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?
Lessons in Marketing from Publishers Clearing House
You know Publisher’s Clearing House right? They’re the ones who can show up at your door with balloons and flowers and a big ‘ol $10,000,000 check (at least that’s what you see on TV).
Remember how they used to send that thick packet of endless paperwork through the mail? You’d have to sift through magazine offers, “official looking” letters stating that you may be a finalist and then spend a half an hour affixing stamps to little boxes that told them whether or not you’d like a lump-sum check or an annuity if you won the grand prize.
They, like most companies have moved online and if you ever wanted a big lesson in marketing, it’s worthwhile to subscribe to their “updates”. They have to the best in the business when it comes to getting you to take action – not only in the subject lines of their emails, but in the way that they word the email itself, all the way through the process of upselling you on dirt-cheap offers once you’ve clicked a link and moved onto their website.
Here are just some of the subject lines that they use:
- (First Name), Review At Once!
- (First Name), next steps…
- (Last Name), Beneficiary Claim Information!
- Failure to open could cost you $1 million this (date)
- Not Opened! (First Name), find out now!
- Issued. (Last Name) Passport to Lifetime Prize Eligibility.
- (Last Name), Winner Selection Range Notice!
- VERIFIED! Winner Selection Authorized!
Notice how none of these subjects actually promise anything but get you curious enough to open the email itself. Which, after all, is the whole point of a good subject line.
Once opened, most of the contents are in HTML so that they can include flashy graphics and the like. Here are some samples of opening text in these same emails:
- Will the Prize Patrol arrive at the (last name) residence?
- (Last Name) Access Pass Issued for $1,000 A Day for Life Prize eligibility!
- (First Name) as the Rightful Owner of a unique SuperPrize Number…
- WARNING! (first name), $1,000,000.000 (date) SuperPrize at Stake!
- Over (number) people from (state) have already won! You could be next!
- Five Thousand Dollars a Week for Life at stake. (FIRST NAME), Review at Once.
- Forthcoming (last name) SuperPrize number eligible to be selected as a winner!
- (first name), $5,000.00 a Week for Life is at stake!
In almost all cases they use your first name, last name or State in which you reside in order to get your attention. They also use phrases like “rightful owner”, “you could be next”, “review at once”, or “at stake”.
Within the content they usually let you know that your going to miss out if you don’t take some kind of action today and while the law prohibits them from requiring you to purchase one of the products they offer you, you’ll still have to go through the entire process of viewing the products they have and then choosing a very large “Next” button at the bottom of the offers in order to move on.
Even if you don’t have any interest at all in the “Prize Patrol” showing up at your door, it’s worthwhile to subscribe to their updates just to see how they’re marketing to you and the process that they take you through in order to do so.
Stats on Facebook Users Any Marketer Would Love to Have
Filed under: Facebook, Internet Marketing, Marketing, Marketing Strategies, Success
Because there are so many people all over the world who use Facebook on a daily basis, there are certain patterns that users tend to follow; makes sense right? If you’re a marketer, these patterns can help you considerably when it comes to knowing who to market to and when.
What Facebook did is look at the use of certain words in status updates as well as how people responded to those updates.
What’s interesting about this study is that Facebook found that the younger a person, the more they swear and refer to themselves more often such as I, me, and my. They also tend to talk about school more often (which is no surprise really).
Older people tend to talk more about their families, use more prepositions and articles and refer to others more frequently.
What I found most interesting is that people tend to be more positive in the morning hours and tend to get more negative as the day goes on.
Additionally, those status updates that are more positive in nature receive more “likes” than do those that are negative.
The take-away from all of this, as a marketer, is to study how people are using their status updates, what words they’re using, and to take a cue from “likes” as to how people respond to the updates themselves.
You can read the entire study at Facebook along with additional graphs and explanations.
