SpeedieConsulting

If you are using Wordpress to manage and run your own site, I want to share a few plugins that are not on the beaten track that can help you run a certain aspect of your Internet real estate.

Managing and displaying Testimonials

A great plugin we found this week is the Testimonial manager, a great way to manage and display your customer testimonials.  The plugin comes with a huge range of display options so you can drop these things in anywhere.

http://www.profitplugs.com/testimonials-manager-wordpress/

Helpdesk

You can also now use Wordpress to run a customer help desk facility. This could be a great way to set up an online way to manage customer enquiries in an easy and familiar environment. You could simply setup a seperate Wordpress install on another sub directory called helpdesk or support.

http://www.wordpresshelpdesk.net/

Affiliate Programme

We also found an affiliate programme that you can use to run your own onsite affiliate programme using Wordpress. This plugin has a great number of features but the main ones that we like is that it can be a two tier programme.  The plugin works with lots of other plugins such as shopping carts and membership site plugins. YOU can also integrate this plugin to run a pay per lead campaign – which is great for finance and insurance sites.

http://www.tipsandtricks-hq.com/wordpress-affiliate-platform-plugin-simple-affiliate-program-for-wordpress-blogsite-1474?ap_id=jhulott

We have finally opened the doors on our new Wordpress theme site for Insurance and Finance brokers. Aimed at DIY Insurance or Finance brokers who see the power of Wordpress to build their own websites, our themes are perfect to give then a slightly out of the ordinary template.

Our templates come with all the help needed to get a site up and running very quickly and then once live, our complimentary marketing guide will help you attract visitors and potential clients to your new website.

We currently have 3 designs available, with more on their way. They come in two flavours a single licence for use on a single website and developer license which means you can use them over and over.

We also give you a static html version so you can use the same design to develop HTML emails or if you are going to use PPC marketing, these can be used to develop landing pages for your campaigns.

To find out more or to snap up one of these themes please visit:

www.brokerthemes.com

The site is also packed with useful articles and tips to help you get the best out of Wordpress.

Micro sites or mini sites are a good way to take a profitable offshoot of your main business and build a totally focused site of around 5 – 10 pages.

What are the benefits of this? Well micro sites allow you to branch out and create something totally focussed on a single topic. For example , an IFA website could include Pensions, Investments and Insurance products. On one site it will be difficult to rank highly for all three easily.

Yet a single site on Life Insurance could help attract more traffic and rankings. It also gives you two bites of the cherry when it comes to web rankings. We have clients that have multiple page one rankings both for their main website and their microsite.

And with the popularity of Content management systems such as Wordpress, it is easy to create a second or even multiple mini sites for your business. Simply register more domain names and add a second web host, and away you go.

Instead of cutting marketing spend, lots of companies are reducing their Pay Per Click budgets and investing in Virtual Real Estate (VRE) by building a range of targeted themed mini sites. In this way they are investing their marketing spend in the future not just the right now.

Why not enquire of your webs designers or web marketing company what it would cost to build a series of mini sites?

It could be just the thing to separate your from your competition. Need ideas for mini sites. They could be product specific (a critical illness website), geographic (Kent IFA website) or even profession based (Pensions for Teachers).

Hopefully this will give you a kick-start for thinking about what you can do. And once it is build, start incorporating some of the marketing techniques you will be using for your main website. You can find a ton of them here: Wake up Your Website

Having microsites is a great way to build up your companies VRE and drive more traffic. The cost upfront is offset by the fact that once build and marketed, you have something driving you traffic for as long as you like.

Good luck!

RSS or Really Simple Syndication is one of the oldest yet underused marketing techniques available to webmasters. Below is a list of the top 10 things to do with an RSS feed

1. Build one. You can’t do anything without having an RSS feed. They are simple to build. Go to google and carry out a search for building an rss feed.

2. Add it to your Google, Yahoo and MSN homepages. If you download our free reports as described in our resource box there is a step by step guide to adding RSS feeds to your main site homepages.

3. Include it on any social networking sites that allow you to import RSS feeds such as Ecademy, Myspace, Fast Pitch networking and others.

4. Add links to it on your website and attract users to add it to their feed readers. You can grab RSS icons at www.rssicons.com

5. Ping it! Use a Ping service to promote your feed.

6. Use a widget to allow other sites to add your feed content to their site. Try tools such as widgetbox. Build a seperate page on your site to show how other webmasters can syndicate or use your RSS Feed.

7. Use Javascript or php to add it to any other related sites you may have.

8. Submit it to all the RSS directories listed here: http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

9. Make sure you have a meaningful keyword loaded RSS title and Description as this is used by the RSS directory and RSS search engines to rank and display content.

10. Add it to your Google Webmaster tools account so you can track what keywords and what positions you are achieving with your feed.