Category: General

Top 10 WordPress Plugins for every WordPress sites

There are thousands of plugins to install for WordPress platform, making it a hard decision to decide which plugin is really a must-have. We have analyzed and ran a survey on our customers and publishing list of plugins that every website running WordPress must have.

1. Hitsteps Ultimate Web Analytics

Since our base of survey was our own users, so obviously they all mentioned they cannot run a website without Hitsteps, we second that! It pack most important web analytics features in a simple and unified user interface, allowing you to see list of online visitors, click on them and see pages they see in your website, see click heatmaps and even start a chat with your visitors.

2. WordPress SEO by Yoast

WordPress out of the box is already quite a good platform for SEO but that doesn’t mean you can’t improve it further! Improve your WordPress SEO, Write better content and have a fully optimized WordPress site using Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin.

3. Visual Composer

Visual Composer is Commercial Drag and Drop Frontend and Backend Page Builder Plugin for WordPress. You will be able to take full control over your WordPress site, build any layout you can imagine – no programming knowledge required. Moreover, now you can choose either work on a backend or move your page building process to frontend and instantly see changes you make.

4. AddThis

Traditionally known as the “sharing tool”, AddThis has taken website tools to the next level through the creation of recommended content and conversion tools while also streamlining and evolving their suite of social tools, including sharing and following buttons. AddThis provides the best sharing, social, recommended content, and conversion tools to help you make your website smarter.

5. WP Super Cache

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. A very fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static html files.

6. WordPress Backup to Dropbox

WordPress Backup to Dropbox has been created to give you peace of mind that your blog is backed up on a regular basis. Just choose a day, time and how often you wish your backup to be performed and kick back and wait for your websites files and a SQL dump of its database to be dropped in your Dropbox! Keep your valuable WordPress website, its media and database backed up to Dropbox in minutes with this sleek, easy to use plugin.

7. Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

8. Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on. It is not just another contact form plugin!

9. Wordfence Security

Wordfence starts by checking if your site is already infected. Wordfence do a deep server-side scan of your source code comparing it to the Official WordPress repository for core, themes and plugins. Then Wordfence secures your site and makes it up to 50 times faster.

10. TinyMCE Advanced

This plugin will let you add, remove and arrange the buttons that are shown on the Visual Editor toolbar. It includes 15 plugins for TinyMCE that are automatically enabled or disabled depending on what buttons are chosen. .

5 Rules for a Successful Campaign

We all do campaigns from time to time, some might be successful and some might feel like waste of resources. Question is, how to get most out of every campaign we run?

To answer this question, we need to study our current customer base. What make them use our service/product? More importantly, what problem are we solving?
It must be main focus, if you have no idea what your customers are looking for, then stop right now and use services like SurveyMonkey to ask this question from your customers. Make them engage with your survey by offering something of value once they fill up the survey form.

Once you know your customer base, now it’s time to analyze your campaign source. Is your campaign targeting your existing customers? Then you already know what they are looking for. Go ahead and get most of your result by offering them a new feature, discount or something they all are looking for.

Are you targeting new customers? Then you must go back and see what problem are you solving for your current loyal customers. New customers will most likely have those problems and you’ll be able to help them. Put focus on what you can solve for them.
Make it look big result yet easy to achieve. Make them want to try your product and see if it work for them.

Now, where to run this campaign? If you are targeting your current visitors, then of course, you can run campaign in a frame in your website or use services such as MailChimp to blast email to them (make sure they agree to receive promotional emails, nobody likes spam)

If you are going to tagger target new customers, where is better than Facebook ads?
You might say Google AdWords, but that depends on your competitor. Try your keywords in Google AdWords and see how much is price of your keywords to be appear in homepage.
If that’s very expensive, just forget about Google AdWords. Competition is very high and you’ll lose more than you earn. You might try Microsoft ads system as an alternative where there are less competitors and take it as your advantage.

But Facebook ensure that your ads will be seen, commented or shared among users, thus you’ll get more exposure. Make sure your target correct audience. Try to guess which interests are more likely to attracts your specified audience. Try to narrow down your audience, so that you get more quality exposure. You don’t want people who like vintage gadgets to see your high end product ads!
Try to run few ads and see which text attract more customers.

You’ll need a SEO optimized landing page to bring those users in. It must be as attractive as your homepage, and it must have very clear call to action button. Make sure keywords the is main problem for your users which you are solving, are bold and repeated over.
These way you get some chance to earn organic free clicks from Google and beat all those competitors who are paying expensive funds for their ads.

Lastly, you’ll need to track this incoming and existing visitors. You never can guess why your visitors are not converting unless you track their behavior and see in which step, visitors are dropping. Hitsteps offer real-time web analytics dashboard so that you can watch them as they switch pages, as well as campaign tracking so the you can see how many entered your landing page and went as far as registration page, as far as add to cart page and so on. Just sign up for your free account and put tracking code in each of your pages.

Now you are fully equipped for a campaign success. Run your ads, monitor your audience and pages where visitors are dropping, optimize those weak area, keep changing your ads until you get best outcome and lastly, don’t forget about interacting with comments people leave in your Facebook ads and posts.

Hitsteps now offer free licenses

Big news, We are excited to announce Hitsteps is available for free now!

Your account is eligible to use free license if your website don’t have much of page views.
1,000 page views per month allowance is good for blogger, photographers and newly developed websites.
What are you waiting for? Get your free plugin at http://wordpress.org/plugins/hitsteps-visitor-manager/ for WordPress or http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/extension/site-management/analytics/hitsteps-visitor-manager for Joomla

View hitsteps feature in our website: www.hitsteps.com/features.php

Say Hi to Hitsteps!

Welcome to the next generation of visitor manager and web analytics web app which allow web masters and business owners to get closer to their visitors and understand them more. In next few weeks, service will be completely built and it will be up and running. You might consider testing the service now as well. Stay tuned!