A person I admire a lot just wrote a blog post that everyone should read.
Frank Kern – who has had some personal experience with the subject he is writing about – wrote a great post about a new FTC ruling that can affect everyone who uses testimonials in their business.
For a great read and some great information, check out Frank’s post at:
http://masscontrolsite.com/blog/?p=59
PS – if you’ve heard me talk about WordPress – let me know what’s wrong with this link!
Cathy – The WordPress Wizard
On March 12 at 6PM EST, The WordPress Wizard will embark on a new adventure as a radio host. Please visit Blog Talk Radio to find out all about this new show called Social Connection Strategies. While you are there you can share it with your friends, get a reminder for the upcoming show, follow me on Twitter and lots of fun things.
Blogs are at the heart of social media but there are so many ways to make Social Connections that we will be exploring how to leverage all the social media that is available to help you Turn Your Blog Posts Into Profits.
Be sure to join me Thursday, March 12 and every Thursday after for Social Connection Strategies.
This is not an exhaustive list but I MUST have these plugins:
Vipers Video QuickTags
Tired of copying and pasting the embed HTML from sites like YouTube? Then this plugin is for you.
Just simply click one of the new buttons that this plugin adds to the write screen (rich editor included) and then paste the URL that the video is located at into the prompt box — easy as that. You can fully configure how the videos are displayed (width, height, colors, alignment on the page) and much more. Your site will even stay (X)HTML valid unlike with the code provided by most video sites.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/vipers-video-quicktags/
Share This
The ShareThis WordPress plugin provides a quick, simple to use, and unobtrusive way for users to add your post to many social bookmarking sites, or to send your post link via email, AIM, Facebook, MySpace and more.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/share-this/
Dean’s FCKEditor For WordPress
This plugin Replaces the default WordPress editor with FCKeditor.
FCKeditor is an open source WYSIWYG text editor ,brings to the web much of the power of desktop editors like Read More→
Finally – a WordPress Membership plugin that works. I’ve used them all and none have worked. You might expect that I’d be a bit skeptical about yet another one. The difference is that my friend Stu McLaren and his techie (and all around good guy) friend, Tracy Childers developed it. Oh yeah – and IT WORKS!
I have shamelessly stolen part of his page because no words describe this plugin better than Stu’s.
Features Include:
Unlimited Membership Levels
Your membership site can have as many “levels” as you want. So if you want “Silver”, “Gold” and “Platinum”, you can! Now you can charge more for a higher level of access – all within the same blog.
Simple Installation With New or Existing WordPress Blog
Whether you have an existing WordPress site or if you are starting a new one, installing WishList Member is a breeze. Just unzip the file, upload to your “plugins folder” and activate.
Flexible Membership Options
WishList Member gives you the ability to create Free, Trial or Paid membership levels (and any combination of all three).
Sequential Content Delivery
Depending on your setup, you may want to graduate your members from one level to the next. For example, members start at “Module 1? and after 30 days they are automatically upgraded to “Module 2?. That’s what the Sequential Content Delivery system is for
Control Viewed Content
If you don’t want your members to see content they don’t have access to, just click the “Hide” button. This works REALLY well if you have a “modular” membership and only want people in “Module 1? to see “Module 1? and not “Module 2,3,4,5? etc.
Shopping Cart Integration
WishList Member seamlessly integrates with the most popular shopping cart systems including PayPal, ClickBank, Google Checkout and many more. Plus, WishList Member now has total integration with 1ShoppingCart.
Easy Member Management
At a glance you can see your members, their registration status, membership level and much more. It’s also a snap to upgrade members, move them to different levels, “pause” their membership or delete them entirely.
Multi-Level Access
WishList Member can go beyond just a membership site as you can easily give your members access to multiple levels within your membership (this works well if you’d like to create a central download location).
Total Content Protection
WishList Member gives you the ability to determine exactly what your members can access. You can even drill down and grant access to specific posts, pages, categories and comments for each membership level. The possibilities are endless!
Secure RSS Feeds
Secure RSS feeds allow your members to view their membership material in their favorite RSS reader. But, it also gives you complete control – non-members can’t access the feed and if a person stops paying, their feed automatically stops working.
Subscription Length Control
With this feature you can control the length of time each member has access to your membership site. Now you can automatically expire a membership after 3 days, 7 days or whatever time period you want.
Login Redirection
If you would like to control the first page your members see when they login, now you can. The best part is, you can have a different redirection page for each membership level. It’s perfect for adding welcome messages, updates, news and so much more.
“Sneak Peak” Content Display
Protecting your content is extremely easy because everything after the “more” tag is automatically protected for members only. So an eye-grabbing post title, combined with a compelling opening paragraph is more than enough to wet the appetite of non-members!
Custom Error Pages
When a person tries to access content they don’t have permission to view, they will be taken to an error page. Now you can determine what that page will be. This gives you the chance to encourage them to register or upgrade to a different membership level.
Partial Content Display
Let’s say you want the majority of a post to be displayed for non-members except for one sentence. With the Partial Content Display feature you can hide that “secret sentence” so that it only displays the “secret sentence” for your members. It’s very cool
Much, Much More!
WishList Member has a wide variety of additional features that expand the way you can use WordPress to build and grow your membership site. Plus, we’re always adding more based on suggestions from our customers.
So – if you have, as I have, been waiting for a WordPress plugin to create a great and complete membership site, check out WPWishlist.
The WordPress Wizard blog is now listed in Alltop. What is Alltop? Here is who they are in their own words – Alltop is an “online magazine rack” of popular topics. Tell us what you’re interested in, and we’ll bring you stories from the best websites and blogs on the topic. All the topics, all the time.
Check out the listing here – http://wordpress.alltop.com/
Cool! The WordPress Wizard is NEWS!
Please read my post over on Alex Mandossian’s blog. I wrote about repurposing your content into blog posts. Don’t be stuck for posting ideas. Look at what you’ve already written and turn it into one or many posts. Do this over an over again and you have much fodder for your blog!
It’s almost here – Blogging With WordPress in a Web 2.0 World!
Registration will be opening soon but in the meantime, go to WordPress2.0 to get notified when registration opens as well as getting a few free goodies just for being interested.
This is going to be a great class. More details will be released over the next few weeks but get on the notification list because seating for this class will be limited.
In a word – gobs! Articles and blogs go hand in hand. You can drive traffic to your blog through your articles. You can repurpose articles into several blog posts. You can take several similar topic blog posts and craft an article from them.
My friend, Jeff Herring, over at The Great Article Marketing Blog has a great blurb on submitting articles to article directories and is it a waste of time in his post titled Article Marketing Tip of the Week. (Hint – it is not.)
Go check it out for some excellent, realistic advice on articles, directories, and blogs.
Here are the links I promised on the Wizard Weekly call.
Dean’s FCKEditor -
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/fckeditor-for-wordpress-plugin/
I know I said GoDaddy is the one with MCE problems but what I read was that it is ‘primarily’ GoDaddy. One of our listeners had the same MCE problem and he is NOT on GoDaddy. So – if you lose your editing icons and ‘Use The Visual Editor’ is checked in Users -> My Account, get this editor plugin.
The Advance Tiny MCE Editor is at – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tinymce-advanced/
I still prefer this one because it is so cool but if you lose editing icons altogether, use the first one!
Here is the WordPress link for WP-Sticky – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-sticky/
It might be easier to find here than at LesterChan.net. Both are the same plugin.
And don’t forget to check out the new Google Keyword tool. See the previous post for that one.
Enjoy!
Register here and if you have a WordPress question, ask it and I'll either answer it personally or on the blog. AND I'll send you the WordPress Site Security Whitepaper
Just being on your list becomes an ongoing education. Your help has been vital as I begin my transition to all WordPress All the time (and blogs/websites).
— Tom Justin – Your Inner Wizard
Great work!
Be sure to watch to the end to see me 'fly' off the screen.
Seth Godin on Commenting
I love Seth Godin – do you? He has a stellar post today over at Seth’s Blog.
It’s called Ignore Your Critics. When I saw the title I thought – ‘How timely! I’m teaching a class this Tuesday on Your Commenting Strategy.’ My advice is always to ignore your critics so I decided I must be on the right track.
Seth, being Seth, put a new spin on it. He also talks about your fans. What? Ignore you fans? How can you build a community if you ignore your fans?
I can’t say it better than he did so here’s a quote from his blog.
“Your fans don’t want you to change, your fans want you to maintain the essence of what you bring them but add a laundry list of features. You fans want lower prices and more contributions, bigger portions and more frequent deliveries.
So, who should you listen to?
Your sneezers.
You should listen to the people who tell the most people about you. Listen to the people who thrive on sharing your good works with others. If you delight these people, you grow.”
See why I love Seth Godin? He always has a slightly better way of looking at and explaining things. I will definitely incorporate some of his thoughts in my class Tuesday. Thanks Seth!
I’d like to invite you to take a look and consider enrolling in this Commenting Strategy class. One night for less than the cost of 1 press release and your ideas about commenting will be drastically changed and surely profitable.
Cathy Perkins, The WordPress Wizard