As of the end of last week the announcement was made regarding the first release candidate of WordPress 3.0. For any of you that have been looking forward to this release of WordPress you can rest assured that within a few weeks you should have the availability of WordPress 3.0 in a stable format.

For anyone that has not been following the development of WordPress and the announcement concerning WordPress 3.0 the biggest change is Merge of WordPress MU + WordPress.

If you are unsure of what WordPress MU is, no need to worry. WordPress MU is basically WordPress platform that allows users to run multiple sites under one installation. As a great example WordPress.com is running on the WordPress MU code base. While Matt Mullenweg announced the merge news during WordCamp San Francisco 2009, the WordPress developers have finally announced the first release candidate of 3.0.

While the merge was the major feature enhancement to WordPress there are a number of additional features that can be reviewed at the following link:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.0

Some of the highlights that you will want to know about are:
* New menu management feature
* New theme “Twenty Ten” is the only theme in the WordPress distribution.
* Improved child theme support; child theme use is highly encouraged and as described in the Child Themes article, very simple to accomplish
* New comment_form() that outputs a complete commenting form for use within a theme template
* Expanded contextual help
* All importers moved to the plugin repository (e.g. WordPress Importer)
* Custom backgrounds for themes
* The Default (Kubrick), and Classic themes, are no longer included in the WordPress distribution, but are available in the Theme repository
* Bulk theme update ability
* Improved custom post types (try the Custom Post Type UI or GD Custom Posts And Taxonomies Tools plugins to see the possibilities)
* Improved custom taxonomies including hierarchical (category-style) support (again, try the Custom Post Type UI or GD Custom Posts And Taxonomies Tools plugins)
* Standalone WordPress and WPMU code merged and is called Multisite (Note: extra domain stuff remains plugin territory for this version)
* Multisite requires wp-config.php file changes to institute

If you have been using Twitter for more than just the occasional glance to see what your friends are up to you, there is no doubt that you have seen a hashtag. As a matter of fact now that I say that you may not even know what I mean by the term “Hashtag”.

Let’s start there. A hashtag is nothing more than a word, maybe two with the “#” symbol attached to the front of the words. To make it even easier for you to get an understanding of which hashtags may currently be trending, login into your Twitter account and you will see a list of current hashtags listed in the right-hand column of your Twitter account. For example at the moment the top listed hashtag that I am seeing is “#nowplaying”.

By default your account will be showing hashtags that are trending on a worldwide scale, but you can narrow that down to your location or a location of your choosing.

Ok, so who cares?

If you are spending time on the Internet to make your living or at least supplementing your income, you care. Hashtags are nothing more than a way in which you can catalog or categorize your Tweets, so that they are more easily found by the people that are interested in your chosen topic. Additionally, due to the fact that hashtags tend to spread very quickly it is highly likely that your Tweets will be found by people that are not currently following you.

Trying to build a large following of Twitter users?

Do you have a specific event or marketing campaign that you are trying to promote?

Are you working to build some buzz around a new product launch?

The short answer is that hashtags are your key to building a large Twitter following, increasing the size of your blog subscribers, and as I would assume most business owners would be interested in, improving your bottom line.

And, now for the bad news: As with everything on the Internet, there are people that have begun to abuse hashtags and surprise, they have become a vehicle for spamming. If you want to maintain your reputation and build a reputable following online, never ever use hashtags in a Tweet that does not pertain to the content of your Tweet. This is nothing more than maintaining proper etiquette, integrity and plain being honest about how you conduct yourself on the Internet.

So, for those of you who are thinking ahead and asking yourself how you can leverage current trends to give your following, marketing and/or website traffic a boost, let’s discuss that option. You’ve done some research and found that there are a number of current hashtags that are trending and you are wondering which ones you can leverage. The simply answer to this question is that it totally depends on how you are using your Twitter account.

In my case, I happen to read a lot and absolutely love quotes from people in all walks of life and in many cases they make me laugh, give me new ideas or simply provide inspiration for the day. As such a large number of the Tweets that I send out are quotes that I have come across and feel that there is someone else out there that might enjoy the quote as well. Additionally, I spend a lot of time helping entrepreneurs and small business owners leverage the power of the Internet and Tweet on subjects related to this endeavor.

As such it would make NO sense for me to be Tweeting on the latest trends in the entrainment world, Tiger Woods or any subjects like this that are totally unrelated to my primary theme. Additionally, do NOT use hashtags in every Tweet that you send out. Use your common sense. When in question, ask someone that has more experience than you and simply be smart about how you are using your Twitter account.

Lastly, please, please make sure that to the best of your ability you are providing value to the people that are going to be searching on the hashtags that you are using in your Tweets.

While this is in no way an exhaustive discussion of how to use hashtags in your Twitter account and the Tweets that you are sending out, I think you get the idea. If you have additional questions please feel free to leave me a comment and let me know how I can help.

Have some great success in using hashtags to grow your business, please take a moment to leave a comment and share with us all. I personally, always look for tips, tricks and ideas for people that have more knowledge than I.

As always: To Your Success!

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In a previous life as a systems engineer protecting system data, having the resources to recover from a fatal melt down and frankly protecting clients from the headaches that come with lost data was a daily focus.  As many of you reading this, my daily activities rely heavily on the performance of WordPress and its incredible reliability. To that point a significant chunk of my revenue is dependent upon WordPress performing as many of us take for granted.

Let me ask you as question: When was the last time that you backed-up your database? How about your site files?

Do you keep your WordPress up to date with the latest updates? How about any plugins that you make use of, do you keep them updated?

Let me tell you a quick little story.

A very good friend of mine uses WordPress as the foundation for his website and as you would expect WordPress has performed flawlessly. No real shocker there as that is the norm and pretty much what we have all come to expect.

However, as he and I were working together to prepare for a major email announcement that was being sent out for him (to 9000+ contacts)  by a referral partner the unimaginable happened.  With the anticipation of hundreds of people hitting his website because they were driven there by a highly reputable collogue we discovered that his website was not working properly.

To make matters worse neither of us had been making any updates to the site, no changes: no WordPress updates, no WordPress plugin updates, no site changes and yet, the site was displaying a solid white page. Even with a minor hint of panic setting in, I made up my mind that I would simply get into the admin section of the site to figure out what was going on.

This is where things got very interesting (meaning more panic) as I discovered that they admin interface was giving the same results as the public side of the site.

With a string of progressively more stressful events, we finally had some good news. A few weeks back I had setup the WordPress Database Backup plugin to automatically email me a copy of the database each day. That’s right, the extent of work that I have to do each day is simply save the backup that is waiting in the inbox of my email.

After opening my database management tool in the web browser, I uploaded a backup from a few days prior and we were back online. For what could have been a major disaster we were back online and running with a sigh of relief within about 20 minutes.

WordPress Database Backup (WP-DB-Backup) has a great admin interface that will allow you to make quick backups of your WordPress Database tables anytime that you are preparing to make updates, but more importantly and a feature I have not used consistently, the plugin will allow you to schedule backups that will be emailed to you on your schedule.

Even though the WP-DB-Backup plugin will allow you the option of saving the backup file to the server, I would strongly discourage you from leaving your database backups on the server. In a perfect world and if all is configured properly, then you or your technical support would be able to gain access to your database backups. However, in the middle of a major melt down I am not so sure that is a chance that you will want to take.

If you are running a WordPress website that contains important information that you would not want to lose or that website is an important component of your producing income, I would strongly encourage take a moment to check out the WordPress Database backup plugin (WP-DB-Backup) – Click Here to Visit the Plugin Website.

Additionally, if you have plugin that has been useful to you in helping maintain your WordPress website please tell me about it as I am always looking for great new WordPress resources.

To Your Success!

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All too often I meet with very sharp small business owners that do all the things you would expect when it comes to building a successful small business. These business owners are developing strategic relationships, monitoring their sales and marketing goals, keeping tabs on expenses and ensuring that forecasted cash flow is going to meet expected demands. While this list could go on, I am sure you get the point.

Why is it that these same business owners seem to disconnect their brain when it comes to their website design, performance and overall role in the business?

Why is it that many of these business owners fail to understand that their website presence is a very real and viable source of new prospects, sales and business opportunities?

There are countless small businesses that have a website presence that is nothing more than a destination driven marketing tool. To make things worse it doesn’t even fill that role when the sales team is actually in the physical presence of a prospect, because at that time they are handing them a brochure. Please don’t take that last statement out of context as I am a huge proponent of having printed materials to pass on to prospects, clients, and especially referral partners.

However, my point with regards to the above statement is that other than company employees, the only traffic that many small business websites receive is simply because the site visitor was prompted to visit the site because of some type of direct contact.

In my world that is a pretty sad statement.

Why is it that more small business owners are not outraged at the fact that their website is not actually creating new business for them? When did it become acceptable that, a primary channel for new prospects and business, perform so poorly, if at all?

In the above scenario, the company website has become little more than an electronic version of their company brochure. The website link is passed on to prospects through emails, over the phone, through a business card and/or included in other marketing materials. From a convenience point of view that is great because even when it is not possible to meet in person a new prospect can get an idea of what your company is about, details on products/servers, and maybe even put a face to a name.

The real power in a small business website shows when that company acquires a new customer that was not first contacted through the sales and marketing efforts. Now you are answering the phone to find that you have a new prospect calling you to ask about your products and services. Better yet, you may have a new client walking in your door asking to make a purchase. And saving the best for last, you are receiving commissions or revenue via your website, never having spoken to this new customer.

Let me ask the question that I started with; what kind of website does your business have?

The difference in the two scenarios that I have described above is the difference in a website that is nothing more than a destination website verses a website that is attracting new prospects. So, the real decision you have to make is do you want an attraction website or a destination website.

The great part about this entire subject is that you get to make the choice. Yes, it is your choice!

The difference between the two websites is very simple.

Destination website (Online Electronic version of your marketing materials):

- Make the decision regarding what information you are willing to share via your website.

- Get a designer that can and will ensure that your website design matches your branding.

- Launch the site and send prospects, referral partners and clients to the site whenever required.

- At this point you’re pretty much done.

Attraction website (A sales/marketing tool that works for your company 24×7):

- Take the above steps and ensure that your site is Search Engine Optimized.

- Install Google Analytics to enable you to monitor your website performance.

- Keep your website content fresh and updated.

- Initiate a company Newsletter that is closely integrated into your website.

- Make adjustments, enhancements to your site based on performance data.

Before leaving the above comparison, let me state that these lists are in no way comprehensive and could have countless variations based on a company’s needs.

As you can see from the comparison above the website that is going to generate new prospects, revenue and business opportunities, is not a website that you publish and forget. For many small business owners the additional time and effort required to have a website that plays an important role in your overall business growth is simply not that challenging.

How many new clients per month and in some cases per year would it take for your website to have a significant impact on your bottom line?

Your prospects are online and in many cases searching for exactly what you are offering. If you are not going to make the effort the position yourself such that they can find your business website, your competition will. For many small businesses the amount of new business that they are losing because of the poor performance of their website, could easily equal their current revenue.

To Your Success!

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As it is so readily pointed out by Google “Local customers already search Google for the products and services you offer”, so I often wonder why more small business owners don’t leverage the revenue generating power of these listings. Have you created your business listing so that your customers and more importantly prospective customers are sure to be able to find you?

If not take a few moments to read on to find out just how much business you may be missing out on.

First of all let’s define Google Local Business Listings and how they are different from your typical organic search listings. Google Local Business Listings are different than organic or pay-per-click listings and typically only show up when the user types a service oriented business followed by the city for their search. At this point a Google Maps appears alongside up to ten URLs with a phone number by each.

For those that need more than ten listings you have the option to click the “More Results“ option and you’ll be taken to a map with alphabetically lettered red pegs for each register business on Google Maps. There is no secret that being listed on Google Maps and/or Google’s Local Business Listings is becoming even more important since they are being displayed more often in searches with up to ten listings even before the organic listings start.

There are a number of very simple steps that can be taken by the small business owner and entrepreneur to get additional traffic to their website and new prospects buying products:

Be sure to get free listings in as many local directory websites as possible. I very rarely recommend setting up reciprocating links as they often provide little to no value or paying for links in directories. However, if there are local directories that are offering nonreciprocal link options that are free you should definitely take advantage of the listing.

Always include your phone number whenever you write a description of your company on a third party website. Research suggests that Google may use your phone number to improve your local business listing rankings, similar to the way they use links for improving your traditional organic search engine rankings. For those of you using WordPress for your website updates like this are very easy.

Make sure your local business listing is complete. For instance, include pictures, videos, coupons, a full description dense with keywords, be sure to select the appropriate categories for your business, etc, etc.

Use keywords in your local business listing description and make it as long as Google allows.

If you have local competitors that are ranking well with the Google Local Business listings take the time to look at their local business listings.

A very important and often overlooked piece to the overall puzzle is having customer reviews associated with your Google Local Business listing. So, how do you go about getting customer reviews? Simply add a link from your homepage to the listing and encourage current customers or website visitors to review your company. You cannot have too many customer reviews!

As for your website, be sure to include your business name in your title tags, description and throughout your website. With WordPress you can accomplish this very easily in a number of ways depending on your installation and plugins available to you.

Additionally, you will want to ensure the following items are covered by on your website:

*Include your address and phone number on every page of your website. Often the bottom of every page is a great location to do so.

*Include your city and state in your website’s content, titles, descriptions and/or page headers.

*Do some searches on Google to find out which phrases local business listings show up for, and optimize your site for those phrases.

When mastered, local business search engine optimization has the potential to be very lucrative, generating large amounts of targeted traffic, within a short amount of time. Please feel free to comment with more tips and resources.

Have more questions? Leave me a comment and I will do my best to help.

If you found this helpful please pass it along…..Thanks

To Your Success!

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Unless you have been living under a rock somewhere you are sure to have heard the term “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO) at least a few thousand times. While improving your overall search engine ranking and having your site optimized to maximize the amount of traffic is obviously of critical importance, more traffic is not everything. Yes, that is what I said and I will say it once more for those who weren’t sure they heard me say it: Increased Website Traffic through Search Engine Optimization is not everything!

The other side of that solution and equally as important is your website conversion rate. Your websites conversion rate is nothing more than a fancy way of saying the percentage of visitors (website traffic) who make a purchase; sign up for a newsletter; download a report or whatever your call to action may be.

Let’s face it, if you have thousands of people visiting your site on a daily basis with exactly none of them making a purchase, signing up for your newsletter or whatever your call to action may be, does it really matter that you had all of that traffic?

To know if your website is really producing the results you are looking for ask yourself a few questions:

*What is your website traffic conversion rate?

*Do you have the website traffic statistics to measure the effectiveness of your website traffic?

*What is the increase in your business as a direct result of increased website traffic?

*What is the return on your investment (ROI) of your website promotion efforts?

If you didn’t have answers to my questions, you’re not alone. Despite the importance of web site conversion, I found that it’s one of the least understood measurements among the small business owners.  In short I am talking with business owners and network marketers who thought getting a web site would improve their bottom line, but ended up being disappointed by the lack of results.

One of the first places that I would recommend starting in order to get a grasp on your website traffic, your conversion rates and the overall performance of your website is Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free service that Google offers to its customers to allow them to track, monitor and measure with great accuracy statistics relating to traffic, conversions and page views on your web site. In short, Google Analytics tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site.

With Google Analytics, you’re more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create a higher converting website.

Other important information that you can obtain is the profitability of your keywords across different search engines and online campaigns. How about being able to identify where your best online customers come from and which target audiences are the most profitable for your specific content?

In fact, Google Analytics allows you to track all of your marketing initiatives. Measure the effectiveness of your ads, email newsletters, affiliate campaigns, referrals, paid links, search engines, and keywords, thereby allowing you can compare performance across all of your marketing efforts.

The best thing is that with a well design WordPress website and a simple plugin it is easy to add Google Analytics to your website. Where many small business owners now have to call up their web designer to make a simple addition like Google Analytics to their website, with a WordPress based website you have just avoided that challenge.

After creating your account, to make Google Analytics work you only need to place the special snippet of code that Google provides you in the Google Analytics plugin for your WordPress website.

One of my favorite features of Google Analytics is the identification of critical pages and bottlenecks where you are likely to lose most of your online customers. Funnel Visualization, shows you the bottlenecks in your conversion and checkout processes that are often attributable to such factors as confusing content or confusing navigation.  Once identified you can eliminate the problem content and/or create less confusing navigation and start “funneling” visitors through the steps you want them to take.

Additionally, Google Analytics comes a large number of predefined reports to assist you with the analysis of your website traffic data.

Are you already an advertiser with Google? You can immediately log in into Google Analytics and start using these tools right from the start. Google Analytics automatically imports all your existing keyword data from your AdWords account. In this way you can see the ROI and other key metrics for every keyword you buy on AdWords, without any extra setup.

My guess is that by now you are starting to understand the importance of combining Google Analytics with your WordPress website.  As I bring this to a close I will leave you with a few of the huge benefits to combining Google Analytics with your WordPress Website:

* Zero cost. Take note that the free version is limited to 5 million page views a month. However, users with an active Google AdWords account are given unlimited page view tracking.

* Great visual maps, stats, reporting and great use of effective information design principles. Navigating data is a strong point.

* Ease of use: Google Analytics is easy to use for novice marketers, yet provides all the capabilities that experienced web analytics professionals expect.

*AdWords integration. If you have an AdWords account, you can use Google Analytics directly from the AdWords interface.

The benefit s to making use of Google Analytics is much longer than the few benefits I have listed above, but I think you get the picture. Now that you have a clear understanding of how to start measuring the effectiveness of your website I think it is time that we turn our attention to website traffic conversion. In my next article I am going to dive further into the challenge of converting your website traffic to prospect, leads and/or new customers.

Have any questions regarding the above information please feel free to leave a comment or contact me HERE.

To Your Success!

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While there are a large number of Network Marketers that have figured out the importance of having your own MLM blog there are countless others that do not understand just how essential this tool is in building their MLM business.

A properly configured WordPress blog will give you a very powerful tool for generating new leads for your MLM business, creating traffic for affiliate programs, building relationships with potential prospects and/or other potential business partners. Please take note that I specifically stated that all of the above can be accomplished via a “properly configured” WordPress blog.

For starters, having your own domain name and having a professional installation of your WordPress blog is a key to your long term success. There is no other blogging system that gives you the number of money making features that are available from WordPress.

One of the biggest mistakes that I see people make day after day is setting up their blog with one of the FREE blogging services that are available. First and foremost the main reason people select a free blogging service is that they don’t have the technical skills to do an installation (not to mention that many other tweaks and setup steps involved) to properly setup and configure WordPress.

The sad truth is that when using one of the FREE blogging services you are immediately putting yourself at a disadvantage over your competition that has a hosted version of WordPress to build their MLM business. PLEASE – Avoid the free platform and go for a WordPress blog hosted on your own account and your own domain name.

Once your WordPress blog is installed and ready for you to start with the variety of modifications that are available to you that allow you make your WordPress blog uniquely yours, there are still a host of decisions that need to be made.

At the top of your list should be deciding which plugins are essential for your MLM WordPress blog. While many of the plugins are just nice utilities that you can do without, there are others that are VERY important in helping with things like generating sitemaps for the search engines or helping you to make your blog more SEO friendly.

Just a few of the plugins that I consider a must have are:

Askimet – Spam has become rampant in blog comments. One of the best protections that you can have against having to deal with hundreds of spam comments is to make sure that the Askimet plugin is installed and active or your MLM blog.

All in One SEO Pack – If you think that search engine optimization (SEO) is a real pain, then you will love this plugin. This plugin will help you to optimize each page and post on your MLM blog for the search engines. So there is no need to worry about SEO.

Google XML Sitemaps – Sitemaps are very helpful any helping the search engines to find and index all of the content on your mlm blog. This simple plugin automatically builds and updates your site map whenever you update your site, making it easy for Google to index your content.

Google Analyticator – Adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog.

WordPress Thread Comment – One of the great things about having an MLM blog is the interactivity of such a site. Your visitors and prospects are allowed to comment on the information that you post. This particular plugin makes it easy for users to comment on existing comments as well. It displays these discussions in a nested style format.

Sociable – Automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. You can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites!

TweetMeme – The TweetMeme retweet button easily allows your blog to be retweeted. The button also provides a current count of how many times your story has been retweeted throughout twitter.

WP Super Cache – This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

WP-reCAPTCHA – reCAPTCHA is an anti-spam method originating from Carnegie Mellon University which uses CAPTCHAs in a genius way. reCAPTCHA has earned a very prestigious reputation among the various CAPTCHA systems available and is used by such sites as Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, and a few U.S. Government Websites.

WordPress Database Backup – Everything that you post in WordPress is saved to a database. If you have ever suffered a computer crash, then you know just how trying it can be to get everything situated again. Your WordPress database is subject to crashes and corruption as well, so backing up your database regularly is a must. This plugin makes it child’s play with a few clicks.

While I have listed some of my favorite plugins here for your use there are thousands of plugins available for WordPress, and more coming online every day. If there is something you want your WordPress blog to do chances are there is a plugin available to do it.

While originally design as a blogging platform, WordPress has grown to be one of the most powerful content management systems available for the overall management of your website. The user friendly Administrative dashboard will have you up and running in no time at all.

Deciding to develop an MLM blog in conjunction with your network marketing business is a great idea. As we have pointed out one of the great things about using WordPress for your MLM blog is that there are many great plugins that will help make it easier for your blog to be found in the search engines and improve the overall functionality and interactivity of your website.

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