5 Simple Ways To Speed Up Your WordPress Blog

Blogging, Small Business Marketing, Wordpress, , ,

WordPress pluginsWordPress is a blogging platform which has so many features that will enable its users to customize their blog to meet their needs. There are thousands of plugins, themes, and scripts available for WordPress that can be installed easily to enhance your blog performance. However, using too many features of WordPress for your blog can potentially slow down your blog speed. Here are 5 simple ways to speed up your WordPress blog:

1. Remove Unnecessary Plugins

Plugins can be useful for your blog, but too many plugins will affect your blog load speed. In other words, if you have too many plugins installed on your WordPress blog, your visitors will have more time to wait your blog to load completely. That’s why it is necessary for you to remove plugins that you don’t really use. If you have some unused plugins, you should remove them completely from your WordPress blog. In this way, you can improve your blog performance.

2. Simplify Your Widgets

Sometimes, having too many widgets will also make your blog load slowly. So, don’t clutter your blog with useless widgets that don’t really help your visitors at all. Some widgets are beautiful to put on your blog, but are they really necessary for you? For instance, displaying pictures from Flickr might allow your visitors to see beautiful pictures while they read your blog, but is it necessary for you? Unless you’re having an image-hosting blog, it won’t be necessary for you. So, you should simplify your widgets to boost your blog speed and make your blog as clean as possible.

3. Compress Your Images And Use Wp Super Cache

Compress your images so that your visitors can load your blog images quickly. Be sure to use the WP Super Cache plugin as well. This plugin increases your blog loading time significantly. This plugin will create HTML files for your dynamic blog. So, instead of loading your blog through PHP scripts, the plugin will just load the HTML files, which will make the load time faster.

4. Use A Simple WordPress Theme

Your WordPress theme can also contain lots of files and media that can only slow the speed of your blog. It is better for you to use a simple WordPress theme, which have less images and less media files within it. Make sure that this theme is optimized for SEO as well, so that your blog will have a good performance in the search engine. Changing your WordPress theme can effectively fix your blog speed problem.

5. Use A Web Hosting Service Specialized For WordPress

If you have an extensive blog, with heavy content updates every day, you should consider using a web hosting service that is specialized for WordPress. The difference between using a regular web hosting service and using the service which is specialized for WordPress is that the specialized WordPress hosting is fully optimized for WordPress, which means it has been tweaked to ensure that every WordPress blog can run smoothly and load quickly with it. So, if you want to speed up your WordPress blog significantly, using a specialized WordPress hosting will help you to do it.

Those are some simple ways to speed up your WordPress blog. Follow the tips above to ensure maximum performance of your blog and prevent your visitors from getting frustrated when they try to access your blog.

About Chris

Chris is an SEO Consultant who is an expert in helping websites owners understand ranking effects and how website loading and other aspects affect web rankings. He recently used a new application called www.readycache.com to boost website loading speed.

Learn How To Implement Effective Content Marketing For Global Success

Content creation, content marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Video marketing, Viral marketing, YouTube Marketing, , ,

The world of marketing is changing rapidly. In the information age, traditional methods of advertising have begun to lose their luster, forcing companies to raise the bar on how they market their brands and products. Central to this new advertising paradigm is content marketing: attracting customers not by “selling” them a brand, but instead by creating interesting, entertaining, or compelling content that will guide customer behavior without making an explicit sales pitch. Many large brands are now making effective use of content marketing to change the way customers engage with their brand.

Vouchercloud®

When it comes to variety, Vouchercloud® offers instant delivery of money-saving coupons on mobile devices and voucher codes for online shopping. The use of social media and YouTube is to showcase its content marketing and is delivered well. Check out this video below, that silently showcases a family enjoying the benefits of Vouchercloud® as they travel through a fictional restaurant meal, train ride, and movie theater — all without making a traditional sales pitch. Videos such as these showcase the benefits of services that Vouchercloud offer without the need for spokespeople or even explanations of their services, instead focusing on a brief, entertaining video that shows customers what their service is all about and the discounts they can save.

Timex®

For its iconic IRONMAN brand, venerable watch company Timex® knew it had to break out of its traditional advertising practices and focus on a new kind of marketing. They eventually unveiled the “I am a Runner” campaign, choosing to focus not on the products themselves, but on the storytelling opportunities involved in running and the Ironman challenge. Timex® already had a strong connection to the Ironman running challenge, and so capitalized on that connection by creating a Facebook app that collected runners’ stories and photos and allowed real athletes to share their experiences.

Burberry®

Clothing company Burberry®, one of the oldest fashion brands in the industry at 157 years, sought to freshen up their market image and take some new approaches to advertising. Investing heavily in digital advertising, Burberry® launched two projects. The Burberry® Acoustic project, unveiled in 2010, featured a series of videos showcasing up-and-coming British musicians (all wearing Burberry® clothing, of course), and the Burberry® Kisses project involved a website that allowed users to capture their unique “kiss print” on their computer webcams, modify the kisses with virtual “lipstick,” and then share with others. The focus on customer engagement and participation spread awareness of Burberry’s iconic brand.

Red Bull®

One of the most memorable and resonant content marketing campaigns in recent memory has come from Red Bull®. The energy drink company took its slogan (“Red Bull gives you wings”™) to the limit when, as the centerpiece to their “Stratos” campaign, they sent daredevil Felix Baumgartner into space to perform a record-breaking dive from low orbit. The video of the jump, which showed Baumgartner’s successful plummet to earth at Mach 1.25, garnered over eight million simultaneous live streams on YouTube. The photos of Baumgartner’s landing on Facebook gathered over 200,000 “likes” within minutes of its posting. Red Bull created massive awareness for its brand and raised the bar for content marketing everywhere, without turning the Stratos event into a commercial.

The scale and scope of Red Bull’s® marketing efforts have raised the bar for other content marketers worldwide — not every company, obviously, can afford to send a man into space to promote their products. But in the world of content marketing, ingenuity and creativity frequently trump limitless budgets and high production values, and with enough inventiveness, even the most modest content marketing effort can achieve a massive audience.

Author: Hannah is a writer who works alongside the travel, fashion and food brands for vouchercloud.com. We look forward to hearing your thoughts on content marketing for success and any tips you may have.

SEO For Startups

Analytics, Organic SEO, responsive web design, SEO, SEO tools, Small Business Marketing, Webmaster Tools, , , , ,

seo-for-startupsStartups have many things to worry about, so it’s not surprising that sometimes they neglect SEO. That’s detrimental to their websites because search engine optimization can bring them online exposure, as well as help them establish a more powerful online presence more quickly. If you run a startup yourself, hiring a SEO company may prove to be one of the best investments that you ever make for your business. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do some optimization on your own for your website, before the experts arrive.

What to Focus On

First you have to make sure that when someone enters your company’s name in Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, the first result that the search retrieves is your website. This is done most of the time by the search engines automatically. Once that is done, you need to focus on optimizing your web pages for search engines, so that when someone searches for keywords that define one of your offerings, your website appears as high as possible in the search results. Ranking first is tough if there is strong competition in your niche, but you must struggle to make it to the first page of the results, because few people check the second page. The SEO for startups strategies below will help you get more exposure, but to really make it on the first page you need the help of an SEO expert.  A SEO company can help you out to make your local business grow in all of the San Francisco area. There are some good companies that are offering SEO services for small fees. Make sure that you always check their portfolio before hiring one.

  • Invest in high-quality web design. A bad, cluttered design can ruin all your SEO efforts.
  • Use Google Analytics and Google Webmasters Tools to monitor your website and get more insight into how your visitors are using it.
  • Make a list of your offerings and come up with relevant keyword ideas. You can use Google Keyword Planner to check how the keywords perform. The best keywords are those that have a high volume but a relatively low cost per click.
  • Ensure that every page on your website has a friendly URL, a unique title, and adequate page tags.
  • Make all website pages accessible in less than 3 clicks from the home page.
  • Fix any broken links.
  • Put your sponsors, endorsers, and partners in a visible location – on the homepage if there’s enough space – and link to their websites.
  • Add keyword-optimized content to your website, including images and videos.
  • Set up a blog on your domain and publish on it worthwhile content weekly, including in your posts links and references to your events and offerings.
  • Optimize your website for mobile devices, making sure that it displays well on all the popular smartphones and tablets used today.

These are only a few things that startups can to do improve their SEO. Save yourself the trouble to apply all these tips yourself by hiring a reliable SEO company. You have nothing to lose.

Citations:

As a marketing expert who has experience with online advertising, our guest blogger Josh loves to share his expert advice. He regularly researches the evolving SEO trends, and provides consultation to a bay area SEO company. You can check his contribution on Google+.

How to Increase Sales with Social Media

content marketing, Sales Coaching, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, ,

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Social-Media-SalesHow Social Media Can Spread Information Faster

Despite its reliance on modern infrastructure, social media is based on much the same basic mechanism as good old-fashioned gossip. One person learns something relevant to his or her interests, before choosing to share that information with the people in his or her circle of acquaintances. Some of the people belonging to a group will read it and remain silent, while others will actively share that information with the people in their groups. Thus, something of interest to one person can spread to maybe a dozen people with the most robust connections to that original source. Social media is far superior to its word of mouth predecessor when spreading information because of its unmatched speed and quantity of networks. In part, this is because people can communicate faster using the Internet rather than speaking person-to-person. More importantly is the ease of sharing information to people who have similar interests. Combine that with the Internet’s international reach and speed and you have a network that is much more capable of spreading information than its offline predecessors ever did, making it both a curse and a blessing for businesses.

How Businesses Can Use Social Media to Increase Sales

Businesses can use social media to communicate in much the same manner as consumers do online. However, social media’s real value for businesses lies in its potential for building their brands. Since brands are one of the most useful tools for securing sales, this means that social media can help businesses increase their revenues without a corresponding increase in expenses. To sum up the concept, a business’s brand is its perception in the public consciousness. Positive impressions result in more potential customers because more people will be inclined to approach the business over its competitors due to confidence, trust and familiarity with the brand. Businesses can create a positive impression through its interaction with its customers, some of whom will pass information about their experiences on to their friends (the new word of mouth marketing if you will). With the popularization of social media, this means that each and every business interaction a company has with its customer has the potential to exert a far-reaching rewards or consequences on its image and its revenue-earning operations.

How Different Social Media Sites Provide Different Benefits to Businesses

It is remember to note that even though all social media sites can be used for brand-building, each one is unique, meaning that it provides a unique selection of benefits to businesses. For example, both LinkedIn and OpenForum focus on businesses, meaning that B2B businesses have a much easier time reaching their intended audience with their posts and marketing campaigns. In contrast, a social media site such as Google+ pages and Google Places provides businesses with a more competitive environment because of how Google prioritizes local results. However, none of these social media sites can match Facebook when it comes to its tremendous potential. Facebook has more than a billion users so tapping into that audience is a marketers dream. Reaching the right audience is difficult in such a target-rich environment, but businesses that do their homework and succeed can tap into a rich and rewarding resource.

Conclusion

Understanding that businesses can benefit from using social media is not the same as being able to use a said medium for that precise purpose. Even businesses with extensive experience using social media to secure sales are always able to benefit from an outside perspective on its usage. For these businesses, there is a convenient solution in the form of sales coaching. In fact, sales coaching from skilled and experienced experts might be one of the easiest methods for turning the useful tool that is social media into an outstanding one.

By Peter Marino, owner of the content marketing firm in NYC, reelWebDesign.com.