September 2011 - Page 3 of 3 - The Last Drop of Ink

Part 1: WordPress WWW (The What, The Who, The Where To Start)

September 3, 2011/by Matthew Ogborne

In the next 3 or so articles, I’m going to be covering the aspects of WordPress that I wish I had known about a long time ago!

Many of these I wish I had known about before experiencing the ‘ah-ha’ moments when it finally clicked and realised that it was either exceptionally neat or was the answer to me bashing my head on a brick wall when trying to do something “odd”.

WordPress & blogging is not something I have really talked about much here before and its one of skills & experiences I take for granted, but rarely share with the outside world. It wasn’t until October 2010 that I bit-the-bullet and started writing about myself, however I’ve been using WordPress for years.

In these next few articles, I’m looking forward to sharing with you my experiences with you and also homing in on the aspects that will help me, help business owners take the plunge or refine their work using WordPress. However we need to start at the beginning.

The beginning – What is WordPress?

WordPress in it’s simplest form is a “Content Management System”, a common name for this type of tool is “CMS”, however Alice the rabbit hole goes deeper, much much deeper.

With some 25 million, yes million downloads, the free hosted version that when checking today at WordPress.com they’ve almost 100 million words in a single day, WordPress has become the #1 free CMS.

There are many reasons why this is happened, these include:

Its free
Its extensible
There is a obscene amount of extensions, themes & plugins for it
Its open-source
Its very, very good
Its very easy to use
Its well documented
If you need something “custom” made, there are millions of developers/coders/programmers that can help you.

In short, there are other blogging & CMS tools that are available, however my personal opinion (& some obscene amount of other people on this planet) believe that WordPress is the best there is.

So who’s using WordPress?

I avoid politics, however I, as you, cannot ignore that the PM uses WordPress!

You want names? Lets try some of these:

http://ebayinkblog.com/ <== eBay
http://ycorpblog.com/ <== Yahoo
http://blog.ted.com/ <== Ted.com
You got the point yet?
http://sundayafternoonclub.blogs.topgear.com/ <== TopGear/BBC
http://blog.flickr.net/en <== Flickr
http://about.digg.com/blog <== Digg.com
Oh you want more?
http://www.thefordstory.com/ <== Ford
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/ <== Wall Street Journal
http://blog.us.playstation.com/ <== PlayStation
http://electronicsblog.sel.sony.com/ <== Sony
http://blog.mozilla.com/ <== FireFox
http://business.blogs.cnn.com/ <== CNN
http://download.cnet.com/download-blog/ <== Download.com
Oh cannot forget these either…
http://www.stephenfry.com/ <== Stephen Fry
www.theroyalweddingwilliamkate.com <== Some random bloke & woman that got married recently
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/ <== Harvard
Oh and the prime minster as well http://www.number10.gov.uk/

So do not even try to tell me that an “Open Source” CMS is not viable to be used for business use, I’m using it right now & I’ll laugh at you.

Where to start

I’m not going to mince my words here & I make no apologies, if you want to procastinate on this, that’s your choice, however:

“Getting started with WordPress is piss-easy”

Three steps that will take you less than 2 minutes:

Go to https://en.wordpress.com/signup/ and fill in the 5 boxes
On the dash board there is a section called “Quick Press” enter this information:
Title = I have started something
Content = I am not a blogger, I am a winner
Press ‘Publish’

Congratulations.

To clear a little mist, there are two versions of WordPress, there is either the free hosted option which you just made or the self hosted option. These are found at http://wordpress.com/ (free hosted) and http://wordpress.org/ (downloadable)

There are positives and negatives to each. As you’re probably a business owner that is reading this, then I would ask you the simple question below:

Do you want absolute control over everything about the CMS?

Yes, then use self hosted
No, then use the free hosted version

Summary

WordPress is the #1 content management system on the planet and there are many reasons for this, the two primary ones are that its free and its so easy to use. Its used by massive corporations, the Prime Minister, individuals like myself and people just like you.

There are two versions, ones free hosted and also for those who want more control, a download version is available and this the downloadable WordPress code which you’re reading right now.

I’ve not covered why you want to start using a CMS and I’m not going to either. I’ve also not covered how you can install WordPress on your site as frankly there is no need, most hosting providers provide a one-click solution to install it and if you get stuck, they’ll be able to help you or just check YouTube.

If you’re looking for a reliable host for the self hosted option & have one-click installs of WordPress, then I personally recommend Evo-Hosting (which this site is hosted by) and also Heart Internet, which I have used for years.

Create a free WordPress site
It takes only a few moments, even if you have no intention of using it, take action now and break your WordPress virginity https://en.wordpress.com/signup/

Wednesday Workshop – Questions Answered

September 2, 2011/by Matthew Ogborne

I wanted to start by saying “thank you“. The workshop was fully subscribed at in total there were 81 participants on the Webinar! I was quite taken back by the number of people that attended and thank you for attending.

Also as part of the Webinar you also gained a taste for what this whole “ProjectE thing” was about and where its heading. For those who didn’t attend, sorry I’m not publishing the details here and are saving it for another day.

I’m learning too!

The biggest take-away from the Webinar for me was that you can actually expand the questions box outside of the tiny side bar of the Webinar tool.

I was using the three screens, one to run the live view from which you saw, the main screen for notes & the webinar tool and the other to make any edits on-the-fly to the power-point presentation.

I did think I had everything “licked”, however the questions box was really small and after a few questions, it scrolled in itself and it wasn’t until afterwards I found that one could expand it out into a single window.

Your questions answered

My apologies for not answering these live, I don’t think I’ll be making that mistake again and here are the questions and the crucially answers:

Thanks Matt. Very useful information. Would like to see something on sourcing products once you have done the research on what sells. Also some more detailed info on keywords particularly with the increase coming up on eBay shortly.
– Lynn

I’m going to avoid the first part of that question as that is something I am working on for the UnderstandingE project, its at 7,000 words at the last count and is aimed at taking you through the right way of doing this with not a single mention of “Secrets” which drives me bonkers.

The second part regarding keywords, this is something I’m aware I did not drill down upon at all in the webinar, its something you can easily gleam basic ones from eBay Pulse or by researching categories / products in Terapeak and is really specific to your products.

A lot of the information seems to be for an average sale. Is there any way of drilling down further? eg gold rings data average sale price is fairly meaningless
– Rik

Yes, the keyword research which we covered had two issues:

It was generic
It wasn’t drilled down far enough

We also did not carry the research as far as it could or rather should be taken, using the drill options on the left (as I pointed out) and also investigating the top sellers for the keywords in a specific category.

Is there a way of checking competition webstats?
– Jagg

Yes, there are ways of finding out ‘rough’ information, however they tend to be wholly inaccurate on smaller sites and tend not to provide anything substantial. This tends to be quite in-precise and its not something I intend to cover.

Hey its cheaper on Terapeak.com!

I checked that this morning, the UK site is £9 and the US site is $9.75 which is about 30% cheaper!

Video Recording & Slide Decks?

As I type the recording from last nights Webinar is being converted to a more usable format and in both HD, SD & transportable (for iPods etc) formats, however I am posed with two issues:

Hosting this is proving an issue as the it far exceeds the 15 minute limit on YouTube
I have been asked not to publish this by a member of the UE team

I do apologise, I said I’d do so, until the above two are hammered out, I am unable to post them on-line. Starting the entire project wasn’t going to be easy and I knew I was going to put myself in some awkward situations, this is one of them and I currently do not know the correct path to follow.

Your Feedback

I’ve received some fantastic feedback on the Webinar and are looking forward to putting these into practice. If you do have any comments, I’d love to hear from you and you can either contact me on the Contact Matthew page or use the comments box below.

Thank You for the Mug Gill & Terry!

September 1, 2011/by Matthew Ogborne

Just a quick post to say thank you to Gill & Terry from Printaway for the fantastic mug, that actually arrived yesterday.

Also it was a chance to try out the new opening section of the video content and try out the lighting arrangement, however I definitely need to do some more work on the lighting!

Anyway, thank you again and here is the video!