From writing articles, doing Pay Per Click marketing, doing videos, setting up a WordPress blog, or forum marketing, we believe we have to know it all and do it all. According to Jeff, most marketers fail because their organizational chart is filled with nothing but ‘YOU’. While it’s possible for us to know everything, it’s also not very realistic if we want a life. Working from home or running an internet business was about creating more time freedom for ourselves, not less.

The solution that Jeff has for all this? Easy. Outsource your work to the skills, talents and special abilities others. Most are not even aware that there are websites that are devoted to people offering their services for hire at decent rates. Everything that you could possibly want done in your business, you can pay someone to do it for you at a price much lower than you think.

For the past couple years I have been learning these principles from Jeff and have found them to work well for my own online business. I have my own full-time WordPress and website techie doing my client work… enjoying what he does and the money I pay him… and I don’t have to do it all myself.

You need to get a copy of Jeff’s FREE CD and learn how to do this yourself.

Since the introduction of WordPress in 2003 by two young programmers, Matt Mullenwag and Mike Little, WordPress has truly taken on a life of its own. Early on a key goal for this blogging software was that it would be built on Open Source code making it free for everyone from the smallest home user to major Fortune 500 businesses. The software is an ongoing creation by a community of thousands of developers around the world.

WordPress can be found in three variations on the Internet; WordPress.com, WordPress.org and WordPress MU. WordPress.com is run on a multi-user platform hosted with WordPress MU which is the multi-user version of the software. WordPress.com is a hosted website operated my Automatic.com where many of the WordPress developers work. The focus of this article is on WordPress.org which is the self-hosted version of the platform.

By 2007 WordPress was gaining a following by home based business users because of the free nature of the software, the ease of installation on a virtual server running the associated PHP script files along with MySQL database and the additional tools called plugins and widgets. This combination of simple installation and many add-on tools is one reason that WordPress is popular. Another is the built in SEO, or search engine optimization features of WordPress.

Everyone wants traffic to their website and WordPress bloggers are no different. The big advantage for those using WordPress is that it includes features that help the search engines “read” your website in the way that works best for them to build their databases of content. Search engines do not see your website with eyes like humans but thy read the content and index it.

Because WordPress includes SEO tools like; .htaccess, permalinks, blogrolling and content pinging, search engines can quickly identify the new and updated content on WordPress blogs. This non-static nature of WordPress blogs makes them a great website platform for online business owners. Text and images along with audio and video files can make up the total content of the WordPress website to make it attractive to humans and search engines alike.

Another key feature of WordPress that makes it great for online business is that it is easy to add content to without the need for a highly paid webmaster. Many business owners have paid for beautiful websites, sometimes paying hundreds or thousands of dollars, to find out later that the webmaster is slow to respond to posting changes or may become totally unreachable. It is very easy to add new posts or make page changes with WordPress. No locally installed software is needed to create the posts or pages as the entire website is server based.

Today, because of the system and tools available with WordPress, the ease of editing and updating content and the search engine optimization built into WordPress, it is an excellent platform for businesses large and small to build their online business on.

If you would like to learn more about using WordPress for your home based business, please contact Henry Griner for more information.

I try to keep up with the latest news going on with WordPress and all the new cool tools and Plugins available for WordPress. As you know I promote WordPress as the first and often the only system needed for a person to create their online business.

Last week a client asked about building a shopping cart into their new WordPress blog to add music and other artwork. So, I just “Googled” on the term WordPress Shopping Cart and found a great solution.

I downloaded the free e-Commerce Plugin from Instinct in New Zealand, installed it to my client’s new blog that is under construction and now I’m learning how to build a shopping cart using this new tool. That is, it’s a new tool to me. Instinct has been working on this for 3-4 years and they say that thousands of WordPress sites are using it. They further say that sites with just a few products up to 10,000 products can use their plugin.

Here are a few sample sites using this e-Commerce plugin for WordPess.

• www.seekanddestroyclothing.com
• www.orangutan-appeal.org.uk
• www.tabletalk.com
• www.imagecubes.com
• www.edenripley.co.nz

I hope to have some products added into my client’s new blog in the next few days as soon as I finish looking over the setup procedure and work with them to get a PayPal account running that we can link to. When the site is live I will update this posting with a link and let you know how the installation and configuration went.

In the meantime I wanted to post this and see what feedback my readers might have about this product. If you have used this e-Commerce plugin or other shopping cart plugins for WordPress please post your comments here.

If you are looking to create your own WordPress Blog and need a shopping cart solution that is easy to install and work with, let me know.

The opt-in page is used to trade something of value for the visitor’s name and email address. Because most people are not going to make a purchase on the first visit to a website, you need to build a mailing list for the product or niche area and continue to give away more value to the email list while promoting your products.

The sales letter is normally seen after someone opts into your list using the opt-in page. Most sales letters are very long and describe the product, offer testimonials from customers and may include videos of the product in use.

You can use the blog to generate free traffic to your opt-in page by offering free content that pertains to the niche your product is in. Keywords for the product or niche help to generate the website traffic when people search on those terms. You link those keywords to the opt-in page so that when people click on the hot-linked keyword they are taken to the opt-in page.

Now let’s look at several other things that we can do to help to generate tons of website traffic to your WordPress blog to get this process started.

Create RSS Feeds on Your Website

This allows easy access to your information and updates.

Offer Free Consulting

This works especially well for content sites. Free consulting can help establish your site as an ‘expert’ name in the field, and bring more to you through enhancing your reputation.

The option of obtaining free consulting itself can gear more people to visit you.

Product sites can do the same by offering samples and trial runs or demonstrations of products.

Ensure Accessibility

A site that is easily accessible, easy to navigate and browse, doesn’t hurt the eyes, encourages more people to visit it than sites which are complicated and cluttered.

Good layout and color choice is vital.

Another aspect that shouldn’t be underestimated is spelling errors in page content. This can act as a big deterrent.

Build Uniqueness

Give your visitors a unique experience and unique content and atmosphere. Chances are they will surely come back.

A unique concept can also embed your site in viewers’ minds, thus allowing for recognition and easy association.

Provide Useful Resources

Be an expert in your field and also aim to help the people who visit you.

Product sites can provide links to related items, or guides such as maintenance for the product they offer. This also helps create goodwill in your name.

Content sites can do so through their content itself, by providing accurate information and becoming the one destination for their topic.

Again, replying to queries and comment add in to the helpful experience.

Provide Follow-up

Especially useful and vital for product sites. Following up with clients will create a good impression of your site and place you in your clients’ good books.

Auto mail and responders also work, and can be used by content sites.

Providing Exit Pop-ups

When a viewer exists your site, a window pops up where he is taken to another address.

This takes place in an exit popup program where sites can register. As a window pops up from exiting your site, your site can pop up the same way on another website that is part of the program.

This helps to increase your visibility, and clients who may not know of your site can be exposed to it in this way.

Ask Viewers to Bookmark Your Website

Bookmarked sites are more visible to a viewer, as the links are right there in front of him when he opens his browser. This can entice a viewer to visit back when exposed to the site’s presence in his favorites list.

Be Active on Discussion Boards

This can generate awareness of your site and provide exposure.

Furthermore, having your own discussion board on your site enhances the interactive, human feel viewers look for on the Net.

People who have had a good experience on your discussion board will think of it when they run into a problem again, and some may even come back just for the social aspect, to meet new people in a setup that is familiar and pleasant to them.

Product review boards would work well for a product site, further working as a tool to promote the products.

Content sites can make use of the board as a platform to help others and provide insight and further information about their topic of interest.

Let Them Use Your Content for Free But Link Back

Encourage your viewers to forward your free articles or newsletter, provided they always include the link to your site on it.

This provides additional exposure as you will have circulation in clients’ private contact lists, a feature that would not have been accessible to you otherwise.

Encourage Viewers to Spread the Word About You

If viewers are satisfied with the experience and content/product you provide them, ask them to tell others about their experience.

Word of mouth is still one of the most effective promotion tools even in this age, so make use of it.

Always use a WordPress Blog

This allows for easy updates and an added ‘human’ touch to your site.

Blogs also provide features that can generate traffic and exposure even more. Features pertinent to blogs, for example pinging, allows for each update to the blog to be pinged and updated on blog directories that are scouted by lots of people.

There are other, very effective methods of generating additional traffic to your site. These methods, which will be mentioned later, have gained lots of popularity recently and as such, will be considered in more detail.

Forums

Forums allow you access to industry/sector specific areas where you can comment and interact with others.

Interacting on forums is a good way of getting your name out. Topic-specific forums can allow content site owners to provide helpful and judicious advice on forums posts, thus helping to present them, and in turn, their site, as ‘experts’ in the field.

Most forums also allow the one posting to have a signature attached at the end of a post. This signature can be used to provide links back to the site and specific pages if it is content-oriented. Always make sure whether signatures are allowed though.

Products can promote themselves on forums too.

However, it is wise to refrain from spamming and even too-obvious promotion posting on forums. Aim to offer relevant and accurate content, and offer your help wherever possible. This established goodwill already allows your reputation to precede you before the person even goes to your site.

There are many forums out there, and finding one or a few pertinent to the sector your site specializes in should not be too hard.

Pay Per Click or PPC

Pay per click is the process whereby a site pays for every click generated from its advert on a specialized page or a search engine results page.

This process works on the premise of selected keywords. The site selects its keywords and states the amount it is willing to pay, or bid, for every keyword. The highest bid for this keyword then earns the best placement in the sponsored links section of a search engine’s results page. If a viewer clicks the link to the site, the site owner then has to pay the search engine the amount it was willing to pay for the keyword. Thus the site only pays for a ‘clicked’ visit.

PPC is basically a new form of paid advertisement that is getting more and more exposure and popularity as site owners are not reluctant to pay to earn traffic.

However, the process doesn’t work just like that to ensure good results. Even landing a prime spot in the sponsored links section, people may simply scan over the ad and discard it.

The key then, is to have a very good ad copy to present for your link. Something that is intriguing and catchy and which covers what the viewer will find at your site is bound to work better than a general description of your site offerings.

Using varied keywords for better exposure is also another way of ensuring broader scope.

It pays to note that the ad should be linked to the specific product/content page it is advertising.

Another requisite of PPC is that links should constantly be checked to see if they work. Also, testing can allow the site owner to find which keywords are earning him the best placements and consequently focus his attention and money on those keywords.

Tomorrow at the end of Part 5 of this series on how to generate website traffic I will provide a list of resources for you. Also, I will have an invitation to a special event where you can learn more about building your online home based business. Stay tuned.

WordPress blogs are wonderful tools for building your home based business for many reasons. One of the reasons that blogs work so well is something called pinging. No, it’s not the pinging of sonar in those submarine movies but, in the same way that sonar helps to locate other vessels in the ocean, blog pinging helps to let others know that your website is there.

Blog Building Using Pinging for One Way Links

What is pinging?

Pinging is a way of letting search engines know that you’ve created a new post, or updated an existing post on your blog. A ‘ping’ is a message sent to a ‘ping server’ notifying it that the blog has been updated with new content.

What is a ping server?

A ping server is a web-based service that accepts messages in the XML-RPC format. It uses the information in these XML-RPC messages to publish a list of blogs which have updated content. Some of these ping servers run their own blog search engines, and some propagate the information to a number of other ping servers and search engines.

How does pinging work?

Many blog publishing platforms, such as WordPress, have a built-in pinging tool. In the case of WordPress, pinging is turned on by default and pings go out to one ping server which updates several search engines.

You can also notify a ping server that you have updated content manually by going to their website and submitting your blog’s name and URL.

One popular ping server is PingOMatic, found at http://pingomatic.com/. When your blog pings PingOMatic it then notifies a number of search engines that your blog has been updated. Many of these search engines also have their own ping server as well.

These search engines can then update their listings with new content almost instantly. This of course will give you one-way backlinks to your blog from these search engines, many of which have a high Google PageRank.

Four things you should know about pinging

1. Only ping when you have updated content. Otherwise, your site might be blacklisted as a spam blog, also known as a splog.

2. If you tend to post to your blog and then re-write the post frequently you might want to make sure you only ping when you actually post new content, not on updates. If you are using WordPress there are a few plugins that make sure that pings are only sent when a post is created.

3. It’s a good idea to ping several ping services, especially the ones that notify several search engines. Don’t overdo it though. Make sure that if you are pinging a niche search engine that your blog falls into the relevant niche.

4. Make sure that if a search engine is notified by a ping server you are already using that you don’t add that search engines own ping service to your list of servers to ping. Because blog spammers have abused ping servers if you are pinging a search engine multiple times your site might end up being blacklisted, and not appear in the search engines at all.

Popular ping servers

Finally, here’s a list of popular ping servers you might try to get you started.

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://ping.myblog.jp

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://api.moreover.com/ping

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php

http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php

http://ping.blo.gs

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

Blogging With WordPress Blogs Are The Future For Online Business

If you conduct any business online or maintain a website to compliment your offline business, then blogging is quickly becoming a mandatory part of your future. And if you are not currently blogging, chances are after realizing the potential of these traffic-enhancing goldmines, you soon will be!

Blogs, derived from the words “web log” were originally thought of as simply online diaries a place for people to record their thoughts and inspirations. At first, no one took blogging very seriously and these collections of online thoughts were simply passed off by many as hobbies or creative outlets and nothing more.

But then Google came along and started to recognize the unique and original content that these trite little sites presented and the rules of the game suddenly changed. After all, unique content is what makes the Google world go round, and what better way to command the attention of Google than by creating a dynamic environment with content that is solely your own.

At this stage, a whole new SEO world emerged and in the process, brought with it traffic opportunities like never before. People began blogging on more than what they had for dinner last night. They started to blog about new products, exciting travel adventures and all things related to online commerce.

The evolution quickly continued and today, with RSS feeds, sites like pingoat.com and many other content clearinghouses, blogging is big business and not to be overlooked by hungry entrepreneurs looking to establish a web presence.

What currently makes blogging so attractive is the sheer speed with which blogs and blog posts are able to get indexed in the search engines. It is a simple matter of static versus dynamic and the search engines love the dynamic.

Let’s take two different scenarios to see how traditional websites and blogs differ in their index-ability:

Scenario One:

One person creates a website to advertise gardening products and services. Each page of the site contains the traditional information about the company; it’s founders, the services they offer and the products they sell. Maybe, at best, the site has articles and content that is updated with some small frequency that are relevant to the avid gardener. When visitors arrive at the site, they have the option of signing up for the company newsletter and receiving valuable tips and new offerings.

In this scenario, the Webmaster or business owner will need to tend to many SEO related tasks in order to get and maintain high search engine ranking for a tight list of selected keywords related to the gardening niche. Not only will this activity require great skill, it will also involve many hours to achieve the intended results.

Scenario Two:

The same business owner as above also creates a WordPress blog to supplement their company website. Now, instead of focusing on simply one set of tightly selected keywords, the blog itself remains a broad overview of the gardening niche, while each individual post reflects a drilled down topic within that same niche.

So when the business owner writes a blog post about the benefits of “organic vegetable gardening in backyard containers,” this individual post becomes a keyword rich, targeted wonder and when indexed by the search engines has a far greater opportunity to bringing highly targeted traffic to the blog based upon that single post.

Through time, the blog expands with many similar posts that are targeted to sub niches within the broader gardening niche and can even be categorized from inside the blog structure itself. What has now been created in Google’s eyes is an extremely dynamic, naturally evolving site that is content rich and niche specific.

When properly constructed and promoted, each time the business owner posts to the blog, that individual post can get indexed in anywhere from two to twenty four hours on average. Indexing happens within less than one hour if you include a video embeded in the blog. This opportunity is far greater than any options available at the static website.

Additionally, when the business owner endeavors to have a visitor signup for a newsletter, further segmenting can occur and subscriber lists can be refined and targeted. And because the blog is the front-end showcase to the original website, each blog post has the opportunity to link back to specific and relevant products at the main site.

When properly structured, WordPress blogs are the biggest SEO asset to a website that currently exists. The WordPress Dream Theme by Ben Cope is a great theme package for any online marketer.

The wise online business owner will recognize these benefits and when implemented, will enjoy many opportunities that do not currently exist with traditional websites alone.

Ben Cope

Ben Cope, the Internet Genius behind the great WordPress Dream Theme, will be a guest presenter Thursday evening August 14th at 9PM Eastern time for the Midwest Internet Marketing Super Conference, pre-conference calls.

THE WEBINAR IS OVER – REPLAY LINK FOR AUDIO HERE!

Ben Cope is a DotComPreneur, Web Designer, and Internet Marketing Consultant whose goal is to help people understand how to make the web work for them. As the creator of numerous high-end, profitable websites for clients all over the world, Ben’s work has earned him the title of “Internet Genius.”

Ben is the founder of Epic Web Strategies, an internet marketing blog providing tips, techniques, and strategies for success on the internet. Additionally, he is also the creator of WordPress University, a site dedicated to teaching people how to use WordPress more effectively. He also works behind the scenes for several other well-known internet marketing experts.

Jeff Mills is host for the conference which takes place in Minneapolis, Minnesota September 19-21, 2008. This is the third year for this conference which has drawn attendees from across the United States and other countries.

Each year Jeff Mills invites his conference speakers to join him on a pre-conference call or webinar to share some of their secrets to success and introduce themselves to those interested in attending the fall conference. Jeff also invites a few “bonus experts” to these calls each year. Jeff has asked Henry Griner to interview Ben Cope and share with his list members how they can use the Magic of WordPress to explode their online businesses.

No matter what your topic or niche in the online business world there is one tool that everyone needs… a WordPress Blog! This one simple to use software tool can build your online marketing empire quickly and easily without you needing to become an “html code-head.”

WordPress blogging software is sometimes referred to as a Content Management System (CMS). It is fast to install, easy to learn and is often provided as a FREE tool with most web hosting companies. Themes or template designs are found free all over the Internet but you may wish to purchase a custom design including installation such as the WordPress Dream Theme designed by Ben Cope.

If you are already online with your own Internet marketing business or, you are planning to start your own home based business using the Internet, you must listen along Thursday night, August 14th at 9PM EDT, 8PM CDT, 7PM MDT and 6PM PDT when Ben Cope and Henry Griner discuss how you can turn on a flood of traffic to your own blog using WordPress and the WordPress Dream Theme.

Ben’s SPECIAL OFFER from the Webinar of both his WordPress Dream Theme + Video Sales Letter Theme is only available when you use this SPECIAL OFFER LINK! Save $297 TODAY… This link may not be active for much longer.