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Transcript of Episode 498 WP Plugins A to Z

Sniffing Out The Truth It's Episode 498 - We have plugins for Bro-Me Baby, Gambling, Events, Name Games, to Infinity and back....., and ClassicPress Options. It's all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!

All transcripts start from the point in the show where we head off into the meat and potatoes. They are the complete verbatim of John and Amber’s discussion of this weeks plugins that have been reviewed.

WordPress Plugins A to Z Podcast and Transcript for See complete show notes for Episode #498 here.


Sniffing Out The Truth It’s Episode 498 – We have plugins for Bro-Me Baby, Gambling, Events, Name Games, to Infinity and back….., and ClassicPress Options. It’s all coming up on WordPress Plugins A-Z!


Episode #498

 

John:                That is, of course, heading into the depths of plugin depravity. And what do we got for you this week? ClassicPress options are still pretty lean in here. I haven’t had time to do any ClassicPress stuff, and I will have to spend some time doing that if I’m going to get anything because there’s nobody out there submitting stuff. But hey, if you are using ClassicPress and you’re listening to the show, submit some stuff for me. You know, make it easy, at least spread the word to your other ClassicPress users and help us get more information out there about it. Okay, WordPress plugins, what do we have for WordPress plugins this week? Well, first off, what I have for you is I have a plugin called DesignBro Business Name Generator. This is actually a cool little plugin, which I think is quite amusing. You plug it in, insert a little shortcode on your website somewhere on a page that you go to, and then you type in a bunch of keywords about what you think your business is about, and it spits out back at you a bunch of crazy ass names for business based on those keywords.

Amber:            Oh, cool.

John:                And these are names such as — what do we got? We got like parlor or parlay, which is pronounced parlor. And then you’ve got, you know, what are all these crazy names we have for businesses out there, which aren’t even — you like really, you pronounce it that way with all those letters? Okay, I guess that’s a stretch, but anyway, that’s what this does for you. It creates unique names. And then, of course, the way they built it, it’s got links in all the names you click through to Namecheap, which I’m willing to bet is an affiliate link for them. You register it through Namecheap, and you get your domain cheap. They make a buck off you. Fair enough. I won’t begrudge them that but it’s a really cool idea on their part on how to increase their affiliate link sales. It may not be. I didn’t check the links to see if their affiliate, but I’m willing to bet that’s what it is. It’s a really cool idea, but I like the idea of the plugin to help people come up with some crazy name for their business in this day and age when there’s so hard to come up with a new name because, of course, every domain on the internet has to be new and unique.

Amber             Yeah, that’s just a really, really cool idea. I really like it.

John:                Yeah. And I give this one a five-dragon rating.

Amber:            That seems like it could be really useful.

John:                Well, if you’re running an events calendar, it’s extremely useful because, you know, the problem with events is like there’s a few places I go for events calendars, but I often forget to go check them, and sometimes I check and it’s like, oh, I already missed the event — because I didn’t know when they added a new event. And that’s what this allows is, you know, new events added, you’re subscribed to it, you’ll get notification of a new event happening and occurring. And so that’s why I’m like adding that one to mine so — because I know the Hike Club for Men will start to grow. I just don’t know how fast or how slow.

Amber:            So Hemdian had a question for us. What’s with all the short plugin names? Last week they were all so long?

John:                Oh, let’s say, you know, it’s one of those things, and we’ll just call it Kismet — you know, balancing out the universe. We got to have some Yin to the Yang, you know.

Amber:            That didn’t even occur to me. Yeah, last week we did have long names. This week we had shortest and even currently.

John:                Yeah, I never thought never occurred to me either. It’s just the choices of plugins this week.

Amber:            So the last one I’ve got here is Wpit Funny Name Generator. I thought this one was kind of fun. It’s a shortcode-run plugin. You just put in there and then you put the shortcode that they give you in there, and what it offers up is silly names Jedi name, Ninja name, and Mad Max name. It’s actually a lot of fun. You can keep putting in like just a different name every time. You put your information in there, you tell it to find the name for you, and you get your secret Ninja, or Jedi, or Mad Max name. It’s so fun. I know a lot of people on Facebook — like I still see a lot of people on my Facebook who do that, and it could actually be a really good addition to your site. It’s free. It has an automatic share on Twitter button thing. So it could actually get you tweets and be noticed, and all that fun stuff. So, definitely go check this out. It’s totally free, so you really got nothing to lose. Yeah, I rate this at five dragons.

John:                Cool, so it just generates the names, it does nothing else?

Amber:            Does nothing else, but they’re fun.

John:                Okay, well got to have fun. I mean, what else would it be? All right. So this show still currently brought to you by

 

Are you tired of the same old web hosting, not having the resources you need to run your website properly, having a lack of control, then you need johnoverall.com web hosting, providing you with all the resources you need to smoothly run your WordPress website or ClassicPress website. With strict limits on the number of clients allowed per server, johnoverall.com provides high quality, fast server performance. Visit johnoverall.com for web hosting that won’t slow you down.

John:                Absolutely nothing, but high-quality web hosting. And remember folks, my last server is starting to fill up, so there’s not a lot of spaces left on it. So if you’re looking to get some quality web hosting, you better reach out to me soon. I imagine within the next three to five months, it will be filled, and I will only be taking clients when somebody goes out there and snuffs one of my other ones. Okay, contests.

Amber:            these sound clips that we’re getting.

John:                Absolutely. Thanks to Steve Goodtime and Brent Matthews for that one. I really appreciate it. Our contests are also powered by the simple giveaways plugin. I haven’t given them a shout out in a while. I got to remember to do that every once in a while because, of course, they’ve given me a free version of their premium Pro license to run our contest. So thank you very much, guys. I greatly appreciate it. It’s a great plugin. If you’re looking to run contests on your website, it makes the automation really easy for everything, it automatically selects the winners, it adds their names, the email list, connects up with MailChimp and a couple others. It does a lot, really great plugin. I do also want to remember to thank Charlie for coming to the aid of the show and bringing our contests all into an organization that is working. So thanks a lot, Charlie. I greatly appreciate all the support you give the show. And that’s how you can support the show, folks. There’s many different things that need to be done, you know, aside from money. Money is useful, but getting other things accomplished for the show — even someone to do research and send us stuff that would be fantastic. Save some time.

All right. Currently, we do have a contest. Oh, I got to announce out the last contest. We had a winner for that one for the Unlimited Lifetime license of HappyFiles. The winner was Jason Lee. So congratulations to Jason. So currently, we do have a contest where we are giving away an annual single license of Equalize Digital – The Accessibility Checker Pro plugin. This is a comprehensive accessibility scanner tool for your WordPress website. In other words, it’s a way to help ensure that your website is accessibility-ready. If you’re out of the States, you know, how important that is because you could get sued down there. I’m not so certain about Canada yet, but I imagine it’s not too far behind. This is an annual license valued at $149, and it’s a really great plugin. You want to find out more about this, go check out the interview I did with Amber Hind from Equalize Digital. We had a great conversation talking about this plugin and what their organization does and how it came about. Really good interview, so go check that interview out, folks. It can really help you out. So that’s the contest. And remember, hey, even if you don’t think you need this plugin, go into the contest. At least let us know you’re listening and you want to support the show. Even if you win the license, you don’t use it, you can always give it back and recycle it, or give it off to someone else or hang on to it for a little while. You never know when you might just need a license for accessibility checking on a website you’re developing. So go into the contest, folks. It only takes a minute. All we need is your name and email address. And if you’re already entered on our email list, we won’t enter you twice. We’ll only enter you once. An email list all you get is a weekly newsletter talking about things we talked about on the show, and links to the show itself. All right. So that covers up that. And in this episode here, I covered up the following plugins, DesignBro Business Name Generator, which I gave a five to, the Raffle Play WooCommerce which I gave a four to, and the Subscriber Addons for The Event Calendar, which I gave a five to.

Amber:            And I covered Night Eye, which I gave a four to, Infinite Uploads, to gave a three to, and Wpit Funny Name Generator, which I gave a five to.

John:                Very nice, all for the infidels. All right. And a couple of other quick things before we head off into the Q&A segment of the show, which, of course, the Q&A segment is split into two, you know, where we cover part of it here for the podcast, and the other part is only carried on the YouTube version. So if you’re listening on the podcast, you’ll want to go check out the last little bit of the YouTube show to hear the rest of the Q&As. So at the moment, as I said, there’s no meetup plan, but I am in the works of planning up a convoluted meetup that will encompass the Rogues Tavern, No Agenda, and WP Plugins. It’s going to probably happen early summertime, and it’ll probably be up at the oasis. So that’s probably what we’re going to do with that. So stay tuned for that. If you’re not getting enough of hearing about me and Amber’s chat, make sure you go check us out at the Rogues Tavern for the new podcast and live stream we have over there. You can go check it out at the roguestavern.com/live where we do a weekly every Tuesday night at 9 pm, a weekly shooting the shit at the Rogues Tavern. All right. It is time for —

 

It’s question and answer time.

John:                With Amber.

Amber:            So just to start this off, if you have any questions you would like to have asked, send them over to me at amber@wppro.ca, and I will get them up on here. If you want to keep yourself anonymous, just send me the question and let me know you don’t want your name or anything put up there. If you want the world to know it’s you asking the questions, let me know that and I’ll make sure that everyone knows you are the one asking the question. So my first question that is, how do you link advertising to your site to make money, and how do you make a penny-a-click?

John:                Okay, well, that’s two questions.

Amber:            Okay. .

John:                It’s still two questions.

Amber:            Fine, two questions.

John:                All right. Well, the first one, how do you link advertising to your site to make money? Well, that depends on what advertising you’re getting. If you’re selling, you’re advertising yourself. You’re going out and getting the people to advertise on your site. There’s beautiful plugins for WordPress that you can set up an ad system on there. I used to use one called ading, A-D-I-N-G. It’s a premium plugin from — oh, what’s the name of those guys there — Envato — premium plugin from Envato. Really great plugin. It works very well. It costs about 20 bucks give or take. And it allows you to set up zones throughout your site for your advertising, and you get the images from the people who advertise, you create the image, you put the image on the site, you set the link it goes through, and then people click on it and they go through. The other ways is if you can qualify for Google ads, or the dozens of other advertising companies out there — now there’s dozens of them now. If you can qualify for them — because many of them now require you to have 50,000 views of your website a day just to qualify for the advertising to put their advertising on your website. So you got to be a fairly popular website for it.

As for your second question, which does tie into your first one, make a penny-a-click, I don’t know if they pay you that much anymore. That’s an awful lot of payment for an ad nowadays. Some of the ads, they play you on — these advertisers, they pay you on a worsening scale of scamming that I’ve determined over the years, and they pay on what they call cost per thousands. It’s labeled CPM for some reason, but it’s cost per thousand, not cost per million. And what that means is cost per thousands of views of the ad. And so it means every time the ad shows up on your site one thousand times, you might get 10 cents, or you might get a nickel. If people click through the ad, you might get an extra penny or two — if they click through the ad. It varies. The amount they pay you now is so varied.

The only people that really make money are the ones that have created their website years ago, and they constantly creating new content to keep the search engines coming in and to keep the visitors coming to the website, and they have so much content that the visitors are there all the time. There’s a few websites I visit like that, that are just stuffed. The worst thing is, is that many websites I go to, I start to read the article, and the ads are so annoying, I just say, I’m out of here, I’m not going to read this article, and I’m gone. They may have already gotten their money for the ad views, but the ads didn’t mean anything. We’ve become so ad-blind on the Internet, I don’t know if it’s going to work anymore. That’s one reason I’m not going to put any ads on the Rogues Tavern ever. I’ve taken all the ads off of the WP plugin site. The little sponsorship piece I have for the show — that’s in case if somebody wants to do it, but basically, it’s just me showcasing my other company, my main business is basically what it’s for. You know, I’ve had a couple of sponsors here and there and I’ve sold a few ads here and there but it was never a lot of money. It was an extra few bucks here and there. It was never enough money to do anything significantly. So I’ve determined to be — if you want to be an sell ads on your website, you literally have to make that your full-time job. Just like if you become an marketer, you literally have to make affiliate marketing your full-time job to make any significant money off of it. In the early days on the Internet, it was easy. I made hundreds of dollars a month in the early days on the Internet with split advertising and affiliate marketing, and it just required no effort because nobody was there yet. But once the market got super-saturated, the prices came down, you made no money, and I started yanking at stuff because that’s not what I wanted to do for a full-time job.

Amber:            What is affiliate marketing?

John:                Well, you can affiliate market Amazon products, for instance, the first one to come to mind. You get special links from Amazon, and you put those links on your website. If somebody clicks that link, goes to Amazon, buys the product, you get a 2% or 3% of the sale price of that item. The same happens with multiple other companies. They do affiliate marketing, you get a percentage of the sale. The price of the product doesn’t change for the end-user, but what happens is they’re cutting you in on their profit by giving you a percentage of the sale, and that’s because you drove the client to them. And affiliate marketing used to be a really big thing. There was lots of money to be made in affiliate marketing, but again, you have to make it your full-time job to turn it into a significant amount of money.

Amber:            It sounds like when you’re doing consignment –, you give the shop your clothes on consignment, so you get a portion of whatever they sell for.

John:                It’s a similar sort of idea. But that’s how that works there in the advertising. The plugins are really useful, and they do help. You can use them in multiple other ways besides advertising. You know, like, if you’re trying to showcase stuff on your website, and you just want to put banner ads here and there on your website, the advertising plugins are great for that. So there’s lots of things you can do, but advertising on your site to make money, you have to have a pretty busy website before the advertising will give you any significant amount of money. It’s like making money off YouTube videos now. It’s nearly impossible to make money off YouTube videos now unless you get your audience to support you. And that’s the way of the world, you know — like the No Agenda doesn’t forgot to give them their shout out at the beginning — but that’s no agenda with their value for value model where people give them donations in what they consider value for the value the show produces, which is what this show has been working towards trying to be, the value for value. We give value; people will hopefully give us value back. They can give us value back in time, talent or treasure, meaning money, and that’s what we’re looking for.

Amber:            I’m just reading the Hemdian .

John:                Yeah. So my — I just saw that pop up. And yeah, putting ads on your website needs to be done carefully. It can make your site look unprofessional, especially if too many — it depends on what your site’s primary purpose is. Well, absolutely. And that’s what I was mentioning, but not those kinds of words. Your ads on your website, I’ve done that, made my site unprofessional with the ads. I’ve been down those roads, and many people put too many on there because they figure the more the better. Like I used to belong to — what was it, half-a-dozen different ad networks, and I was supplying ads from all those networks, and then Google started down the line of, you know, you can’t put anyone else’s ads, but ours on your site, or you know, you’re limited to one other ad company. It’s like — it just got so insane keeping up with the rules. And that’s part of the reason why I got rid of it. But yeah — and that’s why now I just like — there’s no point in the ads. The ads don’t do anything but distract from what your website is trying to do. So the advertising supported model is dying. It’s going to die a nasty death, I think, over the next 5 to 10 years. The advertising supported model just doesn’t work. You know, what will work is native ads. Native ads will work.

Amber:            Native ads?

John:                Native ads, that’s where some company comes with you with a widget. They got, “Hey, we got this really cool widget. We need you to write an article about how cool our widget is. We’ll pay you X amount of money to write this cool article about our widget, put it on your website, so all the people who buy widgets will read about this thing and then come over to our website and buy our widgets. Native ads, if you listen No Agenda long enough, you’ve heard them talk about native ads, and they point out new stories that are native ads. It’s like the new story that comes to mind over the last year. It happens every Christmas, is the secret Santa’s at Walmart that come in and pay — you know, pay off these people’s layaways. That’s a native ad for Walmart because it’s just like, oh, $60,000 was paid off. Well, you maybe somebody did that and maybe Walmart did that themselves and put the story out. But what does it make Walmart look really good even though someone else paid it off? It’s an ad for Walmart. It’s what it is. It’s a native ad. It’s an ad disguised as a new story or an article, is what a native ad is where people are reading it and they can’t tell it’s an actual advertisement. Though there are rules around that, there’s ways around the rules. There’s always loopholes. All right. Well, there you go. There’s your thing about advertising, which just went into a great big tirade.

Amber:            Well, going the opposite direction now, what about getting ads for your site on to other sites?

John:                Well, you reach out to other sites and you ask them what they would charge you to putting out on their website. And I can tell you the return on that is not very high. The return on investment is usually not very high.

Amber:            Okay, well, once your site is up and going, how do you go about getting your site better known, like, is there a plugin for that?

John:                There might be a plugin for it. You reach out through social media to people — I honestly don’t know anymore. I’ve given up trying. It used to be easy ways to do it. Right good quality content and get the Search Engines Index you. That’s one of the biggest ways. Produce catchy videos for YouTube that people will catch and follow. You might even try producing catchy stuff on. I mean, we’re all the eyeballs. They’re on YouTube. They’re on — what’s that? They’re on TikTok. They’re on Instagram. They’re on WhatsApp — oh, not Whatsapp so much. They’re on Facebook. You promote through those areas there because that’s all they are now is their promotion places. They’re no longer any places for any sort of decent conversation. Yeah, as Hemdian said, SEO is the best thing, Search Engine Optimization. In other words, you write content for your website that the search engines like, and they — you will eventually rise to the top. And that’s kind of hard. It’s a hard thing to do, but it’s not as hard as you think. It’s like — I used to do it. I just haven’t bothered with it in a long time. I’ve fallen out in the rankings because I haven’t spent time on my website because my contents become aged, and you need to have regular content that is not aged.

Amber:            Okay, my last question. Oh, Pinterest — Pinterest is another place that I use.

John:                I use Pinterest too. I forgot about Pinterest. Pinterest is a great place to go if you’ve got artwork you want to sell because people like artwork and pictures because Pinterest is all about pictures.

Amber:            It’s good for art and stuff too.

John:                Yeah, but that uses a store; you got to pay money to them. They’re not a network. They’re an e-commerce site, and they take like 10% of your sale or something.

Amber:            Okay, so my last question is —

John:                Not last — okay, that was the second question, which sites up and down and is there a plugin for it? Okay, there are plugins to help you with promoting your stuff to social networks.

Amber:            Oh, is that — I mean, asides from — okay, like, the basic share buttons and stuff?

John:                No there’s plugins that will automatically publish your content to social networks. I covered one just a week or two ago on the show.

Amber:            Yeah, I do remember you talking about that.

John:                I just don’t remember what the name of it was. All right. Well, this will be the last question. We’ll let you shout out the last question, then we’ll do our closing credits, and we’ll carry it on afterwards.

Amber:            So, how do you go about choosing your color scheme for your site? So it’s pleasing to the viewer, like, what goes into that?

John:                Oh, that’s a very good one. I like that question because there’s a good long answer to that one, and we’ll come back to that one after the end. And we’ll let my girl take us out of here, and I will enjoy my shot.

 

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John can also be reached at his website, JohnOverall.com, or email him directly at john@wppro.ca. Thanks for joining us and have a great day.

Thanks for listening to the show. This show is copyright by JohnOverall.com. So until next time, have yourselves a good morning, good afternoon, or a good evening, wherever you happen to be out there on the globe today.

 

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