In this video tutorial I show you how to to easily create great looking custom email opt-in forms for WordPress using OptinSkin and place them at the end of a blog post.
Find out more about OptinSkin!
Building a list of email subscribers is incredibly important for your business if you’re trying to get vistiors who come to your site into a sales funnel for things like digital training products.
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The Perfect WordPress Theme
It’s called WordPress.
WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool. Geeks often refer to it as a “dynamic content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL”.
You don’t need to worry about that, but if you need convincing take note that as of May 2012 Wikipedia reckons WordPress is currently the most popular CMS in use on the Internet.
Let’s face it. It’s only geeks like us who enjoy digging around a content management system like WordPress, adding links, optimizing a page for search engines and creating custom widgets.
We don’t mind updating plugins or tweaking a bit of custom code to add drop capitals to blog posts and help increase the readibility of your site.
Chances are that you loathe or fear fidding with your WordPress if you run a bricks and mortar business, a consulting business or just about any other kind of business that doesn’t involve the web.
So here’s what you should do.
[Read more...]
Once you’ve got your hands on your spanking new WordPress-based website from your designer and developer to market your business online, the real work starts.
I find that one of the major problems with developing websites for small business start-ups is that they don’t have the budget and/or time and inclination to invest in learning how to use WordPress.
Because I work with it on a daily basis I have a tendency to forget just how confusing WordPress can be under the hood. Sure, it’s drastically improved over the years but if you’re new to CMS you’re not really going to know the first thing about plugins, SEO, security updates, etc.
Now I’m very happy to help clients get started once we launch a website for them, even if we’ve signed off on the project. But of course there comes a point where the customer has to take it forward themselves because goodwill doesn’t pay the bills. Explaining the vagaries of the WordPress menu feature, no matter how easy it is if you’re working with something built on the Genesis framework, takes time and not everyone will grasp it instantly no matter how easy I think it is.
I was at a business expo for new businesses today here in Stockholm. Wandering around I saw there were numerous stands selling turnkey websites.
The idea is that as a small business you buy a Do-it-Yourself website that’s “super easy to update, design yourself and, hey, win business.”
Most of the systems include some form of hosting, a bit of support, and either bill monthly or cost a one time fee.
There are some benefits to this kind of approach if you’re a small business. For example, it will give you a website super quickly and get your business online. If you’ve got a flair for technology, have a bit of experience with web design, you can get going and may produce a site that will help get you started.
Personally, I don’t like this kind of approach because it often ties you into a system that you’re stuck with. That’s why if you start going down this route you want to know if your data can be exported if you eventually decide to move up to a different web solution. You wouldn’t want to invest your time in producing content only to discover two years down the line that all those posts you wrote will get lost if you change CMS.
The solutions I looked at today didn’t really make it clear how search engine friendly they were other than me told “They’re super SEO friendly.”
A brief perusal under the hood didn’t give me any indicators, but I’ll admit that I wasn’t looking for more than 10-15 minutes.
No matter what solution you go for, make sure when someone (or some site) says SEO friendly, you understand how and why. Ask lots of questions about title tags, and custom meta descriptions. I’ve written lots about title tags and meta descriptions so I won’t repeat myself here.
Personally, I recommend either a static html website or WordPress CMS for a small business user looking for a first-time website.
An html site, although old-school, works very well for a portfolio site with up to, say, five pages. Not everyone is going to be doing online marketing, content marketing, social media marketing – to begin with ! They just need a place to show who they are, what they do, and where they can be found. Kind of like an online business card and portfolio.
Buying a complex CMS isn’t what you need for something like this.
My general recommendation for first-time business owners getting started and interested in having the web really grow their business is to go with WordPress.
For starters, it’s free but more than that there’s a really active development community. [Read more...]
I‘m a massive fan of MarsEdit; however, it took a bit of time to figure out how to customise it to work with the custom fields in the WordPress Thesis framework. So here’s a video showing you what to do.
Don’t hesitate to contact me on Twitter if you have any questions. [Read more...]
