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5 WordPress Plugins That You Need To Have

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WordPress powers millions of blogs on the web. However, not all of those blogs are taking advantage of the plugins that WordPress offers. There are countless plugins available, but not all plugins are created equal. I have used numerous WordPress plugins, and these are the 5 plugins that have helped me out a lot.

  1. Acurax Social Media Widget: This plugin allows you to create buttons that lead people to your social networks. There are many themes to choose from and many choices for which social networks you would like to promote. I promote my Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, GooglePlus, YouTube, and LinkedIn accounts with the Acurax Social Media Widget.
  2. P3 Plugin: This plugin (Plugin Performance Profiler), allows you to see which plugins are slowing your blog down. When I first used this plugin, I was amazed to discover that I was not using many of the plugins that were slowing my blog down. By deactivating the plugins that I was not using (and that were slowing down my blog), I was able to dramatically increase the speed time for my blog.
  3. Pinterest Pin It Button For Images: Bloggers can no longer ignore Pinterest. There are many people who are eager to share blog posts on Pinterest. In order to make it easier for people to share your blog posts on Pinterest, use this plugin. When someone moves the mouse on the image, they will be able to see a “Pin It” button. Clicking this button will allow the person to pin the picture. This is an easier way to get more people to share your blog posts.
  4. Social Metrics. Do you want to know how many times your blog posts are getting shared on various social networks. With the Social Metrics plugin, you can do just that. This plugin organizes all of your blog posts and shows you how many times your blog posts are being shared on different social networks. With this plugin, you also have the option to share your own blog posts straight from the WP Admin page!
  5. Widget context. This plugin allows you to choose which widgets appear on what pages on your blog. Not all widgets are suitable for all areas of your blog. Widget context allows you to choose where the widgets can appear.

I am commonly using these WordPress plugins. They have brought good results to my blog, and if you are looking for ways to make your blog better, these WordPress plugins are the best ones for you.

 

An Overlooked Way To Get More Traffic

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There are plenty of ways to get more blog traffic. I recently read Yaro Starak’s free report about building an income with a blog. The free report taught me some things about blogging that I did not know…including an overlooked way to get more traffic.

Here’s what many people overlook: In order to get more traffic, you need to get more daily visitors on your blog. This seems like a statement you would find on the UberObvious Twitter feed. However, this is actually an effective way to get more traffic.

The more daily visitors you get, the more likely there will be someone who visits your blog and has a big following. If your blog is getting 100 daily visitors, you are more likely to encounter someone who has 100,000 followers than the person who is getting 10 daily visitors to their blog. Getting 1,000 daily visitors boosts your chances, and getting 5,000 daily visitors boosts your chances even more.

Getting more daily visitors will allow more people to know about you–and tell others about you. Getting more daily visitors leads to more visitors from other sources.

This is what many experts call The Snowball Effect. When you get more visitors, you will eventually reach someone who decides your content is worth promoting to 100,000 people. Then, some of those 100,000 people visit your blog, and your readership grows.

 

Why You Need To Have Bonuses

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Imagine your customer got everything he paid for. It is an accomplishment to give your customer everything that he paid for. However, giving your customer more than what they paid for leads to more connections and better results. Imagine getting a training course with 20 videos, and then the trainer decided to surprise you with 5 bonus videos.

We want what we pay for, but when we get something extra, we remember that extra gift. Mike Michalowicz has a great marketing strategy for his books. Instead of waiting for people to buy his books, he distributes them to right people who are likely to give him a review. For his book, The Pumpkin Plan, Mike decided to contact people who review business books on Amazon. He asked these people if they were interested in getting the book for free in return for an honest review.

Mike Michalowicz decided to ship out his books with personalized letters and a copy of another one of his books, The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur. While customers were only expecting to get a copy of The Pumpkin Plan, they ended up getting a personalized letter and a copy of The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur to go along with it.

Offering his books for free and giving his customers a bonus resulted in Mike’s books getting hundreds of reviews on Amazon, and most of them are 4 and 5 star reviews. Giving away his Pumpkin Plan book for free was a starting point, but the added bonuses resulted in customers who read and reviewed his book right away.

The “Buy 2 Get 1 Free” sales always attract more customers. That’s because the 1 free thing is a bonus. People flock over to stores with big deals in order to get the bonus. By having bonuses for your business, whether the bonus is an extra hour of services for free, 5 extra videos, or a free report, you will have more customers eager to buy your future products.

 

5 Pinterest Mistakes To Avoid (Part 3)

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A very long time ago, I wrote Part 1. A little further back, I wrote Part 2. This is Part 3 which contains 5 more mistakes that you need to avoid on Pinterest. Although Pinterest is not the largest social network out there, it has grown at a rate faster than all of the other social networks. If you want to optimize on Pinterest’s constantly growing platform, avoid these 5 mistakes:

  1. Not taking advantage of a powerful social network. The biggest mistake you can make is ignoring Pinterest. Pinterest has the potential to dramatically increase your blog’s traffic, and the average pin have been proven to get more engagement than the average tweet.
  2. Not paying attention to analytics. Although there are no free Pinterest analytics tools that offer as much information as TwitterCounter, there are plenty of free Pinterest analytics tools out there. I commonly use Tailwind to see my statistics based on my change in follower count and pin count. Other features become accessible through upgrades.
  3. Only pinning the same thing once. When a board has hundreds of repins, your followers are less likely to scroll all the way down to the first pin. I pin my blog posts more than once, and that results in an increase in traffic.
  4. Not liking a lot of pins. When someone sees that you have liked thousands of pins, they will realize that you are a very active user on Pinterest. In addition, you can like pins to organize all of the pins that you want to repin. By using this method, some people unlike the pins after they repin them. This prevents hundreds of repins clogging up your followers’ timelines.
  5. Not having multiple boards with 100+ pins. When multiple boards have over 100 pins, your followers will have more pins to look at. It is better to have 10 boards with 100 pins each than it is to have 100 boards with 10 pins each. Quality beats quantity, but when you can combine them both together, you will get more engagement on Pinterest.

These are 5 mistakes that too many people make on Pinterest. However, there are other mistakes that people make on Pinterest as well. You can go back to Part 1 and Part 2 in order to see 10 additional mistakes that people make on Pinterest.

 

The Problem With Asking For A Shout Out

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As someone gets more followers, more people ask for shout outs. No one was asking me for a shout out when I had 100 followers. Now I get some people asking me for shout outs. There are some people who I give the shout out (usually in the form of a retweet), but I avoid giving too many people shout outs. Plenty of celebrities are asked hundreds of times every day to give someone a shout out.

This does not go well with a lot of people because requests for shout outs will clog up these users’ timelines. In the end, shout outs rarely happen.

Let’s say someone asks for a shout out from a power Twitter user with 100,000 followers. If that person does give you the shout out, your Klout score will see a big jump, and the tweet may get retweeted and favorited a few times. Then, everything goes back to normal after the shout out is long forgotten.

You probably want someone in your niche with 100,000 followers to give you a shout out. We all do, and we all have that one person (or many people) who we want the shout out from. People ask for the shout out because they know the shout out will lead to more engagement for their tweets, even if that burst in engagement is short-lived.

The question should not be, “Can I get a shout out?”

The question should be, “How do I get a following like yours so people are asking me to give them shout outs?”

Instead of constantly relying on someone else who may not give many shout outs, create your own opportunity. Ask the person how he/she became popular on Twitter so you can become popular on Twitter and consistently get the engagement results that you want to see. I follow people in my targeted audience who are likely to follow back. That’s how I (and a lot more people than you would think) grow their following on Twitter.

Instead of asking someone with 100,000 followers for the shout out, do the work that will allow you to become the person with over 100,000 followers. It’s easier for everyone.

 

5 Lessons We Must Learn From The Olympic Games

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olympic fire The Olympic Games happen once every four years, but their splendor never goes away. The best athletes in the world compete for gold, silver, and bronze medals for their countries. There are many excellent performances, but there are some wipeouts as well. The Olympics can teach us a lot about persistence and building a good character. For each of the rings in the official logo, these are 5 lessons that we must learn from the Olympic Games.

  1. If you want something, you can achieve it. Although this only happens with the right mindset, you can achieve something if you want it. The athletes who compete in the Olympic Games knew what they wanted before they competed in the Olympic Games.
  2. It takes a lot of work to become the best. More work yields better results. The athletes competing in the Olympic Games spent an untold amount of hours getting stronger and practicing their techniques. Becoming the best is not an easy task, and you don’t simply end up in the Olympic Games by accident.
  3. There are going to be some bad days. The gold medalists in skiing had to learn how to ski on ice. It is very easy to imagine that these athletes got hurt while practicing their sport. Imagine teaching a child how to ski. That child can eventually learn how to ski, but there might have been some bumps and bruises acquired along the way.
  4. Preparation allows you to be clutch when people are paying attention. Millions of people watch the Olympic Games. However, these people are not watching the athletes when they spend years preparing for the Olympic Games. Many viewers don’t get to see the top runners practice for years. They just see the runners run during the Olympic Games. Preparation allows the runners to run really good times when people watch them during the race.
  5. It feels good to be victorious. When a United States athlete gets a gold medal, millions of people in the United States are cheering for that athlete–whether at the event or while watching the event unfold on the big screen. When a Canadian athlete gets a gold medal, millions of people in Canada are cheering for that athlete. Then, the athlete gets the medal which shows that all of the hard work finally paid off. In the Olympic Games, it feels good to be victorious as a country and for the athlete. You can feel victorious by accomplishing certain goals, helping others, and doing other things that make you feel victorious as well.

Those are the 5 lessons that we must learn from the Olympic Games. Although the Olympic Games take place every four years, these lessons must be rooted into our mindsets during the Olympic Games and beyond.