Create DIY Videos

Creating your own videos is a powerful way to boost your online presence and connect with your audience on a personal level. By making a video to stand out, you can differentiate yourself from competitors and engage viewers with captivating content. Free video editing tools make this process accessible, allowing you to produce professional-quality videos without breaking the bank. These tools enable you to add audio, change video speed, animate elements, and more, ensuring your content resonates with your audience. Embracing video content not only enhances customer satisfaction but also fosters growth by creating a more dynamic and interactive online experience.

Enhance Your Growth with Video SEO

Optimizing your video content for search engines can be a powerful strategy for small businesses looking to thrive. By adding transcriptions and closed captions, you make your videos more accessible, which can boost engagement and reach a broader audience, including those who are hearing impaired. Additionally, using well-crafted metadata, such as descriptive titles and summaries, helps search engines understand your content better, potentially improving your search rankings. Research suggests that properly optimized videos are significantly more likely to appear on the first page of search results, increasing your website’s visibility.

Leverage Competitor Insights for SEO Success

Gaining insights into your competitors’ SEO tactics can significantly boost your small business’s growth. By analyzing how competitors perform on search engines, you can uncover opportunities to improve your own visibility. For example, if a competitor overlooks certain industry-specific keywords, you can target these to draw more traffic. Additionally, examining their backlink strategies and content approaches can reveal effective practices, enabling you to refine your own methods.

Boost Your Business with Strategic IT Knowledge

Enhancing your IT skills can significantly impact your small business’s growth and customer satisfaction. By exploring various types of information technology courses offered, you can gain valuable insights into areas like cybersecurity and digital management. These skills are essential for navigating the complexities of modern business environments. Online courses offer the flexibility to learn while managing your business, making them an ideal choice for busy entrepreneurs. Investing in IT education not only strengthens your technical capabilities but also prepares your business to adapt to technological changes.

Ensure Website Accessibility

Incorporating accessibility features into your website is a strategic move that can significantly enhance your business’s reach and customer satisfaction. By making your site accessible, you cater to a broader audience, including individuals with disabilities. This not only reflects a commitment to inclusivity but also improves the overall user experience, benefiting everyone, including those with temporary or situational challenges. Furthermore, accessible websites often enjoy better search engine rankings, which can increase your visibility and attract more visitors.

Consider Using AI Chatbots

Integrating AI chatbots into your website can significantly boost customer engagement and satisfaction. These smart bots learn from previous interactions to provide personalized responses to customer inquiries, enhancing the user experience. By adopting this technology, small businesses can streamline communication and operate more efficiently, even with limited resources. This strategic approach not only fosters customer loyalty but also supports business growth during challenging times.

Enhance Customer Trust with Secure Practices

Securing your website is essential for building customer trust and driving business growth. Implementing SSL certificates ensures that data exchanged between your site and its visitors is encrypted, safeguarding sensitive information like credit card details. A secure website not only protects your customers but also signals your commitment to their safety, which can enhance customer loyalty and satisfaction. Prioritizing website security can be a key strategy for maintaining and expanding your small business’s customer base.

Stand Out On Social Media

Adopting social media marketing strategies is essential for expanding your brand reach and maintaining active online engagement. Start by identifying the platforms where your target audience is most active, such as Instagram, LinkedIn, or TikTok, and tailor your content to suit each platform’s style and user preferences. Create a content calendar to post consistently and keep your audience engaged with a mix of posts, including informative articles, behind-the-scenes videos, and user-generated content. Leverage hashtags, paid advertising, and collaborations with influencers to amplify your reach and connect with a broader audience.

Incorporating these innovative website strategies can transform your small business into a formidable player in the digital marketplace. By focusing on engaging content, strategic IT knowledge, and cutting-edge technologies, you can create a compelling online presence that attracts and retains customers.

Discover the world of technology and online solutions with Bnpositive Communication, where Jason combines his passion and expertise to help you navigate the digital landscape with a smile!

Photo via Pexels

Default Page Layout

This is the default layout and structure of most of your standard internal pages as you add them to your site structure.

I've simplified the layout look and highlighted key areas with block shapes and shading.

1. Main Header: Frequently this will consist of your main navigation menu, site logo, perhaps full-width banner or slider
2. Main Content Area: This is where you have your general content layout that can be a mixture of text, images, embedded videos, etc.
3. Main Footer: This location frequently may have an additional menu structure, your contact info, etc.
4. Sidebar: Sometimes you may see a large sidebar that spans the height of the entire Main Content section. This sidebar could appear on the left or right side of the content and can be configured for different width as desired. The content within the sidebar would remain consistent generally for each location it appears.

Blog Page Layout

This layout is where a list of your latest blog posts are displayed in reverse chronological order. Normally the overall structure of the page mirrors the Default Page Layout above, but it doesn't have. Then the "Main Content" area of this page frequently consists within that area of the page layout.

1. Main Header: (as mentioned previously)
2. Main Blog Post Listing: Again each of your blog posts is listed in reverse chronological order. There is frequently the "Featured Image" is displayed. It can be displayed as a full-width image at the top of each entry as shown here with the post title, post meta data, and post content following below. Or, you may also frequently see it as a smaller thumbnail listed to the left of the post title, meta, and
3. Main Footer: (as mentioned previously)
4. Sidebar: (as mentioned previously)
5. Content Footer (or Header): Sometimes you may want a piece of content area to always show-up as a Call-to-Action (CTA) on your blog pages (single post or even default pages as well). Think of this area like a place to have people sign-up for your email newsletter for your blog updates and you want it to appear at the bottom of every blog post/page but not every other internal page.

Blog Post Layout

This page layout is where the full content of one of your individual blog posts will reside and display. This page again generally mimics the basic structure of the default page layout with the individual blog post content displaying within the "Main Content" area of the default layout.

1. Main Header: (as mentioned previously)
2. Single Blog Post Content: There is frequently the "Featured Image" displayed at the very top of the post content, followed by post title, post meta data, and post content below. It could also be displayed smaller and aligned left/right of the post content if desired. Or, on the individual blog post page you may decide NOT to show the "Featured Image" automatically on the page and instead include it wherever you would like it displayed and at whatever size you desire within the post content itself. Note: A default content header/footer may also be added if desired.
3. Sidebar: You can program sidebars to be different across certain page layouts. For instance the content displayed in the sidebar of your default internal pages could be different from the sidebar displayed on your individual blog posts page.
4. Main Footer: (as mentioned previously)

Summary

Hopefully this helps you visualize some of the layout options that are fairly standard features available within the WordPress framework. These options are standard if you decide to use the default Gutenberg Blocks within WordPress, or plugins and themes like WP Bakery Page Builder, Elementor, Divi, and so many others.

For this post lesson, I’m using IrfanView, a completely free, but very powerful image editing program for these types of edits.

Let’s take the following image as an example.

As we can see in the dialog box I’ve captured above, the original image specs are the following:

• Width: 4032 pixels
• Height: 3024 pixels
• DPI: 300
• File Name: IMG_6163.jpeg
• File Size: 3.80 MB

If you just uploaded this image as is directly into WordPress you’d get the following results:

WordPress has automatically tried to help out the user and scaled down the image to at least a little more manageable size, see specs in image above:

• File name: IMG_6163-scaled.jpeg (they’ve adjusted the file name to let you know it’s not the original that’s located in the media library
• File size: 994 KB (a decent reduction from the original file size
• Width: 2560 pixels
• Height: 1920 pixels

Unless you’re allowing people to download your original images at their original quality, there’s no reason to leave images even at this size.

Quick Image Resizing in IrfanView

Let’s take a few minutes to take care of the following steps to a quick and simple image optimization process BEFORE we upload anything to the WordPress media library.

1. Resize the image
2. Change the DPI
3. Rename & Save

A quick note about the DPI. This stands for “dots per inch” and it has to do with the quality of the image as it will be used for various purposes. It references the number of tiny drops of ink a printer can place on a piece of paper within a linear inch of space. 300dpi is usually reserved for things that are going to be physically printed at standard resolutions on paper or other materials.

The vast majority of images placed on the Internet don’t need to be saved at dpi resolutions higher than 72dpi.

Note: Recent new information for me in my testing is that due to higher resolution displays becoming the norm, I have started to increase my default DPI setting to 144dpi. That’s double my original default. The lower setting will sometimes cause images to look slightly blurry on hi-res displays. The increase in DPI does also increase the file size, but not by double as you might expect. So in the end, the trade off can be worth it.

Okay, I’ve taken those actions on the original image and now have the following:

• Width: 1200 pixels (If the image were to stretch across the entire page layout at full-width, it most likely would not need to be wider than this ever)
• Height: 900 pixels
• DPI: 72
• File Name: seed-packets-on-table.jpg (renaming the file allows you to know what the image is if you’re looking at file names in a folder just in a list. Within the media library, you can also search for images and it will read words within the file name. Much more helpful than the original “IMG_6163.jpeg”)
• File Size: 221 KB (that’s an almost 94% reduction in file size from the original)

Hopefully that was helpful for you.

What other WordPress questions do you have that you’d like me to write about in the future? Leave a comment below!

Are You Paying Attention to Emails From Facebook?

One of the things that happened that this particular family member didn't catch in time was the fact that her account had been compromised and the hacker was actively changing the details in her profile for the recovery email address and phone number. If you lose access to these items, recovering the account is going to be nearly impossible as all attempt to verify and validate the correct information is now going to the hacker's contact details.

At 11:37:03am she received this email notification.

A few things to notice on this notification:

• the email address that was added is given to you, if you don't recognize that email address as one of yours, you should immediately be suspicious and take action
• the location of the update was "Near Philadelphia, United States" - if you're not located in that area, again, you should be suspicious and take action
• the device used to make the change was an "iPhone 14 Pro Max, iOS" - if that doesn't match a phone you own... you guessed it... you should be suspicious and take action

The action you should take is immediately available to you from within this email. Click on the "This wasn't me" big, blue button!

At 11:43:41am the following notification was received

What should be noted here, is six minutes later from the initial email being received, this email is alerting you that the phone number associated with the account was removed from the profile. This is now removing the ability for you to use or verify your account via a text message code or by using the mobile Facebook app to verify your identity.

At 11:43:55am the last notification was received by email.

Fourteen (14) seconds later, the hacker went in and removed YOUR email from the account and now the email address associated with your profile is one managed by the hacker and you now don't have access to the email or phone number associated with your account.

I highly recommend setting up two-factor authentication (2FA) on almost any account that allows it and makes it available to you. Can it be and annoying additional step needed to reauthorize and login to your account when you want to use it? Yes, but if your social profiles or other account information is important to you and filled with personal information, you should take the necessary precautions to protect your data and yourself.

Oh, I forgot to mention that this hacking resulted in an attempt from the hacker to blackmail and get money from my family member in order to restore their account. Don't fall for this either. They've already hacked your account. You think they're suddenly going to just let your account go back to you after they've gotten paid? Highly unlikely.

You might also be interested in learning more about this Facebook ruse, Ahh, the Ol’ Facebook Algorithm Bypass Hoax.

As the calendar turns and a new year beckons, the time has come for business owners like you to chart a course for success. This article is your roadmap, unveiling essential New Year's resolutions tailored to elevate your business in the year ahead. These resolutions are more than mere aspirations; they are actionable strategies designed to transform your business, setting you on a path to prosperity and excellence.

Boosting Revenue

Your foremost resolution should center on bolstering revenue streams. Cast your net wider by exploring new markets and diversifying your product or service offerings. Simultaneously, fine-tune your pricing strategies to maximize profitability. In this ever-evolving business landscape, a robust financial foundation is your compass to sustainability. Remember, a well-thought-out pricing strategy can be the linchpin of your revenue growth.

Prioritizing Work-Life Balance

Consider the pivotal step of restructuring your business by establishing an LLC. This strategic move not only offers you the shield of limited liability but also unlocks significant tax advantages while minimizing the burden of paperwork. To facilitate this process, diligent research and unbiased reviews can guide you in choosing the right formation service. If you decide to protect your personal assets with ZenBusiness, you can rest easy knowing that everything is covered and properly taken care of.

Enhancing Customer Service

In the pursuit of excellence, elevating customer service must top your list of resolutions. Harness the power of feedback collection to gain valuable insights into customer preferences and pain points. Invest in staff training programs to empower your team with the skills needed to deliver exceptional service. Furthermore, optimizing communication channels ensures seamless interactions. Satisfied customers, not only frequent buyers, become your staunchest advocates.

Revamping Your Marketing

Adaptability is the cornerstone of marketing success. As the marketing landscape evolves, stay ahead by revamping your strategies. Embrace the art of storytelling to captivate your audience and foster emotional connections. Harness the potential of data-driven insights to tailor your campaigns to the unique needs and preferences of your customers. In this customer-centric era, your marketing prowess will set you apart.

Investing in Employee Development

Your employees are the lifeblood of your enterprise. Nurturing their growth should be a pivotal resolution. Commit to ongoing training programs that enhance their skills and knowledge. Recognition and rewards for their dedication go a long way in fostering loyalty and motivation. Cultivate a positive work environment that inspires creativity and collaboration. A motivated and skilled workforce is the bedrock of your business triumphs.

Focus on Eco-Friendly Practices

In a world increasingly conscious of environmental issues, integrating eco-friendly practices into your business operations is not just an option; it's an imperative. Embark on waste reduction initiatives, implement energy conservation measures, and source responsibly. These actions not only attract eco-conscious customers but also contribute to the broader cause of sustainability, elevating your business's reputation and marketability.

Streamlining Operations

Identifying inefficiencies and streamlining operations should be a top priority. Leverage AI technology and workflow improvements to enhance efficiency across your organization. Process mapping, automation, and data integration are valuable tools in this endeavor. Not only does streamlined operations reduce costs, but it also boosts productivity, allowing you to do more with less. In today's fast-paced business world, efficiency is the key to staying competitive and agile.

In the quest for business excellence, these resolutions serve as your guiding stars. Each one is a pivotal step on the path to success, offering unique advantages that will propel your business forward in the coming year. By embracing these strategic objectives, you position your business for sustained growth, resilience in the face of challenges, and a brighter future filled with opportunities.

Image by marymarkevich on Freepik