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Weekly Links Roundup – WooCommerce Payments, Uptime Monitors, Popup Plugins

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

For WooCommerce users, a new payments option was announced this past week: WooCommerce Payments. This new service uses Stripe’s payment processing but with a different user experience. However, there’s one big drawback – it requires Jetpack to function. If you’re already using Jetpack to calculate taxes in WooCommerce, then it may be worth a look. If not, I’d probably stick with Stripe. Learn more about WooCommerce Payments. And, why you may want to avoid Jetpack if you can.

Looking for a service to let you know if your website goes down? Here are 12 of the best uptime monitoring services reviewed. Note: if you’re a WP Minder client, we do this for you and always have an eye on your site. Learn about all the benefits of working with us.

Popups are everywhere – they can be useful and engaging, or just terribly invasive. This post about the 5 best WordPress popup plugins also has info on how to make sure your popups are not irritating.

And a few posts from our sister site Red Kite Creative that you might find helpful:

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

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 – Ecommerce Sites, PDF Links, Gallery Plugins, WordPress 5.0, Email Signups

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This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

Just in time for the holidays – learn 5 ways to take your ecommerce site to the next level. This is a very useful (and short) article. I totally agree with one of their points and can’t emphasize enough to clients that high-quality product photos are critical to ecommerce sites. Investing in great photography for your site will pay off by providing a strong first impression. And don’t forget – your photographer should remind you – that all product shots should be taken under the same conditions with the same background and angle.

Here’s a simple task: linking to a PDF in WordPress. It’s a help request I get fairly frequently from clients, so here’s a tutorial in how to do it yourself.

I’m a big fan of the FooGallery plugin, but always open to new things! Here’s a review of the 8 most beautiful WordPress gallery plugins.

WordPress 5.0 with the new Gutenberg editing experience came out last week. I’m holding off on updating WP Minder clients for reasons I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, but if you’re considering going for it, take a look at 7 things to know before updating to WordPress 5.0. Just in case, remember that Classic Editor is your friend!

Finally… learn how to get more email signups on your WordPress site. It’s not easy, but this article covers what you need to build your list and strategies that will help you grow your list over time.

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

Weekly Links Roundup – WooCommerce SKUs, Blogger, Smart Slider, Push Notifications

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This week’s top WordPress and web marketing links.

If you’re starting up a new WooCommerce store, or already have one, and have decided not to use SKUs, take a look at this – it might change your mind. Even for very small shops, SKUs can help you sell more by making your products more findable. And even if you really don’t need them now, they may become absolutely necessary in the future for one reason or another.

If you already have a ton of products with no SKUs, never fear… there’s a plugin for that! The Product SKU Generator can help automatically generate SKUs for various WooCommerce product types.

If you’re already blogging but started your site on the Blogger platform, are you stuck there forever, even if you feel you’ve outgrown it? What if you want to add more features to your blog, or have more choices as to look-and-feel? Guess what: there’s a procedure to migrate your post content from Blogger to WordPress. Check out the link to learn how to set up your own self-hosted WordPress site and import Blogger content.

I’m a huge fan of Smart Slider 3, one of the best and most flexible slider plugins I’ve ever seen. And their support is fantastic, too. Learn how to design and build a Smart Slider slideshow with this thorough tutorial. And for more inspiration, check out their examples gallery.

Finally… push notifications are really common now. I’d guess that 4 of every 10 sites I’ve visited this week have had one. And a lot of people find them very irritating! What you can do to make your push notification get noticed and used without being too invasive? Learn about the top 5 mistakes with push notifications, and how to use them the right way. They can be a really effective marketing tool when used well.

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

 

Weekly Links Roundup – WooCommerce, Sales Tax, SEO Checklist, Color Psychology

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

iThemes has published a post with pro tips for more WooCommerce conversions – and who doesn’t want that?

And speaking of online sales, here’s a step-by-step guide to setting up automatic tax calculations in WooCommerce. You don’t want to deal with over 12,000 sales tax jurisdictions in the US alone – let WooCommerce (and maybe TaxJar, depending on the complexity of your business setup) manage this for you. WooCommerce Tax is free, and TaxJar is a commercial plugin.

Here’s a great infographic that has a ton of useful SEO advice in checklist format – which I find way easier to use. While not all of this may apply to your situation, it’s a nice comprehensive resource, and has printable checklists available at the end of the short article (right above the infographic).

Design Tip: color can make a big difference in how a user perceives your company and its offerings. Read this post on how using color psychology can help increase conversions on your website.

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

 

Weekly Links Roundup – Bitcoin, Easy WP Guide, Usernames, Testimonials

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This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

If you’re involved in the roller coaster ride that is Bitcoin, this might interest you – learn how to accept Bitcoin payments on your WordPress ecommerce site. This article covers simple donations, WooCommerce and more.

The venerable Easy WP Guide for WordPress 4.9 is now available. Use it online, or save a PDF for your computer (just don’t print it! It’s huge and gets updated often). Easy WP Guide is the straightforward user manual for WordPress.

As an aside: WordPress now powers 54 of the top 100 Inc 5000 company websites. Read more about it.

Ever needed to change your username in WordPress? This happened to one of my clients in the last few weeks. The easiest way to do it is create a new admin user with the new info, then login as that new user and delete the old user account, making sure to attribute all content to your new user account when you see that option. But there are a few other ways to change a username too, read more here.

Finally… Do you use testimonials on your business website? If not, you should be doing this – it’s a great way to increase your credibility for prospective clients by adding social proof. This post outlines the process of gathering and publishing testimonials with one of my favorite plugins, Strong Testimonials.