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We live under various economic conditions all around the globe, governed by different economic and fiscal policies, that may or may not directly affect the spending habits of the average consumer. However, no matter how the economy is doing wherever you are or how much money you have in your pocket, people will always want to live the good life – a gratifying, enjoyable and comfortable life – regardless. This human need serves as the fuel that drives businesses to market their products to fulfill that desire for the “good life”. The rapid turnover of gadgets and electronic products, and the scarcity or exclusivity of luxury cars, houses, holidays, and other luxury items keep consumers on their toes waiting to buy the next new thing. This is characteristic of the Baby Boomer type of consumer. Work hard. Play hard. Consumerism.
However, analysts and marketers foresee a growing trend – a shift. Today’s digital age is seeing the rise of the “millennials” or “digital natives” – (those born in an era of technology and have grown up with computers, the Internet, and constant connectedness) who use digital wallets and technology-enabled payment tools – who spend their money shopping in app stores, who buy a single music track instead of a whole album, who download software, games, ebooks, other digital media products, aside from the usual physical products.
These modern day, tech enabled consumers rely on technology to research products, discounts, deals, coupons, customer reviews, product information, and other related info on their smartphones or handheld devices. Millennials enjoy the thrill of discovery, the joy of a bargain, the pleasure of sharing, and the power to influence the purchasing decisions of others. Which brings us to say that, one of the major influences to their spending decisions is also the general consensus or sentiments of their social network connections. This shopping behaviour means that today’s consumer goes through more processes before clicking that “confirm purchase” button. What does this mean and how does this impact your business?
This means that businesses should work towards removing perceived barriers and obstacles their consumers encounter. People love to buy but the first thing on their mind is “How much?” It is the first barrier to them making that purchase. One business strategy to lowering if not totally eliminating that first barrier is by employing the “Dollar Store Mentality” to your product pricing. What does this mean?
When people believe that things are a dollar or less, they should be bought in bulk because they are so cheap.
When you lower the consumer’s perceived risk in making a purchase, the easier you make it for them to buy – no matter where they are in the world or what demographic they belong to. This is not to say that everything should be priced at a dollar literally. A product or service that is low cost (relative to similar products in the market) or especially if free will surely attract people like bees to honey. Although this might mean taking advantage of the consumer’s emotional and impulse buying predisposition, this strategy also means that you are opening up a safe entry point for you to introduce your product and for people to try them out with minimal risk. Because the pricing is friendly, the purchasing process becomes easy, fun and addicting, and eventually habit forming. If the product is good, the people will stay, share, and even influence others to patronize your business. Yes, they will talk about you. These habitual customers now become the bedrock for you to start establishing your customer base. As you continue to build trust and confidence in your product and in your business, you can slowly and steadily build customer relationships. Once these relationships are built and established, these customers become more receptive and when you introduce offers for additional products or services at a premium price they don’t pull back because they feel connected to you. The ultimate goal is not just to make a quick sale but to establish a long-term relationship with your customers which is mutually beneficial to both of you in the long run.
According to the WordPress,
The Dashboard is a tool to quickly access the most used areas of your blog’s Administration and to provide glimpses into other areas of the WordPress community. The Dashboard Screen presents information in blocks called modules. WordPress delivers eight modules: Right Now, Recent Comments, Incoming Links, Plugins,QuickPress, Recent Drafts, WordPress Blog, and Other WordPress News.
The first screen you see when you log into the administration area of your blog is your Dashboard. The main idea of the dashboard is to give you a place where you can get an at-a-glance overview of what’s happening with your blog. You can catch up on news, view your draft posts, see who’s linking to you or how popular your content’s been, quickly put out a no-frills post, or check out and moderate your latest comments.
The Dashboard acts like a cockpit with all the controls and switches you need to help your website function the way you want it to. This might seem basic to those who have been using WordPress for quite some time now but there are still quite a few out there who are still struggling to figure out how to find their way through the backend, scared to death lest they “break” their website beyond repair.
If you are a WordPress beginner, the Admin Section or backend can be quite intimidating at first, but once you become familiar with the different sections, everything will make sense. What do you see after you successfully login to your WordPress website? Here’s what you can expect.
The Dashboard contains the following default modules. These modules can be dragged, dropped, repositioned, or toggled on and off according to your preferences.
This module, at its basic, gives you a concise overview of your what’s going on with your site. It contains information and stats about your content (posts, pages, categories, tags), discussions (approved, pending, or spam comments), the name of your WordPress theme and the number of active widgets you are using, users online, and the WordPress version installed. More information can be included in this module depending on any additional plugins you install. You can also customize your Privacy Settings if you wish to keep your site private.
This module is the best and quickest way you can create a simple post. You can add a title, content, media files, custom forms, tags, and save your post as a draft or publish immediately. It’s a great tool for capturing and publishing ideas without going through the “Add New Post” module.
If you allow comments on your website, this module helps you moderate the discussions on your posts. You can approve (unapprove), edit, reply, mark as spam, or delete comments right on the dashboard.
This module displays saved drafts of posts and pages that you are working on which still needs to be edited or published.
This module reveals the urls of other websites that has linked to your WordPress website. You may or may not find this module useful as it does not always include all the websites that link to you. You can also configure incoming links you allow by editing the RSS feed information ( url, number of items to display, item date).
This module displays recent posts from the official WordPress Blog, Other WordPress News, Popular or Latest Posts from around WordPress. This keeps you updated on the latest WordPress related news such as version announcements, security notices, and general WordPress community posts and updates.
This module lists the Most Popular, Newest, and Recently Updated plugins available. If you are adventurous and you want to experiment with how different plugins work on your site, this is the perfect resource to find plugins to play with.
This module is probably the one you need to pay most attention to. It shows you a graph of your website’s activities – views, visitors, traffic – per day, week, or month. It’s a great tool to find out how many visits you get, what your top posts are, top searches on your website, and overall statistics to help you improve, maintain, and optimize your site even further.
Knowing the functions of each of these modules will help you learn how to use them to manage your website. Take some time to go through each one of these modules and familiarize yourself with each of them. You’ll soon be mastering all of them and it’ll be instinctive later on.
The recently held digital marketing conference Traffic and Conversion Summit 2013 was an eye opener to many. Many of the topics discussed were cutting edge and one of the main buzz words that came out of the conference was “channelization”.
What do we mean when we say “channelization”? Here’s an interesting way to look at it.
Rivers come in lots of different shapes and sizes, but they all have some things in common. All rivers and streams start at some high point. The high point can be a mountain, hill or other elevated area. Water from some source like a spring, snowmelt or a lake starts at this high point and begins to flow down to lower points. As the water flows down, it may pick up more water from other small streams, springs or or from rain or snow melt. These streams may slowly join together to form a larger stream or river. Small rivers and streams may join together to become larger rivers. Eventually all this water from rivers and streams will run into the ocean or an inland body of water like a lake.
River engineering is the process of planned human intervention in the course, characteristics or flow of a river with the intention of producing some defined benefit. People have intervened in the natural course and behaviour of rivers since before recorded history – to manage the water resources, to protect against flooding or to make passage along or across rivers easier.
Channelization of a stream may be undertaken for several reasons. One is to make a stream more suitable for navigation or for navigation by larger vessels with deep draughts. Another is to restrict water to a certain area of a stream’s natural bottom lands so that the bulk of such lands can be made available for agriculture. A third reason is flood control, with the idea of giving a stream a sufficiently large and deep channel so that flooding beyond those limits will be minimal or nonexistent, at least on a routine basis.
(source: Wikipedia)
In today’s digital market, how then, does this concept apply to finding or even creating your own niche WordPress stream or channel?
Let’s take a look:
Product distribution (or place) is one of the four elements of the marketing mix. Distribution is the process of making a product or service available for use or consumption by a consumer or business user, using direct means, or using indirect means with intermediaries. The other three parts of the marketing mix are product, pricing, and promotion. Distribution of products takes place by means of channels. Channels are sets of interdependent organisations (called intermediaries) involved in making the product available for consumption.
Today’s digital economy is shifting towards “channelization” – the way products are made available for public consumption. Because of the way business is evolving, what worked years ago may no longer work today. What was effective yesterday may already be obsolete today. Interestingly enough, starting your own business and distributing your own products has never been easier. However, the challenge of independent business owners or new players in the eCommerce arena is being discovered and being able to establish their own loyal market base. Creating your own stream or river from scratch is like pushing a boulder uphill everyday. This is where the shifting or the channelization occurs.
Today, the traditional trader can start off his business by taking advantage of these established “high starting points of distribution” like Amazon or Ebay, plug in to their channel, utilize their structure and distribution network to launch or introduce a new product or project.These powerful distribution channels have significant traffic and extensive networking connections to give your business a boost in the right direction. Once the channel is strong enough and the customer base is established, the business owner can spin off and establish his own business base according to his own terms. On the other hand, DIY-ers and boutique type businesses can create their own online stores in niche channels like Etsy. Other types of businesses can use other distribution channels such as KickStarter, AngelList, CafePress or Barkbox. How to get started? All it takes is to register.
What about digital goods such as WordPress Themes, Plugins and other types of digital products? New players in the WordPress themes business have found opportunities to introduce themselves and pool their work portfolio through established WordPress marketplaces or “channels” like ThemeForest with very little startup capital. The key, really, is to draw a loyal crowd or “traffic”, establish connections, and service them so that their conversion as long-term customers or customers for life will be cemented.
Bottomline, in today’s digital economy, having a good product is great, knowing your distribution channels is better, but having a good product + distributing thru the right channels + creating the media (email lists of customers) = the best starting point for you to build your own niche business and your brand.
If this post has caught your eye, you are probably a current WordPress user, author, developer, designer, or if not, perhaps a potential one. The subject of pricing is a tricky topic that some prefer to ignore or avoid – the proverbial elephant in the room. Why, because this is a hot topic indeed.
For the purpose of this article, let’s start off by saying that a WordPress theme is a downloadable digital product as compared to an actual physical product that can be shipped. When you purchase a WordPress theme you do not receive any physical items at all but instead, you are given permission or license to download an electronic/ digital product (the theme), via email or a provided link, and use it according to the author/developer’s specific TOU (Terms of Use).
Traditionally, the actual cost of producing/manufacturing tangible products can be arrived at by adding the cost of materials used and the labor paid to produce these products to arrive at the total cost of goods. Others may add on overhead costs but strictly speaking it’s simply materials +labor. For services rendered, actual cost can be arrived at based on a rate applied to the number of man hours spent (time) on a project or the professional fee charged by the person (expert) rendering the service.
However,
Digital products require an approach to pricing that differs from that used for physical products. Most digital products have common characteristics which includes:
- high fixed cost to produce the first unit, but low marginal costs to produce subsequent units
- quality is difficult to judge without actually experiencing the product
The most common pricing method that can be used for digital products is to use a licensing approach.
(source: Digital Economy: Impacts, Influences, and Challenges by Harbhajan S. Kehal, Varinder P. Singh)
The cost structure of digital products = high fixed costs that are sunk, and tending towards zero marginal costs.
Fixed costs refer to the costs associated with a product, that are fixed over a number of units. Thus regardless of the number of units produced and sold, the fixed costs remain the same. With digital products, much of the fixed costs are actually sunk costs, and therefore non-recoverable costs. A large portion of the costs associated with digital products are fixed, and sunk, and not variable costs, which are more typical of traditional manufactured goods.
Sunk costs refer to costs that are non-recoverable fixed costs. Digital products usually have significant sunk costs (when compared to other fixed costs) in the form of research & development and intellectual property (copyright, patents etc.) for the product. If the product is not successful in the marketplace, the costs associated with the the product development (intellectual property, labor) cannot be recovered. Thus when making pricing decisions about the product in the future, one should not factor in the sunk costs. If a product’s cost structure is made up of sunk costs (no other fixed costs) and zero marginal costs then any price above zero will contribute to the company’s bottom line. Other fixed costs, that are not sunk (rent, depreciation on equipment etc.) should be factored in when making pricing decisions in the future, since these are ongoing costs to the company. The company will continue to have to pay these costs in the future, this is not the case for sunk costs.
Marginal costs are the costs associated with creating an additional unit of product. This is similar to variable costs, which are the costs that increase directly with the increase in production (unlike fixed costs). Digital products typically have very low marginal costs, when compared with traditional goods (materials, labor etc.) and if the product is distributed via a web site, then the marginal costs can be zero. The consumer is bearing the distribution costs, and there are no packaging costs. This is why companies are able to market their products for free on their web sites, in order to try to entice further purchases at a later time (in the hopes of creating lock-in perhaps).
(source: http://www.udel.edu/alex/dictionary.html#d)
How many of you enjoy BTS (Behind the scenes) footages of upcoming movies? BTS clips give you a sneak peek of how these movies were filmed and the production process these films have gone through. Similarly, if we could do a BTS video of how a WordPress theme is created, can you imagine the amount of work that goes into creating a theme? Can you identify which activities fall under fixed costs, sunk costs, or marginal costs? Can you tell how many working hours have gone into its creation? Can you measure the education, experience, competence and expertise of the author/developer?
When you purchase a WordPress theme from a reputable WordPress author/developer you typically get a long list of features like the one below. But, have you ever associated any cost to these features?
Did you know that creating custom themes for clients range from around $1500 up to $50000 depending on the project. Looking at the list above, and seeing everything that goes into creating a theme, would you say that WordPress themes are underpriced? overpriced? or fair enough?
Let’s ask the next question. What’s important to you? How much do you value your business? your brand? yourself?
The answers to these questions will more or less determine how much you are willing to pay anything actually – whether it’s paying for your website, for your family needs, or even for your own personal growth.
Sometimes you have to make your decision, not based on cost, but based on value – which company do you want to work with? Which one has the most experience, the best portfolio, the most responsive people? A higher cost should not disqualify a company if that’s the one you’re confident can get the job done.
Pricing is not a magic, secret recipe. It’s just the cost of doing business, plus the value of expertise, plus the time needed to complete a project in a particular set of circumstances with a particular set of requirements. (reference: Websearchsocial.com)
At $39 you can already get 80 premium WordPress themes, no sweat. It’s about the same price, more or less, of a plugin or a slider, isn’t it? Do you agree that these themes should be worth a whole lot more than that?
Tell us what you think. We’d love to hear your thoughts.
Churches and other religious or advocacy centered organizations have very specific website needs. Most of them require a combination of magazine, events, multimedia, and community features rolled into one theme. Here are some great WordPress themes that have great features and functionalities that can address those needs:
The Good News Premium WordPress Theme is a theme specifically designed for churches but it is flexible enough to fit other uses. This premium theme includes: custom posts (Events, Sermons, Media), custom templates (Events, Sermons, Media), custom widgets, a contact form, 11 PSD files, and a complete HTML version, everything you need to set up your church’s website. The Good News is also responsive.
Evolution Premium WordPress Theme from Elegant Themes is a simple, clean, responsive multi purpose theme that can be used for any type of website but it can also work well for advocacy groups or church and religious blog sites. Pastors or church leaders can use this theme to publish regular preachings or inspirational articles to inspire their readers beyond the Sunday sermon. This theme includes several useful page templates such as an image gallery, portfolio, a blog feed, and a member login template, among others.
Peacemaker Premium WordPress Theme is an excellent church theme that incorporates all the elements of church related activities into one theme. A notable feature is its events countdown feature which is a helpful events management tool to inform people about upcoming events. This responsive premium theme also includes: four custom post types (Events, Videos, Audio & Galleries), custom widgets, a unique homepage slider builder with the Slider custom post type, layered PSDs for detailed customization, and extensive documentation for easy setup.
Reaching your audience has never been simpler with Genesis Premium WordPress theme, a church theme that’s designed to help you create a dynamic and responsive church website easily. This premium WordPress theme includes a simple custom solution for events that other events plugins complicate. This responsive theme also includes an unbranded theme options panel, unlimited photo galleries (masonry style), video, MP3 streaming, PDF download capabilities, and other useful features to enhance your website.
Sunday preaching time too short to say all you have to say? Not a preacher but inspired to write all your thoughts and insights from your personal devotionals? Write about it and take all the time you need in your very own website. Spurgeon Premium WordPress Theme is a great way to compile all your thoughts and share them to as many as you can on your website. This responsive premium theme is equipped with features to help you easily publish your messages to inspire people and encourage them in their faith.
Saving Grace Premium WordPress Theme is a theme geared towards charities and non-profit organizations. What’s unique about this theme aside from its outstanding layout and typography is the built in donation facility, via PayPal, using its donation page template and donation button and progress bar. This functionality takes advantage of impulse donation and gives visitors the option to donate straight away. This theme also includes 5 alternative color styles for you to choose from.
Today’s church generation is so much different from before. Technology has changed a lot of the traditional methods of reaching people and replaced it with multimedia and audio-visual systems. Malachi Premium WordPress Theme integrates these modern tools and gives you a theme that is in step with today’s demands giving you technical functionalities that include podcasts, streaming music, and music videos. These modern communication tools are seamlessly integrated within the theme so you can create a website that can effectively reach today’s tech savvy generation.
Check out the WordPress themes above to see which ones will match your needs.
As the internet continues its path towards building stronger online communities, greater interconnectivity and increased social networking, website owners are opening up their doors to accepting content contributions from their audiences. To address the issue of privacy and confidentiality, some plugin developers have come up with front-end solutions to enable website owners to accommodate contributions from the community without compromising their backend controls.
Here are some useful plugins you can use to put everything you need for posting, editing, and uploading content on the front-end.
Front-end Editor is a plugin that allows you to edit your content directly from the front end of your site. This comes in really useful when all you need is just to correct a typo or something you overlooked.
This plugin is useful if you have multiple contributors to your site because this plugin allows them to generate content and easily upload it right on the frontend of your website. Essentially, the plugin is a customizable upload form that adds files with allowed MIME-type to your WordPress Media Library under a special tab “Manage UGC”. There you can moderate your user submissions – whether to: Approve, Delete, or Re-attach to other post/page/custom-post-type before they are officially published.
Create HTML or PDF checklists your visitors can save or print anytime they come back to your site. These lists are saved via cookies which enables visitors to continue using the checklist where they left off when they re-visit your site.
MarketPress Frontend is a powerful ecommerce plugin that can be used to set up a stylish online store easily. This WPMU Dev created plugin can help you: manage orders, create and edit products, product tags, and categories, set up store settings such as shipping, payment gateways, and coupons, all through the front end. This means that all your confidential dashboard information will be hidden away from sellers or other users who don’t need to see all that information.
Need more content but challenged? This plugin allows users to contribute articles while still maintaining full control over what gets published.
With this Community News plugin you allow your visitors to add fresh or related content to your blog. This plugin comes with a moderation panel and a settings page including support for custom post types, images, widgets, and shortcodes. You can simply sit back and relax knowing that your blog will have a continuous supply of fresh content.
Just make sure that the plugins are compatible with your current WordPress version before you install any of them.
The word combat stands for fight against or Oppose in battle, Combat photography carries the real mood, its not a real planned Photography. Its nothing but capturing the stunning live moments of soldiers during live action. Here I have collected 20 Combat photography examples, Enjoy…..
Drumroll please, Elvin Jones is in the house! WordPress house, that is. In keeping with WordPress code naming tradition, the latest WordPress update released – WordPress 3.5 has been named “Elvin” in honor of drummer Elvin Jones, and there is a lot to drum about.
Here are some of the new features that have been updated in WordPress 3.5:
The Drag and Drop feature is streamlined, fast and easy to use. Creating galleries is faster with inline caption editing capabilities and simplified controls. Insert multiple images at once with Shift/Ctrl+click or insert multiple galleries per post and independently order images as you like.
Twenty Twelve (2012) theme for WordPress is a simple, flexible and elegant theme with a gorgeous open sans typeface. It is currently the default theme for WordPress 3.5. It is mobile friendly, fully responsive and looks great on any device. This theme includes all the latest theme features including a front-page template with its own widgets which you can customize and also set up as a single page.
Mark all your favorite or often used plugins in the WordPress Plugin Direcotry and access all of them directly in the Admin Panel>Plugins> Install Plugins page using your WordPress.org user name. This pulls out all your favorite go to plugins and saves a lot of time especially when you are setting up multiple sites.
WordPress 3.5 sports a new Welcome Screen, simpler and easier to use even by WordPress beginners. All the basic tasks are accessible in this new interface – from Getting Started to Writing your First Blog Post to Managing Widgets – user-friendly indeed.
WordPress 3.5 is also Retina-Ready (HiDPI) where many visual elements have been updated and converted to CSS3 elements to support the new displays so that they look good on these higher resolution screens.
oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows a website to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource, without having to parse the resource directly. Great news for Instagram, Soundcloud and Slideshare users as WordPress 3.5 supports these services and it is now easier to integrate them to your site without touching any code.
And its absence will hardly be felt probably. WordPress 3.5 hides the Link Manager by default for new installs but if you truly miss it, this feature can still be enabled via the Link Manager plugin. All sites with existing links are left as is.
This means better accessibility for screen readers, touch devices, and keyboard users. This feature is also for remote publishing/mobile and easier connection with mobile apps like the Official WordPress iOS app. Those who are using Atom will need to use a 3rd party plugin.
If you’ve been wanting to import your Tumblr content into WordPress for years now is the time to do so. WordPress 3.5 has now made this possible.
Another improvement in WordPress 3.5 which multisite developers will appreciate is the ability to install WordPress Multisite in the subdirectory and not in the document root.
There’s more under the hood goodness that can be further explored if you want to. Some people wait a while before they install the latest WordPress update to give plugin developers time to update their own plugins. Make sure to backup your files before you do any updates.