8 Ways to Grow Your Facebook Page
Nearly everyone on the planet has heard about Facebook and smart businesses; whether that be online or off are using Facebook as a way to connect with their customers on a more personal basis.
But just creating a Facebook Page for your business is not enough. You also need to get people to “like” your page; which can take time. Here are ______ Ways to Grow Your Facebook page.
- Create your Facebook page.
- Add Facebook plugins to your website or blog. Most of your visitors are probably finding you through your website so make it easy for them to “like” your Facebook page too by using the special plugins that Facebook provides.
- Invite people that you already know to like your page. These can be people on Facebook or even people whom you connect with via email.
- When you do send out emails either in the form of a newsletter or just a simple update, include that link to your Facebook page.
- Do you have a Twitter account? Let your users know that you have a Facebook page as well by adding the link to your profile on Twitter and even updating your posts on Twitter every so often to remind them.
- Just getting people to your page isn’t enough. They need to see that you are engaged there, talking ( and mentioning ) others, and giving updates on information that you believe they would find helpful. Quality content and interacting with those on your page are key.
- When you do post something on your page, ask those who read it to share with others.
- Consider running a contest or a giveaway on your Facebook page to encourage more people to like or share your page. Here are some ideas you can use to do just that.
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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?
Fix Firefox Memory Issues
I don’t know about you but I’ve had a BIG problem with Firefox over the past few months – it uses a ton of memory when it’s running and oftentimes goes into “not responding” mode.
I love Firefox, don’t get me wrong…well, let me rephrase that, I love Firefox for the extensions that I use. Being in online marketing and SEO there are some plugins that I simply can’t do without.
But it was really annoying each time I would head to Firefox and have it hog a ton of memory or worse yet, not respond at all.
After about an hour of research I came across a website that lists all of the plugins for Firefox that could cause it to hang. Lo and behold, one of the extensions was one that I used on a regular basis.
You can find the problematic plugins/extensions list at http://kb.mozillazine.org/Problematic_extensions – it’s in alphabetical order so just open up your list of plugins on Firefox (Tools -> Addons -> Extensions) and run through your list as you run through the list at MozillaZine.org.
The next thing I did was search out a “memory saver” alternative and after traversing multiple message boards and blog posts, I came across “Firefox Ultimate Optimizer“.
Now truth be told, when I got to the free download section of the site; the free download location was having issues so I had to look elsewhere for the free version of the tool.
Secondly, after I installed it, it “pre-installed” with two items I did NOT want…so naturally I ran an AVG Scan on the tool which came back clean. I still ended up deleting those “extras”.
However, the tool works great! My Firefox memory usage went down from 250,000K to around 1000K. Not bad at all.
After I removed the plugin and using Firefox Ultimate Optimizer, Firefox isn’t running at perfection but it’s definitely improved by about 80%.
So if you’ve been having issues with Firefox hogging up your memory or going into an unresponsive mode, these two resources should help you out considerably.
Now, if you don’t have Firefox, I still suggest that you get it. It’s tons better than Internet Explorer and while not quite as fast as Google’s Chrome, it still offers all of those great plugins that Chrome does not.
*just a side note here – I have noticed that Firefox IS faster at loading Java than Chrome is. *
Until next time!
Kristine
