WordPress Plugins to avoid LIKE THE PLAGUE MOFO!

Posted by David Whitehouse

Ok guys, so lots of people out there post about various plugins and how they are “great” etc. But half of the time you get all excited, install the plugin, only to be disappointed. Even worse, some of you guys might install a plugin and actually think it is doing you some good, so I thought I’d write this guide to try to help you choose plugins that don’t suck (trust me, I AM an expert at this, I install crappy plugins all the time)!

Social Bookmarking Plugins

Don’t bother installing a plugin that completely covers your blog post in social bookmarks (see example below – I won’t say what site it is from, but it does rank on page 1 for “how to make money online” in Google.co.uk.)

OMG Social Bookmarks are DA BOMB

There are a few reasons for this:

  • Each one of those stupid links is actually leaking you page rank out of your site
  • The majority of people only use Twitter of Facebook, so the chances of you attracting someone to your blog that uses one of these services AND will submit it is slim (unless your Shoemoney or Problogger, in which case you really don’t need to read this).
  • Is having your blog post announce you’ve only got one re-tweet a really good idea? I did this earlier last year, it’s a bad idea. It puts people off, and they are likely to re-tweet you from Twitter or their Twitter client, not from your site anyways!

Instead why not try using one of those “share this” or “add this” buttons – they keep the social bookmarking up-to-date and it doesn’t cover your page in links. Alternatively use WP greet box – the reason why this is good is it only shows a message appropriate to that user, so they see a Digg box if they came from Digg. If you do use WP Greet Box, I recommend adapting it to encourage:

  1. People to add you as a friend
  2. Sign up to your email newsletter
  3. Take action on your site e.g. buy something

SEO Plugins

Ok some SEO plugins are really, really, really, REALLY bad. First up, SEO plugins that remove stop words and numbers from the URL – this is unbelievably irritating and quite frankly, a bit pointless. We had a client at Bronco recently with one of these and they happened to require model numbers in their posts, but all of them were cutting short, so they were ending up with stuff like iPhone-1, iPhone-2 (for example) – yeah like that is better than iPhone-3gs?!?!?!

Next up is automatic link plugins, so basically you put in a keyword and a URL and it replaces all instances of that keyword up to a maximum of 1 or 2 per post with a link to that URL. Again I hate these – they slow your site down (my site is slow enough cos I’m a lazy bastard and I can’t be bothered to move it, so stop pestering me people)! They also create some stupid, stupid links, where you are writing a sentence and it just puts one in, but it looks totally inappropriate – not very classy seo.

SEO Friendly images plugins – HOW LAZY DO YOU HAVE TO BE THAT YOU CAN’T TYPE 50 CHARACTERS?! Plus it fills it with a load of crap, I have a horrible feeling I’ve got this installed still. Instead, when you upload an image, manually edit a beautifully crafted keyword rich ALT text.

Comment Redirect and Spam Plugins

I used these for a while, and quite frankly I think they are a little bit spammy. Comment Relish actually sends unsolicited email (unless you of course add a simple tick box on the comment saying “I don’t mind you sending me unsolicited email”) – which is obviously against all spam legislation. The other one, Comment Redirect – well to be honest I’m in two minds about it, but I think it pisses people off being re-directed after they are their comment to the post, I know it does with me – so why piss off your readers?

The Rest

Now I am the worst offender here, but I am learning through experience (I’m good at failing over and over – but thats called progress, right?). To finish this big long rant of a post off, and because I want to go to bed, I’m just going to list a few plugins I think suck to high heaven and should be avoided at all costs:

  • Twitterupdater (I used this, it is pants – use Feedburner’s socialise functionality for Twitter, like Patrick Altoft does)
  • Redirection plugin (again I used this, I’m pretty sure it slowed my site down even further, which is pretty bad as it runs at a snail pace anyways – learn to edit your .htaccess file instead, it’s much more fun)!
  • The Odiogo plugin – great in theory, but super slow load times.
  • Most of the plugins I recommend – as usually I haven’t tested them and I’m dead excited about them, but they turn out to be shit – see appendix A, B and C

Anyways, that is my rant for the night – perhaps I’ll do a post on some decent WordPress plugins, such as the superb Google Website Optimizer for WordPress Plugin (or perhaps that’s just me being excited again).

I’m off to bed. </RANT>

Blogging with Dragon Naturally Speaking 10

Posted by David Whitehouse

Well I’ve just installed Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 and it does seem to be a little bit better, although saying that I have had to correct a couple of things already in this sentence.

I started this post at lunchtime and since then I’ve done all the easy training on Dragon naturally speaking, but unfortunately it’s still having difficulties. I’m going to continue to persevere with it, do all the medium and hard training and then see if I am still having problems.

I’ve had to resort to typing now as it just can’t do the job well enough, thoroughly disappointed right now, but we’ll see how it goes…

The Forgotten Split Test – a 3 Year Test!

Posted by David Whitehouse

I was writing a post for the Dave Naylor blog about Google Analytics and Website Optimizer when I thought “have I ever done a split test?”, so I logged into Google Website Optimizer briefly and noticed the following test from 9th May 2007! And it was still running!!!

A graph showing conversion rates changes in a 3 year split test

I’m not entirely sure what is happening over time, but it seems as those my initial test increased conversions by around 33%. But it seems over time that the effectiveness of this has decreased. The test in question was for an old site, originally designed by SEO Doofus, when he was at 9XB (sorry to point the finger Carps).

Here is the original:

And here is the alternative which performed significantly better (awful design I know – but it shows how it was a user interface problem rather than a “style” problem):

So this awfully designed changed actually increased conversions coming through the home page by 35%!!!  So can anyone explain the convergence of the split test over time? I’m really perplexed!!!

Facebook Campaign Followup

Posted by David Whitehouse

Last week I started my first real Facebook campaign for The Old Deanery, the campaign was only meant to run for a week, sadly it didn’t quite have the effect I had hoped for, but still it gave us some useful data to work with, here come the stats!

220,352 impressions
60 clicks (0.027% CTR)
$26.20 spent ($0.44 CPC)
11 Fans signed up (18.33% Signup rate)
$2.38 CPA (£1.54 CPA)

So the real weakness in this campaign was the click through rate, it was shockingly bad – I’m not sure about what the averages are for Facebook, but I still think this is below average. The reason behind this bad CTR is the photo I used, it is just the photo of the building, I should have used a photo of a nice plate of food instead – I think this would have got a much higher CTR.

I am very pleased with the conversion rate as 18.33% is quite high, unfortunately I don’t know if all those new fans were as a direct result of the campaign, but since I didn’t see any other communication about the Old Deanery I think the increase was due to an indirect result of the campaign (people see someone else become a fan of the Deanery, so they do too).

On the whole the CPA was £1.54, which I think was about three times what I wanted to pay, but in the grand scheme of things, if the Facebook Fans perform as well as the email subscribers do, then I think over the period of a year, if we do one offer per week, then these fans are likely to be worth around £36 each.

Overall an interesting and useful experience, next we will be testing the % of fans that actually respond to an offer.

Getting my knee sorted

Posted by David Whitehouse

I’ve been having problems with my knee for almost 4 years now, I spent 1 year trying to continue karate on it, but in the end I had to stop because the pain was too bad and it really felt like I was doing my knee some damage – plus all the stories of people at karate getting hip or knee replacements kind of worried me!

Anyways, during that time I have been to the doctors twice, the first time was just after I injured it, they told me they’d book me a physio appointment and I waited quite a few months before realising that they hadn’t bothered at all. So I decided to go private, I was given a load of exercises, none of which appeared to help, by this time it had been a year. Then I saw another physiotherapist about it around 2 years ago, again more exercises, again no change. Then I saw another physio late in 2009, more exercises and again no change.

So not wanting to give up I saw the doctors again, he suggested I tried strengthening my quads – yeah cheers doc, like I hadn’t tried that one before!

So again, not wanting to give up, I contacted Andy Wray, a local physiotherapist in Ripon who has only recently gone private full time. So I saw Andy, and he went through the usual tests and checks – and nothing really seemed apparent, until I let out a big girly scream and he suggested I might have a “lunge lesion” – as the pain sounded like it was bone on bone.

So Andy wrote a letter and I took it to the doctors and now I am finally seeing an orthopaedic surgeon, so hopefully they’ll get it all sorted and I can get back to a martial art, WOOHOO!!!

Cheers Andy.

My First “Proper” Facebook Ad Campaign

Posted by David Whitehouse

Recently I’ve been helping out my mum with email marketing for her restaurant, we’ve had a lot of success and she has around 600 opt-in emails now, which is great.

Typically it works out that if she sends out an offer to these 600 emails she gets 200 opens and 20 bookings of at least 2 people, each person averaging around 7 or 8 pounds profit. All in all it works out at around £400 profit per email shot – which is ace.

So I started talking about what would happen if we had that on Facebook – where the disadvantage is decreased attention, but the advantage being that people are more likely to “like it” or comment on the special offer, making it go viral.

So using the stats, we worked out that each email was worth £0.70 per email shot, and that we thought we could send at least 10 emails per unsubscribe, meaning that each email was worth around £7. We used this same figure to work out how much we would be willing to pay per Facebook fan.

So I decided to create a campaign targeting the local area, it happens to target quarter of a million people in the Ripon, Harrogate, Northallerton area – and it only costs me $0.44 per click! About 1 in 13 seem to be subscribing so far, so it could be a little bit on the expensive side, only time will tell. I’ve got around $95 budget left, and our initial aim was to get 300 more subscribers, this seems a little optimistic now, but hopefully it should still be a profitable campaign.

I will let you all know how it goes :)