Essential WordPress Plugins You Should Know

WordPress offers a ton of features and flexibility, there is still a lot of functionality missing from the core software. The best way to fill in the missing pieces, of course, is to get yourself the right plugins.

wordpress-plugins

Plugins offer all kinds of customization for site admins, however, with almost 40,000 options to choose from it the WordPress Plugin Directory, not to mention all the premium products available, it can be difficult sorting the good from the, well, not so good.

So here’s a collection of free and premium must-haves, the plugins that can help take your site from good to great.

Comment Spam Prevention

Akismet – best guard against comment spam for WordPress blog!

Database and File Backup Plugins

BackUpWordPress – BackUpWordPress will back up your entire site including your database and all your files on a schedule that suits you.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

All in One SEO Pack – Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog. Install the all in one seo pack or the “WordPress SEO by Yoast” plugin (you don’t need to install both).

WordPress SEO by Yoast – Yoast’s all in one SEO solution for your WordPress blog: SEO titles, meta descriptions, XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs & much more.

Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search. The SEO plugins listed above can also do the sitemap for you.

Blog Security Plugin

All In One WP Security & Firewall – The All In One WordPress Security and Firewall is the ultimate security plugin that will take your WordPress site’s security to a whole new level.

BulletProof Security – BulletProof security plugin offers website security protection against: XSS, RFI, CRLF, CSRF, Base64, Code Injection and SQL Injection.

Wordfence Security – The Wordfence WordPress security plugin provides free enterprise-class WordPress security.

Blog Statistics Related

Google Analytics Dashboard for WP – Displays Google Analytics reports in your WordPress Dashboard. Inserts the latest Google Analytics tracking code in your pages.

Google Analytics – Enables Google Analytics on all pages. This one seems to be simple and does the job. However, the developer doesn’t seem to be very responsive.

Google Analytics for WordPress – This plugin used to be really good but since the original developer sold this plugin, it has gone downhill (many users have reported to us that it doesn’t work well anymore). 

WP Statistics – A comprehensive plugin for your WordPress visitor statistics (doesn’t use Google Analytics).

Caching Plugin

W3 Total Cache – The fastest and most complete WordPress performance optimization plugin. After you use the w3 total cache plugin you won’t go back to using WP Super Cache.

WP Super Cache – WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly.

RSS Subscription Related

FeedBurner FeedSmith – This plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.

Add to Any: Subscribe Button – Helps readers subscribe to your blog using any feed reader.

Category Specific RSS Menu – A simple WordPress plugin to add category specific RSS subscription menu into your posts, pages, sidebars. Very handy when your blog covers multiple topic from non related subjects. 

• Membership Plugin

Simple Membership Plugin – The simple membership plugin lets you protect your posts and pages so only your members (free or paid) can view the protected content.

WordPress eMember – WP eMember is a feature rich membership plugin that can turn your existing or new WordPress site into a powerful membership site.

Affiliate Related

WP Affiliate Platform – WordPress plugin for affiliate recruitment, management and tracking. This plugin lets you run your own affiliate campaign/program and allows you to reward (pay commission) your affiliates for referred sales.

Software License Management

Software License Manager – This plugin allows you to create a software license management solution for your web applications (WordPress plugins, Themes, PHP based membership script etc.)

Other Very Useful Plugins

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin –  This plugin gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site.

Download Monitor – This plugin is very useful for managing and tracking your digital file downloads. You can track which file is being downloaded how many times and who is downloading them.

Executable PHP Widget – Like the Text widget, but it will take PHP code as well. Very handy for inserting custom ‘php’, ‘html’, ‘javascript’ in the sidebar.

Crayon Syntax Highlighter – A plugin to highlight any code in your posts or pages. very handy if you use example codes in your Blog.

Mailpoet Newsletters – Send newsletters, post notifications or autoresponders from WordPress easily, and beautifully.

WP-Polls – Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. Allows you to easily include a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page.

EWWW Image Optimizer – The EWWW Image Optimizer is a WordPress plugin that will automatically and losslessly optimize your images as you upload them to your blog.

WP Video Lightbox – The WordPress Video Lightbox plugin allows you to embed videos on a page using lightbox overlay display. This plugin can be used to display images, flash, YouTube, Vimeo, iFrame etc in a nice lightbox overlay.

Contact Forms Related

Contact Form 7 – Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

Contact Form – The Contact Form plugin allows you to implement a feedback form to a web-page or a post in no time.

Gravity Forms – Build and publish your WordPress forms in just minutes. No drudgery, just quick and easy form-building.

Social Networking

Social Media and Share Icons – Social media plugin which adds social media icons to your website with tons of customization features.

Share This – This is a very useful plugin that allows your visitors to share a post/page with others. Supports e-mail and posting to social bookmarking sites.

Fat Free WordPress Social Share Buttons Plugin – This is a very simple and FAT FREE share button plugin that adds Google plus one, Facebook and Twitter share buttons to your blog posts.

For Google Adsense

Simple Google Adsense insertion – Easy to use WordPress plugin to insert Google Adsense to your posts, pages and sidebar.

Google Adsense Plugin – Google AdSense Plugin allows you to set parameters of the ads displaying, such as format (text ad, image, text with an image or link), size, color of the elements in the ad block, rounded corners and the ad block position on the website.

Google Adsense – The AdSense Plugin enables you to easily use Google’s products – including Webmaster Tools – with your WordPress site.

Photo Gallery Plugin

NextGen Gallery – The most popular WordPress photo gallery plugin.

Simple Photo Gallery – If you are looking for an effective, reliable, yet simple to use photo gallery plugin, then check this gallery plugin out.

E-commerce, Paypal Donation and Payment

WordPress Simple Paypal Shopping Cart – is a very easy to use plugin that allows you to sell products or services online in one click from your WordPress blog. Very useful when you want to sell eBooks or digital products from various posts and pages and need a WordPress Shopping Cart solution.

WP Easy Paypal Payment Accept – This is a very easy to use WordPress plugin to Accept donation or Paypal payment for a service or a product in one click. Handy when you are trying to put a customized payment widget on your site (you can add it to the sidebar or a page or a post of your blog).

WordPress eStore – This plugin provides a complete solution to sell products from your site. It is really good for selling digital products securely from your WordPress blog.

WordPress Donations Widget Plugin – The WordPress Donations Widget Plugin allows you to collect donation for a cause from your WordPress powered site.

PayPal for Digital Goods – This plugin allows you to use the PayPal for Digital Goods gateway to accept payment for digital goods. Provides inline checkout of digital goods.

Stripe Payments – A simple and lightweight plugin to accept payment on your site (for a product or service) via the Stripe payment gateway.

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Affiliate Marketing Summit West 2017

During January 15-17, more than 6,000 digital marketers from over 70 countries will gather at the Paris Las Vegas hotel for the performance marketing industry's premier global event, Affiliate Summit West 2017.

These high-level decision makers will come looking for online publishers, traffic sources, retailers, networks, technology firms, digital agencies and other solution providers. And if you're an Affiliate Summit attendee, it could be you that they find.

There is no substitute for being here, demonstrating your solutions and building face-to-face relationships. The top companies and key decision makers in the space come to Affiliate Summit. Show them what you've got and what they're missing.

January 15, 2017 - January 17, 2017

Las Vegas

Paris Las Vegas Hotel

Affiliate Summit West 2017 (#ASW17) is taking place on January 15-17, 2017 at Paris Las Vegas Hotel.
The conference and tradeshow offers attendees:

• three tradeshow areas packed with affiliates, merchants, vendors, networks, technology providers, digital agencies, traffic sources;
• multiple tracks of relevant educational sessions delivered by industry experts;
• a variety of networking events;
• and online tools to help you connect with other attendees before, during and after the event.

Expected Attendance: 6,000+

• Early check-in: January 14, 12:00 PM
• Conference start: January 15, 10:00 AM
• Conference end: January 17, 4:00 PM

 Agenda

The Affiliate Summit West 2017 Agenda is now live and is packed with sessions that will help better understand the evolving landscape of affiliate marketing.
Don't forget that Affiliate Summit offers two pass types: VIP and Networking.
Review the benefits included with each pass type here to ensure that you have purchased the right pass for the sessions and events that you wish to access.

Register

Two pass types are available for Affiliate Summit West 2017 - VIP and Networking.

To help you choose the pass type that is right for you, refer to the Pass Comparison Chart below and then register here.

Registering 5 or more attendees?  Check out our Group Rates at the bottom of this section.

Call 417-2SUMMIT (278-6648) for instructions on booking at group rates below.

Group Rates	Discount
Group rate for 5-9 Passes	20% off
Group rate for 10 or more Passes	25% off

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SEO tips and tricks to promote website

Developing SEO strategies that can drive an immense amount of traffic to your site within a month is not an easy task, especially if you want your site’s visitors to convert into profits. Generating highly targeted traffic or visitors that have the intent of availing the services or products that you are offering is the best way to really earn from your website.

The good news is that there are many ways that you can do to hasten the process of having your site noticed by people who are in need of the information, services or products that you provide. Here are some of the ways that you can do to generate specifically targeted online visitors in under a month.

Target easy to rank long-tail keywords through blog posts

If your site has no blog section yet, then you better start including one. Blogs can benefit your business in so many ways, and consistently driving traffic to your site is one of them. Using long-tail keywords in your blog posts’ titles (eg. How to learn SEO), can extremely help your site’s performance in terms of traffic generation, seeing as this strategy can very much take your blog posts on top of SERPs without further improving them through off-page optimization or link building.

Blog posts can naturally rank on their own basing on its topical relevance as seen by search engines, and taking advantage of low competition keywords will make your pages rank on the top page of SERPs in no time, which means more organic traffic to your site.

Targeting 3 -5 keywords for each page on your site

Creating your pages or blog posts with the intent of ranking for more than 2 keywords is always a smart move, since it will allow your site to draw more relevant traffic along the process. Say, if your site has 15 blog posts or pages on its first month, and each page are targeting 3 different keywords. Doing the math will give you a result of 45 keywords giving you constant traffic within a month.

Doing this strategy is very simple, wherein you just have to use or combine your targeted keywords on your page or post’s title, URL and on the body copy (eg. Top 10 advanced on-page SEO strategies). With the given example of a post title you are able to target 7 keywords that you can use within the body of the content, including:

    Advanced on-page SEO strategies

    On-page SEO strategies

    On-page SEO

    Advanced SEO

    Advanced SEO strategies

    Advanced on-page SEO

    On-page optimization strategies

    On-page SEO techniques

Dofollow blog commenting

Commenting on blogs with the same theme as your site – particularly blogs that allow dofollow attributed links on their comment section – is one of the most effective ways to promoting your site as well as in improving your keywords’ search rankings. This technique has a lot of advantages and can certainly take your campaign a long way, given that this method allows you to acquire relevant backlinks and can possibly build relationships with other bloggers related to your niche.

Networking with other bloggers is extremely beneficial, especially with higher value link placements such as special mentions, in-content links (used as a resource), guest blogging opportunities and sponsored reviews. Anyway, leaving comments on blogs with the use of your keywords as anchor texts can help improve its search rankings in just weeks, particularly if the links that you’ve built are from topically relevant pages and are dofollow attributed.

Guest blog posting

Guest blogging has been known to be a link building method that’s really advantageous in terms of driving relevant traffic, acquiring high quality links, passing through Pagerank and in improving SERP rankings. It’s best to choose blogs that are relevant to your site, have high page ranks and receives a lot of traffic on their site (can be based through Alexa traffic rank).

In choosing the topic to write for guest postings, writing topics that are strictly about the keywords you are aiming at is the most effective way to get most out of this technique, since the link that you’ll be able to build through your author bio will have higher scores basing on its relevance as well as in targeting the audience that will be able to read it.

Forum participation

Forum posting is a good start for any campaign, especially if you choose to participate on high PR and high traffic forum sites. The best way to benefit from this method is to establish an expert or knowledgeable image through this channel, and not just focusing on building links through your signature.

Establishing yourself through forum sites and being genuinely active in participating with the community can bring you targeted visitors and interested clients within a month, so spending 30 minutes a day on 1 or 2 authority forums around your site’s industry is certainly worth it.

Article submission and converting your articles

This link building method has proven its worth over the past decade and is still known to be one of the most effective ways in generating consistent traffic as well as highly relevant links that can boost your search rankings.  The best thing about article marketing is that it’s capable of building solid links as it gets syndicated naturally, particularly if you have written a solid and informative article. Submitting an exceptionally written article to several highly trusted article directories (such as Ezinearticles, Articlesbase, Goarticles, Amazines, and many more) can enhance its chances of getting scraped or used by other sites that are seeking for quality content to be posted, which gives you more extra links and of course, more traffic.

But there’s more to this method than just the traditional article marketing, you can as well convert your articles to other formats for more exposure and external links pointing to your site. Converting your articles to PDF, podcasts, slide/powerpoint presentation and videos, and then submitting them to their respective directories can extremely amplify your site’s traffic in a short period of time, given that these formats have higher chances of ranking high on search engine result pages.

SEO Tips

To optimize your whole site for search engines, you’ll need to follow these basic tips:

Make the website about one thing.

It can be about other stuff, too, but choose one primary topic that is most essential to your message.

This step is important, so you may want to do a little keyword research before choosing a topic.

Mention keywords where they matter most.

Include your “one thing” in the site title, domain name, description, tagline, keywords, blog categories, page titles, and page content.

If you’re on WordPress, you can change a lot of this in the General Settings or through a plugin like All in One SEO Pack.

Link to internal pages on your site.

A lot of content management systems automatically do this, but if yours doesn’t, you’ll want to be intentional about linking to your most important pages directly from your homepage and cross-linking them with each other.

Use a permalink structure that includes keywords.

Some sites have “ugly” permalink structures that use numbers to identify pages.

Don’t do this. It’s bad for SEO and just doesn’t look good.

Use a URL structure that includes text, and make sure you include keywords in your URLs.

So instead of having a page’s URL be this:

    http://yoursite.com/?p=12

It should look more like this:

    http://yoursite.com/coolpage/

Remove anything that slows down your website.

Page load times are important, so get rid of any non-essentials that bog down your website.

These may including music players, large images, flash graphics, and unnecessary plugins.

Use keywords in your images.

Include words that reflect your site topic in the image title, description, and alt attributes.

Also, re-title the file name if it doesn’t reflect your main keywords (e.g. writing-tips.jpg instead of d1234.jpg).

Link to other websites with relevant content.

You can do this by including a blogroll, link list, or resources page on your website.

Of course, do it sparingly, as each outbound link is a “vote” for another site. However, if you do it well and people click your links, this tells search engines you are a trusted authority on your particular topic.

Update your website frequently.

Sites with dynamic content often rank higher than those with static content. That’s why blogs and directories (like Wikipedia) do so well on search engines. They are constantly being updated with new content.

Make sure your website is indexed in search engines.

A lot of search engines will automatically find and index your content, but don’t count on it.

You want to be sure engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo are crawling your site, so that people are finding you online. (You can add them directly, if they’re not.)

Have other websites link to you.

This is really, really important, when it comes to SEO. The bummer is that it’s not something you can necessarily control. Other than creating excellent content, the only thing you can do is ask (which occasionally works).

Regardless of what you do, know that inbound links are essential to SEO.

Stop changing your domain name.

The age of your URL is a factor in your site’s search ranking, so be patient.

If you’re launching a new blog every six months, you’ll never see your site get the value it deserves.

Write like a human.

None of the above matters if you create content that sounds like a robot wrote it.

Write great stuff, follow the steps above, have patience, and you’ll see results.

Many of you have already started blogging, but many of these tips can be applied retroactively. And once if you done this, you can start writing regular content.

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Online File Storage Sites for Free

List of the best free on line file storage sites. More than just external hard drives, many of these sites are collaboration platforms that you can use to share documents with friends.

.Box: gives you 5 GB of storage for free and lets you organize your files into folders in the cloud, just like you would on your desktop. You can share links or entire file folders with others and see when they’ve been viewed.

.Bitcasa: stores up to 10 GB worth of free files, photos, playlists, videos and docs that can be accessed from any device (and reportedly goes up to infinity for paying customers).

.Dropbox: is a secure place to keep photos, documents, and videos that you can access from your computer, smartphone, or tablet. You can share the files with your social networks as well. It comes with 2 GB of free storage (or up to 18 GB if you refer a friend).

.Evernote: saves all of your notes, web clips, files, scanned documents, and images. You can search for the documents by keyword, access them from any device, and share them with friends. The storage process here is a little different: free users can store up to 100,000 notes (up to 25 mb each), 250 synchronized notebooks, 10,000 tags, and 100 saved searches.

.Google Drive: syncs documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and videos from your computer and mobile devices. It connects to Google+ and Gmail for collaboration and sharing. It has a free storage limit of up to 5 GB that’s shared between Google Drive and Google+ Photos.

.iCloud: is just for iOS devices, but it syncs all your music, photos, apps, calendars, documents, and other files and makes them sharable with friends. It comes with 5 GB of free cloud storage. Bonus: the photos in your Photo Stream and whatever music, movies, TV shows, apps, and books you buy from iTunes don’t count against your storage limit.

.Mega: Internet outlaw Kim Dotcom released this service one year after the U.S. government shut down its predecessor, MegaUpload, for facilitating copyright infringement. The new tool promises “state of the art, browser-based encryption technology” and a whopping 50 GB of free cloud storage.

.SkyDrive: offers 7 GB of free cloud storage for photos, documents, and other files and works on any device. Windows 8 users can log in with their Microsoft accounts to view photos and files, edit and share Office documents, and share the files with friends.

If you still need extra storage space, these companies will be more than happy to sell it to you. But unless you’re the Library of Congress, this should be enough to get you started.

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Motivational wallpapers

Wallpapers that make you want to jump out of your seat and do something, pictures that make you want to go running, push yourself and overall give you motivation

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• HERE’S MY FAVORITE ….

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