How to SEO Optimize WordPress Images

Have you ever wondered how to SEO Optimize your WordPress images? It is commonly understood that on-page SEO can be optimized through the proper use of image attributes for placing keywords, appropriate keyword density, the use of H1 and H2 tags, and decoration of keywords within your post content.

Tip:  SEO Optimize Images But Don’t Keyword Stuff!

The alt attribute is meant to be used as an alternative text if the image is not available and it is another location search engines to read your keywords.  It is bad practice to stuff keywords, however, so use this content area wisely.

Important Image Attributes to SEO Optimize

1. Image Name
2. Image Title
3. Image Alt Text
4. Image Link Text

Uploading and inserting images into your WordPress post is very easy to do. When images are added to a post, the software creates different sized images for use on your pages automatically. The default image link is the link to the image attachment page. From an SEO perspective, this is far less desirable than having that image link to your actual post.

WordPress Image Upload Features Can Help You SEO Optimize Content

Most blog owners upload an image and insert it into their post without giving it a second thought.  Unless you have investigated the advanced options available in the popup for adding images to your WordPress posts and understand how these options help you SEO Optimize your WordPress images, you are missing opportunities for keyword placement on your posts and pages.

With search engines demanding relevant content, it has become increasingly important to SEO Optimize all the elements possible in your posts and pages.  As the saying goes, a picture speaks a thousand words. Don’t overlook these words by failing to utilize the full power of WordPress and image tags.

This short video tutorial will walk you through the process of assigning a name to your image that is related to the topic of your post as well as how to use the advanced features of WordPress to SEO Optimize your newly uploaded image for better on-page SEO.

 

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Mixing Friendship and Business is a Bad for Business

For the past two years, I’ve been in a business relationship with a client whom I felt had also become my friend.  After extracting more than twice the amount of labor than was allocated under the terms of our monthly retainer agreement for WordPress Website Development services over several months, these local clients have reminded me that mixing friendship with business is a bad idea.

In an effort to overcome my disappointment about their denial about what is owed for my services … or even discuss a compromise, I decided to write a post to advise and educate small business owners on better ways to structure contracts with clients who expect to receive benefits prior to payment.

Qualifying Business Prospects

As a former Realtor, one of the refrains that they drilled into my head during training was that Buyers were Liars.  We were taught to qualify people for mortgages prior to investing time and energy in setting up showings or writing contracts.  This is easy to do when you can “spin” your request for qualification as a service that will benefit the Buyer but it is not so easy to do in other service businesses.

The difficulty may lie in the fact that most small business owners cannot afford to use expensive credit checking services.  Thus, the qualification process involves interpersonal communication that almost seems intrusive while qualifying a prospect for their ability to pay.

In a perfect world, you would take 100% of the payment up-front but that is a hard sell.  In lieu of that, insist on a retainer of no less than 50% of the total contract price and establish milestones that pay the remaining 50% for each deliverable at the time of acceptance.  You may want to consider using an escrow service to ensure that you will be paid as tasks are completed.  If you are in the middle of their project and they begin to tell you they are having trouble paying their bills, stop working on their project.  Retainers are non-refundable.  You cannot recover the time you’ve spent once it is gone.

Get it in Writing!

If there is no written contract to enforce a business agreement, things can easily go wrong.  At the very least, put the request into an email message after you’ve agreed to deliverables and pricing.  Don’t begin work on the project until you have an email reply that acknowledges the agreement.

Stick to Business

Since time is the commodity that service providers trade, don’t allow yourself to get engaged in personal discussions with your clients during the project.  Clients will act friendly and they will say anything to get what they want.  Inevitably, they will try to gain your sympathy and convince you that they will pay you later when they want more than they can afford.  In my experience, this never happens when the bill comes due and the friendship that you felt was merely the tool they used to get what they wanted.

Negotiate Before You Do the Work

If a services client requests work that you know will take more time than the payment arrangement allows for, take notes about their request and tell them that you’ll have to get back to them with a price.  Regardless of their insistence, don’t lift a finger to get the work done until you have reached an agreement about compensation and received an additional retainer payment.  This is business and you are delivering value.

I repeat:  Don’t budge if they say they will pay you later.  They won’t.

Don’t be Afraid to Walk Away

As the saying goes, when one door closes another is opened.  If you feel that your client is difficult to work with and they are exhibiting signs of ambivalence about your requests for payment, this is a sign that you need to move on to another client who understands that this is your business.  You are not their employee and you owe them nothing.  You are an independent business owner and it isn’t your job to save them at your expense, no matter how nice they seem.

Don’t Get Distracted by the Noise

When a client knows they are wrong, they will endeavor to assign blame to you for their irresponsibility.  If you get caught up in their accusations, you’ll get distracted from the goal of being compensated for the work that you’ve done.  Acknowledge that you have heard what they are saying but do not engage in a debate about why you are demanding to be paid and do not involve yourself with explanations about your actions as you pursue payment.  You did the work.  In a business relationship, you deserve to be paid.

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Eliminating Blog Spam on Your WordPress Website

The longer your wordpress website is online, the more pages that are listed in search engines.  Getting pages listed is good for your business, for sure, but it also makes it easier for blog spammers to target your site in their efforts to get links to their own sites.  One method of doing this is referral spam.  Perusing some of the comments blocked naturally by Akismet, it is fairly clear that they were not written by a human.  Even though some of the malformed subjects and content created by spinning tools can become a source of amusement, having to manage your blog spam queue is a PIA and waste of time.

To keep your site healthy, you have to learn something about how things work and keep code up to date.  Another term for this is website maintenance.  Over the years they have been online, I have tried several things in my efforts to overcome my blog spam at GetIncomeBlog.com and my WordPress Website Development business site.

Within this post, I offer some alternative solutions and details about the one that I’ve settled on which is working perfectly for me. 

Disabling New Comments

Within the WordPress dashboard, under Settings –> Discussion, there is an option to automatically close comments on articles older that a user definable time frame.  This is probably the easiest counter-measure against blog spam but I’ve never enabled that option because most of my content is not time sensitive and I don’t want to disallow comments for people who might find it weeks, months or years after the post has been published.

Plugins

For a while, I used the Antispam Bee plug-in.  It was effective against blog spam but it didn’t allow me to review comments that had identified as spam.  Because there have been times when I’ve found comments from people that I know which have been marked as spam by Aismet, I didn’t want to risk it.

Referral Blog Spam Comments

Referral blog spam is generated by software and used by people who are looking for links back to their pages.  These people are banking on the fact that their blog spam will land on blogs where comments are automatically approved.  I’ve never set up a site that way and I’ve never allowed any of my WordPress Website Development clients to do so either.

The biggest headache for me was referral blog spam.  Recently, I implemented some changes.  After 72 hours of testing, I’m satisfied that I’ve found a solution that is worth sharing.  Bona fide comments are still delivered and there been ZERO referral spam comments.

What a gift!

Eliminating Referral Blog Spam

The  technique that I used involves three things:

1. WordPress configuration
2. Modification of .htaccess
3. Captcha plug-in
4. A little vigilance

WordPress Configuration

First, here is a screen shot of how my Discussion settings are configured at all of my sites:

Some of these are defaults but others are not.  I do not automatically approve comments from people whose past comments have been approved.  By way of explanation, the reason that I only request notification when a comment is held for moderation is because that second email that comes after I’ve looked over a comment and approved it was redundant. 

.htaccess changes

To completely eliminate referral blog spam, you must add a few lines of code to your .htaccess file.  This is a file that resides on your server and was created at the time you installed the wordpress application.  It is critical that you retain a backup copy of this file because your site may become non-operational if you do not get it right the first time and you need to recover quickly when things go wrong.

# DENY ACCESS TO NO-REFERRER REQUESTS

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} POST
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .wp-comments-post. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*YOURDOMAIN. [OR,NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ ^http://YOURDOMAIN.com/your-page/ [R=301,L]

These lines of code are placed just above the line that says # BEGIN WordPress. You will need to customize the code to agree with your domain names and destination URLs. This post does not endeavor to teach you the function behind the above code but, in summary, what it is doing if diverting comments that are not originated through the comment form on your site and, if someone’s software is trying to do that, they are directed to a page on one of my other domains that counts down the time until Christmas.  Granted, referral spammers will never see that page but it gives me a way to track their attempts when I review statistics that are logged by the Statpress plug-in.

You can use any text editor to read and modify the .htaccess file.  When you are saving the file, you must use double quotes so the file extension is not “.txt”.

Captcha plug-in

After a little trial and error, I decided to use the SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam plug-in.  All that I can say about my choice is that this one did not require any additional coding and it accomplished the task.

Vigilance

WordPress also incorporates the ability to blacklist commenters.  You can bar a comment that contains user defined words in its content, by commenter’s name, by URL, by e-mail, or by IP.  For those referral blog spam comments that slip through the cracks for any reason, this will be the final authority on whether or not you have to manually handle their unwanted comments.

Caveat

There is one caveat to my preferred anti-referral blog spam method.  It will only work with a self-hosted WordPress website.  In other words, if your blog is hosted at WordPress.com, you will either have to put up with referral spam or install one of the available plug-ins through your dashboard.

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With all the outsourcing, is anything made in the USA anymore?

Enough with all this outsourcing talk!  This is the season where many of us are overtly shopping.  Economic circumstances may be forcing greater frugality but, as you are scanning shelves for stocking stuffers and gifts, take a moment to read the labels.  When I did this yesterday, none of the products on the shelf were made in the USA.

If you’re thinking globally about the events that led up to where things stand today in the USA economy, it cannot all be assigned to fiscal irresponsibility on the part of individuals and/or government.  Simply put, the root cause culprit is greed and any business who is outsourcing to overseas resources is contributing to the problem.

During my adult lifetime, from automobiles to toothpaste production, I’ve witnessed the discontent caused when corporate financial decisions were made to improve shareholder earnings.  Opposing forces clashed at annual meetings as the affluent passed through the picket lines of the affected employees.  But it didn’t stop or slow down the processes that have embraced offshore outsourcing and speeding the erosion of the financial foundation of the USA.  Since the early 70’s when this began, more and more US citizens have been put out of work and entire communities have been hobbled by the closing of manufacturing plants and businesses that once enabled them to thrive.

A trending online business is training that teaches internet entrepreneurs how to use offshore outsourcing for parts of their business.  While this may enhance one’s bottom line, these business owners seem to have lost sight of the larger picture.  By sending their business offshore, they are contributing to the problem that their training seeks to solve, in my humble opinion.

I’m not just ranting.  Over the years that I’ve been in the Online Marketing & Branding business, I’ve acquired new contracts with many USA business owners who have been burned by using offshore outsourcing tactics.  When those people seem to expect me to lower my rates based on their bad experience, I’ve had to remind them that whatever happened before they began working with me does not create an obligation on my part to make it better for them.

My rates are my rates, and I’m worth every penny! 

For new entrepreneurial technical talent who are just starting out, using freelance sites to acquire new clients without incurring advertising expenses is a valid but temporary tactic.  I only could do it for about 3 months because devaluing my services was not good for my business … or my self-esteem.  When buyers who had invited me to bid pursued me and begged me to reconsider, I would sometimes calculate out their proposed hourly rate in an effort to inform them that what they were willing to pay was below minimum hourly wages in the USA.

Pretty simple project. Please bid reasonably.

These are words that you might find in a post on a freelancer site.  What are the parameters of a “reasonable” bid?

Budgets for gigs with statements like these normally range from $5 – $200 USD, and they assume they will win by outsourcing to an offshore developer.  When the low end of the proposed budget is $5 USD, the definition of “reasonable” is guaranteed to unreasonable for anyone who is trying to sustain a lifestyle in the USA.  Scanning through the requested deliverables, qualified AND experienced wordpress website design talent can see that the level of effort involved in meeting their expectations will consume no less than 20 hours of development and iteration time, including the iteration time that is part and parcel of the client not having a clear idea about what they want until they become aware of what they can have.

Much to my amusement, many such postings state they will only consider USA resources.  Either these buyers are lacking an understanding of what their outsourcing request entails or they don’t care to pay fairly.  I applaud wanting to control business operating costs but I can’t help wondering if they would ever consider a position that paid a maximum of $2 an hour?  And, with all due respect to anyone who has put something like this on a freelance posting, if someone is incapable of doing the work themselves in a few minutes time, how can they possibly characterize it as being simple?

More importantly and back to the point of my post:

When will those racing for wealth by using offshore outsourcing understand they are undermining themselves too?

Freelance outsourcing service values are only the latest in a long chain of progress that has cascading peripheral effects for us all.  As our country’s dependency on petroleum products shows no signs of lessening and the cost of a loaf of bread spirals upward, we all are feeling the pinch in our pocket books.  When manufacturing began moving offshore during the late 70’s, the source of our country’s expertise was described as being the service industry.  The train has left the station but which way is it heading?  After we’ve outsourced our services industry,  what will be left?

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Don’t Should on Yourself!

A wise man with whom I worked during my earlier years once came up with a profound New Year’s resolution at our annual marketing support meeting.  The entire group laughed out loud when he said his resolution was to never say “it should work” again.

There does seem to be a resurgence of people not thinking through the answers to questions that are asked.  Responses like this are pointless:

“It should have been there by now.” or “That should have worked.”

Normally, a long explanation about how the process is supposed to work follows comments like these.  All kidding aside, it almost seems like an assumption has been made that I wouldn’t have done something simple, like checking my spam folder or reading instructions.  As the support person drones on about how their process works, I’m thinking, “If your system worked the way you’ve described it, I wouldn’t have picked up the phone to find out what was wrong.”

Communicating is such a critical component of business.  Whether it is written or verbal, our phrasing has a lot to do with how the other side of the conversation receives our responses.  We need to empathize with the caller and, above all, treat them professionally.  Without our customers, we have no business.  This applies to ALL business models … assuming the business is legitimate.

Even though this may sound cliché, there really is no such thing as a dumb question.  Entrepreneurs who are operating a truly customer-facing business must learn how to respond appropriately to their customer’s questions.  Here are some suggestions for improving your customer communications:

1. Smile before picking up the phone.
2. Establish set time frames during work days for taking calls to ensure minimal disruption..
3. Draft agenda topics for scheduled meetings and allocate time limits to the topics.  Distribute the agenda to all invitees in advance of the meeting.  Be flexible to requests to alter or rearrange the agenda and time frames.
4. Don’t make customers wait more than 24-hours for a response to their email or voicemail.
5. Set “office hours” so your customers are respectful of your personal boundaries.  Inform active customers of your vacation plans.   If you have a dedicated business line, update your announcement to reflect any extended time away from your office so potential new business doesn’t think you are non-responsive.
6. Ensure that you understand your customer’s problem statement before suggesting a solution.  They’ve been immersed in it long enough to determine it is a problem.  Sometimes you must back them up to the beginning so you can be of better assistance to them.
7. Remain calm and be empathetic.  Understand that your customer may have struggled for hours before calling you and that they could be tense as a result.
8. Set expectations properly if your customer’s issue cannot be handled during the call.
9. Publish an FAQ page on your website and refer people to it first.  Whether you have a product or service, if you’ve been in business a while you know what questions are most frequent.
10. If your product is digital, prepare documentation that assumes the least amount of knowledge while making it complete enough for advanced users.

Most of this blog’s readers are aware that I have a service business and that one of my services is WordPress Website Development. Many of my clients are unfamiliar with the software and part of my service fees include one-on-one training.  I welcome client calls because I love teaching people things that will make them feel more self-sufficient and confident with the products and services they have purchased from me.  Because I also enjoy the clients with whom I work as people, I have to monitor the gab time with some of them because we have so much fun just talking.

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The Proposal …

In my business, potential clients sometimes ask for me to submit a detailed proposal that outlines deliverables and costs for milestones on a project.  This usually follows a lengthy phone conversation.  This is not an unreasonable request but preparing these proposals takes time that cannot be spent on other business activities and exposes details about my strategies and methods so my quandary is what level of commitment to ask of the prospect in exchange prior to delivering the document.  Although it is part of doing business, nobody likes paperwork.

When I launched my business, I submitted detailed proposals without a second thought.  However, I modified my approach after a potential client failed to acknowledge the receipt of the proposal and ignored my requests for follow-up and negotiation until he contacted me to share a listing he had placed on a freelance site which was a verbatim copy of everything I had written in my proposal.  I was shocked.  He seemed pleased about the fact that he had sourced the project at a lower rate than I had proposed.  He has returned with new requests since then but I’ve declined.

My proposals now include a time limitation for pricing and a copyright notification that is intended to discourage prospects from using my content to shop their projects around.  In spite of these measures, there still are people who promise to meet with me after the proposal is sent, fail to return calls or emails for a while, and send a cryptic email saying that they “going another direction” with their project after a couple of weeks.  This is disappointing … and suspicious.

This isn’t a sour grapes post.  I certainly don’t expect to win every contract but I honestly don’t know how to handle prospects who leverage my copyrighted content to shop around for better pricing.  It is a bona fide conundrum.

These are the possible solutions that I’ve come up with:

1. Withhold the delivery of all proposals until a mutually agreed to meeting time where we can walk through and discuss each point/price.
2. Charge a flat fee for preparing and delivering detailed proposals and estimates that covers the cost of my time.
3. Propose only an hourly rate for all projects in the future and track time, which is a big headache for me.
4. Join the Circus and escape it all. 

Well, the last one isn’t really an option but it is fun to muse about sometimes.

Panning for Gold

While having fun with the grandkids the other day, we visited a place nearby that specializes in educating people about the California Gold Rush by providing an experiential tour of a mine on their property.  What does this have to do with Web Marketing and Branding, you might ask?  Read on….

The California Gold Rush created a lot of wealth.  So has the internet.  Not unlike internet properties, 49ers staked claims on mines, hoping the vein was rich.  The conditions were difficult, picking their way back into the mines and chiseling through rock by hand.  There were certain things that they looked for that provided direction about pursuit of a path.  The same is true of internet businesses.  It all relies on choosing the right “real estate” to begin with and doing the work necessary to extract the value of that space.

As the kids panned for gold in the trough that the owners of the ranch had set up, they each had different reactions.  One child in the group complained immediately, saying it was too hard, and sulked for a while.  Another “struck gold” right away, shouted out about their good fortune and continued to shriek every time they thought they had found another nugget.  The remainder of the group quietly found nuggets, washed them off and set them aside, and proceeded to look for more.

Where is the Online Mother Lode?

If you are not new to online business, you know exactly what a niche is and how important it is too.  If you are new, this is a term you need to understand.  I can’t tell you what is a profitable niche in a blog post but I can tell you there is a lot of material out there regarding choosing a niche.

In summary, a niche is an area of interest for consumers.  I will always recommend that people begin a business that is in line with their personal passions or hobbies.  While your passions may align with a profitable niche, it is equally possible that your highest area of interest is NOT what other people are looking for.  This should not dissuade you entirely but it will make penetration of that niche more work.  Equally possible is that a niche that you know people are looking for is also a niche that is saturated.  Specializing that niche may allow you to find a “vein” to follow to create online income.

There are free tools to use to explore possibilities but, as expected, digging for gold by hand requires a little more effort and time.  The external Google keyword research tool is a great place to start.  It may seem like a good idea to choose the niches with the most search volume.  Within reason, it is.  You need to be aware that searches with a lot of volume also have a lot of competition.  A good rule of thumb is to choose phrases that have monthly global search volumes between 1,000 and 15,000.

Once you think you’ve found a niche to exploit, continue your due diligence.  Use Google again to find out how many pages are there for you to compete with.  Take the term that appeals to you, place it in a Google search box in quotes, and submit your search.  This will return the number of pages with each word in your phrase in any order.  If you submit the search without the term in quotes, it will turn up the count for all the pages that have all of the words in your phrase anywhere on that page, whether together in a string or not.

From a reasonableness perspective, it is best to choose niches that have less than 100,000 competing pages online, so long as the supporting search volume is there.  This is a guideline only.  Persistence will get your pages elevated in search engine listings for more saturated niches.

For the expense, a great niche research tool is cleverly named Micro Niche Finder.  This tool allows you to analyze the strength of competition and computes the number of back links, which is a measure of how many links you will need to build to your site to allow it to rise above other listings for that term.

If you don’t want to learn at this level or purchase tools that would make it easier for you to conduct your own research, you can opt to work with someone who has knowledge of how to research a niche and choose good keyword phrases.  Use the convenient contact form to initiate a conversation with me.

What Tools Can You Use to Launch your Campaign?

It is hard to be in an online business without a website.  If the great keyword phrase you’ve found is an available domain name, grab it quick because you will need a website somewhere online to promote your niche.  With all of its built-in features and since my specialty is WordPress Website Design, it is the best software that I can recommend for your business website.

While you can start a free site using wordpress software at Wordress.com, my position has always been that it is far better to retain ownership of your content.  Besides, theme choices and add on open source software is limited at WordPress.com.  These limitations can impede your progress.

I’ve worked with people who operate on an assumption that a site hosted at WordPress.com will get more traffic.  WordPress.com is a high-traffic site but you must build interest in your page in order to have traffic.  Why do all of that SEO work on a site if you don’t own it?  Seems silly to me…

There are many free themes out there for you to use and, if you find a theme that is close to what you want, you don’t need any special technical skills to put up your own website.  Personally, I recommend taking a look at Studio Press themes.

Remember that owning a website does require you to know something about HTML.  Last year, Holly Powell and I conducted a couple of online webinars to teach people the nuances of choosing domain names, registering them, activating them on your chosen host, installing wordpress, and other things you might want to know to use the software.  I will be updating the training for the latest version of WordPress soon but you can follow this link for access to the 2009 Live Blog Training at no cost.  If you sign up for the newsletter there, you will find out more about new training modules as they become available. 

What Kind of Miner are You?

Let’s get back to the kids who were panning for gold.  Maybe you’ve already found your Mother Lode niche and are living your dream life.  But, if you haven’t, what kind of miner will you be when you locate your niche and the first online payment arrives?  Will you shout out your success for all to hear or will you use the knowledge you gained to find that niche to locate and develop another?

Happy mining!

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Website Copyright: It Matters!

Last week, a colleague, who also is an RSS email subscriber to my site, told me they had copied a recent post and published it on their site.  Because I also had helped them set up one of their blogs and coached them a little, I presumed that they meant they had syndicated my content using a WordPress plugin that had been recommended.  However,because they said the word “copy”, it seemed like a good idea to ask a clarifying question.  The subsequent conversation felt a little awkward and I am still trying to determine if they were simply naive or if it was something else.

What is a Web Copyright?

Every WordPress Website theme that I have created or customized includes code which places a default copyright in the footer.  Summarizing an article on this topic that I read on Smashing Magazine, the same laws that protect printed copy also protect internet content.  Since April 1, 1989, all published content is “automatically” copyrighted and it is not available for use in the public domain throughout the lifetime of its creator plus 70 years.

An idea cannot be copyrighted so, if something you’ve come across on the internet spurs a new post for your site, you are not breaching copyright law.  You are allowed to cite excerpts from existing web content without crossing the line but you cannot replicate articles in their entirety without specific permission.

You also must have the permission of an author before you translate their content to another language.

The “fair use doctrine” is a doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as use for scholarship or review.  It provides for the legal, non-licensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author’s work.

Website Owner Responsibilities

As I was researching this topic, I was enlightened on a topic that may be confusing.  Web content is OWNED by the person who creates it.  In other words, comments are owned by the commenter, not the website owner.  Copyright law implies that you cannot alter content that is not owned by you and this may include removal of links, which is something that I have done myself.

This little nit will be covered in a terms and conditions statement on my website so that people who choose to comment about my posts are fully aware of my policies regarding links in comments.

Bottom Line:  Blog Posts are not like Daylilies

In the patio garden behind a house where I used to live, I frequently gathered up Daylily volunteers from between the cracks in the retaining wall and replanted them in the garden bed where I actually wanted them to grow.  That they were interested enough in survival to cast off volunteer plants any place that roots could take hold impressed me.

Bloggers are no different.  We publish our content and send it out on RSS feeds, hoping to acquire new readership and engage our audience in such a way that they will tell their friends on the social network.  We’re honored that you want others to know about our work, believe me.

Some of us put real research time into creating what we believe will be valuable and accurate content that we hope will be helpful to our target market.  The whole idea of spending time on a blog post is to build authority for the business niche that we are endeavoring to grow.  We want to help you but we don’t want to write your blogs for you.  I make no apologies for saying that out loud and will happily engage in discussion about it with anyone whose opinion may differ.

Copyright Resources

Some very helpful people have directed me to authority sites on plagerism and copyright protection for my reference. Here are those links, should you also have an interest:

• www.plagerism.com
• www.copyscape.com

Website Conversion Tactics

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.

PLR WordPress Websites … Turn Key or Not?

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

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