Tumblr-ing into WordPress – Say Hello to Yahoo-blr?

The recent acquisition of Tumblr by Yahoo has sent a wave of uncertainty especially for the large number of digital millennials who have called the site their home on the web. Tumblr — founded by high school dropout, David Karp, in 2007 – is one of the fastest growing media networks in the world and claims 108 million blogs that reach 44 million U.S. citizens and 134 million people globally, according to the New York Times. Among these users are netizens who are teens to the 20-somethings who perceive Yahoo as old and out of touch. Many have reacted to this news by migrating in the thousands to WordPress. Many WordPress theme designs have been inspired by Tumblr – does this mean that Tumblr fans will gravitate towards the familiar and won’t feel out of place in their new found home?

According to Matt Mullenweg,

The relationship between WordPress and Tumblr has always been pretty friendly: Tumblr’s own blog used to be on WP, WordPress.com supports Tumblr as a Publicize option alongside Twitter and Facebook, our Akismet team sends them daily emails of splogs on the service, and there’s healthy import and export traffic both ways. (Imports have actually spiked on the rumors even though it’s Sunday: normally we import 400-600 posts an hour from Tumblr, last hour it was over 72,000.)

Yahoo! chief Marissa Mayer, on the other hand, pledges not to screw things up:

“Per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up,” Yahoo says in its press release, “Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business.”

“Tumblr is redefining creative expression online,” said Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer. “On many levels, Tumblr and Yahoo! couldn’t be more different, but, at the same time, they couldn’t be more complementary. Yahoo is the Internet’s original media network. Tumblr is the Internet’s fastest-growing media frenzy.

In its attempt to be young and relevant, will this “cool” move by Yahoo reverse the company’s slide? Can it successfully integrate its systems and culture on Tumblr without alienating its customers? What about its impact on WordPress? Is the exodus to WordPress simply a knee-jerk reaction or do you foresee a long-term effect?

What are your thoughts? Join the watercooler discussion.

Around the WordPress Neighborhood

The WordPress community is comprised of people from all over the world – developers, designers, experts, users, writers, volunteers, and everyone else no matter what skill level they are at – movers and shakers who collaborate and contribute to enrich this ecosystem we belong to. We enhance our own knowledge and grow and improve by learning from one another and by opening ourselves to different perspectives and different points of views.

Here’s a roundup of useful articles from contributors in and around the WordPress community that we think you will find useful.

A Conversation with Om – by Siobhan McKeown

Siobhan McKeown is in search of WordPress users to feature in her book about WordPress and blogging and Om Malik is one of the people on her list. She shares Om’s blogging journey and how it has evolved since the early days. Siobhan McKeown is editor in chief at WP Realm and runs Words for WP, a copywriting service dedicated to WordPress service providers.

Contributing To WordPress – by Siobhan McKeown

If you have been wanting to be more involved in the WordPress community but didn’t know how or where to start, this article opens up the doors to how you can take part. This article shares why you should get involved and enumerates the many ways you can contribute, no matter what your skill set may be. Find out where you can plug your self in and be a proactive member of this dynamic community.

The Future of UI – How Mobile Design Is Shaping The Web – by Sarah Cannon

In this slideshare presentation, Sarah Cannon shares valuable insights on how smart mobile devices have impacted the web. She discusses the influence of mobile on design, trends, and implementation methods, as well as how touch is changing our lives. She also touches on topics such as HiDPI graphics, UI/UX patterns, touch target sizes, gestures, and managing expectations. All the while not losing track of what’s important: Content.

5 Ways to Support High-Density Retina Displays – by Craig Buckler (SitePoint)

In this article, Craig Buckler gives a quick rundown on how to support high retina displays. As hardware manufacturers move towards HD Retina Displays in all sorts of devices, Craig Buckler gives some practical advice on how to manage images and resolution. Craig Buckler is a Director of OptimalWorks, a UK Consultancy dedicated to building award winning websites.

What is a WordPress Child Theme – WPBeginner

p>This article published by WPBeginner is a very good and solid introduction to understanding how WordPress Child Themes work. It explains in detail what a WordPress Child theme is, its use, its advantages and disadvantages, and what to look for as far as picking a good parent theme. WPBeginner is a free WordPress resource site that provides tips, tricks, hacks, tutorials, and other WordPress resources geared towards WordPress beginners.

Business and Solutions – by Thomas Griffin

If you are a WordPress developer, author, or designer, Thomas Griffin’s insights regarding the how the WordPress marketplace is affecting developers like him. Read about his thoughts regarding Avada, Envato, and Genesis and his shift from being a developer into a marketer. Thomas Griffin is an expert WordPress developer, creator of hundreds of themes and plugins, WordCamp speaker, and a valuable contributor to WordPress products.

Redefining My Website – by Brian Gardner

Brian Gardner is well-known in the WordPress community and is the man behind StudioPress and the popular Genesis Framework. He has released several WordPress child theme designs that are currently being used ii and around the WordPresseaommundty. on about his current website redesign and glean insights from his creative journey.

Owning Your Content – A WordPress User’s Guide – Alex Denning (WPShout)

Interesting read about protecting and “owning” your content on the web as Alex Denning shares about protecting images, licensing content, and how social networking sites such as Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook impact how your images and content are treated. Alex Denning started WPShout around 4 years agoa as a collection of WordPress tutorials.

Finely Tuned Consultant – Aaron Campbell (WPEngine Interview)

WordPress professionals will glean a lot and learn valuable lessons and insights from WordPress Consultant Aaron Campbell in this interview published by WPEngine. Aaron shares his experiences as a WordPress professional and how he deals with the challenges faced by every WordPress consultant on the job. You can find more of Aaron Campbell’s work at Ran.ge

Migrating a Website to WordPress Is Easier Than You Think – Jonathan Wold

If you need are a WordPress beginner and you want to migrate an existing website to WordPress, this article gives you basic and concrete steps you can take to accomplish this. From evaluation, to set up, to importing content, to the actual migration and publishing, Jonathan Wold guides you through each process using instructions, code, video, and images. Jonathan Wold is a full-time business consultant and WordPress developer specializing in basic and advanced WordPress migrations.

Conversion Hacks: Increasing Click Rates

If you are running an ecommerce site, a money site, or a monetized website you need to understand Click Through Rate (CTR) and how to use it to your advantage. The click-through rate (CTR) is the number of unique clicks on links in an email message divided by the number of delivered email messages in a campaign.

The purpose of click-through rates is to capture customers’ initial response to websites, whether it be to buy a product, read an article, watch a music video, or search for a service.

According to Google,

“A high CTR is a good indication that users find your ads helpful and relevant. CTR also contributes to your keyword’s Quality Score which can affect your costs and ad position.”

Although generally, there is no ideal click through rate that can be used as a standard because there are several factors that come into play in every ad campaign that can affect its effectivity. The best thing you can do is to observe and experiment as to what works best for your business. Be a student of your market and study the behavior and responses of your target demographic to the ad campaigns you serve them.

How can you improve your CTR? Here are some strategies shared in the Traffic and Conversion Summit which you can try to improve your CTR stats:

Timing Your Email Deliveries

For email marketing, timing when the email is sent to the subscriber is very important. Some say that the best days are between Tuesdays and Thursdays. The best time to deliver your email may vary depending where you are from but you have to determine the: best time and the best days when you receive the highest results. Short mails usually result in higher CTRs. Tip: Weekends are great for low-dollar and lead-gen offers.

Link Placement

Another important factor to consider is where the link is placed. Strategically, links can be placed in the: intro of the email (1st paragraph), the body (middle), and the close/p.s. sections. Visibility is key. Place ads as close to your most important content as possible. Try to keep your page clean and avoid cluttering it with blinking ads that could lead to banner or ad blindness.

Image Placement

Image placement is also an important factor to increasing your CTR. Make sure that images are clickable. Images of videos are more likely to get clicked. A screenshot of a video with play button works best for video sales letters.

Don’t be afraid to redesign, change or replace an ad or a strategy if it is not working well. Monitoring your statistics and close observation of consumer behavior towards your marketing campaign will give you the clues you need on how to improve your Click Through Rate as you go along.

Conversion Hacks : Increasing the Open Rate

Last week, we touched on open rate as one of several tools that can be used to measure the effectivity of an electronic advertising campaign. This week we’ll take a look at how we can take a good email campaign, increase your open rate stats and eventually convert them into actual subscribers for the long haul.

According to the July 2012 Email Marketing Metrics Report issued by Mailer Mailer,

An open rate represents the number of people who opened an email. It is calculated by dividing the number of email messages opened by the number of messages delivered. The result is expressed as a percentage.

( % Open Rate = # of messages opened / # of messages delivered )

An open can be inferred if images are enabled or a link within the email is clicked. Images may be automatically enabled when an email is opened, especially if the recipient has chosen to display them for all emails from that sender.

However, more often than not, the recipient is prompted to enable images for each email. Since recipients may open the email but fail to enable images, this metric is somewhat inaccurate.

Nevertheless, open rate remains a useful gauge of email campaign performance.

A Standard or Normal Open Rate varies from industry to industry or by list size. According to the same report mentioned above, the industries that were among that scored the highest open rates in 2011 include:

Banking (16.8%), Non-Profit (16.1%), and Consulting and Small business (15.9%)

(source: mailermailer.com)

In another more extensive report, the 2013 Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study conducted by Silverpop, statistics show that consumer product emails scored the highest for open rates with a median of 25.4 percent unique open rate. You can find out more about this report on Silverpop.com.

What about the other industries? What can be done to increase their email open rates? If you are looking to improve your open rate, here are a few tips to follow:

It’s All About the Subject Line

FACT: Nothing happens until the email gets opened.

That’s why it is important to create compelling, effective, and actionable subject lines that make users want to open their emails. Good rules of thumb include asking a question, keeping subject lines under six words and using lowercase in all but the first word and proper nouns.

Test your subject lines. Here are some examples of proven subject lines:

  • Odd Numbers : Why He Paid Google 524,838.71.
  • Question Marks: ex. Google Made Me Slap Proof?
  • Percentages: ex. 99% of People Dieting Need to do This.
  • New Video, PDF, Pics, Video Blog Post
  • Free Report: ex. 7 Deadly S.E.O. Mistakes (free report)
  • Personal Pronouns: (you, your, et cetera)
  • Scarcity: ex. Third and Final Notice
  • Pique Curiosity / Confuse / Shock: ex. Kinda Weird But Very Profitable
  • Negative Subject Lines: ex. I Hate Technology
  • Borrowed Credibility: ex. Steve Jobs was Wrong!
  • Fill-in-the blank Subject Lines: ex. 7 Secrets of _____

Subject Line Sources to glean from

  • Reddit.com
  • Google suggest
  • Popurls.com

Knowing that your open rate exceeds the industry average doesn’t necessarily mean you are meeting your company’s most important business goals. The open rate metric is a useful tool but must be used in conjunction with other metrics in order to give you a realistic picture of your company’s performance. Used correctly, the data can help you calibrate your marketing efforts in order to strengthen areas that need to strengthened. Testing is constant in order to cement customer/prospect relationship, and eventually maximize conversions and revenue.

Best Corporate WordPress Themes May 2013

Here are a few of our current picks for awesome corporate themes for 2013:

Shift Flexibly Creative WP Theme

Time to make the big Shift from your cold and stiff corporate website into a highly creative, extremely customizable, responsive theme WordPress theme – Shift Premium WordPress Theme. This theme includes 12 homepage layouts to choose from. It’s drag & drop enabled feature also allows users to easily arrange, enable/disable sections according to their specific needs or tastes. Each section is customizable, with the option to change background colors, background images even the image position within each section. It is WooCommerce enabled, bbPress ready, retina ready, and fully responsive. This theme was built using the Bootstrap Framework.

Lounge

LOUNGE Premium WordPress Theme is a high quality professional WordPress theme for modern business or interactive creative use. Its clean and professional looking layout creates that sense of reliability and trustworthiness necessary in business. Amazing features include: 4 fluid AJAX animations (can be turned on or off), unlimited Parallax pages, unlimited sliders & slides to each page using two types of built-in sliders, fully responsive, modular shortcodes, and highly intuitive and friendly to use framework.

Co-Worker

CoWorker is a responsive flexible multi purpose theme built for a business, portfolio, corporate, agency or any other kind of website. Salient features include: fully responsive and retina ready design, 12 premium sliders, 30+ page templates, tons of shortcodes including a shortcode generator, 6 header options + menu styles, custom widgets, and many other features to help you redefine your website’s brand.

Moxie

Moxie Premium WordPress Theme is a blend of style, creativity and power. This powerful WordPress theme allows you to take control of your content and build the website you need with the content you want. Creating your own signature website is easy with features such as: Mega Menus, Dynamic animations with Slider Revolution, Drag and Drop feature using Visual Composer, Contact Form Builder, a built in Template System, and so much more.

Stark

Stark Premium WordPress Theme is a highly customizable multi purpose WordPress theme designed by 3 elite Themeforest authors (Damojo, Themepunch, Thunderbuddies) to give you a mega WordPress theme that leaves nothing else to be desired. Quality plugins such Visual Composer, Slider Revolution, Isotope Image Grid Plugin, and FancyBox 2 Lightbox plugin, are just some of the top-notch features included in the premium WordPress theme.

Traffic Analysis – The Open Rate

How many of you open your mailbox regularly and find it stuffed with all sorts of unsolicited mail? – flyers, brochures, leaflets, pre-approved credit cards, and all sorts of marketing materials from local or big companies offering you to buy, join, subscribe, or try. How many of these do you actually read? And how many go straight to the trash can or shredder even before you open it? Real time analysis is difficult to do when measuring the effectiveness of these physical marketing collaterals. There are two types of “open rates”- one for physical mail (aka snail mail via the USPS or other physical mail carrier) and one for electronic mail. In the case of email marketing, traffic analysis is more readily measurable. This means conclusions can be reached at a faster rate and corresponding actions to correct, arrest, or enhance results can be put in place as close to real time as possible.

What is Open Rate?

In email marketing, the open rate is the number of list subscribers who opened the email message. The open rate is a percentage of the total number of emails sent. (webopedia.com)

According to Wikipedia,

The email open rate is a measure primarily used by marketers as an indication of how many people “view” or “open” the commercial electronic mail they send out. It is most commonly expressed as a percentage and calculated by dividing the number of email messages opened by the total number of email messages sent excluding those that bounced (Open Rate=Email messages opened/Total no. email msgs sent).

The open rate of any given email can vary based on a number of variables. For example, the type of industry the email is being sent to. In addition, the day and time an email is scheduled or sent to recipients can have an effect on email open rate. The length of an email’s subject line can also affect whether or not it is opened.

The open rate for an email sent to multiple recipients is then most often calculated as the total number of “opened” emails, expressed as a percentage of the total number of emails sent or—more usually—delivered. The number delivered is itself measured as the number of emails sent out minus the number of bounces generated by those emails.

Many marketing experts question the sole use of the results generated from Open Rates tracking as an absolute measure of the effectiveness of a company’s email marketing campaign. A number of marketers use open rates as a relative measure in comparing the performances of emails sent to similar recipient groups, but at different times or with different subject headers. Perhaps it is safe to say that Open Rate is just one of the many marketing metrics that, when used in conjunction with other traffic analysis tools (Click Rate, Opt In Rate, Conversion Rate, Cart Abandon Rate, Upsell Take Rate, and Renewal/Reorder rate), can paint a clearer picture of how well your website is actually performing.

More on this next week.

Commissioned Work or Commissioned Creative Vision?

Creative ownership has always been a controversial issue. Demarcation lines have been difficult to draw with the coming of the information or digital age. As far as WordPress themes go, a piece of work that emanates from the WordPress author, known as the creator or artist, and transferred to the recipient often identified as client, becomes an arduous task because the artist is oftentimes unable to remove or distance himself from the work of “art” even if it has long left his hands.

For example, a WordPress developer or professional, commissioned to work on a project and whose work has been accepted by the client has intrinsically turned over all rights to his design and has received remuneration for it. In essence, the client now owns the work. However, the designer is still credited to the public eye and both are at the mercy of the terms and stipulations of the legal contract between them.

The coming of the internet/digital age has birthed governing rules such as Creative Commons or GPL where artists openly share the rights to their work to the public under specific licenses or terms of use thus complicating further the very delineations that are supposed to protect the interest of the artist. But where do you draw the line? In the eyes of the WordPress author, the output can be treated as artistic and creative output while to the client, the full rights to the use of the output, specifically, the WordPress theme created, belong to the latter once money is exchanged.

Discussions continue to be controversial. Schools train and teach multi media students how to treat their work and how to avoid exploitation or unjust use of their artistic output. But this is not so in the “real world” marketplace where copying is a “generally accepted” practice. It is not uncommon for a best-selling WordPress theme to birth clones and spin-offs of some sort in a matter of days. How do we address the idealism of upcoming authors and developers who are scared that their designs might get ripped off? The exposure and professional experience of seasoned web developers have given them the wisdom and resilience to cope with these real world ripoff concerns. But this should not discourage those who are can add to the pool of creativity because of fear.

Thankfully, there are many mentors within the WordPress community who are willing to give back to the community and pay it forward to those who are just starting. The dialog is also always ongoing. This is perhaps what makes the whole WordPress community strong and what makes its members continue to thrive.

Interesting WordPress Themes April 2013

Academy (Online Education)

Turn your website into a functioning e-learning solution with Academy Learning Management Theme from ThemeForest. This premium wordpress theme takes the elegant form of an ecommerce site and tweaks it to meet the needs of the e-learning market. Share, sell and promote your knowledge online effectively. This powerful theme includes features and functions to help you manage course offerings, rate their popularity, and publish subscription plans aimed to reach your target market. This theme includes a powerful options panel that allows you to create courses and lessons.This theme provides awesome features for creating online courses, such as extended user profiles, rating system, questions system, file attachments, embedding self-hosted media, tracking course progress, WooCommerce integration and more.

Responsive Knowledge Base & FAQ WordPress Theme

For the business or website that exists to help people make the most of their computing experience, Responsive Knowledge Base is the perfect theme to use. This premium WordPress theme was built for support providers as a first line response solution for clients seeking answers to their problems, technical or otherwise. This theme acts as a knowledge base or depository where visitors can search your site for solutions to their issues. Users can browse through Q and A pages, articles and similar material or do a live search (jQuery TypeAhead powered) to help them identify their problems and find solutions.

Rescue – Animal Shelter Theme with Petfinder Support

Animal lovers unite! Rescue Premium WordPress Theme is a theme built with a specific purpose – to get animals adopted. Outstanding pet-related WordPress themes are few and far between that’s why Rescue is a special theme pet lovers can find a home in. What makes it more unique is the built in Petfinder API support that allows you to easily sync your pets from your Petfinder profile to your WordPress install. Petfinder is an online, searchable database of animals who need homes. It is also a directory of more than 13,000 animal shelters and adoption organizations across the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

GymBoom (Fitness)

If you are in the fitness business or if you own a gym, a health club, or a wellness center, check out GymBoom, a responsive fitness theme with a built in dynamic calendar to manage training schedules for those serious health buffs and fitness addicts. This responsive theme also sports a unique diagonal slider created with the slider creation tool. It’s got useful shortcodes to post lists, highlight text, create multiple columns and more. You also get two homepage option styles: one with a slider and a page styles option. Gymboom includes a google map shortcode integrated in the widgetized footer section.

More Traffic Hacks – YouTube, Pinterest, and Linkedin

One billion unique Youtube viewers every month, 48.7 million pinners, 200 million linkedin members in over 200 countries – mind-blowing statistics and very difficult to visualize. You might as well be looking at the stars. But those numbers are real-time stats of real people who are interconnected, interwoven, and networked all across the world wide web. Wouldn’t you love it if all this traffic got sent your way? Of course, it could break your site but that can always be fixed.

Here are some of the traffic hacks shared during the last Traffic and Conversion Summit 2013:

YouTube

YouTube now allows you to create links to external pages

Enable monetization on external “clickable” link annotations. Send traffic to a squeeze page, Facebook page, or to your main money site.

Video Optimization:

Get more publicity to your videos by exposing it to a bigger market – the shared video loophole or use a paid service like shareyoutubevideos.com or videomarketingblaster.com if you are too busy to do it yourself.

Pinterest

Did you know that Pinterest outpaced Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube combined for share of referral traffic? Below is a sample on how you can get traffic followers, opt-ins, and sales from Pinterest:

Hold creative Pinterest Contests (sample below)

  1. Create 50 new images with quotes and the opt-in URL.
  2. Create a new page with all the images and the contest rules and prizes.
  3. Sendthe client’s list and FB fans (paid and organic) to the contest page.

When someone shares the images, they enter the contest and send their Pinterest followers to the opt-in page.

Conduct Teleseminars and uses memes like “Pin it to Win it” with urls linked to the squeeze page for the teleseminar</p

LinkedIn

Carl White shared a 5-minute agenda on how to monetize followings on big groups like LinkedIn:

What Carl does

  1. Find people with a big following or list (but aren’t currently monetizing it with continuity). Ex: go on Linkedin and type in a group (e.g. fitness, beer). Use lists available. If you can find them on Linkedin, try to find related group on Facebook. Compare fan numbers with involvement on Facebook (7.5% engagement is very high).
  2. Contact these people and see if they are monetizing their list. Ask the followers what they want to buy. Put the following post as a survey on the fan page, Linkedin page, send out an email, et cetera, “What is the one thing that you need the most help with?”
  3. Google it and find people that sell what the group wants to buy (e.g. white label solutions).

Take these hacks for a spin and see how it works out for you. We’d love to hear your results.