Main Street Open » Sales Professionals

WordPress 2.9 Coming Soon

Terrell Sanders — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:55:04 +0000

WordPress version 2.9 is expected to be released this year. The beta is expected to be available at the end of October, and if everything cleans up well, the final release is expected around early December.

What to expect in 2.9? Some pretty cool stuff is being promised:

Dedicated thumbnail images on posts. A separate image you can upload for use as a thumbnail.
Trash function for deleted items. Pages and posts that are deleted will go to “Trash can” and can be un-deleted rather than lost forever.
Basic image editing built-in. Uploaded images can be rotated, flipped, cropped and resized inside WP.
Widgets outside the sidebars. New functions will allow widget placement anywhere on the page.

Fun stuff! As usual, we don’t recommend our clients (or their clients) rush out and upgrade as soon as 2.9.0 is released. Let other people find the hidden bugs, and keep your site stable until 2.9 has been patched a couple of times.

After that, we think 2.9 will have some great new features that both WP developers and WP users will enjoy.

Automatically Update Facebook Fan Pages from Your Web Site

Terrell Sanders — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:37:27 +0000

Good news: each social media platform (ie. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) offers a new chance to meet prospective customers or partners. Bad news: it takes a lot of time to keep each platform updated with current info.

At MainStreetOpen we have a new application that will ease some of this burden. Our Facebook Page App will create a custom tab with dynamic content from your web site on your Facebook Fan Page. Our app pulls data from your web site – both static content (about us, contact) and dynamic (via your RSS feed) — and generates a custom tab with this data on your FB Fan Page.

The best part is that this information is updated automatically when you change the web site content. You NEVER have to update the Facebook Fan Page data. Our app will automatically keep it in sync with you web content.

The Facebook Page App is fully customizable. We can configure the content and graphics to match your site. This works with WordPress sites and any other content manager that generate an RSS feed.

Two examples:

http://facebook.com/ministrycom (Latest News tab) — data comes from http://ministrycom.org
http://www.facebook.com/pages/MainStreetOpen/40320181025 (Web Site tab) — data comes from http://www.mainstreetopen.com.

MainStreetOpen’s Facebook Page App starts at $300 plus customization. That’s a one time cost that will keep your Facebook Fan Page current without any effort from you. Contact Main Street for details.

What are they saying about you? Using Google Alerts

Terrell Sanders — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 20:55:08 +0000

Want to track your business’ publicity? Google Alerts are a free and easy way to monitor what people are saying about you on the internet.

This video shows you how to setup Google Alerts to and discusses several ways to use them.

Five Tools For Successful Web Marketing, Part 5: An Active Blog

Adam White — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 15:20:15 +0000

Many businesses wonder what the benefit is of adding a blog to their site. How is a blog different then the content I currently have on my site. The truth is, that to the outside world, it isn’t all that different. The main difference is the timeliness of the content. A blog allows you provide a constant flow of content to your site. Although, in order to do this, the content will probably not be as high of quaility as what you may be used to. For this reason, most blogs are written in first person and the author is identified in the post. It’s easier to compose content in first person and allows you to worry less about the composition and more about the content. When you are able to focus wholly on the content then you are able to contour your content around your keywords that you are wanting to be found under. The other element involved in blogging is the comments that you allow on your blog posts. Comments and ping-backs show the search engines that site visitors are interested in your content and gives you more credibility for the topic of that particular blog post. There are many different platforms on which you can blog, but the best system for SEO and customizable flexibility is WordPress. As you think about blogging, here are a few tips to go by.

Blog with purpose. More words are not alwasy better. Use words with purpose that enhance or build on those keywords you want to be found under.
Use your blog to establish you as an expert. Speak with authority and give away some of the expertise.
Develop your blog into a resource library. Try to realize while you are writing a post, how this post will be read a year from now. Organize timeless content separate from news that won’t be useful later. Make the timeless content easily accessible as a growing resource on your site.
Force yourself to blog. Set a frequency that you promise yourself to blog. If users see a regular stream of blogs they are more likely to subscribe or revisit your blog on a regular basis.
Link your blog feed to your social networks and allow users to subscribe to your feed or email updates.

Five Tools For Successful Web Marketing, Part 4: ShareThis

Adam White — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 20:32:22 +0000

Combing your website’s unique content with the popularity of social networks and social bookmarking sites can drive a lot of new traffic to your site. There are many applications out there for doing this, but the most convenient and well established is the ShareThis application. It is a customizable javascript that you can place on your site manually or through a plugin that allows visitors to easily share a link to your page on a wide variety of social networking services. The benifits of this should be pretty obvious. Here are a few tips on integrating a ShareThis bug on your site.

Place it close to the content they will be sharing, either at the top or bottom of the article, or even both.
Stylize it to match the look and feel of your site through your site’s CSS.
Simplify the options down to the social media tools you think your target market will be using.

Get the code for the bug from the website at http://sharethis.com/