Posts Tagged ‘wordpress plugins’

Social bookmarking is one of those buzz phrases you may have heard around the internet, but what is social bookmarking?

Put simply, social bookmarking is simply a more public version of the bookmarking you do on your own browser. When you want to remember a page or site on the internet, you usually go to the ‘Bookmarks’ menu in your browser and click ‘Bookmark this page’, right?

Well, with social bookmarking, you simply allow other people on social bookmarking sites like Delicious and Digg to see what you’ve bookmarked and visit that site themselves. Social bookmarking sites provide you with a platform on which you can keep track of your bookmarks while sharing them with other people.

The larger and more established social bookmarking sites are very well regarded by the search engines so when you bookmark something, that bookmark becomes like a vote for that site which Google and the other search engines see and consequently they will often rank sites higher that have lots of social bookmarks.

For a full list of the social bookmarking sites I use plus those that I recommend, check out my List of Social Bookmarking Sites post.

The benefits of bookmarking in this way are fairly obvious, but I’ll break down why I think they’re such a good part of online business and blogging. Read the rest of this entry »

I was chatting to my friend Penny Snowball earlier today and she mentioned that she had a few readers in Russia who were interested in translating the site, in order that she could help/reach more people.

Incidentally, Penny’s site is all about her journey from being a drug addict to getting clean and taking control of her life. It’s pretty uplifting reading, showing how you can take control at any moment in your life.

Anyway, one of Penny’s readers in Russia had a real breakthrough thanks to her writing. So it makes sense for her to ‘go global’ and find a simple and inexpensive way of translating her site.

Enter Matt Duggan, stage right…

I had a little dig around and found something that’s ideal for what we wanted.
Read the rest of this entry »

As many of you regular readers will know, I’m a very big fan of WordPress. It’s an excellent system with a myriad of applications. In fact, I run all my sites on WordPress, ever since David Cavanagh first showed me how easy it is.

The plugins – elements that can be added to increase the functionality of the site – are part of what makes WordPress so good.

Anyway, I thought I’d share with you the 10 top plugins that I believe every blog site needs to run effectively. There are other plugins out there that do similar things but from my own testing and plenty of trial and error, these are the best ones. To get them installed on your blog, simply go into WordPress, click ‘Plugins’ on the left hand menu and click ‘Add New’. From there, just type their names into the search bar (one at a time) and then click ‘Install’ next to the one you want.

So, here’s the list for your blogging/site-building pleasure…
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve discovered a little gem for you all, thanks to my marketing mate Wayne Lambert.

Wayne was checking out my blog and noticed that I was using bit.ly in order to cloak my links. Cloaking links is a good way of making links more attractive to the reader. For example, it’s always a good idea to cloak links to affiliate products in order to make them look better. ClickBank has started using particularly ugly affiliate links for products that look like this:

http://12f41y-2wcm47zalo2lz78gcor.hop.clickbank.net/

Using bit.ly, you can shorten the link to make it look like this instead:

http://bit.ly/ExampleLink

Now this looks much better already, but it isn’t associated with your own site. This is where Wayne stepped in and suggested a little work of plugin genius.

It’s called Pretty Links and it enables you to create Read the rest of this entry »

I’m sure you guys have noticed that more and more companies are bringing out mobile phones that can surf the internet at greater speed.

That means that they can search Google and find blogs they want to read whenever they like.

I was recently at Mark Anastasi’s Listbuilding Masterclass and during lunch, I decided to have a look at some of my favourite internet marketing blogs. The result was pretty astounding…

They were totally illegible. Couldn’t read a thing on them. Nothing. Nada. Rien.

Now, as all my sites are built using WordPress, I wondered if there was a way to make my sites compatible with this new wave of technology.

Turns out there is and you can get it here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mobile-pack/

Alternatively, go to the Plugins section of your WordPress site, click ‘Add New’ and then in the search bar type ‘WordPress Mobile Pack’. It’ll be the top search result. Click ‘Install’ and then ‘Activate Plugin’ and you’re good to go.

Mobile browsers around the globe (all 34 million of them) can now read your blog.

Sorted!