Add Testimonials to Your WordPress website
If you have clients then one of the things that you might want to do is add their testimonials to your website. Sharing the testimonials on your WordPress blog can be a way to let people know what your clients are saying about you.
Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well. Voltaire (1694 – 1778)
Allowing clients to share their appreciation allows them to feel like they are a part of your business. As the quote above states, it’s “a wonderful thing”.
One plugin that should help you add testimonial to your WordPress website is WP-Testimonial.
- It includes the option to display a random testimonial in your sidebar using PHP code for older templates or using a widget for newer themes. The widget is built-in with the plugin, so you have no additional files to worry about.
- Testimonials can also be displayed all on one page. A template file is included that will need to be uploaded to your theme directory. Once in place, simply create a new page and select that template from the drop-down.
WordPress: Featuring Business Directory Plugin
Have you thought about adding a page to your website where you can feature other businesses? Maybe you want to add a resource page that would be easy to manage.
Then take a look at the plugin called “Business Directory” which has the following basic details and is compatible up to version 2.7:
- The Business Directory plugin for WordPress is an easy way to host a free directory page for your readers, affiliates, advertisers, community or club members. Invite them to submit a simple advertisement listing for themselves on your blog.
- Listings include company name, a short description, and contact information including a live URL. The plugin includes an admin tab that allows you to approve of listings before they appear live on the site. You can also edit and delete listings.
- We will soon have a premium version of this plugin that allows you to promote a listing upgrade to your directory participants; you set the cost and collect via PayPal, they get to upload a logo and appear in the top ‘premium’ section of your Directory.
- Business Directory is a great way to increase the SEO value of your site, and to monetize your community participation.
Image courtesy of www.sxc.hu
To Blog or Not to Blog: The Choice is Yours
Have you been struggling with questions of blogging in regard to making it a consistent business activity? Are the dates posted on your blog so old that you can’t remember the last time you blogged? Then we need to talk.
If you have a blog and you are not posting to it then you are missing out on a great opportunity to grow your business. Blogging can also help develop your branding along with content for products. Keep in mind the following things regarding blogging:
- Stay focused: make sure that your blog’s content is targeted and focused as you share information with your blog visitors
- Share relevant information: it is a good idea to share information that would be relevant to your blog visitors so that you can have repeat visitors
- Structure your content: make sure that your content is structured so that it is easy to read and easy to follow
- Simple action items: KISS (Keep It Simple & Straight-to-the-point) and easy to implement/understand; when you give action items make them simple to implement and easy to understand
- S.M.A.R.T. to do list: use S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, & Timely) to create a to do list that your blog visitors will implement and will help them become targeted and focused too.
- Sticky content: create content that will entice your blog visitors to stay on your website or subscribe to your blog.
How to Blog Like a Pro and Profit Like a Guru
How many times have you heard the words blog or web log or how about online diary? If you have been active online for the past few years, you’ve probably heard it thousands of times.
What you might not realize is that blogging is not only one of the fastest and easiest ways to get indexed in search engines but it is also a huge source of income that is just waiting for you to grab your share.
Blogging has actually been around for quite a while but only up until the past few years have online as well as offline marketers, become aware of how powerful this medium is. Continue reading
Optimizing Your WordPress Business Blog
There are three key areas that you can enhance on your WordPress blog that will help you optimize it. The areas are adding additional ping service websites, using Feedburner, and using keyword-rich categories.
Ping Services
The first thing that you should do is add additional ping services to your WordPress blog. You must have administrative rights to your blog and be logged in to gain access the ping service option.
Once logged into your WordPress blog’s backend, click on the “Option” tab and then click on the “Writing” tab and scroll down to the bottom of the page. You will see “Update Services” and a box under this title. There are a couple of ping services listed but you can add the following list by copying and pasting in the ping service list box. To complete the process, click on “Update Options”.
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUdates
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de
http://1470.net/api/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
Feedburner
As a blog owner, being able to capture your blog traffic and generate reports is very important to knowing what you need to do to optimize your blog. One blog tool that works to help optimize your blog is Feedburner. Feedburner allows you to redirect your blog RSS feed through their service so that it can reach targeted blog visitors better.
This helps with optimization by allowing your RSS feed to have built-in options for bloggers to use as they read your blog’s RSS feed. This brings in a stickiness factor which is always good for optimizing your blog. Some of the blog tools that Feedburner allows you to use so that you can increase the effectiveness of your blog are:
Analyze: you will be able to see real-time and accumulated statistics about your blog’s visitor information. This will help you understand the traffic that is going in and out of your blog. This allows you to better target your optimization efforts to specific areas of your blog.
Optimize: allows you to make your blog “browser friendly” so that subscribing to your blog is easy. SmartFeed(R) is an option that you can use to make sure that your blog is compatible for most blog readers. You can even build interactivity into each individual post by using FeedFlare(R) which allows you to add links at the end of each post such as “Email Post” or “Subscribe to Feed.”
Publicize: is another way for you to make sure that your blog attracts web visitors. A couple of the tools that you may use is “Email Subscriptions” and “BuzzBoost”. Email Subscriptions will give your web visitors the opportunity to receive an email once a day alerting them that you have updated your blog. Then BuzzBoost(R) allows you to republish your feed as HTML so that you can add it as a Page on any of your other websites or WordPress blogs.
Using Categories as Keywords
The easiest way to optimize your blog with keywords is to use categories that not only define each post but also relate to other posts on your blog. WordPress blog software uses categories as a way to “tag” search engines so they can be alerted that a new post has been added to your blog for a specific topic area.
Categories are also another way to easily organize the content on your blog. When you list the categories on the sidebar of your blog, it gives your blog visitors the opportunity to see all the content of your blog for a particular topic.
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