For a successful business an outstanding site plays a major role, Today a lot of creative professionals have realized this and use Word Press as the engine for building an online site. The ease of use of WordPress, the high number of portfolio styled themes and plugins available for building a professional portfolio web site makes the decision easy. (more…)
Email marketers are faced with both challenges and opportunities not open to your traditional direct mail or real life salespeople. Opportunities to penetrate a wider audience via email at a fraction of the cost of snail mail marketing or sales rep expenses make it a powerful marketing tool. One of the many challenges, however, is the effectivity of these email campaigns which are dependent on whether the email gets delivered, read, trashed or sent straight to the spam box.
Email marketing is directly marketing a commercial message to a group of people using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. It usually involves using email to send ads, request business, or solicit sales or donations, and is meant to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. Email marketing can be done to either cold lists or current customer database. (source: Wikipedia)
Email is not dead. It’s still very much alive and is still one of the most effective means of communications around. Hackers and spammers still think so that’s why they go through all the trouble of phishing, spamming, keylogging, etc. It’s been going on for years and they are still at it. It’s also why legitimate email marketers have to be strategic and creative in finding ways to reach their target market successfully.
Below are some useful insights shared by Richard Lindner during the Traffic and Conversion Summit 2013 held early this year.
Check your “score” at Senderscore.org. Sender Score is a report used by ISPs to measure the credibility of an email sender on a 1 to 100 scale. Work on your credibility.
In an article on WordPress Plugin vulnerabilities, we mentioned that the top 50 most popular plugins were tested for security and vulnerability by Checkmarx, a leading provider in application security. The first scan was conducted in January 2013 where it was discovered that more than a third of the 50 plugins were vulnerable. The second scan, conducted in early June 2013, was performed on the updated versions of all plugins. However, only six of these updates were free of those previously found vulnerabilities. These were:
– creates a social network for the organization. # Downloads: 1,319,743.
A BuddyPress Plugin is a program, or a set of one or more functions, written in the PHP scripting language, that adds a specific set of features or services to the BuddyPress site, which can be seamlessly integrated with the site using access points and methods provided by the BuddyPress Plugin API. BuddyPress allows easy modification, customization, and enhancement to a BuddyPress powered WordPress site. Instead of changing the core programming of BuddyPress, you can add functionality with BuddyPress Plugins.
– forum software. # Downloads: 483,28. Alerted by Checkmarx to their vulnerabilities.
bbPress is forum software, made the WordPress way – simple to setup, fully integrated, multisite forum, simple interface, customizable templates, highly extensible
– shopping cart plugin. # Downloads: 2,209,352.
WP e-Commerce is a free WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin that lets customers buy your products, services and digital downloads online.
– an e-commerce store. # Downloads: 469,503
WooCommerce is a free, powerful WordPress eCommerce plugin. With the extendability of a huge catalog of commercial themes and extensions we have all the tools you might need to get your shop running. Transform your WordPress website into a thoroughbred eCommerce store, delivering enterprise-level quality and features whilst backed by a name (WooThemes) you can trust.
– site optimization by caching. # Downloads: 1,450,980. Most likely fixed as part of a security overhaul following an external full disclosure of some vulnerabilities.
W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your site by increasing server performance, reducing the download times and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.
– site optimization by caching. # Downloads: 3,984,976. Most likely fixed as part of a security overhaul as with W3 Total Cache.
A very fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static html files. This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. Supercache really comes into it’s own if your server is underpowered, or you’re experiencing heavy traffic. Super Cached html files will be served more quickly than PHP generated cached files but in everyday use, the difference isn’t noticeable.
Note: Downloads statistics are as of the time of the tests.
“We Create Premium WordPress Themes. The Original Kind!” This tagline encapsulates everything ThemeFuse is about. ThemeFuse is a commercial WordPress Themes Shop co-founded by four guys from Bucharest, Romania: Bogdan Condurache (Art Director and Motion Graphics Designer) and Dimi Baitanciuc (co-founder) both of whom take care of the creative side, together with Alexandru Luncashu and Sergiu Bagrin (After Care Support) who, on the other hand are in charge of development and programming. ThemeFuse focuses on providing original high quality niche WordPress theme designs coupled with top aftercare support designed to meet the exact needs of customers in specific industries.
Dimi Baitanciuc and Bogdan Condurache started out selling HTML/CSS templates on ThemeForest in November 2009. They soon realized the huge potential in WordPress and started implementing their designs into the CMS. They were joined by Alex and Sergiu later on. After another 4-5 months on ThemeForest they decided to put up their own and the ThemeFuse WordPress theme club was birthed in 2010. The theme club includes 28+ themes (averaging a new theme every month) available to download which range from portfolio themes through to magazine themes for sports and fashion sites.
The ThemeFuse WordPress theme club currently includes over 28 themes that cover a wide range of themes that include portfolio themes, magazine themes, blog themes, business themes, etc. that cover niche industries such as sports, fashion, travel, events, food, art, corporate, and so much more. The club membership is a subscription based product ($17 per month) where you get access to all themes (current and future) including PSD files. This is automatically renewed each month based on the date you signed up. The membership price includes a one-time only $199 sign up fee. If you decide to cancel your subscription, you will not be able to download the themes anymore. Themefuse enforces a no refund policy applicable to club members as well. Should you decide to reactivate your club membership and sign up again you need to pay the one time signup fee again. Themes are also sold individually to non-members.
Aside from gaining access to the entire Themefuse theme collection, members get VIP Priority treatment in their Support Forum, members get access to a beautiful Member’s Area, members can also give input and suggestions on future themes. Aside from these, members also have the opportunity to earn via their improved affiliate program.
ThemeFuse’s affiliate program allows you to earn in several ways. Once you become an affiliate, all you need to do is put your affiliate link on a banner on your website or use ThemeFuse’s WP referral plugin. Once a person clicks on the link and makes a purchase on their website you earn 30% of the sale, every time. Their affiliate software sets a 60-day cookie that keeps tab of users who visit their website from one of your links. This means you still get a 30% cut on every purchase the user makes, even if the customer comes back at a later time. In addition, if the user joins our club you’ll also get 10% of every recurring payment he makes every month. Themefuse pays its affiliate partners once a month via PayPal. Affiliates can expect to receive their affiliate shares between 1st and 10th of the following month.
ThemeFuse recently partnered with WebHostingBuzz to provide a new service targeted at WP beginners. The goal of the partnership is to deliver a hands-off service, where every client can get their WordPress site installed by a team of professionals on a quality hosting account, along with a well-designed WordPress theme. This service means that customers can pick a theme from ThemeFuse’s gallery and have it installed by their team, on an optimized hosting platform, and under a new domain (of your choosing).
The main strength of this new service is the no-supervision-required approach presented by both companies (ThemeFuse and WebHostingBuzz). All the client needs to do is pick a theme from the official theme gallery at ThemeFuse.com, choose the hosting pack (domain name included) at checkout and that’s it. All within a single checkout process.
For the client, the package includes: the domain (optional), the hosting, the website (WordPress theme), AND all the necessary installs will be taken care of by ThemeFuse. ThemeFuse also provides a dedicated support forum to handle the chosen theme’s issues as well as troubleshooting any problems that may come up.
According to Dimi Baitanciuc,
Talking about the longer term, we plan to release a brand new website as part of our ThemeFuse family, which will not be related to WordPress themes, but to web and graphic design in general. We have been collaborating with high-class designers from around the world the past few months and I think we’ve come up with awesome results.
Visit ThemeFuse today.
You often hear people talking about PPC, CPC, conversion and all those familiar jargon once you start immersing yourself more and more online. Affiliate marketers are quite familiar with these terms and these have become part of their normal lingo. But what if you are just starting out and you have no clue as to how all these acronyms work and if they have any real value to you at all. Let’s take a closer look at these Internet marketing tools to help you maximize them vis-a-vis traffic flowing through your website.
In recent articles, we have pointed out the enormous traffic potential that you can tap into by following some simple traffic hacks shared during the last Traffic and Conversion Summit. Let’s say you’ve done your homework and you’re starting to see a spike in the number of visitors that come to your site. What next? Having a lot of visitors does not automatically translate into earnings for you. You need to give something to gain something in return. This is where these tools come in. Let’s break it down.
According to Webopedia,
Pay Per Click or PPC is an Internet marketing formula used to price online advertisements. In PPC programs the online advertisers will pay Internet Publishers the agreed upon PPC rate when an ad is clicked on, regardless if a sale is made or not.
With pay per click in search engine advertising, the advertiser would typically bid on a keyword so the PPC rate changes. On single website — or network of content websites — the site publisher would usually set a fixed pay per click rate.
How you earn from PPC now depends on which side of the table you are at. You can either be an online advertiser, an Internet publisher, or even both. An online advertiser is someone who pays a publisher (typically a website owner) when the ad he has placed is clicked whether the click resulted in a sale or not. This advertisement cost on the part of the online advertiser translates into several marketing objectives set for the business he is promoting. A few of these goals are: to introduce a product or service, to send the person who clicked to his money site, to encourage subscribers via email opt-in or other sign up strategies, and yes, to make a sale. It’s the advertiser’s tool to earn. Now whether these goals are met or not, the advertiser still has to pay the publisher based on the PPC rate agreed upon between them. This then also translates as earnings on the part of the publisher – similar to how sales commissions work without the sales. It is merely based on the earnings per number of clicks made on a particular ad.
There are several PPC models out there which you can study to find out which one works best for you. You can adopt the Flat Rate PPC model or the Bid Based PPC.
From Wikipedia,
In the flat-rate model, the advertiser and publisher agree upon a fixed amount that will be paid for each click. In many cases the publisher has a rate card that lists the cost per click (CPC) within different areas of their website or network. These various amounts are often related to the content on pages, with content that generally attracts more valuable visitors having a higher CPC than content that attracts less valuable visitors.
In the bid based model, the advertiser signs a contract that allows them to compete against other advertisers in a private auction hosted by a publisher or, more commonly, an advertising network. Each advertiser informs the host of the maximum amount that he or she is willing to pay for a given ad spot (often based on a keyword), usually using online tools to do so. The auction plays out in an automated fashion every time a visitor triggers the ad spot. Advertisers pay for each click they receive, with the actual amount paid based on the amount bid. It is common practice amongst auction hosts to charge a winning bidder just slightly more (e.g. one penny) than the next highest bidder or the actual amount bid, whichever is lower.[8] This avoids situations where bidders are constantly adjusting their bids by very small amounts to see if they can still win the auction while paying just a little bit less per click.
There are several reputable Pay Per Click websites that will make money online for you as you look into monetizing your website. Do your research before you sign up and make sure these PPC sites are legit. It will take more than one website to really make a difference in your income stream so study the market and get into the forums. You’ll find a lot of useful information and real life experiences you can learn from. Once you sign up with the legit ones, refer others and continue to grow your networking cycle. The world wide web is actually getting smaller as more people get interconnected.
If you’ve just started your website, accepting ads from online advertisers is a great way to start making passive income online. Just make sure you agree on the terms and that expectations and results are clear.
Advertising has evolved in so many ways throughout the years. The leap of advertising from traditional print media to the blinking gifs during the early days of the internet to the more sophisticated video showreels of today has been an interesting journey.
Online or digital advertising first entered the scene in the mid 1990’s when HotWired launched the first banner ads from major companies like AT&T, Sprint, Volvo, MCI and others. (Check out this illustrated timeline.) This was followed by PPC (Pay-per-click) keyword advertising, keyword ads, mobile ads, pop-ups and pop-unders, Google Adwords, video ads, all the way to today’s technology-empowered “word-of-mouth” via social networking and viral advertising.
Spending on digital advertising has been steadily on the rise. Digital media advertising in the form of contextual ads, banner ads, cross platform ads, email marketing, search engine marketing, affiliate marketing, mobile marketing, social media marketing, etc. are already part of a big chunk of the advertising budget of major companies. In fact, global digital advertising spending broke $100 billion in 2012. That’s a lot of money spent on cyberspace billboards. Is it really worth it? How effective are your advertising efforts? How do you measure your R.O.I. on your advertising campaigns? What if you don’t have that kind of a budget? How much are you willing to spend to generate a lead? Where do you start?
Here are some simple steps to help you as you plan your own marketing strategies:
There are different kinds of performance measures. A Performance Indicator (PI) is a measure, which gives an indication of performance. Typically a performance indicator is an outcome measure and not an input OR in-process measure. Key Performance Indicators are the critical gauge of a site’s success or failure. Some sectors say that Cost per Lead is a good LPI, while others argue that there are other factors that need to be considered in determining the correct LPI.
Know your “enemy”. Well not quite the “enemy” because they could later on be allies, affiliates, or partners in the future. The point is to be aware of your competitors, find out what’s working for them, the ads they run, where they run them, the affiliate programs they belong to. In short, learn from their successes and their mistakes. You can also use a paid service called WhatRunsWhere – a competitive intelligence service for online media buying. It allows you to look up what advertisers are doing online, where they are running ads, from who they are buying inventory, and what exact ads they are using. WhatRunsWhere allows you to see what is happening on any website: who is advertising there, who is selling the inventory for them, and what ads they are running. With data from multiple countries and actionable insights from the data, WhatRunsWhere quickly allows anyone to dissect advertising campaigns, resulting in reduced risk and a higher ROI for online advertising campaigns.
Start smart by starting small. If you’re still getting your feet wet in media buying you can start your campaign in little doses. Target web and mobile audiences, choose a frequency cap of when your ad is displayed, and choose a campaign max to a manageable number for you to study and tweak if necessary. There are self serve ad buying platforms like www.sitescout.com where you can create & manage your ad campaigns easily. Test ads and copy. Use copy that converts well on the website and utilize it throughout your campaign.
Analyze your data. After 5,000 to 10,000 impressions Identify performing banners. Your banner could be driving down your placement and overall site numbers. Display the best performer until it fatigues. Identify performing sites. A site left to run wild can ruin your campaign. Turn off banners with low CTRs.
Tweak your campaign basics for maximum optimization. Identify times when traffic runs best and run traffic during those times. Tailor your creative or your ad banner to match your audience. Focus on what works and improve on it some more.
Now that you’ve gotten a little bit of experience, broaden your net. Retarget, add more sites, add more banner sizes, offer affiliate commissions, or go direct (www.buyads.com) The point is to take your marketing campaign up another notch.
Whatever evolution advertising goes through, the objective of advertising remains the same, that is, to draw attention to a product, service, or event to persuade an audience (viewers, readers, or listeners) to take some action in the form of sales or attendance. In other words, conversion. Try these strategies and share your stories. We’d love to hear from you.
The average WordPress user probably starts off with a simple and very basic desire to set up his/her own website. There are many platforms out there but the platform that most users end up with or choose to use is WordPress. These users either attempt to set up their own website on their own and learn as they go while others hire someone to do it for them. Not many are familiar with the legal or technical aspects surrounding the use of this software but it does not remove the responsibility of finding out the software’s terms, conditions, and proper use. Let’s familiarize ourselves with some of these technical terms. Some of these terms are quoted verbatim to remain true to its original intent.
WordPress is a free and open source publishing software and content management system (CMS) with a focus on ease of use, speed and a great user experience. “WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL.
Open source doesn’t just mean that you can view the source code — it has political and philosophical implications as well. Open source, or “Free Software”, means you are free to modify and redistribute the source code under certain conditions. Free doesn’t refer to the price, it refers to freedom. The difference between the two meanings of free is often characterized as “Free as in speech vs. free as in beer.” The GPL is free as in speech.
“Free software” does not mean “noncommercial”. A free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution. Commercial development of free software is no longer unusual; such free commercial software is very important. You may have paid money to get copies of free software, or you may have obtained copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got your copies, you always have the freedom to copy and change the software, even to sell copies.
The GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software – to make sure the software is free for all its users. This General Public License applies to most of the Free Software Foundation’s software & to any other program whose authors commit to using it.
When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things.
To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it. For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights.
The reasons for WordPress releasing under the GPL are both practical and idealistic. WordPress was born of the very freedom mentioned earlier. The predecessor to the WordPress project, b2/cafelog, was also an open source project.
(source: WordPress.org/gpl)
According the GNU.org and its Free Software Definition, you have the freedom:
to run the software for any purpose or any kind of job
to study how the software works, change it and improve it
to redistribute copies in a manner that does not conflict with central freedoms
to redistribute copies of your modified version to benefit the whole community
The GPL and WordPress conflict is not new. There have been several occasions before when conflicts of interest have risen between theme providers (ex. Chris Pearson and Matt Mullenweg) and the WordPress Foundation’s interpretation of how the GPL license is applied. The most recent debacle involving Jake Caputo, ThemeForest, and WordPress (resulting in Caputo’s banning from speaking at WordCamps) surfaced earlier this year. Envato and WordPress have been at odds because of the alleged violations of the GPL by the former. Envato claims to be GPL compliant while at the same time been implementing dual-license or split licensing particularly on WordPress themes and plugin. What’s wrong with that?
Here’s a simple analogy to illustrate this.
Choosing a publishing platform is like choosing a car brand. You have several choices: Chevy, Cadillac, a Benz, or a Toyota. Whichever you choose, the technology to create it, the patents, the materials used, and all the basic components like the framework, the engine, the wheels, and everything that makes it run to take you anywhere you want are already built into its system, subject to the manufacturer’s warranty. When it transfers to you, the car manufacturers have no control with what you do with it – use it for business, donate, repaint, etc.
As far as publishing platforms are concerned, you have WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla as the vehicle of your content. In the case of WordPress, the HTML code, the PHP and everything under hood that makes it run are built in and are 100% GPL. When it is transferred to your possession, free or otherwise, you have the freedom to modify, change, sell, copy, distribute, and do whatever you want under the GPL license provided that it retains all those freedoms that you enjoyed when you first got it.
The conflict between Envato and WordPress arose because of the licensing policies of the former, that were not, in the eyes of WordPress, GPL compliant. As far as WordPress is concerned, if your theme is “riding” on the WordPress framework and cannot run independently apart from it, then it inherits and is subject to all the GPL attributes as well.
On the other hand, Envato’s split license states that:
Envato’s marketplace license for themes or plugins sold on the marketplaces covers all the components of these items, except for the specific components covered by the GPL. This is why it’s called a split license: because different license terms can cover individual components that make up a single item.
The PHP component and integrated HTML are covered by the GPL. The rest of the components created by the author (such as the CSS, images, graphics, design, photos, etc) are covered by the marketplace license.As explained earlier, our license also allows for specific components of an item, which inherit the GPL from the platform they’re built for, to be licensed under the GPL. Using this split license complies with the GPL’s requirements, while still providing protection of the author’s copyright on assets they’ve created.
There are valid points on both sides. Proprietary licensing violates the spirit of the GPL while on the other hand, piracy on the creative output of theme authors are also valid concerns. Conflicts arise to reveal gray areas that need to be dealt with or addressed. Striking a balance between GPL compliance and protecting the creative or intellectual output of theme authors is a tough juggling act. We believe the conversation will still continue.
Envato did a survey about licensing among their users and published the results specifically relating to GPL. They have announced that a 100% GPL option is now available for authors on ThemeForest. Jake Caputo has also posted that he has again been invited to participate in WordCamps.
Why WordPress Themes are Derivative of WordPress
WordPress, GPL, and Copyright Case Law
Matt Mullenweg – Q&A – WordPress & GPL
Themes are GPL too
Creating a quality website that will stand up to any standard should be any website owner’s goal. The Internet is reaching a point where it will be more and more challenging to “hide” techniques (good or bad) from users particularly digital natives who are growing up in this Internet environment like fish to water. Here are some of Google’s guidelines to consider as you build your quality website.
Adhering to these basic and specific guidelines will help you build a website that will not only be beneficial to the website owner but to the whole Internet community as well.
Let’s face it…the interwebs are big and only getting bigger. Here are 5 WordPress links you need to know about.