A WordPress Website

The e-book I read to research this post was How To Install WordPress And Build A Secure WordPress Blog by Jan Kearney which is a very good e-book that I downloaded for free on kindle. This book is around 40 pages so is quite short. It is mainly aimed at people considering hosting WordPress on a 3rd party host like Blue Host or Go Daddy. Another option is letting WordPress host it themselves which is usually free and either way it might be best to purchase a domain name. The process of installing WordPress on a separate hosts server is quite simple but might be a bit tricky to do the first time. This book also outlines the main steps in configuring your website and suggests using Yoast a WordPress plug-in instead of c-panel which is normally included and both contain slightly versions of PHP to each other. To really get indepth in designing a site you need at least some fair knowledge of HTML. I did enjoy this book and do quite recommend it. There are probably better books on the market particularly particularly retail ones but I think this book does a reasonable job. Jan the author has a website at http://www.mylocalbusinessonline.co.uk . It also does mention a free website scanner called Sucuri that might be of interest and scans the website for any problems.

The Amazon Millionaires

The book I read to research this post was The Amazon Millionaire by Dave Kettner et al which is a very good book that I bought from kindle. This book is about being an Amazon affiliate and becoming very rich. One good point in the book is a lot of businesses don’t last 5 years because they are little more than tax avoidance schemes. If a company makes a loss 5 years running it automatically gets audited. In the meantime it avoids paying tax. In running the business in the book you are looking at the long term. To maximize your profits you need to find a business to build something to your specifications and resell it. You can also sell secondhand goods which you can find at flea markets or even be given. On Amazon you can sell a wide of items and can sell a few of each product and make a nice living. You may also have to trademark or copyright what you sell to avoid others copying it. Another issue if you don’t is they can be substandard copies that can potentially bring your product into disrepute. You can also try selling on other sites like Amazon’s Chinese equivalent Alibaba.com. Your customer service has to be top notch. Amazon tends to side with the customer perhaps even unfairly sometimes. There own customer service is great and they expect the same from affiliates. This book is around 90 pages so is quite short. I very much enjoyed reading it and do recommend it.

Business Online Resources

The book I read to research this post was Work Smarter 350+ Online Resources by Nick Loper which is an excellent book that I bought from kindle. This author asked 500 business experts and professionals what there favorite business online services and this book is the results of the survey. Google Drive and Docs came top and some of the resources are bound to be familar to you but there are bound to be some you’ve never heard that make you think I might try that. There is Lynda.com for example where for $ 25 per month you can access any of their thousands of online tutorials on different aspects of computing and software. Duolingo offers free language learning software. JSTOR offers free access to over 2 million e-books. There is nimble and spiceworks which are less well known business social media sites. There is ning which is a platform where you can host your own social media site starting at $ 25 per month. There is scrivener which has a 30 day free trial and is a word processing software that you do kindle books with and is priced at $ 40. There website is http://literatureandlatte.com. There is the CRM service Basecamp which is priced from $ 9 per month. There is also Infusionsoft which I think is more for bigger businesses and is priced from $ 199 per month. There is also the online accounting software service xero priced from $ 9 per month. There is also Airbnb which allows people to stay at either a spare room in someone’s house or rent a whole property for going on holiday. Prices vary from $ 50-200 per night. It allows you to both rent out your property as well as stay at any of the properties around the world. This book is around 150 pages so is a reasonable length. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and think it is the kind of book I would want to re-read from time to time. I do recommend it.

Twitter Marketing Book 29

In this book on Twitter marketing I thought I’d write a little bit about websites and blogging. One of the better options is WordPress. This is open source meaning it is configurable and has lots of add ons called plug-ins. For business use definitely consider going self hosted. It allows you to use e-commerce which is banned on the hosted by WordPress option. You need an FTP program like Filezilla to upload files to and from your site. It’s also recommended you use Chrome or Firefox web browsers as these keep up with latest developments and are updated frequently. You may have to buy a theme and domain name for your site or blog. You can use a free theme and I use a theme called Grayzed for most of my blogs but ideally you want something unique and if you use a general theme you should consider configuring it at least to make it look unique. When you come up with a domain name bear in mind there is something like 1,000 different domain extensions available. Obviously the best ones are .com and .net but if your domain name is already in use consider using it with one of these. Often if a domain name is already taken you can often find it for sale although this can be some what expensive. You should avoid getting a domain name and hosting from the same company. You have to consider what is going to happen should you decide to change your host. A dedicated WordPress host is http;//bluehost.com that also has a simplified install for your site. WordPress also officially recommend them. You probably don’t need a dedicated server unless the site is going to be huge. You should aim to have at least 1 GB of space for the site and 5 GB of bandwidth. You may need a mobile theme in addition to take advantage of the number of people visiting on mobile devices. I’ve noticed a lot of advancements are being made in the capabilities of mobile devices and often they don’t do too bad a job of displaying a convential website. WordPress lets you embed video and audio from a wide variety of websites including YouTube and Vimeo. There is also a back up feature and it is a good idea to keep a back up copy of your website which can be cloaked on the host in case of problems. You also need to make sure it is kept upto date with any changes you make.

Sharepoint Collaboration

The book I read to research this post was Productive Sharepoint Collaboration by Steve Goodyear which is a very good book that I downloaded for free from kindle. This book is about collaborating with others on sharepoint sites. A sharepoint site is a website for usually a business where various membes can edit and write stuff together including adding other media like video. It is about Sharepoint 2013 and is around 150 pages so is a decent length. Steve has also written other books on other aspects of Sharepoint 2013. Among its features are wikis where several members can work on and comment on the same article. There’s also blogs where one person does the post but others can comment. There are updates where you can notify other members what is happening. You can also include other media. There are typically 3 types of permissions. There are site owners who have total control. There are site members who can read, write or edit documents. There are also visitors who can read what is on the site. If someone has these kind of permissions there will typically only be certain parts of the site they have access to. Sharepoint 2013 has its own recycle bin and normally when you delete data it goes there. It has to be set but it will typically store stuff for 45 or 90 days before deleting. I did enjoy this book and do recommend it.

SEO And Google

The book I read to research this post was SEO Checklist A Step By Step Plan by Dr Andy Williams which is an excellent book that I bought on kindle. This book is about the new rules for websites and blogs as to what gets listed by the Google search engine. Google does have a site that does tell you what is acceptable but where as these used to be recommendations now they are rules where breaking them can even result in your site not being listed. One thing is mentioning keywords over and over again. Google also expects an article to read naturally. In the past articles stuffed with key words got a high rank but not anymore. Some people use spinning software to create lots of articles that you can specify keywords but don’t say anything interesting. Google has come down especially hard on this and is getting better and better at spotting it. Google does look for websites that say something interesting and original. If someone goes to your site via google and almost immediately clicks the back page and searches for the same term again Google assumes your page wasn’t very informative and downgrades it. Your website needs to be updated regularly, at least 3 times a week. I know I generally do it twice on most of my sites so I’m guilty. At one time the domain name being about that topic was important but know Google ranks the actual information on that site much more important. You shouldn’t have lots of portal sites linking to one site as that is frowned on. If you do a blog post on someone else’s site and put a link back to your site which isn’t relevant to the article it dislikes that. It’s okay if it is more information regarding that article but not otherwise. You should never buy backlinks or accept payment for providing and by that mean any kind of reward even swapping them. There is a heck of a lot of information in this book even though it is only around 150 pages. I have barely scratched the surface. I really enjoyed reading this book and do recommend it.

E-Mail Marketing For Business

The book I read to research this post was Using Email Marketing For Business by Paul Teague which is a very good book that I downloaded for free from kindle. This book is about e-mail marketing where you get people to subscribe to your website or blog and can send them e-mails. This is done with a 3rd party software or service like Mail Chimp or Aweber. This is different to spamming in that people contribute their e-mail address and want to hear from you. I have various blogs but don’t do an online newsletter but have had plenty of requests so I think there is a potential market. The trick is to mix useful information with whatever you are marketing. If you use Mail Chimp and there is a Mail Chimp For WordPress Lite plugin you can collect upto 2,0000 e-mail adresses and send up to 12,0000 messages on a free tariff. You aren’t allowed to spam people and there is a process in setting it up which this book covers. By law you have to have an unsubscribe link for people to unsubscribe. There is an option to send people an e-mail confirming they have unsubscribed but the author has found that tends to make people angry. You have to have a letter heading and footer as well to any newsletter sent online. WordPress is probably the best platform but if it is hosted by them bear in mind you aren’t allowed to sell anything. You can always have it self hosted. Some people store there clients e-mail addresses in an Excell spreadsheet but most of these plug ins don’t allow you to import in case it is spamming you are doing. If you have a website you can connect that to Mail Chimp or Aweber mostly by copying and pasting some code in the right place. This book does guide you through that. This book is around 120 pages so is a fair length. I did enjoy reading it and do recommend it.

 

SEO For 2015 And Beyond

The book I read to research this post was The Complete SEO 2015 & Beyond by Dr Andy Williams which is an excellent
book that I bought from kindle. This book is about the latest updates to the Google search engine algorithms.
Websites that target certain niche keywords in the hope of getting a better rank with in Google typically only target
a very few which are copied several times in an identical form. Genuine sites typically have quite a variety of
niche keywords which aren’t mentioned as frequently per word but also may appear in different tenses or forms. The
latest Google algorithms look for this and of course rank the sites accordingly. Results also can vary according to
circumstances like your geographic location or operating system for example. An example of this is if someone enters
anti-virus on a android device and someone else on a windows 8 computer. Obviously they are looking for different
things. Google also lets you request information like what is the cheapest android I can buy locally. This didn’t
used to work like this but now Google can get information on your location and act accordingly. In the current
algorithms bad links from dubious sites get ignored not penalized like in the past. Obviously you can usually delete
these kinds of links from your blog or website and if they are good links like from a website like the BBC or MSBN
it improves your ranking. They call this update the Payday Loans Update due to a lot of it being from companies
offering dubious short term loans. There is software called spinners or spinning software that you can specify several
keywords and it will generate an article that will appear like it is written by a person but certainly not say anything
interesting and on some sites they will generate hundreds of articles in a short period this way. Google has taken
steps to penalize these. In particular if someone finds a site in their results and is only there a short while
before repeating the same search term they know that person didn’t find what they wanted and downgrade the site.
Something to watch for is if you have a blog and comments like great blog which don’t add anything new you probably
ought to think twice about whether or not to delete them. Similar is comments that go off topic like what theme are you using.
If you allow comments like these it will probably go against you. I did very much enjoy this book and definitely
recommend it. It is around 300 pages so is a decent length too.

Creating Fat Content

The book I read to research this post was Creating Fat Content by Dr Andy Williams which is a very good book that I bought from kindle. This book is around 220 pages so is fairly and is about writing online content that will rank high in the Google search engine. Google calls websites with lots of search terms but little actual content thin sites hence the title of this book having the word fat. There have been literally hundreds of updates to the acronyms used by Google over the years. At one time search engines merely looked for how often a word or phrase was repeated in a website article and ranked accordingly. This led to many highly ranked spam sites with little content. Then they started looking for appropriate domain names which again had a similar result. Google with there acronyms which try to decipher the actual content on a site was a game changer and they bought one company that had come up with an even more intelligent way of organising these sites and incorporated it into the search engine. Currently Google downgrades sites that scrape content from elsewhere or repeatedly break copyright infringements. They try to identify the writers of content so it isn’t worth hiding behind a web identity. They rank trusted content higher particularly popular brands. They also look at do you add useful content as it is no good embedding articles and youtubes which they regard as being available elsewhere. When you enter a search term you will often see popular youtube videos on the youtube site highly ranked. They also look at the number of links and interaction with your site but penalize sites that swap links. This book is really interesting and I learnt a lot from it and do recommend it.

 

Google Analytics

The book I read to research this post was Sam’s Teach Yourself Google Analytics In 10 Minutes by Michael Miller which is a very good book that I bought from kindle. Some years there was a website statistical package called Urchin that was bought and became a free product called Google Analytics. It works equally well for fairly large companies as it does for small blogs and websites. It is brilliant value and outperforms many paid products. You simply copy and paste a javascript snippet to your website to connect it. Ocassionally you might have to edit the snippet. It gives you extensive information like unique visitors, how they were referred to your site and even information like their ISP and geographic region. It tells you what posts they looked at, how long they stayed on your site where they went to when they left your site. You can compare several sets of data on a single page. One problem is although it will tell you what website referred someone to you with a link, it won’t tell you what page on that site contained the link. It integrates with Adsense and Adwords. In the case of Adwords you can co-ordinate it with tv advertising. It can be connected to your Adsense and Adwords accounts giving information like number of visitors who made purchases and number referred from these accounts. Normally you have a Google account and among other things they give you a free e-mail account and also they give you a Google ID. Google also do a web optimizer that optimizes tour website to get as many hits as possible. You can use multiple versions of your website and see which performs best. Google has an enormous range of apps most of which are free that you can use with your computer. I did very much enjoy this book and would recommend it. Each chapter is in a 10 minute segment that should that long to read hence the book name.