There are of course many advantages of using WordPress to run your website and I won’t discuss them here.

Instead I will show you how a specific built-in feature of WordPress can be used to secure the membership area of a website, without needing plugins and without forcing your members to create individual member accounts.

Setting a password for a WordPress post or page

The key feature is that WordPress lets you password-protect pages.

So in the case of our online magazine, we have created a page containing links to the member-only magazine downloads and then set a password for that page.

WordPress only allows one password to be set per page, so of course, that password is shared by all our magazine subscribers (members).

You might be thinking now, “Only one password for ALL the members.. well that’s pretty useless!”

Which brings me to the second part of this approach…

We also use an email list service and all the subscribers join the member list.

Then, the password for the member page is simply changed every so often (once a month in our case, but you could do it more or less frequently) and the new password is sent to current members via the email list.

This works well and is very simple to set up and administer. (And if you have ever tried using one of those fancy membership plugins, not only do they cost money, they are often far from easy to set up.)

Plus, this approach provides another great advantage.. Changing the password every so often, gives you the perfect reason to send a broadcast email to your members to notify them, give them other news and generally, encourage them to revisit to your site.

Some business owners already have experience of a couple of these online methods – others don’t know where to start, or what their business might benefit from.

In this “patchwork quilt” of knowledge about online marketing, the most common want we find amongst local business owners, is for their own business website.

I totally agree with this thought.. the business website should be the core foundation of all their other online promotion activities.

Furthermore, their business website should be firmly under their publishing control. The business then knows what information their customers will be exposed to, if it recommends they visit.

The business can then confidently promote its website to all its customers (and not just those customers who are familiar and comfortable with social media services).

So how do we provide local small businesses with their own solid website like this?

Well.. for the software platform, we use WordPress. Not much of a surprise there.

The benefits of WordPress are now pretty well known:

1. It’s very search engine friendly, with many in-built features that greatly help with search engine promotion.
2. It’s a CMS (content management system), meaning that most of the website technical stuff we used to do manually (such as page navigation links and uploading to the internet), is handled automatically and instantly.
3. There are thousands of themes and plugins for WordPress.
4. And above all, WordPress is very easy to use – even for non-technical people to edit exisitng pages and create new pages, including picture upload.

Which brings me to our “mistake”..

Initially, we thought #4 would be what most small businesses really wanted.

As WordPress sites are so easy to edit (by just about anyone who can use a word-processor), we majored on the point that once we had set up their website, we would provide training on how to use it.

This would allow the business owner, or a staff member, to make their own changes to the website themselves, so reducing dependence on a third-party developer.

Or so we thought…

But so far, this has proved much less of an attraction than we thought.

A couple of local business owners have welcomed the training and immediately started to maintain the site themselves, using the WordPress admin dashboard.

Others however, are much keener to have ongoing maintenance and new content just done for them.

Of course, this is particularly good in one way… it means many clients are more than willing to pay recurring monthly fees for ongoing services!

(Here a some good thoughts from another blog on how to Design Your Website To Grab Your Visitor’s Attention)

Next articles in this series
Look out for later articles in this series. They will share further details of our consultancy services to help small businesses market on the internet.

So to encourage me to write some new articles and  make amends for my lack of updates, I have joined Dr Mani’s Blog Challenge for January.

The aim is to write 30 new articles over the month.. that’s One A Day (gulp!).

Anyway, I have started so I need to carry on.

A problem I have with writing, is I tend to think too much and write too little.

I put this down to a desire to produce the best article I can, at that point in time.  I don’t like to just write whatever, in order to reach some desired word count.

I think it’s a GOOD approach..  however, it does slow my creating and indeed, create some inertia.

Anyway, we will see what happens.

There are quite a few other blogs taking part in the Challenge.

And it’s probably not too much of a surprise, that most are using WordPress (like this one of course).

Here are some of the others to visit:

How To Write A Sales Letter That Sells

What Is the Best Digital Camera to Use for Marketing?

Good Website Design

Overcome Fear- Just Simple As It Is

Learning To Love The Boring Tasks Of Your Business

What Is A Niche Market In Internet Marketing 

To get any startup consultancy going, you need some clients. That’s pretty obvious!  So we set out to find local small businesses, who wanted help with their online marketing.

Now, some of us are naturally good salespeople on a person-to-person basis. Others find it more of a challenge and even somewhat scary. (personally, I’m in this second category)

But if you decide to go into this type of business, you are going to have to be realistic – finding local small businesses as clients IS going to need some face-to-face selling.  In contrast to a pure online business, it’s not going to be possible to do everything indoors, sitting behind your computer screen!

Initially, this rather put me off the whole idea, but I’m glad I followed through. Finding new clients who really want help with their online marketing, is actually turning out to be fairly easy (and quite enjoyable).

Here’s the main reason I see for this..

Small business owners generally seem to be nice people. Also, they know they need to be found on the internet these days.

So they respond very well to another local business person helping them in a genuine, straighforward way to market their business better online.

Here are the three main ways we are using currently to find new small business clients. (and please note, we are learning all the time, so these methods are evolving).

You may notice that none of these ways, involves any paid advertising…

#1  Be a customer first (my preference)

You must use local businesses already.. for example shops, restaurants, hairdressers, motor dealers, dentists etc?

So do a little research online…  see if you can find them easily using Google search, with relevant local keyword terms.

Then, next time you are at their premises as a customer, casually remark that you tried to find them on the internet, but could not (if that’s true). Or perhaps they are listed somewhere such as in a local business directory, but not at a website they have control over?

Make these remarks to one of the business owners of course, rather than an employee. If they seem interested, mention that you work with local businesses to improve their online marketing.

From experience, this method is good at finding small businesses you could work with. And it does not really involve much “selling” as such, certainly not in a pushy way.

#2  Use the telephone

Another way is to telephone potential local small businesses. This is more like cold calling, so you do need to be a bit more confident at sales.

You can draw up a list of potential clients, by first finding local businesses who are spending money on print advertising (this is generally expensive) – just look in local publications.

Then do some online searches for their relevant keywords. If you can’t find a website or a good directory listing that they can control, add them to your list of potential clients.

#3  Email

Again, find potential clients as per #2 and if they publish an email address, send them an email offering a chat.

We know that emails like this are often ignored, so it probably needs to be combined with a telephone call.

One way of getting more attention for your approach, is to record a short screen-capture video, showing you doing some online searches and perhaps finding their local competitors, but not them.

Then the next step…
Whatever method you use to find small businesses who want some help, you can then arrange to meet them for a free chat.

Here, you can find out more about their business and explain how it can better use online marketing to bring in more customers.  It’s best to have access to the internet at this chat, so you can “show and tell” what you are explaining.

Watch out for the next article in this series about our startup consultancy for local small business.

Many courses have been offered, promising to teach you everything you need to be successful at small business consulting.

It’s often suggested that it’s as “easy as falling off a log” to sell consulting to local ‘brick and mortar’ businesses, IF you have some experience (or an expensive training course) about using the internet for marketing.

We noticed this, my main business partner and I. We had seen a lot of this “offline consulting” hype… so we decided to give it a try!

Our backgrounds

I have been using the internet since 1999, making websites, publishing information and selling stuff online, so technically at least, I feel pretty competent.

My colleague has a background of actually owning and running high street retail businesses (amongst other things), but only started on the internet more recently.

Some years ago, I helped her set up websites using WordPress. She has now become very competent herself and has also delved deep into other internet marketing areas, such as local business directories and Google Maps listings.

Our organisation

We decided at the start, to run our consulting businesses separately, approaching small businesses in each of our local areas. This is East London for her and Kent for me. So we each have our own client base.

Throughout however, we have stayed in regular contact to share our experiences, techniques and generally help each other. This cooperation has been very useful.

So does “Local Small Business Consulting” work?

The short answer is YES.

We have found that most local small businesses have by now realised they must be on the internet – they don’t need much selling on this point.

They see that more and more of their customers are finding them (or not!) through online search (especially Google), with much less reliance on print directories and print advertising.

Small businesses are therefore generally willing to buy help with their online marketing, if they are not on top of this already.

In just a few months, we have worked with a diverse range of local small business, for example motor dealers, farm shops, independent photographers, heating engineers etc, creating websites and providing other online marketing help.

It has been fun and worthwhile.

Next articles in this series

Look out for later articles in this series. They will share the details of our consultancy services to help small businesses market online, including our techniques for finding new clients, software used to create websites, how we price our services and much more.

Plus, the unexpected add-on service we have found…

I got a shocking warning email from Google last Saturday… my site was distributing malicious code or “malware”, so it was now blocked.

HOW DID IT HAPPEN?

It’s clear I made some mistakes, but what was the CAUSE?

The setup on the host server? (it’s not my main host and they have since told me, they altered their server after my hacking report). Was it the WordPress software I was running? Or was it something else? (of no doubt hundreds of things, I don’t know about)

What I do know for sure, is several bits of nasty redirecting code were hidden in various places of my site, such as (for the techies amongst you) htaccess files and the wp-content, uploads and themes folders.

BUT HERE’S THE REALLY SHOCKING THING…

Even AFTER the first clean up, when I changed passwords for WordPress, FTP, database and hosting, they did pretty much the same hacks THREE MORE TIMES between Saturday and Monday.

I’m told they must have inserted some sort of “back-door” into the site, to use whenever they wanted.

To be honest, I’m still not sure if it’s all fixed and secure yet. I am hoping the server changes done by the hosting company will work, but it’s too early to say.

I DON’T WANT YOUR SITE TO GET HACKED…

So here are the key lessons I’ve learned from this and want to share. There’s two categories, PREVENTION and CLEANING.

To PREVENT, or more realistically REDUCE the chance of getting hacked:

1. Make sure you have updated your WordPress software, to the latest released version. (I had neglected the hacked site for some time – it was on version 2.8)

2. Set file permissions, particularly in the wp-content folder, to the most secure settings that will run on your server and still display your site. (755 is a good place to start)

These are both pretty basic, quite honestly. Search on Google and you will find LOADS more prevention tips, using properly clever stuff.

BUT WHAT IF YOUR SITE DOES GET HACKED?

(could happen sometime.. probably will)

You will want to be able to CLEAN it quickly and effectively (this is I think, the most important bit of this post).

You don’t want to have to fallback on cleaning individual files, like I had to. Instead, have a proper backup copy of ALL current files and folders, plus the WordPress database.

Here’s a video showing how to do proper backups…

http://websiteworkshop.net/members/backing-up-video/

You can then just restore your entire site from the backup and in one fell swoop, remove any “back door” nasties that might be hiding.

None of this is rocket-science.. it’s all rather boring (until you get hacked).

But PLEASE actually do it for your sites. If the worst happens, these boring steps will save a lot of your time and minimise loss of income.

Posted via email from kevinbrown’s posterous

A couple of months ago, I heard first from Joy. Not only did she get me to sort-out her WordPress challenges, she also persuaded me to run some workshops in London, to help other small business owners start selling online.

We did the first workshop just over a week ago and it went very well (in a very prestigious historic building, on Piccadilly). So we are now planning the next for October 19th.

Would you like to come along? I can promise a very helpful, hands-on few hours, showing how to use WordPress to publish strongly on the internet.

So reserve a specially discounted ticket now (only 6 available). This password protected link will be taken down soon.

[link removed]

Hope to meet you in London, in October.

Now to find a Twitter app? It looks pretty good in Safari on iPad..

Posted via email from kevinbrown’s posterous

Arrived today by UPS courier.  Just opened the box (with a nice “out
of box experience”), although not much inside the box, apart from IT.

Then synched with iTunes (and needed to download the latest 100Mb version).

The iPad is shockingly lovely to handle and use, even after all the
worldwide hype.

This quick picture with it sitting on top of my Toshiba laptop PC,
does not do justice..

Yum yum. Think I will like this expensive purchase.

Posted via email from kevinbrown’s posterous

Posted via email from kevinbrown’s posterous