Fueling Ad Agency New Business
Michael Gass, Business Development Consultant | Speaker | Author of Fuel Lines
Fuel Lines provides new business resources for Advertising, Digital, Media and PR Agencies.
It has been rated among the top 100 marketing blogs in the world, according to Ad Age’s Power 150.
Since 2007, Michael has helped pioneer the use of social media, inbound and content marketing strategies specifically for agency new business.
Read more about Michael
An essential component to your agency's new business program is a prospective client data base.
In my opinion one of the most accurate online database of marketing and advertising decision makers is Winmo. I highly recommend them.
I'm Michael Gass, I'm an author, speaker and a new business consultant to advertising, digital, media and PR agencies.
Since 2007, I have helped pioneer the use of social media, inbound and content marketing strategies specifically for agency new business.
Fuel Lines is my social media 'home-base. It has been ranked among the top 100 marketing blogs in the world, according to Advertising Age’s, The Power 150.
Learn more about me
10 WordPress Plugins for Ad Agency New Business
I began writing Fuel Lines back in 2007 on the blogging platform Blogger. It wasn’t long before I graduated from Blogger to WordPress. Wordpress is by far the most popular blogging platform on more than 60 million websites. It has become the largest, self-hosted, content management system in the world.
WordPress can do nearly anything that can be done within a website. It is used by almost 19 percent of the top 10 million websites, including major brands such as Ben & Jerry, Best Buy, CNN, EBAY, Ford, GE, GM, New York Times, UPS, Wall Street Journal and Yahoo.
A feature that greatly adds to WordPress’ popularity is its plugin architecture. Plugins are pieces of code created with the purpose of offering custom functions and features so that you can tailor your site to your specific needs. They are very easy to install and keep updated. At this time, there are 28,956 WordPress plugins available to help you do everything on your site.
I am showcasing some of my 10 favorite WordPress plugins:
1. Jetpack by WordPress
When I switched from WordPress.com to WordPress.org, I was disappointed that many of the great features of WordPress.com were not available. It provides over 25 free modules to enhance your WordPress experience. I particularly like Stats, Publicize, Sharing, Spelling and Grammar. A feature available for purchase is VaultPress, which provides realtime backup and scanning.
2. Akismet
It was created by Matt Mullenweg of WordPress. This plugin filters out comment and track-back spam for you. It will block 99% of spam from your blog. Every time a new comment, trackback, or pingback is added to your site , it’s submitted to the Akismet web service which then runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down. When the plugin catches something as spam, it saves it in the database for 15 days, in case you want to check it out manually. In 15 days, it is automatically deleted.
3. Disqus Comment System
This comment system replaces your WordPress comment system with your comments hosted and powered by Disqus. 75% of the websites using 3rd party commenting systems are powered by Disqus. It integrates with Akismet. It allows commenters to post as guest, or login via OpenID or social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google and Yahoo.
4. Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin will generate a special XML site-map which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing to better index your blog. It notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.
5. W3 Total Cache
The highest rated and most complete WordPress performance plugin that greatly improved the speed of my website. It will also enhance your users’ experience by improving server performance, caching every aspect of your site and reducing the download time of your theme.
6. WPtouch Mobile Plugin
This plugin automatically enables a simple mobile theme for mobile visitors of your WordPress website. You will have the ability to customize many aspects of your site’s appearance, that is fast and user-friendly for mobile users. Visitors can switch between the theme on your mobile WordPress website and your website’s regular theme.
7. WP Minify
Loading speed is one of the major factors in search engine rankings. I found the WP Minify plugin to be one of the best to speed up WordPress by minifying all CSS and JavaScript Files. After installing, you should immediately notice a huge difference in the loading speed of your site.,
8. P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler)
Your site speed is very important for search rankings and user experience. I learned the hard way that having many plugins or ones that are poorly configured will cause your site to load slowly. Using the P3 plugin, you can evaluate the runtime for your plugins and narrow down anything causing slowness on your site. This will allow you to make better decisions about the plugins to use.
9. WordPress SEO by Yoast
The number one traffic generator for Fuel Lines is through search. The more frequently your site appears in search results, the more visitors it receives from the search engine’s users. This is one of the best free plugins for optimizing your WordPress site for search. It has received over a million downloads. It many simple to use, special features.
10. WP-Optimize
This plugin is a WordPress database cleanup and optimization tool. It allows you to remove post revisions, comments in the spam queue, un-approved comments or items in trash with just a few clicks. Within the WP-Optimizer plugin, you may also set it to automatically optimize your WordPress database. You can set the automatic optimization for every week, bi-week or month.
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photo credit: Chris Blakeley via photopin cc
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