Branding David

For those of you that have been annoyed that I haven’t been posting my thoughts often here, I have decided to purchase, and run a new forum that will, hopefully, bring what I had hoped to do with my private membership forum to the forefront. I have bought EarnersTalk.com, and am now working on porting some content from Branding David Members over to EarnersTalk.com. I will also be releasing my e-books for free there to registered members, and I hope you’ll all come, sign up, and interact with the community, as I work on growing it out, hopefully to the benefit of everyone involved.

I have always found WordPress to be lacking a theme that gave a full set of tools to the user, making sure they could customize their blog in an effective way without any PHP, xhtml or CSS knowledge.

Sure, it might be that I want to be lazy, but I sigh when I have to try to dig through a theme authors code.

Over the last few months, I have been working on a theme system that deals with my own issues in WordPress themes, and today, it is finally being released. The theme is entitled WPUnlimited, and is a paid theme system.

It will be constantly updated, support will be included through a support forum and e-mail responses.

WPUnlimited does two things that I hope everyone will enjoy. First off, it takes plugins out of the hands of plugin authors. I have spent far too much time waiting for plugin authors to keep up with new versions of WordPress as they come out, and by integrating the plugins into the theme, the onus is now on me to keep those features working within the theme.

Secondly, I wanted to make sure I could change the layout, colors, typography, and header image without editing a line of CSS and WPUnlimited allows for this level of customization. The theme truly takes little to no coding knowledge to create custom look and feel results.

WPUnlimited costs $59 for a single user license, and $150 for a developer license. Don’t let the “developer” term scare you though. The license is for anyone that wants to deploy WPUnlimited on more than one blog, either for themselves or their clients.

Check out WPUnlimited today, and let me know what you think.

Sea Winds of Sea Isle is a website that focuses on a very particular business in a very particular geo-locality. It’s not your ordinary website, and therefore requires a very unique approach with branding, online marketing and visitor conversion.

A good friend of mine, Ryan Caldwell, has recently been put in charge of their online marketing efforts. His main concern is that despite higher traffic then their competitors, the site seems to be lagging in conversions. He was looking for someone to bounce some thoughts and ideas off of, and contacted me to give him an in-depth overview of where the site stands, and what changes or ideas I would make.

After some great back and forth, here is what I have come up with.

History

The site, being only six months old,has the disadvantage of not being well-aged. The search engines place a lot of value in the age of a site. In fact, most websites start off with a major search handicap for the first 9-12 months of their existence. The young age is definitely an obstacle that requires extensive work in order to compete against other, older websites in the same real estate and online rental market. Don’t be fooled by the fact that this is a relatively small niche. Sometimes small niches in valuable local markets are the toughest nuts to crack and worth the most long term value.

As the web ages and the barrier for entry decreases, the number of people competing in any given market is going to grow with time. This is especially true in the real estate industry since most everyone now realizes that the web is the perfect tool for real estate agents to market their business.

Local Search and Citations

One of the reasons that small, regional niches can be tough online industries to compete in is that search engines like Google use different methodologies for determining geo-relevance. Rather than simply looking at the raw strength of a website, they look for what are called “citations” – references around the web which contain some or all of the following information

A – Business Name
B – Business Address
C – Business Phone
D – Business Website

By tracking “citations” search engines can then group websites together which belong to the same general geo-location. The most important sites for any location are going to be the ones with the most citations in the most relevant places.

So what are the most relevant places? Read on. Read the rest of this entry »