Greg Cassar.com

We started with the barter system, then moved onto precious metals, then coins and notes, followed closely by credit cards.  The next evolution is using your smart phone as your wallet (credit card).

Google has recently launched ‘Google Wallet’ – an app that makes your phone your wallet—with Citi, MasterCard, Sprint and First Data. With Google Wallet, you can tap, pay and save using your phone and near field communication (NFC).

If you don’t have a Citi MasterCard and you want to use Google Wallet you can use the Google Prepaid Card. The Google Prepaid Card is a virtual card that you can fund with any of your existing credit cards.

The business implications of this technology are far reaching too:

Gift cards: Google Wallet can store gift cards for participating merchants. When you tap to pay at a merchant, Google Wallet transmits your gift card information to the terminal. This is very clever.

Offers & Loyalty: Google Offers are deals on products and services at local or online businesses. Whenever you buy or save a Google Offer, it automatically syncs to your Google Wallet so your offers are always with you. Google Wallet can also store loyalty cards for participating merchants.  The world of the coffee loyalty card will never be the same again.

WordPress is the most common way that entrepreneurs and business owners build sites these days.

 
WordPress is infinitely extensible. One of the core philosophies of WordPress is to keep the core code as light and fast as possible but to provide a rich framework for the huge community to expand what WordPress can do, limited only by their imagination.

 
Plugins can extend WordPress to do almost anything you can imagine, in the directory at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ you can find, download, rate, and comment on all the best plugins.

 
While there are literally thousands of plugins that you can apply to your site, lets now look at 5 Must Have Plugins to extend your WordPress site’s functionality and reach.

 
Please note: We have not included security plugins here. We will cover WordPress security in a future edition of ‘Internet Marketing Magazine’.

No 1. All In One SEO Pack

 
This brilliant WordPress plugin automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).

 
It allows you to set your title tags and description and keywords in one easy place within the plugin for the home page. There are also approx 20 other SEO settings that make your URLs friendly to the search engines and a whole bunch of other SEO related settings.

 
Whenever you make a blog post down below the post while you are still in edit mode you will get the options to set the Title, Description for the search engines, and Keywords related to the post.

 
Price: Free
Get it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

No 2. PopUp Domination

 
This amazing list building WordPress plugin works like a PopUp but gets passed the PopUp blockers. It has a classy look and feel to it and as a result it doesn’t feel as intrusive as what you may imagine a PopUp to be.

 
Its primary purpose is to help you build your list faster. Why we highly recommend it is that we noticed our own list building doubled on our main sites when we implemented this plugin. Every serious marketer should test and implement PopUp Domination.

 
Popup Domination works with all major auto-responders including but not limited to aWeber, iContact, Constant Contact and Infusionsoft.

 
Price: $47
Get it at: PopupDomination.com/new/

No 3. Google XML sitemaps

 
While not particularly exciting in it’s functionality, this is one of those boring bread and butter type plugins that is essential for your site.

 
This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap, which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog/site. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently.

 
The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

 
Price: Free
Get it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

No 4. Like-Button-Plugin-For-Wordpress

 
This plugin adds a Like-Button wherever you want on your blog. The button can be placed before or after the content, as well as a sidebar-widget. And many more!

 
Having a Facebook ‘Like’ button on your content is a great way of getting free referral traffic. When a site visitor presses ‘Like’ it automatically updates their wall and status updates in Facebook to show that they liked your site/post.
Because their friends are likely to be interested in similar things when they see the update there is a good chance of them following the link back to your site.

 
We highly recommend having Facebook ‘Like’ on your site as we have noticed significant traffic improvements as a result in the many places that we have tested it.

 
Price: Free
Get it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/like-button-plugin-for-wordpress/

No 5. Facebook Share (New) Button

 
This plugin adds a Share-Button, which allows site visitors to share your posts. It also shows the number of times the post or page has been shared through out the Facebook.

 
Having a Facebook ‘Share’ button on your content is a great way of getting free referral traffic. When a site visitor presses ‘Share’ it automatically updates their wall and status updates in Facebook to show that they liked your site/post. It is slightly more powerful than Facebook Like because when the site visitors ‘share’ they get the ability to add a line or two of text to endorse why they shared the content.

 
Because their friends are likely to be interested in similar things when they see the update there is a good chance of them following the link back to your site.

 
We highly recommend having Facebook ‘Share’ on your site as we have noticed significant traffic improvements as a result in the many places that we have tested it.

 
Price: Free
Get it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/facebook-share-new/

I hope that is of use to you. We have tested hundreds of plugins and these certainly are some of the best.

We’ve had a few questions in recent weeks about hosting, so I thought I’d give you some of our experience on it. Your website hosting decision is one of the more important choices that you need to make in your internet business.

The most common hosting problems that we see are:

• Support issues – lack of timely support when there is an issue
• Security – hosting accounts that get hacked easily
• Speed – websites loading slow because the servers are overloaded

The hosting we use ourselves and also recommend to our consulting clients is the shared linux hosting from Powweb.

What we like about this hosting from Powweb is that:

• It is good value for money at only a few dollars per month
• The support is great – expecially with the online chat mechanism. We’d now never choose a hosting solution that didn’t have this feature
• We’ve never encountered any security issues with this hosting

If you haven’t got your hosting sorted yet, or are not happy with your current hosting solution then take action with taking up a Powweb Hosting Solution today.

Effectively I’ve been out of the day job and been a full time entrepreneur for about a year and a half now.  In that time I’ve found some amazing tools that can make the life of the entrepreneur more efficient and effective.

If you think back to the days in the day job office where their were people who got off on how much time they spent at work – idiots,  I think its about achieving the maximum result in the shortest period of time so that you can get on with life.

The great news is that most of these tools on this list are free.  Have a look at this list and see if any of these tools can solve inefficiencies in your business.

1. Skype – We use this more than the phone.  You will find that most other entrepreneurs and like minded business people are also on skype.  While you can use Skype to make calls to phone lines with their premium paid services I have found people complained about the voice quality, so now I mainly use it for online chat, small file transfers and free VOIP calls between pcs.  I use this tool all day every day.
2. GoToMeeting -  An amazing tool that we use this to securely share our monitor screens with other JV partners or clients when working on projects together.  The great thing about this is that it can be like you are working in the one room for a meeting because you can both see the same screen. It also has a conference call number. Give their free trial a go.
3. Basecamp -   This is an amazing tool for sharing files in a central location or sharing files and projects between multiple entrepreneurs or companies.  You can also securely share passwords via writeboards with this software as it uses SSL security to create a secure encrypted web session.
4. Google Sites -  Effectively this is a Wiki – think Wikipedia if your not sure what a Wiki is.  We have found it is an amazingly simple and easy central documentation repository that can be accessed online.  This is how we do our documentation now.
5. YouSendit -  An awesome tool for sending large files to other people you are working with.  There is a free version of YouSendIt but I found that it was a bit limiting in that it only allowed files up to 100mb. I ended up moving to a paid member of this service.   Just recently my graphic designer Narelle has got me onto a new tool called DropBox which does a similar thing, but essentially you share a folder online with any one you are working with called a ‘Drop Box’ and any member of the team who you have shared it with can download files from the drop box.  It also works as a backup tool because you can keep backup copies of your files in your drop box.   You Send It is better when sharing a one off file with someone but if you are working together all the time then Drop Box may be more efficient.
6. Google Apps – Google provides so many free tools these days, and this is one of their best.  Effectively they will host your domains email for you so you don’t need to worry about having an Exchange server or anything like that.  It costs $50 per user per year and you get a Gmail type mail experience.  I believe this is the best way for a small company to do email.
7. Google Docs -  This tool gives you a cutdown Microsoft Office type experience online. What I really love about it is that multiple team members can be editing the same document at the same time. This is without a doubt the best way to have multiple team members work on the same spreadsheet online
8. Apple iPhone 3GS – Wow, what a phone for the entrepreneur.  This has it all.  The email client is great, the notes are fantastic, the phone is OK but I find the speaker phone to not be brilliant on it.  If you use the MobileMe service from Apple it will push your email and calendar to the cloud on the web and  keep all your devices and PC’s and Macs in synch. This device is a blackberry killer.  I just travelled and ran my business for a week from the other side of the country just from my iphone. When I got lost my iPhone GPS told me where I was and gave me directions of how to get to my conference – amazing.
9. Mozy -  An affordable offline trickle backup service.  Select the important files on your PC or server and set them to upload to Mozy’s secure servers.  Then when any file changes on your PC it will automatically create a new copy of only the files that have changed on the Mozy backup servers. This is a must for any small company as it takes care of backups for you.  I have found that its best to start off with a small volume of files on it and then gradually add more files once it has successfully backed those up for you.

I hope that’s useful and saves you some time and hassles. Is there any major ones that I should have included based on your experience?