When people are browsing your website, you want them to:

1. Share your content on social networks.
2. Sign-up for your newsletter.

And that’s why we all have social sharing buttons on our sites and also optin forms for visitors to join our mailing list.

Some websites have great looking designs for their sharing buttons and optin forms, under their posts and in the sidebar. I always wondered how they did that and tried using code I found on the internet to make one for myself. However, these experiments were never very successful.

A few days back I heard of and bought a WordPress plugin called OptinSkin, which made it easy to make optin forms and social sharing boxes. I can finally say I’m quite happy with the forms/boxes I have on my website now.

Features

• It has 18 form/box designs which you can choose from. The default designs are attractive and the elements are well selected for each type of form/box. So I didn’t need to change too many things before using them on my site.
• You can customise the design for each form/box, such as size, colour, fonts, spacing and text. I really like the fonts that are available. For some forms/boxes the customisation options are limited and I would’ve liked to fine-tune them more.
• You can place the forms/boxes in several places around and within post content, both automatically and using codes or widgets. OptinSkin also lets you control when and how forms/boxes appears and you can even have them floating on the side as visitors scroll.
• I like the split testing and analytics features they provide as well. It’s really useful to quickly be able to test and see which forms are converting the most visitors.

Easy of use

• Very straightforward to use. Not much of a learning curve and I had new forms/boxes on my site in around 20 minutes.

Support

• I haven’t had to get support from the developers so far, so can’t really rate the support fully. However, there are no support forums and in the member area you are asked to send an email or contact the developer over Skype. So I don’t think the support will be super fast/efficient.

Price

• At $47 the OptinSkin wordpress plugin is neither cheap or expensive.

I hope you found this OptinSkin review useful. Here’s a video from their website, for a nice visual overview.

Update: After using OptinSkin for a few months, I just deleted the plugin

For me, plugin reliability is very important. This is especially so for things like contact and option forms. Everything started out fine with OptinSkin and I was quite happy with it initially. Then a few features stopped working properly – like the ability to make forms float along the page when someone is scrolling. When I contacted the support team, they said they were aware of the issue and going to fix it soon but it’s been a while and it’s still not working.

I had two instances where forms that were working previously, did nothing when someone filled-in their email addresses to subscribe. After going to the form settings and saving them, they started working again.

Yesterday I received an email from a visitor, who wanted to subscribe to my newsletter but couldn’t because the form was not working. So I finally decided to stop using the plugin.

I could’ve contacted OptinSkin support to explore how to fix the issue. But I just don’t trust the plugin any more and don’t know when it might stop working again. And losing subscribers is not something I’m willing to risk.

Continue Reading - OptinSkin Review: I Just Deleted The Plugin

1. Because you want to know if, when and for how long your website is down.
2. Because it leaves a bad impression when visitors see that your site is down. This can impact your reputation and also cost you money.
3. Because it also sends bad signals to search engines and can affect your search rankings.
4. And finally, because your host won’t tell you when your site is down. You need to keep tabs on them (even for the web hosts I recommend i.e. Bluehost and Hostgator).

The good news is that there are tons of reliable and free website monitoring services and here is a quick comparison of 5 of them. I selected these based on my own experience with a few of them, frequent recommendations from other people on the internet and features (check frequency and notification options).

1. Pingdom
Number of websites monitored for free: 1
Minimum frequency of website monitoring checks: Every minute
Downtime notification options: E-mail, SMS (20 per month), iPhone app push alerts

2. UptimeRobot

Number of websites monitored for free: 50
Minimum frequency of website monitoring checks: Every 5 minutes
Downtime notification options: E-mail, SMS, Twitter, RSS or Push Notifications for iPhone/iPad

3. 100Pulse

Number of websites monitored for free: 2
Minimum frequency of website monitoring checks: Every 15 minutes
Downtime notification options:  Email, SMS and Twitter.

4. Binary Canary

Number of websites monitored for free: 5
Minimum frequency of website monitoring checks: Every 15 minutes
Downtime notification options:  Email and SMS.

5. Mon.itor.us

Number of websites monitored for free: 1
Minimum frequency of website monitoring checks: Every 30 minutes
Downtime notification options:  SMS, E-mail, IM, RSS.

Any of these free website monitoring services would be a good choice. I usually suggest using two services, so that you are extra sure of your website uptime/downtime.

Continue Reading - Comparison Of 5 Free Website Monitoring Services

There are many free WordPress contact form plugins that work just fine, so you don’t HAVE to purchase a premium plugin for that. However, I don’t use free contact form plugins on websites where losing a potential customer/user contact could cost me a decent amount of money. I’ve had cases where a free contact form plugin was not working for a few days, before I realised something was wrong. I think that cost me a few hundred dollars easily.

Gravity forms has never failed me so far.

In addition to reliability, there are other great features which this WordPress contact form plugin packs-in, such as:

A quick and highly customisable form builder.

Overall the form builder lets you quickly build and design WordPress forms and easily embed forms on your site using built in tools.

Huge number of form fields

• Standard field toolbox: Single Line Text, Paragraph Text, Drop Down, Number, Checkboxes, Multiple Choice (Radio Button), Hidden Field, HTML, Section Break and Page Break fields.
• Advanced field toolbox: Name, Date, Time, Phone, Address, Website, Email, File Upload and CAPTCHA Fields.
• Post field toolbox: Title, Body, Excerpt, Tags, Category, Image and Custom Fields.
• Pricing field toolbox: Product, Option, Quantity, Shipping, Donation and Total Fields.

Conditional Logic Capabilities

Conditional Logic allows you to configure your WordPress forms to show or hide fields, sections, pages or even the submit button based on user selections. This allows you to easily control what information your user is asked to provide and tailor the form specifically to their needs.

Storage of Entries

Gravity Forms stores all form entries in your database and makes them easily accessible via the WordPress Dashboard. You can view, edit and annotate entries.

Custom Notifications

You can configure each part of the email that is sent to you, when users fill out a form. You can also send quick auto-responders to users, to thank them or provide information right away.

Multiple form uses

It can be used for:

• Simple WordPress Contact forms.
• Order forms: With options for product specifications, shipping methods, adding total order amounts and paypal integration for payment.
• Guest post submission.
• Automatic user generated content.
• Surveys and polling.

There are some things I don’t like about this WordPress contact form plugin as well:

1. I use it mostly as a straightforward contact form and so the price does sting a bit.
2. It doesn’t have easy options to style forms without using code.

Summary of my Gravity Forms Review: It’s an excellent WordPress forms plugin, whether you intend to use it for just contact forms, or additional purposes. My only item on the wishlist for this plugin would be easier styling options.

Continue Reading - Gravity Forms Review: Stress Free WordPress Contact Form Plugin

I just came across an infographic with some nice insights on the importance of photos and videos, for social marketing/engagement in general.

Here are some of the points mentioned:

• On Facebook, videos are shared 12x more than links and text posts combined. Photos are Liked 2x more than text updates.
• Instagram is on a trajectory to beat Facebook, in terms of the number of users in 4 years.
• 42% of all posts on Tumblr are photos.
• Over at YouTube, 100 million users are taking social actions on videos every week.
• Photo and video posts on Pinterest are referring more traffic than Twitter, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn and Google+.

Are you using visuals effectively ? What can you do to make better use of photos and videos in your social media marketing?

Here are some easy things which I’ve been doing for social marketing on Facebook and Twitter:

1. Sometimes when I write a blog post, instead of just sharing a link to the entry on Facebook, I upload a decent size of the image associated with the post and include the post URL in the comment box. This gets more attention/engagement from people, since puts additional emphasis on the picture.
2. I often search for funny or interesting pictures and videos from around the web and share them on Facebook and Twitter.
3. Once in a while I make a simple image (using text and images in Powerpoint) from bits of information I think is useful and share that on my website and social networks.

At this point I’m only using Facebook and Twitter. Haven’t spent much time on other social media marketing platforms like Pinterest and Google+. I’d be very interested to know if you are using these as part of your social marketing and seeing goods results.

Continue Reading - Social Media Marketing Is Ruled By Photos And Videos [Infographic]

A good headline will make people click and a bad/average headline will drive them away in a second.

While professional copywriters might know all the principles behind writing good headlines, the rest of us rely on our own judgement and guesswork, to come-up with what we think is a good headline. Often these headlines are only attractive to us but not other people .

So I was happy to find a free tool created by the Advanced Marketing Institute that will analyse your headlines and provide an Emotional Marketing Value score, to let you know how good they are.

Nice!

The research behind the tool started in the late 1960s, by studying the roots of several languages, Persian, Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic, Urdu and others. It was found that there are basic underlying harmonics, a tonality that flows through language, which are in many ways more profound and powerful than the dictionary meaning itself. Whereas sometimes meaning can be mistaken, the sound tones are always interpreted with similar “emotional” reactions, although the effect is subtle.

The key to communication in general and writing great headlines specifically, is being able to reach people at this emotional level. And that is what the Emotional Marketing Value tool seeks to measure.

All you need to do is enter your proposed headline and see what your score is. You can then make changes to the headline till you reach a respectable score.

As an example, for this post I started with ““How To Write Great Headlines That People Cannot Resist”.

That gave me a score of 44.44%.

I then tried many variations such as:

• How To Write Great Headlines Every time.
• How To Write Great Headlines Without Fail.
• How To Write Great Headlines Consistently, Using The Principles of Emotional Marketing.
• How To Write Great Headlines Using Magnetic Emotional Marketing.

Until I got my highest score with “How To Write Great Headlines Constantly, Using Magnetic Emotional Marketing.” Like it?

Continue Reading - How To Write Great Headlines Constantly, Using Magnetic Emotional Marketing

That was a real waste of money because you can get coupons/discounts for many of these products and services, just by doing a quick search on Google. And you can save as much as 40-50%!

Let’s look at a few examples.

1). Let’s say you wanted to buy a professional WordPress theme framework like Headway.

If you simply purchase the theme from their website, the price is $87 or $174.

However, if you search Google with the term ‘headway discount coupon code 2012′ you’ll find a number of sites that provide codes for getting a discount. Some of the codes will work and others won’t, so you’ll need to try a few.

I found a code (HW25) that gives a 25% discount. Here’s a screenshot of the checkout screen with the code applied.

2). You might also want a WordPress contact form plugin like Gravity Forms.

Here is the standard pricing.

And this is the result of a $50 discount I found after searching the web for a coupon.

Not bad at all, right? And the savings can really add-up over time.

Continue Reading - Before Buying Anything For Your Website, Save Money By Finding Coupons/Discounts

• Ease of installation.
• Attractive design.
• High ratings from other users.

Slick Contact Forms

Creates a widget, which adds a contact form using either a floating, drop down button or a sticky, sliding tab. Can handle multiple forms on each page and the location of the floating button or sliding tab can be easily set from the widget control panel.

The plugin also includes shortcodes, which allow you to add a text link to your content, which will open/close the contact form.

Fast Secure Contact Form

This free WordPress contact form plugin allows you to easily create and add forms. The contact form will let the user send emails to a site’s admin, and also send a meeting request to talk over phone or video. An administration panel is present, where you can create and preview unlimited forms.

Features include a super easy admin panel, multi-form feature, autoresponder, no templates to mess with, and an option to redirect visitors to any URL after the message is sent. Includes CAPTCHA and Akismet support to block all common spammer tactics. You can add extra fields of any type: text, textarea, checkbox, checkbox-multiple, radio, select, select-multiple, attachment, date, time, hidden, password, and fieldset.

Custom Contact Forms

A customisable and intuitive contact form plugin for WordPress. Lets you customise every aspect of your forms: borders, padding, sizes, colours. Features include – Required fields, CAPTCHAS, tooltip popovers, unlimited fields/forms/form styles, custom thank you page or built-in popover with a custom success message set for each form.

SimpleModal Contact Form (SMCF)

Nice looking form. It is a modal-window contact form that uses jQuery. SMCF can be configured to provide you with the contact form submitter’s IP address as well as the option to send the contact form user a copy of their own message.

Contact Form 7

Probably the most used contact form. It can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customise the form and the mail contents flexibly. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

For the most part, free WordPress contact form plugins work well. However, they can have issues every now and then. When using the free plugins, I had a few instances where I discovered that the form was not sending messages! So for important and product/service oriented sites I use Gravity Forms, to ensure I don’t lose potential customers.

Continue Reading - Easy, Good Looking & Highly Rated Free WordPress Contact Form Plugins

However, you can go a step further and make it even easier for visitors/potential customers to contact you. To do this, simply put a contact form on all relevant pages, so that visitors have one less step to take, if they want to get in touch with you. The easier you make it for people to take an action, the more likely it is that they will do it.

In this case, a page is relevant if the ideal action you want people to take after reading the page, is to call or email you. One example is pages where you have descriptions of your products and/or services.

I usually have a small contact form in the sidebar on such pages, like the one shown below. Approximately 40-50% of messages I receive are sent using these forms and the remaining are using the form on my Contact Us page. So people do use them quite a bit.

Especially if you’re using WordPress, adding a contact form on several pages is easy to implement, by using contact form plugins.

For a reliable and highly customisable plugin, I use and recommend Gravity Forms. However, you can use free WordPress contact form plugins also. For the most part they work well but can have issues, every now and then. When using the free plugins, I had a few instances where I discovered that the form was not sending messages! So for important sites I make sure to use a premium plugin, rather than lose potential customers.

Continue Reading - Put Contact Forms On All Relevant Pages Of Your Website. People Will Use Them

The most awaited/requested feature is the ability to manage your Google+ profile from within the HootSuite dashboard. Previously this was only available to Enterprise users.

HootSuite also added an automatic post scheduling feature, which is great. Now you don’t need to worry about when to send your posts. HootSuite will do it for you and schedule your posts for maximum visibility!

Folks at HootSuite – Well done!

Continue Reading - HootSuite Adds Google+ And Automatic Scheduling Features

Over the last few months I’ve been reviewing a few of the integrated social media management and Twitter tools.

This involved trying out each of the tools, comparing the features and seeing what I liked (and didn’t like).

Based on my research, here’s a ranking of some of the popular options:

1. Hootsuite: I use this tool and it has the most comprehensive set of well-organised features.
2. Sprout Social: This comes in a close second. I was using both Sprout Social and Hootsuite for a few months and really had a hard time deciding which to stick with in the end.
3. Seesmic: Less features when compared to Hootsuite and Sprout Social. But it’s free.
4. SocialOomph: This social media management tool has a ton of features but I don’t like it at all. It’s almost like there are too many features and the interface is confusing & painful to use/look at.
5. TweekDeck: Another free service which is owned by Twitter and more focussed on being a Twitter Tool, rather than an all-in-one option. Basic set of features and an interface which isn’t very appealing.

If you’d like to see articles/videos I’ve posted, with detailed reviews and comparisons of these social media management tools, check these out:

• SPROUT SOCIAL REVIEW: GREAT HOOTSUITE ALTERNATIVE. I LIKE IT
• TWEETDECK VS SEESMIC: SAME FEATURES. DIFFERENT INTERFACE
• HOOTSUITE VS TWEETDECK: CLEARLY HOOTSUITE HAS AN EDGE
• HOOTSUITE REVIEW & FEATURES TOUR [VIDEO]

Continue Reading - Ranking Of Social Media Management And Twitter Tools