Drive Traffic Using Q&A Sites To Show Your Expertise

Demonstrating expertise in your field using Q&A sites is a budget-friendly marketing strategy that can drive traffic to your website. Such sites allow the general public to tap the knowledge of the community to get answers to their questions. You gain from the exposure you or brand receives and you typically get a link from your profile back to your site. You can sometimes also reference articles you’ve written as a source, if that’s appropriate.

To make it easier to stay on top of this strategy I recommend you use an RSS reader to subscribe to the most relevant categories for you on your chosen sites and scan them every day or few days to see where you can jump in and contribute.

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How To Choose A WordPress Theme – Design & Functionality Considerations

This post follows on from – How To Choose A WordPress Theme -Free, Premium or Custom

When choosing a theme you must consider design, layout and functionality.
When considering these, keep in mind the general type of theme you are looking for (see previous post). If you are looking for a free theme,  you need to find something as close to what you want as possible (or be savvy enough to tweak it yourself). If you are looking at Premium themes,  you may have some flexibility on colors and admin options. The closer your theme is to what you want to begin with, the less tinkering you will have to do. Determining what options the theme gives you will be important.

Remember as you are looking at themes that colors and fonts are easier to change (with a little CSS) than things like sidebar placement, and changing the layout/ structure, unless you’re comfortable with PHP.

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How To Choose A WordPress Theme – Free, Paid or Custom?

One of the biggest sources of frustrations I hear from clients when using WordPress is choosing a theme that looks good and does what they want it to do.  The next couple of posts will attempt to provide some guidelines to help make this process easier.

Selecting a theme is about more than the way it looks. Functionality and the ability to control options from your WordPress dashboard can be just as important. Many people choose a theme on looks alone and then become frustrated because it doesn’t work the way they want it to.

Generally speaking, there’s 3 types of themes available – free, premium and custom-built. To help decide which category you might be in note down your answers to the following questions:

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Mobile Blogging With WordPress

Mobile networks are finally getting fast enough, and smartphones nimble enough to enable you to do some real stuff on the go. WordPress now has apps for the major players so you can have ready access to your blog away from your computer.

WordPress for Blackberry
The new WordPress app for Blackberry allows you to write posts, upload images, manage comments and more. You’ll need to enable the XML-RPC setting in the Writing submenu of Settings in your WP admin. This allows for remote publishing.

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Basic SEO for Blogger – Adding Alt Text To Images

I personally use and am a huge fan of WordPress – I made the switch from Blogger many years ago. However I do have a couple of clients that use blogger to publish their blogs – they find it simpler to use. But simplicity comes at a price. Although it is owned by Google, Blogger does not do a great job at providing SEO features by default.  One of the basic things it lacks is an easy way for the user to add alt text to an image they are uploading.

Adding alt text to images is important for 2 main reasons:

1)   Accessibility – visitors to your site that don’t see well and are having the page read to them need alt text to understand what the image is all about.

2)   SEO – the alt text is the only way a search engine knows what the image contains. It cannot ‘read’ an image by itself and relies on alt text. Additionally you can attract traffic from Google Image Search with well-optimized images.

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