The WordPress plugin industry has become quite the cash cow for developers and savvy Internet Marketers alike.

What they don’t tell you, of course, is what to REALLY look for in a plugin. Ignore these suggestions, and you risk having your plugins fail, your blog fail, and a major blow to your online income.

Here’s some tips (taken from my personal 1st hand experience):

1) Support – Does the plugin have proper support? Has it been through at least 3-5 major iterations of the WordPress Blogging platform? You see, while WordPress may be the best Content Management Solution since sliced bread, the development team has a nasty habit of rolling out upgrades in an almost frenetic fashion (welcome to Internet Time, grasshopper).

It seems that every time WordPress has a major upgrade, it breaks whole swaths of existing WordPress plugins. They simply fail to work with the new versions of WordPress.

Make sure that the plugin developers have weathered the WordPress Upgrade storm and HAVE A TRACK RECORD of updating their plugins, not only to fix bugs or address security concerns, but to also deal with the latest and greatest WordPress upgrades.

2) Longevity – Has the plugin been around for awhile? I see a nasty habit with WordPress plugin developers…….they may come up with a fantastic plugin. But over time, they simply get bored with it, or just don’t want to hassle with it any more. Check that the plugin and the author has been around for more than a few months.

3) Have a Coder in your Pocket – Over time, a plugin WILL go abandoned. It may be the key plugin you need to make your WordPress-based site work properly. If the plug-in developer has gone AWOL, you’d better have a backup plan. Be sure you have access to a dependable coder/programmer who has experience in developing WordPress-specific plugins. You can go to the usual haunts to find them (Elance, RentaCoder, etc., etc.), but better yet, get some personal referrals from other Internet Marketers who’ve used a good coder-type.

Your plugin may just need a simple tweak, or it may have to be re-assembled from scratch. Be prepared for this eventuality.

Rather than update your plugin, some of you may just opt to not upgrade your version of WordPress. That might be ok for a little while, but we now live in an age of multiple exploits by spammers and hoodlums. You’ll want to keep your version of WordPress regularly updated, mainly to keep your site secure.

And that, my friends, is the hidden cost of using WordPress as the CMS for your Internet Marketing Website.

Mr. P

I heard good things about Expression Engine (EE).

On paper EE looks fantastic, and is full of features.  New to blogging, I let the feature list seduce me and I bit hard.  I even plunked down for a Commercial license, because……….you never know.

Installation was straightforward, but I noticed something straight away.  The load times sucked.  Seven seconds to load a nearly empty home page?  I asked around and the common answer I got was: “your webhost is slow”.  I didn’t buy it, as I have other accounts with my webhost running scripts, and none slog down like this.

After several months of inactivity, I finally got back around to this blog…………..and the load times got even slower. So, in a decisive moment, I deleted Expression Engine and moved to WordPress.

Besides being free of charge, WordPress is one of the most widely used Blog Platforms around.  What does this mean?  Lots of templates to use, lots of plugins, and lots of community support.

Best of all?  Load time of about 1.6 seconds.  (Same exact webhost, by the way).

 

And my name is…………well………call me Mr. P. (I was going to use “X”, but it seems the internet marketing world is now littered with “X” types…….)

You see, this site/blog is a bit of an anomaly. I’m somewhat of a veteran in the World Wide Web world (veteran = Mosaic user, if you don’t know what “Mosaic” is, well Sonny, the first web browser).

I was there when the first entrepreneurs began marketing their wares on the Internet, most often to universal scorn from the “information is free” crowd, mostly trolling on Usenet (look it up, Sonny).

I was the first ever Internet Marketing Manager for a large multi-national corporation, back when corporate execs didn’t even know what a web browser was. As such, I had a budget of about $300,000 to “go play” and create a national web presence (they spend tens of millions now for this.)

So I’ve got some experience in the web marketing game. But I’m not here to impress you with my credentials.

I’m mainly here to vent. To spew my opinions. Hopefully to lower my blood pressure (my cardiologist tells me not to internalize all my stress and anger). And in so doing, perhaps help a few newbies or intermediate web marketers along the way.

Why the anonymity? Well, I’m not a dot-com millionaire, but I am very comfortable. Unlike some of the “dreamers” out there (a topic for another entry), I have a very good, high-paying job. And I’m not going to jeopardize that job by putting up a neon sign announcing my newest business project on the web.

I also have a couple of growing, prospering internet business that I’ve cultivated along the way, all on the side. Sites that will lead me to an early retirement from the real world. And I’m also not going to jeopardize these either.

Thus anonymity. “Like a warm cocoon”, ya know?

I’ve always admired Stanley Bing, the “anonymous” columnist for Fortune Magazine who satirized Corporate Business life. But after awhile, I realized Bing is so…….analog, ya know?

So I’d thought I’d do something similar, but focus mainly on the life of an Internet Small Business Owner. Providing some tips, some observations, some critiques, and perhaps just a bit of an off-kilter view of the web small business world.

So welcome.

And stay tuned.

- Mr. P