WordPress Security

If your website is built on the WordPress platform, then security is definitely something you need to be concerned about. I love WordPress for developing websites for the simple reason that if offers so much in the way of customization and applications that can help market your website. There are thousands of applications (plug-ins they are called) that can automate many tasks that you might need for your website. But all that potential customization comes at a price: namely security. Each one is a door that a hacker can use to gain entrance to your website files, and then wreck havoc with your website (and potentially destroy your website rankings).

Recently, security for WordPress sites has really come into the spotlight as the number of attacks against WordPress websites has exploded, specifically targeting sites that were using old versions of the software. I personally own or maintain about a dozen WordPress web sites and recently a few of them that I had neglected to update over the last six months had all been hacked.

And what does hacking mean?

Well, it can take several forms. Worst case is someone takes the site over completely, adding themselves as an administrative user and then hiding their identity from you, the legitimate owner of the site. The would have full access to all folders and content of the site. For many this is not a major concern as few websites have information on them that might compromise credit cards, financial accounts, etc… That doesn’t mean that it isn’t harmful. It could mean that they are injecting malware to people who visit your site (which will quickly get your site banned from google) Or it could be that they are doing nothing more than posting multiple spam links from your site to theirs. These sites, about cheap Viagra, gambling, adult material, are usually considered to be in “bad neighborhoods” and with your site linking to them can make you part of the same bad neighborhood. Either way, it means that your site is dropped from Google, Yahoo, and Bings index of sites.

There goes all your free traffic.

So what can you do?

First, make sure no one is controlling your site right now. Go to your PHP My admin in your hosting account and check your User table. Hit browse so you can see all the users. If there is one listed there that you didn’t create, then get rid of it. And by the way, you can’t actually go the wordpress admin page and check the Users there as a hacker can hide themselves from this screen.
Second, make sure you secure all your users and passwords. Check your user accounts for one called admin. If it is there, get rid of it. Then make sure the rest of your accounts have good passwords (no pets name or 1234).

Third, keep everything updated. Keep WP updated as well as all plugins as most attacks target older versions of WP which were more vulnerable.

Add security plugins

  • WordPress Firewall II
  • Secure WordPress
  • Login Lockdown

These are a few good security plugins for wordpress.

Backup. Make sure you keep regular backups of your site so in case it does get hacked, you can bring it back. You should back up not only the database but all the WP base files as well as they can get compromised as well as databases.

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Social Media For Manufacturers

Derek Singleton from Software Advice, an online resource for job shop manufacturing software, has written a great article on how manufacturers can use social media in their marketing efforts. The article goes over various social media mediums including Blogging, Facebook, Twitter, Linked In and You Tube and how they can all be leveraged by industrial firms to draw new business.

Some Excepts:

“In my opinion, small- to mid-sized contract and job shop manufacturers have the most to gain from building social media channels. In an industry that relies heavily on word-of-mouth to acquire business, social media tools can help contract manufacturers and job shops stand out from the noise and gain a competitive advantage on a global scale to win new customers. In this article, I discuss how manufacturers should get started with social media.”

“Blogs and YouTube provide manufacturers with the opportunity to do more than simply promote their brand; they provide a place where manufacturers can tell their story and provide industry knowledge using the richer media of long-form stories or video… By the way, video production is no longer the daunting technical challenge or costly expense it once was. You could certainly hire a videographer to make polished videos for you, but first get your feet wet with a $300 high-definition camcorder.”

There’s a lot of good information in the article which explains some of the online marketing techniques we use here at Industrial Marketing Advisers. I would add to the list of benefits mentioned in the article the simple idea of expanding your online presence, the ways in which people searching for your particular goods and services can reach you. And isn’t that what marketing is all about?

Link to the full Social Media For Manufacturers article

 

 

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Top Ten Reasons PPC Fails For Industrial Firms (Part 3)

Number Seven: Having no idea of Quality Score, what it means, and how to improve it.
Quality Score is a very important factor on how often your ad shows, and how much you pay for the click. If you don’t know what it is for a word, or how to improve it, you are wasting money, maybe big money. Sure quality score can be a somewhat ephemeral statistic. But it doesn’t mean it is entirely out of your control. Simple things to improve your quality score include

  • First, make sure the ad your showing is relevant to the keywords it is connected to.
  • Second, make sure the ad points to a page on your website that is relevant to the keywords
  • Third, since CTR is the single most important factor of quality score, make sure you bid on good words, create good ads, and delete poorly performing keywords.

Number Eight: Having Phrase and Broad Match keywords with no negative keywords.
Negative keywords are the single most important factor for lowering the overall cost of your ad campaign. It is also one of the easiest. Just run a search term report on the campaigns and go over them for irrelevant terms, then add them to the negative keyword list. You will never pay for a click for that term again. You should run this report after the first week of the campaign, a week after that, then after the first month. By then, you should have a good list of negative terms which will cut the cost of your advertising dramatically. This one strategy alone lowered the cost of one of my campaigns by over 60 percent.

Number Nine: Ignoring Bing Yahoo
Bing and Yahoo have always been the redheaded stepchild of Google.It doesn’t mean you should ignore it however. They receive fully twenty percent of the overall traffic, and the clicks are often a fraction of the cost of Google. Add these two things together with the fact that it’s rather simple to import an entire campaign from Google and it is definitely worth the effort.

Number Ten: Believing That An Adword’s Consultant Will Take Care Of Everything
So you’ve decided to let an Adwords’s expert manage your campaign. Great. You don’t have to do anything, right? Wrong. You need to be part of the team. A good Adwords expert will send you reports of search terms you paid for, looking for opportunities for new terms to bid on as well as negative terms to exclude from paying for in the future. You need to pay close attention to these reports and go over them thoroughly, looking specifically for terms to exclude. My own advertising budget dropped by 65% by simply adding one negative term which was getting the bulk of my clicks, but no clients. I would have never known that term existed if I didn’t go over the search term report.
The key is to make it a team effort. Remember, an Adwords expert isn’t an expert in your business. You must help them find the best search terms, possible new terms, competitors, and negative terms to exclude.

Summary: After all this, I hope you understand a basic truth about Adwords. It’s much more complicated than it seems. There are dozens of factors to consider and they all interact together, so changing one affects the others. Done correctly, PPC is the single best form of advertising for industrial firms. But done poorly, it is just a waste of money.

Read Part 1: The Top Ten Reasons Pay Per Click Fails For Industrial Firms Part One
Read Part 2: The Top Ten Reasons Pay Per Click Fails For Industrial Firms Part Two

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Top Ten Reasons PPC Fails For Industrial Firms (Part 2)

Number Four: Giving little to no thought to the Ad itself.

Optimizing your campaign for the right search terms, the right area, the right time, and the right bid is just half the work in getting a good campaing. The ads themselves are just as important. Remember, no matter what your bid is for a specific term, your ad will be one of about a dozen on the page of the Search Engine Results Page. Yes, being at the top is one way to get people to click, but this is a very inefficient way to get clicks. Most people who blindly click the top result aren’t serious buyers. Add to that the fact that this position is the most expensive and you’ve got the potential for wasting a great deal of money. Better to have a good add sitting at #3 or #4 for half the cost than to have a bad ad at #1. You’ll get the same conversion rate for far less money.

Also, take into consideration that the ad itself is a big factor in the Quality Score of the keywords its associated with. So make sure the ad is relevant to the keywords it’s associated with, as a poor Quality Score will make you pay more per click.

Every Ad Group should have multiple ads competing against each other. When a winner emerges, get rid of the loser and then create an ad to try to beat it. Even a 1 percent increase in CTR can save you enormous money.

Think about the ad as though it were something you were going on a billboard that will cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars per month. Because in reality, your ad is costing you this much. So pay attention to it. Give your internet marketing campaigns they attention they deserve, because more than any other marketing medium, they can return the most for the effort.

Number Five: Giving no thought whatsoever to the page where the ads are taking people.

So you’ve set up the ad campaign and you are getting a dozen clicks per day. Great, right? But what are these dozen people seeing when they get to your site? Some people are under the impression that since someone clicks on your ad and goes to your site, they’ve somehow made a decision to go with your company for its products or services. That’s not the case. People don’t make decisions because of the quality of your ad. The ad just piques their interest. They make buying decisions because

Number Six: Thinking that you have to be at the top of the page to see results.

The truth is: rarely is the top spot the most profitable for a search terms, and many times it can be very unprofitable. Many large companies through lots of money into PPC advertising without thought to their ROI. You don’t want to compete for the top spot with dumb people with too much money to spend. You want to be smart. And that means knowing where to put your ad. The truth is, that Google is forced by their business model to rotate ads, meaning that they can’t simply block out advertisers who don’t bid highly on keywords or they will lost a great deal of their customers. So what they do is this: the lower you bid for a keyword, the less it will be shown.

You may think that’s bad, but it really isn’t. It’s why you must understand the system to make the most of it. It’s all about your budget. Let’s say you have a budget of 50 dollars per day in a high demand market like cameras. The Google traffic estimator will tell you that if you bid $4.00 per click, you will have an estimated 421 clicks per day for a CPC of $1.61 fora total cost of $678.00. Of course that is way beyond your budget, so this means that if you set your bid for $4.00 you will get about 31 clicks per day before your budget is exhausted at an estimated position of 1.24.

Now, the Google Traffic Estimator is a great tool for setting budgets and bids, so what I will do is set the bid for .50 and see what happens. I get an estimated 77 clicks at .42 for an estimated daily cost of $32.46. That doesn’t reach our budget so I’ll bump it up to .65 and I get 108 clicks for an estimated cost of $52 at position 3.4. I’m now getting  108 clicks at position 3.4 for the same cost as 31 clicks at position 1. Which will perform better? Almost certainly it will be the second as the lower position will almost provide a better conversion rate.

This, as well as anything else, will show just how much ignorance of the Adwords system can cost you.

Read Part 1: The Top Ten Reasons Pay Per Click Fails For Industrial Firms Part One
Read Part 3: The Top Ten Reasons Pay Per Click Fails For Industrial Firms Part Three

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Top 10 Reasons Pay Per Click Fails For Industrial Firms (Part One)

Number One: Setting up a Google Adwords account in 30 minutes without real knowledge.

When you see the Google Advertising banner ad, telling you that you can get 75 dollars in free clicks, and you decide to try it, it seems easy. And it is, to some extent. Just sign up, give them a credit card, apply your credit, and you’re on your way. Easy, right?

But exactly where on you on your way to?

Sure, Google provided you with some basic tools to help you get started. And these tools will work at getting your website traffic. But what is the quality of that traffic? Remember, Google is in the business of giving you as much exposure as possible. This helps their bottom line. But not necessarily yours. Rarely do I find a situation where PPC Newbies don’t end up advertising far too broadly, wasting money on advertising on markets that have little chance of converting.

This mistake is exaggerated for firms which want limited budges, as the standard rule is: the lower the budget, the more targeted the campaign should be. The quickest wa to PPC failure is to have an overly broad campaign mixed with a low budets. Results will inevitably poor, at which point most companies will simply give up, which is a shame, since it’s not the concept of PPC that is flawed but merely the execution.

So can an Adwords campaign be set up in thirty minutes? Sure. Should it be? No. If you really want to set up a limited budget campaign yourself, do this: target your top 5 search terms, make sure the terms have traffic by using the keyword tool built into the interface, set it up geographically targeted, with just exact match and phrase match options along with plenty of negative terms applying.

And if what I just said is Greek to you, then you simply do not know enough to set up a successful Adwords campaign.

Number Two: Buying a basic Guide To Google Adwords, skimming through it on vacation, and deciding you’re ready rule the web.

It’s been said that a little learning is a dangerous thing. Nowhere is this more true than Google Adwords advertising. Skimming through a basic PPC guide will give you exactly that: the basics. The thing is, a successful Adwords campaign is the sum of inter-related parts. If everything isn’t done right, the results can be disastrous. If you really want to do it yourself, make sure you really study the guide so you understand all of it. What I’ve seen is that people start doing things according to the book for all the basic things but start taking shortcuts or missing things when they really matter.

  • Geographic targeting?
  • Google Partners?
  • Display Network?
  • All Devices?
  • Ad Scheduling?
  • Ad split testing?

These are all important questions to consider. And making the wrong choice on any of them can increase your costs exponentially.

So please, if you plan on becoming an Adwords expert, then actually become an expert. Don’t learn the basics and then believe you are an expert. It can cost you far more money than you save by doing it yourself.

Number Three: Blindly opting into the Display Network with automatic bidding.

This is one of the biggest mistakes an industrial advertiser can make, and also the most common. Letting Google decide where on its vast display network it will show your ad as well as how much to bid will rarely equate to a positive ROI. The Display network works best for items that are more impulse buys: weight loss, vitamins, online dating. The more technical the subject matter, the less likely the Display Network will be successful. Now that doesn’t mean you should forget it altogether. If your budget is high enough to warrant it, it can make sense to experiment with it. But the placements must be managed carefully for websites where your potential clients might be surfing.

We took over a large industrial PPC account for a firm that had opted in automatically to the Display Network with Automatic bidding. By turning this off, and moving the allocated budget to more targeted terms on the search network, we cut costs by over 50 percent (while improving click through rates) from this move alone.

Read Part 2: The Top Ten Reasons Pay Per Click Fails For Industrial Firms Part Two
Read Part 3: The Top Ten Reasons Pay Per Click Fails For Industrial Firms Part Three

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Determining The ROI Of A Web Site Redesign

I’m often asked how much a web site redesign will cost for a manufacturing goods or service firm. And my response is always this: the cost of a web site must be looked at as a long term investment. And if the site is designed… Read More

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Google Display Network For Industrial Firms

Is the Display Network A Good Idea For Industrial Firms?
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Is Pay Per Click Profitable For Industrial Firms

It’s All A Matter Of Running The Numbers
When I’m asked whether Pay Per Click makes sense for industrial firms, I always say the answer is: it depends on the market. And the way to decide whether it makes sense… Read More

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Flashy Website Designs

Why Flashy Websites Are Bad For Business Sites
Once there was a time when all web sites were pretty much the same. They were some text transformed into html into web pages. Over time, as technology increased, so did the… Read More

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WordPress 3.1 Problem Permalink 404 errors

Upgrade At Your Own Risk
In my opinion, anyone who uses custom permalink structure on their blog should definitely hold off from updating to WordPress 3.1. Like many other people who use custom permalinks, I found that… Read More

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