A recent Nielsen Trust Study showed that referrals are the most trusted form of advertising. Just look at the first row, “Recommendations from people I know.” The third row, “Consumer opinions posted online,” and the fourth one, “Editorial content such as newspaper articles,” are also forms of referral marketing and show numbers comparable to branded websites and TV ads.
WordPress Made Simple – the bare essentials
WordPress Made Simple is a very clear and perhaps the least intimidating guide for absolute WordPress beginners I ever came across. Even though the site offers more advanced tips and tricks, the Guide itself is just that – bare minimum of what a non-designer or non-developer must know to maintain their new WordPRess web site. The guide covers the following topics:
See? It does not get any simpler than that. Happy learning!
How Does Credit Card Processing Work?
Informative video from Principis Capital about who’s who in the world of credit card processing and what role the processor plays in your business.
ShowMeWP
ShowMeWP is a WordPress training web site that could be of a great help to our clients new to WordPress but willing to learn how to manage their web sites themselves. The basic video library was created with the beginner in mind; videos are created in “bite-sized” chunks to make it easy to learn on even a very busy schedule. For more advanced users, there are more complex tutorials for a very reasonable year-long membership fee and in-depth plugin reviews are coming soon too.
New first stop for hacked site recovery
Google just introduced the new Help for hacked sites informational series. It’s a dozen articles and over an hour of videos dedicated to helping webmasters in the unfortunate event that their site is compromised.
The series give practical advise on how to build a support team, quaranteen the hacked web site, touch base with Google Web master Tools, asses the damage, identify the vulnerability, clean the site, and request the review from Google.
Social Sign-on : the implications for Ecommerce sites
Dave Chaffey discusses the use of a social sign-in for ecommerce web sites. He also posted an interesting infographic from Monetate that shows how exactly a social sign-in can be used to enhance and simplify user’s experience with your online shop.
Success on Twitter: A How-To for Small Businesses
Success on Twitter can be measured in a variety of ways, depending on your goals. If your goals are to increase awareness, buzz, and feedback, then you should be paying a lot of attention to your follower and interaction count, as well as what people are saying about you. If your goals are more focused around driving traffic to your website or blog, you should also pay attention to the click-through rates on the links you Tweet. However, in order to start out, your first priority should be polishing your profile, gaining a voice, and building a community.
Álvaro J. Soltero, an inbound marketer and blogger for Leaf, shows how to get started with Twitter, benefit your target market there, and measure your success.
The Anatomy of an Awful Marketing Email
According to Return Path, marketing emails are responsible for 70% of “this is spam” complaints. That means that you should be concerned about whether your own marketing emails are part of those 70%.
Hannah Fleishman shows what not to do in your email marketing using a completely fictional awful email exmple:
Self Hosted WordPress.org vs. Free WordPress.com [Infograph]
The question about which option is better comes up amazingly frequent, especially with those new to WordPress. The infographic below puts WordPress.org and WordPress.com side y side and shows you pros and cons of both.
Self Hosted WordPress.org vs. Free WordPress.com [Infograph]
How to Change Your Password in WordPress
This simple method will not help you recover a lost WordPress password, but if you need to change your current one for some reason (make it stronger, for one) WPBeginner.com has a simple tutorial for you.