WordPress Child Theme

Wouldn’t it be great if you could create a custom theme for every site you build, every client site you build and have it automatically updated with the latest security fixes directly from WordPress themselves?

Thankfully, you can and it’s a very simple process. In fact, WordPress designed their platform so that any of us, with only a few simple steps, can use a robust basic theme and make as many or few changes as we’d like. When the basic theme is updated it keeps all of our customization intact.

The following video shows how to do it with the twentyeleven theme but it is just as easy to do with any theme you want to use. I am currently using twentytwelve that comes standard in the WordPress install.

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How To Set Up A Podcast Feed

A great marketing tool to use for your business is to transform your articles into audio files or interview experts in your field and provide those audio files to your niche as a podcast feed.

We’ll assume you already know how to record and save your audio as an .mp3 file. We like to use WordPress as a platform for our podcasts and for the last 4 we created we also used a plugin from the folks at Blubrry.

This first video shows you the steps we take in setting up WP and the plugin configuration settings.

The second video shows how we actually add the podcast entries and .mp3 file fields along with testing the RSS feed and some additional configuration settings.

Coming soon will be the steps to submit your podcast to itunes.

If you want to see what this looks like in real life check out http://youvegotfiveminutes.com/ and the feed on itunes

Offline Marketing – So Easy A Caveman Could Do It!

Well, not really – but it is one of the quickest ways for a new internet marketer to start making some income.

I was on one of my favorite marketing forums the other day (Earn 1K a Day) and one of the members was recounting a recent conversation with his ‘regular job’ boss and they began to discuss using the internet to market several of their products.

Offline Marketing To Local Business

Offline Marketing Webinar

My friend proceeded to talk about landing pages, email autoresponders, Facebook business pages, social media, backlinking, etc.

His co-workers were astounded at the amount of knowledge he had and began to pick his brain on various subjects and what they could do to begin implementing some of the ideas.

The truth is that as an internet savvy marketer you have skills and techniques that brick and mortar business owners want, need and are willing to pay significant amounts of money to have you implement.

*** Check Out The Free Offline Marketing Webinar***

It is certainly nice to build and promote 100 or so affiliate sites that each bring in $20-50 a month revenue but with just a little more work (and some personal salesmanship) you can have 30 or so offline clients and charge $300-500 and even more each and every month.  You’ll probably need to outsource some of your work so it won’t be 100% profit, but with 5 figure stable income each month you have a great business model to build off of and add more geographic areas and niches.

Also, as you build your outsourcing team you can use them to further build out and promote your own affiliate sites and strengthen that portion of your business model also.  To learn more about profiting from offline businesses check out the webinar link below

*** Check Out The Free Offline Marketing Webinar***

Dropped Domain Names Are Like Gold… Or Are They?

Finding a great domain name is like finding real estate in the perfect location.  It can make all the difference when it comes to the value of your future web site.  Of course, if you've had to search for the perfect domain name lately you know that most of the incredible names are already registered.

This is where the secondary market comes in and many of us have systems in place to search for names that have been previously registered but for some reason the owner lets the renewal lapse or they've lost interest in their business model or web site.  As such, there are a couple major auctions to purchase these domains as they drop.  Finding one from a previously popular site can reward you with instant backlinks and traffic to jump start your new site.

On the negative side you may be purchasing a problem child that has been used for less than savory purposes or been banned from the search engines for one reason or another.  It pays to do some research before purchasing any domain name.  Following are a couple of the tools and techniques to use in your detective work.

1. The Google Index Is Your Friend.

This is the first place to begin.  Using a couple simple searches we can find previous site references that are indexed in the search engine and also find backlinks and references to the domain.  Type the following searches into Google:

site:http://yourdomain.com
site:http://www.yourdomain.com

Use both of these as the domain could have been indexed both ways.  If you see no results it's a red flag that Google may have removed the site from their index.

http://yourdomain.com
http://www.yourdomain.com
yourdomain.com

These searches will show you various references to the domain or web site on the web.  If you see a lot of negative comments you will have an idea about the character of the person who previously owned your domain.

2.  Domain Tools

This is a one stop shop to find out a lot of information on your previous domain.

http://domaintools.com/yourdomain.com

From here you can find out who owned the domain previously, how many times it was moved from one server to another, how often the ownership changed over the years and when it was first registered.

3.  Archive or WayBackMachine

http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http://yourdomain.com

Here you'll find an archived history of what your domain or web site has looked like throughout it's history.  Unfortunately, it's not a complete history of everything that could have happened to your domain but it's the best we have available.  At a minimum it's fun to look back through the site's history and see what the domain was used for.