weblines

If you want to get traffic to your website and increase the number of visitors to your site…. this is where we get into the realm of “Internet Marketing”. 

The internet is full of opinions and advice on internet marketing!  But it seems to me that, these days, there are only two approaches:-

Traffic Option 1

Are you prepared to write about the subject of your site?  For example, if your website is about men’s shirts, can you write lots about shirts, men’s clothes etc?  (Or are you prepared to pay someone else to do it?) 

If so, your internet marketing approach can focus on writing:-

• a blog,
• articles,
• newsletters,
• snippets on Facebook or Twitter…

You can build up a database of email addresses and contact them regularly, building up a following who trust you and are eventually prepared to buy from you.

An additional benefit of this approach is that other sites link to yours (other sites which have published your articles, or link to useful items in your blog…) – which increases the likelihood of your ranking high in the search engine results.

If you don’t want to put the time, effort or money in to writing, then the only other real option is…

Traffic Option 2

Paid links or Ads - Advertising, to get people who are interested to click through to your site. 

Google Adwords is the obvious way to manage this kind of thing.  There is also Yahoo Search Marketing and advertising on Facebook is growing in popularity. 

Including ads/site links in other people’s email newsletters can be useful, if the emails are going to your target market.  

There are also various Directory sites which usually allow you a free listing but charge for something bigger and prettier, and may also be worthwhile.

But I think you have to be discerning about this.  There is no point in paying for a site to show an ad (or a link) to your Shirts site if the visitors to that site will have no interest in buying shirts. 

Option 1 – writing is really the only way to go if you want to come near the top of Google natural search results today, especially if you are looking internationally.   Have a look on Google and see what comes up for your search terms… you’ll find that most of the top listings are sites with pages and pages of good content. 

That’s what we’re up against today!

The easiest way to add video to a WordPress post or page is to do it via YouTube. 

YouTube takes care of hosting the video files and managing file formats – whatever format your video is in, YouTube will convert it so that it can be viewed over the internet without concern about different video players.  Also, if your video becomes a big hit and everyone wants to see it,YouTube will manage all of the bandwidth requirements for large numbers of hits on your video.

So, let’s assume that you have a YouTube account, you’ve made your video and you’ve uploaded it to YouTube.   (Here’s some YouTube video help if you need it to get started).  

Here’s all you need to do to add that video to your page or post:-

1. Position your cursor in the WordPress Editor

When you are editing the page or post where you want to place the video, position your cursor where you want the video to appear. 

Decide now whether you want the video to be centred on the page or not and, if so, click the ”center alignment” button  before you add the video.  It’s best to get the position right before you start because you can’t edit or move a video around the page the way you can with an image.  

2. Click on the add video button in the WordPress Editor

Click on the “Add Video” button in the edit box.  It looks like this  and it’s on the second row of editing buttons.  (If you don’t have a second row of buttons, click on  to display them.)

You’ll see a box that looks like this (the “Insert embedded media” box):-

3. Copy your YouTube video URL

Go to YouTube and get the URL of your video (not the embed code).  You can just grab the URL from the top of the browser when you view the video (it will look something like this – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECnAT_NV3GY).

4. Paste the YouTube URL into the File/URL field

Paste that YouTube URL into the File/URL field in the “Insert embedded media” box.

You can leave the file Type as Flash.  The dimensions will be set automatically from the video URL that you paste in.  You can edit them if you like, to fit your page better - make sure you tick Constrain proportions to ensure the width and height stay in proportion. 

That’s really all you have to do.  Click Insert to place the video in your page/post.

You’ll see a placeholder like this in your edit window. 

And that’s it

Here’s my sample video.

Hosting your own Video

If you want to show video without the YouTube logo and host it yourself, it’s not quite such a simple process, but it is still quite easy, with the right additions to WordPress.  Watch out for more about that.

Upload an image by clicking on the WordPress Upload/Insert icons just above the text entry box.

Then browse to the location of the file(s) on your computer and upload. 

In the Add an Image box:

• Give your image a meaningful title.
• Remove the Link URL (by clicking on None) unless you want to be able to click through to an enlargement of the photo.
• Choose the image alignment and size
• To include the image in the post, just click on the Insert into Post button.  (If it appears in the wrong place, use Ctrl-X to cut and Ctrl-V to paste where you want it).
• After the image has been inserted into the post, you can edit these settings by hovering the mouse over the image – then click on the little Edit Image icon (picture)

Using a Previously Uploaded Image

To include an image which you have previously uploaded, click on the Upload/Insert icons, then choose the Gallery or Media Library tabs to see all the available uploaded images.

Troubleshooting

Unwanted coloured border around your image – If you decide to make the image link to something (either an enlargement or another web page), you may see a coloured border around it – to remove this border, click on the Edit Image icon, as described above, then choose Advanced Settings and set the Border value to 0.

Error messages when uploading – If your image file is large (digital cameras these days can create huge files for each photo), there may be uploading problems.  You may need to use your camera’s software to save a lower quality version, which will have a smaller file size (as if you were going to email it to someone) before you try to upload.

Log in to WordPress and click on Posts. To write a new post, click on Add New…, to edit an existing one, click on its title in the list.

Using the WordPress editor is quite similar to writing an email and most of the buttons will seem quite familiar.  If you need a little extra help, hovering the cursor over the little editor buttons will show some help text.  Here are some extra tips for a few of the less obvious editor features which I find useful:-

Extra Editor Tips

• Click on  to see a second row of formatting tools
• Be careful if you Paste from Word – If you have already written the content in Word, copying and pasting is fine…. but make sure you use   to paste, so that the formatting is stripped out…. Word adds a lot of extra stuff in the background, which can mess up a web page layout (or even just make it unnecessarily large in size, which is not good from a Search Engine point of view).
• Bold, italic and sub-headers – Use the  dropdown  as well as B, I etc, to add sub-headers or other formatting. To see how they are going to turn out, use Preview…. because the WordPress editor does not render these using the styles as defined for your website.
• Links – To create a link to another page or website, select the text which you want to be “clickable”, then click on  and type or paste the destination URL. 

Three Things to Remember When Adding a Post

• Post title – make sure you give your post a good, key-word rich title. After you have saved the post (even as a draft), you can change its URL (the “link” to the page) – this can sometimes be useful if your title is long.
• Categories – remember to choose a category for your post – the Category selection box is in the right-hand column.
• The More tag – you can use this icon  to create an excerpt of your content which will appear on “summary” type pages, such as the Blog front page, rather than the full content. Position the cursor in the edit window where you want the content to be cut off and click on the icon.

Additional Reading

http://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_Posts

http://codex.wordpress.org/Introduction_to_Blogging

Starting a new series of of help items, aimed at people who want to write Posts or edit Pages in WordPress but have had little previous exposure to it.

This is really a series of Help pages for my own clients, people for whom I have set up a Blog or used WordPress as the content management system for their site.

People who have installed WordPress for themselves can probably manage by searching the internet or scouring through the WordPress documentation at http://codex.wordpress.org.

But I want to provide nice, clear help pages for people who will be using WordPress to add and edit blog posts or website content.