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Archive for the ‘Wordpress’ Category

My most recent project was for a Boston area Women’s Life Coach who came from the publishing industry and has a strong leadership background not to mention super coach and consulting attitude. She will kick your butt and get you motivated as you would expect any good coach to do. This was a very exciting project for me because we encountered and overcame a number of challenges.

The woman’s coaching industry to quite saturated so we had to go about this strategically and knew that blogging was a huge part of how she will be able to gain some ground. One of the obvious challenges was that blogging was new to Pattie. The first step was for her to realize that she already has all of the knowledge and just needs to start sharing it. Interestingly that was the extent to the challenge other than understanding the platform for the new blog. We brainstormed a number of topics, researched her competitors and Pattie is now blogging regularly.

We also set up a new fan page on facebook as well as LinkedIn where we are piping in the blog’s RSS feed and have customized the profile to match the branding of the website. This is still a work in progress and any body getting started with a new blog and/or social media presence has to understand that you have to start somewhere and letting fear delay you will only keep you from your overall goals. Pattie overcame her fear of blogging and is a pro now. It takes time to build up your readership and followers but little by little you can do it.

A few takeaways: focus on content, lay out a plan, and start strong with blogging regularly. Build out your networks in relevant areas as not every social network will be appropriate. You want to write about topics and join groups where your followers are most likely to find common interest, share your content and link to it. After time, with good content built, people fill find you and business will boom…you don’t have to do it all, just don’t delay.

Ever wish that you could ever so gently nudge some of visitors to comment or promote your content? There have been many instances where someone will email me or mention in passing that they really liked my blog post on “such and “such” and when I then go to check they never left a comment…hmphhhh. It’s like thanks for the feedback but a comment would be much more helpful…well guess what…there’s a tool that can help you.

At HubSpot, my place of employment, we constantly talk about the importance of “nurturing your leads”. That is absolutely an important component to ensuring that those you engage with you continue to stay engaged. In a similar manner this wordpress plugin, WP Greet Box, allows you to stay on top of with your returning visitors. Why not nudge someone who returns to your site…they are obviously interested so nurture them by keeping them engaged and in the process giving others a chance to become engaged.

Are you intrigued? So here’s the deal…”Greet Box” allows you to set customized messages to certain audiences. So if someone comes to your site via Stumble Upon you can encourage that visitor to Stumble your content. Pretty cool huh. I haven’t used it yet myself but as I find time I will let you all know how’s it going. You can see more details, screenshots etc through Wordpress.

Let me know if you try this yourself, or if you are employing similar ways to engage your loyal followers and fans.

I am sure you have been among the many recipients of cold calls (or cold emails) from some search engine firm. And if you are like me you find it completely irritating when they send you a completely bogus email with absolute nonsense information…where do they get their information? The letter may sound lucrative. They get to the point and tug on the emotional strings of their prospect, and if you don’t know better you just may go for it…but that’s why I am here to lead you down the right path.

So, here is what the email said:

Hello,

Thank you for taking a few moments to view my introduction of our search engine and web services, it really is greatly appreciated.

To be brief, I’d like to invite you to take a look at how we could greatly improve www.domain.com in terms of achieving top, organic, search engine positions.

I’ve performed a complimentary link analysis for you by utilising 2 different link checks for your website – with a reference at Google.com followed up with a more comprehensive one at Alltheweb.com. Here are your results:

• According to Google.com you have 5 incoming links
• According to Alltheweb.com you have 164 incoming links

(It’s very common for a difference to show between these two numbers, I’ll be happy to explain why if you wish to hear more)

The better your inbound link profile, the higher your website is likely to rank on Google and the more visitors (and ROI) it will bring you.  So, to improve your link profile and have your website rank highly on the search engines for your keywords, we are able to offer you a search engine promotion service that includes ethical, ongoing sourcing of links throughout the Internet with a view to building your link authority – this is achieved through a mix of links from websites, intelligent forum participation, blogs and more.

Additionally, and of equal importance, we will examine the architecture of your website and provide advice to ensure it is correctly set-up for current search engine algorithms.

We aim to achieve Top 10 rankings for your website on the major search engines, whilst protecting your ROI with our unique Performance Agreement that refunds your monthly payments should this target not be reached. Specifically:

1. We will work to achieve first page results for your website across the three most important search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN).
2. The search terms we use will be chosen by you and designed to bring you the maximum level of purchase-motivated traffic possible.
3. If we can’t achieve first page rankings for your site we will refund your money.
4. If we can’t keep your website in the Top 10 we will refund your money.

No-one can promise Top 10 rankings with absolute certainty. What we can do is protect your investment.

We are confident our methods work; they’re tested on our own R&D websites and are currently achieving first page results for many of our existing clients with search terms as tough and massively important as, ‘Graduate’, ‘sales jobs’, ‘Bling’ and ‘dresses’.

As our client, you will be kept fully updated on your campaign progress, with regular ranking reports that show you exactly how your search terms are doing on each of the search engines, and of course, regular contact with your personal technical consultant to answer your questions whenever they arise.

I’d like say thanks once more for your consideration, and you can take a closer look at what we have to offer by visiting a ‘business-card’ website we’ve compiled to provide more information for you…

When you do choose to call or drop me a line, you’ll find our approach refreshingly different, there’s no obligation, and our virtual coffee is the best!

I hope to hear from you soon, very best wishes,

Eva

Hilarious right. So I will dissect this in parts:

1. Professional firms don’t reach out cold to anyone. They work through referrals or are found in organic search or via advertisment. We use the tools that we talk about 24/7 to gain our leads.
2. Using Google for link analysis tells you nothing. When you search link:www.domain.com all that it gives you is a random sample of inbound links. It does not give you a complete list of links (ever)…I wonder if they include that as part of their explanations (doubt it).
3. Your inbound links effect your Google PR (PageRank) which is different from Page Rank (or positioning). Don’t let them fool you. PR is not nearly as influential as it once was. That said, inbound link are important, and you want to gain them naturally and having top search results listings is not the reason you gain inbound links. Sure having top page listings may gain you more traffic, and maybe those visitors will read through your site, and maybe they will share and/or link to information, but it’s not guaranteed. Nor is it guaranteed that having more inbound links will gain you top page rank. It is only one part of a hugely complex formula that helps you achieve that over time.
4. They aim to achieve top 10 rankings…cleverly phrases though still misleading. The parts that they choose to emphasize clearly lead the reader to believe that their site can end up on page 1, which should NEVER be a promise that any SEO makes. SEO should not be about selling ranking. Sure it’s seems like a good sell, that is how it worked years ago, and maybe that’s all you know how to explain.
5. Why would you let a client choose their keywords. I completely agree that keywords should be used that will help motivate leads, however this requires more than just a client telling you what keywords they want. You MUST do research, and research competitors, trends, history, search results etc.
6. As a client I would want to see more than my site’s ranking. Ranking alone does not bring in traffic. You will want to see all organic traffic sources, content viewed, time on site, entrance and exit pages, bounce rate and most importantly the number of leads through your site and specifically the source and what they did while on your site.
7. Sounds to me like a lot of their clients will be getting refunds.

PS: it helps to spell check a letter before sending it out.

What do you think? Would you go for it? Have you gotten any mail like this? What would your response be?

My most recent wordpress project was one that required a move from Blogger’s Blogspot to Wordpress. Check it out www.rungranolarun.com

Many bloggers often start out with Blogspot.com and then wish they were using Wordpress instead. The move is actually not too difficult.

Depending on the hosting solution that you use for your Wordpress, you may or may not be able to upload the Blogger’s blog directly. I use Bluehost (found it’s limitation) and had to use a workaround. Wordpress.com actually did the trick.

Here are the steps you want to follow:

1. Log in to or create a Wordpress.com account. Once logged in you want to find the “Tools” tabAfter selecting the tools tab click on “Import.” Within the import section you then select “Blogger”, then authorize. This section will take you to your Google Account for which the log in is the same as your Blogspot.com log in. If you are already logged in then this won’t be prompted. Google will then ask you again to authorize the connection so click “grant access”.

Once you have finished this connecting process. Your Import > Blogger access will now show you all Blogspot.com blogs that you have with that respective account. Select the one that you want to transfer to Wordpress.

Click “Import” and the process will proceed automatically. This however is where (if your Wordpress setup won’t allow it) you could get stuck. What happened to me was that I’d select import and each time only one post would import and then the process would stop. The workaround is to use Wordpress.com as I mentioned.

After the import is complete and you verify that indeed all of your posts and comments are uploaded you can then do the reverse (unless you are not self hosting, in which case you’d be done now). For those who are self hosting follow the steps under “Tools” > “Export” now. It simply exports Wordpress to a file that can then in turn be uploaded to your hosted wordpress account.

2. Before you proceed with the final import make sure that you have installed the Wordpress Plugin Blogger Redirector and that your permalinks are set to /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html which is the same format that Blogger uses. This way when you set the final redirect from Blogger all of your posts will redirect as well.

3. Test, test, test

4. Log in to Blogspot.com under “Settings” > “Publishing” > “Advanced Settings” and enter your new Wordpress domain address. Then save those settings.

Your final product just may look something like this

Hope this helps. I’d love to know what your experience with blog migrations has been.

Have you ever spent any time weeding through Wordpress plugins and the sea of endless options. On the one hand it’s pretty cool that there is so much out there for you to play with or to use to help optimize your wordpress blog, but on the other hand there is way too much out there for you to play with or use….you get my point.

Here are 2 more plugins that I think are must haves for any professional Wordpress blog:

1. Google .XML sitemaps: I am a huge fan of .XML sitemaps and here’s why…it not only allows you list every page of your site, including those hard to find, but it also automatically updates and resubmits your sitemap every single time there is a new blog post. I highly recommend this wether it be for your blog or your website. And if you use this plugin in conjunction with the Google Webmaster Tools, you have got a head start.

2. Zemanata: Cleverly tagged “blog smarter”…and smart it is. This plugin intuitively gives you suggestions for images and relevant/related links based on your blog topic and content (this is how I recently used it in conjunction with a post about keeping your readers coming back for more). Zemanta also gives you the ability to easily re-blog content. You’ve probably seen the little “reblog” icon on some blogs. This unique feature allows you to literally “reblog” parts of a post that you really like (of course giving full credit to the original author) and thus share that information with your readers…How cool is that?

Check these out when you get a chance. What plugins do you recommend? Have you used any of these yet? Let me know what you think.