WordPress Plugins

Making your WordPress Site More Social

Social Media Advisors, Social Media Training, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Tutorials

We all hear the importance of social media and why you need to have a strong presence in it. We know that there are sites like Facebook, Twitter, & YouTube and other social networks. Many times though we want to see what type of results these social networks are sending in traffic to your sites.

As I mentioned recently in a post, we need to be more social and less media with our social media marketing efforts. But, for those of you looking for cold hard facts to prove that you are not in a giant vortex of time wasting I have some stats for you. Currently, our site is averaging around 30% of our traffic directly from social media platforms. We still are seeing a huge section from search engines and referring sites, but our number of clicks from various social platforms like Twitter and Facebook are increasing rapidly. Because of the increased success, I wanted to share a few things you can do to make your site more social and easy for readers to distribute your content out to social media platforms.

Since I have a fond love for WordPress Sites, here are a few plugins that can be used on your site to increase it’s socialness. (yes, I just made my own word up)

Facebook Share- This plugin has played a huge role in our content being shared. I purposefully placed this plugin at the top right of my posts to make it in eyesight the minute you visit a page. Several of our posts have received well over 40 shares. The average person on Facebook has well over 100 friends. That means that my simple post has just been given the opportunity of being viewed by over 4,000 people!
Twitter Retweet- There are several different buttons that can be used for Twitter sharing of your blog posts. I like the Tweetmeme button personally. Once again our posts are being tweeted well over 40-50 times. Recently, a post I wrote about Google Instant was tweeted by Chris Brogan. Currently he has over 158,000 followers on twitter. His one tweet placed my post in front of all those eyes. Not to mention that his tribe that read the post and liked it then tweeted it out too. This button gets placed at the top of my post right with the Facebook Share for optimum exposure.
Facebook Like- This plugin gets overlooked many times because it doesn’t place a fancy graphic on the person’s feed and a link. But what it does do is place a link that says the name of your post on their Facebook profile. If that is done by 70-80 people this will also drive traffic to your site. I place this plugin at the bottom of my posts to give everyone one more reminder to share stuff they enjoyed.
Sexy Bookmarks- This is a personal favorite of mine. This plugin simply rocks. I liked it so much I actually wrote about it before here. On a side note, they are also a company that uses social media well as they were recently named our Social Media Winner of the Week. The reason I enjoy this plugin is that it opens up endless possibilities for your content to be shared. With a simple click of a button at the bottom of a post your blog post can be shared with over 90 different social media platforms. Included in that list is Google Reader, Posterous, LinkedIn, Email, and so many others. Half of them I have never even heard of!

I have no doubts that the reason I have seen the recent increases in traffic from social media platforms is being caused by these four plugins above. The other major reason for an increase in traffic from these sources is the involvement of both myself and by business partner on the various platforms.

If these plugins are implemented along with the proper use of a social media marketing strategies, you will see a great increase in traffic to your site. The one point that cannot be overlooked in this entire blog post is the previous statement. You have to be using social media platforms like Twitter & Facebook in the ways they were intended and not just spamming others. Remember, installing the plugins is the easy part. Getting consumers to visit your site and use the social plugins willingly is the tough part.

photo credit-ahisgett

Scheduling Your Blog Week in Only a Few Hours

How To Blog, Social Media Advisors, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Tutorials

We do a lot of coaching with clients on how to start a blog and writing effective blog posts for SEO. Whenever I start the process of teaching the client how to do so, usually am met by the comment “I don’t have time” excuse, that I have to tackle instantly. Don’t get me wrong, I know writing blog posts can be time consuming, especially in the beginning when you are just starting. However, I always share that if you can set aside only 2-3 hours on a weekend while watching football, you can have a productive blog. Here’s how:

Before venturing into the world of WordPress, I used to share with clients to just place the posts into draft mode and then on Monday, Wednesday, & Friday Morning to just take a post and send it live. Then spend the rest of the day and a half just responding to the comments. For someone who is new to blogging, this is a good strategy because you are getting new content released every other day and starting to get you a build up of content which helps immensely with SEO.

Then I moved to the world of WordPress which helps make this strategy even easier. When you write inside WordPress, they have a scheduling function built inside the program. That means I can write this post on Saturday afternoon and schedule it to release on Monday Morning at 10:32 AM. By doing so, this means my post will now go live at that time and I don’t have to even be near my computer. In fact, I am nowhere around when this post went live in all actuality. I am out right now on a golf course doing my best impression of “lefty” Phil Mickelson. This is just one of many reasons why WordPress Rocks!

So give the scheduling function of WordPress a try if you never have before. It is a wonderful feature especially if you are on vacation, on the golf course, or tied up with clients. To your readers, they will never know the difference! 🙂

Social Media Plugins- SexyBookmarks

Social Media Advisors, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Tutorials

We are starting another series of posts today on the various plugins that are our personal favorites on our WordPress blog. Jason & I get asked often what are the best social media plugins for social media, so we thought this series might be helpful to many of you. The first plugin that is going to be discussed today is probably the one we get ask about the most often.

People are constantly using our chat with us function in our side bar to ask, “What is that social media plugin at the bottom of your posts? The one with all the little icons for various social media platforms.” The name of that plugin is SexyBookmarks by Shareaholic. The reason I really like this social media plugin is that it adds the slightest bit of animation to the bottom of each post. When you hover over any of the icons at the bottom of a post, they slide up and down making them stand out. Also, it has a great amount of customization.

With offering close to 90 different sharing services, you can enable just about any possible network sharing you wish. There are many that I have never even heard of! You can select all, the most popular, or customize to which services you want to show up to your audience. Some of my favorites other than your standard social networking sites include: Posterous, RSS, Google Reader, Gmail, FriendFeed, & Ping.fm.

Social Media Plugin- The technical side of installation SexyBookmarks

Like most of your plugins for WordPress, you can add this one onto your posts automatically by visiting the plugin library at WordPress and searching for SexyBookmarks. Or, if you prefer to install things via FTP, you can download SexyBookmarks here.

Once you install SexyBookmarks & activate the plugin, you will then need to visit your settings section of your dashboard and customize the plugin. This is where you choose which pages or posts you want SexyBookmarks to show up on, which services you want to activate, the title you want displayed, whether you want the links to be no followed, and if you want a specific URL shortener used for tracking.

In some instances you might be require to fix the “spritgen.” To do this, simply login to your site via FTP, locate the file within your plugin folder and then find the spritegen file. Right click on it and select to change permissions. Set them to 777 and save. Once you do this, your file will now be activated & ready to be used.

SexyBookmarks needs to fix:

The one thing that really annoys me when I am setting up this plugin for a client is that the most popular list is really not the most popular sites for here in the USA. The one that really blows my mind is that Facebook, the social media 800 LB gorilla is not chosen when you click most popular. I wish that they could at least add Facebook and a few others onto that list.

Summary of Social Media Plugin SexyBookmarks

There really isn’t anything else with the social media plugin that I would want to change. I think it is a great plugin that is powerful, looks great, and performs wonderfully. Now that I have shared with you how it works and what it does, feel free to go to the bottom of this post and test it out! Use any of the buttons below to share this post on your favorite social media platform. Of course, once you do, make sure you leave a comment telling us which one you used!