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Wordpress is my CMS and blog platform of choice.  I have tried a lot of different programs in the past, Geeklog, Drupal, Joomala, and even PHP-Nuke.  However the power and simplicity of Wordpress has made it the one for me.

Here is a list of the plugins that I install on EVERY site that I start either for myself or for a friend.

1. Add-Sig – This addon is great for adding a signature to every post.  I put in my twitter link, a reminder to add my feed at the bottom of every post.  Remember to keep it short though, you don’t want your signature to over-whelm your visitors.
2. All in One SEO Pack – If you are going to do nothing else for SEO, install this plugin and use it.  This plugin allows you to give every post its own title and meta information.
3. Google Analytics for Wordpress – This is the easiest way to add your site to Google Analytics without having to modify your theme.  This plugin also gives you the ability to NOT track the information of the admin which will give you a better idea of the traffic on your site when you are starting out.
4. Google Sitemap Generator – Google loves its sitemaps.  I know I said above that if you did nothing else for SEO you should use the All in One SEO Pack, well you should install this too.  With this you just have it install it, and every time you make a post it will add it to a XML sitemap that Google will use to hopefully index your site.
5. Contact Form – One of the things that Wordpress doesn’t have built in is a good contact form.  This plugin will allow you to add a contact form and allow your readers to get in contact with you, without you having to worry about making email public….if you’re worried about that sort of thing.
6. Twitter Widget – You’re on Twitter….right?  Well if you are and you have a Wordpress blog you know that the widgets that they have suck.  This plugin gives you a widget that will match your theme and allow your readers to see what you have been talking about on Twitter.
7. What would Seth Godin Do? – Seth Godin once said in his blog that you should use cookies to ensure that visitors to your site get a unique experience.  This plugin allows you to give first-time visitors to your site a special message.  With this message you can welcome them, point them to other great posts, and tell them where to go next.
8. Wordpress Super Cache – So you just started a blog and you are wondering why you need a caching system.  Well be positive, your blog will be popular enough and if you get a huge traffic spike you want to be sure that your site can handle it.  So install it, test it, and be ready for everything.
9. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin  – This plugin puts a list of past posts that you have made with the same tags as the one that your visitor is reading.  This gives the blog more stickiness so that your visitor has somewhere else to go when they finish reading the post that got them there.

These are my must have plugins for every wordpress installation.  What are some plugins that you would recommend for all wordpress users, or how about alternatives to the ones that I have listed here.

We are getting ready to go on vacation again.  We are going to the magnificent San Francisco.  I say again but it really has been a long time since I got out of town for fun.

I was supposed to give everyone an update regarding my foray into the Ebay Affiliate Network, unfortunately I was extremely busy with other commitments and was not able to actively pursue it.  However on the advice of a friend, I was told not to stop the adwords campaigns that I was using to drive traffic, but to limit them to something like a dollar.

SIDETHOUGHT

When you go to change the budget on your adwords campaign, don’t do it when you are in a rush and when you do take the time to do it check it twice before and after hitting submit.

When I went to change everything to $1, I accidently changed it to $100 daily, luckily I checked it the next day and only screwed myself one day. 

/SIDETHOUGHT

Even with that blunder however I should end the month by breaking even over the start of the year.  I am starting to convert the traffic that I am receiving which really looks nice on the graph.

Next Step

When I get back from my extended time offline I have a few things in mind that I want to pursue.  One is to expand my network of ebay affiliate sites.  I have a few horizontal niches that I want to test out.

I am also playing with ideas surrounding my profession and have started developing training programs.  With these I hope to have a product that I can actively sell while enhancing my professional brand.  This is something that I will take my time developing as it is more important at this stage to maintain the brand that I have developed than to tarnish it.

When the Time Comes

But really that all is going to have to wait till my rest is over.  I only have one more week before I am back at the grind.  Today we go to Alcatraz and see if we could have figured out a way to escape.

The kicker is that I am failing, not miserably mind you, but I am not getting the return on the investment that I am looking for.  Not so much on the money side as that is doing fine, it is more the time versus profit investment, and to make the matters worse I don’t see that it will get better over time.

So what does that say, well try something else.

Might seem weird that I am switching gears again after not even 2 months of trying out the whole Ebay Affiliate marketing thing, but it just doesn’t seem to be working for me at the moment. 

I recently read The Dip by Seth Godin, and an interview of him by the CEO of seesmic.com (cool idea but not quite there yet) and Seth Godin mentioned that the reason that he is not on Twitter is that he couldn’t be the best at it so he decided not to try it out.  In The Dip he mentions a similar thing about the importance of being the BEST in the world at whatever you do.  This world is not necessarily the Earth, but what ever niche that you are involved in.  For example, if you have $500 to spend on a camera, you are going to go out and find the best camera that you can for $500.  You are not going to go out and buy the 3rd best, that would not make sense.

So what do that mean to me, well it means that I have to put more emphasis on the niches that I am going to be interested in for the long term and that will allow me to become the best purveyor of whatever that I want.

I am still going to be involved in my recently made ebay affiliate sites and try to make them profitable, but that will be played out as more of a diversion rather than a main study.  I already have ideas of what my new site and content that I am going to build into my new business.

I am not sure why I’m not doing it, but I am sure that I should be.  Then a buddy pointed me towards this older post, Do it Fucking Now from SEOBlackHat and was thinking.  I really should be doing  a lot more than I am, but I feel like I am spinning my wheels.  I have made very little progress in the month of January, and I am not exactly sure where I should be moving on from there.

So now what am I going to do?

Well I am just going to do IT!!   What am I going to do?  Well that is a question that I can’t really answer that, but I am going to do SOMETHING every day.  No matter what it is, I am going to do something that will bring me a step closer to my $5000 / month before tax profit.  It may be just researching a niche, getting some ideas on content, sites, maintenance, etc. 

The point is to do something.

If you are spinning your wheels, then try changing gears.  Every little step makes a difference.

So what is it, that you are going to be doing to reach your goals no matter what it is.  Let me know in the comments.

 

 

 

I was just about to get pissed with my current web host.  A host that I have been using for a few years now, and that I changed to, after flipping from service to service. 

Hostgator has had a few hiccups over the time that I started with them to where they are now.  They have grown and acquired tremendously, and typically you would think that the customer service would decline. 

The last few times that I have talked to the live chat I have noticed a decrease in their ability to help me out.  More and more they are simply trying to get me off the line and to send in a ticket.  In the “olden days” the live chat peeps would put in the ticket for me at the least, and in some cases I had them go and FIND someone to fix it while I was chatting.  That type of service is amazing.

Problems in Hosting Paradise

Fast forward to a couple of days ago, I noticed the other day that Fantastico still hadn’t been updated with Wordpress 2.7 for this domain.  This was important since I tried out 2.7 on a couple of my other sites that I manually install on and I found it was a HUGE improvement(You can search, and install plugins from the admin area AWESOME !!!) ,so when I had a free moment I logged onto the live chat to see what was up.  Here is the transcript from December 28, 2008:

(2:37:24 PM) Joseph Ve: has entered the chat.

(2:37:40 PM) Joseph Ve: We currently don’t have an ETA on the next Fantastico update

(2:37:56 PM) Joseph Ve: Until then you will have to either manually install or upgrade Wordpress

(2:37:57 PM) Jeff: Any guess?

(2:38:11 PM) Jeff: 2.7 has been out for a month

(2:38:51 PM) Joseph Ve: Really can’t tell ya. We’d have to roll it out to all of our shared servers (five or six hundred of em)

(2:39:25 PM) Jeff: Fair, but isn’t it a security risk to have so many out of date scripts installed?

(2:40:36 PM) Joseph Ve: If there was a serious security flaw in the older version of Wordpress that comprimised the safety of our hosting plan, we would roll it out asap

(2:41:33 PM) Jeff: Alright, I will have to upgrade manually

(2:41:39 PM) Jeff: Cheers, Jeff

(2:41:43 PM) Joseph Ve: Okay, take care and have a great day!

(2:41:44 PM) Joseph Ve: Thank you for using HostGator Live Chat. If you could take a minute to rate your experience with HostGator as well as my overall performance, that would help us to improve our customer service. To do that, just click the button that says Rate and Exit in the upper right hand corner. The survey takes less than a minute to fill out.

Twitter to the Rescue

So needless to say I wasn’t very pleased with the outcome of this. 

But I wasn’t going to kick up a stir yet, I am too busy.  I didn’t write a post about it, I didn’t t Twitter or bitch about them on the forums, I simply left a response on that stupid survey conveying the lack of usefulness that I got out of the live chat.

But out of the blue someone at hostgator contacted me on twitter.  So I replied to them and told them what was up.

This is when it got fast and the customer service experience got a lot better.  I told me the domain that I needed fixed and they GOT IT DONE.

 

When I asked why this was not something that could have been fix eariler.

HostGator Redeemed….For Now

So there you have it.  I should have got the service that I felt was deserved from Joesph (see above) when I went to get some help with the Fantastico service on my account.  It wasn’t done not because they have to do them all at once and they have a lot of servers, (Joseph Ve: Really can’t tell ya. …five or six hundred of em) or that it is controlled by Fantastico.  It wasn’t done because they didn’t want to put in the ticket, either they didn’t know how (doubtful) or didn’t want to.

I feel that when I put in the horrible review that I did after my online chat session, it flagged something.  Not sure how they figured out that I was the right guy though.  Maybe they just searched my email that I sent the survey from.  But going those extra few steps to contact me vis Twitter, and try to remedy the situation.  This puts me back in the good books and prevents me from starting my search for an alternative host.