Hi, it’s me D’vorah again, here with the second of three articles that I’ll be sharing as a Guest Blogger on your site. Being that Connie is very involved in blogging and encouraging others to blog, I wanted to share some blogging tools with you. As you may know, WordPress plugins can extend the functionality of your site. Most plugins are free. However, be selective in your use of plugins; there are thousands upon thousands and they will slow down your site if you add too many.
Pretty Link
Today I’d like to share with you two of my favorite plugins. One of them (Pretty Link) allows you to create attractive looking redirect urls. How does this relate to Relationship Marketing? When you receive an email from someone with long urls that are clearly affiliate links, how does that make you feel? On the other hand, how much more likely would you be to click on the link if it included the site branding of the sender in the url.
Example of a regular affiliate url – infomagnet.com/aff=?77734
Example of a Pretty Link url – conniessite.com/weeklytips
By providing easy ways for people to visit your site, they will have the opportunity to get to know, like and trust you more and thus the likelihood of them coming back often is greatly increased.
Pretty Link is one of my favorite marketing plugins. I use it to create a professional image when I am posting links to products I recommend. Of course, as a smart marketer, whenever possible the products I recommend are attached to an affiliate program!
Here is an example of a a pretty link that I created to direct to Connie’s Build an Online Empire training program: http://theblogstation.com/buildonlineempire
That looks much nicer than a big long url that has things like ? or aff=10 at the enf of the url.
You can find this plugin at WordPress.Org in the Extend/Plugins section.
Here are a few other things that you can do with Pretty Link
- Create clean, simple URLs on your website that redirect to any other URL
- Tracks the Number of Hits or Unique hits per link
- Enables you to post your Pretty Links to Twitter directly from your WordPress admin
- Clean up / mask affiliate links or merchant shopping cart links
WP Wall
The second plugin that I’d like to share with you is called WP Wall. Imagine having a Facebook type of “Wall” on your own WordPress blog! When people post a comment on your WP Wall Guestbook, it shows up as a conversation in your sidebar.
This is a great way for you to get to know your readers and for your readers to get to know one another. Readers can add a quick comment about the blog as a whole, and the comment will appear in the sidebar immediately, without reloading the page.
All comments are internally handled by WordPress so that means you have normal comment moderation, SPAM protection and new comment notification.
WP Wall is fully customizable with a CSS file and included graphics.
Depending on which settings you select, you can create an interactive Wall which can automatically refresh, turning the comments into a chat session.
I’ve set up a WP Wall on my Blog World Tour site and have called it my “Guest Book”. Scroll down to access the link to the site if you’d like to see this in action. You’ll notice the WP Wall comments are in the sidebar to the right.
Powerful Plugins
Being that I am such a raving fan of WordPress and of WordPress plugins, I put up a site dedicated to sharing what I love most about my favorite 50 or so plugins (see link below). This is a hobby site and there is nothing to purchase at this time. It is also a work in progress and I’m having a blast reviewing and sharing these plugins.
Do you have a favorite WordPress plugin that you use and highly recommend? Are you looking for a WordPress plugin to accomplish a specific task? Share your comments below and let’s learn from one another.
Thanks again Connie for having me as a Guest Blogger on your site!
All the best,
Dvorah
D’vorah Lansky
Relationship Marketing Wizard | Author | Speaker | Educator
www.PowerfulPlugins.com
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