Issue #1004 – How Many Plugins…?
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Action Today: How Many Plugins…?
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Tuesday October 11th, 2011: Issue #1004
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Published by Trevor Greenfield. I always welcome your comments.
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Hi,
It seems like everyday now that we get an email alerting us to
the fact that another WordPress plugin is available. Judging by
the number of emails I get about plugins I get the impression
that a lot of niche marketers are unsure about the use of plugins
with their niche blogs. Unsure whether they need to use any
outside of the default ones and if so, which ones and why.
There’s no doubt about it that you certainly can go overboard
when it comes to plugins. I was at a workshop some while ago
where one of the attendees informed the group that he had 72
plugins on his site. He was complaining that his site was slow –
I’m not surprised. One of the things to remember when building
your niche site is that the more plugins you include the longer
your site will take to load.
So which plugins should be included in your niche site and why?
Every niche marketer will have his or her favorites but these are
my must have’s which also tend to be the most popular among other
niche marketers that I know.
My Definitive Plugin List
Akismet
All WordPress blogs are set up with Akismet as standard and I
include that amongst my list of must have’s. Akismet will cut
down the amount of comment spam that you get dramatically. It’s
important that you remember to activate it when you are
configuring your blog because it isn’t active initially. When you
activate it you will be asked to insert your Akismet API key. If
you don’t already have one there will be a link among the
description alongside the plugin that will take you over to the
Akismet website to get one.
All-in-one-SEO Pack
The next one on my list is the All-in-one-SEO plugin. Paying
close attention to your on-page SEO is one of your main tasks as
a niche marketer. This plugin allows you to target the correct
keywords with each post and page that you create. Whatever you
put into the title field in this plugin will appear at the top of
the page when a visitor comes to your site. The title tag is one
of the most important elements in Google’s ranking considerations
as well so another reason why this plugin is a must.
Google XML sitemaps
There’s no question that you site will get listed better and
possibly quicker if you have a site map. The reason being that
your site map provides a clear picture of your site and a path
for the spiders to follow. Like all of these plugins this one is
very easy to install and once done it will continue to add all of
the additional posts and pages that you create to the original
map.
WP-Sticky
The way that WordPress posts work is to add each new post to the
top of the page, pushing the previous post down one. That’s fine
for most of your posting but in most cases it is nice to be able
to have a post that stays at the top. This post should tell your
visitors what your site is about and what they can expect to get
from browsing around your site. It is a lot like an about me page
but entered as a post. This is now possible with the use of
WP-Sticky.
This type of post is known as an announcement post. You create
your post in the normal way but with WP-Sticky installed you get
the option to designate this post as an announcement post, a
sticky post or a normal post. In this case we set this one as an
announcement post and it stays permanently at the top. If you set
the post as Sticky, it stays on top of all other posts posted on
that day but the following days posts will be written above it.
One Click Close Comments
On some of the premium themes, like Thesis for instance, it is
quite difficult to set the post up to not allow comments. This
plugin solves that problem very easily, you simply click a box. I
find this plugin invaluable since I use Thesis on all of my niche
blogs.
Flexi-quote-rotator
Including testimonials on your site provides your visitors with
social proof and helps sales. Rather than have to mess around
with coding to get a nice looking quote box on your site, this
plugin allows you to add several testimonials and have them
rotate on your site. A good example of how this works can be seen
halfway down the page on
http://capsiplexwarning.com/capsiplex-review
WP-Hide Post
This plugin excels in giving you full control over the visibility
of your a post. By default, any post you add to your WordPress
blog will become the topmost post, and will show up immediately
on the front page in the first position, and similarly in
category/tag/archive pages. Sometimes, you want to create a
“low-profile” addition to your blog that doesn’t belong on the
front page, or maybe you don’t want it to show up anywhere else
in your blog except when you explicitly link to it. This plugin
allows you to create such “hidden gems”.
All of the above plugins are free and can be downloaded from
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/plugin-name There is one
other plugin that I think is essential that isn’t free
SEOPressor.
SEOPressor
This plugin checks your post or page for being search engine
friendly. You enter the keyword that you are targeting with this
piece of content and SEOPressor analyses your content for a list
of essential elements that are required if your page is to rank
well. There are two purchase options, a single-site licence or an
unlimited licence. Niche marketers would need the unlimited
licence which costs $97 one-time fee and is well worth it in my
opinion.
All of the people that I know use it and rave about it. I have
included a link to it down in the recommended section.
These are generally the only plugins that I use on all of my
niche sites. Loading up your blog with every new plugin that
comes out just because you can just makes your site run slower
and anything that you have on your server that you don’t use only
provides more routes for hackers to get in so my advice is to
clear them out.
+ + | | | + +
While writing the section above about removing all unnecessary
vulnerabilities from your site reminded me that I wanted to
include something about images and your image folder that lots of
people are not aware of. Viruses and their relatives trojans,
bombs etc are spread in many different ways. The obvious ways are
through infected code in word documents, programs scripts etc but
it is possible for a virus to get into your system through an
image too.
The majority of sites are set up with all of the images in an
image folder. Just typing in www.any-domain-name.com/images will
often display a list of all of the images in the images folder.
One way of avoiding that is to install an index file in the
images folder. This is quite easy to do with most hosting
platforms like Hostgator that have cpanel.
I was going to provide instructions of how to do it here but
since it’s a little difficult to follow just the written
instructions I’ll provide a video showing how to do it if I get
enough requests for it.
+ + | | | + +
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The Thought For Today
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Within you right now is the power to do things you never dreamed
possible. This power becomes available to you as soon as you can
change your beliefs.
Maxwell Maltz
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Action Help
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W. Clement Stone said “The way to make a fortune is to sell a
necessity which is low in cost and repeats. The fortune is made
in the repeat business.
Jim Edwards once said that the magic question we should be asking
ourselves should be, “How can I help a Whole lot of people find
the solution they need to solve this severe problem and make a
big, fair profit in the process?”
Look at problems as opportunities. How many more people have this
problem? Who can I hire to create a solution to the problem and
sell it at a fair price?
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Products and services to streamline your business
recommended by Trevor Greenfield
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Reliable hosting for your niche blogs or website
http://www.nichemarkethosting.co.uk
Unstoppable Affiliate
If you already have some online experience this will get you off
and running.
http://trevor.linktrackr.com/UA
Newbie to Millionaire
If you are a complete beginner, this is the course for you. It
starts at the most basic level and builds your knowledge from
there.
http://trevor.linktrackr.com/newbie
SEOPressor
Must have niche blogging plugin
http://trevor.linktrackr.com/SEOPressor
#~#~#
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Contact details
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Trevor Greenfield, Queens Rd, Kenilworth, Warwickshire,CV8 1JS, UK.
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