Are you looking for a Free Hotel Booking plugin for WordPress? This is the solution! Because free is always in the budget. MotoPress released a hotel booking plugin that is packed with loads of features!! You’ll watch to watch this tutorial through to the end. It’s amazing how much you can do in the budget of free!
Full Transcript:
Hey, y’all, I’m Kori Ashton and you are watching this video more than likely because you’re trying to find a solution inside of WordPress to help you reserve a room, book a hotel room, have some sort of reservation/booking feature on your WordPress website, and guess what, y’all, I have found it. All in the budget of free.
Oh, it gets so good! Yes, there’s a premium version. Yes, it gets amazing, but the free version is what I’m about to showcase for you. It is extraordinary what you get for that and then of course, if you have just a little wiggle room in your budget, you can go up just a little bit further and go all out Premium.
Let’s go take a look. So I’m gonna show you a detailed look at MotoPress’ brand new hotel booking plugin. Now, this, of course, is the light version that lives over here on wordpress.org in the repository, but in and of itself it has a lot inside of the free version.
So I’m gonna show you right now how to go in your dashboard, install it, and optimize some of the free version and then we’re gonna go even deeper into the Pro version. Let’s go take a look. So this is the beauty of it.
Online Search Availability Form
This online search availability form. So there’s a form that visitors can come to your website, select dates of when a room might be available, how many adults, how many children, and you can open it up and say Book Room and it’ll go into the search and look at your listings.
Accommodation details
You have many different types of attributes like bed size, capacity over all, you can add in all sorts of other accommodations like WiFi or Fire Pit, you know, different ideas that you might have available. You can add in all of those details.
Booking Calendar
There’s a booking calendar right here. Really cool user interface so they can select the dates. From here checking in to here checking out. This is another incredible feature.
Season Pricing
Now, this one is seasonal pricing so let’s say you know that in the summertime for South Padre here in Texas, it’s gonna be packed out and you have a room for rent. Hey, we’re gonna hike those prices up. Well, you certainly don’t wanna go in there and manage that by yourself, manually having to do that.
So you’re gonna set that from the get go and this system is so smart, it will know when those dates are applied to go ahead and boost those prices. Gotta love that.
Variety of Rate
You can also have variations of room rates. If you wanna include some amenities. Something like adding in breakfast. You can toggle it up and do an upsell.
Weekly & Monthly Rates
Weekly and monthly rates, look at that option.
Extra Services
So if you have an extended stay, you can have that included inside of here, and then again, add those extra services. Maybe you wanna add in transportation that you’ll go pick them up. Concierge-style service, right?
Booking Multiple Accommodations
What if they wanna come in and reserve multiple rooms? Love that feature.
Booking Rules
All sorts of booking rules. So this is important for those who might have a little bit more complex bookings. You’ve got that capability inside of here.
iCal Syncing
Now get excited for this, you guys. If you’re actually running Airbnb, booking.com, if you’re over inside of TripAdvisor or hotels.com and you’ve already got some sort of affiliate network there, you wanna pull those out, put them on your WordPress website. This syncs with iCal. Mind blown!
Variable Pricing
Another cool feature is variable pricing, so if you have many more guests and you need to do a quick upcharge, you have the ability to do that as well.
Multilanguage Support
The plugin itself is ready to be multi-lingual. You can’t beat that, so as you’re having guests from all over the world get ready to come in and stay with you here in San Antonio, Texas, or wherever you are, this is the tool, it’s ready to be translated. Look at this right now. There are 14 languages, already right now ready to go. I’m sure they’ll be adding even more.
Online and Offline Payments
This is something really extra as well. Maybe you want them to just reserve it now and pay when they arrive. You can go that option.
WooCommerce Integration
It also easily incorporates as an add-on inside of WooCommerce.
Other Features:
Taxes and fees get set up
Discount coupons
automatic email notifications to your visitor, to your guest.
Booking confirmations, immediately. You can have this thing even set up and send out a confirmation email to them. They have to respond to that email in order to solidify the reservation.
I mean, you’ve got all sorts of really dynamic options. This team here as MotoPress, I’ve worked with them on several other projects. Seriously, their support is absolutely fantastic. You’ll wanna connect with them on this.
Installation
So let’s go look now at how to install it. Okay, headed into the WordPress dashboard, into the site that you wanna tinker and play with this, and of course, please, best practice is stop right now, if you’re trying to install this and tinker around on the live site, slow down. That is not best practice. I need you to be absolutely certain that you have a backup in place of whatever website you’re playing around with and ideally, you would be managing this in some sort of staging environment, a sandbox that you can really tinker and have a lot of fun with without having any of your traffic see this or have anything break on your website. So we don’t want that to happen, but right up above me right here is where you’re gonna come search and you’re gonna be looking for Hotel Booking L-I-T-E, Lite.
And that’ll pull this one up right here. So I went ahead and clicked Install and of course, you clicked Activate. And as soon as you do that, we transfer over to this page right here and you’re gonna notice up at the top, there’s a little bit of a directional cue for us. It says install the pages, so let’s read the instructions really quickly.
Booking confirmation and search resolve pages are required to handle bookings. Press Install Pages and basically, it’s gonna do it for us. Here we go, y’all. Install the pages.
Now if we were to head over to our Pages area and view all pages, of course, we’re gonna find those in here. Here are some of ’em right here. How nice is that those are already included? And by the way, this works on absolutely any WordPress theme.
You can take this plugin and put it into any theme and it’s fully responsive. You’re not gonna have any sort of wonkiness or breaking issues, especially if that theme is up-to-date and so is this MotoPress Hotel plug-in. So now you’re gonna see right away, over here, that we have some more custom post types inside of our left-side navigation. We have Accommodation and Booking.
Now, don’t get intimidated by all these options sitting here. It actually moves pretty quickly to get it set up.
If you go into Accommodation Type, what’s great about this plugin and the developers of this plugin, they’ve been very thoughtful for us. They’ve given us a lot of information here. These are not physical accommodations, but they’re types like standard room, right? They’re room types. So you see, it took me 14 minutes to pause the video for a second and go create this.
Check this out, I’m gonna click View and show you what I just was able to build out in just less than 15 minutes. There’s my cover picture of the room. Here’s this beautiful gallery that I was able to add, the details of the room, and the different amenities that are all clickable, so that if you wanna find other rooms that have those same amenities and then here’s our availability calendar for booking, right.
Behind The Scenes
Oh! man, this gets you pretty excited. Let’s look behind the scenes just a little bit. So then clicking on the Accommodation Type and I’ll show you how to add one ’cause its literally just click Add New.
You’re gonna give it a name, you’re gonna give it a description and then kinda work down the page. Obviously, this is Yoast, so I can cinch that up. You can throw in a quick excerpt if you like. It depends on your theme as to whether or not that’s gonna display.
You can add in the capacity of the room down here. There’s that. You can put in a view, if that’s possible in the room. The bed type, there’s that available.
We’ll click here for the adding of a service. Over here on the right side, you’re gonna see the different amenities and of course, you can add whichever ones you offer by clicking Add New Amenity and then saying laundry service. Add New, there you go. Adds to the list, super simple to do there. So if we keep scrolling down, you’re gonna see the gallery for the room. Just by clicking there, you add whatever pictures you want in there to the gallery, and then you’re gonna be able to set your featured image.
Doing all that super easily and of course, the first time you do this, you’ll be clicking Publish, after that, you’ll be updating it. Go and view it and again, this is what it did for me. It has this beautiful featured image up here.
Ashe Theme
The theme that I’m using right now is called Ashe, A-S-H-E, it’s a free theme. So right now, I’m working all in the budget of free. This is a free plugin so far and this is a free theme I’m using.
This is the gallery, though, look at this. This beautiful, open lightbox happens that you can scroll through. I didn’t have to code anything. All those features are already inside of there and again, there’s the amenities and the availability calendar. All of that inside the budget of free.
Support/Training/Premium
Just an amazing, I absolutely love this thing. They also have incredible support. They’ve got an entire YouTube playlist here for how to handle every single one of these things. So if I went too quickly for you, please come over here. I’ll put the link to this playlist down below so that you can come check this app.
Each and every one of these features are gonna be detailed out in how to address them, how to use them inside of your booking options and when you’re ready to go Premium and go Pro, it’s only $50. That is it. There’s your license. If you’re a freelancer or you’re a small agency and you know that you’re gonna be helping other clients have this, go ahead and invest and buy the unlimited license. That gets you free and clear across the board to handle this on any WordPress website here, moving forward.
Conclusion
What do you guys think? How cool is this? I don’t know about you, but this is one of the things I love about WordPress. There’s so much free options out there and it’s great developers like MotoPress who lead the way and they’re offering so much to us in the budget of free.
Give them a shout-out. If you’re using this, please tell them thank you. If you need support from them, obviously get over to their support area, connect with them. I’ll put the link to that in the Description Box below.
Give ’em a shout-out over on Twitter, too, if you’re using this and making money with it.
Are WordPress Auto updates safe? All WordPress websites require updates – plugin updates, theme updates, and core WordPress file updates. Knowing that for security purposes we want to keep things up to date, sometimes it’s easier to just allow your Hosting company to auto-update, or set up a plugin to do it. What’s the best practice when it comes to handling this required task each month?
Full Transcript
Hey, y’all. Welcome to another WordPress Wednesday. My name is Kori Ashton, and every Wednesday I am hanging out right here on YouTube to help you improve your online marketing, specifically inside the world of WordPress.
And today I’ve got a question from one of my awesome subscribers, and I’m gonna share that with you right now. It’s all about automatic updates. Anna writes in,
“Hey Kori, Love your videos etc- “you make it all sound so simple. “I build websites and I often refer to your information- “so thank you! “I have tried to find it on your site, but do you have a blog or video about the pro’s and con’s of having ‘automatic updates’? Thanks, Anna”
No, thank you, Anna. I appreciate having ideas for content, and your questions, anybody sending in questions, for that matter, really helps me get an idea and a pulse on what your needs are, and kinda what level of my audience is paying attention and asking me for help. So, thank you so much for sending those in, and if you have questions, be sure to come over to askkori.com, submit those, or Tweet to me. Alright.
So, automatic updates. What are best practices? We all know that whenever we’re dealing with WordPress, we login our dashboards and we get updates like this: Notifications that your core is needing updates, your theme is needing updates, all your plugins need updating. And I don’t know about you, but sometimes my stomach starts to turn a little bit in fear of breaking something. So this is why, in the past, I have always said, you need to manually handle all of your updates, especially if you have 12 or more plugins running on your website.
You need to absolutely be methodical on how you go in here and do it. You need to be certain that there’s a backup in place. Of course, I preach that! Be certain you have a backup in place. Be sure you also know how to click and roll back the site if something does break. Better yet, test all this in the staging environment, right? Be certain it all works there, and then come over and do it in the live environment.
So, there’s definitely best practices when it comes to how to actually execute these things. But when you’re talking about setting and forgetting, kind of implementing some sort of an automatic update process, What are best practices? Should you be using something like that? Again, I would say that this really depends on the plugin that you’re using, or the service that you’re using to accomplish this.
If you’re using something like iThemes Sync, I’m kinda blown away with the safety net that they have to provide this type of service for WordPress websites.
iThemes Sync Features
So, a lot of cool features here. I’m just gonna punch through them, as a solution for handling your automatic updates inside of WordPress.
All-in-one Dashboard
They have an all-in-one dashboard where you can see all of your websites that you’re managing at one time. Which is a super-cool feature. It gives you one dashboard to log into, looks something like this, allows you to see all the different installs. You get to see very quickly what plugins are needing updating, what themes need updating, what core. And, here’s the thing, you can go into each and every one of these individually, and set it to automatically update, or set it to be locked down and do a manual update.
So that’s set individually. You can also come in here and then see those that are running the automatic updates. We’ll have alerts if there’s anything that’s concerning about the site. So, here’s what happens very quickly, kinda behind the scenes. When it knows that there’s an update that needs to run, it will go over very quickly and test it first in a staging environment of its own.
If any error messages kick out, it will pause the update from happening automatically and send you a notification asking you to check it out and be certain you want to go ahead and push that update through. But it’s gonna tell you what that error message is. This ensures that nothing goes live on your site for an update that might break. Mind blown, phenomenal safety net for you.
So, if you are using a solution like this, I’m all for it. Go for it, Anna. Click update. Click automatic update and set it and forget it type of scenario, right? But what I don’t want you to do, is run a plugin or tell your hosting service, please go ahead and update everything, and then you’re not knowing when that’s being pushed through, whether that’s on Tuesday at two o’clock, or whatever that looks like.
Monitor Uptime of Website
Some of the other features, really quickly here, with iTheme Sync, because I’m just so blown away by it. It will also monitor the uptime of the website, each individual install.
Reports
You can also send out, you can have a custom dashboard and send out reports. This one got me excited because a lot of clients wonder, well, what are you doing for me, every month? This particular system will allow you to put in their email address and set it to automatically send out at the end of every day, every week, every month, every year, whatever you set it to.
Send out a report and let them know, this is all the work that’s been accomplished for your website this month. And, the exciting thing is, some of those things will be automatic, and it’ll look like you are just grindin’ for that client, which is really exciting to see. You know that there’s this safety net here, though, to ensure that their website is running perfectly.
So, your hosting company might provide something like this for you, especially if you are running on Liquid Web. Because they own iThemes, right? So, whenever you’re at hosting with these guys, you actually get this included in any of your packages. iTheme Sync is included. So, if you’re looking for another hosting solution, check out Liquid Web, look at their managed WordPress pricing, get in here and see if you can partner with them to get that great service, or you can get it kinda a la carte over here. I’ll put the links to both these in the description below.
Realize, as well, that both, as of today, are running specials, discounts goin’ on. This one up here, Liquid Web, is running 33% off for the first three months, and iThemes is running 35% off site-wide. So, very exciting.
Oh! In the budget, there is a free version of iTheme Sync, so check that out. You do get free, and free is always in the budget. And then, for a little bit more, you get a whole lot more, if you’re able to jump to a premium and have a little bit in your budget to spend.
Hey, I hope this helps you guys. Every Wednesday, I’m here on YouTube, helping you improve your online marketing. And I have over 300 videos in my library to go check out here for free.
If you’re interested in joining the community that we’re talking about, improving your freelance business, improving your small agency and how to grow it, I have an entire community over on Vimeo, where you can come join me every month as we’re doing webinars, and we’re kinda working through a little bit more advanced conversation about growing your revenue, improving your process, how to find clients, all sorts of great conversation happening over there. I hope to see you next WordPress Wednesday. Bye, y’all.
How to remove the new blocks in WordPress 5.0 and revert back to the classic editor. Simple / Free Fix – Kori Ashton helps you understand why things look different in WordPress 5.0+ and how to get back to the standard look you’re used to inside of the WordPress editor.
Full Transcript
Hey, y’all, welcome to another WordPress Wednesday. My name is Kori Ashton and this is Ask Kori. Every single Wednesday, I’m creating a video just like this to help you improve your online marketing, specifically inside the world of WordPress.
So if you like content like this, be sure to subscribe, and be absolutely certain to go take a look at my entire library here on my YouTube channel. Over 300 videos to help you.
Alright, let’s get to it today. If you are struggling because you’ve logged in to your WordPress website now and you are finding all of these blocks, and you’re wondering, what the heck? I just wanna change existing content. How do I make these changes? How do I make these blocks go away? What just happened to WordPress?
Slow down for a minute. That is an update for Gutenberg, the new type of drag-and-drop editor, which is super cool and exciting. But if you’re trying to just make a simple quick fix, and you don’t really wanna go learn all that right now, there is a workaround and it’s a simple plugin. I’m gonna show you what to do right now.
So you’ll be logging in to your WordPress dashboard. And you’ll see if you’re struggling and you see things like this, this is what’s going on here. Go into Edit. I’m gonna show you the view that I’m seeing. And really, I’ve never created a page that looked like this. I don’t know why this page looks like this, right? What happened is that 5.0 update, if you’ve already updated beyond that, you are running something called Gutenberg. And again there’s a simple quick fix.
You’re gonna go to your plugins and click Add New. And we want to go look for Classic Editor. It should actually be on this screen right now. If not, do a quick search up here for Classic Editor. And you’ll have it pull up. This is the one you’re looking for. Go ahead and click Install Now. And, of course, you wanna activate it. As soon as you do that, it will in a sense, overwrite Gutenberg, and allow you to move back to the classic screen that you’re very, very familiar with, and you won’t have any more type of, oh, my gosh, what just happened?
But to give you an idea for those of you who are interested in Gutenberg, and getting to know a little bit more about the editor, there are some really cool tutorials for you to learn all about blocks, learn how simple it is to drag and drop, and add more function and really cool layouts to your pages.
But again, if you’re just trying to get in there make a quick simple fix, go install Classic Editor and the world will be all back to normal again.
I hope you’re having a great one. Be sure to check out my library of videos and subscribe, because every Wednesday, I’ll meet you right here at WordPress Wednesday. Bye bye, y’all.
If you’re looking for a live chat option on your WordPress website, Kori Ashton shows you three different plugins. Some of these have totally free options – which is always in the budget. Remember that using a live chat feature on your website could increase sales and engagement. It’s a simple plugin to add a powerful feature. Each of these live chat plugins offer support and resources to learn how to customize and use their platforms.
Full Transcript
Hey, y’all, my name’s Kori Ashton. Happy WordPress Wednesday, I hope you’re having a great one. Today I wanna walk you through three different options to include a live chat feature inside of your WordPress website. It’s gonna be easy, let’s go take a look.
The question actually came in on my YouTube channel, on a video from Pradeesh Ravi. Sorry if I’m not pronouncing your name incorrectly, but I so appreciate you just taking a minute to give kind feedback or a question, it’s really cool. And he’s asking me here,
“Your videos have been very useful in maintaining my website. Do you have any suggestion as to which plugin to use in order to enable live chat on my website? This way I could reach out to the customer the moment they visit them.”
So I love this question. I know a lot of you probably want to engage your customers as they’re visiting your website, in real-time conversation.
How do you do that efficiently?
How do you do that budget-consciously?
What do you use?
What tools do you use?
I’m happy to report that there are three that I have vetted, I know the reviews on, and I can tell you right now, we’ve got some options in the budget of free.
Live Chat Plugin – Zendesk Chat
The first one I am most familiar with is Zendesk Chat. It used to be called Zopim. That’s when I was using it for most of my clients. This is a really great, great resource for you, especially if you only need one operator communicating with your customers.
It has really good analytics, super ridiculously easy to install, you can customize it to match the colors on your website, really really easy, and again, it’s in that budget of free option.
So what you would do is come over here to the actual plugin, or you’d go to your dashboard and go to plugins and click add new. And you’re able to just come install the plugin that they created that Zendesk has, for WordPress. And it plugs right into your website.
Again, there’s a free option, so we love that, that’s always in the budget. And it’s free for the life of the use of the tool, as long as you meet the requirements of, I think it’s one user, so you wanna have just one operator speaking back and forth. And then you only get to keep a 14-day chat history. So you have to just kind of be aware of how you’re using this tool.
Of course, they have upgrade options. If you have a budget in the range of 20 dollars, you’re really gonna be able to have a lot more options open up for you.
Live Chat Plugin – Live Chat
The second one we can look at has great reviews as well. It’s called LiveChat, and they also have a plugin that you can use, and just drop right into your WordPress website. So you see here that it has 20 plus active installs, it’s been updated recently, and you wanna just be sure that it’s been tested with your most recent version of WordPress. So currently it’s been tested up with the famous 5.0.
They do have an option for you to do a free trial, but it is a fully paid system moving forward. Here’s what I want you to do, though. Look at the different features and try to understand what it is that you might be needing. And if you say, “Well I’ve never had a live chat feature before, I don’t know what I need,” then start with a budget of free, and see if that meets your needs. I would suggest again, trying out Zendesk Chat, just to see if that meets your needs.
If you want more robust data, if you want the ability to have more operators on your team, if you wanna be able to keep the chat history longer, whatever that looks like. You’ll start to know that over time. And what you won’t do is waste your budget.
Live Chat Plugin – WP Live Chat Support
So be sure to look at both of these, LiveChat and Zendesk Chat, and the third one that I’ve looked at is WP Live Chat Support. Now this one has over 60,000 installs, has great reviews, and it has been tested again with Gutenberg 5.0, so that’s exciting to see that they’re already that up to date and current with their code. Very exciting stuff, and really, really good for you to use.
Also, it has unlimited live chat agents. So very, very cool options here. These are the three I’ll suggest to you, and of course, I will always put all the links in the description box below, so that you can easily access these three. You just go into your WordPress dashboard, go to plugins, and click add new. That’s where you’re gonna find all of these living, because they already have plugins specifically for WordPress.
Remember you need to be on the self-hosted version of WordPress in order to do this. Something you absolutely wanna keep in mind is that you can improve your sales, you can increase your sales, they say up to about 30 percent more, if you’re able to watch when a visitor lands on your website, and engage with them as soon as possible, answering their questions quickly, confirming that you are the professional service or product that they’re looking for.
It’s very exciting to see how you can utilize live chat. The other great thing about it is, a lot of times if you’re away from your desk, and you need to access that conversation, you can just get a notification on your phone, and you’ll be able to sit right there and chat with the customer while you’re out and about.
This is a great, great resource for small to medium-sized businesses that don’t have a large team to monitor this, and just to sit at your computer all day long. Hope this helps, y’all, and thanks again for sending in the question. It’s very kind of you to give great feedback, it’s very much an encouragement to me. I will see y’all next WordPress Wednesday. Bye everyone.
Easily create a free sitemap to your WordPress website that dynamically updates itself as you publish content! Kori Ashton helps you create the sitemap link on your website with this easy plugin resource.
Sponsored by: Pressable. WordPress Hosting & Support Use ASKKORI for a free 90-day trial!
Full Transcript
Hey, y’all, my name is Kori Ashton and you have found a video inside of a YouTube channel dedicated to all things WordPress. There’s over 300 videos that I have created over the years to help you improve your online marketing. So if you like this, not only comment below please, but also subscribe because every Wednesday, I’m creating videos totally for free to help you improve your online marketing.
Another great solution for you is Pressable. If you love WordPress and you need a great hosting company that can answer and support things dealing with WordPress, plug-ins, themes, whatever issues you might have, Pressable.com is where you need to be and I’ll give you a link below to go get some free stuff from them. They give you a money back guarantee.
Alright, let’s get to it. You guys, I have a solution for you on how to create a free– free is always in the budget– sitemap link to help Google crawl your site better and to let your users quickly go and find pages in a sitemap, a really cool layout. Alright, you ready to learn? Let’s do it right now.
Install Yoast
Okay, first thing’s first, you need to install Yoast. It’s one of my favorite SEO plug-ins. If you’ve never used it before, I’ve got an entire playlist to help you improve and use this really cool free tool. Alright, so you’re gonna go here right up above me and do a search for Yoast. It’s like toast but with a Y. Yoast. Do a search and do an install now.
What’s interesting about this is they use to have it a little bit more accessible so you can find it, but now it’s a little hidden of how to go in and find the link to your sitemap.
XML Sitemap on Yoast
It’s kinda tricky, so now that you’ve installed it and activated it, over here on the left side, you can go to all of these different areas and just kind of learn, each tab, kinda learn what you need to do and work on the settings. So of course, right now, it’s gonna say, “Hey, you’ve got an issue,” because I’m in a staging environment. But, if you go into Features, and go down to XML Sitemaps. Do you see this area right here?
So you wanna be certain, of course, that it’s on. But if you click on the little question mark, interestingly enough. Open that up, check it out.
Enable a sitemap that Yoast generates. See the XML Sitemap. And then you can read why it’s so important. So they have a link here to give you a little bit more education, right? That’s always cool.
And see the XML sitemap. If you click on that little link, it’s gonna give you the URL that you need- voila– for your sitemap in your footer. So you’re gonna just copy that on to your clipboard.
Now, if you wanna drill in and only offer your pages sitemap, this is kinda giving all four of the different sections of my site. My post, which is my blog, my pages, which is kinda my static content, my category sitemap, which is pretty cool, and even an author sitemap, if you have multiple authors for your website. So if you wanted just to offer your pages, you could click on that page sitemap option, click Copy, and have that one available for your users.
Best practices, though is probably to offer everything to Google. Let them crawl it all. So I’m gonna use just the sitemap_index.xml link. Grab that right there. Grab the whole URL, copy it, and then you would go into the front side of your website and put it down in your footer, right? Where that lives down in the bottom part, usually where it’s got like, powered by WordPress or your copyright information. Throw it down there as a link to get to your sitemap. And that’s gonna vary based on your theme, right? So that could be totally different based on your widgets that are available down there. So as long as you know how to get to that URL, that link, grab it, you can go put it down in your footer. So, I’ll show you.
Adding XML Sitemap to 2017 Theme
For now, if you’re done, you’re done. If you wanna stick around for a second, I’ll show you how I actually add that to the 2017 theme right now. Okay, we have a couple of different options.
I’m using the 2017 theme, so I’m gonna scroll all the way down to the bottom and they do give you widget options here. So I have footer one and footer two in my two columns here. So I could if I wanted to come in here and add it very easily to my widget area right here underneath my search bar.
So from there, you just go into Appearance and go to Widgets and this is my footer widget two area so I’m gonna add a text box to that, add it to footer widget two. Excellent. I’m just gonna go into text mode here and write the little nerd code.
If you wanted you, you can easily do this in the Visual mode as well. But because I had it on my clipboard, I’m able to just paste it right in there, right? Give it a title for best practices here. Say sitemap, excellent, and say sitemap, and end the nerd code there. Click Save. And I’ll show you how it lands, or kinda displays. See it right there, sitemap? That’s perfect. You click on it. Of course, you always wanna test whenever you’re doing HTML code, any kind of code for that matter, you always wanna test the link and be certain you did it correctly. And we did, voila! Exciting.
If you wanted you, you can even continue in this space. You can do a pipe, and you can say Privacy Policy and add in all of your legal things that you need to add, right? You could say Accessibility Statement. You could do your Terms of Use, right? Add all of these in here and put all of the links in there, click Save, and of course, you’d write all the links. And they display beautifully right here.
Using Child Theme in 2017 Theme
Now if you’re trying to get this further down into kind of a copyright area, 2017 doesn’t really give us access. This particular theme does not give us access to this area. Easily. So you’d have to use a child theme. If you don’t know what that is, I’ll put a link below so you can go figure out what a child theme is, and you would add it into the footer PHP file.
Adding XML Sitemap to footer.php File
So you’d go to Appearance Editor. Right now, we could add it to the footer, which is over here. We could add it in here and display it in here, but as soon as the theme has an update and we click Update on that option to stay secure, which you have to do, right? Everybody nod your head with me. This would go away. It would revert back to the original copy. That’s why if you’re ever editing inside of a PHP file, you need to be doing it inside of a child theme. So that it’s always going to be relevant, it’s never gonna be overwritten, okay? So that’s just a quick tip for ya.
I really do hope that this has helped you guys. I know it’s kind of a longer tutorial, but if you stuck around for this at the end, way to go. You’re amazing. You can code, I know you can do it. Don’t get intimidated by seeing PHP on a screen. I’m not really a developer. I just kinda hack my way through it.
I appreciate you sticking around, though. I will see y’all next WordPress Wednesday. Bye, everyone.
Kori Ashton gives you 5 Tips to Help Make Your Life Amazing! with WordPress and Google Hacks.
Sponsored by: Pressable. WordPress Hosting & Support Use ASKKORI for a free 90-day trial!
Full Transcript
Hey y’all, it’s Kori Ashton and it is another WordPress Wednesday. You have found a YouTube channel dedicated to all things WordPress and today I have five tips that are gonna make your life amazing. You might say, well I might know one or two but I wonder if you know all five. If you do be sure to comment in the thread below and tell me, Kori I already knew all five or tell me hey, I learned two or three new things.
I hope this helps you and if you love this be sure to give a shout out to Pressable because they’re the one sponsoring all this goodness. Alright, let’s check it out.
Tip One – Gravity Forms (Stay in Place When Click Submit)
Tip number one. Alright, the very first tip has to do with Gravity Forms. If you’ve ever used a form, specifically Gravity Forms you’ve probably experienced something like this. I’ve got this form, actually, at the bottom of a page right now but it functions anywhere you put this form on any page for that matter. If I were to fill out the form and click submit, see how it jumps me back to the top of the page?
So if I had a thank you message there which I actually do have a thank you message right here. I’d have to scroll again right back down and actually see what the message said. It’s kind of annoying.
But did you know that Gravity has a feature inside of it known as Ajax and you can enable it and it’s super, super, super easy to do. So you actually do it when you go to embed the forms. You’ve already created the form. You can give it as many fields whatever you want it to have as usual.
Like you’d normally use Gravity Forms but when you come in here to embed the code I’m gonna delete what I currently had and I’m gonna go ahead and click Add Form. You’re gonna go ahead and choose the form that you wanna choose. Display the title, don’t display the title. What I want you to do is enable Ajax. Just click that little box right there and insert form. It’s gonna add Ajax true to your shortcode.
We’re gonna click update and I’m gonna show you now what it looks like whenever somebody fills out that form and how cool it’s gonna look and how simple it’s gonna look in the process of a user experience, right? So same form, same page, same placement, right? Askkori.com and where are gonna go here testing again Ajax, right? So that we know the difference. I’m gonna click submit and watch this. Stayed right where it was.
Gave me a little timer showing it was submitting and then there is my thank you message. Super cool, quick tip that you should be using on all of your Gravity Forms.
Tip Two – Site Search on Google
Second tip has to do with Google specifically. Did you know that you can do a site search for all of the pages, all of the files, that google has indexed on your website. Super cool, quick, easy. What I want you to do is type in the word site S-I-T-E, do a colon and you can do your own if you want Askkori.com click enter and it’s gonna spit out every single page that it has indexed. This is a super important thing for you to do.
Let me zoom in a little bit so you can see what the code is. Site, S-I-T-E, colon, Askkori.com is my URL. You’ll put in whatever domain name you have, your clients, whatever that looks like. This is so important to do because you can very quickly see if Google has been indexing or been able to crawl your website. Also, it’s a very quick overview of all your snippets so you can check out and see how Google is displaying every single one of your pages for people to click on. Cool, huh?
Tip Three – Non-Clickable Link on WordPress
Tip number three. This one has to do again back specifically with WordPress. Did you know that up in your menu you can actually have a link sitting up there that is not clickable? It can just kinda be a placeholder.
See this one currently, if I click on it, it actually does take me to my whole blog landing page. But what if I wanted to create just kind of a placeholder here and then allow to have drop down options underneath. You really don’t want this one to be clickable.
How is that done? I’m gonna show you right now. Let’s head into your dashboard. We’re gonna go over to Appearance and go to Menus. Right, Appearance, Menus. I want you to get to whatever menu you want to edit. Right now I want to edit that top menu up there and my primary menu. And I want to add in just another placeholder and then maybe just put my WordPress topics from my blog. Those categories underneath that.
So you’re gonna come over here to custom links. And instead of a URL, I just want you to put in a hashtag for now and I’m gonna say WordPress Topics and click add to menu. Now it’ll add it and I can take these other things and drop them underneath here which are, as you can tell, categories inside of my blog. And this just becomes kind of a placeholder sitting up there. So I can click Save Menu. Go back to the front of my website so I can see this easily and clearly. WordPress topics. Now, this is not clickable. If it is clickable, it just kind of resets the page and then WordPress Hacks takes me into my individual categories. Pretty cool, huh?
Once you actually get here, you could if you wanted to remove that hashtag completely. And then it’s in no way shape or form clickable. It just becomes that placeholder living up there. So, I’ll refresh so you can see it again. See how my cursor turned to that I? It’s not clickable at all. Kind of cool, huh?
Tip Four – Instant Images Plugin in WordPress
Tip number four. So this one is all about images because there’s nothing more frustrating than trying to build out a website but you have to go search for hours to find available free to use stock imagery. So frustrating. Did you know there’s a plugin that can remedy that for you with just a couple clicks?
You can embed, install, and activate this plugin called Instant Images that references images from Unsplash.com if you guys are familiar with that really great resource. Those are free stock images for you to use but this actually embeds them into your media library. Check this out.
When you go onto your plugins, you can go-click Add New you’re gonna go do a search for instant images. Once you’ve done that, install it now, and then activate it. Then, inside of your media area over here lives instant images. You can come in here and it’s basically sourcing all those images into your dashboard. You can come here and do a search, let’s see, for coffee. Just to get a really cool coffee cup and you see all these different ideas. And this, of course, is also available whenever you’re inside of a page.
So you can go in and embed any of these images inside of a page, inside a post. For your featured image, even. It’s just gonna be something that saves you a little bit of extra time, extra steps. And makes the user experience really great. Especially if you’re handing this off to one of your clients, right? You want them to be able to use images that are safe for them to use.
So now you got this Instant Images up here. I can click on that. Come over here again. Do our same search for coffee. Enter. Find the one you wanna use and embed it right away. It’s gonna go ahead and do everything it needs to do to resize the image, allow it to be used, and a safe mode inside your website. And then all you do is click insert into post. Kinda nice, huh? Slick, sleek, easy to use and you know for a fact that you’re not gonna get in trouble for infringement on an image that isn’t available to be used legally.
Tip Five – Free Resources on Themeforest.net
Alright final tip of the day, number five. If you have ever done nay searching whatsoever for WordPress Themes, you have probably found yourself over here at themeforest.net. But did you know they have as of today at least, they have had this for considerable years, I believe.
As of today they still allow free stuff. Every week, every month, they’re giving away free stuff. You can come over here and grab themes, templates, audio files, all of these things that are normally products that they sell. They’re giving you totally for free whenever you sign up which is a free account and be a part of the community. So get over here, be sure to check out this website every single month and pick up some of these really cool images. Video pieces that they’re letting you use. Especially if you’re trying to figure out how to use a specific software. You can come over here and grab some of these templates and play around with ’em. This specific one is an After Effects template, super cool, all for free and free is always in the budget.
Alright, you guys, I hope this helps you today I hope you’re having a great week. Be safe tonight, if you’re going out trick-or-treating, alright way to go I just dated this whole video but that’s okay. And I’ll see y’all next WordPress Wednesday. Bye, everybody.
Here’s a coupon code for your 15% Off the premium version ASKKORI15 Click here to purchase it.
Sponsored by: Pressable. WordPress Hosting & Support Use ASKKORI for a free 90-day trial!
Full Transcript
Hey, y’all, it’s Kori Ashton, and one of the absolute best things you can possibly be doing on your WordPress website is gathering leads, how do you do that? How do you gather leads in a really cool way that gets people excited and engaged and maybe sends out even an automated response to them, sends out alerts whenever you’re publishing fresh content? I’ve got a way to do it, and we’re gonna stay in our budget of free, check this out.
MailOptin reached out to me and asked me if I would do a review of their plugin, and I’ve gotta tell you, I’m pretty impressed so far, so in this session, I’m gonna walk you through actually how to install the free version, how to set it up, how to use it.
Some exciting things about it that might get you just as excited, is that it auto feeds already to:
MailChimp,
to Constant Contact,
to Aweber
It allows popups, really cool different ways of engaging your users as they come in. It also has the moment that they go to leave, it’ll engage them then, with a popup saying, again, don’t leave, asking them to enter their email address or whatever information you need to gather that lead and drive, drive, drive conversion and sales on your website.
It’s so important, I can’t stress enough, missed opportunities on your website every single time, and this is a tool that’ll help you retain and gain those loyal customers, so be sure to check this out. I’m putting links to all this in the description below so that you can get access to it, and be sure to check out their premium upgrade version because that’s gonna open up so many other opportunities. I’ll talk about that toward the end of this video, but for now, let’s take a look at some of the features.
Installation of MailOptin
First step to engage the free version, remember, I’m gonna show you both, the free and the paid upgraded version. The free one, you’re gonna go on your dashboard, go over to the plugins area, click Add New, and you just want to do a search for MailOptin, all one word, MailOptin, gets you this.
Now note, as of this video today, it’s got phenomenal reviews, only 5000 installs, but it’s certainly gaining a lot of traction, and of course it’s compatible with our version, so you certainly want to be sure that all those things are still in place, no matter how many years from now you’re watching this video to be certain that this is still a great solution for you, and then you’re just gonna go ahead and click Install Now, and of course, we want to activate this plugin so that we can go in, test it, and see how it’s gonna be best available to use inside of your website.
Click Activate. So now that it’s activated, you can already see right here that you can go into settings if you like. You also see right here that it’s MailOptin Lite, which is the free version, right? So you’re gonna be limited on some of the things that you can do, and you certainly can open up some really cool options when you go premium version, so let’s take a look at some of the things you can do easily and quickly on the fly.
Free Version of MailOptin Features
This is your first screen, kind of the settings area, just the general overview, and you can certainly leave these kind of default mode if you want to.
Email automation, you’ll come in here and kind of set the things of who the emails will be coming from once the system automatically connects with your new leads, how cool is this?
And then, of course, you have the other options over here, you have the integrations with the different systems, so if you’re using something like MailChimp, you can come over here, click on that, throw in your API key, you’re off and running. What that means is, as soon as somebody enters in their email, if you’ve created this API to feed over to your email marketing system, like MailChimp or Constant Contact or Aweber or ConvertKit or whatever’s over here, that they have the capability of doing, that email than automatically ships over and sits inside of that system and becomes available for you to use inside of there.
There’s no need to download a list and try to upload a list and try to keep that up to date. This is a really cool dynamic solution here, very very exciting, but another cool feature about MailOptin is that you don’t have to have one of these other systems. They will allow you to kind of internally collect that email sitting in here, and their system will automatically email out to that lead that’s already inside of your list, how crazy is that?
I’m loving this, and again, we’re staying right now, the features that you’re seeing right now, are living inside of the free option, so let’s go over here and actually create a campaign.
Creating your First Campain with MailOptin
Let’s do this. So, all I did was click the lite box version, right? So that’s what we want to do right now, is kind of see what type of a campaign we can create, what sort of mousetrap, basically, do we want to create to have somebody fill in the blank, fill in their information and let us gather the details, so you’ve got a couple of options here.
These two that are in the free option, the rest you’re gonna see that are premium that are gonna require you to buy a license to use, but you can get excited and be inspired about the different layouts, the different options that allow you to again engage, so we’re just gonna select this particular theme just for the sake of showing you these capabilities, stay with me, cause this is gonna get super exciting as we go through this and you’re able to see how quickly you can easily optimize these options, let’s do this, we’re gonna name the campaign.
Just for now, we’re testing, we’re gonna select the theme, and again, I want you to see kind of how quickly and easily you can make some of these changes.
Font, colors, all this fun stuff right here, so let’s go here to Design, change the background color. I’m just gonna go a little extreme for us right now, so that you can kind of get an idea of what the capabilities are. Back here, the headline, do we want to say, subscribe to the latest updates?
We can say, subscribe to the latest videos, right? Have that there, that looks great.
We can change the font family to better match our website and to play a little bit more directly with our branding cause you certainly want to be beautiful in your branding and stay consistent there so you’re not throwing people off, right, of staying on your website, and of course, this is the area, too, that you can change.
You can change anything here, how nice is that? Change the color here to a white and let that really pop off the page there.
Loving it, change the font family as well. I’m just guessing at this point, this might look like a hot mess when I’m done, but I want y’all to be able to see kind of what all it can do. We’ll promise not to spam you, you can unsubscribe any time. This is kind of fine detail down here at the bottom, down here, that you can make changes to.
Font family again, change it to whatever you’d like. The color, very very cool options here. Close the opt-in on click, so that’s an option here that you can close it down, enable an acceptance box if we want them to be able to click, okay, I’m accepting that option there, that’s a nice little feature, they can click on that and agree basically to terms, right, they’re accepting the terms of signing up.
Some field options here, you can change kind of the placeholder text if you’d like, you can just say First Name, there you go. And instead of saying all the way, enter your email address, you can just say Email Address. Look how just completely customizable this is, and again, I’m staying in the free version, which has gotta get you guys excited.
Change the crazy button color to something crazy, bold and just obnoxious at this point. Save changes, and you actually have your first quote-unquote campaign ready to roll out. I mean, this has got to get you super excited with the ability to be able to do these things so quickly and easily, of course you want to activate it.
So the other thing you can do before we clicked out of the actual campaign is go into it and set the rules, basically, of how or where it displays. So, there’s some additional things you can do here, the configuration, you can say the duration of how many days basically it will take between them clicking the x, the individual user.
Maybe you want it to appear every day. You can just take that back down to one, and whatever you’d like to do, here’s the cookie duration as well, and you want to remember that if you’re making any of these changes or adding something like this to the website, you might want to reference this inside of your privacy policy or certainly your GDPR, kind of your terms, right, on your website.
Integrations again, if you want to add this integration into your MailChimp account, you can come in here and do that and once that’s set up on that settings screen, you can do that here.
After conversion, what do you want them to do? Once they fill this out, do you want to give them a success message, do you want to take them somewhere else? You want them to go to a different URL and really blow their minds? You can do, think about it this way, you guys, you could say something here like, enter your email address and get our top 10 conversion strategy ideas, right? Instantly, you can use those sort of words. If that’s the case, once they fill this out and click Subscribe Now, you can have it redirect to the page that has the file sitting there for them to download, you just have to get creative with something like this, it gets really exciting in all the possibilities.
Get very, very creative, and watch the conversions just fly on your website, you’re gonna love it.
So here is some of the things where you’re able to add in different display options, so right now, we’re doing globally, this is across the board, every single page, this is gonna be in here, you could do some options that you only want this one feature publishing on, cause you only want it on the homepage, you only want it on certain pages, you can do that, and of course you’ll get all sorts of additional options when you go to that premium version, but really, a cool concept here. This one is of course just the lite box option inside of MailOptin.
They also have additional options like: in post, sidebar and widget options, notification bar, and slide in, which, slide in is pretty cool because this one allows it to kind of pivot and play, but again, that’s gonna be a premium option, right? That’s gonna be a premium option, you go buy a license.
I can’t tell you, though, how cool it’s gonna be for you to get over here and do this. I’m gonna put a coupon code so you can get some, a little bit of a discount on this, but it is so worth the money, because you can imagine spending money like this, monthly even, on some sort of a lead generating campaign inside of a social network. You do this one time per year and you’ve got the ability to gather leads nonstop on your WordPress website.
Features on Premium Version
One more thing before we go. I wanted to say, again, if you go with that premium version, you get to unlock a lot of analytics, which I think is incredible. Not only do you get the A/B testing whenever you go pro version, premium version, you get a lot of different layouts.
You get to do this analytics where you’re really tracking your conversion, this is so important, because you really don’t have other options like this inside of other kind of opt-in or popup or any sort of lead generating tools inside the WordPress website. Normally, you have to leave the website. This is gonna be contained right here where you can see in real time mode, what sort of results you’re getting from using this tool.
Super important in measuring your ROI. I hope this is getting you guys excited about the possibilities here. I’m pretty excited, I think again that the free option is phenomenal, but when you really wanna take your online marketing and your lead generating to that next level, I definitely wanna recommend going and checking out the premium version.
I hope this helps y’all, I hope you’re excited. If you have any questions about it, be sure to reach out to MailOptin first, because they have a great support team, and if you like it, comment in the thread below. Let us know how you’re using it and what sort of results you’re seeing from it. I hope y’all have a great one, be sure to subscribe, I’ll see y’all next time, bye everyone.
Coupon Code
Here’s a coupon code for your 15% Off the premium version ASKKORI15 Click here to purchase it.
How cool would it be to leave a message, alert or note on your WordPress dashboard for other users or your clients? Kori Ashton shows you a FREE plugin to help you add a note to your WordPress dashboard. It’s simple and free – did we mention that?
Hey, y’all. Welcome to another WordPress Wednesday. My name is Kori Ashton, and today, I’m going to teach you how to leave a note inside of your dashboard for a client, hmm, or maybe even a fellow team member helping kind of edit the website.
There’s a really cool plugin that you need to be aware of, because this could be a lifesaver if you’re trying to communicate kind of where you are in making edits on the site or an alert that you’d like to leave, or maybe even just your contact information so that your clients, when they log into your dashboard, can connect with you. Check out this really cool resource.
So today, I wanna show you this cool plugin, and it’s a free plugin, which, free is always in the budget, called WP Dashboard Notes.
Installation of WP Dashboard Notes
I’m gonna install it right now and show you how simple it is to use. Over inside your dashboard, you’re just gonna go into plugins and say add new, and of course, because this is a free plugin, it lives inside the repository here. You can just access it here.
Dashboard notes, do a quick search for that, and it’ll pull up here, Dashboard Notes. Of course, you wanna be sure that it’s compatible with your most recent version of WordPress that you’re running.
Be certain that it has really great reviews, like it does, and that it’s gonna be safe to use for your WordPress website. So once you’ve installed it, you click Activate, and now that that’s active, you can actually go up to your dashboard because remember, this is about putting a sticky note on your dashboard, right?
Adding a Note
So now that you’re here, check it out. Over in the far right-hand corner, up at the top up here, it says adda note. Lemme see if I can zoom in a little bit. There you go, it says add note.
So we’re gonna click on it there, engage and add the note. Here it is.
By default, this starts with a white, plain background, and it starts as a list item, so you can just add tasks if you wanted to. Please update all plugins, right? You can put that on here. You can say please update the theme. Please confirm that all is still working, right? You can add whatever you’d like to there, and whenever you’re done, or just gonna set it to either be visible to everybody like it is by default, or only visible to yourself, right?
You can change the background color if you wanted to to make it really noticeable or have it kind of color coordinated. And that’s it, that’s it. You’re done. You can click Done, Saved. You’re off and moving, and you can move onto the next one.
If you wanted to do something where you had just a plain note and kind of convert it to plain note, by the way, you can change the title if you’d like as well, title of each one, right, title, there you go, you can just type in whatever you want. Please contact Kori for more information about the updates and alerts, seeing your dashboard. You can take this, drag it up and drop it to whatever area you want. Again, if you want it to only be visible to you, you just change that one.
As you hover over each of these icons, they’re very generous to let you know kind of what these can do so that you can make changes easily and quickly. And of course, you can click delete and get rid of it. Easy peasy, just like that. Pretty incredible, huh? What a fun little option for you to be able to add notes to your team members.
If you have other people contributing content and you need to do a content freeze, you can put that on here and say, oh my goodness, there’s a content freeze on this date, you know, 10/3 through 10/8 and leave that on there, right? And give them a note and tell them, please do not add or edit content. I mean, this is really cool, especially if you’re using this to collaborate with other team members building out on a project, or potentially even to put a note here for your clients, kind of like that too, right, as they’re logging in and making changes to things.
Hey, I hope this helps you guys. If you have questions about it, be sure to contact the plugin author first so that they can help you with those things. They might even have a support forum. I’ll put the link to that in the thread below. But, be sure to subscribe, ’cause every Wednesday, I’m creating content just like this, and I have over 300 videos now on my YouTube channel for your reference, all for free. Go check it out.
I hope you’re having a great one. I’ll see you next WordPress Wednesday. Bye, y’all.
Hey, y’all, welcome to another WordPress Wednesday! I received in a really great question from Kevin, who asked about privacy policy and this GDPR thing. What is it about? Do I need to be concerned about it for my WordPress website? Let’s talk about it!
Hey, y’all, thanks for tuning in to another WordPress Wednesday. My name is Kori Ashton, and today we’re gonna look at the GDPR and privacy policy issues for our WordPress websites. How do we handle those things? What are some quick solutions that you can do today to be sure that your website is compliant, and be sure that all your clients’ websites are compliant? Let’s talk about it, I’ve got a couple plugins I wanna show you, and a couple of really quick free solutions for you.
First of all, I have to talk about Pressable. You guys, if you’re looking for a great hosting company that can help you with all of your WordPress issues, if you had questions about this, even, you can reach out to them and ask them, because they love WordPress, and they’re gonna be able to answer WordPress questions. You’ve gotta go check out Pressable! I’ll put a link to them in the description box below, be sure to tell them that you heard about them from Kori Ashton. I would appreciate it. And they are phenomenal for your hosting, and for support, and for security on your WordPress website.
GDPR Compliance
Alright you guys, GDPR. Let’s look at a couple of different solutions. Let’s talk about, first, what the heck is it? Let’s take a look. Alright, so our first stop in finding out what GDPR is all about is over here at EUGDPR.org. That’s where we can see that it’s the General Data Protection Regulation. And this really is all about any traffic that’s coming from the EU, so from Europe.
So, you wanna monitor that inside your Google Analytics. If you have any viewership, any traffic whatsoever, this could affect your WordPress website. You’ll want to add this regulation onto your website so that you’re compliant, and you’re not breaking any laws.
What are Privacy Policies?
So, what does that really mean when we’re talking about privacy policies in general? So, privacy policies are actually required by law on your website for you to disclose to the individual visitor what it is that you’re collecting, what you’re monitoring, and how you use that content. It’s actually very, very important that you have a solution on your WordPress website.
There’s A Plugin For That
This is one of the plugins that I’ve found that I wanna talk to you about today. It does help you become compliant as it helps you add in your Terms of Service and your privacy policy terms into your WordPress website. They’re gonna give you some general conversation, some general terms, and then you’ll go in and add in the specific details to how you’re using the data, how you’re collecting the data.
Why Should I be Concerned?
You might be thinking right now I don’t even know what this means, I don’t know how this affects me, or what I should even be talking about. Think about this:
Do you have a contact form?
If you’re using contact forms, any sort of a contact form on your website that somebody fills out and submits their email address or their name to you, you have now collected data. You now need to be compliant, because you need to be able to tell people how you’re using that content.
Do you track with Google Analytics?
If you’re tracking Google Analytics, you’re collecting data! You’ve collected what browser they use, where they came from, where they went to after they left. You’re collecting data! So, you need to be sure that you have it kind of written in your terms, what you’re doing with that content.
Do you have affiliate links?
Think about if you’re, also have any affiliate links, right? If you have any affiliate links in your website, and you’re selling any products in your website, that are not your products. There are things that you need to notify to people, and maybe they’ll never even read them, but you wanna be sure to be compliant.
Install Auto Terms of Service and Privacy Policy Plugin
So let’s look at this plugin, plug it in and let you see how it works on your dashboard. So head into your dashboard and click Add New, and we’re gonna go ahead and install the one single plugin that we’re looking at today, the Auto Terms. Is, all you really need to do is search for really quickly Auto Terms, and you should be able to find it right here. Auto Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. As of today, this has been updated very recently, it’s compatible with 4.9.8, which is what I’m running right now, and it has a lot of active installs, and obviously great reviews. So be sure down the road that those things are also in place so that you know you can trust this. You’re gonna click Install, and then you’re gonna click Activate. So, let’s do it, y’all! Here we go, it’s installing, it should just take a matter of a couple seconds here, depending upon how fast your server is, and of course, you wanna click Activate, and then we’re gonna have it over here on the left side.
There you go, it appears right over here on the left side, Auto Terms, Compliance Kits, Settings, License, Contact. So, just so y’all know, there is a premium version of this, that addresses the GDPR. It allows you to have a cookie notice and actual little pop-up. And then it also allows you to have auto-notifications that go out to your individual users as you make an update to these pages. So, it might be well worth the investment to go for the premium version of this, but we’re gonna work on the free version today, ’cause free is always in the budget, right?
So I’m gonna go to Settings, you just wanna be sure that these are setting correctly with your website name, your URL, and your company name. They’re gonna be using these to kind of plugin, or fill in the blank, the different fields. So you wanna just be sure that all these things are set up correctly first out of the gate. Of course, the great state of Texas, there you go, and we’re gonna click Save Changes.
So now you have those things set and it’ll be able to plug those in for you on the pages we’re about to create. Next up is just to click “Add Legal Pages”. Let’s do it, clicking there, takes us over here. Now again you’re gonna have to upgrade if you want the GDPR privacy policy language, but, other than that, we already have a privacy policy here, a Terms and Conditions here, and any other custom legal page that you might wanna create you can create here as well, and they’ll kinda walk you through how to use it. Let’s go into the Terms and Conditions first, click Create.
So, we’re gonna fill in the blank. This is so cool and really, really helpful because sometimes we don’t even know what to put on these pages. So, all you’re gonna do is fill out this information, then click Create! And, again, it’s gonna fill out all the terms here. You can go in and certainly adjust things as you feel more comfortable, make changes to it.
Please don’t just click Publish. Please read through every single one of these steps. If it has something that says please contact us, you can highlight that, link it to your contact page, or you can go ahead right here and put in your phone number, or your email address, right here in this space. Don’t just blanket statement, have these things dropped in, and click Publish, alright? Be sure to read through every single thing and, to save my tush, I’m gonna say reference your legal team, if you do have a legal team, to be certain that this covers all the areas that you need to be compliant, especially if you are selling products directly on your website. Or, especially if you have any sort of products like vaping materials, or alcohol, or anything to do with age-appropriate content. You need to be certain that you address your legal team, and don’t just take these terms and conditions blanketly.
Now that this page is published, I’m gonna show you something really cool that these guys, these developers, just went above and beyond and thought about you guys. So, I love it. This is created, it’s published, watch, I’m gonna go back to the front side of my website now, and I’m gonna click Refresh, and as I do that what it’s done now that this page is published is it’s actually gone ahead in the extreme footer-footer area of my website, and actually added the link for me. I’m gonna keep scrolling down here all the way to the bottom.
Look way down here at the bottom, we’ve got a Terms and Conditions link right down there, that if I click on, it links, goes straight to that website. Beautifully in place, by the way, any shortcode that you saw had my name replaced, so here’s Ask Kori. Everything’s in place, and we have a Legal Terms and Conditions page in there. Isn’t that cool? I didn’t have to go figure out how to add the link down in my footer. They did it all for me.
Now you can go ahead and add another legal page, if you wanted to add in that privacy policy, I think is really important to have. Click Create, the same exact process, just go through and answer the questions as honestly and openly as you can, get all these answered, and click Create. It’s gonna do the same thing, add in the link right next to that Terms and Conditions link.
Now you have your privacy policy page as well. Let me show you one other area that I think is really cool on this, if you go over here to the Compliance Kits area, Link to Legal Pages, Update Notice of Legal Pages, here’s your Cookies Notice, which I think is pretty great, you do have to have a purchase license for both of these, and in those endorsements, so you’ll be able to inform your visitors, that you might have endorsement or affiliate links in your website.
So both of those again are the Premium, but, this right here if we wanted to configure kinda how those links looked, if we didn’t like down at the very bottom of our website, if we didn’t like this white banner that doesn’t really match anything on my website with this black link, they give you the ability go on and change those things. So you can disable if you want.
Let’s say that you already kinda put these things in your footer and you just wanted to add them yourself, you can certainly do that, or you can leave them enabled. Change the background color to anything you want it to be. I’m just gonna show you how silly I can go here, so that you can see it all take effect. Change this, change this. Instead of a dash, if you wanted a pipe, you can do that. Click Save Changes and once that’s done go back to the front side of your website, click Refresh, and now I have a nice red link down there, Terms and Conditions, and of course if I had published that privacy policy page, that would be living down here too.
What a great plugin, you guys, right? All on the budget of free.
Tool Inside WordPress to add Privacy Policy Page
I’ll show you one more quick way that you can get a privacy policy page just kind of on the fly, ’cause actually, inside of WordPress, they give us that tool already. If we were to go into Settings, and go to, let’s go to Settings, and go to Privacy, WordPress thought that hey, you know what, they probably need some help writing a privacy policy page.
You can come here and click Create New Page, and it’s gonna actually generate the privacy policy page for you. All the content again is just kinda this generic wording, so again, you have to read through each one and kinda answer the questions yourself. Be sure that you’re changing out your link for their link. Get rid of any of their conversation, drop in your content, but, out of the box, this is pretty great content to have on your website. And you’ll have a link right here, this privacy policy link, that you can take and put down in your footer, or wherever you’d like to reference that.
So this is another solution that you have in place if you don’t wanna add another plugin. This is already inside your dashboard underneath that Settings, Privacy area.
Be sure that you’re running an updated version of WordPress. If you don’t see that, that might be one of your issues, that you need an updated version of core WordPress. Or perhaps your admin role is not set to Admin, and you need to increase your role capability. So be sure to reference that if you’re having any issues with any of this. I hope this has helped you guys, a lot of people have asked me about the privacy policy, Terms and Conditions, Terms of Use, the GDPR.
I hope this answers your questions. If you have more though, be sure to comment on the video. I’ll try to answer them to best of my ability. Reference your legal team, of course!
I hope you’re having a great WordPress Wednesday. If you haven’t subscribed yet, be sure to subscribe because every Wednesday I’m giving some love out to the WordPress community creating a video just like this to help you improve your online marketing. Thanks so much for watching all the way to the end, y’all! I’ll see you next week, bye everyone!
Bloopers
That this is the General Data Protection Regulation. Basically a regulation that comes in your website when it talks about. Alright, so heading over here to EUGDP, Ah, poo poos!
Are you having trouble adding your featured image from your WordPress website into your social networks like Facebook and looking for a way to overwrite images on social media? Kori Ashton shows you this cool work around with the Yoast Plugin.
Hey you guys, if you are using WordPress and you’re trying to advertise your posts or your pages on social media, and maybe that featured image isn’t coming over correctly. I’ve got a really cool way that’s a workaround using a free plugin that you probably already have active or should have active on your WordPress website, let’s take a look at it right now.
Hey you guys, I’m Kori Ashton. Thanks for tuning in today. Every single Wednesday I’m creating a video just like this to help you improve your online marketing so be sure to subscribe. And Pressable’s one of our sponsors that makes this video happen. So if you’re looking for a great hosting company that can help you with your WordPress support, as well as hosting, be sure to reach out to them and let them know that Kori Ashton sent you their way. I’ll put the link to them in the thread below so you can check them out.
Okay, so you’re probably already using Yoast on can your website for SEO, if you’re not, I highly recommend it, and I’ll put links to that in the description below as well. So you can go check out that plugin. It’s a great plugin, a great resource to help you with search engine optimization, but it also has this really cool little back door area that I wanna show you right now. Let’s take a look. So Yoast is what I’m talking about. So it’s like toast but with a Y. Yoast, the free plugin that I want you to have installed and when you do have that installed you can come into your dashboard, you’ll have a section, it’ll be here on the left side that is for SEO, that is for the Yoast plugin.
Inside of here, there’s a little area called Social. So I’m gonna click on that and just show you something for a second, okay, let me show you an example of exactly what I’ve been trying to do to be sure that this is what you are trying to accomplish. So I’ve got this blog article in the front side of my website, and it has some pictures in it, I also have a featured picture, featured image assigned to it.
So let’s say I take this URL right here and I go over to my Facebook page, or any social media for that matter, right. And I come in here and I click the link, I drop in the link, right, and I wanna add something, it’s gonna build out that preview for me, so if my theme was built correctly, I want you to wrap your head around this, if your theme was built correctly with open graph, it should have gone over and be able to find an image inside of that blog article and rendered that image here beautifully. If it is not doing that correctly, you might have something disabled inside your website, or perhaps your theme author just wasn’t generous enough to do this for you. Well again, there’s a workaround to it.
So if it’s not pulling the correct image or if it’s not pulling it correct or it’s distorting it, you can go into this social area, and you can come in here and actually set in a default picture for Facebook, I actually put this picture in here.
So if my blog article doesn’t have an image in it or if I didn’t set a featured image in it, this picture would actually render so it’s still advertising my brand, right, it’s kind of a default or generic option inside of there. But you can do that for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google Plus.
Now these four Twitter, Pinterest, and Google Plus, are allowing you to use different types of settings specific to those social networks for their metatags, it’s super cool. But Facebook specifically I’m able to come in here and upload an image that I would want to use for default. But here’s the thing, if this is clicked to disabled, it won’t read it correctly. So be certain that these are all enabled across the board for all of these to be advanced and help you, and you wanna fill out these profiles as well to just allow Yoast to go ahead and connect your website easily and quickly inside of these social networks, kind of cool, huh?
So now every time you go over to make a post, it should pull the correct image inside of your article, and if you’ve forgotten one or if your article didn’t need one, it’ll pull that default image that you set there. Now that was kind of for the overall generic part of your website, right, but what if you wanted to override it page to page, post to post, specifically on your pages, you can do that as well. That’s what makes this so powerful.
So I’ll give you another quick example. Join Kori Live here, this is for my webinar page, and I do have a lot of little pictures that live on here, but I want a picture that’s gonna be really cool and can work really well on social media. So look at this example. This is that URL right here, but it’s pulling up a really weird picture inside of Twitter, as I was talking about getting ready to do another webinar with Rebecca Gill, well we weren’t talking about WordPress translation plugins, we were talking about SEO. So this picture is not relevant at all. So what you’ll wanna do is go into your media library, upload a picture that works best for you, I kind of just took a screenshot of the whole page. I’ve got that URL now, you’re gonna go back and edit the actual page.
This is my early bird page. Inside of each page is a Yoast area. You’re gonna click on this little social area and right here, here’s my tab for Facebook you have another tab for Twitter if you wanted. I’m gonna go to Facebook, paste it in there, there’s my picture. You can add in a custom Facebook description, a custom Facebook title, it even gets really cool if you wanna address your Facebook followers on here.
So really cool here, and of course, if you wanna add it in there for Twitter as well, you would do that so that the next time somebody tweets out this URL or posts this URL on Facebook, now the correct, correlating picture will show up and it won’t look weird as you’re advertising this on all social media.
I hope this helps you, hang on one second though before you go, I just wanna let you know this isn’t instant, so if you go plug this in right now and click and then you run back over and check, it might take a little while, caching on your website might take a little bit. So I would say enable everything, and maybe give it a day or two to test it and see if it works correctly.
Pretty cool huh you guys. I use it all the time on all of our websites here at WebTegrity, and we also use it on askKori.com, it’s a great resource, and if you’d like to learn more about Yoast, I have an entire playlist for that plugin that helps you understand keywords, the readability tab, all sorts of cool features inside of that Yoast plugin. I’ve got a whole playlist, I’ll put the link to that in the description below.
Be sure to subscribe because every week I’m creating content just like this to help you improve your online marketing. I’ll see you next time, bye everyone.
