Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of using WordPress:

1.    Ease of Use

WordPress has long been hailed as one of the easiest to use Content Management Systems ever developed. Featuring an intuitive interface, the average user of WordPress has no need to learn complicated code in order to make routine changes to their website. Writing articles, product reviews, and uploading pictures can there for be accomplished by a member of your staff with minimal training, significantly reducing the need to hire expensive web developers to perform routine maintenance. This saves you money.

2.    Expandability

The WordPress community has developed many extensions and plugins that are free to use, that can accomplish just about any task that you want your website to perform, from file downloading to shopping carts, to full e-commerce solutions. These extensions are largely offered under open source licenses, which means you save money.

3.    Blogging

WordPress was originally designed as a blogging platform, which means that everything you need to operate a successful business blog is already included. This includes Social Media connectivity, which is vitally important in today’s online world.

4.    Search Engine Optimization

Search engines love WordPress sites. Why? The code is very simple and clean, a factor which is included in the search engine ranking algorithms. Since the majority of search users never go past the first page of results, this is vitally important to gain the most visitors to your online business.

5.    Scalability

There is no upper limit to the number of pages you can have on your WordPress site, which means that your site can grow as your business grows, without the need for continual investment in more and more software. The best part is that the number of pages has no effect on the performance of the site, which is good for users.

6.    Ease of Workflow

The administrator of a WordPress site has the ability to assign multiple users to work on the site, and also has the ability to choose exactly what they can and can’t work on. This prevents an untrained person from accidentally making catastrophic changes to the site through ignorance. Do you have a staff member that you want to only update product information? You can restrict their access to just that section. This means that you can assign your staff to work on the site without expanding the range of their already assigned duties.

7.    Customization

With WordPress, you can customize your site to look exactly how you want it to look, and keep the look consistent on every page, which leads to less confusion for visitors. While you may need to hire a web developer to create a custom template if you’re going for a specific look, these costs are far less than a site built with any other platform.

So, give WordPress a try for your next website design or upgrade. You will find yourself glad that you did!

To achieve this the consultants had recommended 6 different websites, 6 different mobile sites, over 300 emails worth of email follows ups, videos, SEO, PPC, Social Media and a lot more.

In fact it took over 4 hours for the client to explain what he had actually brought and at the end of it I informed him that he made one of the biggest sins business owners make when shifting online.

You see, business owners understand now, more than ever, that an online presence can drive significant business and they realize just how much money they’ve been missing out on.  As such they decide to “hit it with everything” and they go from no online presence to being on everything and everywhere.

Now I’m not saying that the strategy was wrong, in fact it was very sound the issue was that the business owner was asking the consultants to execute a strategy that he didn’t entirely understand.

He was going from no websites to 6 in the space of a month and no-one in his team understood how to manage a website, produce web content or even know if the sites they were building were quality.

If you’re new to online marketing you really should consider taking baby steps to start with.  Sure you can map out the whole strategy, and you should do this before starting but to engage in all of it from the start could be overwhelming.

For this lawyer it was, 5 months into his new web strategy his wallet was significantly lighter but nothing was live, no leads were generating and he was almost ready to pull the plug.

Ultimately it was his fault for taking on too much too quickly in a market he just didn’t understand, don’t make this same mistake when building your online presence.

In my opinion though, if webmasters have sites getting penalized it’s because they’ve been trying to game the system.  Anyone who tries to play Google and thinks they can win probably deserves to have their site affected.

Let me explain, the purpose of the Internet is to provide users of the Internet with information and advice on your product or service and then to allow them to interact with you and other customers to verify that information.  If a website owner is doing this, providing quality information, quality advice and a quality user experience then there should be no room for concern.

So if each month you’re worried about the next update Google’s bringing out or your site is already affected then you probably deserved it.  You were too focused on “beating Google” and not focused on quality user experiences.

It’s important to understand that achieving good Google rankings is a marathon, not a sprint.  You want to work steadily towards improved rankings through delivering quality content, quality links and quality experiences.  This will not only just help with your Google rankings but also help with your sales as well.

Often people forget that they are using their website to market two ways, one way to market for positions and one way to market for sales.  Unfortunately less educated website owners lean too much one way and end up losing out.  You need to find a balance between both that sits within the guidelines of major search engines like Google.

Google has not, in the last few months, announced an update which is contrary to it’s guidelines.  In fact all they’ve done is reward sites that are doing the right thing.  So if you’re worried about search engine updates and how they are affecting your rankings then you’re being too aggressive with your SEO strategy.

Roll your strategy back a bit and focus on just delivering quality content and quality experiences to your users.

Most of the criticism is focused on the new Apple Maps app, which was designed to replace the Google Maps app and separate Google from Apple in the smart phone war.

Unfortunately the decision to make this change appears to be a little too early and could actually lead to an embarrassing drop in sales.  Now I’m not criticizing the decision because Apple was driving a lot of traffic to one of their major competitors Google.

What I am criticizing is that a company the size of Apple should not have released an update, which had bugs of such a large magnitude.  The bugs are so bad that websites have been set up to specifically track the bugs in the Maps function.

News media is reporting the release as a “laughing stock” of the internet and a complete “failure” something which Google would be happy to see.  In fact, this could actually get even worse for Apple, potentially they’ll have to roll back to the Google Maps app.

This would destroy their hopes of releasing a maps app again and would solidify Google’s position on the iPhone and continue to drive competitor traffic to Google’s Android solution.

Now you may believe that I’m over stating the issues here but the maps app is so bad that there are misplaced towns, misplaced cities and buildings, roads which defy the laws of gravity and those are just a few of the issues.

The issues don’t stop with just the Maps app either, users are reporting other issues across the web.  This leads me to my question, did Apple rush the release of their maps app as they are scared of the Google Android movement?

A company which has such a great brand, great products, great launches and a strong fan base should have very little to worry about.  But maybe some of the spark of genius is now missing at Apple and they’re scrambling to make it up.

Let me know your thoughts on the latest iOS 6 release below and whether you think apple released the new version too early.

While the concept of outsourcing like’s is not a foreign concept to me, it’s one that I am extremely cautious about recommending to business owners.  There are a few reasons, the biggest one being that Facebook Likes decay very quickly.

Let me explain, someone likes your page, it may be the result of an advertisement on Facebook, a viral promotion or even a paid like.  This same person can then also choose to “unlike” your page at any time.

The amount of people of unliking your page is an indication of your Facebook Like Decay rate.  For example, if you have 20 people that unlike your page a day then you have a decay rate of 20 likes per day.

Now it’s natural that people would unlike your page, but when your spending up to $1 per person liking your page the cost of this decay could be significant.  Which is where I falter when personally recommending to people to go out and buy likes.

If companies are buying likes they need to factor in this decay rate so they can see that for every 100 likes they may actually lose 20.  This loss of likes will result in a higher per like cost.

As an example, if I pay $1 per like for 100 likes the total cost is $100, but if 20 of those likes decay then the actually cost per like is $1.25.  This hidden decay rate which many businesses don’t factor into their advertising spend can actually lead to an unprofitable campaign.

One of the major reasons that companies cap there per like cost is they have a set campaign cost, with a set goal and a set revenue amount.  These set figures can be significantly affected when the decay rate is factored in.

So before you embark on a Facebook Like campaign consider your decay rate and factor that into your advertising budget and spend.

In my opinion there are two massive growth opportunities that exist in the marketing right now, one is mobile websites and the other is social commerce.  In this post I’m focusing on social commerce.

Social Commerce is the term used to describe the process of buying and selling goods via social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest.  When Facebook initially listed publicly one of the major reasons why it listed at such a high price was investors were gambling on social commerce.

They saw that Facebook had a captive audience and was the most visited website in the world, they were hoping that Facebook would find a way of successfully introducing e-commerce into the platform and start profiting this way.  This speculation by investors was partially backed by a code leak found by a few developers.

You see, Facebook has an open API and part of the API showed code, which indicated that Facebook would be introducing something, called a “want” button.  This was different to the “like” button and was linked to another function within Facebook called “products”.

Now these functions are not yet publicly available but they were taken as strong indications that Facebook was trying to tackle the larger problem of social commerce.  While there share price has fallen considerably lately, if they can solve the social commerce problem in just months they could quickly recover the price.

Very simply put, investors are hoping that Facebook finds a way they can become the “Amazon” of the social world.  In my personal opinion if they could do this then they would very quickly overtake Amazon based of their large user base.

In the mean time, while they find a way to do this, us as Internet Marketers and business owners need to put our energies and focus into turning our Facebook Page presence’s into social commerce.

We need to monetize our fans by selling to them within the platform using online stores like Payvment and Big Cartel.  These stores allow you to set up a Facebook shop simply and without coding required.

It’s time to embrace Social Media and start engaging in Social Commerce.

As soon as I heard this I told them to hold on ordering the T-Shirts and to do a pre-sale campaign so they could gauge interest from their audience.  They took my advice and went through a 3 day pre-sale campaign where their active fans could purchase a T-Shirt on pre-order and have it shipped to them when they arrived.

The client was selling the T-Shirts at $45, which in my opinion was a little high for the market he was targeting but he wouldn’t budge on the price.  So he went ahead did the pre-sale campaign and after 3 days he had no orders.  In fact the only responses he received from his fans were how outraged they were at his profiteering from them.

You see, some of his competitors were also selling T-Shirts there T-Shirt price was just $20, under half of what he was charging.  At the end of the campaign the client got in touch with me and thanked me for saving him $3000 and he said he needed to now go off and think more about this strategy.

As a way of helping him out I sent him an email with the major learning’s he needed to take from this process.  I’ve listed the learning’s below as a way of hopefully helping you out as well.

Learning #1: Test Your Market Before Investing

This is probably the biggest mistake I see Internet Marketers make, they see list growth of Facebook fans as being proof that their concept will work.  This is untrue, if you want to truly know if your market is going to return you must test your market.

The simple test I suggested to this client took him less than 1 day to set up and less than 3 days to execute.  The total cost of the test in terms of time and financial investment was less than $100 and less than 3 hours.  The overall saving for him was $2900 and he also saved a lot of heartache as well.

Any business can test their market online using this pre-sale approach so I strongly recommend that any business use this before investing in product and stock.

Learning #2: An Active Community Does Not Equal Active Buyers

The hardest lesson that Facebook Marketers have to learn is that an active Facebook Page does not equal active buyers.  While they may be engaged with you and commenting frequently this does not mean they will buy your products.

In a few tests that I did with this client the Fans were very reluctant to leave Facebook at all.  When we posted links to videos or surveys less than 1% of the fan base actually followed those links.

These are indications to the Page owner that they may be working with a Fan Base, which are not buyers.  Don’t just blindly believe that because the community is active that you will make money.

Learning #3: The Money’s In The ACTIVE List

As a way of trying to fix his poor conversion rate from Facebook Fan to sale the client built a list via an email subscribe app.  The community quickly subscribed as they were given an ethical bribe to do it.

This was exciting for him as quickly he built a list of over 2000 people, I was a bit dubious though as I’ve seen this before and seen it fail.  Sure enough when he emailed the list less than 50 people opened the email and even fewer went to the links.

It’s important to understand it’s not about list size, it’s about responsiveness.  The more responsive the list is the more likely it is to make you money.

As you can see, this client failed in their product launch but through some strategic thinking the failure was minimized and the financial impact insignificant.  Consider this when completing your own business launches!

Now I know, that all sounds very corporate and possibly is a little hard to understand, so I’ll explain it in more simple terms.  If you were to build a table and you placed just one leg at the front left would it stand up?

Of course not, a table needs at least two legs to stand, and then it’s still not very stable at all.  The more legs you add to the table the more stable it becomes.  In terms of an online marketing strategy, if you have just one channel, social media, then your online marketing strategy isn’t stable.

To build a stable, robust and scalable online marketing strategy you need multiple channels, you need SEO and Social media, but there are also other channels you can add as well.  The more channels you add the more likely your strategy is to succeed and not fall over

Be careful though, as a business owner you have limited time to actually oversee and participate in your online marketing strategy.  If you want to succeed you need to find that happy medium between too few channels and too many channels.  Committing to too many channels could result in you doing none of them well, while committing to too few channels could results in failure as well.

As you can see, the balance of creating a good online marketing strategy can be very tedious, but in my experience the more time spent in planning and developing the strategy the greater results you can achieve.  So if you’re a business owner wondering why you’re not succeeding at generating online sales, then you need to look at your strategy.

Specifically start by looking at what channels you are targeting and what results you are getting.  Cut out the channels which are taking too much time and not generating results and test adding in new channels.

The study highlighted a period between 2011 and early 2012 where the most searched term for 5 out of 15 months was news-related.  As an example, during this period one of the most searched for videos were Japanese earthquake videos.

An interesting research finding was that YouTube news videos were on average 2 minutes 1 second which is longer than normal TV news segments of 41 seconds.

Now you’re probably wondering what this means for business owners, well there really are three major points to take from this latest research:

Key Point #1: Video Length

Don’t be constrained by traditional TV video lengths when filming and placing your videos online.  A 2 minute video online is more likely to get watched than a 41 second video, so length is not a major concern.

Key Point #2: Breaking News

In the event that your company is directly or indirectly involved in a breaking news story turn to YouTube for user feedback and also for your replies.  Without utilizing this source you are not directly targeting your consumers.

Key Point #3: Don’t Forget About YouTube

Now this is more loosely related to this report, but the report does indicate a higher usage of YouTube.  As such I’d strongly suggest that you don’t disregard YouTube as a source of traffic and customers for your online marketing efforts.

So when implementing your strategy for generating traffic don’t forget that YouTube gets over a billion views per day.  There is a captive audience waiting for you there, so don’t miss them!

It is important to understand Facebook. Creating a Facebook page and building a following is important, but just as equally important is creating great wall posts.

What I mean is that if you post something that isn’t up to par, it may not do anything for your brand, and may not increase your following. Sometimes posting a bad wall post can actually have a negative effect. It is important to understand how to create hot wall posts that will activate your fans and excite them…either excite them to go to your Facebook page or to follow your post to your advertising message.

The point of Social Media via Facebook is to keep your following engaged, while giving them useful information or tips that they can walk away with. It is give and take.

You want to make sure that you are giving just as much as you are taking….generally it is a great practice to give more than you take. What I mean by “give” is to provide useful information or tips without advertisements, and what I mean by “take” is the advertisement for something you will profit from.

Creating a great wall post is a science. There are certain words that will generate a higher response rate than others. There are a few tips that are always recommended for creating great Facebook Wall Posts:

1. Update your status frequently, but not too frequently. Three times a day is good, ten times a day can be considered as spam.
2. Ask Questions – by asking questions, you will keep the user engaged and they can interact and feel that they are contributing to your post.
3. Make your wall posts short and sweet (like a breaking news headline)

Keep your wall posts light and sometimes funny – putting a serious wall post can sometimes work in the adverse affect by putting the user in a bad state of mind.

When someone replies to your wall post, it is ALWAYS recommended to respond to them promptly.  This will keep them engaged and returning to your page. By replying, you are showing the human side of your facebook and also showing that you care what your “friends” have to say.

Treat your Facebook wall as a center for learning and enjoying. By creating this atmosphere, you are greatly increasing the chances of your “fans” returning to your page often and interacting with your posts. Remember, when other people see that other people are responding, it will implant something in their subconscious that will make them want to join the conversation. When one person sees that other people are involved, it is human nature for that person to want to get involved as well.

Finally spend time going through other businesses’ Facebook Posts and see what works and what doesn’t. It is easy to do this because all you need to do is look at the amount of “Likes” and how many people have added comments to the posts.

For the posts that have a huge response, adapt that type of structure to your wall posts. For the posts that you see that have either no “Likes” or no comments, equally observe that and make sure you stay away from the “hot” words in that post that made it a bad post. Many times you will see a common thread in these “fail posts”, which are negative words or run-on sentence type of wall posts.

As you can see there are many different ways to find high quality wall posts for your Facebook Fan Page, whether you’re a great writer or not these strategies should help you out.  Don’t forget, posting something is better than posting nothing, so keep active and engaged with your audience.

The company was looking to reduce costs while still maintaining work flow output, very simply put they wanted to move the “grunt development” offshore and leave the technical architects in place.  While this sounds like a typical outsourcing job, one that requires only finding a decent development partner, this didn’t turn out to be the case.

The problems for this company started early, the first development firm that they recruited to work with the Technical Architects had all of their code thrown out.  The code quality wasn’t poor (admittedly it wasn’t exceptional either) but the Technical leads who were US based didn’t like it.

This first bad experience was marked down to “poor hiring” so they went about hiring a second team.  This time with more stringent guidelines, an elongated interview and due diligence period and even a test job.  They were confident that this second team was considerably better than the first team and they would get a great coding result.

Now in this second process they heavily involved the Technical Architects in the interview process and even left the final decision up to them.  The thought was if they could engage them throughout the process they were less likely to end up with a team they didn’t like.

Unfortunately though the second team had the same result as the first team, all the code was thrown away and they had to end the relationship.  By this time, the investment in “discarded code” was getting quite high, so we sat down internally and started to review their process.

I created a brand new hiring, interview and testing process and went about hiring their third development company.  Again the Technical Architects were heavily engaged in the process and the final decision was there’s.

But again, after hiring the third team, having them complete a small project we found ourselves throwing away the code.  The Technical Architects said it wasn’t up to scratch and they weren’t happy to integrate the code.

This was frustrating for the company CEO I was consulting to and as such I suggested we get an independent assessment by a qualified development company.  We proceeded to do this, and you’d be surprised to know that the independent assessment declared that all 3 coding samples were up to standard and would have functioned as desired in the coding platform.

Now what was interesting was in this case, in this outsourcing horror story the issue wasn’t the outsource company we were dealing with, but the internal team resources not accepting the companies decision to outsource.  As such they rebelled against the company and the code resulting in wasted time and wasted code.

So if you’re considering bringing on an outsourcing team I’d strongly suggest that you first get the buy in of your current team prior to doing this!

It’s not just luck, it’s part of a well-orchestrated product launch plan that they’ve been implementing for months.  Now this product launch process isn’t an “Apple” only process it’s something you can also use in your business.

You see, the goal of a Product Launch is to build momentum in your market place where customers, competitors and alliance partners are all taking about your new launch.  By sparking these kinds of conversations you build a buzz about your product and people realize that there’s a potential for your product to sell out or run out of stock.

This is exactly what Apple do, and over the years they’ve got very good at it, but as I said earlier this isn’t an Apple only process.  You can achieve the same outcome as Apple by following the 5 step product launch process outlined below.

The 5 Step Product Launch Process

Step #1: Product Creation

The product creation step is where you take your company’s expertise and package that into a single sale-able product.  If you’ve watched Apple’s launches you would have noticed they don’t launch multiple products at once, they launch a single product and create as much market place momentum for that product as possible.  This same principle needs to be applied to your business, create a single product for the target of the product launch.

Step #2: List Building

The list-building phase is where you start to gain momentum in the market by generating a list of potential customers who are interested in learning about your product launch.  By creating this list you’ve now built a targeted, qualified audience to notify when your product launches which should result in quick sales and further market momentum.

Step #3: Relationship Management

The third step is probably the most important as it’s the process of taking a lead generated in step two and turning them into a customer who’s literally begging to buy your product.  Through a serious of well-crafted emails you’ll engage your potential customers and have them sitting on the edge of their seat waiting to purchase the moment your products released.

Step #4: Launch Management

The next stage of the launch is to manage the technology processes that occur during the actual launch of the product.  Ensuring that all order forms are working, servers are scaling to deal with site load and product delivery mechanisms are activated.

Step #5: Buzz Management

The final stage of the launch is to manage the social media buzz and industry buzz around your product.  Not only do you want to manage it but you also want to encourage it by syndicating Press Releases, engaging Joint Venture partners and posting social updates.

The more active you are in generating buzz and managing that buzz the more scarcity the market will feel resulting in higher sales.

As you can see a product launch is a science and when executed properly there is a predictable results.  Just like Apple knows that each time they bring out a new iPhone version they’ll sell a minimum number of units, you too can predict the success of your product.

There are pros and cons to outsourcing your Facebook wall management. It is up to each individual to way these pros and cons and decide if outsourcing is the right decision for you and your business model.

Outsourcing your management to offshore business or individuals via platforms like oDesk can save you money…I’m not talking about peanuts here; you can save sometimes an upward of 60% by outsourcing it. It is also important to understand what should be outsourced and what should not. For example, it is fine to outsource your simple day to day management of your wall, but it is never recommended to outsource the development of your plan or Social Media Strategy. That’s like giving the keys to your Porsche to someone that you never met – you wouldn’t.

Outsourcing Has Its Limits

You may need to pick and choose what tasks that you want to outsource. There are several reasons for this, and it is always decided on a business by business basis, according to your business model.

For example, if you have a local business with local customers, it can sometimes be difficult for a third party based in India to understand your local market and keep your customers/users engaged in conversation. Also, even small things like dialect can hinder profitability and create a metaphorical distance between your company and your users – even though you’re in the same town (or country).

Why Did You Start Your Business?

This is a rhetorical question. You started your business because you are skilled in what you do and passionate about your business. But there is a fine line between being passionate and skilled, and overloading yourself with work. Do you need to everything yourself?

The clear answer is no. You should always do what you do well, and delegate or outsource the latter to other people that will achieve better results in that area. Many people try to avoid spending money by doing everything their self, but this can lead to exhaustion and even under performance.

A Few Reasons Why You Should Outsource Facebook Wall Management

1. Facebook is not stagnant. It is always changing. In order for you to keep up with the trends it would require hours of research on your end. You would also need to constantly test different methods.

2. Your Facebook needs to be enhanced graphically. Facebook is not just about text and words, but also needs to appeal to peoples senses (eyesight), which will sometimes require a Graphic Designer.

3. The most important reason to outsource your management is “thinking”! That’s right. Thinking. Most people don’t realize how much time goes into thinking about what their next wall post will be, and it is justified. It is never recommended to post a wall post off the cuff without putting thought into it first. This can use up your brains resources and often lead to confusion, stress and even fatigue.

4. Facebook Branding is a process, not a quiz. This is not something that can be done in one hour, or even one day or one week. This is a long process that is always changing and requires constant attention. Don’t get me wrong, when first creating your page, yeah, it’s exciting, but it’s the three weeks after that that can become tedious and “boring”. Neglecting your Facebook Page will most likely lead to Social Media Suicide.

If you do decide to outsource your Facebook Wall Management, don’t just pick anyone at a whim. Make sure you do your proper research and ask for samples or previous work that they have done. Make sure you always retain Administrator access to your page and most importantly, choose wisely!

Don’t just stick to one platform for your outsourcing. If oDesk doesn’t deliver the consultant you want, don’t settle for less. There are many third party site like oDesk suck as Freelancer.com and eLance.com.

Good Luck and remember, choose wisely and never settle for less!