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Bradley Spencer makes WordPress Simple.
Bradley Spencer makes success with WordPress simple. Improve your website or learn how to get more traffic today with a free estimate by email or phone. Or just keep reading below for tips and tricks for WordPress and SEO.
Lately I’ve been reflecting a lot on the things I’ve learned from the last round of projects and websites I’ve been working on. I wanted to distill some advice from the experiences so as to avoid making the same mistakes again in the future. Hopefully this list helps you, too.
7 Things NOT to Do When You Start a Business Online
1. Make projections based on the size of the market.
When you are predicting the revenues for your business, don’t start with the size of the market.
Let’s take an offline example of a Lawn Mowing company:
In Columbus, where I live, let’s do a very rough estimate and say that the amount of money spent on commercial lawnmowing in Columbus is 20 Million dollars per year.
$20,000,000 spent on lawnmowing
So the aspiring lawnmower comes in and says, ‘Geez, if I just get 5% of the market then I’ll be bringing in 1 million dollars per year.’ You can do the math as many times as you want and it will always be a million bucks. And 5% doesn’t really sound like that high of a number, right?
$20,000,000 x 5% = $1,000,000
The truth is that getting 5% of the lawnmowing market would be very difficult. While this may be apparent in an industry as transparent and easy to understand as lawnmowing, the same idea holds true in an online business. But, for some reason, online entrepreneurs tend to consistently overestimate their future revenues this way.
So what should you do instead?
Contact Form 7 is my favorite free WordPress plugin for making (you guessed it…) Contact Forms. It’s a very popular plugin, and that means that spammers have decided it’s worth their hassle to write some scripts to spam you through Contact Form 7.
Assuming your viagra need are sufficiently filled, you won’t be needing to see these emails. So let’s figure out how to stop those spam messages from getting to you without making life more difficult for the real people who might want to use your form.
Based on my experience, these three changes should help really cut down on spam in Contact Form 7.
- Spam filtering with Akismet: Follow these instructions to make Contact Form 7 use akismet to test and see if the submission is spam.
- Install Bad Behavior Plugin: Install Bad Behavior. You can read more about BB, but it works in a unique way to test for spam.
- Install Cookies for Comments: Because most spam bots’ browsers can’t accept cookies, this plugin will try to set a cookie on a user and if the cookie isn’t there then it considers it spam. The plugin also tests to see how long it took the user to leave the comment. If the commenter took a very short time (think a second or two) to leave a comment, chances are it’s spam.
Once these three changes have been made, your contact form should let much less spam through. Of course, if you want to try a paid plugin for contact forms, I personally really love Gravity Forms.
It took me forever to find this code which allows you to manually insert the Sociable Plugin for WordPress directly into your theme. This helps when you want to place the plugin in a place that isn’t one of the options in the Sociable settings panel.
<div id='customsociable'>
<?php if (function_exists('sociable_html')) {
echo sociable_html();
} ?>
</div>
Hope that helps! And if you need more info about the Sociable plugin, you can find more documentation here.
I’ve started noticing stars in my Google Results on reviewed places, products, etc. They look like this:
Or for a place, they look like this:
It seems obvious that these would improve click-thru rates on a search result, so I went on a little search to find out how to include these on my sites.
Google allows these star ratings on review-type sites only. I suspect you may be able to extend it to newspapers or blogs if you had people rating the articles, but I suspect Google must be using some type of system to avoid letting people put 5 star ratings on all of their content.
The process of adding this to your pages is surprisingly simple. You just have to acquaint yourself with microdata and add a bit of code to each page. An example looks like this for the pizza shop:
<div itemscope itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Review-aggregate">
<span itemprop="itemreviewed">L’Amourita Pizza</span>
<span itemprop="rating" itemscope itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Rating">
<span itemprop="average">9</span>
out of <span itemprop="best">10</span>
</span>
based on <span itemprop="votes">24</span> ratings.
<span itemprop="count">5</span> user reviews.
</div>
If you want to read more about Review Stars, check out this article by Google. And if you end up trying this yourself then you are going to love the Rich Snippet Test Tool.
And if you are into this sorta thing, I’ve also noticed a coupon site doing something similar but adding a ‘Map This’ line to their results. See here:
Rich Snippets may be the new wild-west of SEO. They obviously improve click-thru rates on your result. If I try some experiments soon, I’ll make sure to report back.
Do you have password protected pages or posts in WordPress that you’d rather not have Google indexing? Well worry no longer!
If you add this code to your header.php file, it will tell Google not to index your password-protected content:
<?php if (!empty($post->post_password)) { ?>
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW">
<?php } ?>
Thanks and enjoy!
Do you give it a 'College Try'?
One of the most useful things I learned in High School came from an English Teacher who loved to ask, “Did you give it a college try?”.
Anytime I approached her with a problem that started with… “I tried X but…” I was almost guaranteed to get her motto: “Did you give it a college try?”
At the start of the year this was really irritating. All of her students (including me) wanted her to tell us the answer or do our thinking for us. But after hearing her motto over and over, it became a mantra. I started asking myself this question before giving up and looking for the quick answer. Had I really given it a ‘College Try?’
The funny thing is: I almost never had given it a “college try”. I would hit the first bump in the road and look for someone to give me a clue or an answer. Rarely did I try a handful of different approaches or look for the answer on my own. What this english teacher taught me is that there are many different levels of trying. What I’ve learned from my own experience watching people I know and work with after that is the level of trying we default to is a huge factor in how effective we are. read full article….
I’m really pleased to bring you the following Q&A with Alex Becker of Highly Relevant. Alex is a very smart and capable guy who I would trust with the success of your business online.
1. What is your opinion of lead gen with Social Media? What do you think the future holds for Social Media?
Social media as far as lead gen is concerned is an interesting animal, that’s for sure. First of all, the impact and implementation of social media in your marketing strategy really depends on the niche your business is in as well as how much time and resources you have to put towards social media marketing.
For example, only 3 of Highly Relevant’s 50 or so clients have come from social media marketing. With that said, we look at this as a “bonus” because our primary goal with social media is to become known in our industry and become experts in our field. All we try to do with social media is provide value and engage people we get value from or who engage us. If they become clients that’s great, but again, we don’t do social media marketing straight up for lead gen, that’s what SEO is for! read full article….
A wonderful article in Slate by the Astronaut-Turned-Patient Safety Expert talks about the importance of improving your system (or in my mind your website) instead of blaming isolated incidents.
“When I got into healthcare, I felt like I’d stepped into an entirely different world. It was all about, “Let’s figure out who screwed up and blame them and punish them and explain to them why they’re stupid.” To me, it’s almost like whistling past the grave. When we demonize the person associated with a bad event, it makes us feel better. It’s like saying, “We’re not stupid so it won’t happen to us.” Whereas in fact it could happen to us tomorrow.” (keep reading)
I tend to agree. When you have a problem or issue with your website or company, it’s more important to look at what led to the possibility of that happening rather than blaming the incident on someone.
This reminds me of Toyota’s 5 Whys… which encourages you to ask Why 5 times when something goes wrong. read full article….
Friend and colleague Alex Becker was kind enough to post a few questions he and I talked about recently. Here’s an excerpt:
Alex: What are the most common mistakes people make with their WP blog?
Brad: I think you can break this up into 2 parts, the Technical side and the Content side.
From a content perspective, I think Bloggers should focus on having at least one call-to-action that is really prominent on their site. If you are blogging for a cause then make sure that it’s easy for your readers to get involved. If you are selling something, make sure it’s easy to buy that thing. Basically, if someone likes your blog, make it easy for them to take the next step… whatever that is.
From a technical perspective, I think it’s important to have a fast-loading and clean site. The devil is in the details and the almost subconscious smoothness and planned out user experience in a good site is what keeps people coming back (in my humble opinion). So I suggest taking a look over your site and making sure that it’s very user friendly. Have some friends use it and give you feedback. It’s tough to hear but very helpful.
You can read the rest here.
Give up money, give up fame, give up science, give the earth itself and all it contains, rather than do an immoral act. And never suppose, that in any possible situation, or under any circumstances, it is best for you to do a dishonorable thing, however slightly so it may appear to you. Whenever you are to do a thing, though it can never be known but to yourself, ask yourself how you would act were all the world looking at you, and act accordingly.
Encourage all your virtuous dispositions, and exercise them whenever an opportunity arises; being assured that they will gain strength by exercise, as a limb of the body does, and that exercise will make them habitual. From the practice of the purest virtue, you may be assured you will derive the most sublime comforts in every moment of life, and in the moment of death. If ever you find yourself environed with difficulties and perplexing circumstances, out of which you are at a loss how to extricate yourself, do what is right, and be assured that that will extricate you the best out of the worst situations.
Just a tidbit from a great letter by Thomas Jefferson to his nephew.
“The role of a homepage is unique to a website. It is not so much a landing page, as it is a channel. And the primary purpose of a homepage is not to get people to it, but rather, through it.”
A quote from this awesome webinar on improving your homepage. read full article….
Premise:
There are plenty of times when you’d want to tell somehow how they can improve the Search Engine rankings of their site quickly. I’ve found that with most lay-people, you have about one minute before their eyes gloss over.
So below is my attempt at giving someone the best tips for SEO that can be read in about a minute. Of course it isn’t all-encompassing, nor is it meant to be. But hell, it’s short.
The One-Minute SEO Plan:
SEO means ‘search engine optimization’. The goal is to get more targetted traffic to your website specifically through Search Engines.
There are two parts to SEO. These are 1) What is happening ON your site that the search engines can scan and see and that helps them determine what your website is about and 2) What and who are linking to your site on other parts of the internet. The Search Engines look the number of links to your site as a gauge of how popular your site is. Search Engines tend to like sites with many links from other popular websites.
‘It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear.’ -Frank Luntz
Last week they were running a deal at AppSumo that made the cost of user testing low enough that it would be silly not to try it. So I decided to give it a go and I learned a lot about how people use my websites as a result. I’m going to share the 5 most intriguing with you today.
As an SEO, I’m usually way more focused on just getting traffic than what happens to that traffic when it hits the site. But even rough ‘back-of-the-napkin’ math can convince the most skeptical that user testing is cheaper and more effective than trying to get more traffic to a poorly-designed site.
For that reason, I encourage everyone to try user testing on their own sites. Yes, this means you. Try it. You’ll be amazed what you find.
Without further ado, let’s dive in… read full article….
I usually don’t do posts that include code, but this trick it just too cool.
The code below is for your .htaccess file. You would want to use this whenever you are working on a site and you want to redirect the site elsewhere while you are working on it.
So, in this case we duplicated the site on a subdomain while we worked on the main site. Then we put in these redirects to direct everyone looking for the home page & anyone who reached a 404 page to be redirected.
What’s great about this is that you can still work on your site as long as you know the right URL for the page you are looking for.
# TEMPORARY REDIRECT redirect 302 /index.html http://youwantthemtogohere.com ErrorDocument 404 http://youwantthemtogohere.com
Just replace what’s in your .htaccess with the code above and you’ll be fine.
Of course, this works in WordPress too, so worry not!
Affiliate Summit East, 2010
Affiliate Summit East is a conference for affiliate marketing. It took place in New York City over the last few days. My two business partners and I took some days off from our day jobs and headed to the conference to strike some deals and learn some tricks that we hoped would improve our business model. Since our business is only 4 months old (though profitable already!) we hoped that getting infused with some good networking and awesome speeches would improve our company’s trajectory.
The experience was a lot different than I had expected and I’ve come away with some lessons that may be helpful to young business owners and people new to conferences. So if you are a veteran conference-goer, you may disagree with my assumptions. For the rest of us, maybe you can learn from my mistakes.
First of all, I want to say that the trip was a ton of fun. The folks who put it on are brilliant and the quality of the conference isn’t in question at all. So kudos to all of the folks behind ASE. read full article….
Today marks the launch of a refined and updated WordPress Consulting Service specially tailored to quickly and painlessly answer your questions. You can see more about that service here.
I’ve been doing phone consults with folks for a couple of years now, and have figured out what most people want is really down to earth advice delivered over the phone. It’s sort of like the helpdesk that WordPress doesn’t have.
So if there is something about your WordPress blog or website that has been bothering you and you really want to fix it, swing on over to the new WordPress Consulting page and let’s get your problem fixed.
Late last week I was approached by Seth Shoultes about a new plugin he made for E-Junkie. The plugin allows a wordpress user to quickly and easily add an E-Junkie shopping cart to their website. I thought the plugin was really cool and helpful and figured you guys might want to know about it.
Then Seth and I got to talking and it turns out he just released another really cool plugin to help manage (and take payments for) events. So many of my clients have looked for event plugins and I haven’t been able to suggest any until now. Check out that plugin here.
I hope these plugins help you out, and if you have any other plugin favorites please drop them in the comments!
As part of our 30 Days of WordPress Par-Tay, we are moving right along to the next question by Christina. Christina’s question about Child Themes is a great one, specifically with the recent flare-up of interest in proprietary themes in the WordPress Community.
Christina asks:
Some premium WordPress themes use child themes, and some just seem to be stand-alone themes. What’s the advantage of buying a child theme like Lifestyle versus something that isn’t built on a proprietary parent theme?
Without getting into the politics of the debate about proprietary themes, let’s take a look at what a Child Theme is and why advantages and disadvantages there are with using Child Themes.
What is a Child Theme?
A child theme is basically a way to re-skin a theme so it looks different.
A lot of times you’ll really like a theme except for one or two things, and creating a child theme (in its most basic implementation) would allow you the change the things about your theme that you don’t like in an upgrade-proof manner. If you are a developer, this is a great child theme intro.
For normal non-developers, let’s take a look at the benefits of using Child Themes. read full article….
In deciding what direction to take WordPress Landing Pages and how to help the folks out that are members of that community, I try to stay on top of developments in the online marketing world. But there is so much hype and crap out there that sifting through it can be very tough. However, I’ve finally found a resource I think is truly amazing, professional, and free. It’s called Marketing Experiments.
Here is the Marketing Experiments Resources page that has enough data and research to keep you busy for years. Enjoy.
Best, Brad
PS: If you are a member of WordPress Landing Page, you may be interested in our new blog post about making a cool graphic header like we use on the front page of WPLPT.
