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If you’re a WordPress blogger, like me, then you know that there are certain plugins you need in your life. For those of you who are not too savvy with plugins: they are little tools which, when installed in your blog, help you showcase things from your social networks to set up’s of custom contact forms and even back-up your files safely. Here are some WordPress plugins that I just can’t live without – and I’m sure they will be very helpful to you too:

SOCIAL

• Pinterest “Pin It” Button for Images: there are lots of these types of plugins; but after trying a few, this one is truly the best. It places a “Pin It” button over each of your blog images when your readers hover over them. From there, your readers can pin your images to their Pinterest boards in seconds.
• Alpine PhotoTile for Pinterest: speaking of Pinterest, this plugin retrieves photos from a specific Pinterest board (of your choosing) and displays them in multiple gallery style options. It’s beautiful as well as engaging – since it links from your blog directly to your Pinterest board.
• Pretty Pinterest Pins: place a widget on your sidebar with your most recent pins. Simple, classic, and linked – ready for repinning!
• Instagram for WordPress: share your fun-filled-&-filtered Instagram images on your sidebar. It’s quick and easy with this plugin!
• Shareaholic: at the bottom of every blog post, you can chose which social networks are available to share with. It’s a simple set up with a lot of power.
  

FUNCTIONALITY

• Contact Form 7: although it’s one of the older plugins, it still works like a charm. You need to pay attention to the coding a little in the setup, to be sure not to mess anything up; but, overall it’s simple and to the point. Pretty dummy proof actually!
• Under Construction: working on your blog design but don’t want anyone to see the mess? Then this is the fix for you. This plugin has an easy on/off switch where you can block out your site with a custom under construction message while you’re getting things done. When you’re ready for you live site to show, just turn “off” the plugin and you’re back!
• Login Logo: this plugin gives the back-end of your blog a custom look and feel. With a simple image drop, you replace the WordPress logo in the login screen and place your logo in. This works especially well when building client blogs, as you give them a final product with a fully customized login page.
• All In One SEO Pack: with Google analytics and automatically generating META tags, this plugin is vital to getting your blog on the top rankings for search engines. It’s simple to use and has many features to explore within it.
• WordPress Backup to Dropbox: this plugin may have saved my life already. In the case of WordPress blogs, everything is stored in your FTP space – but let’s say you get hacked or somehow you mess up the code in your theme. There’s nothing to fear if you have a backup set up. I searched for many backup options, but the Dropbox backup was the best choice. I do this for my personal site as well as my client’s sites; I simply set it to automatically back up once a week, and I don’t have to think about it anymore.

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• Humans tend to be control freaks. We must learn to let go! How to Learn the Art of Surrender has wonderful questions – and answers – to help you master this.
• In my quest for enjoyment, I’m seriously becoming a foodie online. I found this delicious doctored-up 7-layer dip that I just have to make. And for dessert: Nutella sandwich cookies. Mmm!
• Creative-block? I recommend Behance for inspirations. Like searching Typography and finding all of these goodies.
• Are you and infographic junkie like me? Then you have to check out ColumnFiveMedia’s plethora of infographics.
• Unsure of which color palettes complement each other? I use the Color Scheme Designer to test different color options and combinations – it definitely helps!
• Sometimes you just need a quick reminder of awesome things in life. How about 1,000 of them?
• Simply put: “Inspirations Devoted to Colour” at Plenty of Colour. Gorgeous visuals!
• This design project, Wikipedia Redefined, is one that Wikipedia should seriously consider. It’s a beautiful, strategic and modern take on the classic site.
• Every designer needs to know their Photoshop Etiquette! Get detailed explanations to make your Photoshop experience run smoothly.
• Lastly, I can’t stop laughing with this website. We humans purchase some funny things. Appropriately titled: ThisIsWhyImBroke.com

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If you’re a hard-working American, you more than likely have to create presentations to impress your boss with your sheer awesomeness. Well, maybe not your awesomeness – but your work productivity. It’s all relative, I swear.

And when it comes time to present, the traditional PowerPoint Presentation just isn’t cutting it anymore. It’s outdated. It’s old news. There are multiple ways to present online and I found my favorite – Prezi. I blogged about Prezi about a year ago, when I first found the online program. Ever since, I’ve been impressing bosses all over the world! No joke – my job entails me to travel and present marketing solutions to the heads of companies throughout Latin America.

Every time I present one of my Prezi’s, I get asked the same questions: “How do you do that? I want to learn, can you teach me?”

So I thought about it, and I decided to be a good-tutor. I created a Prezi Tutorial, for dummies! (Well, it’s for beginners, but the dummies title is fun.)

It’s simply a step-by-step guide.

You’ll learn the basics from how to create a Prezi account and start your first Prezi to creating frames, paths, inserting images, and finally saving and exporting the file! It’s easy, I promise. Like everything in life, practice makes perfect. But overall, Prezi is very user-friendly. Try it out and you’ll see.

Ready? Here it goes.
Download the Prezi Tutorial. Check!
Visit Prezi.com to start. Check!
Impress your boss with Awesomeness. Double Check!

Suggestions or Questions? Let me know in the Comments below

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Small Businesses don’t have a bajillion advertising dollars to spend; thus, Small Businesses are always seeking cost-effective ways to market their services. And lucky for those in this group, there is a definite way to reach the masses at a low, low price — Social Media!

We all hear about it and talk about it — Social Media — but do people really understand how to interconnect and use Social Media to their full advantage? Well, just in case you’re trying to figure it out, here’s a short How-to-Guide on Marketing your Small Business through Social Media.

Step #1
Get on Facebook and Twitter!
If you own a business but you are not on the Two Major and Most Popular Networks for Social Interaction, then you’re considered to be living in the stone age. Seriously, people “Google” a business just as much as they “Facebook” or “Twitter” search one. In other words, take Step #1 very seriously and keep your Business’ Social Networks filled with status updates and current information.

Step #2
Your Company Needs to Blog.
You may ask, “Why Blog?” The reason is simple: People like Current Information, Updates and Live-Connections — similar to the world of Facebook and Twitter Status Updates — but your Blog is Centered on your business. And you don’t have to be a Pro-writer to blog! Simply post event updates or new projects you’re working on; Images, Videos, and Exterior Links always make blog posts more interesting.  You may also post Articles that you find interesting and would concern and intrigued your target market. Also, it’s important to post comments and follow the current information in other blogs that fall-in-line with your same industry.

Step #3
LinkedIn. Yelp. Foursquare. YouTube.
All of these Social Giants are here to help you grow, so Use Them! LinkedIn connects you in a serious business platform — don’t ignore it — LinkedIn may not be as “Big” as Facebook and Twitter, but it is a definite way that you’ll be researched on by your prospective clients. Yelp connects you publishes tons of reviews on local businesses — review your competitors and make sure you have positive reviews — if not, take note of your company flaws and make changes asap. Foursquare allows you to “check-in” and lets your Social Network followers know where your Business is geo-located — it’s a nifty tool and highly recommended. Lastly, YouTube is your multimedia guru, so create videos to show your customers what you have to offer — YouTube has a lot to offer and Billions of viewers, so brainstorm your ideas for videos and get to work!

Step #4
Your New Best Friend: Google.
With free online tracking programs like Google Alerts and Google Analytics, you don’t want to miss out on the benefits. Google Alerts sends you email updates from Google search results about topics you’re interested in tracking — i.e. your business’ name, your competitors, and keywords for your business. Google Analytics tracks your website traffic and tells you which sites and/or social platforms are bringing in hits to your webpage — so you can focus attention and budget on the ones that do work, and you can revamp or cut out the ones that don’t.

Step #5
Connect Everything!
The final piece of information is to integrate all of your Social Media Marketing Efforts. For one, it saves you time instead of updating a bunch of networks. Second, it keeps you current on all platforms — and that’s one of the most important details for a Small Business to keep their potential clients engaged. The Social Media, Tech and Business blog, Mashable, offers three suggestions to cross-market your efforts:

First, connect your Twitter account to Facebook so that your tweets will appear in your public updates on Facebook. This will let you leverage your time on Twitter to also update your Facebook fans.

Second, connect your LinkedIn profile to your WordPress blog. LinkedIn allows you to publish, in your profile, synopses of the most recent blog posts on your blog. This application will automatically update your LinkedIn profile with your most recent blog posts.

Third, integrate Twitter tools into your blog. I like and use the TweetMeme retweet button on my blogs to make it easier for users to tweet about the blog posts. I also use the ShareThis tool to enable readers to quickly share content on multiple social networks.

*Although my opinions are incorporated in this post, I stumbled upon the details seen here. For more information and links to the tools that will help get your Small Business started, read the entire article at Mashable.com

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Prezi – The Zooming Presentation Editor
This nifty little tool has been out for over a year now, but I recently ran into the online program and instantly fell in love. Forget the traditional PowerPoint presentation, and say Hello to Prezi. Easy-to-use, Prezi is a quick and animated way to display your presentation content, while keeping your audience engaged!

Why is Prezi pretty awesome?
It’s Free. It’s Simple. It Creates Movement with Elements of Zooming. It Shows Relationships within Content. It has an iPad app. You can import PowerPoint slides, if you’d like. And It’s just all around Cool.

Once your Prezi is started, you have all sorts of options for building, layering, and ordering the objects in your presentation. To use Prezi, you really do have to break the traditional thought process of ‘slides’. Prezi is not based on a series of ‘slides’ or single screens full of data, but is more based on how your presentation delivery is structured.

It’s more like an outline, with related groupings, ordered objects, sequential ideas, and unified thoughts. All of these come together in one ‘whiteboard’ construction area that is, literally, as large as you need it to be – and will expand to fit the needs of your presentation. Once you’re done, you can download your Prezi directly to your computer and present from the hard disk or you can embed it online; whatever works best for you.

Prezi is a great alternative to PowerPoint, but does have it’s drawbacks. I found that the system is fast and is user friendly, but offers only a few options for text and overall styling. Besides that, it’s open to your creativity.

The best tips for creating your Prezi in the most enjoyable-fashion are:

• Start with your big ideas and spread them around the canvas. Then add details to those main ideas.
• Practice with just text to start. Then add pictures to create visual interest.
• If you want a group of objects (text and/or images) to be seen at the same time, use a frame to group them.
• Be careful with how much zooming and movement you use: The right amount creates interest, but too much creates motion-sickness.
• Once your text and images are in place, set up just the first few steps of your path.  Then view the show to see how these elements appear.  You may realize that you want to change the grouping, size, or location of your elements.  If you like how the first few steps appear, continue to set the rest of your path.

Still not sure how to start? Well, their getting started tutorial explains the basics pretty well; I promise you’ll have fun learning it. As for pricing, you can use the Free Version to get to know the program; but those of you who sign up with Student Emails are able to get the upgraded version for Free – where you can insert your Own logo instead of Prezi’s, have extra storage space, and a few other perks too.

Before you go, check out my First Prezi design: I quickly put this together – literally in 10 minutes – to just see how the program works. It’s very user-friendly and I’ll definitely be using it for my future Presentation Projects. Happy Preziing!

EDIT: Here’s a gift for you! Check out my Prezi Tutorial

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If you’ve ever thought of building a website, you know about Landing Pages and how vital they are to your “user-friendliness.” Companies tend to like Landing Pages because it serves as the hub for their exterior Links and important information. Plus, consumers generally like to see all the info they need in one quick look. So, over-doing-it on a Landing Page can truly hurt your business, and that’s why it’s important to keep it simple.

I was Stumbling and found this this snazzy description on how to Create the Perfect Landing Page. Thought it was pretty cool, so I’m sharing it with YOU:

• Headlines should be Clear and Concise
• You’re Grammar needs to be Perfect!
• Use Call to Actions and Big Buttons
• Go Easy on the External Linkage
• Keep it Above the Fold
• Also Test, Test, Test your Page
• Think about your Color Choices

Want more info? Get all the details from the Source