Among the things you may have been told to do in your business is to create ‘systems’. Most of the time, people talk about this in relation to outsourcing. Writing articles, submitting articles, social media posting, research and so on but really, it can be applied to websites too. In fact, it should be applied to your site building process. I’ll admit I’ve not been doing this in the past. As our site portfolio grows (and grows), I’m really appreciating this concept and working towards creating whole website frameworks. Here’s what I’m thinking… Niche content site framework Opt-in only site framework Recurring membership site framework Fixed membership site framework I think you get the idea. These website frameworks aren’t just same/similar design wise but they would include everything from Contact, Disclaimers, Privacy Policy pages, a set of plugins to complete the job for each ‘type’ of website. In other words, everything I’d need to start the site minus the content. Like a huge template bundle. Photo by Claire Whitehouse Why? The simple reason – shortening the development cycle. You see, all these years, every time I launch a new project or site, countless hours are spent on perfecting the site.

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Every year around this time, members at SoloMasterminds (which I’ve been a part of for years) work feverishly to create some fantastic $5 deals. We call it May Madness and for what you can expect to find it is madness indeed, but oh so very good for you. The time has come for May Madness again. Woot! We have put up a special too. It is a 2-day intensive class for those who: Need guidance setting up a WordPress site or, Anyone who wants to develop WordPress sites F-A-S-T without FTP, HTML or CSS Everything we do from set up to editing fonts, colors, backgrounds and even creating custom layouts is all point-and-click using the browser. There are also lots of other great offers such as PLR Graphics VA services Affiliate courses HTML templates and more… Go check out the offers now. I promise you, you won’t want to miss it. I’m getting ready to make a couple of purchases myself.

They say putting a picture in your blog post helps people understand the subject matter. It’s also visually appealing and perhaps can entice people to read. Don’t know about all the science behind that. I like to put pictures in my posts because they look nice and a tech blog can be kinda dry don’t you think? So images break things up and help people understand things – hopefully. The problem with images is, you only have so many of your own you can use, it can get uber expensive to buy stock photos for every single post. So most of us will go search and use images from Flickr or similar places. Free images usually require a link back or credits – small price to pay really. Sadly, by default WordPress captions don’t allow links. It will strip them out and you can add photo credits that link back to the photographer, I often had to relegate it all the way to the bottom which is OK I guess but rather disjointed. I could make the image clickable but I don’t think that would give a good user experience because people just don’t expect that when they click on

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If you are using aMember version 4 and getting ready to pay affiliates, you may find there are no commissions to pay. The good news is, it is not a bug but a setting. By default, aMember sets commissions to be delayed by 31 days. So any sale that is less than 31 days old is not included in the report. If you had no commission-able sales older than 31 days, aMember assumes no commissions are to be paid. To protect yourself, a 30 or 31 day delay on commission payments isn’t such a bad idea. There have been merchants who lost a lot of money on fraudulent sales. The fake sales were made using stolen credits cards through an affiliate URL. So the merchant is already out of the money from the stolen card but since they had paid the affiliate their commissions, it’s a double whammy. Of course, if you have an established affiliate program and change your payment terms, you will want to give your affiliates a good explanation and some time to get used to the idea. Anyhow, in aMember, changing the delay to 0 will allow you to generate commission payments.