I am by no means the authority on this topic, nor am I the best Twitter user out there. I do not have the largest group of followers on Twitter, but I have a few. Some may think that I am not qualified to talk about this, but I feel like there is a lot of information out there about how to use Twitter to grow your business. In fact I think that everyone involved in the industry has written a book on it. Not that I believe this to be a problem, after all we live in the “information age”.
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So who has the best tips for speeding up WordPress sites???

WordPress Slow?

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5 Plugins To Make Your WordPress Blog Faster

WP Super Cache by Donncha O Caoimh- A very fast caching plugin for WordPress. This is what has been saving me from traffic spikes. In a normal WordPress install, every time a visitor comes to your site WordPress builds the webpage for them from scratch by pulling information out of the database and processing a variety of things in the software. The bottom line is, this is time consuming – and usually after you’ve published a blog post, it doesn’t change very much except when people comment. When a page is loaded, WP Super Cache caches a static (one time generated) copy of that webpage, and then every time a new visitor comes, it preferentially gives them the cached version of the page. This is much faster, and has totally saved me when a rush of people come from one of my posts going viral.

GZIP Output by Austin Matzko- This plugin automatically compresses CSS, Javascript and HTML output, allowing it to travel faster from your blog to a visitor’s browser. According to Best Practices On Yahoo! Developer Network: “Gzipping generally reduces the response size by about 70%. Approximately 90% of today’s Internet traffic travels through browsers that claim to support gzip.” This is a simple change that will not affect what your readers see at all – except that it will load in their browser faster.

WP Minify by Thaya Kareeson- This plugin uses the Minify engine to combine and compress JS and CSS files to improve page load time. Like the previous plugin, it also automatically shrinks the size of your files without you having to do anything.

W3 Total Cache by Frederick Townes- If I was starting a brand new blog today, this is what I would use on day one – and then go with a more complicated set up (like I have currently) after it grows. This plugin is amazing. It includes minify capabilities, caching (but less aggressive than WP Super Cache) and GZip compression.

Free CDN by Phoenixheart- If you have static files (images, javascript, css) taking a long time to load and slowing your site down, you may benefit by installing Free CDN – especially if you have large images. Briefly, a CDN is a content delivery network. Static files are cached on the CDN and pulled from their servers instead of your own – which means that your server has to do less work, and potentially can serve more people at once, faster.

Bonus: Upgrade WordPress! This isn’t a plugin, but every time a new version of WordPress there’s a good chance they’ve optimized the software so it runs faster than before. Be sure to test your blog after you upgrade to make sure everything still runs smoothly.

from Darren Rowse at problogger.net

In my opinion, as I am sure you have gathered from my blog here, one of the most important pieces of the Marketing puzzle is blogging! I am also very aware of how overlooked blogging is from a marketing prospective. Sure it is non traditional and it requires a little bit of dedication to making it work, but the benefits are amazing.

Let me show you what I mean by amazing benefits!

Just yesterday I ran a report on my blog, using Hubspots website grader tool. It’s free and I suggest that everyone give it a try. It is amazing what you can learn. So my blog (blog4biz101.com) has some outstanding results! The last time I ran this report was about 3 or 4 months ago, and I was ranking in the low 80′s. When I checked it yesterday here is what I found!!

What does this mean?

A website grade of 91/100 for blog4biz101.com means that of the hundreds of thousands of websites that have previously been evaluated, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 91% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness. The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over 50 different variables, including search engine data, website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others.
Here are a few of the details, that the reports shows me, to help me improve my blog or website.

Bellow are a few things from my report, that are both good and that need to be improved upon…

1. This is something that you do not want to see ever! You do not want your pages to be missing Titles, Descriptions or Keywords!! I have this really great plugin called All in One SEO which makes optimizing your blog post and pages really easy, but I am not always good about using it.

2. You want to make sure that Google is indexing all of your blog post and pages. When this is done effectively it is like having hundreds and thousands of one page websites on all kinds of topics (depending on the things you write about in your blog). Another way to look at this number is like this…I have 227 chance to be found in Google search results for a number of keywords in a number of variations.

3. If Google is not crawling your site, then they are not listing you in their search results! If Google is only crawling your site once a year, then they are not placing very much importance on your site, because there is little to no change. You want them to be visiting your site as often as possible, once a month is great, but weekly is much better! You get them to do that by using tools like XML site maps and writing lots of content!

4. Links! Who and how many people are visiting, bookmarking, referring and subscribing to your blog? This is very important, search engines are looking to see how popular you are to determine how important your content is and where you should be ranked in the search results. I do not have very many links, however the links that I have are from qualified sources. That just means that I am not submitting my URL to hundreds of link farms trying to trick the system.

Really the huge benefit that I am pointing out here, is that blogs can make it so easy for you to get listed in Google search results and make it easy for people to connect to you, which improves your score and better scores lead to more people being able to find you using more keywords!

Lets compare to ProBlogger.net

One of the pro bloggers I look to for advice and guidance in improving my skill and blogging results is ProBlogger. I always compare myself to them because Darren is the best at what we do.

Here is his score;

The website problogger.net ranks 2,684 of the 1,442,856 websites that have been ranked so far.

Sure he has almost 1 million inbound links and over 7,000 pages indexed in Google giving him a Google rank of 6. All of these things have helped him achieve a great score! But the things that have really been beneficial to ProBlogger is his ability to write GREAT content and properly optimize his blog.

I am just going to say, I honestly do not believe that you can get much better results then Darren does with his blog!

So have you given any more thought to a business blog yet?

Here are a few questions you can ask yourself…

Do you have a blog set up?  A professionally looking blog that generates you 10-20+ leads per day?

In this economy and in today’s market place you’ve got to take the marketing approach of all the top earners (attraction marketing) you MUST have a blog!

Your blog is your central nervous system where your leads will go to learn more about YOU before they do business with you!

Make sure you sign up for a free training course. We’ll show you everything you need to know about setting up your blog, which will take YOU and YOUR BRAND to the next level… a blog is not optional anymore, its essential.

Check out some of the stuff you’ll be learning in this FREE Training Course………

* How to install WordPress on your HostGator or GoDaddy hosting account so that you have a much better chance at ranking on search engines and getting 100% free traffic.

* How to set the basic options required to get your blog up and running so you can get start building your blog today.

* How to add an opt-in box to your blog so you can generate red-hot laser targeted leads for your business directly from your blog.

* How to install WordPress themes and plugins to make your blog look professional so that you stand out as an expert.

* Great plugins you can’t afford to not have (these won’t cost you a dime!)

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If you are interested subscribe today to be added to the list of attendees. There are only 25 spots available so act fast!

Use this form to subscribe…

I do realize that it has been some time now sense our last post!!  I know, I know, not even a quick update!  Some have been concerned that we might have dropped off the map!  But I assure you that is not the case, we are here to stay!

I do not even want to look and see the official date of out last blog post, mainly because I am ashamed that it has been so long.  But I want to go back a bit to get things up to date.  But first a little background on Blogging For Business 101 for those that might be new to our blog or just passing through.
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What is Branding?

Well, my favorite definition for branding comes from wiktionary.org,

branding – process in which a mark, usually a symbol or ornamental pattern, is burned into the skin of a living personal or animal.

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