Gravity forms emails responses or entries from their forms. It’s one of the most important aspects of your website. Those leads, registration or simply contacts are vital to your local business. However, email is not perfect. Occasionally email services go down or emails get lost. With Gravity Forms, your data is saved in the backend of WordPress.
Adding More Videos to Your WordPress Blog or Website
Every website wants to capture their readers attention quickly. Search engines are rewarding pages which receive longer viewing time. What better way to create stickiness and captivate your audience than through video.
Why Add More Videos
Stickiness is playing a greater and greater role in SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Stickiness is how long a viewer stays on each page. You can create great copy for them to read or a video for them to watch. An ABOUT ME video on your WordPress sidebar widgets is another great way to occupy your audience with great information so they want to stay on your page even longer. Your reader is curious about your company or blog. That’s why they came to your website in the first place. Give them a reason to know, like and trust you through an ABOUT ME video.
How to Add More Videos
YouTube (which is owned by Google now) makes it easy for the user to upload a video and share it on their WordPress website.
The latest WordPress upgrade has made it even easier to include video in a post or page. Simple add a link to YouTube video in your blog post or page. No additional coding required.
But what if you’d like to add a YouTube video to the sidebar of your website? Or to another widget location? You can simply embed the YouTube code into a TEXT widget. This is a bit more complex, but still simple to do.
To further increase the video views, be sure to add a PLAY VIDEO link right below the YouTube video. The link helps reduces confusion for your readers. Here’s the code I’m using:
<div align="center">
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/embed/u4FArEQsqxM">
Play Video </a></div>
Enjoy this quick video with the step by step tutorial.
Your Turn
Share in the comments below how you have been adding more videos to your website. Have you added an ABOUT ME video? We’d love to see it!
How to Add a Guest Blogger to Your WordPress Blog or Website
Once you have become practiced at blogging, having a guest blogger add some of their quality content to your website refreshes your content. Guest blogging is a terrific way to trade your knowledge with someone else’s and create quality links back to your website.
As a small local business, you may have more than one employee publishing information to your blog or website. WordPress does an excellent job creating useful user roles for a variety of applications. Here are the user roles and generally what each of them do:
- ADMINISTRATOR
Manages all aspects of website and can change anything from widgets and plugins to posts and pages - EDITOR
Writes, edits, publishes posts and pages for themselves and others - AUTHOR
Writes, edits, publishes their own post (no access to pages) - CONTRIBUTOR
Writes and edits their own post. Cannot PUBLISH posts or access pages. - SUBSCRIBER
Only manages own profile. No access to writing posts or pages
If you’d like more technical details about these roles, be sure to check out the WordPress Codex. But don’t get lost in all the geek speak.
Today’s video takes you step by step through how to add each type of user. The video also shares how you can apply each of these different roles in your small local business or with simple guest blogging.
Do you add guest bloggers to your WordPress website or blog? Let us know in comments below . . .
3 Mistakes a Local Small Business Makes Getting Their First Website
Having a website for your local small business today is no longer an option. Few folks have the yellow pages around any more and are looking to find local businesses on their smart phone, iPad, and laptop. If your business doesn’t have an online home then you’re losing valuable potential income.
In my experience, local small businesses struggle with 3 mistakes once they decide to get a website.
First business website mistake #1:
Get your website designed by a part-time teenager or relative who has little experience and will even complete (maybe some day) your website for free.
When your vintage Ford Mustang is needing repairs, you don’t take it over take it to the kid next door because he is taking a mechanics class in high school. The same is true with your valuable website. You’re going to be offering and showing your precious local small business to the entire online community. You want your online representation of your business to shine.
What to do instead:
Choose carefully. Find a web designer who has experience designing websites. And more importantly designing websites you LIKE. Ask other local business owners who they used for their websites.
As a local business owner, you want to make sure your business image is reflected professionally. While it might seem like a simple process to throw a website together, a professional can share and guide you with the best options for your business. They may also help you skip over some of the pitfalls that may come from poor planning, poor design and poor SEO (search engine optimization – think Google).
First business website mistake #2:
Building the website yourself.
You are smart enough to build your own local small business so developing a great website can’t be that hard. Whether you spend late nights learning how to design and code your own website from scratch or you bought into one of the “free”website options being advertised everywhere, you’ve invested your valuable time and effort into an ever-changing and technically challenging marketing tool. You have to climb the steep learning curve of whatever website system you are learning. It can be very frustrating!
What to do instead:
Instead of investing your creative talents into something outside your local small business expertise, hire a website designer to do your website for you. Use the time you would have spent on the website creating and serving in your local small business – where you are the expert. Only you can lead and build your local small business, but a professional website designer can easily build a great website for you without the huge time expenditure on your part.
Having someone else develop your website frees you from keeping up with all the latest technical and design changes and updates, too. Wouldn’t you rather call someone to figure out why Google crashed your website overnight and losing a day of money making work on your local small business.
First business website mistake # 3:
Going overboard and insisting on using a high end PR firm (or the most expensive marketing company in town) to make sure you have every imaginable bell and whistle on your small business website.
Adding factors like music and moving actions or Flash throughout the site as well as insisting on a lot of complex content upfront distracts your website visitor from the primary purpose of your website – to make more profit. Eventually you get so bogged down in the perfect and huge website, that nothing happens.
What to do instead:
Consider what results from your website would make it successful. Is it more traffic through your front door? More leads to your sales force? Better attendance at your next show?
Keep your initial website as simple as possible. You can always add to and improve it, but first you need to have a website live.
Talk to a few different website designers recommended by fellow local businesses. Interview them and compare their pricing. Give them the marching orders and get the website live.
Bottomline:
If you’ve made some of these mistakes, don’t despair. There are a lot of qualified, reasonably priced website designers ready to help you create the website you need.
5 Reasons You Need One Google Account
When I went to log into my Google Account for Gmail today, this was the image Google was showing me beside the sign-in box:
I realized as I was reading through the text that this image was a concept I had tried to explain many times.
While I can see one username and password as a security nightmare, the ease and simplicity of a single item to remember dwarfs the concern. Beside Google has a number of security precautions you can enable, including having Google ring your phone with a code every time you log-in. So for you, dear reader, I’ve created a list of reasons your webmaster desires for you to have the ONE password for all of Google.
Authorship
By creating a Google+ account under one username and password, you can show your photo next to your articles, blogs, etc. when they appear on a Google search. Studies are showing more folks are clicking the links with the author’s photo next to them.
Google Analytics
Knowing who, how, and from where someone is visiting your website are important metrics for any business to measure. Have a simple, but in-depth interface to do the measuring can be expensive – unless you using Google Analytics. A free website metrics tool, Google Analytics can provide analysis of your website visits, keywords, and even web browsers used. If you haven’t created and placed the tracking yourself, your webmaster can easily do it and add you as an administrator. All using your one Google username and password.
YouTube
When Google purchased YouTube a few years back , I noticed it didn’t take them long before our YouTube accounts were connected to our Google account. This can be a challenge if you have more than one YouTube account today since you will need a separate Google account for each. This transition has caused difficulties for clients who had to rediscover their YouTube accounts after the need for the SEO connection became apparent. Your best bet it to consolidate to ONE YouTube account. YouTube is currently testing have multiple administrators managing a channel.
Google+
Google+ may still be the new social media game in town, but with Google continuing the extend and improve features like Google Hangouts, Google Pages, and Google+ Local, if you haven’t setup an account by now, you will want to set started. Google+ interaction also improves your Google Authorship and potentially your Google search rankings as well. Since Burst Media announced in April 2013 that Google+ has more users now than Twitter, this newer social media site it picking up steam.
Gmail
After search, Gmail has been a hallmark of the Google brand. Setting up your Gmail account is the first step to harnessing the power of your Google account. Gmail can be a simple answer to many email issues.
If
- you have multiple accounts elsewhere
- you want to be able to use email on your phone without loosing it on your desktop
- you just want a simple online interface for all your email accounts
- you need help with spam filtering (especially for older domain names),
then Gmail can be a good solution.
While Google offers a number of other options, these are the ones I discuss with my clients the most. So if you haven’t started a Google account yet or you want to consolidate the ones you have, start by creating / consolidating your Gmail account at www.gmail.com
Have you setup a Google Account yet? What Google products can you not live without? Share your insights in the comments below.
5 Ideas for Posting on Facebook Page for Your Local Business
Coming up with ideas for posting on Facebook page can be challenging. Over the past few months, I’ve been working with clients to help them improve their Facebook interaction. While adding to a local Facebook page regularly is essential to quality results, improving interaction and developing relationships with your local customer is important, too. Along the way, we’ve learned a few ideas for sharing (especially when we’re stuck). Give these a try on your local business Facebook Page.
- Notice the Weather – Today’s weather can have a big impact on foot traffic to your business. Pointing out what’s happening and how it’s relevant can be helpful to your customers. Wild weather always gets people talking.
- Post an encouraging quote with an imaginative photo – Consider a quote / photo your customers would want to share on their Facebook page. More shares exposes your local business Facebook page to more folks. And, if you created own the photo, consider adding your domain name subtly to the bottom. That way if friends of friends share your photo, it keeps drawing people back to your local business.
- Promote What’s Happening in the Neighborhood – Your business is part of a neighborhood, town, or city. When you promote festivals, activities, or events
- Don’t forget staff celebrations – Birthdays of staff, new babies, big anniversaries, graduations, etc. are great opportunities to bring personal celebrations to your clients. These are also ways to spread information virally.
- New and exciting products – Every business consists of products and services. Make sure you get yours noticed, but do it sparingly. When something new and exciting comes out, be sure to share it with a photo.
Be consistent with your posts and at least 3 hours apart. Now get started on your posting on Facebook page today.
Do you have some great posting ideas? I’d love to hear them. Share your ideas in the comments below.
How to Whitelist an Email or Domain Name in Gmail
The frustration cannot be explained when the important email you’re waiting for (and know was already sent) doesn’t appear in your Gmail nearly immediately. Or worse yet. That important email ends up in your spam or junkmail folder.
For local business owners, having leads not show up at the top level of your email in-box can cost you sales.
Most public email providers, like Gmail, have their own spam filter algorithms that save user from hundreds of junk emails as well as nasty viruses. Sometimes Gmail mistakenly labels an email from a frequent forwarder (like your website domain) as a spammer and moves the emails into your spam or junkmail folder.
To correct Gmail’s misdirect, you want to add a filter to Gmail to WHITELIST the important email address or domain name.
Delete Post Revisions in WordPress
Sometimes I forget WordPress is based on a database so it needs a bit of cleaning up once in awhile. Some of the clutter comes from endless revisions WordPress stores. While it has saved me many times to have a recent revision of a blog to go back to, having 100 revisions is quite a bit of overkill. In addition to the text of the post itself, WordPress saves tags, meta information and more.
For revision intensive websites, I’ve begun enacting two changes to rein in the quantity of website slowing revisions.
Install Better Delete Plugin
The Better Delete plugin replaces an old favorite, Delete Revisions plugin, that wasn’t working with the latest versions of WordPress. Better Delete made some important improvements to better reduce the WordPress database size and speed up the website.
Reduce Revisions Being Saved by WordPress
If you never have the problem of too many revisions, you won’t have to delete them. After deleting the old revisions from the database, we want to do a bit of preventative medicine to prevent having to repeat this action regularly. However, it does take a bit of coding.
Find the wp-config.php file. It’s in the root directory of your WordPress installation).
I added the following code to wp-config.php file:
define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 3);
define(‘AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL’, 120);
WP_POST_REVISIONS defines the number of post revisions that is saved. I selected “3,” but have seldom needed more than two.
AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL changes the time between automatically saving revisions. I changed it from 30 to 120 seconds.
Save the wp-config.php file.
Facebook is Essential for Your Web 2.0 Marketing
Here is a great interview with Mark Zuckerman, founder of Facebook. He shares why Facebook is an important element of your marketing strategy.
Starting Beginning Facebook Webinars
Join us for four exciting webinars to learn about start out on Facebook. See more at: http://www.beginningfb.com