Designing a website for conversion is something that every business owner cares about, if they are savvy and have a solid business goal for their sites.  Top gun internet marketers sell memberships and consulting services to people who want to get income online.  It is a good idea to have a mentor when you are starting out, for sure, but I wonder if there really is a one-size-fits-all approach to building an online business.  My instincts say no. 

As an Online Branding Consultant and website developer, I’ve been monitoring website tools and trends for years.  When my daily research introduced the idea that the color orange converted better than any other color, it seemed like a reasonable thing to try.  Within a few months, just about every site that I saw had an orange buy now or add to cart button.  Recently, this button has gotten much larger.   Does the image below look familar to you and did you feel compelled to press the button?  It took me 2 seconds to find one. 

One trend that I have no argument with at all is to use Wordpress website technology as the basis for a business and sales funnel.  The software is remarkable, easy to manage, and delivers great SEO benefits too.  Many top guns have migrated their sites to wordpress with good reason and anyone paying attention knows that Wordpress is much more than a blogging tool. 

Video capture pages are a very good idea and they have been for a long time.  However, there has been a disturbing trend with them recently.  The latest video marketing tactic is to enforce an opt in before one is granted access to the video.  This is a ploy to build a list, which I understand, but if you do this please manage your lists so you aren’t broadcasting the same message multiple times.  That is kind of irritating.  

Another rising video marketing trend is to put up content with no controls or information about duration.  I find to be both inconvenient and rude, and I know I’m not alone.  If it is off-putting, why does it convert?  Perhaps someone who is doing this and tracking results can enlighten us all. 

The OTO (one-time-offer) tactic has taken on new proportions of irritation.  When I opt in to something for free, I expect an obligatory up sell but is it really necessary to introduce two, three or more?  Newbie or not, I’m betting that I’m not the only person who loses patience and gives up.  It would be great to see the split testing results that support the claims of people who say this builds loyalty and increases sales.   

Please save us all from the disingenuous “fear of loss” call to action tactic.  If you aren’t sure what this means, it is the one that compels you to decide right now and threatens that, if you don’t, the offer will be lost forever.  If it really is a limited time offer then using this tactic doesn’t constitute coercion.  A high percentage of the time, however, the claim is not true.  How many times have you bought something because you were led to believe you needed to decide right away and found that same site months after the fact? 

When internet marketers began to sell products that teach how to target local business owners, it intrigued me.  I wondered if they really knew what they were talking about.  As it turns out, few internet marketers have ever dealt with offline business owners so please don’t expect them to teach you everything you need to know in order to succeed in this niche.  I’m not saying it isn’t a good idea but, trust me, it isn’t an automatic gateway to wealth. 

If you want to have credibility with a local business owner, you need more than a spiel and a ghost written book to hand to them at your first meeting.  You must understand THEIR business and be prepared to explain how you can help them improve their bottom line.

Think about the different businesses that you see in your neighborhood for a moment, excluding chains and franchises.  I doubt that the target market for an attorney, accountant, florist, or day spa lends itself to hype, being forced into opting in to view a video that has no controls on it, or the huge orange “add to cart” button.  Please let me know if you think I am wrong. 

Small busines owners understand their niche and they’re good at sensing deception or they don’t stay in business long..  You won’t know how to help them if you haven’t done your homework.  Customer acquisition costs are a factor to small business owners, as well as return on investment.  If you want to play in that field, make sure you understand business basics first.

The bottom line is this:

No internet marketing formula is one-size-fits-all.  

We joke about watching paint dry when time seems to move too slowly but, believe it or not, this is an actual role for which people are paid.  Duties include touching the painted item to ensure that it is dry.  What does this have to do with businss and online income?  Read on… 

Many people put up pretty websites and expect immediate results.  Very few people get what they desire, unless they have found a particular niche that is in demand and has not already been exploited or they have a well established and responsive list. 

As a website consultant, I’ve always recommended beginning with the end in mind.  During initial meetings with any new client, I always inquire about their keywords and SEO strategy.  Of all the hundreds of sites that I’ve built, only one customer actually had a plan in place.  Statistically, those who did not embrace the idea that they needed to identify niche keywords and strategically pursue them experienced less than optimal results. 

Once you’ve determined your SEO and linking strategy, you must set about the task of doing the work necessary to accomplish it.  This entails tactics that will build relevance based on keywords through on-site and off-site content. 

Perhaps the best known method for getting links to your website is writing articles, adding a link to your signature in a forum, or commenting on blogs.  But, how do you know which sites have importance from Google’s point of view?  Michelle MacPherson recently released a free tool for monitoring top internet properties for your content and links.  I don’t know if it is still available but I’ve used it and it is very helpful.  The caveat is that each site has different rules so make sure you read the fine print when you register and begin to use them.

Lately, there has been a resurgence in using videos to promote your business or opportunity.  This isn’t big news.  Video marketing has been a great way to give voice to your brand for years and new video distribution channels are popping up every day.  Your videos need to go viral, for them to really provide benefit, and if you don’t use good keywords when posting the video, it is just “out there” waiting to be found.  Alternatively, and as I mentioned earlier, you can deploy it to your dedicated and responsive list. 

Differentiating yourself online may be the biggest challenge you face.  Most of what I observe is a lot of emulation.  That isn’t a bad idea.  Heck!  It worked for me when I wanted to learn to sing like Joni Mitchell.    Still, emulating what everyone else is doing only makes you like everyone else.  Your market will choose to buy the offer, if it is something they want or need, and they will buy it from a link that appears in early in their search results.  Thus, if you have no SEO strategy, whether or not you’ve done your niche research homework, there will be a lot of people ahead of you in the pile. 

Assuming that you’ve are now convinced that learning SEO and keyword research is important to your business success … online or offline … what can you do?  Well, you can begin by learning more about SEO and keyword research from an expert.  Dan Thies has availed a great ebook entitled Fast Start SEO which you can download at this link.  Dan Thies also offers a free membership where people aspiring to learn more, or those who are active in the arena already, can interact and swap ideas.  You can choose to outsource the task to someone who knows what they are doing, if you feel you have more important things to do,  but I imagine it will be hard to sift the wheat from the chaff  when interviewing potential outsourcing partners without any knowledge so learning something about how SEO is done is still advisable. 

Building an online brand requires patience, dedication and belief.  Once you have your keywords and SEO strategy in place, all that remains to be done is to implement it.  However, waiting for the benefits you seek can be difficult if you are impatient.  Not much different than watching paint dry, I suppose.  But, if you’ve done your homework and selected a good niche and linking strategy, your results will come.

Tools help.  I use a product called Micro Niche Finder that is easy to understand and provides a lot of data very quickly.  If you don’t want to buy a product, you can also use Google’s free keyword research tool. 

If you’d like to know how I can help you, please don’t hesitate to ask.  You can complete the contact form at www.VirtuallyMarj.com and I will certainly respond.  I’d love to learn more about your business and, if it feels right to us both, help you build your online brand! 

Social networking is a great way to connect with prospects and friends.  Over the past few months, there have been a lot of internet marketers advising that Facebook is a better advertising spot than Google.  When you must advertise, it is good to have choices where your ads will be targeted but has Facebook gone too far to serve up data for their advertisers?  It would appear so, if the US Federal Government has gotten involved.

In a nutshell, here is what has changed.  Previously, Facebook flushed personal information from their cache each 24-hours.  The privacy policy revision states that it will be held infinitely and that advertisers may use it for targeted promotions.  Many internet marketers have picked up on this nuance and developed products for sale to help people get more bang for their advertising buck. 

Although Facebook users have the privilege of opting out, the user interface is confusing and most folks don’t know where to look for the opt-out.  Heck, finding your public profile link can be an absolute chore!  I do understand the genesis of Facebook as being sort of an online yearbook for a university.  This may explain the unwieldiness of it  but it doesn’t forgive the fact that we should be able to easily locate all news and important links by visiting out own profiles.  In other words, the obligation to track changes to the privacy policy of any social networking site is not the user’s.

Many Facebook users won’t care one way or the other.  Still, there are those among us who don’t enjoy unsolicited advertisements.  I’m sure one.  When I logged into my account today, I found a dozen ads that were geo-targeted to my location.  Local shops, product providers, service providers, Realtors and bars.  I’d rather not be bombarded like that.  I looked for a method of opting out and I just couldn’t find it! 

Facebook is not wrong to sell advertising space.  Their on-screen real estate is valuable and they must fund the site support.  All things being equal, Facebook ads are less expensive than Google Adwords. 

The fact remains that nothing replaces good SEO with a solid keyword strategy.  In my online branding business, I never advocate that my clients use paid advertising.  I will provide some consulting services to help them learn the SEO ropes.  It isn’t a big secret or anything.  Most of the information someone needs to learn SEO is available online for free.  With interest, the ability to read, and the willingness to monitor results and experiment, perseverance will take your site where you’d like it to be.

When you decide to work with a client, your business relationship has potential to develop into a friendship.  This can be very rewarding, as long as the boundaries between friendship and business are established and maintained. 

Very few people understand how awkward it can be when questions they are asking begin to encroach on the time you had set aside to relax.  Under most circumstances, gentle reminders that you are “off the clock” will be enough.  Conscientious people will never ask you to work for free and there is no reason to feel guilty about accepting compensation in exchange for your expertise. 

Here are a few gray areas that you may have encountered:

1. Someone expects you to do something for them which is a service for which clients normally pay.
2. You’ve earned an affiliate commission because someone clicked on your link and that person treats it as if they are owed services in exchange.
3. Sudden demands for a “finder’s fee” months after an introduction.
4. Promising future work for reduced fees.

Expecting Free Help

We’ve all hit financial speed bumps.  My first response to someone who asks me to work for free so they can preserve their cash is to suggest that they need to adjust their mindset.  This sounds brutal but it isn’t.  We are what we believe and, if we believe we are broke, we are broke! 

Many philosophies, including the Law of Attraction, conceptualize thought as energy that attracts like-kind energy.  If your thoughts are trained on what you lack, you will attract more of that.  In other words, your lack will increase.  This is so stupidly simple, yet so difficult to master! 

Placating your associate’s fears by working for free is a choice that you make based on whether or not the time commitment will put your real business obligations at risk.  We all like to help people out but, if you do, recognize that it can be a slippery slope.  Like silencing your barking dog with a treat reinforces bad behavior, your associate may expect that you will continue to work for them for free. 

Leveraging Affiliate Commissions

You’ve taken the time to set up accounts and establish affiliate relationships for products or services that you want to recommend.  Affiliate earnings are intended to be passive.  Thus, any expectation that you will provide services in exchange for an affiliate commission you’ve earned is flawed logic.  All that person did was click a link to buy something of value that they wanted. 

In the rare instance that someone insists they could have purchased the same product on their own, it may be their way of inducing guilt.  Don’t fall for it.  If you are like me, you have not overpriced your services to begin with and you’re worth every penny. 

Does this mean you should not offer affiliate links to clients and friends?  If you do, ensure that you disclose the fact that you will earn an affiliate commission and that it is their choice to purchase elsewhere. 

What Finders Fees?

True Story:  A year or so back, a “friend” asserted that he was owed 25% of everything that I had earned since we met.  This came out of nowhere so I was stunned when I realized he was serious. 

I explained that I would never have agreed to referral fees of that magnitude without having a formal contract in place.  This fell on dead ears.  His rage and desperation, coupled with some other observations about his online behavior, created an awkwardness that ultimately ended our friendship. 

Expecting Immediate and Repeated Help

Most people admire my intuitive grasp of technology.  I will always answer quick questions but, if I know that a request will take more time than I have available, it must be postponed.  When I find a solution, I take the time to carefully explain exactly what solved the problem, in layman’s terms, so people can more become self-sufficient. 

Some folks repeatedly return for help with the same things.  I don’t mind re-explaining but, if I can’t drop everything at the moment of their request, enduring unfounded accusations or complaints is unacceptable.  My rule is no tolerance for such bad behavior. 

Beware of Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing

One client relationship relationship evolved into spending a lot of time exchanging ideas about Wordpress website design, CSS and Photoshop techniques.  Those sessions always began when they would ask a “quick question.”  Since my associate already had some skills, it didn’t occur to me that I was providing information they planned to use to start a new and competing business.  When they announced their plans, they invited me to become a resource, with the provision that I could not use my own business name or offer a link to my website.  I declined and wished them luck. 

The tactic of promising “future work” for a discounted rate is the proverbial Pandora’s Box.  In my experience, such requests better serve the requester.  In one extreme case, my willingness to work in this way resulted in many delinquent invoice payments and their expectation that the delayed payments would not compromise the development schedule for the project.   This particular client also neglected to mention very time-consuming development requirements at the time we settled on price and refused to discuss additional compensation.  When their behavior turned into abuse, they were summarily fired with no regrets … at least on my part.   

Choose to NOT Diminish the Value of Your Expertise

We all have unique skills to offer in professional liaisons.  The confidence you gain through exceeding customer expectations can lead to business expansion.  When your clients trust you, they will naturally recommend you who their friends and colleagues.  Referrals from such sources are the best kind of business.

Perhaps I am the exception but it perturbs me that the long and predictable sales letter page is being replaced by an optin form leading to a long-winded video which has no details about its length and takes way too long to arrive at a point. 

This trend reminds me of a desert character that I met recently on an outing.  Although the dialogue was entertaining, this person spent an hour telling my friend and I what he was going to tell us AFTER he told us why he was going to tell us what he was going to tell us.  Of course, we were free to leave at anytime but he seemed to have a need to tell his story, and I wanted to give him a chance.  In the end, it was a circular and one-sided discussion and he never really told us anything.  :D

But it was interesting to behold… 

Time is a non-renewable resource

How we spend our time each day is one of our more important decisions.  An email or link sent through Skype sometimes elevates my interest .  When the destination turns out to be a video landing page that provides no text to scan, the journey is predictable.  Someone is going to try to sell me something. 

While it is entirely possible that what they have to sell is something that I want or need, what is the benefit of biding my time through more than 30 minutes of self-aggrandizing dialogue, waiting to hear the price and being forced to endure so much “ but wait … there’s more” yammering? 

deep discount or inventory liquidation?

People don’t like to be convinced of something’s worth.  Idle curiosity led me to computing the discount of the bonus items for the most recent Video Sales Letter so I could report it to you.  The add-ons for this particular Video Sales Letter offer were “conservatively” valued at $38,731.  Yet, this internet marketer was willing to “give” them to me for $1,997.  That’s nice, but is it believable?   

If you are quick with a calculator, you’ve already determined that this is a 94.8% discount.  I’m fairly certain that opting into this offer would have led multiple upsells and an offer to have a trial membership with on-going fees of $97 a month, or more.  I’ve seen it before. 

But here is my point:  Liquidation sales are not a new idea.   In fact, Russell Brunson just had one and he didn’t pretend it was anything other than it was.  I truly admired that. 

ambiguity, logic and the law of averages

During the dialogue, the marketer informed us that his secrets had only been released to a handful of people who had proven to him, during 8 months of trialing his methods, that what he had found was not a fluke. 

What is a handful to an internet marketing millionaire with a huge list?  If the handful of people privy to the software and techniques have an 8-month head start, is there a prayer that these “hand selected niches” can be still penetrated and leveraged? 

Even though I’m basically an optimist, this sort of talk makes me skeptical.  I learned in the racquetball court that timing and position are everything in life.  In other words, creating the money-making idea or being part of the cadre of founders is the place to be if you really want to be if you want to cash in on something. 

If you are invited through a mass mailing, you are not in that group.  Applying their techniques to your current tactics has potential to improve your sales but please stick with your own niches.  Those “hand selected” niches are highly likely to be saturated. 

Passionate Pursuits

My viewpoint is that wealth will follow the pursuit of something that you already are interested in and will enjoy working with every day.  Using that base formula, your marketing, whether or not it is a Video Sales Letter, will genuinely convey your enthusiasm and have greater potential to become viral.  Your time spent researching the niche is time that you would be spending anyway because it is interesting to you.  Your targeted list is easy to acquire and grow because you are interacting with people naturally already, through Twitter, Facebook,LinkedIn and your blog. 

Identify those things that you truly enjoy and focus on what you like to do anyway and don’t invest yourself in the outcome.  It will come to you without a struggle if you maintain focus and don’t allow yourself to become distracted by the noise around you and frivilos get rich quick schemes.

PLR Websites are a tool used by internet marketers as a way to get your site online quickly, complete with content.  If you’ve ever worked with them in the past and have an interest in learning the underlying technologies that make a website work, the instructions and a little time are more than adequate. 

Everyone working on the internet must be aware of the rising popularity of Wordpress.   If you aren’t, feel free to contact me to learn more about how you can leverage this amazing software for your websites, beyond the traditional blog. 

Under the Covers

 Wordpress Websites require knowledge of more than simple HTML to set up correctly.  Wordpress is a Content Management System (CMS) that uses databases for content storage and PHP scripts to access that content for presentation on a website.  Learning how things all work together can be a rewarding journey if you like knowing how things work.  If you have limited experience with technology and become impatient when things don’t go as expected, your project can be less than fun.

 The whole idea of PLR is that you can purchase content, slightly modify it, and put it up as your own.  This permits the ability to begin creating a web presence with a minimum of effort and can also save on expense of hiring someone who can adequately translate your vision into a functional website for a product or service launch.  If your goal is to monetize a site quickly and you lack the base technical skills you need to read into the instructions,  you are likely to be confounded by a PLR Wordpress Website purchase.

 PLR products will give you all of the information that you need about installation, usage and reselling privileges.  There are some generalized guidelines but PLR products do have differences so reading the license for your new software is advisable.

 Wordpress Database and Security Matters

A simple Wordpress installation creates 11 tables, at this time.  Wordpress requires that certain things are set up in order for the software to operate correctly.  These specialized data are stored in various tables within the site database.  The list of items includes a site URL and blog URL, if it is different.

 While reviewing the installation script for a recent project, I saw that the PLR Product had altered the standard Wordpress Installation script, apparently in an effort to bypass the need to make these changes in the database.  All things being equal, uploading the database export to the destination database on my client’s servers was easy.  As I analyzed the data that was stored in the tables, however, I realized that the instructions lacked very important information for truly owning the site and its data.

 Another observation that I made about the setup script was that it didn’t follow secure Wordpress Website installation practices that have been recommended for more than two years.  As we are all painfully aware, website security is critical … especially if it is a source of income for you.

 A new user of Wordpress, who may have been misled into believing it is a one-click install would not have known what to look for, let alone how to change it. 

Wordpress Setup

 No one that I know puts up  a website, Wordpress or otherwise, just for the sake of having a website alone.  At least I hope not!    The whole idea of having a website is that you want traffic to your site so you can share some specialized knowledge, build authority in a niche or campaign about products and services that you might be offering.  Once again, knowing what settings affect the visibility of your new Wordpress website are the key.

 The PLR software package that needed to be installed did not have the privacy settings nor ping list optimized for broad access to the new site.  Indeed, the website was up as predicted but nothing in the installation instructions addressed these critical and necessary changes so it could be found through organic searches and paid advertising campaigns. 

 The Virtually Marj Service team uses standardized procedure for optimizing settings, as well as a standard list of plugins for analyzing and improving traffic to the site.  This is our “secret sauce” so I won’t be laying all of that out for you here but if you’d like to know more about that, you can contact me. 

To PLR or Not to PLR, that is the question

 PLR Products are a great way to jumpstart your business and website and it is wonderful that people take the time to create them.  As with all business decisions, choosing the “right tool for the job” is an important step along the way.  As for PLR Wordpress Websites, they are not recommended for people who do not have the underlying skills to read into the instructions or who don’t have staff to make them work properly as a business building tool

We all set Goals in some form.  At the time we establish them, they feel exciting and new.  Sometimes are goals are set with a purpose of diverging from our ordinary daily lives.  These sorts of ideas enthuse us, no matter what they are related to. 

One such goal could be to branch out in your business.  Many pursue the goal of passive income and this doesn’t always entail joining a business opportunity or MLM, thank goodness.    The difficulty that exists, however, is that you can become swept  away by your primary income-earning activities because you enjoy what you do, have built a reliable reputation and you like the people with whom you are working. 

My primary business is project based.  A very high percentage of that business is returning customers with new projects.  If the experience of working with them in the past was mutually beneficial, as well as being fun, I have no qualms about taking on their requests.  On the other hand, there are some clients whose projects I can’t wait to finish and with whom I will not work again. 

New projects and cash flow are great to have, and hard to say no to.  But, with only 24-hours in a day, you begin to wonder if you are spreading yourself too tasks to forego are the ones that aren’t producing income for you yet .  It is true that you can outsource some aspects of your business but, when YOU ARE THE COMMODITY that people are seeking, you ultimately must decide if you want to decline new business so you can stick with your business building plans. 

This is what I lovingly refer to as a Creative Conundrum. 

The best strategy that I’ve found for achieving balance between what I have and what I want is to list all of the things that I want to do, as well as the things that I must do, on a schedule of some sort.  Don’t forget to set aside “me” time. 

Blocking time is not a new concept but it works.  In fact, this was the basis of Steven Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.   Among other things, Covey recommended establishing your task list, prioritizing those tasks and checking them off or updating their status on a daily basis. 

A little more tedious, but also helpful, is keeping some sort of log on how your time is being spent.  If you do this for a week or so, you will notice patterns in your days and where you are spending time that takes away from your business building or income generating activities. 

Once you have a handle on how your time is being spent, you are in a position to determine what you can spend less time on, or possibly stop doing, so you have more time to pursue your creative goals.   Those are the things that you really wanted to do when you imagined them, right?

As you’re taking down the tree and visiting relatives are checking the status of their flights back home, it is clear that another holiday season is winding down. Like it or not, another year has passed and it is time to think about how to make your next year the best one you’ve had, so far.

You work hard every day to build your business but, if you don’t feel your business is where it ought to be, it may be due to the fact that you’ve been so swept up with tactical matters that you haven’t really stopped to consider what it is that you really want. With that list in front of you, you are ready to set some goals.

Goal setting for your small business owners requires both imagination and foresight. Here are some great questions you can use to organize your thinking for a goal setting exercise:

1. What do you want to change?
2. Where will this change take your business?
3. Why do you want to change now?
4. What do you need to do to make the change?
5. When do you want the change to take effect?
6. How will this change improve your business?
7. What happens after you’re there?

This sort of brainstorming can help you whether your goals are business or personal and envisioning goals in this way guides you to think strategically. Putting things in a list can actually help you find related goals, or goals that need to be done in sequence, so you can economize on the resources needed to accomplish them too.

Setting goals may seem like a daunting task but it is a necessary step in setting the course for advancing progress. As John F. Kennedy said:

“Effort and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.”

So think SMART when you think of goal setting.

S is for Specific

If your goals are specific, you have a much better chance of achieving them. So, for each of your items on the list, answer these questions:

Who: Who is involved?

What: What will be accomplished?

Where: Identify the location where work will take place.

When: Establish a time frame.

Which: Identify essential and constraining factors.

Why: Specific reasons and benefits of the accomplished goals.

M is for Measurable

Establish tangible criteria for measuring progress toward the goal’s attainment. Each milestone is a point of potential exhilaration that motivates you to continue. When verifying that you have set measurable criteria, ask yourself questions like:

How much?

How many?

How will I know when it is done?

A is for Attainable

This is where the priorities or the “why do it at all” questions help. If you have items on your list that really matter, you can find ways to accomplish them. Your dedication to accomplishing these goals will drive you to develop attitudes, abilities, skills, and the financial resources necessary to reach them.

If your goals seem far from reach, remember that you have the ability to make them attainable by growing and expanding to match them. Each time you do what you previously believed could not be accomplished, you are improving your self-image, which allows you to feel worthy of the rewards that reaching your goals can give.

R is for Realistic

Choose goals that are representative of substantial progress and include objectives toward which you are both willing and able to work. It isn’t necessarily true that your goals must be set low in order for them to be realistic. You are at the helm of your own ship, after all.

T is for Tangible

Your goals ought to be something you can experience with one of the five senses. If you must have an intangible goal, like one that is tied to self-improvement, relate it to a tangible one through offering yourself a reward that you can experience.

Remember that none of your goals are cast in stone. If you are persistently evaluating outcomes while working toward them, you may find adjacent goals that actually will bring greater improvements for your lifestyle or business. When this happens, go back to your list and adjust it accordingly.

While it is important to work toward things that you need, if these things are not what you want, you’re far less likely to accomplish your goals. Ultimately, you must WANT something in order to take ACTION to acquire it. This is where my favorite mindset philosophy comes in: DREAM – DO – HAVE.

Dare to DREAM so you will DO what is necessary to HAVE your dreams come true!

Thank you for your readership, always, and here’s wishing each of you a Happy and Prosperous New Year!

If you are using Wordpress as a basis for your business website, you’ll expose yourself as a newbie, possibly open yourself to online security risks, and lose potential SEO benefits the software provides if you don’t take time to learn how it works. While it is true that installing Wordpress is simple, setting it up correctly contributes to your website’s success, which also has an impact on your business success.

We’re talking business here, right? I do acknowledge that there are many extremely successful bloggers who established blogs on free sites, like Blogger, before Wordpress came of age. These days, sites like that are most useful in your SEO linking strategy and should NOT be the base for your primary website. This is also true of Wordpress.com, another free blogging platform.

For starters, free blogging sites offer limited theme and plugin options. The most important for you to understand about them, however, is that they own your content and can arbitrarily take your website down at any time. While “free” may sound good to you, building SEO for a website is actual time spent, whether you outsource the work or not. Why in the world would you choose to invest that much energy on a domain and content that you do not have complete control over? It boggles my mind…

Hire an Expert Wordpress Developer

So here you are. You have a great business idea and you know you need a website to make it happen.  Everyone is saying that Wordpress is what you should use too. You’ve found a lot of helpful and free articles on the internet explaining how to install and set it up so why would you want to hire someone to do this for you?

Based on stories I’ve heard from my clients and some of the projects that I’ve been asked to finish, I can think of several reasons. Primarily, they come under the heading of insufficient technical skills or a lack of understanding about how computers and database applications work. If you don’t understand the underlying technologies of your Wordpress software, you can get into trouble which can affect your business plans.

Other things that make it easy to spot a newbie include:

Lack of Focus
Have you ever visited a site with frequent and unrelated posts designed to bring in affiliate sales? Offering too many different things or choosing too broad a niche can make your website invisible. Up-front keyword research, to isolate low competition keywords with adequate search volumes, is essential to your website’s success, whether your products are affiliate offerings or your own content, like an eBook.

Having Too Many Pages
While every place you go on the internet is considered a web page, Wordpress uses the term pages differently. When I wind up at a site where the majority of the content is pages, I know that the site was created by an inexperienced Wordpress user. The beauty of Wordpress is that it notifies search engines automatically when post content is updated.

Default Installation Content on the Site
Another dead giveaway is seeing the default installation content, like the blogroll or the standard meta login. Worse yet is spotting the “Hello World” post or the default about page on the site.

Categories
Visiting a Wordpress site with nothing categorized is a tell-tale sign of a newbie blog. So far as I’m concerned, no content should exist in the “uncategorized” category.

Cross-Browser Inconsistencies
Although I’ve been tempted, I’ve never published a site with a “best viewed in …” message on it. Without inflaming the debate about which browser is better, and taking the high road, assume that you should not enforce the use of one browser over another. Over the past several years, I have learned that not all themes are created equal and solid CSS skills, as well as knowing what to look for in the theme, are necessary to resolve browser incompatibility.

After a free consultation, people often say that they can put up their own sites. After weeks of trying, some have come back to retain my Wordpress website development services.

Our blogs are intended to present us as professionals. The best advice that I can offer to you is that, if you are not technically adept, hire a professional who can deliver the website you want and help you learn what you need to know so you can build your online reputation and add value to your bottom line.

Listening to the Prairie Home Companion program today, I experienced a bit of home sickness. The program aired from the Minnesota State Fair. As Garrison Keillor spoke of fall, apples, harvest moons, and the fair, all the sights, sounds, and smells from my home state and that event rushed to my senses. These are all pleasant memories. You can take the girl out of Minnesota but you can’t take Minnesota out of the girl, I guess.

Garrison Keillor is a delightful story teller. He may even be remembered with the likes of Mark Twain, eventually. His stories have a way of creating empathy for his predicaments and the laughter that bubbles up when imagining his scenarios is totally spontaneous and impossible to suppress.

How does this relate to Online Marketing? We’ve all heard of “My Story Marketing” by now. This is a method used to evoke empathy, build excitement and gain sales as a result. I’ve sure read some long-winded sales letters in my day. None of them were happy stories, like Garrison Keillor’s witty tales, and most were so tedious and predictable that I didn’t even finish reading them, let alone feel compelled to press the buy button.

In fact, the recipe for “My Story Marketing” is to begin with a problem that you have faced in order to grab people’s attention. After doing this, you can explain what you’ve done to effect a change and how your life is now. Supposedly, this will inspire your visitors to buy your product or join your business. Having never tried it myself, there is no way to know how effective it really is but there are enough proponents of the tactic that it is worth evaluating.

In my former career as a Realtor®, I learned that there were two ways to write compelling advertisements. One was to use a headline that evoked fear.  The other type of headline permitted people to imagine or dream.

Statistically, most of my guests came to an open house because they saw the sign while they were in the neighborhood or were neighbors who were merely curious to see the inside of the house but, in my experiments with print advertising, I found that using the positive headline drew more people in, if they came as a result of seeing the ad. If “My Story Marketing” is effective, it would be interesting to see the split test results, assuming they tried a page with a positive and happy story too.

So let’s apply my real estate marketing experiment to Internet Marketing. When we have internet real estate, we use many different methods to bring our websites to the attention of surfers. In a way, some of our website traffic is similar to people driving by an open house sign and deciding to stop in along their way. How are they affected by their visit?

Generally, you have less than a minute to entice someone to stay at your site and have a look around so the look and feel of your site is your curb appeal. This includes color, font, image, and layout choices. If your page is too slow to load, uses garish colors, or has too many blinking ads, visitors will abandon it quickly. But that is aesthetics and one person’s “ugly” is another person’s “beautiful” so you’ll need to experiment with things to see what works best in your niche.  More importantly, look and feel is not what helps you to get income from your website.

For several reasons, the most important part of your page is your content. The area above the fold (i.e., seen without the need to scroll down) is critical real estate so you need to use it wisely. Do you want to frighten your visitors into reading on and possibly taking action or would you rather build a relationship with them established through interest, truth, value, and trust? From my viewpoint, the latter goes miles further than the former.

I’m advocating that Internet Marketers start creating “My Story Marketing” stories that are entertaining. We all need more joy in our lives, don’t we? Enlightenment or laughter must be equally compelling and writing about things like that certainly is much more fun for the author too. Current studies indicate that leveraging humor can lead to a potentially big payoff. Social scientists have long documented that people who are perceived as being witty, clever and funny are destined for popularity and greater success in their work and relationships.

If you actually have had a difficult problem and your business or product has resolved it, by all means write the traditional “My Story Marketing” story. I caution you to be honest in the results you claim, however. Credibility is very easy to lose and nearly impossible to recover.