Masterful Marketing » wordpress

Full Posts or Excerpts?

Debra — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 23:33:48 +0000

Are there benefits to having only excerpts on your blog home page or should you have the full post (or maybe a combination of both)?

I started thinking about this question from a marketing perspective (of course) and decided to do a little bit of research to find out if there were benefits to exerpts on the home page and if there were any serious disadvantages.

From all that I read, the only disadvantage I found was the user had to click to read more. But, if the post is interesting, clicking on the link is really not a deterent because if the user isn’t interested, they won’t read past the first paragraph anyway.

However, if you are like me and write posts that are around 600 words or more, this may be an option you may wish to consider.

Why?

Eliminates duplicate content. Since blogs contain the main index, single post page and archives (both by category and by date), you may want to limit how many full posts are available to the search engines since search engines don’t think highly of duplicate content.
Increases page views. Right now my analytics tell me that my bounce rate is pretty high (i.e. people come to the site and leave without viewing another page). I suspect that is because people are reading what they want and leaving without purusing other pages. By giving visitors only a taste of the post, you may get visitors to read more pages while they are on the site.
Encourages comments. If the visitor is interested in the post, they need to click to the single post page, making the comment area very visible. I have found that people who find posts and view their single post page are more likely to comment than those who read the full post on the home page and depart when they are done because the comment area is not “in their face”.
Enables scanning and offers more content in a smaller space. Fitting more headlines and first paragraphs on your blog homepage helps visitors determine if you have what they are interested in and whether they want to read more or not. Today’s readers prefer scanning content for gems rather than reading everything presented. Give your visitors more gems.

But, one of the drawbacks that kept me from using excerpts on the main index page is the fact that standard excerpts tend to be, well ugly. You can’t control the formatting to stay within your brand, they break at points you don’t necessarily want them to and formatting and images are stripped from the excerpt. There are plugins that make the excerpt more managable. I use one called Custom Excerpts by Sean Bluestone which allows me to set the length in words, change the excerpt link text and add html tags to format the excerpts more consistently with the rest of the site. But that still doesn’t solve the problem as most still require a set number of words or characters to function. And on the home page, you want control of what your visitors see.

Best of Both Worlds

In WordPress, you can create extended excerpts on your home page using the quick tag. You get to control where the excerpt breaks so that you can decide how much or how little you want on the main index page. And if your post is rather short, you don’t need to break it at all. Your choice!

To easily insert the tag:

Position your cursor where you want the tag to be and click on the little icon in the top row of buttons in the WordPress visual editor that looks like the image to the right. If you hover over the button, “Insert More tag (Alt+Shift+T)” smart tag appears.
If you use the HTML editor, position your cursor where you want the tag to be and click on the “more” quick tag button above your text.

This capability gives me the control I need to ensure the visitor gets enough varying content to ensure they stick around and read more.

So what do you think? Full posts or extended excerpts for your main index page of your blog?

No related posts.

WordPress, Not Just for Blogs

Debra — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 03:00:52 +0000

Small businesses need a Web presence. It’s the central hub of your social media strategy – the place where you send everyone to find out more about what you do or provide.

The challenge for many small businesses is to obtain a high quality, professional Web presence that is affordable and easy to keep fresh with new content. On top of that, business owners are hearing that if they blog, tell stories and keep people aprised of what they are up to, they will help increase their chance of being found through search engines.

So how do you maximize your Web presence without breaking your marketing budget?

For most small businesses, building your Web site in WordPress will help you achieve what you are looking for. You can get a quality web site that is easy to update and maintain, support all the multimedia features you want to keep it interesting, while having the ability to add a blog if you are ready to take that step.

I’m still finding small business owners are confused as to what they truly need when it comes to the Web. What is necessary is a place you can call your home base. This home base is where you should be directing everyone through your calls to action in your marketing campaigns. This one place should tell your prospect why they want to do business with you. And, this one place should have everything you need to keep your visitors engaged. You should strive to combine your Web site and blog into one Web property that does it all for you. If you have two separate sites – one for your static Web site and one for your blog – you risk splitting your traffic between the two and you may just find yourself

If you are starting to develop a social media strategy, be sure this Web presence is solid so that when you point people to it from your LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or Google profile, you will be proud.

Why WordPress?

[/caption]I have finally moved all of my client’s Web sites to WordPress and have trained them on how to update their content. This has liberated many of them, helping them keep their Web site up to date with news, events and content that attracts their ideal clients. In my opinion, the following are the key benefits for building your Web presence in WordPress:

It is easy for anyone to add, change and update content – This is a real benefit to businesses that sell services. Sharing your expertise through articles, a blog or other types of content keeps your Web site interesting and up-to-date and helps you demonstrate how you help your customers.
The developer community has built an enormous number of quality plugins – This enables you to include complex features, such as embedding video, audio, image galleries, flash, and secure email forms without having to know how to write code. This reduces development time, thereby reducing the overall cost of building the site. In my experience, if I search for “wordpress plugin xyz feature”, I usually come up with a plugin that does what I want.
The business can grow their Web presence as needed – Start with a web site using only the page template and add a blog when you are ready for that option. Businesses don’t feel like they have to know everything about how their site will look to get something done. They can add new areas of pages (if the theme is set up to accomodate), change content and add the blog without a major redesign.
The site takes less time to set up – The structure of the site can be set up in a much shorter timeframe than developing a web site using html. If the business owner has the time or another resource, they can enter the content themselves, reducing the overall cost of the site to create.
WordPress templates extend the design capability – You don’t have to have just one page template for the whole site. You can create different templates and apply them to pages to create a customized look for various sections.
WordPress sites are search engine friendly – You still have to ensure other SEO (search engine optimization) techniques are used, but the structure of the site (page names/categories/tags) are all used to help the search engines index the site better. Two plugins that help with this is All in One SEO Pack and Google Sitemap Generator which creates an XML sitemap supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.
Your site can be mobile ready with a simple plugin – By installing the WordPress Mobile Edition plugin, you can support mobile devices such as iPhone, Blackberry Storm and other powerful smart phones without a lot of additional development. Mobile support has become a must for all web sites now given the number of people who access the Internet from their mobile device.

The following sites are all created with WordPress. These examples illustrate the creative sites you can achieve using this platform. In addition, even though these sites are a tad complex, they all support mobile devices.

So the bottom line is this: small business owners – take the plunge and get your web site built on WordPress. Many Web developers can do this for you. Find someone who understands the online marketing world and can help you set up a Web presence that helps you grow your business.

For a really comprehensive discussion about building a WordPress Web site, read the blog post Guide to Your First WordPress Web Site by Jerry at Web Hosting: Secret Revealed.

Amazing WordPress Plugins – Part 2

Debra — Mon, 04 May 2009 11:47:33 +0000

Creating a Membership Site

Back in February, I wrote about two amazing WordPress plugins that made implementing a rotating flash header easy to implement. In this post, I want to talk about more nifty WordPress plugins that helped me implement a membership area on the Web site. This area is used by the condominium association to communicate with the owners of the properties, providing updates to documents, minutes to board meetings and information on social events.

Once again, I needed to find some WordPress plugins that helped me implement some type of protected area on the site. Through my search, I found two very powerful but easy to use plugins – Member Access and MemberWing Membership site plugin.

Based on the features needed for the site, I ended up selecting the simpler of the plugins, Member Access. This plugin allows you to select what pages or posts on the site need a password to access. You can set the default as open to all and selectively protect the different pages until the member signs into their subscriber account. Once the member signs in, all the pages are accessible to them. This is just what I needed for this site.

Another membership plugin I found was the MemberWing Membership site plugin. And although I didn’t select it for my client’s site, I’ve saved that one for future use for me and a few of my clients. If you need to create a member’s area where you want to charge for content, Memberwing is what you want. It is very easy to set up and use, gives you four levels of access, users can register themselves, put in a credit card number and gain access to the content without your intervention. So check these membership plugins out.

Simplifying the User Experience

I also wanted to make it simple to manage the community of owners so I implemented another plugin called Register Plus, which allows members to register themselves while enabling me to customize the registration page and ask for information from the person wanting to register. Register Plus only supports WordPress 2.5+ but we’re at 2.7, so no worries there. It allows you to add a custom logo, password field, invitation codes, disclaimer, captcha validation, email validation, user moderation, profile fields and other features that help you create a user community on WordPress. We set it up so that the accounts need to be approved by the management company, but this has cut down on the administrative needs of the site. As owners sell their properties, the new owners can register and the administrator can remove the accounts for those who are no longer owners. Before, I had to create user names and passwords for each of the owners and change them when properties were sold.

All was well and fine when I was testing the site, but when actual users were starting to register themselves, I needed two more plugins to remove the last two challenges and simplify things for users (and for me). Peter’s Case Insensitive Login removes the case sensitivity for those logging into the site. I’ve had this issue with many of my clients thinking “debra” and “Debra” are the same and email me when they get an invalid user login. I most likely will add this to all my client’s sites so they no longer have this problem.

The Peter’s Login Redirect enables me to send the users to the member’s home page of the site when they log in rather than the WordPress dashboard based on their roles, which for the owners is “subscriber”. This very useful plugin removes the confusion for the user and puts them at the area on the site where they belong.

I absolutely love the flexibility and power of WordPress as you can tell, and these plugins made something that was once project for a very skilled developer very easy to implement. My thanks to these developers who have contributed to this community.

Amazing WordPress Plugins

Debra — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 20:18:26 +0000

I am a big fan of WordPress. Most of my clients have chosen to move their Web presence to that platform for the following reasons:

Low cost
Easy to use
Easy to maintain and update content
Easy to add a blog when ready
Many cool plugins to make our lives easy
Add your favorite reason here!

So when I suggested we move the Beach Dreams Community Web site to WordPress, I really didn’t think twice about it. However, I had forgotten that we had a Flash header with a variety of catch phrases that were randomly assigned to pages. I really wanted to find a way to create the site so that the phrase changed everytime a page is refreshed or a new page is loaded. But after looking for a plugin to provide that feature, I came up empty-handed. But with my creative juices flowing, I managed to implement the headers using two plugins – Kimili Flash Embed and WP-Ads.

WP-Ads lets you set up rotating ads pretty much anywhere you want them on your page or post. In the administrative interface in WordPress, you set up as many banner ads as you want, indicating the location and the html code that will show the ad. Unfortunately it did not take the Flash code directly but by using the Kimili Flash Embed plugin, I was able to put the following code in place of the html the plugin was expecting:

[kml_flashembed movie="/flashfiles/catchphrase1.swf" height="171" width="639" /]

Kudos to these developers who built these plugins. I’m sure neither thought this was how their plugin was going to be used, but the flexibility of WordPress and the creativity of the development community enabled me to accomplish what I had set out to do. To view the site with the rotating flash header, go to Beach Dreams Properties web site and go to any of the back pages and refresh a few times.

Small Business Marketing on the Internet

Debra — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 02:31:28 +0000

Getting found on the Internet is one of the most cost effective mechanisms for finding new business, yet many business owners don’t have the time to figure it all out or the budget to hire someone to do it for them. Using the Internet to market your business has its complexities like all marketing strategies, but understanding the basics can go a long way towards having new customers find you when they are in need of your services.

There are two valuable avenues available for marketing on the Internet – Internet marketing and social media marketing. These are two different, but very related and overlapping strategies.

Internet marketing is using online media to execute more traditional marketing techniques such as advertising, direct marketing, and public relations. Social media marketing uses the Internet to create relationships via conversations, networking and word of mouth marketing techniques. One could say that Internet marketing uses “push” marketing and social media marketing uses “pull”.

Using the Internet to Get Clients

To start down the path of Internet marketing for your business, you need to understand what you want to accomplish with marketing on the Internet. Just like all other marketing programs, before you decide that you want to “do” Internet marketing, you need a plan. And, like any marketing program, if not planned properly, you can spend a lot of money with little result. Figure out what you want to accomplish with Internet marketing and if your target audience is using the Web to find the services you offer.

The following simple diagram gives you a roadmap to help you implement these strategies without becoming overwhelmed.

Develop Your Web Presence

The first thing to do is to invest in a good web site or blog optimized for search engines. You may be thinking, “Well duh”, but I still speak with many business owners who really don’t have a web property of any kind. And if they do, their web site was created by a friend and has not been touched for a few years. The following tips will help you get started:

Regardless of whether you choose a web site or a blog, consider having it created in WordPress. In the past year, I have been converting the web sites of most of my clients to WordPress. Even if they don’t need a blog right now, they still have a flexible site where they can manage the content for themselves. In a very timely post, Shama Hyder lists the top 10 reasons for using WordPress for your web site.
Get a great design that is easy to navigate and consistent with your brand.
Build your web site and continue to work the content so that it reaches your ideal clients with the precise message that resonates with them.
Write regularly on your blog with content that appeals to your target audience. A blog without regular posts lose its readers quickly.
Purchase the domain name for your company name and your personal name. You will take control of your complete online reputation. Both domains can be pointed to the same site or blog initially. Matt Dickman has a post on Owning Your Digital Identity that suggests you not only get your domain name, but secure your ID as soon as possible for all social media sites now.

These are only basic tips to get started. If you are not sure how to proceed, get help from someone who understands this space and can mentor you through the process. In addition, this is only the first in a series of posts about marketing your business using the Internet. There’s a lot more coming in future posts that cover many of the topics in the diagram.

Changing Your Blog’s URL

Debra — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:19:39 +0000

Apologies to those of you who received the Masterful Marketing feed of quite a few posts yesterday. Here’s the scoop on what happened and my learning experience (which were many for the record).

I decided to take Chris Brogan’s advice (don’t remember where but possibly a Twitter post) about turning your web site around and have the blog be the home page to begin the conversation with your target right away. His concept made a lot of sense to me, especially for Masterful Marketing’s audience.

So I embarked on the effort, rebuilding my site from scratch. I did that to remove the subdirectory /mmblog (which has been a thorn in my side for a while so this was a good time to rid myself of that mistake). So I reinstalled WordPress, uploaded my theme and plug ins and reloaded the blog content from the exported XML file. Piece of cake.

(Note: this is a really good way to backup your WordPress blog in the event you need to recreate it after a problem).

Well of course, changing the URL required me to update a bunch of things such as Technorati, Google Adwords, LinkedIn, etc. etc., and of course, my Feedburner feed. I didn’t recreate the feed, just updated it so it pointed to masterful-marketing.com and resynched it to clear out what was there and reload the feed with the proper addresses.

Hm so I guess resynching must have caused Feedburner to think these posts were new and resent them out to all my subscribers.

The good news is masterful-marketing.com is now how I want it set up and I can stop stressing over it, the feed still works, Google Webmaster tools has stopped giving me errors, and I hopefully made the change before I caused too much damage.

Content Strategy: Helping Your Small Business Blog Stay Visible

Protect Your WordPress Site

Debra — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 22:01:10 +0000

As one of your major marketing tools and in many cases, the only thing your prospect sees of your business before deciding to call you, your web site and/or blog is a valuable property that needs to be protected. Having had a client that built security software to help companies prevent malicious attacks on their systems and networks, I am sensitive to these issues. So the two posts from Anita Campbell at Small Business Trends caught my attention.

The first post called Hacked: It Could Never Happen to My Site (Famous Last Words), tells the tale of what exactly happened. The second post, How to Protect Your WordPress Site has some useful tips to work into your operations.

I love WordPress and recommend that all my clients use it for their web property due to its ease of use. But like all things web, it is subject to hacker’s antics just like other types of web sites. Here are two more tips that you can do to have a contingency plan if your site is attacked.

First, always keep an updated clean copy of the WordPress theme code on your local system. Since most themes are modified to your unique needs, once you have the site or blog design updated, copy it from the hosting platform to an area on your hard drive. That way if you do need to reinstall WordPress and recreate your blog or site, you have a non-compromised version saved. Remember, any time you rmodify the theme code to update your local copy.
Second, use the WordPress export capability (found under Manage) to export your posts, comments and pages to an XML file locally. Again, if you need to recreate the blog or site quickly, you can upload the content really quickly. There are definitely ways to backup the database itself, but in the event you have to start over, you can reload the content into a clean database. Depending on how frequently you post, you need to make the export a regular activity.

Security is an ongoing process. Don’t think it can’t happen to you. Keep backups of both the code and the content and you can recover quickly if you are one of the unfortunate few.