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Weekly Links Roundup – Online Sermons, Help Desk Plugins, Before You Hit Publish, Download Managers

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Here’s our latest selection of curated WordPress and web marketing links to help your business thrive.

Are you the manager of a WordPress site for your church? If so, have you considered putting sermons online? Here’s a guide to doing that, including audio and video recording, getting sermon content into your site, turning your sermons into a podcast and more.

Here is a review of 13 of the best WordPress help desk plugins. Offer product support right within WordPress!  Help desks can make it much easier to manage client support – assign ticket numbers, organize all support requests and followups in a single dashboard (much simpler than using email!) and be less frustrating for both you and your customers.

Here’s a treat from ProBlogger – this video teaches you 23 questions to ask yourself before you publish your next blog posts.

Download manager plugins extend WordPress’ native ability to handle downloads by adding in download tracking, organization of downloadable materials, and user restrictions on downloading content. Here’s a roundup of 15 of the top WordPress download managers.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – Blogging Misconceptions, Tweeting for Business, WooCommerce Images, Multisite

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Here’s our latest selection of curated WordPress and web marketing links to help your business thrive.

If you’re thinking about starting a blog for your business, and are feeling a bit intimidated, here’s something for you. Learn about two misconceptions about blogging that are 180 degrees apart. Is blogging ‘just writing’ or does it really require ‘superhuman effort?’ Turns out that neither of those views is really very accurate, and somewhere in the middle is a more reasonable conclusion.

If you use Twitter to promote your business (or want to start), what should you tweet about? Here are 21 easy ideas for business tweets. Some of these can also be good to use on other social platforms you might frequent for your business, like Facebook or LinkedIn, though the article is focused on short tweetable content.

I’m building a WooCommerce site for a client right now and had some issues with gallery thumbnail image sizing. Here’s a useful and recent post containing all you may need to know about WooCommerce images. If you need a little more focus on resizing those products try this second post on changing WooCommerce image sizes.

Finally… if you have a need to run several WordPress sites on one server and would like to manage them all from a single control panel, WordPress Multisite may be for you. Here is a great and comprehensive guide to Multisite just published last month. Is your company or organization a candidate for the networking tools that Multisite provides? Maybe, if you’re:

  • A company with different departments each with their own website
  • A university or school with various departments and also student/faculty who need their own sites
  • A global or chain business where each location has its own website
  • A gym where each trainer needs their own site
  • Basically any situation where you need a network of sites under the control of one administrator.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – Blog Post Length, Online Courses, Gutenberg Addons, Plugins

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Here’s our latest selection of curated WordPress and web marketing links to help your business thrive.

One of my clients is now starting a blog with the goal of getting more traffic from search results. She asked me last week: “How long should my blog posts be?” The answer, like for so many things, is “it depends.” Looks like current trends are pointing to longer blog posts being better for getting more traffic (to the dismay of many!). Really long – like over 1700 words. Here is a post to back that up with research data, along with a number of other opinions and guidelines.

Ever thought about teaching others online? Here’s a thorough and informative post about creating your own online courses using LearnDash, a course plugin one of my clients uses and likes. There is a lot of upfront work involved in creating an online course, but the benefits in passive income can be worth it. Note that the linked post recommends a commercial theme that may or may not suit you or your course idea – you can use any theme with online courseware.

If you’ve made the switch to Gutenberg, you may be wanting more options than what comes in the new editor by default. Here’s a review of 10 of the best Gutenberg add-on plugins. These plugins give you new and different types of blocks to use in your page layouts. One of my current favorites is CoBlocks which includes about 30 layout blocks.

For new WordPress users – confused about the differences between themes and plugins? Here’s a great post explaining what plugins are and why you’d want to use them. One important thing to remember when choosing plugins (free or paid) is to look at the reviews and the compatibility. As a rule it’s better to avoid older plugins that haven’t been updated recently or tested with current or recent WordPress versions.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – WP Guide, Collapsing Categories, Tags, Installing Plugins

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Happy Holidays!

This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

Easy WP Guide, an online/downloadable handbook for using your WordPress site’s tools, has just come out with a fresh new updated version. Get it here.

Collapsing Categories is a useful plugin if you have a lot of blog categories and subcategories. It will expand and contract as needed and works great as a sidebar widget. You can see it in use here.

If you’re new to blogging in WordPress, you may not realize how handy using categories and tags can be. They can help with site navigation and general browsing.  They’re also useful for helping search engines crawl more of your website. Check out the 10 best practices of using tags and categories.

And if you’re brand new to WordPress, you may not be aware that you can add any of thousands of plugins to add new functionality to your site (that’s if you’re using self-hosted wordpress.org, not wordpress.com!). Learn about plugins and how to install them.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – CDNs, Shortcodes, Writing Blog Posts, Before-and-after Photos

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This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

Is your blog slow? Especially if you have a lot of media files like images and video, you may greatly benefit from getting a CDN (content delivery network). A CDN serves your media files from servers around the country (or the world) that are closer to your users, speeding up delivery of those files in their browsers. Here’s a review of the 10 Best CDN Services for WordPress users. My current favorite is CloudFlare, which has a free plan and is pretty painless to set up. It also has security benefits for your site.

As a WordPress user you may have come across this before. You have a shortcode, which inserts something dynamic like a form or button wherever it’s placed. You want to paste it into a widget so your dynamic content will show up in a sidebar or other area – here’s how to do that, two easy ways.

Are you starting a blog, and you want to learn everything? I mean everything… Check out this article on How to Write a Blog Post. This may be more than you bargained for… if so, try this one instead: Write Better Blog Posts.

Finally – a nifty plugin I ran across this week. If you ever need to display before-and-after images, this tutorial on How to Show Before and After Photos is perfect for you! The plugin is very easy to use, and the effect looks great.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – Security, Google Maps, FooGallery, Why Blog?

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This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

I’ve had WordPress clients tell me they don’t worry about security or backups because their site is “too small to hack.” I beg to differ. It’s small sites with owners who have poor security practices that are frequently the target of hacks because they are so easy to crack! When a site owner doesn’t update WordPress/plugins/themes sometimes in years, or when they have simple login passwords, their sites are much easier to attack and use for malicious activity. If your site gets hacked and begins churning out spam or displaying links to porn sites or worse, gets defaced, your business’s trustworthiness and credibility will take a big hit. Don’t let this happen your business – read this quick post on why it’s important to harden your site. And check out our WordPress Care Plans if you want a partner to do this critical work for you. Our plans start at just $2 per day.

Maps are a great addition to your website when you have a brick-and-mortar location. And, you can add them to your WordPress site easily using either some manual code or a plugin. Learn how to add a Google map to your WordPress site.

FooGallery has been my go-to WordPress gallery plugin for several years. Besides being a full-featured responsive and flexible gallery plugin, they also have excellent support if you need it. FooGallery has a pro (commercial) version that includes more features, like a video galley option, but for my clients the free version usually works fine. Here’s a big comprehensive review of FooGallery so you can see whether it’s a good fit for your site too.

Finally, here’s an interesting take on the evolving purpose of blogging. How has blogging changed in the last decade or so? Do you find yourself writing more to teach others what you know, or to get a reaction out of them? Both purposes have value. Some food for thought…

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.