June 1st, 2009 by Michelle Moore

Something I’ve noticed over the last year is that there is no shortage of “ultimate” WordPress plug-in lists floating around. So why have I created another one? Simple – because the other thing I’ve noticed is that most of these lists are created by AdSense bloggers. Folks who are blogging for dollars using Adsense have a different goal than, say, a person who is blogging to create personal branding or corporate buzz. These folks don’t need 6 ways to impose Adsense ads, or disguise affiliate links. They need a different set of tools.

Getting Better Social Media Mileage Out Of WordPress

There are a handful of plug-ins that go into every blog I put up, whether it’s one of my blogs or a blog for a client. These are social media related plugins that make it a snap to share articles, create bookmarks, and generate buzz.

The first and most basic of these are the social bookmarking links - those little icons at the end of every article that are designed to remind you to add this article to your Delicious bookmarks or post it to Sphinn or Digg or Technorati or Yahoo Buzz or… well, you get the idea. The reason I add this type of tool has pretty much nothing to do with expecting readers to use it – it has more to do with reminding bloggers that they are their own best promoters. There’s not a blogger alive who doesn’t load up the finished article to admire it when it’s posted. Ok, so go bookmark the thing yourself and get the ball rolling. Additionally, these types of tools are so widespread that not having one installed is a disservice to the readers who have come to rely on those links instead of browser plugins (which slow the browser down).

Bookmarking plugins I can recommend:
Social Bookmarking RELOADED
Add to Any: Share, Bookmark, Email
Damn Sexy Bookmarks
Sociable

The next set of “socializing” tools I install covers things like status updates and article distribution. If you are even in the earliest stages of pervasive SEO, you should be working at least two blogs (one self-hosted and the other free), a Twitter account, and Facebook/MySpace/LinkedIn. One of the most basic steps you can take to simplify your pervasive updates is to “connect” some of these accounts to each other so that they share updates. There are tons of  Twitter badges floating around but with the right plugins, you can do more than just demonstrate that you’re connected to the Twitterverse… For example, Twitter Tools will allow you to share updates – you can tweet your blogs and/or blog your tweets.  Twitter Friends will let you display a block of your Twitter Followers in a widget, to demonstrate the quality of your following. Dandy ID services lets you create an aggregatation of all your social networking identities which can be displayed easily through a WordPress widget, allowing your readers to quickly hit your other social accounts to see what all you’re up to. With a tool like Easy Twitter Links, you can automatically share the Twitter love – this tool recognizes @ tags and # hashtags and links to them for you, so you can interconnect with other Twitter users.

Twitter Tools
Twitter Friends
Easy Twitter Links
Dandy ID

There is also a list of general purpose tools that no WordPress installtion should be without. These tools cover most of the basics required for good SEO and link circulation, which are essential for getting the best mileage out of your articles. The most basic of these tools are the SEO enhancement tools, which give you the ability to customize meta data, title tags, headlines and other things in your articles without just repeating the settings for the main blog page itself. Then there are tools designed to provide things like robots.txt files and XML site maps which automatically update with the permalinks for your new articles. And no blog is complete without a set of tools designed to spread the word AND return the favor when this happens… My basic WordPress toolkit always includes the following essentials:

All in One SEO
Google XML Sitemaps
Comment Luv
Yet Another Related Post Plugin
MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer

Comment Luv embraces the circular linking that is the reason people blog… use this tool to make sure your blog embraces the notion of offering titled links to other blog writers who take the time to leave comments for you. YARPP allows you the chance to publicize yourself a little more by including a list of other related articles at the end of a post. A “ping optimizer” is a tool that controls how often your blog pings  out that it’s been updated – while I can’t say I particularly like the marketing emails I get from MaxBlogPress every week, I do value this plugin’s ability to make sure that while I’m correcting my typos, I’m not spamming the ping servers with every single article update.

The plugins for SEO and XML sitemaps are usually essential to anyone who wants to get indexed properly. You don’t have to use these specific tools, but if you are not using a theme that gives you some control over SEO customization on a per-article basis, you should install some sort of SEO management tool. If you aren’t manually generating sitemaps with links to your permalinks, you should be using an automated XML sitemap generator. Using both these tools will make your life a little easier. The XML sitemap tool might be called a “Google” sitemap generator, but the auther does also provide updating for MSN, Ask and Yahoo.

Remember, WordPress is a pretty powerful platform, but part of that power resides in the massive user support provide through all these nifty, cool plugins. Don’t foget to think about the ultimate goal for your blog and then go research appropriate plugins to help you acheive that goal.

April 22nd, 2009 by Michelle Moore

For me, the realization came after noticing that one particular person I followed seemed to Tweet 200 times a day and ALL the tweets were relevant, timely, and COOL. ” Who has this kind of time?”

No one does. But they have tools.

Be warned, the following practice is not to be entered into lightly! It’s really easy to cross the line from informative info stream to senseless spamming. If you are building a reputation as a personal-touch sort of personality, this may actually damage your online reputation. Choose your tactics with care. However, if you have some secret aresenal of blog content, RSS feeds that you never miss, sources of info that are so cutting edge that you wish you could tell everyone to read them… well, here’s how you do exactly that using your Twitter account and become a resource-beacon among the tweet traffic.

First, choose four of your bestest, most favoritest RSS feeds ever… not your own blogs, but other people’s feeds. Do you have a link to an awesome Photoshop site that’s so far off the beaten path that no one knows about it? Is there a trend feed in your iGoogle dashboard that’s instrumental in helping you plan your marketing strategy? Did you promise your followers that you would inform them of anything having to do with Emperor Penguins?(hint: use a Google Alert on this one.)  Choose carefully and don’t overdo it.

Second, set up an account with TwitterFeed.com for your Twitter account. Once your TwitterFeed account is established, you then have the ability to tell it what RSS feeds you want to keep track of, how often to check it, and how many posts you want to pull at a time. As you put this info in, you can also choose a URL shortener, which I simply find amusing. All of my feeds use different URL shorteners, just cuz I can. You can also chose whether to show titles only, descriptions only, or however much of both will fit in a Tweet.  You can also preface each feed with something, like “Reading Newsletters:” or “From the PSGuru” to indicate that what follows is not originating with you, but is info you want to share from another resource. Don’t mislead the Tweeps by pretending that this is all your wisdom.

Third,  sit back and monitor your feeds. Do Not Forget This Step! If you make a mistake in the frequency or number of topics you grab, you can easily annoy the bejeezus out of everyone who’s following you and destory your follower list.

Fourth, and optional, if you use WordPress, install the TwitterTools plug in. Not only do you get sidebar widget Twitter list capability for your blog, this tool will also re-cap all your tweets for the week and post them in a blog new article for you. This gives you a nice, easy way to summarize for extra blog content, and an easy way for you review the info stream you’re sending out and see if it needs modification (remove that feed, reduce the number of articles, increase the frequency, whatever).

I should also mention that TwitterFeed is not the ONLY way to accomplish this tactic. Other tools out there accomplish the same thing, like the RSS feed organizer in HootSuite but this is pretty much all TwitterFeed does, so fails are less likely, and it keeps things simple for someone who’s just getting their feet wet.

Now, go forth and inform responsibly!