Creating the Website

The first thing to think about is the type of site you want to create. This will allow you to compile specific information for your site and target potential advertisers within the same market. You will also be able to target certain keywords so your site is found in specific internet searches.

Next, consider how you want to build your site. Are you going to keep the site fresh by updating regularly with blog posts? For those who use WordPress as their platform, this is a great idea because every new post will automatically be pinged by the search engines courtesy of the free plugins WordPress offers. This keeps your site relevant and ranking high in the search engines.

However, if you are pressed for time and don’t think you can keep up with writing regular blog posts, creating a site with static pages is a solution. Another option is to purchase PLR articles and rewrite them for your websites’ content.

Keep in mind that there isn’t a rule limiting you to just one website. You can have more than one website advertising your products and/or services, which will help generate more income.

Making Money

After you’ve created your WordPress websites, you can make money in the following ways:

• Pay Per Click Ads: Google Adsense allows you to place ads on your website and get paid each time those ads are clicked on by a reader. The only problem is that you may be waiting a while to gain enough clicks in order to reach your payout. For instance, Google requires you to earn $100 before disbursement occurs.

  While you can place as many ads as you want on your websites, you may not want to fill up the pages as this can be distracting to visitors and have the opposite effect of what you want. Instead, monitor your site and change things up until you’re satisfied with the results.

• Affiliate Marketing: There are many affiliate marketing programs out there that you can make money with. Basically, you find a product related to your niche and sign up as an affiliate. You can then advertise the product on your website and when someone buys that product, you receive a commission for it.
• Product Sales: This is similar to affiliate marketing, but generally the products being advertised were created and/or designed by you such as coffee mugs, t-shirts and e-books.
• Paid Advertising: Paid advertising allows you to sell space on your websites to other business owners for advertising purposes. For instance, a business owner may pay you to place a box ad or a banner ad on your website. Paid advertising is usually done month-to-month or by the year, giving you a great opportunity to earn instant income.
• Membership Sites: You can also earn money by creating your own paid membership site. This works by providing little tidbits of free information on your current site, but requiring readers to pay for the “good stuff.” Once they pay for a membership, they will have access to another site you’ve created with the in-depth information they’re looking for.

Everything suggested above can easily be done through WordPress. Once you create your website and develop a strategy, continue to duplicate the process and watch your income increase. There’s no reason you can’t supplement your income by making additional money through your WordPress website!

There’s no quick fix for making fast money but my coaching program can guide you in the right direction.

Basically, social networks are just what they sound like. They’re a website that allows users to interact socially with a group of people online. Unlike traditional WordPress websites, social networking sites allow people to follow their friends and family members in order to keep up with them minute-by-minute. This is something you don’t learn about when learning how to use WordPress.

Is WordPress a Social Network?

The short answer to this question is “no, not yet.” The WordPress MU (multi-user) has announced the future release of a new platform called BuddyPress. BuddyPress will have features similar to those found on many of the social networks today, which will give WordPress websites the appearance of a social networking site.

There’s no need to worry if you aren’t currently using WordPressMU because WordPress has a lot of social networking plugins available for you to utilize.

Another difference between social networking sites and WordPress is that when you have your own WordPress website, it’s yours. Social networking sites give users the ability to create their own page, but the site/page isn’t really theirs. They’ve just created a page that’s an extension of the social network.

How Can You Get Social Networking Features on WordPress?

The answer is “plugins.” The key to getting what you want out of WordPress is to utilize their free, user-friend plugins. Most of the social networking plugins give readers one-click access to your actual social network locations (facebook page, twitter page, etc.). The majority of bloggers put an icon or a drop-down box on each of their posts so users can quickly find their social networking homes.

Some of the social networking-like plugins are: Social Links, Social Dropdown, Tweet My Blog, SocioFluid, Social Bookmarks and About Me. There are many more to choose from.

Additional WordPress Plugins for Social Networking

• Twitter Updater: This plugin will automatically let your followers on Twitter when you post a new blog post.
• Socialite: This plugin will automatically publish any WordPress posts to social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.
• Lifestream: This is a pretty complex plugin, but it does a lot to keep your blog readers updated with your online social life. It provides a live stream of your online social activity from other networks so your blog followers can keep up with you.

WordPress and Successful Social Networking

If you want to successfully incorporate social networking in with your WordPress websites, then you not only have to give readers a way to keep track of your online activity, but you have to keep them interested in you and your blog.

Reader Engaging Plugins

• FV Community News: This allows your readers to publish news items they find interesting to your sidebar.
• WP-Polls: You can create your own online polls and post to your blog or sidebar for readers to weigh in on. They can even leave comments with this plugin.
• Top Commenters: This plugin puts your top/recent comments in a place (designated by you) on your sidebar for everyone to easily see.

Social Networking and Business

People are turning to the internet more and more for their news and entertainment. As a business owner, you need to stay on top of this trend. Give website visitors a way to follow your social interactions online, as well as, giving them a way to interact with you online. This will help you expand your business.

Are you feeling ovewhelmed? My coaching program offers personal advice and assistance with sorting through everything you need to know about WordPress.

However, for those of us who have WordPress websites, we often wonder how we can get our sites to pop up when a relatable search is entered in Google. This is all part of learning how to use WordPress correctly.

Basically, the way you are going to get your WordPress websites to pop up in a Google search result is by using the right Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques. Once you learn how to use WordPress, you’ll find that it’s not difficult to improve your websites’ rankings and traffic as you’ll be able to get search engines to effectively pull information from your websites!

So, how can you achieve this?

The Expensive Way

Many website owners hire Search Engine Optimizers to help them with their SEO woes. These professionals will look at your websites and review your content. Then they’ll work to build keyword searches, provide location specific statistics and help establish a website development plan. Sounds great, right?

While these services do work, keep in mind that they aren’t free. Often, these services are pretty expensive, causing many people to try it on their own first.

The Inexpensive Way

The good news for you is that you have WordPress websites, making it possible for you to improve your websites’ presence and visibility on the Internet, by yourself, without spending a lot of money. WordPress has several different plugins that will help you do this in an easy, affordable manner. However, there are some rules you should know first.

The Rules

Titles are Important – Research has proven that titles are very important for how well an article or website ranks in the search engine. You want to have your SEO keywords/phrase towards the beginning of your title if at all possible because they will receive more attention by search engines and viewers.

Improve Speed – Search engines don’t just create a list of search results randomly. Often times, the websites at the top of the results will load much more quickly than those towards the bottom. Why? Search engines look at load time when they compile lists. Therefore, work to improve the speed of your website’s load time by increasing cache speed, removing unnecessary code and toning down the videos.

Tag Each Post – If you want to increase your web presence, then you have to tag each one of your posts with the keywords, or similar keywords, used in the post. You can also link various articles together by inserting links within your content to improve site visibility.

Reduce Number of Outbound Links – Finally, once you get visitors, you want to keep them. Do this by reducing the number of outbound links you have on your website. Yes, it’s good to provide your readers with a way to find additional information, but when you have too many informational sources in your sidebars, you’re encouraging readers to leave.

The Advantage of WordPress

If followed, the above tips will help you improve your WordPress websites presence and visibility on the Internet. The advantage you have with WordPress is that is helps you do several things that other platforms don’t. These include defining titles, tagging, linking to related posts and including optimized descriptions.

In addition, WordPress is incredibly easy to use once you learn the basics. This gives individual business owners, like yourself, the ability to build customized sites on their own, saving a ton of money. You’re also able to use specific search engine optimization techniques through WordPress plugins that you can’t do elsewhere, saving you the additional expense of hiring a professional to do it for you.

I’ve got a free WordPress Setup checklist to help you include all the important features of a great site! Check it out!

Content is a term used to describe the various types of information you have on your WordPress websites. It’s the key ingredient for successful sites. Just like you had to learn how to use WordPress, you also have to learn how to produce quality content that will keep your readers coming back.

Content needs to be given in the right amount, in the right place and with the right information. Once you master this, you’ll have mastered CMS (Content Management Systems).

Can WordPress Be Used as a CMS?

Absolutely! WordPress allows you to quickly and effectively add new content to your website, which is very important. However, while WordPress makes a great CMS, it’s important to understand that it still doesn’t have all the “bells and whistles” that other systems may have…not yet, anyways.

What Are the Benefits of Using WordPress as a CMS?

The greatest benefit is having the ability to create individual pages instead of just individual blog posts for your content. This allows you to store static information such as contact information, about the business information, sign-up forms, etc. While the information placed on these pages won’t be changed often, it is possible to create a post page.

Post pages are the pages where you will upload your blog posts. You can choose to have these pages in a single or multi-post format, giving you even more versatility. In addition, you can also create archives, categories and multiple posts to be displayed all at once. This ability creates the perfect balance for both business owners and bloggers!

Another great benefit of using WordPress for a CMS is how easy it is to use. You don’t have to be a seasoned computer professional in order to customize your website. Regardless of your skill level, you can easily go into the control panel and change things on your own, in not much time at all. You can even set it up to where contributing writers can go in and post individual posts, but nothing else.

Lastly, WordPress offers a number of free plugins, widgets and themes to help you customize your website and the content you put on it. WordPress also allows you to add additional things to your websites such as comment cards, an online store, outbound links and even polls!

It doesn’t really matter what type of site you need to build, WordPress is the best option for those looking for easy content management.

Are you feeling ovewhelmed? My coaching program offers personal advice and assistance with sorting through everything you need to know about WordPress. Give it a try for just $1!

The Background

First, you may find some unwanted, embedded codes lurking in the background of the free themes you choose for your WordPress websites. Sometimes this embedded code has the ability to attach spam to your sites’ visitors or existing customers.

While it may be possible to remove the troublesome coding, some themes make it impossible without crashing the entire site. This is the last thing you want to deal with when first learning how to use WordPress.

The up side is that premium themes are generally spam-free. Yes, you have to pay for these themes, but it may be worth it to avoid all of the time and frustration you’ll spend on a free theme full of hidden spam.

Theme Support

Generally speaking, most free themes offered on WordPress don’t come with support. So, if you have questions or the theme isn’t working properly, you’re most likely going to be on your own in fixing it. Now, WordPress has tried to help remedy this problem by creating web forums and other online resources, but you there’s no guarantee you’ll find the help you need.

In contrast, the designers of premium themes are making money off of these themes. Therefore, they are interested in helping users work their way through any questions and/or problems they’re experiencing with their themes. Some designers are available through email and others have dedicated web forums, making contacting them easy.

Sometimes, specific themes need to be modified in order to make them work. If it is a premium theme, most designers will work with you and be willing to make the necessary changes so that you can use the theme. In addition, if the problem is one that everyone will experience, the designers will often contact everyone who has purchased the theme to notify them of the upgrade. This is not going to happen with a free theme.

What Should You Do?

Free themes are tempting to use because they are free. And, just because some free themes do have hidden spam codes lurking within them, this doesn’t mean they all do. In fact, there are many free themes that work just fine.

Additionally, many new business owners and/or bloggers, don’t have the time available to sift through all the premium themes out there and need to get their sites up and running as fast as possible. This makes choosing a free theme the best option for them.

However, you should do your research before deciding to upload a free theme. If you currently have a free theme, then once your business gets going and your profits begin to increase, consider upgrading to a premium theme. You will notice a difference. One of my absolute favorite producers of premium themes are the guys over at iThemes because they are totally dedicated to the WordPress community and it shows. I use the Builder theme on my main website at www.MarketersMojo.com. For this site you’re reading I used Optimizepress and I really like that one.

One other piece of advice about using premium themes is to find one you like and learn it well. Then use it where ever you can. If you switch from theme to theme to theme you will spend more time than you need to learning how to use new themes and not enough time marketing your business!

There’s no quick fix for finding the absolute best theme for you my coaching program can guide you in the right direction.

Finally, the best advantage is that you don’t have to know anything about HTML to create your own WordPress websites! That’s right, if you have dreaded building your own website because you don’t understand HTML coding, then you have nothing to fear when you learn how to use WordPress because you don’t need this information.

It doesn’t matter if you are using WordPress to create a business website or a personal blog. You have the ability to bypass the HTML option and use the user-friendly WYSIWYG option instead.

What is WYSIWYG?

When word processing first came out, WYSIWYG was a term quickly used by professionals. It means “What You See Is What You Get.” In years past, when sentences were typed into a word processor, one didn’t know if he’d actually get exactly what he typed. Therefore, when technology improved, WYSIWYG was used to let people know they get exactly what they see on the screen.

When working with WordPress, you’ll see the term “visual,” which is used in place of WYSIWYG. When in the “visual” format, you’ll see exactly what your article will look like when posted, as you typing it. Now, if you were to type an article under the HTML option, you will need to use various codes within your content to get the information to appear how you want it when it goes live.

As you can see, things are much simpler to understand with the visual option. You can use icons to manually change your font type and color, add shading, create text boxes, as well as, add lists to your posts; all without worrying about HTML coding.

Creating Posts with WordPress

Many people prefer to type their blog posts and/or articles into a word processing program like Microsoft Word and then copy and paste the completed document into their blogging platform. This can cause a lot of problems for WordPress users. Why?

There are actually a lot of codes embedded within Microsoft Word documents. This will cause things to appear differently when you copy and paste from MS Word into WordPress. However, WordPress has created a Microsoft Word icon that you can use when transferring an MS Word document into WordPress.

While the icon should help WordPress recognize the embedded codes and change the formatting for you, it doesn’t always work as intended. You can fix the problem by using the icon “insert as plain text” and then paste your text directly through this application. The embedded codes should be removed when you use this option. You can then use the visual tab to format the document to your tastes.

WordPress also provides users with a “preview” button so they can get a final preview of exactly how their posts will appear once it goes live on their site. It’s a great tool to use as it ensures that your posts appear exactly how you want them to when finally posted.

The features mentioned above are standard WordPress features. However, there are many more that make WordPress very easy to use. These benefits make it easy for users of all skill levels to create their own website, whether it’s for business or personal use, as you don’t have spend hours of your time learning HTML coding.

I’ve got a free WordPress Setup checklist to help you include all the important features of a great site! Check it out!

Question: “I’d like to convert my Frontpage websites into WordPress. Is that easy to do?”

Answer:
It’s hard for me to say if it will be ‘easy’ to transfer your site and pages from Frontpage to WordPress because it depends on a few things. Before I tell you what those things are I want to answer a question you might be also asking yourself: “Is it WORTH transferring from Frontpage to WordPress”. Personally I think it’s one of the smartest decisions a business owner can make because WordPress puts you in the fast lane to building a highly effective website. I LOVE helping clients do this so please don’t mistake my passion about the topic for hype! I used to have sites in Frontpage and transferring over was like getting out of jail, free! (hehe). It’s SO worth the effort to make the switch over.

So here are things to consider:

1. Your WordPress Skills – WordPress can really be made to do just about ANYTHING if you know how to work it and you have a good theme. One of my favorite themes is iThemes Builder and the reason is it’s really good for things like this because the format of the theme is so flexible. Instead of looking for a theme with the perfect layout to match your current site you can actually adjust the Builder theme to the layout you want (that is NOT the case with all WordPress themes).

2. The Amount of Content You Have – If you have hundreds of pages on a current site then it will take quite a bit of time to do the transfer because a lot of copy/paste will be involved and possibly much reformatting. Typically you can take the HTML from Frontpage and copy it into the html of WordPress and be pretty good to go but you will want to check that. If you only have about 5-10 pages then I would say, yes, transferring that much should be relatively easy!

3. Your Website Design Layout – Most people have a fairly simple ‘boxy’ layout where each section of the site fits into a simple box or rectangle. That would be an easy transition from one format to another. Other people may have a fairly complicated site layout where images and sections overlap each other. If you want to recreate this in WordPress it can be done but it will take a little time and extra configuration.

Obviously it would help for me to see your site but I thought I’d write out some of the things to consider when transferring over your site from Frontpage to WordPress. I suspect you probably have a site that can be easily transferred over using a simple layout, the builder theme and a bit of time.

If you know very little about WordPress at this point then I would recommend you do one of two things:

1. Give yourself some time to learn WordPress through my course so that you have working knowledge of how to use it to recreate your website.

2. You could hire me to do the transfer for you. I usually charge about $595 for projects like this but I would need to have a look at your site first to do a completely custom quote. If you have more than one site I could offer you a deal if you pay for two or more at a time. You can see some of the sites I’ve completed in this manner on the portfolio section of my WordPress Website Design Services site.

Hope this helps, and, after all that said please send me the link to the site you wanted to transfer so I can have a look at it.

Take care, Angela Wills

Here’s part of the email:

“This is a courtesy notice that we have found and corrected exploitable timthumb.php file(s) on your account, which are listed below. While we have corrected these files, we do recommend you ensure all potential exploits are corrected on your account. This is best done by updating all scripts, plugins, modules and themes on your account to the latest version.

As the owner of the account, you are responsible for keeping your hosted content free of malicious software. For technical assistance, you can also reach our chat team from Bluehost“

The files that caused the issue were from older WordPress themes I had installed a couple of years ago and never deleted – my bad!

So after getting this email I went back through all my sites and deleted all old files.

By the way, the culprets were actually OLD WordPress themes that I had tried out, used for a little while and then left to site in my WordPress installation. Now I realize it’s not a smart idea to keep them there. So please go ahead and delete your WordPress themes, plugins and other files that you are not using. You don’t want to unknowingly let someone in through the back door by leaving these files in your account!

Just a reminder to you that it’s important to do this for your sites, to delete all old files you don’t use and update all the files you do. Keep your installations safe.

Here’s a list of five common questions I get from people ready to start a website and my best answers for you.

1. How do you get a website address?

One of the things to understand about getting a website domain name is that you ‘register’ the domain and not buy it. It’s kind of like renting. So, what you need to do is find a domain registrar to rent the domain from and then find a place to ‘host’ it. It’s kind of like renting a car and then you need to find a place to park it.

Make sure it’s in your OWN name. It is so important that you actually own your domain name. Believe it or not there are people out there who will register YOUR domain name in their name and that’s something you really need to watch out for.

You get your website address from a domain registrar. GoDaddy is one well known registrar but there are thousands out there. A good way to find one is to go on referral from someone you trust, or to do some research via Goggle. I like Bluehost for registering and hosting my domains.

2. How do I get a website?

There are many ways to get a website online and really this is one place you should do your research before just jumping in. The web host you choose or the designer you pick can have a big impact on how you move forward with your business on the internet.

You have a few options:

• Learn to build a website yourself – time consuming and confusing if you go it alone but very rewarding once you master it!
• Hire a website designer – you still need to do your research so you understand your needs with a website.
• Use a website builder – Some website hosting companies come with built in website builders that help you get online but are very limiting when it’s time to grow and do other things with your website.

If you’re new here then you might not know that I teach people how to set up their own websites using a free software program called WordPress. It’s my absolute favorite way to build a website! Gone are the days where you have to be a programmer to make your own website. WordPress really puts the ability to build an online business into the hands of anyone with a great idea and the determination to get it done. For more on how to build your website with WordPress, check out my program here: Website Design Mojo Coaching

3. How do you take payments on the internet?

Even if you offer a service, instead of a product, taking payments online is a smart way to boost business and get new customers or clients when they’re ready to buy. The process of setting this up can be baffling to those new to the process.

Many people who sell on the internet will use a shopping cart system to actually collect payments even when they’re not there. The shopping cart is set up ahead of time and then when people come to your website, see something they like and are ready to buy, you don’t need to be there to help them make the purchase. It all happens automatically through the shopping cart.

One of the most common ways to take payment online is through an online system called Paypal. With Paypal you sign up for an account and hook up your bank account or credit card to the account. This way when you make a purchase the only one who gets to see your credit card or banking information is Paypal and you are a little safer than if you’re randomly surfing the internet marketing purchases.

You can also sign up for a merchant account to accept credit cards on your own website through a shopping cart system.

The shopping cart system I have hooked up to my own websites and business is called Amember. It’s more for digital products and not ecommerce.

4. How do you set up a business email?

You should have a business email that matches your website. Normally you will purchase this either with your website hosting package or as an add-on. It creates more professionalism to have an email coming from your own domain name then a local internet service provider account that you get when you sign up for the internet.

Once you have your hosting setup, it’s a fairly easy process to then setup your email. Most hosts (or good hosts) will have a program called Cpanel available to you through the hosting account. To set up your email you log into Cpanel and click on the email section and then follow the prompts. If you have trouble finding this you should be able to call or email your hosting company to ask them how to set up your email.

5. How do you get your website listed in the search engines?

Getting on the search engines doesn’t have to be a long or expensive process. There are some people who will charge you a lot of money to submit your site to hundreds of search engines. Don’t pay them. There is no need to submit your sites at all as they can be found naturally.

The search engines send out what are known as ‘spiders’ constantly. These spiders follow the links from one website to another. All you need to do is get yourself a link on a site that is already being ‘spidered’ and the search engines will find your and do what they call ‘index’ your site in the search engines.

Note – this post includes affiliate links.

Keywords can seem elusive. I get it because it really took me a long time to be at peace with them.

Before I explain to you how to pick a keyword for your site let me give you a few of my best keyword pointers:

• Pick one or two programs to do your keyword research with, I use SEO Book’s Free Keyword Tool mostly.
• Don’t overthink keywords so much that it stalls your content creation.
• Remember Readers First! People will be reading so write for them, not robots or spiders

So here’s the question:
“When I do my keyword research how do I know what words to pick to get the people I want on my site? For example, if I want to get proofreading clients, how do I know if people are looking to hire a proofreader or if they want to get paid to do proofreading themselves?”

The Answer: Picking Keywords to Add to Your Site

In terms of SEO research, sometimes you won’t know what someone is looking for if the word is general.

For example the word ‘proofreader’ is going to attract both of the markets you mentioned – those looking to hire one and those looking to be one. That is an untargeted keyword. You can also look for what’s called ‘long tail keywords’ and those give you more information about who’s doing the looking.

I just did a quick search in the SEO Book tool and here’s what I found:

Here are some examples:

Someone looking for a proofreader to hire:
- proofreading services
- get a proofreader
- cost of proofreading
- hire a proofreader

Someone looking to be a proofreader:
- proofreading jobs
- proofreading employment

See the difference?

This is really key in any research you do. You need to try to get into the mind of the person on the end of that keyboard and see what they will type to find YOU. Don’t just pick keywords based on the highest search volume because the last thing you want to do is go through all the effort to attract an untargeted market who won’t buy from you!

I hope that helps

Angela

p.s. Picking your keywords is the start of really understanding what your target market is searching for and thinking. Once you’ve decided what words to use, you need to add them to your site. Using WordPress as your website software is a great way to do some simple SEO without having to hire an expert or spend hours on search engine strategies.