WordPress Tutorials

How to Add Images to Gallery Leaf in Headway

Custom WordPress Sites, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Tutorials

As many of you know, I build a good amount of Custom WordPress Sites for clients. One of the main themes I use for these sites is Headway. I like it because of the ease in making changes with it’s drag & drop theme. It also comes in handy if the client decides they want to make some changes down the road to their site. With a few simple clicks they could make all types of color changes & move things around on their theme.

One of the leafs (similar to a widget or plugin) that Headway has is called the Gallery Leaf. It allows you to quickly & easily install a gallery either on a page or in the sidebar of a page. One of my clients that is using this was having difficulty getting new images to load, so I made this quick video below on how to add images to the Gallery Leaf in Headway. I figured that if he was having a problem with it, that there were probably others out there as well who could use some help with it too.

How to Add Feedburner Email Subscription to WordPress

Custom WordPress Sites, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Tutorials

Feedburner is a wonderful tool that allows visitors to your site to either subscribe via email or an RSS feed and received updates of your site every time you add one. I find this tool extremely helpful for the person who enjoys my content but may not always have time to come by my site every day and see what I have written.

Adding this simple widget to the sidebar of your site gives people a really easy way to enter their email address, confirm their subscription and then get email updates. I was having a conversation with someone earlier today who didn’t realize this option was available on Feedburner, so I decided I would do a quick tutorial on how to set it up:

So do you use Feedburner? If not, what do you use to give your consumers the ability to subscribe via email?

How To Embed YouTube Videos in WordPress

Custom WordPress Sites, How To Blog, Video, WordPress Tutorials

I had a friend the other day who said it was hard to create a new page inside WordPress and then embed a YouTube video into it. Since I’ve been asked this question before, I figured it was time to do a quick tutorial. Watch the video below and it will walk you through both of these steps:

One thing to remember when doing this: Write all of your content before clicking over to the HTML tab to embed the code. If you switch back from the HTML to visual tab to add more content or edit the content, it strips out part of the coding making your video not load. The pasting of the embed should always be the last thing you do.

Hope this helps, and if you would like to see more tutorials like this, leave a comment below and I will make one in the near future!

Who’s Online Plugin for WordPress

Custom WordPress Sites, Social Media Advisors, Social Media Speaker, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Tutorials

If you are anything like me, you are a complete & total nut when it comes to the analytics of your site. I am one of those people who looks at his Google Analytics multiple times a week to see how the site is doing. But, one thing that I never liked was the fact that while Google gives me great information, it wasn’t real time statistics. However, a few months ago I was able to correct this by installing the Who’s Online Plugin for WordPress. Since then I have become such a huge fan of this plugin that I now install it on every Custom WordPress Site I build for my clients.

Now you may be asking why would you want to see real time data on how your site is performing. Here are 3 simple and easy to understand reasons:

1. Test the limits of your server– Ever visit a site and you see the dreaded Error message that the server is over capacity? I know I have & hate when I see that. I’ve had it happen only once here on this site and after running some tests and seeing that it wasn’t traffic on the site, I learned quickly that I needed to remove a plugin that was using entirely too much bandwidth to run. Once I removed the plugin everything was smooth sailing again. Since then, I’ve tracked over 490 people sitting on my server at once without it crashing.

2. Measure the effectiveness of your social sphere- I use this plugin as a good measure of how my social media efforts are going. Right now I have slightly over 9,000 followers on Twitter. What I’ve been able to gather from using this plugin is that when I tweet a blog post the amount of clicks on my links go up when I am spending more time on Twitter engaging others and having conversations with them. This has become even more evident over the past few weeks as I have been very busy with social media speaking gigs around the country. With the higher level of travel, there has been less time for online engagement on Twitter. I’ve also noticed the same on other social networks like Facebook & LinkedIn.

3. Determine the optimal time of day to share content- Have you ever wondered when is the best time of day to send your content live into the interwebs to garner the most traffic? While there is no optimal time that is perfect for every business, this tool will help you to determine times and days that work for your personal business. If you tweet a link to a post on Thursday evening and only get 10 clicks you will learn that you may want to try to deliver your new content on a Thursday morning at 8AM if that is garnering 85-100 clicks. Use this tool to track your instant traffic and you can learn the best time of the day.

Now that I’ve shared three ways I use the Who’s Online Plugin for WordPress, let me leave you with a video demonstration of the plugin.

These are just three ways how I use this tool, if you can think of others please share below in the comments. And sorry Chris, you didn’t break my server…yet.

Linking Strategies for Your Blog

How To Blog, Online Consulting, WordPress Tutorials

We write blogs regularly and share wonderful information with others. One of the integral parts of a blog post are the links. These links give an added layer of depth of knowledge to your posts. What most don’t realize is that the links you insert into a post have either an internal or external destination. By internal or external destination, I mean that the link is either going to direct the reader off of my domain to another site or direct the reader to some other place inside my site.

When adding links into your blog post you need to be aware of what the affect will be when someone clicks on it. If the link is sending them off your site, you may want to make sure the link is opening in a new tab/window on the consumers browser. If the link is staying on your site, have the link open in the same window. Why? Well, if I write a post and share a quote from someone else and link to them, I am going to give a link to that person in my post. I don’t want to take my consumers completely away from my site because once they leave my URL and land at that other domain there is no telling where they would go. However, if the link opens in a new tab on the web browser, my site is still there for the consumer to return back quickly and easily.

How To Set Links Targets

When you insert a link, into a post, you have the ability to set the target to either open the link in the same window or open link in a new window. So, next time you enter a link into your blog, make sure you set the target. While this doesn’t seem like much, it can increase the amount of time people are spending on your site. The more time spent on your site by consumers means the higher the probability of someone doing business with you.

So when you write your next blog post take a moment to think about your link target and set it to keep consumers with you as much as possible!

Making your WordPress Site More Social

Social Media Advisors, Social Media Training, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Tutorials

We all hear the importance of social media and why you need to have a strong presence in it. We know that there are sites like Facebook, Twitter, & YouTube and other social networks. Many times though we want to see what type of results these social networks are sending in traffic to your sites.

As I mentioned recently in a post, we need to be more social and less media with our social media marketing efforts. But, for those of you looking for cold hard facts to prove that you are not in a giant vortex of time wasting I have some stats for you. Currently, our site is averaging around 30% of our traffic directly from social media platforms. We still are seeing a huge section from search engines and referring sites, but our number of clicks from various social platforms like Twitter and Facebook are increasing rapidly. Because of the increased success, I wanted to share a few things you can do to make your site more social and easy for readers to distribute your content out to social media platforms.

Since I have a fond love for WordPress Sites, here are a few plugins that can be used on your site to increase it’s socialness. (yes, I just made my own word up)

Facebook Share- This plugin has played a huge role in our content being shared. I purposefully placed this plugin at the top right of my posts to make it in eyesight the minute you visit a page. Several of our posts have received well over 40 shares. The average person on Facebook has well over 100 friends. That means that my simple post has just been given the opportunity of being viewed by over 4,000 people!
Twitter Retweet- There are several different buttons that can be used for Twitter sharing of your blog posts. I like the Tweetmeme button personally. Once again our posts are being tweeted well over 40-50 times. Recently, a post I wrote about Google Instant was tweeted by Chris Brogan. Currently he has over 158,000 followers on twitter. His one tweet placed my post in front of all those eyes. Not to mention that his tribe that read the post and liked it then tweeted it out too. This button gets placed at the top of my post right with the Facebook Share for optimum exposure.
Facebook Like- This plugin gets overlooked many times because it doesn’t place a fancy graphic on the person’s feed and a link. But what it does do is place a link that says the name of your post on their Facebook profile. If that is done by 70-80 people this will also drive traffic to your site. I place this plugin at the bottom of my posts to give everyone one more reminder to share stuff they enjoyed.
Sexy Bookmarks- This is a personal favorite of mine. This plugin simply rocks. I liked it so much I actually wrote about it before here. On a side note, they are also a company that uses social media well as they were recently named our Social Media Winner of the Week. The reason I enjoy this plugin is that it opens up endless possibilities for your content to be shared. With a simple click of a button at the bottom of a post your blog post can be shared with over 90 different social media platforms. Included in that list is Google Reader, Posterous, LinkedIn, Email, and so many others. Half of them I have never even heard of!

I have no doubts that the reason I have seen the recent increases in traffic from social media platforms is being caused by these four plugins above. The other major reason for an increase in traffic from these sources is the involvement of both myself and by business partner on the various platforms.

If these plugins are implemented along with the proper use of a social media marketing strategies, you will see a great increase in traffic to your site. The one point that cannot be overlooked in this entire blog post is the previous statement. You have to be using social media platforms like Twitter & Facebook in the ways they were intended and not just spamming others. Remember, installing the plugins is the easy part. Getting consumers to visit your site and use the social plugins willingly is the tough part.

photo credit-ahisgett