Broken Backlink Checker

For all you non-technical users out there, trying to determine if your website has a 404 error or a broken link can be difficult. Fortunately for you, there's a website called brokenlinkcheck.com. All you need to do is, type in your web address, click on "Find broken links."



It's going to do a little security check to make sure I'm human, hopefully, I am. I would suggest clicking the second box down here and then "Find broken links".



What the system is doing is, it's going out and it's looking for broken links. Now, I've already run this on the Simple Biz website, you'll see it's complete, and it processed 492 pages, zero broken links found. If it had found a broken link, it would list the URL of the webpage that had the broken link. Then you would need to go in, find out where that broken link is and fix it.

Year-End Website Check List 2015

What Is A Heat Map?

If you’re a visual learner and you’d like to know how your website is performing, a heat map is a great tool. While I always recommend having Google Analytics, not everybody can read numbers the same way they can see things visually. I like to use “Crazy Egg,” they have a plugin that you can install into your WordPress website and you can actually see it overlays your website and collects information where people are clicking.

Why it’s important? One, it will let you know where people are clicking most. That way you can go to those pages and make sure that the content is convincing, if you want conversion. The other thing you can do is if you see that people are clicking in areas maybe you’re not expecting them to, find out why. Look at the elements, look at the text, and make it different. If I’m clicking here and this isn’t doing anything it’s going to frustrate me as a customer.

How To Delete A WordPress Plugin From A Website

To delete a plugin from your WordPress website, the first thing you’ll need to do is log in, and then on the left hand side click on plugins. You’ll need to identify which plugin you want to delete and make sure that it is currently inactive.

So, as an example, this GoDaddy quick setup, I want to get rid of it, and you can see that it’s currently inactive because it gives me the option to activate it. That means it is currently deactivated, so all I need to do is click the red delete button, and it’s going to go ahead and remove the file. Typically, it is going to ask me if it wants me to delete all of the files. In most cases, yes, this is the case. So I’m going to go ahead and delete all files and data.

Any time you delete a plugin, I always recommend that you go back to your website and double check that it hasn’t affected anything since it is a piece of software. And that’s how you delete a plugin in WordPress.

How To Update A WordPress Plugin

WordPress and WordPress plugins are software, and they do need to be updated on a regular basis. The first thing you’ll need to do is log into your WordPress account.

Then on the left hand side, you’ll see plugins in the dashboard. You’ll see there’s a one next to it. That indicates that there is a plugin that needs to be updated. All you need to do is at this top bar right here is look for “update available”, click on it, and it will automatically pull up all the plugins that need to be updated. If you have multiple, all you need to do is click the button here, that will select all the plugins in this list, then click on bulk actions, and up-to-date. Click apply, and now your plugin is up-to-date.

The one thing you’ll want to do is make sure you check your WordPress afterwards, and make sure it didn’t create any problems. Since it is an update, it may cause interference with your WordPress site.

And that’s how you update a WordPress plugin.

Brand Social Media Accounts With Canva

Canva is a very simple graphic design tool that is free to use, all you need to do is go to canva.com. I use it personally for a lot of my social media content.

Now, what’s really cool about it is if you click on canva.com and log in, you click on this “more” button, they have a number of presets for your social media header. So you can create a consistent brand by clicking on a Facebook event cover, a YouTube thumbnail, a Tumblr banner if you’re on Tumblr, YouTube channel art, Twitter header, Google Plus photo, Facebook cover, email header, even if you… And look at this, they even have Etsy.

What’s really cool about it is it predetermines the size, the number of pixels across and the number of pixels down, and all you need to do is put your content in by uploading it. Start branding all of your social media accounts by visiting Canva today.

How To Choose The Right Fonts For Your Website

How Create A Twitter List

Twitter lists can be made on both the desktop and mobile application. In this case, I’m going to show you how to do it from a desktop.

What you’ll need to do is go to your profile, and you can click your image and then “View Profile”, and you’ll see right down here in the middle of the screen approximately is “List”. Go ahead and click on “List”, and any list that you’ve already created will show up here. On the right hand side, click “Create New List”, and then go ahead and give it a name.

In this case, I’m going to call it Influencers. I’m going to make it a public list so everybody can see it. If you only want you to be able to see it, just click “Private”. Once you’re done, save list. The next thing you’ll need to do is add people to your list.

In my case, I’m going to add Gary V, so I’m going to do a search. The little gear icon next to his name, go ahead and add to list, and I’m going to add him to my Influencers list.

And that’s how you create a list on Twitter.

Brand All Your Social Media Sites

We know how important social media is today to market your company online. So the big question is,why are you not branding yourself appropriately online?

Now, I’m a firm believer in the VCC process. That is, Visibility, then Credibility, then Conversion. The second step is credibility, and that’s where your brand comes into place. The question now is, how are people finding you? If they’re on their Facebook page, there’s my brand image. If they find me through YouTube, here’s my consistent brand image.

Regardless if they go to any of my social media accounts to do research, because that’s what people do online is research, they will see brand consistency. And what that does is build credibility in my brand, and therefore it makes it easier for people to pick up the phone and call me, and that’s the third marketing step, which is conversion.

This is why I’m a big fan of branding all your social media accounts.

How To Install A WordPress Plugin

There are two ways to add a plugin to your WordPress site. The first thing you’ll need to do is log in, then on the left-hand side in your dashboard, click on the plugins option. Up top you’ll see plugins, add new, click on the button.

The next thing you can do is, you can actually do a search for a specific plugin. If I wanted to add Buddy Press, as an example, I would just click install now. The other option would be to actually upload a plugin directly from your website. In this case, I don’t want to install this one so I’m going to return to the plugin installer without activating, but the next step would be to activate the plugin. The second option would be to upload a plugin.

This is going to come directly off of your computer. All you need to do is choose the file, choose the plugin that you’ve already downloaded, and click install. Again, once it’s installed, you will need to activate, which I’m not going to do in this case. But that’s how you add a plugin to your WordPress website.

How Change Google Plus Banner Image

Mid-November 2015, Google changed Google+, and one of the things that changed was how you update your banner image. The first thing you’ll need to do is log into your Google+ business page, and you’ll notice the icon up here in the upper right-hand corner. This way, you know you’re on the right page.

Now, on the left-hand side, all you need to do is click on “profile”. Here, you’ll see your current banner image, and you want to click on the “edit profile” button. Here, you can update your profile image or your banner image. All you need to do is click on the photo icon. You can choose a photo that you’ve already uploaded, or you can upload a current photo.

For me, I’m going to update the photo for a holiday photo, and I just want to make sure I grab my Google+, because it is a specific size. Once you’re done, click “done” here, and then “save” in the bottom right-hand corner. And this will update your banner image.

Optimize YouTube SEO Description

When uploading videos to your YouTube channel, it’s important to optimize not only the title of your YouTube video, but also the description. This one here is “Website Design Trends Moving Into 2015“, so the keyword I’m targeting is “website design trends”, and “2015”.

Now, a lot of times people will put a title in but they will not fill out anything in the description. The sad part is, this is a very important part. YouTube allows up to 5,000 characters for your description box. Make sure you incorporate your keyword phrase or keywords into this description box. The other thing I recommend adding is the link to subscribe, that way if people do like what they have, what you have to say, they can go ahead and subscribe, real easy.

If you haven’t been updating the description in your YouTube channel, do it now. Make sure you use the same keywords in your title as you do your description.

YouTube SEO Optimize Title

To help improve the search visibility of your YouTube channel, it’s really important that you SEO optimize the title to all of your videos. So we’re actually looking at my channel and you’ll see the title of this one is “How to Create a Custom URL Video”.

The keywords that I’m trying to target, custom URL, YouTube, is right in the title. The next one down, “How to Disconnect Twitter Auto Post to Facebook”. Twitter, Facebook, disconnect, auto post; all of these items are keywords that I want to be found for, and so I make sure that I include them in the title of the video.

All you need to do is when you upload the video, is make sure you include the title which can be edited. So if you have any videos that are not keyword loaded, you do not have specific keyword or keyword phrases in the title, go back and edit them. Go ahead and make the change here and then click save changes. It will really help the visibility of your YouTube videos.

How To Change Banner Image In Twitter

Why Brand Videos With A Custom Intro

The branded intro for Simple Biz Support looks like this. This is a custom made branded intro that I use sometimes at the beginning of videos, towards the middle of the video, or in some cases I only use it at the end of the video. And the idea of including the brand imagery is that when people watch the video, they know exactly who this video is about. And it increases your brand awareness over time.

The more and more people see your brand, the more comfortable they become with the brand, and you create more credibility.

Now, you already know from sales marketing or the sales funnel that you need multiple touches before people generally feel comfortable about considering the use of your product or service, and that’s why I use a branded intro on my videos.