https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl36-Sjhe4U
The Cart66 secure customer portal has gotten an update! The sign in page is now skinned with your WordPress theme. This makes for a really nice, seamless experience for selling access to content on your WordPress site.
If it was just as easy to accept credit cards as it was to use PayPal, wouldn’t you want to let you customers pay you with their credit cards? Even better, why not accept credit card payments and PayPal at the same time? Offering both payment options will increase sales. With Cart66 it is as easy to accept credit cards as it is to use PayPal. People often shy away from accepting credit cards, because it seems complicated to setup and scary to deal with credit card information. Cart66 handles all the security for you so it is just as easy to accept credit card payments as it is to use PayPal.
In this review of PayPal vs Credit Cards we look at the following:
Read the article: PayPal vs Credit Cards
How To Create Content That Brings Traffic To Your Website
If you are going to write about your business, make sure you are using the right words. In this article we take a look at how to use Google keyword data to help you learn how your potential customers talk about your business. Rank well for the right keywords and you’ll see your traffic skyrocket.
Automated Screenshots of Web Pages In WordPress
This is pretty awesome! I totally didn’t know you could do this and it’s really easy. This article will show you how to take screenshots of webpages – like for theme reviews, demos, etc. – with a shortcode. If you write reviews or find yourself taking screenshots for you blog posts, this will make your day.
How To Add Bar Charts and Graphs To Your WordPress Site
This article is about the free version of this plugin. It looks, to me, to be one of the best plugins for creating chargs and graphs in WordPress because of how easy it is to manage the data points for the charts. If you ever have a need for putting charts in your blog posts, take a look at this.
What To Expect in WordPress 4.6
Last week, WordPress 4.6 beta 2 was released. The full update won’t be released until August 16. In the meantime, take a look at what is just around the corner.
Until next time…
Thanks for reading,
Lee Blue
If it was just as easy to accept credit cards as it was to use PayPal, wouldn’t you want to let you customers pay you with their credit cards? Even better, why not accept credit card payments and PayPal at the same time? Offering both payment options will increase sales. With Cart66 it is as easy to accept credit cards as it is to use PayPal. People often shy away from accepting credit cards, because it seems complicated to setup and scary to deal with credit card information. Cart66 handles all the security for you so it is just as easy to accept credit card payments as it is to use PayPal.
Doing a WordPress ecommerce integration isn’t as scary as it might seem. As long as you select the right tools for the job, ecommerce is a breeze to setup. If you want to start selling things on your WordPress site, you don’t have to totally rebuild your site. You don’t even need to change themes. With Cart66 you simply install the plugin and start selling. You don’t need to worry about of the technical details surrounding a traditional WordPress ecommerce integration because Cart66 comes with a suite of secure, connected services to handle things like PCI compliance and connecting to your payment gateway. Everything is taken care of for you. You don’t even need your own SSL certificate. In this article, we will discuss why Cart66 is the easiest and most secure WordPress ecommerce integration and how it is different from other WordPress ecommerce plugins.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71g8vSN56Tc
You have a great idea and have created your own business to bring it to the world. But on the internet, things are a sort of reversed. You need to bring the world to you. In other words, you need traffic for your website. This is where keyword ranking tools come into the picture. As a small business owner myself, I understand the challenge of having constraints on the size of the marketing budget. The good news is there are plenty of things you can do for free to promote your online business. One of the main things you will want to consider is content marketing. To effectively create content that reaches your audience you need to do Google keyword research. In this article I’ll show you my favorite Google keyword research tool, how to use it, and why this will make a great tool in your marketing toolbox.
Last week was a big week. We launched a couple new features, including one of the most anticipated and highly requested features in a long time. Let’s jump right in.
Inventory Management
You can now track inventory at the product level or down to the variation level on any of your products. Watch this quick video demonstration.
Google Analytics For Ecommerce
We have improved the Google Analytics integration with Cart66. Where you used to have to use a Thank You page snippet, now you don’t have to do anything. Cart66 will detect if you have Google Analytics installed on your WordPress site. If you do, we now send along itemized ecommerce details to Google Analytics. You don’t have to make any changes to your site or your settings. If you are using Google Analytics, and it is installed in the head section of your WordPress site then this enhancement is already working for you.
We are continuing to load up our YouTube Channel with new videos showing how to do all kinds of cool stuff. Subscribe to get in depth tutorials and helpful insights into e-commerce.
Here are some highlights from this week.
Sell Products On A Payment Plan
If you sell expensive products and would like to have your customers pay in installments, this video demonstration will show you how to get that going.
YouTube Marketing For Your Online Store
Learn how to create awesome marketing videos for YouTube then link directly from the video to a page on your WordPress site. Creating an annotation that links right to the product you are describing is a very powerful tool. This is what an annotation looks like and this article shows you how to do it.
What Is PCI Compliance?
One of the most common questions we get about PCI compliance is, “What is PCI compliance?” If you have about 6 minutes, this quick video will bring you up to speed with an accurate understanding of what PCI compliance is and how it impacts your business.
WordPress and PCI Compliance
Installing an SSL certificate has almost nothing to do with PCI compliance. In this article we discuss the role of SSL certificates and how to avoid mistakes that make securing your site much more difficult so you do NOT end up building your website to do something like this.
Here’s a quick list of some WordPress news we found interesting and helpful this week.
Which WordPress Files Should You Back Up?
Take a look at which files you need to back up along with some recommendations for services and plugins to help you get the job done from WPBeginner.
How To Download Older Plugin Versions From WordPress.org
Have you ever updated a plugin to discover it’s got problems and you wish you could revert back to the previous version? Here’s a quick article showing you how easy it is to do that.
Setting Up PHP and Composer In MAMP
A lot of people use MAMP for WordPress development. In this article Tom McFarlin describes how to get Composer working under MAMP.
Keep in touch on our blog, YouTube Channel, Facebook, and Google+.
We’ve been creating a lot of new content lately. So this week we’re sending you a list of the top 5 articles for June.
The most popular page on our site is our growing list of video tutorials. Some of most popular new videos include:
Check out the full list of videos on our new video tutorials page.
The Cart66 Launch Pack is a service we provide that gets you up and running as fast as possible. Just last week, here’s what a customer said:
You can’t beat this service! Especially if you’re new to setting up an ecommerce site. Dude! I’ve got an error free, fully functioning ecommerce site in a couple hours.
When you get a Launch Pack, one of our WordPress developers will connect your WordPress site to your Cart66 Cloud account. We’ll skin your hosted payment page with your WordPress theme and make sure everything is running smoothly.
To learn more, check out the Launch Pack.
In this video we talk about what PCI Compliance is and what it means to be “in scope.” We also go over some ways to “reduce scope” to make launching your online business safer, easier, and less expensive. If you accept credit card payments, in any way, this video / article is important.
Watch this video to learn What Is PCI Compliance Scope?
This getting started guide, shows you how Cart66 is a fundamentally different kind of WordPress ecommerce plugin because of the suite of connected services that are included. These services make Cart66 the most reliable and most secure way to run an online store with WordPress. We put together this article and filled it with pictures and videos to show you how Cart66 works and why we like to say, “It’s Better Together.”
Learn more about Getting Started With Cart66 Cloud
Did you know you can sell tickets and event registrations with Cart66? In this event registration demonstration video we’ll take a look at the different features to look for in any WordPress event registration plugin and how Cart66 meets all of those needs.
Watch how you can use Cart66 as your WordPress Event Registration Plugin
New Beginner WordPress Tutorials to Help You Learn WordPress
Here is a list of 24 videos to get you (or your clients) up to speed on how to use WordPress. These video tutorials are specifically designed for beginners. There’s also a free getting started guide that you can download as a PDF. If you like the videos, there are ways you can use unbranded versions of these videos for your own clients.
How To Link To An External Site From The Post Title In WordPress
I can’t believe I didn’t know about this. Here are two different ways you can get your post title to link to an external site. Sometimes you may just want to share a link with your readers that links to another site rather than your own post. Here’s how you can do it.
/a>
Finding photos for blog posts is always a challenge. Or, maybe you just want better pics out of your iPhone. All the photos in this article were taken and edited on an iPhone 6. Environmental adjustments, technical adjustments, and editing are all covered in this great guide to taking better photos with you iPhone. (P.S. almost all of this also applies to other mobile phones as well)
Thanks for reading this email! If there’s any way I can help you with anything, just let me know.
Until next time…
Lee Blue
cart66.com
>> A review of the fundamental differences between WordPress ecommerce plugins
Let’s talk about the fundamental differences between the various WordPress ecommerce plugins. Everybody knows that there are a lot of ecommerce plugins out there. Some plugins focus on digital products while others are designed for physical products or donations.
Here are 7 questions to help you understand the fundamental differences between the various ecommerce plugins for WordPress.
Most of the WordPress ecommerce plugins require you to buy add-ons to get the features you need. For example, most payment gateways tend to be available as premium add-on plugins. Cart66 has built-in support for over 100 payment gateways.
You can also accept credit card payments and offer PayPal as a payment option at the same time.
Cart66 brings everything you need together in one place. All the features are available without having to buy any additional add-ons. All the features are developed by our own team and are seamlessly integrated and always kept up to date. Most notable is that Cart66 comes with a suite of connected services to improve the reliability and security of your ecommerce site.
One of the most important connected services is the secure, PCI compliant, hosted payment page that looks exactly like your WordPress site.
Check out this article for a review of the fundamental differences between WordPress ecommerce plugins
A New Way To Get Great Images
Have you heard of Canva? It is one of the best and easiest ways to get images for blog posts, social media, newsletters, or whatever else you might need an image for. Leslie does a great job giving an overview of how it all works.
Yoast vs All-in-One SEO Pack
This review dives into the differences between the two most popular SEO plugins for WordPress. Nick provides a very in-depth look at both plugins to help you choose what’s right for you and your WordPress site.
What Might Be Confusing You About The WordPress Admin
I help a lot of people with their WordPress sites through support tickets, WordCamps, etc. One of the most common issue is not seeing certain controls in the WordPress admin because they are not enabled in the screen options panel. Bud Kraus digs in to reveal a bunch of other tips and tricks to help you navigate the WordPress admin.
12+ Fastest Loading WordPress Themes
Last week we talked about using minimal ecommerce themes for WordPress. Here is a list of themes that are remarkable because of how fast they load. Adding Cart66 might make them perfect ecommerce themes for your next project.
Thanks for reading and until next time…
Lee Blue
WordPress ecommerce plugins are all different. This is not a normal top 10 list of WordPress ecommerce plugins review. Instead, we’re going to look at the fundamental differences between the various WordPress ecommerce plugins. There are ecommerce plugins for selling digital products, physical products that you ship, memberships, subscriptions, and more. Other features like recurring billing, customer order history, and coupons might be important to you. Last, but certainly not least, you need to figure out how you want to accept payments. Are you happy just using PayPal or do you want to accept credit card payments too? In this article we’ll take at the differences between popular ecommerce plugins for WordPress and point out some things to help you choose the ecommerce plugin that’s right for you.
If you are looking to themes for ecommerce features, you might be looking in the wrong place. Unless you have hundreds of products, most of the work you do for your online business is going to be marketing related. You will be writing blog posts, SEO optimization, and making sure your site is running as fast as possible. With that in mind, the marketing features of your theme are probably more important than the ecommerce features. In fact, sometimes ecommerce theme features can get in the way.
Using an ecommerce plugin that bring the features you need to sell your products will do two important things:
Let’s take a look at why a minimal ecommerce theme may be the best choice and how to find one.
>> Minimal Ecommerce Themes for WordPress
If you decide to stop selling something and don’t want to have that product cluttering up your list of products, now you can archive that product. This will move the product form your list of products that you are actively selling and put it on the “Archived Products” screen in you Cart66 Dashboard. While archived products are no longer listed among your active products, you still have access to all the orders for that product and all the revenue history remains as well. Archiving products lets you keep things nice and tidy when you are managing the products you are selling.
Setting up email notifications for WordPress updates
Keeping your WordPress site updated is crucial for the security of your site. Here’s a quick tutorial on how to receive email notifications when updates happen.
15 most annoying things about WordPress and how to fix them
Does that “uncategorized” post category annoy you? Ever wanted to change your WordPress username but couldn’t figure out how? What can you do about comment spam? How about improving the WordPress search? Find all those answers and more with this really helpful article.
Syncing content between two WordPress sites
Maybe you have a staging site and a live site and you need to sync content between them. There are already plugins like WP DB Migrate Pro, but that is a little more technical and maybe you don’t need to sync the entire database. Perhaps you just want to sync a couple posts. Checkout this new plugin and see how easy it can be to keep things in sync.
Thanks for reading this email! As always, if you have any questions or if there’s anything I can do to help just let me know.
Until next time…
Lee Blue
cart66.com
