Getting too many “guru” emails?
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Marketing Products, Marketing, Productivity
Here’s a few tips that I thought you too might be interested in, especially if you tend to subscribe to a 
lot of online marketer’s email lists like I do. First off, I am subscribed to dozens of other marketers lists mainly because I want to keep tabs on what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, what’s being promoted, and so on (let me tell you, it’s not easy). Some of the products I see pitched are wonderful, many border on spam and still others can even be classified as downright unethical.
Regardless of why you’re on someone’s list you might find it helpful to organize those emails because, if you’ve ever subscribed to even one popular marketer’s list, chances are you’re getting an email every other day – sometimes multiple times a day (one marketer in particular comes to my mind). Here’s what to do to get a handle on all of these emails.
- Use a Gmail account that is only for the specific purpose of these emails. It helps so much to have this separate email address! I learned this the hard way when years ago I had set up a Gmail account (when Gmail was brand-spanking new) and started to subscribe to many lists. Before I knew it, I had dozens of emails hitting my inbox each day, which eventually grew to the thousands because I simply couldn’t read all of them.What I did (and may what work for you too) is instead of having to go through and unsubscribe to these lists (which I still need for research), I instead created a new Gmail account that is specifically for business purposes only and kept the original one.I then created categories for all of these lists so that whenever these promotions hit my inbox, they automatically head into a folder. (See the next point):
- Categorize these emails and then set a rule within Gmail to instantly place each sender into a specific folder.Under the “settings” within Gmail, there is a tab entitled “Labels”. You can set up as many labels as you want to. Once you’ve done that, and you’ve started to receive emails from the lists you’ve signed up at, you can select the individual email and then choose “Label” from the drop-down list to label so that the sender gets placed under that label. You can also set up rules by clicking on an email, choosing “more” and then “Filter messages like these”. This way, each time that sender sends off an email, they’ll automatically get filtered for you.
- Finally, I received a great tip from Matt Cutts head of Google’s Webspam team. I at one time had so many emails that were just sitting there that I wanted to move out of the way, but I didn’t want to delete them so I followed Matt’s advice.First, select all of the emails in your inbox, and then create a new label such as “Last Years Emails” or “Old Inbox”. Finally, click the “archive” link – this will move all of your emails to the “oldinbox” and you can start fresh (well, sort of) but it at least gives you a clean slate to begin with.
Google Analytics – Removing Your Own IP Address
Using Google Analytics on your website gives you lots of great information about your site visitors and keywords along with a host of other useful information. But sometimes that data that you get can be a bit skewed if you haven’t told Analytics to NOT count your own IP address.
Chances are, you visit your own site quite a bit and these visits are being counted in your overall data.
So how do you tell Analytics to stop tracking your own visits?
It’s actually very simple…here’s how:
- First you need to find out what your own IP address is. To do this visit http://www.whatismyip.com/. When you get there you’ll see in very large letters at the top of the page “Your IP Address Is:” and this will be followed by a series of numbers such as 012.345.678.910. Copy your IP address down and then head to Google Analytics.
- Once you’re logged into your Analytics account you’ll see the website(s) you’re tracking. Next to each site on the far right-hand side of the page is an “Edit” link. Click this link next to the site you want to modify.
- The next screen will have a section entitled “Filters” – once you find this look for an “Add Filter” link on the upper right hand side of this section and click that link.
- Now you’re going to create a new filter. Choose the radio button that says “Add new Filter for Profile” if it’s not already selected.
- Next, give the filter a name that’s easy for you to identify what the filter is for such as “My IP Address”.
- Next, choose the “Predefined filter” button if it’s not selected already.
- You’ll see various drop down boxes. In the first box choose “Exclude”. In the middle box choose “traffic from the IP addresses” and in the third box choose “that are equal to”. Finally, enter your IP address that you just copied into the boxes.
- Click “Save changes”.
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?
