[PODCAST] WordPress Hacks to Double Your Traffic

JSB Talks Digital Podcast #109

JSB Talks Digital is a weekly digital marketing and social media podcast hosted by author, strategist, consultant, speaker and trainer Joanne Sweeney-Burke. Each Friday Joanne shares her digital marketing and social media insights from her work as CEO of Digital Training Institute. 

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In this episode #109, I’m talking about WordPress hacks to help you double your web traffic.

In social media news:

o New LinkedIn features rolled out

o Skype adds a call recording feature

o Facebook is testing AR Ads in Newsfeed

* I interview Nathan Bradley from Weasi Peasi, a WordPress support company

* Shoutouts: three WordPress plugins I cannot live without

* Ask JSB – can you have too many plugins?

* In JSB’s column: Wow your web visitors with these WordPress hacks

* And find out what social media tool saved my working week

Tune in to Episode #109

SOCIAL MEDIA NEWS

New LinkedIn features rolled out

LinkedIn has rolled out a raft of new and exciting features! Writing on their blog, they say they want to make it easier for us to make connections and have conversations with our peers on the platform.

There are five important new features which I cannot wait to test out.

1. Video captions

Following in Facebook and YouTube’s footsteps LinkedIn now offers the capability to add closed captions to videos. You can do it natively on the platform by uploading an SRT file.

2. Share quotes from articles

We now have the ability to highlight a quote from a LinkedIn article on mobile and share it directly with your network in the feed. This is fantastic feature which will encourage more sharing of user-generated content.

3. Save posts as drafts

Not ready to share the LinkedIn post quite just yet? No problem, you can save the post as a draft to complete and share later.

4. See translations

Many of us do business globally so seeing and engaging with posts from peers in any country is now easier with the “see translation” option on posts.

5. Access the content you’ve created

It can sometimes be difficult to see all the content you’ve posted on LinkedIn. A new hack allows you to get it on one place. On desktop, simply click on the “Me” tab and voila, it’s all there.

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Skype adds a call recording feature

Skype has finally added a recording feature but is it too late? I’ve already jumped over to Zoom for all my meetings and webinars because of its recording feature.

On the cusp of its’ 15th birthday, Skype announced a built-in call recording feature. It’s a cloud-based feature with all call recordings stored on cloud servers so that users can access these recordings across various platforms and devices including Windows, Android, Mac, iOS etc.

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Facebook is testing AR Ads in Newsfeed

Facebook is testing augmented reality ads in Newsfeed.

As these AR ads are in the testing phase, only users in the US will see them for now.

The new feature allows users to try on the products that are advertised through a process similar to that of a Snapchat filter.

INTERVIEW

Wordpress hacksIn this episode, I interview Nathan Bradley, co-founder of Weasi Peasi.

Experienced front-end developer & WordPress lover for over 9 years, Nathan is a child of the eighties. He grew up in the world of computers and found his flair for websites at an early age. This passion carried through to a Master Degree in Creative Advertising.

With experience working in top end London Advertising Agency, Leo Bernett along with various marketing agencies, Nathan has helped 100’s of businesses build their online assets and turn them into marketing machines.

With a marketing background and a technical mind, Nathan understands the importance of having a website that works as an asset for your business and the know-how, to make it happen.

Now he’s turning that passion to a new mission: “To help business owners get their websites up to the right standard and turn it into an asset.”

WeasiPeasi is here to be the WordPress expert so you don’t have to. Saving you time and giving you peace of mind that your site is well cared for.

Wordpress hacks

Find out more at https://weasipeasi.support/

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SHOUTOUTS

In this part of the show I give shoutouts to brands, organisations or individuals whose work online is remarkable and worth talking about.

In this episode, I’m sharing my three favourite WordPress plugins which help me scale my online business.

1) Learn Dash LMS

LearnDash is a premium WordPress learning management system (LMS) plugin.

LearnDash comes with multi-tier courses which allow you to easily create courses with lessons, topics, quizzes, and categories. It has a drip feed content feature, so you can schedule course content for the entire course duration.

You can give user assignments and then approve or comment on them. It also comes with quiz and test management tools with multiple question types. You can easily set prerequisites for students such as finishing one lesson first, before going to next lesson.

There are multiple payment gateways available to accept payments like PayPal, Stripe, 2Checkout, etc. It also integrates beautifully with bbPress, WordPress eCommerce plugins, and WordPress membership plugins.

Find out more at https://www.learndash.com/wordpress-course-plugin-features/

2) Beaver Builder

Beaver Builder is an intuitive drag and drop page builder plugin for WordPress that aims to help you build custom web pages in minutes. Beaver Builder uses the best SEO standards such as code compression and schema.org among others to ensure the pages you create are easy to find in search engines.

Find out more at https://www.wpbeaverbuilder.com/

3) ActiveMember360

ActiveMember360 is a WordPress plugin that turns any WordPress site into a full-featured, advanced membership site with almost limitless customisation, all driven by ActiveCampaign data and automations.

ActiveMember360 comes with a built-in extension for the LearnDash LMS, integrating LearnDash with ActiveCampaign.

Find out more at https://activemember360.com/.

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Ask JSB

Wordpress hacksIn today’s ASK JSB, Ian Anderson Grey, Live Content Creator asks if you can have too many plugins?

Did you know there are over 50,000 WordPress plugins? With speed being a significant ranking factor and also the main factor for site visitors, you’ll want to see if your plugins are slowing down your site. You begin losing visitors if the site takes more than 2-3 seconds to load.

Another issue is the compatibility of plugins. Many have experienced the problem when one plugin fails to work because it conflicts with another.

Finally, the more plugins you have installed, the higher the risk is of one of those plugins having a security hole that a hacker could exploit to infiltrate and infect your site.

My best advice is to do a monthly speed report and audit of your plugins. Lucky for me I’ve a company to do it for me and trust me it’s worth every penny!

If you have a digital marketing or social media question, don’t forget you will have it answered on the show by using the hashtag #AskJSB on Twitter or Instagram. You can also leave me a voicemail with your question at www.digitaltraininginstitute.ie/askjsb.

And you can also post a message on any of my social networks!

Do you have a question for #AskJSB? Don't be shy! |#JSBTalksDigital Click To Tweet

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JSB’s COLUMN

In today’s JSB’s column I share WordPress tips to double your website traffic.

? Speed matters

Check your mobile speed with Google’s speed test tools that indicates how well a page performs on the Chrome UX Report and suggests performance optimisations. Take the page speed insights test

? Produce quality content

Google loves quality content and so make that a priority over the quantity of content you publish. Last year Google found me and hired me because of the quality content I produce which demonstrates my knowledge and expertise.

? Optimise every time with Yoast SEO

SEO doesn’t have to feel like rocket science. One of my favourite SEO tools is the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress which uses a traffic light system to optimise each page. It covers everything from the slug, meta data and headers, sub-headers and subtitles. Your H1s, H2s and subtitles are some of the biggest indicators Google takes into consideration when it comes SEO keywords. Trust me, there’s nothing like the feeling of getting full green lights when your blog post is fully optimised!

? Back up your site

Daily backups along with completing WordPress updates regularly will help avoid a slowdown in your site, plugin conflicts and hacks.

Daily backups along with completing WordPress updates regularly will help avoid a slowdown in your site, plugin conflicts and hacks. | #JSBTalksDigital #WordPressHacks Click To Tweet

? Building back-links

External links back to your site may do more to boost your SEO rankings, but internal links are a great place to start. As you’re producing content, take the time to link back to things that you’ve written in the past–especially popular or useful things. This practice will also make it easier for search engines to locate new content as you produce it.

? Fix broken links

Back links are great, but they won’t help you if they link to the wrong content! Make sure that links to your website are current and accurate, especially if you’re completed a recent site migration or otherwise changed your directories.

? Videos

Embedding rich media, especially videos, makes a significant difference to organic web traffic.

? Responsive

Responsive web design (RWD) is a setup where the server always sends the same HTML code to all devices and CSS is used to alter the rendering of the page on the device. Google’s algorithms should be able to automatically detect this setup if all Googlebot user agents are allowed to crawl the page and its assets (CSS, JavaScript, and images).

In 2017, mobile traffic made up 52.64 percent of global online traffic. This further proves how much people are using their cell phones over their desktop devices. Furthermore, that mobile traffic is expected to rise to 79 percent by the end of 2018.

If you want to discuss your web marketing strategy then get in touch. Drop me an email to [email protected].

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Social Media Tool of the Week

The social media tool that saved my working week this week is Weasi Peasi.

I have my own websites and a client site using the service. Speed was an issue for my site and with their package they improved it.Wordpress hacks

I also receive a monthly personalised website status report giving me a breakdown of how my website is performing.

Nathan and his team continue to monitor my site and apply any 
necessary updates or improvements that it needs.

Find out more about their packages at https://weasipeasi.support/.

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Thanks for listening!

Thank you for tuning into episode #109 of JSB Talks Digital. If you are a regular listener I would love a review!

As always, I have everything discussed on today’s show on my award-winning blog at digitaltraining.ie

Don’t forget we are now on Google Podcasts reaching more Android users. You can also subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Libsyn, Stitcher or Soundcloud.

If you are interested in becoming a digital marketing pro and work in the public sector, check out my new Diploma in Digital Communications for Public Sector at: https://publicsectormarketingpros.com/diploma/

It starts on September 3rd.

Thank you for continuing to listen and don’t forget to get in touch you’re your questions. I love hearing from my listeners so don’t be a social media stranger!

Tweet me to @tweetsbyJSB; post a comment on our Facebook Page; Digital Training Institute. you can also snap me at jsbsnaps or why not send a boomerang to jsbgrams.

I’m Joanne Sweeney-Burke. This is JSB Talks Digital. Thanks for listening and I’ll talk to you soon.

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