Dan Scalco says, “Your website serves as the digital storefront for your business. If it doesn’t look appealing, load quickly or even have a mobile version, customers are going to keep walking. Many small business owners rely on their website to bring in a steady stream of leads and educate potential customers on what they offer. However, when it comes to designing and developing a website, most of those same small business owners think they can’t have all the bells and whistles that larger businesses have. But that’s not true. Why? Meet WordPress. WordPress is a free platform that... [...]

Page Load Speed is a key ingredient in the search engine algorithms for ranking, along with mobile-responsiveness, backlinks, and more. Not only that, speed can make a difference in whether a visitor stays around to look at your site or bounces off to some other site. Tuning your site for better speed is critical if it is to bring you long-term success. But, isn’t this a job for experts? Yes, it is. But fortunately for the rest of us, experts can capture their knowledge in software that can act as a portable expert. If done well, tuning software can look into the “behind the scenes”... [...]

Sonia Simone says, “If you want to build a software business, there are a lot of advantages to the world of WordPress plugins. To begin with, you have a built-in audience of committed users. That audience is massive — around a quarter of the planet’s websites use WordPress. And that number is growing every day. But we all know that “Build it and they will come” is a myth — for software or any other business. There are tens of thousands of plugins with just a few downloads, and a few successful standouts. Here’s how to put your awesome plugin in the second category.”. 7 Keys... [...]

IM NewsWatch had server problems a couple of weeks ago. We were down for a week. It was a miserable 10 days. Why the long delay in getting it back running after the break-down? Well, we had out data backed up, but our software that runs the site had not been backed up and it it had to be re-built. We learned our lesson. Your whole site needs to be backed up. If you are one of the 76% of WordPress users who don’t back up your site, you are courting disaster. There are many ways your site can fail: • Hard disks fail. • Your site can get hacked. • You can install incompatible... [...]

Cindy Donovan Bettye has been hard at work, turning out useful software for people and companies who market their goods and services online. One of her latest and best is StickyPost. This is a new WordPress plugin that any person can use. It lets you pull into your posts, graphics that will illustrate them, making them more attractive, more “sticky”. In summary, StickyPost lets you turn any post into an image-rich, fully monetized slideshow divided into compelling bite-sized mini-posts. Three steps: 1. Write your post 2. Decide how many sections you would like it divided into 3. Click... [...]

Brian Clark says, “A business powered by digital products is ideal. It’s still hard work (naturally), but you don’t have the particular headaches of dealing with clients or shipping physical goods. If you’re considering building a digital business (or adding to your existing one), the premium WordPress market is definitely something you should consider. WordPress powers more than 25 percent of the websites in the world, and there’s a constant demand for themes, plugins, hosted solutions, and more. The key to success is avoiding the common mistakes that entrepreneurs commit when entering... [...]

The new social media site Periscope is full of opportunity for marketers, but most marketers haven’t caught on to it yet. This new site adds 10 years of content every day, and virtually all is free for you to use for your own marketing. Not only that, people watch 40 years of the historic content every day. This is a big deal, if only you could exploit that bounty of content in your marketing. Cindy Donovan Bettye saw the potential, studied how to take advantage of it and produced a training program that shows you all she learned (and software to implement it.) She calls this package WP Scope... [...]

Angela Petteys says, “Setting up and using Yoast SEO When you’re working with a self-hosted WordPress site, the Yoast SEO plugin is one of the most valuable tools you can have. Yoast SEO is one of the most widely popular WordPress plugins around and it’s easy to understand why. Whether you’re running a personal blog or you’re a SEO professional managing a website for a client, Yoast is a powerful tool that can help you make your site as search engine-friendly as possible. Yoast SEO can be installed on any self-hosted WordPress site. (Sorry, free WordPress.com bloggers.) It’s easily... [...]

A moving “ticker tape” style message, scrolling across your home page; what a way to attract people’s attention to something important. Ken Reno has a new WordPress plugin, ScrollTabs WordPress Plugin, that will do just that. In fact, it will add a scrolling message, not just to WordPress sites, but also to HTML pages And not only do you get the right to use this feature on your own sites. You also can sell the plugin.. You can even sell the right to sell the plugin. For less than $10, you can use it yourself on all your sites. And you can earn money from your subscribers by... [...]

Matt Mansfield says, “It’s 9 a.m. on a Tuesday and one of Tom’s regular customers just called to let him know that the website is down. Jumping into action, Tom calls his hosting company only to find out that his website database has become corrupted thanks to the new plugin he added last week. Their advice? Restore his site using the latest backup. As he hangs up the phone, reality hits: he hasn’t backed up his company’s website for over eight months. He knew it had to have it done, but it just kept getting put off in the face of more urgent-seeming tasks. Head in his hands, Tom... [...]