Weekly Links Roundup – Membership Sites, Not Secure, Emailed Blog Posts, .com to .org
This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.
Ever thought about starting a membership website? It can be a daunting proposition. Here’s a short but informative list of FAQs for starting a membership site from MemberPress that may help you gel your ideas before you decide to take the leap. Also: MemberPress is an awesome tool for running your new site. They have good support and the plugin itself is pretty intuitive to set up and use.
One more step in eradicating the insecure website – as of last week Google Chrome is now flagging all plain HTTP sites with a more prominent “Not Secure” warning in the address bar. If you’re still using HTTP you’ll see this warning before your site’s URL. Please, get an SSL certificate for your site and switch to HTTPS. If you don’t know how, contact me. You are hurting your business and your customers by not doing this.
A great way to reach more readers is to offer your blog by email. Basically, a blog produces an RSS (really simple syndication) feed that users can subscribe too with tools like Feedly. But you can make it even easier for your readers by having them instead subscribe to a blog mailing list and delivering excerpts of new posts to their email inbox automatically. The awesome email marketing tool Mailchimp offers a step by step tutorial in how to get your blog posts automatically into newsletter format. You can choose to send out notifications about new posts as they’re published or on a regular schedule. The Mailchimp RSS tools will provide prominent links to your post and blog to drive more vetted traffic to your website – which is what we all want, right?
Finally…. You may know that wordpress.com and wordpress.org are two completely different animals. If you started off with a wordpress.com site and quickly realized that it has too many limitations to function as a business platform, here’s a guide on moving from wordpress.com to wordpress.org. Please note that the quality of your host really matters. A $3-per-month host may sound like a great deal, but it will not be – you will pay primarily with poor performance. Do some research and find a solid host – it’s worth the effort.
Please let me know if this information is useful to you by commenting below. And let me know if there’s something in particular you’d like to know more about.