My Site

Creating Awesome Wordpress Sites With Genesis

Build Your Email List Faster With Thrive Leads

By | Last updated 4

ThriveLeadsBanner

Are you one of those people that uses the default web form from your autoresponder and sticks it on your site? Do you then wonder why your conversion rates are always so low?

The truth is, I’ve yet to find a decent form builder with any autoresponder. Aweber and GetResponse might have the best of the bunch, but they still give you form designs that look old fashioned and out of touch.

That’s why I have been so eager to get my hands on the new Thrive Leads plugin, the latest product by Shane Melaugh.

While it’s not quite released yet to the public, I’ve been playing around with an early access release and I’m certain it’s going to become one of the best plugins to build up your email list fast.

Read more …

Turbocharge Your Opt-Ins With Content Upgrades

By | Last updated 8

What is the best way to build up your list? Most marketers these days stick with tried and true methods like a sidebar optin form, maybe a feature box, a lightbox popup or even all of the above.

The problem is that these sorts of incentives are not very targeted. Unless you are already well known in some way, you are unlikely to get more than 1% of your visitors to optin using these methods.

Luckily, there is a better way to get opt-ins that is much more targeted.

It's called the Content Upgrade, a term popularized by Backlinko's Brian Dean. Brian didn't come up with the concept himself though. Folks like Kim Roach (who is one of my favorite marketers) has been using content upgrades on her blog for a long time now.

Read more ...

The Cheapskate’s Guide To Free Genesis Child Themes

By | Last updated 30

FreeGenesisChildThemes

One of the biggest advantages of choosing the Genesis Theme Framework is the enormous variety of child themes available for it. Each child theme gives you a unique foundation from which to change the look and feel of your site.

Having a wide variety of child themes to pick from makes the Genesis framework a great choice for building a wide variety of different types of websites from your basic blog to your next business website. Especially if you are building sites for clients or own several sites of your own.

If you were just browsing around the StudioPress website, you might get the impression that there are only premium Genesis child themes available. That’s what I thought at first too.

But if you do a little digging, you will find that there is a whole ecosystem of free Genesis child themes available for download. And some of them are quite good.

Read more …

How To Speed Up Your Site With MaxCDN and W3 Total Cache

By | Last updated 3

In my last post, I told you guys that the next step in my quest for faster page load times was to start using a content delivery network (CDN).

So that is what I did.

A content delivery network, for those new to the concept, is essentially a set of servers deployed around the world. With a CDN, copies of your website’s static files (images, CSS, javascript files) will be hosted on each of these servers.

So now when a visitor comes to your site, they will download your site’s content from a server that is closest to them (as opposed to from where your web host’s servers are). This means all your visitors will see consistently fast page load speeds, no matter where they are coming from.

maxcdn-banner

There are several different CDNs to choose from, but after some research, I decided to go with MaxCDN. It seemed to be the most popular one amongst bloggers and it’s being used by a lot of well known sites like StumbleUpon, Yoast, and CSS-Tricks.

This post isn’t meant to be a full review of MaxCDN since I’ve only been using it for a couple of weeks so far. I’ll save that for a future article.

Instead I wanted to publish a quick tutorial on how to quickly get up and running with MaxCDN by integrating it with W3 Total Cache.

Read more …

Awesome New Additions To Thrive Content Builder

By | Last updated 10

I did a review of Thrive Content Builder (TCB) back in May, but a lot has changed in the 3 months since then.

When you purchase a Shane Melaugh created product, one thing that you can count on is frequent updates to his products. And not just some small, random bug fixes. But awesome new features that always make me smile whenever they get posted on the ThriveThemes blog.

For those of you who haven't been exposed to Thrive Content Builder yet, it's a wordpress plugin that replaces the default WordPress editor and allows you to add custom Thrive elements to create highly converting landing pages. No custom coding is required and everything can be added to your page in real-time just by dragging and dropping elements on your page.

In fact, this post is written inside of Thrive Content Builder so I can demonstrate some of the new features that were added.

Read more ...