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Recommended: Plugin for WordPress Rewards Activity on Your Site

January 28, 2011 By 1 Comment

How do you encourage site visitors to keep coming back? How do you keep them active?

One possibility is to give them something for various activities on your site. A great plugin for making this reward program simple to manage is called the Cube Points plugin for WordPress.

For example, you could reward someone with 5 points every time they login to your website. You could give them 10 points for every comment they leave on your blog posts. You could even them more points for leading discussions in the forum or producing more in-depth content for the site.

What they get for the points is totally up to you. For example Cube Points makes it really easy for to you recognize the most active members on your site. You can even set titles for each level of activity. For example someone with under 100 points would show up as a “Newbie” and someone with with way more points could be seen as an “Expert.” The titles and the number of points required to earn the title are all set by you.

If you really want to get creative then enhance to reward system by offering top point earners free access to some of your premium content or maybe even give them something more tangible like your website logo shirt or some other prize. The sky is the limit.

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Filed Under: Blog, Wordpress

How to Get Your Videos Seen By Your Prospects

January 24, 2011 By Leave a Comment

web video hosting site logosO.k., you have a video. Now what?

It won’t do you much good if nobody sees it. So you have several options to get prospects to see your video:

  1. Broadcast television – very expensive, difficult to track results or target your audience.
  2. Cable television – less expensive but still difficult to track results or target your audience.
  3. Upload your video to the web – cheap, easy to track results and your audience can be highly targeted to get much greater response rates.

Even though uploading your video to the web is a great alternative to broadcast television, there are still challenges to overcome.

  • Uploading video to your website is just one step to take. It’s cheap to do but only people who come to your website will see it. So, it won’t have much effect in driving new traffic.
  • Uploading your video to free hosting sites like YouTube, Blip.TV, Revver, Veoh and many others is another essential step you must take. The problem is that it’s extremely time-consuming & tedious to upload, title, tag and describe each video at each hosting site.

The secret tool that savvy internet marketers use is called web video syndication.

Web video syndication tools allow you to quickly and easily distribute your videos to multiple hosting sites all at once, saving massive amounts of time and money. Even though web syndication will get your video to rank high in the search results this isn’t enough to get highly targeted, high converting traffic. There is one more secret you need to master first.

The real secret to driving highly targeted, high converting search traffic to your website is in using the right key words and phrases.

This means you need to do some serious keyword research to know which words your prospects are actually using to search for your type of content online. No guessing allowed. You’ll also need to know which keywords your competition is using to get search traffic to their sites.

Let’s face reality, if there is too much competition for your choice of keywords then you will probably have a very hard time ranking on page one of Google for those words. Or if you merely guess at what words you think your prospect will use then you’ll likely end up wasting your efforts on words with too little search traffic to see real results.

For example: a client of mine gave me a list of about 50 of their top keywords and phrases based on their best guess and some competitor research. I used some of them on the first video we syndicated to test results. We grabbed the first four positions on page one of Google within the first day. Great, right?

Not really. I went back and did more in-depth traffic volume research on the keywords we used and discovered that there was NO search volume on those words. Zero, zip, nada. Bummer, dude.

Once you know which keywords have reasonable search volume and reasonable competition then you can use them with your videos to dominate the search results. This will help you get your content on page one of Google where your prospects can see it and drive more highly targeted, higher converting traffic to your website.

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Filed Under: Blog, Video

Recommended: Plugin Adds Forum To Your WordPress Website

January 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

To have a successful website of any kind usually means that you have a way to engage your site visitors and keep them coming back.

One way to do that is to provide a community forum where your visitors can ask questions, get answers and post comments or share ideas. A great forum plugin for WordPress is called Simple:Press.

You will need an FTP client to upload it to your WordPress plugins folder on your server. Currently, automatic upgrades are not available so you will need to FTP upgrades as well. Once it is installed on your server and you activate the plugin then you may need to do a few extra steps to make sure all the folder locations are properly set. Don’t worry, the plugin instructions walk you through this. Once it’s fully installed and settings are in place then future upgrades are pretty quick and easy to manage.

I also recommend downloading the various icons and skins folders to go with your new forum. These let you customize the look and feel of your forum so that it blends nicely with your website design.

Installing the plugin is the easy part. The real challenge is getting activity on your forum. A forum is something that requires monitoring. If people are asking questions then somebody needs to know that and then provide the answers. If you have loyal followers who are knowledgeable on your topic then you might consider inviting them to be your forum monitors.

The next challenge is getting enough members to remain active so that there is enough content being frequently updated.

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Filed Under: Blog, Wordpress

Experiment Testing TwitterFeed vs. NetworkedBlogs on Facebook

January 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I’m a huge fan of content syndication.

That means I create my content on this blog and then let various apps do the tedious work of spreading my content over the web for me so I can use my time doing something else.

I’m also a big fan of testing to see what gets better results. For example, I have been using the NetworkedBlogs app on my Facebook account to pull my blog posts in and post them on my wall. It works great but I noticed something that kinda concerns me. If you click on the blog post on my wall, it takes you to my full blog post but it’s framed in the NetworkedBlogs.com website. What  bothers me about this is that I wonder if it’s hurting my website traffic count and score.

On the other hand… my friend and client Jory Fisher uses the TwitterFeed to pull her blog posts onto her Facebook wall. There is no thumbnail image to go with it but when you click the link you are taken to her actual web site blog post. It’s not framed in a TwitterFeed web page the way NetworkedBlogs is.

So, I am trying to halt the NetworkedBlogs app and start the TwitterFeed app to see if my traffic count and score improves over the next several months. This post will be the first post using the TwitterFeed app. It may appear twice on my Facebook wall… if I was not successful in turning off the NetworkedBlogs app. If so, I apologize.

I’ll post the results of this experiment on this blog as soon as I have something significant to share.

PS: Trying to stop a Facebook app is a pain in the butt. There is no clear, easy way to even find how to do that. If someone has a tip to share on how to stop apps you are currently using, let me know. Thanks.

Follow-up: I think I found how to revoke publishing rights of NetworkedBlogs on my Facebook wall. Simply mouse over the right side of a post so that you see the delete X icon. It should ask you if you want to delete the post, revoke publishing rights or remove the app. I revoked. I also went to NetworkedBlogs and managed syndication so that it will stop posting to Facebook and Twitter.

The reason I did this is because it was over-riding my TwitterFeed app. The twitterfeed worked but the link it posted to Twitter and to Facebook still went through NetworkedBlogs which defeats the purpose of the experiment. I am making this update and will now attempt to re-post to TwitterFeed to see if it works the way I want.

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ClickZ’s Top 7 Online Marketing Trends for 2011

January 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Here are the top four to get you started.

The other three and all the cool graphs showing the data are in the full article written by Heidi Cohen for ClickZ.

  1. Social media marketing goes mainstream… climbing from $3.30 to $4.29 Billion in spending.
  2. Mobile hits its stride… with 30% of all U.S. mobile devices being smartphones. If you still aren’t sure about getting into mobile marketing then be sure to check out my blog posts for December 2010. The focus for the month was mobile marketing and why you need to be there.
  3. Content marketing expands in new venues… think iPad and Kindle.
  4. Marketing goes real-time, not just watching issues for PR and potential fires.

Several points to keep in mind when reading the article on ClickZ… the stats are typically estimates and projections. They reflect what marketers are doing but not necessarily what is working or how well it is working. I’m guessing it must be working reasonably well because the trend has been growing over several years and the online marketing budgets keep growing while the traditional media ad budgets continue to decline.

Read the article and you will see that corporate bosses are keeping a close eye on the ROI of these trends.

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Recommended: Plugin Boosts Banner Ad Conversion Rate

January 9, 2011 By Leave a Comment

If you want to make money online then you will need to add some affiliate promotions or banner advertising to your multiple streams of income.

This means that you are going to need an easy, affordable and effective way to manage that advertising and track the results. I have tried a number of different banner plugins for WordPress… both free and paid. The one that I use and recommend is by a group called MaxBlogPress.

The plugins is called MaxBannerAds and comes in two flavors, a free version and a premium version with a few extra bells and whistles.

Why do you need a plugin like this? If you want to improve the click through and conversion rate of your affiliate ads then you need to keep the ads fresh. The challenge with banner ads is that people tend to ignore anything that looks like an ad. So affiliate programs offer animated ads that change to grab your attention. But then people can quickly ignore the animated ad unless you change the ads that they see on your site.

Changing ads manually can become tedious and unproductive. So, use a plugin that rotates your ads for you… keeping them fresh anywhere on your site that you designate as an ad zone. MaxBannerAds does this for you and it also makes adding animated banner code super easy. Some of the previous plugins I have used didn’t let use animated banners or they only let you put ad in your sidebar. MaxBannerAds lets you put ads inside your posts, at the top, at the bottom or in your sidebar.

This plugin takes the hassle out of ad management and improves my ad conversion at the same time. I highly recommend it.

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Recommended: WordPress Plugin Turns Your Blog Into A Membership Site

January 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment

This is one of my favorite plugins for WordPress.

It turns your WordPress website into a full featured membership site. They also offer a membership site of their own where you can learn all the “How-to’s” of membership site management, community building, extra plugins, customizations, and tons of other membership related topics.

I found this plugin while searching for a solution for my own membership site needs. Most of what I found were very expensive software packages or hosted solutions with high monthly fees.

Those just weren’t practical for someone new to membership sites and wanting to learn. I needed a simple and affordable solution so I could experiment without needing to make an immediate profit. Let’s be real… it takes time to build a following willing to pay for membership. Your content has to be good. It takes time to figure out the best pricing strategies and product offering mix.

After nearly a year of frustration and searching, Jim Edwards posted a short note on Wishlist Member. I jumped all over this plugin and bought a developers license immediately. I installed it on several of my small websites to play with it and learn how to use it. It’s pretty simple to use but it does take time to set-up your membership site.

You’ll need to create pages for the welcome, thank you for registering, wrong membership level, membership canceled, please log-in and other membership site functions. I like to look at what others have done on their sites for ideas on what to say and what kind of graphics to use.

This is where the Wishlist Insider membership comes in handy. You can learn as much from looking at what they’re doing as from what they are saying in their content.

I highly recommend the Wishlist Member plugin for WordPress.

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Filed Under: Blog, Product Creation