Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

Featured Resource

Join the Duct Tape Marketing Coach Network in 2010

Join the Duct Tape Marketing Coach Network and become part of a network of small business consultants and coaches across North America that are discovering the tremendous power behind the Duct Tape Marketing Brand, Tools, Programs and Systems.

Let our brand open doors and help you take your business to the next level. We are looking for marketing professionals with a passion to serve small business.

Exclusive access to provide our newest program - Social Media Pro!

Live Discovery Webinar - Enroll for an upcoming session here - to learn about the opportunity.

back to top

Featured Resource

Recording Live Interviews on The iPhone

I found a nice option for recording live interviews on the iPhone from Blue Microphones. The iPhone built in mic works pretty well up close but the Mikey has settings that make it much more sensitive when conducting an interview in the field. I use a Blue Snowball USB mic to do my podcasts and really love their design.

Featured Article

10 Ways to Make WordPress More Useful

This article is a reprint from my column at AMEX OPEN Forum from Dec 02, 2009

The WordPress blogging platform is one of the most popular software choices for adding this powerful content tool. Its wide adoption is aided greatly by the fact that its open source architecture means that outside developers can create add-ons to extend the basic functionality.

WordPress, developed as blog software, is now, through various plugins, capable of supporting full web sites, membership site and premium content management and multi-author content sites with ease.

Below is a list of 10 plugins that can make any WordPress blog more useful for both the author and the readers.

1) Wishlist Member – This paid plugin allows you to turn a WordPress blog into a paid membership or course site. Wishlist integrates with a number of shopping carts, payment processors and email marketing tools and offers many ways to protect and deliver blog and page content based on membership levels.

2) Disqus – Disqus is a comment plugin that adds a great deal of functionality to the WordPress comment function, including the ability to see the history of blog comments from anyone leaving comments, nested comments, avatars and additional social media contact details, such as twitter mentions of your blog post.

3) Add to Any – This plugin makes it very easy for anyone to subscribe to a blog via their chosen RSS reader, such as Google Reader or Bloglines, or via email.

4) podpress – podpress was build to make it easy to add a podcast and audio player to a WordPress blog. The plugin also supports video podcasting features. Download stats, support for many file formats and the ability to manage and view feeds to services such as iTunes makes this a great plugin for anyone posting audio or video content to their blog.

5) Custom Class Selector – This plugin is a little on the techie side, but allows you to create unlimited numbers of CSS classes and then insert them on the fly to customize content styles in your blog posts. This can be very helpful if you want to create icons or styling for certain types of content, but don’t want to open up and change the theme stylesheet.

Read the Rest of the Article Here-->

Image credit: magerleagues

~ ~ ~

John Jantsch is a veteran marketing coach, award winning blogger and author of Duct Tape Marketing and The Referral Engine (May 2010)

He is the creator of the Duct Tape Marketing small business marketing system. You can find more information by visiting http://www.ducttapemarketing.com

You may reprint this article in its entirety if you attribute the article to John Jantsch and include the information about the author above.

back to top

Featured Reading

Unfolding the Napkin - Dan Roam

Unfolding the Napkin is Roam's follow-up to the wildly successful The Back of the Napkin. This book features all of the exercises and examples you need to put this work into action drawn from actual 4-day programs Roam conducts. Problem solving using pictures is a breakthrough technique.

More info here

back to top

Featured Listening

Need You Now - Lady Antebellum

I don't feature a lot of contemporary country. I'm just not that much of a fan of the category, but there's something about the trio Lady Antebellum that captivates.

I think it's the fact that their music seems very informed by 60's rock and blues with some great vocals.

More info here

back to top