Alberta Business Marketing

Probably not…but I think I took a good step forward on Saturday.

I have been a huge supporter of the blogging platform WordPress for many years.  Like many of you, I cut my teeth on the free versions of WordPress and Blogger.  However, when I started to take blogging seriously, I stumbled on a company called Siteground.com and the rest is history.  Blogging is now part of my daily routine and this blog reaches thousands of folks each day.

WordPress offers one of the most reliable and easy to use blogging platforms available today.  Over the course of my regular business day, I work with many Calgary and global companies on how they can leverage blogs in their business.  Ulistic offers a wide range of blogging consulting services for business.  From blog consulting to coaching.  Contact me if I can help you with your business blogs at anytime.

WordPress is evolving to a fully functional web development platform.

For many years WordPress has strictly been used as a blogging platform.  For a while, some of the leading web developers started developing great looking websites on WordPress.  However over the past little while WordPress has become more acceptable in the mainstream web development world.   WordPress is now making serious moves towards offering a full-featured and rich content management system and web development platform.

On Friday, I met up with a good friend of mine and fellow WordPress blogger in Calgary and we immediately jumped into sharing tips and tricks on how we can make our WordPress blogs really sing.  I shared a few great plugins that I have found and started to use every day.  Many of our Ulistic clients are also leveraging these great additional functions on their WordPress blog.  Some of the plugins allow you to scroll testimonials, perform grammar/spelling checking and a wealth of other great added features.  You can even send a thank you note to those folks who leave a comment on your blog.

Then my friend shared with me a service he has been using and having some great success with, headwaythemes.com.  Headway is a blog development platform for WordPress.  You can see it on this blog, this weekend I changed the layout of my blog to a headway designed blog.  It took a bit of playing around at first, but after you learn how it really works and read the manual  or watch the YouTube videos it is quite awesome.  Headway takes all the confusion of CSS and HTML  and offers a powerful interface for you to develop your own professional business blog.  Upload your own header, change colours and really take ownership of your blog.

Don’t kiss your web developer goodbye just yet, but here is another web tool you can take advantage of for your blogs.  Your web developer combined with Headway can really make your blog rock n’roll.  I am not a developer, but as an avid blogger and marketing professional…I get this and the power a great locking blog can do for business.

Headway only works on your hosted WordPress blog.

Sorry folks…you need to have your own hosted version of WordPress to make this work.  If you have your blog hosted on the free WordPress servers, you can’t take advantage of the power headway offers.  However, don’t worry I have a solution for you.  Get a hosted version of WordPress with your own domain name for only $9.95 for the first year.  Click Here – Cheap WordPress Hosting.  After the first year, your hosting is only $120 for the year.  Great deal to get started.

Headway is about $90 for a personal version which allows you to run it on 2 of your websites, upgrade to the developers version for about $160.00 and use it on unlimited sites.  This is an awesome tool for WordPress, if you are serious about your blogging – this service if for you.

Tags: Akismet, awesome tool, blog, Blog hosting services, Blog software, Blogger, BuddyPress, Business/Finance, Calgary, Computing, content management system, Content management systems, functional web development platform, HTML, mainstream web development world, PHP programming language, Siteground, Technology/Internet, ulistic, USD, web developer, web developer goodbye, web developers, web development platform, web tool, wordpress, World Wide Web, YouTube Inc
Posted in Blogging | | Comments Off

Our clients at Ulistic challenge us from time to time.  Encouraging us to think outside the box when it comes to functionality with their online marketing, blogging and social media.  I would like to believe that my 15 years of experience as a Calgary IT consultant helps me understand how things work technically and then I love to put my creative layer over top and see where things go.  It is pretty cool and without great clients to push us…we would never be where Ulistic is today.  Thank You.

Blogging platforms are a dime a dozen.  Everyone has their favourite.  For me, when it comes to blogging platforms, WordPress is a hands down winner. I have used Blogger, TypePad and a wealth of other options and personally I haven’t used a platform that is as feature-rich plus offers the ease of use many small business marketing professionals are craving for with all of their online marketing solutions.

During a recent Internet Marketing Coaching call with one of our clients in Tampa, FL. I was challenged by them to add particular functionality to help with getting their message out online.  They needed to add a signature component at the end of each blog post so they don’t have to constantly type in a calls-to-action or quick blurbs about their business.  Sounded pretty simple and with my experience I knew WordPress would already have something I could recommend to my client.

The WordPress community did not disappoint.

I stumbled upon this great new plugin for WordPress which met our client’s need.  The FT Signature plugin designed by FullThrottle Development offered everything they  and we were looking for to meet this particular requirement but all now we have something we can use with all of our fully-managed online marketing clients.

The FT Signature plugin provides bloggers and clients of Ulistic, the ability to append a signature file at the end of each of their posts.  Just like you would with Microsoft Outlook.  You will see a great example of the FT Signature plugin in action at the end of this post.

It is customizable with a bit of HTML knowledge and can be turned on or off when you are composing your blog post.  This is a pretty powerful plugin for the WordPress platform.

If you haven’t heard of FullThrottle before, they provide full service web development in Raleigh, NC. Thanks to the team at FullThrottle for helping us out.

Learn more about how to automatically insert your signature on a WordPress blog today.

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Ulistic focuses on serving the needs of Canadian Small Business, REALTORS, and Information Technology firms across Canada and United States. Helping your business understand, deploy and leverage social media, search engine optimization and online communications to generate business opportunities and make an impact inside your community and industry.

My business partner David and I are business professionals first. We understand what it takes to run a successful small business.

I invite you to reach out to me personally at 403.775.2205 or email Stuart at scrawford@ulistic.com.

Tags: Blog software, Business/Finance, Calgary IT consultant, Computing, Content management systems, florida, FullThrottle Development, HTML, Microsoft Corporation, North Carolina, online marketing clients, online marketing solutions, Online Solutions, PHP programming language, Raleigh, recent Internet Marketing Coaching call, social media, tampa, Technology/Internet, ulistic, web development, wordpress, World Wide Web
Posted in Online Marketing | | Comments Off

Working with Today’s Business Woman Magazine

Thanks to my good friends at Bulletproof InfoTech, one of Calgary’s top Microsoft Partners serving the needs of small business in Calgary.  Rene Sloos and the team allowed Ulistic to use his boardroom with fancy SMARTBoard to show the team from Today’s Business Woman the power of blogging.

Blogging as some of you may know is a passion of mine and whenever I have the opportunity to share the ins and outs of WordPress blogs with those looking for insight using this social media technology is a blessing.

Tags: blog, Blog software, bulletproof infotech, Business Woman, Business/Finance, Calgary, Computing, Content management systems, Internet, Microsoft Partners, PHP programming language, rene sloos, Social Landscape, social media technology, Technology/Internet, this social media technology, Uncategorized, wordpress, World Wide Web
Posted in Alberta Business | | Comments Off

Have you heard of Jeremy Epstein?  I don’t believe he is related to Juan Luis Pedro Philippo DeHuevos Epstein at all?  Actually this Epstein is a fictitious character.   Besides being a handsome man, Jeremy Epstein is a pretty savvy Marketer from the DC area.

Jeremy shared a very interesting story of link spam showing up in his blog the other day and where it came from and who was doing it.  A while back, I was getting a tonne of link spam as well when I installed the IntenseDebate Wordpress plugin.  Stay clear of this plugin all of you WordPress bloggers, total trash and full of spammers who surely increase your comment count but not in a good way.

Jeremy shared a story about four firms who are paying some SEO firm in North Carolina to do SEO work for them.  According to Jeremy’s blog post this SEO firm employs blog commenting and linking tactics aimed to get a higher number of inbound links to their client’s websites.  First off, what about the NOFOLLOW tag Google put in place a while back designed to combat this type of behaviour?  A good SEO firm would understand this loophole has been closed quite sometime ago and link comments don’t work anymore.

Jeremy shared the names of these four firms on his blog post. But I will say this.  There are some SEO firms out there who wound rather take their clients money and run.   I wonder if these four business are even aware that the behaviours of their SEO firm just got them blogged about by my Washington, DC friend.

Question…how do you know what your SEO firm is doing out there?  This is why we are teaching our clients how to do their Calgary SEO work and our approach of education will help your business stay clear of this sort of junk that happens out there.

Buyer beware comes to mind, how are you going to employ your next search engine optimization firm?

Read the complete post from Jeremy here.

Tags: Blog software, Computing, E-mail spam, Google Inc., IntenseDebate, Jeremy Epstein, Juan Luis Pedro Philippo DeHuevos Epstein, Nofollow, North Carolina, PHP programming language, search engine, search engine optimization, Spam, Spamming, Stay, Suh, Technology/Internet, Washington, wordpress, World Wide Web
Posted in Marketing | | Comments Off

Have you heard of Jeremy Epstein?  I don’t believe he is related to Juan Luis Pedro Philippo DeHuevos Epstein at all?  Actually this Epstein is a fictitious character unlike Mr. Epstein the blogger and marketer.   Besides being a handsome man, Jeremy Epstein is a pretty savvy Marketer from the DC area.

Jeremy shared a very interesting story of link spam showing up in his blog the other day and where it came from and who was doing it.  A while back, I was getting a tonne of link spam as well when I installed the IntenseDebate Wordpress plugin.  Stay clear of this plugin all of you WordPress bloggers, total trash and full of spammers who surely increase your comment count but not in a good way.

Jeremy shared a story about four firms who are paying some SEO firm in North Carolina to do SEO work for them.  According to Jeremy’s blog post this SEO firm employs blog commenting and linking tactics aimed to get a higher number of inbound links to their client’s websites.  First off, what about the NOFOLLOW tag Google put in place a while back designed to combat this type of behaviour?  A good SEO firm would understand this loophole has been closed quite sometime ago and link comments don’t work anymore.

Jeremy shared the names of these four firms on his blog post. But I will say this.  There are some SEO firms out there who wound rather take their clients money and run.   I wonder if these four business are even aware that the behaviours of their SEO firm just got them blogged about by my Washington, DC friend.

Question…how do you know what your SEO firm is doing out there?  This is why we are teaching our clients how to do their Calgary SEO work and our approach of education will help your business stay clear of this sort of junk that happens out there.

Buyer beware comes to mind, how are you going to employ your next search engine optimization firm?

Read the complete post from Jeremy here.

Tags: Blog software, Computing, E-mail spam, Google Inc., IntenseDebate, Jeremy Epstein, Juan Luis Pedro Philippo DeHuevos Epstein, Nofollow, North Carolina, PHP programming language, search engine, search engine optimization, Spam, Spamming, Stay, Suh, Technology/Internet, Washington, wordpress, World Wide Web
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