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 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

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…

Although Wordpress is a one-click installation on most hosting accounts, choosing a good theme, customizing it, knowing how to configure the software correctly, and selecting the right plugins are not one-click solutions. Knowing what to look for is not intuitive if you don’t understand how Wordpress works.

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.