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WordPress as a Content Management System

November 15, 2010 by Valerie Cudnik

Check out the latest post on Inspired Magazine for a great article about WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS). They cover the pros and cons of using WordPress to manage your website content, feature some WordPress websites from some movers and shakers in the business world, and they round it out with a list of favorite plugins. (though I think they missed a gem: Widget Logic, which lets you customize which pages each widget will or will not appear on.)

One of my favorite things to do when I see such a hot blog is to open the source code and hunt for the plugins. I love to see what the big boys are using.

The Inspired Mag site has a pleasing design; note how they prominently display the number of followers and subscriptions they have… with all the tools to jump on the bandwagon and follow them right there in the same area. Who doesn’t want to be friends with the popular kid on the block?

I’m actually surprised at the number of ads: more than a third of their site is devoted to them. But I guess if you’ve got a page rank of 5 you can get away with it.

Printing Jargon You Should Know

March 25, 2010 by Valerie Cudnik

“Do you want that to bleed?” she asked.

[Deer in headlights look]

“Um… will it hurt?”

<smirk>

Ah, fond memories of learning the jargon of printers. Bleeding, in this case refers to the ink going past the cut edge of the paper, so you have edge-to-edge ink coverage.

Whether you have a designer that handles your art and printing projects, or you work directly with printers yourself, there are some common printing terms you should be familiar with.

Term	Definition
4 color	This is full color printing using 4 colors (cyan, magenta, yellow, black – CMYK) to produce a vast spectrum of colors.
4:4, spoken as 4 over 4	Full color printing on both sides of the paper
Bleed	Printing that extends to the edge of a sheet or page after trimming. This is created by printing past the trim line, then cutting it off. Bleeds range from 1/16″ to 1/8″, depending on the printer’s requirements
Camera Ready Art	A digital file that is ready for the printer to process digitally without any manipulation. This term is from the pre-digital era, where the printer had to shoot a picture of the art using a special camera in order to make a printing plate from the negative.
FPO	For position only. This refers to sample images or dummy text used during a mock up to give a basic idea of how the finished design will look.
Color Gamut	The entire range of hues possible to reproduce using a specific device, such as a computer screen, or system, such as four-color process printing. The gamuts for printing and video are vastly different, which is why what you see on your monitor can be so different from what appears on paper.
Rich Black	Black created using a mixture of all 4 colors of ink for a denser coating and a richer color (as opposed to just black ink).
DPI (dots per inch)	A measure of resolution in relation to printers, scanners, and monitors. Normal high-quality printing requires a minimum of 300 dpi to avoid pixilation. Video and computer images are often referred to by PPI (pixels per inch), which relates to how a monitor represents an image. The higher resolution the monitor, the smaller the image!
PDF	Portable Document Format. A standard for representing electronic documents, allowing them to be transmitted and reproduced accurately.
PMS	This is an abbreviation for Pantone Matching System. Pantone created a library of specific ink colors which can be used instead of or in addition to 4-color printing. If used in addition to 4-color printing, it’s called a fifth color. PMS colors can be APPROXIMATED by 4-color printing, and generally will be close, but not exact.
Crop Marks	Marks that determine where the paper will be cut after printing
Safe Zone	An area that will not be affected by slight shifts in the paper as it’s printed and cut. Images and text outside the safe zone run the risk of being trimmed.
Thermography	Method of printing using colorless resin powder that takes on the color of underlying ink. Also called raised printing (Similar to embossing powder used by rubber stampers.)
UV Coating	Liquid applied to a printed sheet, then bonded and cured with ultraviolet light. Glossy!
Aqueous Coating	Water-based coating applied to protect and enhance the printing underneath. It provides a high-gloss surface that deters dirt and fingerprints. Aqueous coating improves the durability of postcards as they go through the mail, and protects business cards as they ride around in people’s pockets.
80# Gloss Text	Standard glossy paper stock, about as thick as a light magazine cover. The shiny finish provides an excellent opaque base for rich process color printing. This is our most popular stock for: Brochures, Catalog Inserts, Flyers, Posters, etc.
100# Gloss Text	Similar to the 80# gloss text, but 25% thicker and heavier, for a piece that feels more substantial. Standard Uses: Brochures, Information Sheets, Self-mailers, etc.
14pt C2S Stock16 pt CS2 Stock	The pt size refers to the thickness of the paper, as represented in mils; thus 12 pt stock is .012 inches thick. C2S = Coated 2 sides, meaning both sides of the paper are coated with some sort of finish.
Matte	Non-gloss finish.

Distributing your Blog Content

March 22, 2010 by Valerie Cudnik

No matter which blogging platform you are using, experts agree that it’s a valuable way to connect with both your existing and future customers. So you might be asking yourself:

“What’s the best way to get readers to follow my blog?”

You need to make it as easy as possible for your readers to follow your blog; fortunately most blogging platforms come with built in tools and plugins to do so. The two most common ways to stay connected to your readers are:

RSS feeds
Email

RSS Feeds

RSS feeds are simple to use (both as a blogger and as a reader), but some people don’t like them. I personally subscribe to most blogs I follow using RSS and have them fed straight into my iGoogle page (organized by tabs for different topics). The default for most blogging platforms is already set with RSS feeds turned on.

If you’d like to track your subscribers, I recommend using Feedburner (a Google product) to process your feeds.

Email Distribution

With plugins and services like Feedburner, distributing your blog posts via email is really simple. You’ll need to consider whether to distribute whole posts or just excerpts. If you distribute whole posts you will find that your traffic drops off; people don’t need to come to your site anymore. Excerpts then, in my opinion, are the better choice. Your readers get a teaser via email and can click the link to read your complete posts and they get the full benefit of your site (comments, sharing options, related posts, etc.) while doing so.

I’ve tested several plugins for WordPress to add email functionality. From an ease-of-use standpoint, Feedburner wins out, followed closely by a plugin called “Subscribe2” by Matthew Robinson. Finally, for a full-featured, completely customizable solution, MailPress is hard to beat. Not only can it process your post subscriptions, it handles your forms, and has an auto-responder function in addition to many other features. It’s much more complicated to set up (especially when creating a custom template), but the functionality and controls are outstanding.

Other Considerations

In addition to automatically alerting your subscribers when you make a new post, it’s a good idea to install a plugin or script that will automatically post a link to the new content on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. There are many choices for plugins that offer this function. I prefer two of them: Status Updater (By Francesco Castaldo) and Su.pr, which is a StumbleUpon product. Each has their pros and cons, but the biggest benefit of Status Updater over Su.pr is that it can post a link to a fan page, and not just a Facebook profile. Huge difference! Su.pr offers more ways to promote your site and your posts, as well as tracking information about those links. The Su.pr advantage, to me, is using it for custom tiny URLs — much nicer to have a shorter URL with your domain name than http://tinyurl.com/yktexsf. These two plugins each have a lot going for them. Tough decision! I’ve not had much success getting them to play well together, but with the latest updates to these popular plugins, it may now be possible. (I’ll post an update if I can work out the logistics.)

Free Secret Way to Promote Your Business

March 6, 2010 by Valerie Cudnik

Got your attention, didn’t it? It’s not really a secret, it’s just that so many people simply skip it, or don’t use it well, that you’d think it was a secret.

Free and Easy Marketing that Everyone Can Use

Are you looking for a set-it-and-forget-it way to keep your company information in front of your contacts? One that’s FREE? Piece of cake!

Your email signature is the perfect opportunity to not only make sure your contacts have information about how to contact you, but it’s a quick way to share links to your web site, your social networking pages, and even a YouTube video channel. Don’t stop there, though… A one-liner about your business that get’s people interested (referred to as your “talking logo” by John Jantsch in Duct Tape Marketing) should also be there.

Every modern email program has some sort of a “signature” option available. Once you set it up, the signature is attached to every email you send out. Most programs even allow you to have multiple signatures. In the case of the Mail app on my Mac, I can have multiple signatures for each email account.

Email signatures should be either text or html. There should be no graphic attachments in your signature — your logo can, and should, be embedded as HTML. To do this, the logo or other graphics must be hosted on the internet somewhere. The “somewhere” can either be on your own hosting account, Flickr, Picasso, Photobucket, etc.

Here are some samples of email signatures that I use:

Valerie Cudnik
1508 Percheron Ct.
Chesapeake, VA 23322-1928
(757) 271-4602
cdgwebdesign.com

Website Design | Printing | Graphic Design

Connect with me online at:

A woman-owned small business (SWaM: 685565)

CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This e-mail may contain confidential and/or privileged information and is intended to be read only by the person or authorized representative of the organization to whom it is addressed. Please do not print, copy, re-transmit, disseminate or otherwise use the information, all of which are prohibited. For your protection, we remind you that this is an unsecured email service, which is not intended for sending sensitive information.

Valerie Cudnik
Chesapeake, VA 23322
757-632-0757 (Main)
VirtualValerie.net

Fun fashion. Five bucks!
Connect with me online at:

Independent Consultant for Paparazzi Accessories

These particular signatures serve various purposes. I’ve just updated it and the CDG (html) version with my social networking information. The logos and graphics help maintain my brand for my various ventures.

I’ve created a WordPress plugin exclusively for the use of my clients to create the html they need for their own email signatures.

Top 5 Tips from “Duct Tape Marketing” by John Jantsch

January 17, 2010 by Valerie Cudnik

duct-tape-marketing The book “Duct Tape Marketing” by John Jantsch is easily one of my favorite business marketing books. Jantsch takes tried-and-true marketing concepts and breaks them down into understandable, usable, basic methods – suitable for the average business person.

In no particular order, here are my favorite strategies:

Identify your ideal client (page 2). This is actually chapter 1 in the book, and for good reason, if you don’t know who you are marketing to, you will have no focus in your message. If your business is handyman services, your ideal client is probably a 40-ish woman who either doesn’t have a man around the house or has one that isn’t getting household projects done. How you relate to that market segment is completely different to say, how you relate to a single 20-ish woman.
Develop a core marketing message (page 20). This isn’t the “mission statement” popularized in the 80s that became a self-aggrandizing joke. Jantsch focuses on setting one’s business apart from the competition. It’s more than just a slogan, too. For Hampton Roads locals, think in terms of WAVY-TV’s “10 on your side” brand. If they didn’t actually deliver on the message, it would be nothing more than a slogan, but the community at large knows WAVY’s history of getting involved. It’s what set’s them apart from the other stations in the area.
Match your business identity to your message (page 39). Identity includes everything from your logo to your to your website to your outgoing voice mail message. All the components of your identity should clearly identify your company, it should appeal to your target market, and it should differentiate your firm, as well as support the most important aspect of your core message.
Writing an effective ad (page 115). While this strategy was developed with focus on small display ads, the premise and techniques are perfect for Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads, such as on Google or Facebook. He talks about writing headlines that get read and a powerful call to action.
Become an expert (page 156). This is just part of the whole PR chapter, which is quite involved. I’ve seen the same concept in other books, and that is to become a source for reporters when they need to get an expert opinion on an element of a story. The PR chapter goes into detail on how to reach the right media outlets and even outlines the elements of a good press release.

These are just some of the high notes from the book, which is chock full of practical techniques. Jantsch builds on the basics of good marketing practices in a way that the average Joe-business-owner can understand and immediately put to use.

FREE Bing Local listings = FREE Advertising

January 15, 2010 by Valerie Cudnik

Here is an internet marketing secret most people ignore: get your business in Bing Places (Bing Local). While you might think nobody actually uses Bing, you would be wrong! Bing is the default search on every iOS device sold in America. If you talk to Siri, or use spotlight to search, you are using Bing, and that’s a significant amount of traffic. It would be foolish not to add your business to their local listings. It’s free. Free advertising is ALWAYS good.

Bing Places for Business

You have to have a Windows Live ID to create the listing, but that only takes a few minutes to set up, so don’t use it as an excuse.

Make sure to take advantage of all the category and services fields, just like on Google Local, the more information you provide, the better your listing will work for you. For instance, instead of just saying “handyman”, spell out “tile repair, cabinets, faucet installation, etc.” Really use the space they provide to provide specific details in order to capture more of your potential audience.

Bing verification is pretty much like Google’s, they’ll send you a postcard to validate your business.

Take 10 minutes RIGHT NOW and add your listing. And if you don’t already have a Google local listing, add one of those immediately, too!

A marketing strategy for the average Joe

December 14, 2009 by Valerie Cudnik

Part of blogging is selling. Part of selling is knowing not only what your customers buy, but why they buy it.

Not only do you need to know what and why they buy, but you also need to know how to communicate to potential clients so that they know that your company can provide what they need.

WOW! That’s a tall order!

Volumes have been written on sales and marketing strategies. Entire degree programs are dedicated to it. So, how’s the average Joe Business Owner supposed to get a handle on the essential knowledge?

Here’s my personal recommendation, a book, Duct Tape Marketing: The World’s Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide. I stumbled upon this book on Amazon, then promptly borrowed it from the library. After reading it (twice), I bought my own copy. THAT’s how much I like it.

The author, John Jantsch, also has a website by the same name: Duct Tape Marketing, which is filled with even more great ideas that are easily understood and implemented by business owners and bloggers alike. Heck, I even learned a cool way to pimp out my Facebook page from reading his Facebook page. Both the book and the site are full of really useful stuff.

Linkshare

December 5, 2009 by Valerie Cudnik

I’ve been a Linkshare affiliate for a few years. I’ve been very pleased the the choices of merchants and offers. They have some great tools, making it easy to develop links and feeds to automate your advertising program. I’m by no means an expert at it, but I’m happy to report that Linkshare lives up to their end of the deal, and consistently sends payment in a timely manner.

My blogs aren’t at a pro level, so I haven’t been accepted by a few of the larger merchants; there are so many to choose from that that is just a blip of an issue.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Basics

November 26, 2009 by Valerie Cudnik

Whether your are blogging or developing another type of website, the basics to SEO remain the same:

On-page SEO includes:

Good, fresh content
Optimized content
- Meta <Title> Tag containing keyword
- Meta <Description> Tag containing keyword
- A reasonable density of the keyword you are targeting in your content
- Proximity of keyword to beginning of content
- Keyword appearing in H tags and alt tags (there is dispute over this in the SEO world)
Schema markup

Off-page SEO includes:

Quality links back to your site:
- Organic links
- Directory links
- Authority site links
Social Signals
Integration of products offered by the search engines (Google, Bing, etc.)

The trick, of course, is doing all that optimization to make the search engines happy, and still having a site that looks and reads well to your human audience. If your visitors don’t become leads or customers all the SEO in the world is useless.

SEO is a top that changes constantly, mostly due to updates in the algorithms used by Google (primarily) and other search engines.

This barely scratches the surface of SEO. Entire courses are available on this topic because, contrary to rumors: SEO is here to stay.

10 Blog Traffic Tips

November 23, 2009 by Valerie Cudnik

In every blogger’s life comes a special day – the day they first launch a new blog. Now unless you went out and purchased someone else’s blog, chances are your blog launched with only one very loyal reader – you. Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and best friend about your new blog, but that’s about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.

Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called “traction”, which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.

Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

You don’t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need a easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that’s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger’s article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry – it’s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important – it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at blogcarnival.com.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it’s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it’s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it’s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have – your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.

How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

I hope you enjoyed my list of traffic tips. Everything listed above are techniques I’ve put into place myself for my blogs and have worked for me, however it’s certainly not a comprehensive list. There are many more things you can do. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience and I have no doubt if you put your mind to it you will find a balance that works for you.

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.

To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link:

www.BlogMastermind.com