Before buying membership site software – ask these questions to every vendor

Building online membership site business is an exciting step on the road to build our own source of residual income.

We all have talents, we all love and know to do certain things better than anyone else. We all know how to solve certain problems that others would love to learn from us. Taking time to put our skills, experience, passion and knowledge on the web and having a chance to monetize it brings triple excitement:

1. You do something more about what you love.
2. You share what you love to do with other people and helping them to solve their problems.
3. You can make money doing what you love.

One way to monetize your skills and experience is to build a site  and share your skills and experience in form of writings, posts, helpful articles, downloadable ebooks, text, video and audio tutorials or in any other kind of "digital" format. Idea is to share your talents with other people, helping them to solve their problems and making money along the way by charging for information access.
Today on internet people are happily paying for useful practical information.

Once you decide to take a step and start building your online membership business the question is how to proceed?

The best, most easiest and most flexible online building platform is wordpress. WordPress is free and can be installed in a matter of minutes. WordPress does not includes any paid membership capabilities though so you need to add a plugin to make it do what you need.

There are many wordpress membership plugins on the market, many new are created daily and the big question is which one to choose?
Whether buying a car or buying a software - the easy way to make a right choice is to ask the right questions to vendors of plugins directly.
To make your choice easier here I will outline a list of important questions to ask to vendors of wordpress membership plugins.

The magic of the right questions! At the end you will see that the list of vendors who are capable of answering positively on all these questions is very limited. The goodness of that is the choice of membership software that you will need to make will be much easier.

Here goes the list of questions about membership site softwares:

1. How SEO optimized is your software? Which SEO benefits your membership site software will offer to my website? 
   SEO means Search Engine Optimization - it's an ability for your membership site to be ranked high on major search engines.
   Membership sites are rather unique in an aspect that much of their content is protected, which means less content is available for search engines as well. So the more bits and peices of SEO juice you can squeeze the better for your business.
   Here are SEO questions to ask to your membership site software vendor:
   
   • Do you offer free teasers for articles and pages? Free teasers could be indexed by search engines even though the rest of content is not available.
   • Do you support Google First Click Free standard? Google first click free standard was specifically developed by Google to allow premium membership site owners to gain extra organic ranking juice.
   • What happens when new visitor  (as well as search engine) tries to access premium ebook or premium movie for which he has no access?
     Does user and Google are going to see "access denied" or "404" errors or you offer more intelligent way to handle these cases?
     Most softwares does not handle these cases in any intelligent way and Google is going to see lots of "404" or  "access denied" errors on your site.
     This will negatively affect your site's organic ranking as google will consider your site "not friendly",  "buggy" site with lots of missing pages.
     MemberWing-X is the only membership site software on the market at this point that allows you to automatically substitute premium digital downloadable materials with special promotional version of these materials when search engine or free visitor access them. This feature named PromoFusion. PromoFusion serves double purpose:
     
     1. Google will never see errors but instead will notice that your site contain plenty of rich media content
     2. New visitors will be able to see promotional "teaser" pieces and get more interested to buy full access to your materials.
   You want comprehensive Search Engine Optimization care for your website to be offered by membership site software.
2. Do you offer free support forum where users are openly discussing your software? How long do people need to wait for your replies?
   Software support forum is great way to search for solutions and answer on questions.
   You want software vendor to have free support forum.
3. Do you offer free fully featured trial of your software?
   My most successful experiences with any product always started with the free fully featured trials. Ability to test-drive software is as important as test driving car before buying it. Not that many commercial plugin vendors offer free trials. Most offer "money back guarantee" that does not often works as smooth as you want. You want free trial with no questions asked.
4. Does source code of your plugin is encrypted or opened? If down the road you want to make a tweaks to source code to make it fit your theme or your business model better - the source code needs to be opened. If it is encrypted - you're on mercy of the vendor. He may or may not want to accomodate your custom need and even if they would agree to do so - the fees they'll likely to charge will be high and non negotiable. If source code is not encrypted you may do small modification yourself or hire any good coder at a market price to make modification for you.
   You want source code to be opened.
5. Does your software allow me to launch membership site within minutes or do i need to learn your proprietary technology for a months before making next step?
   Many vendors offer somewhat awkward administration and configuration interfaces that would take a long time to navigate and configure before their system would be of any use at all. While complexity of software is a fact of life - some vendors make their solutions auto-configurable to large extent. For example MemberWing detects all settings automatically and allows to launch membership site with zero configuration efforts at all. Naturally it takes 2-3 minutes with MemberWing. While it has plethora of custom settings and long manual as well - you may learn them all "after the fact" once you already launched your membership site that is fully ready to accept payments. It's fun to get couple paying membership already while you still learning the craft.
   You want quickly launchable and close to zero-configuration membership software.
6. Do you offer hosted version of your software?
   Most vendors offer only downloadable version of their softwares. Which means you have to do all "under the hood" installations and setups yourself. If you are busy professional that do not have time or desire to get your hands dirty with proprietary technical things and just want to set up your business on internet - hosting version may be a great solution for you.
   Hosted version comes with a recurring monthly fee and usually includes pre-configured website hosting + pre-installed membership site software in one package. It is a guarantee that everything works and operating as it needs to be and leaves your hands free to concentrate on what you do best - your business and your talents.
   You want an ability to have a hosted version of their software.
7. Do they offer Gradual Content Delivery Functionality (dripping content)?
   Gradual content delivery allows you to pre-populate your site with a number of lessons or tutorials or articles and make them available gradually to your new members. This attractive concept is very successfully used by a number of autopilot sites where most of it's content is pre-loaded upfront. But every new member sees new content appearing "gradually" on your site and that prevents person to be overwhelmed with the flood of new materials. Gradual Content Delivery functionality helps to keep members to stay longer with your site, protects against content leeching (new member signup, copy everything and cancels) and overall keeps more money in your pocket.
   You want an ability to have Gradual Content Delivery functionality.
8. Do they offer ability to securely sell digital downloadables products?
   Internet is ideal place - "cloud" to sell access to all kind of information over and over again. That's how millions of dollars of residual income is made!
   Selling information could mean:
   - Selling access to premium content by a single fee and by subscription (which mopst membership software supposed to do anyways).
   - Selling digital downloadable materials such as eBooks, movies, MP3's, premium images, software downloads, ZIP archives, and other files.
   - Giving access to premium digital materials for members who purchase certain product or group of products.
   Important part of selling information is security features.  Security for your digital business comes in:
   - Ability to prevent loss of revenues by having one person to purchase the product and sharing download link with 100's of his friends.
   - Ability to prevent cases where one member purchases your premium product and uploads it to torrent site and file sharing sites.
   For example many online hosted digital download services send download link to the purchaser. Such link is unsecure and can be shared with anyone. To prevent this issue most softwares and services came up with idea of "expiring" links or limiting link to certain number of downloads. This in turn cause lots of grief to legitimate purchasers who want to download product after arbitrary expiration date or download it to their desktop, laptop and office computer as well.
   MemberWing-X came up with a nice solution to all these issue by requiring customer to login with his own username and password to access his purchases at any time and as many times as he wants.
   MemberWing also the only solution on the market that could invisibly watermark each digital downloadable product with unique identity of a user before letting him have it. This feature will help webmaster to track down illegal file sharers, digital thiefs and terminate their membership to prevent revenue losses.
   You want not just an ability to sell digital downloads, but ability to securely sell digital downloads with revenue protection features.

While there are many offerings on the membership software market today - it is not easy to make the right choice. Mostly due to difficulty to see through the hype and promotional push that many vendors and their affiliate offer.

You are the best person who may answer which features are most important for your membership web business. The secret to success before making any purchase is to ask the right questions.

If you consider above questions as important ones for your business I may offer you the last tip of this article:
The latest release of wordpress membership plugin MemberWing-X gives “yes” answer on all of these questions.

How to fix Ioncube error with WordPress on 1and1 shared hosting space.

Ioncube is a source code protection script that often packaged with commercial PHP scripts.
This include many commercial wordpress plugins including my own MemberWing family of wordpress membership site solutions.
This applies to 1and1 shared hosting only:
When you'll see Ioncube error do this:

1. Create php.ini file with the following content:

   ---

   zend_optimizer.optimization_level=15
   zend_extension=/homepages/xx/xxxxxxxxxxx/htdocs/ioncube_loader_lin_5.2.so

   ---

2. Copy this php.ini file under root of your website and inside the plugin (or theme) that causing the problems.
3. Copy ioncube_loader_lin_5.2.so file (freely downloadable from ioncube.com site) into root directory of your hosting space.

Please note that "5.2" in ioncube_loader_lin_5.2.so filename means "version of PHP" - so you may need to change this file as well as entry in your php.ini file accordingly.

Thanks for 1and1 support guy who was pleasingly attentive, knowledgeable and responsive to my request.

Build Membership Site for free? You got it!

Would you like to build membership site for free?

MemberWing plugin for WordPress just filled in the long standing gap between webmasters interested to build a fully featured membership website and amount of dollars that quest was required to fork out.

Traditionally to create membership website you'd have to buy a piece of software that allows you to manage permissions to access premium content as well as payment processing needs.

MemberWing is the first membership software script that helps you to accomplish all that at exactly zero cost.

MemberWing is actually a plugin for the WordPress (free blogging software). By adding and activating MemberWing for your website or blog - it suddenly makes it a membership site.

Up to 4 levels of memberships (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum), SEO optimized functionality allowing major search engines to index predefined parts of the premium areas, automated payment processing with Paypal support - all these features makes it a no brainer for webmasters to try this software as a solution to build fully featured permission based membership site.

MemberWing, as many other free softwares, is supported by the backlinks back to http://www.memberwing.com/ site.

But in case you want to build unbranded version of membership sites for yourself and for your clients - the options are available as well, including flat fee license for unlimited installations.

The cost is zero. The choice is yours. The risk is not.

Why Hostgator’s support absolutely rocks!

Here's my little experience with HostGator service and support.

Well, let me say first that I moved to Hostgator after finding that someone's e-commerce site was totally flying in terms of speed of contents delivery and she was hosting it all off hostgator's lower end shared hosting plans. So I decided to move few of my domains to hostgator and even opened a reseller account with them to get a bit of boost in performance.

Yesterday I was working to update my WordPress Membership Plugin (MemberWing allows to build free membership sites) - and it was supposes to send an email when new user is paid and signed up.

Everything was working but that piece - sending email. It was kinda annyoing to me to deliver software that works but no one get notified that it works. In other words sending email part of script didn't work. So I decided to blame Hostgator and send them email asking it to fix sending email from PHP. My perception was that their security settings was over elevated.

Just to let you know - Hostgator has phone and email support. Phone support may or may not take long time because of time of the day. Sometimes you're #17 in the line, sometimes you're #2 and it get quicker. Although their email support is quite impressively fast.

While 1and1 (my current hoster) tends to give you 24-48hrs ETAs for any meaningful email answer (and you still have a chance to get Paypal-ish type of email reply nonsense fluffed at you) - I was pleasantly surprised to get very fast and technically helpful and detailed responses from HostGator guys on pretty much every email. Bear in mind it often happens that they been very patient to describe detailed solution in email instead of RTFM-ing and FAQ-ing.

So back to my email issue - I sent email to support@hostgator and pretty soon asked by them to provide a source code that i use to send email. This was like 7pm.

I sent them code - they replied again within an hour asking me to clarify some issues. Apparently I setup redirection that confused everyone - so I fixed that part and send them updated script with the source code.

That was 9pm+

Something good happened overnight and early in the morning I received email from Hostgator's
Linux Systems Administrator Matt S. who actually found a bug in my code and found a problem in the way I setup DNS at my other provider's space.

He managed to do something good at Hostgator's backend to make sure that my emailing started to work (even though the way I setup DNS at 1and1 was still problematic) and pointed out on bug in my script that generated an errors.

Really, when was the last time *you* had helpful technical guys to spent nighttime fixing *your* problems, looking at *your* code, adjusting their backend to accomodate issues that *you* created, staying *polite and professional with you* and finally delivering complete working solution so that *your* business will kept running?

Kudos to HostGator!

WordPress Membership Plugin – MemberWing. And it’s free!

If you want to convert your wordpress blog into membership site and shy spending hundreds of dollars upfront - keep reading!

The new free wordpress membership plugin - MemberWing allows to convert your existing blog into membership site without any changes or re-designs.

MemberWing was built with Search Engine Optimization and speed in mind.

By inserting small text marker "{+++}" inside any article (old or new) - the content of it will become "protected" and available only to registered premium members. Simply put - anything that was before the marker - is visible for everyone - so put your teasers here. Anything after the "{+++}" marker will only be visible to users who are "Gold" or "Platinum" members. This is great feature that allows search engines to index and rank free text "teasers" part of your blog/website. Other plugins and multi-hundred dollars membership software packages does not have this very useful feature. They just lock site completely leaving you on your own with zero chance for organic rankings.

Once activated, plugin created 4 separate group members - Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum. So you may (if wanted to) have 4 classes of contents and charge fees accordingly to access each class of contents. The way you mark contents of your articles for each group is the same simple one - via markers that separate free teasers from premium "juicy" part. {+} - Bronze members, {++} - Bronze and Silver members, {+++} - Bronze, Silver and Gold members, etc..

Membership plugin MemberWing supports latest version of self-hosted WordPress 2.6+ and works on any hosted account that allows wordpress installations.

I've installed it here - and protected this article

Here's how your protected article will look like, when viewed by non-premium member:

{+++}

Yes.

Aweber vs 1ShoppingCart vs GetResponse – autoresponders comparison

I was searching for the best autoresponder to use for business and as many of us do - went to Google to search for unbiased opinions, reviews and experiences. The quest was a bit time consuming - Google still has a work to do eliminating useless spam and zero-value pages from their index. Until they do - we - the searchers has to do it ourselves. So I did it and filtered through the content of all these results to make the final choice.

My research might save you time if you're after similar task.

I already have basic shopping cart account with 1ShoppingCart and they also offer autoresponder at extra monthly cost. Another contender is AWeber. I also found quite a few people using GetResponse. I wanted to find which one is the best and whether I might be missing other choices in this area.

Choosing the right autoresponder is VERY important as the task of moving away from it later on could mean serious loss of established business (old list members refuse to re-optin).

I decided to search for reasonably fresh pages - dated less than 1 yr old. I wanted to find decent  reviews/comparisons/articles regarding choosing the right autoresponder.

So here I just list the reasonably decent posts I found and at the end summarize my choice.

• Great discussion thread of Aweber vs GetResponse and autoresponders in general is here:
  (Link changed by portal, sorry)
  Includes direct responses from Tom Kulzer - founder of AWeber.
  Summary - even the ones who blame Aweber for their glitches, agrees that 1SC is worse.
  Winner: Aweber.
• Good thread at:
  http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/405/aweber-email-autoresponder-review/
  Author was slightly biased to Aweber although plenty of valuable replies / comments and answers on questions.  Some mentioning 1ShoppingCart.
  Overall winner: Aweber.
• Short Positive report about switching from 1ShoppingCart to Aweber:
  http://www.kaboodle.com/reviews/testing-aweber-v.-1shoppingcart-for-deliverability
  Winner: Aweber.
• Another fresh post from Gobala Krishnan:
  http://www.gobalakrishnan.com/aweber-defines-email-marketing/
  His view in terms of choices: 1: Aweber, 2: GetResponse, 3: 1ShoppingCart
  Winner: AWeber.
• I wanted to find something "bad" about AWeber just to fill both sides of scale and came across great blog post of Caroline Middlebrook:
  http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/aweber-6-painful-lessons-learned/
  At first I thought that her painful lessons would tell people to stay away from aweber, yet i found great teaching article and tips that help other people to actually use aweber more productively.
  Cautious winner: Aweber.
• Nice post that explains benefits of Aweber vs. Feedburner/Feedblitz:
  http://www.chrisg.com/aweber-versus-feedburner-for-bloggers-with-email-newsletters/
  Main point of this article is that Aweber beats feedburner/feedblitz combo with introduction of a service that can read your RSS and post it out to subscribers.
  I personally was glad to learn that. And here's how Aweber explains it:
  When you publish articles to your blog, your blogging software automatically publishes content to an RSS feed containing your newest blog posts.
  Our Blog Broadcast feature can check this feed frequently for new content, and if any new articles are found, a blog email newsletter will be automatically created and sent to readers who subscribe to receive them.
  This article had great replies from people as well - worth reading! Readers seems to jointly agree in appreciating AWeber's customization features.
  Additionally to that from my personal experience customizing and setting up feedblitz as a full blown autoresponder is not for the faint of heart. I really didn't like it's non intuitive and convoluted interface and hence will be switching to other means of feed-to-email delivery.
  ON a side note - author have a nice posts for beginner bloggers/marketers about email marketing in general - worth checking:
  http://www.chrisg.com/email-marketing-tips-what-is-email-marketing/
• Tom Kulzer (founder of AWeber) on email deliverability to yahoo email addresses:
  (need to click link in video window):
  http://www.marketing-ideas.org/Stump-Markus-648.php

Conclusions + Bottom line:

• Switching from one autoresponder to another one is bad - choose one carefully and stick with it.
• Stay away from "free" solutions. What you pay is what you get.
• I've known marketers who use solutions that cost almost 100x times more than AWeber but have yet to see independent trustworthy report of their real benefits.
• 1ShoppingCart is great integrated solution for everything e-commerce. It is an excellent shopping cart, it's premium version includes affiliate marketing features, digital downloadable products delivery and autoresponder as well. If you want all-in-one for everything (ecommerce+autoresponder) this might work well.
  There were number of people though who expressed criticism toward 1SC autoresponder's features and capabilities in favor of Aweber.

Overall winner of all autoresponders: www.Aweber.com

5R System: How to build your opt-in list 4 to 7 times faster

I missed this week's call with Michel Fortin and Daniel Levis about growing your online customer and prospects lists 4 to 7 times faster. Luckily Michel Fortin (my fellow Ottawan) was kind enough to mail me MP3 recording of a call. This call was obviously pre-sale for more complete and detailed system by Daniel Levis but nevertheless it was full of actionable tips that could be utilized by any webmaster in any business immediately.
Just by reading these ideas and acting upon them could really improve the speed of any opt-in prospects gathering process quite a bit.

So here they are.

5R system by Daniel Levis - well defined workflow for improving conversion. It boils down to:

Effective Communication

which in 5R terms could be spelled as:

Right person communicating Right message to the Right audience at the Right time in the Right way

What these principles are (in different order):

1. Right audience.

   Take empathy for your audience. Learn their language, find their problems, live their emotions. To do that - search relevant blogs, forums. Create and let people fill single question surveys: whats your biggest question or problem about "X" ?
   Utilize exit popups in sales pages - ask question: "why didn't you buy?" or similar, invite feedback.

2. Right message.

   Begins with simple, easily understood, ultra compelling promise, follows with social proof that your product can deliver on it, ends with a singular clearly defined, easily measurable call to action. This action could be as simple as asking to "put your first name and primary email address to this box". "Click here to lock in your spot". Relevant promise, proof and call to action - helps to grow list faster than competition.
   Whats target audience goals? They dont buy things, they buy results, outcomes, benefits. They want to go away from pain / toward pleasure.

3. Right person.

   You must be perceived as the right person doing communicating. Inject human element into static world of a webpage. Position to the upper left is preferable. Use conversation language - not corporate or average marketing bubble. Jargon/sleng familiar to your target audience could give a good personal feel. Personal signature at the bottom is great. People must feel personal with your marketing message. Physical attractiveness gives best impression. Expression on face - eyes, smile, look - always work well. Evaluate your current imagery - dress, look, allow prospect to identify with you more easily. Positive visual presentation principles allow prospect to bond with you.

   Michel Fortin: it takes about 1/20th of a second for a person to decide whether to stay on or leave your website.

4. Right timing.

   = Sequence: in what order you will need to deliver your sales message. It must be in series of linked steps. Important to segment the message. Each step must have specific function.
   Simple scenario:
   - Banner ad(on other sites): seize attention+arose curioucity and interest.
   - Landing page: seize attention, establish liking, authority, stimulate reciprocity, demo proof, make offer, reverse risk, create scarcity/urgency and scarcity, take prospect to the shopping cart page.
   I personally detest these lame cheap "scarcity" tricks that marketers are trying to pull on you nowadays. Only 29 copies of "digital" downloadable product left, so you have to hurry to buy, or else!!! Yeah right, blow me. Not my type of marketing. When I see this type of stuff on a sales page - I don't trust the marketer any more, don't buy and go to download his product from torrent site in a few days).
   - On shopping cart page: summarize offer, restate guarantee, restate social proof, close the deal.

   What doesn't add to the sale - detract from the sale. The less steps the better.
   Dedicated squeeze page - best way to increase number of leads - single purpose - short - all must be above the fold.

   Longer copy - bad 50% less conversion. Extend person's existing beleifs toward what you want. Don't try to change him. For example: Prospect believes that buying new car is difficult + paying too much. How to bridge gap between distrust and trust? Offer free report: "10 sneaky tricks card dealers use to inflate car price. How to turn tables on them".

   if he downloaded your report - trust is gradually established. Series of more emails strengthen trust.

5. Doing  it in the right way.

   Aim at sales killers: bad things you never want to happen on your website:  confusion + boredom + disbelief.
   Each line of copy must maintain readers interest. Always keep reason to keep reading.

   6 words that never failed to captivate interest: "Let me tell you the story" (Gary Bencievenga).  Good story always has element of surprise. Good story emotionalize facts - makes them more meaningful. People acts on emotions and than justify their action by logic. Emotion - driving force of sale. Story about blind man's sign: "i am blind - please donate" vs. "It's spring, and i am blind".
   Clarity is important. Ok to tease - never ok to confuse. Look at each sentence and eliminate double meaning words. Get rid of too long sentences. Bridge sections together properly.

So here they are - great easy principles to use in your online business to increase conversions and opt-in rates!

Thanks for Michel Fortin and Daniel Levis.

Building fast SEO-optimized websites

This tutorial is the result of my quest to find the best way to build fast, CMS-based, easy to manage, SEO friendly websites that would be well capable of generating money.

(I wanted to use the word "extra" but then why "extra"? It could very well be "main" money! The act of "generating money online" I envision as an act of easily delivering useful products or services to other people with the help of a website and being compensated for your work. The less problems or tractions that are happening during this process - the better)

The following features of WEB site building tool as well as features of final website were of the most importance:

• Ability to quickly build fully featured website. No painstaking struggles with web building software itself is acceptable.
  
• Ability to easily manage website from any internet-connected computer with any browser. In other words I want CMS (Contents Management System) based solution. No "create here and then copy there" solutions are acceptable any more.
• Ability to clone website - duplicate your success at will!
• Web site needs to load fast - Google spider wouldn't wait 30 seconds to read your sluggish pages and will move on.
• SEO: Web site needs to be highly optimized for search engines and SEO-important elements and structures needs to be highly customizable.
• Web site needs to be WEB2.0 ready. Meaning:
  • Allowing your visitors/members to contribute and share contents right on your website.
  • Having Social Media / Social Networking elements either built-in or easily added.
    
• Web site needs to be perfectly suitable for online e-commerce - in other words I want to be able to build online store to sell anything.
  
• Web site needs to be compatible with modern membership-based solutions (for the webmasters who wants to build membership sites)
  
• Web site needs to be able to be properly indexable by spiders and able to rank high on major search engines. This of course depends on skills of webmaster, but having these skills - the solution needs to be on par.
  
• Web site needs to have integrated backup facility - I had my share of defacings done by mentally challenged script kiddies and backups are a necessity of life.

What I don't care much about:

• Obsession with CSS purity. The is no proof that CSS-based website could generate more money than table-based site. CSS - while being a wonderful concept - trying to create perfect CSS based site that works on all browsers - is an ungrateful activity. It will distract you for a long time from other creative work that other people might benefit from. Nevertheless - there are large number of religious CSS obsessive compulsive disorder communities in existence that create (or proudly copy from each other) amazingly good looking pure CSS web pages full of hacks to satisfy all flavors of unruly web browsers - and I totally respect that. If CMS of choice could generate good CSS - it's a plus. Yawn. Btw - i think Yahoo is seriously under way to change the worldwide CSS and Javascript suffering via Yahoo User Interface YUI Library.
• Obsession with [X]HTML validation. Unfortunate reality is that Internet is full of ugly unvalidating pages that generate mind boggling amount of cash for their owners on an hourly basis. To prove my point - search for any popular moneymaking keywords on google and try to validate first 10 hits - you'll see what I mean. Again - the concept of validation has a large following - perfectionists are welcome.

Joomla

At first I went Joomla way. Joomla is an open source Contents Management System. Joomla is packed with features but having said that Search Engine Optimization was not the first priority for Joomla developers. Default URL structures of Joomla  looked just plain ugly and while some quick fix was available through admin panel - the need was to install a special add-on component to take care of redirects. Later on this component disappeared from the market to appear later on as part of commercial package of some sort. Joomla wants to be everything for everyone right from the beginning and hence it's admin panel is looking like a freshly decorated Christmas tree carrying tons of elements and features that you might not need, yet missing essentials that you likely want when building SEO optimized website. Additionally to that Joomla being pretty large and heavy CMS is not super high performing either. To customize Joomla look and feel you'd be quickly lured into paid membership sites selling $49 templates or custom consulting fees. Joomla has a huge community of faithful followers and excited community of commercial developers selling their products to faithful followers. I had my share of Joomla-related purchases and paid memberships and still ended up having my site look like 1000 of other similar looking sluggishly performing Joomla-based sites. On January 22, after long and painful pregnancy Joomla gave birth to the new major upgrade to their CMS - 1.5. By then I was heavily into WordPress-based solutions so I couldn't participate in the party. If you'd search "powered by joomla" - google will claim to find 11.3 million of pages carrying this message! This is a strong sign of huge online presence for Joomla. This also means that if someone wants to hack your Joomla-based website - you'll be easy to find. Although removing this message from your site is considered to be "not ethical" among conservative pussies.

Drupal

Then I went to Drupal. Drupal is another well-respected CMS enjoying huge following. It comes bare bones (although lately more and more features were included) and to make something useful out of it - you'll need to lurk around, read tons of documents, assemble a long list of things-to-do and things-to-get. I passed through these stages and ended up creating some sort of conglomerate of "recommended" add-ons and mods to make my new Drupal-based website perfectly SEO optimized. Along the way I actually wrote a tutorial on "How to make your Drupal site SEO friendly", describing step by step instructions. But performance of my website sucked! It was very slow. Slower than Joomla even. You may blame my cheap shared hosting account but WordPress works so fast at the same place - so I wouldn't bother argue.
Having said that I think Drupal is a great concept that makes for stable secure bare-boned system for building scalable web portals - but only for people who knows PHP and MySQL intimately. Last I checked - the consultant who knows Drupal and who knows what he is doing charges about $100/hr for the work. Unfortunately it takes too much time for an an average small business owner to create customized Drupal based website and make it do what you want.

Yahoo Merchant Accounts

Then I went to Yahoo stores. Let me say it upfront - if you are USA-based person and want to build 50,000 items high performing catalog-based no-frills online store - stop reading and go for Yahoo Stores. Yahoo have everything ready for that. Additional HUGE bonus comes in terms of trust and ranking friendliness from Google. Most Yahoo stores are apparently allocated within small group of IP addresses that Google is well aware of that. Yahoo have very strict policy on what you can sell from your store as well as what you cannot do from your hosting account. Lots of things you cannot do - hence Yahoo hosting is the last choice of hackers, spammers, lamers, script kiddies, black hatters and similar audience frowned upon by Google. What it means for you as potential Yahoo store owner - is that Google will grant you immediate trust in your intentions and content with ability to be ranked higher than your less-than fortunate competitors hosting at other hosting services. One of my test pet store was almost immediately listed on the first page of google for high volume 2 keyword target phrase.

Disadvantages of Yahoo Merchant account are including but not limited to the following:

• Cannot do a lot of things you could of if you'd own a dedicated server or 1and1 shared hosting account. SSH access? silly question! .htaccess editing? you gotta be kidding! Custom redirects? Stay away!    - This list of limitations is likely much longer...
• Yahoo Store editor is Yahoo's proprietary way to create online store - very awkward but does the job. They also have other ways such as "Store Builder" or some extensions for Dreamweaver.
• Serious customizations of templates needs to be done via RTML - which is another Yahoo proprietary technology. The result of it is a limited number of people who knows it (including YOU) and it will cost you a fortune to satisfy your Yahoo Store customization urges.
• Canadian customers are loosely supported in terms of merchant accounts. Yahoo only supports some sort of Nashville-compatible merchant accounts platform. This term is widely recognized in USA but canadian bank's reps never heard about this term. In other words - Yahoo Merchant Solution does not properly support canadians. You can still make sales via PayPal of course.
• It's not designed to run multiple stores off single account. In other words if you want to open www.mysuperwidgets.com and your wife wants to open www.mysuperpets.com - you'll need to fork out $40/mo x number_of_stores_you_want_to_open  to have them up and running. There are braintwisting ways to get around that but I didn't even wants to know it.
• Hard (impossible even?) to build multi-level hierarchy of web pages - all pages are created off root folder.

Having said all the bad things above - if you are in USA - most of that negatives does not apply to you. With yahoo stores you *will* enjoy rock solid secure space, lighting fast page loading, huge respect from Google search engine right up front and large community of free and commercial services available to help you launch successful online store. If you are looking for absolutely world's best help in setting up, configuring and customizing your yahoo store regardless of your level of experience - I could highly recommend Shauna Fennel's 1Choice4YourStore. I met her personally at business conference and highly admire her friendly personality, attention to details and quality of work she is doing. She offers her services commercially yet if you have a budget to start up your online business from 0 to 60 is shortest possible time - she's your one stop place for anything about Yahoo Stores.

XSite Pro

XSite Pro is a great product created by Paul Smithson. I purchased it and used it. I was pretty impressed by many features. Paul put SEO features of his product on high priority and that earned him well deserved appreciation from many customers. Did I mention that XSitePro has a strong set of SEO features and options? XSite Pro is not an online CMS though - all development has to happen on single machine and results of website development work need to be uploaded to the hosting server every time. The disadvantage of XSite Pro - is that it creates pure static portals and you need to have access to your development system to change/update/delete anything from your site. This of course carrying the advantage of these web pages being fast. In fact super fast. The added advantage of your website pages being fast is that Google will give you more ranking juice - it is well known fact that faster loading pages are favored more by Google and other search engines, spidered more often and rank higher than slower ones. Obviously google wouldn't want to put slow loading web sites high in ranks, but with static sets generated by XSitePro your site will likely fly fast even at cheap shared hosting accounts.
So if you are hosting your site on shared hosting space and do not need dynamic database driven backend - this is the great software, probably the best one available out there.
It also has great active community and excellent set of up to the point video tutorials.
For more complicated social media ready dynamic portals look for dynamic CMS-type solutions, like Semiologic's XSitePro.

A bit about WEB hosting places/spaces.

HostGator

I use Hostgator for their very fast and SEO friendly hosting space with lighting fast tech support. I haven't considered them until recently where I came across super fast loading affiliate marketing website carrying many products and images on the front page. Yet it was so fast that I asked owner where does she host it - and the answer was HostGator. I was sure she had a dedicated server - but she really surprised me saying that she only has shared hosting "baby" account with them. I signed up with them next day. Being slightly geeky - I requested and received SSH access. They have SVN installed by default (my preferred way to install/upgrade wordpress). I have to admit their support is very good. Contrary to other services it takes them only 15-30 minutes to answer/resolve your problems by email. With other hosters you're lucky to get ticket opened within 24 hrs of submission. Phone tech support, while takes some time on hold during peak hours is handled completely by local American people. No offense to my old 1AND1 service where young guy from india recently managed to resolve/answer all my questions pretty nicely. Hostgator also offers a less advertised dedicated IP address for mere $2/mo extra on any account. I think this is just amazing. All above sold me out and I closed accounts at other places in favor of hostgator. In fact I looking to move there all my domains and spaces. So if you are looking for fast and reliable service - look no further, I give them 2 thumbs up.

...and back to SEO WEB Development solutions

Semiologic Pro

This and some my other sites are using commercial WordPress theme named Semiologic Pro theme.

So what is WordPress? WordPress is an open source (read - "free") blogging software with an excellent set of features. Additionally to that it is simple, written on PHP language, it is "lightweight" and very well performing even when installed on cheap shared hosting accounts. As a blogging software it has large set of features + zillions of plugins, widgets and themes created by other people. WordPress has large following and large number of developers creating free and commercial add-ons to it.

I came across wordpress in my quest to create a simple CMS-based website where I could concentrate on quickly building my online presence and business instead of struggling with mutually incompatible WEB technologies and overcomplicated lackluster solutions.

Semiologic Pro is an excellellent "umbrella" of the latest WordPress software packaged with most useful plugins, widgets and add-ons to help you create, customize and manage full-blown CMS based website highly optimized for Search Engines and well suitable for Social Media Marketing (WEB 2.0).

This page will contain more details about my experience, tips and suggestions about Semiologic Pro for WordPress.

Semiologic Pro is good not only to build general static websites - but also fully featured online stores. Here is one of my online stores built with Semiologic and selling very specialized hardware devices -> VGA Frame Grabbers
Here's a good example of how well optimized is Semiologic Pro - based website:

1. I registered domain on November 25-th
2. At the end of December I put a first cut of the website (with many pages were still empty)
3. On January 25th,  2 month anniversary of domain name I made a first $300 sale! The customer reported that he went on Google looking for specific device, found my site on the first page and proceeded with his purchase. This made me really feel excited about the powers of WordPress + extra work that was put into Semiologic Pro "umbrella" to come up with a good package suitable for money making websites.

Self hosted, self-themed WordPress sites.

Semiologic Pro theme offers you "everything at almost click of a button", but if you'd like to get a bit more customized look and feel for your blog/site then you might need to check other available themes. There are plenty of resources, free and commercial.

If you looking to create SEO friendly online magazine, sports reporting blog, business looking portal, real estate website or news portal - then Revolution Themes is the first class option to consider. Product of Brian Gardener, Revolution Themes gives you excellent quality design and top notch polished look and feel portal at a click of a button.

Additionally to large selection of high quality themes he also offer free support forum that has active and knowledgeable community of webmasters and developers. While software itself is not free - it is one of the best available collection of modern WordPress themes available.

I strongly suggest considering Revolution Themes by Brian Gardener. I use and will continue to use them on multiple portals with great success. I purchased his all-inclusive developer's option and was pleased to discover how easily they could be modified and customized for different needs.

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Next Upcoming Article: Building SEO Optimized Membership sites with WordPress.

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Disclaimer: I've purchased and using all above products myself on more than one site with significant success. I actually purchased many more tools, software packages and services to evaluates but this article dedicated to the collection of the best tools that I could personally recommend.

How to reboot/reset/restart iPhone or iPod touch

WordPress folks recently released free application that allow you to manage your WordPress blog directly from iPhone or iPod touch. This free neat app lets you write posts, upload photos, and edit your WordPress blog from your iPhone or iPod Touch. It supports WordPress 2.5.1 and higher as well as WordPress MU.

I downloaded it but experienced a problem where application would just close by itself right after starting up. Sincerely - it started to happen after I also downloaded a few games as well. Not sure whether different apps started to conflict with each other or iPod developed some sort of Windows-ish need-to-be-rebooted-often-to-work-properly syndrome.

So to fix it I removed a few games and performed the following "soft reboot" procedure:

Press and hold down the Sleep/Wake button and the Home button (top edge of your device) simultaneously for a few seconds. The iPhone/iPod's display will clear. Then the Apple logo appears. In a few more seconds the whole system gets back to normal. Reboot/restart is done.

After that my new WordPress App worked properly.

How to prevent wordpress from messing up with your rich editing tags

After spending countless hours fighting with wordpress changing my tags and text formatting in it's rich text editor I finally decided to create a tiny little cute plugin that makes wordpress to leave alone my HTML formatting, tags and line breaks. Essentially the source code of the whole thing is this:

function myautop ($text) { return $text; }
function mytext  ($text) { return $text; }
remove_filter ('the_content', 'wpautop');
add_filter    ('the_content', 'myautop');
remove_filter ('the_content', 'wptexturize');
add_filter    ('the_content', 'mytext');

You may download actual plugin from the link below. Just unzip, copy it into ./plugins directory, activate and enjoy. Note: to fix another big annoyance with WordPress eliminating line breaks - this is what I use to "create" line breaks that WordPress doesn't kill. In HTML mode insert this code:

<div style="margin:2em;"><span style="display:none;">-</span></div>

Advantage of this method is that you can regulate size of your "custom line break" by changing value in "margin" CSS tag. Bonus TIP: Actually I just found a better way to keep linebreaks: Advanced TinyMCE plugin seems to add lot more features to TinyMCE editor as well as has an option to stop WordPress's messing up with line breaks.

Download: WP-AllowTags Wordpress Plugin that allows inserting tags

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