WordPress

A Plugin to Make All Themes Responsive, Coming Soon (Lähde)

4.2.2012

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of responsive themes. Knowing that your WordPress blog will look just as good on a tiny mobile screen as it does on a huge desktop screen is one of the most important factors of design to me, especially in today’s age where mobile device usage is growing so rapidly.

Sadly, there aren’t many responsive themes out there, but Responsive Plugin aims to change that. Once released, Responsive Plugin will make any theme scale perfectly on any screen size. There is no definitive release date, but it is definitely coming out sooner rather than later, and you can find a signup form at the bottom of the site if you want to follow the action.

Lähde: A Plugin to Make All Themes Responsive, Coming Soon
Avainsanat: WordPress Plugins, WordPress Templates WordPress Skins WordPress Themes

How Much Does A New Customer Cost? (Lähde)

For someone who is about to start up their own business, whether online or not, this is an essential question to ask.

When you sell a product or service you need someone to make a purchase so you can make money. The most important principle in business is that there are two different types of people involved in your business; customers and clients.

While both of these may appear at first to be the same they are critically different and concentrating on one over the other can be the difference between success and failure.

This concept, what I call the $1 Customer, I teach to clients in order for them to focus on building relationships that last.

The difference between a customer and a client is repeat business.

For every link you exchange, promotion you run and ad you place to attract customers to your business or website there is a cost involved. It can be something as simple as your time, but the cost reduces your profit immediately.

For every $1.00 someone spends an initial customer will cost you something; regardless of whether that cost is $0.15, $0.25 or $0.50. With a customer you never get your full $1.

A client, in comparison, is a returning customer to your business and can cost you nothing. They may purchase something because of a promotion, but clients are the most likely to return to your business because of their positive first experience or because you have a value proposition (like Daily Blog Tips) very few others do. In the online world clients are what attract advertisers and build your email list. Clients are highly targeted high value customers.

Very few businesses can survive on customers alone; a successful business needs to concentrate on turning any and all customers into a client.

High value clients are also the most likely to refer your business to a friend or acquaintance providing you with another $1 customer and prospective client.

Email lists are the best way to stay engaged with your clients as you can inform them of promotions, new products or services and announcements related to your business. A customer is a one-time transaction or visit with no loyalty; a client is someone whose repeat business can be forecasted, expected and maintained over a long period of time.

Are you paying enough attention to your customers and turning them into clients?

Brad Ferris is a marketing consultant and writer of Triage Investing Blog where he authors content on business fundamentals and successful investment practices.

Lähde: How Much Does A New Customer Cost?
Avainsanat: Monetize

WordPress Plugin Releases for 2/3 (Lähde)

3.2.2012

New plugins

Quick Notice Bar will help you to display a sticky message in your site’s header.

RePress allows you to circumvent internet censorship by proxying traffic to websites that have been blocked by repressive regimes.

Widget Logic Visual lets you control on which pages widgets appear using conditional tags.

WP Really Simple Health allows you to view memory utilization, server uptime, and CPU load on the new admin toolbar.

Updated plugins

Tallyopia Analytics provides analytics that you can embed into your site using shortcodes or view in your admin dashboard.

Ultimate TinyMCE beefs up your visual editor with a plethora of advanced options.

Lähde: WordPress Plugin Releases for 2/3
Avainsanat: plugins, WordPress Plugins

10 Ways to Ensure No-One Will Read Your Content (Lähde)

So many bloggers put tons of time and effort into getting more traffic – but perhaps that sounds like trying way too hard. Your ideas are so awesome, your personality so strong, that readers will just come to you.

I’m going to give you ten straightforward ways to make sure the whole world knows you’re not going to pander to your readers. (Oh, and if you would like to have a few more readers – try doing the opposite of everything on this list.)

1. Give Your Post the First Title You Come Up With

You’re in a hurry, right? So your post will do just fine with the first title that pops into your head. Sure, that title might not be descriptive or engaging – but hey, you’re not worried about enticing people to click through and read your post.

2. Write Whatever Comes Into Your Head

Instead of sifting through some great ideas or coming up with a plan, just write whatever comes into your head. What you had for breakfast, that cute thing your cat did, your favorite rant about the goverment … put it all in.

3. Write Long, Dense Paragraphs

Subheadings, lists and bold text are for the weak. If someone really wants your content, they’ll manage to get through those long blocks of grey text that you’ve written.

4. Use Formal Language

You were probably taught about writing in school: why not simply apply all those rules to blogging? Write in a dry, academic way, with plenty of long words, and you’ll be certain that your posts are worth an A (even though no-one’s reading).

5. Make Your Blog All About You

It’s your blog, so make it about you. Every example you give should be drawn from your own experience. Don’t bother phrasing talking to the reader as “you” – instead, use “I” as often as you can. [link to my post on you & I]

6. Don’t Edit or Proof-Read

No-one cares about good writing online, do they? Don’t bother re-reading what you’ve written: those typos won’t matter. And if your general point is a bit vague and unclear, perhaps that’s for the best…

7. Never Link to Old Posts

All your (three) readers have been with you from day one, so don’t link back to old posts: they’ll already have read them. New readers can just use that handy “Archives” page that’s definitely on your blog somewhere.

8. Don’t Promote Your Post

If you build it, they will come. Don’t bother tweeting your post or mentioning it on Facebook: you need that space to moan about the long line at the grocery store and that weird guy on the bus.

9. Post Erratically

Sometimes you’re filled with the desire to create – and sometimes not. Post whever the muse descends, even if that means twenty posts in a week followed by nothing for two months. Your real fans will stick with you … won’t they?

10. Plaster Your Blog With Ads

You don’t actually care about the readers: you’re into blogging for the money. And you’re pretty sure that the best way to monetize is to shove as many ads onto your site as possible, so that the actual content almost vanishes.

Ali Luke is a writer and writing coach, and has a weekly DailyBlogTips column on content creation. If you’re struggling to get enough writing done, check out her free ebook How to Find Time for Your Writing.

Lähde: 10 Ways to Ensure No-One Will Read Your Content
Avainsanat: Writing Content

The Keys To Writing Effective Email Newsletters For Your Blog (Lähde)

2.2.2012

Experienced bloggers may have a profound understanding of the dynamics of composing an engaging and informative blog but they may also be entirely clueless when it comes to applying their writing skills to a very different medium: their email newsletter.

The creation of an effective email newsletter requires a very specific form of writing moxie and the mastery of a structure which varies considerably from your garden variety blog post.

Promotional vs. informative

The first determination which must be made is what your readers want to read. In order to address this situation you might need to rewind your entire creative process back to Square One and re-determine what the actual goal of your email newsletter is in the first place. Of course you’re trying to drive more traffic to your blog, but are you doing it in a promotional or an informative manner? The two approaches can translate in very distinct results.

Depending on your email subscribing audience they may be more responsive to a form of mini-blog which presents ancillary or even totally separate information than what you are currently featuring on your formal blog.

However, some types of readers would rather receive the information you provide on your blog itself and may be confused or irritated by having to resort to two separate channels to receive “the full picture.” You can certainly rely on your knowledge of the sector, but by far the more accurate manner to make this determination is by extensively testing both approaches to see which one provides the better conversion rate.

Short & punchy

Once you have the overall approach set, it’s time to simplify. Most bloggers craft email newsletters that are way too long, complex, convoluted, and detailed to be effective. The best email newsletters feature short, punchy paragraphs, a wealth of bullet lists, and links that not only lead back to your blog, but to other pages that your readers could find of interest.

There is usually no need to cram in everything but the kitchen sink into your email newsletters, as general summaries with links back to your blog for the meat of the matter is usually all that is required. If you find yourself composing voluminous tomes for your email newsletter content that requires repeated scrolling by the reader, you should channel that time and energy into your blog itself.

Chat, don’t lecture

Your email subscriber is a regular person, not a member of a peer-review scientific journal committee. That equates into your composing your email newsletter in the style of a one on one conversation not a post-graduate thesis. You can reserve the heavy lifting of facts and figures for your blog, as an email newsletter is best written in the way that you would chat with them, not lecture them.

Reward your reader for having the trust and confidence in you to sign up for your email newsletter and then carrying through to actually opening and reading the emails they receive by providing them content that is friendly, approachable, and conversational.

Avoid insider-speak

Jargon is one of the greatest enemies of a successful email newsletter campaign. Even though you may operate in an extremely technical industry, you should always aim the readership comprehension of your email newsletter writing at a reasonable eighth grade education level.

Take whatever steps are necessary to avoid writing email newsletters that require extensive technical footnotes, or worse yet read like the Hollywood trade magazine Variety where different movie genres are described in insider lingo as laffers (comedies), mellers (melodramas), oaters (Westerns), or chopsocky (martial arts). Excessive jargon or technicalese can lead to misunderstanding which can alienate a large part of your audience.

You should always place yourself in the position of your subscriber when writing an email newsletter. If you were subscribing to your blog, what would you react to most favorably? If you find that the way you are crafting your email campaign now is actually responsible for disaffecting your subscribers, it’s time that you made a change… while you still have subscribers left!

Hal Licino is a successful author, award-winning freelance writer, and frequent contributor to a blog hosted by Benchmark Email, an email marketing service for small businesses. He also writes a weekly column for Daily Blog Tips.

Lähde: The Keys To Writing Effective Email Newsletters For Your Blog
Avainsanat: Promotion

WordPress Theme Releases for 2/1 (Lähde)

1.2.2012

Dusk To Dawn is a dark theme that melds old-style organic ornaments with modern design and typography.

Grisaille is a classic and simple two-column design adjusted for mobile browsing.

Stark has 2 columns with a left sidebar, is of fluid width, has both an upper menu and a vertical menu, and is high contrast with vivid red, black and white.

Lähde: WordPress Theme Releases for 2/1
Avainsanat: themes, WordPress Templates WordPress Skins WordPress Themes, wordpress themes

WordPress Theme Releases for 2/1 (Lähde)

Dusk To Dawn is a dark theme that melds old-style organic ornaments with modern design and typography.

Grisaille is a classic and simple two-column design adjusted for mobile browsing.

Stark has 2 columns with a left sidebar, is of fluid width, has both an upper menu and a vertical menu, and is high contrast with vivid red, black and white.

Lähde: WordPress Theme Releases for 2/1
Avainsanat: themes, WordPress Templates WordPress Skins WordPress Themes, wordpress themes

Track Your Time Automatically with Chrometa (Lähde)

If you are a freelance writer, designer or consultant, you’ll certainly get involved in projects where you need to bill your clients by the hour. But how do you track your time accurately so that both you and your client will be happy?

There are several solutions available (both free and paid) which help you with this task. For example, if you are using Firefox or Google Chrome you’ll certainly find extensions that do it.

The problem with most of those solutions, though, is that require you to actively start the timer when you start working on a client’s project, and to stop it once you are done. Sounds simple enough, but what if you working on multiple projects at the same time? Or if you are working on a client’s project when you decide to check your email or chat on Facebook for some time? As you can imagine, it becomes a mess.

Is there a better way? Yep, there’s a time tracking software called Chrometa that automatically starts and stops your timer for you, depending on what activity is going on on your computer. Here’s a small video illustrating how it works:

How does the software know to what client the work you are doing belongs? You can create keyword-based rules and the times will be assigned automatically according to those keywords.

On top of that you can also create invoices on the fly or export your time to a third party billing system (like Freshbooks). Here’s a screenshot of the user interface:

The basic version starts at $19, but you’ll probably be able to make that money back in a matter of days once you start tracking your time more accurately. Reading through their testimonials there were users who increased their billable time by 20% once their started tracking time spent with email, drafts and so on. Here’s the link to their website if you wanna check the product out.

Lähde: Track Your Time Automatically with Chrometa
Avainsanat: Software

The WordPress Theme Review Team Needs Your Help (Lähde)

31.1.2012

Are you a WordPress blogger? Do you enjoy having thousands of safe themes to choose from in the official directory? Did you know that a small group of volunteers goes through every single line of code in every submitted theme to make sure that they work properly on a basic installation and are free from malicious code? Chances are, you didn’t know that last bit, but now you do.

The Theme Review Team could use your help, especially if you know your way around a theme or two. At this time, there are typically many more theme submissions than active reviewers, so if you’re looking for a great way to help out the entire WordPress community, join the Theme Review Team today! If you’re a theme developer, but don’t have the free time to volunteer, you can at least help the team out by ensuring that your theme meets the guidelines before submitting it.

Lähde: The WordPress Theme Review Team Needs Your Help
Avainsanat: theme review team, WordPress Templates WordPress Skins WordPress Themes

The WordPress Theme Review Team Needs Your Help (Lähde)

Are you a WordPress blogger? Do you enjoy having thousands of safe themes to choose from in the official directory? Did you know that a small group of volunteers goes through every single line of code in every submitted theme to make sure that they work properly on a basic installation and are free from malicious code? Chances are, you didn’t know that last bit, but now you do.

The Theme Review Team could use your help, especially if you know your way around a theme or two. At this time, there are typically many more theme submissions than active reviewers, so if you’re looking for a great way to help out the entire WordPress community, join the Theme Review Team today! If you’re a theme developer, but don’t have the free time to volunteer, you can at least help the team out by ensuring that your theme meets the guidelines before submitting it.

Lähde: The WordPress Theme Review Team Needs Your Help
Avainsanat: theme review team, WordPress Templates WordPress Skins WordPress Themes