21 WordPress Plugins that Will Make Your Life Easier

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WordPress is an amazing web publishing platform with tremendous capabilities right out of the box. But what truly makes WordPress my platform of choice is the dizzying array of plugins that you can download (for free, mind you) to customize things exactly the way you want.

Plugins are simply bits of code that you can add on (or “plug in”) that can do all sorts of things beyond the basic program.

As of this morning, WordPress had 5,546 plugins listed in their Plugin Directory that had been downloaded a total of well over 35 million times. That’s a whole lotta code!

Yesterday Rober Hruzek asked me which plugins I recommended. Well the short answer is, “It depends on what you want it to do.” But then he came back and asked if there were any “must haves” in my book.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that for me I’m a fan of things that make my life easier. So, with that in mind, here are 21 WordPress plugins that I have found make my life easier. I’m guessing they’ll do the same for you.

I don’t mean this to be an exhaustive list by any means. Heck, I’ve got more than twice that many installed here on SuccessCREEations alone. And not every one of these will work on every blog. Some of these are very popular plugins and some are more obscure.

Here’s my list: Read more

Twitter for Business: 15 Masters Show You How

Twitter is being talked about by everyone. You know when Oprah talks about something it’s gone mainstream. With over 19 million unique visits a month, up from only 4 million in December, Twitter is by far the fastest growing social media website right now.

If you’re struggling to see how to tap into all those people and all that growth to help grow your own business, here is something you need to check out.

Twitter Masters TeleSummit 2009

The Twitter Masters TeleSummit 2009 brings together 15 of the best social media marketing experts to share exactly how to tap into that market for your business.

We’re talking 15 hours of interviews with some incredibly sharp people who know their stuff when it comes to Twitter. People like Joel Comm, Dan Hollings, Carrie Wilkerson, Scott Stratten, Deborah Micek, Scott Tousignant, and the marketing team of Travis Miller & Jimmy Vee just to name a few.

There’s a broad spectrum of backgrounds and approaches to Twitter in this group. Follower counts for these folks range from just over 2,000 to in excess of 58,000 followers!

Did I mention they’ve invited Yours Truly to be one of the speakers too?

Sneak Peek at What You’ll Learn

Here is just a tiny taste of some of the topics the speakers will be covering in this landmark event.

• Connecting online and offline strategies quickly
• Simple techniques that increase your followers by being yourself
• Successfully creating buzz for your business and product promotions
• Create fanatical fans on Twitter through offline leads
• How Twitter can build strong relationships one tweet at a time
• Big mistakes social networkers make that cost you fans, followers, leads, and sales
• 4 Hands-Off Twitter tools to manage your time and get business done efficiently
• Building a word-of-mouth army for you on social media sites
• Attracting interested followers through retweetable (RT) material every day
• 12 Must-Have Tools when Using Twitter For Your Business
• Create a growing and active fan base in just a few weeks
• 2 simple ways to streamline your social media strategy
• Build an intentional Twitter space that gets you heard and respected by your followers

And here is what you’ll hear from me.

Becoming a Master Media Marketer
by Blogging and Micro-blogging (Twitter)

• 4 Top Reasons Bloggers NEED Twitter
• 9 simple trade secrets that get you noticed and attracting more subscribers
• Effective and proven Twitter techniques that gain influence without automation
• Why Twitter is the “Secret Weapon for Non-Profits”
• How to build presence on a shoestring budget

It is an amazing amount of content.

And here is the best part…

They’re Giving it away for FREE!!

That’s right. If you register for the event prior to the kick off on Monday you can listen to all 15 interviews absolutely FREE!

UPDATE: You can still listen to the remaining interviews for Free until the end of the week!

It doesn’t get much get much more affordable than free, I know.

But I’m sure you’ll want to get the mp3 recordings of the entire series. The folks running the Twitter TeleSummit are offering downloadable recordings of the entire series that you can listen to as many times as you want along with PDF transcripts of each interview to study at your leisure.

Be sure to order them when you register now so you can save 30% off the price. If you place your order before the end of the TeleSummit you can get all the recordings and all the PDF files for only $67.

After that the whole enchelada will still be available for the incredibly low price of $97.

Go Register Now and get your complete set of this incredibly valuable information so you can harness the power of Twitter to help your own business grow.

How to Use Gravatars in WordPress and Beyond

We all like to see pictures of ourselves. It’s part of how we’re wired. We’re visual creatures. Somehow just seeing an image of someone else makes it easier for us to communicate with them and have a stronger connection.

Not only that, but using a consistent image to represent yourself around the web can help improve your branding. Using a Gravatar is an easy way to do that. Easy and free (I like free!)

The name Gravatar came from Globally Recognized Avatar. An avatar is simply an icon or an image that represents a computer user. Using Gravatars is really very simple. Since version 2.5, Gravatar support has been built into the core WordPress functionality.

And even though the service is owned by Automattic (the same company that develops WordPress) it is fairly easy to implement in all sorts of other platforms too! Check out the Gravatar Implementation page to see how to use Gravatars with platforms like Blogger, MovableType, Drupal, Joomla, LiveJournal, Ruby on Rails, Cold Fusion, Pearl, Python, ASP… And the list goes on.

Gravatar as a Commenter

The easiest way to use Gravatars is as you are commenting on Gravatar enabled blogs. Simply go to the Gravatar website and click the link at the top to Sign Up.

The site will ask for your email address which you will have to validate. Once you do you can add your image from either your computer’s hard drive, web cam, or a web URL where your image is already online.

One thing to keep in mind is that you will want to crop your image to be square, which you can do after uploading the image, to keep it from distorting when it is displayed as a square image around the web.

Your Gravatar will then be married to your email address so that whenever you use that address on any Gravatar enabled web site your image will be shown automatically. That’s all you have to do. Piece of cake.

If you have multiple email addresses, you can even set up a different image for each one. Then choosing which image to use is as easy as entering a different email address. Read more

8 Commenting Mistakes that Make You Look Like a Spammer

Spam is the scourge of the internet. Depending on which source you want to use, somewhere between 80-99.9% of all email is spam. Akismet, the most widely used WordPRess spam filter, shows that right now 83% of comments are spam on blogs running their plugin. That means that only 17% of blog comments are legitimate, what Akismet calls ham.

The flood of spam is the reason I first implemented a Comment Policy here at SuccessCREEations.

Spam is nasty stuff.

Danger of Getting Labeled a Spammer

When it comes to blogging, there is a big danger in getting labeled a spammer. Most of the prominent spam filters such as Akismet (Defensio is another good one I recommend) have filtering algorithms that learn which commenters are spammers and which are legitimate (hammers?) based on user submissions.

This means that every time I mark a comment as spam, or tell the filter that I think a comment that it has marked as spam is really OK, it sends that info to a central database and learns. Combine my input with millions of other users and the filters get pretty accurate pretty fast.

Of course, if the filter ever starts thinking you are a spammer it can be nearly impossible to get your comments approved again. On any blog anywhere.

I’ve had friends end up there by mistake and I promise it is no fun. You don’t want to have that happen. Seriously.

Characteristics of Spammers

To help you out I thought it would be good to share some common characteristics that spam comments tend to share so that you know what to avoid. Hopefully it will help you stay out of spam purgatory.

Keep in mind that most of these characteristics taken individually do not necessarily mean your comment will be marked as spam. However the fewer of these you have in your comments the lower your chances of your comments being marked as spam. On, and I’m going to leave out the painfully obvious things like link stuffing for porn, pills or gambling.

1. Arrive from a DoFollow list. The short version is that there are lists of blogs floating around out there listing blogs with decent Page Rank who have removed the NoFollow property from comments. Since this blog is on many of those lists I know that the majority of folks who come here from them are more interested in link juice than conversation.
2. Leave several comments in a very short time. It is not unusual to see a commenter leave a half a dozen or more short comments on various posts in the span of 10 minutes or so. More often than not they never comback after their initial slash and burn pass. Instead, leave on comment a day over several days.
3. Use key words instead of their name. Since spammers are all about getting better ranking in the search engines they often fill the name field with key words instead of, well, their name. Talking with keywords instead of people makes for awkward conversation, to say the least. Use your name and participate in the conversation.
4. Don’t have a Gravatar. Spammers are about staying anonymous. Adding a picture of yourself goes a long way towards identifying you as a person and not a spammer. Go get your Gravatar set up so blog owners know you are a person.
5. Only 1 or 2 sentence comments. Spamming is a high volume, low return activity. Since comment spamming is about getting the link the only incentive is to add just enough comment text to (hopefully) make it past the filter. Taking a moment to add value to the conversation will go a long way towards your comment being approved.
6. Use free email service instead of email with your domain name. Spammers use throw away email addresses because it helps the anonymity factor. They tend to be random letters and numbers. Using your name in your email, or better yet your own blog domain will help you look less like a spammer.
7. Blog has comments closed on all posts. Spammers are not interested in conversation. Since they are spamming, they probably think everyone else is spamming too. Turning their comments off is a sure way to prevent getting spammed back. Make sure yours are on and encourage conversation.
8. Link to a sales page instead of a blog. Spammers are trying to improve the ranking of their sales page so they can make more money. It is much more effective long term to engage in dialog and let your ranking grow over time rather than trying to “trick” the search engines into giving you good ranking. If your blog is on an internal page of your business site, consider linking there instead of to your front page.

Obviously this is not an exhaustive list. But avoiding these mistakes will go a long way towards keeping your comments out of spam filters.

What would you add to the list?

How to Game Twitter to Add Thousands of Followers Every Day

And Why You Really Don’t Want to Do It.

With the social media service Twitter beginning to be more widely adopted, less sophisticated marketers are joining the community. Some of these folks are opportunists of dubious ethics who are not looking to use the medium engage the community.

Instead these social media hucksters are simply looking to take advantage of Twitter’s simple format and established user base to push their weak marketing message out to a larger audience.

It was only a matter of time, I suppose, before the slimier and more obnoxious fringe of the internet marketing world saw Twitter as yet another target for their short sighted slash and burn, spammy approach to marketing.

Some of the worst offenders are actually selling “secret” techniques on how to quickly build a massive Twitter follower list. I’ll save you the money & tell you exactly how to do it. For free. Read more

Carbon Motors Police Car of the Future in Savannah

Yesterday I had the opportunity to see the future of law enforcement vehicles. And it’s pretty cool.

No. It’s way beyond cool.

The coolness was on display down at the Savannah International Trade and Convention Center in a public event that, well,  really wasn’t publicized all that well. I happened to hear about it from my good friends over at the Creative Coast, and being into cool stuff, went down to check it out.

Straight off the company executives made a big point about how no one would be allowed to touch the car, which seemed kind of strange to me. I mean granted they don’t want some doofus breaking the $5 million prototype that they are staking the future of their entire company on. But shouldn’t a police car be at least somewhat doofusproof?

Of course they then proceeded to parade any law enforcement personnel that wanted a closer look through a tour of the interior, pushing all the buttons and touching whatever the heck they wanted.

That part I get. All the police officers had guns. You walk up to my car with a gun and I’ll probably let you sit in the driver’s seat too. Touch whatever you want. And I’ll smile while you’re doing it, just like they did.

I briefly thought that perhaps I should have brought my Glock stuffed down the back of my shorts like Magnum used to do. Though somehow I don’t think that would have gone over so well in a room full of police officers.

I took my pictures from a distance. But I digress. Read more

Loving to Hate Facebook

As long as we’re on a a Facebook roll this week, I thought I’d share this little video I found via Cherly Smith’s blog. Over and above the TOS issue, the video pretty much sums up the things I don’t like about Facebook.

Check it out. 25 Things I Hate About Facebook – What do you hate about Facebook?

Facebook Overtakes MySpace

Yesterday we talked about a change in the Facebook Terms Of Service that means Facebook owns your content – forever. And then at a talk I participated in for our local Small Business Chamber here in Savannah yesterday a couple of the panelists shared a little about how their being active on Facebook is leading to direct donations in support of their non-profits.

Facebook Now On Top

In spite of the new TOS changes Facebook is growing at a record pace. In fact, Facebook surpassed MySpace to take over the number 1 spot for social media traffic levels.

You can see by the Compete comparison at the right that Facebook has been growing traffic steadily since last spring while MySpace has been steady to slightly declining over the same period.

According to the published Facebook statistics they currently have over 170 million active user accounts with over 15 million users updating their statuses at least daily. (I’m not one of those 15 million.)

MySpace doesn’t have any published statistical data that I can find. In fact, the only “company” info they have on their website is this very lame “About Us” page which doesn’t say much of anything. Perhaps that is part of what contributes to the general perception that MySpace is for kids. If they don’t bother to even appear to take their business seriously, why should the rest of us?

Real Connections

Personally I’ve never done much of anything with MySpace for myself beyond opening a profile and poking around a fair amount so that I could have an understanding of the platform’s pros & cons when working with clients.

However I am fairly active on Facebook (in spite of my TOS concerns). I probably average checking in on my account about once a day to see what my friends are up to. I figure since so many others are active their it would be irresponsible of me not to. I’ve got over 300 friends there and have connected with folks that I haven’t been in contact with in years. Ok, in some cases it’s more like decades.

If you want to send me a friend request, here is my Facebook profile.

Congratulations to Facebook for becoming the number 1 social media site. It’s a place where we can all make real connections.

Facebook Now Owns Your Content – Forever

Update: This subject made the front page of Drudge yesterday. The article is here.

I’m big into social media, especially as a way to promote your business. Even so I’ve never been head over heels about Facebook as a means to promote business. I know many businesses out there who see great returns from their networking on on the site.

Facebook recently made a change to their Terms Of Service that make me a little less enthusiastic about the site.

Their Content, Not Mine

As long as I can remember Facebook has always had in their TOS that they can do whatever the heck they want with anything that gets posted to their site. However, until the change this month, if you ever closed your account that “irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense)” of theirs would expire.

Sure they’d probably still keep your stuff on their servers. But at least they wouldn’t have the rights to distribute it once you closed your account.

You see, their TOS used to have this at the end of the Licenses section:

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

But I guess that Facebook decided they just couldn’t stand to ever part with any content you gave them (and probably thought was yours) so they  deleted those two sentances from their TOS.

Business Implications

Does this mean that Facebook is a bad idea for businesses? No. I think it still can be a great way to help get the word out about your business. Just understand that anything you post/upload to Facebook is not yours, it’s theirs.

What it does mean is that it is especially important to keep in mind the Law of Online Perpetuation:

Internet content will persist in direct relation to how embarrassing it is to you irregardless of your efforts to remove it, so don’t be stupid.

And in the case of Facebook, that could be forever.

BuddyPress One Step Closer to DIY Social Media Site

Social Networks can be very powerful. For those who know how to tap into them effectively, social media websites are are greatly accelerating businessesby expanding their reach and influence in a cost effective way.

There are even tons of options for those who want to create their own networking groups. If you want an all-in-one solution you might look at Ning or CollectiveX. To add social modules to an existing web site, KickApps is an option. Or if you just want some basic message board like communication you can look at a free Google Group or Yahoo Group.

But what if you want more control than any of those options offer?

Up to now your only option would be to spend a huge pile of cash hiring a crew of programmers to develop a custom solution. That’s out of reach of most small business owners.

Open Source to the Rescue

Leave it to the good folks at Automattic to come up with a solution. They are backing BuddyPress which builds on their WordPress MU (multi-user) platform to create full blown social media sites. For those who are familiar and comfortable working in the WPMU environment, BuddyPress is a very cost effective way to get a new niche social media site up and running relatively quickly.

And BuddyPress moved one step closer to being ready for prime time today with the release of Release Candidate 1, which means it is getting more stable and most of the bugs have been worked out of it.

This is really good news. Having an open source option for creating social media sites really opens the doors for organizations that can really benefit from providing a way for their communites to better connect.

I’ve been working with BuddyPress for a couple months now and I’m impressed. Something tells me once word gets out about this project we’re going to see BuddyPress sites all over the place.

Update: Here is a video intro to BuddyPress so you can see what all it can do.

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