Over the years, I have had very limited success matching successful conversions to content from the Amazon Associates program.  I have done very well in other affiliate programs, but always felt like I was missing something with Amazon Associates.

1. After all, Amazon is a great website
2. It converts well
3. It treats its customers very well
4. It offers almost everything
5. The interface is easy to navigate and highly optimized

So why can I hardly ever get something to convert through the Amazon Associates program?

Creating Best Seller Amazon Associates Lists

I read through Darren Rowse’s (aka ProBlogger’s) article titled 11 Lessons I learned earning $119,725.45 from Amazon Associates Program.  Its about a year old as I write this article.  Its a great article with maybe a little more emphasis on motivation and giving someone ideas about what can be done as opposed to how to actually DO IT. 

One of the ideas that I thought was off the charts for insight was number 6, Social Proof Marketing 1 – Best Seller Lists.  The basic concept is that once you do everything else (get enough people of the right type to your site primed to do the right thing) offering up to them a list of the products that the majority of buyers actually choose to buy is one of the best ways to get them to convert.

• Show them the hot products.
• Show them the products that made the cut in $$$ for other readers
• Show them the results of the cloud and crowd after they performed their due diligence and put their money where there mouth is.

But I had a huge problem with the recommendation

1. The recommendation assumed you already have sales results with Amazon, despite the insinuated premise that most people do not including Darren (in the early days)
2. It also didn’t really show you how to gather this information together inside Amazon Associates.
3. 

So I tried to figure out a way to get best selling product information on Amazon Associates for areas that might fit my audiences.  No luck, there just isn’t a tool there nor information.

Then I tried working into this information via Amazon itself.  I figured if I could at least get the product list of best selling items, I could add the Amazon associate links afterward.  Then when/ if I actually get more sales data to work with I could customize the listings starting from the set of ALL Best Selling products > in a Category > in a sub category > Filtered by a Keyword search.  My later customization could slice that one more time, for the my own audience interacting with those sets or subsets.

So here’s how you can create a list of best selling products on Amazon.com

1. Go to Amazon.com
2. 
3. Choose a Department, and category in the department, such as Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry>Shoes
4. 
5. Peform a keyword search within that department>category
6. 
7. Filter the default results of ‘relevance’ by Best Selling with the sort box on the right upper hand corner
8. 
9. 
10. Make sure you reality check those results!  Amazon’s vendors and marketing companies can cook these numbers a bit by buying back product.  Amazon probably doesn’t like it, but do consider whether you fully trust the results enough to put something in your best selling list, or at least disclaim it if you do.
11. 
12. Alternately, you can also come up with a list of items that has the highest user reviews on Amazon.  Again, this is subject to people cooking up the numbers.  If a company or marketing company had an employee or third party buy something, that person that bought could now go in and write up a review on Amazon that may be higher than normal.  Similarly, a competitor could buy the product and write up a bad review.
13. 
14. This could happen regardless of your list, so keep it in mind and maybe remind your readers, but at the end of the day, you are simply providing a presorted list anyway, and the whole point of the exercise is to provide them useful information when they need it, and then let the crowd continue to improve upon the list as they too make their own informed buying decision.

Other Amazon Associates Resources, Tips & Articles (External Links)

1. How to make money through Amazon Associates/Affiliates Program
2. How to Track Multiple Amazon Associates Campaigns
3. How to Make Money With New Amazon Associates For Blogger: It’s a Snap
4. Amazon Associates: A Real Case Study
5. Top 7 tips I used to make $41,438.42 in 2009 with Amazon Associates
   1. Includes creating Best Seller List on Amazon and the percentage of this earning total that came from Best Seller Lists -15%!
   2. Top 5 Worst Ways to Make Money with Amazon Associates
6. Build a WordPress Amazon Associates Store with AffiliateBang

People covering Amazon on Twitter

• Amanda Stone
• eMarketingScientific

Related posts:

1. Drop Ship Products-How Do I start Selling Products from Drop Shippers?
2. Two Cool Plugins from WordCamp Boston and Many Honorable Mentions

However, when I went to set up their account, I rapidly realized that PayPal had done a large rewrite of their setup procedure for non-profits.  It was almost impossible to find the information in PayPal by doing searches, but after spending 45 minutes on hold, I was guided one click at a time to the Non-Profit account setup page.

WARNING!  If you work for a religious non profit, if you attempt to call PayPal it is likely that their phone menu system will drive you nuts and you might be tempted to utter blasphemy or its equivalent in your religion.  You may want to remove yourself to a less public place before the phone menu system drives you to curse up a storm!

That’s exactly what I’m going to show you here so you can save yourself and your non-profit 45 minutes of wasted time and possibly excommunication, a stoning or 30 lashes or something!

I’m also going to share with you some information from PayPal about accepting donations from your Facebook page, which might prove very useful.

How to set up a PayPal for Non Profit Account to Accept Donations

The general process to set up a Non Profit account with Paypal requires multiple steps and probably can not be completed in a single session nor day.  You will have to create a Business Account first, highlighting your non profit category during the setup form.  PayPal will then contact you requesting information that proves your Non Profit status.  Once provided you can then apply to PayPal to create a Non Profit account and you will then be allowed to receive donations via PayPal with the lower Non Profit rates mentioned further below in the ‘How to Find general information about PayPal for Non Profit Accounts.

Here are the Steps

1. Click here to Go to PayPal’s home page

2.  Click on the Sign Up link at the very top of the page

3.  Confirm or change the country and language options as needed and then Click the Get Started Button in the Business Section (the Personal and Premier options are only for individuals and individuals cannot be non profits, even if they are unprofitable!)

4.  From the next Web Payment Solution Form Screen provided next, choose

This is the base level account and as you will have to go through the confirmation phase with a PayPal representative anyway this is the best place to start, if you need additional or higher level services, these can be added or adjusted later, but they typically can not be chosen first.  Get your non profit designation confirmed before you attempt to do anything else.

5.  Depending on your Browser or how many times you might have explored the PayPal site the next screen you see may give an outline of the sign up steps to follow, Click the GO button (or possibly the Continue button) to proceed

alternate screen if you have started this step once before in the same browser and PayPal remembers you

6. Start completing the application form by choosing your Organization type, I won’t tell you how to fill out your name and address, but DO pay attention to the Business Type and Category and Sub Category fields as they are VERY important for Non Profit Consideration

7.  Don’t worry too much about the amount sections of the form, use conservative numbers especially if your non profit has never collected money online via donations before, better to start at $0 and work your way up rather than set unrealistic expectations.

8 Hit Continue

9 You will now need to enter some information that will create your PayPal account.  Tips! Use an official email address for your organization for someone that DOES check their email regularly and DOES have authority from your treasurer or equivalent.  You can add other email addresses later if necessary, including generic email addresses to be used on your website.

10.  After you hit Continue again, You will need to link up your checking account and then you can proceed to wait for PayPal to begin processing your account setup and application.  They will send you a request of the additional information that they need which will include proof of your non profit status.

How to FIND general information about PayPal for Non Profit Accounts

1. Go to PayPal’s home page

2. Click on the Business Tab

3. Click on the Why PayPal Tab?

4. Scroll down to the bottom of this page and click on the link PayPal Products for Business (yes I know we’re talking about a Non Profit sign up but hang in there PayPal isn’t organized terribly well, they seem to consider a Non Profit as a type of account within their business account category, probably a programmer thing.)

5. Scroll down again and see the links at the bottom for Non Profits and Political Campaigns (click which ever is appropriate!)

6. IF AND ONLY IF you already have a PayPal account for your organization you may wish to Click ‘Try it Now’ (after investigating the information provided) in order to create a button (if you already have an account)  This silly button will only walk you through an example of how you might create a donation button if you actually had an account but WILL NOT set up an account for you.

How much does PayPal Charge for Non Profit Accounts?

PayPal Pricing for Non Profits is Cheaper.  There are only two tiers and they are priced as follows:

*PayPal pricing tiers normally start off at 2.9% and only drop down to 2.2% after a $10,000 threshold is reached.

How do I accept Credit Cards in the office or Over the Phone for my Non Profit?

PayPal has a separate service called Virtual Terminal for processing credit cards over the phone or in person.  The account type of above would be used on the web only where a person comes to your site, clicks the donate button then fills in their credit card information themselves.

Under the virtual terminal program, a person might recite their credit card information to one of your employees over the phone and that employee would enter the information into the virtual terminal to process the credit card transaction.

Virtual Terminal is considered and add on or extra service and there are no discounts for Non Profits for this Add on.

Virtual Terminal has a fixed monthly fee (think of it like a subscription fee).  That monthly fee is $30 whether you process transactions or not.

The ratable fees vary depending on the size of the transaction as follows

You pay only one $30 monthly fee and 2.4% to 3.1% plus $.30 per transaction based on your monthly processing volume.

There are no set up or cancellation fees and no long term commitments.

The pricing table above applies to domestic payments in US dollars. There’s an additional 2.5% charge for any currency conversion and a 1% charge to receive payments from another country.

So if you set up a non profit account and Virtual Terminal any charges that take place on your website would be processed at the lower/cheaper rates and any that were processed under virtual terminal would be at a higher rate.  This would give you an incentive to push your donors to use online tools as opposed to over the phone or in person donations where it is practical or possible even if that means setting up a computer terminal for donors to utilize or a terminal at an event.  If it saves you 0.5% – 0.9% on a donation, that might be worth a few hundred dollar investment in an extra PC with internet access, but do make the financial review yourself first.

What Documents will PayPal need to Confirm my organizations Non Profit Status?

For a U.S. based tax-deductible and tax-exempt organization, you’ll need
to fax:

• Evidence of tax exempt status or registration with any applicable
  regulatory bodies, such as a §501(c)(3) Determination Letter

OR

• Proof of tax-deductibility with a subordination letter, illustrating the
  account as a child of a larger, more national organization.

AND

• A copy of a bank statement or voided check or cheque. The document must
  include:

Your organization name and address pre-printed on it from each bank
account that you intend to add to your PayPal account.

Each bank account that you add to your PayPal account must be under the
ownership of the organization and cannot be a personal bank account.

• If this is a tax-exempt only organization, you’ll need to provide:
  Evidence of tax registration status and/or registration with any
  applicable regulatory bodies governing your jurisdiction.

OR

• Subordination letter, illustrating the account as the child of a larger,
  more national organization.

AND

A copy of a bank statement or voided check or cheque. The document must
include:

• Your organization name and address pre-printed on it from each bank
  account that you intend to add to your PayPal account.
• Each bank account that you add to your PayPal account must be under the
  ownership of the organization and cannot be a personal bank account.

Any non-U.S. based organizations will need to provide:

• Evidence of tax-exempt status and/or registration with any applicable
  regulatory bodies governing the organization’s jurisdiction.
• A copy of a bank statement or voided check (cheque) with the
  organization name and organization address pre-printed on it from each
  bank account that the organization intends to attach to the PayPal
  account (if applicable).
• Link to confirm the organization’s registration status online (if
  applicable).
• A brief organizational summary or Mission Statement.
  Subordination letter from the parent organization (if applicable).

All documents should be faxed to 303-395-2862, ATTN: Compliance – Due
Diligence. Please remember to include your email address as registered
on your PayPal account on any correspondence or faxed items.

Here’s how to find more information on nonprofits:

1. Go to the PayPal website and log in to your account.
2. Click “Business” at the top of the page.
3. Click “Nonprofits” at the top of the page.

How do I sell tickets to events?

Enabling people to register for your non profit events via Eventbrite is one of the easiest and fastest ways to get started.    Eventbrite manages all the software for managing event registration.  You can easily setup an account quickly, then copy paste a widget to your own wordpress powered website that will manage the registration process from your site using eventbrite tools for you.  Eventbrite does take a commission of the ticket sales, so you have to make certain that the net fee you receive covers your costs and contribution goals.  That cost is the trade off you make for saving money and time creating, developing, rolling out, and maintaining an independent web system.

How do I Accept Donations on my Non Profit Facebook Page via PayPal?

You will need to set up an account with PayPal’s partner site WhatGives.com

Update – Do Prepare for More Traffic and utilization on your server

8-25-10 update

This month as I help a client prepare for their first event utilizing the tools above we noticed a couple things that will be important to your own non profit organization’s success at fund raising online with pay pal.

The number of page views on your site will likely increase after you add the capability to your site to take donations or process event registrations.  Quite simply, your site starts to transform from simply informative to interactive.  People start clicking and doing things on your website.  This means an increase in page views and in aggregate this might increase the use of your server or hosting plan.

If you run a popular charitable event and process registrations (as we were) you may also notice a lot of activity as the event date gets closer.  We saw a small but important increase in total traffic, but the interaction level was very high and started slowing down the load time of our site.

So I quickly deployed some of the tips I describe in a separate article about optimizing a wordpress site for page speed load times.  At a basic level, I added a cache plugin and configured it, not a beginner step.  I also installed a plugin I love called wp-smush-it.  This little plugin processes images in your wp media library and makes the file size smaller so the images and pages they are on load a little faster.

Every bit counts, especially when you are trying to raise money through non profit PayPal donations, or process registrations through your new PayPal account.  You want the check out process to run smooth and fast regardless of how many visitors are on your site and doing something!

This is a good challenge to deal with so don’t shy away from it.

Related posts:

1. Migrating Cancer Services of Gaston County from Joomla to WordPress as a CMS
2. My Google Domain Will Not Forward from GoDaddy – 301 Redirect Issue & Solution Prescribed by GoDaddy

This patch is provided from a Japanese coder that figured things out(BIG THANKS!).  There is NO patch currently from Artisteer themselves, but I HAVE successfully used this patch myself on a PC running 32 bit Vista.

You can get more information and download the Artisteer WordPress 3.0 patch here.  (it will require replacing some of the application files in Artisteer, but its easy to reinstall the old files if you need to.

Next month (May 2010) WordPress 3.0 is scheduled to roll out.  I wanted to make sure my themes and my client themes will be ready for the upgrade from WordPress 2.9.2 to WordPress 3.0.  This is my ALPHA attempt at documenting what is needed.  I WILL update this article as I learn more about upgrading themes to WordPress 3.0 or Artisteer themes to WP 3.0 functionality.

WordPress 3.0’s eminent launch has been talked about since last summer.  Its general release date was always stated in general terms of ‘It will launch when it is ready’.  Well this goose is almost cooked. 

Over the last few years I have designed and rolled out hundreds of different WordPress themes.  Compatibility was never an issue with WordPress themes for the most part (at least for most of the life of the WordPress 2.x era.)

Now, I do not play in the WordPress development world.  I stay in touch with a few people that do, but its not my cup of tea (yet).  WP has about 202 million users worldwide and by the last numbers I saw (but can’t seem to find now) there were close to 400 million websites powered by WordPress.  I’d actually bet that the number of WordPress websites is a great deal higher by about 20-40% as the number I last saw is over a year old.

Regardless, 202 million users for 400 million WP websites is a lot of people that need to make an evolutionary leap on a system.  This isn’t going to be a Windows 3 to Windows 95 type of move, probably closer to 95 –> NT.  The point is that a large number of new types of functionality are going to be possible with WordPress 3.0 and with that new functionality a lot more possibilities to make great sites and to really screw them up (using the wrench as a hammer).

There are lots of sources talking about the new functionality in WordPress 3.0 and how to install WordPress 3.0.  But I couldn’t find any sources that talked about what a site owner would need to do to upgrade their existing them to get the most out of WordPress 3.0, initially.

I had heard a reference to the topic of how to upgrade themes to WordPress 3.0 or how to make an existing theme compatible with WordPress 3.0 as proposed for a NYC WordPress Meetup, but I’m not in NYC and the slides aren’t out yet so I kept looking.  I couldn’t find anything on YouTube, nor anything useful on Twitter, which is probably not a surprise to anyone. 

Then I checked Slideshare and found a presentation by a user named Yoavf whom I later learned is Yoav Farhi’s who I think works on the Automatic Theme team, but if you really want to confirm his credentials look no farther than his twitter profile where he states that he is NOT a Social Media Expert so at a minimum Yoav is probably not a social media douche bag either.  That’s about as much trust as you can find on the internet these days, so I’m buying what he’s selling (ergo going to test his recommendations from his presentation which was free to view) and go from there. 

Now the key slides for understanding the basic requirements to upgrade your theme to WordPress 3.0 seem to fall in the slide 42 – slide 46 range.

How to upgrade a theme to use WordPress 3.0 Custom Backgrounds

Slide 43-44

Simply add the following line in your theme’s function.php file

add_custom_background();

Note Otto on WordPress takes a much deeper dive into what you can do and how to do it when it comes to WordPress 3.0 backgrounds.  In general Otto’s tips and blog rock, so I’d advise checking it out for other useful tips such as this one (WordPress 3.0 Theme Tip: Feed Links) if only I had found his site earlier I might have avoided this mistake myself. 

How to update a theme to use WordPress 3.0 header customization functionality

Slide 45-46

Add the following code to your function.php file

define( ‘HEADER_TEXTCOLOR’,”);

define( ‘NO_HEADER_TEXT’, true );

define( ‘HEADER_IMAGE’, ‘%s/images/headers/default.jpg’); //%s is theme directory

define( ‘HEADER_IMAGE_WIDTH’, 775 );

define( ‘HEADER_IMAGE_HEIGHT’, 200 );

add_custom_image_header( “,’mytheme_admin_header_style’ );

function mytheme_admin_header_style() {

?><style type=”text/css”>

#header {

background: url(<?php header_image(); ?>);

}

</style><?php

}

register_default_headers( array(

‘berries’=>array(

‘url’=> ‘%s/images/headers/berries.jpg’,

‘thumbnail_url’=>’%s/images/headers/berries-thumbnail.jpg’,

‘description’=> __( ‘Berries’ , ’mytheme’ )

),

‘cherryblossom’ => array (

‘url’ => ‘%s/images/headers/cherryblossoms.jpg’,

‘thumbnail_url=> ‘%s/images/headers/cherryblossoms-thumbnail.jpg’,

‘description’ => __( ‘Cherry Blossoms’, ‘mytheme’ )

)

) );

* note spacing and characters may need some correction, transcribing from a slide

How to Add a Pluggable Comment form to a theme for WordPress 3.0

Slide 49

in the comments.php file add

comment_form();

How to add WordPress 3.0 Menu Navigation functionality to an existing theme

slide 50-51

in functions.php file add

add_theme_support( ‘nav-menus’);

and then in the header.php file add or replace

wp_list_pages(‘title_li=’);

with the following

wp_nav_menu();

Now note from what I have read so far the new menu creation capability in WordPress 3.0 is nice for people that have never had a menu before, but for those of you using Artisteer themes or any of the numerous variations of Suckerfish menus, STICK WITH WHAT YOU HAVE FOR NOW the new functionality in WordPress 3.0 for menus is far less advanced than what you are probably already using.  It is not dynamic (so far) you will have to create every single new menu item manually.  It does not generate a new menu item every time you add a new page or sub page or category or sub category like most WP dynamic menus.

Here is a blog article that offers up some images of the WordPress 3.0 menu backend

How to add Custom Post Types functionality offered in WordPress 3.0 to your existing theme

slide 54

Go to your functions.php file and add the following

funtion post_type_reviews() {

register_post_type(‘reviews’, array (  // this will add a new post type for reviews as opposed to videos, or podcasts or whatever category you might think of

‘label’ => ‘Reviews’,  // guessing at the interpretation in the actual slide

‘singular_label’ => ‘Reviews’,

‘description’ => ‘My reviews on the tone of warbling toads at 6 pm from my dock office’,

‘public’ => true

));

}

add_action(‘init’, ‘post_type_reviews’);

How to Add Multisite functionality to your WordPress installation

now before you leap into this one, you better go do a lot of research, but from a code perspective the first step (possibly off a cliff with your host) is simplistic

slide 66

in your wp-config.php file after you have made a backup of this file simply add

define( ‘WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’, true);

What happens if Categories no longer display in WordPress 3.0?

On some wordpress installations (doesn’t relate to Artisteer one way or another) after you upgrade to Wordpress 3.0 you may click on some sub category links and notice that a 404 error is returned as the result.

I’ve seen one proposed solution for this that will not work for most people if they have a lot of posts or pages.

The solution that I found relates to the permalinks settings.

If on an old wordpress installation your site had an option for /%category%/%postname%/ you will simply need to delete the /%category%/ option and go with /%postname%/ alone.

WordPress seems to now automatically use /category/ inserted into the permalinks whether you pick it or not, but things tend to break if you leave this legacy setting in.

Related posts:

1. Optimize Artisteer WordPress Theme’s H1/H2 Title Tags for SEO
2. WordPress Theme Design Contest – Win a Free Artisteer License
3. How to Speed up Artisteer WordPress Theme Load Times

I’ve discovered enough of the code to make it this far, which would be great and exactly what I’m looking for, but it only works right now in Firefox, safari, and Chrome, but not in IE8.

Here are the elements in the css code that I have changed to achieve this result.

/* begin LayoutCell, content */
.art-content-layout .art-content
{
width: 50%;
}
.art-content-layout .art-content-sidebar1
{
width: 100%;
}
.art-content-layout .art-content-sidebar2
{
width: 79%;
}
.art-content-layout .art-content-sidebar3
{
width: 71%;
}
.art-content-layout .art-content-wide
{
width: 100%;
}
/* end LayoutCell, content */

/* begin LayoutCell, sidebar1 */
.art-content-layout .art-sidebar1
{
background-color: #D4CCAA;
width: 50%;
overflow:hidden;
position: relative;
float: left;
}
/* end LayoutCell, sidebar1 */

/* begin LayoutCell, sidebar2 */
.art-content-layout .art-sidebar2
{
background-color: #D4CCAA;
width: 29%;
overflow:hidden;
position: relative;
float: left;
}
/* end LayoutCell, sidebar2 */

/* begin LayoutCell, sidebar3 */
.art-content-layout .art-sidebar3
{
background-color: #D4CCAA;
width: 21%;
overflow:hidden;
position: relative;
float: left;
}
/* end LayoutCell, sidebar3 */

And another section in formatting that looks like this after my changes, the items in bold represent items I added.

/* begin Layout – change css */
.art-content-layout
{
display: table;
padding: 0;
border: none;
width: 994px;
position: relative;
float: left;
}

.art-content-layout .art-content-layout
{
width: auto;
margin:0;
position: relative;
float: left;
}

div.art-content-layout div.art-layout-cell, div.art-content-layout div.art-layout-cell div.art-content-layout div.art-layout-cell
{
display: table-cell;
position: relative;
float: left;
}

div.art-layout-cell div.art-layout-cell
{
display: block;
position: relative;
float: left;
}

div.art-content-layout-row
{
display: table-row;
position: relative;
float: left;
}

.art-content-layout
{
table-layout: fixed;
border-collapse: collapse;
background-color: Transparent;
border: none !important;
padding:0 !important;
position: relative;
float: left;
}

.art-layout-cell, .art-content-layout-row
{
background-color: Transparent;
vertical-align: top;
text-align: left;
border: none !important;
margin:0 !important;
padding:0 !important;
position: relative;
float: left;
}
/* end Layout */

Related posts:

1. Can’t Drag Widget into Sidebar 2 on Artisteer Designed Theme?
2. Optimize Artisteer WordPress Theme’s H1/H2 Title Tags for SEO
3. How to Speed up Artisteer WordPress Theme Load Times

UPDATE – Video Audio Fixed!
Open the following files in your theme in a text editor of your choice (I use dreamweaver, which allows a find / replace option on all open files)

• Style.css,
• header.php,
• index.php,
• page.php,
• single.php,
• style.ie6.css

Dreamweaver Tip! If you open all the files at once in dreamweaver you can run find/replace on all ‘Open Documents’ and speed the process up!

style.css
find and replace in Artisteer 2.4

First, find
h1.art-logo-name, h1.art-logo-name a, h1.art-logo-name a:link, h1.art-logo-name a:visited, h1.art-logo-name a:hover

and replace them with . . .
h2.art-logo-name, h2.art-logo-name a, h2.art-logo-name a:link, h2.art-logo-name a:visited, h2.art-logo-name a:hover

Second

If your site has dynamic text in your header, you will need to update your css file for your header too

Find the h1.art items

Replace these with h2.art

Older versions of Artisteer before v2.4.x

Artisteer is constantly working to improve and refine the css code its themes, skins, and templates generate. So the css code used for the current version, artisteer 2.4, may be different than older versions
2.3 generated css code that looked like this

To fix this, simply copy the font-size and color from the h2 to the h1 section, because the theme was designed to display things as shown by h2, so you do not want your theme to break with the wrong color and size on titles. Alternatively, when you design your themes in Artisteer, make sure that your H1 and H2 settings, sizes and colors are the same!

index.php

find and replace

find
<h2 class=”art-postheader”>
replace
<h1 class=”art-postheader”>
find
</h2>
replace
</h1>

page.php

find and replace
find
<h2 class=”art-postheader”>
replace
<h1 class=”art-postheader”>

single.php

find and replace
find
<h2 class=”art-postheader”>
replace
<h1 class=”art-postheader”>

header.php

run a find and replace

find
<h1 id=”name-text” class=”art-logo-name”>
replace
<h2 id=”name-text” class=”art-logo-name”>

Note older versions of Artisteer (prior to 2.4) used a different structures for header.php files that might not include the h1 tag at all!

Current Artisteer Wordpress theme setup before editing

Older version of Artisteer WordPress theme header

Should you Make this Change on your WordPress site?

For some sites you may not want to make the change. The H1 emphasis on the site name may be a better option for sites that are not so much of a blog and more of a CMS setup, especially if the Name of the site is very close to the domain name (ergo keywords in the domain name) You may want to emphasize the h1 tag on the site name to help compete on the keywords in the site title and domain name, but if you plan to write a lot of blog articles and want those to be your main attraction then this change will help.

If you have condensed your css files to speed up artisteer page load times, the search and replace phrases may be different than mentioned above.

Should the H2 Tag Ever go Before the H1 Tag?

Sure, I know some hardcore SEO types are probably thinking, saying, twittering, placing the h2 tag (in the blog/website title post optimization) before the h1 tag (blog article title) on the page is a little wonky.

I agree, but it is better than placing the h1 tag on the site title name and putting an H2 on the blog article or page name.

In the interest of making the artisteer WP theme optimization process relatively easy, even for non-coders, I chose to swap the code, but I am definitely open to more elegant options that are just as easy.

Here’s a good reference on H1 and H2 Tag Optimization

Related posts:

1. How to Speed up Artisteer WordPress Theme Load Times
2. Exploring 3 sidebars in Artisteer 2.4.0.25435 WordPress themes
3. How to Upgrade a Theme to Work with WordPress 3.0 (Alpha 1.0) using Artisteer

Copywriting, Content Optimization, and SEO Optimization may be tedious, but they do not have to be time consuming nor arcane with the new Scribe SEO for WP Plugin & the upcoming Scribe for the general Web service, which methodically guides writers through the SEO copywriting and content optimization process boosting Search Engine Optimization Results as well as Click through from SERPs!

SEO Copywriting & Content Optimization – Automated by Copyblogger himself!

The Scribe service is the brain child of Brian Clark, aka Copyblogger, and he had great reason to create this tool, helping people achieve better results with Google’s Search Algorithm.

I successfully tested this content optimization plugin myself on an Artisteer generated theme, its already been proven to work with Thesis themes and StudioPress among others as well.

Why SEO Copywriting is Important

If you want your content, your web page, web site, blog article, news article, product page, service, etc to be found on the net, it needs to be written and published in a way that search engines can understand.  You not only have to write the write (key) words, the right number of times but you have to get them placed in the right spot too – SEO Copywriting in a nut shell. Its not the end all to getting a number one position in the SERPs, but it can be a solid starting point, one that should be skipped.  Yet up until now, content optimization is something that is typically a time consuming process with a learning curve as steep as the boredom curve of using it!

Any writer, professional or amateur, publisher large or small, business hoping to gain traction on the internet and maintain their position there in a world where location is definitely everything, all of those groups need to make sure that their website is search engine optimized for copywriting and that includes every page of importance in that website too.

Is it necessary to optimize every silly little blog article?  No.  But if you have an important blog article or three, you should definitely consider it.

Scribe SEO Copywriting in WordPress Video Tutorial and Walk through

Wow, that title is a mouthful.    Anyway, enough of the optimized mumbo jumbo.  Odds are if you have read this far, then this might actually be something useful for you to consider.  The 2 videos walk through the plugin for wordpress from Scribe, the brain child of Brian Clark, aka Copyblogger.  I wanted to take a look at the first incarnation of this service, to get a feel for what it can do.  The video gives the overview in the first part, and in the second part I delve into what it actually does, and where the pricing sweet spots are.

Yes this does cost money.  That’s why I put the video together.  You can download the plugin for yourself and use a 10 page analysis free trial yourself, but that’s a big time commitment up front.  So check out the second video at least (if not both) and see if you think this plugin would be useful for you.  After the videos, I ‘ll share some of my own insights on how you might want to use it.

Part 1 Scribe SEO Copywriting w WordPress Review

Part 2 Scribe SEO Copywriting for WP Review – What it Analyzes, How it Helps and Where the Bargain is

As a former accountant and financial analyst I don’t generally step up to the plate and shell out money for something I can do myself.  I’m cheap, I know it and there are times when that is a character flaw. 

All that said, when I look at this plugin I can see that there would be times when you would want to optimize some but not all of your content.

Sure, altruistically, we might think that every single thing we ever write is very important and should get the maximum amount of attention.  In reality that is not the case.  Sometimes on the web, some pages just communicate timely little pieces of communication, like a happy birthday in 2005 or a ‘I had a bad day in 2006 and noticed XYZ’.  Some of these article might help a writer or business connect better with parts of their audience or customer base, but the shelf life on these articles is probably pretty short.  So imho don’t spend money optimizing it.

But if you have content that is important, that is generating some traffic or incoming backlinks all on their own, take some effort to optimize those articles first.  Get some more bang for your buck out of your high performing articles.

Then start looking through your content for those elements that are under performing for no apparent reason.  See if there is a SEO copywriting optimization opportunity to increase those articles or product pages in the SERPs(not to be confused with SERPS) through some crafty SEO suggestions from this great plugin.

After that if you have time and money, and you want to boost some other things knock yourself out.  As you write new content, if you want those articles to have the opportunity to reach their full potential, then optimize them also.  But don’t neglect your big rocks, get them in your jar first before you put the smaller rocks in if you want your site to fill up with traffic.

Prioritizing Long Tail Copywriting Optimization

1. Identify your highest trafficked Pages or Posts (Check your stats, google analytics, shortstat or a popularity tool if you are running one)
2. Analyze & Optimize these first!
3. Then go back and focus on good articles that are low performers
4. Finally, Optimize new articles as you see fit

UPDATE

Just to give some additional static visual references, I went through the process of analyzing and optimizing this very article.

First, I go to my post to edit.

I noticed right away that my All in One SEO tags, description and title had not been uploaded correctly to WordPress from WindowsLiveWriter where I’m running the All in One SEO Bridge and All in One SEO in WP.  So I next copied and pasted that information into wordpress and updated my wordPress page because something wasn’t working with my add on.

Everything is all green now for Scribe SEO, so I’m ready to hit analyze.  (I’m still working through my own free trial as of 3-19-2010)

It processes . . .

I scored an 89%, which isn’t too bad, or at least feels a little gratifying.

The 3 yellow areas indicate that my title is too long, so is my description and I only have 7 external links when I should have about 8 external links.  So I did a quick Google search on the keyword ‘copywriting optimization’ thinking I might find some additional resources or further background information.  Had to chuckle when I saw that this article, published 5 minutes ago was already in the Google top 10.

I was already pretty generous with some links to other blogs, so I simply added a Wikipedia link to SEO Copywriting.

I next reviewed the Keyword analysis in Scribe’s tab.

I was happy with the results of the copywriting optimization on this front so moved on.

The next tab gave me some suggestions about ways to adjust the primary keywords as viewed by a search engine.

The Tags and Serp Tabs were self explanatory.  (I do like the SERP Tab for a preview of your article listed in Google)

The SEO best practices tab, is just general SEO information as far as I can tell and not specific to this article

I wrapped things up, by shortening my description, removing the original blog title and replacing it with a shorter version for optimization reasons, and copied the old title (which the stupid writer in me thought had a nice hook and made it an H3 level header.

Finally, re-ran the analysis (each re-run of the analysis deducts from your account, so I don’t recommend too many redos, I had a 95% score on this article.

Basically that boils down to about $0.32 – $0.40 to optimize my article and make sure it is delivering the results I want it to deliver!

Related posts:

1. The Most Important WordPress Plugin You Will Ever Find – All in One SEO Pack
2. Optimize Artisteer WordPress Theme’s H1/H2 Title Tags for SEO
3. Charlotte May WordPress Meetup Fav Plugin/Setups/Configurations (SEO Focus) 5/14

So how do you increase load times for Artisteer Themes powering WordPress?

There are four areas that you have to focus on and only one of them relates to Artisteer directly, which is what I will cover directly below. While it is the fourth step, you can work on these out of order and still see an improvement in your site load times!

First, you have to work to speed up WordPress.

Second you have to insure that your hosting server is set up in an optimal way to power wordpress or your website and traffic in general.

Third you have to speed up your plugins, or choose alternative plugins that work faster and more efficiently.

Finally, you need to optimize your Artisteer designed wordpress theme.

So where to start . . . 

Take a look at the tools on the right, they are presented in the order I would recommend using them.

Run a general speed test first at iWebTools. Its not the best nor most complete, but does give a more understandable measure of speed, and is probably easier to compare apples to apples before and after you are done improving your site.

1.54 seconds looks pretty fast, but it could be faster, and from my own experience on Softduit it doesn’t always load that fast.    So I want to do even better, and more importantly do better more consistently.

Then run the pingdom test. This will be the tool that you will utilize to make incremental changes and improvements to your load time one area and file at a time in your wordpress configuration, plugin configuration and your artisteer generated theme.  (this will work for other themes as well, but I do not know if the optimization tools (3 & 4)   will work as well.)

Note Pingdom also displays some general information further down the page, don’t neglect this information!

You can see that Pingdom is telling me that this same site is loading in 23.1 seconds!  That’s a big difference from 1.54 seconds.

Why the discrepancy? Time to respond to initial request

When I first hit the button to start the test or a user hits the link to my site or the refresh button, an attempt to connect to the softduit server is initiated.

In this test the green area

represents the time it takes for any bit of data to be sent back from  the server.  During this green area, nothing has actually started to load, but it is included in the total measurement of time for pingdom.  In this example the green bar was about 16 seconds worth of time of the 23.1 in this test.

That gets us to the point where we can understand the tests.

Now we are ready to start improving those results.

We need to prioritize our improvement efforts in two areas: reducing file size on (1) large files and (2) slow loading files.  Sometimes these are the same files and sometimes they are not.

There are 3 areas we are going to focus on.

1. Reducing file size of javascript files
2. Reducing file size of .css files
3. Reducing file size of image files, which can include the images that make up an artisteer theme.

The biggest file slowing the home page load time is actually in the content, ergo loaded into a wordpress page and not part of the theme.  I do want to reduce its file size, so I download a copy from WordPress uploads, open it in Fireworks, and then reduce the quality of the .png file to something smaller.

This is a .png file, and I could make it a lot smaller with a .gif or .jpg but I want to continue with .png in this case.  That said, I can reduce the quality by converting it from .png32 to .png8 and by reducing the number of colors from 256 to 64.

Next, focus on your themes (artisteer theme’s) style.css file and the script.js file. These are the first two files circled in red above.  The script.js file is 10.4 KB and the style.css file is 26 KB.

After I compress the script.js file with the javascript Crunchinator tool and the style.css file with the CSS SuperScrub tool those files drop down to 8.3 kb and 22.7 kb, saving a total of 5.4 kb.  Not a huge savings, but a savings in a key area for the website to render.  In the case of the .png file, we were able to reduce that file size from 94.2 KB to 18.7 kb!  Definitely going to help on homepage loads.

When I run a new Pingdom speed test my load time has dropped from 23.11 seconds to 5.2 seconds, but don’t get cocky and think your work is done yet, you can do more and the test is just a sample, it could spike up from time to time, we might have simply gotten lucky!

When you are working with the javascript tool, you basically copy the content of any given javascript file, paste it into the box and hit crunch.  Once it is done removing the extra spaces, line breaks, etc, you copy the remaining code and paste it back into your original (backed up) file and upload it back up to your site.

So after I optimized the css on 2 plugins and the javascript on the same plugins (contact form 7 and the sliding panel plugin), I saw a .2 second boost in speed.

Every bit helps, and keep in mind that some samples of your sites speed will be different than others.  On any given query things may load faster or slower for you or your visitors.  On a fast load, you may not notice 0.2 seconds, but on a slow load where someone is coming in on a slower internet connection, that 0.2 second savings might actually be a 1 or 5 or 10 second savings.

Reduce css color codes from 6 to 3 characters

Every little byte helps, so if you can reduce your color codes in your css file down, that can help load time as well.  If you have a color that repeats through your theme of #FFFFFF or #000000 these relatively generic color codes can be simplified to #FFF or #000.

You can run a find and replace on your Artisteer style sheet and update a number of these items.

After making just the simple find and replace substitution in the primary style sheet, I was able to remove another 0.1 seconds even though my CSS file size didn’t seem to change visibly at the kb level.

Don’t forget when you are designing themes in Artisteer that if you choose colors that can be reduced to 3 characters they will take up less space.  Use fewer images, icons, glares, gradients etc and that too will reduce both the size of your image files but possibly also the number of images too!

Optimize the Artisteer Theme Images, especially the .png images!

So after all of the big items, I next went through and hit the largest 4 images generated by the Artisteer theme, the Button.png Header Footer and the Page-bgGlare.png files.

I opened each of them up in Fireworks and change them from a 32 bit color file to an 8 or 16 bit file, resaved them and loaded them up and cut out another 59 kb and 0.5 seconds too!

UPDATE: Today (3/9/10) I worked with a wordpress plugin called Smush.it (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-smushit/) !  It basically helps to squeeze down the file size of images in your wordpress library already.  This is much faster than downloading images into fireworks and individually optimizing those images.  It may not optimize the images as much as possible, but if you are pressed for time or want to do a good first pass, I found it to be very useful.

The downside to Smush.it is that you have to Smush every image individually, which creates a lot of button pushes and page refreshes. TIP! I found it faster to Right click and open in a new Tab on each of the Smush.It links in my wordpress media library.  I was then able to process multiple images at the same time.

Now, there is a lot more, I can do and will do, but this should help you make some more progress.

Remember, Artisteer simply helps you make a theme easier, like any website, it is then up to YOU to make the most of that site, optimize it and get better and better results.

Even more resources on improving your website load time

14 Other Resources on Speeding up WordPress

1. 38 ways to optimize and speed up your WordPress blog
2. CSS: Use Shorthand Hex Colors
3. 15 Ways to Optimize CSS and Reduce CSS File Size
4. Yahoo! YUI Compressor
5. Speed up your website: Part One
6. How-to: Optimize your site for speed
7. How to Enable the Default WordPress Object Cache
8. 4 Simple Ways To Speed Up WordPress
9. Speed up and clean up your WordPress!
10. 5 Tips to Help Your Slow or Sluggish Blog or Web Site (Wordpress Especially)
11. Deleting excess records in your WordPress database
12. WordPress on Speed: 17 Tweaks to Accelerate your WP
13. The 3 Easiest Ways to Speed Up WordPress
14. WordPress Optimization: Control When Plugins Are Loaded

Related posts:

1. Optimize Artisteer WordPress Theme’s H1/H2 Title Tags for SEO
2. How to Upgrade a Theme to Work with WordPress 3.0 (Alpha 1.0) using Artisteer
3. WordPress Theme Design Contest – Win a Free Artisteer License

Vertical Menus for WordPress or other CMS systems like Drupal, Joomla etc

You can essentially run two menu systems with Artisteer now (at first glance).

In the image example above within the Artisteer design environment I have the option of both a horizontal menu and a (new) vertical menu. 

No idea yet how that will be managed in WordPress as I haven’t exported one of these puppies yet, but that’s coming up next!

Category Driven Menus

Update – I just heard through the forums that not only have vertical menus been added, but now category driven menus are possible.  There appear to be binary options for this.

• You can either have a Category based menu OR a Page based menu in the Horizontal menu or in the Vertical Menu.
• You can have a category in the horizontal and a Page based in the vertical or vice versa.
• You can NOT have a category AND a Page based menu in the vertical at the same time.
• You can NOT have a category AND a Page based menu in the horizontal at the same time.

All that said, this is just the post export (standard) options.  There are probably some easy ways to hack some additional combinations into a theme after the fact

Flash Header Support for WordPress Theme Design

There is also flash headers support for WordPress themes now.  I can add some very basic animation templates that Artisteer includes with the software, or if I have an .flv file I can import it into the theme header.

I’ve tried building flash banners using Camtasia to create .flv files that I then import into Artisteer 2.4, which worked very well!

Changing a Template from one System to Another (Ergo WordPress Theme to Blogger or Drupal)

Here’s a nice cool upgrade option.  If you have designed yourself a nice little template in say WordPress and you want to use the same exact design in Drupal or Blogger or Joomla or DotNetNuke or just an HTML page (for like a WP page template with modifications!) you can now do this with a click of the mouse (ok 2-3 clicks).

After you have the design you like, just change template type.  Then save file as something else if you don’t want to lose your original theme/template etc and you are off to the races. 

If you have a website powered by WordPress and you have a blog powered by Blogger, you could then easily cobrand the sites to look very similar as one working example.  Gonna have to ruminate on some additional practical applications.

Extending Free Upgrade License

For just over a year now, I have received free upgrades to Artisteer.  That’s part of the license.  Buy Artisteer and you get free upgrades for a year.  When I first picked up Artisteer in November of 2008, they were just moving to beta version 0.8 I believe.  1.6 versions later or from my perspective about 20 improvements, updates and upgrades later, it was now time for me to update my license.

For $59.95 I purchased another year of Artisteer upgrades, and now I’m cranking through the possibilities with 2.4.

In case you are wondering, it only took moments for my order to process and my old license became good for upgrades all over again.  There is a huge amount of value in this program, but every time I download another free upgrade (yeah I paid for it, but most software companies don’t give away free upgrades at all), it feels great and puts a smile on my face.  In total, I’ve invested just short of $200 in this software over the course of about 15 months, and I have earned a return on that investment of about 100x. 

You can check your own
upgrade subscription status here.

Artisteer Discount Code/Link

If you would like to get a 5% discount on a new Artisteer license (home/education or standard) feel free to use my referral link http://www.artisteer.com/?p=brett

UPDATE Artisteer 2.4 beta was updated to Beta 2 in Mid March and then to Release Candidate on 3-22., the items below detail bugs I found with Beta 1 and shared with the team that went into improvements in Artisteer Beta 2 and ultimately the full release out of Beta.

The following bugs are gone. 

Artisteer 2.4 Beta bugs I’ve identified so far Update And Work arounds to design a WordPress theme successfully

Note this is still just a beta, the rc should be available soon.  The beta has a lot more customization options if you have the full standard version of Artisteer.

I did encounter a few issues.

1. I opened a previously existing theme file and the 2.4 beta version added textures (where none previously existed) to the Sidebar header blocks and to the menu bar and menu buttons.  UPDATE 2-10 – This has been reported to Artisteer, they have been able to recreate this issue in this beta version of Artisteer 2.4 and they are working on it!
2. It also changed my sidebar background color, which may not be a bug, but just a guess as I think the ability to customize this might not have been available or at least not to this level of detail before. UPDATE 2-10 – This has been reported to Artisteer, they have been able to recreate this issue in this beta version of Artisteer 2.4 and they are working on it!
3. It also took sidebar icons and moved them to the far left of the block, and I do not have an option to adjust any offset now. (there is an offset option between the icon and the text, but not between the icon and the left side of the bar.
   1. 
   2. Update 2-10 – After speaking with Artisteer, they indicated a method for fixing/adjusting these settings.  I will mention that from a usability perspective this is not as intuitive as most areas of Artisteer and I have suggest they reconsider menu navigation slightly.  Regardless to make this adjustment (ergo to move the icon further over) . . .
   3. Go to Sidebar Select Header-> Hover over Text (not Icon) – then Click Font Options
   4. 
   5. Now go to the paragraph tag, and identify the number of pixels in the left indentation, this will move the icon and the text to the right of it over by however many pixels you select
   6. 
   7. Hit OK and you are done. 
4. Separately, I see a new bug that was partially buggy in 2.3, but not terribly noticeable.  Its now partially fixed, but more noticeable than it used to be.  Notice the category drop down box, in the 2.4 beta version on the left it extends outside the div tags of the left sidebar 1.  In artisteer 2.3, it was simply chopped off, so you couldn’t actually see the drop down.  Basically this form option needs to auto size to the appropriate width allowed by the css file for the sidebar in question.  UPDATE 2-10– This has been reported to Artisteer, they are looking into this issue, which in many ways is an issue driven by WordPress functionality.  They are contemplating some work arounds in Artisteer that will help correct the WordPress display functionality until better WordPress logic comes to exist.
5. 

If you notice any other bugs with this or other versions of Artisteer in beta or not, let me know with a comment or contact Artisteer directly.  They are very responsive to bug reports and getting them fixed in future upgrades! 

Related posts:

1. Greatest WordPress Theme Generator Now Available for Macs!
2. Can’t Drag Widget into Sidebar 2 on Artisteer Designed Theme?
3. Optimize Artisteer WordPress Theme’s H1/H2 Title Tags for SEO

Videos of the WP theme design presentation in 3 parts

Update – Part 3 is now fixed and working

Getting setup and going with the presentation was a little haphazard so the presentation wasn’t as polished as similar versions I delivered in Birmingham, Las Vegas and Savannah, but the audience had a lot of good questions, and I didn’t mind the change up.  It actually helped me quite a bit get a better feeling for those areas of the presentation that are probably more important for people learning to design WP themes for the first time.

Related posts:

1. WordCamp Birmingham 2009 Presentation Slides – Design Your First WordPress Theme in Minutes
2. Barcamp Chattanooga – Brett Bumeter Design a WordPress Theme in 10 Minutes
3. Greater Charlotte Area WordPress Meetup – How to Design a WP Theme

I was introduced to the After the Deadline plugin while helping people at the Genius Bar.  After the Deadline is a great plugin that does grammar checking and spell checking of wordpress posts and pages.  This is no simple tool, it performs contextual checking of grammar and spelling at a very high and accurate level.

WordPress comes with a built in spell checker these days, but its not to powerful.  After the Deadline is a plugin that has been picked up by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com.

I was also re-introduced to the Shopp ecommerce plugin for WordPress.  These days there are several WordPress plugins that provide ecommerce capabilities either as a bolt on plugin or as a conduit to another ecommerce plugin like OScommerce.  Shopp provides a number of great features as an ecommerce tool which include but are not limited to

• Easy to install WordPress plug-in
• Bolt-on e-commerce functionality, just install and activate
• Works out-of-the-box with any theme (quality may vary)
• 2Checkout.com (included)
• PayPal Website Payments Standard (included)
• PayPal Express Checkout (included)
• Google Checkout (Lvl 2 Integration) (included)^†
• PayPal Website Payments Pro (available add-on, US & UK only)^†
• Handles multiple product images with easy drag-and-drop sorting
• Support for selling digital & physical products and donations
• Export orders and customers into Tab, CSV and Excel formats
• Export orders for import into Intuit QuickBooks
• Search engine optimized shopping pages (product name and category in the title, semantic markup, alt/title attributes set, <meta> keywords/description)
• Built-in smart categories provide easy ways to highlight: new product additions, featured products, bestselling products, on sale products, random products, even related products for cross-selling
• Standards-compliant mark-up output (targeting XHTML 1.0 strict)
• Setup free shipping discounts
• Promote overstocked items with buy X get Y free promotions
• Apply any of your discount options using promo/coupon codes

Shopp is not a free plugin, it costs about $55.  As compared to the WP-Ecommerce plugin, which is free at a basic level and has multiple add on components to make it shine.  That said, the total price adds up to about the same amount.

Related posts:

1. The Essential Plugins for Using WordPress as a CMS
2. WordCamp Boston 2010
3. How to Design a WordPress Theme – Unconference WordCamp Boston