The one criticism of WordPress when compared to its peers (i.e Drupal, Joomla) is the lack of content customization from within the admin panel. If you are a designer it doesn’t really matter, but for others this poses a serious problem to using WordPress as true content management software.

Thankfully, many points of criticism have been addressed in the latest version, WordPress 3.0, which has taken big leaps towards becoming a full fledge CMS. Below are some key new features:

• Custom Post Types – Easily create unique templates for various types of content.
• Menu admin – Now users can easily manage navigation bars directly through the Wp-admin panel – change order, names of links, and easily create advanced drop-downs.
• Background/header admin – Users now have the ability to quickly change the header and background images directly through the admin panel.
• New template files – Templates can easily be created to address specific authors, tags, and single posts.
• Multi-site management – Manage multiple WordPress installs from one admin.

If you already have a build of WordPress installed, then you should be able to easily update from within the admin panel. Others can check out their hosting panel or go directly to wordpress.org.

And like always, if you need help installing WordPress 3 on to your website, then let us help.

While some of the ideas are outdated now, the concepts are still the same. Also, there may be some broken links in these reports.

Report 1 – Site Starter

Report 2 – Banking of Adsense

Report 3 – Building an Email List

Obviously, the higher the rate the better.

The goal that every website owner, designer, and marketer continue to work on is finding better ways to keep inching that conversion rate higher and higher.

Simple factors like color, copy, and location of the call to action can drastically impact the rate of success (positively and negatively).

Below is an example of one of ASANT Media’s project’s, Chart Pattern Manifest, squeeze page that has a 44% conversion rate. Again, in other words, there is a 44% chance the user will sign up to the list when they visit the site.

To some 44% might seem low, but industry average for email lists are usually around 10-20%.

So what makes this particular squeeze page better?

Over the last couple of months, we have been testing out different formats, schemes, and copy material, below are some tips we have taken away to creating a compelling squeeze page.

1. Make it short – When you are giving something away for free, there shouldn’t be too much selling needed. If your offer is actually good, then a few sentences should suffice.

In our CPM example, you can see we pretty much summed everything up in the title of the page.

2. Make the form stand out – We found the best positioning for a form to be above the fold and to the right. It also helped to make the textfields larger and have the labels in a different font and color from the general text.

In our CPM example, we put the form labels in a green Georgia font and created large textfields and submit button (labeled ‘subscribe’).

3. Social proof – Everybody likes to be part of something. If you already have a signficant amount of users as part of your list, community, or whatever, then show it off.

In our CPM example, we simply threw up a counter of users subscribed to our service.

4. Identify persona – We tested this item a couple times. Is it important to let people know who is behind the product? We found it was important to create that relationship and let users know we aren’t hiding anything.

In our CPM example, we put “created by TheWildInvestor.com” in the first sentence. Even if users don’t know what that is they can check.

It is important to constantly test and tweak design factors when it comes to sales/squeeze pages to see what works best with your specific audience.

Below is an example of an itinerary of our design process that includes design creation and CMS integration.

1. The Idea

First and foremost, you have an idea. It may be vague or a very detailed idea. Either way, we will take your idea and create a strategic plan that will best execute your idea.

Generally, we give clients a simple questionnaire that will help us get to the bottom of what you are looking to get out of your website. Once we know this, we can construct a plan around it.

2. Wireframes

Now that we have all your needs and wants down, it is time for us to get to the drawing boards, while you go back to work on making your business bigger and better. We will craft together what we call wireframes. These are simply blueprints of how the website will look and highlight any features that may be used.

We will continue to go back to the drawing board until you see something you like.

3. Coding

Once we get the okay on all the wireframes, it is time to get under the hood. Based on your needs, we will implement the right content management system (CMS) within the selected design. A CMS is basically the admin panel for the content of your website.

Through the CMS you will be able to add and edit content without having to dig into any web coding, which will save you money from having to take on some technical guru to do that work.

4. Walkthrough

When all the coding is complete, your website is basically done. We will walk you through all the features, teach you how to manage the site yourself, and shares some tips on how to market your new website. If everything is to your liking, then we release the website into your hands and let you do what you best – make money.

5. Follow-up

We like to maintain a working relationship with our clients, so at anytime should you have questions, you are always welcome to contact our support team.

Web Hosting – Sounds like a no brainer, but, believe it or not, many people have no idea what web hosting is or how to go about getting it.

Simply put, web hosting is your site’s home. It is where all your files are stored. As technology improves the cost of hosting is quickly getting cheaper and cheaper, and major differences among competitors generally comes in the form of 3rd party services that are offered. See our recommended web hosting services.

Domain Name – Every legitimate business needs their own .com. Without it, the only way to visit your website is by remembering its IP address. Nowadays, many web hosting services offer a free domain with purchase, so be on the lookout for those deals. Why you need an unique business name.

Depending on how big you expect your website to be, consider purchasing .net and .org versions of your domain name as well as any short-forms or alternate representations of your doman name. It could save you from potential copiers down the road.

By ensuring you have these items before meeting with any designers, it could save money and should make the whole web design experience much smoother.

Whether it looks good or not, coding your site 100% in flash basically does more harm than good.

For those unfamiliar with how web coding and design works, there are basically two form of sites: flash and non-flash. Take the following example to help distinguish the difference:

Compare two identical parks: Park 1 is trapped within a glass box (flash site); Park 2 is not (non-flash site).

Which park do you think people will go to? Obviously the one not in a glass box because people can go into the park and interact with all the amenities it has to offer. Nobody just wants to look at the park just from the outside. This is exactly the effect flash has on a site.

1. Search engine spiders can’t read it.
2. Usability for readers is just horrendous.
3. There are no back buttons and no right click options.

Overall, the functionality and usability of flash sites are completely pointless and not solving our main problems.

Moreover, the overall design appeal of flash sites tend to be annoying to most users as well. In today’s internet world we have trained our head to think flashy, animated objects are spam. If we add all these things in our flash site, then what good does it do?

When flash is good to use. While I never believe flash is good except for some game or unique marketing campaign, there are coding techniques that allow flash to take on characteristics of non-flash sites; however, that requires some deep pockets, which is never really good on our bottom line.

In the whole online marketing/make money online field, you can never stop learning and adapting. Because so much of it deals with how people use the internet, understanding social tendencies is a great concept to grab a hold of.

There is definitely no shortage of business models to make money online. Of the top of my head, you can sell an information product, create a membership site, run a blog, or create a review site. My latest project, Stock Brokerage Reviews (SBR), fits under the review site category.

What is a review site?

This type of site focuses around one main topic, and just spits out reviews of similar products. Obviously, in this case, SBR focuses on stock brokerage reviews. They are great SEO content builders and highly optimized because most visitors of this type of site have come for a specific reason.

On the backend, money is made by using affiliate links to refer people from your review site and make commission once they sign up or take the necessary action. Check out my  recommended affiliate networks. So if you can get affiliate links for majority of your review subjects, then you are likely to get a conversion regardless of the users choice, thus, giving the option of choice to the user.

The key to a good review site

Probably the biggest factor of a good review site is to be completely neutral. Don’t give a bad review just because you don’t have an affiliate link for something. Its best to develop some type of review format or template and just plug away. This keeps things aligned through the site.

Create SEO how-to content. While the reviews themselves are great SEO content, create solid how-to content. For example, on SBR I have articles that tell people what they need to sign up for a stock brokerage, how to sign-up for one, and so on. Odds are that people searching for those topics will like to see the reviews as well.

Allow some type of social integration. Whether it be through comments, some sort of rating plugin, or social network integration, try to give voice to visitors. If readers can see other perspectives, then it will make them more likely to take action.

Yes, this site is barely 1 month old, but it has already created over a hundred dollars in commissions, while distributing valuable content to visitors. I still have some tweaks and addition to make to the site, but overall it has definitely been a good experience so far.

With any business, revenue is usually generated in an exponential format… meaning your money grows exponentially over time. While you make a couple cents in the first month, the next month could bring a couple dollars, followed by a couple hundred, and so on. The ability to see passed the rough patch and keep you eye on the end goal is what separates successful ventures from fallen one.

Many times though our long-term revenue is not effected by our work, but the decisions we make for the short-term.

Probably one of the quickest and easiest ways to make money online is by selling your site. Through sites like Flippa, there are many ways to do it. Sites can sell for as low as couple dollars all the way up to tens of thousands. Pretty much a decent design and some content will easily fetch you between $100-200. If you start to build a portfolio of sites, that money can be very enticing because what difference does one less money make, right… WRONG!

But how do we know when we should sell or hold?

To anybody an instant $100 seem rather enticing, but you have to remember that that $100 is all you will make from that particular site. How much more money could you make if you held onto it a little bit longer? Are there any other tweaks and changes you could make to squeeze every penny out?

Even if you don’t have enough time, what happens if you could work on it a couple minutes each week? A measurement to consider when deciding to sell or not, is “did you take it as far as you can go?” If there is nothing left for you to do or you don’t know what else to do, then it could be time to move on.

Point is… experienced greatly in the make money online business… at the beginning, the amount of money you make compared to the hours you put in might make a child laborer look like a billionaire. When we aren’t making money, any amount looks good; however, remember to consider your long-term outlook before making any final decisions because it could end up meaning less money overall.

Take a second to think about this…

At some point of your business lifespan, you can change everything… except the company name. You can always change the product, logo, rebrand, and so on, but you can never change your company’s name. If anything, you have to create something else under another identity if you want to ditch your name.

For the most part people understand this, but because of that they are scared to be creative when choosing a name, rather they are looking for what I call a descriptive name (i.e. Bob’s Dry Cleaner, The Electronic Shack, etc).

While fundamentally there is nothing wrong with that, the truth is that a boring name does nothing for your brand awareness. Brand awareness is all about separating yourself from the competition. When the consumer is faced with similar options, will your name stand out from the rest?

Take a second to think about some of the popular business and product names today…

You’ve got Pepsi, Gatorade, Bounty, Google, Facebook, and Twitter. I could go on all day, but you get the point. The name of your company doesn’t matter. Its about your product and overall marketing exposure. Years before any of these companies or products were around you would have never known what they were or do, but now these names are almost synanomous with their use.

Instead of saying “go search it,” now they say  “Google it.”

Regardless of the paper towel being used, people say “get me a Bounty.”

To sum it up, the determinant of your business’s success is not about how clear your name is. A solid name should be unique and bold. In the end the product should make the name, and not the other way around.

The allure of starting something like a blog is enticing to most because they can make money without have to expense really any of their own. While you can relatively build and grow your site without have to spend to much extra, how do you know when and what to spend money on?

We need to first look at the essentials that we have to spend money on: Hosting and domain. These are annual payments and combined can cost you somewhere between $80-$100. Not bad especially when you consider of starting an actual brick-and-mortar store. Check out a bunch of cheap hosting companies that offer free domains with web hosting plans.

The next item you will probably need to spend money on is some sort of email management service. I personally use Aweber. Remember that the longer you wait to get your email list setup, the more potential leads you will lose. Make sure to do your research before choosing a service because it is almost near impossible to carry over your subscribers from one service to another. Generally these services will run you about $230 per year. See the benefits of having a mailing list.

So together with your hosting, domain, and email management service, the essentials of a site are pretty much covered and it will only cost you around $300 per year.

While many people already know about the top 3 items, the problem gets to the “smaller” items. Services and products that you could really do without, but could possibly do better with.

Examples of these items include: website design, software, hardware for videos and other media recording tools, and advertising.

Before we can really decide whether we need these items, we must first run a cost analysis…

Especially when your profit margin is narrow, people are always quick to say no to spending; however, this is kind of thinking will stunt any growth within your site. Instead we must weigh the costs with potential profits.

For example, if you know nothing about designing a site and you try to put something together that looks like a little kid made it, then is that really good for your business? Rather we must look at the benefit of spending a little more money on a design or WordPress theme compared to trying to make the site yourself. Obviously it might cost you more money overall; however, it will most likely bring in more money than had you designed the site yourself. Plus it is only a one time fee, so once you make up the difference the rest is profit.

Rather than trying to avoid spending, the key should be to finding the best deal. There are tons of people that will offer you designs or various locations to find cheap high-quality WordPress themes. Do a little bit of research and find the best value.

So the next time you come across a potential new cost, do not just throw the idea out the window. Think about the bottom line. Yes, you may have to put up more money, but will it bring in more than the current format?