Caching and Offloading

One of the easiest things that you can do to improve the performance of your WordPress site is to install a good caching and performance plugin. My favorite is W3 Total Cache. Install it and activate it. The first thing this plugin does is cache the html generated by your posts and pages of your site, eliminating the need for resource intensive database lookups and PHP processing. Another feature allows you to easily push your static content to a CDN or Amazon S3. With this enabled, visitors to your website will hit the CDN for images, stylesheets and javascript files instead of your webserver, speeding up the user’s loading time. Check out the official W3 Total Cache for detailed installation and configuration instructions.

There are other good plugins for caching and pushing your assets to a CDN, but I have found W3 Total Cache to be a great all-in-one, easily configured plugin.

Remove Unused and Unimportant Plugins from Your WordPress Installation

This tip won’t have as huge of an impact as caching, but is still worth doing. Delete unused plugins from your site! Consider disabling and deleting plugins that are not really that important to your site. Every plugin could do a lot of processing and potentially database lookups. Don’t use them if you don’t have to! (It’s easy to use the WordPress dashboard to go into the plugins area and disable and delete plugins).

Upgrade Your Hosting

The default, low-cost hosting solutions that most people use for their websites are “shared hosting” accounts. This means the machine running your site is shared with many users, with little or no segregation of system resources. All users can be punished when one customer on the same machine starts using tons of resources.

These types of accounts can be fine for moderate traffic websites. I have been particularly happy with a HostGator business plan that I use for some sites. But if your site starts to get significant traffic, it is probably time to upgrade to a VPS or other heavier duty hosting solution. Most VPS solutions today let you start with a relatively inexpensive moderate amount of RAM and other resources and seamlessly scale up (or down) as needed. (I have had good success starting with the Turnkey WordPress Appliance Image on a VPS account).

Other Optimization Resources

The official WordPress website has lots of tips on optimizing your installation. Check them out:

• WordPress Optimization
• High Traffic Tips For WordPress
• WordPress Optimization Cheat Sheet
• WordPress Optimization/Caching
• WordPress Optimization/Offloading

Users prefer speedy sites. We now know Google really cares too! So take a little time this week to speed up your site!

The image in this post is by Luis Argerich

Now, thanks to Square (co-founded by Jim McKlevey and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey), we can process credit card payments with iPhones and computer scanners.

“In February 2009, Jim McKelvey wasn’t able to sell a piece of his glass art because he couldn’t accept a credit card as payment. Even though a majority of payments have moved to plastic cards, accepting payments from cards is still difficult, requiring long applications, expensive hardware, and an overly complex experience. Square was born a few days later right next to the old San Francisco US Mint.” Source: CrunchBase

Freelancers and small business owners are no longer hobbled by bureaucracy and expense. The iPhone’s portability and touchscreen seems ideal for transactions where immediacy is a key sales component. Smaller-ticket items are immediately handled, tracked and policed by credit card companies and software within seconds. And the customer walks away immediately satsified.

Despite the initial security concerns, democratizing technologies like Square are leveling the playing field for modern marketers.

Check out CrunchBase for a various video demonstrations.

A Guest Post by Michael Mitchell:

As an senior consumer trends analyst and consultant, Mike Mitchell has profiled and reported on emerging consumer trends throughout the globe. From people raising urban chickens for eggs to bolster the local food movement to the emergence of colored beers like electric green and fluorescent blue, he has continually unlocked some of the deepest and most fascinating forms of modern consumer behavior.  His interests lie primarily in crowd behavior and crowd intelligence, as well as consumer sentiment, sector blending,  the irrationality of buying and Gen Y trends.

Your Email Has Problems

I don’t mean your email is broken; it probably works fine. Messages go out, messages come in – it works. I don’t mean that it’s a mistake to use email, either.

So What’s the Problem?

The problem is that your email doesn’t know things about your business or your industry. It doesn’t know things about your customers or your suppliers. Email software doesn’t recognize the relationships you have with the people you communicate with. It sends and receives messages, and it tags messages if you set it up, but underneath, your email leaves the hard day-to-day work of forming a picture of your business and your industry to you.

Google Buzz Connects the Dots

The reason your email doesn’t know all that much about your contacts and their roles in your business and in your industry is because your email software doesn’t crawl around the net 24 hours a day associating your contacts with their social network profile. Of course not: email software and search engines do very different things, right?

It’s Called “Google” Buzz for a Reason

The business power of social media all flows from knowing about the contacts in your network. They know about you, and you about them. With Google’s new platform, email itself – your inbox itself – becomes the social network environment. The email flows, and now, status updates, links, videos and other shared features simply appear in the the Gmail interface. These might include information about the sender, the recipient, the company, the industry, the supply chain, you name it. Buzz is email that knows about the e-mailers. It is your very own authentic network. Your DIY online business community. Give it a try.

Either way, you know something is wrong don’t you? You’re not satisfied. You’re embarrassed by your website. And your mid-size business is facing a new, larger and more powerful online world.  You’re surviving the recession, but what about the competition or start-ups nipping at your heals?

Does Google Like Your Website?

Does Google even know you exist?  Is your content being spoon-fed into Google? The robots that come by to collect the information you publish just aren’t very bright. Do you accommodate them so that they don’t drop anything as they run back to Google to index the contents of your site? If you haven’t thought of this, chances are your search results aren’t what they should be. It’s time to work on the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of your site. Well configured sites built on free platforms like WordPress are immediately indexed by WordPress.

Can You Easily Update Content on the Fly, Anytime, for Free?

Most corporate solutions for web publishing are handcuffs in terms of keeping your site current, rich and relevant. If you can’t easily manage content, you need to look into moving your site into a modern Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress. Did I mention it’s 100% free?

Does Your Site Invite a Dialogue?

“Brochureware” sites stink of decay and neglect. Brochure sites talk at visitors – announcing: “We don’t get the internet as a business channel.” Modern sites are “marketing platforms”. They invite a dialogue, comments, analysis and debate.  Modern websites are a multimedia content syndication engine.

Is Your Site Networked With Social Media?

Is your site wired into new media? Do you have a blog with shareable content that educates prospects? Is your content shareable? Do you have a subscription service? Do you even have presences on social media sites? Don’t miss out on the single biggest business transformation in years. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook – these are serious commercial opportunities. And your customers know that.

Is Your Website a Measurable Marketing Platform?

Are you measuring how visitors interact with your business online? What are you doing to optimize the experience. Modern business websites measure every aspect. They orchestrate, analyze and adapt with intent and purpose. Modern living breathing sites have a purpose and measure how your market interacts – pages views, traffic patterns, time on site, subscribers, comments, posts, keywords – and yes these tools are free.

Does Your Site Generate Business Leads?

Cost Per Lead or CPL is an online advertising pricing model, where the advertiser pays for an explicit sign-up from an interested consumer interested in the advertiser. What isn’t well understood is that business websites can be a long term CPL campaigns. Modern marketing websites are purpose built and evolve based on specific lead conversion goals.

Bury that relic and upgrade your business.

Tombstone image adapted from photo by Lenore M. Edman, www.evilmadscientist.com

What is a Micro-Blog?

The “micro” part of micro-blogging comes from the fact that each tweet—the messages that Twitter users send—must be no longer than 140 characters (including spaces). This feature—some call it a constraint, others say it’s the best part of Twitter—forces you to compress whatever it is you have to say into only a few words. As an example:

+Beginning after the first plus sign and ending before the second plus sign, this sentence serves to show you exactly how long tweets can be.+

Between those plus signs are exactly 140 characters of content. That’s the longest tweet you’ll ever see. In order to accommodate these parameters, the abbreviations and jargon that most people associate with instant messaging and SMS (i.e. text messaging) have found their way to Twitter:

Its not odd 4 u 2 c thngs writn like this since lots of ppl can stil undrstnd u w/o seein it all spelled out.

Tweets Can Be Professional

Writing in SMS style, though occasionally important in order to fully communicate your message, has it drawbacks: it lacks professionalism, and some users might balk at the seeming incomprehensibility of it. The truth is, most of the people on Twitter are not tech nerds or impatient 12-year-olds who lack basic grammar and spelling skills. Many are older, educated, and just discovering social networking, so catering to their sensibilities is important.

Making it Fit

Another obvious way to fit into the 140-character limit is to eliminate non-essential words like articles, prepositions, and other content-poor words that we use in everyday conversation. If you wanted to tweet about the Copenhagen climate summit happening this month, you could write with proper grammar: “Obama is going to the climate change summit in order to seal the deal on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.” That’s 107 characters. Or, you can communicate the same point with only 62 characters: “Obama going to climate summit to seal deal on Kyoto successor.” Writing in this truncated “headline” style may feel strange at first, but it also enables some of the other features that make Twitter one of the most important websites currently in operation.

@Replies

Replying to a tweet enables you to comment on others’ tweets and hold an open conversation between your networks of followers, depending on each person’s settings in that regard. To reply to someone you merely begin your tweet with “@” followed by their username, and then fill in your content. This conversation style is great for businesses looking to talk directly to customers, partners or prospects.

Retweeting is Currency

Retweeting is a way to spread something you saw in someone else’s tweets while giving credit where credit is due. Depending on the character length of the original tweet, it must be shortened to accommodate “RT @username.” “RT” stands for “retweet,” which is just an indicator to your followers that you’re passing something along. (Important Note -We coach our clients to make it easy for others to retweet their messages by  leaving 20-30 characters for this citation.  Retweeting is the currency of Twitter because your message is broadcast  beyond your own direct followers.  Check out How to Retweet: A Simple Guide.) 

Link Shortening Services

The first time you want to pass on a link, like a news article or something business related, you may notice that the link is too long to fit into a 140-character tweet. This fact has not been lost on Twitter users. A bunch of secondary services have sprung up that will generate mini URLs that fit into your tweet and leave as much room as possible for your comment or message. Among the most popular are bit.ly; TinyURL; and Cligs. They all work on the same principle, though bit.ly and Cligs can also provide analytics about your links, giving you valuable information about how many clicks the link has received.

To use these services, follow the above links to their websites. On bit.ly and TinyURL you can immediately put your long URL into the box and have it shortened. Then, copy the short URL into your tweet. On Cligs you have to navigate to the “Create New Clig” tab, but once there the process is the same: insert the long URL, shorten it, and post the short URL into your tweet.

(Important Note – Sometimes URL shortening like this is used to hide the URL of a malicious website, exposing you to security issues if you click on something corrupt. So always make sure you trust the user who sent you a link before you click on it.)

Photo in this post is by Jeff Turner (respres)

One fantastic plug-in is the All-in-One SEO (“AIOSEO”), which has a few key fields for assigning strategic keywords and phrases. There are several other SEO plug-ins (AIOSEO is the most popular). Plus, some WordPress themes like Thesis actually build-in similar SEO functionality. Whichever you choose when installing WordPress, the same basic concepts apply.

It’s very important to have a keyword strategy for your site and support it with individual blog posts and SEO settings.  In this post we’re going to cover the most universal fields found in most SEO plug-ins.  When adding a new post, look for the SEO fields below the text editor section:

Custom Title Tag Field

This is the Page Title that you will see at the top of a web browser. It is the most important of the three settings. By default, it inherits the blog post’s editorial title. But, for the purposes of SEO, it is possible (even advisable sometimes) to override the default post title by specifying a custom title tag that optimizes your content in search results.

Let’s say Bill is the CEO of Bill’s Human Capital Consultants in Chicago. Bill writes a post with an editorial title “Head Hunting for Top Executives”. Depending on his keyword stategry and objectives, Bill might want different in this field so that Google associates his company with the desired search results. For peak SEO power, Bill might override the default Title with the keywords “recruiting” or “Chicago” so that it reads “How to Recruit Top Chicago Executives”.

In most cases you’ll get more value if you override the default and manually set it to a title that explicitly associates a few of your most important keywords with your brand. Grammar isn’t top priority in this field since it does not affect the editorial title or body of the post. You can make the Custom Title Tag a little longer than this example, but don’t go overboard.

Meta Description

This is a 160 character summary of the post that searchers will see in the returned results. It’s not very important in terms of SEO, but it does entice the searcher to visit, as this is the text that appears below your title in search engine results. These descriptions should be short and sweet: “Bill uses a proprietary database for finding and evaluating top executives”.

Meta Keywords

Most search engines don’t pay much attention to Meta Keywords. But, just in case, we recommend including some of your secondary phrases that didn’t make it into the Title. Use commas to separate phrases like “Human Resources, Staffing, Hiring, Consultants” etc.

Blogging and the (AIOSEO) plug-in are a powerful and free start to your SEO strategy. A thoughtful keyword strategy coupled with a properly configured blog program opens new marketing doors for mid-size businesses.  Please contact us with questions.

NOTE:
There’s a lot more to SEO than discussed here. Using the WordPress SEO plug-ins correctly, coupled with writing good headers and content in your posts, helps you optimize your “on-page” SEO. The second and probably most important part of SEO, “off-page” optimization is not discussed in this post. “Off-page” optimization primarily consists of getting quality in-bound links to your site. A great first step to getting quality in-bound links is writing great content!

Check out the video:

(If you have trouble seeing the detail, you might want to view it at YouTube and maximize the video)

A few key WordPress authoring points from the video

The main two content types are “Posts” and “Pages”

• “Posts” are blog entries that can be used for timely content such as events, news, etc.
• “Pages” are the content on your website that are more static in nature: “About Us”, “Contact Us”, etc.

“Categories” and “Tags” can (and should) be added to posts.

They help humans and search engines find your content.

• “Categories” are for high level categorization of a post. For example an entertainment magazine might use “Music”, “Movies” and “TV” for the site’s main categories. Posts must be in at least one category, but you can add a single post to several categories if applicable. So, for example, if you write a post about the Godfather movie, the category might be “Movies”
• “Tags” are like keywords. You can add as many tags to a post as you like. It is not unreasonable to add 10 to 20 tags to a post. So, for example, if you write a post about the Godfather movie, keywords might include: movie, mafia, mob, 1970s, Francis Ford Coppola, Al Pacino, Marlon Brando, etc.

Two helpful tips

1. Make sure to hit the “Show Kitchen Sink” control in the WordPress editor to reveal a second row of editing tools (see image below):
   
2. If you are authoring or borrowing content from a Microsoft Word document, use the “Paste from Word” tool to avoid most funky character issues.
   

Here are helpful related resources:

• WordPress.org Posts definition
• WordPress.org Pages defintion
• WordPress.org Categories vs. Tags discussion

Releated Videos from WordPress.tv:

• How-to: Writing and Publishing a Post
• How-to: Adding Categories and Tags to Your Post
• How-to: Adding an “About” (or any static page)
  

Good luck authoring your content!

Twitter keeps track of all Lists that you follow as well as all Lists that follow you. Lists are automatically public by default but can be made private if you choose. Public Lists are particularly interesting as an organic research source because you can follow any public list and take advantage of  their grouping and interests.

To create a List, click “Lists” in the right sidebar just under the Search field. Below are some useful links to more information:

• How To Use Twitter Lists
• Twitter Lists FAQ
• 10 Ways to Use Twitter Lists

What’s a Gravatar?

From Wikipedia:
Gravatar (an abbreviation for globally recognized avatar) is a service for providing globally-unique avatars.

At Gravatar.com, users can register an account based on their email address, and upload an avatar (a square image displayed at 80 by 80 pixels by default) to be associated with the account. Gravatar plugins are available for popular blogging software; when the user posts a comment on such a blog that requires an e-mail address, the blogging software checks whether that e-mail address has an associated avatar at Gravatar. If so, the Gravatar is shown along with the comment. Gravatar support is provided natively in WordPress and in many many other websites, content management systems, and blogging engines.

In a nutshell, when you comment on other websites and blogs (which you should be doing!) your avatar, a square image of yourself or your brand, appears next to your comment and you look like a pro!

Gravatar.com is what makes Mark’s Glamour Shot appear next to his comments like this:

So, check out the official Gravatar intro video below, sign up at Gravatar.com and start commenting and leaving your personal brand around the web!

As Mac users, we’ve worked with a bunch of Twitter campaign techniques and tools.  TweetAdder’s weaknesses are overcome by strengths as a reliable Marketing Machine component.

Strengths

• Feedback, statistics, limits and exception handling
• Easy segmentation by location and user profiles
• Follow and Unfollow work perfect
• Automation and tolerances
• Safelist option
• Stability
• Mac compatible (there’s also a Windows version)
• One time reasonable price

Weaknesses:

• Not web-app
• Must be logged-in to run automated processes
• Managing Tweet content not usable (there are work-arounds)
• Weak scheduling
• Safelist not very usable

Contact Us for specific tips and ticks anytime.  Full disclosure: We liked this tool enough to sign-up as affiliates.  This in no way influenced our unbiased review.  Our mission is to use the right tool for each job so that our clients can concentrate on sales and strategy.  Try the demo for a bit and see if it makes sense for your business.