I build a lot of WordPress sites and these are, in my opinion, the must-have WordPress plugins for 2011.  I start almost every new WordPress install with these plugins, even if I don’t have a specific intention for them all at the time of development.  If for no other reason, these WordPress plugins will make your websites function at a top-notch level in 2011.

Jetpack WordPress plugin for 2011

Jetpack is a compilation of handy features for any WordPress installation.  It includes Gravatar Hovercards, WordPress stats (available as a standalone plugin), Twitter Widget, wp.me shortlinks, Sharedaddy social sharing plugin, and Shortcode Embeds.

Usernoise Contact Form WordPress plugin for 2011

Usernoise is an absolute must.  It is the easiest, smallest and best-looking contact form plugin available for WordPress.  It is super-simple to setup, but that means there’s not a lot of customization options.  Usernoise Plugin ads a floating “feedback” image on the side of your site, that when clicked, created a slick AJAX powered overlay contact form.

Donation Can WordPress plugin for 2011

Donation Can creates a widget that accepts both set and custom donations via Paypal.  It works magically, letting you choose fundraising goals like “Pay for our server costs” or whatever you’d like.  Set weekly, monthly goals, anything really.  Perfect for kickstarting your WordPress website development.

Password Protect WordPress Plugin for 2011

Password Protect plugin is essential for development, especially if you’ve got a great idea that you don’t want stolen.  Make sure your WordPress install is not indexable by search engines, then install this plugin.  It will only show the front end to logged in users, ie: you.  You can even set a custom message to users who try and view your site.

Facebook Traffic Pop WordPress Plugin

This plugin creates a floating Facebook like box that utilizes jQuery overlay to catch visitors for a set period of time.  They can either “like” you or wait for it to fade away.  This is a great, albeit pushy technique to increase your social networking presence.

Foobar Announcement Bar WordPress Plugin for 2011

This plugin expertly mimics the HelloBar which is a free but branded dropdown bar at the top of your page.  HelloBar limits what you can place in their bar, and asks for $25/monthly to unlock the best features.  That’s pretty steep, especially when this plugin only costs $9 once at CodeCanyon.

Google +1 WordPress Plugin for 2011

Despite how you feel about Google’s foray into social networking, savvy webmasters will need to adopt Google +1 as the next wave of content sharing.  This plugin is free, in the WordPress plugin directory and gives you tons of flexibility to choose how the button is displayed next to your content.

Converting users is as important as ever before. With millions of websites being created every day, how can you compete? Here’s how: convert your readers like a pro with these essential tools.

Meebo Toolbar

A sweet little bar that hangs out at the bottom of all your pages. It is available as a WordPress plugin or standalone code. You can customize the bar with anything you might need to convert users like RSS links, and integration with your Facebook page.

Wibiya Toolbar
Another handy toolbar with some different content and style options. Both tools can help convert users, it’s up to you to decide which one is best for you.

WP Greet Box

This handy plugin will insert a discrete box below the heading but above the content with dynamically generated message to readers based on their referral source. See it in action here: 43 Ways to Promote your content like a pro.

Smart Sharing Plugin

This plugin creates a box that can be aligned to the left or right of your site with important sharing links.  It scrolls with the user, meaning they are always reminded to switch from “casual visitor” to “avid follower”.

We recently reported on Wibiya, an exceptional tool for WordPress blogs (and other sites but we don’t care about them).  At the time, Wibiya was in beta mode, asking you to request an invitation to use the plugin.  Just recently, Wibiya took two pretty big steps.

First, Wibiya is now open to the public.  Simply click “Get it now!” to sign up.  You will select a few settings like applications to include on your toolbar, then download a plugin zip file.  Previously you were given a raw PHP file that required manual upload (instead of the handy “upload new plugin” option in your WordPress Dashboard.

Second, Wibiya updated the toolbar altogether.  If you already had the Wibiya toolbar, you need to reinstall it.  The toolbar now includes a couple more applications and a better interface for adding/removing them.

So what does the Wibiya toolbar do?

• Integrates Facebook into your blog
• Integrates Twitter, allowing users to tweet about you right from your blog!
• Offers easy navigation of random and previous/next posts – increasing pageviews and retaining visitors.
• Lets readers chat with other visitors
• Lets you communicate with visitors by setting up announcements (popup or not)
• Decrease reasons for visitors to leave by allowing social networking right on your site (instead of leaving to do so)
• And tons more applications (translations, real time users and more added all the time)

Like we said, we don’t care about anything that doesn’t involve WordPress, but Wibiya also works with Blogger, Drupal, Ning, Joomla and more.  Check out the new Wibiya toolbar here.

Have you noticed some websites have those toolbars at the bottom of the screen? They stay put as you scroll around and offer you all sorts of conversion tools like twitter buttons, subscribe buttons, search features, etc. See them in action on the top blogs like Web Ecoist, Walyou and The Next Web. This tool is free but available to a beta group only. Request an invitation here.

The idea of creating content to target social media is nothing new. Terms like “Made for Digg” have been coined, and many people have created a basis for a successful site by focusing on attracting social media. When discussing the term Social Media Optimization (SMO) I consider it to be the optimizing of content on your site, this doesn’t cover your actions in social media environments away from your site, which are also important. Take a look at some existing information on this topic:

Rohit Bhargava’s 5 rules for social media optimization:
1. Increase your linkability
2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy
3. Reward inbound links
4. Help your content travel
5. Encourage the mashup

   Web Strategist adds:

6. Be a user resource, even if it doesn’t help you
7. Reward helpful and valuable users

   Cameron Olthuis adds:

8. Know how to target your audience

   What I would like to add:

9. Make your content attractive in appearance – people are shallow, especially when browsing social media, if it looks rubbish, it has much less chance of getting read.
10. Make sure your site is optimized for a fast loading time – if it takes too long to load, people won’t bother. If your site is poorly optimized, large spurts of traffic will crash it.
11. In your face ads, placed where your content should be will hurt your success. It will help your earnings placing ads in key spots, but social media visitors will hate it, and none of them are going to click ads anyway.

Is it really worth it?

Visitors from social media have a short attention span. They drop in, look at what they came to see, if it is attractive they scan over it, if something catches their eye, they may even read it. They will hardly ever click on other content on your site, they won’t click your ads, and very few will subscribe to your feed. So why bother?

Good content for social media is good content for anyone. If you can catch the attention of visitors that are sent your way from social media sites, you can catch the attention of anyone.

Rand Fishkin from SEOMOZ also discusses the value of Social media traffic for gaining incoming links, a very important SEO factor for increasing overall traffic of your site.

This is the main reason why you see so many top 10 type  list posts and other viral content when browsing social media. These types of posts tend to attract people to link to them (linkbait). This should be a key goal in your aim for success on social media sites.

_{Images used in this article are copyrighted by their original websites.}

After reading Dana Wallert’s article, 34 Stumbleupon posts that aren’t crap, I am feeling inspired to write about one of my favorite web services, StumbleUpon.

StumbleUpon is a great browsing experience, you find great content quick. It learns what you like, so great new content keeps on coming. Because of this it is a terrible procrastination tool, but I won’t hold that against it. As someone who publishes content on the net I also have an interest in StumbleUpon for the purpose of generating traffic to my blog.

I will look at two main factors of Stumble related traffic: 1) User related or organic traffic 2) Stumble algorithm related traffic

When looking at algorithm, audience score seems to be a huge factor, and it is defined at Venture Skills:

Every stumbler has an audience score, and in the old days stumbleupon told you what your score was but have since taken this facility away. The audience score was based on number of fans, number of pages thumbed up, number of pages thumbed down and number of reviews written. The score is what determines how much stumble juice a person carries.
The audience score has one other factor stumble history. If a stumbler initially stumbles a site and the site receives a large quantity of thumbs up their audience score increases, conversely if they initially stumble a site and it’s thumbed down their audience score goes down. Stumblers who stumble a site after the initial stumble also have changes to their audience score but not to the same extent.

…… and in the comments:

The initial stumbler’s audience is a huge factor as you say quite a few of our experiments when run resulted in null results even when I would stumble immediately afterwards and one particular stumble which had nearly 20 thumbs up had the total of 8 visits from stumbleupon. Interestingly this post which has received a large quantity of thumbs up has very little traffic via stumbleupon. The reason the first few stumblers were people who read the blog and regularly stumble it, now that non regulars are thumbing it its starting build traction.

What are 4 questions I would like to know about StumbleUpon:

1. Does having more friends on StumbleUpon help the sites “You” submit do better?

   What I think: As it is possible to browse friend stumbles, I suspect that this does help get more user related organic stumbles, as the article will get more hits from those that are browsing user stumbles instead of categories. However, I would caution just adding anybody. I am more likely to browse the stumbles of those who I know. I am interested to see what they find interesting, however I am not so interested in what some random is interested in who has just added me to their friends, along with 199 others (I believe the limit is 200). The article from Venture skills also states that the initial stumbler’s audience is a huge factor in the algorithm, and the amount of friends you have is a factor in audience rating.

2. Does writing a good review for an article when you submit help it perform better?

   What I think: I suspect writing a positive review helps get more hits from the Stumble algorithm, however it is hard to prove. Also as reviews are visible on the stumble profile / blog of the user who wrote them it will definitely gain some more user related organic hits.

3. Is stumbling user profiles worth while?

   What I think: I read that stumbling user profiles is a good way to promote your friends, however, after reading about audience rating, I think you should be very careful about submitting or stumbling any content which you believe will not become popular.

4. What is the weight of thumbs up versus the weight of thumbs down?

   What I think: I have 2 trains of thought on this topic. The weight of a thumbs up has the same weight as a thumb down. Or the weight of both are related to the audience score of that user, as such a thumb down by someone who is new would carry little weight, where as a thumb down by a power user is likely to carry a lot of weight.

After researching this article I think I have come to two major conclusions:

1. Only submit and thumb up articles which you think are very good and have a high chance of becoming popular.
2. Using stumble more will help add value to the weight of your votes, but only if you rating sites with the value they deserve.

I have just read an interview in the October .Net magazine with Andrew Keen. Andrew is self proclaimed as one of the most hated people on the net because of his criticism of Web 2.0, current social network habits and online culture. As hated as he may be by the masses, I feel most of what he is talking about is very intelligent, and well worth listening to. Are the sites like YouTube, MySpace and Flickr ultimately rather evil? Is user generated content the future of entertainment?  Or is it just a big scam to drive traffic and sell advertisements, and line the pockets of the already wealthy. Here is an excerpt from the .net interview:

.net: Why don’t you like user-generated content and social networks? Isn’t it great that the power is in the hands of the people now?

AK: Who says that power is in the hands of the people? I don’t see any evidence of this. The A-list bloggers – mostly rich, white men in silicon valley – are no more representative of the “people” than any other traditional cultural or economic elite. The only “people” economically benefiting from user generated content are the millionaires at Google, YouTube, MySpace and Flickr.

User generated content is a huge scam. It’s a way for the owners of sites such as YouTube and MySpace to get content for free, drive massive audiences and then sell advertising around it. If the content has any value, then the creators should sell it…

Consider The Effect Of Your Actions In Social Networks

I think it is hard to argue that there isn’t a financial drive in the motive behind any venture on the net. Ultimately the reason why these types of sites are started are to make money, and I don’t think you can hold it against the pioneers of these sites for having a great idea in the first place. However, it is worth at least considering the effect of your actions when creating content for someone else. When you upload a video to YouTube and it is viewed thousands of times, who is making money from it? Not you. Would you be happy if you knew what sort of revenue was being generated from your MySpace blog.

When you invite an email friend to join a social network like MySpace, you are giving their email away. On MySpace you can’t even read a private message or comment without visiting the site, which is littered with in your face advertising.

Where Does Blogging Fit Into The Picture?

Most blog platforms allow you to place your own advertisements. You can make money from blogging. You can produce content, and drive traffic to a site where you benefit. And when you own the domain that the blog is on, there are also long term benefits, such as page rank, profile and branding etc.

Content that you create, under your own name, on your own domain, on your own blog creates value for you. Content that you create anonymously, for a large social network site like MySpace or YouTube, creates value from someone else.  On that note here is some user generated content created by someone else, that I feel adds particular value to this topic:

Prometeus – The Media Revolution:

Epic 2015:

This article will discuss success ranking systems within the blogosphere, and then give ideas about how to manipulate and benefit from them.

TEN – Technorati Favorites

Although I don’t think this is a particularly useful metric, having a lot of people who have added your blog as a favorite on Technorati may get you some traffic. It also shows potential readers that others think your blog is good.

How can it be manipulated?

Very easily. There have been, and continue to be, plenty of exchanges set up for swapping Technorati “add to favorites”. i.e., “You add me and I will add you.” Here is one such popular example: DoshDosh. I doubt it is worth it though, as because it is so easily manipulated it doesn’t hold any real weight.

NINE – Blog Catalog Rank

Blog catalog is a fairly large online community, where as a blogger you are free to promote your blog as shamelessly as you please. This alone is reason enough for you to want to put effort into developing a rank on the site. The directory side of the site works by providing category based listings of blogs. You can also buy a sponsored slot which will get you to the top of a list for between $8 and $30. How high you appear on the list depends on your rank. Here is a definition of how the rank is calculated:

Blog Rank – a special formula that analyzes your hits, views, comments, neighborhood members and other special secret ingredients to create a numeric score based on a 100 point scale. Your Blog Rank is primarily used to determine the order blogs appear in our Directory and Search Results. The higher your score the better your placement.

How can the rank be manipulated?

Fairly easily. A factor in the formula which you can manipulate is the members in your neighborhood. If you add everyone as a friend, many will add you back, and many of those will consider the act a nice enough deed to either visit your blog or even join your neighborhood. That is why you will see users with thousands of friends on blog catalog, many of which they don’t even know.

EIGHT - Alexa

Alexa is a page rank system that ranks your site as a number compared with every other site in the world. i.e., your site is ranked 333,000 in the world. Yahoo is ranked 1st, Google 2nd, Myspace 3rd, YouTube 4th, and Facebook 5th. There’s no doubting that these are popular web sites, so it must have some degree of accuracy. It is mainly used by certain advertisers, and it gives you an idea of how popular your site is compared to not only blogs but all sites on the net.

How can it be manipulated?

I have read that installing the Alexa bar on your own browser can help you climb the ladder to a small degree. The idea is that you visit your own site a lot, so if you browse it with a browser that is using the Alexa bar, it will help you rank better.

SEVEN - Web Site Traffic / Page Hits / Unique Visitors

No success metric list would be complete without considering traffic. If a blog is getting a lot of visitors it is successful. If a blog is getting very little, then it isn’t.

How can it be manipulated?

Having consistent traffic over a long time period is something that is very difficult to manipulate. Although, for a boost of traffic you can use social media sites to promote your content. Long term consistent traffic will rely on you being successful with many of the factors discussed in this article.

SIX - Technorati Authority

This is a fairly important factor for bloggers. It is calculated using the amount of incoming links or “blog reactions”, where links from higher authority blogs will help your authority more. Although I don’t use Technorati as a blog search engine myself, I am sure if you have a higher authority blog you will pull some traffic from Technorati.

How is it manipulated?

You will often read theories of how “A-List” bloggers, or high authority bloggers tend to link to each other a lot. The idea is that because links from high authority blogs carry greater weight, that if A lister’s keep it to themselves, they will keep the authority amongst themselves and make it more difficult for new blogs to break in. An A list blogger could easily argue that they link to other high authority blogs more often because they have better content. So although I suspect this sort or thing goes on, there is no point complaining about it.

How can you manipulate it?

Not so easily. Although anything that gains you links will help. So blog carnivals, group writing projects, viral link schemes or running competitions all help.

FIVE – Income Generated

Although income generated from your blog is a harsh measure of success, I feel it should rank fairly highly. If your blog makes you thousands, then it is successful. However the opposite doesn’t necessarily apply, as there are many great successful blogs that aren’t in it for money.

How can it be manipulated?

I don’t know, I don’t make money from blogging. Maybe John Chow has some tips for you, although I wouldn’t recommend reading most of what he spouts out on his blog these days. Just because blogging about money makes him money, reading about him doing it won’t make you money, it will only make him more.

FOUR - Social Media (Stumbles, Diggs etc) – An Article Level Rank

Many bloggers are fixated with success on social media sites. There is no doubting that success on these sites can drive a lot of traffic and attention towards your blog. Both of which are important measures of success. So social media success should be considered fairly highly on this list.

How can it be manipulated?

Varying degrees of difficulty. The concept of “Digg Rings” or “Exchanges” suggest that there are other factors at play that help certain content rise to the top. Making friends who are more likely to vote for your content is how many people work the system. Ultimately, content would have to be of a certain quality to get anywhere on popular social media sites, but there are certainly ways that help some do better than others.

THREE – Google Search Rank for a Keyword

Scoring highly with Google on a keyword or phrase can bring your blog a lot of traffic. So using this as a measure of success is useful. How well do you score for important keywords in your niche? This particular concept drives the “Make Money Online” niche, where the key focus seems to be to rank on Google using the aforementioned term.

How can it be manipulated?

Not easily, but in the long term there are plenty of pointers to set you on the right path to success, which is what the SEO niche is based around. Key concepts involve keyword rich anchor text aiming at your site, keyword rich article titles, keyword rich content, keyword rich image alt text, good content structure, good keyword research and much more. I suggest Aaron Wall’s SEO Book blog for great SEO advice.

TWO - Google Page Rank

Google page rank is a form of authority in the search engine world. Having a high page rank gives links from your site more authority. It is one of the factors that will help your pages score well on Google search, and it may help you gain respect from other bloggers.

How can it be manipulated.

Not easily. You need to aim at gaining quality links from high page rank sites,  particularly sites from within your niche, and hopefully using anchor text that includes important keywords or phrases.

ONE – RSS Subscribers On Feedburner

The top of the list has to be RSS subscribers. Having a large list of subscribers guarantees you a level of readership more so than any other factor. At the point of writing this Techcruch has 609,000 subscribers. 609,000 people think that Techcrunch is worth at the very least following, if not reading every article. Having a large RSS readership can and should be a pull for sponsors and advertising. Also because it is so difficult to fake or manipulate it should hold a lot more weight in the future.

How can it be manipulated?

Not easily, which is why it is such a strong metric. However, to ensure you capture as many readers as possible, an easily accessible button or link to your feed is important. Providing a full feed, and not an excerpt will help. Submitting your feed to rss directories may help get you some extra subscribers and it does give your feed a lot of hits on the day you add them.

Conclusion

I know that this article is rather superficial at times, and I haven’t necessarily encompassed all that could be considered success, i.e., enjoyment, comments left, the quality of content to you and your readers etc. However, I have attempted to rank the factors that drive the blogosphere. I hope you find it a useful resource.

In an environment rich with social media sites providing quick fix for our short attention spans what is an acceptable time for a visitor to spend on a Blog? If you don’t keep track of the statistics of your site Google Analytics will do nicely for tracking your site statistics.

The Bounce Rate (also called % Exit) is the percentage of visitors that leave your site without clicking any further links. So if they were sent to a certain page on your site by Google search, they looked at that page, then left.

Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Analytics Evangelist states, “it is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying.” Source: Wiki

The Wiki goes on to explain that different types of pages should expect different bounce rates based on the type of traffic expected to visit that page.

1) Typical traffic expected on a modern blog that may not be expected to stay long could consists of:

• users who are following links from social media sites
• users who are coming from an rss feed just to read a page – even though they are probably regular readers.
• users who are reading an article on another blog and have followed a link to see a particular point

2) Traffic that may be expected to stay longer and read different pages may include:

• users researching
• users searching
• users who intend on interacting in some way -  comment, contact etc

If you get a lot of traffic from the first bracket rather than the second bracket you are likely to have a much higher bounce rate, but is this cause for concern? 

Perhaps a better way to look at it would be to look at individual pages. Is your prize article, your best work sending users running?

Another factor is site structure. Do you use extracts on your homepage or do you display the full post? If you are displaying full posts your bounce rate is going to be higher than the same content on a site that uses extracts, as users don’t have to click anything to read your full articles.

Social Media Patterns

StumbleUpon (SU) – A large percentage of the traffic for this blog comes from SU users. It is so easy for a SU user to click the stumble button on their toolbar, be sent to a site that doesn’t at first look like their cup of tea, then instantly click stumble again. If your SU traffic has a high bounce rate, then maybe you need to consider working on the first appearance of your site. What is visible when the page loads and is that a good message to send visitors? Fortunately, the first impression of Pingable must be ok, because SU users have one of the lowest bounce rates of traffic sources for this blog.

Digg – Digg users are notorious for heading to a site, looking at what they see, then leaving straight away. I haven’t had any popular articles on Digg so I can’t really comment on how true this is.

Conclusion

So to answer the question…What is a good bounce rate for a blog? Obviously the lower your bounce rate is better, regardless of all the reason you may have for it being poor. If your bounce rate is over 50% then maybe your are marketing your content to the wrong crowd. Is writing that Digg bait really winning you readers? What first impression does your site make? As long as the bounce rate for certain pages and traffic sources suggest things are good, I wouldn’t get too worried about it.

This article is a summary of some of the best articles I have read recently.

Steven Snell from Vandelay Design writes about 9 Essential Tools for Bloggers. This is a great article summarizing some key tools for bloggers. The article names the following list of tools, please visit the article for a full write up.

1. FeedBurner
2. Google Analytics
3. Del.icio.us
4. Bloglines RSS Reader
5. Windows Live Writer
6. Google Webmaster Tools
7. Page Speed Checker from Self SEO
8. Google Alerts
9. Link Checker from Technorati

Nate Whitehill writes about Using Free ebooks to Promote your Blog. The article suggests how using ebooks he can convert people who download the ebook into email subscribers. Costa also has a Cheap Ebook Download. Good stuff.

Tadeusz Szewczyk from SEO 2.0 writes about The Real Rules of Social Media Marketing. Tad writes good stuff, and this article is well worth reading if you want to improve how your content’s scores of social media sites. Tad has informed me that this article is a parody of Social Media Marketing by Glen Allsop.

Michael Martin from Pro Blog Design writes about Formatting your Posts for Readability. This article puts together some valuable information about good habits you should get into when formatting your blog posts, great stuff.

Brian Clark from Copyblogger writes about What Facebook Can Teach You About Effective Blog Marketing. Copyblogger has some exceptional content, so this blog is well worth visiting if you have never been there before. This article discusses how to segment your readers, for effective marketing and uses Facebook as an example.

David Airey writes about Using your Readers for Writing Inspiration. This is a good read on how to use your reader’s comments to create content. Good stuff.

How to Attract Readers Who Don’t Read Blogs is a very good article on performancing.com. This article is good food for thought. Who reads your blog? Is it mainly other bloggers? Do regular people actually know that they are reading a blog?

If you are looking for a new niche to blog about check out stock market for beginners, it is a great paying niche if you are interested in that sort of thing.