Category: Wordpress

This article will explore the wider dimensions of effective social media contests. It will also analyze whether the relationship between them and increased revenue is more than a myth.

Benefits of social media contests

The important thing is that social media contests are only effective when they are designed meticulously. These contests only enable organizations to attract audiences when there is strategic planned involved.
So, why should one create a social media contest?

Publicity

For starters, you will be getting some much-wanted publicity for your brand, good or service. This is the perhaps the most fundamental yet vital step which eventually your business to expand. Although the contestants, or the target market, will take home the prizes, you too will benefit from it.

Consider this statistic:
The top three industries that use social media contests are entertainment, technology and music.

The fact that the three biggest industries in the world use social media contests is very telling. It just goes on to show how much people have come to rely on social media platforms. In addition to this, all major apps use social media contests to boost their campaigns. Here is another important statistic:
The number of entrants through mobile devices has increased by 8 times since 2012.

This trend indicates that mobile social networking is increasing social media activity. This goes on to show how beneficial social media contests can be if pitched properly.
As the number of people who engage with your brand increases so does your overall sales volume. This, in turn, would lead to an increase in revenue, promoting further business expansion. Social media giveaways do more than providing you with opportunities for engagement and lead conversion. They also help you develop long-lasting rapport and connections with your consumers.

Look at the following statistic:
One in every three entrants agrees to receive information about brands and partners.

This ensures long yet useful engagement of consumers. For example, they will become more aware of what an individual brand has to offer. This will increase the likelihood of purchasing the goods being delivered. This inevitably leads to higher profits and more opportunities for the business.

Greater engagement, greater profits

The more actively engaged your audiences, the greater your profits in the long-term. Keeping this simple rule in mind, social media contests become ever so compelling. Social networking sites like Facebook use algorithms to filter content that appears on users’ profiles. If your content has an extensive following, the algorithms will detect this and consider it worthy of suggesting to other users. Basically, the higher the activity on your page, the greater its chances of showing up on users’ profiles.

Thus, a larger number of people will become familiarized with your brand. This increases the chances of their buying your products. Increased sales will, of course, translate into increased revenue. Thus, social media contests are ideal for business as they give your firm the boost or kickstart it needs to stand out and expand further.

Keep track of your contestants

On average, one-third of the contestants willingly give their contact details so you can launch them when you launch new products or events. However, with social media contests, you can target the numbers who declined. You already have the contestants’ email addresses, which you can forward to your marketing department. This will make it easy to target a large number of people and increase the chances of converting them.

A social media contest is perhaps the easiest and fastest way to expand your target market’s email list. By emailing all contestants on a regular basis, you are bound to capture the attention of some, if not all of them. This is a great tactic as it fosters higher levels of engagement. Also, and perhaps more importantly, it increases your customer base.

As a result, your sales are likely to grow. This, in turn, will have a positive impact on your company as a whole.

In short, social media contests provide a way to keep track of the people most likely to buy your products. This can be very helpful when conducting effective future advertising campaigns. That is because your campaign can be tailored in a way that appeals to the age, gender, ethnicity or other factors most dominant in your contestants’ list.

Be a trendsetter

In this fast-paced and media-centric era, it is often easier to just sit back and follow where other companies lead. You may, for example, adapt their production methods and marketing gimmicks simply because it is simpler and less risky than running with your original ideas.

Social media contests, however, bring an entirely new and unique dimension to marketing and business ideology. If you are sufficiently creative yet practical with your contest, it could be a mega-hit. Its success could even make your company viral. Once you have achieved this, the world would quite literally be at your feet. You will be the one in control. You decide how the market ought to perceive your product. There will no longer be any need to copy other entrepreneurs’ ideas. With the success of your social media contest, you can quickly transform other people’s perceptions of your brand and products.

A change in perception would give you greater freedom to experiment and innovate. This way, new and exciting ways of marketing and advertising will emerge, which would seek to further the growth of your business. You can also utilize this elevated position to bring about a positive change in the world.

Since you are now truly in control of your company and the course it takes, you can invest in things that are likely to have a greater positive impact on your organization.

How do you go viral?

Beyond dispute, this is easier said than done, but it is by no means impossible. There is no particular pattern or rule you can follow which would guarantee a successful social media contest. However, there are a few general guidelines which will help you attain that ultimate goal:

Innovation

First and foremost, you must be innovative. An aesthetically appealing social media contest will attract more attention. Be creative and invest an appropriate budget in planning and designing your social media contest. The more creative your layout and presentation, the greater its appeal among audiences. A well-planned and meticulously thought-out campaign certainly brings in the numbers.

You could decide a theme that complements your business ideology or conforms with your marketing message. In essence, anything that is different and stands out will give you a better chance of attracting more people.

In addition to this, if users are allowed to create their original content, you might be able to engage more people. Once you get a decent number of contestants, do not hesitate to ask them to share the content. You want as many shares as possible to make your social media contest go viral. This is what will ultimately increase your revenues and bring in expansion opportunities.

An underlying goal

Make sure to have a goal in mind when running a social media contest. This will give you a sense of direction, keeping you on a proper course without getting sidetracked. It will also enable you to choose the right content to use in your contest. The goal or objective can differ from one business to another. Common goals include increasing social media following, boosting social media engagement, increasing social media leads and expanding social media business.

Whatever the underlying object may be, one thing is for certain. It will certainly benefit your overall company and provide you with the much-needed sense of purpose. This feeling of purpose will then, to a great extent, assist you in determining the contest’s content. This is a task which would otherwise take you much longer and waste valuable time.

Social following directly increases exposure for your brand and products, which ultimately translates into greater profits. Thus, this could be your central objective, and you could use the others as side goals or secondary priorities.

Choosing the type of contest

As part of planning a social media contest, you will need to decide which type of contest to run. You could opt for a real old photo contest. If you want to be little more daring, go for an essay contest. Remember your choice should ultimately be appealing to your target market. The bigger your customer base, the more your profits.

Why use the WordPress Raffle plugin?

This is one of the best plugins to use when running giveaways and contests. If you want to create the right type of hype for your brand, this plugin is your friend!

This social WordPress giveaway plugin allows you to set up appealing contests and giveaways on your website in just minutes. Here’s what it offers:

• The chance to run viral giveaways
• Multiple entries
• The ability to track the number of participants
• Integrating entries with platforms like MailChimp
• Exporting the list of participants after the giveaway ends

Using this plugin, you can run social media contests that go viral and create positive publicity for your brand.
In a nutshell, therefore, it can be said that social media contests are beneficial as they lead to greater engagement, more customers, and ultimately, higher profits.

This is a guest post by Swati Gole.

What is Stockio, and why it’s useful

To make it short, Stockio is a stock asset website, where people can freely download stock videos, images, vectors, fonts and icons for personal or commercial use.

Unlike many stock websites, Stockio is taking pride in keeping the assets quality very high. Assets are handpicked by a team of designers and have been made by popular assets producers.

Assets are handpicked by a team of designers and have been made by popular assets producers.

Stockio also features a convenient search module, allowing to select which kind of asset you’re looking for. Once you click on a specific asset, assets related to the one you’re viewing are automatically displayed, in order to make your search easier and faster.

Another very useful feature is the color search: On any download page, a bar of colors can be seen. Once clicked, the site will find photos, or vectors, containing the same color. Very useful for designers who needs to stick to a particular color scheme.

New, but already complete

With such high quality, it’s not a surprise that Stockio is quickly growing popular amongst designers. Another great thing is that despite the site relative freshness, it’s already pretty complete. As of August 2017, the site contains 25 pages of videos, 4,500 icons, 11,000 free fonts and over 900 pages of stock images!

Whether you’re a blogger or a designer, Stockio is definitely a website that should be in good place in your bookmarks!

The problem with external scripts

When using an external service as such as Google Analytics, you are often required to include external JavaScript files into your own website.

While this isn’t a problem per se, you obviously don’t have as much control over those files than over files hosted on your own server. This is especially problematic since you should always set an expire header to static files in order to leverage browser caching and optimize your website speed.

Google PageSpeed Insight will recommend you to do so:

The solution: Adding expire headers to external scripts

So what we need to do is to import all the .js files dynamically into our website. To do so, we’ll use PHP and the file_get_contents() function.

The first thing to do is to locate the external script:

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://ssl.google-analytics.com/ga.js"></script>

The next step is to create a .php file. Let’s call it externaljs.php. Insert the following code in it:

<?php

$files = array(
	'ga.js' => 'https://ssl.google-analytics.com/ga.js',
	'bsa.js' => 'https://s3.buysellads.com/ac/bsa.js',
	'pro.js' => 'https://s3.buysellads.com/ac/pro.js'
);

if(isset($files[$_GET['file']])) {
	if ($files[$_GET['file']] == 'ga.js'){
		header('Expires: '.gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s \G\M\T', time() + ((60 * 60) * 48))); // 2 days for GA
	} else {
		header('Expires: '.gmdate('D, d M Y H:i:s \G\M\T', time() + (60 * 60))); // Default set to 1 hour
	}

	echo file_get_contents($files[$_GET['file']]);
}

?>

Let’s have a look at the code:

• Lines 3 to 7: An array containing the accepted files is created. This is super important since otherwise any file could be embedded into your site, leading to potential security problems.
• Lines 9 to 14: Since we need to adjust the expiring time for every script, we need a conditional statement to do so.
• Line 16: If the script passed out as a GET parameter is found in our array, we can now safely display it.

You’ll need to adjust the code and enter the URLs of your external scripts. Once done, just upload it onto your server. If you’re using WordPress, it’s a good idea to put the file in your theme folder.

Then, simply replace the external .js call and replace it by a call to your externaljs.php file, as shown below:

<script type="text/javascript" src="externaljs.php?url=ga.js"></script>

And you’re done. You can now dynamically import external .js file on your server and therefore, set the right expire header for each script.

Python SEO Analyzer

A small SEO tool that analyzes the structure of a site, crawls the site, counts words in the body of the site and warns of any general SEO related issues. The script requires Python 2.7+, BeautifulSoup4, minidom, nltk, numpy and urllib2.
Info & download: https://github.com/sethblack/python-seo-analyzer

Broken link checker

Google doesn’t like sites with broken links, which is truly understandable. But how do you daily check all links your site has?

If you’re using WordPress, the easiest way to do so would be to install the Broken Links Checker plugin, which really does wonders. But if your site isn’t WordPress based, here’s a great Python script to crawl your site and return broken links so you can edit them.
Info & download: https://github.com/yushulx/crawl-404

Calculate keyword growth using Google Trends and Python

When doing SEO for your site, Google Trends is extremely useful to determine if interest in keywords has grown over time or if they are slipping away into oblivion. But Google doesn’t provide an API for easy bulk keyword growth research.

Thanks to Python, this can easily be done with a little script and a .csv file.
Info & download: https://searchwilderness.com/google-trends-api-slope/

Get Google Webmaster Tools data with Python

Search Query report in Google Webmaster tools is more important than ever, with the ominous mask hiding 25%-40% of referring keyword traffic in Google Analytics. Google recently made WMT data available through an open source Python Library, making it easy to transfer that data straight into Google Docs or to your desktop, but setup and configuration aren’t easy for most.

Here is a ready-to-use Python script to easily get Google Webmaster Tools data. Full instructions are provided on the related article.
Info & download: https://www.seo.com/blog/tutorial-google-webmaster-tools-data-windows-python/

Pyscape: grab data from the Mozscape API

Moz crawls the web constantly, searching for new content and re-crawling existing content. Each URL and other interesting details about pages are saved: HTTP status code, page title, links, and other information.

Pyscape is an open-source Python library for accessing the Mozscape API and grab the aforementioned data from Moz.
Info & download: https://github.com/benjaminestes/pyscape-client

Test Your Site’s Performance

The biggest thing standing between you and Black Friday success is website performance. If pages take too long to load, visitors will stop browsing, abandon their shopping carts, and shift their loyalty to one of your competitors.

The answer is load testing. Many businesses don’t bother with load testing because of the high costs of hardware. Thanks to cloud-based load testing solutions, it’s possible to load test any site at a fraction of what it used to cost. You’ll only pay for the server usage necessary to run the test. Using the cloud, you can emulate users from around the world or stay local depending on your customer base.

Record some test scripts that imitate typical user behavior (searching, adding products to the shopping cart, checkout). Then look at last year’s Black Friday traffic to see how many visitors you’ll need to test for. Plan on an increase in traffic depending on sales projections.

Crash on Purpose

The purpose of load testing is to make sure your site can handle the expected number of visitors without slowing down significantly. But stress testing is meant to see how much traffic it takes to overwhelm your servers and crash your site. Some businesses don’t bother with stress testing. But if your site crashes on Black Friday, your company may soon follow.

A robust site can handle more visitors than even the most optimistic sales manager can imagine. One of your products could be included in a publication’s gift suggestions. A high profile celebrity could share their love your products. Or you could find yourself with this year’s must-have item.

Stress testing will ensure that your site can handle unexpected success.

Prepare for Seasonal Challenges

Although consumers are increasingly using Black Friday to treat themselves to otherwise unaffordable items, the day is still focused on gift shopping. That means orders will be more complicated than usual. Include shipping to multiple addresses in your test scripts.

Your site may have seasonal features, such as holiday graphics or gift suggestions for her, him, and so on. Even if you didn’t have anything special last year, now is the time to ask your business users if they’d like to do something along those lines. Designing and building site enhancements when you have months to spare is going to result in a more robust site.

Be Prepared

Your business could achieve viral success at any time of the year, bringing in Black Friday-levels of traffic unexpectedly. Thorough load and stress testing will make sure that you’re always ready for an increase in business. If you’re looking for tools to get started with load testing, there are a few options. In terms of a free option, Apache’s JMeter tool is unmatched. If you’re looking for a paid option, you may want to consider LoadView or HP LoadRunner.

This is a guest post by Jen Oksnevad.

Designing a website has several stages and one of the most crucial things to keep in mind while starting up a website is the color scheme of the website. Finalizing the color pallets for your website can be quite tricky sometimes, but to help the users, there are a lot of web tools and resources out there which will make this process a whole lot easier.

Design and Color

• Adobe Kuler – one of such tool is the Adobe product called Adobe Kuler – A great tool that the Adobe offers its users for free of cost and which allows the members to create, upload and edit different color schemes of their own desire.

• Colorzilla – the next tool to help the users with the color scheme of the website is Colorzilla chrome extension. This tool is more like the eye-dropper tool from the Photoshop but for your browser. You can pick up any color from any random page on your browser.

• Dribbble.com – it is a very popular web-designing tool. You can explore many existing color schemes which are created by other designers from all over the world and pick up anything suitable according to your project. And the best part is that it’s free of cost.

• Hues – this tool comes for $2.99. You can sample any color from any project you’re working on and it will give you the exact hexa code for that particular color.

Typography or Fonts

Typography is another very important and essential part of web designing process. It has a huge effect on the look and feel of your website. The first tool to help any web-designer with the typography is:

• Google Web fonts – these free web fonts are provided by google for no cost at all, are absolutely free and incredibly easy and user-friendly to use and implement into your website or project. There are numerous web fonts you can find in it.

• Font Squirrel – it is another free tool for the typography of your website. And also widely used by most of the web-designers as it is a high-quality tool with hand-picked fonts and also includes fonts for commercial use.

• Lost Type – it is a simple foundry where you pay for what you want specifically in which you can customize your typography anyway you want and is one of its kind till now. It can cost you about $1. Any web designer with the use of this tool can push their web designs to the next level.

• Typecast – earlier it costed for $29 per month, but the developers changed their pricing and made it a free tool. With $0 per month. It has a lot to offer with over 100,000 free web fonts, Google fonts + 3k licensed fonts from fonts.com and many more.

• Typekit – one of the best place to find fonts for your web project. It is an online service which offers a subscription of high quality modern fonts. The fonts in typekit can be used directly on your websites or you can choose to sync them with your Adobe Creative Cloud account

Wireframe

Wireframing is a very important part in any type of webpage designing or screen design process. It allows you to manually define the information hierarchy of the design and making it easier for you to plan the layout according to how you want to use it to process your information. It’s one of the main parts of designing a website.

• Balsamiq – A $79 tool is completely wilted when it comes to wireframing. It’s probably one of the best tools out there to wireframe your website. It comes with many pre-defined shapes and tools that will help you increase your workflow incredibly.

• Macflow – Macflow is an online tool to wireframe your website. The best feature of all is the collaboration tool in it. You can allow other users to view the notes you have made as well as chat with them in live time about the functionality and UI decisions.

• Google Draw – Google draw is passed on by a lot of web designers while. It offers its service entirely for free with an option to store your work online on a google drive which makes it quite accessible.

• And of course the last one in the list and probably the most popular ones are the Adobe Photoshop, In-design and Fireworks which may cost you for a price of $49 / month.

Coding and Development Tools

Coding is one of the most complex parts of the process of developing a website. Here are some tools which will increase your workflow when it comes to coding:-

• Coda 2 – if you literally sit and compare other code editors and the coda you will find that coda will always win. This may be a little new and for some users may be a completely different experience, but it is suggested that you give it a try. Best services aren’t for free and so isn’t the coda, it comes for the price of $99. You can try it for free for a limited trial period and later on if you like it you can purchase it.

• SublimeText 3 – the sublime text editor is probably the only other editor up there with coda. There are many features and smooth UI of the tool which makes it a lot easier for you to concentrate on the coding and provides you with numerous editing options as well. It is available for cross platforms like Windows, Linux and OS X. This tool comes in both free and paid types with additional features for paid members. The pricing for this app is $70 per license.

• Aptana Studio – a free alternative for text editors like the Sublime text and coda is the Aptana Studio. It is available for both Mac users and Windows users and has an amazing potential to code virtually any type of application that comes in your mind.

• Cloud9 IDE – it is a tool that can help you to collaborate with others in small as well as big scale code projects. It also lets the developers around the world edit the same code and communicate and exchange ideas in real time. Code completion is also one of the best features along with the ability to code on two different projects side-by-side.

• Visual Studio – one of the best tools for coding and editing with a lot of unique features that other competitor tools won’t have. The UI is extremely satisfying and user-friendly of course. The developers also provide its users with a customer support 24/7. Compiling, linking and debugging is a lot easier with this tool with code completion, prompts and proper solution to the errors in the code. It is an open source tool from Microsoft that has many smart features and has got inbuilt Git commands as well. The UI theme can be changed to either light or dark as per users convenience and this is one of the features that makes it stand out.

File Transfer Protocol Software

If you’re looking for an FTP client then below are the best FTP services and tools:

• CyberDuck – probably the best ftp client in the market with a pricing of $23.99 and comes for both Mac and Window Platforms. There are infinite ways of connecting to the local servers as well as the web servers and access different devices via ssh and more.

• Filezilla – it is another free alternative for CyberDuck and it is also an open source software. You can’t expect too much of features from it, but it gets the job done pretty well.

• FireFTP – it is a free, secure and cross-platform compatible FTP client for Mozilla Firefox. It allow you to have easy and secure access to your designated file transfer protocol servers.

• CuteFTP – it is a paid version of FTP software, you can easily create and schedule your transfer task with it. You can also reate scripts to regularly backup or synchronize your sites and fully monitor local folders for any changes.

Grid Tools

• GuideGuide – apart from the fact that it is a free tool, GuideGuide is pretty awesome extension of photoshop. When it comes to editing with ease, with just one click you can create perfect grids, more accurate rows & columns, along with the perfect midpoints and baselines.

• Columnal – this tool features extra functionality for application. it is a great tool for development of responsive web design as it makes grids flexible and change dynamically when you re-size your browser window.

Screenshot Tools

• Lightshot – it is one of the most popular screenshot tools with an incredibly easy use and super user-friendly on screen editing. It has multiple features and all comes in for free. It is developed for both Mac and Windows users with multi-lingual support. When you press the print screen key on your keyboard, it will by default select the whole screen and you can proceed towards taking a screenshot as well as allow you to drag and select the area to take screenshot of, making it very useful and a must have tool.

• Awesome Screenshot – it is a great browser extension which enables you to capture, edit and save your current chosen screen area or your entire screen. It have various screen options available and this tool also lets you save your files to your computer or your own Google Drive account.

• Windows built-in – alternately you can use Windows built-in snap shot to take a screenshot of your desktop items. However it is not possible to make any adjustments, the snap shot will be saved in your computer picture folder.

File Storage or Backup

• DropBox – it is a very simple tool for storing your stuff online on the cloud and works with almost all types of platforms and devices like iOS, Android, LINUX and Windows. It can be explained as a folder and anything you stick into it whether it is picture, music, video or any documents is automatically synchronized to the cloud. it is a free option to 2 GB and if you need more than that then you can get it for very reasonable prices. It also offers ways file sharing, uploads and downloads with a great UI and speed functionality.

• Google Drive – you can use your Google account to get free Google Drive to store and access files wherever you are. You’ll get 15GB of free storage which covered from all your Google apps account such as Gmail and Google photos.

• One Drive – it is Microsoft’s free online storage. You’ll need a Hotmail or Live mail account to get access to one drive storage, since it’s free, you can setup easily with your Microsoft supported emails.

This is a guest post by Richard Kiew.

Below is a list of essential eCommerce tips, tricks, and best practices to look at before you start your own eCommerce website:

1. Study your competitors and look at your market

A good place to start is by viewing a successful site that offers the same or similar product or service that you intend to. These sites will be your competitors. Look at how products are displayed and ordered. See what sort of engagement tactics – like tutorials, blogs, webinars, etc. – are being utilized.

Small-to-medium-businesses (SMBs) generally fair best when they can serve a niche market. Niche market may be a very unique product, or it may be a specialized service. What should be avoided are commodity products that are provided by the likes of Walmart and Amazon, as it is difficult to compete with the volume discount they receive from suppliers.

Make a list of the number of items or services you will offer. Consider how many options may exist for each product, in terms of color, size, quantity, or any other way an order may be customized. Determine what you think should be accomplished online, whether it will be complete order of product, setting of appointment, arrangement of shipping, billing, or any other component of the transaction that can be completed.

2. Choose a good merchant account & payment gateway

To accept payment online, you will need a merchant account and payment gateway. These are the tools used to process debit and credit cards. PayPal is a common a choice. You will want to shop rates, as they vary from one provider to another. Published rates by providers are oftentimes negotiable, so if the rate is higher than market, ask for a discount.

3. Use a good eCommerce platform

After you have a good idea of what you want your eCommerce site to look like and do, check to see if your current hosting provider offers any good eCommerce platforms. If not, find a good eCommerce hosting platform that can provide these features. There are several good options available that make it easy to set up and take care of all your eCommerce needs. Some website builders also provide a cheap and simple way to setup an eCommerce site.

4. Add & optimize your page’s meta tags

Add a unique meta tag for every page of your site. Meta tags are short descriptions of web pages and a list of keywords, which are used by search engines to find and rank relevant pages. Meta tags are easy to create and insert on pages, and most website building and eCommerce programs have a form to automatically insert them.
When composing meta tags, run a keyword search and perform the same type of test on your meta tag description. Once you know where meta tags are placed on a site, you can visit the most popular sites in your category, right-click on your mouse, and select view source to check out those tags. Use that information to help formulate meta tags of your own, using the same keywords and description style.

5. Use detailed product descriptions

Every product or service offered should have a detailed description. Include measurements, weights and specifications where appropriate. Any pictures or videos should be of the highest quality possible. Hiring a professional photographer, or investing in a good camera and some great lighting is money well spent. For small products, a professional photography box can be purchased for $20-30, that will really make your product standout. The image presented reflects your company and product and will affect the buying decision.

6. Create a strong call-to-action

Each page on your site should contain a strong call-to-action button. These buttons may be used to purchase the product, signup for an email list, or view a more detailed presentation. Whatever action you are trying to prod the visitor towards should be easily visible as that visitor scrolls through a page, because visitors are fickle you want to catch them the second they are hot.

7. Provide multiple payment & shipping options

Customers will want payment and delivery options. The more means of payment and shipping options provided, the higher the sales conversion rate will likely be.
Most of the payment options will be defined by what is provided with your merchant account. It is a given that you will want accept Visa and MasterCard, and maybe American Express, but check the fee for each, as American Express is typically higher. PayPal and Payoneer are other options you may want to consider. Both are easier to setup than merchant accounts, but rates tend to be higher for processing.

Shipping options should be balanced between what works for the customer and the business. Postal service is available most everywhere, and convenient for most everyone, and offers different delivery options. If offering delivery through a private carrier, like FedEx or UPS, you will want to make sure that pickup or drop-off will be convenient for you. All major carriers allow you to print your own shipping labels or use an account, which saves a lot of time.

8. Analyze your customer’s behavior on your site

Closely monitor the activity on your site to determine what is working and what is not. Google Analytics is a great way to easily evaluate who is visiting your site, when it is visited, the source of the traffic, what actions were taken (conversions to sale), and much more information about the visit and visitor to the site.
Implementing Google Analytics is easy and free. A small bit of code, referred to as a “Tag”, is placed on each page you wish to monitor. Every time a page is loaded, the transaction is reported to Google and may be viewed on the Analytics page of Google. This information is invaluable for determining what advertising campaigns may be working and what demographic should be targeted.

9. Test ads & displays

Split or A/B testing is a great way to determine what works in your segment. By using different ads for a product and different pages on a site, that sell the same product, you can determine what works best where. Google Analytics will show how much traffic was generated by each ad, and sale conversion rates of each display, so you will know what works well and what does not.

10. Optimize your site for search engines

Traffic to a site falls into two categories: organic and non-organic. In the broadest sense, organic traffic is not paid for, but came about as a result of a search engine, a referral, or a return visitor. Non-organic traffic is the result of paid advertising. Organic traffic may be won by having a vibrant site, an outstanding product or service, or a deal that cannot be beat.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is another way to win organic traffic. With relevant keywords, fresh content and heavy traffic, a site will appeal to Google and other search engines. A site should be reviewed regularly to assure that keywords used are still among the top and that content is fresh.

11. Provide customer engagement

Website customer engagement helps to keep folks coming back to a site and content fresh (which appeals to search engines). A board for questions, which are promptly answered, tutorials on products, blogs, and podcasts are all ways to keep a site relevant and appealing. One consideration, if blogs and podcasts are used, is that they should not be strictly commercials for the product, but rather provide information that is of interest to the audience in general.

12. Stay in touch with customers

This should be obvious, but an online business should also keep in touch with customers after the sale, or missed sale in some cases. Maintaining email addresses and delivering newsletters and special offers is a really cheap way to touch parties who have already expressed some level of interest in the product or service offered.

Conclusion

While some eCommerce deployments truly offer the owner a hands-free golden goose, the overwhelming majority require continuous maintenance and improvement to remain viable. With a little study and work though, most anyone can pick up the technology and when applied, it works.

This is a guest post by Miller Henley.

1) Collaboration between Designers and Developers

It is better to be in liaison with the website’s designer, to deliver the best results to your client. Statistics show that website design has become prominent in shaping a business’s online presence. Web developers who collaborate with designers will deliver better results than those who do not. It will also improve the development-to-design workflows.

2) Unique Layouts

In the years past, there has been a trend where website development has maintained a consistent type of layout, and it has become boring to many users. It is crucial to consider unique designs when developing a website for your clients. This does not call for you to overhaul your layouts, but to move icons and items on the website that looks fresh and unique, with an appropriate call to action phrases.

3) Static site generators

These create a better and easier way to develop websites since they remove the need of having a database, instead, with a static site generator, your web pages can run on your client’s host servers. This decreases the development time it takes for the website to load, improve site security and ease of deployment of the site.

4) Chatbots for Better Customer Support

Internet users are increasingly interacting with businesses through websites, and it counts to consider including a chatbox when developing a website. Technological advances have made the old way of offering customer support through email exchanges obsolete, and chatboxes are the future of customer support. Chatbox uses bots and statistics show that they are increasing online sales, and they provide help in solving customer problems.

5) Content Management System (CMS)

There are many CMS platforms available, and you should be wary of the one that you chose. WordPress is the best and most popular platform, and at least 75 million websites used it as at the Q4 of 2016, which is at least 27% of all the websites created. Using WordPress puts you ahead especially when it comes to on-page SEO, and creating search engine friendly pages using HTML. It also makes it easier to use title tags, headings, permalinks, et al. There’s also tons of tutorials on how to optimize your WordPress website so you won’t get stuck when developing your website.

6) Color Scheme

Different colors have the ability to evoke emotions such as happiness, frustration, et al. in the site visitor, which influence the purchasing decision. Despite this, many clients do not realize the importance of having a color scheme, so it is upon you to understand your client’s target audience, business niche, branding as well as the elements of color theory. For example, red captures the audience’s attention; blue portrays the business as honest, and trustworthy, green shows balance as well as reflecting nature, yellow is fun and cheerful, turquoise presents the business as one that communicates best with clarity of thought, et al.

7) Functionality

This is arguably the most crucial thing to consider when developing a website in the literal sense. Check that there are no broken links, page-loading issues, adequacy of the site’s security features, et al. Issues with the functionality of the website will prompt users to leave the site, and statistics shows that they less likely visit again. The best way to gauge a site’s functionality is by viewing it from the user’s perspective.

8) Hosting Platform

How do you choose the best hosting platform for your client’s website? Much thought needs to go into choosing a hosting platform with top factors including, hosting control panel, reliability as well as uptime guarantees, privacy policy, sign up and renewal costs. However, the main priority should be the hosting needs of your client; this will depend on the type of website they want, the uniqueness of the website, special software, et al. However if you’re doing a testing environment for your own website, you could choose to use this recommended free hosting with no ads.

9) Navigation

If the site you are developing is difficult to navigate and has a confusing layout, customers will abandon the site and will not return, even after fixing the navigation issues. Carry out in-depth site reviews as though you are a new visitor and you will identify the issues you need to rectify before deploying. It will also help to identify the navigation streams that make sense and those that add no value to the intended user. Include a site map to help visitors in navigating the website.
Streamlining the site’s navigation by removing underperforming pages will reduce the site’s loading time and improve the quality of your client’s online presence.

10) Loading Time

Slow loading times are one of the biggest turn offs for visitors looking for information on a website. Before you deploy the website, test the site’s loading time and for every page on the website. Remember that if a visitor does not get the information from the site you develop, they will get if from a competitor.
So ensure that the website has a short load time as well as for all the pages on the site. This will form a positive user experience, and it will increase customer retention for your client’s business.

11) Search Engine Optimization

By now, you know that ranking high on search engine results pages (SERPs) is a major factor of having a strong online presence. It is crucial that you have a clean and SEO-friendly code to increase the chances of search engine spiders to find the website.

CMSs such as WordPress have plugins that help in cleaning up your SEO-code. Eventually, the site you build with clean SEO code will be an invaluable resource for driving traffic to the site and maintaining a strong online presence.

12) Browser Compatibility

It is a hard task trying to keep up with the number of browsers available today. You should ensure that the websites you develop are compatible with popular browsers such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Bing, Yahoo, et al. It should load with ease on multiple browsers even on their older versions.
You cannot assume that users will only use the popular browsers, and this will lock out a significant percentage of traffic to the site.

13) Website Responsiveness

Statistics show that the number of users accessing the internet through the desktop is declining at a fast rate. It is important that the website you are developing be responsive in such a way that it is accessible from various devices without compromising design quality.

Final Conclusion

All sites you build today and in the future need to go hand in hand with the latest trends. Smartphones are increasingly becoming the choicest option of accessing the internet, and so your websites need to be responsive to any device. You should also integrate it with social media to help visitors to the site share posts from the website to their social media pages. These and more items will assist you in developing a one of a kind website.

This is a guest post by Richard Kiew.

About MailOptin

MailOptin convert your website visitors into email subscribers and customers, nurture and engage them with beautifully designed automated event triggered emails. All in WordPress.

Let’s have a quick look at the plugin features:

The first feature is lead generation. In order to transform visitors into subscribers, MailOptin can display popups, sidebar widgets, notification bars, slide-ins, and more. Want to see how this works? Simply head over the demos!

The second feature offered by the plugin is the newsletter in itself. Basically, you can manage an email list and send campaigns, all within WordPress.

MailOptin’s powerful intuitive email template builder allows you to create great looking, responsive and and highly effective automated email campaigns and newsletters that are optimized for the highest conversion. A very interesting feature is the possibility to create automated newsletters or email notifications of new blog posts.

For a more complete list of the newsletter features, just have a look at the official site.

More info about MailOptin’s plans and pricing: just have a look at this page.

How to enter the giveaway

Feeling lucky? In order to take part in the giveaway and try your luck, just leave a comment below to let me know you’re in. In one week (August 7), the 2 winners will be randomly chosen and will receive his prize directly from the MailOptin team.

And if you’re not the lucky one this time, no worries! MailOptin has a free “lite” version that you can download on the WordPress plugin repository.

Good luck!

Visitors to your site aren’t going to stick around and wait for a page to load. You have mere seconds to give them what they’re looking for or they’ll go check out your competition. Website performance doesn’t get as much attention as design or user experience, but it can make or break a company. This is why speed testing and load testing are so critical.

1) Load test on a regular basis

Load testing shows how your site performs with a certain number of visitors. If the load test shows that you can handle more users than expected without a significant increase in page load time, then you’re ready for anything. If it doesn’t, you’ll know that you need to make some changes.

Load test for higher traffic that your most optimistic sales projections predict so you can be ready for unexpected success. As the company grows, you’ll need to repeat load testing to ensure you’re ready for the increase in users. There are a variety of load testing tools that you can you in order to run an effective test including Apache’s JMeter, LoadView, and LoadImpact.

2) Don’t skip stress testing

We all dream of viral success. A celebrity endorsement, positive press coverage, or widespread word of mouth can double or triple your site traffic. Or more. All that good publicity will be for nothing if your site crashes when the world comes knocking at your door.

There are two ways to find out if your site can handle an increase in traffic. The first way is to wait for it to crash on Cyber Monday, or right after a product launch. The second way is to stress test the site so you can avoid disasters in the first place.

Stress testing will show how much traffic it takes to bring down your site. It should take an improbably high volume of visits to cause a crash.

3) Think twice before using images

Images can be extremely effective, but make sure that your site doesn’t have too much of a good thing. Images take time to load, so make sure you’re not using them where text will do the job just as well. If your load testing shows a greater page load time than you’d like, small changes to site design can bring the needed improvements.

4) Avoid sloppy HTML

Your developers know to make their code as elegant as possible to minimize load times. But your business users may copy and paste content from word processing programs, bringing along excess code that they didn’t even know was there. Teach them to paste the copy into a basic text editor to strip out all formatting. Text copied and pasted from the text editor will result in much cleaner HTML.

5) Fight for Net Neutrality

If the FCC overturns their Open Internet Rules (as they’re currently considering), your site may face slower load times than your competitors. All your hard work ensuring website performance will be undone if this happens. Leave a comment on the FCC website showing support for Open Internet Rules and encourage your colleagues to do the same.

This is a guest post by Jennifer Oksnevad

1. Get your SSL certificate from your host

The first thing to do is to get in touch with your hosting company and ask them to install SSL on your site. Most hosts will ask you to pay an annual fee for it, ranging from $19 to $99 a year.

Good news if your website is hosted on Vidahost, SiteGround, WPEngine or DreamHost, they can provide you a SSL certificate for free, and assist you with the whole process of going secure.

2. Update WordPress URL

Once your host has added SSL on your account, your website should be accessed through the URL https://yourwebsite.com. If you can access your site through this address, it’s time for you to start setting up WordPress for HTTPS.

The first step to do so is super easy. Just log into your WordPress dashboard and visit the Settings > General section.

Simply update the WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL) to HTTPS, as shown in the image below. Save the settings and you’ll be logged out of your WordPress dashboard.

3. Force SSL admin in wpconfig.php

Use your FTP to edit the wp-config.php file, located at the root of your WordPress install. Append the following:

define('FORCE_SSL_ADMIN', true);

This constant easily enables and enforces WordPress administration over SSL, adding extra security to your WordPress dashboard.

4. Redirect HTTP to HTTPS

At this stage, HTTPS is already working on your website. But there are a few things left to do. The first one is to redirect the http traffic to https.

Over the years, many websites have linked to your site using http://, so there are gonna be a lot of people still accessing the http version of your site.

So what you have to do is to redirect all the traffic to the secure, https site. This is done by using the .htaccess file, located at the root of your WordPress install. Open the file and add the following in between the <IfModule mod_rewrite.c> tag:

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

Please note that .htaccess redirects can be a bit tricky, and sometimes will work perfectly on one host and not on another.

If the code above doesn’t function properly, simply revert the changes and get in touch with your hosting provider support. They’ll be happy to provide you the correct .htaccess redirect that works on their servers.

5. Make all your links https

Alright, now we have HTTPS properly set up, and the HTTP traffic is automatically redirected to the HTTPS site. But there’s one more thing to do before we can call it a day: Replacing all HTTP links on your site by their HTTPS equivalent. This is done in two distinct parts:

Hardcoded links in theme files

Let’s start with your theme. If you’re using a WordPress theme from the WP repository, from ElegantThemes or any other free/premium theme shop and haven’t done any changes to it, you have nothing to do. However, if you’re using a custom theme or a theme that you modified yourself, there might be some HTTP links hardcoded somewhere.

Have a look in your theme files (especially header.php and footer.php) and update each internal hardcoded HTTP link to its HTTPS version.

Internal links in database

When writing posts or pages, there are strong chances that you inserted HTTP internal links. In order to update your links, you can edit each post and page, but this will be a very time-consuming task.

Instead of dealing with so much hassle, there’s a super simple and fast solution to update all internal links in your database: Using SQL queries.

There are several ways to run SQL queries. Most of you probably have a cPanel installed on your server. This is the case if your host is Vidahost, HostGator or InMotion Hosting, for example.

To access phpMyAdmin from cPanel, simply log into cPanel and click the phpMyAdmin icon in the Databases section.

Make sure to backup your database, in case something goes wrong. Once done, run the following two queries:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, 'http://yoursite.com', 'https://yoursite.com' ) ;
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, 'http://www.yoursite.com', 'https://www.yoursite.com' ) ;

Here you go. The queries have updated all your internal links from HTTP to HTTPS. Now, your WordPress site is fully SSL compliant and you should see a green padlock in your address bar, showing your visitors that your site is fully secure.

Design is as important to a website as it is to a home or retail space. The better that it looks, the easier that it is for people to feel comfortable while visiting. A solid site will encourage customers to keep clicking around to learn more about your services, rather than have them close the window out immediately due to a site that is harsh on the eyes. Consider these points to get more from your website and understand why design plays such a big part.

No Distractions

Imagine the absolute worst website that you have ever visited. Try to picture what it looked like and why it was so unappealing to you. Chances are good that you are thinking about a website that was difficult to navigate. Most people can look past simple design mistakes when browsing a site. When those design flaws get in the way of a task like navigation, however, it becomes much more frustrating for customers. This means you want to be certain that the site you are designing is easy to explore and understand.

The main reason for this is that you want your customers to sink into what you have to offer. If a customer wants to learn more about specific services you offer but cannot figure out how to find that part of your site, it is going to lead to frustration. On top of this, you’ll be less likely to obtain any new customers when they are too stressed on your site to click through to more pages. When designing your site, make the overall ease of navigation one of your top priorities to see more lasting success.

Creating a Name

Business culture has changed a great deal in recent years. Nowadays, people are equally interested in what a company has to offer and what a company stands for. The brand you create is going to be either a huge draw or a deterrent to potential customers. People want to look at your brand and know exactly what they will be getting. Your website is a perfect chance to hammer out your brand and come up with something that will help you to develop something that people will remember.

Branding is important these days. You want your website to help and showcase the type of lifestyle your company promotes. Are you aiming for an effortless appeal? Perhaps your business is edgy and modern? No matter what your exact aim is for the overall branding of your business, it is a good idea to make sure that your website serves as a reflection of what you are attempting to portray.

Clicking Through

The website that you design for your small business is going to have a big part in your future success. If you are wise with how you go through the process of designing the site, you are more likely to see results that will appeal to you. Take a moment to consider how you stand to gain from designing a website that is easy to navigate and helps to represent your brand in an appropriate way. Once you’ve got this down, you will be ready to see the way you do business shift in positive ways.

This is a guest post by John Mason.

Personalizing the customer experience – getting the timing right

Personalizing the customer experience is a useful online marketing technique, but not if you try to do it too soon. The experience people get when they visit your website is not just about personalization. It’s important that you concentrate on getting your overall website design right first.

It’s all about making sure that the experience is good for everyone who visits your website, before you start to personalize the experience for specific customers, or customer groups.

Making sure that everyone can access your website

2016 was the first year when more people used a mobile device to browse online than did so using a desktop. Now that mobile device users are in the majority, when it comes to using the Internet, you should ensure that they have access to all of the same content as someone who visits your site using a desktop. This is not just good for the customer experience, it’s also important if you want to fare well with Google.

The importance of great content

You should never forget that the Internet is a hugely competitive place. If you want to get an advantage over your competitors, you need to provide website content that attracts, informs and engages potential customers. Here are some things to think about when creating content for your website.

• Make sure the most important content is near the top of the page. This is where users first view your website.
• Be clear and succinct. Most people do not want to have to read through a huge amount of information. Too much text also starts to make your website look untidy and confusing.
• Use clear menus and headings. This makes it easier for people to navigate the content.
• Use keywords in the right way. They need to make sense within the context of what you are saying, and not just stuffed in anywhere. This is important for SEO purposes as well as the customer experience.
• Tell customers what they should do, with well-designed calls to action. This helps customers to complete their experience of your site and should also increase your sales or leads.

If you do not get your website content right, there is little point in concentrating on personalisation, because people are going to lose interest in what you have to say anyway.

Starting to personalize the user experience

Once the overall user experience of your website is up to scratch, you can start to think about personalisation. You need to consider various aspects of the customer’s life, and potential requirements.

• Where do they live?
• What items have they already bought from you?
• What have customers with a similar lifestyle and interests bought in the past?
• What special occasions, such as birthdays, can you recognize with a discount?

This is not an exhaustive list of what you should consider, during the personalization process, but it’s a good place to start.
Personalization works if you do it well; but you need to know your customers before you can really use it effectively. This is why you need to take time getting the overall customer experience right, before you make a start.

This is a guest post by James Andrews.

Server speed

Let’s say it straight: Quality hosting IS fast hosting. The speed of a website is a very important thing to care about, first to provide your visitor with a comfortable experience, and secondly since it’s a known fact that Google is incorporating website speed as a factor of how the site will rank.

Although site speed consists of many aspects (such as using a speed optimized WordPress theme, optimizing images, minimizing HTTP requests, etc.) a quality hosting environment will definitely be a key part of any very fast website.

PHP 7+, MySql 5.6+

The official site of WordPress lists both PHP 7+ and MySql 5.6+ as recommended on their requirements page. As WordPress is pretty good when it comes to compatibility, it can run on older environments such as PHP 5.2/MySql 5 without major problems, but your site performance will be higher if you’re using PHP7.

Benchmarks of WordPress using PHP7 are showing a 2-3x speed improvement compared to PHP5 or 6. You can have a look at other improvements and new features in PHP7 on this article.

PHP7 is now available for all plans on Vidahost, WP Engine and Siteground.

Managed WordPress hosting

Unlike shared hosting, managed WordPress hosting server environment was designed specifically with WordPress in mind. This means you can enjoy faster page times, a higher level of protection against WordPress-specific attacks, and automatic WordPress updates.

Managed WordPress hosting is offered by an increasing amount of hosting companies, including HostGator (Enter coupon catswhocode at checkout for 50% discount), Dreamhost, KickAssd and WP Engine.

HTTPS support

HTTPS is a communications protocol that consists of communication over Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) within a connection encrypted by Transport Layer Security, or its predecessor, Secure Sockets Layer. The main motivation for HTTPS is authentication of the visited website and protection of the privacy and integrity of the exchanged data.

Google has announced that going HTTPS — adding a SSL 2048-bit key certificate on your site — will give you a minor ranking boost. Another reason to definitely consider HTTPS on any of your sites.

The vast majority of hosting companies support HTTPS, however Vidahost, SiteGround, WPEngine and DreamHost can provide you with a free SSL certificate.

CatsWhoCode has recently gone HTTPS! Thanks to the awesome Vidahost support, the process went smoothly, 100% free of charge, and on a Sunday!

Frequent backups

Although this isn’t exactly related to WordPress, a host that does backups for you is a real plus. Sure, any serious website owner will do their own backups, but believe me, host-based backups can sometimes save your whole website when everything else fails.

Having frequent backups done automatically by your hosting provider will provide you peace of mind, this is why I’d go with a host that provides them.

Most hosts will do backups of your site, however backup frequency depends of the company. Daily backups are offered by KickAssd, SiteGround and WP Engine.

Quality, available support

A super important factor of what makes a hosting company a quality one is how good and fast the technical support is. Think about it: All of a sudden, your website stops working… You have no clue about what’s going on. Naturally, you send your host a request for some help. Imagine them taking 48 hours to answer because it’s a holiday. Your website will be unavailable for 48 hours, making you lose visitors, clients, profit…

When buying hosting, always make sure that the support is available 24/7, and also do some research about how good, technically speaking, the support staff is. The day you’ll need hosting support, you’ll be very happy to have been cautious when getting your hosting space!

HostGator and WP Engine have a reputation for quality support. VidaHost, the company that hosts CatsWhoCode, has always provided me with valuable help when needed (see above).

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More to read, more discounts

Before you leave, don’t forget to take a look at some very interesting related articles by our partners. Fancythemes.com have a post about the best WordPress hosting providers, WPKube is sharing thoughts about the current best managed WordPress hosting solutions available. Ecommercebooth.com has both an interesting article about the best WordPress hosting and a WP Engine coupon.

Note: this article doesn’t use the $ shortcut for the jQuery object.

Send data using the GET method

jQuery.get() is a shorthand AJAX function, which loads data from the server using a HTTP GET request. The following snippet shows how to send two values to a page named mypage.php.

jQuery( document ).ready(function() {
	jQuery.get( "mypage.php", { name: "John", time: "2pm" } )
		.done(function( data ) {
		alert( "Data Loaded: " + data );
	});
});

Send data using the POST method

Similar to jQuery.get(), jQuery.post() loads data from the server using a HTTP POST request. The code below demonstrates how to send a POST request to page.php when button is clicked.

jQuery("button").click(function(){
    jQuery.post("page.php", function(data, status){
        alert("Data: " + data + "\nStatus: " + status);
    });
});

Retrieving text from a webpage

The jQuery.load() method makes it extremely easy to retrieve text from a specific webpage. The method allows to only fetch a specific part of the document, so you don’t have to get the whole page and parse it afterwards.

<ol id="new-projects"></ol>
 
<script>
jQuery( document ).ready(function() {
	jQuery( "#new-projects" ).load( "/resources/load.html #projects li" );
});
</script>

Get all values from form and send it to a page

Here’s a super handy snippet that I use very often. It works very simply: once the user clicks on #submit, the data from #form is serialized and sent to a remote page using the POST method.

jQuery( document ).ready(function() {
	jQuery( "#submit" ).click(function() {
		 jQuery.post( "https://yoursite.com/yourpage.php", jQuery('#form').serialize())
			.done(function( data ) {
			alert(data);
		}); 
		return false;
	});
});

Retrieve JSON data

Back in the early days of AJAX, data sent by a server was mostly formatted as XML. Nowadays, most modern applications use JSON as the format for data from the server.

The getJSON() method loads JSON-encoded data from the server using a GET HTTP request. The example below shows how to use jQuery to retrieve JSON-encoded data.

jQuery.getJSON( "http://yoursite.com/test.json", function( data ) {
        alert(data);
});

Once you get your JSON from the server, use the JSON.parse() method to turn the data into a JavaScript object:

jQuery.getJSON( "http://yoursite.com/test.json", function( data ) {
        var obj = JSON.parse(data);
        jQuery( "#container" ).html(obj.name + ", " + obj.age);
});