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common work press mistakes that will kill your business on today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by ECM Rush started in 2008 with one mission. To make online competition fair and transparent, with equal opportunities for all. To find out how SCM Rush can help you compete with the big boys. Go to serve no master dot com Backslash ECM rush today. Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast where you learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host. Well, the past 10 years I built dozens of websites and every single one of them I build on the word for US platform. It's a free platform, and the fact I was just working with one of my coaching clients, helping her to set up her first word press installation. Many large corporate websites that you visit are built on WordPress. It's a very common platform. It's one of the most common systems used on the Internet right now. Many, many websites Millions of websites are built on this platform, and unbelievably, the software is free. It's really the backbone of many websites. Many new bloggers, new entre pros online set of a WordPress site and immediately begin cutting corners. Unfortunately, the Internet punishes you when you cut certain corners. One of most common mistakes. I'm gonna call this mistake zero, because it's so basic. Can't even consider one of my eight is setting up your website on someone else's domain. If your website is something something dot wordpress dot com, you don't own your website. You will never make money. You are not a business. Whenever someone sent me a link to their website and it says dot wordpress dot com dot blogger dot com type pattern. Whatever blogging platform you're using, I am merely know that you're not serious and that you will not make any money from the website. I know this because you're not allowed to make money from these websites. I know you're not serious because the cost of setting up your own website is about $2.14 a month. If you're not willing to invest $2 a month in your business, you don't have a business. I'm sorry to hurt feelings. I'm sorry if that cuts to the quick and you feel like I'm a real jerk for saying that and that $2 is a big expense right now. But if you can't put $2 into your business, then you've got a real problem because you can put in all the work you want into. Ah, something dot wordpress dot com website. But you will never make money no matter how much work you put in because you're not allowed to. They're set up to make money for the word for a site owner. Not for you. So don't do that on the number one, the first and most common mistake that people make with WordPress. Iss it completely and totally ignoring Essie. Oh, now I get it. Search engine optimization duck. It's annoying. It's technical, It's boring. It's not fun. It's very confusing. Google releases a new outward of every three months. You could be perfect, do everything right and then they change the rules all the time. It's like being in one of those movies where you're in prison and they forced you to participate in some type of game or competition or race. And if you win enough races, they'll give you your freedom. And then as soon as you are about to do your last race, they change the rules on you. That's what it feels like. Thio compete with Google and try to stay ahead of all the search engine rules and all the little steps and their search engine algorithm. It's over 180 different things, they check. It's always getting longer. The list is probably way more than 1 80 now. Before, you just had to really focus on how you do your links and eternally. Then you had to silo your website, and then you had to learn how to deal social signals. Now it's a nightmare. I get that it's a complete and total nightmare. So what I want to say is, let's keep it simple. There are a few key things you could do to put on some s U infrastructure. You don't have to become an expert. I put in very little effort into my S e o. Just a few basic things. The first is installing a simple plug, and that will handle s yo for you. I use the Yost Seo plug in. There's a link on my toolbox page showing you exactly where you can grab it. It's a free plugin takes about five or 10 minutes to set up to have some really great instructions, and then it automatically handles a lot of those tasks that are necessary that the WordPress platform on itself doesn't d'oh. Every time you write a block post, it asks you what's the term? What's the most important key word here, and you just write it in a little box with each of your block posts, you can simply type in the keyword that you're targeting, the term that you want to rank for, and the plug in will take care of the rest. It really helps you out. You don't have to spend ages on your Sulu don't have to do a lot of other things, but simply putting in five or 10 minutes of work, setting up the plug in and then one extra minute or less on your block post will make huge difference. There are people who write hundreds of block posts and wonder why they're not getting any traffic. And the reason is they completely ignored. S e o the second big mistake. Very common work. First mistake is having no back of system of place. They don't back up their website and we're gonna do a special podcast episode all about how to back up your website. I use updraft plus, which automatically creates a backup it send it to my Amazon server once a week. What that means is that I always have a backup hosted on a different website. Common mistake is for people who even do create backups. Then you create a backup on your own server. When you get hacked, they destroy your website and your backups because they're held in the same place. They're a couple of other options. Duplicate Ear's a cool option to, but unfortunately duplicated charges you for automatic backups and they charge you for connecting two s three, so it's much easier to use updraft. Plus, it's a free plugin takes about five minutes to set up or less, and it will create backups and will send backups to Tanya. Different places. You can send himto, dropbox or Google Drive. However you want to store. Your backup says lots of lots of options. Your website will get hacked at some point in your career. It happens to everyone. Just recently, there was a hackathon event where people decided to see how many Web site they could take down and they took down. Twitter got attacked. Spotify got attacked. All these different websites, PayPal has been taken down in the past. If websites like those could get damaged, yours can certainly get damaged. I've had two or three websites hacked throughout my career. It happens. It's an inevitability. There's a constant war between website owners and people that like to hack websites. And I've had a website where someone broke in and I didn't even know it because I'm not us always checking all the security things. And they put something on the Web site, and they were just sending out hundreds of gigabytes of pornography from my website. I don't even understand how it was done. This is when I was a blue host. They didn't catch it until over 100 gigs were stored on their servers it's what the reasons in the previous episode I mentioned that I don't recommend them. How could you not catch such a massive infection? It was an old website that I'd done a test installation had it worked on so long. This is one of the problems. Nowhere press puts out updates all the time. There's almost an update every single week, and they're all security updates. They're constantly finding exploits, and then where press clothes and hackers by next, within where press goes, Um, eventually you're going one of people that just gets got. And when that happens, if you don't have a backup, you're going to be weeping. Especially now that backup software is free. There used to be only a few backup solutions, and they're quite expensive and in fact, now the expensive ones that cost hundreds of dollars, mostly garbage. There's a pretty expensive one that's $297 for license, and their reviews are terrible. They make a backup, and then when you try to reinstall, it doesn't work. If you want to be a little more advanced, you should create test installation and make sure your backups are actually working. You could test them in a sandbox on your own computer. Other things that's a little more advanced. But you do want to know that you're back. It's gonna work when it's time to deploy it when your side gets attacked. Our third very common mistake is for people to install way too many plug ins. We've all done it. There's all there are so many cool plug in to do. Amazing and really cool things. Social media sharing plug ins, Popular Post plug is a CEO plug and security plug ins. You could end up with 2030 or 50 plug ins on your site. I'm constantly having to fight against putting more plug ins on my site just to run. This podcast requires three or four plug ins than my backup set up is another plug in that I have my S E O plug and then have a social share plug and I have a popular post. Plug it and it adds up. But I have 12 or 14 active plug ins on the site and always fighting to keep as the number of plug ins minimize its one of reasons that I left Dr Themes, it's they have built in a lot of the features that other themes required to do. Be a plug. And if you have a website that's not no mobile responsive than you have to use a mobile responsive plugin plug ins are often there to fill in the gap for a problem or weakness in your theme or something that's missing if you have more than a single page of plug ins, if you have to click to Page two in the little plug in section of WordPress, you've got a big problem. Always look for ways to slash the number of plug ins. You have each plug and you have takes time. It's a little piece of software. Every time someone visits website, all those plug ins get activated so it slows down your website a lot. It takes a lot of your bandwidth and can cause a lot of problems. It's hard. I see some of these lists that say, like the 36 plug ins every blogger must have. What a nightmare. Whenever I see one of those lists, I know it's a website that I can't take seriously. How dare you recommend that to someone 36 plug ins will shut down. Almost every website will slow him down and kill the business of your block. You can't have a blogger that's so slow because it's loading all these plug ins. Make sure you know why every plug it is on their one of things I've discovered. Whenever I hire someone to work on one of my sight, someone from five or some of us work, they always install these extra plug ins, and it's so annoying. The reason that I have a separate membership side installation in the separate main website installation is because they each need a bunch of plug ins. I have my membership site plug ins, everything from security to locking the different sections to some design customization, plug ins, all of those things. They take up a lot of room, and I don't wanna have to sites merge because then I would have all of these plug ins in the members area that don't need to be there and all these plug ins in my main site that are only from the members area. I don't need a podcast plugging. I don't need all my podcast plug ins in my members area caused by members here. He doesn't host the podcast, so separating the two allows both installations to run a little faster. Our next mistake is bad Perma links. This doesn't happen as much as it used to. When you first install WordPress, especially a couple of years ago, it would automatically say your file structure would be like serving mass dot com. Backslash p 001 p 002 and number your pages. This is terrible Fresco. This is terrible for the customer experience. The visitor experience cause the visitor comes to website and they can't find their way around because they trying type in the name of a post and instead of just numbers, then have you got a little more sophisticated and I don't see this was often, but I did see someone doing this this morning where it goes. Post State, then Post name. So then, for example, this post might be served mass dot com back slash 2016 backslash 10 backslash 21 back slash common WordPress Mistakes. You don't want the date in your your all structure in your link structure. It's bad. Fresh Theo. It's bad for the customer experience when I see a post and I couldn't really see that. It's two years old. I don't read it. Who wants? Who wants to read something that's no longer relevant? I was reading a bunch of posts comparing backup plug ins this morning, preparing for a podcast episode that's gonna come in a few days where I talk about how I chose my plug in, and then why use updraft plus, as opposed to duplicate and some other things. We're going to a lot of detail about how to back up your website. So I was looking at all the competition out there to see if there's something I don't know about. And one of the post was from 2014. Why would I use opposed? It's two years out of date. So many pieces software were great. 2014. They don't exist anymore. Removed the date structure from your linking from your your else. Now another mistake that we people make that we can make. And if you have a website that's been using the wrong link names for a long time there long your L names for a long time, don't fall into this mistake, which is where you change a past your later. Once you name your block post, don't change it. If you're gonna change the structure and you're doing a massive site, restructure where you're changing from, like post numbers or dates and getting rid of that part, that's okay. And you could put in a plug and that will do an automatic redirect. There's like 301 and three or four Reader Xers plugging that will automatically send people that we're going to the old link to the new link. You could do that once, and that's if you're doing a massive founding restructure. But if you're following the advice or previous episode, I talked about giving really good names. Dear Block posts. You can change the name of the block post, but then don't go in and change the link to the block post. The old link is fine when you start changing the links. It causes problems as far as your interlinking structure and cause problems. As far as other websites that link to that block, post broken links are very unforgivable. As faras Google's concerned. As far as other surgeons are concerned, it will hurt your rankings overall, hurt your business in the long term. So if you do change the name of a post, don't change the link itself Very important because it damages your reputation. Damages your site, and it could undo all of the work you've done Up to this point are six mistake Common stake is bad image sizes. I was working on an image yesterday that I wanted to upload to the members area, and it kept timing out. What's going on? This is a tiny picture, and then I looked at it was over two megabytes and size. Now I know that's on huge number. But when it comes to images making someone download two megabytes just to see a tiny images ridiculous, I have set up that once the images uploaded automatically gets resized, so the problem is only upload process. But it reminded me of how important ISS to resize your images. There's a really great plug, and they will handle this for you called W P Smush s M U S H. Great plug in it will go through and re size all of your old images. So if you click on most of the images on my site and you say show me the image or it will often say image, name, and then it will say, a size. It will say like certain Buster logo 1 70 by 300. Or serve investor logo 200 by 360 Those different sizes, those different numbers they're generated by my plug ins by dumpy Smush or by thrive teams. Now, because I've thrived themes every. Why don't youse two apiece mush? But if you're not on thrive themes and it's the free alternative. Five teams doesn't automatically, but w such does it as well. Either way, you have to set up one of the other to handle your imagery. Sizing this way, someone who's visiting my website. You're visiting the website from your mobile phone and you're on three g connection on your cell phone connection. It will send you a lower resolution version of the image because your screen sizes so much smaller you can't display those additional pixels. Anyways, you're sending your customers data that they will never see or use when you have images that are too big. This is something that kills lot of websites. When you're using images, you take a picture with your camera, then you take a picture with your phone. Then you have a picture you downloaded or bought from stock photo website you have on your Web site. They're all different sizes. Some websites out there will advise you to resize your images manually to go into Photoshopped or affinity photo. You know, big affinity photograph switched from photo shop to a family photo, and I love it, but they will tell you to manually re size every image. And I've done a lot of that in the past. Sometimes I do resize an image for the upload when I go to making rice is insane. I can resize this to 1/3 the size easily. You don't need to do it manually. However, you just need thio. Have one of these to plug ins that takes care of everything. If you're on thrive themes. When you install the Thrive theme, it will make you resize all the images. Emilie. It's the first alert you get the second way to do it. It's free. W Smush Blufgan Now, until about two weeks ago, done piece much was how I resized on my images. I went through every size over 2000 images and When I installed thrive themes, he goes, we need to redo it, going to the drive teams rules. And I said, Fine resize my images. They went through over 3000 images that W Smush already processed and save me a total of 2.5 kilobytes. Think nothing. So I know from my testing that both processes are almost identical. There's a 0.1% difference in a lot of compression. The seventh mistake people make is cheap hosting. It's very tempting Thio by hosting that you see a commercial for Aunt Bea, or that seems like a really great desk and arts too good to be true. It's really, really, really, really, really hard to find honest reviews of hosting programs. Because every hosting company offers an affiliate program, 99% of the reviews that you read of hosting programs were lies. The only thing I can tell you is the two hosts that I use. I use a small orange for my small sites and dumpy ex hosting for my sides need to be fast. That's it. When you use cheap hosting or fall for one of these tricks, where people recommend all these different hosting programs. You can't tell which one's going on. Which ones not I've been down those roads before. I used a hosting program that other people we liked and they deleted on my website because they said that I didn't make a payment and I said, Isn't socially automatic payments went earth. Would this happen? Why in earth wouldn't you call me or send me a bunch of e mails? And they were blaming me and I said, Look, man, it's not that I don't have the money. It's that you guys didn't withdraw it. You're supposed to just take the money. You know what's happening here? So that was my experience with, ah, host, you know, that I was using that was the host. Actually, people I knew recommended It's tough to find the right hosting company because there are a lot of fly by night operations that are fake. For example, you can become a reseller with most hosting companies. This means they give you a certain amount of bandwidth, certain amount of size, and you can create sub users. You can do this with big names like host Gator. That's a big, well known hosting company so I could become a host, get a reseller. I then create my own website That makes it look like I have a host. So you think you're hosting with a different company, but you're actually hosted host Gator on their computers in their server farm. This is one of the dangers of cheap hosting what she posted. You're gonna run into security problems, speed problems, hacking problems, tech support problems. They all stink. The reason I recommend the two hosts that I do is that if you contact tech support, you get a reply in under two or three minutes. Most of time, it's way quicker, but occasionally there's a high traffic time. We have to wait two or three minutes at most of the time. They know what they're talking about with, you know, with a small orange. I eventually ran into a problem that they didn't know how to fix. It was a little bit beyond, because serving master got too big. Certain Master is a very large, very commercial website, has a lot of block. Post has a complicated podcast as a huge membership area. All of those pieces integrator very important. And it was a little beyond what $2 month hosting could handle, so I upgraded to Debbie PX hosting, which was called Traffic Planet at the time. But the great thing about depicts hosting it's actually not that expensive. It's $25 a month that you get five domains. So if you have five websites, you paid $5 a month pro upset. It's not crazy compared to a lot of the competition as faras premier hosting. It's not so bad, and that's just a higher level of tech support, a higher level of ability. But for most people, small orange to $3 a month is all you need. It is cheap, but there's cheap hosting in this cheap hosting. The final mistake that people make on WordPress and this is very common is that the name for their admin profile is admit a D m i n when your user name is admin, which is the default where press user name what they give you. If you don't choose your own, your website becomes very easily hackable. A brute force attack already has half of the access to your site. They have admin Now that is going to try, admit and multiple passwords. They try all these variations, and eventually they'll break into your website. Please, please, if you're using it was admin. Change it. It should always be something different and something that's not obvious. It's bad enough that people use terrible passwords, and I I don't want to talk about passwords today, but please make sure your username on WordPress is not admit. If it is, go change it right now, before you do anything else today, this is a critical mistake that leaves your sight unbelievably vulnerable and in fact, some of the really big hacks that happened where people hacked a 1,000,000 where press websites in the day happened. Because all of those websites have the same username, it's so easy they should be hard to find, not easy. If you fix these eight common WordPress mistakes, your business will grow. You'll get more traffic, your website will run faster, and you'll have a better experience for your customers. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve No Master. Make sure you subscribe so you never miss. Another episode will be back tomorrow with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race head over to serve no master dot com forward slash podcasts Now for your chance to win a free copy of Jonathan's best seller, Serve No master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you tomorrow. Thank you for listening. To serve no master podcast. Head over to serve no master dot com back slash podcasts right now to find out how you can win a free copy of my brand new book.