It loads the external JavaScript libraries required for the share buttons asynchronously giving you a slight performance boost on your page loads.

Why Use This Plugin (Advantages of this Plugin)

There are many, many Social sharing plugins available for WordPress but I needed one that is ultra lightweight and compact so it does not affect the page load time of my site (I don’t like to add heavyweight plugin to my sites).

When adding a social sharing plugin to the site, many users don’t realize that the more sharing options it has, the more JavaScript files it needs to load on your site and that can affect your site’s page load time.

The following are the main advantages of this plugin:

• Loads the JavaScript files asynchronously (this helps with the page load time)
• Loads on single view only (only in your single posts)
• Only 3 share buttons for the ones that really matters (Google plus, Facebook, Twitter)
• It shows the share buttons in a compact form (takes up less real estate of your webpage)

Obviously this plugin will not full-fill everyone’s need but if you have similar requirement(s) like mine then this plugin should help you out (a lot of our customers have noticed the use of this plugin on our site and requested us to release it).

Plugin Screenshot

When you install this plugin it will add the share buttons at the end of your WordPress posts which will look like the following:

Social Sharing Buttons

Plugin Installation and Usage

1. Go to the ‘Add New’ plugins screen in your WordPress admin area
2. Click the ‘upload’ tab
3. Browse for the plugin file (gfts-share-buttons.zip)
4. Click ‘Install Now’ and then activate the plugin

Download Latest Version

Download the fat free social share plugin

Checkout our projects page for more WordPress plugins.

This latest update has been named “Penguin” and the main objective of the change is to specifically target webspam.

To quote Matt’s words:

“The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing quality guidelines. We’ve always targeted webspam in our rankings, and this algorithm represents another improvement in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content.”

If your site’s search engine traffic went down significantly since that date then your site is most likely being penalized by Google for not following the quality guideline.

A lot of you may remember that the last time a high profile and significant algorithm change occurred was around February 2011 and that was given the moniker of “Panda”. Back then the Panda algorithm tweaks were aimed at penalizing sites with poor quality content – especially content associated with content farms like article directories.

Although the Penguin update is believed to chiefly be aimed at webspam, a lot of the general rules of thumb regarding what makes a quality website in the eyes of Google still apply.

The main thing which all website owners and creators should keep in mind is that Google is always tweaking their search algorithms because, as a global multi-billion dollar a year business, it’s in their interests to provide accurate and quality search results to their users.

Matt Cutt’s even says that Google wants to provide search results which will enhance the experience of the user.

How will the Penguin update affect your sites?

For starters if you have created and maintained a solid site with original and quality content which has been organically rising up the rankings, then you won’t have much to worry about.

By “organically” we mean that you have been steadily creating quality content which has been indexed by Google and over time it has naturally risen in the search rankings.

However, if you have tried to take shortcuts and employed what are known as “black hat” techniques to try and fool Google into ranking your site above the higher quality competitors, then you will probably see some significant drops in your rankings and traffic in the coming months.

Examples of “black hat” techniques which may have worked in the past but will, over time, cause more harm than good to your site are things like:

• Unnatural and excessive back-linking
  You might have noticed by simply checking your spam folder in your WordPress administration panel to see how much garbage your Akismet plugin filters out of your comment area.
  All of these spam comments are from people (or automated robots) which leave comments with links going back to their site in the hope that they will be able to build a significant number of back-links. A lot of the time the comments are totally irrelevant and out of context to the topic at hand which makes them very unnatural.Another technique spammers employ is to try and leave comments with links going back to their sites in forums. There is also a variation of this method whereby the spammers create forum profiles and place links in their profile without ever leaving a comment.Whereas previously the technique of building huge numbers of back-links may have been effective in increasing search rankings, this type of tactic is now being targeted more readily by Google and it may be something they are addressing in the Penguin update too.
• Poorly written articles which don’t make sense because of bad grammar
  In the effort to write as many articles as possible in the shortest amount of time, some people use what are known as article spinners. That is, they will often try to recycle existing articles which they’ve found on the net, by using a spinner to reword the article so that Google doesn’t detect any duplicate content.
  The end result of sites which are primarily built using such a technique is that they are grammatically illegible and quite useless as far as being informative goes.Google is constantly introducing intelligence into their search engines and crawlers to spot things like this and penalise sites with such qualities by demoting them in the search rankings.
• Keyword stuffing
  “Keyword stuffing” refers to the unnaturally high frequency of keywords which are placed on a page. The reason why people do this is that they hope to get a better ranking for their chosen keywords by exhibiting a large number of those keywords on their pages.
  Quite often, when you read a page of a typical spammy website you will find that the content actually doesn’t make any sense because the post was written specifically to contain as many instances of a keyword as possible without any regard to the quality of the content itself.

The above are just some of the “black hat” techniques which spammers and wanna-be Internet millionaires employ in order to short circuit the work needed to succeed online.

However, with algorithm tweaks such as Panda and Penguin and future updates, these techniques will soon be as toxic as kryptonite was for superman in terms of the success of your website.

What to Do if Your Site Got Penalized?

If your site got penalized by the penguin update then you should try the following:

1. Carefully read Google’s quality guidelines
2. Make the necessary changes to your site
3. Log into your Google Webmaster tools account and submit a request for reconsideration

How time flies… it seems almost like yesterday that we were talking about the release of 3.3.

As you probably remember, the release of 3.3 contained a lot of major changes and tweaks but in comparison, WordPress 3.4 will be a substantially modest update.

Currently WordPress 3.4 beta 3 is available to anyone who wishes to take a sneak peak and perform their own testing, but as for all beta versions, it is highly advised that you play with it on a test site and not slap it directly onto your live sites, because it is after all only a “beta” release.

Before we go into the new things you can expect in WP3.4 I wanted to talk about something which you won’t find in the 3.4 release; and that is the new and highly anticipated native WordPress theme called Twenty Twelve.

The Twenty Twelve theme was planned to be introduced in 3.4 early in the development stage but has now been pulled from this release and will make its debut in 3.5.

So now let’s look at some of the most obvious things which are new in 3.4.

A handy theme customizer from the admin panel

In WordPress 3.3 and earlier if you traversed to the Appearance->Themes menu in your administration panel you would be presented with your currently installed themes with the ability to preview any of your non-active installed themes by clicking on the “Preview” link.

In 3.4 a similar thing is possible but the link called “Preview” has been removed and now you just click on the theme thumbnail image if you wanted to see a preview of a particular theme. But the major change you will notice is that upon previewing a theme you will be also be presented with a theme customization menu which will allow you to try out various changes to your theme on the fly as shown below.

With the new theme customization menu you can now experiment with various options for your theme’s background color and images using a handy color picker.

You can also make changes to things like your site title and tagline,  navigation menu, and if you’re previewing something like the Twenty Ten or Eleven theme you can even change the header image on the fly by dropping an image file into an upload box (see below)

The cool thing about this theme customization preview menu is that it can allow you to quickly and conveniently experiment with various simple cosmetic changes without hacking theme files etc. Your changes are only temporary (kind of like making CSS changes in firebug) but you can also save and commit them simply by clicking the “Save and Activate” button.

Searching for and previewing new themes has been slightly improved

On a related note to the above, you will also notice some changes when you click on the “Install Themes” tab on the Appearance->Themes page.

For example if you’re searching for a theme and say you click on the featured link you will be presented with a selection of thumbnails representing some available themes you can install.

In previous versions you would see an anchored popup window when you clicked on the “preview” link but in 3.4 the “preview” link and the short lines of theme info are gone and when you click the thumbnail you will get a near full screen preview window with a sidebar containing the theme’s details and an install button (see below).

Flexible header sizes and images

WordPress 3.4 has also introduced the ability for allowing custom header images where users will be allowed to upload header images of varying heights and widths instead of being constrained to a certain size.

This is great for both theme users and authors alike because it adds that extra bit of flexibility to a theme and can negate the need for people to hack theme files or create a child theme just to achieve the purpose of simply adding a customized header image.

With the new version, all of the header support parameters will be included in a single array and can be enabled by calling the add_theme_support() function in your theme’s functions.php file.

Theme designers need to to be aware that this flexible header support will need to be added into each theme and will not work automatically with pre-existing themes.

Improved Internationalization

There are numerous small improvements to localization/internationalization which will make WordPress easier to translate.

For instance there is a change to the way translation files work, in that these files will be split up differently to allow for better performance improvements and flexibility when loading translations. Detection of RTL languages has been improved also.

So those are the main and obvious changes. There are also more changes mainly under the hood which are described by WordPress as follows:

• New XML-RPC API for external and mobile applications
• Performance improvements to WP_Query by splitting the query (Please test!)
• Performance and API improvements when working with lists of installed themes
• Support for installing child themes from the WordPress Themes Directory

Also another handy little quirk I noticed by accident is that if you click anywhere on the Admin bar which isn’t a menu or link, it will automatically scroll the page to the top.

So despite the 3.4 not being as earth-shattering as previous releases we should all remember and appreciate that with every release which WordPress make, the platform is evolving at an amazing rate and cementing its place as THE content management and blogging platform of choice for millions of bloggers and businesses on the web.

The qualities about online businesses which attracts the most people is the flexibility of lifestyle and the prospect of making a very good living because of the huge global exposure and reach which you potentially have by being connected online.

Unfortunately due to this wide potential market base there will always be those who will try to exploit this in ways considered to be unethical. I guess this shouldn’t come as a surprise because unethical business practices happen all the time and have been happening since man first started to trade in ancient times.

The only difference is, now with the interconnectedness of the world wide web and the huge internet technological advancements, the unethical side of business and marketing has been magnified.

For instance before the internet really started to take off in the late nineties, people were hardly ever confronted with ads, spam or junk mail about “acai berries” or “penis enlargement”. I mean when was the last time you got a flyer in your regular letterbox about “Adding 3 inches” to your you-know-what?

The peculiarity of today’s internet marketing is solely due to the nature of the technology itself and for all of the advantages and benefits the internet has brought us, the same advantages and benefits are unfortunately exploitable for those intent on using unethical means.

There are probably a few qualities about the online environment which are unique to it compared to other mediums and which therefore make the unethical marketing seem so much more pronounced.

For instance we already mentioned the grand scale of reach which people have when using the internet. You could potentially spam millions of people daily on the internet with little or no cost to you, whereas doing the same thing using snail mail would take you years and probably send you broke.

Also, the faceless nature of the internet makes it seem easier for people to fall into unethical practices because they don’t ever have to face the people they’re trying to scam.

The current global economic turmoil and job uncertainty is no doubt also playing a role in increasing peoples’ fear and desperation and so some are willing to try anything to make a few extra bucks.

But in the long haul you will find those trying to cheat the system and other people, eventually get found out and their money-making strategies come crashing down. Quite often these same types of people quickly try to think up new schemes and the process starts all over again.

The point is that from the perspective of building a stable income online, unethical schemes and scams are definitely not the way to go.

I know it’s a cliche but it’s also very true when people say: “If something sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t”. This cliche has never been more apt than what has been happening on the internet now for over a decade.

Google and How It’s Leveling the Playing Field

Google is by far the most popular search engine, taking something like over 80% of the internet search pie followed by Bing and Yahoo who share less than 10% each (according to  2011/2012 statistics).

You may also probably know that Google is a huge business globally, making most of its money either directly or indirectly from search activities. Therefore as the biggest search engine provider, Google is also most exposed to the unethical activities of people trying to cheat the system. Due to this exposure, they are also constantly tweaking and refining their search engines to combat the low quality, low value, high spam sites being displayed in their search results.

The latest announcement by Google’s Matt Cutts (who is the head of the Webspam team) was that they are increasingly targeting sites which are “over-optimized” – meaning those sites which might have an overabundance of unnatural backlinks and stuffed with keywords which make them almost unreadable and uninformative.

After all it’s in Google’s and everybody else’s interest that they provide a quality service to its clients by way of offering relevant search results. This means reducing the number of bounces caused by sites which are low quality and spammy in nature.

The way Google usually targets low quality spammy sites is that it gives them a lower weighting and ranking in the search results. The effect of this is that such sites are demoted from say the top one hundred search results to something further down the rankings.

Changes in Google’s core search algorithm and rankings methods shouldn’t come as a surprise when you consider that Google apparently make hundreds of code and algorithm modifications per year. But what is becoming more and more surprising is the increasing intelligence being built into the Google algorithms which are making them smarter in identifying a “good” versus a “bad” site.

So what does this have to do with you and your online ambitions?

Quite simply, if you dedicate your time and work smart to offer quality products/services/information to people and in doing so you also instill ethical practices in your online business ventures, then you will more likely reap the rewards from your hard work; quite often simply from the benefits gained from Google’s smarter search algorithm.

About the Author: This post was written by Peter Petreski who is an author for Tips and Tricks HQ.

These 2 techniques will come in handy if you ever find yourself in one of the following situations:

• Installed a WordPress plugin and you get a white/blank screen when you log into your WP Admin
• Edited some PHP code from the plugin or theme editor and there was an error so you can’t access the WP Admin anymore
• Installed a WordPress securiy plugin that locked you out and you can’t get inside WP Admin

Deactivate a WordPress plugin via PHPMyAdmin or FTP

Alternatively, you can watch this videos on YouTube by going to the following link:

• Deactivate WordPress Plugins without Logging Into WP Admin

Hopefully this video will save the day if you ever find yourself in this situation.

Some Internet Marketers like to use the term “primary call to action” to refer to the most important action which you would like any person viewing that page to perform.

There are also other levels of call to action types which are sometimes referred to as “secondary call to action” and “subordinate call to action” but these are lower down on the importance scale when compared to the primary call to action.

The primary call to action is the ultimate goal of your landing pages and it defines the purpose of why you have that page on your site to begin with.

A primary call to action should generally be represented by some kind of button although this is not strictly always the case.

Human beings surfing the Internet seem to be psychologically drawn to buttons and people are almost instinctively compelled to click them if they feel that the situation calls for it.

This is why well designed and strategically placed buttons are often the best tools you can employ for your primary call to action.

Qualities of Effective Buttons and Button Copy

The button representing your primary call to action must be easily identifiable and its purpose should be clear and unambiguous.

The information below is an outline of what to look for in the qualities of your button in order to make it achieve its intended purpose of getting people to perform your primary call to action.

1) Button Text and Copy

You should always aim to be specific with the words that you place inside your buttons rather than generic.

Being specific, concise and clear with the button copy leaves no doubt in the visitor’s mind about what they should expect when they click your button.

For instance, some examples of effective button copy are shown:

• “Sign Up For Free”
• “Get Your Copy Now”
• “Start Creating Today”

You may notice a pattern in the above statements.

They all start with familiar verbs (Get, Sign, Start) and they all contain either a statement of value (ie, Free) or a promise of instant gratification (Now, Today)

2) Using case in your button text

Internet Marketers have found through their research that the way you present the text in the button can also make difference as to how noticeable your button is to the people reading your web page.

Using title case, where the first letter of each word is in capitals, is one easy and effective way to make your button appear more eye catching and readable to your visitors.

3) Good button design and placement

It seems that some buttons are better than others when it comes to effectiveness.

This is why choosing your button design can mean the difference between a conversion or a lost sale.

But what makes one button better than another?

Below are some good button design characteristics which you might want to consider when selecting your buttons:

• Use an eye-catching color which stands out:
  Some colors which are pleasing to the eye include green, blue, orange.
  The color red can sometimes be used too but remember that it can also tend to be associated with some kind of warning or danger.
• Your button should be large and bold:
  Because your button will often be associated with a primary call to action, you should make it noticeable and large enough that it stands out and is not obscured by the content on your page.The definition of large can vary from site to site, but your button should be at least as big if not larger than your logo.
• Placement of your button:
  The positioning of your buttons is another important factor which can affect your landing page’s effectiveness.In general, you should position your primary call to action button within the first few hundred pixels of the top of your page.

  If your landing page contains a lot of copy and the reader will need to scroll at least more than a page’s worth of content, then you should also consider placing your button at least one time on your page.

  For instance if your landing page is long enough, your primary call to action button may appear near the top of the page, then somewhere in the middle and lastly at the bottom of the page.

  By placing your call to action in several places you are making it easy for your readers to buy if they want to.

Using Click Triggers to Enhance Button Effectiveness

In some cases a button needs some kind of a catalyst to convince somebody to click it.

This is where some Internet Marketers use what’s known as click triggers with their buttons.

A click trigger is basically a message or piece of text which is placed near or inside the boundaries of a primary call to action with the aim of persuading somebody to go ahead and click the button.

The click trigger message usually serves to alleviate doubts somebody might have before purchasing something.

Examples of effective click triggers which you could place near your button are:

• “Risk Free”
• “Free Shipping”
• “No Questions Asked Money Back Guarantee”
• “Save 50% – March Only”

Quite often you’ll see many web sites with multiple click trigger messages placed near their primary call to actions and buttons.

Don’t be afraid to apply click triggers liberally to your call to actions.

Secondary and Subordinate Calls To Action

We mentioned earlier that in addition to your primary call to action, you might also have secondary and subordinate calls to action on the same page.

A secondary call to action is usually represented by a large text link or even a button, but it is designed to serve a secondary purpose to your primary call to action.

For instance if someone wanted to “Find Out More” about your product or service, then this is a great example where you would create a button to serve as your secondary call to action.

You should strive to differentiate your secondary call to action button from the primary by making it smaller in size and/or a different color.

The subordinate call to action is almost always represented as a text link and is even further down the list of importance but can still serve a useful purpose.

This type of call to action can be used to help navigate a user to another page where they might seeking some related information.

In summary, applying the above information and techniques to your landing pages is the best way to learn what works for you. Remember that each site and niche might have its unique quirks so don’t be afraid to experiment.

Most of your website visitors will have JavaScript enabled by default so in most cases you do not need to worry about it. Less than 2% of your visitors may not have JavaScript enabled in their browser. When you have this plugin active it will show a warning message like the following to those 2% visitors so they can enable it (visitors using a modern browser with JavaScript enabled won’t see this message).

No JavaScript Warning Message

Plugin Installation

1. Unzip and Upload the folder ‘check-no-js-or-cookie’ to the ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress

Plugin Usage

There is no special usage instruction needed for this plugin. Simply activate the plugin and it will start to show the warning message to the visitors who do not have JavaScript or Cookie enabled in their browser.

Plugin Testing

Do the following if you want to test how the warning message will be displayed to users without JavaScript enabled:

Temporarily disable JavaScript in your browser and then load your website where you have the “WP No JavaScript or Cookie Checker” plugin active.

Download Plugin

Download the Plugin from here.

Also, checkout our list of best WordPress plugins to find out what other plugins you should be using.

WordPress multisite, sometimes abbreviated as WPMS,  is defined in wordpress.org as:

“Multisite is a feature of WordPress 3.0 and later versions that allows multiple virtual sites to share a single WordPress installation. When the multisite feature is activated, the original WordPress site can be converted to support a network of sites.”

In other words WPMS gives you the ability to have multiple individual sites within one WordPress installation and one database which all fits under the umbrella of what is known as a network.

So when talking about WPMS it is common to refer to the whole multisite installation as the network. The term site is usually used when talking about each of the individual sites within the WPMS network.

The individual sites created within the WPMS network are also sometimes known as “virtual” sites because they don’t actually exist in the file system but only the database.

Each site within the network can feature different plugins and themes and have completely different content – just like a separate, independent single site WordPress installation.

WordPress multisite was once known as “WordPress MU” where MU stands for “multi user” and was a separate project to the main “single site” WordPress platform which we all know and love so much today.

However since 3.0, WP MU has been renamed to WPMS and is now part of the core WordPress platform.

WPMS is not enabled by default when you install WordPress and you must explicitly set a parameter in the “wp-config.php” file in order to see the WPMS menu items.

Possibly the best example of a large-scale site using WordPress multisite is wordpress.com.

This site allows people to set up their own blogs and does not require that you have a dedicated host because each individual site is hosted within the wordpress.com multisite network.

There are currently something like 30 million blogs running under the wordpress.com WPMS network and the general features available for the individual blogs are controlled by the main site administrator.

Some typcial scenarios where the multisite functionality is useful and is currently widely used, are:

• Retail stores which represent a single company and which may be located in several cities or states could each have their own dedicated site under the main WPMS  insallation. For example Best Buy uses WPMS where each store has its own WP site within the network.
• Institutions such as universities often use WPMS to represent their various departments and faculties on separate sites.
• Online news sites are another typical candidate for WP multisite. Each of the departments such as the main news, sport, finance, etc typically would have their own sites within a multisite network.
• You might be a theme developer and wish to show your customers a live demo site for each of your themes. Therefore you could create a network of live demos within WPMS.
• You might decide to set up a collection of blogs for your family and extended family, and thus WPMS might be a cool way to collectively run and maintain all of your family’s sites.

As you’ve probably already surmised, the possibilities available to you with WPMS are endless and not limited to the brief examples given above.

What are the main pros of multisite?

As you may have already guessed, multisite has some very useful advantages some of which are listed below.

• The most obvious advantage of running a multisite installation is that there is only a single installation of the WordPress platform which you need to maintain.Even though the WPMS installation may have hundreds of sites running within it, you only need to update plugins and theme versions in a single place and this will automatically apply to all of the sites.Imagine if you didn’t have multisite and you had to do separate plugin updates or installations to over a hundred single site installations – you would have to repeat each task over a hundred times!
• As an administrator of a multisite installation, you can easily set and lock down administration functionality that your network users have for things like plugins or themes. For instance you can quite easily prevent people from deactivating, upgrading or even using certain plugins or themes from within their site.
  You can also set and control disk usage per site and specify maximum file size uploads per site and even specify which filetypes are allowed to be uploaded.
• You can easily aggregate content from each of the individual sites into your main blog site within a WPMS installation. This can useful for things like showcasing content from a number of the individual sites.

What Types of URL Addresses Are Possible With Multisite?

With multisite you basically have 2 main installation types which govern how the URL addresses will appear to the outside world:

1. Sub-domains
   With this setup, each site will have a URL address which appears like the following:
   site1.example.com
   site2.example.com
   site3.example.com
   etc,
   Where example.com would be the URL of the main WordPress installation.
2. Sub-directories
   This type of setup will produce URL addresses for each site as follows:
   example.com/site1
   example.com/site2
   example.com/site3
   etc
   

For a new and fresh WordPress installation either of the above two types are easily configurable at installation time. However if you’re trying to convert an existing single site to multisite, there are certain criteria which need to be met in order to have the ability to choose the sub-directories option. (Please see the WordPress codex page for more info)

There are even plugins which make it possible to use domain mapping to produce URLs for each site which would make them appear to outside observers that the site is not part of a multisite installation.

For instance you could make the URLs for each site look like single independent sites, eg, abc.com, xyz.com, etc

Some Limitations of WPMS

Previously we mentioned that WPMS uses a single database.
Each site in a WPMS network has its own tables which contain the data for that site.

A WPMS installation has a slightly different DB schema to single sites. The tables of a site in a WPMS installation are prefixed by the table prefix followed by the blog ID followed by the table name.

For example the following shows the possible table names of two sites in a multisite install:

Due to this type of setup, it is very easy to quickly use up server resources if you tried to run a WPMS with thousands of sites on a small shared host. Therefore you would need to take such things into consideration when setting up your WPMS installation.

In summary, WPMS is a very powerful WordPress feature and one that you might want to consider.

To learn more about WPMS and how to install and configure your own system please see the wordpress codex page.

Ivy (our graphics designer) has put together an image and icon pack with various shopping cart images that you can use to customize the look and feel of your shopping cart (you can use this with any cart software/plugin).

You get the following in this cart image and icon pack:

• All images are in PNG format so it will easily match the background color of your site
• Delete item from cart icon images
• Empty cart icon images
• Some Secure checkout buttons images
• Some other useful shopping cart images

She has also made some color matched sets that can be used to match the theme of your site. Here is a preview:

Shopping cart images and icons pack preview

Download the Shopping Cart Image and Icons Pack

Download Add to Cart Button Images For Your Site

Check the Add to Cart Button Image page to download some free Add to cart button images that you can use on your eCommerce site.

If you want to use these images in the WP eStore or the Simple WP Shopping Cart plugin then do the following:

1. Find the image that you want to replace in the “images” directory of the plugin in question
2. Choose the image you want to use from this image pack
3. Rename your chosen image’s file name to exactly match the one you want to replace (make sure the file extension match too)
4. Now, copy and paste this image file in the images directory (overwriting the original image)

I hope some of you find this useful.

Simply getting traffic in the form of thousands of unique visitors daily is meaningless if the time they spend on your site is less than a few seconds or your bounce rate is more than 95%.

There are certain things you can do in the way you present your pages and posts which will maximize the chances of your visitors sticking around for a longer period on your site.

The longer people stay the greater your opportunity to monetize their visit or convince them to take your desired call to action.

A call to action is an Internet marketing term which refers to the primary action that you want your visitors to take when they land on your page or website. One example of a call to action  is where you want someone to click your “buy now” button and purchase your product. Another might be that you want to get people to download your free ebook after signing up as members.

Below are some tips which will help you to keep the attention of your visitors or at the very least keep them interested long enough to stay and explore your site and ultimately perform the call to action you want them to.

1. Remove unnecessary external links from your landing pages and use internal links
   Trying to increase the average visitor time on your site is one of the ways that you can decrease your bounce rate and increase your rankings.If you use Google Analytics you’ve probably already heard of the term “bounce rate”.Bounce rate (as defined by Google) is:“..the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page”.

   Therefore plastering your affiliate banners and links all over your pages can work against you if your visitors leave your site immediately from the page they entered from.

   Try to entice your visitors to read more by offering them some relevant links to another internal page or post where you provide a useful review and which ultimately contains your affiliate banner. This way you are not pushing people straight out of the same door they entered.
   There are some useful WP plugins you can use to add relevant internal post links to your blog such as Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

2. Use emotion to present your message
   People most often buy from emotion whether they admit it or not. This is because the actions which emanate from emotion are quite often subconscious.
   Hence, an emotional response is much more likely to achieve a call to action than a logical one.For instance if you are trying to convince someone to buy your product by using logic, then the chances are that they will also look at your argument from a rational point of view and they will weigh up the pros and cons of buying versus not buying.If you introduce an emotional element to your message such as presenting a benefit or selling a solution to a problem or highlighting how people can get closer to achieving their dream, then you will appeal to the emotional decision making areas of the brain.
   This will maximize the chances of gaining a customer because it will create an emotional connection between your message and the reader.Therefore once you have successfully forged a positive emotional relationship with your readers, they will happily want to come back to your site to explore further or even become regular customers.
3. Include video content on your posts and pages
   Video is one of the most effective ways to communicate a message to people. Even short videos of just a few minutes can often deliver more value to your readers than multiple pages of writing can.
   Therefore in the cases where you would usually get people browsing through an article in 10 to 20 seconds before leaving, the added benefit of using a short video is that it increases the likely-hood that people will stay on your site for longer because they are watching your video.
   Video on the Internet is really just a modern extension of TV but the great thing is that you get to be the producer of the content.
4. Use captivating images in conjunction with your copy or content
   Quite often the right image coupled with the relevant content can induce an emotional response and it can help lay the foundations for the right mindset you want to create before somebody reads your sales pitch or post.
   Humans are quite easily visually stimulated and you can exploit this by using effective images and colors with your message.
5. Focus on providing value and informative content rather than blatant advertising
   Your content and the value which it provides is the sticking point which helps to build a relationship with your readers. A relationship needs some measure of trust by both parties but when you successfully gain this trust from your readers or clients then you are also creating a longer term investment where current customers also become future customers.There are many ways you can provide value for people who will in turn be very happy to return the favor by becoming a customer. For instance you could offer free online courses or a series of tutorials which people can access after they sign up as free members.
   You could also set up your own forum or support system which provides help to people but also an opportunity for people to interact with each other.