WordPress Training Expert

Author: WP Training Expert

  • WordPress Upgrades

    If you use WordPress to power your websites, there will be times you need to upgrade. Luckily WordPress lets you know this right in the back office of your website. You will get a notification that WordPRess is ready to be updated, and a handy link you can click on to do it. Should you click it as soon as you see it? I am not so sure about that, here are some things to think about:

    1. Is the release brand new? If the latest WordPress release is brand new you might want to hold off for awhile. They do a great job of testing and re-testing their releases. Going live always brings up a hiccup or two, it is just the nature of the beast. If you hold off a week or two that will give the WordPress development team time to address any bugs. So for example, instead of upgrading to WordPress 3.0 maybe wait a couple days and see if WordPress 3.1 is going to come out.

    2. Backup! Yeah i will admit I have upgraded WordPress before without backing up, and nothing happened. Why tempt fate though? Why take the chance. I know I never want to be the guy on WordPress support forums saying “I didn’t back up my site but…” Make sure you back up your site before an upgrade.

    I usually use the cPanel of my host to create a database backup. You will have to figure out how your host handles back ups. I also back up my wp-content folder by downloading it via FTP. I zip it and create a copy to store a couple different places. Lastly, I do an export from the back office of WordPress. I navigate to Tools and then Export. This way I get a small XML file that will cover all of my pages, posts and comments.

    3. Plugin Compatibility – One of the best reasons for waiting to see if a release is stable is that it gives plugin developers a chance to catch up. When you upgrade there is always the chance your plugins won’t make it. If you have a certain plugin that you find indispensable, you might want to monitor it to see if it gets updated to match the WordPress upgrade. Some plugins will work fine anyways, and if you keep an eye on the plugin homepage or forums you will find that out as well.

    If you remember these three steps or rules, you will have no problem with your WordPress updates. The biggest key is to back up! Years of hard work can be flushed down the toilet if you don’t! Enjoy your WordPress site and may all your updates be smooth and trouble free!

  • Importance of Forum Based Market places

    f you are trying to make a mark in deliberate online marketing, then you should definitely try to utilize the different forums that are available online. To begin with, forums are excellent to get information. Thus, one should frequent these forums to establish one’s professional status. This can be done prior to actually starting to sell his/her product or service. Almost every full time marketer is fairly active on the various popular Internet Marketing forums. These serve as excellent medium to achieve brand awareness for one’s program.

    These further serve the cause of generating several useful contacts. There are a lot of like minded people you can find online and these forums help on to garner networking prospects like never before. Thus the forums are extremely useful social mediums too.

    One thing that you should definitely avoid while making use of the forums is to push your product indiscriminately and too frequently to ruin your professional image and lose all trust of fellow users.

    There is only one way of garnering the trust of the forum members and holding on to it and this can only be done by offering information or services which are genuinely useful to fellow users along with a proper promotion through signature tags, valuable posts etc. There might also be the case when the forum would itself allow for promotion for example many forums have marketplaces where you can actually sell your products and services.

    A significant part all online marketers efforts should be framed on forum marketing. This can prove to be another very useful equipment to create a brand of one’s own. To create a professional brand on a forum is the most efficient kind of promotion. Trust does not come as something easily buyable.

  • Mobile Marketing for Small Businesses

    Video: Brad talks about how brick and mortar businesses can take advantage of mobile marketing.

  • Inspirations for Content

    Inspiration. Some say it is the key to great art. I think it is the key to a great many things. Most of our greatest successes and most tragic failures were sparked by inspiration. Why should our blogs be any different? What inspires you to create content for your blog? I don’t mean how do you get ideas, I am talking about a higher level here. What inspires you to post? The topic doesn’t matter, the feeling of wanting to post does. What gives you that feeling? A couple things that make me want to post to my blog are:

    1. Music: I am a big fan of music (who isn’t?) and it is one of the my top inspirations. One reason it works for me is because I blog about music a lot. When I hear a great song, or great album, I instantly feel like blogging about it. Even if I wasn’t blogging about music, I would still be inspired by it. Music is really all about emotions. Certain songs can effect our moods, and sometimes those emotions will inspire us to create. Even lyrics without the music can inspire you if they are well written. Anything that effects your emotions can inspire you to create a blog post. If you are feeling down or uninspired, fire up your itunes and you might find yourself writing a blog post in no time.

    2. TV: I know it is cool to hate TV these days – but besides the internet, this medium is one of the most all encompassing ones we have. You can see just about anything on TV, and anything you see can be possible inspiration. I was watching an old TV show the other day that reminded me of a certain part of my childhood, instantly I wanted to blog about it. When I watch the news, and see a topic I am passionate about I want to post my thoughts instantly. Even watching something as banal as realty TV can inspire you. Watching people react to each other under the pressure of the camera, can stir up a lot of emotions that lead to a great blog post.

    3. Life: Everyday life can inspire as well. I am not talking about helping you think of blog ideas, I mean the inspiration to post…about anything. Whether you are inspired by positive factors, or negative ones – your life will throw enough of both at you. You will see beautiful things that make you want to post, and horrible things that will make you want to post. That is the reality of life. This is a good reminder for those people who are always connected to the net – sometimes going out and actually living your life will make your online work that much more effective.

    Blogging regularly isn’t always thinking about content or topics. Sometimes you need to be inspired to post anything. By using music, television and living your life to the fullest you should be able to find reasons to post as often as possible. Next time you are struggling to produce content, leave the internet behind, and check out some of the above inspirations.

  • Email Advertising

    It might come as no shock to you to learn that the most commonly engaged in activity on the Internet is email. People are connected to their email like no other function on the Internet, and we all know how popular Facebook and Twitter are. If you really want to get somebody’s attention but can’t or don’t want to call, we reach for our emails. Email is one of the most professional and reliable ways to get in contact with somebody in the modern era, and even people who are “less connected” tend to have email addresses.

    This means that if you can tap into an email connection with potential and current customers and clients, you’ll be getting their attention in the most reliable way possible. Most people check their email every day, and even those who don’t spare a glance at it every week. That means there’s a high chance that those people will be looking at your email in their box, and even if they don’t read it, they’ll be reminded of the existence of your company and its products and services.

    Best of all, email advertising is cheap. In fact, it can be free. Sound too good to be true?

    The flip side of all this is what’s known as spam. Spam is unsolicited emails – that is, the digital equal to “junk mail.” People loathe spam with a passion, and virtually all email accounts these days come with “spam filters” where if you try to reach out to a potential client uninvited, your email gets diverted to a netherworld of Viagra offers that most people don’t even look at.

    So how to get into the email boxes of your potential and current clients without falling prey to spam? Simple. Don’t send unsolicited emails.

    Most companies who are looking to take advantage of email advertising do so by utilizing “opt in” email lists. This is done by the customer actively choosing to sign up for your mailing lists. Most wise companies who take advantage of this offer a customer the chance to sign up for their email lists after making a purchase. Some even advertise it on the front page of their website (or right next to the checkout counter if it’s a brick and mortar operation).

    The trick to opt in email lists is to make it worth your customer’s while to be part of the list. Don’t send them ten emails a day. One a week is probably the maximum. When you do send out the emails, make sure that they have something relevant to say, and preferably at least one coupon. Rewarding your opt-in email subscribers is a great way for your business to be passed around by word of mouth. It’ll work even better if they’re extremely happy customers!

  • Three Reasons Why You Suck at Internet Marketing

    If you spend any time browsing Internet marketing forums online you will see a disturbing pattern of people who call themselves Internet marketers. What they really do is give those of us who do the work of Internet marketing a bad name. I have come up with three things people do that will absolutely ruin their ability to make any money online.

    All you do is try to sell me crap.

    If all you do online is try to peddle products and offers, you might get some traffic and you may even make a sale or two but you will never succeed as an Internet marketer. You see the Internet as a big shopping mall. I see it as a virtual community.

    You would never do business with a real estate agent who was constantly asking you to sell your house even when you weren’t in the market. On the other hand if you knew a real estate agent who was a friend of yours, client, or trusted resource you would probably give your business to them. The most successful off-line business people make themselves available as speakers, as charity event coordinators etc.

    You think it’s all about Google.

    There is nothing worse than an Internet marketer who is just waiting for the next Google update. You might as well be playing the lottery. You can do all the hard work of search engine optimization and Link building, but if your content sucks you have a very slim chance of ranking well.

    One of the best lessons I learned in Internet marketing was to give up on Google and pretend they don’t exist. The funny thing is the more I do this the more they noticed me. Google doesn’t want you to try and game their system, they want you to provide value to the Internet community on the whole. Trust me they will reward you for it.

    You think communication can be automated.

    You’ve set up your auto responder, your drip feed, and probably some sales pitches to automatically be delivered to people who opt in to your list over a period of time. This is a very poor way to communicate with your list. There is nothing worse than getting an e-mail from someone where the message is clearly out of date. The only reason I get the letter is because it’s part of a chain of letters that will be sent to me automatically until I unsubscribe.

    If you are building an e-mail list you really need to consider how you will stay current. As a for instance I don’t use drip feeds or auto responders at all. That’s not to say I don’t do any e-mail marketing, I am building a list all the time. The difference is that I mail my list something that is current in the form of a newsletter which gets broadcast to everyone. If I sent a really good e-mail today and you join my list tomorrow, you will simply miss out on that e-mail.

  • Go offline to succeed Online!

    Many people will tell you that to get your web site noticed you need to ‘optimize’ your site for the search engines. You are then led up a path where you have to keep changing your web site as the search engines change their ways of listing things. As fast as you ‘optimize’ your site, Google and the others have moved the goalposts, meaning you have to keep optimizing over and over again.

    Now consider some facts. Most people in the world are not users of the Internet. Let’s repeat that. The vast majority of people who you want to reach don’t use the Internet. It doesn’t matter how well you optimize your web site, they simply will never find it.

    Here’s another fact. Some of the best Internet marketers make most of their sales ‘offline’. They sell their books, CD-ROMs and so on at seminars, workshops and conferences. Indeed, for many ‘Internet marketers’ these ‘offline’ sales represent the bulk of their income.

    So what do these facts tell us? They show us that ‘offline’ promotion is more important than online promotion. You may be able to optimize your web site to get high rankings in a search engine. But that doesn’t mean you’ll reach the vast majority of people who could buy your product or use your information.

    This was confirmed recently by one study that showed most people go to an Internet address (URL) after having read it in a newspaper or magazine, been given it by a friend or colleague, or having heard it being mentioned by someone speaking at a meeting or on TV. In other words, it seems that significant numbers of people who get to your web site will do so having heard the URL somewhere outside the Internet.

    You can get many people visiting your web site, even if you are not ranked highly by the search engines. You can do this in two main ways:

    1. Write articles for use in regular publications – newspapers, magazines and so on. Always include your URL in the article and you’ll get millions of people to notice your web site address.

    2. Speak at every opportunity. Make presentations to business clubs, chambers of commerce, local societies – you name it, you should speak at it. Every time you speak, announce or your web site address.

    Although these are the two principal ways of gaining offline publicity for your web site, don’t neglect your business stationery, posters, car stickers and so on. The more your web site address is visible outside the web, the more visitors you will get regardless of how kind the search engines are to you.

  • Improve Your Sales and Prospecting Skills

    Most people starting a business forget about the most important part. They spend loads of time picking just the right product or service to sell. They’ll carefully weigh the best kinds of office equipment to buy. They’ll even fuss endlessly over their workplace decor.

    But none of that holds a candle to what is most assuredly the core of any new business: you can’t succeed until you master prospecting and selling!

    “But I’m really good at what I do. Won’t word just get out and people will find me and want to buy?” you say.

    Don’t bet on it. We live in a busy, crowded world where thousands of businesses are shouting their marketing messages. If you don’t get in there and promote — and promote WELL — your customer base will resemble a trickle more than an avalanche.

    Here are several proven methods for finding lots of new prospects and turning them into customers. Then I’ll show you an exceptionally EASY way to do all this on a shoestring.

    1) Get a web site, get it listed on search engines, and let your site grab prospects 24/7. By now you’ve surely seen scads of small businesses doing this. For those who do it right, the Net can pull in lots of new customers with very little effort. But remember, it’s not as easy as some make it look. Your site has to be good, your copy has to be right, and you must be visible in search engines to make the magic happen.

    2) Sell over the telephone. I love email, and face-to-face meetings will always have their place, but good ol’ telephone conversations are a top-notch selling strategy. Prospects feel like they’ve made a personal connection with you when you give them information over the phone.

    3) Finally, method number 3 is the one to use if you don’t want to or don’t know how to build your own professional web site, or can’t bear the idea of talking to hundreds of strangers on the phone.

    Frankly, this 3rd method has become the only method I truly recommend to small businesses and individuals: OUTSOURCING. These days, you can OUTSOURCE all your online promotion and selling to companies that specialize in doing the work for you.

    In the past, that would have meant spending tens of thousands per month to hire an outside selling team. Today, with online and telephone automation reaching new heights, you can have all the advertising, phone calls, and closing done for you by the pros for about what it costs to get a decent home office computer set-up.

    Don’t hesitate, do it! Getting a really good marketing, prospecting, and selling machine working for you is essential to your success!

  • Using Product Recommendations To Increase Your Bottom Line

    In affiliate marketing, there are many ways in which you can increase your earnings and maintain the account that you have worked so hard for already. Most of the techniques and tactics can be learned easily. No need to go anywhere and any further. They are available online, 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.

    One of the more important ways of increasing affiliate marketing bottom line and sale is through the use of product recommendations. Many marketers know that this is one of the most effective ways in promoting a certain product.

    If the customers or visitors trust you enough, then they will definitely trust your recommendations. Be very careful in using this approach, though. If you start promoting everything by recommendation, your credibility will actually wear thin. This is seen especially when recommendations are seemingly exaggerated and without much merit.

    Do not be afraid to mention things that you do not like about a given product or service. Rather than lose any points for you, this will make your recommendation more realistic and will tend to increase your credibility.

    Furthermore, if your visitors are really interested in what you are offering, they will be more than delighted to learn what is good about the product, what is not so good, and how the product will benefit them.

    When you are recommending a certain product, there are some things to remember on how to make it work effectively and for your advantage.

    Sound like the true and leading expert in your field.

    Remember this simple equation: Price resistance diminishes in direct proportion to trust. If your visitors feel and believe that you are an expert in your niche, they are more inclined to making that purchase. On the other hand, if you are not exuding any confidence and self-assurance in endorsing your products, they will probably feel that same way and will go in search of another product or service which is more believable.

    How do you establish this aura of expertise? By offering unique and new solutions they would not get anywhere else. Show proof that what you are promoting works as promised. Display prominent testimonials and endorsements from respected and known personalities, in related fields of course.

    Avoid hype at all costs. It is better to sound low key and confident, than to scream and seek attention. Besides, you would not want to sound unprofessional and have that thinking stick to your potential customers and clients, now would you? Best to appear cool and self-assured at the same time.

    And remember; prospects are not stupid. They are actually turning to experts and may already know the things that you know. If you back up your claims with hard facts and data, they would gladly put down hundreds, or even thousands worth of money to your promotions. But if you don’t, they are smart enough to try and look at your competitors and what they are offering.

    While recommending a product, it is also important that you give out promotional freebies. People are already familiar with the concept of offering freebies to promoting your won products. But very few people do this to promote affiliate products. Try to offer freebies that can promote or even have some information about your products or services.

    Before you add recommendations to you product, it is given that you should try and test the product and support. Do not run the risk of promoting junk products and services. Just think how long it took you to build credibility and trust among your visitors. All that will take to destroy it is one big mistake on your part.

    If possible, have recommendations of products that you have 100% confidence in. Test the product support before you begin to ensure that the people you are referring it to would not be left high and dry when a problem suddenly arouse.

    Have a look at your affiliate market and look at the strategies you are using. You may not be focusing on the recommendations that your products need to have. You plan of action is sometimes not the only thing that is making your program works.

    Try product recommendation and be among those few who have proven its worth.

  • The Importance Of Social Media For Offline Business

    There are literally thousands of articles online speaking about the importance of social media for online businesses. A simple Google search will likely turn up more information than anybody could want regarding how best to use Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Facebook for the purpose of online business – and these social networking sites are merely the tip of the iceberg. There are several other, lesser-known social media sites that can factor into the game for online businesses, as well.

    It’s obvious why social media sites are important for online business. It’s a free, efficient way of marketing to the virtual crowd. After all, if your business is virtual, then it only makes sense that you should be advertising where the virtual populace goes to hang out and chat with friends. It’s the equal to putting up a sign at a baseball game or the mall. Online businesses must market to an online audience.

    However, many people mistakenly believe that social media need not factor much into the running of an offline business, and this is a serious mistake. Even if you own a store front with tangible products and physical shopping carts – and not a Café Press website with a “shopping cart” icon in the corner – you should still be meandering through the virtual crowd with the rest of the world.

    Why? Even though your business might be physical, chances are that your customers are spending a lot of time on these social networking sites. If your store exists in the real world as well, working both the social media angle and the traditional means of advertising can give you a double edge over the competition, and that’s not an advantage that should be glanced over lightly. Thousands of people do their shopping primarily online these days in the comfort of their homes – in order to have a chance of bringing some of that business through your physical door, you need to be working on the virtual side of things, as well.

    So when you sit down in your store in the real world, don’t forget to spend some time thinking about how you can promote your store in the virtual one. Most people have a foot in the physical and a foot in the virtual nowadays, and you have a serious advantage in being rooted in the physical world. Online businesses have no stake in the world outside of the Internet, but you can step into the virtual world with ease. Be sure to take advantage of this position you have as somebody who owns a physical store, and the benefits you’ll reap will be incredible!