Wei's Blogger: How to Market Yourself Online

How to Market Yourself Online

Download How To Get Clients the full eBook

How to set up a website

Installing WordPress

What to write about in your blog

Optimize your site for search engines

How to get links to your website

Adding images to WordPress posts

Offering RSS Feeds and email subscription

Making a contact page

And finally...

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Contents

3 Contents page

Introduction

I’m really grateful to you for taking the time to download and look at this eBook and I really hope you find it useful and enjoy it. (And please let me know if you don’t!) Marketing is one of the most important things any professional or company will do.Internet and content marketing is in it’s infancy and the business is only just startingto figure out how powerful it is. It’s essential you become a part of it now, if youhaven’t already. If you already have a blog and are already active in social media,this book will give you some tips on how to maximize these exciting new tools.

Is it easy?

It’s not difficult, but it is important to remember that you can’t cheat the system.There is no easy course of action.However, if you have quality content and quality inbound links then targeted traffic and customers will come your way. Of course, this is easier said than done. But,blogging and internet marketing require patience. Although, you may get lucky and see instant results, you’re in it for the long term – it takes a while to secure a reputation. However, if you proceed with internet marketing as laid out in this eBook, a little bit every day, a blog post every week. You will go a long way to securing lead generating content online that will be there forever, working to bring traffic to your website and business to your company.

Again, please don’t hesitate to contact me if you wish to discuss any of the contents of this document.

Enjoy ...

How to set up a website

The first thing you need to do is to set up a website if you haven’t already. Your website is the hub on your online life. All the work you do on the internet will point back to your site. Websites need authority and reputation and that is built up over months and years. So every second you spend thinking about creating a website is an authoritygathering second wasted.

It is almost impossible to make “bad” or “wrong” decisions with websites as they can be corrected. On the web, content is separated from design. So if you think you have made a mistake with the look of the site, it is possible to change it without touching the content. The content can be held in a database which can be moved from webserver to webserver, from web address to web address, from Content Management System to Content Management System.

There are four things you need to do when setting up your website:

• Decide on the website’s purpose

• Decide on your website address (URL)

• Register it

• Find a web host

Decide on the website’s purpose

The first thing you must decide upon (or, most likely, you have decided already) is it’s purpose. What do you want your website to do for its visitors and what do you want its visitors to do with the website?

How to decide on your web address

Many people spend hours thinking up a catchy URL (Uniform Resource Locator) or website address. The most important SEO (Search Engine Optimization) point is to include some keywords. Your URL doesn’t have to be your name or your company name so why not increase your chances of being found in searches before you’ve even written a web page? So, if you are a web designer, why not try webdesigner dot com? (OK, it’s already gone, but you know what I mean).

I would always prefer a “dot com” to any other extension like “dot net” or “dot me”.Try not to use hyphens before the dot com.You can test out domain names at any domain name registrar. Which brings me on to the next thing you have to do.

Once you have decided on the name of your website it is necessary to register it. I use GoDaddy. GoDaddy are the market leaders. But have 123-Reg, Enom, NameCheap, and Network Solutions.One thing I would suggest is not to use your domain name registrar as your host. I like to keep the two operations separate because if you have a problem with one it is easier to move. And, specifically, GoDaddy has a dreadful reputation as a host.

It should cost around $10 a year. When you register a domain name, your contact details are included in a publicly available database known as the Whois database.You can spend slightly more to hide these details.

Search engines prefer if the domain is registered for a longer time into the future sotthat you don’t look like a fly-by-night website. This is not a huge issue but it’s better to register for three years rather than the minimum one year if you’re serious about the website - and it’ll be marginally cheaper as well.

How to choose a web host?

The web hosting industry is highly competitive with seemingly hundreds of

companies offering similar packages. Here are some of the things you need to take into account.If you are going to build a self-hosted WordPress site, which is what I recommend,then you are better off using a host that uses a Unix operating system rather than aWindows one. Secondly you will need to decide between Shared, VPS and Dedicated hosting. Shared hosting means your website will sit on a server with scored of other website whereas Dedicated means you’ll have a whole server to yourself. Shared should cost you about $5 a month; Dedicated is much more. would recommend Shared hosting if you’re just starting out – you can always upgrade later.

The minimum specifications for the hosting of a WordPress blog are PHP 4.3 or greater, MySQL 4.0 or greater and the mod_rewrite Apache module (only available on UNIX servers). PHP is scripting language; MySQL is a database server. These are fairly standard specifications and will be offered by most quality web hosts but make sure you check!

Here are some other important points to look out for:

• Disk space. Once you have a host you will find it useful for a number of things not just your website. It is another bit of computer space to use. You can use it as your own personal FTP site for storing information. If you think you need this facility go for a web host that’s offering tons of disk space.

• Monthly transfer / Bandwidth. This refers to how much your website is accessed.For example, if your website consists of one page of 1MB (very unlikely) and is visited by ten people a month, you would need more than 10MB of monthly transfer to facilitate this. Of course most website pages are less than 100K so, unless you are expecting huge amounts of visitors, 10GB/month will be enough at first and your web host will be able to offer you more as your website increases in popularity. Keep your eye on it though. How?

• cPanel. cPanel is the most advanced web hosting control panel in the industry,designed to simplify administration of a website and I would recommend choosing a host that offers it or something similar. Through the cPanel you can set up and read email, manage and edit your website’s files, monitor your website’s traffic (making sure you don’t exceed any bandwidth or space restrictions), and loads of other things including backing up a MySQL database which is essential for good WordPress maintenance. cPanel sometimes comes bundled with Fantastico which is a set of scripts which automate the installation of, but not always the update of, CMSs such as SMF, phpBB, Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress and over 50 others, although I would not install WordPress this way.

• The validity of your web host. I would only choose a web host that had a

professional looking website. Also, I would definitely insist on 24/7 email support,personally I wouldn’t mind if it didn’t have phone support.

Best shared host for WordPress (if you’re starting out)

Shared web hosting is a service where many websites reside on one web server connected to the internet. It is generally the most economical option for hosting, as many people share the overall cost of server maintenance. However, being the cheapest package, it has its disadvantages. Firstly, it usually has a reduced level of security as you are sharing the server with several other websites. Shared hosting also has limited resources causing speed issues at both the back and front ends of your site.

Maybe you are just starting out as a blogger, or maybe you are using WordPress for your new website. Maybe you are probably not expecting thousands or even hundreds of visitors a day. Does this sound like you? Then you need a shared host.I contacted hundreds of WordPress experts and high end webmasters with hundreds of sites on their books who have been around the block as far as web hosts are concerned – many of them were using 3 or 4 shared hosts for multiple sites.

The three most important factors we discussed in the survey were: speed, reliability and quality of support. Here are the four hosts who came out as the best shared hosts for WordPress by WordPress professionals:

• JustHost. JustHost started providing high quality hosting services in 2008, so,compared to other hosting companies, JustHost is a new kid on the block. But nonetheless it scored high on our three hosting factors: speed, reliability and quality of support.

• Bluehost. The general consensus seems to be that Bluehost is inexpensive and has many powerful tools but support is maybe where it lacks the most. BlueHost is one of the 20 largest web hosts, collectively hosting well over 450000 domains with its sister company, HostMonster.

• Hostgator. The company was founded in 2002 by Chairman Brent Oxley, who

started the company from his dorm room at university. With over two million

domains, HostGator hosts approximately 1% of the world’s internet traffic. They

came up many times in our survey as being a reliable host.

• Dreamhost. Reasonably priced, good support, fantastic recommendations.

Unlimited space and bandwidth. Dreamhost have their own award-winning

user’s control panel.

Best VPS hosts for WordPress (if you want a little extra speed)

Virtual private server (VPS) hosting could be a solution if you have outgrown your

shared hosting and don’t need to move to a dedicated server. It is the best option for

small to medium sized businesses. A site hosted on a VPS gets its own RAM and

disk space, however, it shares the processing capacity (CPU) with other sites.

Remember, Google includes a site’s speed into it’s algorithm – so a faster running

site is not only good for your visitors but also good for rankings.

I contacted the same WordPress experts to ask them about their experiences and

recommendations. Speed, reliability, ease of use and quality of support are again

important factors when looking for a VPS hosts. Here are the most recommended

VPS hosts:

• A2 hosting. Inexpensive and their support comes highly recommended. 128 MB

RAM, 1 GB storage, 100GB bandwidth for $10.46/month. You can get cPanel with higher specs for $17.46/month.

• Dreamhost. Reasonably priced, good support, fantastic recommendations. This is my choice! 300MB RAM, unlimited space and bandwidth. Dreamhost have their

own award-winning user’s control panel. For $15/month.

• Liquidweb. Their VPS plans start at $60/month and include cPanel as well as root access, 384MB RAM, 20GB storage, 400GB bandwidth, 4 IP addresses.

• Rackspace. Their users had nothing but good things to say about Rackspace.

Cloud Sites™ runs on a series of clusters so it has redundancy and protection

built in. When you upload your site or web based application, multiple instances

of it run so that even if an entire server goes down your site stays up and

running. They have their own cloud control panel proprietary GUI to navigate

you through the clouds. Cloud Sites™ start at $149/month.

• VPS.net. By default everything is command line; cPanel is an extra $10 a month.

376MB RAM, 10GB storage, 250GB bandwidth for £15/month per node. (I don’t

know why they have the monthly price in pounds but the cPanel extra in

dollars!) But again, their users were extremely complimentary.

So, I’ve got a web address and a host, now what do I do?

Your new host should give you 4 useful pieces of information:

• IP or FTP address. An IP address is a unique number that every computer

connected to the internet is assigned. It consists of 4 numbers separated by dots.

This is the IP address of your server’s computer, not your personal computer. Or

an FTP address may look like this: ftp.yoursite.com

• Your username.

• A password. These first 3 are necessary for uploading files to the server.

• Domain Name Servers/System/Service (DNS). A very important link between

your domain name and IP address.

If, as I suggest, you register your domain name with a company other than your

host you will need to return to your domain name registrar’s website and fill in the

name servers (usually one primary and one secondary) you got from your host.

That done, wait 24 hours (usually much less), and you can create your new website.

Next, use your favorite FTP client (eg. Filezilla) and, with the IP address, username

and password, you can log on to your host. You may find quite a few directories.

Look for one called “public_html” or “html_docs” or similar. This is where your

website should go.

Use your favorite text editor (for example, TextEdit for Mac; Notepad for PC) and

make a new plain text document, write a message in it (for example, “Hello, world!”)

and save it as “index.html”. Upload the “index.html” file. Now if you type in your

domain name in a browser it will display your message.

Congratulations, you have just created a website!

How to set up WordPress

What is WordPress?

WordPress is a robust and feature-full web publishing platform (or Content

Management System - CMS) with a focus on aesthetics, web standards and usability.

It is well designed and structured for search engine optimization and this is my

preferred method of creating and updating content for visitors, clients and search

engines alike.

It’s free. It’s easy to use. There is excellent support documentation and forums

because, literally, millions use it. It’s database driven so you can transport it to

another CMS if you really want to. Anyone can edit the site (with a username and

password) from anywhere in the world. There are many different themes designed

that you can dress it up in.

You can add loads of functionality to your website very easily, for example, search,

sitemap, RSS feeds, comment forms, contact forms, galleries, etc.

How to install WordPress on your host server

Of course, there is great information on how to install WordPress on the WordPress site and many hosts will offer a one-click install option (look for Fantastico! in the cPanel if you have one).

I prefer the famous 5 minute installation which took me half an hour the first time I did it and even now takes at least 10 minutes! Setting up WordPress on your host server is a task that prepares you for the process of owning and maintaining and constantly updated professional-looking website!

Conclusion

It’s not just me that expounds the virtues of WordPress, it’s used by over 2% of the

10,000 biggest websites and is the most popular blogging software in use today.

There is no way you’ll be making a mistake by choosing WordPress.

What to write about in your blog

So you’ve got your WordPress blog set up and you are just starting to write.

Words are, in my opinion, the most important thing on a website. This is because the search engine robots that crawl the web every day can pretty much “read” what

you’ve written, but they can’t look at your website and think “mmm, nice graphics!” For me, there’s two things to think about when writing. One is keywords; the other is making sure you’re writing stuff that people are going to want to read.

Keywords in your content

Keywords are what people type into a search engine (Google, for example) in order to find websites. Remember at the very beginning of this book I advised you to use Google’s keyword research tool before you set up your website? Well, I want you to keep using it while you’re creating content for your website. It is important to keyword research every topic you consider writing about so you can check which words are being used by people searching with Google.

Now there are good and bad ways to introduce keywords into your website text for SEO purposes, but I’ll come to that later. For the time being, if you are a designer for example, you should write about – guess what? – design.

Use keywords in the title and body of your articles with the most important being

the most frequent. But, there is only one way to do this – naturally.

How would you rather read about a subject you’re interested in – in an ad or an

article? It’s so much better to read the considered thoughts of an expert in a field

rather than the hurried ramblings of someone who just wants to make money.

And, here’s how you make money:

Write content that people will want to read

Write intelligently and lucidly about what you know best.

Remember, you are an expert, we all are. You’ve spent your life doing something – it doesn’t matter what it is – that something is useful to somebody. This to me is the crux of what internet marketing is all about.

When you write about your specialities you will naturally attract to your website

those who are your best customers. Let me explain, I do graphic design and

marketing, now graphic design and marketing are huge fields, it would be nuts for

me to market myself in this area and leave it at that. So I specialize – every

organization does.

So I’ve written tutorials for Photoshop and Illustrator, blog posts about delivering advertising messages with graphics, articles about web and print production. Other articles have been solely responsible for me landing certain jobs. The subjects of these have been: interactive and rich media PDFs; pop art; creating countries’ map outlines and flags; WordPress for website creation. Quite a mixed bag. But if someone wants to ask me to do something I’m always grateful for the work! Constantly ask yourself when you write something if you really are sure about it.Very often in our professional careers it’s easy to believe certain things by hearsay or rumor. Use the internet and any other resource to back up your assertionsthoroughly before you publish your post. So when writing about your specialties, do you spill the beans and reveal all your trade secrets or do you hold back on certain information hoping to retain the power of knowledge from your competitors? I would always favor the former rather than the latter.

I would encourage anyone to put as much detail into their descriptive articles as

possible. I’m sure it won’t harm your business to reveal the correct and best

practices that you use. Transparency in governments is considered to be ethical so I would encourage anyone to be open as possible in their own organization.

Your potential clients won’t have the time or the inclination to use this information

to do the job themselves and this priceless insight will win you kudos for your

generosity. (And, of course, valuable information on the internet will be linked to

raising the profile of your site and have it appear higher in search engines’ results,

more information to come on SEO later in the document.)

For me this is kind of business karma. Take Matt Mullenweg, for example, the

founding developer of WordPress – the most popular and best blogging software

that has empowered millions of ordinary people to publish in a beautiful way for

free. Matt is listed in Business Week’s 25 Most Influential People on the Web. My point is that Matt’s initial and ongoing commitment to open source software –

giving out good stuff for free – has helped him in his brilliant career.

So I would advise virtually anyone to get a WordPress site and start writing on the

cutting edge of what they know best. The advantages you will see in your

community, your networking and your client list will far outweigh the effort.

Conclusion

Add keywords to your blog titles, tags and post contents – but add them naturally

and keep it real.

Write about the interesting developments at the cutting edge of your industry.

Remember, biggest beneficiary of a blog post is the blog author - you learn a lot from getting your facts right!

Optimizing your site for search engines

WordPress is pretty well structured for SEO anyway but there are a number of

things you can do to improve it’s performance thus winning you more visitors,

collaborators and clients.

Get the right URLs

As discussed earlier, by default WordPress uses web URLs which have question

marks and lots of numbers in them (for example: http://www.your-site.com/?p=N). It’s not good and it’s not pretty. In the WordPress admin panel go Settings >

Permalinks. What format is the best to choose? I would go for /%postname%/. This is best because the URLs to articles should never change and it gets keyword rich page titles in there separated by hyphens (for example: http://www.your-site.com/keyword-rich-post/). But, remember, don’t stuff any area with your keywords. Just use them naturally.

Title tags

The most important part of a web page in terms of SEO is the title. Optimize what

goes in between and on the top of your browser window (you can’t see it in Google Chrome you have to click on the Window option at the end and then you’ll see the Title with a check beside it.) So put your keywords into the name of your WordPress blog which is put in the title tag of every page of your website.

Search engines put more weight on the early words so it is better to have your page title (and then category) to come before your site title. There are many ways of doing this. I would recommend that you use the HeadSpace plugin, All in One

SEO plugin or Yoast SEO plugin.

Further reading

Here are a couple of pages I have found to be very useful for SEO and WordPress:

• SEO for WordPress – The only guide you’ll ever need by Glen Alsopp

• WordPress SEO by Joost de Valk

How to get links to your WordPress website

There are two sides of a coin when considering how to market your site on the

internet.

Firstly, concentrate on the site itself: write regularly updated quality content and

optimize the site for search engines. Secondly, by concentrating off the site: getting quality sites to link to yours.

Introduction

As I’ve said before in this book, there is no way to cheat the system. Employ these

link building methods in an honest and respectful way. There is no quick and easy

solution to link building and SEO. It takes time to do and time to see the results.

Why get links? Simply, more links = more traffic.

But also, Google (and other search engines) counts a link as a “vote” for your site.

The more votes for your site, the higher your site will feature in their search results. But it is important what sort of page is linking to your site.

Here is what Google says about links:

Links help our crawlers find your site and can give your site greater visibility in our search results. When returning results for a search, Google combines PageRank (our view of a page’s importance) with sophisticated text-matching techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant to each search. Google counts the number of votes a page receives as part of its PageRank assessment, interpreting a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

But the relevance of the inbound link is also important. Get links from sites that are

in a similar area of business to yours.

Here are some tried and tested ways of getting good relevant inbound links to your

site. (Apart from having quality content!!!)

Write articles for articles sites and other blogs

In order to move up the search engines results pages you’re not only going to have

to write articles for your blog but you must also write articles for other websites in return for links. One way you can do this is by writing articles for articles sites.

Google has recently updated their algorithm to downgrade the effect of links from

article directories and content farms. Nevertheless, this remains a way to get some

decent links to your sites and should always be a part of any SEO strategy.

Always write original and good content for submission to article directories (but it

doesn’t have to be as good as your blog’s content). Only submit an article once to an article site, although you can re-write the same article for submission on several article sites. Add your link with your keywords as anchor text in the author information section.You may also like to write a compelling and newsworthypress release about developments in your business or site. Submit it to PRWeb or PRLeap.Your article or press release will sit on these sites for months and years to come with a link back to your site. Also write for other blogs in your niche, again specifying the anchor text for the link you get in return for the article.

Comment on other blogs

If you read a good article on a blog, why not spend a few minutes writing to say

what you liked about the post and see if you can add anything to the discussion?

People may follow the link from the comment to your site.

These comment links back to your site may not provide you with any link juice.

The nofollow/dofollow issue and an explanation of “Link Juice”

Link Juice is the name given to the PageRank (and other things) passed from one page to another via a link. Because a lot of blogs, forums, social bookmarking sites and even some directories are “nofollow” you will not get any link juice from links from these sites.

What is a “nofollow” link? rel=”nofollow” is a piece of HTML that is used to instruct search engines that the link should not influence the target’s ranking. In other words, a nofollow link sends traffic but not PageRank.Some webmasters and blog owners actually want to reward commenters with a bit of

link juice and remove the rel=”nofollow” tag. So if you comment on these blogs your PageRank and, ultimately, your place in the search engine rankings will improve. Lists of “dofollow” or “nonofollow” blogs do exist but I would exercise caution here.Commenting on these blogs with a few words such as “nice post, dude” and entering your keywords instead of your name will not help you. Comments such as these will be deleted immediately (they may not even make it on to the page) and will serve only to make you unpopular with the very people you need to get on with. As always with SEO, act honestly.

I used to have a “dofollow” blog but I stopped because of too much comment spam.

Social bookmarking sites

People submit links of content they like on the web to social bookmarking sites such as Digg, delicious, StumbleUpon and Technorati.

You can create a page of your own favorite links and include a few back to your site.

If your links are considered a good resource by others they will follow them,

including the ones to your site, and you may get more links from them.

Social bookmarking is a great way to promote your site, network with other people in your area of expertise and find new ideas and information to help you develop your site. But don’t over-submit your own content or you will be penalized. If you’re offering something valuable you will reap rewards.

As with all these sites, like Digg and StumbleUpon, try to follow as many people as possible, it is easy to do this fairly quickly if you search for people with certain

keywords in their profile.

Link to other sites

Link to sites as you would like sites to link to you.

If you find some valuable information or resource related to your field then link to it from your site. But do this in the correct way. Write good anchor text for the link. The anchor text or link label is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. The words contained in the anchor text are weighted highly by search engines. So when you are linking to some other page say what it is (and maybe something nice!).

So do this:

<a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page”>Wikipedia</a>

or this:

<a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page”>Wikipedia, is amazing multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia </a>

but not this:

<a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page”>Click here</a> for Wikipedia

The webmaster or blog owner will see this lovely inbound link with good anchor

text and may return the favor one day.

Also certain blogs will automatically publish a trackback to your site when you link to it. These trackbacks can produce traffic and, in a minority of cases, link juice – but, again, don’t abuse!

Forums

Whenever you join a new forum put some links in your signature. If there is a

thread on a forum where the question can be answered by one of your blog posts

then put the link a post on that thread. But, as with all these things, don’t abuse and

put your links everywhere!

Submit to directories

It’s tedious and depressing and should only be done for 10-15 minutes at a time with some musical accompaniment but here’s a list of 50 free directories with good Google PageRank with no reciprocal link needed.

Reciprocal links and three way link exchanges

Reciprocal links are the “I’ll scratch your back” method of SEO. You link to them if they link to you. The benefit of doing this is considered to be extremely limited.

What may be slightly better is a three way link exchange where site A links to site B and site C links to site A. This creates the illusion of a one way link in the eyes of the search engines. When partaking in this form of linking I would be cautious of link building companies. Regularly check to see if their link to you stays there as many will delete these links a few weeks after they are set up. And try keep them relevant to your site’s subject matter.

Conclusion

So, what’s the best method of ensuring good in-bound links? Content. If you

haven’t got anything anybody wants, not many people will link to you.

Go about the above techniques with respect for other sites and for the subject matter

– keep it real and honest. And, in my opinion, limit these link building activities to

less than an hour a week. You’ll go mad otherwise and it’ll make sure you’re not

diverted from the main goal – quality content!

You can get links back to your website by: writing articles for other sites;

commenting on other blogs; and submitting your links as well as others to social

bookmarking and social networking sites. And don’t forget to pay attention to the

anchor text!

Adding images to WordPress posts

As mentioned previously, images are an extremely important side of SEO. If they

are uploaded with correct and keyword-rich names and alt texts they can pull in a

valuable amount of targeted traffic.

How to insert images from your computer via the Visual editor into a WordPress post or page

So you’ve got your image which has been named correctly with no spaces and a .

jpg, .gif or .png at the end (for example brown-bear-in-forest.jpg - upper and lower case letters are irrelevant here, best stick to lowercase with hyphens). Click the first icon top left after the words “Upload/Insert”, if you hover over it the tooltip will be “Add an Image”. In the resulting dialog box you can click “Select Files” to get the image from your computer. (I would choose the Browser uploader rather than the Flash uploader).Once the image is uploaded you will see another dialog box with the image’sthumbnail displayed.

Firstly, look at the dimensions and check if the image isn’t wider than the pixel

width of your blog post (if it is too big you can check a smaller size in the box below– we’ll come to that later).

Secondly and importantly, write an Alternate text for the image. This is how you

would describe the image to a blind person. So, in our example the Alternate text

would be “European Brown Bear walking through the forests of Finland”.Remember, this is crawled by the search engines so put keywords in where appropriate!

Make sure the Title and Link URL fields are both blank. This is if you wish a larger version of a photo to be view independently of the blog post. I think 99% of the time you won’t want to do this.

If you have a large image (of, say, 400 pixels wide) you may want to put it on it’s

own after a paragraph of text. To do this make sure you have hit Return before

clicking the Add an Image icon . And whilst in the adding image dialog box, under

Alignment, click “Center”.

If you have a smaller image of, maybe, 200 pixels or less width, you may want to

insert it into a paragraph with the text flowing around it. If so, make sure your

cursor is blinking next to the word at the beginning of the paragraph you want the

image to go in when you click the add image icon. And whilst in the Add an Image

dialog box click, under Alignment click “Left” or “Right”.

One last thing to consider when uploading images is their size. If you want the

image to be the same size as it is on your computer click Full Size under Size. If you want the image to be a bit smaller you can choose Thumbnail or Medium.

If you want to write a caption you may.

Lastly, click “Insert into Post”. If you’ve made a mistake you can always click the

image in the Visual editor and click on the “mountain” icon, then click “Advanced

Settings” and here you can change many of the above variables. Otherwise, delete

the image and start again.

If your image is not displaying to the left or right correctly or the caption does not

appear close enough to image the put this code in your theme’s CSS:

.aligncenter, div.aligncenter {

display: block;

margin-left: auto;

margin-right: auto;

}

.alignleft {

float: left;

}

.alignright {

float: right;

}

.wp-caption {

border: 1px solid #ddd;

text-align: center;

background-color: #f3f3f3;

padding-top: 4px;

margin: 10px;

-moz-border-radius: 3px;

-khtml-border-radius: 3px;

-webkit-border-radius: 3px;

border-radius: 3px;

}

.wp-caption img {

margin: 0;

padding: 0;

border: 0 none;

}

.wp-caption p.wp-caption-text {

font-size: 11px;

line-height: 17px;

padding: 0 4px 5px;

margin: 0;

}

It says in the WordPress Codex that “Each theme should have these or similar styles in its style.css file to be able to display images and captions properly”. But I can tell you many themes don’t has this code in there. Probably because theme designers like to style images and captions themselves and don’t realise that WordPress can do it for you.

How to insert images manually into a WordPress post or page

There are two main ways to put an image into a post. One way is to make the image straddle the whole width of the text. To be able to get the image to fit snuggly into the box you are writing you need to know the width in pixels of the blog post. You can find this information out using Chrome’s Developer Tools or the Firebug plugin for Firefox.

Once you have done this you need to re-size your image to that pixel width using

photo editing software such as Photoshop or an online resizing service and upload it using an FTP client to your website, preferably into a directory called “images”.

Once that is done you can enter this code into the HTML text editor:

Remember to add two returns above and below it in the HTML text editor. Also,

don’t forget to write good keyword rich and descriptive file names and alt text for

the image.

The other method is to add a less wide image to the left or the right of the main

body of text and have the text wrap around it. In this case you don’t want to add

any returns after the code as you want the text to run adjacent to it. Simply insert

this into the beginning of a paragraph to insert an image on the left hand side of the

text:

<img src=”http://your-site.com/images/image.jpg” style=”float: left;

margin: 0px 10px 0px 0px;” alt=””/>

And here is the code for inserting an image on the right hand side of the text:

<img src=”http://your-site.com/images/image.jpg” style=”float: right;

margin: 0px 0px 0px 10px;” alt=””/>

Free stock photography

There are many cheap micro-stock agencies like Shutterstock, Fotolia and, the one all my clients seem to know iStockphoto. These agencies charge $1 to $20 per image.

However, there are also some free stock photography sites.

• Everystockphoto is a search engine for free stock photos, offering community

features to the stock photography community.

• stock.xchng The best and most reliable for me. Some of the free images are large

enough to use for print. Some are of excellent quality. Log in necessary.

• morgueFile I haven’t used them for long but I have found some impressive and

large images here. No login necessary.

• FreeFoto Not fantastic. Email address required.

• FreeDigitalPhotos OK. Small web images only. No login necessary.

• ImageAfter I’ve just started using them but they seem good. You can choose the

number of thumbnails viewable on page. Some nice large images. No login

necessary

• indisain.com Annoying website in terms of usability but good quality large

images.

• PhotoBucket Good, large selection. Small web images only. No login necessary.

Other sources of free imagery on the internet

Of course you can find images in the internet using Google image search,

deviantArt or Picasa but these images may be subject to copyright so please check with the owner first.

Conclusion

Don’t forget to enter Alternate text to your images and make sure they have good

file names. This will bring in traffic from image searches.

Decide where and how you want your image to appear and make sure the cursor is

in the right place before clicking the Adding an Image icon.

Offering RSS feeds and email subscription

So you’ve got your self-hosted WordPress blog set up, optimized and have already published a few great posts and you want to offer an RSS feed and email

subscription to your posts.

What is RSS?

RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication and is a format used to publish frequently updated content from the web on the web. The RSS feed is your posts’ content without any of your website’s style so it will contain just the titles, body text and image paths of your posts. So you better make your image paths absolute not relative!

The benefit of RSS is the aggregation of your favorite websites from multiple sources in one place. RSS content can be read using software called an “RSS reader”, “feed reader” or an “aggregator”, which can be on your browser or on your desktop.

How to set up a Feedburner feed

You need to sign in to Google or Feedburner and look for where it says something

like “Burn a feed right this instant”. WordPress blogs already come with a feed so

you can enter either your blog’s URL (eg: http://www.my-blog.com) or your blog’s feed (eg: http://www.my-blog.com/feed, http://www.my-blog.com/?feed=rss2), check a box if you are a podcaster and hit “Next”.

You will next be greeted with a page where you can enter your feed title and feed

address. Once you are satisfied with those hit “Next” again. After this there are

further Feedburner options to choose from – most of which I ignore, it’s

FeedBurner’s email subscription that rocks but I’ll come to that later!

Install the FeedBurner plugin

For the best results using FeedBurner with your self-hosted WordPress site, the

FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin is recommended. It will detect all ways to access

your feed (for example, http://www.my-blog.com/feed/ or http://www.my-blog.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.

WordPress settings

Feedburner can only handle feeds under 512K. In WordPress, make sure your feed

doesn’t exceed this in the administration area, by going Settings > Reading, “For

each article in a feed, show” – you can choose “Summary” although I like to have

“Full text” and don’t put more than 35 in “Syndication feeds show the most recent”

if you write long posts.

What is email subscription and how can you set it up?

Email subscription to your blog allows those who have signed up for it to receive

your blog posts in their inbox. You can use 3rd party companies like Aweber,

iContact, VerticalResponse and MailChimp a little more professionally. Here I’ll show you how to do it for free with FeedBurner.

With your feed selected click the “Publicize” tab, then click “Email Subscriptions” on the left, making sure “Feedburner” is selected, and click “Activate”. This will then present you with some HTML code in the box which you will need to copy and paste somewhere in your website.

Once signed up a subscriber will receive your posts as emails shortly after they are published. Google/FeedBurner handles all the backend work – subscribers verify themselves by email and have the option of unsubscribing at the bottom of every email they receive.

Design your posts so they look great as an email

Underneath the “Email Subscriptions” link in FeedBurner whilst in the “Publicize”

tab there is another link entitled “Email Branding”. Do spend some time on this

page formatting text, headings and links – you can specify the font, size and color.

You can also add your logo and specify the title of the email.

Advertise the RSS feed and email subscription on your website

On my website I advertise the RSS feed with the familiar RSS icon which is linked to my FeedBurner feed. And I use the familiar email icon which takes you to the page where you can subscribe to my posts by email. I’ve also got some general information about feeds on this page so that my readers can decide which is the best way for them to subscribe to my blog.

What’s the benefit of RSS and email subscription?

They are both fantastic marketing tools. RSS brings in traffic as it is, for some people, an easy way of reading a site’s content. Email subscription can work like a weekly newsletter to your subscribers with a link back to your site. A subscriber is always worth more than a visitor because, more often than not they will return to your site again and again. The added advantage of the email subscribers is that you have the list of their email address’s although I wouldn’t advocate sending them much in the way of extra mail.

However, I strongly advise that you also set up an email newsletter separately from your blog using a professional emailing service like Aweber, iContact,

VerticalResponse or MailChimp.

Making a contact page

You’ve got a beautiful website and blog and you want people to contact you, either

by phone or email. What do you do? Everyone has a contact page on their website.

OK, maybe not everyone, but you should have one, really. Here are some really

important points to think about when you’re doing your contact page.

How to publish your email address online without getting spam

Spammers use software to crawl the internet to look for email addresses to spam to.This is why people have their email addresses as something like me [at] server.com or something like that to try to cloak the email address from the spammer.

But there’s better ways out there. For example there’s HTML clocking which uses

HTML number codes for the ASCII characters.

<a href=”mailto:abc@myhost.com”>contact us</a>

The above HTML will be a normal mailto: link in the browser.

But even better is JavaScript cloaking of the email address and the mailto: tag.

<!--

var username = “rob”;

var hostname = “robcubbon.com”;

var linktext = username + “@” + hostname;

document.write(“<a href=” + “mail” + “to:” + username + “@” + hostname +

“?subject=Enquiry” + “>” + linktext + “</a>”)

//--></script>

When put into the webpage it creates the clickable email address that will give you “Enquiry” in the subject field of the email.

If you are using WordPress you can happily paste this into the body of a page or

post as long as you are using the HTML editor.

Warning: I can not guarantee that any of the above methods will not produce spam

at all, just substantially less than if you published your email address uncloaked.

Contact form

But it always makes sense to give your visitors a choice and every website should

also have a contact form. There are many different ways of doing these. One thing

you need if you want one is PHP on your server.

If you are using WordPress I would recommend the Contact Form 7 plugin. If you

are using a Linux server you can basically plug in this plugin and play with it.

Should I include my telephone number and address online?

Whether you include your telephone number and address is entirely up to you. I

wouldn’t give out my address on my website for security reasons. I include a mobile number on my contact page and it hasn’t resulted in many problems. In the UK, if your phone rings once and hangs up and you’re wondering whether to call back, simply check the number in the WhoCallsMe website or even just Google the number. If it’s a premium rate scam someone will have posted up a warning about it. This has happened to me maybe 5 times in about 4 years.

How to design your contact page

Generally, I would say that you should put the link to your contact page as

prominently as possible on all pages – preferably at the end of the top navigation.

The contact page itself should be simple and well laid out. Here is my contact page.

And finally...

Once again, thank you for downloading this eBook and reading it. Hopefully, the

contents of this eBook will help the marketing strategy for your small business.

After following the recommendations in this document, your blog should be set up

to increase traffic and interest in yourself and your company.

You should try to write at least once a week, at least 600 words but more is better. Try to pack the blog with quality information about subjects connected to your area of expertise.

Whilst blogging, remember to put appropriate keywords into the titles, subtitles,

tags, image alt texts and body text.

Set up and maintain a network of bloggers, followers and contacts within your area of expertise.

Work consistently to build links by using the article marketing, guest blogging and

social media techniques explained. With these techniques, don’t put all your eggs in one basket, don’t rely on one source of traffic or linkbuilding. Look at the recent

Google upgrade, the people who only relied on article marketing really suffered.

However, I used article marketing as a small part of my link building activities and the Google update didn’t affect me.

Thank you for reading this document. If you have any questions or want to discuss

any issues mentioned here feel free to get in touch.

Rob Cubbon

Rob@RobCubbon.com

http://www.RobCubbon.com

Wei's Blogger

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2013年12月27日星期五

How to Market Yourself Online