We’ve covered how to start a website or blog and how to set them up and now it’s time to publish your content to the world, but not just publish it but publish it so that that it can get the most exposure. To do that, requires perfect and very precise website optimization. Don’t be scared of the words “website optimization” trust me, with WordPress things like SEO and optimization are child’s play.

Setting Up Category Pages

Remember that keyword list I told you to put together in Part 1 of this guide? Well now it’s time to turn those  keywords into pages, category pages to be exact. WordPress has a category function that allows you the place whatever content you are publishing into a category. These category pages will be accessible by visitors that come to your website, this helps with organizing your content not just for users but for the search engines as well.

Take a look at my blog iHipHopMusic.com and you’ll notice that in the sidebar there is the option to browse by topic, those topic links are category pages. These pages overtime will bring more traffic to your site.

Take a look below at some search results that some of the category pages on iHipHopMusic.com ranks for. These pages bring in thousands of visitors per month to the site. Now you can see the importance of doing the keyword research. In many cases the competition for these keywords are very minimum.

Publishing Content, Making A Post

Before category pages can be visible on the front end of your WordPress blog or website, you need to add content to them first. At this point your blog should be setup and ready to go, now it’s time to make your first post. Publishing a post is the easiest part of this whole thing, if you’ve ever used Microsoft Word or written a email then you will have no problem making a post using WordPress, the page you are looking at right now is a WordPress post.

Syndicating Your Content

RSS (Really Simple Syndication): You know even though I know what RSS is, to this day i still don’t have simple answer for when people ask me what it is, so I always point them to the Wikipedia description. The best way I can describe it is that it’s a type of news feed for your website that is dynamic and lets people know what’s the latest activity on your website, people usually keep track of your site’s activity by adding your RSS feed to their Feed reader. They’re thousands of different feed readers available online for people to use for free.

Feedburner: Most website publishing tools nowadays have RSS functionality built into it but they usually don’t have a way of tracking your RSS subscribers and readers, this is where a service like Feedburner comes in handy. Feedburner is a free service which Google acquired that allows you to track and manage your RSS subscribers. There is a 9 out of 10 chance that you’ve come across a site that uses Feedburner.

Email Marketing: This is a no brainer, if you don’t have a mailing list for your business then your not truly in business. If I was suppose to loose it all tomorrow and had a option of keeping one thing, that one thing would be my mailing list. With my mailing list I can get it all back, rebuild my business. Your website content needs to visible everywhere not just on your website, even with all the developments in Social Media, email marketing is still the number one and most effective way to keep in contact with your audience.

The best way to manage your mailing list is by using a Email Marketing service provider, over the years many email marketing services have emerged, so it’s virtually impossible to not be able to find a service that meets your specific needs.

A few of my different recommendations include Aweber, Get Response, Vertical Response and Stream Send.

By now you should have a fully functional website ready to go, and you should now be thinking of the type of content your going to be providing to your website. In part 4 of this guide I’ll cover ways to get traffic to your website.

Part 1: How To Start A Website Or Blog

Part 2: How To Setup A Blog Or Website Without Technical Skills

To learn more about WordPress, I’m writing a WordPress guide right after this guide is finish to cover everything a beginner needs to know about using WordPress.

There isn’t a shortage of ways to build membership / subscription based sites with WordPress, as you can clearly see from the list previously posted. The first thing you need for creating your membership site with WordPress is a good premium theme. They’re a few different WordPress premium theme developers that provide very flexible and highly customizable themes.

Finding A Good WordPress Theme

A few of the good ones include WooThemes, StudioPress, ElegantThemes and of course SoloStream. I’ve used all those theme developers for many different projects I’ve done for clients, SoloStream specifically makes very plain looking themes that don’t have much graphical aspects to them but allot of framework. This makes the themes highly customizable for users that are more web design inclined, this is why they’re my favorite. If your not a web designer and don’t have the time to learn then WooThemes, StudioPress, and ElegantThemes would be the better options. These guys are the best in Theme development so once you set up your theme you won’t have to worry about it after that.

A WordPress Membership Plugin

So you’ve got your theme together, now lets get into the meat of what you need for your membership website,  a membership plugin. I previously posted a list of the 10 best WordPress membership plugins for building and managing a membership website. Depending on what your looking for and what you want your subscription site to do, take a look at the list and decide which one is for you or you can just listen to me and just go with WishlistMember, problem solve.

WishlistMember is the most popular and most flexible plugin on the market and it’s the one I use for my subscription based website (Mixtapes.tv). The main reason for it’s popularity is due to it’s API and third party extensions that make it easy to customize for any type of membership website you want to build. It’s pointless to go through all the features of WishlistMember since everyone is looking to do something different.

The most important features that applies to everyone is that it’s compatible with many different payment processors such as ClickBank, PayPal, 1ShoppingCart and more. You can create unlimited membership levels and you can protect every part of your WordPress site.

Other Tools That Will Improve Your Membership Site

IdevAffiliate: is the most popular affiliate management software available on the web, having an affiliate program for your website will greatly increase the success of your membership site. An affiliate program allows other people to promote your product or service in exchange for a commission, the greatest benefit to affiliate marketing is that you only pay when you get customers. For that one reason is why affiliate marketing is one of the best business models and the only one that thrived in a down economy. You should really consider adding an affiliate program to your membership/subscription website.

SimplePress: This is the best message board plugin for WordPress and one of the best message board software, period. It even puts the official WordPress to BBPress to shame. The most convenient thing about the plugin is that it can be fully integrated with the WishlistMember plugin. Using SimplePress will help your membership site by creating user retention and keep your members coming back after they’ve lost interest in the main content of the site.

This is just a starter guide to building a membership / subscription based WordPress powered website, to cover everything you need to know about building this type of website will take more than one post so be on the look for more upcoming post regarding building a membership website.

Until next time…

First of all I’m not big on Joomla, WordPress is my weapon of choice when it comes to building websites not because WordPress is better but it’s just the tool I started with on the web and I’ve always been satisfied with it so I have no reason to change it. Since I run a website called Site Builder Tips I can’t make it all about WordPress, Though I don’t use Joomla for any of my projects I do use some there theme designs, meaning I’ve seen some great CMS themes for Joomla that I then convert to WordPress themes, I have a membership at Joomlart which is a Joomla premium themes site that has some really great themes that I convert to WordPress themes.

It’s on Joomlart where I discovered a site called JomSocial which is a Joomla social network website builder plugin, I have to say this is the first time I ran into a tool that I couldn’t find for WordPress, I mean there is BuddyPress but JomSocial is a whole other level. The cool thing about JomSocial is that the site it self is a social network that allows you to see the extension in action, a couple months back I joined the site and I completely forgot that I was trying out a demo because It was a real social network where I was interacting with other members. I think that’s a great way to sell a tool, the look, feel and functionality of JomSocial reminds me of being on Facebook.

JomSocial does a good job with this tool and they’re quite a few successful sites powered by JomSocial, 3 of which are GibLink.com that has 113,380 + members, OnlineRadioStations.com with 49,500 + members and KenyaHub.com with 120,583 + members just to name a few.

A few features and Specs that stood out for me.

Facebook Connect

Facebook has now eclipsed MySpace as the #1 most popular social network on the planet. With over 350 millions active users worldwide, chances are someone registering at your community will already be a member of Facebook.

To make the registration process hassle-free, JomSocial even included our new Facebook-Connect login-module in JomSocial, so your members can log-in to your JomSocial-powered community using their Facebook account details.

Profile pics, status updates & more are “pulled” in safely & securely from Facebook, making it easy for new and existing users to sign up and stay logged into your community.

Twitter Integration

If Facebook Is the king of social networks then Twitter is the prince, I’ve watch the service bloom from the very beginning (I was one of the first to use it back in 2006) when it was just a side service to Odeo to now being one of the most talked about services on the web, I mean you can’t even go a day on the internet without seeing something regarding Twitter.

JomSocial allows you to integrate your community with Twitter allowing your members to show there Twitter updates as well as there friends updates on your JomSocial community profile pages, also members of your community also have the option of automatically updating there Twitter account with status updates they make on your JomSocial community.

External Applications Support (Apps)

This is a really important feature for tools like this because it allows you to integrate your community with pretty much any third party service out there, thus giving you more flexibility with your community.

I’m really considering building WordPress plugin that does exactly what JomSocial does for Joomla because there is nothing out currently for WordPress that does this and I think a tool like this would be great for WordPress.

Anyways check out JomSocial, sign up to there community to get a real life demo of JomSocial in action.

Check em out, JomSocial.

BigCommerce is a new comer (well sort of new) to the list of ecommerce solutions BigCommerce is a hosted, fully managed version of Interspire Shopping Cart that was launched by Interspire in June 2009. With the Interspire Shopping Cart software being so highly popular and successful they the decided to launch a full blown hosted version of it, it’s a hosted solution meaning they take care of the servers, security, upgrades and backups for your online store so you don’t have to, this is great for small and large size businesses that looking to run there business and no worry about managing a server. Not I know I said ProStores was the The Best Ecommerce Website Builder, but I think BigCommerce could give them a run for their money and here is why.

BigCommerce does a pretty good job of describing all the features that are included in there service so I won’t do their job for them but instead I’ll touch on only a few of the key features and why they’re important in today’s web environment.

Reporting and Analytics

One thing you should always remember when running a website, whether it’s an affiliate site, blog, ecommerce site, or a subscription based site is that “the money is in the stats”, this will be where you spend most of your time after you’ve finished setting up your online store. Stats will tell you exactly what works and what doesn’t as well as what’s making you money and more importantly what’s costing you money. Of course if you don’t have a stats system with enough features to help you know how each and every part of your website is performing then you’ll just be wasting time. Big Commerce has 20+ performance reports some of which include daily conversion rates, inventory report, best and worst performing keywords, order location (Google Maps) just to name a few. You can also integrate your store with Google Analytics which is one of the best site tracking services available on the web not to mention it’s FREE!.

Built In SEO

SEO is important but it’s not something you should spend all your time on, most services out there coming with basic SEO features included while others completely ignore them, stay away from website building services that don’t have SEO features built in. BigCommerce web pages are optimized by experts and make proper use of title tags and search engine friendly SEO links, of course there a tons of other things to know about SEO but most of them are not worth the time to learn, trust me the search engines are smart enough to rank your site for accurate search terms.

Google Merchant Center (Formerly known as Google Base)

If there was ever a source for getting free traffic to your store this would be it, if your not familiar with Google Merchant Center it’s where you can upload your store’s product feeds and make them easy to find on Google Product Search. The thing is most store owners or people looking to start a online store don’t even know what a store feed is or how to create one, basically a store feed is a XML file (don’t need to know what it means) that is automatically generated for your site that allows you to automatically syndicate all your products across product search engines and comparison shopping sites like PriceGrabber.com, BizRate .com, Shopping.com, Yahoo Shopping and much more. This is a untapped way of driving traffic to your website because most store owners are not using this free source traffic simply because they are not aware of it or their site isn’t equipped to create store feeds. BigCommerce automatically generates store feeds for your site that can be submitted to Google Merchant Center as well as other product search engines and comparison shopping sites.

The best thing about the features is that Product results show up above natural search results, so you don’t have to worry about ranking for search terms in the search engines just list your products in the product search section and your good to go. (Example Image below)

Affiliate Tracking System (Affiliate Marketing)

Apart from Reporting and Analytics, this is by far the most important part of your business at least in my business, for those not familiar with Affiliate Marketing it’s an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliates marketing efforts, usually that affiliate is paid a commission when a sale is made, or if a lead is generated. It is also known a performance based marketing in other words you only pay for results. Imagine if you launched a website and you had a thousand people advertising your site for you for free and the only time you would have to pay those people is when they refer a paying customer, that’s power of affiliate marketing and if you don’t offer  affiliate programs for your store in this day and age then your definitely at a huge disadvantage. The problem here is that most website building solutions do not come with affiliate marketing built in, BigCommerce however comes with a built in affiliate tracking system that allows you to track, manage and pay your affiliates. 75% of my sales come from affiliate referrals, this is not a feature that should be overlooked.

There are a bunch of other great features such as drag and drop layout design, support for 50 plus payment gateways, Google Awords and Yahoo Search Marketing export, Single page checkout and the list goes on, but I’ll leave that up to BigCommerce to list all the features.

Here are A few live sites…..
YuBo
Christine & Taylor
Pro Golfer Gear
Report Collection
Baby and Me Gifts

In Conclusion

Apart from ProStores this is by far one of the best online store builders that I’ve seen on the market, they both have pretty much all of the same feature sets with a few differences, it all depends on what your looking for.

Visit:BigCommerce

I just finished creating a social network on SocialGo to see what they had to offer, above is the video you see once you finish signing up and head to the dashboard page. At first glance at the dashboard there very similar to Ning but far more polished. Ning is good for building Social Networks but the features are limited and you have share your network of members with other network creators, which doesn’t work well when your trying to build a brand. Kickapps offers far more features than Ning (you can do virtually anything) but it’s not free, it use to be but not anymore, actually it’s quite expensive. SocialGo picks up from where Ning and Kickapps left off by offering a common ground those services don’t offer, it’s free to start a social network and also has many premium features.

The one feature that stands out the most about SocialGo is the Member Billing feature, where you can charge members to view content that you deem as premium content. One cool thing about this feature that you can have some content as free content and some aa premium which is great for converting sales, I can see marketers jumping all over this. Another great feature is the Audio, Video and Chat modules which allow members to chat with one another using Text, Audio and Video. There’s allot more bells and whistles that were available but these were the two that stood out the most.

Another thing that should be noted is the flexibility in SocialGo’s theme structure, which gives web designers such as myself more freedom when creating website themes. You can also use ready made themes that are available in the theme store both free and paid. You can see screen shots below of some actual social networks powered by SocialGo.

Is SocialGo the right fit?

Well it all depends on what your looking for in a social networking platform, personally I’m looking into maybe possibly implementing SocialGo into my video site MusicVideoCast.com, which I’ve been searching for a social network to integrate with the site. I’m not sure but it would be great if SocialGo had a single sign on feature that could work with WordPress powered sites but since they have REST API access, it wouldn’t be hard to build a custom script to get that done.

SocialGo seems to be a solid platform and would be beneficial to those looking to start a social networking site, or add one to there existing site.

Visit SocialGo.

Features:

• Free domain name
• Unlimited disk space
• Unlimited transfer
• Photo, audio, and video galleries
• Use yahoo design tools or your own editing tools. FrontPage, Dreamweaver)
• Use your own designs or pre-made yahoo store designs.
• Experts available to build the a site for you.
• Sell up 50,000 products in your yahoo store.
• Accurate inventory tracking that alerts you when you need to reorder.
• Checkout pages can be designed to match the rest of your website’s theme.
• The option of multi page or single page checkout to increase sales.
• Create custom fields to collect relevant information from your customers.
• A reliable hosting platform.
• Marketing tools to help you with marketing your products.
• Easily authorize orders, issue refunds and print shipping labels.
• Choose any shipping provider and customize rates and fees to fit your needs.

Benefits:

1. 60 days of store setup consulting at no extra charge.
2. 24-7 tool free phone technical support.
3. Helpful extensive guides, tutorials and online help is available.
4. Advance website security encryption.
5. Ability to easily integrate PayPal into your shopping cart.
6. Track sales and more with 40 reports that gives you a 360 degree view of your business.

Webmaster Review:

Ok, there are two feedback that I’ve seen on the internet regarding Yahoo Merchant solutions, and that is either they hate it or they love it. There is no middle ground with this product, my review is probably the only middle ground that you will probably find on the internet.

My experience with Yahoo Merchant Solutions was a good one, I created it to sell video game consoles and accessories. I had no real inventory since everything was shipped from a drop shipper, I was able track all my inventory and sales through Yahoo’s product tracking interface and with over 40 reports you can do far more than that.

I was doing over $10,000 /mo in sales after expenses, which is nothing compared to other yahoo store owners. I accepted all my payments through PayPal which was completely integrated into the yahoo store via the shopping cart. I’ve since then sold the business and the new owner continues to use Yahoo Merchant Solutions to host the store.

If you don’t think my figures are impressive, then maybe you can take a look at another Yahoo Small Business customer, who has been using Yahoo stores for over 5 years. His name is Brad Fallen and his website is called MyWeddingFavors.com. He is ranked number 3 in Google for the search term “wedding favors”, which is searched for in Google for over 800,000 times a month. He brings in over $500,000/mo which makes my $10,000/mo look like nothing, He has a inventory of over 5000 products all of which is track, handled and manged using Yahoo Small Business solutions.

The bottom line is if you’re a small business owner with a offline business and your looking to make a smooth transition and create an online presence then Yahoo Merchant Solutions is a great choice.

Visit Yahoo Small Business

Please note that Yahoo Web Hosting is great for hosting Eccommerce websites. Blogs, CMS and other scripts are a completely different story.

Benefits:

* Domain Registration
* Unlimited Pages, Unlimited Bandwidth
* Point-and-Click Site Building
* Site Templates, Fully Customizable
* Powerful On-line Logo/Graphic Image Creation
* HTML Uploading with Full Integration
* Easy Blogging
* Image and Link Libraries
* Unlimited E-mail Accounts, E-mail Domain Forwarding
* PayPal Compatible
* Automatic Search Engine Optimization
* Automatic Search Engine Submission
* Automatic Search Engine RE-Submission
* Automatic Search Engine Rank Tracking
* Pay-Per-Click Research and Mass Bidding
* Newsletter Subscription & Delivery (HTML+Text) w/ Spam checking and Open Rate
* Traffic Stats, Analysis Click In and Out Stats and Analysis
* Advanced Link Exchanging -Step-by-Step Action Guide
* Fast Track Guide
* SBI! Xpress E-zine
* Unlimited One to One Customer Support
* Tips ‘n Techniques Headquarters where SBI! users share their most effective strategies

Review:

Site Build It (SBI for short) is the number one website builder on the internet, some of the most successful websites on the internet are hosted by Site Build It. They have repeatedly shown that by using there system you increase your chances of having a successful website.

I actually have friends who use Site Build It (some of which I referred) to promote there products and services. If your not very Internet savvy and your looking for a solution that is simple but effective. Site Build It is the way to go.

The great thing about Site Build It is that once you purchase it you don’t need to buy anything else for your website, Site Build It handles everything else for you, such as keyword research, link exchange, traffic stats, search engine submission and a allot more. What I love about Site Build It the most is the traffic stats, not only does it show you how much clicks you get, but it shows how many of those clicks are unique visitors and which ones are returning visitors etc.

As if that wasn’t enough it also shows you where exactly the traffic is coming from, in other words if you if you have traffic coming from 10 different sources it will tell the exact url where the traffic is coming form. This is important because you can know what links to work on in order to get even more traffic and which one to pay less attention to.

When it comes to building affiliate websites, Site Build It is second to none, they have recently added new eCommerce function called Store Build It, which is not yet up to par with other eCommerce solutions on the internet, but judging by how successful they are as a website building company, they have both the money and the technology to improve this service very quickly.

Despite there limited store features which can easily be replaced by a third party shopping cart (PayPal), they are still the number one all-in-one website builder solution available online. They are the only web hosting company that focuses on getting traffic to your website, and when it comes down to it the main reason you created a business website is to get traffic to that website. Without any traffic you don’t have a business.

It is proven that 60% of SBI users get more traffic to their website than other websites on the internet according to Alexa (A Amazon Company). That means 6 out of every 10 SBI user will get more traffic to there website than other websites that are hosted elsewhere.

Site Build It provides more successful Case Studies than any other website building solution on the web or web hosting company for that matter.

In conclusion SBI lives up to the hype and over delivers, I gave you my honest review with the good and the bad, and obviously there is far more good than bad. I use the system everyday so I know it’s a great website builder, which is why I give it 5 stars. Visit Site Build It