Part II – What every small business should know about WordPress | Episode 20 Local Knowledge

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Episode 20 continues our Local Knowledge video series on basic skills you’ll need in order to run your small business Website using WordPress. Our lesson today kicks off with some background on how your normal website (the frontend of your website) relates with the WordPress Dashboard (the backend of WordPress) and concludes by hightlighting the most often used parts of WordPress. Our examples even give you a sneak peak of editing and adding a blog post and page – something we will cover in greater depth in our next video lessons.

This lesson assumes you have a working WordPress installation and that you have logged in.

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What every small business should know about WordPress | Episode 19 Local Knowledge

QuickTime, iPhone or iPod Download.

Episode 19 begins our Local Knowledge series on basic skills you’ll need in order to run your small business Website using WordPress.

Our lesson today kicks off with some background on using WordPress to power your small business website and concludes with a how-to video showing you how to log in to WordPress. This lesson assumes you have a working WordPress installation.

I’ll be continuing the WordPress for small business video tutorials by covering the most common things you’ll need to know to update your WordPress website on your own.

You can also follow the Pictorial under the video if you don’t want to watch the video intro and video lesson.

Step-by-Step Pictorial Below

Step 1: Click on picture to see full fize image

Step 1: Click on picture to see full fize image

Step 2: Click picture to see full size image

Step 2: Click picture to see full size image

Step 3: Click picture to see full size image

Step 3: Click picture to see full size image

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E-mail Marketing the Good, the Free and the Ugly

I have three points I want to share with you today about small business e-mail marketing that are relevant to today’s post title (The Good, the Free and the Ugly).

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly 1998 DVD cover art.
Image via Wikipedia
  1. The Good: E-mail marketing is one of the best tools you can use to market your small business
  2. The Free: It’s possible to use free e-mail tools to publish an e-mail to your subscribers (your list)
  3. The Ugly: The only thing that’s ugly about e-mail marketing is not using it in your small business online marketing mix. We recommend you start learning about e-mail marketing today (we’ll cover that)

E-mail Marketing Works for Small Business

  1. a 2008 Direct Marketing Association (DMA) study showed that, “E-mail’s ROI in 2008 was $45.06 for every dollar spent on it
  2. a February 2008, retailer survey by shop.org, showing that email marketing has the second lowest Cost Per Order (CPO) of any online marketing method. The email marketing CPO of $6.85 beat paid Web search, which yielded $19.33 CPO

Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/marketing-articles/email-marketing-is-about-roi-678856.html

Small Business can use Free Google Feedburner to send e-mails

Feedburner is known as a best friend to bloggers and website publishers that lets you publish your latest website updates to a RSS feed (click link to watch video on RSS). While reading website updates via RSS feeds is still largely the bastion of geeks, the remainder of the world continues to live in their e-mail inbox. Because of this, Feedburner started offering a way to subscribe to website updates via e-mail (rather than just RSS). Website visitors are given a simple sign-up form on their favorite websites and each time a blog or website with Feedburner RSS publishes an update, an e-mail gets sent out to anyone who has ‘opted-in’ to receive that update via e-mail.Subscribe via email

To enable e-mail sign-ups for your small business website you need to use a content management system (CMS) like WordPress that generates an RSS Feed. Next, you sign up for a free Google Feedburner account and then turn the e-mail feature on. Once that’s done you put a form or icon like this one (client site example) on your website to let people subscribe to your website e-mail updates. As you post updates to your website an e-mail automatically goes out to anyone who has subscribed to your e-mail updates. There’s nothing to think about and it’s completely free!

Learn More Today

Or course, there are good values in e-mail marketing platforms if you can invest a little money. For example, Constant Contact has reasonable monthly rates and a very solid product (not to mention a 60-day free trial). There’s a lot to know about building an e-mail list, writing effective e-mails and getting them delivered and read by your prospective customers. Today’s e-mail marketing platforms like the aforementioned Constant Contact are doing a tremendous job of educating us on using e-mail marketing for our businesses. You can learn more by visiting the Constant Contact’s Learning center and watching their archived lessons or signing up for one of their free weekly webinars.

Here at LOCAL Na8ion we’ve love to help you get your e-mail marketing started. We can assist you with all phases of your e-mail marketing program, from list building tactics to copywriting or assisting you with setting up a free Google Feedburner account, a WordPress website with RSS, or a campaign running on the Constant Contact Platform.

The only ugly outcome in e-mail marketing is failing to use this fantastic tool.

We’d love for you to subsribe to our LOCAL Na8ion website updates – just use the form below. ;-)

Enter your email address:

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All the Best

Julian,
ed, LOCAL Na8ion | Websites that drive sales

http://www.localna8ion.com

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