Monday, September 9, 2013

Email Marketing - A Must Use Tool

Many website entrepreneurs have mentioned that one thing they wish they had done from the beginning was include an email subscription list. Email marketing is a great way to connect with your followers, but often we don’t know enough about it.

I’ve used email marketing for about 2 years and my favourite to use is Mailchimp. It’s easy to use, the support is great, they have a host of features and… they are the only big email marketing company that has a free package. Unless you’re sending to thousands of subscribers, you won’t pay a cent, so it’s perfect for starting out and getting a feel for things without having to splash some cash upfront.

One of the biggest draw cards to Mailchimp (although some other email marketers have this too, but you have to pay for the subscription) is the “signup form”. This form goes onto your website so followers can enter in their details and get added to your subscribers list. Mailchimp makes it simple by providing the html and also a WordPress plugin!

With this plugin, you just need to install it, add your “API key”, and the setup takes you through the configuration process. One problem I did run into was the alignment of the text and text boxes in the widget. I fixed this by adding this bit of code to my style.css file.

#mc_signup_form .mc_var_label {
display: block;
float: left;
width: 100%;
}


Another Mailchimp plugin made by a third party is called “MailChimp by ContactUs”. It allows for a bit more configuration and you’ll need to fiddle a bit to get it right, but it does have a few cool features.

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Authorship on your WordPress website

The latest craze in SEO today is all about building authority. Have a look at this article on building authority. One thing that this affects is what you include in your posts on your website.

Once you've verify your email address (which has the same domain as your website) with your Google+ account, then any post on your website that has your name in the byline will be associated with your Google+ account.

Let's break that down a little. First, what is a byline? Simply put, it's the author's name after a post. EG. "by Jevon Coffin-Grey". Secondly, why would you want to associate your Google+ account with your website? Well if you've read the article on building authority, you'll know that creating a social presence is important to your SEO. Your social presence needs to rank well too. So by marking your authorship on posts indicates to Google that you (or really your Google+ profile) is an authority in the niche... and hence your website will grow in authority.

When I posted to my WordPress website, I realised that there was no byline after my posts. Here's how I fixed that:
Firstly, I needed to go to Users->Your Profile in my WordPress admin area and enter my author details. Secondly, I went to Appearance->Editor, because some code was needed. The required was "content.php".(I'm using the WordPress Twenty Thirteen theme, so the file may be different for you)
Here's the code required:
<small><?php the_time('F jS, Y'); ?> by <?php the_author(); ?></small>
This code needs to go into the section of code which displays your post. Below this section will be the code for the comments. In my file, I needed to insert the code above this line:
</div><!-- .entry-content -->
For an example of how this works out, check out the website on Online Business Ideas.