I Love Wordpress.

As someone who has a web-design background, and who madeover ebay stores for over 2 years, I’ve never seen anything as fun and as flexible as wordpress for content management and for an individual user to have an almost ‘instant’ web presence.

It’s the most convenient and fastest way to Increase your ‘Brand Equity’ Online.

Wordpress is an extremely powerful platform, and if you are an entrepreneur establishing your business online, you must have a Blog – Period.

Even if you Have a Website, you should have a blog.

Why?

Because you can always add fresh content to your blog, by yourself, (without having to call upon your webdesigner), which results in eager readers and followers just waiting for your next post, hungrily waiting for what you have to say.

So, aside from going custom with your blog design, which is something that I’ve really been turned onto, there are a ton of ultra cool plugins you can add to your wordpress blog to totally take it up a notch.

But first, before you start adding plugins to your wordpress blog, you first must understand what they are.

Here is a quick explanation:

A Plug in is an add-on for Wordpress that can do almost anyting you can imagine. It is an add-on file that you install into your WP-Content Directory, in the Plugin folder that will enhance the way your wordpress blog runs.

There are all kinds of plugins. All you have to do is basically think of something you want your wordpress blog to be able to do… and then all you have to do is google what you want, for example, “Affiliate” and then add + Wordpress Plugin, and see what comes up!

It’s super cool!

Well now that you know what a plugin is, and how it helps your Wordpress blog, here  is a list of my personal 7 favorite plugins for Marketers who sell products and services like I do.

And they are listed in no particular order.
1. eStore Shopping Cart Plugin – If you are looking for a way to sell products or services on your
blog, out of all the plugins I checked out, and believe me I checked out many, eStore is the simplest
most user friendly easy to install plugin I’ve found for what I want to do. It is integrated with
Paypal so you can easily accept payments. It allows you to add multiple items to your cart and checkout
through paypal at the end.

2. WWSGD – That stands for What would seth Godin Do. If you don’t know who Seth Godin is,
He is an American Author of Business books and popular speaker with appearances at ‘Google’
‘TED’ and a number of charities. Godin popularized the top of ‘Permission’ Marketing.

This is a super cool little plugin that really makes your blog readers feel special. You can program
a ‘first time user’ message that appears on either individual blog posts or on each page of your blog, and a 2nd message for return users. I think it’s useful in that it breeds familiarity, and makes your blog readers feel at home and welcome
on your blog, which is your personal space on the web and welcomes them back each time they visit!

3. Contact Form 7 – Forget having to create an html form in Frontpage and then cutting and pasting it into your
wordpress blog. All you need to do is install the Contact Form 7 Contact form Plugin. Make sure you create a ‘Contact’ page in your Backoffice admin area and then all you have to do is activate the plugin, copy a small snipet of code and
then paste it into the page. Hit Publish, and voila, you have an instant contact form where your blog readers can send you a message or comments that go to your email directly from your blog. But doing this can also leave you open to receiving spam, which is why I activated plugin #4 which is….

4. Simple Captcha. A Captcha is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the
response is not generated by a computer. In other words, it’s those screwy looking letters and numbers
you sometimes see on a page that require you to type in what you see in the box, to ensure that you are
not some sort of Spam Bot!

Simply Customize some coding in this cool little plugin and then paste it right into your ‘Contact’ page where you activated Contact 7. These two plugins work hand in hand or you can use them seperately. Either way, they definitely do compliment each other.

5. Wordpress Affiliate Platform. I’ve been wanting to add an affiliate program to my design services for a while now, as it is a great incentive for others to promote your business on your behalf, but I didn’t need anything too complicated and I wanted it to run on wordpress. Whew, seems like a tall order? Could a plugin possibly exist? Yep, it sure does! It’s the Wordpress Affiliate platform and it’s a really cool plugin that allows you to track affiliates, it generates an affiliate link, you can track sales, manage affiliate payouts, and even upload affiliate banners and generates the affiliate link and codes so that your affiliates can just copy and paste the affiliate banners to promote your site. There is also an affiliate admin panel where affiliate can track their sales as well! Gotta love it! Oh and it’s fully integrated with the Wordpress eStore. They work beautifully together, just like peas and carrots

6. Commentluv – Commentluv is one of those cool little plugins that again, breeds familiarity and reciprocity. The way it works is that when a fellow blogger posts a comment on your blog, commentluv will pick up on their last post, depending on what site they list in your Leave a Comment Section. For example, if you enter your website as your twitter profile, it will display the persons last twitter feed. This little plugin helps promote others that have taken the time to comment on your blog, which entices your readers to click on their links and visit their blog. In other words, it spreads the ‘comment Love’ hence the name

and last but not least….

7. TweetMeme. Tweetmeme is a cool little plugin that packs a punch. It can be placed on all your posts and on every page, and lets your readers conveniently RT or Retweet, a blog post directly from your blog. Make sure to update your twitter profile in the settings section of the plugin, so that when someone  retweets, you can see your own name and know who retweeted your post. I like this plugin alot because not only does it help promote your post and drive more traffic to your blog, but you find out whose contributing to your blog and retweeting your posts, which in turn, usually results in you reciprocating by following that person too.

So there you have it. These are my top 7 favorite plugins for marketers who sell services or products
on their blog.

There are so many cool plugins out there, you just gotta get creative and start googling!

It’s So much fun!

Do you have any cool plugins to give a ’shout out’ to? Anything you love that we should know about?
Make sure to add your 2 cents to the comments section! I’d love to know what your favorite is!

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