Category Archives: blog

Warning – Check your Gmail Spam!

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Check your Gmail Spam

Gone With the SpamGoogle seems to have changed their Gmail spam policy recently. I have not
read anything about this, but have noticed that some of my email is
not getting through to people with gmail accounts. Since I have one
myself, I decided to check my spam.

Spam or Not Spam?

Surprise, surprise! In among all the spam I found several IMPORTANT
emails – including some notifications and reminders that I had sent
to myself. It seems that Google thinks that I send spam to myself.
I never used to even look at my spam, but now find that I need to
check it daily to make sure that important messages are getting
through.

Here is the procedure I have developed – you may want to
follow something similar:

  1. Check spam daily
  2. Set filter “Never send to spam” on messages you want and move to inbox
  3. Delete all remaining spam messages.

Gmail Filters

If you’re not familiar Gmail filters, the way to set them is as follows:
  1. Open the message
  2. Click on the “More” button above the message
  3. From the drop-down list select “Filter messages like these”.

Check Your Spam Now

I trust that these hints will help you to get all the messages you
want to receive, while still allowing Gmail’s excellent spam blocker
to keep away the unwanted stuff. There are three reasons I suggest
doing it every day:

  1. The list can get pretty long if you leave it: I get over 100 spam messages daily
  2. If you don’t check daily you might miss the timing on an urgent message
  3. It’s easier to remember it if you make it a daily routine.

How many “not spam” messages did you find in your spam box?

2 Essential WordPress Plugins

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WordPress plugins extend the capability of WordPress from a blogging platform to a full Content Management System (CMS). However, plugins present their own problems:

  • There are so many WordPress plugins, how do you choose those you need?
  • Some plugins can be more trouble than they are worth.
  • You must keep your plugins updated to keep your website secure.

Given these issues, it is a good idea to keep your WordPress plugins to a minimum, and only use those that really help further your aims.

frustrated_copywriter

WordPress Training 

If you’re not already using WordPress as your CMS platform of choice, you owe it to yourself to take a look at it and see how it can help you to build and maintain your websites. But where do you start?

My friend Terry Anglin holds a free WordPress training webinar on Tuesday evenings, U.S. Time. This series deals with building a WordPress site from the ground up. If you are new to WordPress, he will be starting a new series, beginning with installing WordPress, on Tuesday, May 1: put May Day on your calendar and start learning!

With WordPress installed, he will walk you through the back office and teach you about the most useful WordPress plugins, one week at a time.

2 WordPress Plugins 

Yesterday evening, Terry introduced us to these two plugins:

  1. SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam
  2. Shortcodes Ultimate

SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam

For a website to be interactive, and thereby generate increased traffic, it is vital to allow comments. However, once your site becomes popular – and maybe even before – it will attract spam. The spambots crawl sites and generate comments that you will not want to see on your site.

SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam is a simple anti-spam plugin that requires a commenter to log in and enter a “Captcha” code. Spambots cannot do this, and most human spammers will not take the trouble. They will move on to an easier site instead.

Shortcodes Ultimate

Shortcodes Ultimate is powerful editing WordPress plugin. It include 37 different shortcodes allowing you to handle special formatting that would normally need a CSS stylesheet change. Shortcodes Ultimate is a giant step forward in allowing those of us who do not wish to become proficient in HTML, CSS and PHP the power to build elaborate websites quickly from simple templates.

The “across-the-page” headings in this post were generated using Shortcodes Ultimate.

Summary 

If you want to build your own websites, but do not choose to spend time learning to program, then WordPress can most likely meet any need you could ever have. WordPress itself is free, and most of the useful plugins are also free, so apart from registering and hosting your domain there is no cost. And with Terry’s free training you can learn as you go.

Click Here for the training schedule – bookmark it now while you remember! Great Idea

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We offer a free course WordPress/Blogging From the Ground Up
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Facebook to Provide Frictionless Sharing

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Facebook’s “Frictionless Sharing” is going to be powerful.

In case you hadn’t heard, it’s coming soon, and it works like this: If a visitor to your blog or website has enabled access, Facebook will automatically post your content on that user’s wall. They don’t need to “like” your post – just going there is enough to post the link on their wall: how cool is that?

If you think only young people use social networks, think again. According to the Pew Research Center, two-thirds of all Americans use social networking sites and more than 42 percent of Americans over the age of 50 use social media. There are millions of people of all shapes, sizes and interests, using Facebook every single day and they love it when Facebook makes it even easier for them to share – and 60% of U.S. Facebook users are over the age of 35.

How are You Using Facebook Now?

Your reaction to Frictionless Sharing may be, “So what? It doesn’t appear on my wall. How does it affect me? Take a look at how you’re using Facebook now.

Where is Your Traffic Coming From?

Take a look at your analytics and see where your visitors are coming from. If you have traffic from Facebook there is no way to tell who they are or why they came to your blog – all you can see is that they came through a Facebook link.

Maybe they came tbecause someone told them your blog was interesting. They visited because someone else told them to, not because of your search engine optimization. Right now, that is probably true of only a few visitors, but with Frictionless Sharing this is going to change very rapidly. Have you noticed how much information from your wall is shared following the recent Facebook changes?

Increase Your Connectivity Now!

If you’re like me, you worked hard to build your Facebook and Twitter friends, and then, once you got to a certain number (say 4,000) you left it to take its course. You probably focused on one niche, which may not be the best one for you now: the times they are a changin’! Now is the time to review who you want to connect with, and build your friends accordingly.

With Frictionless Sharing, anyone who comes to your blog (from Facebook or anywhere else) will automatically get a link posted on her wall, and all her friends will see it. This opens you to the 750 million current Facebook users without your having to do anything except attract some existing Facebook users to your blog! No other SEO is necessary.

What this means is that you need to provide something useful to the one person who visits your blog, like writing to him as if he were a real person, rather than a traffic statistic, for example. That way, he’ll want to come back from time to time to see what else you have of interest, and every time he does his “friends” get to see what he’s doing. Do you see the power in this?

His friends will want to see why he keeps going there, so they will visit, and their visit will appear on their walls. Soon, their friends will want to visit you:

now that’s viral!

Take Action Now!

So what do you need to do right now?

  • Post valuable content, so that people want to read what you have to say (yes – content is still king!)
  • Spread the word on Facebook (I’m sure you’re doing that already.)
  • Reconsider your niche. I’d love to hear your views on this, but I think this could be the end of niche marketing! You see, you have no idea where your net will be cast with Frictionless Sharing, so the wider your appeal the more chance you’ll attract buyers. I really hope this is true, because I have a hard time narrowing my niche: just look at the range of topics I cover!

Tell me what you think, and how you plan to use Frictionless Sharing.