Perfect description of running a business online.

Found courtesy of Paul Boomer on Twitter.

Information vs Confusion

A recent chart post from eMarketer looks at the loyalty of visitors from social media sites: Loyal visitors but small share from social sites. But in the same post, it quotes some information sourced from Chikita about the overall volume of traffic.

Most Referrals are from Search (Source: eMarketer)

The company looked at the top sites sending traffic to the publishers in its network and found that Google alone accounted for 76.13% of referrals.

Taken together, search engines made almost 98% of all referrals, while social networking sites made up just 0.55%.

Running an active marketing campaign using Twitter is time intensive. Think of all that time spent reading tweets, tweeting and participating in conversations.

Can it lead to conversions? I’m sure it can. But marketing involves focussing your scarce resources (mainly time) on the actions that deliver the greatest outcomes. And what this chart shows is that when it comes to traffic, Google is the 800lb gorilla.

So for a small business with limited resources it is going to be hard to get the same results from a Twitter campaign that can be achieved from a search marketing campaign.

Twitter vs Google for business websites

Stacy Cohen's New Website

Stacy’s new website coincides with the launch of her new book – Last Train from Paris.

A website with blog, supported by key social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr makes great sense for a book launch. Hook into the right networks in social media and you can spread the word incredibly fast.

Using social media for a book launch

The organisation that has gone into the launch of the markets is incredible – all of the 35 stalls are sold out, and everything is lined up for a bumper launch day.

Subi Farmers Market on the way

Icon PHOTO 09 Photography Competition

The entry process integrates custom uploading of images and size checking, PayPal payments and integration with a CampaignMonitor mailing list.

Icon PHOTO 09 photography competition

The graphic designer for this site was Tracy Graffin, and once again she has produced a design that is elegant, simple and distinctive.

James had to code a few new settings for our image rotator plugin to achieve the visual effects – no use of Adobe Flash required.

A Welcome for Mark Greenland

Not all links are created equally. In some cases there are technical reasons why search engines may not pick up on a link that you might think they should. Applying the nofollow tag to a link is one reason, but there are others.

This article by Gyutae Park explains how it all works: How To Confidently Build Links that Pass SEO Value.

Note: the article is quite technical in places – but so are search engines.

How Search Engines See Links

For one of our current projects James has implemented a new Custom Text Box for the header, which allows the precise placement of – well, just about anything into the header.

The custom text box can include text, images and shortcodes, so this might include:

• a set of custom navigation links – perhaps About or Sign Up
• a search form
• a clickable image
• an image rotator set

So you get the idea, it can serve a lot of different purposes.

Don’t forget that in the header you can already:

• display a core header image or a custom header image for the current page
• display a custom menu or a rollover menu (drawing on your pages/sub pages for navigation items)
• display an Action Button (a clickable image link, useful for a primar call to action)
• and using CSS with absolute positioning, you can also place an image, rotator set or Flash file into the header, from the body of your page or the sidebar.

So all in, a significant increase in configurability to achieve a precise effect.

Finer control over your website header

This shopping cart has more features than our Quickshop shopping cart option. Some of the additional features include:

• inventory checking, so you can sell products with limited quantities
• downloadable products, so you can sell an eBook or audio file and allow download after payment
• Australia Post shipping integration, so your shipping pricing can be linked to Australia Post

We’re aiming to support this on both WordPress MU and WordPress standalone sites. We’ll start with the core plugin, and perhaps later on add support for the Gold pack.

Because there are many different configuration options, if you want to use this plugin you’ll need to get familiar with the WP e-Commerce documentation, maybe purchase of a copy of the Bible, and be prepared to ask questions in the WP e-Commerce forums. Our main focus is going to be making sure you can simply activate the plugin on your OM4 site and start using it.

This is our initial setup information page: WP e-Commerce Setup on an OM4 site

Using WP e-Commerce as your shopping cart

All our OM4 websites run on WordPress. Each time a WordPress upgrade or patch is released, we assess it and apply it.

When security patches are released, we apply them promptly.

With larger upgrades, it might take us a bit longer to make sure any required changes are integrated to enable new functionality. Some upgrades introduce a lot of new functionality that require changes to theme files. Sometimes plugins aren’t compatible with updates and we have to co-ordinate the update with plugin updates to keep everything working together.

We’ve been doing this ever since launching our first WordPress site, and plan to keep doing it. As Matt says, there are no guarantees, but it is a good strategy for keeping your WordPress website secure.

Keeping WordPress Secure