So there’s this site that presumably shows you how rich you’ll be. It asks a bunch of questions, starting with whether you’ve decided on, or are unclear, about your sex?!

Naturally, it’s all meant to be in good fun and if you really think the dollar will be worth anything in the next 10 years than you’re going to need much more than what this site defines as rich.

16,671,658

Great viral marketing technique by the makers of this site. Right, time to go off to make my millions - hopefully by the end of this year!

It seems the U.S Navy {read Government} is now taking it one step forward and trying to recruit you via the RSS feeds of your favorite blogs. I logged into my Feedburner account today to see a new Ad waiting for my approval, it was for the U.S Navy.

Screenshot:

As you can see there are 3 creative units as part of their campaign to try and lure you into signing up for them. I like the 2nd one the best “Want to do great things in your world?” - yeah like watching rockets blast away from miles off at sea and not knowing who they are going to kill in another “shock and awe” campaign.

I did not approve them to run on my blogs feed and I hope other bloggers who were solicited with this “recruitment drive” didn’t either.

If you use WordPress you will inevitably look at extending it with a few, or a lot of, Plugins, and there is certainly no shortage of those on the web. Since starting up one of my own WordPress plugins, an auction widget, I’ve come to highly appreciate the work that all plugin developers put into their products.

Some plugins are pretty much mandatory like Akismet and the Feedburner plugin. As your blogging increases you soon realize that you would like to add more, especially since it’s so easy to do so. Upload, activate and personalize - who can argue with that.

I’m pretty plugged myself, I started with just Akismet and then went up from there. I’ve also deactivated quite some plugins from my blog as frankly they ended up taking space and being of no benefit. So how do you exactly figure out which plugins you should use and which ones to avoid? No matter how strong the urge. Here’s a short checklist that could help you out.

Checklist: Use The Right Plugins For Your Blog

1. Do You Really, Really Need It - Most of the time you will not ask yourself this, but you should seriously do so - at least twice. Don’t get bought into if it’s being offered for free. It was nice in 2006 to have your blog with the latest widgets, but today the name of the game is to have your blog load as fast as possible. Sending multiple server plugin requests will just slow it down. Do you still need that plugin?

2. Is It Compatible With Your Version of WordPress - Let’s face it, not everyone likes to update their WP install as much as Matt Mullenweg would like us to. Before you decide to download the plugin check from the developers notes if it’s compatible with the version of WordPress you are running.

3. Does The Plugin Compliment Your Blog - Many a times a plugin will have a feature that you need yet it somehow does not fit in with the natural scheme of things. For instance, I’ve used AdSense Deluxe on this blog before but it didn’t give me the flexibility that the WhyDoWork plugin does. So I ended up using that instead. Both plugins fill the need, but the WhyDoWork one compliments my blogs needs better.

4. Use Plugins To Offer A Better Experience - Your ultimate blogging goal should be to offer a relaxed reading atmosphere. Any serious user of WordPress will tell you that you need to do quite some tweaking to get your blog at that level. Using plugins can help get you there faster. Plugins like Share This and Related Posts will help your blog become more social and keep readers around longer. Remember, people like to click on the web so give them as many opportunities as possible within your blog. Hopefully keeping them on your blog longer.

5. Automation - If you are blogging then you are also exploring the opportunity at making some money on the side. Plugins like OIO Publisher can help you automate this process, once you’ve set it up to do so. Also, technically this is not an exclusive WordPress plugin, but ScribeFire is a great way to blog faster and efficiently. The less time you spend thinking about how to get things done, the more time you can spend on blogging. Always keep that in mind when looking at installing a new plugin.

6. Will The Plugin Help You Do A Task Better - Everyone needs help with something, at some point of time. So ask yourself, Is this specific plugin going to help me get this task done better? You may need the All In One SEO plugin to better optimize your blog for search engines, the Google Sitemaps Plugin can help in a better indexed blog and the Photo Dropper plugin will help you in getting creative commons images for your blog posts without leaving your admin area. These are all tasks that if you decided to do by yourself would cost time and money.

In conclusion, using WordPress plugins to enhance your blog is probably the most wise thing that you can do for it. Just make sure you end up using the right ones.

Speaking of which, please raise your hand if you use the “Hello Dolly” plugin that WordPress includes by default. If you do, then please drop your URL in the comments as I’ve never seen it in use anywhere…at all!

Also Read -

Top 16 WordPress Plugins

Make Money With Your Blog

photo credit: Matt From London

Everyone’s trying to make a buck euro or two, or double what they made yesterday online. The best part about the web is that you do not need a degree, you don’t have to be in any specific country or city and most importantly you do not need to know someone that’s knows someone so you can land a “deal”. You can pretty much make it on your own here and look forward to an early retirement.

So in the spirit of everyone, and their mom, offering up tips and tricks on how to rake it in online. Here’s -

5 ways that you can use the web to plan an early retirement

• Get Social Online & Offline - You do not need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on traffic, SEO, a custom made CMS or glitzy graphics, even though a good web design can help you down the road, to get started on the web. You just need to have a sense of humor and good social skills. Then let social media do the work for you. Use linkbait content that people just cannot resist seeing. Learn everything you can about social media marketing, slowly but surely, and remember to market yourself offline too. People still read t-shirt slogans no matter how silly it may look to them. Social media marketing is where the new rich hang out, you need to get started today before it’s too late!
• Write To Retire - People are getting book deals because of their daily ramblings. BOOK DEALS!!! Was that possible 10 years ago if you kept giving advice, or telling funny stories, to people from your cubicle? Nope, but today you can. If you are good with words, and are not abusive of using tags, then by all means get started on your A-list status. You never know what could happen.
• Affiliate Today, Super Affiliate Tomorrow - This takes some work, but once you get started there is seriously nothing that can stop you. I’m getting a little bit of the taste myself and I’m loving it. Starting in affiliate marketing can be a little intimidating at first, but mark my words the key here is perseverance. If you can persevere in your job, just so you can retire after 40 years, then spending a few months on this cannot be that hard.
• Freelance Today, Vacation Tomorrow - Seriously it’s not that hard as it sounds. I’ve been doing it for years now, even though my pace is slower than most, I can very arguably say that going freelance is probably the best choice I made. I started slow and steady before I went in full swing. Word of advice, if you have a family - get a separate office space where they cannot see you for said amount of hours, unless it’s an emergency.
• Use The Web, I Mean That Literally. USE It! - If there is one thing you should know about the web, it will not care about you tomorrow. It probably doesn’t even care about you right now. Don’t try and be friends with search engines, algorithms, traffic rankings, “buzz” indicators, linkbacks etc… they can stop caring about you in a heartbeat. Use each and every single aspect of the web for what’s it worth.

Now that you are on your way to planning an early retirement there is one other thing you should know.

Stop reading this and take action. You’re not getting any younger.

I have my birthday this month, on the 13th, and so does my blog. That’s right, on the 30th of May it will be two years since I started EverybodyGoTo.

I turn 29 this year and one year closer to my own personal date of achieving financial independence, i.e by the time I’m 30. Which is shaping up pretty good so far, but I still have some ways to go. I owe most of that drive to this blog as I’ve used it to launch most of my web products, not to mention it has helped me “think outside the box”.

So, what do I have planned for this birthday bash of mine? Well, to be honest, I just discovered yesterday that the blog will be having its anniversary so I haven’t planned anything as yet. I just couldn’t hold myself back from writing about it.

Anyway, I’ll be offering something up for sure. So watch out for that post.