eCommerce
Cart66 is the best way shopping cart plugin to for digital products and to easily integrate into an existing theme. It allows incredible control over the placement of the cart with short codes. I also just adds shopping cart functionality to WordPress and doesn’t change or duplicate any WordPress functions which tend to slow down your site. And you can choose from a lite and premium version. The lite version is fully functional and works very well for simple single line purchases with 2 or fewer options. The Cart66 premium plugin provides integration with several third party services including Gravity Forms, MailChimp, and many more. This is critical to tie into your email list and to create forms that I personally use the Cart66 premium shopping cart plugin for my clients and I highly recommend it.
WordPress Themes for Business
My favorite source for WordPress business themes is Woothemes.
They offer themes with features that can be easily adapted to almost any business niche. Here are some of my favorite themes by category:
- Services business theme with Blog Page.
- Restaurant theme with built in Menus, Features, Reservations, Google Maps Integration, and integrated blog page.
- Photo/Video Multimedia themes with sliders, photo/video thumbnail layouts, portfolio page, and integrated blog page.
- Real Estate Theme optimized for to feature listings, photos, details, maps, and integrated blog page.
- Directory Theme to create a listings/directory based website with content builder for custom post type, taxonomy, and custom field generation.
If you have specific questions by theme, I have used many of these themes at some point and would be glad to point you in the right direction.
Tools to help you manage your Twitter Presence including managing views, automating, increasing followers, and growing your presence.
Seesmic-Use the Seesmic Desktop or Webapp to manage your Twitter account(s) and use the multi-column layout to view your @ replies and favorite lists all at a glance. It bypasses the “noise” of your Twitter timeline. This is a free service.
Tweet Adder excels at building a highly targeted list of Twitter users and doing it automatically. Once you build the list of highly targeted Twitter users with the Tweet Adder search engine, you can download the entire list so Tweet Adder can automatically follow your targeted list for you. Here are the ways you can find a targeted list for your niche with their powerful and simple search engine:
- Keyword
- Location
- Location and Keyword
If you have found some specific Twitter users who are leaders in your niche, and you have a global business, Tweet Adder can also automatically download the followers of a specific Twitter user and then follow them automatically. You can configure how it many people it follows at a time by number or ratio. Then you can set up times to run these tasks in the background. If you want to build up a highly targeted list of real followers and you aren’t a celebrity already, Tweet Adder is indispensible. Tweet Adder also automates unfollowing those who don’t follow you back, scheduling future tweets, and many more features. Tweet Adder is the only application I recommend that you will have to buy.
Hosting and Domain Names
Go Daddy-You need to own your domain name so that you own and control your own content with your own .com domain name. While I like the ease of buying domain names at Go Daddy, I suggest getting hosting elsewhere.
Hostgator-This the company I use for my own webhosting because they have excellent 24/7 customer service, 1-Click Installation of WordPress, cPanel (Easy to Use Control Panel) unlimited domains and bandwidth, and video tutorials for $5-9 per month.
Newsletter, Email RSS, and Email Marketing
Chimpmail-Setting up your own email marketing service (autoresponder) is the first step to building your website into a business. Create an opt-in newsletter or free e-book in exchange for an email address. Chimpmail is a free autoresponder software for up to 1,000 subscribers and after having used Aweber and Chimpmail, I believe Chimpmail is better in every way. Get Your free account here.
Accept Credit Cards
Paypal is the most trusted, consumer and business friendly credit card processor. If you already have a consumer account, you just have to go to the store and create buttons or a shopping cart. If you are new to Paypal, it is free to use their Get Paid/Accept Credit Cards service so all you have to do is create an account. And to top it all off, Paypal only charges you when a payment is received so there is no out of pocket cost. Try finding the following at any credit card processor:
- No monthly set up fee
- No monthly minimum
- No setup charge
- No cancellation charge
And they have a very easy to use build your own button and shopping cart utility where you can set up an entire process to buy your product or service and install the HTML on your blog in minutes.