In this article I will share a few simple upselling tips that I personally use without irritating the customer and have had success with. Please note that my goal with upselling is not to trick a customer into buying something or sell them some junk. My aim is to show the customer additional products or services that might better meet their needs or will add value to the product that they are already buying. It's a way of demonstrating that I am aware of my customer's needs and care about their satisfaction. What is Upselling? "Upselling is a sales technique whereby a salesperson induces the customer to purchase more expensive items, upgrades, or other add-ons in an attempt to make a more profitable sale. Upselling usually involves marketing more profitable services or products, but upselling can also be simply exposing the customer to other options he or she may not have considered previously." - Wikipedia 1. Place Offers on the Checkout Page There are many places on your website where you can upsell. The most common would be the view cart/checkout page. Visitors who come to your checkout page are potential buyers and most likely have the credit card ready. So it is a lot ...

Pay-Per-Click or PPC in short, is an effective marketing scheme for the Internet. If you have a personal blog/site that attracts moderate to high traffic, and you want to generate some revenue from it then PPC is a very good option for you. There are many companies, including the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo! etc. that offer PPC ad-serving applications for webmasters and publishers. After registering with the company, all you have to do is put some Javascript code or HTML in your pages and activate the advertisement. The company tracks how many times the ads have been viewed and clicked and makes your payment at the end of the month. In this article we will take a look at some PPC ad serving applications and try to help you decide which one could be the best option for you. Google Adsense Google AdSense is the current leader in content-sensitive web-based marketing. Webmasters can place Google AdSense JavaScript code on their web pages in order to allow Google's servers to show context sensitive advertisements (Google Adwords). Google uses their search engine ranking technology to decide what ads to show on your site, and on specific pages on your site. On a ...

Few weeks ago I wrote on how to optimize your WordPress site for better performance which has some tips and tricks on how to speed up a WordPress Site. I received a few requests to elaborate on some of the points as not all of them are obvious changes. In this article I have explained how you can add far future expiry header to your image, css and javascript files to speed up your site. Adding expires headers do not affect the site load time for a first time visitor but you will be surprised how much the page load time decreases (faster page load) for subsequent page views/return visits from that visitor. Expires header specifies a time far enough in the future so that browsers won't try to re-fetch images, CSS, javascript etc files that haven't changed (this reduces the number of HTTP requests) and hence the performance improvement on subsequent page views. If your server is Apache (most web servers), you can use the 'ExpiresDefault' directive to set an expiration date relative to the current date. ExpiresDefault "access plus 2 months" This sets the expiry date of the file 2 months into the future from the current time. The following values can ...

One of my readers asked me the following question regarding CPM ad network and I thought I would write an article on it: "What CPM ad network would you suggest for a relatively new Blog that doesn't have a lot of traffic?" Before I answer the question and reveal what I use myself, I would like to cover a few other related topics in this article that I think will add value to a lot of other readers. The following topics have been covered in this article: What is CPM ad? Why use CPM ad? List of the  popular CPM ad networks that I know of Which CPM ad network do I use and why? A simple trick when using ADSDAQ CPM ad network What is CPM ad? According to Wikipedia - "CPM is frequently used in advertising to represent cost per thousand (where M is the roman numeral of 1000). When used in online advertising it relates to the cost per thousand page impressions." An impression is a single instance of an ad appearing on a Web site. A blog generating 20,000 page views monthly displaying an advertising banner with a $2 CPM, will earn $40 monthly from that banner ad unit. Why use CPM ad? CPM ad gives you another means ...

WordPress eStore and WordPress Paypal Shopping Cart Plugins can now be integrated with the NextGen Gallery Plugin to create a Digital photo store similar to the demo given below: [nggallery id=10 template=wp-eStore] The Shopping cart will appear below this line when you add an item to the cart. The shopping cart can also be found on the sidebar. The images have been resized to 800x600 resolution using the NextGen Gallery resize utility. An watermark has also been applied to the image using the NextGen Gallery 'Effect' option to prevent stealing. Once the purchase is complete the encrypted download link for the original image (1920x1200 resolution and no watermark) is emailed to the buyer. Just to clarify... You don't necessarily have to sell digital photos to use the gallery. You could be selling anything and still use the Gallery as a means of displaying the products where each thumbnail is the icon of the product you are selling. How to Integrate NextGen Gallery and WordPress eStore Plugins What Plugins do you need? You will need the WordPress eStore v1.4 or above and NextGen Gallary Plugins. This guide assumes that you have used NextGen Gallery Plugin and know how to use it. If you don't know how to use ...

I wanted to use widgets in the footer of my WordPress theme but my wordpress theme didn't come with a footer-sidebar by default. I didn't really wanted to change the theme just because of that. So I hacked the wordpress theme to introduce footer-sidebars. If you are looking for a tutorial that explains how you can add sidebars/widgets to the footer of your WordPress theme then keep reading. There are really three main parts to introducing a footer-sidebar 1. Registering the Sidebars in the WordPress Theme 2. Inserting the Sidebars In the WordPress Theme 3. Putting some style into the sidebars 1. Register the Sidebars in the WordPress Theme Go to the WordPress theme editor and open the Theme Functions (functions.php) file. Now Search for the following line in your Theme Functions (functions.php) if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') ) Once you find the above line then take a look at the the next line which should look similar to one of the followings depending on how many sidebars you have: register_sidebar(array( or register_sidebars(2,array( Say for example you have one sidebar in your theme and you want to add three rows of sidebars in the footer area so you can put widgets then overwrite the code with the following: register_sidebars(4,array( The above will register 4 sidebars (one ...

If you use YouTube videos in your blog then you might find some of the following tips and tricks pretty handy if you don't know them already. Link to a Chosen Start Time of a YouTube Video Say for example, you want to link to a nice video that you found on YouTube but it has some crap at the start which you don't really want your visitors to watch. In a situation like that you can just link to a specific time of that video so when the video starts it will start from that specific time and skip everytime before that. So if I wanted to link a YouTube video and wanted it to start playing from 1 minute and 17 seconds when someone follows the link then all I have to do is append #t=1m17s to the video URL. Original video URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFoe6oS0Np0 Vidoe URL linked to a specific time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFoe6oS0Np0#t=1m17s Below is a link for a demo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFoe6oS0Np0#t=1m17s Add a Video to Quick List for Future Viewing This is particularly useful when you are trying to find some videos on a specific topic but along the way you discover something interesting that you want to watch too but if you don't want to get distracted at that ...

I have been revisiting the various security settings of my WordPress blog after the sudden database table corruption of this blog for unknown reason last week. In this post I have highlighted some of the security tips that can help protect your blog from possible outside attacks. Use Strong Passwords for all Entry Points I was surprised to find out how many of my friends use the WordPress admin password generated by WordPress during install time and thinks that their blog is protected from attacks as they are using a strong password! The WordPress admin password generated during install time is normally pretty strong (consists lowercase and uppercase letters with numbers and symbols) so there is nothing wrong with that. I was mainly shocked to find out that their ftp/cPanel password for that domain is not that strong. It gets even better... one of them were using his partners name as the password (Did I mention that his partner's name was mentioned on his blog's 'About' page?)! The ftp/cPanel password for your domain is equally important. If someone can access your cPanel then that person can delete your WordPress database from the cPanel->Databases->MySQL Databases. Anyway, the bottom line is to use ...

I hope this doesn't happen to anyone else but this morning  my blog Tips and Tricks HQ somehow disappeared from the face of this earth! The day started as usual... I woke up in the morning went to my office and started checking my emails and found out that I received an email from SiteUptime (SiteUptime is a website monitoring service that checks your website at regular intervals and notifies you via email or SMS if it becomes unavailable) telling me that my site is down. So naturally I wanted to check if the site is up now. When I entered the site address in the address bar I got the following screen! [caption id="attachment_959" align="alignnone" width="444" caption="WordPress Blog Setup Screen"][/caption] You can probably imagine that at this point I was pretty scared! I always backup my database and WordPress files regularly so I wasn't completely in the water but what about all the articles that I have posted after the last backup? Not to mention the traffic that I am loosing now! Anyway, in my case the damage wasn't that severe. One of my WordPress database tables 'wp_options' was marked as crashed and I was getting the following error that I recovered from ...

Favicons are a great way to make your site stand out from the crowd. It is also very easy to implement too. In this post I have explained how you can easily make a favicon and use it on your site. What is Favicon? Favicon is short for favorites icon. This is the icon that shows up on the left side of the browser's address bar. Favicon is also known as bookmark icon, website icon, url icon or shortcut icon. Size of a favicon is 16x16 pixels. How to Make a Favicon Easily in Photoshop In Photoshop open a new file (make sure the image size is 16 x 16 Pixels). Design your favicon. You can either start from scratch, use a picture, or a section of a picture. Note: The image size is rather small so I advise not to use a picture with a lot of graphic content. Save the favicon you created as 'favicon.ico' (you can save the image as .png or .jpg and then rename it to .ico) You can even use MS Paint to make favicons too... all you have to make sure is that the image size is 16x16 pixels and the filename is 'favicon.ico'. How to Use Favicon on Your Site? Adding a ...