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What is Involved in Shopping Cart Software

By on November 29, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, article directory, article plugin, article themes, Blog Business, Blog Platform, Blog Posting, blogging, Blogs, Conversion, Domains, Free Reports, Google Adsense, Membership sites, Mobil Blogging, New Blogging, SEO, Themes, Traffic, Web Design, Websites, widgets, wordpress, World Internet Summit, Wp Headers, Wp Themes, Youtube Video

What is Involved in Shopping Cart Software

There are many things that go on within a shopping cart. There are many different features and management systems, so many that it can be mind-boggling. When deciding on which shopping cart program to purchase you should know what the basic parts of a shopping cart system entails so that you can make a smart buying decision.

All shopping carts have some kind of ordering system whether it is a simple online ordering system that includes buttons that have HTML attached to them such as is done with the Paypal shopping cart or a store-front ordering system where everything is done on site.

All shopping carts also have the ability for customers to add items to the cart, delete items from the cart, and input quantity desired. All shopping carts collect data such as the customer’s name, address and phone number. All shopping carts have to include shipping modules unless the products are all digital in nature in that case there would be a download manager.

Advanced shopping carts would allow customers to have several options per item such as color, size, weight, shape, height or width. Some carts even have choices between bulk or single item orders.

Shopping carts normally have shipping options with common ones being USPS, UPS and FedEx, DHL, CanadaPost, and also AustraliaPost. Not only do you have the different carriers but you also have other shipping options such as delivery time: next day, second day, ground, and air.

Tax calculation are also a part of what shopping carts need to offer when the customer has a physical address that is in the same state or city as the merchant. Tax calculations are done by zip code. Merchants who have stores in multiple rates would have a hair-pulling experience if not for advanced software plug-ins such as TaxWare’s Sales/Use Tax System or CertiTax which can calculate for the customer in real time the exact taxes.

Buyers insist on secure transactions before they hand over their credit cards so it is important for the shopping cart to integrate a payment gateway that is secure, protection for credit card numbers that are stored on the Website, an SSL secure connection certificate between the customer and the Website to discourage hackers from stealing sensitive financial information from the customers. It is also important to have a secure Sockets Layer (SSL) between the customer and the Website. If your Website server is not secure customer won’t buy. It is also important to have secure order retrieval.

Not all payment gateways are compatible with all shopping carts so you need to verify that the payment gateway is compatible before making your purchase. The most common U.S. based shopping cart compatible payment gateways are Authorize.net, LinkPoint, veriSign PayFlow Pro, and WorldPay. PayPal is another alternative payment system for most shopping carts but PayPal’s proprietary Instant Payment Notification (IPN) is not always available so you have to check before deciding to use PayPal.

Most shopping carts nowadays provide email confirmation of order placement and a few provide email confirmation of shipment.

Cookies, temporary IP number assignment and randomly generated cart numbers are all ways that shopping carts have to help keep customer orders straight. Because some shoppers turn off cookies it is important that shopping carts be set up with other methods alongside cookies just in case.

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How to Install WordPress Theme2

By on November 28, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How to Install WordPress Theme

So you have hunted high and low and found the perfect WordPress theme. Now you need to know how to install WordPress theme or it will just be a pretty file collecting dust on your hard drive.

Installing a WordPress theme is not as complicated as many people think it is. The thing that tends to confuse people is that there are two different methods you can use when trying to figure out how to install WordPress theme.

Manually install WordPress theme

First I will go over how to install WordPress theme manually to help you get familiar with the WordPress structure.

To install a WordPress theme manually you will need to download the theme, which I am assuming you have done by now.
You will also need to unzip the WordPress theme to a folder on your hard drive (try not to forget where you put it).
Now you will need to fire up your FTP program and FTP to your site.
At this point you will want to navigate to the themes folder by going to the ‘wp-content’ folder and then the ‘themes’ folder.
Once you are in the themes folder on your web site, you will want to navigate to the theme you unzipped on your hard drive (you did remember where you put it, didn’t you?).
You will then need to upload the theme on your hard drive (folder and all) to the themes folder on your web site.
After your all FTP’d out you will want to go back to your browser and log into your WordPress blog on your site.
You will then go to the ‘Appearance’ option on the left side menu and select the ‘Themes’ option.
At this point you should be able to see your theme listed as an option. If not then you probably uploaded it as a folder within a folder and will need to double check it.
You should now be able to preview and then activate your theme by selecting the appropriate options listed under your theme.

Automatically install WordPress theme

If you are lazy like me you will want to let WordPress do all the work for you. So now we will learn how to install WordPress theme by letting WordPress get down and dirty.

To put WordPress to work you will need to first log into your blog.
You will navigate to the ‘Appearance’ option on the left side of the menu.
Next you are going to click on the ‘Themes’ option located under the ‘Appearance’ tab.
Once you are under the ‘Themes’ section, you will see ‘Manage Themes’ at the top of the page. Next to the ‘Manage Themes’ tab you will see the ‘Install Themes’ tab which will probably be grayed out. You will want to click on the ‘Install Themes’ tab to make it the active tab.
Now you have a couple options here.
Option one is that you don’t have a theme in mind yet and want to search for one. In this case you will select the options you are looking for and click Search. Once you have the results up on screen you can scroll through until you find one that you like and want to use. At this point it is only a matter of previewing the theme to make sure it is what you are looking for and if it is, then you can click Install and let WordPress do its magic.
Option two assumes that you have already downloaded the theme you want to use. In this case you will want to select the Upload option that you will find available under the ‘Install Themes’ tab. Once you have selected the Upload option you will want to browse to the theme file you downloaded and select it. (Yes WordPress will even unzip the file for you. How’s that for service!) Then it is just a matter of clicking ‘Install Now’ and let WordPress go to town.

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A Very Slick Photo Gallery WordPress Theme

By on November 26, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

A Very Slick Photo Gallery WordPress Theme

Without a doubt, the Manhattan theme by StudioPress is a very slick photo gallery WordPress theme.

Why is the Manhattan theme such a slick photo Gallery WordPress theme?

Keep in mind, this is my opinion. I’m not basing this proclamation on any official WordPress theme rating organization. My reasons for liking this gallery WordPress theme so much are twofold:

It has my preferred photo gallery layout on the home page, and
It’s a theme that operates on the Genesis Framework.

My Reasons Explained

1. Photo gallery layout and Design of this theme

The home page is what makes the design so fantastic. I like the large above-the-fold image slide show for featuring your best photographs.

Under the large photo space on the home page you have space to create a gallery. The Manhattan gallery demo features only 4 photos, but you can add many more if you like. You can create a large scrolling gallery of photographs on the home page. This is easily done in the WordPress Widgets panel.

What you do is drag the Featured Posts feature built into the theme on the Genesis Framework and drag it to the home page widget section. The Featured Posts widget pulls your images from the specific posts you place your images. You can also manually insert source image code in the Widgets to display any number of photos.

The point is you can create a huge or small photo gallery on the home page. Those photos can link to a post or not. It’s up to you.

Moreover, because the Manhattan home page is configured with widgets, you can add article titles and/or excerpts as well or in place of photos.

Essentially, you have many options for designing your home page with the Manhattan theme.

2. I like the Genesis Framework

There is much to say about the Genesis Framework.

If you go with the Manhattan theme, you gain the benefits and features of Genesis. That is a fundamental advantage of the Manhattan photo gallery WordPress theme. In other words, Manhattan is not a stand-alone WordPress photo theme. Instead, it’s driven by Genesis which gives you the tools for building a fantastic photo gallery website.

Just so you know, I use the Genesis Framework for many websites, including my offline business website. When Genesis was released, I fairly quickly migrated most of my websites onto Genesis. I’ve been very happy with that decision ever since.

Why pay for a photo gallery theme when there are many free gallery themes available?

Good question. In fact, before I used paid themes, I used free themes as well. I became frustrated with free themes. Then I read something about some free themes being encoded with links and perhaps even poor code. I became a concerned and dug a little deeper.

I wish to emphasize not all free themes are compromised. The trouble for me then was I couldn’t tell whether a free theme was okay or not.

A few words about StudioPress

When you buy a theme from StudioPress (such as Manhattan), you can use it on as many domains as you like. This is important. Some premium themes restrict the number of uses. Not so with StudioPress.

You also have access to a good support forum with senior moderators who know A LOT about WordPress themes and StudioPress themes specifically. They answer questions generally within 24 hours.

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Obtaining your Blogs Initial Traffic

By on November 25, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, article directory, article plugin, article themes, Blog Business, Blog Platform, Blog Posting, blogging, Blogs, Conversion, Domains, Free Reports, Google Adsense, Membership sites, Mobil Blogging, New Blogging, SEO, Themes, Traffic, Web Design, Websites, widgets, wordpress, World Internet Summit, Wp Headers, Wp Themes, Youtube Video

Obtaining your Blogs Initial Traffic

When you first start adding content onto your blog you probably won’t have much if any traffic and I’m sure you’re dying to get some visitors. In this part of the guide we’re going to look at how you can get some initial traffic to your blog. Search engine traffic is by far the most valuable traffic to obtain, but it takes time and work to get this traffic so you need alternative ways to obtain traffic in the beginning.

Once you have your first twenty posts on your blog you should spend a day or two working on building links to your blog homepage and article pages. You should first work on submitting the pages to the many social bookmarking sites out there, you should choose at a minimum five websites to submit your pages to and make sure they get good traffic before submitting.

After you’re done submitting your pages to some social bookmarking websites spend some time writing a few articles on the topic of your blog. You could also just rewrite some of the posts you’ve made on your blog, it’s totally up to you. The reason you need some unique articles is so that you can submit them into article directories. EzineArticles is by far the most popular article directory and I would recommend sticking with this directory for the first couple months. Article directories will allow you to place 2-3 links in each article in the author resource box. You can gain a lot of valuable links from writing and submitting articles into directories so don’t ever stop working on adding more to your profile.

While you’re waiting for some of your articles to be approved in the article directories you can work on submitting your blog into directories. All you need to do is submit your homepage into these directories for the most part, some will allow deeplinks and I would recommend submitting deep links when you have the option.

You should also spend at least an hour or so a day reading other blogs in your niche. Although there your competition you can gain valuable links from their blogs by commenting on them. The search engines love relevant links and you can get a lot of them from blog commenting. You can also get traffic from people clicking your links on other blogs which happens fairly often.

As you can see there are plenty of ways you can obtain traffic while you wait for search engine rankings to kick in. All of these methods also help your search engine rankings and will assist you with getting ranked. Articles submissions are very important and make sure you never stop submitting articles for the life of your blog. They will help you rank in the search engines for tons of keywords and once you have enough search engine traffic coming in then you won’t need to work as hard on promotion and marketing.

In the beginning of your blog you’ll need to do everything you can to gain traffic though. Spend as much time as you can the first few months building content and links to your blog as this will directly reflect your traffic. If you write valuable content and have an appealing blog then some of the traffic you build will turn into return visitors which are the goal. Not everyone will become a return visitor to your blog, but the more that do the better. Always make sure that you continue writing content for your blog and never stop because for the most part once the content stops the traffic comes to a halt.

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Why use Sideblog in WordPress

By on November 25, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Why use Sideblog in WordPress?
For the blogging community of WordPress, it is well-known that there are lots of plugins available for your blogging experience. It would be impossible for one to utilize all of them and not all are suitable for your taste and style. Thus it takes time to learn the advantages and disadvantages of each of the plugins and whether they are serving the purposes they were built for. Some of the plugins are known to make your sites wonderful, while there are some that are just disasters.
One of the popular plugins is Sideblog. It is a small blog that sits in your sidebar. Here, you can post short entries on anything such as personal updates, recommendations of websites, links or updates of your blog.
Why should you use a Sideblog? There are several benefits for using Sideblog. You will be able to obtain more frequent updates. There are active bloggers who update several times a day, however for those who do not there will be a period of inactivity of their blogs. The only update they are getting is from the comments of the readers and visitors. A Sideblog will be useful here as it allows you to break up the inactive period.
For those who do not have sufficient time to post up a full blog post, Sideblog is useful as it allows the bloggers to post up short and quick updates. This is helpful to those who have a thought or update to share, but the amount of time is limited.
There are some readers who only read from RSS, and thus they may never have visited your blog although they may be loyal readers to your blogs. A Sideblog is separated from your main blog post feed, and thus readers will check in often to read the posts on your Sideblog. This will not only increase the number of visitors to your site, but also giving them a chance to leave comments or ad clicks.
With Sideblog, you will be able to add links to other sites that your friends are blogging, even if they are non-related to the contents of your blog. It comes with options such as preventing the search robots to search the Sideblog, and thus Sideblog allows you to add non-related links to your site. With this, you will be able to gain more friends by linking your sites to theirs and to link to friends that you have made, but cannot be linked from your main content.
Sideblog also allows the bloggers to show some of their true sides. In the blogging community, professionalism is important and bloggers work hard to retain this in their posts. This leads to good quality of articles they produced. With this plugin, a blogger will be able to show a little more of their true self. Sideblog is more personal compared to the main contents of a blog site.
The reasons to why should you use Sidebar plugin in your blogs are listed as above. There are positive feedbacks from the blogging community on this plugin.

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How to Install WordPress Plugins Easily

By on November 24, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How to Install WordPress Plugins Easily

Most plugins can be found and installed easily. You do not have to leave your WordPress website because you can install most plugins quickly from your dashboard. The search for plugins is just as simple.

Where do I find Plugins?

Simply login to your WordPress dashboard. Scroll down to “”Plugins”” then select add new. In the new window that opens to the right there is a search box. You can also see a tag cloud of popular searches. Type in your term or select one of the words.

How do I select a Plugin?

Now there should be a list of plugins for you to choose from. If you know exactly which plugin you want check the name and the plugin author to make certain you have the right one. Otherwise you want to decide which plugin will be the best one.

What can I learn from this list?

Without clicking install there is a lot to learn from this list of plugins. You can see what the name of the plugin is. The average rating, however you do not know how many people rated that plugin. Then the description of the plugin. See if the description meets your particular needs. The plugin may be related to what you need not do what you need. If you still like the plugin at this point click install.

Does it pass the Installation Screen?

A Install pop-up screen will appear. This will tell you even more about the plugin. Here you can read more about the description. To the right you can see when it was last updated. This is in days. Next you can see if it is compatible with your version of WordPress. If the version is fairly current then even if it does not list your version it will probably work. You can also see how many people download it and how many people rated it. This is good because one person giving it a 5 means less than 100 people rating it a 4.5.

Still not certain about this WordPress Plugin?

Look towards the top of the pop up. You will see description, which is what you are looking at. Click Installation, Screenshots, and other tabs. These tabs change depending on if it has information or not. Visit the Plugin Site which is on the description tab. Then visit the WordPress plugin page. Hopefully this will get you enough information.

What about installation?

If you are satisfied enough, try the plugin. Just click install, then activate. Remember you can try a plugin and if you do not like it uninstall it. Simply click installed under the plugin tab. Scroll down the list of plugins to the one you want. Then click the word deactivate. If you do not plan on using it further, click delete next. But most plugins are free, and easy to deactivate. So when you need a new one, try it, you might like it

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Ways to Choose Best WordPress Theme For Creating Your Blog

By on November 22, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Ways to Choose Best WordPress Theme For Creating Your Blog

A great thing about WordPress is that it is a storehouse of tens and thousands of free and highly customizable themes that you can download from the internet. Now the question that may come to your mind is that why would the designers offer the themes for free, particularly those known for their stunning and professional looks! Well, by doing so, they are in a way increasing their credibility amongst the common mass!

Now with so many themes available online you may find it a bit complicated when it comes to choose best WordPress theme for your blog…I guess I’m right! Well, this is where the contents of this article come into play. Here you will find innumerable considerations such as personal taste, monetization, niche and much that helps you to choose best WordPress theme without much hassle.

Choose your niche: Yes that’s the most important…I mean you need to decide what you blog is about…whether you’ll be creating a photography blog, a marketing blog and so one. None of us aren’t that insensible to choose pretty flowers or puppies as themes to create business blogs…isn’t it so! However, the same themes can work well when it comes to creating your personal blog. What I intend to say is that you choose your niche; you can choose the relevant themes accordingly!

After choosing your niche, your next job lies in flipping through the designs available in that category. Design does play a viable role when it comes to creating a blog. Make sure you choose best WordPress theme to give an attractive look to your blog. If you succeed in doing so then you are sure to attract more and more visitors to your blog.

If you are interested to make money from your blog then choosing the right design is of utmost importance. Layouts without any sidebars may be your personal taste but are you sure they will work wonders for your ads? Instead why not go for multiple and “”widgetized”” sidebars together with three column layout!

And there comes your personal taste…you are free to choose any WordPress themes for your personal blogs…all you need to do is use large fonts so that the text is readable.

A good thing that you can do when it need to choose best WordPress theme is downloading anything and everything that you find appealing. You can then sort the ones that look promising. Practicing this sorting procedure for a number of times will help you get your dream WordPress theme!

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Why should you use plugins for WordPress

By on November 22, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Why should you use plugins for WordPress?
The default WordPress comes with only basic features. Thus to make your blogs more colourful and attractive, there is a large variety of plugins available to suit what you want and your taste. These plugins will not only enhance your experience as the owner and the blogger, but also to make it more pleasant for the readers to read your blogs, leave comments or to link to your blog site.
Some of the useful plugins for WordPress users are listed as below. One of the useful plugin is WP Cache. This plugin works by caching WordPress pages and storing them in a static file for future use. It is very useful especially if you have a site with low performance server or high traffic. Instead of loading and compiling the whole PHP code before building a page from the database, WP Cache will use the files stored in the static file when needed to save more time.
For those who are selling things on their blog sites, WP eCommerce is an useful plugin. It is easy to use and you can setup the shop within a few minutes through the Admin panels. It is a shopping cart plugin for WordPress users who are selling products or services on their blog sites. There is a wide range of setting for your product or service such as downloadable products, promotions, coupon codes or product variations.
Intouch Ajax contact form is another plugin for WordPress blogs. This contact form has been known to be useful and it filters all spams. Apart from filtering all spam messages, it has the option where you can customize the email subject, addition of form fields and thank you messages. It allows you to insert a custom-made contact form and the information will be sent via email.
Ajax Post Rating plugin adds a 5-star Ajax rating system to your pages and posts. It allows readers to rate your pages and posts either daily, weekly or monthly. Another similar plugin is Ajax Polls. This plugin is very flexible with lots of features. Other option available for this plugin is it allows you to archive the polls and the layout is customizable via Admin panels.
Another useful plugin is Ajax Comment plugin. It is a simple but effective comment plugin as it checks whether all fields are filled correctly, makes sure that there is no duplication of comments and it has flood protection capability too.
Digg This is another WordPress plugin which detects incoming links from Digg.com website to your WordPress posts. It will then automatically display a link to the post from Digg.com so that people will be able to digg your story. An email will be sent to the admin of the site once a dig is recognized.
The above are only a few of thousands of plugins for WordPress bloggers. It is worth the time to research around to search for plugins that will enhance your blogging experience. Plugins are a necessity not only for the blogger, but also for the readers.

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