What You Need To Know About WordPress Podcasts

March 5th, 2010

 

WordPress is a blogging platform that has podcasting support. A podcast is a pre-recorded audio program, very much like a radio program that is listened to on the computer. Podcasting is distributing audio or video content via RSS 2.0 or atom as WordPress creates all the necessary links for the site.

Using WordPress for Podcasting

WordPress works for podcasting. It starts with the creation of a video or audio that is intended to be shared. The file is uploaded to a server and the line to the file is posted in the weblog. WordPress automatically includes a link to the file in the RSS/Atom feed. Listeners will then subscribe to the feed where new files are downloaded automatically.

Podcasting is supported by WordPress 1.5. Linking to an audio file in one of the posts will result to WordPress automatically adding the enclosure tag to the RSS2 feed to make it usable as a podcast. It is important to use a complete and absolute URL when linking to an audio file or WordPress will not be able to make an enclosure for it.

The RSS2 feed should be made available by putting a linking somewhere on the page. As of WordPress 1.5, the RSS 2.0/Atom links are located at the bottom of the page by default. This only works for posts and not for static pages. When a linked file is inaccessible upon publishing of the post, WordPress will not be able to collect the information it needs from the linked files.

A change in the linked file would require refurbishing of the posts so that WordPress can update its file size information about the file. In order for WordPress to recognize m4a and m4b files as podcast, the web server has to be configured to serve the right content type. An XML at the end of the RSS/Atom URL may occasionally be needed for it to work properly.

Dedicated podcast feeds can be made by creating a category in the Admin>Manage>Categories panel for the audio files, and a post containing an audio link must be assigned to every category. If audio file are being hosted on http://archive.org, a custom field called “enclosure” should be added and the full URL is posted for the MP3 file in the value field.

Podcasting allows anyone to create his/her own audio programming and deliver it via the web. The usual way of distributing podcasts are through RSS enclosures as it allows the reference of binary data from within the RSS feed. Podcast readers subscribe to the RSS feed and download the audio files contained in the enclosures. The downloaded audio files are then moved to a portable audio player for later consumption.

Of WordPress Plugins

There are resources that will help in getting to know the WordPress blog platform better. The WordPress podcast features easy and understandable commentaries about WordPress plus a couple of plugins. It is a great learning resource for any skill or experience level. The Diagnosis plugin presents the detailed information about the server, operating system and the database. It is presented in a way that could be understood by the least technically-inclined person using it. Most will be able to appreciate its rich tech content.

The PodPress plugin is designed to make podcasting with WordPress as easy as possible. It has several features that will make its use fruitful to the user. It has full featured and automatic feed generation as well as auto generation of enclosure tag. It provides a preview of what the podcast would look like on iTunes. The podcast is able to download stats and there is support provided for premium content for pay accounts. This plugin makes adding a podcast to a post very simple and makes possible the viewing of MP3 files’ ID3 tag information. The contents of the ID3 tags can even be copied into the post.

It likewise provides control where the player will display within the posts. Support for various formats including video podcasting is given while it facilitates support for unlimited number of media files. It has automatic media player for MP3, MP4, MOV, FLV, ASF, WMV, AVI and others. It also includes in-line and Pop-up Windows support and provides preview image for videos.

The Mechanics of Podcasting

Podcasting’s publish/subscribe model makes use of the push technology wherein the information provider chooses which files to offer in a feed and the subscriber chooses among available feed channels. As a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program which is made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player, podcasting makes use of an automatic mechanism that transfers multi-media computer files from a server to a client. Podcasts are generally analogous to a recorded television or radio server.

The content provider starts by making a file available on the Internet usually by posting the file on a publicly-available web server. However, it is not technically necessary that the file be publicly accessible but it is required that it be accessible through some known URL or a general-purpose Internet address. He then acknowledges the existence of the file by referencing it in another file known as the feed.

The feed is a machine-readable list of the URLs by which episodes of the show may be accessed. One episode refers to the originally made file while the list provides other information such as publish dates, titles and accompanying text description of the series, and each of its episodes. This list can either be published in RSS format and less frequently in atom format.

Feeds may contain entries for all episodes in the series but are usually limited to a short list of the most recent episodes. A feed from one author is commonly used for standard podcasts but the practice of having multiple authors contribute episodes to a single podcast feed is fast becoming popular. The location known as the feed URI or feed URL at which the feed is posted by the content provider is expected to be permanent. This is to be made known to the intended audience.

The user enters the feed URI into a software called a podcatcher or aggregator which retrieves and processes data from the said feed. A podcatcher is a program which starts when the computer is started and runs in the background. A set of feed URIs is managed by it which is added by the user and downloaded at a specified interval. Any substantive change in the feed data from the time it was previously checked will trigger automatic downloading of the location of the most recent item to the user’s computer. Some podcatchers make the newly downloaded episodes available to a user’s portable media player. Downloaded episodes can be played, replayed, or archived like any other computer file.

 

Working From Home by Starting your Own Website Design Business and Designing Chicken Arks

March 3rd, 2010

If you are looking for a legitimate work from home job, consider Web Site Design. The beauty of this business is that it requires low start up costs. The only office equipment you would need would be a good computer, an Internet connection and website design software. You can also set the hours you want to work which suits me as i have already designed a chicken ark I want to market.

The web design software I recommend are Macromedia Dreamweaver (html editor) and Macromedia Fireworks (graphics editor). Microsoft Front Page and Adobe Photoshop are also excellent choices. If you lack web site design skills, don’t fret. The Internet is jam packed with free tutorials and advice on everything you would need to know about web site design and development. You would only be limited by your desire to learn. You can also purchase professional website templates to give you a jump start on designing web sites for your customers.

Have you ever thought about working from home? If you have, you know that the majority of the so called “work at home” jobs are scams. After being laid off from my telecommuting job I found myself looking for another at home job to replace it. After you’ve worked from home for a while, it’s hard to go back to the corporate 9-5. In my experience, most of the work at home jobs out there appeared to be scams. You shouldn’t have to pay an employer to work from home.

I thought I’d be smart and sign up with a website that specialized in work at home jobs. I Googled a website that promised to give you leads from employers who were looking specifically for people to work from home. The home page listed a lot of national companies (Bank of America, American Express, etc.). It appeared that these companies routinely posted jobs on the web site. All I had to do was buy a yearly membership and I’d have access to those awesome jobs. Those national companies may have been known to hire people to work from home but I quickly found out that they did NOT post any jobs on this website. The membership was a total waste of my money. To sum it up, it was a scam. Were there jobs posted on the web site? Yes, but the jobs were for telemarketers and sales. Nothing for a computer professional. It bugged me that the same stale jobs would be listed each day as if they were fresh!

That being said, web site design is a very exciting field to be in. The technology rapidly changes so there is always something new and exciting to learn, it’s a great outlet to release your creativity, you can make a lot of money quickly, and the best reason of all is that you can work from any location including at home in your PJs.

Given all of these reasons, many people wonder how to get started designing web sites for profit. As I said before, it takes very little money to start a successful online business. Once you learn how to design professional web sites (or use web templates), your only obstacle will be to market your business and win jobs. Sounds easy, but it’s not. There are many web site development firms out there who never win bids on projects. You could search the Internet for advice on winning web site design jobs. You can search for advice from business owners who are out there running successful web site design companies. This is a good approach but it does take time. I highly recommend visiting forums. Some of my favorite are Digital pint (http://forums.digitalpoint.com/) and Sitepoint (http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/).

 

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Forget the Phone Book: Make your Internet “listing” Shine With Good Web Site Design!

February 22nd, 2010

 

If you wanted a cult DVD you couldn’t find in stores, are you more likely to spend a few minutes searching the Internet to order it online or drive from store to store for hours, asking salespeople disappointed? If you needed a vet for your new kitten, are you more likely to type “Vets in [Your Area]” into a search engine and read about each veterinarian online or take your chances on a one-inch ad you found in a phone book?

The Pew Internet & American Life Project (www.pewinternet.org) has found that 41% of the 70 million Americans who log on each day say that the Internet has helped make shopping easier and 81% of them research a product or service online before they buy. An estimated 4 million Americans buy a product or service online each day.

If your company doesn’t have a Web site, chances are that your competitors do, and you automatically lose the “battle” over a myriad of potential customers. If you have a Web site that’s visually unappealing or difficult to navigate, people are going to leave your site behind and head over to an attractive, easy-to-use Web site that comes up above your listing in a search engine.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t or can’t do any business online, the Internet is a more extensive phone book. Attract customers to your door with a well-designed Web site with search engine optimization so that your Web site comes up in search engine requests near the first results page. Let your potential customers know what your company does, what you charge, and where you’re located. Share some positive customer reviews.

If you’re a small business, you might benefit from a simple three-page Web site design package, with free one-year Internet hosting and a domain name, thirty free days of Web site updates if you come up with some more ideas after a few days of being online, and a completely original professional Web site design.

If you run your business completely online, a well-designed Web site with an effortless online shopping system is especially important as the Internet is your one and only place of business. If you have a store location, think of how much more business you could do by going global and selling your products online, too!

 

How to Use Wordpress Marketing to Build a Chicken Coop!

February 17th, 2010

 

A lot of people are marketing online nowadays and there are tons of different options when choosing a platform for promoting your products or services.

A really effective strategy that I have found is called WordPress Marketing. You can use it for promoting affiliate offers - for example building a chicken coop.

If you are not familiar with wordpress it is a FREE blog service that allows you to create your own website (blog) for free! You can your own domain name (wordpress.com/nameofyourblog) and anybody with an internet connection can view your page by visiting that web address.

Now, you are online! You can promote products as an affiliate OR you can promote your own products or services from there too. Another popular thing people do when marketing online using a wordpress blog, is to write about something that is very popular at the moment (or always) and get traffic to your site that way. Then, you can place ads on your site for Google or Yahoo (also FREE) and YOU GET PAID anytime someone just clicks on one of the ads on your site!
This is a very popular way of making money online.

What else is WordPress Marketing good for?

Yet another awesome technique for making money with your blog is to build your opt-in list of email subscribers by giving away something of value for FREE right from your blog, in exchange for the email address of your reader. It may in form of e-Books, e-Courses, software or a short report. You would not believe that most people will exchange their email address with these free stuffs. If it is useful for them, they will be your loyalty customer in the future easily.

You can sign up for an auto-responder service for less than $20 a month and easily set up the email address capture form where the customer must enter their first name and email address in order to receive the free download (a short, informative report that you write on the same topic as your blog or promotion).

If you do not want to pay for monthly cost, you can try some free auto-responder services. But it would be a better idea to invest on the paid auto-responder service as it will provides a much more stability and durability.
Once you harvest their email addresses you can promote (legally!) products and/or services to them via email and then you can make some serious money!

If you want to make more money, just create your own product and promote them. If you do not want to create your own product, you may finding some affiliate products to promote. That is Wordpress marketing in a nutshell!

Seree Woradechjamroen
http://www.articlesbase.com/affiliate-programs-articles/how-to-use-wordpress-marketing-to-your-advantage-496332.html

 

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Tips in Promoting a Website

February 8th, 2010

 

Most of the companies today want to establish their business online. And the Internet Solution Company can help advertise and assist in every way possible to get the best Internet Solution for the company’s website. They are looking on the form of online marketing strategies called “website promotion”. It is a strategy that makes your website visible to the Internet. It is an effective way of getting good search engine ranking position in Google, Yahoo and MSN.

If you to have asked yourself “how do I go about promoting website online?” Here are the ways on how to advertise site online.

First, if you are launching a new site, your first step is to submit your site to search engine such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. Search engine submission process is also a way to get exposure on the web.

Second, is submitting your site to Web Directories. It is the form of website promotion that will submit site through directories that are categorized by topics.

Third, is through Banner Advertisement, this is a website promotion that consists of placing banner ads that usually scroll bar at the top of the web page. In creating banner advertisement; make sure you understand who you’re targeting, the goal of your campaign, and how to creatively use the ad confines to get viewers to click on your ad, not away from it.

Fourth, Search engine optimization that refers to search engine position and placement, a concept whereby you improve your sites design and content to achieve higher ranking search engine. The use of keywords is the important element to achieved high search engine ranking and best described the web page. In search engine you must use keywords that are related to the website and most frequently used by the target audience.

Lastly, is through Link building, it is a website promotion that helps search engine ranking. This is the link that appears as anchor text of inbound links for the website. There are three form of Link Building. This are through - one way links, reciprocal links, and three-way linking. One way link is the way of endorsing the site through discussion forum that you can share expertise to other. Get active in online discussion groups and always include your URL in your signature. Another is through Article writing .The articles is used to get a link back to the site and it recognize of being an expert in that topic. Link Exchange is a complementary or competitor site that is related. It is your own link exchange by asking sites complementary to yours and to put your link on their pages and you’ll do likewise. It is the number of links pointing to the particular site that will increase traffic. Three-way linking requires at least one person in the trade of two websites. It has different domains and preferably should be hosted in different IP Address. They get traffic between the sites, and the two websites get full benefit of the inbound links.

This is the effective marketing tools for companies expanding their web promotion. In implementing internet marketing strategy you’ll be amazed of your effort. It gives you the opportunity to expose your business to World Wide Web.

 

How To Appear On The First Page Of Google Search Results

January 20th, 2010

 

Once you create a website for your business, you quickly figure out that people are not flocking to it. When you assess the different ways of driving traffic, your options include advertising your website address, promoting your website address through Public Relations and gaining media coverage, encouraging other sites to link to you and getting placed in online directories.

However, these marketing activities will deliver small and sporadic volumes of traffic. The single biggest thing you can do to drive traffic is search engine marketing. Here is why: it is estimated that 80% of traffic to most websites comes from search engines. There are roughly 500 million searches performed everyday and 88% of that traffic comes from the top 4-5 search engines, Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN. Of these, Google is by far the largest. Approximately 90% of people searching do not go past the third page of results and few go beyond the first page.

Therefore, if you want to drive traffic to your site it is imperative that you get onto the first three pages of Google and the other top search engines. Surprisingly, the majority of small businesses have not figured this out yet and for those who have, the majority are asking the question, How can I get my site to appear on the first page of Google search results?

Different Options

There are two main methods of appearing on the first page of search results.

Paid for results or Pay Per click (PPC)
This is where you pay to appear in the sponsored links section of the results page. In Google, this is at the top of the page and the right hand side. You decide which search keywords e.g. London restaurant, you would like to appear in. You appear in the search results and you pay for every user who clicks through to your site. The cost will vary by keyword and can range from 10p to several pounds or dollars per click, depending on how many other companies are bidding for that keyword.

Natural results achieved through SEO
Natural results are when you appear in the main list of results. You do not pay to appear or when a user clicks on your link. However, to appear on the first three pages of results, you need to implement a number of design and content changes to your website, which are termed Search Engine Optimisation or SEO.

Which is best?
Both have their merits, but natural results are by far the most preferable because once you have invested in SEO, you do not have to pay for the traffic that is generated.

PPC is a great solution if you:
Have just launched your website and you need immediate presence on the first page of result or if you have not yet successfully optimised your site to appear on the first page. Remember, there are thousands of websites all looking to appear on the first page of search results for certain keywords.

Spiders and Links: The Basics of How Search Engines Work

Without getting bogged down in the technical details of how search engines work, here are a few basics that you should be aware of.

Search engines want to ensure that the most relevant sites are displayed to customers who are searching for keywords e.g. London restaurants.

Each page is ranked by the search engine on different criteria.

Each search engine uses different criteria when calculating the ranking of the site, but there are some commonalities such as:
Automated Spiders are sent by the search engine to index each page on your site. These spiders log the content of your site. This allows the search engine to know whether the key words that a user is searching for appear within your site and on specific web pages. However, in addition, the search engines have decided that it is not sufficient to simply have the keywords appear in the site. They believe that the most useful and relevant sites for the person who is searching are those which have a lot of other relevant sites linking to it.

The important points you should take out are:
You want to make it as easy as possible for the spiders to visit and index your site.
You need to have relevant keywords on your site that are easily found by the spiders.
You need to have many other sites linking to your site.

Four Components of SEO

In order to optimise your website to appear in natural search results, there are four components that you will need to address.

1. Design: What to do when designing your website

Many small businesses make the mistake of designing their website and then start thinking about driving traffic to it. The problem is that the way you design your site can result in your site being ignored by the search engine spiders, which means you will receive very little traffic. When designing your site, ensure you avoid the following pitfalls and ask your marketing agency to confirm that they have been avoided.

Avoid flash sites
Sites are designed in HTML or flash codes. The spiders that are sent to your site by the search engines cannot read flash.

No frames
Some agencies design sites within frames. For example, the menu on the left might be within a frame and the main body of the page within another frame. It makes designing the site easier as the only thing that changes from page to page is the content within the frame. However, spiders cannot read what is inside a frame so you will not get indexed and noticed by search engines.

No dynamic pages
Some sites are developed with a database which generates dynamic pages. You can tell if there are dynamic pages on your site if there is a ? within the page URL. Again, most but not all of the search engines can read dynamic pages.

Text within graphics
To ensure text is read uniformly by different browsers, design agencies often put text within a graphic. It looks great, however, a spider cannot read what text is in a graphic and simply moves on.

Keywords
At design stage, think about the keywords you want to be found by on search engines and incorporate that into your design. For example, if you were to design your site so that a page was allocated to the most popular keywords, it would be easier to include more keywords on the page which would be found by the spiders.

2. Content: What to do when developing your content

Keywords

Choosing the keywords that you want to appear in search results for is one of the most important things you can do. Think of it as planning the location for a physical shop. Choosing keywords that people search for a lot (i.e. generates a lot of potential traffic) and then ensuring that those keyword are peppered around your site (i.e. more chance that the spiders will index them giving you a good chance of appearing high in search results) could result in your being positioned on Oxford street as opposed to a back alley.

Invest time in choosing the keywords. Think about how you would search for your product or service. If you are running a restaurant, you should immediately think beyond the generic search keyword of restaurant and consider descriptive keywords such as seafood restaurant or family restaurant. You also need to think of target keywords, so consider London restaurant or London seafood restaurant.

Once you have decided on your keywords, you need to place them throughout your site. The main areas are:

Web page title
This is what you see written in the title bar of the browser. It is also what you see when you bookmark a page. This should explain what the purpose of your site or your page is and include keywords, but always in such a way that makes sense to a user who reads it.

Meta tags
The tags are not visible to users but they explain what the content of the page is. Keywords should be placed in here as they are easily searchable by spiders.

Homepage content
Your homepage is searched by the spiders and you should ensure that your keywords appear near the top header. They should also be sprinkled throughout the homepage. See keyword density for guidance on this.

Keyword density
A question often asked is how many times your keywords should appear on a page. The guidance for SEO is that each page should have a minimum of 250 words; your keywords should account for 2 - 8% of the word on the page. That means they should appear between 4 and 16 times.

Two important points to bear in mind are:
1. You need to balance the need to write your copy for your users, in order to sell your product, and the need to write your copy for search engines, in order to be found.
2. To help you achieve both objectives you should focus on a couple of keywords for each page rather than a large number.

3. Links

Inbound links are key
To combat a lot of sites achieving high page ranking by simply stuffing their sites with keywords, the search engines have placed a higher weighting on the value of the number of sites which link into a site. The rationale is that if a site is linked to by lots of other sites, then it must be offering popular and relevant content.

Therefore, your site might be designed in a way that is easily searchable by spiders and your content might be sprinkled with keywords, but you need to have other sites linking to you in order to achieve success.

Audit your links
Ensure you know how many other websites are linking into your site and set a goal for increasing that figure. You should have at least 100 quality links.

How to get links
There are many creative ways to generate links to your site:
Ask friends, customers or suppliers to link to your site.
Post comments on forums or discussion groups with a link back to our site.
Register your site with sites such as stumbleupon and if users like your site, they will bookmark it, creating a link to your site.
Issue an online press release which should result in online media coverage and links back to your site.
Register your site with multiple directories.

4. Maintenance:

Once you achieve a high ranking in the search engines, it is important to realise that you need to maintain your ranking. The criteria the search engines use in the algorithms constantly change and what works today may not work next week. Your site will need to be tweaked to bring you back up the rankings

Evan Mangan
http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/how-to-appear-on-the-first-page-of-google-search-results-107737.html

 

Profitng And Benefiting From Wordpress

January 13th, 2010

 

It was only a short while ago that the “Wordpress” developer team has successfully launched their latest version of Wordpress, called “Wordpress Ella”. Numerically, the version number is called version 2.1.  Now we’re already up to 2.8.4 with 2.9 in beta.

To the uninitiated, news like this seems like a normal announcement from software developers and are often passed on by. However, from the eyes of a trained mind and savvy businessman, the news of “Wordpress Ella” contain many benefits that online business owners can immediately tap into and profit from.

“Wordpress Ella” comes with the following enhancements which are a great resource for online business owners.

1. First on the list of enhancements from Wordpress Ella is an ‘autosave’ function that ensures you will never lose a post again. This is an invaluable tool especially at times when you have spent a lot of time in front of your computer screen, brainstorming on what to write to promote your business.

Imagine the horror or frustration especially in instances where the battery of your notebook died and you forgot to save. Or perhaps there was a blackout or you accidentally closed the browser window without saving your work.

“Wordpress Ella” autosave function is a real time saver and is an abosolute must for any online businesses.

2. Next in line on “Wordpress Ella” is the “Import” and “Export” functions. Let’s talk about the import function first.

The latest release of “Wordpress Ella” has an import function that allows you to import your blog created from other popular blogging platforms such as ‘Movable Type’, ‘Typepad’, ‘Livejournal’, ‘Blogger’ and so on, into Wordpress itself.

This way, you don’t have to lose any important data such as your blog posts and comments. This flexibility is another reason why Wordpress itself is so successful and continues to gain a huge following and user base.

Why would anyone want to transfer their blog from another platform to Wordpress? Well, one reason is because with most of these other blogging platforms, the user has to pay a monthly fee. Wordpress, as almost everyone knows is free, and you can easily install with a few clicks using Fantastico from within your hosting account’s Cpanel.

Another reason to migrate or transfer the entire blog to Wordpress could be due to the limitation of some blogging platforms. Blogger, for example does not support the use of categories, which are critical when it comes to optimizing the blog to rank high for specific keywords related to the business.

Now, let’s discuss about the “Export” function.

“Export” as the name implies, will export all the Wordpress posts and comments into a file (called XML). This file can then be imported into other Wordpress blogs. It’s like a cross transferring of data between similar or related “Wordpress Blogs”.

This is useful when one is starting a new blog and perhaps need to populate the blog with useful content instead of just displaying news feed. For example, if you have a blog on muscle building, and you started a new blog on weight loss, you can import the content (which are the posts and comments) from the muscle blog into the weight loss blog.

This way, when you drive traffic to your new weight loss blog, you can at least provide the reader with some useful content while you build up the content around weight loss. Naturally there is some correlation between these two topics. After all, if you want to build muscle, naturally you need to burn off the excess fats and turn them into muscles!

3. Another enhancement of “Wordpress Ella” is the new search engine privacy. What this means is that you can indicate whether you’d like your blog to be indexed or ping by search engines, especially Google, Yahoo or MSN, which are the three top search engines online.

Most experienced marketers know about the pinging power of blogs. Everytime when a post is published, Wordpress will ping or notify specific blog directories about updates to your blog, causing them to index or visit your blog, brining you that additional and much needed targeted traffic.

As crazy as it sounds, considering that most business owners would like to get their site listed in the search engines, there are also times when you might want to hide or mask your blog from the radar screen of search engines. This is true especially in cases where it’s only meant for paid customers only. For example, you might be providing some sensitive information meant for paid customers and you don’t want anyone doing a search on the search engines to stumble upon your blog and have access to the information.

4. Another powerful upgrade that “Wordpress Ella” brings is the ability to specify a static page as the front page for your site or blog.

Most savvy marketers employ the use of a mini site or a one page only sales letter when marketing their products or services. Normally such one page sites will also contain an opt-in box, where visitors and readers are enticed to provide their email address in exchange for a free gift, software, e-course etc.

When they do so, they will normally be enrolled in an autoresponder course that automatically does the follow-up with the said subscriber which either results in a sale or no sale.

With a blog, however, the main page or the front page will always a display of the latest chronological posts. You can create pages for a blog, however, in the past it was not that easy for the layman to do so.

With “Wordpress Ella”, all you need to do if you want a static front page is to select this option in the Wordpress control panel. It can’t get any easier than this.

These are just some of the enhancements that you can immediately benefit from “Wordpress Ella”.

This article assumes you already have some basic knowledge about the marketing power of blogs in terms
of its syndication power, targeted traffic and search engine optimization capability for keywords.

Brandon Hong
http://www.articlesbase.com/marketing-articles/profitng-and-benefiting-from-wordpress-ella-103768.html

 

7 Website Design Tips to Make your Site More Attractive

January 6th, 2010

 

“How can I attract thousands of visitors to my site?”, many people ask me this question. Well, driving high traffic to Website is very important, but what’s even more important, is designing a website in that way which makes them stays longer.

In this article, you’re going to learn 7 important website design tips to make your site more attractive. So not only your website will attract many people, but it will also motivate them to stay for a long time.

1. Be Aware during Selection of the colours scheme:-

If your company has a logo or preferred colours on its stationery that’s a good start. For those of you starting from scratch, choose two or three complementary colours and stick with them – don’t change colours on every page. The most common colour schemes include:

- Red, yellow and white

- Blue and white

- Red, grey and white

- Blue, orange and white

- Yellow, grey and white.

- Onion shade, Tan, white

If you’re not sure what colour scheme to choose, surf the internet and find a website that you like. You can then model your colour scheme on what already exists.

Always Select those colours which Attract the visitors, and the person revisit your site.

2. Page Backgrounds

Ensure your visitors can read the text on the background, i.e. no black writing on dark blue background or yellow on white. Means if the page background is dark always use light colour for the writhing a text or if the light colour is used for the page background the always use dark colour for writing a text, like this colour scheme for the background everything is visible to the visitor. Also be careful that your links are visible before and after being visited. The default for links in most programs is blue (before being visited) and burgundy (after being visited), so if you have a dark background, ensure your links are light.

3. (Page loading) site open within a minutes

All I’ve seen for the last 10 minutes is ‘page loading’, I think something might be wrong with my browser this is probably one of the biggest gripes a site visitor has. If your page takes more than a minute to load (on dial-up) and you have anything less than the meaning of life hidden within your content - something needs to be done. The average person does not have time they just go for another site without passed his time for these type of site those take time to open. So a good website takes less time for loading a site.

4. Appropriate page Size

Web pages are measured in pixels. Pixels are the unit of measurement for the screen. A Web page can literally be any size. Standard Web pages usually fit into a few sizes:

* W × H * 600 × 800 * 640 × 480 (Dream weaver default) * 1024 × 768 * 550 × 400 (Flash default)

The default Web page sizes provided in Web friendly applications and listed earlier are a great place to start. You will probably use a smaller, custom size for pop-up windows. The Web page size you choose is up to you. Remember to use actual space for the Web page effectively so that the content is in the proper proximity to the user’s navigation patterns. Web page size affects the way users move around the Web pages and the Web portfolio site. One rule: Pick a size for all main screens and stick to it.

5. Logo

Create a simple logo to identity your website. Have a captivating tag line somewhere with the header, and write an About us page which describes the uniqueness of your website. These will leave an impression for your visitors to remember your website.

6. Application of graphic designs

you must be careful in choosing for the appropriate design that will best represent your projects, and tell about your business. Create a design which coveys in a stylish way what it has to

7. Be aware about grammar and spell

Grammar is overrated [and the spill-checker too] Most web authoring and word processing software comes with a spell/grammar check utility - don’t let your hard earned money go to waste, use it. Some of the more common grammatical mistakes are misusing its, it’s, there, their, they’re, your, you’re, and noone (correct=no one). Proof reading your final product is also helpful. No one is infallible, that’s why pencils have erasers and computer programs have [ctrl+z].

 

Optimize Wordpress for Search Engines

December 17th, 2009

 

This article is about how to make Wordpress search engines friendly, and optimized for.A default Wordpress installation is SEF enough, which means that the structure itself performs pretty good in Search Engines. But with these hints, you will give your posts the best environment as possible to compete in the Search

Engines Results Page (SERPs).This guide is divided in five points:

Site structure

Present your website with the best looking face showing to the Engines robots that scan and index your work. Content organization Don’t play messy: if you give order to your content, it will be more searchable. Write content

A few tips about how to write your content optimally - not only for Search Engines. Interact with
others Subtitle is: Don’t just publish your stuff. It’s about being “social” when blogging. Help Search Engines Directly Some final hints to perform well and maximize the power of your blog.

Site structure

Optimize your theme markup First of all, assure that your theme markup (both CSS) follows the W3C standard guidelines.Put posts content’s code as higher as

you can in , the code block of your sidebar menu should follow the main content.

Permalinks
Have static URLs for your posts. Unless you own a news weblog (for which news evident freshness is force), I suggest to adopt this permalink structure:

/%category%/%post_id%/%postname%/. It drops the defaut inclusion of date information in favor of more descriptive URLs, with a significant keyword inside (that is the category name). Remember: unless you’re familiar with HTTP code status redirects AND search engines indexing behaviour, DO NOT CHANGE YOUR

PERMALINK STRUCTURE once your website gets indexed and posts linked. Link between posts having the same topic or subject “If one is reading an article focused on a specific subject, probably he’s interested in reading other posts about the same, or at least similar, topic”. Do you agree with this sentence? Believe me, search engines do.

All you have to do, is to facilitate the chances of jumping between articles. Link every post with others by the same category (maybe my plugin can help you),and also link posts that are in some way related each other, even despite the category information (try Related Entries plugin).

Categories

If you write articles on different topics, you should organize them in categories. Open a category for each topic, and be descriptive in its name choose.
Then, be strict when it’s time to categorize your posts. Don’t worry about open a new category, if it’s necessary. Organizing content into categories helps both visitors and search engines to easily understand what your articles are about, and to search them. Don’t forget to place a link to the filing categories, for each post, in your template!

Posting order
If you already know the number of articles you’re about to post for next, and you already know that some of them will be about the subject area A, and some other about another topic, say B, then try to post all your article about A, before you start posting about the topic B. If you can, don’t alternate topics, but make a post being semantically related with its previous, naturally following them.This will give continuity to your content posting, and will add strength in the engine’s view of your site. Make your content searchable Wordpress gives two ways to search content: the search form, and the archives. There’s not much to say about the search form (but maybe you want to track your user’s searches with a specific plugin).

But about archives, I suggest to give up the archive by date, in favor of the category-based one: users will be likely to search articles by content, and not by publish date. I’m sure yourstatistics will confirm it.Tag your posts: Did you ever see a tag cloud? It’s a direct and very fast way to: 1) see what a blog is mainly about, and 2) find posts focused on a specific subject.With the keyword tag plugin you can assign keywords to your articles: for every post, you will have links to searches for other posts tagged with the same key. Since this plugin stores tags in a custom field named keywords, it’s particularly useful when applied in tandem with the meta keyword plugin.I have noticed that the use of this tag plugin, in conjunction with the meta keyword one, gives great benefits on services like Technorati (without doing the claim for this blog, people are able to find my posts in Technorati by searching the tags I choose for them).

Writing content

Content:
What you are going to talk about, is all up to you. But you can help both human readers and search engines, making your content friendly. What does it mean, practically?
When you have found an interesting subject for your post, try to write an article that exhausts the subject matter in a single post; don’t break up the article in multiple posts: if you have long text, break it with a “read more” link, and don’t be afraid to use lists and paragraphs to separate periods (this helps readability).
If the subject is really wide, write a post for each sub-topic, and exhaust it in the article.Start your post with one or two sentences that summarizes what the article is about. Repeat key-words and key-phrases of interest inside your post, and emphasize them with a bolder font weight. Once you’ve finished, read again your text, and make it shorter. Summarize, and don’t go off-topic. Don’t forget to check text for errors: avoid mispelling, typos, and grammar mistakes!

Linked resources should help your post communication, deepening the subject. To do it well, simply follow these rules: If you cite a resource, link it. If you think that a resource can be useful to your readers, link it, too. But don’t place random or useless links. Place links naturally into text, don’t put them in a meaningless list at the end of your post.: a link should be a phrase that fits good into the flowing of text. Give descriptive names to link anchors: don’t call a link “click here”. Give more descriptive titles to your links. Link regularly: no javascript, no server-side click counters, no cloaked nor shorted URLs. These rules applies both to internal links (links that point to a page of the same domain they’re on) and external links (a link pointing to another resource on the web).

Post titles

Once you have the content ready, think to its title.Find a short phrase that is well-descriptive of your content, possibly not shorter than three words and not longer than seven. Then, run a search on your favourite engine for your title. See if someone appears in the first page with the exact match of your sentence.Try a search with only the keywords of your title. Take note of how much results you get, and of who your competitors are.Do the same for each possible title you’ve thinked at.

Then, think again at your title: be original, try to figure out what will be the keyphrases or keywords that one would type in a search to find an article like yours. If this match with your title, then use it! Interact with others (don’t just publish your stuff) Open comments, encourage visitors to comment your posts: place an evident Comment link, ask questions in your articles; in other words: set up some space for your visitors in which they can express themselves! Comments are content; a good comment is related to your article and can add value information to it.

Track back other’s posts

If your post deeps something discussed on another blog’s post, or if you take a post just as reference to write your own, then link it and use the Trackback function to send a ping to the post you refer to. There will be a link to your post in some other’s one. Ping only posts that you cite in your article or that are, at least, strongly related with yours. DON’T DO TRACKBACK SPAM! Once you’ve written your own, Comment others Find another blog article related with the topic your post is about. Read it carefully, think on it and then, if you have something to say, leave a comment.

Comment intelligently, DON’T SPAM COMMENTS!

Don’t be shy about leaving your Website’s URL, just remember that many adds rel=nofollow to any link in the comment area.Use the Description meta tag, as

following:

This description will be displayed in Search Engine Results Page in some cases, so use a short phrase that describes well your weblog, and invite users to visit it.
You could also use a personalized description for each post, page, and category page. I suggest to use the meta description plugin for this purpose.
Finally, add the Keywords meta tag. It’s useful if you customize it for every page of your blog, and show, for each post, only the really specific keywords. The meta keyword plugin can help you: it takes keywords from the custom field named keywords of each post. They will be likely the same as your post tags, if you tag your posts (see) . This great plugin automatically generates a fully-featured, and fully-customizable Google Sitemap of your Wordpress blog. It automatically updates the sitemap every time you update your blog, and then pings Google. This plugin’s result can be really fine-tuned.

Ping services

Use the Update service function, to inform tracking services that you have updated your weblog. By default,Wordpress pings rpc.pingomatic.com, which is good (if you don’t want to change this, you don’t have to). But if you want, you can add/remove services to ping from the list. There is a list of ping services you can refer to when modifying your Update Service list.

 

Numerous Benefits That an Affiliate Marketing Program Has to a Marketer

December 13th, 2009

 

affiliate marketing program, receive traffic from other affiliates and they also direct traffic to
other merchants in return for commission.
An affiliate marketing program is a revenue-sharing marketing strategy where a merchant pays their affiliates a commission for referring business to their website. The webmaster signs up as an affiliate in the affiliate marketing program and gets a login id. He then collects information about the marketing material for the affiliate marketing program and uses it on his web site as banners, ad- links and search boxes. If a visitor to the website is interested in one of the affiliate marketing program links then he clicks the referred link and purchases the product. The marketer identifies that the particular sale has been through the affiliate marketing program, and he pays the affiliate his commission. By having an affiliate marketing program the owner does not pay for expensive advertising but pays when a sale, lead or subscription action occurs.
There are numerous benefits that an affiliate marketing program has to a marketer. Affiliate marketing programs have become one of the easiest ways to advertise the products in the market. An agreement is formed between the website owner or affiliate and the merchant. The website owner allows the merchant to promote his product through his site and the merchant pays the affiliate commission for the sales generated through these sites via the affiliate marketing program. Affiliate marketing programs are a cost effective medium to provide brand awareness. It also provides a wider market for the merchant. The marketer gets a chance to identify new markets which he might not have thought of without the affiliate marketing program. Affiliate marketing programs have beaten the traditional advertising techniques by giving maximum exposure world wide. The affiliates can introduce the products and services to the niche markets which have been neglected and thus boost the business of the marketer.
There is affiliate marketing program software called Affiliate Network Pro which enables a person to start his own affiliate program. There are many features including multi-language, instant payment module, sales reports, anti fraud blocking, email messages and reminders etc. Financial affiliate marketing programs are also available which provide facilities such as auto loans, debt recovery and settlement programs, and the best converting payday loans.

Affiliate marketing programs are not just for customers, but it also provides a strategy for development of business to business partners. Here the merchant and the affiliate become partners. If a person owns a website, sells his products through the site, and if he pays other website owners, or bloggers for sending customers to his site, then he becomes the marketer. If you have a website and direct surfers to various merchants for services and products through blogs, or e-mail links then you become the affiliate. There are several merchants who are affiliates too.

 

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