Just a quick post about a great plugin for WordPress that encrypts any email address on your blog. So you can merrily add email addresses without worrying that you’ll then be deluged with offers of body part enlargement aids and the like…
Download the Cryptx plugin here
One blogsite that I’ve been working on included a News page that was made up from the RSS feed from the client’s separate blog.
And using the FeedWordPress plugin all seemed to work just fine. Until we noticed that it had stopped!
Foolishly my first approach was to revisit all the settings and check those, however what I should have done is popped to the WordPress support forum and do a search there. Or at least check against the plugin details there. One issue that others had noted was upon upgrading the WordPress itself, with someone having figured out that a couple of files needed to be moved – presto! This is exactly what happened here -and thanks to herculano for sharing the solution:
Just copy the files that come with feedwordpress:
/MagpieRSS-upgrade/rss.php
/MagpieRSS-upgrade/rss-functions.php
to
/wp-includes folder in wordpress
So – always check that your plugins are happy after you’ve upgraded WordPress, and go have a good look at the WordPress support forum for solutions.
Following on from an article written elsewhere at the end of 2007, about the insistence of some “experts” that they are achieving top listings on Google for a particular search phrase, I was today astonished that still this is highlighted as successful SEO activity. And while I suppose it is successful at what it was created to achieve, it’s wasted effort by missing out the fundamental step of knowing what your customer is actually looking for!
It bothers me that this is being promoted as the way to carry out SEO. Such vanity is really easy to pander to – especially when nobody else is trying to achieve the same – so they are happy bunnies. It’s not something I will enable or carry out for my clients or friends unless there is a sensible reason for using phrases that nobody actually searches for.
It could be that I’m missing something, but I suspect not – funnily enough there’s a good reason why I focus on Internet marketing strategy. I do wonder if perhaps I should stop being quite so insistent on giving thorough, results-based value, some of which is not what people want to hear, and make money out of what I can do. However, to my mind, giving clients a false sense of success is dishonourable and downright unethical – the result of this is that I have to dodge the occasional sideways swipe at my reputation from dissatisfied ex-clients, but I can live with that. I’ll stick with being authentic in my marketing.
It may be that the chosen phrases are intended to be contentious and not meant to be of value from a business point of view, other than to point out to people that they have achieved a high listing on Google for this particular phrase. And they do generally provide relevant content for that phrase, they are doing the right things from that point of view, but just imagine how powerful and beneficial it would be for their business if they’d researched and chosen phrases that people actually use. Of course the whole point may be to score points somewhere along the line – fair enough – but to actually label it as successful is inaccurate, incomplete. The point of SEO is to be an active contributor to your Internet marketing, surely.
If you’re going to bother, why not first discover what your intended visitors actually search for, and whether they do even look for you on the web. For some the Internet is not the route to market; it can support the route to market, but some sectors and services just may not be using the Internet as their way of finding out about you. Of course taking action now is going to reap rewards, but to celebrate an empty achievement is vanity, nothing more.
If you’re going to make the effort to try to attract people to your website, find out what those people are actually searching for. It’s not rocket science, but is fundamental. So time to get busy practicing what I preach and show those of you that want more business how to achieve that through the Internet.
I’m not one to use punchy, attention-grabbing headlines, but couldn’t resist this time. What I’m referring to is that it’s never been so easy to “chat” with our customers online. And while I have seen a similar sense of things in other areas of marketing – offline networking, for instance, I’ll stick with what I know for now…
So maybe I am mainly referring to those customers that are comfortable with using the web for business, but there are few of us now that don’t at least have access, and indeed if you give those less keen on all this “Interweb” nonsense something friendly and simple to engage with, they will be glad to be gently introduced to how useful it can be.
I am talking about blogging, of course. And within this I include Twitter – that micro-blogging system of 140 characters each time – great for quick updates, keeping people aware of what you’re up to – the uses are many and I’ll explore those with you another day.
The most successful business blogs are:
- easy to read
- short and sweet
- worth reading
Any blog that we read, and especially those that we then subscribe to, should:
- make it worth spending our precious time reading them
- be relaxed and in a style that appeals to your readers – your customers
- not be written in a voice other than your own
It’s yet another area in which you should apply your own standards – what do you actually bother reading and subscribing to? Apply that thinking to your blog – put your reader, your customer, first – write with them in mind, but be yourself. People buy from people – we hear this a lot these day – a cliché indeed, but for a very good reason – it’s true!
So have a think about your blogging – if you’re really not sure if you can, or how to go about it, then have a chat with someone like Mark White – he does courses on Business Blogging. You do indeed want to be realistic about what it can do for you (if anything) and how much time you can allocate – blogging is really taking off this year and finding its place as a valuable Internet marketing activity, and so essential to consider.
Have a read of Ian Lurie’s Conversation Marketing book – a wonderfully easy read and vital for anyone’s Internet marketing strategy.
Let me know if a chat would be useful – this may be something for a group live chat – I’ll set something up…
This post offers you the questions that are useful to consider when figuring out your own Internet marketing strategy. Answer these honestly and thoroughly (indeed if you’re not going to bother doing that, you’d be better off not wasting your time), write your answers down in detail and you will then understand more about what is likely to work for you, for your customers and for your business. Go for it!
1. What do you want for your business?
2. Who are your customers? (i.e. small businesses, homeowners, woman, men, older people, young adults, a specific sector)
3. And where are they – geographically?
4. Where do they look for what you sell? Online searches, online directories, shops, town, magazines, free papers?
5. Right now – how do your customers know about you?
6. Why do they buy from you?
7. Why should new customers buy from you?
8. What do you have that they need?
9. How do you tell customers about all this?
10. What exactly do you want customers/visitors to do when they get to your website?
11. How do you find your customers?
12. How do you find their websites? Have a go and see what happens, and what you have to do in order to find them.
13. Your ideal customers – prepare a spreadsheet for this, I suggest, and if you’re happy working with one. What are their websites like? What are they doing right? What are they getting wrong? Do you think they “get” the web?
14. Your competitors – again, some form of spreadsheet may be helpful with this. And the same questions – what is good about their websites, what is bad, and what is just plain ugly?
15. Try a search for what you do/sell/offer. Write down all the words and phrases that you use for this. What are the results? Explore this some – surf!
16. And then just spend some time, after all the above, looking around the web, making notes on what you think is good, what is working, and what is missing. What would you love to see on the web, what would your customer like to find?
Now – bring all of the above together and see what comes out of it. If you want some guidance and ideas, give me a shout. I’ll post more on what to do next very soon… Either subscribe or let me know if you want to be advised when this is ready for you.
Have fun!
And if you want to download the above in a Word document…
Internet marketing strategy questionnaire
Another popular activity just now, and one in danger of being abused, is social bookmarking…
About time I gave my view on Twitter and whether it’s something to be allocating your time to, or not!
It can actually be useful for your business, I find. It’s wonderfully immediate, intriguing and potentially one of the biggest online timewasters available to procrastinators.
Once the novelty passes, however, and this is likely to be very soon, we should all settle down to more relevant “tweeting” and make the most of it. Well I hope that is what happens.
So what is “Twitter” and “Tweeting”?
In a nutshell, it is a fast-moving, micro-blogging online social networking website. You have just 140 characters for your “tweet”. And if your tweets are of no interest to people they won’t bother to “follow” you.
While writing a section towards a thoroughly comprehensive guide to networking, this place can provide you with additional links, ideas, tips and resources, as well as sharing my own views and experiences – having built at least half of my client base from plenty of online networking activity.
For me the Internet enables me to do a lot more than I could if it did not exist – apart from the obvious issue of what I actually do, of course! Choosing to create and build a business while also producing 2 children means that I need to get “out there” while also juggling a happy home life for me and the children. Breakfast and evening meetings just are not an option for me – and lunchtimes are only just now possible, with both at school now. But that can only really be local. My solution has been to build my reputation online. Now I can bring this to more local networking, which I am looking forward to – meeting people face to face is the best way to get to know people for most of us.
The following is taken and updated from a detailed article written a while ago that outlines the various areas worth considering for your website and for your Internet marketing strategy. Now I’m going to break this down into a few sessions for you – preparing you for the workbook that will then make it even easier for you to get your own Internet marketing strategy right.
There a few important and fundamental areas that you need to look at, ideally before you spend a lot of time and money on your website, but even if you already have (as most of us will by now), then knowing what to do next is still vital to the success of your marketing plans.
So let’s take a look at your website. Most of us already have one, and while in an ideal world we will have created it with a firm strategy in mind, many of us merrily created a website because we were told that we all needed one in order to keep up with the latest marketing initiatives, with the way people were doing business. At this time, in this leaner economy, we need to be more focused on where we are spending our resources; and that spend – whether of time or money – has to justify itself and work hard for our business.
So just what is the point of your website? What do you want it to do? What do your customers do? How are they using the Internet – do they have websites themselves? What do you want them to do?
Consider these questions thoroughly – spend some time online with this; see what others in your industry are doing, and your competitors. What do you want to happen as a result of having a website? Make notes – they will be useful for you – and don’t aim to answer your questions just yet – do the research first.
Explore what you want your website to do for you – if it was possible, achievable, what would you really like to get from your website? It may be that all you need and want is a simple brochure site that you can refer customers to. It may be that you’d like to be more pro-active and get stuck in with attracting more customers through the Internet. Do you know just what your website could do for you?
Spend some time looking around on the Internet (surfing – it’s not just for geeky teenagers or the silver surfers) to see what you like, what you don’t like, and why. This is important. And keep making those notes…
Until next time when we’ll do something with all this research!
One of the annual website maintenance tasks for early January can be to update the copyright notice on your website(s). This is obviously not urgent and can certainly be included when your website is next updated (you do update your website regularly, don’t you!), however some eagle-eyed visitors may just be impressed to see 2009 added to your copyright notice early in the year, so for something pretty simple, I think it’s worth doing.
Now of course this can be automated with some simple scripts, codes or even manually with whatever find and replace functionality your software has – I’m not going to go into the options as each of you will likely have a different set-up, or prefer doing things in your own way. Though one simple example is to add the following php code to your footer, if you just want the current year noted (do a Google search for other methods):
Copyright © <?php echo Date(Y);?>
I like to include the date range – from the year of creation through to the present year (i.e. copyright © 2003 – 2008) – demonstrating how long the website/page has been live as well as it being current. And to do this manually – it’s a good chance for a quick review of the page and to do any minor tweaking that may be helpful – we all need that now and again!
Of course if your site is based on WordPress, something I will be encouraging many to do if that meets their needs, then this is taken care of for you automatically by the theme’s code – though that you can change if you are so minded – and if you are then you don’t need me to tell you how!
