software

Oct

2012

Get Plugins Weekend Sale

Offer Closed

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Starting today I’m running a weekend sale for the exceptionally useful “Get Plugins” plugin at just $10 (full price at launch is ~~$27~~).

What does it do?

You know how when you install a new blog (or worse still you’re working with an existing one that might be a clients installation) and there are certain “must have” plugins that need installing? Usually you can either FTP them all up at once (which is how I *used to* do it) or install them one at a time by using the browser uploader.

FTP is easy and quick enough (unless there are lots of files in a plugin), but sometimes if you’re working with someone else’s blog, they don’t give you (or don’t know!) their FTP details.

So then you’re stuck with having to upload them all via the browser or search through the WordPress repository in the admin panel and adding them that way. It’s a pain and it can take AGES if you have about 15-20 standard plugins to install.

What “Get Plugins” does is allow you to set up your list of plugin locations in advance, and the plugin will go fetch them from wherever they’re located and install them all for you.

This can be a location in the WordPress repository for free plugins you’re using, or a location on one of your own domains if it’s a premium plugin.

All you have to do is know the URL where each zip is located and either do a quick copy and paste into a box, or just upload a text file with all the URLs in. For extra speed you can even add the text file into the plugin zip if you want to and the plugin will find it when it’s uploaded.

So now instead of installing all your plugins one at a time, you get to install the whole lot in one go.

Pretty cool eh?

When you click the “Submit” button, then all the plugins in the list are retrieved concurrently and independently of the others, so there’s no waiting for each one to complete before the next one starts – they all run at the same time. 😉

The weekend sale starts today at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST), and I’ll send you a short email when it does.

I wonder if you have any suggestions for some favourite plugins you’d like to see in the default text file list of plugins we include? If you do, please leave the full URL of the zip file AND the page it’s on.

-Frank Haywood

Oct

2012

Like Plus 48 Hour Sale

Offer Closed

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Today at 6.00pm I’m running a 48 hour sale for the newly updated Like Plus plugin. I can’t believe it’s been over a year since I first released it with FaceBook only support. The latest version (v1.3.0) now also has G+, Twitter and Pinterest built in too – all optionally selectable.

If you purchased Like Plus last year then go back to your download page and grab the new version with the new features built in.

If you don’t have it, then today’s your chance to pick it up with all the new stuff for just $10. 🙂

What does it do?

Like Plus is what’s called a content locker.

You can hide snippets (or even lots) of content from your posts and pages until someone gives you a FB Like, a G+, a Tweet, or Pins an image on Pinterest. Now that last one isn’t totally working 100% the way it’s supposed to because Pinterest don’t yet have an API that will do a callback to confirm the pin, so use it at your own discretion. All the others work as you’d expect them to.

When your visitor clicks one of the buttons, the plugin Likes, Pluses or Tweets the pre-defined text you set in the admin panel. The content they want to see is then revealed to them, and this could be any HTML including text, graphics, video or whatever.

But it won’t be revealed until AFTER your visitor clicks one of the buttons.

So what kind of content would you hide? Well, any killer offer you can come up with.

Aha!

So your visitor clicks the Like button on your post or page for a ZIP or PDF or whatever it is you’re offering, and ONLY then can they get at what they’re after.

In return, YOU get a new “Like” etc, which is then publicly displayed on the service they’re using…

Muhahaha!

I’m sure you can straight away see the potential of making your blog viral? Hence the evil laugh. 😉

Their friends will see what they “Liked”, and some of them will click. Some of them will “Like” it too in order to get at your hidden goodie. And it will then appear on their wall and their friends feeds… And so on.

You’d use it in conjunction with some killer offer you come up with to get people to Like it for you. Here’s the sequence of events for someone using a FaceBook Like:-

#1 – Your visitor likes the post and the content reveals itself – it could be a link to download a report they want.

#2 – In the background the Like then appears on their wall / feed.

#3 – Their friends then get to see they’ve Liked something and may click the link to see what it is.

#4 – They read the offer and decide they want it too.

#5 – They Like it. Goto #1.

Viral, yes? 😉

However, you need to use it judiciously. If you put it on every single post and page then it will almost immediately lose its effect. People won’t want to “Like” everything on your blog.

What you need to do is set up a killer offer on a page or post. Something really good. Something where visitors will go “Yeah! I want! I Like!”

*click*

The 48 hour sale begins here today 9th October at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST).

-Frank Haywood

Sep

2012

Spam Cracker – Re-use Your Spam

Offer Closed

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One of the things that we all have to face every day is spam. This is my solution for removing it from all your blogs.

I’ve used various tools over the years to deal with spam and one of the good ones was Akismet and I’ll continue to use it even though it’s now a paid service. But I’ve always thought there had to be a better way of dealing with blog spam.

Logging into a site for the first time in a couple of months only to find 800 comments waiting to be reviewed isn’t my ideal way of spending my time, and what I’d usually do is just delete the lot. Page after page of them – it can take ages.

TIP: Did you know that if you’re on the comments page and click the “Screen Options” tab next to the “Help” at the top right, you see an option to control how many comments are displayed on that admin page? By default it’s set to a stupidly low 20, but you can change it to 999 and that saves a heck of a lot of time. You get the same option on the posts and pages admin too. No more time wasting clicking through loads of pages.

Anyway. One day I got to wondering if there was a way to take advantage of all that automated effort that someone was making and turn it instead to my own advantage.

Turn the tables so to speak.

I wanted a way of (for some blogs) being able to leave comment moderation OFF so that comments always got auto approved – it makes the blog look busier and people who see a busy blog leave real comments. But I didn’t want any of the potentially spammy backlinks in those comments to be displayed. Or to have spammy keywords showing either. I’m sure you know the ones I mean. 😉

And that’s when Spam Cracker was born.

What it does is when ANY comment comes into your blog, it temporarily replaces any links with your own taken from a list at random. It also replaces any spammy words with your own, again taken from a list at random.

That means that all the spam comments start pointing to links that you decide, and all the keywords are converted to words that are relevant to your blog. Yes it will mean that sentences sometimes won’t make any sense, but it’s far better than the alternative.

But the most important thing is it will seem that visitors are commenting and leaving behind on-topic keywords and links that point to your own sites.

(You could even use your OWN affiliate links for some of them and occasionally earn a commission from it.)

The search engines would then see plenty of commenting activity which they see as a positive social indicator for the amount of activity on your blog.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, social indicators of this nature seem to be the direction Google is going in its pursuit of giving people the best search results. The way I see it, lots of commenters using similar keywords on your posts is a good social indicator for the keywords being used.

You with me? 😉

We’ve also added an option to remove URLs in comments on posts older than n days. Typically my own spam comes in on older posts, so setting this value to say 14 days will stop any URLs from being added to those older posts. (Really that’s an option that should have been in core WP, so I thought it made sense to fix that.)

If a genuine person makes a comment (you can usually tell), then you can choose to manually approve the URLs in that one comment and they’ll revert back to the original links left by the commenter.

And finally, we added in a nice little idea we got from Akismet.

Each user URL (the one the commenter types in when leaving a comment) in your admin panel has a little x next to it so you can quickly just remove the URL if you want to.

Tomorrow at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST) I’m running an introductory 48 hour sale starting at just $10 for the first 50 copies.

The Spam Cracker plugin is one you should definitely consider having in your arsenal for use on all your sites.

I’ll drop you an email when the sale starts.

-Frank Haywood

Jul

2012

Pin-It Plugin Weekend Sale

Offer Closed

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In just over 3 hours as I write this, today at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST) and one hour before the Olympics start, I’m kicking off a weekend sale for a very powerful little plugin.

In my email and post yesterday, I said that I’d realised that with the advent of some very big changes at Google how important it was to kick up your social marketing.

It couldn’t be simpler.

Not so very long ago, ranking was decided by backlinks and then by social indicators (likes, pluses, follows).

It seems that it’s the complete opposite now, and I’ll talk about this another time as it’s very important to both your business and your clients.

What I have for you today is a plugin that leverages the power of the fastest growing social network out there.

Pinterest.

The reason it’s gathered so many users is because… dare I say it?

It’s EASY and it’s FUN.

The interface (unlike G+) is nice and simple and can be picked up in minutes. It works how you expect it to work (unlike G+ – I’ll shut up about that now) and is a very nice experience all round.

You sign up, add the pinmarklet to your browser and off you go.

When you see an image or a video on the web that you like, then you can pin it to one of your pinboards. People can repin and comment on what you’ve found. You can follow people and they can follow you.

For many people it’s addictive and they want to show their friends what they’ve done.

How does this affect us?

Well, it makes it easy for us to start using the Pinterest system to market ourselves, our products and our clients.

Every time someone pins something from our site (or repins it) then you get a backlink. People will then click those backlinks to get to the original sites the image or video came from.

Because people are pinning your stuff, then all you need is a few images or videos on the site you want traffic to. It helps if they’re colourful or interesting and these pinnable items can be photographs or videos.

“But I don’t have any videos” I can hear you say. (Make some!)

But YouTube does. On every topic imaginable. And you can embed most of these on your site. 😉

The Pin-It plugin allows you to set things up so that you can add videos to any of your sites, and then add a “Pin It” button that when clicked pins the media to one of your visitors pinboards.

Pinterest believes it’s been done by the Pinmarklet in your browser.

However, the button can link to ANY URL you wish, not just the originating page. 😉

The plugin also allows you to add various styled “Follow Me” buttons to your blog so that you pick up more followers.

So what you’re doing with the plugin is reminding and encouraging people to use the “Pin It” button and add it to one of their pinboards.

You can even get the whole ball rolling by pinning the media to your own pinboards and then go commenting on and liking other peoples pins on Pinterest. Many people will click through your link to look at your pinboard as a result and may well follow you or repin some of your stuff on their pinboards. Every re-pin is a link back to the site you decided.

Apart from YouTube, the Pin-It plugin also supports Vimeo videos too, which is something the browser pinmarklet doesn’t yet do.

Okay?

Sound complicated?

It isn’t. It’s REALLY simple to do – I guarantee you that.

And if you get it right you’ll start seeing traffic back to your sites from buyers.

Because it seems that by many accounts, Pinterest is crawling with buyers. Some businesses rely solely on Pinterest traffic alone for their entire income. A click through from Pinterest is far more likely to result in a sale than from any other source. – there’s lots of reasons why and I’ll cover that another time.

All I’ll say in closing is I’m switching BIG time to social marketing.

I like to tell myself that it’s not because I’m a bit slow, it’s just that it’s only really now come of age due to the changes in Google search algorithms. Ahem. 😉

I think you should too if you haven’t been doing so already. Backlinks aren’t enough any more.

Today at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST) I’m kicking off a weekend sale for the Pin-It plugin. When it’s over the price will go up immediately and I’ll be doing some updates to the plugin which you’ll get for free when they’re done.

This is your chance to get the plugin at the lowest possible price if you go for it now.

I’ll add a video later today to show you how it all works.

It’s fun and easy. 😉

-Frank Haywood

Jun

2012

Click-Me Alert Bar

Offer Closed

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Update: You can watch the overview video above (okay I got carried away and it’s a full feature-rich tutorial) and also see a working demo of the Alert Bar in action on the link below.

http://broadexample.com/

On Wednesday at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST) I’m releasing a very cool (and sneaky) new plugin called the “Click-Me Alert Bar.”

I outright stole this idea from a WSO, but I think I’ve made mine a lot better. You be the judge. 😉

In the other plugin, you had to upgrade to the “pro” version just to get the features that mine has right out of the box. Mine is a third of the price in this sale.

So what does it do?

You know those little “alert” bars that appear at the top of your browser when a pop-up is blocked or you’re missing an addon to play certain media? Well this plugin does that but you get full control of the alert bar on your blog so that you can deliver your own message.

We’ve been a little bit clever with it and added in WordPress Conditional Tags (we *like* those) so that you have total control over which alerts show where.

Features?

o Create multiple alerts and have different ones show on different pages and posts including special pages like home, 404, tag, category pages etc.

o Multiple alerts on the same page (one at a time only), either rotated or picked randomly.

o Split test statistics for clicks so you can see which alert performs best.

o Set the delay time before the alert shows.

o Rich Text HTML editor for the clickable URL text.

o Rich Text HTML editor for the message.

o Select one of the built in icons or use your own.

o Colour picker for the alert bar, so you don’t have to use plain yellow.

o Set the alert bar to your preferred height.

We’ve been testing all day and as is typical with me I’ve just asked for some usability changes but they should be done by tomorrow.

Now there’s going to be a little change with tomorrow’s sale if you’ve been a customer for any length of time. I’m going to be running it through an affiliate scheme. OMG! I know… 😉

So you’ll be able to snag it yourself and then get your money back by promoting it. (That’s something I typically do for products I buy and like and it works for me.)

Set yourself a reminder and tomorrow at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST) the sale goes live. At any rate I’ll drop you a line a few hours before, and then again when it starts.

More details tomorrow.

-Frank Haywood