|
||||||
|
When you log in, you’ll want to be in “My Dashboard” not the Global one. Click Posts on the left. Find the Add New button and click it. Start typing in the big white area. To insert an image in your blog, find the words “Upload/Insert” just above the the white space where you type. See the rectangular gray icon? Click that and then you can browse to find an image and insert. Make sure you click the insert button. The first time I tried it, I kept uploading it but it wouldn’t show up in the blog. Then I realized I was uploading to a gallery. When I finally hit insert, it showed up in the blog. Create categories to put your posts in – if appropriate. Let’s say you sell hand-painted t-shirts. Maybe you want a category called “Inspiration” and that’s where you put any postings that talk about what inspires your art. Maybe you want a category called “Fashion Do’s” where you talk about ways/places/how to wear your t-shirts. The goal of categories is to make it easier for someone to find postings that might interest them. It’s also to help search engines find what you write. Be sure to fill in the the Excerpt when you write a new article. Keep it short and to the point. And include 2 to 4 tags for your post (enter them in the box in the right column). Think of them as keywords. When done, click the blue Publish button on the right. Or Preview (the button above that) if you’re one of those anal types that likes to catch your mistakes before other people see them. You can also change the date to something in the future, which is useful if you want to have a bunch of articles publish automatically when you’re on vacation. You can leave a posting as Draft and use it if you’re sick and don’t feel like writing one day. People frequently ask how or if they can edit their websites themselves. So I thought it might be easier to post the options here rather than re-writing them every time I get a similar inquiry. OPTION 1: Pros: Pretty easy to use, especially if you’re willing to read directions. (Surprisingly true for most products.) Also, Contribute doesn’t care whether a site is built with PHP or ASP or plain old html, so it works with any web host. OPTION 2: OPTION 3: OPTION 4: OPTION 5: OPTION 6 My recommendation? If you have an existing website that you’re happy with, but there’s a page or two that you’d like to update yourself, get Contribute. If you started a new website or doing a complete redesign, go with Wordpress, TypePad or Interspire’s Website Publisher. Totally unrelated to ecommerce or my business… so ignore if you want. It’s 7:10 pm and I’m sitting here working, with the tv on, and that commercial promoting High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) has come on for the 87th time today. You know – the one where someone says “You know what they say about it” and the other person is at a loss for what’s bad about high fructose corn syrup. Well, let me tell you why it’s bad. High fructose corn syrup was invented about 40 years ago. It is made from corn and is a “natural” product but your body does NOT recognize it as a sugar. Therefore, your body will not say to you “Oh, I’ve had too much of that drink/candy/food stuff/etc.” like it will with real sugar. Therefore, you’ll keep eating and eating and eating those chips or juice drink or whatever because you’ll never feel full. There is a correlation between the invention and use of HFCS and the increase in obesity in America. So now you know why it’s bad in case you didn’t already. It’s cheaper to make and use than sugar is and that’s why all the soft drinks and snacks contain it. I really try to be non-political in my business, but I figure food choices aren’t very political so I wanted to share my thoughts with you. It just ticks me off every time I hear that commercial. One of the problems with our farm economy is its reliance on corn as the primary crop and if we could quit using HFCS, that would go a long way toward restoring a little biodiversity. snopes.com: Urban Legends Reference Pages Always check Snopes before you fall for any of the warnings, scares, etc. that people send you. You’re an intelligent person. Aren’t you tired of being scared? If you own a website, even if you have a fabulous webmaster who does everything short of cleaning your house, managing your website and your domain name and such is still ultimately your responsibility. Tips for being responsible:
Follow the steps above and your life will run so much more smoothly, relative to your website at least. Once a year your domain registrar will send you a notice asking you to confirm your contact information for each of your domains. It’s that time of year. The email will normally contain a link to a web page and a code for you to copy and paste into that page. It’s important that you do what the email says, particularly the part about confirming your information. ICANN is the international authority that controls domain names and designates who can be registrars (such as Network Solutions, GoDaddy, TrulyTexan, etc.). If you don’t receive an email from your registrar in the next month, use this as your reminder to confirm that your registrar has the correct mailing and email address for you. Otherwise, your domain name could expire and one of those awful name squatters will snap it up and offer to sell it back to you for some ridiculous price. Happy Halloween!
Mugs are available as travel mugs, ceramic mugs and so forth. Very cool! I get calls from companies wanting to improve my ranking and get me to “#1 on Google” and I always wonder – how did they find me if I rank so poorly. But I just say no thank you and hang up. My clients get the same sort of calls and many of them ask my opinion.
Here it is: But what if you aren’t independently wealthy or you don’t have an unlimited advertising budget and the experience to bid on the right terms? The next best thing is to work on being #1 in the “natural results” which are all the sites below the “sponsored links.” How do you do that? The easiest way is to hire me because that’s what I’ve been doing for 12 years. But if you want to do it yourself, the first thing to do is look at who’s #1 now. Examine their website. Right-click on their home page and view the source code to see what they have for their meta description. Look at their navigation structure. Is it text links? How many pages in their site versus yours? How do they link to those pages, i.e. do they have a page called “t-shirts” or do they have multiple pages for their different kinds of t-shirts? The more pages on your site, the more opportunities to rank well for various search phrases. The competition for top place is fierce and never-ending. And some industries are infinitely harder to “crack” than others because there are tens of thousands of companies selling the same sort of product. And I never promise to get someone to the top because most of my clients can’t afford what it would cost to make that happen. So, I recommend realism. If you sell t-shirts, don’t even try to be #1 for “t-shirts”. Try to be #1 for the type of t-shirts you sell, such as “rock band t-shirts” or “vintage football t-shirts” or “bluebonnet t-shirts” or whatever. And keep in mind that getting to the top doesn’t mean you’ll get the click-through. That’s where the text on the page and/or your meta description come in. When someone sees your listing, is the description below it interesting and to the point? Will it help close the deal by getting them to click through to your site? Be concise in your meta description. Do not be concise in your product description on the actual web page. Put important points about your product or service in bullets so– if you’re lucky–your visitor will read them. But below the bullets, more fully describe the product or service, using complete sentences. You can rarely have too many words on a page. Your visitors won’t read them all, but search engines will read at least the first 200. So make those words important and relevant to the product or service you’re trying to sell. Finally, if someone says they can get you to #1 for your company name, just say thanks, no and hang up. If you’re a current client and I designed your website or you’re on a site management plan with me, and you aren’t in the top 3 for your company name, I’ll give you a free hour of work (an $80 value) to correct the problem (assuming your company name isn’t something utterly generic like “Gift Baskets”. If you aren’t my client, call your webmaster (or me) and tell them to fix the problem. It will cost you some money, but it should be worth it. If someone knows your company name, the least you should expect of your website is that it’s found when they enter the name in a search. Squirrel Nut Zippers. I love this band. You cannot feel bad while listening to their music. |
||||||
|
Copyright © 2010 Advice My Clients Probably Won't Read - All Rights Reserved |
||||||
Recent Comments