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I’m teaming up with Demandforce for a great webinar this Thursday November 3 at 9am Pacific Time.

In the webinar I’ll show you:

• How to optimize your website for better search rankings
• Key tips for ranking in the local search results
• How to build and manage your online reviews
• What makes a successful business Facebook Page
• How to use Email to increase appointments

Even if you are not a chiropractor there are tons of great tips in here that apply to any small business looking to improve their online presence.

I’m partnering with Demandforce on this webinar, and I’ve got some really cool stuff to show you. They’ll be there to do a short demo and answer questions too.

I hope you’ll join me!

WordPress is on fire. Latest stats show that almost 15% of the sites on the Internet are powered by WordPress. And out of every 100 new domains registered, 22 of them are for WordPress websites, which indicates continued growth.

After attending WordCamp in San Francisco a week and a half ago, I was planning to do a blog post right away. I live blogged some of it on Google+ here. But I really wanted to have something more complete on Expand2Web.

So I took some time to reflect after listening closely to Matt’s State of the Word address, and talking to a bunch of cool people at the show.

1. The Reading and Writing experience start to become one

Today, when you want to change something on your WordPress page or post, you can click Edit Post on the top admin toolbar if you are logged in. This takes you to the familiar post editor within WordPress. You make your changes, Preview them, and then Publish them live when ready.

But imagine if you could just make your changes directly while viewing your page. You’re browsing a page on your website and think, “hey, I want to change this text a bit…” If you are logged in, you just highlight the area and start making changes! That’s probably going to take a little longer than 1 year, but I think things will start moving in this direction.

Another thing Matt mentioned in his keynote was improving the way you modify WordPress Themes. The proper way to modify a theme today is using Child Themes. The problem with Child Themes, is that they can be a little hard to implement for people not familiar with FTP and editing a little code.

If you want to see how it works today, I’ve put together a video that shows you how to make a Child Theme based on any theme in WordPress. Here is the video:

And here is a link to the full blog post – How To Create Child Theme in WordPress.

Matt envisions you being able to make changes to a theme within the WordPress Admin panel, and having the Child Theme automatically created for you, seamlessly. I think that would be a huge win for theme developers and site owners.

2. Improved photo uploading experience

Another thing I am hoping to see this year is a much improved media uploading and management experience in WordPress. If you’ve ever had to upload a lot of photos using the WordPress Media Library then you know what I’m talking about.

Matt mentioned that he has 30,000 photos on his website/blog. Can you imagine uploading this many using the current Media Library? Well, he said he felt the pain and they are working to improve it dramatically.

In fact, he mentioned that they would like to make uploading much more like Google+. (If you are not on Google+ yet, visit my profile there and I’ll invite you.)

Google has really nailed the photo upload, display and management experience on Google+. As a result, it has attracted a TON of photographers and designers.

So I’m hoping to see some great improvements in image/media uploads and the ability to manage and rearrange galleries in upcoming versions of WordPress.

3. Responsive Design

Responsive Design was buzzing at WordCamp this year. I hadn’t really heard of this before now.

But after attending a few sessions and seeing it in action, believe me – Responsive Design is the new Mobile – and much more…

Responsive design allows you content to adapt to a given environment. What this means, is that instead of having a specific design for people viewing your website on their PC, and another for mobile viewers, and another for iPad viewers, your design adapts your content to whatever the size of the screen is.

This is super important – look at all the device formats emerging. Take a look at the Android phones out there, all with different screen sizes. Same with Windows Phone 7 devices. And now there are many different Tablets emerging to challenge the iPad. That means we will have a ton of different screen formats you need to worry about, unless you design your site to automatically adapt not based on specific device sizes, but based on the screen size itself.

So the goal of Responsive Design is to provide the best user experience on any platform with structured content that adapts to its given environment.

Sara Cannon’s presentation on this was excellent. I’ve included it here:

If you want to see a responsive site in action, here is a website that was designed to adapt to the screen size. Open it up in your browser and try resizing it – notice how the content adapts based on the window size. You’ll even see the navigation menu move from the side to the top when the screen gets too small!

Click here to view a site that implements Responsive Design (resize your browser window while viewing it to see how it adapts)

Sara is in charge of designing future versions of the WordPress Admin UI in this way. So I can see this type of design coming not only to the WordPress Admin UI but also to WordPress themes very soon. The Twenty Eleven theme, for example, already has responsive design elements baked in.

Note: I still think mobile Apps are still important, but as far as adapting your website to mobile device formats I think this is the way to go.

This is something we’re going to be doing the SmallBiz theme as well.

Ok, this ended up being pretty long. If you’re still with me, thanks for hanging in there! I’d like to hear what else you would like to see from future versions of WordPress?

Do you find yourself wondering if you should attend an industry related event? Do you find yourself wondering if it’s worth the expense?

I found myself thinking exactly that in the Summer of 2001. I had learned about a conference that was being held in the Fall of that year in Santa Barbara, California. It was called Commission Junction University.

And although my business was doing well, it was still a going to be a considerable expense.

I attended Commission Junction University in the Spring of 2002. It was my first industry conference. I loved it. I enjoyed meeting new people. I loved the breakout sessions. I loved the hotel. Everything.

Lets face it with airfare, accommodations, meals and time away from work it can be costly to go to these events. You need a reason – besides a love of air travel- to invest that kind of time and money.

Reasons to Attend an Industry Conference

The reason I now regularly attend Internet marketing conferences is the same reason you should attend an industry conference; the need to grow.

At my first conference, I learned that there is a universe of marketers, IT specialists and social media gurus who cumulatively have more knowledge that I’ll ever be able to learn on my own.

That conference allowed me to “plug in” to that cumulative knowledge, but that was just the beginning. By meeting so many successful people, I was able to see what I could achieve as well. That, my friends, made all the difference.

I have attended all of the conferences listed below, and I have been asked to speak at several of them as well. If you are into online marketing, or if you just want to know what the Internet could do for your business, you should really consider attending one of these events during 2011.

The Best Internet Marketing Conferences to Attend

The Affiliate Summit is the largest event in the affiliate marketing industry, and is held annually in Las Vegas and New York City. This should be a required event for affiliates as well as merchants who want to glean knowledge from the industry’s leading professionals.

The Blog World Expo brings bloggers from the world over to Las Vegas for panels, networking events and of course, an exhibition hall crammed full of vendors and merchants. This event has great resources for bloggers as well as anyone using blogs to enhance their marketing campaigns.

The Webmaster World’s “PubCon” is yet another reason to visit Las Vegas, but at this event you will learn about a variety of internet marketing strategies, particularly focusing on advanced SEO methods for everyone.

Commission Junction University makes Santa Barbara the place to be, at least three days of the year, to connect with over 800 industry leaders and top Commission Junction affiliates. If your business depends on or can be improved by affiliate marketing, you should be there.

AffCon is one of the newer internet marketing conferences, and it is a free event. AffCon features high level panelists, leading vendors and merchants, and lots of information for new and veteran affiliate marketers.

The ShareASale Think Tank just is a great opportunity for brainstorming and networking. It is an intoxicating blend of sports action, great parties and actual educational opportunities that leads to many great connections and at least a few good ideas.

Many people can benefit from the conferences listed above. A well-managed Blog or a Twitter or Facebook account could help your business. However, there may be conferences available which are more specific to your industry or interests.

Other Options for Conferences and Events

For instance, my wife Arlene has a website called epilepsymoms.com which offers support and information for caregivers of children with epilepsy. There are several health-care related conferences every year which would help her build a more informative website.

My associate Matt Papas is another good example. He has a website focusing on weight loss. Consequently, he could benefit from weight loss industry events. These conferences help companies market to folks who have weight problems and might be looking for a Medifast coupon code or would like to see research on “Does Nutrisystem work?”

You get the idea.

Someone somewhere is organizing a gathering of the best and brightest in your industry, and you should be there.

So, what do you have to gain?

You might learn how a Google Plus photo gallery could benefit your marketing plan. You may meet the vendor who has the app which will revolutionize your company’s bidding process. Most importantly, you just might meet the person you want to be in five years, and he could show you how to get there.

So, what do you have to lose?

Nothing, really. The time spend traveling and meeting is actually time invested, not time l
lost. The expenses incurred are most likely tax-deductible (be sure to check with your accountant or company bookkeeper). In any event, the return on these modest investments will likely be very large if you make the connections, use the information, and stay focused on your goal.

So, what conference will I see you at this year?

I look forward to reading your comments.

About the Author:

Author and Podcaster James Martell has been an Affiliate Marketer since 1999 and has been mentoring other marketers since 2001. He is a leading expert in natural search engine optimizing. His lifestyle as an internet entrepreneur gives him time to spend with his wife, Arlene, and four children in their home just south of Vancouver, British Colombia.

WordPress Jetpack is showing up on many WordPress installs now. In fact, if you use BlueHost for your hosting and install WordPress with SimpleScripts, Jetpack is installed automatically for you.

At first glance, it looks like a bundle of plugins. But it’s really much more than that.

So what is Jetpack?

I get a lot of questions from readers about Jetpack, so when I was at WordCamp San Francisco last weekend my mission was to dig in and get the scoop.

I had the opportunity to talk with Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress and co-founder of Automattic about it at Wordcamp San Francisco last week. I got the strategy and vision behind it from Matt, and then talked to some of the Automattic engineers for a demo and deeper dive.

As you may know, there are two ways you can run WordPress – WordPress.com or self-hosted from WordPress.org. See my article WordPress.com vs WordPress.org – which one should I choose? for details on the differences between the two.

Matt explained that the idea behind Jetpack was to bring the coolest features available in WordPress.com and make them available to anyone using WordPress, even if they are hosting it themselves. He has a vision of “closing the gap” between WordPress.com and WordPress.org functionality and ease of use.

Video Tour of Jetpack

WordPress Jetpack Functionality

So what kinds of functionality does Jetpack bring to self-hosted WordPress users? Here are the plugins that are part of Jetpack now:

• WordPress.com real-time stats – Simple, concise site stats with no additional load on your server.
• Shortlinks – WP.me-powered shortlinks for all of your Posts and Pages for easier sharing.
• Social Media Sharing – Sharedaddy plugin to share content with Facebook, Twitter, and many more.
• Spell and grammar checking – After The Deadline adds spell, style, and grammar checking while you edit
• Twitter integration – Display the latest updates from a Twitter user inside your theme’s widgets
• Gravatar Hovercards – Show a pop-up business card of your users’ gravatar profiles in comments
• Shortcode Embeds – Easily embed videos and more from sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and SlideShare.
• LaTex – Mark up your posts with the LaTeX markup language, for complex mathematical equations.

And there are others on the way. You can individually turn on or off these features too, depending on which ones matter to you.

The feature I’d really like them to bring over from WordPress.com is the ability to post to your blog via email.

It’s possible to set up on your own self-hosted site, but it is very complex and limited. I’d like to see it work Posterous – they have made it super easy to post all types of media to your blog via email.

The Problem with WordPress Plugins…

One of the great things about WordPress plugins is that you can extend the functionality of your blog to do almost anything. There are over 15,000 plugins available for WordPress as I write this. But if you’ve worked with WordPress for very long, you know this diversity and power comes with some problems.

Anyone can write a plugin, and many times plugins conflict with each other, break when a new version of WordPress comes out, or introduce a security risk. Some WordPress experts even suggest that you avoid using plugins altogether.

When I talked with the Automattic team they told me one of the reasons for Jetpack was to provide a rich set of functionality with Plugins that you can trust, that work together and are updated with each new version of WordPress. They are also coming up with core groups of contributors for other important plugins to make sure they are managed and updated properly too.

Jetpack and SmallBiz

We tested Jetpack with our SmallBiz WordPress Theme and everything works great. So if you are using SmallBiz, don’t hesitate to fire up Jetpack, and turn on or off the features you want!

So what about you. Are you using Jetpack? What is your favorite plugin that you wish was included?

A good friend of mine, Bob Thordarson, is launching his new service called Scrubly tonight at my favorite Jazz Club – Boxley’s Place.

Boxley's Place attracts top Jazz talent in the Seattle area

I really wanted to be there but couldn’t make it up to North Bend, so I’m missing the party and blogging about it instead

Scrubly is a super cool tool that backs up and cleans up your contact lists on GMail, iPhone, Outlook, Mac, etc. It helps you clean up duplicates, merge contacts across services, and it backs everything up for you too.

And today it is officially out of beta. Here’s a coupon to try it for free if you want to check it out: Free Scrub.

Good luck Bob – I’m sure you’re off to a successful start!

p.s. You’ve got to love that cute Scrubly mascot.

I‘m heading to Searchfest in Portland (sitting in the airport right now) but I screwed up my ticket and didn’t make it in time to attend Local University on Tuesday.

Local University is a great event where many of the Local SEO Experts help small businesses learn how to build an effective web presence and rank well in the Google Places search results. The faculty is top notch.

If you follow the #LocalU tweet stream you’ll see an amazing number of 140 character gems fly by. So many good ones, in fact, that I thought I’d summarize them for you. I hope you get a few gems out of here that can help your business, or your client’s!

Quotes and Tweets from the experts @ LocalU in Portland

“Filling out your website field in Google Places is how Google is tying your website prominence with your geo-prominence.” via @niftymarketing

“If you do one thing when claiming your listing add photos. Consumers like photos to help make decisions.” Amar Patel (Bing) via @gsterling and @niftymarketing

“50% of restaurant searches are happening on mobile phones, even at home” via @gsterling

“Before you start worrying about Local Search, make sure you provide excellent customer service!” @mblumenthal

“NAP+W Consistent name, address, phone & website on all business records” @mblumenthal

“Keep one phone number for your business at all costs; keep one number forever.” @mblumenthal Why? Because this is one of the keys to your fingerprint on the web (NAP = Name, Address and Phone number).

“Only claim your listing in as many places as you can manage.”

“Sites with active blogs get 7x more search traffic than those without” @mattmcgee

“offline networking should turn into links” for small business owners @mblumenthal

“Only use tracking phone #s on local listings in limited and controlled scenarios…” @trentcarlyle

@davidmihm – “Your home page is the most important page on your site. Use it wisely!”
“Categorization is one of the most important factors for Bing”

“Create your own page for complaints and reviews. Better on your site than on another!”

“twe.pe is a great free rep mgt tool” @mattmcgee

And my favorite, by @mblumenthal “if you want to outrank your competitors in search engines marry an SEO!”

See the tweet stream yourself here: LocalU Twitter Search

Also – if you live in the Spokane Washington area, don’t miss LocalU Spokane Friday February 25.

I’ll be at Searchfest (#SEMpdx) tomorrow and will have more from the show!

Pubcon 2010 in Las Vegas is fast approaching. Starting November 8, thousands of Internet geeks will be converging on the Las Vegas Convention Center to talk about websites, SEO, Social Media and affiliate marketing for PubCon.

I went to PubCon for the first time last year, and it was an outstanding conference. I learned a ton and met many super smart people. Unfortunately I can’t go this year due to a previous commitment, but I plan to go next time.

What I learned at PubCon

Here’s a quick summary of what I learned last year at PubCon.

1. Google might add page load time as a ranking factor. Well since then, they have added page load speed as a factor and I was able to make some changes to my sites to be ahead of that curve.
2. YouTube is the #2 search engine on the web. After that show I really doubled down in using YouTube as a channel for my screen casts and tutorials. This has resulted in a completely new traffic source for my blog, and now I’m even in the YouTube partner program and can earn revenue from Ads next to some of my videos!
3. I learned about a new toolset, Raven Tools – that I use for my SEO now.
4. You CAN get a hotel in Vegas for $25/night. A decent one too!
5. For the rest of the tips I learned at PubCon last year, click the link below…

Top Ten Things I Learned at PubCon.

Watch this video to get a flavor of what PubCon is like:

If you go this year, let me know what you learned – I’d love to hear about it!

I‘m at the beautiful Ritz Carlton at Half Moon Bay for the ShareASale Think Tank affiliate conference. I’ll try to capture the highlights of the sessions I’m going to and share them here.

ShareASale ThinkTank at the Ritz Carlton

Panelists

Shawn Collins, Chris Pearson, (I will add the rest of the panelists soon!)

Which blogging platform do you use?

Mostly WordPress. One Moveable Type and one HubSpot.

Including Images in your Blog Posts

Having an image in every blog post is important for several reasons. It helps your post stand out and get read. You can also get SEO benefit from it. Users are more likely to read your Headline and Image Caption than any other text on your page!

Many people said they put their images on Flickr and use them in blog posts. But Flickr recently started “nofollow” ing those links.

What Plugins do you use?

Shawn uses PrettyLink
All panelists say they keep plugins to an absolute minimum. Why?

• They slow your site down.
• They complicate the upgrade process and can break your site.
• You don’t know who created them.

Chris Pearson took a pretty harsh stance on Plugins and says he is in the business of eliminating plugins by building functionality into his theme.

The take-away from this session is that you want to be careful with how many plugins you use, and know exactly what you use them for.

I think I have about 14 active plugins on my blog. Probably too many but nothing I want to eliminate just yet.

One audience member said that he thinks the All-In-One SEO plugin slows your site down and is more harm than good. I followed up with him later to get some more details on this. I talked with Brandon Wirtz and Jake Ludington and they gave me some awesome tips on reducing your page load times and how that can help you and your site visitors. This was so valuable that I’ll be writing this up separately.

How do you get your blog noticed?

Constantly churning out great content, with an eye toward the keywords you are after. Shawn Collins has written a blog post every day for the past 4 years.

Don’t undervalue the value of YouTube and Twitter.

Retweet contests help get the word out.

If you have a site that is brand new, you can buy some AdWords to get it indexed

Do XML sitemaps (Chris Pearson says this is the one plugin he uses: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/)

Claim your site in Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo and Bing services too

Linking Strategies

Put an embedded link in your product/theme (vary the link)
Have a marketing list (email) send them new stuff you are doing. Use Blog RSS capability in AWeber to automatically create emails from your blog. You don’t have to send them right away.

Using Headlines

Headline and Title tag are different – headline is what readers see, title tag is what shows up in the Google SERPs. You can make them different.

How are you Mobile enabling your site?

Look at your site – see if you even need a mobile solution. Maybe your theme looks good on iPhones, Android and Blackberry devices.
Chris says many people use a popular plugin to mobile enable their sites (WP Touch WordPress Plugin), but it makes every site look exactly the same on mobile devices. He thinks the theme should handle mobile display.

Ok, I’ll touch this post up later with more details…

Expand2Web is going to be at WordCamp SF (#wcsf) this weekend en-force. (Yeah, that’s right, all THREE of us )

We’d love to meet up with you, so if you’re going to be there ping me on Twitter at @doncampbell and we’ll grab a coffee and geek out over WP themes and plugins. Thomas, Randy and I will be there both days.

I hope to see you there!

By the way, we’ve been testing out SmallBiz Themes on the WordPress 3.0 beta builds and everything is running awesome. We’re looking forward to learning some new core WordPress 3.0 tech to tweak out our themes with this weekend…

Fellow Local Search Expert Dev Basu presented at Search Engine Strategies Chicago yesterday. Dev is a local search expert based in Toronto Canada, and a contributor to the Local Search Ranking Factors report.

His presentation, entitled “Local Search On a Dime” provided a nice step-by-step guide for small business owners showing them how to build a presence for their business in the search engines.

And I’m very excited that in Step 1: Optimize Your Website, he gives a shout out to our SmallBiz WordPress Theme!

Local Search On a Dime

Here is his presentation:

In the presentation:

Learn how to Optimize for Local Search rankings for low or no cost. Steps discussed include:

• Website Localization + Optimization
• Business Listing Claiming Procedures
• Citations and Local Link Building
• Getting Customer Reviews
• Offering Local Business Coupons

This presentation was delivered by Dev Basu at the Search Engine Strategies Chicago conference in December 2009.

He also includes some great tips for small business owners to claim their local listings with GetListed.org and Universal Business Listings.

Thanks Dev!

Need a website? The Expand2Web SmallBiz Theme is a complete small business website theme for WordPress. Click here to watch the video!