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WordPress – The Pros and Cons of Hosting Your Website on the WordPress Website

By on May 8, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

WordPress – The Pros and Cons of Hosting Your Website on the WordPress Website

When starting out with your online business you probably want to set it up as cheaply as possible, and this includes the setting up of your website too. WordPress is often the platform of choice for those just starting out online, without the budget to hire someone to create a website for them, it offers the cheapest and most versatile option.

Setting up your first website in WordPress is a great idea for so many reasons. If you are unsure about which business you want to go into, setting up a WordPress site, whether it’s hosted or self-hosted, is a cheap way of making a mistake if you decide to change your mind and do something else, so there is little or no risk. You can get some WordPress experience through trial and error for very little cost that you can take with you to your next website or just perfect the website you already have.

For those with a very limited budget is can seem that hosting your website at WordPress.com is the best option, as there is no cash outlay, no real technical skills are required and being hosted on the WordPress site you would presume it would be very secure so no likelihood of anyone hacking into your website. However, there are some limitations with this method and to understand what they are you need to look further down the life of both your business and your website.

Although there are hundreds of free and paid WordPress templates available, you may want more flexibility on how that template looks. You may want to change the color scheme or change an image and customize the WordPress template more to your liking and for this you need access to the templates css (cascading style sheets) files. This is a paid upgrade option for those websites hosted at WordPress.com.

Many WordPress templates will come with a variety of options so that you can edit the template very easily from your WordPress dashboard. Just look out for these within the “”add new template”” option on your dashboard. To edit an image or a header and that option doesn’t appear in within the template dashboard, you need access to the images located in the hosting file, which you do not have access to. So just be aware of this.

Another thing you need to take into consideration is both your technical knowledge as well as the software you have available to actually edit your images. If you don’t have technical knowledge nor editing software then you should look for templates that you won’t want to edit in any way. This goes for self hosted WordPress websites too.

Also, if you want to offer free reports or audios to the visitors of your website, you will be unable to upload them to your WordPress site as you don’t have hosting access. Depending on how you see your website developing this may or may not affect your decision on choosing a WordPress hosted website or not.

If you want to just get used to WordPress and try different things out then by all means register your chosen website at WordPress.com. Please note that your URL, or web address, will be a subdomain of WordPress, for example mychosensite.wordpress.com and it doesn’t really give a professional image to your business, however it will make you more confident using your WordPress website. You can always buy a domain and forward it to your WordPress.com website if you decide to keep this as your main website.

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How Do You Go About Comparing Shopping Cart Software

By on March 28, 2012 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

How Do You Go About Comparing Shopping Cart Software?

Anyone who desires a successful Internet business understands the importance of a good shopping cart. There are so many shopping carts online now that it can be difficult to wade through all your choices to locate the one that will work best for you.

One way of knowing which shopping cart is best for you is to read shopping cart product reviews that you can find online and in IT magazines. Read about what others think of the shopping carts, make note of the features discussed and compare what is offered to what you need.

Another way to find what is the best shopping cart software for your business is to do some comparison-shopping yourself using a list of what you need in a shopping cart and your budget.

When you have pared down the possible candidates to just a few, then it is time to look at live stores that use each of the candidates shopping cart programs. Notice how easy or not it is to navigate, search for products, add to or delete products from the shopping cart and the features available for the customer. Look to see if the shopping cart software companies offer a customer service and give them a try to see how they respond to you.

When you are paring down your list of possible shopping cart candidates do it by comparing price, feature, and by reading the reviews of each shopping cart. Look for the shopping carts that seem to be up to date on the latest technology, are easily integrated with payment processors and your Website. Make sure you discard the shopping carts that are older or have lower quality.

When investigating live stores that use the various shopping carts that you have pared down your candidates to you want to get a feel for how the shopping carts work when in use. Typically the shopping cart companies will provide a list of several online stores that use their shopping cart. Some of the things you will be looking for are how well the shopping cart blends in with the Website and does each store look different from the others? Actually use the shopping carts on these stores to see how the carts perform.

When filtering out the candidates use a list of the top 3 things that you are looking for in a shopping cart and if a candidate does not have one of the top 3 than cross it off your list. Make a list of the features that are important to you and which ones you cannot do without this will help to narrow down your list of candidates.

If you know you will be using electronic certificates that cross off any shopping carts that do not offer this feature.

Make sure you investigate how good each company’s customer service department is by sending them each an email asking some pre-sale questions and make notes about how fast they respond, if they respond with a canned reply or really give you individual attention.

Do the candidate shopping cart companies have technical support? Take a look at the FAQs and index of help topics to see how helpful they are and if they are easy to understand. Download the user guide and review it to see if it is understandable.

Read shopping cart review from respected sources to see what is recommended. See if you can find user reviews on each of the shopping carts that you have decided are the biggest contenders for your money.

Once you have your list narrowed down to just 3 or 5 shopping cart software companies than it is time to look at the total cost of using each shopping cart, and also look at what the strong points are for each of the remaining carts.

Look at price, features and support and make your best decision.

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Steps to Dominating a Niche with Blogs

By on March 4, 2012 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

Steps to Dominating a Niche with Blogs If you want to dominate a niche on the internet with blogs nowadays it’s completely possible and although it will require a lot work the payoff is huge. Not many webmasters or companies can say that they dominate there niche and it’s very difficult to do, but with the right planning you could do it. The first thing you need to do is choose your niche, which should be something you enjoy and are familiar with. Don’t choose a niche that is overcrowded with webmasters though because then ranking your blogs with become a lot more difficult and in some cases nearly impossible. You don’t want to compete against any big companies for search engine rankings, because most of the time there budget is a lot larger then your budget is and you don’t need that hassle. Once you a narrow down a niche that isn’t very competitive then you need to begin planning out your exact plan so that you can simply follow through on the plan. Also don’t expect to be dominating a niche in a week either as it takes time and hard work. The number one reason why webmasters don’t succeed is because they give up without allowing their websites enough time to establish themselves and earn money. Step One The first thing that you need to do is establish an authority blog, which should cover the entire niche. Your niche should be small enough that you can have an authority blog ranking for many of the terms in the niche. You should spend a couple months establishing this blog before moving much deeper into your network of blogs. Once you have some traffic and rankings then you can begin to expand. Step Two Once you have your authority blog established then you need to know break down your niche into anywhere from three to ten categories. You’ll know create a blog for each of those categories and begin adding content to them as much as possible in the beginning. Content is important on blogs and you need as much of it as possible so never think you’re writing too much. The traffic you get from these blogs should be targeted and could earn you some good money. Step Three In this step you’ll be creating small blogs that simply consist of only a few pages a piece. These blogs will be used to promote the different products in your niche. These are the small websites that you’ll be sending your blog traffic to in order to convert them into customers. Blogs can build up great search engine traffic and this is the best traffic to sell products to which is why you should send all your blog traffic to these websites. As these blogs age you’ll also begin getting traffic from search engines for the keywords you targeted. As you can see if you follow these three simple steps then you’ll be able to dominate a niche within one year pending the competition isn’t to stiff. You’ll need to of course spend long hours building links and traffic to the blogs in order to have any success, but if you do the work then the money will follow. Nothing is handed to you on a silver platter in the online world so always be willing to work for what you need or else find a typically 9-5 job now before you waste anymore time online.

 

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WordPress Plugins – What Are Their Security Risks

By on December 16, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

WordPress Plugins – What Are Their Security Risks?

The WordPress platform owes a lot of its popularity to the availability of thousands of plugins that perform any function a site owner may need. Simply put if you need to do something there is probably an existing plugin to do it. But what are the security risks that come with installing WordPress plugins? I will tie these threats to the central principles of information security which include Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability.

Confidentiality – Goal is to prevent the disclosure of information to unauthorized individuals or systems

Integrity – Goal is to ensure that data cannot be modified without detection

Availability – Goal is to ensure your site is available when someone tries to access it.

Plugins vary in code size from very simple to very complex. 99.9% of plugin users do not have the time or expertise to do a security review of the code prior to installing a plugin. That means you are at the mercy of the developer that nothing malicious has been programmed into the plugin that could affect the confidentiality, integrity and availability of your site. For this reason it is best to stick with WordPress plugins that have a large user base and come from more trusted sources.

Plugins are primarily developed by individual developers or very small teams with limited budget for testing. That means if you are an early adopter of a plugin you are the equivalent of a beta tester so it is wise to avoid being on the bleeding edge of adopting a new plugin version unless there is a security vulnerability in the old version that is actively being exploited in the wild. Otherwise you risk something going wrong with the plugin that could negatively impact the availability of your site. For this reason it is important to have a viable backup of your site prior to installing a new plugin or upgraded a currently installed one.

When you install a WordPress Plugin you are installing an application. That means you should careful consider whether you need and intend to use the plugin regularly. Each plugin installed required additional site administrative overhead in the form of applying upgrades to ensure you are running the latest version. For this reason it is important to only install plugins that will be activated on your site and plugins not active should be removed to eliminate a potential source of vulnerability.

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Tips to Make Money with your PPC Ads

By on October 2, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Tips to Make Money with your PPC Ads

If you’ve begun implementing PPC ads into your arsenal of marketing, but are having trouble making money off of your ads then follow these tips. I will be sharing will you some tips that will help you turn your PPC ads into profit pulling machines. When you first jump into PPC ads it’s difficult to get a high quality score and it’s even harder to make a profit. If you try implementing the below tips into your PPC ad campaigns I can assure you that you’ll be happy with the results.

#1 – Always go for Long-Tail Keywords

Whenever you set-up a new campaign you should only target long-tail keywords in your campaigns. You need to think about what the person will search for when looking for the information on your blog. For instance if you sell doctor notes then instead of targeting doctor notes you could target phrases such as Fake Doctor Notes, Buy Doctor Notes among many others. The best way to find long-tail keywords to target in your campaigns is to utilize a keyword tool.

#2 – Target Buying Keywords

What I mean when I say you should target buying keywords is simple, you should think about what someone would search for when ready to buy a product. Bid on keywords with the product name, review keywords and comparing keywords. These keywords will turn in the highest conversion ratio and this is what you want to be aiming for in PPC campaigns.

#3 – Create Targeted Ads & Creatives

You want your ads and creatives to be targeted around a small set of keywords which are all highly targeted towards what you’re selling or promoting. The more targeted your ads are the higher quality score you’ll have and the better luck you’ll have with PPC.

Turning PPC campaigns into profits isn’t rocket science, but it isn’t simple either. When you first start out expect to have a small budget that you can waste for testing purposes. Take a few products from different niches and begin doing small tests on the niches. See which one converts the highest and which one is bringing in the most profit. Once you have a good niche that is converting well then start spending more on your campaigns in that niche.

When you run a PPC ad campaign you need to check the results each and everyday. If you don’t then you risk losing too much wasted money especially in the early stages. A lot of PPC ads is testing and once you find out what converts then you just need to ride that wave until it ends. Once it ends then you need to have other campaigns running to create your revenue. Never just rely on one product because you never know when the money from that product could stop rolling in.

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