2010 is ending and 2011 is just around the corner. I’d love to share a review of some of the more popular posts Blue Deer Designs had in 2010. Wishing you a prosperous and wonderful beginning to your business New Year!

1) Top 3 Wordpress Shopping Cart / e commerce Plugins

(a great review of the pros & cons of plugins such as Shopp, WP Ecommerce, and PHPurchase)

2) Selling on Facebook: Core Commerce vs. Payvment

(selling your products on Facebook is the next big thing, learn a few ways to approach it!)

3) Best Business Apps for Smart Phones

(some time saving and business solutions, let your phone work for you!)

4) 7 Ways to making a WordPress Website Secure

(Making sure your Wordpress website is safe and secure can ease your mind and prevent a lot of frustration)

5) Why you should never eat alone!

Have you read “Never Eat Alone” by Keith Ferazzi? If not, this post might influence you to do it.

Happy New Year! See you in 2011!

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• Top 3 Wordpress Shopping Cart / e commerce Plugins

It’s that time of the year, a time to reflect on how your business performed and changes you would like to make for the new year. Looking back over 2010, it’s easy to look for trends and habits that brought you closer to your current goals.  It might be wise to focus on some of your habits that might have pushed you away from your goals (spending too much time on Twitter or not charging enough for your hourly rate)

Setting goals can help you move forward and measure what you want to achieve. Many times we set an unrealistic goal around New Year’s to lose weight or stop a bad habit. It can be hard to maintain a hard goal if you don’t have the right support and guidance to help you reach it.

Here’s some suggestions to help you get started with your 2011 business goal strategies. Please leave other suggestions in the comments, I’d love to hear other tricks to tackle your goals!

*Set Clear Goals

It’s very important that the goals you set for yourself are clear and something you could easily share with a colleague (they would understand it). Don’t set fuzzy goals. An example of a clear goal would be: Writing a 3 paragraph blog post once a week (have it due every Tues at 5pm, publish on Wed at 12pm).

Just saying that you’d like to do more YouTube videos or blog posts isn’t enough, you need to be explicit and write down exactly what you want to accomplish.

Put the goals in a place in your office where you can see them daily or weekly if possible. I’ve read that it’s good to move things around at your desk every week or so, so that you still can SEE them. After a while, you can’t really see a piece of paper, especially if it’s been sitting in the same place for week. Mix it up!

*Have Someone Hold You Accountable!

This could be a colleague, a mentor, or a business coach. Personally I found it hard to hold myself accountable to goals and noticed a huge change when I promise someone I’ll get something done. Be sure to maintain this accountability on some kind of schedule. Perhaps meeting with your accountability person every 2 weeks or once a month. Explain and give valid reasons why you didn’t achieve a goal and have your accountability person help you re-evaluate the goal to make it more attainable. Also, celebrate when you have accomplished your goals!

*Look at Your Habits of 2010

Did you have hurdles in your business that caused you to slow down or not accomplish what you wanted? I’ve seen it happen with myself and colleagues, we become afraid of finishing that one step that will lead to bigger and greater things such as hiring an assistant, investing in software that will free up our time, partnering up with a colleague, and many more.

Take a look and examine those hurdles and figure out some strategies to help you break free to them. Incorporate the strategies into your goals.

*Use Visual Aids

Having visual triggers can help you motivate as well as be very inspirational. I wanted to double my web hosting customer base over the last year. My office mate wanted to help me, so he created a graph to reflect my current customers and how many more I needed to reach my goal. Every time I got a new customer, I would physically stamp a little deer on the chart. I can’t tell you how excited I got very time I signed up a new customer and had the chance to add more deer!

*Break Goals into Bite-Size Chunks

Don’t forget to break the goals into weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly goals. This can help you reflect on data and numbers in different ways and give you an overall sense of where your business is going. Many times, business is seasonal, maybe you have a slow time in Quarter 1, but always double your sales in Quarter 2. Perhaps you sell a lot of products around holidays, so you can set more timely goals and plan to market for those occasions!

*Reward Yourself

If you do make your goals, be sure to have a way to reward yourself. This could be as simple as taking a day off, getting a massage, or doing an activity you love, but don’t make time for (golf, hiking, skiing, camping, etc). Sometimes the best rewards are making memories with family and friends.

Dream up those goals out and be creative. Imagine that they are as important as the supporting posts in your house. Without the posts, the house would collapse. They are necessary for a house and how it functions, just like in your business!

For more tips on goal setting, visit: http://www.entrepreneur-resources.net/setting-goals-for-2011-2010-habits-to-keep-or-leave-behind

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Since I wrote a blog post regarding WordPress E-commerce Plugins, I’ve been asked by multiple folks on what are some security strategies when using Wordpress. I did a little research and asked some Wordpress experts I work with to find the answers. I tried not to get too technical about the details and give just an overview. Please feel free to contact me or the Wordpress experts below if you’d like help securing your website!

1) Samuel Hulick, a Portland web developer,  recommended that changing the administrative account, usually the default is “admin”. Making the username from “admin” to  something more unique can help buffer against hacking.

2) Doron Orenstein, a Los Angeles web developer,  recommended changing the prefix of the tables in the database. Usually they begin with “wp” such as “wp_options” so it would be good to replace them with “$tsg33f56_options” instead. Using a prefix that isn’t standard.

3) Doron recommended this plugin: – WP Security Scan. It will scan your website for security vulnerabilities such as passwords, database security and more.

4) Limiting access. Know who has access to your site, what their permissions are, and what their activity is.

5) Keeping backups of the database and files on a regular basis can help restore problems down the road. This is just good practice to do before updating Wordpress and it’s plugins. Sometimes you can run into compatibility issues with a theme and updated plugins. It’s nice to be able to restore your website to a “working” mode once you find a solution and stop it from breaking.

6) Make sure your password is secure too – use lowercase and uppercase letters as well as numbers.

7) Make sure you are running a current version of Wordpress. Many times the new versions include security fixes.

For a more detailed, technical overview, visit: http://www.problogdesign.com/wordpress/11-best-ways-to-improve-wordpress-security/

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• Top 3 Wordpress Shopping Cart / e commerce Plugins

Christmas is only a month away and more folks are buying their presents online! Make it even easier for them with these tips below. Some of these tips can be applied to businesses that offer services as well!

1. Make it easy for the last-minute shoppers.

Provide an overnight shipping option to customers so they can still get their gifts delivered before the big day.

2. Another way to say “thanks.”

Add a holiday greeting to your thank you page  and promote any upselling items on your thank you page. This can include customers who place an order or subscribe to your newsletter.

3. Physical gift cards

Make it easy  for shoppers to receive purchased gift cards or gift certificates by mail so they can present the card or gift certificate in person to their loved ones.

4.  Spruce up your homepage

Update your homepage graphic or slideshow to focus on holiday items.  Highlight your customers to holiday-related categories or your popular selling products.

5.  Allow in-store pickup.

Offer your customers  in-store pickup if you have a retail location. This will save you and your customer on all the shipping charges.

6. Offer free shipping for returning items

Ok, so Zappos does exactly this, but it works! Build up your customer’s confidence as they click “Buy Now”

7. Customize it!

Provide a way for  your customers to include a unique notes when ordering. You can either have them place this in the order notes or create a custom field on your checkout page.

8. Don’t surprise them!

Don’t freak out your customers with shipping charges.  Be explicit about the shipping costs before they push the “Checkout” button. Sticker shock from shipping charges are the #1 way for customers to abandon their shopping cart.

9.  Enlist help and feedback

After making changes on your online store for the holiday, ask  a few friends or colleagues to do some user-testing. For example, ask them to find a certain product or to apply a coupon. This will help you avoid errors or problems down the road.

10. Out with the old

Offer a discount on any extra or leftover items as Christmas comes closer.

11.  Send them a holiday greeting through email

Send a special holiday  email to your entire customer base, be sure to thank them for their business. This will trigger them to visit your site when gift shopping. Subject lines like, “Happy Holidays from (Insert Store Name).” are a good start. If you can, offer a special discount!

12. Turn towards your customers

Give a social media campaign a go and ask customers to submit content such as videos, photographs or letters on how your product has changed their lives. Give customers who submit a discount on their product of choice, and then use their quotes and images on your website next year. Testimonials are always a winner!

13. Provide a way for customers to “Share”

Add social sharing features like the Facebook “Like” button on your product pages. It’s an easy way to allow visitors to make gift suggestions for loved ones.

14.  Out of Stock Products – Hide them away

Be sure to  enable your ‘Hide When Out of Stock’ option within your ecommerce software.  The last thing you need is unhappy customer who feels disappointed.

15. Use your Blog

Write blog posts about different products in the headline. Be sure to include why it’s a popular item and link to the product page on your site.

16. Start Networking now

Start chatting with bloggers and e-magazines that crossover into your industry. Find out if you can get into their gift guides or if they will link to your site.

17. Extend discounts to the social networks

Use Social media to share your discounts. Highlight featured products daily, it can help extend your info onto search engines.

18. Give something back

Try a campaign where you donate a certain percentage of sales to a local charity, like Toys for Tots. This can help make a splash on the local news and go viral. Everyone likes to give back during the holiday season, so make it easy for your customers to do so.

19. Make it a game

Try out a campaign where you hide a small image of a holiday-related image , like a snowflake or candy cane in one of your pages. Give a gift or gift certificate  to a certain number of users who find it first.  This helps customers navigate all over your site and share more of your products available.

20. Demo your product

Add videos of our product to show how to use it, its benefits, and other interesting facts about it.

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You love working with Wordpress and using it as a tool to manage your website . Now your business is in a position and it makes sense to start selling products online. Why not keep using Wordpress as an ecommerce solution as well?  You want as much control over your shopping cart, so keeping it open-source and not paying a monthly fee sounds great. Also, you understand that if you go the open-source route, you need to hire or maintain updates and security patches on the plugins and software, but it’s all worth it!

Having arrived at this decision, what are really your options? We’ll look at the top 3 WP plugins, at the moment, that can serve as a shopping cart.

Download plugin: http://shopplugin.net/

$55 for single license,

See the plugin in action : http://www.soigneur.net/store/

Overall Shopp offers some great features:  drag & drop for multiple product images, support for physical & digital products, order history, email notifications, fast product search, shipping rate calculations, discounts and promo codes.

Speaking with developers, this plugin is probably the most user-friendly of the three and isn’t overwhelming to start using right away.

Pros

• Easy to Install, cleaner than free plugins
• Great customer support (lots of documentation)
• Is compatible with other plugins

Cons:

• It isn’t free

WP Ecommerce

download the plugin: http://www.instinct.co.nz/e-commerce/

See the plugin in action: http://icondock.com/ (unique drag & drop interface for purchases)

With over 500,000 downloads (the most popular ecommerce plugin for WordPress), tons of free and premium themes built using its code, and too many  features to list, it really is an essential powerhouse of a plugin. Developers I’ve spoken with love the different options this plugin provides, but does have a high learning curve and requires some patience to set up.

Pros:

• Payment options: WordPress eCommerce supports Google Checkout, Paypal, Authorize.net, and several others

• Social media is super simple, as they’ve optimized everything using the ShareThis technology, which will absolutely help your products get noticed.

Cons:

• Hard to customize
• Poor customer support
• No option to print invoices

download the plugin: http://www.phpurchase.com/

$49 for the Standard edition and $99 for the Pro version

see the plugin in action: http://www.hydrapak.com/

PHPurchase is a newer plugin that makes it simple to create an entire catalogue of products with custom variables (size, color, etc.), it has a a powerful dashboard-based order management system, easy to track your orders, with an option to offer discounts and provide shipping options.

Developers I know are excited about this newer plugin, but haven’t had the change to really check it out yet. Hopefully in the next 6 months there will be more feedback on this plugin!

Pros:

• Lots of payment gateways
• Very customizable
• Easy to add products
• Great customer support
• One page checkout

Cons:

• Not based on a template, so it can involve more work

Looking for more comparisons? Here’s some Shopp vs. WP Ecommerce blog reviews:

http://lbnuke.com/2008/12/30/wordpress-ecommerce-plugins-shopp-vs-wp-ecommerce/http://wordpress.org/support/topic/shopp-vs-wp-ecommerce

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