The debate continues about whether or not bloggers should auto post their content to other platforms. I have heard the gambit of arguments for and against this practice and I used to fall somewhere in the middle. I believe that like everything, auto posting in moderation is definitely not a bad thing. More importantly, how your content is displayed on the various platforms like social media networking sites makes all the difference.

What is Auto Posting?

Auto posting is the use of an application or tool  that allows you to schedule a post to be made at a later time. Some applications also allow for reoccurring auto posts. There are more than enough tools available to help us with this evil practice (that is just one of the descriptions I have heard in recent times .  Here are just a few of some great apps for auto posting:

• Hootsuite
• BufferApp
• Sendible
• CrowdBooster

Enter Next Scripts and the Social Network Auto Poster (SNAP) Plugin.

This wordpress plugin I believe has changed the face of auto posting. You can send content from your blog to  unlimited platforms and there is no trace of it being push via automation! There is free version that works well although the pro version has a few more useful features. According to NextScripts:

SNAP can publish nicely formatted messages to your Facebook, Twitter, Google+(Google Plus), Blogger, LiveJournal, Delicious, Diigo, Stumbleupon, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Plurk, VKontakte(VK.com), WordPress, and Tumblr accounts. You can reach the most audience and let all your friends, readers and followers about your new post automatically. Plugin works with profiles, business pages, community pages, groups, etc.

Plugin makes 100% White Labeled Posts. The main idea behind the plugin is to give you the ability to promote only yourself. Plugin uses your own apps and all posts to all networks come only from you. No “Shared via NextScripts.com” or “Posted by SNAP for WordPress” messages.

I recently started using this plugin and so far, it does all that it boasts and I am loving it more than any other plugin I have used! Seriously!

The feature that I LOVE the most is the scheduling, which not only allows you to schedule posts, it also allows you on every social networking profile or business page you are pushing content to, to set delays for when the content should be sent to that platform. This means that unlike many of the other tools, you can have the appearance of sending the same content out to various social networks at different times throughout the day. How kewl is that??

As of this writing, the plugin supports a total of 15 platforms or networks and here is what Next Script says about future networks being added:

We are getting a lot of requests to add Digg and Reddit to our list of supported networks.

1. Digg. As you may notice old Digg (that allowed anyone to share links) is not here anymore. New Digg it still undergoing development and has no API and no way to submit new links using their own accounts. They don’t even allow their accounts to be created yet. We are monitoring the development, and we may consider adding it as soon as their system allow it in any way.

2. Reddit. Technically we can add reddit, but it’s basically useless. Reddit does not allow you to post your own links (and they force this policy):

So, if you are looking for a tool to share your content across many platforms with a lot more control and without the usual identification from the developers of these tools, then SNAP is definitely the plugin for you!

Are you using Auto Posting or not? What are your thoughts?    Have you thought of using it?

I’d love to hear your thoughts about this controversial topic!   Please comment below, on my facebook page or hit me up on Twitter @urwordpressdiva.

You can learn more about this plugin and Next Scripts below and, I understand that at the time of this posting, there might be a sale going on for their pro version!

See you in the Blogosphere!

To utilize this chatroom application, all you have to do is register in the homepage. Registration can be accomplished in just seconds—the larger chunk of your time will be focused on chatroom modification. Chatwing has a very powerful dashboard. For example, you can design a color scheme from scratch, and you can even select from the platform’s background images. If one doesn’t fancy you, try uploading an image link of your choice.

Social media is another highlighted factor in the Chatwing chat app tool. Currently, there are four social media login options: Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, and Google. These login options will help your visitors interact with each other. You can also send invitations to your visitors and know them even more. In due time, these visitors will become your clients. Setting the login options can be done easily in the dashboard. With this social media function, your website’s traffic rate will grow by a high percentage.

One of the best things about the Chatwing tool is its parameters. Currently, the admin can ban chatroom visitors that are obnoxious. The ban-time can even be set according to the desires of the user. There is also a quick and easy word filter system—you can just input foul words and the platform will just detect them.

With such versatile chatroom tool under your control, traffic will no longer be a problem for your blogs, websites, or forums. It can overhaul your whole online communication process by a high notch.
You can visit Chatwing directly: Chatwing

According to www.wordpress.org,

Plugins can extend WordPress to do almost anything you can imagine!

 

Many great plugins are available at no cost and those that require a fee, are available usually at a very affordable price.

I believe that it is probably true that anyone who knows even the basics about Worpress, uses at least one plugin.

Here are 15 (in alphabetical order) that I use on every wordpress site I create.

I use others on some sites depending on the nature and purpose of that site but these 15 are included as a standard part of setting up/creating the site:

1. Askimet: This plugins comes installed with WordPress. You need to purchase a key and activate the plugin. You can use the same key on all your WordPress sites.
2. Broken Link Checker:   Now you can monitor your website  for broken links and be notified if any are found. Links in your posts and across your site can become broken for many reasons. This tool ensures you are aware when it happens.
3. Duplicate Post: Clone a post or page, or edit it as a new draft with this easy to use plugin. It saves you time if you want to maintain say a certain layout for your posts and just change the content. It is also useful if say you are writing a series.
4. Google Analytics For WordPress: To stay on top of your website traffic and other critical information, GA for WP  lets you track your WordPress site easily and with lots of metadata: views per author & category, automatic tracking of outbound clicks and pageviews.
5. Google XML Sitemap: This MUST HAVE plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.
6. Hide Trackbacks: With this installed, you have the benefits of track/ping backs so you know when someone writes about or links to your post, while keeping the comments clean and uncluttered with trackback links and code.
7. MHR Anti Copy: Works on pages/post content protection. Protect your content from being copy-paste via right click and words selection. It comes with powerful custom settings. You can protect a single page/post or overall pages. Everything can be done with a few simple steps. With short codes you can protect a single page that you want to protect. To see this in action, right click on any part of this site!
8. Next Question: You can post a link to subscribe to your feed by placing a question at the end of the post. To see this in action, check out this post and scroll to the bottom of the post: (This plugin is no longer available from the developer for download but I would be happy to send it to you. Just hit me up in the comment box below)
9. Pretty Link Lite:  Shrink, beautify, track, manage and share any URL on or off of your WordPress website. Create links that look how you want using your own domain name!
10. Premise (Premium plugin): This plugins lets you “quickly and easily create 8 critical landing page types, control fonts, colors, and styles without code, included custom graphics, and copy writing advice from the WordPress interface. This is perhaps the best investment I have ever made and my clients agree that it makes their life easy!!! You can see some samples here:

    http://ginastorr.com/e-course

    http://reneeheigel.com/lynchallenge

11. Really Simple Facebook, Twitter share: In contrast to several other sharing plugin, this one aims to use only original code provided by any social network. There is no other service in the middle, you are not required to register or get a key to use it. It puts Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google “+1″, Pinterest, Tumblr and other share buttons of your choice above or below your posts.
12. Tweet Old Post: An easy to install tool that helps you to keeps your old posts alive by tweeting about them and driving more traffic to them from twitter. It also helps you to promote your content. You can set time and no of tweets to post to drive more traffic.
13. Uber Login Logo: This is a simple plugin that lets you customize the login screen on your wordpress website.  The kewl thing is that is utilizes existing WordPress media uploader. There are no fancy bells and whistles but, this plugin delivers what it promises, and does it well.
14. WP Backup (by BTE): Although I also use a premium plugin for certain kind of back-ups, this plugin is one that I use as a standard part of any wordpress set up. It performs regular backups of your upload (images) current theme, and plugin directories. Backup files are available for download and optionally emailed to a specified email.
15. WP Smush It:  Provides an automatic way to reduce image file sizes and improve performance within WordPress. Every image you add to a page or post will be automatically re-sized behind the scenes and, you don’t have to do anything different.

While not everyone will agree that you need each of these plugins, based on my experience and clientele, these have emerged as the most commonly required and useful plugins.

See you in the blogsphere!

I have found and tried  3 Anti-copy plugins which can address this issue on some level. Although I only site three such plugins, a search of the WordPress Plugins directory indicates that there are at least 44 related plugins.

Here are the three that I tested on my sites before settling on one.

1. No Copy -  prevents visitors the context menu (right click) on your blog. Although there are many means to copy a site without using the context menu, this plugin helps to remove the simply right click, copy and paste capability.
2. Copy Right Pro -  a free version of Wp-Copyrightpro plug-in helps prevent the copying of texts and images from your blog. With the simply installation of this plugin, your content will be protected. The developer acknowledges that this is not a complete solution, but says it will prevent about 90% of attempts to copy your contents.
3. MHR  Custom Anti Copy –  protects your content from being copied and pasted using the usual right click. Additionally it prevents the highlight and selection of words and images.

Although any of these should meet your needs, I recommend and personally use MHR Custom Anti Copy, which  works on pages and posts, to protect my content. It is easy to install and has some simple but powerful custom settings.  You can protect a single page/post or overall pages or, with short-codes you can protect a single page or post that you want to protect. The part I like the most is that everything can be done with a few simple steps.

To see this plugin, MHR Custom Anti Copy,  in action, you can attempt to highlight and copy then past content from my any of these two websites:

WEBSITE 1

WEBSITE 2

Although some sites welcome the use of their content via copying and pasting, many website owners do not and these plugins make it easier to manage your preference to do so.

NB: One way to encourage the “legal” or “fair” sharing of your content is to use the Link To This Page plugin seen at the end of this article.

One such use would be conducting short surveys, hosting a question corner (here are two examples:  example1  example2). Or, if you simply want to enhance the process of adding and monitoring forms that integrate with your existing email provider account.

While creating and hosting contact forms on your WordPress site is easy because of the many plugins available, web forms are a spam magnet.

Here are 5 great Contact Forms for WordPress, chosen in part because of the inclusion of spam control:

1. Formidable Forms:  You can quickly and easily build forms with a simple drag-and-drop interface and in-place editing. Unlike many of the form-building plugins which can be confusing and overly complicated Formidable  is easy to create forms within a simple drag-and-drop interface. You can construct custom forms or generate them from a template. Shortcodes can be used as well as spam catching services. Fordmiable forms has a limited Free and Full Premium version.
2. Gravity Forms: This Premium Plugin is for WordPress users looking for all the bells and whistles! It offers several features not found in many of the other free or less robust plugins and integrates with many third party providers like AWEBER etc. Some of the features that make Gravity Forms so popular:
1. limit entries – for controlling number of contest entries e.g.
2. scheduling – let’s  you control time that a form is displayed
3. pricing fields
4. posts field
3. Custom Contact Forms:   Many WordPress users consider this plugin to be a thousand times more customizable and intuitive than other popular contact form plugins. This tool lets you customize every aspect of your forms without any knowledge of CSS: borders, padding, sizes, colors. There are Ton’s of great features, including: required fields, captchas, tooltip popovers, unlimited fields,forms,form styles etc. Additionally, you can use a custom thank you page or built-in popover with a custom success message set for each form.
4. Contact Form 7:   This plugins is simple and easy to use. With it you can manage multiple contact forms, make it match you site with customization of both  the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering to minimize spam.
5. Form Builder:The Form Builder Plugin for WordPress allows you to build complex forms in the WordPress administrative interface without needing to know PHP or HTML. The developers claim that is it simple enough for anyone to make them, yet customisable enough to use for the most difficult job, which is the ingredient of a great plugin!

Since capturing information about your users is the best way to grow your lists and learn about who your visitors are and what they want, having a good contact form is a must!

Looking for some more great Plugins for your WordPress site?

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Here are five of the most popular Task and Project Management plugins:

1. WP-Task Manager:  A simple and easy to use tool for managing tasks from within the dashboard, this plugin let’s you control permissions for others that you want to create a task list for. It is also a great tool for creating and managing a  task list for yourself!
   Learn more about WP-Task Manager.
2. CollabPress: One of my favorites, this task and project management tool provides an easy to read format and makes it easy for others to upload documents and files right to WP.  Assigning tasks to others is easy and, includes email notification.  Because it uses the already built in WP Users accounts system, it is super easy to provide access to others, at different levels. It works with WP Multisite!
   Learn more about CollabPress
   
3. Propel:  A simple and clean plugin that lets you work with projects from within your WordPress framework. Easy to install and use, it includes a feature that allows you to control access based on user lever. Like the popular Project Management application Basecamp, it allows you to show all projects to administrators while only showing projects to users, for which they are authorized.
   Learn more about Propel.
4. ToDo Plugin: This plugin is a  very simply way to create and manage a ToDo list.  You use it to send assignments to other then, you can check the status from within your dashboard.  Although a simple and clean tool, it does allow you to control the level of access for uses. A great tool for blogs that have multiple writers.
   Learn more about ToDo Plugin
   
5. WP-Project:  This plugin will give you the feel of some of the popular online task and project management tools like Basecamp, but, is completely managed from within WordPress. Features include tracking clients, tracking projects by clients, tracking tasks by project. One of the best features, is that it works with dynamic timer tracking software like Harvest.
   Learn more about WP-Project.

Are you looking for more great WP plugins?

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social-networking

If you have a blog/website, you already know that you need to integrate Social Sharing into your site, to make sharing your content across social networks as easy and seamless as possible.  You probably also know that there are tons of options available and may even be a bit overwhelmed with the notion of having to choose, how to install etc.

Here are 4 of my favorite Social Share Plugins:

• Sexy Bookmarks/Sharaholic: Allows you to choose from over 50 social bookmarking sites, to include an icon that your readers can use to share your content. Icons can appear above, below or in both places, after every post. You can find this plugin in the WP Plugin directory and download it from within your dashboard.

• Smart Share: Places the links to Social Sharing to the left or right of your posts. Additionally, it inserts icons at the bottom of each post. This plugin is available only after you provide your email address to the developer at WP Beginner. You can see it in action at the left of this post.

• Social Share: Add various social share buttons to your site, with some customization. Also add Facebook activity feed to your site. Available in the WP Plugin directory so it can be installed from your dashboard.

• Tweet, Like, Google +1 and Share: One of my favorites (you can see it at the end of this post), this plugin allows you to incorporate the recently introduced Google +1 and Facebook Send links. It also includes an option to control the load time of your site, since adding plugins can sometimes increase load time to your site. You can download this great plugin from your dashboard, since it is listed in the Plugins Directory

Remember that including Social Share Plugins on your site is completely optional but, if you want to make it as easy as possible for your content to go viral, then you will want to find the ones that will meet your needs, and make sure that you include at least one.  When choosing, be sure to research the plugin to learn what the features are and, do some research to see if there are any complaints about the plugin, as it relates to your particular theme.

If you are not already familiar with installing plugins, here is a great tutorial.

Are you getting the most out of Content Syndication?

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Here is part 2 of my article, Search Engine Optimization for WordPress.

If you’ve read part 1,  you already know that WP comes ready to take full advantage of search engine submissions.  You also know that the first 4 things to remember are:

1. Good clean code
2. Content speaks
3. Create content with live searches in mind
4. Site content is reviewed first.

Following on part one then, here are the remaining 4 things to remember about SEO for wordpress, to ensure that you are maintaining  optimal search engine friendliness towards search engine spiders and crawlers, despite the customization:

5. Keywords, Links, and Titles: Search engines are not interested in how good looking your site is and do not consider it in the evaluation of your site. Instead what they do is place a value on certain words and combinations of words. Words found in  your article or post are compared to those found within your links and titles. You “score” is improved by the level of matching between the two.

6. Labels and words in your Links and Images: Even if your site does not have a lot  of written content but mostly images and links, there are places in which you should add textual content. Search engines look for alt and title in link and image tags and having keyword rich titles and descriptions in these attributes gives the search engines content to digest.

7. Popularity of Links: Although having a good site is important, it is more important to have good sites linked to yours. Search engines still give high ranking to links so at the end of the day it’s about who links to you.  You can check the number of incoming links your site has by typing link:www.yoursite.com into Google.

8. Good Navigation Links: A search engine crawls through your site, moving from page to page. Good navigational links to the various components on your site will allow a search engine to move smoothly from one page to another, following the connecting links and visiting most of your site.

You can review part 1 of this article here.  In the meantime, here are a few Search Engine Optimization tools for your wordpress stie that you can install and begin using immediately:

SCRIBE SEO (You can also  read my article about this application here).

ALL IN ONE SEO PACK

Thanks for reading and if you found this article useful or have any questions about the content, please leave a comment (http://yourwpdiva.com/search-engine-optimization-for-wordpress-part-2). You can also share this article using the social media tools I have installed at this site.

Did you know that there are easy to use plugins to help mange your projects right in your WordPress dashboard?

[Post Update] This question is answered here: 5 Task and Project Management Plugins

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SEO Chart

Did you know that WP comes ready to take full advantage of search engine submissions?

According to WordPress.org,

“its features and functions guide a search engine through the posts, pages, and categories to help the search engine crawl your site and gather the information it needs to include your site within its database.”

The basic WP platform includes several built in Search Engine Optimization tools. One of the best is the ability to create static permalinks.   Additionally, to further enhance your Search Engine submission to the engines, there are a lot of third party applications, called plugins, that have been developed for the sole purpose of making it easy to improve your Search Engine Optimization submission ranking.

Something to remember however, is that customizing your wordpress theme, adding various plugins, etc. may break some of the built in search engine submission friendly features.  One way to minimize this problem is in the selection of your theme. Be sure to check to see what the theme developers say about SEO before selecting.  To ensure that you are maintaining  optimal search engine friendliness towards search engine spiders and crawlers, despite the customization, there are 8 things to remember  about SEO for wordpress:

1. Good, Clean Code : Make sure your site’s code validates since having errors in your code can prevent a search engine from crawling your site successfully.
2. Content Speaks: Search engines can’t “see” your site but they can “read” your site. Although the ascthestics of your site might be important to you and to your visitors, what “speaks” to a search engine is the content. Make sure you have quality word content for a search engine to examine and compare with all the parts and pieces to give you a good “score”.
3. Create Your Content  With Real Live Searchers In Mind: If you are writing content that you want to be “found” in a search on the Internet, think about the what someone would type into the browser, the specific words and phrases, to find your information.
4. Site Content Reviewed First: A search engine visits your site and, in large pare, completely ignores the colors, design etc.  It just crawls through and gathers content and information. A great WordPress Theme is designed with the content as close to the top of the unstyled page as possible. Many search engines scan only the first third of the page before moving on. Make sure your Theme places the relevant content near the top.

Part 2 of Search Engine Optimization for WordPress will follow.  In the meantime, here are a few Search Engine Optimization tools for your wordpress stie that you can install and begin using immediately:

SCRIBE SEO (You can also  read my article about this application here).

ALL IN ONE SEO PACK

Thanks for reading and if you found this article useful or have any questions about the content, please leave a comment (http://yourwpdiva.com/search-engine-optimization-for-wordpress-part-1). You can also share this article using the social media tools I have installed at this site.

Want to see the next 4 SEO for WordPress tips?

[Post Update] This question is answered here: Search Engine Optimization for WordPress - Part 2

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I learned about another great WordPress Plugin that was just released, called Traffic Player.

While I have not purchased Traffic Player Plugin just yet, I have previewed it and am certainly leaning in that direction since it is just what the doctor ordered, if you want to create professional looking videos for your blog or website.

Take a moment to watch and you will see in the demo, it is extremely easy to use, and even a newbie can create high end, professional looking presentations from any existing or new videos.

There are two versions of the plugin and the reviews so far are very good.

The first version, includes the following:

• 10 Custom Premium Video Skins + No Skin Option
• Skins Automatically Resize Around Your Video Dimensions
• Selection of Custom Youtube Parameters: No controls, No Info, Centering, AutoPlay, AutoHide, HD
• Training & Support
• On-Going Improvements
• Personal Multi-Domain License

The second versions includes all of the above plus, support for Google Video Sitemap! If you are not familiar with GVS, then you will be glad to learn that search engines love videos and Google has given us another way to have them found in searches. Traffic Player makes it easier to get your videos noticed!

I am so looking forward to using this great tool as I am in the process of creating more video tutorials for this and my other website over the coming months.

Do you know that WordPress comes ready to take advantage of SEO?

[Post Update] This question is answered here: Search Engine Optimization for WordPress - Part 1

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