Business Strategy, Marketing
If you have a business, you need to have performed a SWOT Analysis. SWOT stands for:
- Strengths
- Weaknesses
- Opportunities
- Threats
In each of those parts you’ll want to identify as much as you can and try your best to document or illustrate areas for awareness and/or improvement. This is a practice that should probably be done once or twice a year, but have your findings reviewed by leadership and staff on a regular basis. If you’ve never performed this before, download this FREE template that will help you document each part of this analysis. If you have any questions please feel free to contact us!
All Posts, WordPress, WordPress Plugins
If you’re like me, you’re almost always on your smartphone or have your device in a close reach. It’s not because I want to look busy all the time, but that there are a lot of things that are happening online from social media posts, website metrics, responses to blog posts, and content creation to name a few.
I came across this post from WPMU Dev that highlights quite a few of the apps and tools I use as well as a bunch more including:
- Buffer
- SimpleNote
- PingDom
- Google Analytics
- MailChimp
by Brenda Barron
Blog, Podcast
We’re really excited to be working on another media project. This one being audio podcasts. In these podcasts we’ll be talking briefly on business strategy tactic, social media, and web design on a weekly basis. Because there’s so much information out there, we found it to be easier to let our clients and audience digest the things that will matter to them most and in a quick 15min podcast that gives you the points and then ways to take action.
Some of our podcasts will actually be Q&A’s submitted by you. You can ask us questions for things that you’re facing in your business and we’ll talk about them in the show. Chances are you’re not alone in the challenges you’re dealing.
While we’re working to launch you can visit our YouTube page and see some of the How-To videos and other videos we’ve posted.
All Posts
For the past five years or so, I’ve been really into Podcasts. For me they were an alternative medium for consuming media of all types, from entertainment to business. What I enjoyed the most was being able to listen or watch my content wherever I wanted regardless if I was connected to the internet. It took me back to when I got my first walkman. Anyway, below is a list of Podcasts I listen to that I wanted to share for your enjoyment and inspiration.
StartUp
This podcast has setup their series into seasons, much like a television show. I would highly suggest you start listening from the beginning and binge your way to the most current episode. StartUp profiles their own business behind the scenes on a weekly basis from team meetings, proof of concept, investor meetings, and a whole lot of other transparent takes on their “startup” business. The second seasons profiled an online dating startup.
Online Marketing Made Easy
Amy Porterfield has been inspiring I’d say hundreds of thousands of people with her smart and easy to consume marketing tips. She occasionally will interview marketing gurus that we all have heard of and probably follow to pick their brains on current trends, how they got started, hurdles they’ve overcome, and then tips and freebies for listeners.
The EntreLeadership Podcast
This one is brought to you by the folks at studios of the Dave Ramsey show. Each week they provide great business tips mainly from a leader or business owner perspective. Team building, corporate environment, and topics all in between. Occasionally they’ll interview well known industry leaders to talk about their experiences as well. This podcast usually is about 45 or so minutes each week, but is really worth your time, especially in a long commute.
The $100 MBA Show
I really look forward to starting my day with the energy that Omar Zenhom has for his shows. This guy actually produces a 10min podcast for every day of the week. That’s right, 7 days a week he’s got a show for you to listen to. Each day he offers great tips on marketing, small business advice, good habits, and more. Once you’ve listened to a few of his shows, you can see why he has an award winning show, but also a great business behind it due to the wealth of knowledge he puts out in bites for free each day.
Career Tipper
Michele Badie is a friend of mine, and is here in Orlando. She is the author of this weekly “Confidence Conversation” with local movers and shakers of various industries around Central Florida. What I admire about her most is that she interviews people that’s she’s never met. Typically when you hear interviews they’re by people who have a good enough connection to approach the ability to have someone sit down and open up about their history and experiences. Be sure to check out her casual podcast to learn more about some influential local leaders around Orlando, FL.
These podcasts above are really just a few that I listen to. If you have some that you listen to, let me know in the comments below. I’m seeing Podcasting really pick up over the last two years and there are plenty of great content creators out there publishing information that we can all benefit from.
Product Reviews
This morning at
Ideas Orlando, the WordPress Orlando Meetup held a talk and called it “WordPress in Business”. In this talk there were a few talking points that were mentioned that I notated below. I was unable to post all of these on the
MeetUp page as the text exceeded the comment limits so I created this post for the notes. Please feel free to share where needed.
Hosting Provider Suggestions
- Host Gator
- Digital Ocean (cloud based)
- SiteCore
- SiteGround (inexpensive shared hosting for starter users)
- Pagely (high volume of traffic)
- GoDaddy (WordPress specific hosting)
Food for Thought:
A good idea to note is that hosting providers do not make changes or updates to your website. When you get to a point of making money with your business/website consider hiring an agency that will monitor and maintain your hosting services for your websites.
Plugin Suggestions
- Pretty Links
Shrink, beautify, track, manage and share any URL on or off of your WordPress website. Create links that look how you want using your own domain name!
https://wordpress.org/plugins/pretty-link/
- Gravity Forms
Advanced Forms for WordPress Websites Just Don’t Get Any Easier than Gravity Forms
http://www.gravityforms.com/
- Member Mouse
MemberMouse is an easy to use WordPress membership plugin that allows you to sell products, subscriptions and memberships, setup a password protected member’s area, offer 1-click upsells and downsells, manage customers, automate customer service, track critical retention metrics and more. No matter where you’re starting from, MemberMouse has the power you need to maximize revenue and get your business running like a well-oiled machine.
http://membermouse.com/
- WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a free, powerful WordPress eCommerce plugin. With the extendability of a huge catalog of commercial themes and extensions we have all the tools you might need to get your shop running.
http://www.woothemes.com/woocommerce/
- Shopify
Online shopping cart software
http://www.shopify.com/
- Sharesale
ShareASale has been in business for 15 years, exclusively as an Affiliate Marketing Network. Our technology receives accolades for speed, efficiency, and accuracy – and our reputation as a fair and honest business is well known within the industry. We encourage you to browse around our website and learn more, but if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us!
http://www.shareasale.com/
- Commission Junction
Affiliate Marketing
http://www.cj.com/
- Click Bank
Entrepreneurs everywhere use our powerful online and mobile e-commerce platform to build a vibrant business across popular lifestyle categories. We believe in cultivating a new generation of digital entrepreneurs and helping them transform their passion and expertise into top-selling digital products and affiliate marketing programs to achieve financial happiness. Our solutions, combined with top-rated client support, help you grow and maintain every part of your business. Making money online has never been easier.
http://www.clickbank.com/
Tips and Ideas
- Amazon has tips and reports about website speed and why it is important to your website conversion rate and more.
- Look into CDN options like CloudFlare or JetPack. (Content Delivery Network) This will make your website load much faster by utilizing distributed content processing.
- For video hosting you can use Amazon S3 hosting, YouTube, or Amazon. http://aws.amazon.com/s3/
- To check your web page load times check http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ or try
- Google Page Speed Test https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
- Set up email filters (Gmail)
- Hire a virtual assistant for your repetitive tasks and saving more time each day to dedicate more to yourself or to the core parts of your business
- Advertising on Facebook is really the most effective once you start paying for ads. Even at a small daily rate.
Suggested Reads:
Great source for asking questions or finding answers about WordPress: