7 Leathal eBay Listing Mistakes (Including Borat)

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I’ve put together some of the most lethal eBay listing mistakes, I’m sure you’ll not use any of these, just in case, here are some of the things to avoid!

No Gallery Picture

No Gallery Picture

No Gallery Picture

Have you seen how many items are in the clothes, shoes & accessories category lately? On checking there is approximately 13 million listings. Fashion items are the most visual items of them all and not including a gallery picture, which is free I hasten to add, will pretty much kill any chances you have of getting a buyer (or anyone for that matter) to view your listing.

One Word Titles

No eBay Title

One word eBay title

We’ve now got space for 80 characters from the previous 55 this month. There are extremes of keyword abuse, however this one falls rather short.

SCREAM AT YOUR BUYERS

eBay Caps Lock

SHOUTING at your buyers doesn’t help.

BY TYPING IN CAPS LOCK IT MAKES READING STUFF REALLY HARD. DON’T DO IT! (pretty please).

Poor Images

ebay-poor-images-1

One hours free consulting if you guess right what this is.

You can get mobile phones with 12Mp cameras on them now (probably more!), there is no excuse for not including great images on your listings.

Using Borat to Sell Your Wares

ebay-borat-1

Say NO to Borat

Look, I cried with laughter at that film, but skimpy birthday suits to sell your wares, naaaa.

L@@K This!

ebay-keyword-boredom

L@@K This!

If you cannot think of any more constructive keywords to put in the title, stop!

Get your Pricing Right

ebay-pricing-1

Pricing gone AWOL?

Yep that’s a seven million pound book. I’d not want to be paying the 9% fees on that!
(£617,282.88 to be precise, ignoring any discounts)

Summary

The above are a bit of fun, I found all these on Sunday evening within a few minutes.

On a serious note though, great eBay listing’s are a combination of the lots of little things done right, great titles, superb images, informative descriptions and so on, not a Borat-look-a-like in his skimpys.

Stop - Take Action!What could you do today?
What tiny tweaks could you make today, to make your listings better?
Need ideas? See an earlier guide I wrote for SEO for eBay 10 minutes per day.

I Am Failing At… Email!

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Email, Email, Email, Email, Email, Email, Email, Email!!!

Time to rewrite the book on email usage for me and this completely down to me failing badly at answering email in a sensible amount of time. Ironically you probably have the reverse of this  problem and are addicted to answering email in nano-seconds.

Failure is OK, but not recognising it and then not doing anything about is insanity.

Quick Background

One of my tasks for last week was to reach out to those I felt were “fab” and tell them so. Trust me I got some odd replies, however one was Chris Ducker from virtualbusinesslifestyle.com.

I’m not going to include what I wrote and only part of his reply, put it this way I’d have not replied to it and credit to the chap, he did.

This was his reply:

Hi Matthew

[content here]

Thanks again, and stay tuned – lots of great stuff coming up!!! :-)

C

————————————————————-
Q: Why is this email 3 sentences or less?
A: Click here to find out!
————————————————————-

Chris C. Ducker
Virtual CEO
@chriscducker

The main contents of the reply is irrelevant to this article, what is, is in the link here:
http://www.virtualbusinesslifestyle.com/my-three-sentence-rule/

Quote:

The Solution
Although receiving and replying to email is an important part of my business, I feel it should not BE my business. So, I now treat all email from this blog like SMS text messages from friends. Since it’s too hard to count and limit myself to a number of letters, I simply count sentences instead.

The maximum of three sentences.

What I am Now Doing?

Anything has to be better than what I am doing & where I’m at now with email (which is a backlog & a mess).

I have been failing badly and this may actually work! So if you get three sentences in a reply, you now know why and who’s responsible.

Image source

Be a Player not a Bystander. Get in. Get Mucky

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Foreword: I wrote this in January and wasn’t quite prepared for the effect it had on myself and several others. I’m reposting it this morning as it might help you too.

The irony of this entire blog and some of the articles I have written here is that sometimes I do not even follow my own suggestions I choose to share with you. There is a very good reason for this, I’m looking forward to sharing this with you and hope that you follow suit.

lingerie-football-league

Yes, that really is Women Playing Football in Lingerie

Bystanders

These are the fans that are stood at the side of a game, it doesn’t matter who is playing, the point is, you are stood there doing nothing, wishing you could play, thumb up your bum, where as the players are already playing and enjoying their game.

Players

Players only get good through practice. Professional’s only become great when they research and know the game backwards. Do you think David Beckham got good by having his haircut? Do you think I know the stuff I know, by sitting on my arse and wishing I did something else?

This is part of the definition of an Expert from Wikipedia:

An expert is someone widely recognized as a reliable source of technique or skill whose faculty for judging or deciding rightly, justly, or wisely is accorded authority and status by their peers or the public in a specific well-distinguished domain.

An expert, more generally, is a person with extensive knowledge or ability based on research, experience, or occupation and in a particular area of study.

Let’s break this down so it’s completely ‘Matt proof’:

An expert is someone

YAY, we’re at an advantage there we are talking about someone, that is a human, just like me and you.

widely recognized as a reliable source of technique or skill whose faculty for judging or deciding rightly, justly, or wisely

So, we’re still talking about a human and they have scored some recognition for their achievements. Remembering they are human, they have probably made some royal screw-ups too, mostly likely not so well publicised.

is accorded authority and status by their peers or the public in a specific well-distinguished domain.

They gained this recognition by most likely their peers or some governing body. This could be as simple as the people you work with or it could be recognised body such as AACSB (the Association of Advance Collegiate Schools of Business) who themselves are recognised by their peers as being distinguished. I wonder how that happened?

An expert, more generally, is a person

Sorry no Dolphins. I hope you’re getting my point, we’re all human.

with extensive knowledge or ability based on research, experience, or occupation and in a particular area of study.

Now here is the mother-load. Prodigies are over-rated and are you one? Didn’t think so, I’m certainly not.

How do you think this person, gained ‘Extensive Knowledge’. That’s right he got-in-the-game and played. And played lots.

So…

So back to my original point, sometimes I do not follow my own advice, at these times, I decide that by being in the game, I can learn a lot more about the game by playing.

Meeting peers, playing with peers and ultimately gaining the experiences that leads to being pronounced and being an ‘Expert’ by your peers.

Seeing a very experienced MD be intimidated by my knowledge & experience last week is quite an achievement. I play hard. I know my arena. I’m extremely passionate about my game, this shines through. You can too.

lingerie-football-league-pants-down

Sometimes you get caught out, but that’s OK. You are on the road to becoming an ‘Expert’.

I’m amazed by the frequency of certain visitors to this site. I’m not publishing how many hits I get, but I am extremely pleased on this blog’s success. Four months in, its known amongst the right people, I’ve been told to STFU twice and have even had to apologise three times. But I’m in the game and playing. Where are you?

Stop Thinking, Get Doing

  • Is there something that is holding you back?
  • Are you scared of embarrassing yourself?
  • Scared of other ‘experts’?
  • Blah blah blah

Who fucking cares.

No one is ‘lucky’, you make your own luck.

No expert was born an expert, they played hard.

That’s why in places this blog sucks. But that is OK. I am in the game and I am playing. Get in the game regardless of what’s going on. Right Now.

Come join me, I need you, the other players need you. Let’s play.

Tuesday (Not Weds) Workshop With ChannelGrabber!

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Register NowI’m really excited to be able to announce that on Tuesday 13th September, I’ll be holding the next Webinar & have roped in two fantastic people to join me.

Here is your personal invitation and you can register here.

Guest Speakers

The first is Daniel Williams, Managing Director of ChannelGrabber and we’ll be delving deeper into why this product was created, how it helps businesses who sell on-line and what it can do for you.

The second is Jason. Jason is one of the 6 businesses that I’m working with as part of the ProjectE. You’ll be able to hear directly from one of the ChannelGrabber users, why he uses it, how it’s impacted his businesses and how it’s enabled him to work on his business and not purely in his business.

Why am I Excited?

I half-mention this in the video above, to be able to do “Multi Channel” effectively, then you need a tool in the background to support you & to apply processes, so that you can work more efficiently in and on your business. ChannelGrabber makes this task very easy and is exceptionally affordable.

Why Tuesday & Not Wednesday?

eSellerPro are holding a “customer council” that I have been graciously invited to on Wednesday and are attending the public “customer conference” event on Thursday. If you’ve missed this, then you can see the full article for the eSellerPro at Lords here.

BTW if you’re attending, look out for the bold bloke wearing purple & come say “hi!”.

When & Where

Register NowThis workshop is on Tuesday 13th September at 5pm UK Time. There are only 100 places and on the first workshop there were 81 attendees, register now before all the places are taken!

Previously Registered?

If you’ve already registered for the “Wednesday Workshops” from two weeks ago, it’s the same registration details. No need to re-register and you’ll be sent an email automatically just before the event on Tuesday. (Thanks Andre for pointing this out to me!)

House Keeping

Please arrive early, it will take a few moments to download the free GoToWebinar application and if you can arrive a few minutes before hand, you won’t miss the start of the meeting.

Stop - Take Action!Register now, only 100 places!
The first workshop there were 81 participants, the application only supports 100 and I’d hate for you to miss out.  You can register here.

When People Buy from You, They Make a Commitment

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Getting Married to your buyers

Buyers make a commitment to you, do you make a commitment back?

Lets think about this for a few moments as its sometimes just glazed over, its very easy to do so, with suppliers calling, all those emails to answer and packages to pack, not to mention the kids are going to need picking up later. But are we missing what a epic journey your customer has just been on?

Unless you’re selling “consumable goods” like bread & milk, the buyer that just purchased from you, has probably been through quite an ordeal to make that purchase.

Not a one click & forget

eBay isn’t a one-click purchase, Amazon can be, I used it once, but still prefer to “checkout” to ensure the details are correct. Its even worse on most websites, with no uniform checkout process. They [the customer] has had to work to make the purchase from you and even then they still have doubts.

What have they been through so far?

So with the buyer in mind, lets flip-ourselves into their shoe, to see what they’ve completed to actually buy the item from you.

  1. They found the item you sell
    Probably amongst hundreds of others. Quite a feat.
  2. They probably bookmarked the item, or added it to their watch list
    This is especially true for “considered purchases”, typically items over £40-50
  3. They’re happy with “you”
    They checked your feedback and read the negs & neuts and are still happy
  4. They’re happy with the description
    After scouring the other products, they’ve decided that this item is “right for them”
  5. They’ve envisaged using the product
    Think fashion or a drain rod set. One’s going to solve an emotional need to look great, the other, well…
  6. They’ve jumped hoops to pay for the item
    Is the eBay checkout really that straight forward? Is the Amazon checkout that straight forward either? Logging in, signing into PayPal, these are all barriers that the customer has just been through and could have tripped up at any one of them.
  7. They’ve handed over their money in good-will
    The irony is that for both eBay & Amazon, they have paid you in “good will” before even having the goods. If you were in Tesco shopping, while you may not be able to open up the bread and take a bite (unless you have kids and they’ll do it anyway), you can still interact with it, check its consistency and “personally inspect it”.
  8. They still have doubts
    Even though they’ve been through all the barriers above, they still have doubts. Is the item right? What if its damaged? Will it turn up? Will I be in to collect it? Did they get the mooney? Did I screw something up in the checkout process? Pants, was that my old address or my new address I used?

Summary

Its like getting married (an experience I’m looking forward to next year), one party is making an epic commitment to you, what are you giving back in return?

Its easy to get consumed with the day-to-day actives and forget that your buyers have been through an epic ordeal to buy the goods or services from you.

Stop - Take Action!What are YOU going to do?
What can you do to make the buyers tasks easier? What can you do right now to over-come barriers or quash doubts?

Image source: Adamjonfuller

“Apples are Apples” or are they? – eSellerPro V’s ChannelAdvisor

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Yesterday was an interesting day’s reading. On the one hand CEO of ChannelAdvisor Scot Wingo was elected to Shop.org’s board of directors, which is frankly quite a feat considering there are only five places for non-retailers & is a highly coveted position.

A quote Scot Wingo:

“I am absolutely honored to join a board of such diverse executives and e-commerce leaders to serve the Shop.org members and continue the development of such a prestigious program,” said Wingo. “I look forward to collaborating with these other industry leaders to influence and inform many of the top issues facing the world of e-commerce.”
Source: Business Wire

And on the other hand a few minutes later, this crops up on Twitter:

It really has been a fantastic year for eSellerPro so far. I joined the company as the new CEO in January,and since then we have seen several other key additions to the management team and the sales team has doubled in size. Our annual revenues have grown to £2.4M with more than 100% growth forecast for the current year. If that wasn’t good enough, the business now has more than 200 customers, including well-known brands such as BMW, Dixons Group, JJB Sports, Office Shoes, Maplins and Tesco. 

It is a very exciting time for us all at eSellerPro, and as we continue to grow we can only expect things to get even better.

Keith Bird, CEO, eSellerPro
Source: eSellerPro Blog

While at least three of these are 3rd-party clients is almost irrelevant, what is interesting is the ~100% growth and disclosure (see here) that the platform is churning over £1M in transactions per day.

Summary

While some way from the $3 Billion USD ChannelAdvisor processed in a year[2010 ?], £1M appears to be rather small. However apples are certainly not “Apples” when trying to compare two SaaS (Software as a Service) platforms that operate in the same market, one has been around since 2001, the other is just getting started,  however could this be where its heading?

Image courtesy of Fir0002

This Wednesday WorkShop Postponed (More Detail this Afternoon)

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To give you a heads up, tonights “Wednesday Workshop” is being postponed, there are a couple of reasons for this and includes politics and a bloody awkward (good, I hasten to add) situation with ProjectE.

I’ve got to dash as its playgroup this morning, however I have a treat for you with a special guest next Tuesday & will spill-the-beans this afternoon.

More to come later!

Your Invitation to ‘Connect’ with Matt

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I do not run a ‘product’ based company. Doing so would cloud the line between consultant and competitor. As such I am able to uniquely leverage 10 years of experience over two software providers. that of many past & present clients, to adapt, mould processes and drive results to suit your unique business requirements.

There are a number of online channels out there that are all aimed at keeping people in touch, I’d like to virtually ‘connect’ with you and there are a couple of ways you can do so.

Note: I would have included a video with this to make it more personal, however its out on loan currently.

LinkedIn

I’m a big LinkedIn fan, its like the adults version of Facebook.

You can connect me here http://uk.linkedin.com/in/matthewogborne

Twitter

I have a few Twitter accounts, the main one I use is @MatthewOgborne and the original one is @LastDropofInk and I monitor them both most days. Also you’ll see specific messages on each account too.

YouTube

As you may have noticed, there is a distinct move on my part towards using video content more and mopre here. Its a very personal medium and you’ll literally be seeing a lot more of me!

You can subscribe to my YouTube channel here http://www.youtube.com/user/matthewogborne

Google+

I must admit, I’ve not paid Google+ much attention yet, mainly because I am focused on other sites. However the messages you’ll find here from me are both personal & business related.

Facebook

I’m also on Facebook or rather this site is.

You can find the LastDropofInk Facebook page here, I need to update it after the design change here and will be doing so later this week.

RSS & Email

Did you know that you can have the latest posts delivered straight to your inbox using Feedburner, a free Google App? No, well you do now!

Go to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheLastDropOfInk and hit “Subscribe with Google”.

Also I have an ongoing mailing list, you can subscribe at the top of this page on the right. I keep communications to a minimum and tend to use it to grab feedback before a large article or event, like the Webinar I held last week.

You can of course just interact by leaving a comment on an article here that you’ve liked, if only yo say “hi”.

That’s it, I look forward to ‘connecting’ with you!

Matt

The Only 3 Podcasts I listen to & Why

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In the next few minutes, I’ll be taking you through a little bit about podcasts, what you need to listen to them and the 3 I listen to and why.

More podcasts than video channels

Podcasting has really taken off in the past few years and is more prolific than video, although I suspect as more and more devices integrate to the likes of YouTube, that video will become the more popular format.

There are millions and millions of podcasts and wading through them all can be difficult, that’s where iTunes comes in handy as the podcasts are well organised and you can easily find a topic that interests you.

iTunes is required

ITunesWhile not absolutely required as I’m sure there are lots of “other” podcast sites, I’ve only really focused on iTunes. You can navigate a selection on the Apple website, however you really need the iTunes application to dig deeper and its free and can be found here.

The iTunes application lets you navigate the the podcast sections (and lots of other stuff too) and will manage the subscriptions you chose to subscribe to.

I personally find the app “clunky” (sorry but it is, must be Windoze eh?), but its worth figuring out as it makes subscribing and managing the subscriptions much, much easier.

The Business section

Now I’m only really interested in the Business section of the podcasts on iTunes and a direct link to these is here. The vast majority are free and there are also some paid-for versions, however I’ve never looked at those.

The variety is huge and you’ll find the obvious publishers, like the BBC and Bloomberg, I’ll leave you to dig around and see what you can find.

My top 3 podcasts that I actually listen to

Its quite tempting to just subscribe to everything, but frankly you’ll never listen to half of it, so instead I found a more focused approach worked and I never miss an episode of the three chosen podcasts and I strongly suggest you limit yourself to just a few and commit to them as well.

Six pixels of separation

While my first, this is always the last one I listen to in preference of the other two. Really informative and I find the presenters easy to listen to and equally I enjoy their content. You can find their podcast here.

Smart passive income

Pat Fylnn is author comes across as an extremely authentic person and holds little back. He’s a role-model that I’m using for some of the new projects you are experiencing. Frequent guest speakers and some really interesting insights. You can find Pat’s podcast here.

Virtual business lifestyle

Chris Ducker is well connected and I actually have three podcasts waiting to be listened to. One is with the legend “Chris Brogan” and another person of personal interest is “Gideon Shalwick” due to his activities with on-line video.

I like his[Chris’s] voice and the topics he covers. You can listen to his podcast here.

Summary

My biggest tip is to try and limit the number of podcasts you subscribe to, otherwise you’ll do what I did and get overwhelmed. I’ve found my three and they’re great when out on the bike, hiding from the kids or like right now, I have the speakers on and listening to one while I type.

You don’t need iTunes, but it makes life a lot easier and there is only one place you need to check for latest versions. In my example, that would be three websites, that ain’t going to happpen.

Stop - Take Action!What you waiting for?
iTunes is free and there is an obscene number of podcasts out there and I’m sure with a little narrowing down, you’ll find your 3 podcasts too.

Free Site Monitoring – Pingdom

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In the past few weeks I’ve had a couple of questions regarding website monitoring, my first choice used to be “AlertFox” as you could go much deeper than just pinging the web server and script actions for the site to follow.

However they’ve[AlertFox] gone to a completely chargeable structure , even though they offer 30 days free, $49 a month is too much for most and I’ve found and cruically used a free alternative.

Pingdom

While they offer the ability to have both Basic accounts at $10 a month and Business accounts at $40, there is a free option (that i use) that allows you to monitor just one site and you can register here https://www.pingdom.com/signup/ (its below the two paid options)

Setting it up is exceptionally easy and I was 50/50 – delighted/concerned when I started getting notifications the other morning to let me know that this site was down.

Here is a screen shot of some of the emails I received:

Pingdom Email AlertObviously I could now go and find out what was up with the host and it turned out one of the switches in the BlueSquare data-centre had died, fair enough, it happens and a data-centre across the road from them had the same issue last year, give them an hour or so and they’d have it sorted and they did.

Top marks to Evo-Hosting by the way, they were already on the ball and as soon as I started looking, they had already communicated the issue and were harassing the data-centre.

Reports

I also just received the monthly report for this site a screen shot is below. They also have reporting on their website, but to be frankly honest I don’t care, up or down, thats all I care about.

pingdom-report-1

Summary

I like free, I know you do too. While not as powerful as the paid options and that found with AlterFox, this works, as I’ve shown above and its free!

While the free account is “basic” it works and for less than 5 minutes work, it was a set-and-forget action.

Stop - Take Action!Have you set yours up yet?
Go here its free! https://www.pingdom.com/signup/

One Hour Per Week is Working!

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I’m looking forward to sharing this with you as its changed my views on how I can help more people in less time and its all thanks to the six business I’m working with as part of ProjectE.

On face value this post is pretty much just about me, its the kind of post that I write in the background and rarely share with the outside world. However I have one critical question I need your help with at the bottom.

I’m still hammering down the details of where I am going, both personally, professionally and with ProjectE and I’m taking the opportunity to share it with you as in the past few weeks, I’ve found this sharing process very beneficial and its helping me move forwards and narrowing down how I can help you more effectively.

Here is a quick update of where I’m at and why

If you missed the invitation, this was a pretty big investment from myself and it was all on the fork of ‘commitment’. I had been procrastinating for ages around the entire project and I could feel this project slipping away from me. Then decided that I needed to get public and make a commitment that I could not back out of.

So I did and it went spectacularly as well.

I covered he results in a couple of earlier posts, you can view the original invitation on YouTube here that I set live on that Friday and the full invitation also on YouTube here that I posted the following Monday, along with the supporting article here.

There is nothing like jumping in with both feet I can tell ya!

With procrastinating over, I ended up with 56 applications and spent an entire weekend sifting through them. It was my intention to work with just five, but a sixth sneaked in. Hey I was already in the deep end, what would one more do to me?

Shortly afterwards I made arguably the worst video to date (see here) which promoted me to get more professional, especially after that damming, but valid email I got, which I covered in the article “Are your video’s so bad, they need this feedback also?”

Into the 3rd week

And up to today, we’re now into our third week of working together.

I’ve not mentioned who they are yet, I’m saving this for later this week (hint hint), however its becoming glaring apparent that with the right content and structure (which I’m still hammering out) that one hour per week consulting is actually working and having a positive effect on all of the six businesses.

Frankly I was a little concerned on what could be covered in what is just 8 hours of my time spread over a period of eight weeks, plus some extra time as a group and the real impact of it.

What I’ve found so far is that the tool-set of experience I have at my disposal is actually very “wide” and I had completely over looked that if I focus the six businesses on actionable points at the end of each of the meetings, that in the time we’re apart, they can move at a rate that suits them and still be ready for the following week.

Its a case now of working out how I can detail this process for not only personal one-on-one projects with new clients, but to also make it scalable (and affordable for the masses) for ProjectE.

Revised & new site pages

Its also proving exceptionally useful as for a long time I’ve not focused on exactly “how I can help” & “where I can help” and are refocusing on some critical pages to this site.

The first is the pending redesign of the ‘Contact Matthew’ page, this page does not have a clear goal and the new version has a defined set of goals and will be a marked improvement.

The second is a new page that I should have added months ago called “Work With Matthew” and its proving fun exactly what to include on this page and its on my weekend to-do list, by the time this post goes live, it may already be live on the site.

Summary

I’m so lucky to be able to work with the chosen six businesses

The commitment to them takes up my entire Friday and part of Thursday evening too, but that doesn’t matter, its great fun & I can see tangible benefits to them already.

The biggest take-away for me so far is that one hour per week is working and as I mentioned, its a case now of scaling this, removing the mist and defining exactly how I can help you grow your businesses.

Stop - Take Action!

I need YOUR help!
In the past I have frequently come across the statement “Matt I know you can help me, but I’m not sure how”, I’m actively addressing this.

However flipping the question back at you “Where do you feel that I can help you?” Answers either in the comments below or privately via the “Contact Matthew” page.

Part 2: My Top 20 Free WordPress Plugins (And Why)

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One of the huge reasons for WordPress being the number one CMS, besides it being free & there being countless development resources available for it, is because there are thousands of plugins & extensions for WordPress. Some are free, some are paid for.

I’ve been through hundreds of plugins, I’ve found really useless ones and I’ve found fabtastic ones. Its some of these “fabtastic” ones I’m going to share with you in the rest of the this article and I think they might be useful for you too.

Oh and all the plugins I mention here, they’re ALL free.

#1 AVH Extended Categories Widgets

This plugin isn’t for everyone, 99% you need not even look at this one (great start eh?). It enables you to control the WP categories and group them together and show them as groups for specific pages.

Its not used on this site, however I’ve used it on much larger scale sites where content needs to be broken down by category and sub categories. This plugin allows you to group them up and show a side widget that is dedicated to that “group” of categories.

If you have a deep category structure that goes past 2 levels, then this plugin may help you show categories that are specific to the category root.

To make this a little more visual, imagine you have this category structure:

  • Top Category 1
    • Sub Category 1-1
      • Sub-Sub Category 1-1-1
      • Sub-Sub Category 1-1-2
      • Sub-Sub Category 1-1-3
    • Sub Category 1-2
      • Sub-Sub Category 1-2-1
      • Sub-Sub Category 1-2-2
      • Sub-Sub Category 1-2-2
    • Sub Category 1-3
      • Sub-Sub Category 1-3-1
      • Sub-Sub Category 1-3-2
      • Sub-Sub Category 1-3-3
  • Top Category 2
    • Sub Category 2-1
    • Sub Category 2-2
    • Sub Category 2-3

Its quite likely that the content that is in “Sub Category 1-1” is very different to the content found in “Sub Category 1-2“, think “WordPress” and “Book Reviews” for these and the sub categories for each are apt sub versions of “WordPress” like “plugins“, “tips & tricks” & “How to Guides“, where as the “Book Reviews” category is broken up into sub categories based upon genre.

This plugin allows you to show just the categories that are below the main category, so the users that are viewing the “WordPress” content, get a sidebar navigation for the “WordPress” related categories and the users viewing the “Book Reviews” content, are shown the categories that are related to that. Oh and categories can in live in multiple category groups to give maximum flexibility.

Like I said, unless you have massive amounts of content in a complex category structure, 99% of you can ignore this plugin. However when you do have deep categories, this plugin can help users unravel the mess. I hope the colours helped!

#2 Broken Link Checker

broken-link-checker-1I only found this one a few weeks back, amazingly it only found 15 broken links, of which 8 were on purpose (two old articles that used ‘keywords’ in the links). However the remaining links were all dead.

A nice touch to this plugin is that it’ll show them on your dashboard, although there is no cron option and I disabled the update every hour option as that’s a bit excessive

#3 Contact Form 7

I tried about 5 different contact form plugins, this was by far the best of them all.

Exceptionally flexible, I’ve used this plugin on every WP site since.

This plugin is also directly linked to #4 Really Simple CAPTCHA which allows you to put a spam captcha option to the forms and if you look in the footer then you’ll see this in action.

#5 Custom Post Template

This plugin is brilliant, but was a complete ‘mare’ to get right as there were no examples with the plugin.

In short it allows you to make extra post and page templates. I use it for the super wide page layouts on this site and on other sites, I’ve got a couple of versions for different media types. You can see an example of the wide format in action here.

#6 Google Analyticator

Quickly and easily add your Google Analytic’s code to your WP site.

#7 Maintenance Mode

I just found this one on Saturday afternoon, I wish I had know about this months ago. Allows to lock your site down to specific users and display a maintenance page along with a counter. Simple, but very, very useful.

#8 Newsletter Sign-Up

You’ll find this on the right of most of the pages & “thanks” to Rob Cubbon for forking me on this from one of his articles I read.

This plugin makes the integration of newsletter subscriptions childs-play and works with custom providers and the major ones like MailChimp, iContact, AWeber, PHPList and so on.

#9 Sharebar

See the funny bar on the left, where you are about to press the Google +1 button to? That’s sharebar. Its actually missing the +1 button for Google by default, but its pretty easy to add it in.

BTW Did you press the +1 button?
Thank you!

#10 Shortcode Generator

Really handy for pre-making content. The short codes it makes are a bit long, but none-the-less exceptionally useful. Saves me/you hijacking the functions.php file and borking the sites like I have been known to do on occasion.

#11 Subscribe to Comments

Look at the comments form at bottom, notice the check box?
Enter a comment saying how fab this article is and check the tick box.
Beautiful!

#12 W3 Total Cache

The traffic I get here warrants the use of such a plugin. In short this makes the site load faster. Users typically see a 50% increase in page load times from just activating this plugin, let-alone tweaking it.

I prefer this one as I can set up custom CDN’s and have spent a large amount of time focused on ensuring that this site loads fast. There are a lot of options, the defaults will be fine for most blogs.

#13 WordPress SEO by Yoast

I used to use “All in One SEO”, until I read Yoast’s damming (yet fair) report on it and moved to this version. Very comprehensive and more features than what used before, really one of those set-and-forget plugins

#14 WP-Syntax

This is really handy for “code”. If you’re posting blocks of code in your articles, then this plugin is pretty neat.

It uses the PRE tag and adds styling options, a big tip for this option is to always edit your posts/pages that have “code” examples or snippets in them, as HTML only, the WP editor will each these for breakfast.

#15 Capability Manager

One of my pet-hates with WP is its user control, this plugin helps manage the poor user access control and adds the level needed when working with staff, editors and content writers.

A big tip for using this is to create your own and test it with a sample account to ensure it behaves as you expect!

#16 JavaScript to Footer

This is simplest of them all, install and activate. Thats it. No config options, it just pushes all the JS files to the footer and makes the site load faster, as the JavaScript is the last to load, allowing the rest of the site to render first.

#17 Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu

This is another personal dislike of WP solved in one plugin.

The left hand menu takes up too much room. This plugin solves this by putting the entire menu system along the top, allowing for more writing space. Which considering the point of most WP sites is to create content, has to be a good thing.

#18 TinyMCE Advanced

I tried a few that were supposed to change the editor, this one actually works and allows you to alter the layout of the HTML editor option in the page/post creation pages.

You can get rid of the options you never use and organise the ones that you do need and use in a layout that makes sense to you. Dab-handy!

#19 Yoast Breadcrumbs

The breadcrumbs at the top of this article are powered by this, so easy to add and on some themes will auto-insert.

Worth noting that this is actually included in the earlier plugin from Yoast.

#20 WP Security Scan

General paranoia is advised when working with any open code platform, this plugin helps cover the obvious. It has a few neat features like a backup option and the provides the ability to change the table prefixes on the database used for the WP site.

Summary

WordPress is free and the vast majority of plugins that you’ll ever need are also free.

These are my top 20 free WordPress plugins, I do use a few paid-for plugins, I have had plugins coded for me and I have also created my own for highly specific uses.

Stop - Take Action!I’m wondering if you have a favourite WP plugin I’ve not mentioned here?
If so let me know in the comments below.