to learn is that when it comes to traffic online you will need quantity and quality. For these purposes, quality means finding people who love the product or service that you are selling and who are actually willing to spend money on it.

    If you can get enough qualified people to your website it is like shooting fish in a barrel. Putting your offer in front of those people who are looking for your offer is about as easy as it gets.

    But how do you get the traffic to your site? With hundreds of various options to use to get traffic which one do you choose to do? For most people starting with some free online traffic generating methods is the best way to go.

    Simple things like search engine optimization and article marketing are great ways to get started. They are easy to learn, don’t take a lot of time to do and they are free.

    As your business progresses it’s pretty common to add other forms of traffic generation, some paid and some free. At this point you may also decide that your time is better served elsewhere so you might want to hire a company or individual to do it for you.

    It’s generally a good idea to have between 3 to 5 different methods that you use to generate traffic. The whole don’t put all your eggs in one basket thing. The only problem with this method, especially if you have several sites online that you are promoting, is that keeping tabs on all your promotions can get pretty overwhelming.

    That is why hiring a company to take care of the day to day activities associated with it can make your life much easier. True, you will have to pay them and that will cut into your profit margin, but your time is worth something too and the overall cost shouldn’t be that much.

    So, to sum up: your biggest job online is to get quality traffic to your website so you can make sales. Doing much of the work yourself when you first start to save money then hiring a company to handle your online marketing strategy once you are profitable is an excellent game plan to follow.

  • The Biggest Blog Traffic Mistakes Revealed

    Do you care about your blog’s traffic? Some people don’t really care about traffic, they just write about what they are feeling. They are happy to just have friends and family find their blog. There is nothing wrong with that. For other people traffic is king. Some people use blog to make money through ads or affiliate offers. Other people use it to build a brand and direct traffic to their money sites. In either of the latter scenarios, traffic is important. If traffic is that important to your site then you have to monitor it. There are a lot of free options out there to monitor traffic. The problem is that people get way too wrapped up in these. If you care about traffic and want to monitor it, then avoid these mistakes:

    1. A visible counter: These used to be found on a lot of sites, there is a reason they aren’t anymore. They are lame. Counters on your website are just too old fashioned. No one really cares how many people have been to your site, except you. Besides being cheesy, they are also completely useless and usually inaccurate. There are a lot of options that let you monitor traffic behind the scenes, so stick to them.

    2. Living and Dying by Alexa Rank: Alexa is a website that ranks other sites based on traffic. People new to blogging love to watch their site rise on the Alexa rankings. I used to be one of these people until I realized how useless it really is. First off, Alexa only counts when someone with the Alexa toolbar comes to your site. So sites that attract webmasters and technical people will have better results than a site that doesn’t attract people likely to have the toolbar. For example, I had a general interest blog that got about 13k hits per month. My friend had a blog that attracted more techy people and got about 3k hits per month. Even though he had 10k less visitors per month than me, his Alexa ranking was hundreds of thousands better than mine.

    You can easily tweak your ranking too. Just install the Alexa toolbar and surf your own site. I installed it last night, and checked out my site a couple times, I woke up this morning having gained 6 thousand spots on Alexa. That was with NO effort either.

    3. Stat Addiction: This happened to me and it was worse than crack. I had to wean myself off of checking my stats to curb the withdrawal symptoms. Okay, it wasn’t that bad, but it can be quite addictive. I had three traffic monitors on my site at one time. I had Google Analytics, StatCounter and Woopra all on one site. Besides negatively effecting my load times there is no need for this.

    There is no real benefit to monitor your traffic every 10 minutes. I can understand checking it after a new post or something. That way you can monitor how effective the post was. Besides that though, you need to chill out on the traffic monitoring. It is a huge time sink. I was checking my stats 10x a day, taking 5 minutes to do so each time. That is almost an hour of wasted time. I could have created two high quality blog posts in that time. I could have created dozens of backlinks to my site. I could have promoted my blog through social media. I could have done anything more productive than staring at my traffic stats! My suggestion is to check your stats at the start of the day each day, and maybe at the end of the day as well. That way you can still monitor the effectiveness of your content, but you won’t waste hours a week doing it.

    Monitoring traffic is important for most blog owners. We all want traffic right? With that said, make sure you avoid the above mistakes. Don’t get swept up in the traffic monitoring hurricane. Traffic is important, but it will come whether you monitor it or not.

  • Easily Install WordPress Plugins Automatically

    Video: How to insert and format images in WordPress

  • Promoting a business with Ebooks

    There are innumerable ways to use E-Books to promote your business and drive quality traffic to your website. Once posted on your site, you can turn them into a daily course, which brings your customer back to read the next chapter. You can use them as a free gift for making a purchase or for filling out a survey. Put your E-Book on a disc, and you will have an innovative brochure. Blow your competition away by inserting the disc into your sales packages.

    The most effective marketing products are those that are unique. Copyright your E-Book, and immediately, you have a powerful tool that you, and you alone, can offer to the public. People will have to visit your site to acquire your E-Book, which increases the flow of quality traffic and the potential of sales and affiliate contacts.

    Make sure that you keep your E-Book current. Update it frequently as the market and trends change. Add new advice and techniques to show your prospects how your goods or services can enrich their lives. By constantly keeping abreast of new trends and techniques, you can continue to see profits from your E-Book for years after your original creation.

    Another phenomenal advantage of E-Books is that you can test their marketing potential without putting out hardly any cash at all. You can even produce an E-Book one copy at a time, each time you receive an order, eliminating the need for storage and inventory. By this method, you can gauge the salability of your E-Book, and make adjustments as necessary until the orders start pouring in. E-Books allow you to learn about your market and customer habits and motivation over a period of time, without risking your precious financial resources. They also provide you with an invaluable way to gather marketing information, which you can use in many different facets of your business.

    Use your E-Book to discover what the specific goals and problems are in your specific industry. Then figure out how to solve these problems, and publish an E-Book with this invaluable information. This will increase the value of your business, upgrade your reputation, and get you known as an expert in your field.

    You can extend the value of single E-Book by breaking the book down into chapters for a serial course, into special reports available on your website, or into audio or visual tapes. E-Books can be broken down into several different promotional materials by accepting some of the articles and using them to promote your product. You can include a catalog in your E-Book to promote all the products or services you sell. You can include a thank-you note for reading your book and an invitation to download a trial version of your product. Or you can include a form for your audience to contact you for further information or with questions, thereby building your business relationships and your mailing list.

    Using E-Books in this manner helps to cut the cost of individually producing separate promotional materials. You can use a single E-Book to entice new prospects and to sell new products to your current customers.

    No other medium has this kind of flexibility and ability for expansion. Think of your E-Book like a spider spinning a beautiful and intricate web. Now go and create that web, and see how many customers and prospects you can catch!

  • How to Use Facebook News Feed

    Video: Facebook News Feed

  • The Rights and Lefts of Tracking Program

    What if Jonas Salk hadn’t tested the polio vaccine? Or, what if Einstein never tested his theory of relativity? Do you think they would have been successful? In the science world, definitely NOT, and in the marketing world, testing is every bit as important if you want to achieve success.

    Any number of tracking programs are out there from Hits Connect to Track That Ad to the new Link Brander. Even server-side tracking scripts are available for purchase. Regardless of what you use, tracking every ad that you post, whether it be to a traffic exchange or to a safelist, you need to know how successful your marketing is. Why? Because if you don’t track your ads, you may spend tons of time and money chasing a dog that you’ll never catch.

    Tracking works simply. You place the ad URL into the tracker, which devises a new URL for you to use in its place. Every time you employ the tracker URL, that “hit” is recorded by the tracking system.

    Let’s say you buy 1,000 hits at XYZ traffic exchange. How will you know if they have been delivered, unless you’re using a tracking system? You won’t, and though it’s the exception rather than the norm, you may not get the hits you paid for.

    What should really interest you are actual click-throughs. That tells you how many times someone has actually seen your page and clicked on the link to take them to the site you’re promoting. In this case, you will use the tracker link as the URL in your “call to action” (the click here, join now, etc.) button on your splash page. Or, use it as the link in your safelist mailing, as an FFA link, or in any other form of traffic generation system. By using the tracking link, you’ll know every time someone clicks because the tracking system will tell you.

    As another example, let’s say we advertised site ABC on traffic exchange XYZ and we used a tracking link for our call to action. We did the same thing at traffic exchange 123. At XYZ, we got our 1,000 hits and only 15 people clicked through to our page. At 123, we got 1,000 hits, but 100 people clicked through to our page. In which traffic exchange do you want to promote that particular page more heavily? No brainer, right? At 123, of course.

    The only way that you can possibly know whether your advertising is working is by tracking the results. Check out several tracking services to see which fits your budget and has the features you like. Then, either buy the script or sign up for a subscription. A tracking system is one tool in your marketing toolbox that you cannot afford to be without.

  • How Keywords Impact Off Page SEO

    Your keywords are also important with regards to off-page SEO. Many people think they can’t control factors that aren’t on their own websites, but this isn’t true.

    There are two important things you can do to ensure your off-page SEO is as effective as possible:

    Make sure to seek backlinks from relevant sites.

    Make sure to control your anchor text.

    Relevancy

    A relevant backlink is one that comes from a page that discusses something that is on-topic for your niche. If you’re in the golf niche, you would want to seek backlinks from pages about golf. While almost any backlink is valuable, those that come from relevant pages are much more so.

    Anchor Text

    Anchor text is the text that is used to link from one web page to another. If you were going to create a link to Google, your anchor text would probably be “Google”.

    The code would look like this:

    Google

    If your page is targeting the keyword “buy golf clubs” that would probably be the keyword you would want to use for most of the anchor text linking to that page.

    Notice I said “most” of the anchor text linking to that page. You definitely do not want to use the exact same text as your anchor text 100% of the time. This would look unnatural and potentially get your site penalized by Google. Instead, use your main keyword phrase about 50-75% of the time, and use another two similar phrases (such as “purchase golf clubs”) the rest of the time. This will look much more natural.

  • Fast And Easy Guide To Setting Up WordPress

    This is a quick, 11-step WordPress set up guide. This article won’t teach you how to completely create your site but it is a good reminder of the simple starting steps everyone should take when they begin their WordPress journey.

    1. Install WordPress: This is pretty self explanatory. The first step should be to install WordPress on your host. WordPress has a great guide to follow so this shouldn’t hold you up. Some webhosts even have something called Fantastico, if your hosts does you are in luck! Fantastico will install WordPress automatically for you.

    2. Login to your new site: Again self explanatory. The way I usually access my WordPress site is by adding a /wp-admin after my domain name in my web browsers address bar.

    3. Make sure your email addresses are set: This is important because this is where you will get your updates and password if you ever lose it. There are two places to make sure your password is set. The first spot is in Settings->General. The other spot is in your Users menu – you will want to ensure your Admin email is correct.

    4. Change your permalinks: I suggest this to all clients. In your Settings menu there is a Permalinks section. Open that menu and then choose your new style of permalinks. For the ultimate in clean URLs I suggest choosing custom structure and inserting the following string: /%postname%/. This will make the title of your posts be the web address.

    5. Add your title and tagline: In General Settings once again add the name and tag line of your blog. The name is anything you want – keyword rich is best. The tagline is your site’s description.

    6. Choose your theme: If you want to use a theme (you do) you can find a wide variety to choose by using your WordPress back office itself. Just navigate to Appearance->Themes and then use the tools they have to search for a theme. Once you find one to your liking download and activate it.

    7. Install your plugins: Any plugins that you wish to add, do so now. Plugins are very flexible so you can add more later on if you discover one you need. Install whatever plugins you think you need. I would suggest that you definitely include All-in-One SEO and XML Google Sitemaps. They will both help with your SEO and each has fantastic support if you need to know more. I would also suggest Askimet but it comes installed already.

    8. Activate Akismet: I think this should be done as soon as possible. Askimet is a great spam blocking plugin that ensures your site isn’t full of spam comments. As soon as you start adding content you will notice the spam beginning. Askimet has a huge database of comment spam so it can usually pick up and block any on your site. If it does make a mistake then you can manually override it for a particular comment and it will actually learn from that. The one caveat to this is you have to get a WordPress API key. To get that API key you have to sign up for a free account on wordpress.com. Not a big deal, but an extra step you might not be aware of.

    9. Check your privacy: In your Settings menu there is a Privacy heading. Click it and make sure your blog is visible to everyone. If it isn’t, Google will not index any of your content!

    10. Add your widgets: Under Appearance there will be a Widgets menu. You can use this to add functionality to your WordPress site using the sidebars. If you chose a widget ready theme (most are) you will have one or two sidebars (or more) on your site. In the widgets menu the sidebar will show up and you can drag and drop “widgets” into it. These widgets can be things like a search bar, an archive, a calendar, a recent posts list or a text/html box that you can put just about anything in. There are even more widgets than that available. There are even downloadable ones if the standard ones don’t do everything you need.

    11. Create content: Now you can create some content! You can add pictures, galleries of those pictures, an about page etc… You can also start making posts – remember to create categories to keep them organized. Take advantage of the tag feature as that will come in handy when you have hundereds of posts. It helps with searches on your site as well.

    That is the bare minimum to get started with WordPress. You will have to learn a lot more but when you do, you will be happy you made the move to WordPress. Happy blogging!