The Open Source Marketer » talkr http://opensourcemarketer.com Online Marketing Advice In Everyday Language Fri, 16 Jul 2010 19:25:53 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Top Ten WordPress Plugins You Must Have Or Else http://opensourcemarketer.com/top-ten-wordpress-plugins-you-must-have-or-else/ http://opensourcemarketer.com/top-ten-wordpress-plugins-you-must-have-or-else/#comments Mon, 23 Jul 2007 13:08:02 +0000 Charles McKeever http://opensourcemarketer.com/blog/8020-productivity/top-ten-wordpress-plugins-you-must-have-or-else/ Do you ever wonder why some bloggers seem to enjoy greater success while exerting what seems like less effort than other bloggers who work twice as hard and only seem to get half as much done? Well, in this post I’m going to show you how the successful bloggers cheat the daily clock to get more benefit out of their efforts.

No matter what you might think, blogging is hard work. Blogging it’s just about writing a few paragraphs and going outside to play. There are search engine rankings to optimize, articles to tag, comments to respond to, rss feeds to promote, mailing lists to promote and manage, and ads to manage. So with all that to do, anything you can to reduce your labor is a good thing.

Here are ten WordPress plugins that you must have or else you will end up doing more work than you need to.

  1. SEO Title Tag Plugin – http://www.netconcepts.com/seo-title-tag-plugin/
    Customize your blog title beyond what is allowed with the default install of WordPress. “SEO Title Tag makes is dead-easy to optimize the title tags across your WordPress-powered blog or website. Not just your posts, not just your home page, but any and every title tag on your site!”
  2. Sociable Plugin – http://push.cx/sociable
    Add social bookmarking icons to every blog post so that your readers can add you to their favorite social bookmarking site. “Social bookmarking sites allow websurfers to save, catalog, and share interesting pages they find online. The Sociable plugin appends links for your readers to use those sites to the end of each of your blog’s posts, increasing your potential audience.”
  3. Ultimate Tag Warrior Plugin – http://www.neato.co.nz/ultimate-tag-warrior/
    Add tags to every post so that your readers can find related content on your site. This is another level of content organization beyond putting your posts in categories.
  4. Adsense Plugin – http://philhord.com/wp-hacks/adsense
    Embed adsense into your blog posts by simply adding a special tag in the post. This is a great time save because you don’t have to go to the Adsense ad creator or keep the code in note pad to paste in each time you write an article.
  5. Talkr Plugin – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sds-talkr/
    Convert your text blog post into downloadable audio format that can be downloaded or listened to right from your blog. See my article, How To Create Text To Speech Blog Posts
  6. Contact Form Plugin – http://www.douglaskarr.com/projects/wp-contactform/
    Add a contact form to your blog so that your readers can contact you. Effective use of this plugin really depends on how you want to receive contact from your audience. Some people like to allow an email option for reader contact, while other bloggers like to push all the reader communications to the comments for search engine use and community content creation. There is no right or wrong way, but this plugin makes it easy to add a contact form to your WordPress blog without having to hack out a solution yourself.
  7. Comment Avatars Plugin – http://www.napolux.com/projects/myavatars/
    Add avatars to your blog comments. This adds an element of community to your blog and grabs the attention of your readers. It also encourages comment participation and adds visual interest to your blog.
  8. Subscribe To Comments Plugin – http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comments/
    Encourage reader comments by allowing them to subscribe to comments so they will know when comments have been added to your blog posts. Your readers probably take in several other blogs and you can count on them remembering to come back and check for updated comments. The subscribe to comments plugin helps you and the reader by letting them know that new comments have been added to your blog posts.
  9. Comment Spam Protection Plugin – http://sw-guide.de/wordpress/plugins/math-comment-spam-protection/
    Protect your comments from spam by adding a spam protection question to each of your comment forms. This plugin is simple and effective. It asks a basic question of the reader that only a human could answer. Because this plugin is so simple it is easy to use and customize, if you are into that sort of thing.
  10. DoFollow Plugin – http://kimmo.suominen.com/sw/dofollow/
    Encourage commenting by allowing search engines to follow links in your blog comments. Readers will be rewarded by a little link love when they comment. Remember that when you use your blog to give to the greater community then you will ultimately get back more. This is the law of reciprocity and it is a valuable point for any blogger how is trying to build value in their site. Be open to sharing the love and the love will be good to you.

These just a few of the WordPress plugins that will help you optimize your blog for search engines, encourage reader comment participation, add advertising to your posts, and enhance your content by offering an audio version.

Keep reaching for success,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

P.S. If you are interested in other time saving, money making, blog optimizing ideas, then me and the other bloggers at Yaro’s Blog Master Mind Course.

]]> http://opensourcemarketer.com/top-ten-wordpress-plugins-you-must-have-or-else/feed/ 3 How To Create Text-To-Speech Blog Posts http://opensourcemarketer.com/how-to-create-text-to-speech-blog-posts/ http://opensourcemarketer.com/how-to-create-text-to-speech-blog-posts/#comments Wed, 11 Jul 2007 05:00:00 +0000 Charles McKeever http://opensourcemarketer.com/blog/clickbank/how-to-create-text-to-speech-on-your-blog-posts/ text-to-speech-mic

UPDATE: Originally, this article covered the Talkr service for adding text-to-speech to your blog. Unfortunately Talkr doesn’t seem to be updating their service, so you if you’re interested in a long term solution for adding text-to-speech to your blog, you might want to take a look at the Odiogo Listen Button. Odiogo provides a free services that automatically turns your text blog posts into spoken audio that website visitors can either listen to on your blog or they can download as an MP3 to their desktop. Here’s a quick video that shows how the Odiogo Listen Button works.

Here is the original Talkr article for reference:

If you want to put audio on your blog but don’t know where to start then the next few articles in this series will introduce you to some of the available solutions for adding audio to your blog. In this article we’ll start by looking at a text to speech option. Then in the next few articles we’ll look at podcasting, paid services, and a free conference call solution. When we’re done you should have enough information to mix and match to get what you want.

Text To Speech

If you just want to add audio to your blog without the need to record audio files, convert them to MP3, upload them to your server, and include the code in your post for playing and downloading the file, then using Talkr.com to convert your text to speech is probably your best option.

Talkr.com offers a free text to speech conversion service that let’s you turn your text blog posts into an almost human quality voice recording. The service uses your existing RSS feed to read in your text content, which is then converted to audio.

They even offer statistics on the number of downloads for each audio file, a podcast RSS feed that supports the podcast enclosures tag, and an opportunity to revenue share if you opt into their inline advertising program. Let’s talk about the advertising for just a moment and then we’ll take a look at the statistics.

Using In-line Advertising

The advertising is voluntary and they state that they don’t allow adult content or profanity. But don’t worry, if you still want to opt-out of the advertising the service is still free and you still get the reporting services and the podcast RSS feed.

Using Your Own Advertising

If you’re interested in generating revenue from audio versions of your blog posts then I recommend you place affiliate links in your posts with some form of text that says something like “This post is sponsored by xyz product, for more information visit xyz.com”. The web address you give in the sponsor text can be your easy to remember web address that redirects the listener to your affiliate link. You may have to work a little harder to get them where you want them to go, but if you include the advertisement in a series of articles then the listener will hear the web address multiple times which is a good start. If you want a direct payment for the playing of your audio, then you might consider using the inline advertising that the service supplies.

Tracking Audio Listens

If you want to know how many times your blog post audio has been downloaded, then Talkr supplies reporting on that too. You can report on the number of downloads by date range. The report shows the individual audio downloads that way you can tell which article is most popular as an audio download. This information could be useful as a way to tell which audio should be converted into a PDF as a bonus download in future promotions.

Using The WordPress Plugin

To make the whole process really simple Talkr provides a WordPress plugin that automatically puts a download link at the bottom of each of your blog posts. So, essentially all you have to do is post your text content like you always do and you automatically get the benefit of offering a downloadable audio version of your blog posts for free. Take a look at the podcast link at the bottom of this post for a good example of how the download link looks and functions.

In the next article we’ll look at how to use podcasting as a way to add audio to your blog and we’ll look at how to use a popular WordPress plugin to allow readers to play your audio files right from your blog post.

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Be sure to catch the second article in this three part series, How To Add Podcast Audio To Blog Posts

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