We recently received an email from a supplier to tell us that they had tweeted a discount code for their products and services on Twitter, and in case we hadn’t seen it, and here was the coupon code. The following week, they sent a reminder email to tell us that we hadn’t used the coupon and to hurry because it was running out soon (and here again was the code). Twitter coupons can help drive traffic to your site, but it got us wondering what is the point of them if they are not exclusively available on Twitter?
Twitter can be a powerful social marketing tool, but if you are going to use it as a way to make your Twitter followers feel more exclusive, by providing Twitter only discounts, then the worst thing you can do is to also email that Twitter code out to your customer base. If you do that and tell people via email the Twitter-only code, what benefit is there for your customers to also sign up on Twitter as a follower of you?
One alternative to a Twitter promotion like this is to use email as a teaser to your campaign, but not part of the campaign itself. For example, send a newsletter a month out to say that something big is coming soon, but it will not be advertised any where but Twitter. Explain that there will be a series of things within a really short time frame (e.g. less than a day) so there’s little time for them to wait to find out about it in any other way except to be a Twitter follower of yours. Alternatively put a limit on the number of sales available at the discounted price, so that Twitter followers will get a headstart on other customers.
Add this information to the end of your new customer and order emails. That way, new customers and those ordering from you have every opportunity to be reminded of your promotion.
When the promotion has started, do not email your customer base again to tell them the code, or remind them they haven’t used the code. Use only Twitter to post your code, so there is an exclusive benefit for being a follower.
Do something for your Twitter followers that is a bonus, and wasn’t advertised in the original promotion.
When the promotion ends, you can then use email to contact the people who had signed up as both customers and followers of yours but did not take up the offer. Send them another discount code of a smaller value with a longer time frame for usage (e.g. a week or month), as a reward for taking part. That way everyone is rewarded at least once for taking part and next time, people will know that the only way to get the best discounts from you, is on Twitter.
If you create a post, save it in a subcategory (instead of a top level category), and you later want to change the location of that post to another subcategory, you may find that the other subcategories that you could move it to have vanished, and only the top level categories are visible.
For example, let’s say you were writing an article on personal loan debt consolidation (where you join multiple loans together into one combined loan – to make it easier to pay and often at a lower overall interest rate). You write the article and when you create it in WordPress admin, set the category to “Debt Consolidation” which you have set up as a subcategory of “Personal Loans”.
If you later decide to go back and edit that article to include information about car finance, when you get to the edit post screen in admin, the “car finance” subcategory is gone. Where did it go?
This is caused by the default behaviour of WordPress which puts the chosen category at the top of the categories box in Edit Post. The code that checks for the checked category and pushes it up to the top of the list then loses the connection between the subcategory and the parent.
As at the time of writing (WordPress 3.0.5), the only easy way to resolve this issue is to edit some core WordPress code. It’s not a hard edit – it involves “turning off” the feature that pushes the checked categories to the top of the list.
Here’s how:
Open the file wp-admin/includes/template.php
Find the line function wp_terms_checklist in the code. The code around it will look a bit like this:
/**
* Taxonomy independent version of wp_category_checklist
*
* @param int $post_id
* @param array $args
*/
function wp_terms_checklist($post_id = 0, $args = array()) {
Scroll down in this function and find a piece of code towards the end of this function that looks like this:
foreach( $keys as $k ) {
if ( in_array( $categories[$k]->term_id, $args['selected_cats'] ) ) {
$checked_categories[] = $categories[$k];
unset( $categories[$k] );
}
}
Comment this out by putting /* in front of this block of code, and */ at the end of it. So it will look like this:
/* foreach( $keys as $k ) {
if ( in_array( $categories[$k]->term_id, $args['selected_cats'] ) ) {
$checked_categories[] = $categories[$k];
unset( $categories[$k] );
}
} */
And you’re done. The Edit Post categories box now looks the same as the Create Posts categories box, and you can add “Car Finance” as a category for your post.
Want to create your own WordPress sidebar that is accessible in admin under Widgets? It’s easier to do than you may think. Here’s how.
There are three basic steps to the process:
- Tell WordPress about your sidebar and give it a name
- Add it to your template so that WordPress can find the sidebars in the place you want them to appear
- Go into Widgets in your WordPress admin and add widgets to your sidebar
Tell WordPress about your new sidebar and give it a name
You will need to edit the functions.php file for your theme. There are a few functions.php files in a WordPress installation, so make sure that you get the one in the root folder of your theme. For example if your theme is called geekz, it would be in /wp-content/themes/geekz/functions.php
Open the file and take a look at it – try to find some other blocks of code that look like this:
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar(array(
'name' => 'Navigation',
'before_widget' => '',
'after_widget' => '',
'before_title' => '',
'after_title' => '',
));
The Navigation part will have the wording of whatever sidebar is part of your theme, and often the before_widget, after_widget, before_title and after_title will have html in them as well. These set the styling tags for the sidebar container and the defaults for the content within the sidebar container. If these are set you can style them in your stylesheet.
Under this block add a similar block of code for your custom sidebar widget. We’ll create one called top_sidebar with an h2 style on the headings of any widgets in the sidebar.
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar(array(
'before_widget' => '<div class="widget">',
'after_widget' => '</div>',
'before_title' => '<h2>',
'after_title' => '</h2>',
));
The div class=”widget” part tells WordPress to wrap the whole widget in a container called “widget” which you can then apply a styling to. If you haven’t used that class name anywhere else in your site, it could be used to give the widgets in that sidebar a different styling from your main sidebar.
If the text just prints out or you get a blank page, check the location of your code very carefully and see if you need to add <?php and ?> tags around the block of code.
Now place the sidebar in your template
The most common place you’ll want to place a sidebar is somewhere in the sidebar.php file of your theme. But you may want to put it somewhere else – wherever you decide to do, here’s the code that you need:
<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar('top_sidebar') ) : ?>
<?php endif; ?>
Substitute out top_sidebar for the name of the sidebar that you created in the steps above; And that’s it – you can now go into your WordPress admin under Appearance > Widgets and your new sidebar will be there – ready to drag any WordPress widget in to. And because you didn’t edit any core files, it will still be there when you upgrade your version of WordPress.
One of the things that many people overlook in their ecommerce websites are the buttons. A quality, professional looking button set can add an extra dimension to a ecommerce web site’s design. Even if you have a great looking site template that you or your web designer has spent a long time customising to suit your business, if you have default buttons, inconsistent looking buttons, buttons of different sizes and colours or just buttons that don’t look that enticing, you could be losing potential sales without even realising it.
This is easy to fix by downloading a button set for your cart? The short answer is not necessarily – because downloadable button sets don’t always provide buttons for some of the popular add-on modules that people add to their cart.
To help solve this problem, we’ve put together an ecommerce button set for one of the popular shopping carts you can install yourself on a Geekz business web hosting package: zen cart.
This free zen cart button set comes in four different colours: black, green, hot pink and red.
The full list of buttons available in each file are: button_add_address, button_add_selected, button_add_to_cart, button_back, button_buy_now, button_cancel, button_change_address, button_checkout, button_confirm_order, button_confirm_send, button_continue, button_continue_checkout, button_continue_shopping, button_create_account, button_delete, button_download, button_goto_prod_details, button_in_cart, button_login, button_logoff, button_more_reviews, button_next, button_prev, button_read_reviews, button_redeem, button_return_to_product_list, button_reviews, button_search, button_send, button_send_a_gift_cert, button_send_another, button_shipping_estimator, button_sold_out, button_sold_out_sm, button_submit, button_TellAFriend, button_unsubscribe, button_update, button_view, button_write_review, search_small, small_edit
How to install the free zen cart button set
First download the button set that you want from one of the links below and uncompress them. They are saved as a ZIP file, which is the most common form of compressed file on the Internet. If you don’t have a program to uncompress these files, go to the Winzip website and get a trial copy of their Winzip program. This is a free trial and well worth buying at the end of your trial.
The buttons are in PNG format rather than zen cart’s default of gif so you will need to go into your includes/languages/english/button_names.php file using FTP and change all of the .gif file extensions to .png in order for these buttons to work. Once you have done that, to install the button set just upload these buttons in to the includes/templates//buttons/english folder of your cart to overwrite the buttons you have on your template. If you only want to use these buttons as the fall back buttons where you do not have your own template specific buttons, then copy them into includes/templates/template_default/buttons/english instead.
Free Zen Cart Buttons: Geekz Download Links
Red button set from Geekz
Black button set from Geekz
Green button set from Geekz
Hot Pink button set from Geekz
We will post other button sets on this blog in the future – if you’d like a button set for a particular cart that you are using do contact us and let us know your suggestion (current Geekz web hosting customers get priority in the votes).
If your ecommerce website is using Paypal to accept payments then in most cases the customer will be redirected to Paypal to make the payment and then back to your store once the payment has been completed. When the customer is returned to your store, all the website knows is that the payment has been completed; no other data is passed back by Paypal.
Adding a PDT token to your Paypal account allows your website to effectively become authorised with Paypal for a higher level of information disclosure after a transaction completes. PDT stands for Payment Data Transfer. Effectively, this means that when the customer returns you’ll not only be able to provide a thank you message, but also provide details of the transaction that took place on Paypal’s website.
Here is the flow of a PDT transaction, as shown on Paypal’s website:
What details can be sent back to the website from Paypal?
With a PDT token set up, the website can query the following information from Paypal following a successful return from a payment transaction: the first and last name of the customer, confirmation of the payment status, the payer’s email address, the currency they paid and the amount they paid.
If you are using a cart like oscommerce or zen cart, then a PDT token is essential to your cart’s successful use of Paypal. In other carts, it’s not essential but adds to the functionality.
How do you set up a PDT token?
- Go to Paypal and log in.
- From the main screen once you are logged in, click on the White link “Profile”. Make sure you click on the link and ignore the drop down menu that appears when you hover over the word Profile.
- A screen with a lot of link options appears, in the third column choose “Website Payment Preferences”.
- Turn on both Auto Return and Payment Data Transfer (PDT) token settings. See the screenshot below. Then click save and your PDT token is created.
- You’ll now be back on the home page for your Paypal account. Click Website Payment Preferences again and scroll down the screen to see your PDT token. Save this to Notepad as you’ll need to enter it in to your shopping cart application like Open Cart, Zen Cart or osCommerce in the appropriate place.
It’s not essential to use a PDT token but if your website does it can display more meaningful results. The issue comes when you have multiple websites requiring a PDT token on the same Paypal account – as there’s only space to enter one return URL on the above mentioned screen.
The successful prosecution of the company Allergy Pathway by the ACCC demonstrates the importance of reading and reviewing any testimonials posted on Facebook pages by you.
In the case concerned, customers of Allergy Pathway posted comments about the company on their Facebook page. The company knew them to be false as they had previously received a probationary warning from the ACCC from previously making similar comments themselves about their products. Because the comments weren’t removed by Allergy Pathway, they were deemed by the court to be the publisher of the material and therefore responsible for that content – as if they had written it themselves.
The case points to the importance of monitoring what is written about you on your Facebook page or on other social media pages that you control. It also acts as a good reminder that it’s important to know what people are writing about you in all forms of media.
Some steps you can take to monitor what is said about you
When you come in to your office each day, the first things you will probably do is have a coffee and check your email. Add check your Facebook page to the list of things you do. It’s best to play it safe: if there’s a comment about your business that appears to paint your business in a way that you wouldn’t paint yourself, then delete it. This was the main point of the ACCC’s case: it was not so much that people were making these representations, it was that the material was not deleted even though they were able to when the company became aware of it.
This should be extended to affiliate marketers. In the United States, the courts there are moving to hold companies responsible for what affiliates say about their business to their customers. It’s more than likely that this type of ruling will spread to other countries of the world, including Australia, so it’s a good time now to check what your affiliates are saying about you.
Sign up for Google Alerts with your business name as the keyword. This will give you a lot of false positives if your business has commonly occurring words in it, but it will give you a good heads-up on what people are saying about you, right in your inbox.
If your business is big enough to get media attention, then you should be paying for a media monitoring, website monitoring or media clippings service. If you have a public relations company working for you they will often be able to do it for free. Look for a service that does positives and negatives scoring preferably using a weighting system for the level of exposure that is generated (e.g. a page one headline mention or breaking news mention online has more weight than a page 20 inner section mention).
The music game “Guitar Hero” which took the world by storm only six years ago is now set to be axed by it’s publishers Activision. It’s an important lesson for any software, online or offline business that even when you have a super-successful product, you can never bank on it’s popularity forever. A strong brand will only stay strong if it is kept fresh.
The reasons given for axing the game are the cost of licensing fees and the production costs of the music hardware – together with falling popularity for these types of games.
Brands that continue to innovate and invest in new technologies and ideas, even in the face of adversity, are the ones that stay successful in the long run. Apple are a classic example. After taking the world by storm with the Macintosh in the 1980s, they floundered in the market for a number of years remaining a niche competitor to the much stronger Windows/PC movement. And then came the iPod, iPhone and iPad and once again Apple sit as kingpins of the computer industry again. And in contrast the former-super-innovator Sony, once a brand of true innovation has found its brand somewhat depleted by allowing themselves to become what we would call too “safe”.
The lesson of Guitar Hero for all businesses is that no matter how successful you are, no matter how much brand power (aka “brand equity” in marketing-speak) that you have, no matter much you take the world by storm, never, ever forget the power of new innovation and new ideas.
This is where the power of online business comes to play. We see many of the major offline competitors of today, the corporate chains, underestimating the power of online, effectively laughing it off and believing that their offline brand value will carry them through online. Online really does level the playing field, as there are different rules of engagement and it doesn’t necessarily follow that those with the most money to spend can dominate the web. A page one ranking on Google for every search term cannot be bought for example. Even the biggest brands in the world have learnt that the hard way by underestimating their competition. A good online brand, good quality service, fast delivery, smart marketing and strong prices can do wonders to an online firm. It’s never too late to take on an industry if you know your customers well and are prepared to use the specifics of online to your advantage. There’s no doubt that with the commitment and innovation, a small home-business can successfully compete head to head with a multinational corporate online. And win!
So if you have an online idea, maybe it’s time to get an online business started, and open an online shop (and if you do decide to do that, we have the web hosting space and the tools to help).
Today’s giant is tomorrow’s has-been unless you develop a culture of innovation, go with your gut. And never stop.
See the news report about Guitar Hero’s demise here.
If a standard user creates an account in your WordPress site, after the registration process is complete or after they return and log back in to your site, by default they will see what is called the Profile page. By default, this page looks a lot like your WordPress admin backend, with none of your site branding on it. What can you do about this?
You could hack the code to force the login process to redirect back to the page of your choice, and there is plenty of help on how to do this on the WordPress forums. But the problem with this approach is as soon as you need to upgrade your WordPress version or make a duplicate of your website on another domain, you’ll need to do it manually. Otherwise, your code hacks will be lost. That means a lot of hard work, comparing files and updating code – every time the core of WordPress changes. If you want to promote your website or are building your blog website to help promote your main shop or information site, then that’s too much hassle that you don’t need.
Fortunately, there is a free WordPress plugin available that makes light work of this task. It is called Theme My Profile. What this plugin allows you to do is to either provide a different look for your profile page if you wish to display it, or block it altogether and redirect people to a different page of your choice (for example, a custom my account page). You can create different pages or block the profile page by user type. (We don’t recommend using it for admin users as you could end up blocking yourself out of admin by mistake).
You can see this plugin in action at our Australian Clothing and Fashion Directory website (and at the same time, submit your website for a free link if it’s fashion related). And if you’re a Geekz business web hosting customer in the fashion industry, please contact us for a little discount offer on your first year’s membership 
One method that spammers use to try and trick mail servers is to impersonate other domains or email addresses. In this way, someone could send out spam emails to hundreds of people and pretend they are you. A problem of many mail servers and web hosting set ups is that they are not protected against this kind of spoofing. The solution is something built in to cPanel, called SPF records.
An SPF record is like an authenticity seal for an email address on a domain. That is, they identify the servers that are authentic for that domain name. When a server receives an email reportedly from an email address they can download just the header part of an email, look up the SPF record for that domain, and determine if it has come from a legit server. This gives them the opportunity of rejecting the message before the rest of it is received. This allows the rejection of spam by email servers before it is even delivered to your inbox.
An SPF record won’t stop your computer from receiving spam, but it will stop spammers from pretending to be you because their emails won’t be delivered. Most modern email servers do check SPF records if they exist, so this is an effective way of helping to reduce spam. If everyone used spf records on their domains, spammers would have a tougher time sending spam and cluttering up everyone’s inbox with meaningless rubbish.
How do you set up an SPF record in cPanel?
1. Log in to your cPanel
2. In the section “Mail”, click on “Email Authentication”
3. In the section “SPF” click on enable
4. You will see a confirmation Screen. On that screen you can click “Go back”.
And you’re done.
Domain Keys are also useful
If you are looking to block spam, it’s also a good idea to turn on the other option on this screen called “Domain Keys”.
If you’ve logged into your WordPress site today, you may have seen that it’s telling you that WordPress 3.0.5 has been released and to Please update now. We strongly recommend that everyone with a WordPress site does this upgrade, as it contains some important security fixes; especially for those of you who give access to your blog to authors.
The latest version improves the level of protection of security issues fixed in the previous version of WordPress, as well as closing a hole which potentially allowed article authors and editors to gain higher level priviledges than they had access to, as well as to see posts and pages they did not have access to (e.g. drafts and private posts). See the full list of fixes on the WordPress Blog.
How to upgrade WordPress
While you can upgrade your WordPress manually, the easiest way to upgrade is just to click on the “Please update now” link that appears in your WordPress admin. A manual install would be required if you have manually edited the core of WordPress, however. Most people wouldn’t do this as WordPress plugins don’t generally require edits to core files.
