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How Can Video FAQ’s put your site on steroids?

By Brett Bumeter

Show Summary

FAQs are referred to as frequently asked questions. These are questions that you usually see on websites. The FAQs section will help you answer simple inquiries about the website or other things. You also have the ability to expand the answers to these questions to know more and for a deeper understanding.

Using videos in FAQ sections will help the user/viewer to better understand the answer to their inquiries. These allow the user to engage more in this section for the user/viewer will not only see text but also graphs, images and audio as well.

Embedding it in the FAQ section will make it easy for your user/viewer for they will just hit the “play” button. Video embedded has a title of its own; it may come from youtube.com, you can see related videos and will help you strengthen the page. Searching in Google and Google zero will be easy as 1-2-3 and will surely answer the question that you are looking for.

How to get more Twitter Followers by Being Follow Worthy

By Brett Bumeter

Show Summary

Twitter.com is social media website that allows users to follow and be followed. The amount of followers does not really matter what matters most is to be “follow worthy” and know how to listen. The effectiveness to be followed is (1) to listen and (2) love.

Love in a sense that you love your fellow human beings like your friend and treating them with respect.

Listening is trying to pay attention and understand their needs and situation. Being a better listener makes you provide what people are looking for like on what to buy, like, know and trust. Making your post interesting makes it interesting. It’s not about liking and following but it’s about caring for somebody.

To be follow-worthy means to make your post interesting and to like other people. Helping and caring for other people will surely give a huge amount of followers.

Responding and engaging with other people is easy with Twitter for it offers tools that filters and create human connection like the category geographical location and more.

Building connection, caring and making your post interesting, unique and extraordinary will sure make your post “follow-worthy”.

How to consolidate multiple websites in one WordPress CMS – Theory

By Brett Bumeter

Video Summary

In this video, Brett Bumeter presents a brief theoretical outline in response to Warren Whitlock’s query about how to consolidate multiple websites and blogs into a single word press website.

Brett mentions that people like to start and create their presence online through new websites and blogs as and when they come across new ideas and thoughts. Over a period of time some of these ideas shape up nicely to take form of a well maintained online website whereas some of these whims might just phase away.

People sometimes find it difficult to maintain and keep the websites or their blogs going in spite of not being able to contribute to it. But they also do not want to lose some of the interesting, valuable, informative and legacy articles, blog posts, discussion forums and much more that has already been posted on their website or blogs. So they go ahead and want to close it down.

But Brett further goes on to explain, not in details, but in general, that instead of shutting the entity down completely, one always has an option to consolidate their different ventures like – a blog, a website, maybe a tumblr site and much more – bring them all together under a common roof, and thus have the ease of maintaining and most importantly preserving its contents.

Some of the basic consolidation steps he describes are –

  • Start by importing each of the entity into word press.
  • Once you bring the file in, set it up under its own defined category.
  • One can name the categories relevant to the old website or blog names

This way, one can easily maintain and salvage the evergreen content from their non-functional websites and blogs under a common umbrella.

Over pay for a Broken Website? This Government WordPress site cost $15m!

By Brett Bumeter

Have you ever seen someone over pay for a WordPress Website?

Unfortunately, we’ve all seen over priced websites before.  Every now and then someone over pays for website work.  This may be one of the more extreme cases, I’ve ever seen.  Personally, I’ve fixed websites for far less than the charges brought by the original developers who charged my clients hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Much to the chagrin of my bank account, many clients often come to me after they have spent six figures or more on a website.  I usually get them fixed up and running for far far less (think 4 figures tops).

 

If you were overcharged the last time you needed a website built, check this out: The Free State provincial government in South Africa reportedly forked out R140-million (US$15 366 680) for its online presence.

 

This example is even more egregious as this government was charged a massive amount and they didn’t even get any custom development according to this article.  Usually, when I hear of a client over paying, they are paying for a bunch of custom coding (that doesn’t need to be done in the first place).

However, in this case, they apparently paid $15m for something that probably cost $40 in materials and a month or two of labor.

Please!  Don’t over pay for your web development.  If you seriously feel the need, give us a call. I’ll admit we’ll charge you a whole lot less, but you can take the $100k – $10m you might save and donate that to charity or something.

;)

See full story on memeburn.com

How Non Profits Connect with Donors on Social Media

By Brett Bumeter

Here’s a great presentation by Tim Bete where he walks through the process of how non profits or anyone with donors can connect with their donor base using social media tools and best practices.  

This presentation is about 60 minutes long.  The first few minutes talks about how many non profits and others with donors often fail out of the gate and then given up on their social media campaign.  Even though the presentation starts with a bit of a negative, there are definitely a number of very useful examples, tips and perspectives throughout the rest of the presentation.  I briefly toyed with the notion of recreating this presentation myself without all the negativity, but thought I’d post the original first.  Let me know what you think.  How could this presentation be more effective?  Does the tone take away from the guts of the content?  Is it missing anything?

How to Choose WP themes to fit Your personality and business

By Brett Bumeter

Have you tried casually looking for a new theme lately?

There are hundreds of thousands to choose from and most of those are free.

So why do people pay money for premium (not free) WordPress themes?

The answer is functionality and support. If you want to find the right tool to get the job done then it’s important to understand some of the functional differences between theme types so you will know what to look for.

In the video below, Warren and I talk about the general types of themes in terms of how they can be ’functionally changed or designed’.

In future videos we’ll cover functionality that relates to what a theme can do after you have finished up the design process.

Don’t forget to ask Your Web Developer thisQuestion!

By Brett Bumeter

I always have one question in mind when I first start talking to a new client. However, every now and then the topic slips my mind. Sometimes the client is so interesting that I get caught up in their story and never get back to the most important question. Sometimes the list of things they want is very specific and detailed and is a thousand miles away from the big picture question that I always find the most important.

Usually, I always intend to circle back to the question, offer it up somehow and then answer it if I can, just at the right point in the conversation. That’s usually where I make a mistake. I’m looking for the right place and time in the conversation to make sure that my new client will ask me the most important question that I can answer for them. I should just jump into it first thing every time. I don’t miss it very often, maybe 1 out of every 15 new clients might not get this answered when they first talk to me. That might be considered good or it might be bad, I’d prefer to answer it for 15 out of 15 every single time.

What’s the most important Question you should always ask a new Web Developer?
Simple – How can you save me money?

There’s lots of follow up questions that can ensue, but more often than not most new clients that I speak with have 1 or more elements of their current website that are not current. If they simply changed these things out, they could often literally start saving real money by

  • decreasing their monthly costs in hosting
  • decreasing their bandwidth
  • reducing their hosting service calls, and time wastedtalking to hosting tech support
  • decreasing their ppc spend or budget and replacing the results with more effective PPC campaigns or with Organic results
  • increasing conversion
  • increasing search rankings
  • boosting site speed to help accomplish much of the above

But you know what? That first bullet point is often the easiest fix and it is usually the one that is overlooked the most. People get on a host and the costs slowly creeps up while the service or the perceived service slowly declines as the host gets bigger and less capable of providing unique and custom experiences for you!

Over the years, I’ve had to move away from several hosting companies that ‘were’ good and over time no longer worked for me or became
too expensive. I’ve moved away from iPower, POW Web, Inmotion Hosting, Godaddy, and partially away from HostGator and Rackspace. Each move has improved the performance of my site and typically decreased my real monthly expenses. So do consider this yourself and ask me to reality check your hosting bill and whether or not you could do better elsewhere.