Wow Nick. How exciting!! Thanks so much for all the work you have done, particularly tidying up the site in the way you have. I am impressed! A lovely unexpected surprise.

- Chris McRae, Trail Blazing Woman, Alexandra Hills, QLD, Australia

- Mina Hunt, Unique Social Media Solutions & SwUrl, QLD, Australia

- Kamran Aazami, Kamran Hairdressing, Robina, QLD, Australia

Is it better than the competition, or does it just do the exact same things as everyone else’s products.

Successful websites are never “me-too” sites. They have come up with a unique angle for a targeted niche. They are not “All things to everyone!”

What is your angle or UWP that differentiates you from all the other competitor websites? Are you:

• Better, Faster, More Efficient, Save Money
• More Qualified
• More Experienced
• Only for Men, Women, Younger, Retired age group
• Selling online with a ShoppingCart or offline only
• …

1 Minute Action To Produce Massive Results

Write down all the things that are unique about:

• your product; or
• your service; or
• the way you do business with your customers

Place your UWP on your website ‘Home Page’ above the fold, or in the ‘Header’ area so people know exactly how you are unique when they visit you for the first time; and…

…to remind your current customers why they choose you over all the rest.

THEN, develop (or re-develop) your website around your UWP! Get rid of everything else that detracts from this.

How It Works

Here is an example of what this looks like and how it works on our website HomePage.

This post series you have subscribed to will reveal a few of the techniques and strategies available that you can easily implement on your website.

The main aim is to show you some of the possibilities rather that to provide you with step-by-step instructions for internet marketing.

The posts are deliberately brief, so not to languish in your email or web favourites ’to do later’ list, and can be read in less than 11 seconds.

If you need more information on the strategies, or need assistance to implement these in your website, simply send us an enquiry or ‘Leave A Comment‘ in the ‘Comment Box‘ below the Content in the web page displaying the particular strategy.

Implement and Enjoy! 

- Ross Dohnt, President
Hinterland Field Archers Inc

If you require work on your WordPress website whether it be to tidy up some code, add some styling, add a page, upload a vide...

If you have been dithering about getting your business online or update your existing website, now you have no excuses. $1 ge...

A Basic Brochure website with a powerful Content Management System to allow you to easily create new pages, change existing p...

Merinda Smith F4Solutions.net BecomeAnRTO.com

I was recommended the services of Nik Cree by a colleague and co-incidentally met him face to face whilst at a conference. His knowledge and experience in using “wordpress” websites impressed me so much that I decided to employ him to assist me with my website development.  Since that point my business has grown tremendously as has the website.

The fact that Nik and I are situated at opposite ends of Australia has been absolutely no issue. Nik has always been there for me at the end of the email, telephone or skype and I now consider him as part of my team and success. Nothing is too small or too difficult for him.

His experience with a variety of businesses and his ability to maximise SEO has shown many times over. Nik has done an awesome job with the creation of pages and his marketing ability.

I now recommend his services to my clients and friends and know that he will provide them with the same excellent service and capacity to build a website that gets hits, as he does with me.

Exclude Category From Appearing Or Displaying On The Front Page

Firstly, I needed to exclude the category ‘Newsletter’ from showing up with the blog posts on my front page. The plugin that manages this is Front Page Excluded Categories. You do have to duck into the code of the plugin to make one small but very simple change which is explained very well with the plugin instructions.

Open the plugin php file in a text editor and add the category id values you wish to exclude to the $cats_to_exlude string. This is on line 14.

List One Category Posts On A Specific Page

To list the posts from a specific category on a page I installed and activated the List Category Posts plugin. Then with the use of a shortcode I was able to specify what category I wanted to display and what parts of the category to display.
For example:

To display the posts from Category ID 11, the full content, and listed alphabetically by the Titles I inserted the following shortcode into a new page I created (remove the space after the ‘[' bracket and before ']‘ bracket. Had to put the spaces here so the code would display):

[ catlist ID=11 content=yes orderby=title order=asc ]

You must have

[ catlist ID=# ]

Replace the # with the ID Number of your category or to make it easier, just use the category name. So for the category called business you would write the shortcode

[ catlist ID=business ]

The other parts of the text in the shortcode I wrote above are other values which determine what and how to display information from your posts. Here are some values below that you can use:

• orderby – use any of these values in the format orderby=author (this would be to order posts by the person that wrote them):
• author- Sort by the numeric author IDs
  • category – Sort by the numeric category IDs
  • content – Sort by content
  • date – Sort by creation date
  • ID – Sort by numeric post ID
  • menu_order – Sort by the menu order. Only useful with pages
  • mime_type – Sort by MIME type. Only useful with attachments
  • modified – Sort by last modified date
  • name – Sort by stub
  • parent – Sort by parent ID
  • password – Sort by password
  • rand – Randomly sort results
  • status – Sort by status
  • title – Sort by title
  • type – Sort by type. For example:
    [ catlist name=mycategory orderby=date ]
  • order – How to sort orderby. Use either:
  • ASC – Ascending (lowest to highest).
  • DESC – Descending (highest to lowest). For example:
    [ catlist name=mycategory orderby=title order=asc ]
• catlink – Show the link to the category. Use the template system to customize its display using the variable $cat_link_string. The default is ‘no’; To activate it use catlink=yes.
• numberposts – Number of posts to return. Set to 0 to use the maximum number of posts per page. Set to -1 to remove the limit. The default: 5; To display 10 posts use as numberposts=10]
• date – Display post’s date next to the title. The default is ‘no’; to activate it use date=yes.
• author – Display the post’s author next to the title. The default is ‘no’; to activate it useauthor=yes.
• dateformat – Format of the date output. The default is get_option(‘date_format’)
• template – File name of template from templates directory without extension. Example: For ‘template.php’ value is only ‘template’. Default is ‘default’ that means template in code of plugin not in template file, that’s an unordered list (ul html tag) with a CSS class: ‘lcp_catlist’
• excerpt – Display the post’s excerpt. The default is ‘no’; to activate it use excerpt=yes.
• excludeposts – IDs of posts to exclude from the list. To exclude posts numbered 12, 52 & 37 use excludeposts=12,52,37
• offset – You can displace or pass over one or more initial posts which would normally be collected by your query through the use of the offset parameter.
• content – Show the full content of the post. Default is ‘no’; to activate it use content=yes.

Now you have a page which will display only the posts from a single category, in my case the ‘Newsletter’ category without these posts being displayed on the front page. You can create a whole lot of pages for different topics using this method

Of Course There Is Another Way…

…but this is for people who know a lot more about PHP coding. And that is to create a separate template for the category you are wanting to display posts for in a separate page. It is actually not that hard and a great description on how to do it can be found at moshublog.com. WordPress has a great article in its Codex Directory on Template Heirarchies which will give you an understanding how WordPress works with its templates. You can find this at http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Hierarchy.

If you don’t have squillions to spend on Google Adwords, magazine or newspaper ads, yellow pages or you don’t know anyone to affiliate with to send an email out to the millions of people on their lists inviting them to your site, then this may be the answer.

• What does it cost? Zip!
• How much work does it take? Zip!
• How much marketing expertise do you need? Zip!
• How many hours do you need to set it up and keep tweaking? Zip!
• What else do you need to know that ‘they’ don’t tell you to make it work? Zip?

All you need is a WordPress site, watch this video and cut and past the list of sites below to the Update Services in the Writing Settings, and Save. From now on every time you publish a post on your blog it ‘pings’ out and ‘indexes’ in the search engines.

Add this list of Ping sites to your WordPress blog or website

• http://api.feedster.com/ping?
• http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
• http://bblog.com/ping.php
• http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
• http://ping.amagle.com/?
• http://ping.bitacoras.com?
• http://ping.blo.gs/
• http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/?
• http://ping.feedburner.com?
• http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
• http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
• http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php?
• http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/?
• http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2?
• http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/?
• http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/?
• http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
• http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
• http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
• http://topicexchange.com/RPC2?
• http://www.blogoole.com/ping/?
• http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
• http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates?
• http://www.blogsdominicanos.com/ping/?
• http://www.blogsnow.com/ping?
• http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
• http://www.feedsky.com/api/RPC2
• http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/?
• http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
• http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php?
• http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
• http://www.wasalive.com/ping/?
• http://www.xianguo.com/xmlrpc/ping.php
• http://xping.pubsub.com/ping

If you like this, have additional advice to add to this, or have a question, please leave a comment below. And send it out to FaceBook or Twitter by clicking on the Sharing Icons below

A seagull in Brisbane has developed the habit of stealing ETA Chips from a neighbourhood convenience store. The seagull waits until the Manager isn’t looking, and then walks into the store and grabs a snack-size bag of cheese chips.

Once outside, the bag gets ripped open and shared by other birds.

The seagull’s shoplifting started early this month when he first swooped into the store in Brisbane, and helped himself to a bag of chips. Since then, he’s become a regular. He always takes the same type of chips.

The Manager thinks it’s great because people are coming to watch the feathered thief make the daily grab and run, and that’s good for business, and especially since customers have begun paying for the seagull’s stolen bags of Chips because they think it’s so funny.

However, the Manager did say, “This is Australia, and if that seagull starts to grab a 6-pack of beer to go along with the Chips, I may have to put a stop to it.

You can’t buy your favourite magazine in store like this…you will pick it up online and this really is extraordinary!

Imagine flicking through your favourite magazine and being able to listen to interviews, scroll through an album of photos accompanying an article, see a video demo of products being advertised (of course you choose whether you want to see it or not), share an article that captures your attention on FaceBook or Twitter, play a game (a step up from filling in a crossword or soduku puzzle).

Check Out This Issue of Sports Illustrated…even if you are not a sports fan!

I promise, you will be amazed at the stunning new way this magazine is delivered, and get a look how you can get magazines in the future (like this year). Watch this video then comment below on what you think about having your favourite mags delivered like this.

 

1. Optimise the database (and automate this to run at intervals you specify (e.g. weekly);

2. Repair the database;

3. Empty or Drop Tables (careful with this as you can delete all your data doing this. However, there are occassions where you might want to remove date. Often when you remove a plugin and want to remove the associated data, or you have been hacked or spammed and want to remove the offending data);

4. Run SQL Queries

5. Schedule automated Backing ups of your WordPress MySQL Database. These can be emailed to youand / or stored in a db-backup folder on your server.

When you install the plugi you will notice a message in red that appears at the top of your screen on every page when you are logged into the administration area:

“Your backup folder MIGHT be visible to the public
To correct this issue, move the .htaccess file from wp-content/plugins/wp-dbmanager to /home/username/yourdomain.com/wp-content/backup-db”

Move the .htaccess file…BUT…

When you follow the instructions and move the .htaccess file (which is called htaccess.txt and you need to rename to .htaccess – remember to put the dot at the front) to the correct directory, the warning message does not disappear. That is because it is not coded in to disappear when the issue is fixed.

To remove the warning message you need to edit the wp-dbmanager.php file in the plugin directory in the wp-dbmanager folder. You need to find the following line:

add_action('admin_notices', 'dbmanager_admin_notices');

and comment it out (hide it so it no longer displays). You do this by adding two forward slashes in front of the code like this:

// add_action('admin_notices', 'dbmanager_admin_notices');

…and voila, the warning message has disappeared.

Where To Find It In WordPress

The easiest way to edit the file is to go to the Plugins Menu | Editor | “Select plugin to edit:” wp-dbmanager | click on wp-dbmanager/wp-dbmanager.php and find the line to change, then click the ‘Update File‘ button.

Of course before making any changes it is always prudent to copy the entire text of the file into a text editor or notepad just in case you muck it up. If you do you can simply copy it back and start again.

 

You may not want the title of your Home page to appear as ‘Home’ or the About page to appear as ‘About’ at the top of the page. Like me, you may want to create your own title or headline to appear at the top of the page rather than the WordPress default.

To hide the title you need to edit page.php file in your theme and comment out (hide) the title tag. You do this by logging in as Administrator and going to the Appearance tab, click on Editor and select the page.php file in your theme.

Find the line of code:

<p><?php the_title(); ?></p>

<p>and change it to:</p>

<p><!- -?php the_title(); ?- -></p>

Save the change and the default WordPress page title will no longer appear.

How To Edit Comments.php

It is very easy once you know where to look, and just so you don’t muck things up for good it would pay to copy the code into your text editor (a good one is Notepad++ and it is free) and save as a backup.

When you open comments.php, find the following section of code:

<?php
// END of "If comments are open, but there are no comments"
 else :
// If comments are closed:
?>

<?php _e('Comments are closed.','kubrick'); ?>

<?php endif; ?>

Delete the text Comments are closed (leaving ”) so it looks like this:

<?php
// END of "If comments are open, but there are no comments"
 else :
// If comments are closed:
?>

<?php _e('','kubrick'); ?>

<?php endif; ?

Depending on your theme there may be other pieces of code in you comment.php file so just look for this line of code:

<?php _e(‘Comments are closed.’,'kubrick’); ?>

and change it to:

<?php _e(”,’kubrick’); ?>.

Remove ‘Comments Are Closed’ Video

If you are like me and need to see how this is done here is short video which will take you through removing Comments are closed step-by-step. It is a good idea to view the video in full screen by clicking the icon on the very bottom right of the video screen.

[SWF]http://www.positivebusinessonline.com/wp-content/uploads/Remove_Comments_are_closed_video.swf, 500, 350[/SWF]

Of course, there is always a better way!

Removing the ‘Comments are closed’ with the procedure above still leaves an empty comments box on the pages. So to remove the text AND the box here’s what you do.

In the comments.php file find the following code:

<?php else : // comments are closed ?>

<!-- If comments are closed. --> 

<div class="art-Post">

and change it to this:

<?php else : // comments are closed ?>

<!-- If comments are closed. --> 

<div style="display: none;" class="art-Post">

This video will show you step-by-step how to change the code in comments.php to remove ‘Comments are closed’ text and the box.

[SWF]http://www.positivebusinessonline.com/wp-content/uploads/Remove_Comments_are_closed_text_and_box_video.swf, 500, 350[/SWF]

Videos Made with JING

I always like to know what programs and software people use on their blogs and websites and usually have a look into their source code to find out. But to save you the trouble, this video was made by a fantastic free screen capture tool called Jing, the little cousin to Camtasia. It is free to download from www.jingproject.com

19th Century Twitter Users Tweeting

Social Media is today to email what the telephone was to the telegraph was to letters – a faster way to communicate with more people in a shorter space of time. But back then SPAM was a brand of awful tasting salted meat!

Telegrams were expensive to send compared to letters and the sender paid for every word. Consequently messages were short, to the point and conveyed a single idea as precisely as possible.

They a ‘call to action’ for the recipient, like Peter Sellers the actor who, while working in his study upstairs sent a telegram to his wife in the kitchen just downstairs:

COULD YOU PLEASE BRING ME A CUP OF COFFEE?

Superfluous word such as a, an, the, you, do it, etc were trimmed so that the essence of the message was conveyed with the minimum of words. Now doesn’t that sound like Twitter? The disadvantage of Twitter is that it is free and so much rubbish is tweeted. Used well it can convey a simple message or call to action succinctly but this may be more difficult than it seems. Mark Twain, and American writer summed up the difficulty when he receive a telegram from a publisher:

NEED 2-PAGE SHORT STORY TWO DAYS

Twain replied:

NO CAN DO 2 PAGES TWO DAYS.
CAN DO 30 PAGES 2 DAYS.
NEED 30 DAYS TO DO 2 PAGES.

Newspapers were one of the biggest uses of telegram services and to save money they would often combine words or invent new words (lk txt msgs 2day J). A famous example from British newspapers where the word ‘no‘ was put in front of other words as ‘un‘ turning the two words ‘no money‘ into the single word ‘unmoney‘. A message from an editor to a journalist:

WHY UNNEWS?

Received the reply:

UNNEWS. GOOD NEWS.

To which the editor telegrammed the response:

UNNEWS. UNJOB.

The famous author Rudyard Kipling was reportedly paid 50p per word calculating the earning from his writing. A group of students sent him 50p and asked for a word. He telegrammed back:

THANKS

The shortest telegram sent was by Oscar Wilde, while living in Paris, to his publisher in Britain, enquiring on progress with a book he had written. His telegram read:

?

to which the publisher replied:

!

You can have a lot of fun with Social Media, and deliver memorable messages, evoking the curiosity in your readers, and inspiring them to action.

Both Mark Twain and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle apparently sent very similar telegrams to a number of prominent men, all of whom hurriedly packed their bags and left town immediately.

Their mischievous message?

FLEE AT ONCE — ALL IS DISCOVERED

Twitter places a limit of 140 characters on messages you can send. When composing your tweets, imagine you were required to pay $1 per character. What messages would you tweet?

P.S. If you really want to experience the nostalgia of the telegram (or for those born pre-1980′s experience the telegram for the first time) you can send one via the internet! Yes, it is true!

Check it out and send a telegram to your clients. It will be unique and memorable because chances are they will not have received a telegram in years if ever at all.

You can send an authentic looking telegram at Telegram Stop.

As at 4:14am today there are 7,388 WordPress plugins which have been downloaded more than 63,080,132 times.

A plugin which are also have other names like  addin, add-in, addon, add-on, snap-in or snapin, is a mini-program or application easily installed into a WordPress website of blog to provide a very specific function.

Simple As Plug’n Play?

The great thing is there is not additional code to write, you don’t need to know any html, css, php programming languages, nor pay an expensive web developer to design the feature for you. Often it is a 10 second click to download, click active, occasionally there are some simple settings to configure, but more often than not it is a plugin-and-go.

The hardest part is searching out the right plugin for you among the myriad that are available that will perform the same function. Fortunately there is a directory of some of the plugins available at WordPress.org which you can search for. There are a whole lot more you can find through the search engine.

So, How Do Plugins Work?

On the right of this site you will see a section How Plugins Work. Here I will be adding new WordPress plugins regularly to show you how they work. Feel free to have a look and play around with it and if you want to know more or need a hand finding and installing the right plugin for your site, send me a not at the Contact Us page.

Plugin Reviews

And if you want me to review a specific WordPress plugin or want to know if there is a plugin for a specific function or application, leave a comment below and I’ll do some research, put some examples under How Plugins Work so you can see exactly what they do.

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