January 10, 2009 By

Do You Really Use Twitter?

twitter

How many of you actually log in to Twitter and use it, and how many use it indirectly like I do?

I still don’t really understand Twitter. Perhaps there are people out there dying to tell the world every single thing they do an a day-to-day basis, but hey not me. I basically use it as another way to make sure my email messages and writing get read by my target audience.

I syndicate my latest blog posts, and also the latest emails from Aweber, to my Twitter account. In fact I have found over 23 WordPress plugins for Twitter than can help you use the service in smart ways, and still generate traffic to your main sites and blogs.

I have never sent or created a message in Twitter alone. This is how I do it, and you may want to consider doing the same if you’re still reluctant to get started with Twitter.

If you’re looking for a better Twitter marketing solution do check out Viral Twitter Profits.

Filed Under: Social Networking Tagged With: , , ,
January 7, 2009 By

23 Twitter Plugins for WordPress

twitter

Twitter is hot right now, and without doubt there is a huge demand on integrating it with other applications such as FaceBook, YouTube and most importantly, WordPress. While trying to get a plugin that will post my latest blog entries to Twitter, I came across not one, not two, but over 23 different plugins.

tweet-meI eventually settled for the Twitme plugin – it’s simple and does just what I want it to do. However, here are some other plugins you can use for Twitter.

Once installed all you need to do is enter your Twitter username and password, and select a posting template. I just use a basic one like this: %POSTTITLE% : %POSTURL%

Here’s how the results look like:

twitme

You can also choose to publish your 5 most recent posts to Twitter, and on the settings page you can all all your Twitter followers and also recent updates from people you are following.

Here are other Twitter plugins worth checking out, grouped by functions.

Syndicate Your Blog Posts to Twitter

  • Twitter Tools – Twitter Tools is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account
  • @ Reply – This plugin allows you to add Twitter-like @reply links to comments. When clicked, those links insert the author name and a link to the comment you are replying to in the textarea.
  • Twitme – This plugin allows you to automatically post your new posts on the twitter website
  • Twitpress – Echoes user definable notification of published blog entries to twitter
  • Bird Feeder – Tweets your about your posts when they are published
  • WP to Twitter – Posts a Twitter status update when you update your blog or post to your blogroll, using the Cligs URL shortening service
  • Twitter updater w/ TinyURL – Updates Twitter when you create a new blog post utilizing TinyURL.com

Display Twitter Stats

  • TwitterCounter – Integrate TwitterCounter.com badges on your blog to display the number of followers you have on Twitter

Displaying Tweets on Your WordPress Blog

  • Twitter for WordPress – Twitter for WordPress displays yours latest tweets in your WordPress blog
  • MyTwitter – MyTwitter allows users to display their recent Twitter updates (tweets) on their blog and update their status through the Options page
  • SimpleTwitter – SimpleTwitter displays the most recent twitter post (tweet) for a given user. The tweet is cached on the webserver for a number of minutes
  • Twitter Widget Pro – A widget that properly handles twitter feeds, including @username and link parsing. It supports displaying profiles images, and even lets you control whether to display the time and date of a tweet or how log ago it happened (about 5 hours ago, etc)
  • twitterDash – twitterDash adds twitter to your WordPress-dashboard
  • Twitterdoodle – Allows a user to create posts and categories based on Twitter keyword searches. Each post would be a digest of twitter posts in that category
  • Tweet You – Putting twitter on your website with tweet!, an unobtrusive javascript plugin for jquery

Sharing Tweets / Multi Teeets

  • Tweet Tweet – This plugin archives your tweets, and the tweets of those you follow in your database. It also stores replies from other people, as well as direct messages
  • Twitter Feed – The Twitter Feed plugin makes including and linking to tweets on multiple Twitter accounts simple and flexible
  • Twitter Blaster – Twitter Blaster is a plugin that will allow your visitors to post to your Twitter account

Miscellaneous Twitter Plugins

  • Tweet This – Adds a Twitter icon to every post and page, so your readers can share your blog entries on their Twitter accounts with ease
  • Top Twitter Links – Widget that displays currently popular links that have been tweeted
  • WP Twitter Pitch – This plugin provides PR companies and users wanting to pitch, a means to give an “elevator” pitch in 140 characters or less
  • Twitterfountain – Twitterfountain mashes up tweets and Flickr-images that share the same tags into a spectacular visual
  • Tweet Rooster – A widget that allows people to twitter directly from your blog

There are other plugins as well, but based on rating these seem to be a complete waste of your time so I wont list them here. Remember you can search for these plugins, and automatically install plugins from your WordPress dashboard.

If you’re looking for a better Twitter marketing solution do check out Viral Twitter Profits.

Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With: , ,
October 29, 2008 By

WordPress Review Site Plugin And Themes

WP Review Site is a plugin and theme package developed by Dan Grossman that adds Amazon-style user ratings to the WordPress blogging software. Using the plugin and themes, you can convert your WordPress blog into a powerful product review blog and easily make money from affiliate programs, CPA offers and more.

What I love about WP Review Site:

  1. Detailed Reviews – You can specify the criteria for your review, so your users can rate each criteria instead of just giving it a general rating. For example you can allow users to rate by Quality, Performance, Customer Support, Design, or any other criteria that is specific to different type of products.
  2. Automatic Ranking Front Page – Yes, the front page will automatically display products according to ranking, not the date / time it was written. According to the website, they use an advanced “weighted average” formula to calculate the highest rated products.
  3. Assign to Category – You can choose to assign the rating bars and rating displays only to a certain category. This is useful if you only want to use the review function on a category called “Review” or something similar
  4. Plug-n-Play – It comes with two simple but adequate WordPress themes that already have all the required code built in. All you need to do is activate the plugin, set your rating requirements, and you’re ready to go.

Here’s how the comments / review section looks like once you’ve activated the plugin:

image

Here are examples of the two WordPress themes included in WP Review Site; one plain white theme and another black “web 2.0” type of theme. Both display rating differently but you can easily edit that if you know what you’re doing.

screenshot screenshot

To make the best out of the WP Review Site system, this is what you need to do:

  1. Do your keyword research first to find niches where people are looking for product reviews
  2. See if there are good affiliate programs you can join in that niche, as this blog will rely mostly on affiliate marketing
  3. Register a new domain name and hosting account specially for this site
  4. Install the WP Review Site plugin and included themes
  5. Get a list of the 20-40 most popular products in that niche, write a short post about each explaining the features of the product – remember that you should not write a review as that’s the job of your readers!
  6. If you find writing too hard, you can use Instant Article Wizard to crank out some decent 200-word articles easily.
  7. Then submit your blog to 3 Way Links for automatic link building – this will get the search engines to index your site.
  8. Submit an article or two using Article Marketing Automation and other good article distribution services
  9. Submit your new blog to a few related web directories – find good ones that seem active, ignore the spammy ones
  10. Leave some related comments (not spam) on other people’s blogs – this will get you some traffic and attention as well
  11. Consider getting some PPC traffic to your blog – bid on related keywords, product names (beware trademarks) and long tail keywords
  12. Do all the above and you should have a highly profitable product review blog

Understand though that you will not be writing the regular “blogging” type of content on these type of review site. Yes you can add related articles for more search engine traffic, but generally speaking once the initial 20-40 posts are done there’s not much you need to add to the content. Just focus on getting traffic.

Get the system here: WP Review Site plugin and WordPress themes

Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With: , , ,
October 28, 2008 By

FLV Plugin For WordPress Blogs

When producing and blogging with full-motion videos, the FLV format is probably the best to use. But unlike embedding a YouTube video, embedding a FLV video in your WordPress blogs is a little bit more difficult.

FLV Plugin for WordPress makes it a whole lot easier, plus it gives you 17 great-looking FLV video layers to display your video professionally. Once installed, you should see a link to “FLV Plugin” when writing a new post or page.

image

Just enter the exact URL of the FLV video and everything else is done automatically.  You can also upload the video directly but I recommend you use a proper FTP program, especially if your video is large.

Below are the 17 video players included, which you can simply select from the Settings page in your WordPress dashboard.

image

This FLV plugin can be used for all FLV-format videos, but in case you’re having trouble converting your videos into FLV you may want to consider getting FLV Producer.

Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With: ,
October 24, 2008 By

Free Tell A Friend Script For Your Blog

If you’re looking for a free “Tell a Friend” script for your website or blog, read this post to discover how to use FreeTellAFriend.com to create the buzz / viral effect for your blog. First let me clarify – YES it’s completely free, and YES you can use it for blogs AND static websites.

I came across the FreeTellAFriend.com service when I was looking for a WordPress plugin for social bookmarking, but found something much more useful. Using this service, you can do all the following at the same time:

  1. Put a basic “Tell-a-friend” form on your website where names and email addresses are entered manually
  2. Allow users to import addresses from their email accounts (Gmail / Yahoo etc), which has a more “viral” effect
  3. Allow users to bookmarks your blog / site with social bookmarking services like Delicious (and about 20 others)
  4. Allow users to bookmark directly to their PC using their browser

You can just go to the site and get the script, copy and paste it to your blog. Then when someone clicks on the image or text link, they see a window like this:

image 

But you may want to consider creating your own account, which is also free. This allows you to change the setting of the form, and the default email subject, and the actual default message sent using the Tell-a-friend system.

image

More importantly though, you can then check your stats and see how many users have emailed their friends about your site, saved your pages to social bookmarking services, or bookmarked it on their PC. This is powerful as without this you never know if the Tell-a-friend is working at all on your website.

image

Ideally, you would want to create your own images that match your blog or website. This makes it look pretty integrated – you could also do away with images and just use a text link.

To test it out, click on the image at the bottom of this post to start the form and click around to see how it works. Also, while you’re at it maybe you could do us a favor and save this site to your social bookmarks, Facebook, Stumble it, or recommend it to your friends who have a website :)

Website: FreeTellAFriend.com or get the WordPress Plugin

Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With: , ,
September 3, 2008 By

Top Social Bookmarking Plugins for WordPress

Today, the blog-O-sphere has led us to socialize to an extent one would have never thought of. Thanks to one of the most innovative technology of the century, the Internet. Blogs no more confine ourselves to writing posts and getting feedbacks or comments. Web 2.0 involves much more than just that. With the advent of technologies like Ajax, XML, Django framework, Python web development, etc. the way people work on the Internet has changed dramatically.

Moving on to the topic of discussion today, we shall have a look at one of the popular ways in which one can promote a blog post. This is known as Social Bookmarking. We shall review few of the top social bookmarking plugins for WordPress. I feel socializing a blog is somehow adds more value to the posts as compared to employing direct SEO strategy. Such plugins allow your visitors to evangelize your blog posts by sharing it.

1) Sociable Plugin

sociable

Use this awesome plugin to automatically add links below posts to popularize it on social bookmarking websites like Digg, Technorati, StumbleUpon, Facebook, etc. The admin panel allows you to choose any number of social sites from around 100 listed networking sites!

sociable-2

The plugin gives you a choice to decide on pages where you wish the social sites icons to be shown. You can keep it on full-posts, static pages and even in the RSS feed. The plugin is showcased as a “share and enjoy” badge just after the post.

2) ShareThis Plugin

sharethis-2

As the name says, you may use this plugin to allow the visitors to share a post on your blog to several social bookmarking websites. They can also send your post to friends and their peers via email! This plugin is a good option if you’re looking for an option to track sharing statistics.

sharethis It is by far one of the most widely used sharing or bookmarking plugin across a plethora of blogs in the blog-O-sphere.

3) Social Bookmarks Plugin

social-bookmarks-plugin

This is yet another WP plugin which adds an array of XHTML compliant social bookmarking graphic links at the end of blog posts, allowing your visitors to submit them with ease to a number of different social bookmarking websites.

social-bookmarks-plugin-2

The plugin can be customized from within the WordPress admin panel. The plugin uses a stylesheet named social_bookmarks.css which can be modified to integrate it further with your theme.
[Read more...]

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April 14, 2008 By

WordPress Lightbox Plugin for Your Images

If you use a lot of images in your blog, you’ll definitely want to have a Lightbox plugin to jazz up the previews and display of your images.

To give you an example of how this works, click on any of the thumbnails below and you’ll see the lightbox preview window, with the ability to browse all the images.

WAS-eCover WKG-eCover WSA-eCover doab

To do this effortlessly on your WordPress blog, you need to download the Lightbox 2 plugin for WordPress, and upload the entire folder to your plugins directory.

Then, activate the plugin and go to the “Options” page (or the “Settings” page in WordPress 2.5). Here you can select different color schemes but after trying all of them I still prefer the default “black” color scheme.

To activate the lightbox effect, you need to add this code to every link you create:

rel="lightbox"

Of course this can be automated using another brilliant plugin called the “Add Lightbox” plugin. Once you install this plugin, all thumbnail images linked to the source image will automatically use the lightbox preview codes.

If you’re a photographer or have an image-heavy blog, this will make your site seem much cooler!

Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With: , ,
November 13, 2007 By

AJAX'd WordPress 0.9

There are plenty of plugins out there to add some special effects for your weblog, the live preview and even the seamless commenting system introduced by k2 but there’s one new plugin which integrates almost all of the great features available and is a mass effort to bring in more ajax functionality to wordpress.

AWP Modules: Modules are mini plugins for the plugin itself, and adds some great features like ajax page navigation, inline comments, etc. After installation, in your Presentation menu, you have an AWP options panel.

Features:

The main features is that it adds seamless AJAX functionality into your posts, comments and theme in a seamless and easily modifiable way. There are a lot of options to be explored.

A lot of special effects are available including the ones supported by scipr.aculou.us and jquery.

Support for expand posts along the post break is also nice.

Known Issues:

Adding large libraries or AJAX functionality can increase the file size by 20-50 kb. So if you prefer to have a light site with few images and greater stability, you would prefer to not use this.

For most others who want to bling up their site, however, this plugin is for them.

Screenshots:

Here are a few screenshots on my local testing server:
Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us
Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us

Links:

The plugin release site.
The Readme

Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With: , ,
October 30, 2007 By

What Others Are Saying Plugin

Do follow comment links and blogrolls have become very popular lately. We basically fall over each other trying to follow the movement of giving out some link love to those we deem worthy enough. Blogging is all about sharing and social networking and right now we can see proof of this everywhere.

A great WordPress Plugin that can help you to link to your friend’s latest blog entries is the “what others are saying Plugin”

image

The Plugin is available from Sarah who is a very helpful UK marketer. You can download the Plugin by visiting her website and if you follow the instructions, it should be a breeze.

The way it works is that it pulls feeds from your blogroll links. You will need to input them yourself, but it is very easy to do so. This will allow you to display others feeds right in your sidebar and it is a great way to share some luv.

To see how the Plugin works, head over to Sarah’s Blog. It is displayed at the bottom of her left sidebar.

Enjoy

Monika

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