What in the World is a QR Code and How Do I Use It?
Filed under: Google, Marketing, Marketing Strategies
Companies everywhere are starting to use QR codes which gained in popularity through Google’s Place Pages for local businesses. They’ve now moved into the mainstream and although not all companies are currently using them, a lot of them are starting to but you might not be exactly sure as to what their purpose is or even how to use them.
You might have seen them (I recently was at a car race where a company had a very large banner out in front of their store with their QR Code printed on it and boy did I get some strange looks when I walked up and scanned it.) Probably because there’s not a whole lot of companies currently using them or people unsure of what it is in the first place; but it is my belief that QR Codes will only continue to grow with time.
So what is a QR Code anyway? Well, one way you can think of of it is like a bar code you’d see on some product packaging but for a website instead. Now, that said, some companies refer to these as barcodes so it can get a little confusing. Let’s try and sort this all out.
First off, a QR Code looks like this: 
And using some special software (see below), you take a picture of the code and the code will do one of a variety of things such as:
- Taking you to a website
- Displaying some text
- SMS (text messaging)
- Email messaging
- Taking you to a Google maps location
- Taking you to a PayPal Buy Now Link
- Taking you to a Facebook page…
- …or even taking you to a YouTube Video.
The thing about these is that you need a special QR Code reader for your smart phone or essentially any kind of phone that has a camera, internet access and a way to decode the code 
. So if you have an iPhone, an Android, or a Blackberry, it’s relatively easy and all you’ll need to do is download a special kind of application to read these codes.
If you have one of these phones, here are some places that have QR Code Readers you can download and install:
- OptiScan for the iPhone
- BarCode Scanner for the Android
- i-Nigma – for most smart phones
- Google Zxing – for most smart phones
- Blackberry Messenger – usually standard with most Blackberry’s
So what if you don’t have a smart phone? Well, there’s actually a way to do this using the built-in camera from your computer and again, using a special application. Here are some places where you can download applications to read these codes from your computer:
- Bar Capture
- Mobile Bar Coder – this is a Firefox plugin that you can use to read these codes.
- QR Code Tag – and Google has one as well for their Chrome browser.
So once you have these applications installed either on your smart phone or on your computer, how do you use them?
Well, the process is pretty much the same. You first have to take a picture of the QR Code itself using whichever software you chose and from there, the code will take you to it’s designated place.
The actual steps you take will vary depending upon the software that you are using and where you are using it from. But all in all, it’s pretty easy to do.
30 “Must Have” Plugins For Your WordPress Blog
Filed under: Facebook, Google, Marketing Strategies, Plugins, Productivity, seo, Traffic, twitter, Videos, WordPress
There are 14,865 (and counting) plugins available for you to download and use. But how do you know which ones pack the most punch, which ones are updated often and most of all, which ones will be worth your time.
Below are 30 “Must Have” Plugins for your WordPress blog.
Membership & Engagement
Having a blog just isn’t enough. You need a way to get those readers engaged and these plugins will help you do just that.
- WordPress eMember – this neat little plugin let’s you turn your existing WordPress site into a membership site.
- FeedBurner FeedSmith – this plugin will detect all of the ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so that you can track every last subscriber.
- Add to Any: Subscribe Button – Helps your readers subscribe to your blog using any feed reader they’d like.
- MailChip Widget - This lets your users sign up to your MailChimp mailing list.
Social Networking
We all need ways to engage people on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the like. These plugins will help you do just that.
- Simple Twitter Connect – this plugin makes it easy for your site to use Twitter in a very modular way.
- Facebook Comments for WordPress – let’s your visitors comment on posts using their Facebook profile. (I’m sure you’ve seen this widely used across the web). This also supports custom styles, notifications, combined comment counts and recent comments.
- Simple Facebook Connect - this makes it easy to use Facebook Connect on your site.
- Share This – a very useful and popular plugin that let’s your site visitors share a post or a page with others. This also supports email and posting to social bookmarking sites.
- Sociable – automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed.
Monetization
We all would like to have the ability to make money from our blog right? These plugins help you do just that.
- AdSense Now! – Simply puts your AdSense code in up to three spots in your posts and pages. Even those that don’t exist yet!
- WP e-Commerce – this is an application that let’s you use a fully featured shopping cart application.
- Awesome Google AdSense – This plugin will automatically insert Google AdSense ads into your posts, pages and sidebar. No more copying and pasting!
- WordPress Simple PayPal Shopping Cart – This lets you add an “Add to Cart” button on any post or page. You can also display the shopping cart within the sidebar easily. It shows the user what they have in their cart and lets them remove items if they want to.
Media – Videos, Images and Audio
Many people like to have all kinds of content on their sites; not just text but images, videos and even audio files. These plugins will help you do just that.
- NextGen Gallery - A fully integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a slideshow option.
- FancyBox for WordPress – Integrates FancyBox into your blog and allows you to upload, activate and done. But…you can customize it if you want to.
- All in One Video Pack – Touted as “not just another video embed tool”. Includes all kinds of functionality you may need.
- WordPress Video Plugin – A filter for WordPress that allows for easy embedding of supported sites. (Currently 65 different video sites).
- Degradable HTML5 audio and video – Use this plugin to embed video and audio on your site using shortcodes. It enables HTML5 native playback for those users who have compatible browsers.
Security
If you run a WordPress blog currently, you know that WordPress updates constantly; usually for security measures. That said, sometimes you can’t get to it quick enough to upgrade so these plugins should help you out.
- LoginLockdown – If someone tries to login to your blog and guess your password, this neat little plugin will detect how many times someone has tried from an IP address and locks it down after a certain number of failed attempts. It even logs the IP address and timestamp of when these attempts occured.
- Akismet – This plugin catches all of those spam comments you receive on a constant basis. Now, that said, it used to be 100% free; and it still is for personal, non-business accounts. But if you have a blog that would be classified as a business site, it’ll now cost you $5 a month. A small price to pay for saving time deleting spammy comments.
- WordPress Database Backup – Creates a backup of your core WordPress database tables as well as any other tables of your choice.
Search Engine Optimization
We all need SEO on our sites, whether that be a blog or not. But, WordPress makes it easy to optimize your posts and pages with a few plugins.
- WordPress SEO by Yoast - “The most complete all in one SEO solution for your WordPress blog.” With a huge list of features that are far too numerous to mention here.
- Google XML Sitemaps – Creates an XML Sitemap that’s compliant and supported by Ask.com, Google, Yahoo!, and Bing.
- SEO Smart Links – Automatically links keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with their corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags.
- Google Analytics for WordPress – There’s a complete video introduction about this plugin if you visit the link on the left but essentially it does so much more for you than a simple “plug the analytics code into your blog”. See the site for more information.
Speed
In case you missed it, Google is now taking into account site speed when it looks at a site. No one wants to visit a website and have to wait 15 seconds for it to load. These plugins will help you with this issue.
- W3 Total Cache – Used by some well known names such as MattCutts.com, Mashable, and LockerGnome.com, as well as recommended by HostGator, MediaTemple and more, it improves the user experience by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site.
- WP Super Cache – Generates HTML files that are served directly by Apache without processing heavy PHP scripts.
Functionality
Sometimes you just want your blog to do certain things…
- Redirection – Manages 301 redirects, and essentially ties up all those loose ends you may have on your site.
- Exclude Pages – Adds a checkbox, “include this page in menus”, which is checked by default. If unchecked, the page will not appear in any listings of pages.
- WP Contact Form – A drop in form for users to contact you. Can be placed on any page or post.
This information was originally posted at ineedhits but I’ve expanded the explanations a little bit to give you a better overview.
Are there any other plugins that you use and recommend? What are they?
Google Adds “Me on the Web” – Manage Your Reputation
Google has quietly added something to your Dashboard called “Me on the Web”. You can find it by visiting https://www.google.com/dashboard and logging in with your Google account information.
What it does is notify you whenever some of your personal information is published online. It will search for you name as you have it listed within your Google accounts data and email addresses that you use. As it stands right now, these are the only things it tracks. Now, personally I don’t see how this is much different (as a matter of fact it seems to be a little more limited) than Google Alerts which lets you track nearly anything you want including names, email addresses, business names, competitor’s names, etc.
That said, it does make these same items a little easier to set up.
One report at USAToday called it a “Reputation Management” tool and I guess it is, to an extent but not the way I think of reputation management since my main profession is SEO for local businesses.
If you’re a company looking to monitor your business reputation then this tool probably isn’t going to cut it for you since it’s pretty limited as it stands right now.
But if you’re looking to monitor your company’s reputation then you might want to take a look at a few of these resources:
- http://www.trackur.com/
- http://www.socialmention.com/
- http://www.radian6.com/
- http://www.brandseye.com/
