WordPress Tips for Beginners

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Andrew Cunningham recently asked a good question about getting started using WordPress.

Can any of you guys recommend good, simple resources for learning how to use wordpress?

How do you get started? It’s a great question that deserves some more attention.

Your Objectives

Ultimately the best way for you to get started depends on what your overall objectives for you website are. It’s the place I start with all my clients because if you don’t begin with the end in mind you will likely waste a whole lot of time and/or money working on things that don’t move you towards your real goals.

Some possible objectives include

• Raising brand awareness
• Increasing personal profile
• Driving product or service sales
• Improved search engine visibility
• Put a more personal face on your business
• Providing a personal creative outlet

Obviously the possibilities are nearly endless. But until you take the time to work out exactly what you want to achieve with your web site and write it down, you will likely be painting yourself into corners that may be difficult (and expensive) to get out of later.

Get Your Own Domain

Once you’ve got your objectives thought through, you are most likely going to want to get your own web domain. If you are planning to conduct any business via your website having your own domain is a must.

By having your own domain I mean purchasing your own .com name. There are other possibilities besides .com but for most folks, especially in the US, .com is the right way to go.

Having your own domain for your website will do a number of  things for you. The biggest ones that come to mind are

• People will take your business more seriously
• You have more control of your site

That second one is huge. Because there is no way to know what the future will bring, you want to give your self the flexibility to make changes later.

Ultimately your web site is yours, right? So you should have as much control over your site as you can.

I get all my domains through www.GoDaddy.com and I’ve got dozens of domains with them. They are the world’s largest registrar of domain names and for good reason. They are really good at what they do.

It is a good idea to register your domain for a minimum of 2 years for better search engine rankings because spammers tend to buy short lived domains and then abandon them quickly. I also recommend most of my clients get GoDaddy’s “Deluxe Registration” because it bundles some features that can be valuable for business owners.

One note about GoDaddy. They are a bit aggressive on the up-selling. Just be careful not to add on a whole bunch of stuff that you don’t need and you’ll be fine. Read more

Age of Conversation 2 Released Today

Today marks the official release of the collaborative social media book, The Age of Conversation 2: Why Don’t They Get It?

The book includes chapters from 237 authors (including yours truly) from 16 different countries and addresses the broad topic of some of the mistaken ideas people have about how social media intersects marketing efforts. The eight topic areas covered in the book are:

• Manifestos
• The Accidental Marketer
• A New Brand of Creative
• My Marketing Tragedy
• Life in the Conversation Lane
• Keeping Secrets
• From Conversation to Action
• Business Models

Capital ‘C’ Commitment

The Age of Conversation is the brain child of Drew McLellan and Gavin Heaton, and as such is truly an international effort. Drew is in Des Moins here in the States and Gavin is half a world away in Sydney Australia.

And they have had their hands full shepherding the 200+ authors and bringing all the aspects of the project together. They’re two highly committed men.

And the best part?

All Proceeds for Charity

The best part is that all of the revenue (above the actual publisher costs) is being donated to charity to help kids. The charity they have chosen to support is Variety, the international children’s charity.

Their goal is to raise at least $15,000 dollars for the charity. It’s ambitious. We need to sell a bunch of books to get there.

But with 237 bloggers generating conversation about it, I think it’s a vary achievable goal. So go buy a copy or two in your favorite format.

Pricing for The Age of Conversation 2 is:

• e-book: US$12.50  ($10.00 going to charity)
• paperback book: US$19.95 ($8.02 to charity)
• hardback book: US$29.95 ($4.60 to charity)

I bought my copy already. Go get yours right now.

It’s chock full of great information from some of the world’s leading bloggers and marketers. And you will be supporting a worthy cause at the same time. Read more

WordPress Releases Security Update Version 2.6.3

Yesterday WordPress released a security update in Version 2.6.3. According to the WordPress development blog this version update corrects a vulnerability in the Snoopy Library.

Now unless you want the Red Barron to be able to cause havoc with your blog you will probably want to either update the two files that are changed in this version or update your entire install.

Version 2.7 Coming Soon

The good folks at WordPress are working hard on the next major revision to version 2.7 and which will reportedly be released in the next few weeks.

Version 2.7 will take another leap forward in usability improvement on the back end with the dashboard and all of the administration panels getting a thorough going over.

Last month they conducted a survey to get user input on what changes to prioritize and user preferences on how the dashboard menus should be organized. (Yes we participated in that survey. So if you don’t like the new changes after they come out I guess we are partly to blame for it.)

If you want, go take an early look at the changes. Seems like they are making an already great platform even easier to use.

WordPress Support Services

If you’re behind in upgrading your WordPress installation, please be sure to take a look at our WordPress Support services. And if your project is a little bigger in scope, take a look at some examples of our work here at SuccessCREEations, Inc. to see if we can meet your needs.

As always feel free to contact us with any questions you may have.

And on that note I’ll leave you today with a little Snoopy vs. The Red Barron to enjoy.

Traffic and Money

There are two types of people who tend to know how to drive traffic on the internet. And the top players in both categories know how to drive massive traffic.

Interestingly enough historically there hasn’t been much of any crossover between the two groups. In fact, the two groups tend to look on one another with suspicion and disdain.

Internet Marketers

On the one hand you have the hard core internet marketers. These folks go by many different names such as SEO experts, search marketers, affiliate marketers, pay-per-click marketers, ect.

Their realm is that of the paid search results. They live in the land of the Sponsored Results that you see at the top and right side of the Google results pages.

Internet Marketers understand keywords and bidding processes. They know that it takes money to make money and they are perfectly willing to spend what it takes to drive traffic to their web sites because those web sites in turn make them money.

They tend to be really good with numbers and analysis. They use terms like click through rate, impressions, autoresponders, and squeeze pages. Sure they have word skills too.

But their interest in words often only carries as far as it takes to persuade people to take action, whether that is to click on the search ad or make a purchase after their target audience has clicked through to their website. And their websites often consist of a few landing pages designed specifically to convince people to make some purchase.

Good Internet Marketers are making a bunch of money. The best take in millions each year.

Bloggers

The other group that knows how to drive traffic to web sites is the bloggers. Their methods are very different from the Internet Marketers.

Bloggers are the word people, the relational ones. They are really good at generating original content and developing conversation. They network with other bloggers, spend time in the comment box.

For the most part bloggers completely ignore paid search all together. Some even cary that so far as to almost never click on ads or “sponsored results”. Often the only time they pay attention to paid search ads is when they check the few dollars they may earn a month from running Google ads on their blogs.

Instead bloggers live in the realm of organic search. They understand search engine optimization and assume that the only way to be good at it is to master the free side of the search results. They are self restricted from the paid side of the search engines.

Because most bloggers are completely broke.

Bridging the Gap

As I already mentioned there tends to be very little cross over between the two groups. The internet marketing folks are busy tweaking and adjusting their ad campaigns so that they are profitable to have time to generate lots of original content. They may even have a tough time understanding why someone would bother spending time on a website (or a blog) that wasn’t earning any money.

Bloggers have a tendency to be suspicious of anyone motivated by profit. They thrive on independent viewpoints and in their minds once moeny gets involved the independence flies out the window.

But here’s what I suspect. Something tells me that the folks who bridge that gap between the two biggest traffic generators on the web will be in a position to become very wealthy indeed.

As a longtime blogger I’ve recently been doing some heavy research on the internet marketing side of things. And I’m intrigued with what I’m learning.

New Projects

I started looking at paid search because I had an idea for a new project and, with everything else I have going on, that project needs to be profitable if I’m going to make it work. I’m thinking that paid search will play a significant role in that profitability, especially during the start up phase.

Not only will bridging the gap be useful for my own side project but it will allow me to help one of my clients directly. And beyond even that, the simple act of doing the research, gaining the knowledge, has opened the door for another new opportunity for me.

All that to say, expect some announcements in the next couple weeks. Things are happening here at SuccessCREEations!

Learn What Really Stresses You Out

HighCallingBlogs.com and Robert Hruzek of MiddleZoneMusings.com are joining forces again to talk about what we’ve learned from stress. (The project is still open, just visit that link if you want to participate.)

The Reality of Stress

Stress is a core reality in this fallen world we live in. There is no such thing as a care free life, at least not one that’s firmly anchored in reality.

I think one key to happiness, or even survival then is to get a firm grasp of what really stresses you out. We’re all different and things affect us all differently.

An ordinary person spends his life avoiding tense situations. A repo man spends his life getting in to tense situations. — Bud in Repo Man

Throughout my career I’ve had what most folks would consider fairly stressful jobs. I prefer to think of them as high intensity jobs.

Stress from Physical Danger

I’ve worked in some physically dangerous environments. Whether it was the fight deck of an aircraft carrier or on the docks working cargo operations, I’ve seen a few men killed by work related accidents while I was on the job.

I’ve even been hurt myself. Loosing focus for even a fraction of a second can have disastrous consequences. My left index finger has a nice little scar to remind me how easily I could have lost a fingertip hooking up cargo to a ship’s crane one day.

And I watched in stunned horror one bright morning when a friend of mine ejected from his F/A-18 as it rolled over immediately after launching from the front of the carrier. He waited just a moment too long to pull the handle and ejected down into the water. His mistake was fatal.

But I boarded my plane just the same and rode down that same catapult into the sky, all kinds of questions swirling through my brain.

That stress of physical danger never seemed to bother me all that much. What it did was serve to keep me paying attention. Read more