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Weekly Links Roundup – Old Blog Posts, PDF Viewers, Landing Pages, Paypal Alternatives

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This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

If you’re a regular blogger and have been doing it for some time, you’ve likely built up a large collection of old blog posts. Some may be useful “evergreen” content, but many may not longer be accurate or that useful. Should you do something about that? The answer is yes – check out this article on what to do with old blog posts. Start with an objective inventory. This process may be rather painful, but in the end you’ll be left with a blog that’s much more useful to your customers. Think of it this way: if you chose to commit to blogging in the first place, also commit to keeping that content at its best. As an added benefit, this cleanup will likely improve organic traffic to your site.

If you offer PDF documents on your site, did you know that you’re not stuck using the browser (which you have no control over) to display them? There are a few PDF viewers for WordPress that give you lots more control over display and keep your viewers on your site when they click to open the document. Both of the plugins reviewed in this article are commercial, but I’ve used the free PDF Embedder plugin on a few sites to good effect.

Well-thought-out landing pages can make the difference in getting a conversion (like a sale or a signup) or not. They simplify things down to one key idea – what it is you’re selling or asking people to sign up for. Here are 10 examples of successful landing pages to inspire you. And… here are some WordPress landing page plugins to help you construct your ideal landing page for any given purpose.

Finally… do you use Paypal in your ecommerce site? It has over 60% market share, so it’s a good bet. Love it, or hate it? If you’re in the latter category, this post is for you! Learn about the top 18 Paypal alternatives for ecommerce sites. I’m not sure if all of these are WooCommerce-compatible, since it’s quite likely you’re using WooCommerce if on WordPress. Stripe is my go-to payment plugin for WooCommerce, Gravity Forms, and Harvest. Compared to Paypal, their support is fantastic, and I find Stripe’s great dashboard makes it much easier for me to do my accounting tasks.

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

Weekly Links Roundup – RSS, Finding Your Blogging Niche, WordPress Glossary, MemberPress

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

You probably know a little bit about RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds – your blog generates them and users can subscribe to them to get content updates. They were really popular in the early 2000’s, not so much now, but still very useful if you like to follow lots of news sources and read them all in one place. Did you know you can optimize your RSS feed to make it more attractive and get more subscribers? This post mentions Feedly, but there are still some other alternatives for aggregating RSS feeds. I personally use Feedly and like it pretty well, no complaints…

If you’re a blogger, especially a new one, you may feel like you’re struggling to find your niche – that sweet spot where you start to get some traction with your writing and readers and growth is finally happening. Maybe you feel like you just don’t have a niche, or even an idea where to focus? Don’t worry – check out the post. It may give you some ideas you haven’t thought of yet.

You know how when you run a WordPress site you run into words that are just outside any normal conversation all the time? Like when your developer talks to you and you need a dictionary to understand him/her? Here’s something just for you! A new WordPress glossary that explains all those weird terms – things like ‘Akismet’ and ‘shortcode’ and ‘custom post type.’

And finally… One of my favorite membership plugins is MemberPress. I’ve used it on a number of client sites and on my own. It’s easy to set up and has great support. Here’s a post from the folks at MemberPress for the new MemberPress user to help you get going in the right direction with your membership site.

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

 

Weekly Links Roundup – Nofollow Links, WooCommerce, Great Headlines, Blogging

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

Should you ‘nofollow’ all outgoing links in your blog posts? It’s a big question with a complicated answer. Basically, when you link to another site you’re giving them an official vote of confidence, or a statement of trust. Read the first post to learn when it’s appropriate to add a ‘nofollow’ and when you should leave a link alone and let it do its thing naturally. Here’s another take on nofollowing external links.

And just how do you add ‘nofollow’ to a link? Guess what: there’s a plugin for that! It adds a ‘nofollow’ checkbox to the link dialog box for you.

Thinking about starting an ecommerce site or starting to sell products on your existing WordPress site? Check out this very basic walkthrough in using WooCommerce to sell t-shirts. This isn’t terribly detailed (if you’re a beginner you’ll need more help most likely) but it does show how easy it is to set up something like this t-shirt shop without a lot of fuss.

Compelling headlines are one tool in the SEO arsenal. Research shows that most people will read headlines but rarely read all of the body copy, so they help readers skim more effectively. And headlines are also used by Google to decide whether your post meets searchers’ needs. Learn how to write great headlines (and titles, too) with these 12 free SEO headline tools.

Finally… a roundup of 11 types of blog posts that can get more readers to your website, including guest posts, top 10 lists, product reviews and more.

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

 

Weekly Links Roundup – Page Builders, Headline Formulas, Better WordPress Search

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

As a developer who hand-codes I’m not a fan of page builder themes and plugins. Though I agree that they accomplish their goal very well – enabling users to make nice-looking complex layouts without knowing any code – the majority of them have some big issues. The ones that a few of my clients use (or used to use) are very, very popular – and they leave a huge nasty mess of shortcodes all over your website if you ever decide to stop using them.

Here’s a post about one of the most popular theme-based page builders, Divi, and how if you decide to use it, you need to marry it, because you shouldn’t plan on leaving it. Ever. If you do, the mess can be excruciating to clean up, especially on a larger site.

That said, I must give props to another page builder called Beaver Builder. I’ve heard developers gush over how lean and mean this full-featured plugin is. If you decide to stop using it, are you left with a pile of junk where your content used to be? Nope. Beaver Builder’s code degrades to clean HTML, not shortcodes. You won’t have to manually strip out crap-tons of shortcodes to clean up your content. Try Beaver Builder.

Having trouble coming up with a good headline for your new blog post? Here’s a guide to common headline formulas along with examples and an explanation of why they work so well. We need all the help we can get, right?

Finally… you may have noticed: the default WordPress search tool is not always that great. But there’s hope – here’s a roundup of 8 search plugin alternatives that can greatly improve the search process by including things like custom fields in the results.

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

 

Weekly Links Roundup – Membership Sites, Not Secure, Emailed Blog Posts, .com to .org

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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.

 

Weekly Links Roundup – Event Calendars, WooCommerce SEO, Blog Kickstart, Category Pages

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

Need a great event calendar for your WordPress site. This post (don’t worry that it’s from 2017, it’s all good) reviews 9 top WordPress event calendar plugins, both free and commercial. I’m currently a fan of the free My Calendar plugin for its good looks and ease of use. Take a look at My Calendar in action on my client’s website.

Optimizing a WooCommerce site for SEO is not as easy as a non-ecommerce site, but it’s still very doable even by non-experts. Learn how to boost WooCommerce SEO with the goal of bringing more customers to your site in this post that includes 10 straightforward tips.

If your blog has been in a bit of a slowdown lately for one reason or another (1-month vacation? Long holiday period? Unplanned time off from blogging?) then you may need a kickstart getting it moving again. Here’s a podcast from the venerable ProBlogger Darren Rowse on how to restart blogging after a slump.

And finally… If you like customizing the look of your blog, have you tried custom category pages? Here’s a great post on how to crank up the appeal of category pages. Warning: some theme file modification is required for this mod. If you’re not comfortable doing that, contact us for custom coding help and get a sharp new look for your blog categories.