Having fun today in Pawleys Island.
Blogging With WordPress
Almost every day I receive email from clients who want to better results from their online marketing. Normally the conversations begin with some sort of statement to me like: “I wanna get started on Facebook” to which I always respond: How’s your blog doing?
To me your blog is your home base, one of the quickest and easiest ways to share information to your audience at a place that you own and can completely control. Also, Google and other search engines love the constant stream of new content which will help with your search engine rankings as well. Blogs also give you the ability to share your content quickly & easily with all of the social networks. Finally, the statistics show that businesses who blog receive 55% more online traffic than those who do not which is just another reason why you should be blogging today.
Join me Friday September 14th at 1PM Eastern for “Blogging With WordPress.”
During this one hour webinar I will share with you how to get started with blogging as well as discuss with you some of the many great features that a self hosted WordPress site has.
[maxbutton id=”3″]
Are You Commenting Or Selling Me Something?
The other day a buddy of mine sent me a message on Facebook of someone who had commented on his new WordPress Blog that he is building. He found it strange that he had received a comment as the site isn’t finished yet, and the content in the comment seemed a little odd. Over the past few months we have discussed me designing a Custom WordPress Site for him in the near future.
The random comment was made by a “Bruce” whose site domain entered had nothing to do with WordPress sites, Agentpress themes, SEO, or anything close. His site domain was a religious one. So when my friend asked me about it, I said, do you have the IP address? I had a hunch.
To look into things a little more, I asked him to send me the comment because it just seemed rather strange & awkward that someone would not only come & comment on a blog that isn’t even built yet, but to also that the comment would randomly suggest someone to redesign his site.
Here’s a screen capture of the comment:
The first thing I did was a simple IP lookup to find what I had expected. The IP address of the commenter on his post who suggested a company to do site work for him was in the same location as the company suggested. Now, I don’t know for certain that the commenter & suggested company are the same, but my gut feeling is that they are since the site that was commented on was 2,300 miles away and the company mentioned to hire does have connections to my friend through various social networks.
Now maybe I’m the only one that finds this kind of tactics really below par, sneaky, and shameful. If you feel that someone should hire you because they could really benefit from your services, then simply email the site owner and tell them. I’ve done this before with many people. Some I’ve helped by giving them solutions to fix something wrong on their site, others have gone on to hire me to do work on their site instead. But, to impersonate someone else and push your services in the comment on someone’s site is just wrong.
A common courtesy when commenting on someone else’s site is to not try & push your services, or link to something off the current domain you are visiting. When you have a WordPress site, you gather all the information needed to check where someone is commenting from. This is just another reason why having your own Custom WordPress Site can be a great addition to your online marketing strategy.
Let’s all try exhibiting a little common comment courtesy and stick to adding comments of value, not selling our products or services dishonestly.
There Is Strength In Numbers
Let me start by saying I have debated writing this post for at least the past three months. Why? Well the post has nothing to do about benefitting your business online or how to use some sort of new social media tool. In fact, let me just get it out in the first paragraph and say that this post is about me and a situation I am in now where I need your help. If that bothers you, feel free to click off this post now.
As some of you may or may not know, in October of this year my wife and I are going to accomplish something that has been a passion of both of us. Before we even got married almost six years ago we both decided we wanted to make differences in other people’s lives through taking short-term missions trips to other countries. On October 22nd we will be loading a plane to head out on our first trip as a couple for one month. We will be traveling to Tirunelveli, India, Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, and to both Johannesburg & Cape Town, South Africa. If you want to see all the details of our trip, you can visit the site I built specifically for it at http://sendustosouthafrica.com.
While on this trip I’ll be working closely with teams in each of the areas we travel to help them get the equipment they need as well as assist them in getting it all set up so that they will be able to stream their services worldwide and get their churches set up online. I will be holding sessions during the day with businessmen and women in the various locations to show them how to use technology to increase their businesses which is what I do daily with my business.
Another thing we plan to do on this trip is work closely with the leadership in the churches in some leadership training. During the days we are planning to spend time working closely with an orphanage in Cape Town, South Africa that helps children that have been abandoned or have diseases. This part has my wife Katherine beyond excited. At night we will be participating in many revival type services where we will minister to thousands the Gospel in the multiple countries. It’s also been rumored that there might be a few small construction type jobs for us to handle while there which is fine by me.
My final job during this trip will be document everything to share with the church family when we return home in both pictures and video. Many times people know you go on a missions trip, but they never get to see what the results were of their generosity in supporting you.
So here’s my challenge to everyone: We have three days to raise basically $5,000 and meet our goal. Maybe right now you are strapped tight and don’t have the extra to share. I get that & understand completely. As someone who owns his own business and has a family with two young children I truly understand. If you can’t give monetarily, will you at least assist me by sharing this post with your friends on the various social networks? The more people who view this post means the more chances we have to reaching our goal by the September 10th deadline. I’ve heard sayings before “There’s strength in numbers” and “Many hands make the load light” which I believe are both very applicable right now.
If you are like me, you have probably think a small donation wouldn’t do much help, so why even bother. My type of personality can sometimes be that all or nothing type, where if I can’t give the $5,000 needed, then there’s no point in giving any. But, if 500 people each made a $10 donation, we would have things covered in full. Most everyone I know has the ability to spare that right now. That’s the equivalent of a Frappuccino & bagel one morning at Starbucks or a #9 value meal at McDonald’s.
So can you help us out? I’m placing the donation form below. If you make a donation, please let me know by either tweeting about it with the hashtag #5KFORSA. If you are not on Twitter, send me a message on Facebook or whatever other means you want. On behalf of myself and my wife, I want to sincerely thank everyone for their generosity!
Optimizing Your Custom WordPress Site Load Time
Have you ever visited a website that seems to take forever to load? I get calls regarding this from clients that I’ve built custom WordPress sites for as well as others that have built their own WordPress site by themself.
Most of the time when the calls or emails come in, I ask for a link to their website so I can assess the situation. Many times, the problem isn’t caused by a slow or unresponsive server, but rather one of two things. The first reason has to do with plugins which I’ve touched on slightly in the past and will share more on down the road.
The second big reason I seem to come across a WordPress site, or any type of website for that matter may run slow has to do with images. As megapixels inside cameras continue to go up, so does the size of the file it creates. For example, my Canon t3i DSLR creates size that are roughly 6-7 megabytes each. If I am loading these file sizes onto a server, it is going to put a major strain on the load speed of a site. Also, the actual dimensions of the site are going to be entirely too big at around 5,000 pixels wide.
Here’s a quick video showing you how to check your images:
Make this simple change and watch how fast your custom WordPress sites speed up!
Not Everything Is That Pinteresting
I love when social networks alert me of my friends joining another network so we can connect there. Through social media, it has become an even easier task to stay connected with others and what is happening in people’s lives. Just like several other services, Pinterest likes to alert you when one of your friends from Facebook or Twitter join. Today, I got notified, my new friend “carpal tunnel” joined Pinterest.
Curiosity got the best of me, so I had to head over to Pinterest and see if they are actually pinning or if it was just another spammy account that someone set up. To my surprise, they had three boards set up.
Shocked to find out they are not only pinning, but have three separate boards built and using, I then had to find what images were they pinning about carpal tunnel that would be so moving, so inspirational that HAD to be placed on Pinterest. Here’s what I found:
If you are like me, you don’t find these photos that pinteresting. In fact, with the weak stomach I have, I found a few of them rather disturbing. Not a single image has been repinned, liked or shared by others which leads me to think people agree with my initial thoughts on their boards.
My guess is that some marketing guru visited a doctors office somewhere and mentioned to the owner of this Pinterest account that Pinterest is the newest and hottest social network on the market. That Pinterest will “take over Facebook” and many other promises which prompted them to jump on Pinterest right away.
Unfortunately, Pinterest is not one of those networks that will be super valuable to everyones business. So make sure before you jump on this social media bandwagon that your brand has something that would be actually pinteresting.