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Tips To Market Your Book On Facebook

By Samkit Shah

Video Summary

In this video, Brett Bumeter seeks Warren Whitlock’s expert comments and discusses the best approach to market your book through Facebook to get effective results.

    Some pointers from Warren’s advice on how to approach promoting your book –

  • Social media is not a medium to broadcast and sell something
  • What comes to a user’s mind is that matters when he or she is looking for information
  • You need to get known and be attracting those people who actually want to read your book
  • As an author you should be available to the readers and create a two-way medium
  • You should have a presence where people are already talking about your subject
  • Collaboration is an effective way of getting the word out
  • Finding the group of people which are interested in your niche is a personal touch and very important to promote your book
  • Adding a persona is highly recommended wherein in spite of the non-existence of a real person, users get to engage with the author behind the works
  • People like to talk to a person rather than a page

Warren goes on to give different analogies explaining what’s best while marketing your book. He explains an example of Betty Crocker drawing comparisons about how one should take a similar approach. It was not a great experience creating fan pages on Facebook for Warren, but he recommends that approach as a personal choice. Most importantly, he suggests being available for the readers to engage with and being represented in all social mediums like Twitter and LinkedIn to add the professional touch.

Learn How To Revamp Your Old Content Using YouTube Videos

By Samkit Shah

Video Summary

Through this video, Brett Bumeter and Warren Whitlock, provide information on how YouTube videos can help a user revamp the older content to give it a fresh perspective.

As Brett indicates, over a period of time, one evolves as a blogger, writer and content producer. There could be plenty of information which is old but yet ranks higher. Adding a YouTube video to that content will give new traction driving more traffic.

    Brett goes on to explain a few advantages of adding videos, such as –

  • A video helps users better understand the content of an article
  • Including a video alongside your written content makes it an interesting blog post with a fresh new feel
  • The older articles get a new impression through a video enabling the user to review it even if it has been read before
  • Creates a new insight into your content and gives a visual appeal

Brett shares a few tips about how one can take advantage of adding such videos to revitalize their older content. He suggests having the content re-written to some extent, such as not to lose the ranking, and then add a video link to it. One can also add a video stating information about that old post, mentioning the year when you wrote that content. You can also portray the differences and observations over a period of time. Videos add a new vector to your old content and makes it look new and informative.

Filed Under: Client Tips
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Find Out How FAQ’s Can Improve Your Website

By Samkit Shah

Video Summary

In this video, Brett Bumeter and Warren Whitlock discusses as to how FAQs, which stands for Frequently Asked Questions, can help improve your website presence and engage users.

Brett explains that a regular user might not envision browsing the website and learning the content in a similar fashion as the owner designed it to be. Including a FAQ section helps prevent misconceptions and misunderstandings about the content of the website and goes on to make the user familiar with it.

    As per Brett, one should review the website pages, and figure out if there is any content which seems unclear and needs clarification. Adding a FAQ section at the bottom of the page helps the viewers in two ways –

  • It helps answer queries which the user might have before they decide to exit the website due to lack of information
  • It helps clear any doubts or discrepancies in terms of what the user’s perspective is about the content

Brett also mentions that adding the FAQ section improves SEO due to extra content written on your website. It helps Google better index and contextually “understand” your page. There are various plug-ins like “FAQ Plug-in” available which can help one create the FAQ section at the bottom of the page.

A user can entail the use of such a plug-in and create different FAQ sections pertaining to the about us, products, services and other categories. You need to type in the question, answer it and add a category. The plug-in will organize the FAQs as per the chosen category thus providing a pleasant browsing experience avoiding clutter.

Filed Under: Client Tips
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Importance Of Deep Links For SEO Purposes

By Samkit Shah

Video Summary

This video encompasses inputs from Brett Bumeter addressing Warren Whitlock’s query about how to find and create deep links within an article. Brett highlights a simple way of achieving the deep linking and goes on to indicate some of the advantages.

Brett explains that users do not always remember what content they wrote over an extended period of time, and thus creating and inserting deep links adds value to the article. The deep linking method holds good strong value from an SEO perspective too by linking your own stuff within your own site. He mentions using a related post plugin which puts images at the bottom of an article, but is terrible for SEO. One does not need these related images at the bottom of the article, but rather should have them appear mixed in within the context of your article.

    Brett enlists simple steps related to using a contextual related plugin –

  • Setup the plugin and let it run on your article
  • The plugin shall figure out what’s contextually related
  • It will then scan down to the bottom of the article and look at the couple of related articles that it found out
  • The plugin then will go back to your content and after hunting for the related keywords will insert links to the articles that it found out

This way of deep linking holds SEO value with a visual queue for images that people can browse and click. Another way of prioritizing would be to take help of Google analytics to monitor and evaluate the traffic on your site and articles. It will help you figure out which content to deep link within the deep link thus making the foundation stronger. Brett also suggests hiring a virtual assistant to get your entire site deep linked. This will have the user get to consume more related information and makes browsing your site a great experience and thus help you build reputation.

Why Should You Enable And Encourage Comments?

By Samkit Shah

Video Summary

In this video, Brett Bumeter questions the potential of why one should keep commenting enabled on one’s website or a blog. He is concerned about spam comments and contemplates whether it would be more beneficial to disable comment completely? Warren Whitlock addresses this query by bringing forward the advantages that are attached to having the functionality of comments alive.

    Warren encourages users to keep their website or blog open for other followers and readers to leave comments. Some of the benefits he mentions are –

  • Comments are a flow of informational activity which is of great use for search engine ranking
  • Commenting helps build a community of users who become true followers of your content and care enough to actually spend some time to leave back feedback
  • A genuine real user who leaves a comment, is considered a gem, a potential customer who would be worth getting in touch with if there exists an opportunity of interaction
  • Commenting helps build your network, get in touch with likeminded people, share contact information and further connect for work

    • He goes on to mention that as a user if you don’t care about people who comment on your content, or if you are not moderating the comments, or do not extend the courtesy of answering back by not paying attention to feedback, then you are inviting spam. Warren concludes with the thought that every writer who reads a comment is also excited to get back one too. So in order to be considered a thought leader in your niche, he recommends to take out time to comment and contribute as much as you can.

Recommended Social Sharing Plugins For Word Press

By Samkit Shah

Video Summary

This video enlists many social sharing options that Brett Bumeter presents and also describes some benefits of sharing content online as mentioned by Warren Whitlock.

Warren starts by expressing his concern about the Digg Digg toolbar and not being able to see the numbers on the toolbar and they float off the screen. He mentions trying to resize and couple of other solutions but without luck. He finds out that maybe it’s due to the number of buttons that he had which was creating a lot of outbound links thus messing the overall feel of the toolbar on different devices other than the computer.

Brett addresses this issue by emphasizing the concepts of responsiveness and adaption of different devices to different themes. Old models of the web used to take into account separate themes for different devices, whereas, the new models now uses an adaptive theme that re-sizes according to the device be it an iPad, a smartphone or a computer.

    Brett goes on to list some options of social sharing –

  • Sexy Bookmark – He recommends this as an old fashioned but very effective toolbar which is supported well. User has the option of inserting buttons at the top or bottom of the article and can have different display settings.
  • Social Widgets Plugin – This plugin allows a user to insert social buttons which are more like personal contact buttons enabling the user to connect with the author. This could be inserted as a widget into the sidebar or a header.
  • Studio Press Theme Framework – Brett mentions this having a plugin that allows a user to insert widgets into the menu system thus creating a responsive menu system.

Brett also suggests having the social tools in rotation thus not overwhelming the user with plenty of options and instead sticking to one option at a time and monitoring the experience to figure out the most used social sharing medium.

Warren emphasizes the advantages of having social sharing on your website to enable visitors to get the word out, share your content and thus making you reach out to a wider audience. He also describes an example of a game indicating two different approaches for sharing taking into consideration the user feedback.

Future In Depth and Comprehensive Review coming

We’re going through an extensive review of new social sharing plugins now.

 

Please consider subscribing to our blog at  to stay up to date and learn even more!

How to Record Video Shows using ooVoo

By Samkit Shah

Video Summary

This video displays how Brett Bumeter and Warren Whitlock record these video shows through ooVoo. They have tried Skype, Google Hangout and other software but finally decided on ooVoo to record the videos.

    Advantages –

  • Headshots are of the same size
  • Names above the headshots with the Twitter handle
  • Links can be embedded
  • Easy workflow for recording
  • Generates an AVI file and has ease of uploading to YouTube
  • Affordable pricing
    Disadvantages –

  • ooVoo does not offer a screen sharing while keeping the recording on
  • Undergoes the process of buffering up the recorded video, and works on it once the call ends

Brett and Warren discuss why overall ooVoo offers good value compared to other video recording tools.

Real Name vs Business name on Google Plus Accounts

By Samkit Shah

Video Summary

The video displays a discussion between Brett Bumeter and Warren Whitlock on the topic of whether someone should setup a Google Plus account with a personal name or a business name to start with.
Warren mentions that Google requires identifying your account with your real name. He also highlights that people are smart enough to figure out what’s real and what’s fake. He gives different analogies along with an example of Betty Crocker explaining how one can use a pseudo name.

Some takeaways from this discussion –

  • Anybody can create pages in Google Plus. Pages can be developed for characters, stories, movies and much more
  • Be authentic, be real
  • Create separate pages for characters, stories, personalities and keep your personal profile separate
  • Try to mix and match with your initials to create a unique identifier to make you stand out
  • Creating your unique ID enables you to be civil while posting comments and sharing your views

Warren recommends avoiding creating IDs with a same name as some famous personality or replicating their information. Instead if your information matches with someone already existent, one can play around with the initials or pseudo names to create a unique identity, domain name or even a twitter handle. Make sure to stick with what you create.

29 Booking Plugins for WordPress Websites (Video)- CLT WordPress Meetup Review

By Brett Bumeter

I’m writing this article about Booking Plugins in preparation for a meetup tomorrow (Friday, 18th of April).  Our local WordPress meetup group is going to try to take a look at several of these WordPress plugins for scheduling appointments or booking people and clients.

I wanted to pre-publish this list to share back with the group and after the Booking Plugin meetup on Google Hangouts, I’ll also share the video here too!

As these things go, this started out as a list of 15 Booking plugins, and has now grown to a list of 29 booking or reservation plugins and growing. Not all of these plugins are equal or up to date.  If you have had experience with any of these plugins, I’d love to here your opinions, pros, cons, warnings, hype, etc!  :)

Here are some of the Booking Plugins we are covering.  They are in the order of my tests on them.  This means some perspective may be subjective to my experience with previous scheduling plugins.

  1. Booking Calendar & Appointment Scheduler – formerly called Appointy Appointment scheduler - The Appointy service starts off with free levels.  Paid levels kick in at $9.99 per month which includes full unlimited connections to Google Calendar.  Email marketing and analytics kicks in to their packages at the $19.99 and $39.99 levels.  In general the plugin seems to be a very minor integration with WordPress, the real system is maintained on Appointy and the setup there is imho extensive in that you have to establish every element of your business in their system such that appointments can be booked there, people can be charged, payments processed etc.  It could very well be worth the functionality but for purposes of this review, I simply wanted to see the system in action in order to find out if it was worth the time investment and well, that didn’t seem possible!  Most of the complaints and one star reviews of the plugin (lots of positive and lots of negative not much in the middle) relate to the requirement to register to do anything. – My Rating – 1 Star Potential for 5 if I ever needed the full service, bonus weird point for offering a pole dancing scheduling category. That gave me a laugh.
  2. Booking Calendar - When I first activated this plugin, I thought, “Ok great, this is actually a plugin!”  Then I tried to get it to work. In the admin area, I liked what I saw.  Setup was relatively quick and easy with only one page of settings.  I had to create a page and click a new button on that page in the text editor to add my short code.  This became my calendar and booking page.  The calendar worked great, but there was no form to book anything!  I next went into widgets and was able to add a booking widget to my primary sidebar, but if I viewed this widget on the Booking page I created the two seemed to conflict.  Probably calling the same javascript twice or something.  I could now see a form but no calendar.  It was wonky and the FAQs on the propreitary plugin site were extensive.  I was able to add a fake booking and that brought me up short, because I could only schedule an entire day.  No hours of the day options.  That might work for an overnight stay at a hotel, but didn’t seem to cover all the other scenarios that the plugin professed to be able to handle in the service industry.  Somewhere in all of this I realized that this was the ‘free’ booking plugin and they also offered a paid version.  Their site is not easy to navigate, not even to buy, but eventually I found that the prices for the paid version range from about $175 – $999.  No subscriptions which is nice, but for $1k but those prices did not seem cheap!  My rating 3 on first impression, 1 on actual working function (because it didn’t)
  3. Acuity Scheduling - After my first two above, I was tepid at best about proceeding but the show must go on.  I activated Acuity and instantly saw that this was not a ‘real’ plugin either.  Acuity prompted me to include a shortcode with a link to my acuity account, so basically this is just an embed option (similar to Appointy).  They too offer a subscription plan starting off with a free plan for life.  The free plan is 1 account and there is no calendar sync option.  I have to admit their plans are simple and easy to understand.  For $10 you get calendar sync.  Plus you can do recurring appointments, which sounds handy.  At $19 per month you get to have unlimited location and staff, which must be a resource scheduling bump up.  At $10 you only get ‘single location/staff’.  Not sure what single staff means, maybe only one person can be scheduled as a resource at $10 a month.  I signed up.  I then had to create appointment types.  I opted for a free account and rapidly learn you cannot offer ‘classes’ on a free account.  No worries. Next I had to create forms, but the instructions provided no clue as to what these forms were for.  The example made them look like a poll?  As opposed to a form to get people to schedule something.  The form builder looked a bit old fashioned (think Contact form 7 as opposed to Gravity Forms).   I fumbled my way through not knowing why this was remotely important and then got to the ‘setting my availability’.  Once I did that on the Acuity site I was able to book myself for a sample and finally got to see where the forms came in.  So now I went back to the plugin, embedded my accuity url, and walla!  It doesn’t work for the free version!  :(  Thanks for that bait and switch accuity.  Apparently you have to upgrade to be able to use the WordPress Plugin.  My rating: The service looked like a 3 for functionality, 4 for simplicity, and 1 for a plugin that duped me.
  4. Appointment Booking and Online Scheduling by vCita - After the first 3, I really felt like I would never see an actual booking plugin work, but I’d settle for a freemium service that worked with an average plugin at this point.  So far Bookings Plugins were pushing my expectations lower and lower and lower.  The wordpress plugin settings looked a lot more high tech with vCita (no idea how to say that out loud btw).  I also learned that this company really likes hover over tips.  So when in doubt hover over something and it might tell you what’s going on.  they offer settings to query people for help while they are viewing your website with a pop up.  It is very slick, and I liked the setup interface. Much better than I could have designed in css myself given a week or less.  Now so far I have to say that the vCita wizards for setting up anything are definitely the slickest, cleanest and easiest to unerstand.  Plus they are short and to the point and do not make me feel like I am repeating a semester on ancient Roman Trust Law and its evolution in modern tax policy. Not intimidating at all.  Along the way, I definitely felt like their plugin, widgets etc would class up my website and customer experience significantly.  However, this is a freemium/free trial paid service as well.  They do offer a free service.  The paid service starts at $15 a month or if you prepay for a year thats $9.75 a month and includes calendar syncing and other items.  At the $10 price point this was the first one that seemed worth that price.  I could see clients converting with the forms they offered because they looked and worked that well.  They also offer cool options to schedule from email signatures and Facebook among other things.  On the negative side, this really isn’t much of a wordpress booking plugin, again more of a quick patch integration of their very good online service into WordPress. Better than the others I had seen but just being honest not a true WordPress plugin.  That’s OK, it doesn’t have to be in all cases but in some it would need to be.  This is probably better (my first impression) for consultants and trainers and people that provide professional services, not so much for hotels, or service related industries like doctor’s offices or hair dressers etc.
  5. BirchPress Scheduler – Appointment Booking Calendar - this is the first plugin out of the box at a free level that I have used that ….. (are you ready for this)  It worked!  The setup instructions are almost nonexistent, but you can fumble your way through things pretty easily.  There is a pro version although it is not easy to find.  Prices range from $99 – $499 for different levels of the pro version, but the free version does work.  It is no frills, but it was pleasant to find one of these that did work.
  6. WebReserv Embedded Booking Calendar - This plugin requires that you sign up for their service first.  I did that, but couldn’t get any further.  The login I created did not work later and it would not reset my password, so on to the next! Update – I later found an activation email buried in my spam folder.  I clicked the link and was able to log in.  The plugin setup is essentially an iframe embed, but it did seem to work when I created a page.  The setup guide, reads like an Office 2003 support manual.
  7. BookingBug Booking Calendar Widget - this service does offer a free trial, but you have to sign up for a paid account to get the 14 day trial.  The wordpress plugin generates errors without signing up for the service, so I took a pass on this one.  BookingBug plans start at $20 a month and ramp up to $69.95 per month.
  8. innhand - they offer a free version that even allows bookings on Facebook.  The paid version seems to charge people at a rate of 2-5€ per room that you set up in the system.  Judging by their website and their ipad app, I suspect a lot of work went into this tool.
  9. Bookings - This is a plugin that does actually use WordPress.  It is not just an iframe embed or some other such minimal type of WordPress plugin.  It is powered by a service or tool by Zingiri.  They offer a free plan that is based on how many ‘bookings’ you might have in a month.  You can have up to 5 resources on the free plan and that combination seems like a good start for a free service.  The paid version starts at $9.99 per month.  In the WordPress admin area the service seemed to have potential.  It was a little tricky to find the short code to light up the plugin on an actual page on my site.  Once it was lit up, this plugin on my test site did not look terribly hot.  I only did a very quick walk through of the setup and in 10-12 minutes was able to get it working.  However, it was apparent that some css work and clean up and refinement would be needed before this plugin might be ready to show off to customers or clients.  It might be worth the time investment, let me know if you try it and what you can do with it if you do!  I’m rating this one a 3.5 overall because it does seem to work.  The .5 was for the wp admin area and I would have gone with a 4.0 if the it looked a little cleaner when displayed on my actual external page.
  10. EzyOnlineBookings - So far this is one of the better ‘services’ that I have seen.  The plugin itself is just a little difficult to activate.  In fact after you activate the plugin, it will not be connected to the EzyOnlineBooking service until you next setup a widget and enter your client id in the widget.  That is counter intuitive if you want to add a book now plugin to a page!  Regardless, the user interface on EzyOnlineBookings is one of the better and easier of the UI’s that I have seen when it comes to booking plugins, especially for professionals.  This plugin offers a short 7 day free trial and after that it is worthless as a freebie.  The paid version costs $99 for the first year and then $29/ year every year after.  As a benefit it includes both PayPal integration and Google Calendar integration.  That was something I really liked.  In general, I’d rate this a 4.5 out of 5.  If the plugin activation had been more obvious and less wonky, I’d have given it a 5!
  11. Booking Calendar Contact Form
  12. Appointment Booking Calendar
  13. WP Simple Booking Calendar
  14. AppointPress – Online Scheduling & Appointment Booking
  15. Booking.com Affiliate plugin – currently has not been updated since 3.3.2 but plugin author is working on responsive update in March of 2013

Other Booking related plugins

We will not cover either due to time or in some cases as they are too narrowly focused for this article include:

  1. Beds24 Online Booking
  2. Bookitme
  3. FLM Golf Booking – Has not been maintained for current versions of WordPress
  4. MP Booking – hostel and hotel booking last updated for WP version 3.2.1 at time of this article
  5. Booking Manager - almost a year since last update
  6. WP FEvents Book
  7. Lodgix.com Vacation Rental Listing, Management & Booking Plugin
  8. ScheduleMAX Online Scheduling

Freemium and Premium Booking and Reservation Plugins

  1. Event Espresso - A great plugin for events, ticketing and registration.  There are some aspects of this plugin that are similar to the concept of booking when it comes to say booking multiple people into a class or training session.
  2. Checkfront’s WordPress Online Booking Plugin - they also offer Facebook booking tools!
  3. Booking System PRO (on Code Canyon)
  4. Online Hotel Booking System (on Code Canyon)
  5. Rezgo Online Booking - last updated for WP version 3.3.2 at the time of this article
  6. BookFresh – Online Scheduling & Appointment Booking – claims support for over 100k businesses but plugin has not been updated in 199 days at time of this article.  The website bookfresh.com seems well put together.  There is a free plan, plus a free trial for the Business plan that runs about $19.95 per month.  They do offer syncing to Outlook, Google Calendar and ical!  Seems to be a full featured Booking System, but I’m not sure how much integration comes through on the WordPress side of things based on the lack of a recent update.  Bookfresh has a youtube channel, but no product demos, more of a sales pitch series created back in 2009.