The Profitshere

Attention all Website Owners – Do you have a website that you have been thinking about turning into an ecommerce site, but it is too hard or you are not sure where to start.

Traditionally in order to set up an ecommerce website you needed to be a webmaster guru, or you needed to pay someone to do it all for you, which could often turn out to be a costly exercise.

There are a number of very good free ecommerce solutions available on the internet, but in order to customise these to suit the look and feel of your business you need to have a good working knowledge of website programming languages. And trying to add these to your blog or facebook page was usually not worth the hassle.

Well, the good news is there is a simple and effective way to now add ecommerce facilities to almost any kind of website without needing a comprehensive knowledge of website programming. Over the last week I have had the opportunity to review Wazala. Wazala really changes the face of ecommerce and makes it accessible to all website owners. In a similar way to what sites like Blogger and Squidoo allow almost anyone to create a website, now Wazala allows almost anyone to add ecommerce facilities to their website.

Wazala will easily integrate into your existing website by pasting small snippets of HTML code into your website. This takes away a lot of the hassle of having to customise an existing ecommerce cart template to match your website. It also allows you to add the code onto any website that will allow you to add HTML code including your blog or even your Facebook page.

Wazala also allows you to tailor the size of your ecommerce site to meet your needs, and will cater for both physical and downloadable electronic products. One of the biggest challenges I have found with ecommerce shopping carts is that some only allow you to sell physical products and some only allow you to sell electronic products, but very few of them allow you to do both. Wazala allows you to manage your monthly spend based on the number of products that you are selling and the types of features that you require, again allowing you to tailor the product to suit your individual needs.

A few years ago, in order to have a website on the internet you really needed to be a web designer or you needed to pay someone to create it for you. Now, with platforms like Blogger, Squidoo, Hub Pages and others anyone can have a website. Add some content and some images and some styling and in almost no time and for no cost you can have a website.

Unfortunately adding ecommerce facilities or creating an ecommerce website up until now has required that you pay someone or have a good knowledge of programming languages like PHP and javascript. The good news is I think that over the next couple of years, websites like Wazala are going to make ecommerce accessible to everyone. More and more people are buying more and more products over the internet, and there is now no reason at all for you to miss out on the opportunity of selling products over the internet.

It could be as simple as 1-2-3.

1. Create a blog
2. Create of find a product
3. Add Wazala

And then you too are an online business owner.

Check out Wazala now and see how easy it is to add e-commerce facilities to your website.

Are you a new blogger? Do you have a blog on your business website? I have to say that Wordpress is my blogging platform of choice. Once you get it all setup I find it an awesome way to securely manage your blog.

In order to get the most from your Wordpress blog there are some plugins that I would suggest that you install. These plugins will help you to maximise your blog for search engine optimisation, security, and user experience.

I do sometimes use other plugins with my blogs, but I install these 16 plugins on all of the Wordpress blogs that I manage.

Blog Management Plugins

1. Akismet – this will be installed by default but you will need to activate it. This is your comment spam filter to stop you from getting spammed by people that are just looking for unprotected blogs to post alot of pharmacy or sex links to. This will save you a lot of time and heartache.

2. WP DB Optimiser – this plugin keeps your database in top shape so that your blog loads and runs quickly.

3. Wordpress Related Posts – this provides your readers with a list of posts that are related to the one that they are currently reading. This helps to keep your visitors engaged by providing them with other relevant content.

4. FD Feedburner Plugin – create your feedburner feed for your blog and then make it easy for your readers to stay informed whenever you make a new post to your blog. Feedburner will also give you stats about how many subscribers you have and what they click on so you know what your readers are finding interesting about your blog. Then keep giving them more of that.

Security Plugins

1. Wordpress Database Backup – at some point in time during your blogging career, there is a good chance that your blog will get hacked. The quickest way to fix this is to restore a proper working copy of your blog. In order to do this you need a recent backup. I schedule this plugin to run daily on all of my blogs and I have the backup emailed to me. This will safe you a lot of heartache if your blog gets hacked.

2. Wordpress Firewall – this plugin will reduce the likelihood of your blog fropm getting hacked in the first place. This stops people from writing unauthorised scripts to your blog which allow them access to your blog.

3. Login Lockdown – this plugin stops hackers from trying to uncover your username and password by ‘brute force’. After a set number of incorrect login attempts (I usually allow 3) they will be shut out for a set period of time.

SEO Plugins

1. Google XML Sitemaps – this plugin will automatically create a sitemap for your blog and resubmit it to Google whenever you update your blog. This will ensure that the search engines are aware that there is new content on your blog and will ensure that their robots will visit often and find your new content.

2. Headspace 2 – this allows you to set your title tags and descriptions for your posts and pages. Sometimes with a blog it can be difficult to manage your meta data. The Headspace 2 plugin allows you to manage all of your meta data in one place to ensure your get the best onsite optimisation for your blog.

3. SEO Smart Links – create internal links within your blog automatically to help the crawlers find your content.

4. SEO Slugs – this removes obsolete words like ‘a’ and ‘the’ from your post titles so that you get maximum benefit for the keywords in your titles.

User Experience

1. Subscribe to Comments – This plugin will help you to create a community around your business blog and keep your users engaged in your blog. As it says it allows a user to be notified of future comments that are made on a post that they have commented on. This helps to promote future discussion on your blog and brings your users back to your blog.

2. Thank Me Later – this sends a thankyou message from you to any user that posts a comment on your blog. Again this helps to create a community feel about your blog and helps to keep your readers engaged. It costs nothing to say ‘thanks’.

3. WP Super Cache – this plugin allows your pages to be served more quickly to your readers. As we are all time poor in this day and age you need to serve your content quickly otherwise your reader will be gone to the next website.

4. Light Social – make it easy for your readers to share your post with their friends and expand your social network with this plugin.

5. No Follow Case by Case – this plugin allows you to decide which links on your blog will be follow and which will be no follow. If you have people that are just link commenting you can no follow their links and quickly discourage this practice on your blog. At the same time you can reward people that leave meaningful comments by making their links follow links.

Got any other Wordpress Plugins that you love and just can’t do without? Put them in the comments below.

Got questions? Ask them in the comments below.

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