• WordPress Press User Guide – 100 pages.PDF
• Simply guide to blog posting on WordPress

I would thoroughly recommend this for making the sidebar / widget areas of your wordpress site more effective. Please note it takes a little bit of getting use too but one you master the basics it is easy. To learn more about Widget Logic Plugin visit: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/widget-logic/

1. Log into administration section of your wordpress site
2. Look for ‘Settings’ tab on the left hand side bar and click on it
3. Then scroll down and click on ‘Permalinks’
4. When the menu pops up in the main window insert the following code in ‘Custom Structure’ option (4) /%category%/%postname%/

In the past creating and maintaining e-commerce websites has required specialist knowledge. This is now changing because leading developers on CMS platforms such as WordPress and Joomla are now designing functional templates that support e-commerce.

Some of my favourite WordPress e-commerce themes include:

• http://demowp.templatesquare.com/rgbstore/
• http://demowp.templatesquare.com/estore/
• http://demo.shopperpress.com/simple/
• http://templatic.com/demos/wpstore/
• http://wpshop.themebolt.com/
• http://demowp.templatesquare.com/oscomm/

This shift has resulted in the content of some websites not receiving the levels of exposure that they would, if they offered easy ways for the visitor to share the websites content on their social networks.

To ensure your WordPress website doesn’t have this problem you may wish to consider adding one or more of the following proven social share plugins to your website:

Social Share WordPress Plugins:

• Socialble
• Share This
• Add to Any
• Wickett Twitter Widget
• TweetSuite
• Tweet This

1. Fully complete your profile – Ensuring that this contains all relevant career history and interests. LinkedIn makes this easy by displaying a percentage score to show how complete your profile is. A LinkedIn profile basically acts as an online CV, so make sure you’re being honest and describing yourself and career clearly.
2. Edit profile to claim vanity URL – This should be set to use your name (or closest match if unavailable) within the URL, for example: www.linkedin.com/in/kevingibbons – this will help you to optimise your own name in the search engines and also makes the URL easier to remember if promoted on business cards or email signatures.
3. Make your profile publicly available – You can set the information which is publicly available to non-members/contacts, be careful with blocking too much information as this will also be unavailable to the search engines. As a minimum, I would recommend providing enough information for the search engines to index your profile and cache the external links you have listed! In terms of optimising your profile, the main goals are normally to rank for your own name, company name and possibly industry keywords related to this.
4. Make connections – Increase the reach of your profile by connecting with current and former work colleagues, clients, friends and family. I’d also recommend adding any industry contacts, perhaps from people you have met at conferences/events or are connected with on other social media sites and share a similar interest.
5. Request recommendations – Obviously don’t ask everyone, especially if you don’t know them that well. But having recommendations will help your profile to stand out and will help to build trust in your reputation to visiting users. This will help improve the visibility of your own profile within internal LinkedIn searches too.
6. Register a company profile – If your company doesn’t already have a company listing, you should create one! Here’s an example of the SEOptimise company profile, if your company does have a profile, you should encourage employees to create their own individual LinkedIn profile’s and ensure the current employer entry is completed. This will automatically update all employees listed on the company profile, providing the company name is exactly matched.
7. Make use of the 3 website hyperlinks – For SEO value, LinkedIn is very good – they give you the opportunity to add three hyperlinks to websites of your choice. If you’re not trying to optimise your site for “My Website”, “My Portfolio” and “My Blog” it might be an idea to select “Other” and choose your own anchor text instead!
8. Join related groups – Find groups where other industry professionals have joined and look to participate in (or at least join) these groups. Adding value to your own profile and helping you to get found by other industry contacts.
9. Use LinkedIn Answers – This can help to build up your reputation within a field. For SEO it also builds the number of internal links pointing to your profile from within LinkedIn, therefore helping to strengthen your profile in the search engines!
10. Optimise your job title – LinkedIn now includes your job title within profile title tags. I’m not saying you should lie about your job, but within reason you could include descriptive keywords which may help to attract relevant search engine traffic. For example, using “SEO Account Manager” as a job title instead of “Account Manager”, if appropriate.

I encourage all our WordPress website clients to explore the world of plugins for themselves because half the fun of plugins is discovering them for yourself.
However as with everything in this world there are a few Plugins that spoil it for the rest. Therefore to ensure you only explore the best WordPress plugins you may wish visit the following links:

Links to Great WordPress Plugins:

• Ultimate collection of WordPress plugins
• Ultimate list of 17 useful WordPress plugins
• 50 Ultimate list of free & useful WordPress plugins
• 15 Best WordPress plugins of 2011
• 10 Best WordPress plugins of 2010

Twitter Information Guides:

• eBook: Demystifying Twitter Marketing – Global Thoughtz
• Newbie’s guide to Twitter – Webware – CNET
• Successful Twitter Marketing Strategies – Social Media Optimization Blog
• Making the most of Twitter – Guardian.co.uk
• How to Measure Twitter Marketing Success – Quick Online Tips
• 35 Twitter Tips from 35 Twitter Users – Pro Blogger
• Ten Top Twitter Tips – OnRamp101
• A Comprehensive Guide to Twitter – Buzz Blogger
• Twitter Tips For Bloggers – David Risley dot com
• Twitter Ebook – Geekpreneur
• 20 Twitter Tips to Make You a Better Twitter User – JMorgan Marketing
• Twittin’ Secrets: The 100 World’s Greatest Twitter Tips & Twitter Secrets – Dan Hollings
• 10 Ways To Increase Number of Followers on Twitter – Kevin Rose
• Top 11 Twitter Tools and Best Practices - Brand Hackers

Setting budgets can be a minefield, people’s opinions on budgets are vastly different and often become further confused by the amount of differing guides on the internet. In my opinion for a business to achieve steady growth they must be prepared to invest at least 5% of their turnover into marketing. For dramatic growth I would suggest raising the budget to 10-15%.

A consistent investment into marketing of between 5-10% will provide your marketing department or consultant with a budget that they can work with to achieve the companies ‘realistic’ objectives. Once the budget is set it is then up to your marketing team to create a marketing strategy, which consists of activities that will create a suitable return on investment.

What should you expect with regards to return on investment?

There are a number of complicated ways to work this out but in my opinion the best way is to ask the business owner…. If I gave you £10,000 worth (or another round figure that is related to the business) of new business what would you be prepared to pay for it? The answer they give is directly related to their business and provides a good place for negotiating a workable figure for both parties. It also help the business owner to understand what you are discussing and avoids confusing calculations on cost of sale, profit margins etc Its not scientific but it does work and if the ROI figure is a hard target it focuses the mind on dropping some of the fluffy forms of marketing in favour of results based marketing forms such as PPC.

Anyway these are only my thoughts… Below are some other resources that you may wish to consider.

Useful Resources re: Marketing Budgets and ROI

• http://www.marktheglobe.com/seo-budget-roi-calculator
• http://www.drewsmarketingminute.com/2007/10/how-much-should.html
• http://www.jimnovo.com/ROI.htm http://www.allbusiness.com/accounting/budget/508610-1.html

Google Analytics – The Basics Seminar presentation