Freelancing is helping businesses to move where the work force is cheap. You can’t compete with someone who can program a full month for 500$. In USA, you can barely live with that money. In India, with that amount of money you can live a year. You can compete only if you are more efficient and focused than others. But don’t worry, I have the solution for you.

With PHP Runner you can save time writing php code, you can improve the functionality of your website, create database driven forms in seconds. You can practically build a simple website in only 15 minutes, in the way you want it.

Maybe you were used to use the same text editor to do many things: simple text, php programming, mysql programming, java programming. The programming evolves and the same text editor that will do it all is not the best way anymore. You need specific text editor and generator for any programming language you are working with. Why to edit your text in a general text editor when you can have a dedicated php text editor ?

Here is a sample generated website build with PHP Runner:

And this is how the editor looks:

You have to click on the images to enlarge. As you can see in the second image, PHP Runner supports having the header, the footer and other elements on different pages.

You can learn more about PHP Runner here.

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2. Plugin to Add Google Analytics code to your wordpress pages
3. How to add widgets to your theme without hiding the current ones

I am a freelancer for over 7 years, with good periods and bad periods. There were many advantages and good moments, and there were  some dissapointments too. In this article I will go trough most important disadvantages, but before I want to make a quick review of some of the biggest advantages of the freelancing. 

I like freelancing because I love freedom. During the 16 years I spend in school and university I always felt as being trapped into a prison. I didn’t liked school, or better said I hated school, and I still hate it when I remember. Whenever I think of something from my childhood there are some bad memories from school that comes out. I hate that I can’t look back and enjoy the happy moments in my early times. Despite I was good at some classes, and despite I liked most of them ( except maybe French class ), I hated because I didn’t  liked what they were trying to teach me, what they thought it is important, and mostly, that they wanted me to do things whenever they wanted, never when I wanted.

I had a fixed job for 2 times in my life. And it was bad, so bad that in both cases it didn’t lasted more than 3 months. I can’t explain exactly why I wanted to leave, because it was a feeling from inside. I started to feel exactly how I felt in school, doing things that I don’t agree with, during a time when I wanted to do something else.

Freelancing saved my life so far. Even while I was employed I did some freelancing on the side. With much less time I’ve done more money doing things that I liked to do. It is not that simple at it looks because I had to spend a lot of time looking for the right jobs for me, but I never considered this as a lost time. It was a pleasure to read what others are looking for because I was able to see what other people are looking for so I can keep the track with the market.

If I do everything right, I can work 1 week to make money that I usually do in a month. In the rest of the time I can learn something new, I can rest or I can travel. Usually I take work to cover a longer period, but never to fill up all my space. I always have time to learn or try something new.  I don’t live to make money. I make money to live the life I want. Some people may suck at time management. In such cases, maybe freelancing is not a good option. I am not a time management expert, but I can deal with it. If I don’t want to wake up in the morning to work on a project there is no problem, I will stay up late to do it. If I have a lot of time and no idea what to do then I work more on the projects. If there is no project to work on then I spend the time looking for new ones.

Freelancing learned me almost everything I know, from programming to internet marketing. Browsing the available jobs made me curious about things that people were asking for. I was later searched them and if I liked I learned the basics so I can apply to that kind of jobs.

I think it is enough with the good side. I wanted only to take into account some advantages but it seems that there are a lot and it took more space than needed. Now, I will go trough the disadvantages. It is not intended to scary people off freelancing. If you are asking my opinion you should definitely try freelancing, it can improve your life a lot, but you can’t expect that it is like not working at all. If you think that it should be perfect, and you find out that it isn’t you might be disappointed. Freelancing can be stressful, overwhelming in some points, boring in others, and some people can’t do it, this is why you have to be aware of the downsides so you can overcome them and build a life around freelancing.

1. Very high competition.

The best thing about freelancing is actually an advantage for the business owners. They can work the same with one from United States or someone from India. The distance does not matter anymore. This means that when you get on the market you compete with people all around the world. Most of them will want to do the work for less than you do. This is by far the worst disadvantage of being a freelancer. Most people, when they realize that there are so many freelancer are deciding that it is not worth doing this and they leave before trying.

They are right, you can’t match their prices, but let me tell you something: they can’t match your quality. I’m an not talking only about the quality of the code that you write, but the quality of the service you offer as a whole. Because you asked for more money, you can spend more time talking with the client and having a better understanding of what he wants to do. You can talk with him and understand his goals so you can make suggestion. Let him believe that you are the right person to do this job. The truth is that most buyers have bad experience with cheap freelancers that are asking for almost nothing, they want to get away from those. If you ask for more you have a higher change to be selected, and more time to produce some quality work. If you go into their pricing war, you will lose it. There is always someone that is willing to do the same thing as you do for less.

2.  You have to spend a lot of time looking for projects.

When you first start out as a freelancer you don’t have connections, you don’t have any portfolio to show. If you are quiting a day job you migh have some friends or old clients that you can take away, but this applies only to few of the new freelancers. Most freelancers are getting into the field with nothing behind.

The portfolio is also important. If you are not in a rush for money to live, you can spend few weeks on this step, and it will highly improve the chances to get good projects. Learn more in your field. For example if you are a freelancer web developer, spend some time learning wordpress for example. If you are a web programmer but never worked with wordpress it will be harder to get wordpress related jobs. Then do a project on your own to prove your expertise. Once you have the project completed you double your chances to have a project awarded, at the price you want.

If you want to spend less time looking for projects and more time working, you must know that there is one thing more important than your ratings or your portfolio: the proposal. If you think that the more projects you bid the more chances you have and you just copy and paste your proposal you will waste your time, you have few chances to get a project and if you get one, it might not be suitable for you or underpaying because you only scanned the requirements. Spend some time to understand what he wants, what are his goals and don’t forget to include this into the proposal. Tell him how you plan to approach the solution, even if you know that he don’t understand. He will think that you really know your stuff and you will have more chances winning that project.

3. You will live with the fear of not getting paid.

Despite most clients have no intention to rob you, there are some of them that this is why they are working with freelancers: they want to get something away for free. If you find your clients on a good freelancing website like Freelancer, Elance, or vWorker then you are pretty safe. They have escrow systems that will prevent them from fooling you. If you find your clients in other places, then I advise you to use an escrow system, although it does not guarantee that you will get all the money for your work. How is that ? Well, this leads us to the next disadvantage.

4. All the clients will try to make you work more than agreed upon.

Not always the requirements are clear, or the client may have something in mind but he is unable to understand what he wants. Because the payment is on the project, some clients will try to make you think that it will be less work to do, while they know that the project is bigger. They will use phrases like: “Someone experienced will do this in less than 2 hours.” or “It is an easy job for someone who knows what he is doing.”. If you see phrases like this in the job description, it is a flag to stay away or to charge much more. If you charge less you will end up doing much more work that you expected.

In most cases, the client will intentionally have you do more work than you want. You will tend to do the work because you may thing that if you don’t do it you will not get paid, or that he will give you a bad rating. If you are in one of these situations, my advice is to try to do everything to get out. Don’t work with that client again. If you manage to get out of it with minimal loses, don’t think that you might be doing better next time. He will always push you to do more.

It is not only about the money. You can actually ask more if he adds up things that were not discussed. If you find yourself in this situation, ask for more money. There are 2 outcomes of this: the client pays you what you ask or he cancel the added stuff. If you think that there are only small issues don’t worry, he will give you more and more until you decide to stop it.

Added stuff will take more time to finish the project, and you might not have time to finish other projects and will screw with your time management which will lead to the next issue.

5. Projects may take more time than expected.

When you work on a day job, if a project takes more time than expected and it is not your fault then it is not your problem. You go home when the work hours are done or you will get paid double to do extra hours. On freelancing, even if it is your fault because you misjudged the time needed to complete the project, or you are asked to do extra things that you don’t refuse, or simply there are things out of your control, you will feel the effect.

A late project means that you will have to work instead of going out or sleeping at night, or working on weekends. You have to pay extra attention to time management and leave you enough spare time. If you do not, you will either miss deadlines and things go very messy, either you have to pay with your free, sleeping and weekend time. Even if it is your fault or not.

Imagine this scenario: You book your plane tickets to go few days on vacation. A project goes bad and you need 2 more days to finish it. You either sacrifice your vacation, or you sacrifice the project which means that you lose all the money involved. It will get even more complicated if you planned to use the money from that project to spend on the trip.

If you work full time and you get sick, or simply you are not able to work that day you can just call a personal day or a sick day. Your boss have to deal with this situations. In freelancing, the client will have a hard time understanding what is happening and will think that you just don’t want to work for him that day. You might pass the deadline which will mean that he will have a reason not paying you for the project.

Either way, you must be very careful when planning working time, projects and vacation. Leave more spare time even if you are sure that you won’t need that. Remember that you work for money to live, not the reverse.

6. Bad feelings about your time spent on working or relaxing.

We are getting to more complex things invonving the freelancing lifestyle. If you are not doing it right, bad time manangement won’t affect only your money earned from projects or trips. It can affect your happiness at a deep level.

If you go to a day job, you don’t have too many doubts. You work a fixed number of hours and you get a relative fixed amount of money. You will never think that: “if I work harder to make some more money I can buy that car/phone/tablet”, or “if I worl less I can travel more”. In freelancing lifestyle you will tend to doubt if you need to work more or if you need to work less. This feeling will lead you to not being satisfied about yourself. You either work too much and you don’t have time to relax, or you work too little and you don’t have money to buy all the things you want. It is very hard to get away from this feeling.

When you will work hard and you will start to get tired you will think that it is at your own option to get away and watch tv, or go outside. However, it is not that simple, you have a project to finish and a deadline to meet. You made a decision before that is affecting you right now. When you look for work, you take a decision that will affect you later and you will always try to think what will you do next week and how you will feel. It would be nice to have a machine that will allow us to see in future.

On the other hand, when you are relaxing, looking tv or just hanging out with some friends you will ask yourself if it will be better if you go to the computer and work to that project to finish it sooner, or to try to find some more projects to work on so you don’t run out of money.

A solution to this problem, although I am not sure it is the best for all, is to have fixed work hours. Set yourself to work a fixed number of hours every week or every day. Start the clock and when the time runs out it is finished. Even the project is finished or not. Maybe it will be harder at the beginning, but when you get used, whenever you take on a new project you will judge based on the fixed time you have every week, and you will let the bad feelings about why you take so much work to go away.

7. Doubts about what future holds.

This can be maybe the biggest disadvantage of freelancing vs working full time. On a fixed job you have health insurance and retirement plan. If something bad happens you are covered. If you are fired you will get the compensation that will help you to deal with the life until you get something better to work. When you are a freelancer, you have no health insurance, no retirement plan and no compensation when you stop working.

The good thing is that no one can fire you. But, you don’t know what future holds, maybe next year the web development market crashes and you will have to work the same for half of the money you make now, or worse, your are left with no work. If you just finished high school or college you don’t have to think about this issues, but at a point you will definitely start to ask you about the future.

You can pay your insurance by yourself, and make a deposit to have for bad days, but still, these won’t give you the same safety that you have at a full time job and more, it costs you a lot of your money. At this point you realize that your employer was spending much more money with you than you got in your hands.

If you are just starting out you must hope that when you will get at this point you will earn enough money to not care about the insurance, taxes and other costs. If you reached this point and you don’t make enough money then you have to change something. Either the way you do freelancing, or you get go a day job. If you make enough money but never thought of this, believe me, you will sleep much better if you deal with them.

8. Workig from home is not always as good as it seems.

The advantages from working from home is that you save the transportation time. You can basically reach your work desk in few minutes. You can have a nice breakfast at home and a good an inexpensive lunch. You can wake up whenever you want, start and finish working whenever you want. You are close to your family and you can take breaks at your own desire.

How can this be a disadvantage ? First of all, at home there are a lot of distractions. You can’t work where you sleep. You can fix this by having a special space only for working. Another tip I found by reading articles related to working from home is that you have to dress for work when working. Distractions are numerous. Family members or other cohabitants will disturb you to ask you to help them with something, or when they just are bored and want to have some time with you. It is very hard for them to understand that you actually have to work. If you want to start this discussion they will say that you can work later if you want, and help them now. They actually have a lot of arguments to make you not working, and ultimately it will get to the fact that you do not like them or not care about them. They are more important than your work, but you still have to do it. If you do other things instead of working then you have to work instead of going out with your family or spending time with your friends. You know whos fault is this, but do they understand ?

There is no easy way to fix this. If you make enough money you can consider renting an office elsewhere. Most freelancers are students or teens that don’t even own their own house. Some of them are already living in shared spaces and there is not way to talk about a separate office space. The result is that you will work less and it will be hard to focus. You earn more money and it will be harder to make a living only out of freelancing.

Outside your peers there are other distractions too. Tv, games, cooking, doing other house work, paying bills. A workaround to this issue is to set your working hours to be different from traditional time. Set the working hours at times when you will have the fewest distractions. For example, I used to work at the very morning, waking up at 6-7 in the morning and taking a good distraction free 4-5 hours of work until 11 am. Then I take a small break to prepare the launch and do some other house work and when start again at 2 pm to 5-6 pm. This worked out best for me. If the non-work related work took so much and I was unable to get back at 2 pm to work, then I postponed it later. I also found that good hours for work are around 10pm when all others are getting to sleep. However, I am sure that I cannot keep a program like this forever.

Working in the same house you sleep can’t get you in a state of full concentration. I got the best outcome when I had an office far from my homeplace.

9. The clients don’t respect your free time.

When working on a project, you will get to a point where you need the client feedback or you need some content that you have to add on the website. You will not get what you want when you want. The client won’t care about your work and free hours. He will give you the content at 6pm and will expect to be ready next morning. This means that you will waste your work time, and you have to sacrifice your free time to work for a lazy client.

If you work hard you can learn how to work with clients and prevent this to happen, but it is not easy because no one will think that you have free time. They will call you whenever they see fit and ask you to do or change something.

You have to learn how to filter this type of clients, and to start keeping in touch with the clients that respect your time, your work and the money they owe you. If you want to learn more about other experiences with clients requesting for extra work or who don’t pay there is a great site you can read: ClientsFromHell.

10. Missing the social life from a workplace.

When you work on a day job, you have a lot of colleagues. It is known that the closes friends to a person are college friends or work friends. You see them every day, know a lot about them and ultimately you will tend to spend more and more time with them. They are your friends.

If you work alone as a freelancer, then you basically have no mates. There are a lot of hapiness implications to this issue, and you really need to have a lot of friends so you can be happy. Working all day only with your computer will not help you with this issue. Other frellancing aspects like time management will keep you away from hanging with your friends or making new ones.

The solution to this is not simple, you can try to get invonved in a team to do projects togheter, or have some friends and rent an office space togheter. That will make you feel that you are really working, getting involved into a working community and being your own boss.

Conclusions.

The purpose of this article is not to convince you that freelancing is hard. I suggest you to try at least one the freelancing lifestyle. Being aware of these disadvantages will help you to deal with them when you get there, or if you are already stuck at any point to know that you are not the only one who face problems.

If you have any other problems that you have faced as a freelancer, or tips to overcome them please share them with us in the comment field.

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It is true that you can pay a good programmer to do whatever plugin you want to use on wordpress, but if you already pay a lot of money, why don’t you start from scratch ? The best part is that you don’t have to pay someone to do a wordpress functionality because you can use a plugin. You will still have to pay to get the things combined, customized and designed, but you will pay only a small portion of what you would have paid to do everything from scratch.

The Numbers

When I started this blog, in the begining of year 2010, there was a number of 7000 plugins in wordpress plugin directory. In February 2011, the number grown to 13000, an increment of 5000 plugins. Today, we have almost 20,000 wordpress plugins only in the free official wordpress directory. This means that more and more plugins are developed for wordpress, making it better to find the perfect plugins for you.

Whenever I start doing something new, or when I add a feature to a site, first I am searching comprehensive into wordpress plugin directory to see if there is something similar, or at least something I can change to do what I need. I may seem lazy, but I am proud that I like to save time when doing things. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. If I don’t find anything good in the free plugin directory then I will try to look in other places for paid ones. I think it would be a good thing to see both free and paid plugins in the official directory but I think this will never happen.

I always found something that I can work on. Even I didn’t find exactly the plugin I was needed, I found something similar than I can work on to make something better. This means power, not some fancy features that you can replicate in few minutes. I hear people praising joomla with phrases like: “Joomla has a better contact form”, “Joomla has a better default theme” or “Joomla has better colors” etc. The problem is that these are details. If you focus on details instead of focusing on issues you will never do something good, or something better than others.

Quality over Quantity

At some point, because WordPress getting more and more popular, there will be a lot of duplicate plugins, or low quality ones. It is good to have more plugins that accomplish the same thing. Variation is good. We will have different point of views and there is a higher chance that users will find the right plugin. The drop in quality is obvious if you look at numbers: 2 years ago, from 7000 plugins there were 1000 great plugins. Now, from 20 000 plugins there are only 2000 great ones. The numbers don’t look so well, but the plugin actually improved a lot. The number of great plugins doubled, the quality doubled. If you can cut the crap and ignore it then you are left with more quality choices.

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Once your business grows, you will be overwhelmed by tasks that are not related to your main business. For example, if you are a web development firm you get involved in website creation and services. But if your firm grows and you get more and more clients to work with, several employees then you need to fill more accounting paper sheets, to deal more with human resources tasks, etc.

The first solution that comes into your mind is to employ other people to do these tasks: hire a full time accountant, hire a full time human resource person, hire a client service operator, etc. While this is a sign that your company has grown and you must be happy and congratulate yourself for what you achieved, this is the expensive way to deal with the problem.

In such economic situation, the right way to do this is to put the software at work. To pay a full time accountant you have to give at least 50,000 a year, for a senior housing software you have to pay only 250$ a month, which will make it 3000$ a year. You can find a software for every business, to help you with accounting, billing, human resources, task management and many other things. You don’t have to pay a lot of people to take care of this.

With the right information and tools, you can save thousand of dollars on tasks that are not related to your main business. Paying an expert is very expensive. Instead, using a software and accessing the right information is cheap. For example, if you want to grow your business and get a website, consulting a  website development documentation can save you tens of thousand of dollars that you might pay for work that you don’t need. The problem is that you don’t know what you need and what you don’t if you don’t have the knowledge.

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PayPal: The Most Popular Money Making Web App

PayPal is one of the most popular and easy to use ways for small businesses to accept various forms of payments. Subscribing to PayPal will allow customers to pay you in multiple methods and currencies. You’ll even be able to accept checks just by taking a picture of them with your mobile device, and will be given a free credit card swiper for your iPhone, iPad, or Android device. Over 100 million people around the globe are already using PayPal. Just imagine being able to open easy spending on your website to over 100 million people, plus making your face-to-face transactions that much easier. PayPal’s business plans range from absolutely free to $30 a month, depending on which option you choose, and while it’s not a full servie banking account, like a business free checking account, it’s one of the most affordable ways to process merchant payments..

MobiCart: An App that Makes Apps

MobiCart can make your e-commerce store compatible for iOS and Android markets by turning it into an m-commerce app. This will instantly open your store up to many new customers, or allow current customers to access your site in a new, convenient way. Mobile shopping is a booming new industry. In fact, over 18% of last year’s Christmas shopping was done through mobile shopping apps. Currently, over ten thousand companies are already successfully using MobiCart to reach an expanded customer base. MobiCart also lets you offer your mobile store in just about any language or currency. There is truly no easier way to break into the mobile shopping market than by using MobiCart.

Expand Your Horizons

The focus of these apps is to expand the horizons of your business so you can reach more customers or more customers are comfortable using your site. For example, PayPal is a trusted resource that many people are comfortable using to pay for items online. By seeing the Paypal logo, it’s more likely that someone is going to pay using credit cards with interest. Some people may not be comfortable paying for items online without the comfortable PayPal interface. Do not let these customers get away.
Also, do not be the last to get into the mobile market. The earlier you get into the mobile market, the more of an impact your store will have. Both of these services are a great way to increase your profits.

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1. The Top 5 Facebook Apps
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3. Top eCommerce Trends for 2011

The most common technique I found among website flippers is that they try to convince you to value the website just by knowing only the previous month income, or less. They will say: “This website made me 100$ in the last 15 days, this means that if you buy it with 300$ you will get the money back in 1 and a half month”. If that was so easy, why he wanted to sell the domain instead of waiting 1,5 months to get that money ? This is what guys like him does. They don’t have to lie you, they tell you the truth, but only the parts that are at their convenience.

If a website is less than 6 months then it is a bad thing to consider buying it for 10 times monthly revenue. The traffic is probably forced ( redirection from other websites, overuse of social media ) or it is brought. Nowadays, you can buy tens of thousands of visitors with few bucks. They are real visitors, but those people are not interested in the content. But, what is most important to you is that they will be all gone after you buy the website.

They will continut the communication with you and they will “try” to help you, but when it will come the question: “Why does the traffic dropped ?”, they will say that the you did not put all the marketing efforts that they have done before selling and since you are not as experienced you will think that this is the reason. If you want to learn more about how to value a website you should read on this website and maybe ask for a quote.

Related posts:

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2. Is Outsourcing the SEO worth it ? Choosing Individual, Companies or Resellers.
3. Why Adsense is not scaling

Before using wordpress on everything I do, I used php list to build directories, but now, I found something better. A wordpress plugin  that provides all the functionality of a web directory to my wordpress installation so I can still have all the benefits of wordpress community: themes, plugins, help, etc. It is called WpLocalPlus.

The biggest advantage of this is that you can use it on any theme you want, including twentyten or twentyeleven. What is most intersting at this plugin is that you can automatically extract business information about a specific place from google places. So, immediately after you install it you can have all the information from google maps on your website.

So, if you want to give it a try, go to their website and download it.

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1. UK Web Directory List – Finding the right directory
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1. Change the permalinks structure

By default wordpress link structure is set to show an ugly url. Something like yoursite.com/?p=3 . WordPress have options to do this in whatever way you like, but this is the default when it installed for the first time because some hosts are not very well with url rewrite so in 3% of the cases it won’t work. To set the permalink structure go to Settings -> Perlmalinks and select the option that fits best for you. In my opinion  the best way for the links is to show only the name.

You may be tempted to show the year and the month in the url. It is a blog right, it is good to know when the article has been created. This is the biggest mistake you can make at this point. Most of your content will be timeless, so showing the year in the url will be a flag for outdated content. Why to flag it as outdated when you know it is still worth a lot ? Links having the year and month are ugly, and search engines also hates them.

I think it is a big mistake because changing from year/date style to post name can be painfull. All your links are indexed and linked to in the old way so you need to take care of the whole redirects. You have to go and do some changes manually in htaccess file. You can find the code over the internet but it will be very hard for you to make the change right just from the admin panel. If you don’t add the right rules to your htaccess file your old urls won’t be accesible and you will lose a lot of visitors.

The best option is to show only the name. If you fear that at some point you will have 2 posts with the same name, then don’t worry anymore. WordPress will know this and will add an additional number to the second post with the same name. Long story short, just place /%postname%/ into the “Custom Structure” section in permalinks settings and you will be just fine.

2. Activate Akismet.

Akismet is a plugin that comes with the wordpress install files. However, it is not activated at startup, so you have to do this later. More, you have to go to wordpress.org website and register for an account to have your akismet API key. Just skip the page where they ask you to create a paid account and go with the free one.

Akismet will protect your blog from spam comments. It is very accurate and you will make your blog and your mail inbox happy. If you don’t do this, when your website get crawled by the search engines and by “do follow blog lists” then you will receive hundreds of automated comments every day, saying the same thing. Why bother to filter spam from real comments when you can let automated software to do this for you ?

3. Create a contact or about page.

If you want to start a blog or website you want to let people to see who you are and how they can contact you. The about page should contain some background on you and usually some links to social networks where you are involved. If you have a blog and people like what they read they will want to follow you and what you do, and you should not miss this opportunity.

Just writing your email address on the contact/about page is a bad thing. Spammers will use software that crawls websites for posted email addresses and what you get is only spam. Most people won’t bother to contact you unless is very important. Instead, use a contact form. I recommend to use Contact Form 7 for this. You will create a contact form on the admin panel with desired fields and then you paste a shortcode on your contact/about page. In this way you don’t get spammed and you don’t miss opportunities. A contact form is a good way to receive: collaboration opportunities, thank you messages, feedback for your website, advertising/link requests, etc.

4. Install a SEO plugin

WordPress SEO settings are ok, but you can do more. The default setup has the basic but it is not meant to maximize the output in terms of SEO. It is best to install a wordpress SEO plugin like All in one seo. What you do is to ensure that all the pages on your website have the right titles, description and keywords meta tags. This will not make your site rank on the first page instantly but it will surely help you in the long run.

When setting up the title, you should have it something like postname + blogname. I noticed that this is working best for me, despite I sometimes prefer to not have the blog name in the titles of blog posts. It looks more professional this way, but it is not that good for search engines. For example, if you want to be in the first page for a certain keyword, then you should place that keyword at the end of every page title. You have a link from every page to your homepage. Having the main keyword in every title page will just add more value for your homepage when showing search results for that specific keyword.

If you use All in one seo pack there are options to have no index on some pages like tag pages or category pages. Pages that will show all the post from a specific category, or pages that show all posts from a specific tag may result in search engines to index different pages on your website with similar content. Advanced SEO guys that overreact about duplicate content will tell you that you should definitely make those pages noindex, to tell search engines to not index tag or category pages. It makes sense but this also have downsides. It will hurt to your internal linkbuilding since you blog posts will not be very well linked to other posts with similar content. For example, if you write two blog posts for the same tag, they will be interlinked trough that tag page, making the connection stronger and yelling to the search engines that those posts are related and relevant one to each other. Secondly, is you use noindex or nofollow a lot on your blog Google will know that you overuse these to influence search results and you migh get sandboxed or penalised. The best way to overcome the duplicate issue is to use the more tag. Placing the “more” tag when you write a blog post will tell wordpress to show the full content only on the single post page. On all other pages like homepage, tag pages and category pages it will show only the content before the more tag.

5. Add  RSS button and Email subscription

You will invest a lot in writing quality content. Whenever someone reads a post from you that he likes he will want to read more from you, but it will not waste a lot of time to remember your url or to check every day if you’ve posted anything new. He will want to connect to your content in a way or another.

The best way to let others know when you post and read your articles is your blog feed. You can locate it ad yourblog.com/feed or yourblog.com/rss. WordPress output your blog content in xml format by default. Using your content feed people can add your blog into their favourite feed reader or to receive your content by email.

Content readers are a common way to read online content. If you don’t do it already you should try Google Reader. To make it easier for others to add you, place a nice rss button somewhere at the top right of your blog. You should add the basic rss image and link it to your blog feed.

A good advice I can give you here is to use Feedburner. It is a service that will redirect your feed and will make it easier for people to add it. Also, if you use feedburner users can subscribe to receive updates on their email inbox whenever you post something new.

6. Create a Facebook fan page and a twitter account and link them from your blog

Another great way to keep your readers connected is to have a twitter account or a facebook page. Whenever you post new content to your blog, make sure you let your tweeter followers and facebook fans about it. If it is your only blog and something that represent you then you should use your personal twitter account for this. On the other side, you still need to create a facebook fan page. You don’t want to receive a friend request whenever a user want to read more from you. People can become fans of your facebook page and you can notify them whenever you post something new. The facebook page can be user in other ways too but you should learn it while practicing.

Don’t forget to add a nice follow button for twitter, and become a fan button for facebook. You can also add a nice widget that will link your facebook page with your blog.

7. Add social media and bookmarking buttons

If you write quality content or post interesting images, people will like to share it with their friends. The changes that they will tweet or share your content are higher if they can do it right away. At the top or end of every post you should have some buttons that will let people share your content on top social media or social bookmarking sites like: twitter, facebook, digg, stumbleupon, pinterest.

On wordpress you can quickly to this by installing a social sharing plugin like share this, or sexy bookmarks or whatever you see fit.

8. Add lightbox plugin for your images

By default, when you add an image into a post on wordpress, the image will have a link on it that will direct users to the full sized image.  This is good but not perfect. When someone click on an image, the image will open on the same window and he will have to hit back and reload the page to continue reading. I hate when this happens. In 2012, all blogs should have a good lightbox plugin. You only have to install it ( try lightbox 2 ) and you’re all set. Whenever someone will click on an image on your content a nice javascript pop-up will show that will represent the full-sized image. The image can be closed by pressing the close button on the lightbox or clicking outside the image.

It is called lightbox because the image will show and the rest of the content will be darken to make it look that there is a light pointing to that image.

9. Add some widgets to your sidebar.

Today, almost every right coded theme will have a widgetized sidebar. This means that you can customize what you show on the sidebar directly from the Administration panel. Go to Appearance -> Widgets. On the left you will see a list of widgets you can add to your sidebars. On the right you will see the active sidebars on your theme. It is called generic a “sidebar” but actually it can be added anywhere in your theme ( header, footer, etc ).

Drag widgets that you will like to display, for example: Calendar, Archives, Recent posts, Pages to show your menu, etc.

10. Write and post some great stuff.

If you do not post quality and original stuff then you will probably fail very soon. Why will someone revisit your website, click on that ads, buy advertising or buy something that you recommend if you only post content copied from other sites or crappy articles ? Think about it and try to add value to the topic that you write about. Remember that unless you are a pop or movie star no one cares what you ate at dinner or what movies you saw ( unless you run a movie review blog ).

This being said, good luck with your new blog. Below it is an image that contains a list with all the above steps that you can save on your computer for later use.

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The first place that comes to anyone mind when looking for a programmer is to got the top 2 or 3 outsourcing networks and to post a job. This is a way to do the job, but you should take care of some things from the very begining. You should know how to write that ad so you can attract the right coders.

Here is a list with things to follow when writing your ad:

• Give clear specifications
• Take time to arrange your text ( if you don’t care enough to arrange your text then a good programmer won’t care to bid for your project )
• Don’t post your ad to more than 1 website. At first you will disagree with this, but most programmers have accounts on all major outsourcing websites and if they feel that there is a chance that you will not select a programmer they won’t bid. Good programmers won’t waste their time to read your ad and to bid on it.
• Avoid any cliche. For example: “This is an easy job for someone who knows what he is doing”, “This should only take few hours of work”, “Please bid only if you are good at this”, “I can do it myself but I don’t have time”. When a programmer bid on your job, he is aware of his skills and they will bid only if they know they can do it. If you post this stuff poor programmers won’t be excluded. They just copy and paste their proposal to all jobs even some of them clearly states that are only for a specific countries. It does not matter for them, so writing such phrases will only make good programmers to go away.
• Adjust your budget accordingly. If you aim to get the lowest bid then deal with poor programmers. They will only waste your time. If you want to attract good programmers then make it to look that you don’t care and let the programmers to tell you what they think their time worth. You will find enough programmers that will do a good job for the half of the price that you may have to pay to a full time programmer that you employ.

If you adjust your job ad accordingly then you might start to get proposals from good programmers. Then you must know how to choose them. If you think that a bid is too low, then it migh really be. There are sellers that bid to every project, you can’t get away of them. They don’t even read what you wrote. If the bid looks too generic then ignore it. You have to find that programmer that took enough time to understand what you want. If you select a programmer that you were aware that the bid is too low but you try to ripe him, he will realise sooner or later than continuing the job is bad for him and will leave you with the project half completed. Try to communicate few times with the one you want to choose so you can be sure that he meant what he said in the proposal and he still wants to work with you even if you will be there to drive him and to review the results.

Where you have the most chances to find the good ones ? That depends. I’ve seen Elance a good way to find good programmers because they have a system that let them to bid only on about 20 projects every month for free. If they want to bid more then they have to buy the “connections”. This system works well enough to prevent the people that bid very low to a lot of projects and they only follow up the ones that they think their payoff is best. Since you are looking for a specific type of coders: WordPress programmers, you may want to look in dedicated places.

There is a job board website dedicated to WordPress: WordPress Freelance. You can be sure that all people there know wordpress and want to work on wordpress. Another good place to find is to post directly into the wordpress official forums, or go trough the people that advertised their wordpress work and ask them for quotes.

In the end, please remember: You get what you pay for.

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Perhaps the most notable example in previous years is the BP oil spill. In this case, many organizations and individuals criticized BP for making numerous PR blunders after the spill. Many believed that BP spokespeople should have learned from the Exxon oil spill and how that disaster was poorly handled. While the BP oil spill in itself
was enough to have a great impact on the company, the follow-up communication strategy dug the company in deeper. Still, to BP’s credit, it was a tough situation and continues to be in the legal aftermath.

Goldman Sachs is another corporation that followed questionable tactics that led to permanent reputation damage for their company. Although a check of Google search results shows their first page is clear of negatives, the second page doesn’t look so good. Their current 10,000 women initiative is a good example of the right way to do things though.

These examples of reputation management are well known. Most companies run on a much smaller scale, yet can be just as affected by reputation management mistakes. This is why it has become increasingly common for companies to seek the advice and services of reputation management professionals who get their reputation back on track. By reducing the effects of negative press and consumer reviews while increasing positive press, it is possible to enhance the success of a business as long as these goals are achieved sooner than later.

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