626 ? Added functions for your website: Tom talks Plugin Week Part 3
Dateline: Virginia Beach, VA
Episode 626 – Plugin Week 3
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.
[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 626 of Screw the Commute podcast. We're in plugin week. This is session three of plugin week and we're going to talk about other plugins. We call them like boutique plugins or boujee plugins. And I got to tell you a little history lesson here. The term boujee currently is used as kind of a slur against hipsters, you know, trying to be cool. But but it really goes back over 100 years and comes from the term bourgeoisie, which the Urban Dictionary says you're aspiring to a higher class than you really are. And so we're going to help you use your plug ins to make your site better than it really is. How about that? So you're a you're a bourgeoisie today and with these bougie plug ins all right now. So hope you didn't miss Episode 625 That was plug in week episode two. That was on essential plug ins. That's where virtually every site needs these plug ins. And then Monday was an overview of what plug ins are, big things that you should watch for, what widgets are, and the differences. And just I mean, listen, if you listen to 624, you'll know more than 90% of Web designers about the the technical part of your site. And if you don't know this, I'm claiming after doing this 28 years, seven days a week, that you're negligent if you don't know what's going on in the back end of your site and we get it every day, somebody says, oh, I got this wonderful site.
[00:02:04] And then we Larry and I look at it and we're like, compared to what? Like a lame donkey with broken leg. I mean, what is what is so great about your site? So if you don't know that you're negligent and your business could get hacked, all kinds of bad things could happen under your name because hackers can use your site as a kickoff point to spam millions of people and mean all kinds of bad stuff. So you're really negligent if you don't take the time to listen to these. So if you want to get to a back episode, if you missed those, go to screwthecommute.com slash and then the episode numbers 624 and 625. And of course you'll want to listen to this one screwthecommute.com/626 and we encourage you to pass them on to your business colleagues so that they stay out of trouble, too. All right. Make sure you pick up a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app. Put us on your cell phone and tablet. Take us with you on the road. We teach you how to use it.
[00:03:05] It's really does all kinds of cool stuff. And then pick up a copy of our automation book. It's screwthecommute.com/automatefree, where just one of the tips in the book, we actually estimate it a couple of years ago saved me seven and one half million keystrokes. See, I want you to working with customers and prospects and developing products and services, not fighting with your darn computer. And just one of the tips will help you do that. All right. And we're still in the middle of our program to help persons with disabilities get scholarships. We have a Go Fund Me campaign set up for that at my school website. And of course, that'll be in the show notes at IMTCVA.org/disabilities. Click over and you can see the progress these people are making is they're very inspiring and I'm just thrilled to be part of it.
[00:03:52] All right. Let's get back to Larry Guerrera. He's our special guest for the three episodes this week. He's graduated from high school that I just mentioned, and he's been freelancing for me for, oh, it feels like 50 years, but it's only five, you know. So and as we mentioned on the first episode, he he alone is responsible for my beautiful back end. Let that sink in for you folks.
[00:04:24] I'm still trying to let it sink in.
[00:04:26] The back end of this podcast. He's done all 625 episodes, and he'll do this one at 626. All right, Larry. So let's talk about all these bougie plug ins and what all kind of things you can make your website do. I mean, literally, you can you can you know, your websites will do your dishes and wash your car, you know, with all.
[00:04:47] Where is that plug in? I want that plug in right now.
[00:04:51] All right. Take it away, man.
[00:04:52] All right. We have we have a bunch of categories we're going to cover. We're going to go fast. So take notes. But this will give you a really good idea of the breadth and scope that plug ins are available for WordPress today. And we're going to throw in a few which are which sound absolutely crazy, but they are real and they are legit. So let's start off at the top with some simple stuff. So if you have a website that has forms, forms that you want customers to fill out, a prospective customers, you could use something like WP forms, that's for WordPress forms or contact form seven. Now contact form seven. Many of you will probably recognize because it's the form that comes as a default with WordPress itself. So you'll always get contact form seven installed when you have WordPress installed. And it's a very simple form to use if you need something better. Wp Forms is rated as one of the highest form plug ins that you could use and you can use it for a variety of things.
[00:05:54] Hey, in any of the ones like the other day, almost all of them free.
[00:05:59] Yeah. So almost all of these are free. But it's a mix because when you get into the when you get into the boutique area or the bougie area of plug ins, there's a vast array of plugins that are very expensive, relatively inexpensive, and what we would consider dirt cheap as in free. Now some of these plugins do contain tiered, tiered payment plans. Like some of them will give you a plug in for free, but it's limited in what it can do. And then if you really want the full scope of the thing, you'd have to pay for it. So it's a range, it's a whole big mix. So the forms one is again WP forms and contact form seven. And if you do a Google search on any of these form plugins, you'll find a whole bunch of others that you could potentially try. Now, I did mention this next category in the last in our last episode at 625, and that's Google Analytics. And in this particular case, it's just the analytics category. There is a plugin called Monster Insights, which we use here at Screw the Commute, and across Tom's vast virtual real estate Empire and Monster Insights is a plug in that connects with Google Analytics to give you all sorts of great statistics how many visitors came, what they were looking at, how long they stayed, and so on and so on and so on.
[00:07:15] So it gives you a real feel for the type of customers and what the customers are actually doing and whether or not you need to make some tweaks on your website to keep them on longer. Because what you're trying to do and what all of us are trying to do is get those eyeballs locked on your website so that they stay as long as possible. And an analytics tool like Monster Insights will give you the information you need to know that next category membership sites. If you are thinking about a membership site, there are two plug ins that you need to look at. One of them is what we use. So the first one is called Member Press. That's one of the highest rated plug ins and one right after that. They're pretty much neck and neck at this point is called Wish List Member. Now, that's the plug in that Tom uses on his membership sites. And what I use whenever I'm developing a membership site, it really I have to say that now I'm not going to say this from a technical standpoint. Just from a user standpoint, wishlist member is almost drop dead easy to install and start using. It got a lot of features. It's really simple to use. Why don't you take a look and see what all the options are? And to be honest, it just works. It just.
[00:08:28] Works. And this is a paid one, but it's still not really expensive to do.
[00:08:32] No, it is a paid one, but it is definitely given what you get for this plug in, even if you compared it only to, let's say a few years ago on trying to create a membership site. It's an unbelievable bargain. It really, really is. Yeah, not that expensive.
[00:08:46] My member gate sites that run my mentor program, which has been running for many, many years, costs $4,000 and then like hundreds of dollars a year for special hosting and all kinds of stuff. So now we use Wishlist Member for Pennies.
[00:09:04] And it and it literally does just about everything that member gate can do and then some for a lot less money. So it's definitely worth looking into if you're seriously considering a membership site. Oc Next Category Push Notifications. All right, I. I know all of you that are listening to this. I've heard this in one way, shape or form. If you have any type of smartphone, you're going to be getting notifications from your different apps about whether about news, email that you get and all this other stuff. And that's great on the phone. But this type of push notification is for websites. So that could be it could be on your mobile device. It could also be on your desktop and laptop. There's one called Push Engage. Which is one of the higher rated push notification. A plug ins that allow you to send messages to those that sign up on your website. Now, what's the advantage of this? The advantage of this is that they don't have to go looking for information. So the customer does not have to constantly come to you to get the information they need. What they can do is set up, send, send you their information, could be an email address. It could be a phone.
[00:10:15] Click on something.
[00:10:16] Or they can just click on something. Exactly. And what will happen is you in the background, this plug in will set up a push notification that will send this customer more information on what they're looking for and maybe related items without you having to do a thing. And that's the best thing about it.
[00:10:32] There are some other things about it. There's no spam filter. Doesn't matter what you write in these things and it's never going to get caught anywhere. It's going to that person's browser.
[00:10:44] That is correct.
[00:10:45] Yes. It's different than email. No, not that we don't just absolutely love email. But the thing is, is you don't want to overuse this because there's been a lot of people using these now. So if they if they keep getting blasted with too many things from you, they'll just hit a button and cut it off.
[00:11:01] Yeah, that's exactly right. You can go really crazy with these things and you're going to start losing customers if you do that, as Tom mentioned. One of the advantages is that it does bypass a lot of the filtering that we see. For things like email and text messages and the like. And here's the reason why. The customer is the one that's requesting this. You are not forcing it on them. So they made they reached out to you in some way, shape or form by either putting in an email address or phone number on your website and saying, I want to receive this information. So that makes it a lot easier. All right. So let's push notifications. The next one is searching. Searching on websites is such a hit or miss thing. Now, even the WordPress has got a really good search function within it, but you're going to need something more if you have an E commerce site, if you have a site where you're selling a lot of products directly to the consumer, so your B to C, for example, business to consumer and that kind of thing. Or if you're an academic site and you have a lot of material, a lot of content that you want people to search through, you need something which is a little bit more comprehensive than the WordPress search.
[00:12:12] So the plug in here is called Search. Wp, that's search WordPress. And what this plugin will do is it creates a really sophisticated in the background, a really sophisticated index of all the content that you have on your website. And it makes it a lot easier for those people that come to visit your website to put in random search terms and almost almost vague search terms where this thing will search out exactly what they're trying to do and bring up relevant information for them to look at much, much better than the normal WordPress search if you have a lot of comprehensive information that you want people to look for. So that's search. Wp Now along with that and along with the push notifications is chat. Chat is a huge thing. Huge, huge, huge, big, big, big, big, big. And one of the £800 gorillas in the plugin space for chatting is called Live Chat. That's live chat. What live chat does. You've seen this on other websites. It's this little icon in the lower right corner of your screen, most likely, and you click on that and a box will pop up and allow you to chat live with with hopefully a human. Now, granted, some of them are AI driven.
[00:13:26] And facial intelligence.
[00:13:28] Artificial intelligence. They're AI driven. And and you're and you're exactly right. You're talking to a bot through through this chat mechanism. However, live chat is created specifically so that it's a human to human conversation through this chat bot the chat box I should say not chat bot. So live chat is really, really well received and it just works well and it allows your customers to reach out to you and you reach backing out to them in real time. And that's, that can always be a good thing. Yeah.
[00:13:57] If you're sitting at your desk working all day and that gives you instantaneous access to potential customers and if you have to go to the bathroom, you just hit a button and it says, you know, we're taking a dump and we'll be right back.
[00:14:11] Well well, I think you want to be a little bit more professional than that.
[00:14:18] But but anyway, it's it's really great. Yeah. Especially if you've got somebody sitting at a desk working all day long. It pops right up and they can start interacting with customers immediately.
[00:14:30] Yeah. And the, and the good thing about that as well is that you don't have to sit there watching to see if that, if anything is going to happen. The live chat stays idle, stays dormant until you need to swing into action and correspond and chat with a potential customer or a current customer. So it's an it's what we call an it's actually what's called an on demand plug in because it'll just sit there and wait very patiently until somebody demands its services. And then off it goes and and and does its thing. And I believe this, too. That's right.
[00:15:03] Here in Virginia, patiently, until somebody demands that they join my mentor program.
[00:15:08] Okay. All right. Yeah. All right. I'll let you.
[00:15:11] In. Sending me a whole bunch of money, and I send you a fortune. Okay?
[00:15:16] And I think the phrase we were looking for is, please hold on. We'll be back in 5 minutes.
[00:15:21] Oh, okay. But depends on what you eight how long?
[00:15:25] Well, that's true, too. It could be a lot longer than it could be a lot longer than 5 minutes.
[00:15:29] All right.
[00:15:30] All right. So that's chat. All right. So that was chat. Live chat. So the next the next category is calendars. Everybody has a calendar.
[00:15:40] I don't.
[00:15:42] Well, you do, but it's a it's a paper calendar. All right. So so for everybody who's listening, this is only among us. Tom has a paper calendar. Yes. He actually writes in the calendar and it never crashes. It never runs out of battery. It doesn't have to reboot. So there's something to be said for that. Yeah, but for the rest of us, there are calendar apps that we should take a look at and see whether or not they will give us the enhanced functions we want, make sure we're on time and all this other stuff. So there's a couple that I picked that I've actually used a few of these just to see how they look and they actually look great on a mobile device, which is really what they're geared towards. One is called the Events Calendar. That's its actual name, the events calendar, and it is a multi platform calendar app, meaning it'll work on smartphones, it'll work on your desktop. I think it's got Windows and Mac versions and all this other good stuff. Most of the things I'm talking about here. Do not have that because they're not made for specific devices that made for WordPress.
[00:16:46] But in this particular case, when you have a calendar, you need to reach it and be able to see it everywhere. So that's the way these things are designed. So the events calendar is one. There's another one called the events manager, which is along the same lines as that. But it gives you a couple more options if you're actually managing other things other than calendar entries. And then there's one which is more personal called my calendar and all three of these, and there's plenty more, but these are the three I picked because those floated up to the top is the cream of the crop of the calendar plugins. These three will help you stay, hopefully stay on time, make sure you can keep track of your appointments. You don't wind up scratching your head saying, What am I supposed to be doing now? And that kind of thing. So those are the calendar plugins that you can use on your WordPress site, and in many cases they will have associated apps that you can download to your various devices.
[00:17:39] All right. Let's get them one of the crazy ones.
[00:17:41] Okay. All right. Here's one of the crazy ones. And then there's another one which I'll finish up with at the end. That's another crazy one. All right. So there is a plug in. Well, let me back up a second. Let me give you the scenario. You're feeling kind of lonely and you need a hug. So you grab a blanket, you wrap it around yourself, and it kind of feels nice and you feel loved and warm and all that other stuff. And what you realize is, is that your blanket is connected to a device, most likely your smartphone or your desktop, which is actually connected to a plug in on your WordPress website. It's a hugging plug in. And what that does is send signals to this blanket which will actually constrict and make it feel like somebody hugging you. So when I first heard this, I thought, this is got to be a joke. It has to be. But on further investigation, which didn't take long, I discovered, no, it is not a joke. This thing actually exists. So if you're looking for hugs, look for the hugging plug in.
[00:18:45] I think I like that one. That's way smaller for other other kind of things.
[00:18:50] Yeah. Okay. Moving on. All right. So that's one of the fake plugins and I'll give you another one after the next few.
[00:18:58] It wasn't fake.
[00:18:59] No. Well, we call them fake because they just sound.
[00:19:02] So sound fake.
[00:19:03] Yeah, they sound fake. They're so implausible. You think, no, this can't be. But sure enough, it is. All right, so my next category is photo galleries. Now, there is a whole bunch of photo gallery plugins out there. I mean, literally hundreds, hundreds, hundreds, hundreds. The what I'm going to give you is called Nvidia gallery gallery envy. I are a. I've used it. I know several other people that are using it and they just love the way it looks. It's simple. It gets the job done and that's really all you want. It'll handle all sorts of photos and images and all sorts of crazy stuff that you want to throw up as an image. Now a simple Google search using environment via a gallery will bring up a bunch of other plug ins, which you may need if you're doing other things. Which leads me to the next category video player. So we talked about photo. A photo gallery, and the next category was video players. But I'm going to mix that a little bit because there's also video galleries which go along with all of these as well. So there's the entire gallery gallery for photos. There are others which handle both photo and video. There are others which are exclusive to video. They handle only video. And in many cases I've seen websites where they actually have rotating galleries of different video, things that you can watch, which is actually kind of cool because you don't have to go hunting down where they are on this particular website. So that's one thing. So the next category was video players. Now these are the ones which are standalone video players that we use in order to play content, whether it's from YouTube, whether it's from a dedicated web server, whether we have it stored somewhere.
[00:20:46] Whether it be from YouTube. Remember? Yeah, remember we used YouTube to drive traffic to the website and then we put the raw, any raw video playing on our sites on Amazon, that's three.
[00:20:58] Right, right. Right. But these players will handle that stuff.
[00:21:02] So, yeah, so we're having a little discussion here behind the scenes, folks, just to be clear, because I believe in a one way. We love YouTube to send people to your site, but when they're on my site, I want them to stay on my site, not go back easily to YouTube using. If you embed the YouTube video instead of using a separate player, it always is easy to go back to YouTube and watch some stupid cat video. So what Larry is saying is that the these players will easily handle YouTube videos. I'm just saying that's not the best practice.
[00:21:37] Right. Exactly. So from a technical standpoint, these particular players will handle just about everything you throw out, whether it's YouTube, Vimeo or Wistia, you name it. They got all sorts of things. But just listen carefully to what Tom said. Your the biggest thing you want to do is to entice people to look at your content, then get them away from that and get them on your website.
[00:22:01] That's that's what we'll look to. Stay on your website.
[00:22:04] Not in the state there. Yeah. Yeah. Because YouTube. Well, we know what happens on YouTube. So the two players that I have here, one is called Presto player. And the other one is called Easy Video Player. And these are very lightweight, simple to install and configure players, which basically do one thing and they do it very, very well. They play content from your website to your visitors. That's all they need to do.
[00:22:30] Yeah. And when he says lightweight, he doesn't mean they're just they're not that good. That means that it doesn't slow your website down. It's not like a real bloated bunch of code. It's all stupid code that's bad for you. Lightweight means it's. It's nimble, it's good.
[00:22:48] It operates fast, it's reactive. Very quickly. Any of the plugins that I've given you over the course of the of this episode in the last two are all plugins that we've actually used and tested. So we know which ones are, as Tom.
[00:23:02] Uses from below.
[00:23:04] Well, except for the calendar, yes, because time is on paper. Excuse us. So those particular players are good ones. And like I said before, a simple Google search will bring up a list of a bunch of others which you may want to try. In many, many, many cases they are free to use. So it does not cost you anything except the time to download them and try them to see if you like them. Some players come with really fancy fancy borders to make it look good against the theme you're using on your website. Or there's a plain what they call plain Jane video players, others float around on your screen if that's what you're into.
[00:23:43] Some others show buy buttons at a certain time, right in the video, that kind of stuff. And also, we really didn't test out the hug video when they come out.
[00:23:53] Well, wild.
[00:23:53] Version. I'll test it out for you.
[00:23:55] Yeah, Tom, I'll have to try that and he'll get back to you on another episode. So that's video players and and that those when it comes to video, one of the things you need to keep in mind, I'm going to go off just a second on here because these video plug ins also have a requirement like this. Be very careful how you generate your your videos. You don't want them too large and too too big in size because in many cases it can be a little difficult to resize those on a mobile device. So you want to be careful the type of video you're playing, as long as it looks good on your desktop and it doesn't take up the whole screen natively, meaning you made the video like gigantic. Like I'll give you a size 1920 by 1080. That's the number of pixels that you're going to have, both horizontally, horizontally and vertically in your on your screen. As long as you're going to have really gigantic sized videos like that, these will work just fine.
[00:24:50] We'll have Mark do an episode on that.
[00:24:52] Okay, good. All right. All right. And the last one that I'm going to give you is another, quote unquote fake plug in, but it is actually real.
[00:25:01] And then I got something after that, too.
[00:25:03] Okay. All right. It is called the smelling plugin. Now, I'm not sure what they're calling it today. They may have a slightly different name for it, but this plug in actually connects to a device that you that you purchase with the plug in that will emit smells and odors appropriate to what you're doing online. Now, this reminds me way, way, way back when and I may be showing my age by mentioning this, if you remember this, there was a thing called smell of vision, and it was very similar to like Technicolor and all this other stuff. And what smell of vision was if you're sitting in the theater, there would be nozzles along the side walls of the theater and they would emit certain odors during certain parts of the movie to sort of get you really involved in the story.
[00:25:55] Yeah, except during Blazing Saddles, everybody.
[00:25:58] Well, yeah, there was definitely a scene in Blazing Saddles that I would not want to be watching it in some television. But yes, this device does exist and it we could take the boutique bougie moniker for this even further because it really is the type of type of plug in slash device where you put in aromatic oils and all sorts of other things to make your place smell wonderful. So if a hacker on the other side of the planet breaks into your website and detects this smelling plug in, he can make your place smell wonderful or absolutely terrible, but legitimately it does exist. It is a real plug in and a real device. Okay.
[00:26:44] All right. So one that I was thinking about must exist. I don't use a plug in for this. I use an outside service. But I'm thinking, Larry, there must be QR code plug ins.
[00:26:58] There are plenty of QR code plugs.
[00:27:00] Yes. Qr folks. As those crazy little puzzle looking things that you see printed on things where you can hold your cell phone up to it and it'll take it to a website or give you some information. Qr stands for quick response. Right. So I'm sure there's plug ins for it. There's plenty of services also for it. But I just wanted to mention that one is one you could use. So so there we go. So we got the bunch of bourgeoisie plug ins we lovingly call them, but basically it makes your site do better than it would have done on its own when you pick the appropriate ones to use. So. So there you go. So thanks, Larry, for developing that list for us.
[00:27:42] I feel very bougie right now.
[00:27:44] Yeah, you look boozy. Yeah.
[00:27:46] Thank you.
[00:27:47] Go to your bougie swimming pool with your bougie flippers.
[00:27:53] Yeah, my bougie flippers. I remember. I have a face for radio, so this is perfect.
[00:27:56] And your bougie hanging thing. I should be a doctor. I cured Larry's shoulder.
[00:28:04] Oh, my God.
[00:28:06] I did not. You admitted it on the meeting.
[00:28:08] That you did. Tom recommended a book about shoulder pain. So I got the book from my local library. I started applying the techniques and voila, shoulder pain gone. Tom is a doctor.
[00:28:22] Is a miracle worker. You're just hanging around to make it work.
[00:28:26] I'm just. I'm just hanging.
[00:28:27] It has to do with hanging. Holding on to a bar and hanging. And it it over time, it moves a bone in your shoulder a little bit. That keeps it from impinging on the nerves. And it worked. I couldn't believe it myself. When I heard Larry did it, I tried it, but the ceiling caved in as soon as I tried it. The hang. So now I have a bad shoulder and a big lump on my head. So to get a well, a tougher thing up there. So so folks, if you like this kind of repartee along to go with our bourgeoisie, you can join my mentor program and you can have Larry and Mark and Travis and Jennifer and myself all on your team to if you want to, we'll just be us like this the whole time. But more likely, we'll be helping you learn all these things, put them into play on your websites and, you know, helping you develop products. And even if you don't have any ideas for products, all I have to do is interview you for about 30 minutes and we'll have more products than you know what to do with. And it's the longest running, most successful, most unique program ever in the field of Internet and digital marketing. And I triple dog dare people to put their program up against mine and they won't do it because they would be embarrassed.
[00:29:48] Oh.
[00:29:49] So. All right. Well, thanks a lot, Larry. For this whole week worth of bourgeoisie stuff and plug in this is plug in week you want to make sure you if you missed episode 624 and 625 and this is 626, these are critical to your success long term with your website. So even just because you know about this stuff means you won't have a Web person do bad things to your website and you're clueless about it. You're paying that person to hurt you, basically. And I just can't stand that. And neither can Larry. And me.
[00:30:27] Neither.
[00:30:28] Yeah, and we see it all the time. It's just so sad that these things are happened to great people that are great business people. But your web stuff is a different animal that you must learn about. All right. So to find those episodes, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash and then the episode number 624 and then do it again slash 625 and this one's slash 626. And if you want to check out that mentor program to have us on your team with unlimited one on one consultation for at least a year. I'm the guy and this is the place. So check that out at greatInternetmarketingtraining.com.
[00:31:09] All right. Thanks, Larry. And we'll catch everybody on the next episode. See you later.
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