Having a website for your business is one thing, but getting traffic to it – the right kind of traffic – is something that many small business owners find daunting.

If you’re keen to discover new ways to get all the traffic you can handle to your website then the World Traffic Summit is worth getting along to.

This 3-day seminar will focus solely on traffic generation for your website(s) or online business, with some of the best-of-the-best from around the world traveling to Australia to share their tips and personal traffic strategies.

When: Friday August 27 – Sunday August 29, 2010

Where: Gold Coast, Australia

For more information and to register – World Traffic Summit

Are You Coming To The World Traffic Summit? is a post from: Donna-Marie Coggins

When something doesn’t work the way it should or things don’t go right in one way or another, it’s easy to immediately play the blame game. We’ve all been there, I’m sure.

• You visit a website and get a ‘page not found error’ so you start blaming the site owner for mucking up their URLs.
• You click on a link within a document or page and a blank page opens, so again, the site owner or whoever put this page together has stuffed up.
• An email or fax you were expecting still hasn’t arrived, so you jump up and down at the unreliable so-and-so who promised they’d send it straight away.

When you manage a business and have other family, community and social commitments you often find yourself rushing to do things. But when something doesn’t work and your first thought is to immediately phone or email the person or company concerned, who has obviously stuffed up somehow, take a moment to stop to think about whether the problem actually lies with you (shock, gasp!)

Or perhaps not necessarily you, but maybe your computer, software, fax line, email program.

For example, in the case of a web page that doesn’t exist, are you sure you entered the web site address correctly? If you clicked on a link, did your email program break the link? If so, you should be able to access the web page by copying and pasting the entire address into your Internet browser’s address bar.

When you’re having trouble connecting to a particular web site it’s a good idea to check some other sites to determine if it’s just this site you can’t connect to or all sites, which may indicate a problem with your own Internet or modem.

If you clicked on a link within a web page and the new page or document didn’t open or opened as a blank page, perhaps there’s a setting within your Internet or security settings that is preventing it from opening. Or it may be that your firewall or anti-virus software is blocking it for some reason. Could it be that the document that should open was created with a program that you don’t have on your computer? Or maybe you need to get the latest updates for one of your programs, such as Flash or Java.

My examples here are predominantly focused with technology, but other factors can also be the cause of things not going the way they should. That’s okay … the point I want to stress here is that sometimes the ‘obvious culprit’ isn’t actually the cause of your frustrations.

So before you start blaming others (and perhaps embarrass yourself in the process) take a few moments to look at the entire situation in order to solve the problem. Then, if you can’t find a solution, contact the person or company concerned and – rather than telling them they need to get their act together – politely let them know that you’re having trouble accessing abc or you still haven’t received the email/fax/phone call/payment, and do they have any suggestions as to how you can resolve this.

Before You Start Playing The Blame Game… is a post from: Donna-Marie Coggins

Last year I came across a HTML editor that’s really easy to use either for creating web pages from scratch or editing existing HTML pages, such as website templates.

I’ve been ‘playing’ with PageBreeze for a while and have been quite impressed by how easy it is to use. You can create and edit pages in the HTML or ‘normal’ (WYSIWYG) view, preview how it will look when published to the internet, easily add page title, description and keyword details and publish with FTP.

It also has a form editor which makes it easy to create forms if necessary.

Best of all … there’s a free version or a more advanced ‘cheap as chips’ version.

The basic Pagebreeze software is free for personal, not-for-profit and educational use. Or the more advanced version for business (or ‘for-profit’) use is only a one-off payment $29.95.

Free HTML Editor

If you don’t really need web development software with all the bells and whistles, it’s worth giving PageBreeze a try.

My Latest Great Find – Free, Easy HTML Editor is a post from: Donna-Marie Coggins

I get a lot of people asking me how they can watch online videos without them stopping and starting all the time.

First, it helps to understand why they stop and start. Depending on various factors, including your internet speed, it can take a while for videos to download. Often you’ll start to watch a video but you’re viewing it quicker than it can download.

So … simply press ‘play’, then pause and give it a minute or two (longer for very long videos) while it downloads.

Then press ‘play’ again and you should be able to watch it nice and smoothly.

How To Watch Videos Online Without Them Stopping And Starting is a post from: Donna-Marie Coggins

Do you ever submit a support ticket, anticipating the quick reply to some issue that you’ve tried in vain to solve yourself … only to be disappointed with the reply? Perhaps they didn’t fully answer your questions or they replied with more questions?

I’ve encountered some pretty dodgy support desks, but I must admit, 99.5% of the support tickets I’ve submitted have been answered promptly, friendly and – most importantly – they’ve solved the issue.

But there are a few key pointers in HOW YOU ACTUALLY ASK FOR HELP that will assist in you getting a useful reply:

1. Be as clear as possible and give all the necessary information, including relevant URLs or site names. For example, “I can’t get the HTML to work right!”, or “Keep getting error messages with my website” don’t give enough information. Although you know exactly what website or task you’re referring to, the support staff reading your message may not know. The only way they can help you is to find out precisely what the problem is.
2. If you receive a specific error message or number, include this in your support request.
3. When you have multiple questions, begin each question on a new line, or even leave an extra space between lines. When you have several questions one after another, all in the one paragraph, it can be difficult for the support team member to read and questions can be easily missed.
4. Keeping points 1, 2 and 3 in mind, don’t ramble. Keep your request as concise as possible while giving the necessary and relevant facts. Quite often, dot points or bullet points are fine, so long as all the information is there.
5. If you need to register your email address in order for the support ticket response to be sent to you, please check that you’ve entered the correct email address. Then double-check it! It’s incredibly frustrating when someone asks for help and you give it, but then the email notification that their ticket has been answered bounces back.
6. Although you may be frustrated by something that’s not working the way you think it should, support staff are there to help you … not bear the brunt of your frustrations. Try to remain calm and work with the support team to resolve the issues at hand.
7. Before submitting your support ticket, check that you’ve followed instructions correctly – sometimes we try to do things quickly and mis-read the instructions. (Or think it’s so simple we don’t need to read them). It’s also possible to miss the fact that there even are instructions available. Often you’ll find sites will have tutorials or ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ pages available. Remember to check for these first as you may find the answers here quicker than waiting for a support ticket response – particularly if you are looking for solutions outside of business hours.

An additional tip … remember that support desks are staffed by people, not robots. Politeness and ‘please’ and ‘thank-you’, while not essential, are usually smiled upon. It’s also nice to be able to address the reply to a specific person, so please remember to sign off with your name.

7 Things To Remember When Asking For Help is a post from: Donna-Marie Coggins

It seems that membership sites are all the rage at the moment … and rightly so. Whether they’re free or charge some sort of fee, if set up and managed well they can be an excellent way to provide online teaching or bring a group of like-minded individuals together.

If running a well-maintained membership site is something you do, or would like to do, here’s an interview that I’m sure you’ll find helpful.

This interview is with professional high-profile blogger, Chris Garrett, where he discusses the membership site advice he wishes he knew before he began building his membership sites, along with pricing strategies, software and how to use “The Bikini Concept” (you’ll have to listen to the interview to find out what this is!)

You can download or play this interview for tips on how to create a successful membership site for absolutely no cost.

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Disclosure: Compensated Affiliate

Practical Tips For Creating A Successful Membership Site is a post from: Donna-Marie Coggins

There’s no doubt about it – professional graphics can make a huge difference to your website, just as they do with print publications. But you don’t always want to go to a graphic artist every time you want a couple of general graphics to tizzy up your web page, do you?

Then again, it can be a time-consuming nuisance trawling through one website after another trying to find some free or low-cost graphics to use, then reading the license terms to ensure that you’re allowed to use those graphics for a commercial purpose.

I’m so pleased I recently found this great little resource – Copy and Paste Graphics. For only $9.97 you get literally hundreds of web graphic images including backgrounds, headers, bullets, buttons, web 2.0 images and even some animated buttons.

I really love these (can you tell?) and can’t wait to start using them. Here’s a small sample of them, just to give you an idea of what they’re like:

Where To Find Affordable Website Graphics is a post from: Donna-Marie Coggins

Do you know what words people are using to find your website? If not, I encourage you to find out.

The easiest way to do this is by using tracking software such as Google Analytics which is free and fairly easy to install on your website. If you’re using WordPress software you can simply install and activate the Google Analytics plug-in.

Then simply log into your Google Analytics account every now and then and go through the various reports.

You’ll see one that shows what keywords were used by people who visited your site. Are there lots of searches on a particular word or phrase that you hadn’t considered before? If it’s relevant to your site, perhaps it’s worth adding this to your existing keywords.

I say ‘if it’s relevant’ because you’ll no doubt find some pretty weird and wacky keywords too.

For example, the most searched for phrase that one of my sites was being found for was ‘mcdonalds victoria point’. I had directions to a meeting venue on that site and it referred to the Victoria Point McDonalds as a nearby landmark. But would it be relevant for me to focus on that as a keyword?

No. People searching on ‘mcdonalds victoria point’ would no doubt be looking for information relating to that particular McDonalds, not details about small business brain-storming sessions.

However, I also discovered that a large number of people were searching on another term that WAS relevant and so I tweaked my site a little to optimise it for that keyword too. The result? Even more traffic now finds me for that keyword – and this is targetted traffic that is interested in the information I’m offering.

If you go through the process of checking your search stats regularly you’ll no doubt have a laugh at some of the weird search terms that come up. In fact, I’d love to hear some of them. Please check your site report and leave a comment below to share the strangest search term that your site was found for.

What Keywords Are People Searching For To Find Your Site? is a post from: Donna-Marie Coggins

A few people have asked me recently how to add an image to their sidebar in WordPress.

For example, in the sidebar of this site there’s a square banner ad for a free audio of mine. How did I add that to the sidebar?

Basically, you follow these steps:

1. From your WP Dashboard, click on the Widgets link (on the left, under Appearance)
2. Add a Text widget by dragging the Text button from the left over to the right of your screen, then position it where you’d like it displayed
3. Click on Edit (bottom right of that Text widget)
4. The Text widget expands and you can paste your *HTML code for your image in there then click on Done on the bottom left of that Text box
5. Remember to click on the Save button, at the bottom of the sidebar widgets

*Now I know I probably lost a few people when I said to paste the HTML code for your image, right? You probably don’t have HTML code for it, right? You’ve just got a .jpg image sitting on your hard drive.

You can do this by various techniques, but the easiest way, especially if you’re not that clued up on your FTP processes, is to do this:

• BEFORE you start to add the image to your sidebar, create a new post and add your image to it, as though you were simply including your image in a blog post.
• Then click on the HTML tab and copy all the text (Control + A will copy all) You can paste this into a text document for now if you like, just so you’ve got a copy of it.
• Then you can delete this post – you don’t need it any more.
• Now, follow the steps above and when it says to paste your HTML code, you’ve got yours all ready to go 

Simple!

The Simple Way To Add An Image To Your WordPress Sidebar is a post from: Donna-Marie Coggins

Earlier this year I began using the Thesis theme for WordPress. Until then I’d been using free WP themes and they were good.

However I couldn’t find a theme that had the exact layout I was after and so ended up installing a fairly generic one… and then pulling it to pieces and customising it. To do this I had to learn CSS coding and spent hours upon hours upon hours getting it ‘okay’. In the end, there were still a few bits and pieces that just wouldn’t come together like I’d hoped.

Then I saw the light… I discovered Thesis.

The Thesis theme is not free but it’s quite affordable. The thing I love the most is just how quick and easy it is to customise, without having to know anything about CSS.

You simply choose – in most cases via a simple drop-down menu – whether you want a 1, 2 or 3 column site, what order you want those columns in, what font you want for the headline and main content text and so on. I also like that it has SEO friendly fields built in automatically so there’s no need to install and SEO plug-in.

Granted it still has its limitations, but in all honesty this is by far the best theme I’ve found and I absolutely love it. I’m sure I could overcome those limitations by editing the CSS stylesheet if I really wanted to, but personally, I don’t feel it’s necessary.

The Thesis theme is produced by DIY Themes – you can visit DIY Themes to watch a quick video demonstrating just how simple it is to customise your site.

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Disclosure: Compensated Affiliate

WordPress Theme Review – Thesis is a post from: Donna-Marie Coggins