Category Archives: Your Online Foundation
I’ve been working on a WordPress website for a local prison aftercare program that I volunteer with. As I was adding plugins, I thought many of you might also have a WordPress site and would be interested in seeing which plugins I use, so here is my list. There are many more, like ecommerce ones, that I don’t use, so you won’t find them listed here.
My recommendation when searching for new plugins is to read reviews, check ratings, and most of all, make sure that the plugin is compatible with your version of WordPress. Also, I learned the hard way that when updating your plugins, do one at a time and then check to make sure your site still looks fine. I didn’t do that, updated all my plugins at once, and could no longer see my website online. One of the plugins wasn’t compatible anymore and since I’d updated all of them at the same time, I had no idea which plugin was the culprit. It took hours of back and forth with my web host before I could get my site back online. If you update the plugins individually and your site no longer works, go to your File Manager files in the website CPanel, find the listing of WordPress plugins and delete the one that you tried to update before the site went down. That should rectify the problem.
Here is the list of WordPress plugins I use: Continue reading
Getting Traffic To Your Blog
- Just because you have an online presence doesn’t mean that people will easily find you. As marketers, we should always be looking for new ways to promote ourselves and our businesses, both online and off. Besides having your URL on your business card and any other offline advertising, what else can you do? Why not try some of these ways of driving traffic to your website or blog?
Use a proper domain name, especially one ending with .com since that’s what most people automatically use. Your domain can end in .ca if you are targeting Canadians (or any country specific extension), but also purchase the .com and point it to the .ca site. Same if you have a Blogger blog – point your own domain name to the Blogger site. It sounds much nicer than one ending in blogspot.com. Use an easy to remember domain name with great keywords on your topic. - Write at least five long article posts, called pillar articles. These usually give information, are longer than 500 words, and have long term appeal, which is referred to as evergreen content.
- For the first month or two, try to write one new blog post per day so that you can get listed in the search engines. After that, try for at least once aweek. If you have no time to write, use a related video from YouTube or an article from EzineArticles.com. Try to have mainly original content though.
- Post useful content that other sites will want to link to.
- Write interesting comments on other blogs with similar topics to get links back to your site.
- Mention other sites in your posts with links to their home page. Not just a link, but a thoughtful post that relates to them in some way. Again, topicsrelevant to your readers.
- Encourage comments on your own blog. Ask your readers for their opinion about what you’ve written or ask a question.
- Submit your most recent pillar article to a blog network. These are blog communities centered on a number of different topics. Find the ones suitable for your blog and submit your best work. This can result in hundreds of new readers each time you do.
- Learn a little about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Search Engines have a little program they send out to websites to “crawl” or “spider” each site, picking up information to index in their Search Results. You optimize your website pages with keywords that, through your research, you feel will bring in traffic.Next, you put the keywords throughout your text on the page without making your content difficult for a person to read. Your main goal, after all, is still good, solid content for your readers to enjoy. Your chosen keywords or keyword phrases should be mentioned in the title of your page, and in the first paragraph, then sprinkledthroughout the rest of the page. The search engines will pick out your keywords using their robots, bring them back to their computers, index you and give you a rank based on a number of factors.
- Try to be interesting to readers at the same time, yet put your keywords first. For example, instead of ‘The Best Places To Go For Family Vacations’ say ‘Family Vacations – The Best Places To Go’. The keywords at the beginning are more important that those following and since the main keywords for this post were ‘Family Vacations’ they needed to be first.
- Eliminate any duplicate content that you may have on your website. This means that if you have two products that are exactly the same but differ in color or some other small characteristic, put them on the same page. Having the same content appear multiple times on a search engine causes you to lose page rank and natural traffic. That goes for blog posts too – don’t post the same content in two different places on your website or you may be penalized for duplicate content.
- Submit articles to EzineArticles.com, or as a Facebook or LinkedIn post. Articles should be 400-500 words. At the end of the article, have a resource box that mentions what they might find at your site and then a link back to it. Try to leave your readers wanting to know more about what you just wrote and that they can find additional information on the topic by following your link. You can also have an Articles page on your website and encourage people to share your content as long as they leave your contact information intact.
- Forum marketing – become an active, helpful member of a forum where your potential customers congregate. Although you can’t advertise there, you can include a link to your site in your signature.
- Yahoo Answers (answers.yahoo.com) – answer questions in your field with a link back to your site.
- Viral marketing – release helpful reports, with a link back to your site, that others are allowed to download and pass around.
- Social networking – become active on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
- Write online press releases of 250-300 words as often as you like to free or paid services.
- Use social bookmarking sites to share your content.
- Have you ever thought about recording your own radio show? People are interested in your expertise and experience and they want to hear about it.
Thanks to the Internet, broadcasting a radio show is no more difficult than dialing a phone number and talking to your guests, either live or as a recorded segment.Services such as Blog Talk Radio allow you to get your message out quickly and easily. Whether it’s a one time episode or a regular show, you’ll enjoy interacting with your market and promoting yourself and your company. Added bonuses – your show can easily be placed on your website and added to Itunes so your fans can listen at their leisure, and you’ll get new traffic to your site as listeners find yourshow. Plus you can create multiple products from your audio. - Post on high ranking sites like Youtube, Craigslist, Kijiji, iTunes, Wikipedia and eBay with links back to your site. Note: eBay only allows links on theAbout Me page.
- Free Traffic From Television – In 2008, I appeared as part of a three woman tech panel on our local Rogers television station. I was there to answer questions about blogging and my blog address was displayed every time the camera was on me. It resulted in extra traffic to my site for a number of days after the show. The local tv station in your area is usually on the lookout for interesting guests and features, so why not contact them and offer to share your expertise with their viewers? The fact that you are a member of the community will also work in your favour. Although you won’t make any money by appearing on one of their shows, the publicity that results will bring people to your website. If your business is new, you will also become known as a resident expert.
I hope these tips are useful to you. Please let me know which ones are your favourites and if I can help you to get more traffic to your blog, please let me know.
To your online success,
Carol
Anyone can start a blog, without expense, by using the free blog software at blogger.com
Filled with easy to create modules, Blogger offers a simple way to test the interest in your new idea, to send traffic to other sites, to establish yourself as an expert in your field, and to collect names of interested possible customers. You can even make money with your blog by inserting adsense ads and links to affiliate products.
Blogger is a great way for older people to capture their experiences and knowledge for the sake of future generations. Although not the best choice for your main web presence since Blogger has been known to delete the blogs of those it deems improper or too sales focused, it’s fine as a secondary site or a main one for non-businesses.
Did I mention that Google loves Blogger blogs and grants them a place in the search engine rankings fairly quickly? I also use Blogger as extra content to feed into my main site using its RSS capability. RSS is the Internet equivelant to having a syndicated newspaper column that shows up in one newspaper initially and is broadcast to others as well.
Have I convinced you yet? Why not try out some of the features Blogger has to offer and add it to your arsenal of online promotional tools?
Carol
What are your objectives concerning your website? Since I have a number of sites, I found it very helpful to write down my Internet plans for the year. Try to focus on your main objective for each site and decide on any regular features to incorporate.
For instance, with my Internet Marketing site, my objective is to journal my progress as I create information products and as I set up my first membership site online. In the past, I’ve written about a number of things related to Internet Marketing with no real focus on specific topics.
Provide regular weekly updates about your business – anything that your target market would find interesting. Answer frequently asked questions.
Why not create an editorial calendar for the year? The calendar will give you specific ideas about what to write on your website. It isn’t meant to be rigidly followed, but helps keep you on track. Write about other things as well, but this gets you started.
A calendar will list a lot of special days, such as Secretary Day. From there, brainstorm topic ideas. That way, each week of the month you can start with an idea and expand on it. For instance, one of the days mentioned was Red Day. Red got me thinking about bold colors, which got me thinking about image. That ended up as a topic about ‘how to get your site noticed’. Many content providers find an editorial calendar quite useful.
Planning takes time, but it helps you focus on where you want to go. Are the goals for your website clearly laid out?
Carol