My Favorite Things Erins Picks - When I Grow Up

My Favorite Things Erins Picks - When I Grow Up This is a brand-new series I like to call My Favorite Things, based on the popularity of the posts where I list my favorite people and products/platforms. Now Im currently sharing a room with my friend Erin at WDS, but she sent over her favorite things to share with you. As a professional photographer, a co-owner of a social media production company and as Your Blog Doctor, I know shes gonna have a ton of gems up her sleeve. Enjoy! My Favorite Things by From Small Things Im Your Blog Doctor so when I say Ive heard a lot of blogging sob stories, you know its true. Designers who never respond, graphics that wont load. And there you are stuck with a site that only kind of works for your business and your brand. You might be creating epic content everyday, but WordPress is blocking you at every turn. Honey, Im here to help. Below is a list of my not-so top secret ESSENTIAL WordPress plugins that can help you run your blog and business more effectively. These are the ones I recommend to all of my clients. Theyre little things that can have a big impact. Some of them might even make running your website a little fun so dont say I didnt warn you. Backup Buddy / Sucuri I have a confession. Before I was Your Blog Doctor, I ran a  WordPress  website that crashed. I wasnt backing the site up and I had to recreate everything from old files that were missing lots of important stuff. I learned the ultra-hard way that having an easy-to-restore backup is as good as money in the bank. Backup Buddy is a premium plugin and in my mind its the best blog backup solution fullstop. Sucuri is a sort of companion service. For a small fee, they will scan your site as often as you want for malicious code (hackers!) and if they find any they will fix it for you as well! And they do it fast.  WordPress  is a fast-growing target for all sorts of nasty people and with these two plugins in my corner, I dont have to worry. Tweetily Im so glad someone made this plugin because it solves multiple problems at once. You set it up to randomly tweet out old content to drive new traffic to your site. You get fresh new tweets and your audience sees articles that they may have missed the first time around! Automation is amazing. WordPress Ping Optimizer Im going to get technical here, but dont freak out.  WordPress  has this wonderful built-in feature called pinging. Basically every time you update your site it sends out a little beacon to let search engines and indexes know that Hey, something new is here! Used properly it can help boost your search rankings. Unfortunately, its rarely used properly. The default WordPress setting means your site is spamming pinging services every single time you update, schedule or publish a post. This can get you banned from pinging services.  WordPress  Ping Optimizer allows you to change that so you only flag search engines on a schedule you set AND lets you specify tons more services to ping so you rank faster. Digg Digg Social Bar There are tons of social share bars out there, and Ive tried them all. This is my newest favorite by the folks who made the Buffer app (which you should also be using.) Its fully customizable and includes buttons for everything that can be turned on or off. Awesomesauce. Gravity Forms If youre running an online business, dont mess around with free contact forms. Gravity Forms, another premium plugin, is easy-to-use but full-featured as well. They also offer Paypal integration so selling off your site has never been easier. Scribe SEO This is a new, premium plugin that Ive been test driving lately and have really come to depend on. The main problem with SEO is that its a ton of work. Researching keywords doesnt necessarily tell you how to implement them in a way to get your articles noticed. Scribe is SEO that is a part of your writing and editing workflow. Its not a cheap service, but if youre trying to build an audience and links to your content, definitely give it a look. Your Blog Doctor is Erin Wigger. I have been building web sites since the dark ages of the internet. In 1993 you could find me running up my parents’ Compuserve bill and teaching myself HTML on a 386 Pentium computer. I have produced web sites for Microsoft and Expedia.com, among others.  I have designed and built WordPress themes for the past five years for fun and profit. As a  professional photographer, I’m uniquely attuned to the needs of creative clients and their businesses.  You shouldnt have to do it all by your lonesome. If youre stuck on what comes next, try a Triage Session to identify what your brand and business needs content plans, social media strategy, video lessons, usability or SEO and lay out a plan to get you there.  Want to know more?  Get in touch!