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My Favorite WordPress Plugins

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Would you believe this blog is almost 2 years old?

I do find that hard to believe.  I thought for sure I would get bored and forget about it after the first 3 months.  But sure enough, I checked the archives over on the right side of the screen and it says my first post was July 2008.

I thought it was interesting that in all of my years of blogging (ok, next month I can officially say “years”) I haven’t really written anything for other bloggers to help them get started with their own blogs.  I guess it’s because I still don’t consider myself a real “blogger” but after 2 years and lots of positive feedback I guess I must be doing something right.

A few days ago someone emailed me looking for help setting up a new blog.  They bought a domain, installed WordPress, and picked out a theme.  Now the adventure begins as they try to figure out what to with their blog.

I thought I would share some of the suggestions I am making to him by posting them here on my blog so everyone can benefit from them.

So, first up… plugins!  I love plugins.  They are what makes WordPress so awesome.  Here are the list of plugin I have installed on my blog:

Akismet – Essential spam blocker.  Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.

All in One Adsense and YPN – Inserts Adsense or YPN code in to your blog posts.

All in One SEO Pack – Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog.

Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.

RSS Power Plus – This plugin will, when a new post is published, submit the rss feed for this post only (not the entire domains feed) to the configured RSS Aggregators websites, including where applicable the tags used in the post.

SEO Friendly Images – Automatically adds alt and title attributes to all your images. Improves traffic from search results and makes them W3C/xHTML valid as well.

ShareThis – Let your visitors share a post/page with others. Supports e-mail and posting to social bookmarking sites.

Smart 404 – Rescue your viewers from site errors! When content cannot be found, Smart 404 will use the current URL to attempt to find matching content, and redirect to it automatically. Smart 404 also supplies template tags which provide a list of suggestions, for use on a 404.php template page if matching content can’t be immediately discovered.

Sociable – Automatically add links on your posts, pages and RSS feed to your favorite social bookmarking sites.

TweetMyBlog! – Updates your twitter account with each new post to your blog.

Tweet This – Adds a “Tweet This Post” link to every post and page. Shortens URLs. Can automatically tweet new and scheduled blog posts. Highly customizable.

Ultimate Google Analytics – Enable Google Analytics on your blog. Has options to also track external links, mailto links and links to downloads on your own site.

WordPress Plugin Alternatives – Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks.

WP Auto Tagger – Automatically finds tags based on your post content.

Got any other suggestions?  Feel free to post them in the comments.

6 Steps To Creating a Killer Squeeze Page

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Now that we have all the safelists and giveaway stuff out of the way let’s get back to the list building.

My last post showed you how to get a product to give away to get people to join your list.

Do you have a product, yet?

Good.

Ok, I know you probably don’t have one yet but i’m going to keep going so you can come back to that step when you are ready. Until then, I want to show you how to create your own squeeze page that you will use to promote your product and build your list.

Just to get it out of the way, a lead capture page and a squeeze page are the same thing.  They are webpages which contain a piece of code from your autoresponder that are designed for one purpose… to get people on your list.

There are 5 things that make up a good squeeze page:

1. A Killer Headline – The purpose of your headline is to get your visitor to read the rest of your page.  Getting the perfect headline takes a lot of practice. Check out: http://www.copyblogger.com for some great tips to improving your copy writing skills.

2. An Eye Catching Graphic – A picture is worth 1000 words.  Having some kind of graphics on your page can really help your page stand out.  You can get access to all sorts of stock photography that you can use from sites like: http://www.istockphoto.com

3. List of Benefits – Your squeeze page should include a list outlining 3 to 5 of
the benefits of your product.  Notice I said “benefits” and not “features”.  If
you don’t know the difference do a google search for “features vs. benefits”.

4. A Call To Action – Now that you have your reader’s attention you need to tell them what to do.  “Fill out the form to get your copy now”.  It sounds  obvious but it makes a big difference if you don’t do it.

5. Your Autoresponder Code – Of course.  Just copy and paste the code from your autoresponder into the page where you want it to appear.

6. The Privacy Disclaimer – Just another way to ensure people that you won’t abuse their email address if they fill out your form.  It’s been proven that if you don’t include this you will definitely get fewer sign-ups.

Here’s a sample:
http://www.safelisttactics.com/jv.htm

Now that you know all the components that go into a squeeze page you probably want to know how to build one…

Personally, I like to make my own from scratch.  I have my own website and I use a free html editor to make my own pages.  For less than $10/month there is so much you can do with webhosting.  If you don’t have your own webhosting I use Servage but there are plenty of good hosts to choose from.

But even if you have hosting you still might not feel comfortable enough to make your own web page.  For that I offer several solutions.

1. Instant Bonus Page – I already posted something about this.  You can make bonus pages for free but if you upgrade you will get access to one of the most simple squeeze page makers around. Highly recommended.

2. AdKreator – This site is great.  It let’s you make stunning graphic  advertisements without having learn complicated programs like Photoshop.   There’s upgraded membership option that gives you the ability to make your own squeeze pages which is well worth the price.

3. TE Toolbox – TE Toolbox has a variety of free Internet marketing tools including a basic squeeze page maker.  While not quite as powerful as the other two squeeze page makers it’s not a bad option.

That all for now.

Are we having fun yet?

Great!  Because next I am going to share with you my all time favorite website which will give you access to all sorts of free tools that you can use to make  money with your list.

See you soon!

How To Get Your Own Free Giveaway Product

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Welcome back to part 4 of my money making series.

Did you read the book I posted a few days ago?

http://getrichwithjerry.com/downloads/imsf.htm

Good!

Now that you know all the benefits of building your list i’m going to start  getting into some of the nitty gritty details.

Ready?

The first thing you are going to need to entice people to join your list is some kind of bait. Bait doesn’t sound very nice though.  Think of it more as an “ethical bribe”.  The idea is to find something to give away that would be of interest to your target audience.

Let’s say you are selling a Twitter training video.  To attract your target audience you might want to give away some kind of product related to social marketing.  You probably wouldn’t want to give away something about SEO or article marketing because even though it’s Internet marketing related it doesn’t tie in directly with your main product.

The easiest way to do this is to take a free ebook that you found somewhere else and use that as your freebie.  Make sure you actually have permission from the author of the ebook before you decide to use it as a free giveaway.

You can find a nice collection of free rebrandable ebooks at Viral Ebook Explosion:

http://getrichwithjerry.com/recommends/vee

The advantage to using someone else’s product as your free gift is that it takes almost no work.  However if you want to build credibility with your subscribers eventually you are going to want to make your own.

Creating your own product isn’t nearly as difficult as it sounds.  All you need is a decent word processor such as of Microsoft Word or Open Office Writer and something to write about.  Both of these programs have the ability to export anything you write into a pdf file which is the format that most ebooks are distributed in.

It only takes a few hours of research on Google or YouTube to become an expert on almost any subject.  Well, maybe not an expert… but you can certainly learn enough to create an ebook that people would want to download.  Especially if that ebook solves some kind of problem that your  reader is having.

You’re not limited to just ebooks either.  You can do audio products and video too.  You can actually spend about 20 minutes in front of a microphone and have your very own unique product with very little effort.

So how do you send your gift to your subscribers when they sign-up?

If you have your own hosting the obvious answer is to upload it to your site and then send your subscribers the link to go download it.

If you don’t have your own hosting then I suggest using Instant Bonus Page.

Instant Bonus Page is a site that lets you create a download page that you can send to your subscribers which includes a link for them to download your gift.  It also puts some “bonus” offers on your page that you can use to make a
little extra cash at the same time.

Instant Bonus Page is free to use and it’s also really easy to setup.  Here’s the link:

http://getrichwithjerry.com/recommends/ibp

The next step is to put together a lead capture page or “squeeze page” which is the page you will promote that builds your list.  Of course that’s going to have to wait until later…

So keep checking back here or subscribe at the top of the page to get some of my best sources for building your own awesome lead capture pages.

See ya!

Jerry Iannucci

PS – When you join Instant Bonus Page you’ll see an offer for an amazing point-and-click lead capture system.  If you want a dead simple way to make your own squeeze pages and you don’t have your own website make sure you check it out.

InstantBonusPage