Bill McRea

wordpress bloggers usually have their favorite plugins that they swear by to help them keep their blogs running smoothly. But with millions of bloggers using this flexible, free CMS, there are tons of new plugins being produced that perform many useful functions on your Blog from helping to improve SEO, to giving your visitors a better browsing experience.

Today we’re going to take a look at five of the newest plugins for WordPress blogs that you might want to try this year.

1. Kindle This

Have you ever found yourself reading a blog post, and then wish you could save it and read it later on your kindle? Well, now there’s a plugin for that. This sidebar widget gives your readers the opportunity to type in their Kindle email address and your blog post will show up on their Kindle the next time they make a wifi connection.

wordpress.org/extend/plugins/kindle-this/

2. WordPress SEO by Yoast

This plugin promises to help you to increase your search engine rankings, and increase the click through rate for organic search results. This is a comprehensive SEO plugin which also helping you to write better content because it forces you to choose a keyword to focus your blog post on.

wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-seo/

3. A/B Test for WordPress

Splittesting is one of those things that you know you should be doing more often, but may not be high on your priority list because you’ve got so many other tasks to maintain your blog. But if you had this handy plugin you could do it with just a few clicks. You can test content, styles, Javascript and themes.

wordpress.org/extend/plugins/abtest/

4. Pinterest RSS Widget

This plugin creates a widget that displays the thumbnail image and title of the latest pins on Pinterest from a specific user via their Pinterest RSS feed. The dimensions of the widget are adjustable, and it allows you to add the official, “Follow me on Pinterest,” button beneath your pins.

wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pinterest-rss-widget/

5. WP Super Cache

This plugin is a very fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static html files, which speeds up your page’s load time. Since Google uses page load time as a metric in their ranking algorithm, using this plugin might help boost your page rank over time.

wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/

Whether you are launching a brand new blog or you are maintaining an existing blog, you always want to make sure that you have the plugins that you need to keep your blog looking and functioning at its best.

Note: We haven’t thoroughly tested each of these plugins, we are simply sharing some of the new plugins that are available for you to try. When you visit the plugin download page, make sure that the plugin is compatible with the version of WordPress that you have installed (which should always be the latest version available). As always when you install new plugins be sure to back up your blog before installing them.

WordPress plugins help make your blog more efficient. For more tips and strategies for growing your online business visit http://mcreasite.com/blog today.

Are you a blogger who has lost their blogging mojo? If you blog has been gathering more cobwebs than traffic lately, it might be time for a blog makeover. There are dozens of things that you can do to breathe new life into a stagnant blog, but we’ve pulled together five specific tasks that you can do to get you blog back on track and producing results again quickly.

If you take action on these five tips you will certainly see improvements. But first you’ve got to take stock of where you are and what your goals are before you can measure the changes that will take place. Let’s take a look at the tips:

1. Define your ideal visitor

This is really going back to basics. When you started your blog you most likely had a topic in mind that you were passionate about, so you started writing a few posts a week on your topic, but did you ever take the time to really think about who you are writing to? It’s just like finding your ideal customer when you are in sales. Having an image of the age, sex, likes and dislikes of your ideal visitor will make it so much easier to write for them, and then will really enjoy how perfectly your content fits their sensibilities.

2. Stand for something

People don’t visit your blog to hear bland, vanilla content. You are the one who sets your blog apart from the millions of other blogs out there. So, don’t be shy. Have an opinion and share your unique perspective with the world, and you will establish a loyal following of those who agree with you, and maybe create a bit of controversy with those who disagree with you.

3. Post consistently

Here’s where you’ll have to get creative because often time we begin a project like a blog with the best of intentions, but when it’s no longer new and the excitement has worn off you’ve got to come up with ways to stick with it if you want to reap the rewards that a popular blog can provide for you.

Try getting Guest Bloggers to fill in for you when you can’t publish a new post. Whenever you sit down to work on a new post, try to crank out a few extra posts on evergreen topics that you can post when you are stuck for time.

4. Use compelling headlines

A good headline draws the reader into the post, so take the time to study good headlines. Create a swipe file of headlines that move you to action and use these to inspire your own titles. Come up with a few different headlines for the same post and pick the best one.

5. Work your blog stats

Keep tabs on your blog’s analytics. Watch your traffic stats to see what kinds of keywords your visitors are typing in to find your blog. check your bounce rate, and the most popular landing pages. Figure out what’s working and what needs improving.

Your blog is your platform and your money maker. Try these tips to breathe new life into your neglected blog.

Looking for more blogging tips? Visit http://mcreasite.com/blog where you’ll find lots of ideas for growing your business using Internet Marketing today.

When you create and publish a new blog post on your Affiliate Marketing blog you want to get the word out as quickly as possible about it. Getting a new post indexed in the search engines helps quickly attract more organic search engine traffic to your blog. Now there’s a super fast way for you to get those new posts indexed very quickly—almost instantly in fact—so that you can start attracting more traffic to your blog. It’s got a quirky name, ‘PubSubHubBub,’ but you’ll be thrilled at what this little tool can do for your blog.

What is PubSubHubBub?

According to the pubsubhubbub page on code.google.com, it’s a, “simple, open, web-hook-based pbsub protocol & open source reference implementation.” To describe it more plainly, pubsubhubbub hooks into your existing RSS feed and pushes real-time updates to your subscribers every time your feed gets updates with new content. With pubsubhubbub your blog posts can be indexed within minutes of publication.

How do I set up pubsubhubbub on my blog?

1: Download and install the free pubsubhubbub WordPress plugin

2: Activate the plugin

Pubsubhubbub is being used already by Google Reader, Google Alerts, FriendFeed and several other RSS aggregators. It supports multiple hubs and supports all of the feed formats used by WordPress.

A good test to see how long it takes to index your next post is to publish it, wait a few moments, and then type: site:http://yoursitename.com into Google.

Using pubsubhubbub you can get your posts indexed really fast, however, in light of the recent “Google Fresh” update, you’ll want to publish lots of fresh, relevant content consistently. Here are some strategies for doing that:

Generate interactivity on your blog.

You can accomplish this by asking for comments and subscribers in every post. Interact with those who leave genuine comments that add value to the post and spark a conversation.

Create community around your topic

You might consider adding a forum to your blog where your visitors can converse amongst themselves. You should actively participate in the forum, and appoint some of the frequent visitors as administrators to keep the spam to a minimum and to keep the conversation going.

Post your social media updates on your blog as well

Add Facebook comments, install a plugin that posts your latest tweets on your blog, and share your status updates to keep a nice flow of relevant content and user-generated content.

Pubsubhubbub is a great way to sort of ‘turbo-charge,’ your RSS feed letting your audience know precisely when you are releasing new content. It represents the future of ‘push’ Marketing, which does not rely on your visitors checking in to your blog to see if you’ve posted anything new. This is critical in the competitive world of affiliate marketing. But it’s also important that you publish as much fresh content as possible to keep that valuable, organic search engine traffic coming your way.

Optimizing your affiliate marketing blog is just one of the many ways you can build your online business. Visit http://mcreasite.com/blog today to discover lots of tips and strategies for growing your business with Internet Marketing now.

Maintaining a Blog is a time consuming project to say the least, and with the recent search engine changes that have come about the demands for higher quality, fresh, relevant content have never been greater. That does not leave lots of time for all of the other tasks associated with keeping your blog afloat.

Here are seven of our favorite blogging tools that will help you to be a more productive blogger and make the most of the time and effort that you’ve got available. These tips are written from the perspective of a WordPress blogger because that’s the platform that we use and highly recommend.

1. 1.      Evernote

Evernote is free software that helps you capture information that you discover on the web and the thoughts in your head and pictures that you shoot. You can access Evernote anywhere whether on your smart phone, computer or tablet. Because everything you stash there is categorized by keyword you can find things quickly.

1. 2.      Google docs

If you use more than one computer, work in different locations, with a team or alone Google docs is a great, free tool to help manage blog operations. All you need is a Google account and you can sign up for Google docs. You get word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet software that’s accessible from anywhere you can get an Internet connection. It’s free cloud storage where you can also create blog posts, save them and access them when you need them.

1. 3.      Zemanta

Zemanta is a fabulous tool to help you kick your content development up several notches. It’s a plugin that reads and digests your text blog posts and then scours the web to find relevant images, related links, additional keywords and brings all of that to you instantly. This is a handy tool to have because it save a ton of time and puts everything you need to enhance your blog posts at your fingertips.

1. 4.      Survey Monkey

With survey monkey you can quickly and easily create your own survey so that you can ask your readers what they want from your blog and be able to give it to them. It’s a free tool that allows you to quickly create a survey and take the pulse of your blog’s following.

1. 5.      Dragon Naturally Speaking

Imagine speaking and having your computer type up your blog posts for you. Well, that’s what you get with Dragon. It’s the ultimate blogging productivity tool because unless you can already type at 100 words per minute or more, chances are Dragon can transcribe your speech faster than you can type. There’s even a free iphone app that allows you to speak and it transcribes your speech into text, which you can then email.

1. 6.      Feedburner

Feedburner supercharges your blog’s RSS feed for you. It helps you manage the subscription process, and if you have more than one blog, handling all of the feeds on Feedburner can save you lots of time.

1. 7.      Google Analytics

This powerful, free software helps you to make sense of where your blog’s traffic is coming from, how much traffic you’re getting and what keywords your visitors are using to find your blog.

*Bonus Tip* Your smart phone is a handy blogging tool when you are on the go. There’s a WordPress smart phone app that lets you post to your blog from wherever you are, you can access Evernote from your phone, snap photos and do research.

There’s eight, solid tools to help you become a blogging rock star. For more tips about growing your online business, visit http://mcreasite.com/blog today.

One of the most important aspects of improving your blog’s conversion rate is to first know what your bounce rate is, and address it if it’s too high. The Google Analytics ‘Help’ page describes bounce rate this way: “Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.” So, if a bunch of people are landing on your blog’s landing page and then clicking away without clicking anywhere or looking at any other pages on your site, they’ve just bounced.

In your analytics program, bounce rate will be expressed as a percentage. So, if your landing page has a 75% bounce rate, it means that 75 out of every 100 visitors left that page without interacting with it in any way. If your blog has a bounce rate of higher than 50 or 60%, it’s time to take a look at some of the tips below to help you bring that number down to below 50%.

• How Targeted is your traffic?
When you look at your site’s traffic sources in your analytics program, you’ll be able to discern which sources are bringing you the ‘stickiest’ traffic–that is visitors who will actually stick around and interact with your site. Track down those sources and make the most of them.

• What is the impact of design on bounce rate?
Your blog’s layout, navigation scheme, the branding and even the page’s load time will have an impact on bounce rate. If a visitor lands on your blog and has to wait too long for it to load they will click away quickly. Does your blog’s theme mesh with your content? All of these factors will have an impact on your bounce rate. You might try changing one element at a time and then testing to see the results.

• Content quality
Your blog’s content is what sets it apart from every other blog on the Internet, so if it’s not bang-on, compelling, and unique with a distinct voice and point of view, or high level of credibility and authority, visitors will be quickly clicking away. High quality, relevant content will attract targeted traffic and keep them on your site. Focus on providing the best content possible and you’ll start to see your bounce rate decline.

• Engagement
Do your visitors read your content? Do they leave comments? Do you ask them questions that invite their interaction? Does every post provide a call to action for visitors? If you want engagement you’ve got to ask for it and draw it out of your visitors by telling them what you’d like for them to do next, and soliciting their input. Become known as a thought leader, and a trusted authority in your industry and willingly share your expertise with your visitors and they will interact with you and hang around on your blog because they are receiving value.

• Internally linking your posts
If the focus of your blog is narrow and deep, you’ll cover a lot of similar ground in your posts. When you write about a topic that is related to other content on your blog create a link to that post internally. If you are running a WordPress blog there are ‘related post,’ plugins that make this easy.
If your bounce rate is higher than you’d like, don’t break a sweat. Follow these tips and watch your bounce rate decrease and your conversions increase.

Your blog bounce rate is just one of the factors of a successful blog. For more tips and strategies for building and growing your online business, visit http://mcreasite.com/blog today.