WordPress, Blogging & Tech Tutorials

WordCamp San Diego Wrap-Up – Community Rocks!

This past weekend I had the pleasure of speaking at the first ever WordCamp in San Diego. It was an amazing experience for many reasons. I delivered a presentation entitled “Treat Your Blog Like A Business: Which Monetization Strategy Is Right For You?” (I’ll get around to posting up the slides soon….) and received some encouraging feedback on it throughout the day. Being a total intovert , any kind of public speaking is a bit nerve-wracking but I like to challenge myself. A couple of years ago I spoke at Orange County WordCamp and in comparison I felt much better prepared and more comfortable with it this time. Thanks to all that watched and spoke with me afterwards!

As I have experienced with other WordCamps, WordPress has the best community I think I’ve ever been a part of. I didn’t know anyone when I went to San Diego this weekend, but by the end of the day I had connected with several incredible people and felt right at home. This is another huge reason why WordPress is so powerful. I’m not sure that any other technologies or industries have this kind of community aspect. If you have any interest in WordPress I highly recommend attending WordCamps – you’ll meet knowledgeable and friendly people who all want to help you and spread the WordPress love! You’ll also learn tons from the talks and get an even larger picture of the scope of WordPress and the many diverse ways in which it can be used.

WordPress Training – Intermediate Class – The Next Steps – July 23rd

WordPress – The Next Steps – Intermediate Level Class

Saturday July 23rd, 1:30pm – 4:30pm
@ Blankspaces

5405 Wilshire Blvd (2 blocks west of La Brea)
Los Angeles,
CA 90036

free parking is available – see Blankspaces website for details.

You have WordPress installed and you’ve built at least your basic site and are comfortable creating content. What’s next?

How do you take your WordPress site from being ho-hum, to being an effective business & marketing tool? Get a deeper understanding of what WordPress can do in this intermediate level class.

How To Tell Google That You’re A Great Content Author

In its continuing effort to keep low quality content out of its search results, Google announced this week that it would be supporting “authorship markup”. Authorship markup is essentially a couple of specific pieces of code you can add to links that would designate you as the author of that content.

Google describes it as:

a way to connect authors with their content on the web. We are experimenting with using this data to help people find content from great authors in our search results.

WordPress Plugins for Food Bloggers

Google Recipe View

Since Google introduced their Recipe View it was only a matter of time before the WordPress community rose to the occasion with plugins to help non-code-geek bloggers take advantage of the development.

So far I’ve found 3 plugins that will help make your recipes Google Recipe View friendly. However based on what I’ve read online, you will also have to submit your site to Google and then you are in for a wait as to whether they actually include your site in their Recipe results or not. It seems to be a laborious process and skewed heavily in the favor of major players like Food Network et al. I would imagine they will smooth out the process eventually, but who knows when? In the meantime I suppose it doesn’t hurt to get your blog nice and ‘microformat’ ready.

The 3 plugins I tried are hRecipe, EasyRecipe and RecipeSEO. They are all easy to use and quite similar, although there are a couple of important differences I will highlight.
For testing purposes I used a recipe for Avocado on Toast with Truffle Salt from Dorothy Reinhold’s Shockingly Delicious (although I made up some of the info such as cooking times, calories etc for testing purposes).

After implementing one of these plugins you can use Google’s Rich Snippets tool to test how your recipe would look in Recipe View. It will alert you if information is missing or if there are errors. I found that there seems to be a bit of a discrepancy between what Google states as the minimum necessary info to generate a preview, and the reality. They say:

“In order to generate a preview, at least 2 of the following fields are needed: prep time, cook time, total time, calories, rating, review count, or image.”

However during testing I found that I sometimes needed to add more than 2 of these fields to generate a preview, such as adding a calories field in addition to prep and cook times.

WordPress Training Class – June 11 – Los Angeles

It’s that time again folks! Time for another WordPress training workshop to initiate more beginners into the WordPress family.

Learn How To Use WordPress For Business and Blogging!

Have an idea for a business or blog and need to get a website up and running at minimal expense? Or perhaps you or your company have an existing WordPress site but you have no idea how to use it!

This hands-on WordPress training class will provide step-by-step instruction for using self-hosted WordPress and plenty of hand-holding where necessary. Get all your questions answered in a friendly,comfortable environment. I work with individuals on a daily basis, providing training & coaching in WordPress and online marketing. I specialize in working with beginners and non-techies!

I’ll not only guide you through the nuts and bolts of WordPress but you’ll also benefit from my years of marketing experience.

Saturday, June 11th – 1:30pm – 5:30pm – $75

Get More Clients & Sell More Products with Effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

It’s true that there can be many confusing intricacies to the science of Search Engine Optimization, but what’s also true is that most people get tripped up on the basics, before they even get to the complex stuff! In working with many entrepreneurial and small business clients, I’ve come to see a few common trends in the way that people look at SEO and why they are often not getting the results they want. Improvement typically begins with some fundamental shifts in the way you think about the process.

1) Forget Sex, Specificity Sells!
Lack of clarity about your business offerings and target market will lead to lack of clarity in your search marketing efforts and you will either attract clients that aren’t a good fit, or you will have trouble converting your web traffic. Your search engine strategy should be based on a clear picture of who your ideal client is and exactly what you can do for them. Then make sure that you are effectively communicating that on your website.