You have probably already seen the Tweetmeme plugin on countless blogs.  It’s the one that creates the Tweet button to the right of your post title.  If you already use Sociable as your main bookmarking plugin, the TweetMeme plugin isn’t COMPLETELY necessary, but it makes it a lot easier for people to retweet your post because the image is at the top of the post, not the bottom.  Another advantage it has is that it keeps a count of the number of RT’s you get. Just go to Plugins, Add New, and do a search for TweetMeme and you can install it automatically in seconds.

Another cool idea for your blog is to Change the Categories sidebar widget title to “Topics”.  I don’t have a link for you, but on Tim Ferris’ blog he said that the word Topics actually encourages more people to keep reading further articles when they visit your site. One simple word change, can increase your visit time.  That’s pretty cool.

If you are moving your blog from a free host to your own domain, you might also want to check out some of the WP Permalinks Migrator plugins.  There are several good ones, to choose from, but basically these plugins do a search for posts and pages ending in the same slug (if you change your permalink structure, you don’t want the visitor to end up on the 404 page; this prevents that by redirecting the visitor to the correct location.

Stay tuned for Part 2, where I will mention a few other cool Wordpress plugins, and ideas for niche marketers and bloggers.  If you are interested in learning how to make a little extra cash online, I am starting a free newsletter full of SEO tips and social media trends to look out for.  The newsletter is completely free.  It will be about once a month. Click here to opt in and get your copy.

RETWEET CLUB: Twitter-Team

If you are an avid blogger, and love posting your new blog articles to Twitter, then this may be of interest to you.

Edit: IT IS FREE; all it costs is your time. It is a Google Group, open to everyone (but only the first 100 people), where we can all just help each other by re-posting our team members’ tweets (ReTweeting) so that our followers can read the blogs. You only RT what is of interest to you, or what might be interesting to your friends.

There is no doubt that Twitter is a great place to find free traffic.  Twitter has drastically changed the face of online marketing over the past two years, by connecting people of similar (and diverse) interests, who would otherwise never have been able to find each other.

Twitter has been a great place for me to meet other web designers, musicians, Christian business owners, and others who share my interests, and every once in a while, when I have an article that I believe is interesting or informative, I post it on my stream, and it instantly brings anywhere from 30 to 50 visitors.  If someone retweets my link, then the potential traffic grows.

Getting retweeted is one of the best ways to increase your traffic, and as long as you are retweeting ethically (meaning you only RT things of value, and that you have ACTUALLY read the content before RT’ing it), it’s a nice way to spread the love.

My brother @HeidelbergChad, a co-founder of the Team Rockstar Google Group (Facebook page here), told me about a Retweet Club idea that he read about on Daily Blog Tips. They allowed 100 members, and to join you must have 100 followers.  Members of the team can submit one link for retweeting per week, but they must retweet 75% of the team members’ links, in order to remain on the team. The first RT club filled up very quickly, so to fill the need for those who didn’t get in quickly enough the first time around, we decided to organize a second Retweet Club, called Twitter-Team.  We will operate under slightly different rules, though: 100 members will be allowed to join, but instead of one Tweet per week, you may submit as many as you want.  But you need to RT 5 links for each one that you submit. This will ensure that those who are submitting RT requests are RT’ing a proportionate number of other team member’s links.

Theoretically, you will not be doing any more work than if you were just retweeting your own link 5 times (not recommended anyways), but the results should be exponentially better.  If you have 100 followers, you might get 100 visits to your blog by yourself. But as a member of Twitter-Team, with 100 team members that have 100+ followers, you could get 10,000 hits to that same link.  Of course, many of our team members are going to have thousands of followers, but 100 is the bare minimum, so this is just an example.

The content of your blog cannot be MLM, get rich quick schemes, nor can you submit ClickBank hoplinks or other affiliate product sales pages.  But if you have a link that is informative, or entertaining, we will all help you out by passing it on to our followers. Twitter-Team will be 100% ethical, and doing anything spammy will get you banned. But as you have heard before, Together Everyone Achieves More.

As I get ready to publish this blog entry, the Twitter-Team Google Group is still completely open to anyone who wants to join (provided you have 100 followers on Twitter), but ALSO, anyone who joins has the rights to send invites to their friends and followers.  We will only allow 100 people to join, so if you are interested, now is the time.

Click here to proceed to the JOIN PAGE. And when you are done, please RT this blog article so that we can launch quickly.

Copy and paste to your twitter stream:
RT @webovator Want me and 98 other people to R/T your stuff? Free retweet club, only 90 spots left. http://tr.im/F2HM Please Retweet this!

Found this while doing a search for SEO and hiphop. Pure gold, he raps about link building and getting indexed by the search engines, along with design and coding, social media, etc. Check out his channel and subscribe, he’s gonna be famous someday.

You create a new site and its content heavy,
With the right amount of pictures you believe it’s ready,
So you launch it trying to put money in da bank,
But when you search and try to find yourself, you can’t,
So you thank until your mind goes blank,
Got titles and headers but no page rank,
Sooner or later it will show if I wait,
In the meantime make sure my code validate,
And it do,
Hmm, now what I’m supposed to do,
Add meta information and alt tags too,
Still don’t get listing,
Something must be missing,
Brad and Chuck recommended doing link building,
So you start hunting down sites like a predator,
Doing back links on all your competitors,
Whoever linking to them need to link to me,
Is it free, do we swap, or do I pay a fee,
Well take it from us, before you take that step,
Some things about the site that you might want to check,
Did they use a link farm or some dirty tactics,
Could have a bad effect on your site that’s drastic,
Could’ve link baited, look at what they created,
Compare it to yours, is it even related,
Take the time, go inspect and see,
Take advantage of paid directories,
If you follow all the steps with a little bit of patience,
Get links from relevant sites that are favorites,
Update your content on the regular basis,
I’m confident you’ll make it to first page placement

If you have been following my tweets, you might know that I have had plenty of stress (more than my fair share). 

Quite honestly, the past year has been hell.

My ideal office space.

It’s time to change your mindset, Chris.

My business almost didn’t survive after I was betrayed by the one person I thought I would always be able to trust till death.  Depression and drinking, DDOS attacks, Kosovo Hackers, and an unexplained server crash, all compounded, NEARLY spelled disaster for Webovator.  But I am a fighter.  I have a tattoo of the word THRIVAL.  I don’t believe in mere survival, I want more out of life. I have been re-evaluating my business, my hobbies, and my reading materials, in an attempt to coalesce a more worthwhile existence. Money is not the goal; the goal is economic and geographic freedom.

My friend Kevin once told me the best revenge anyone can ever get is by forgetting the past and being happy.  A mentor from Broadcast Center once said that real magic is the ability to see patterns between cause and effect, and if you want to change the outcome, you recognize how to change the actions that cause the outcome.  By applying these two quotes I have come to the realization that I am happy, because I enjoy what I do.  I love helping friends and clients to build their businesses with a website, SEO, traffic campaigns, PPC management, etc., because it’s so rewarding to see the results, hear a “thank you”, and watch them achieve their own success. If you know me, you know that my favorite Zig Ziglar quote is “You can have whatever you want in life if you just help enough other people get what they want.”

So I was reading Frank Kern’s blog comments tonight, and stumbled upon yet another internet marketer’s squeeze page.  (You enter your email, and you get access to a free success course on Clarity, Confidence, and Focus–email me or leave a comment if you want the link, but I am not specifically endorsing it, not having opted in, myself.)  But the interesting thing was that the marketer had posted a video of a Tony Robbins interview for people to watch before signing up for his free course.  I watched the interview and I can say two things:

1. There is something very peculiar to me about Tony Robbins’ appearance.
2. He beat a brain tumor, and I think his insight on life is inspiring.

Here is the video for you, if you are in need of some inspiration:

So if you are beating yourself up with worry, wondering what the next step is, just change your mindset. It only takes a few seconds to reclassify a problem as a challenge. Watch the end of the interview, and listen to what he says about the person who is paralyzed from the neck down.  After three years, he is happier and stronger.

My year of hell is over.  Thanks to all of my friends, family, freelance partners, and clients.  May you all enjoy the success you deserve, in the remaining 6 months of 2009.

Recent Q & A from LinkedIn Answers…

Internet Marketing Plan Template

Q: I am working with a start up client which I am drafting up an internet marketing plan to present. Does any one have a template I can follow? And what would you recommend the 3 most important things I need keep in mind as I plan? Thanks.

A: This is a good start:
The 30 Day Challenge.  Hands-down the best IM course ever.  And it’s free.  It starts August 1, 2009.

But to summarize the 30DC:

Use a keyword research tool to pick a high traffic, low competition keyword.  Buy a domain name that uses that keyword phrase. Set up a Wordpress blog, customize it, optimize it for the SE’s.  Add as much original content as you can get your hands on.  Create a youtube channel and put related videos up.  Link every video to your site.  Do the same with Twitter-link it to your site.  Set up a Facebook fan page for the organization-link it to your site. Rinse and repeat for all the major relevant social networking sites.  Create a squidoo lens (or several) and link. Outsource some content to ghostwriters, have them create articles with your niche keywords and in the Author Bio box, link to your site.  Submit these articles to ezinearticles.com and other article directories (but don’t use the same articles that you have on your site; just use them to pique the readers’ interests and make them want to know more.  Update the WP site at least 3 times a week.  Each time you do this, tweet the new blog on twitter.  Set up twitter to update your facebook status as well so those friends also see the tweet about your new blog entries.  Don’t think of Wordpress as JUST A BLOG.   Use it as a complete content management system.  Don’t skimp on the design budget. Set up accounts at all the social bookmarking sites and bookmark each entry on all of them fast, using a service like Traffic Bug.  Use Jeff Johnson’s Free Traffic Getting Plugin. Use Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools.  Create a custom blog entry strictly for visitors from twitter, and write it with the open acknowledgment that you know that’s how they found you, then that entry can link them to the rest of the site.

Viral marketing can be fun, but takes persistence to succeed.

Also: use RSS to your advantage and don’t forget to ask for your customer’s email addresses for your list, too.  In other words, use a newsletter opt-in form.  And leave comments on dofollow blogs and forum signatures if allowed.  Some SEO spy tactics will help, too: Use the LINK: operator on Google to find out where your competition is getting links from, and email those site owners.  Don’t present a reciprocal link exchange, rather, talk about how much a cross-promotion would help with both your business and the other website owner’s.

Need more ideas?  By doing all of these things, you will have a strong influx of traffic in 1 to 3 months, usually.  It’s time consuming to do everything, so outsource what you can afford.  My company takes care of all these tasks, by the way.  But it’s fun work, and worth trying yourself before hiring someone else to run your campaign.

I would be happy to answer any questions that you have, any time.  Also, my brother Chad and I started a group called Team Rockstar, for our friends and family who are doing this year’s thirty day challenge.  It is a friendly group of people with all different backgrounds, and we talk about web promotion strategies via Google Group, Facebook discussions, and forum threads.  If you want to join us, you are welcome.  It’s nice because we all kind of learn from each other, what works best, and what ideas to avoid.

Even though we are still in preseason, I am trying to get a head start on these sites, so I can hit the ground running. The methods Ed and the others teach you will only take a few minutes per day to learn, but if you do the assigned work, it really does make a difference.  The biggest challenge for most people, I think, is learning to create fresh, original content.  Too many people try to cut corners, plagiarize, or even worse, use auto-generated content that just creates search engine spam.  But for those who are updating their blogs daily, creating videos, podcasting, their businesses can become wildly successful. (I have no interest in podcasting, but it’s just one example of good content that people like.)

In the thirty day challenge, MOST of the tools they offer us are free.  Some are not.  I prefer to use what does NOT cost any money, but take Adwords for example.  If you invest in paid traffic, Adwords can be effective, but I recommend not using it until 1) you really understand the best ways to use it, and 2) you have already earned enough money from the free methods of getting traffic so as not to cost you anything out of pocket.

More specifically, what I would do is put Adsense and Amazon links on a blog, then when you earn a little money, MAYBE reinvest that into a small Adwords campaign.  That way you use the income from your free traffic to leverage getting more traffic, and hopefully, not spend an arm and a leg.

Anyways, here are three links on how to join the Team Rockstar conversations, and learn with us:

Team Rockstar on Facebook

Thirty Day Challenge Forums
(The 30DC forum is not being used as much right now, but when the Challenge starts in August, we will use that more.  Meet some of the other people on our team.  My brother is Chad, my parents are Dan and Donna, my friend David is on it, he owns a web hosting company, then there are some other interesting folks too…we are hoping to help everyone be as successful as possible in their respective niches, with open conversations and cross promotion where possible.)

Anyways, hope to see you soon, keep in touch!
Chris