i-netpreneur » Promotion

5 WordPress Themes for Businesses

cyrus — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 13:11:45 +0000

WordPress is the perfect platform for small businesses. It is not only secure, it has a huge community behind it. Best of all, WordPress is pretty good in what it offers. There are plenty of free themes available for WordPress. These 5 premium themes have a lot to offer to businesses:

FaultPress: perfect for developers, this theme creates a bug tracking system on WordPress. It allows businesses to create a support system for their customers.

Chapters: useful for those of you who have written a book and want to promote it the right way using WordPress. You can share sections of your book using this theme just to encourage people to purchase it.

WP Flexistore: if you are selling digital products online or plan to, this theme can save you time setting up shop. It looks modern and highly customizable.

Feedback Engine: in order to build products that people want to buy, you need to listen to what your customers have to say. You never know who’s going to provide you with the next great idea. Feedback Engine is a powerful theme you can use to gather feedback from your customers.

LeanBiz WordPress Theme: a minimal yet attractive theme for businesses promoting their products online. Useful for creating product-specific portals.

These themes are cheap and highly customizable. They save you time putting a site together for your product without having to go broke.

5 Helpful SEO Cheat Sheets for Beginners

cyrus — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 13:53:49 +0000

As a business owner, you will have to wear multiple hats. Developing content and creating your own products are not everything you will need to focus on. Promoting your work is a must if you want to get your work the recognition it deserves. Every online business owner should know the basics of search engine optimization. Even if you don’t intend to do your SEO yourself, you should still know enough to make the right decisions for your venture. These 5 SEO cheat sheets won’t make you a SEO master but will save you time learning a bit about this topic:

WordPress SEO Cheat-sheet: many online business owners take advantage of WordPress to manage their content online. This powerful SEO cheat-sheet shows you how to optimize your WordPress site for the search engines.

15 Minute SEO List: contains over 70 factors that you may want to pay attention to get your website higher in the rankings (or at least give it the best chance to go higher).

The On-Page SEO Cheat sheet: the perfect cheat sheet to go over if you have trouble figuring out what it takes to optimize your site’s on-page factors for the search engines.

The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat sheet: developed for those of you who know a thing or two about coding. It shows you how to tweak your code and optimize it for the search engines.

SEO Audit Checklists: this may not be a cheat-sheet per se, but it contains check-lists you can take advantage of to figure out what are the things you should be doing to further optimize your pages for the search engines.

These SEO cheat sheets won’t make you a guru in this field. But they can save you time getting a crash course on SEO.

Any suggestions? Please share your favorite SEO cheat sheets below.

Traffic 101 for Business: 5 Ways To Get More Visitors

cyrus — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 13:20:12 +0000

Any online business that does not want to have more visitors have something wrong with it. The more visitors you get to view your landing pages and offers, the better chance you have of converting and increasing your revenue. Some small businesses get lucky or catch a break from larger sites. Not everyone is that lucky when it comes to traffic. The good news is there are simple ways all business can drive traffic to their websites (without sending a rocket to the moon). These 5 traffic tactics are not everyone businesses can do, but they can get you started with your e-promotional efforts:

Social Bookmarking: the easiest way to get some traffic coming to your website. Not only you should add social media buttons to your website, you should encourage your visitors to submit your pages to top bookmarking sites. Services such as Social Maximizer could be helpful too.

Social Media: every small business owner with a website needs to have a Facebook and Twitter page. Better yet, you need to have a social media strategy. Twitter and Facebook can drive a ton of traffic to your website if you are serious about them.

Article Directories: article directories won’t bring you a ton of traffic, but they can help you get the word out about your website. EzineArticles.com and iSnare.com are good places to start.

Blog Directories: if you have a blog for your business or offer tips/news of some sort to your visitors, you should take time to submit your website to websites such as AllTop. Every little step helps.

Online Directories: another basic way to get the word out about your website and gain some valuable links for your business. This tactic won’t be a huge traffic driver, but it can help your website with its search engine rankings.

Some of these tactics won’t bring millions of people to your website, but they can help your website get indexed more quickly and keeps its rankings for longer. The good news is you don’t have to be a marketing guru to get started with the above tactics.

4 Ways To Start An Affiliate Program for Your Business

cyrus — Fri, 07 May 2010 13:24:05 +0000

There is no better way to take your business to the next level than starting your own affiliate program. It’s a no brainer really. Many business owners do not want to give up any part of their revenue, which is why they may be hesitant about running their own affiliate programs. It could also take a lot of work if you have lots of affiliates. But why would one want to avoid recruiting affiliates when they can sell products without any real effort on the merchant’s side. You are only going to have a certain number of hours each day, so it does make sense to outsource your promotional efforts by relying on affiliate marketers. The risk is not that high either.

Large businesses prefer working with networks such as LinkShare or CJ. But those networks can be a bit expensive to deal with for small businesses. Thankfully, there are software solutions that one can use to start an affiliate program and control how things are run. Here are 4 affiliate software solutions to get you started:

iDevAffiliate: used by many top independent sites on the Internet. It makes it so easy to host an affiliate program and gives merchants options. It can be integrated with other software solutions as well.

Post Affiliate Pro: a nice alternative to iDevAffiliate. It is designed to handle small or large affiliate programs. Your affiliates can start their campaigns, take advantage of your banners, or create their own links. The report options are pretty nice too.

WordPress Affiliate Platform: if you happen to run a WordPress website and do not want to deal with a whole new platform, this plugin enables you to use your WordPress software to run your own affiliate program. Probably less versatile than the first two options.

aMember Membership Script: owning a membership website is a great way to make money online. But you don’t want to start one without also having your own affiliate program on the side. aMember works with iDevAffiliate script to give you the ability to run both a membership site and your affiliate program.

As your affiliate program grows, you can always join Shareasale or other top affiliate networks. If you plan on running your own affiliate program, the above script can make your life easier.

5 Ways To Build an iPhone App for Your Business

cyrus — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 13:03:20 +0000

The iPhone platform is one exciting journey to be a part of. Apple may be a controlling company, and you may not agree with the company’s policies. But it’s not tough to admit that the company has a gem of a phone on its hands. Add iPad to the mix, and you’ve got millions of people who use Apple products on an everyday basis to get things done. That’s why building an iPhone app for your business makes sense. You never know how many of your prospects use an iPhone to get things done, so it never hurts to give your prospects the tools they need to stay in touch with your business.

Developing an iPhone app is not too easy if you do not know any programming. But you don’t need to know programming to get your business app on iPhone. All you need is a partner to help you with the technical side of things. Thanks to these 5 iPhone app builders, you won’t have to worry about the technical side of things:

BlogApper: a very easy to use and quick way to get your app submitted and displayed on iTunes. If you own a business blog and want to give people an easy way to stay in touch, BlogApper is quite a useful service.

MyAppBuilder: a handy service for anyone who is interested in target the iPhone community. Whether you own a blog that you want to bring on iPhone or start selling your products on the platform, MyAppBuilder enables you to get a fast start for as low as $29 a month.

uBuildApp: uBuildApp is another easy to use iPhone application development service that makes it easy to bring your ideas to life. It costs as little as $99 to get your app live.

Kanchoo: an iPhone application builder for news organizations. If you own a news portal or a blog and want to bring it to iPhone platform, this app has you covered. You can monetize your app as well. The cost is $88 up front plus $28 a month for hosting your app.

App Incubator: my favorite service on this list. It targets those who have an idea for an app but do not have access to programmers to implement their idea. Lets you bring your ideas to life.

What’s your favorite iPhone development service?

How To Add Your Blog To Alltop

cyrus — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:59:28 +0000

Blog directories can be a good source of traffic for your personal or business blog. You do need to have decent content on your blog to keep people coming back for more. But you can’t just sit on your content and hope for others to make it to your blog. You’ve got to promote your blog. One of the best ways to do that is by making sure that your blog makes it to Alltop. Alltop is the brainchild of Guy Kawasaki, top entrepreneur and venture capitalist. You can think of it as the yellow pages of websites and topics on the Web. But here is the catch. Only quality sites make it to AllTop. So when you log on to the site, you know you are not going to get a bunch of splogs.

Adding your website to Alltop will not allow you to gain more credibility with your readers, it can help bring more people to your website as well. As AllTop grows, your traffic grows as well. So everybody wins. Before submitting your website to Alltop, you want to make sure you have a decent, professional looking website with a decent amount of good posts on it. So if you have just started your blog, you want to take the time to develop 10 or 20 high quality posts before going after top blog directories such as Alltop. Once there, you are ready to submit your blog to Alltop:

Alltop covers a lot of topics, but it’s not perfect. The service is growing, so you may not find the specific topic that you want to list your blog under. That’s not a big issue as you can always go with a broader topic and then ask your blog to be moved to a more specific topic when it’s introduced to Alltop network.

What topic should you list your blog under when you can do so under multiple ones? That’s really your choice. But more specific topics allow your blog to shine more whereas if you go for a more general topic (e.g. Tech), you end up showing up with tons of other blogs and may not get the recognition that your blog deserves. Besides, the more specific the topic you are listed under, the more targeted your visitors will be.

You also want to create your own Alltop page and add your favorite feeds, including yours. That way you can promote your work to others more easily or track your favorite topics conveniently as well. Considering that Alltop is a free service at this point, there is no reason not to add your blog and start getting targeted traffic.

How To Get Publicity with Amazon Publishing

cyrus — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 14:50:33 +0000

Writing a book is not everyone’s cup of tea. Not everyone can come up with killer content for a book. But if you can, you are in the driver seat to bring a lot of publicity to your online business. A while ago, many didn’t even want to touch this topic as publishing and promoting a book was difficult or next to impossible for everyday business individual. With the emergence of devices such as Kindle and platforms such as Kindle Publishing, you can publish your book or blog and publish it on Amazon fast. So if you can write, you are going to have the opportunity to get your work noticed as well.

There are two ways you can go about publishing your work on Amazon. You can use Amazon’s Digital Text Platform to bring your work to Amazon. Even if you don’t have a book, you can use Kindle platform for blogs to get your work published.

Amazon’s Digital Text Platform is a bit less straight forward to get your work on Amazon. You’ll not only have to enter your product’s information, but also confirm your rights, set the appropriate territory for your work, and much more. The good news is that you have some control in the process. The bad new is Amazon will keep 65% of each sale, which is way too much. Of course, if you have no other way to publish your work, that may not seem like much.

You don’t have to write a book to get your work on Amazon. If you have a blog with some decent content, you can easily upload it to Amazon through Kindle Publishing for blogs. This is a very easy process. All you have to do is provide Amazon with your RSS feed and a description of your work. Before you know it, your work is listed on Amazon for the whole world to see.

As you can tell, these days it’s not too tough to get publicity even through Amazon.com. Yes, it does take some work to get your work listed on Amazon, but you won’t have to spend too much money, and the process is much easier than ever before. No reason not to take advantage.

3 Premium Article Distribution Services for Businesses

cyrus — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:19:48 +0000

Article marketing is one of the oldest ways of driving traffic to a website. It’s in fact one of those few methods that works all the time as long as you know what you are doing. In reality, you are not going to get a huge boost of traffic from a single article. But if you keep at it and produce high quality, exciting articles on a consistent basis, there is no reason you can’t build a decent following online. Of course, when you write a decent article, you want to make sure you get as many eyeballs on it as you can. One way to do that is by taking advantage of premium article distribution services. These services let you submit your articles to top directories without having to create an account with each site. That not only saves you time but lets you get more out of your articles as well.

If you are planning to go beyond E-zineArticles and get more out of your existing articles, the following article distribution services are worth a try:

My Article Network: is a hybrid article/blog system that can get you lots of back-links and traffic from the blog network that is My Article Network. Your articles are put on highly ranked websites in your niche, and you not only get relevant back-links, but a whole lot of targeted traffic. It gives you much more flexibility as far as your links and content are concerned in comparison to other article distribution services.

Isnare.com: a top article promotion service for small businesses that lets you get more exposure for your articles and increase traffic to your website in the process. Isnare is an article directory and an article submission service. You can submit your articles to up to 40,000 sites by using Isnare’s premium service.

Article Marketing Automation: very similar to My Article Network, but Article Marketing Automation has its own collection of highly relevant sites that you can submit your articles to and get links back to your website. Their goal is to have thousands of articles their customers can submit articles to.

Of course, you can always stick by EzineArticles and ArticleDashboard.com. Those two sites can get you lots of traffic as well if you come up with high quality content on a consistent basis. If you want to go above and beyond what those two sites have to offer, the the above article promotion services are worth a look.

5 Best WP Premium Theme Clubs for Startups

cyrus — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 14:20:18 +0000

Whether you are a small business owner hoping to go online or just starting your online business, you are going to need a website to succeed. Hosting a website is not too expensive these days, but having a website designed from ground up can be. That’s why smart small business owners rely on open source solutions such as WordPress to go live with their websites without breaking the bank. Premium WordPress themes make it easy to give a website a whole new look and feel without spending too much money. And if you need your site to look unique, you can always hire a designer to change things around. That won’t cost you as much as hiring someone to design a site from scratch.

If you are planning to launch multiple websites and need professional quality themes to give your sites the better chance to succeed, here are 5 WordPress theme membership clubs you should look at:

Templatic: a very powerful membership theme club for WordPress that gives you access to various professional looking themes to take your e-commerce business online or start your business blog.

WooThemes: WooThemes is one of the top premium theme clubs for WordPress. New themes come out on a regular basis, and the cost is not that high. Best of all, you get all you need to change these themes around to make them fit your needs.

Elegant Themes: Elegant Theme is one of the cheapest club themes around. It costs only $20 a year, but it gives you access to lots of premium quality themes that are easy to customize as well.

Press75: Press75 is a great membership club for those who are into video blogging. Has lots of useful video blogging themes. Of course, if you are looking for themes for start-ups and small-businesses, this club has you covered.

Affiliate Theme: a theme made for affiliate marketers and online marketing professionals. It’s a very flexible theme plan that lets you build all kinds of affiliate landing pages fast.

There you have it. 5 premium theme clubs that give you plenty of ways to start and rebuild websites fast. Best of all, they don’t cost you a lot of money.

4 Forum Software To Start Your Own Board

cyrus — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:25:14 +0000

Whether you are a blogger, a small business owner, or work for a start-up with a handful of products, you always want to give your visitors and customers a way to communicate with you and each other and share information. Forums have long been used by companies for support purposes. It’s so easy to address the concerns of your customers by putting up a forum and responding to their questions on a consistent basis. Best of all, there are plenty of open source forum software solutions that you can use to save money and get yourself a head start in the process.

If you are looking for a forum software that lets you start your own business forum and save time in the process, here are 4 forum scripts you should take a look at:

PHPBB: a free software solution that gives you the chance to build a killer forum without spending too much money. You can always enhance the functionality of this script and even get help.

vBulletin: one of the best forum software solutions on the market. It’s not a cheap solution and is designed for those who have a commercial forum in mind. Many top forums on the Internet are taking advantage of vBulletin as it’s secure and easily customizable.

bbPress: if you have used WordPress in the past, you are going to find bbPress very familiar. It’s designed by the makers of WordPress to enable you to set up your very own forum fast. It’s almost as easy to install as WordPress.

Simple Machines Forum: one of my favorite forum software solutions on the web. When I started my first forum, I had a lot of trouble in terms of security. SMF did help me set up a more secure forum. The code is easy to change and customize as well. It comes with themes, calendar, image upload, and more.

There are plenty of other forum software solutions on the market. You can spend weeks going through all of them. You want to make sure you pick a solution that is scalable and easily customizable. Being able to enhance to functionality of your forum easily is a big plus as well. Setting up a forum can go a long away towards helping you build a more solid community. Just don’t jump into it with the wrong piece of software.