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One Absolute Essential that Your Marketing Strategy Must Include

David Ward — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 01:34:11 +0000

Make no mistake about it. Our world is plugged into technology. The more that technology plays a role in your overall marketing strategy, the greater the exposure you’ll have to your potential market. One absolute essential that your marketing strategy must include is a Website IF you are doing business in the 21st century. A Website is not just an option, but a requirement in your marketing strategy, because it is now such a huge part of building a personal or business brand.

I have said this often – that the question that most prospective customers ask a business owner is no longer, “Do you have a Website,’ but ‘What is the address of your Website?” From a marketing strategy perspective, it’s becoming more and more UN-acceptable to a prospective customer OR CLIENT to hand them a business card and it not have a Website address on it for your business. It’s just a given that if you are in business and want to compete, even in a local market, that your customers need to be able to find you online. No one that becomes a client of S. D. Ward & Associates will be without a Website for more than the time it takes us to build it for them. It is an absolute requirement that every client of ours has a Website as a prerequisite to receiving our help in building their personal and/or business brand.

With more and more people turning to Google or Bing to search for local businesses over that of picking up a phone book and looking for a number in it, if you do not have a Website you are losing not only new customers to your competition, but you will ultimately begin to lose your existing customers to your competition as they are drawn away from you by interesting, content rich Websites that are owned by your competitors.

Here are some very important considerations for you to look at if you are wanting to have a comprehensive marketing strategy that includes the basic technology of having a Website to aid you in your success.

1. A Website is a necessity for bolstering credibility.
2. A Website is an extension of your staff and good will.
3. A Website is an extension of your knowledge as a professional.
4. A Website is a reference source for your prospects and customers.
5. A Website is a place where your customers can come for answers.

When you weigh the benefits of having a Website against the cost of having one built or the time it would take you to build it yourself, there is no comparison to the far reaching affects of having a Website versus not having one. Without including a Website (or even multiple Websites) into your marketing strategy, you will become less and less viable as a reputable business, and be seen in many cases as having something to hide by not having one.

If you are serious about being successful in the things you are doing or in your profession, ask yourself this question: How will I compete in the twenty-first century amid both local and worldwide competition for the products or services that I have to offer unless I have a store front on the information highway where both prospects and customers can find me?

How to Prevent WordPress Security Problems with Your Website

David Ward — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 11:21:26 +0000

Knowing how to prevent WordPress security problems with your Website can save you tons of time and aggravation if you will just take a few minutes each week to maintain the updates of your WordPress Website. Let’s face it. There is always someone who thinks it’s cool to hack into other peoples websites. And, as great as Matt and his team are at WordPress, even their platform has security issues if they don’t keep providing security updates for the millions of users worldwide. ”It’s not just a WordPress security issue, but a security issue with all Websites. If you have a Website, you will be hacked. It’s just a matter of time,” says David Ward of ITfamilyGroup. To illustrate his point, he went on to say, “It happens to the best of the best at one time or another. Listen, if two 10th graders can hack into the National Security Administration’s mainframe in a moment of boredom after school one day, if someone wants to hack your website bad enough, they will.”

If you are new to the Internet as a Website owner, don’t let this ominous first paragraph scare you. Again, even with all of the security that even the biggest Website owners put in place to prevent hackers from gaining access to our several websites, we all will still get attacked from time to time. One thing to learn that is the best way to prevent being attacked as a WordPress Website owner is to see that you keep your WordPress website updated. It only takes a few minutes a week to do this, so it is very doable.

For the techno idiots among us, we realize that it is easy to get yourself up to your ankles head first in your work day and forget to visit your website’s back office to check out the status of your updates. If you are one of this esteemed group of techno, we suggest hiring a virtual assistant for about $30 per month to maintain the security and functionality updates for your Website so you can go on doing what you enjoy most – whatever that is. We are not recommending this because we offer solution through our offshore outsourcing services through a sister company of ours. It IS however our point in telling you because we really hate to see people frustrated and discouraged because they forgot to do updates or didn’t have their settings right in their blog.

As a coaching and training firm, we believe that our job is in part to be the pain reliever for our clients. One way that we do this is to help prevent major headaches with our clients by educating them and/or taking this added responsibility off of their plates by referring them to someone who can do it cost effectively. After all, time is money, and if you could make more money doing what you do best, and pay someone less for their time, why not work smart, right? The point is that whether you do it or we do it, without a proactive position when it comes to the security and operability of your Website, you will be met with many setbacks and costly delays in your goal as a successful Internet marketer. This is especially true if you are a newcomer to the world of the Internet and Internet marketing.

Let us assure you that the updates are always important both for the WordPress platform and the various plugins you are utilizing as a part of your WordPress Website. If you want to keep your Website up and running, and free of hackers and the typical mayhem they bring when they hack your website, the VERY BEST WAY to do this is to visit the administrative area of your website and check daily to see if there are updates and install them. This most often prevents attacks to your website that the average hacker will attempt. We recommend this to every one who uses our Internet marketer’s hosting services, since the vast majority of them use WordPress for their Website’s platform.

Tutorial on How to Update Your WordPress Blog Platform

How to update WordPress using the automatic update option is the easiest way to do it. Why talk about the hard way, right? This is what you need to know to do it.

1) Every time you visit your website, you will see if there is an update available that can be installed to your website (see diagram below). When a new version is available, you will see a notification in the WP admin area. If there is a newer version of your WordPress platform, it is for a reason. Do not negate it.

2) Before beginning your update, make certain that you have a current backup of your website before you begin your upgrade. It’s hard for us to put a number to just how many times we have had to help clients rebuild their websites after something went wrong with an upgrade to their Website where they did not do a backup of their Website. The time and aggravation (and money) that you may have to experience if you do NOT keep a current backup of your Website is not worth neglecting the few minutes a week it takes to back up your Website. Before you proceed with the upgrade, backup your Website!

3) Once you have completed the backup of your Website, click the ‘Please update now” option (blue hyper-link as shown below). When you do this, a new page will appear.

4) At the prompt on the following page, click on the ‘Update automatically” – this is the fastest and safest way to do it and eliminates the possibility of confusion in the process if you try to do it using a round about way like that of downloading the new version to your desktop and then uploading it to your website using an FTP client. (If you don’t know what an FTP client is, you DEFINITELY want to use the ‘Update automatically’ option! For those who are used to using an FTP client who want to do the upgrade manually, 1) download the newer version to your desktop, 2) upload it to the root directory of your hosting account.

For those doing this for the first time, the page will look like this as you are getting started:

5) After you click the “Upgrade automatically” option, your page will start showing the process of of the upgrade. If it is successful, your page will look something like the window below. The line you most want to see it at the bottom … ”WordPress upgraded successfully” …. congratulations! If you see this, you have successfully updated your WordPress security update.

Five Steps to Affiliate Marketing Success with No Money

David Ward — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 04:00:52 +0000

Everyone likes Free, and especially if they can start a business for free. Unfortunately, even the best FREE business opportunities are not really free. Even if there is no money out of pocket in the beginning, there is an investment of your time, and your time is worth something. The only question you must ask yourself when considering a ‘free business opportunity’ then is how much time are you willing to invest into the opportunity to make it successful for yourself. But, if money is the only thing holding you back from making money online, there are a lot of opportunities that can generate you an income – and in some instances a very large income – but you must decide if you are willing to invest your time in the same way you would if you had put up a bunch of money to get involved.

SD Ward & Associates is continually reviewing online marketing opportunities for clients, and have several recommendations for great online marketing opportunities that you can join for free under our “Join for Free!” tab to the right of this article; however, this particular article is dedicated to that of getting started in affiliate marketing without having to spend any money to do so.

The following are five steps are how you can start building a financial future as an affiliate marketing professional. All it will take is your time – a few focused hours a day for a few months – to start generating a growing income without any out of pocket expenses. There is really no better place in the world that an average individual with Internet access can start making money without having to put a single dollar out of their pocket in order to do so. Let me share briefly how you can go about doing this, and offer you some guidelines that will get you well on your way to building a monthly re-occurring income working from the comfort of your home.

The one business that I know for certain that you can start with absolutely NO money out of pocket is that of building an affiliate marketing business. Affiliate marketing is a really slick way of earning an income from home, and the only ‘investment’ you have is your time. Affiliate marketing is the process by which you select a product or service that you believe in or feel comfortable with telling others about, then set about marketing that product or service on behalf of the individual or company that is offering it. The best part of affiliate marketing is that you can promote as many products or services as you want to. And, IF you are good at it (and thousands upon thousands of average people are) you can make enormous (LOTS) of money.

Steps to Starting Your Own Online Affiliate Marketing Business

In a nut shell, for you readers who get bored or grow impatient quickly, this is how you do it: choose a product you like, sign up as an affiliate of it, write articles that interest you, advertise the affiliate links for your products or services on your article page, promote your article. It’s that simple. OK, so, now that I have the bored and the impatient taken care of, let’s break this affiliate marketing business down and see what it takes.

1) You will need to have access to a computer or smart phone with Internet access. I have known some people that did not have a computer or Internet service to start an affiliate marketing business who worked from a school computer lab or used a computer at a public library. There really isn’t any reason anyone that can read or type can’t do this if they really want to.

2) Find a good affiliate program that offers good commissions for what they have to sell. There are lots of companies that have affiliate programs. Almost everything you can think of is or can be marketed through affiliate programs. Most Fortune 500 companies offer some sort of affiliate program to promote at least one of their products if not all of them. There are several companies online that you can work with who broker affiliate programs. In some cases you can deal directly with the company that is offering a product or service. One particular type of company that I started doing affiliate marketing with was computer software like that of Anti-virus and computer performance and maintenance software. I chose this because, #1, I really believed in what the software had to offer (personal experience), and #2, the commissions were good on the software I chose to sell.

3) Determine what subject or subjects that you are really knowledgeable or passionate about. I always recommend to my coaching clients that it be one that you know a great deal about where others could either be inspired or benefit from your knowledge or experience. Once you determine what that subject or interest is (or they are), begin writing on it each day. Write short articles of between 500 and 750 words that can be read in three or four minutes max. This is a good length to engage a reader, but not so long that they run out of time to read it.

What are you most passionate about or what is it that you know the most about from your life work, education, or recreation? Once you determine that, start writing about those things. Begin by just opening up a word processing program and start writing about it – everyday, for 20 minutes. You will find that the number of articles you will accumulate will be more than enough to promote your products or services with after a few months. If you are unsure what you are most passionate about, one of the best reflections of who you are is what you post to your FaceBook or Friendster profiles, or whatever social network you belong to.

4) Start a blog or begin posting your articles to your social media profiles that include links to the products and services that you are promoting. If you choose a subject like ‘camping’ that you enjoy and want to write about, include links to camping supply and outfitter companies that you are an affiliate for. I encourage most writers to set up a WordPress blog (it’s free to set up), and begin their personal blog in a blogging community to get additional exposure, and link their social network profiles to their blog.

5) Find others who need articles for their blogs or who would be willing to allow you to post some of your articles on their blogs that have your affiliate links embedded into the content of your article, i.e. an article on rock climbing that talks about the importance of having a good fitting pair of rock climbing shoes, with a link embedded in it for a Website that sells rock climbing shoes that you are an affiliate of. The more your articles are distributed with your links or contact information in them, the more traffic you will see on your Website or through your affiliate links.

EXTRA CREDIT: If you really want to explode your affiliate marketing business once it is up and running and generating you some monthly income, consider self host your blog as soon as you can afford to. When you self-host your blog, it gives you full control over everything that goes on your blog Website, including the advertising and affiliate links that will earn you money. In order to self host, you will need a domain name. A domain name is your personal or business address on the World Wide Web. They cost between $8.00 and $35.00, depending on the company you choose and whether or not there are any additional services provided to you with the domain name. Hosting costs are based on the amount of traffic you hope or plan to have. Expect to pay between $2.50 and $100.00, per month depending on what added services you want.

Keep in mind that you can make as much money with a low traffic Website with a high rate of visitor response as you can with a high traffic Website with little or no visitor response. That is why product or service selection for your affiliate programs are so important. The product or service affiliate programs you choose should reflect the nature and content of your Website. I also recommend you do not use any company that promotes or reflects values that are not shared by you personally (this is known as being a socially responsible net-citizen.

If you are not sure about how to go about choosing a product or service affiliate program that’s right for you, read my blog on “How to Choose an Affiliate Program that’s Right for You.”