I often get requests from peo­ple ask­ing me what plu­g­ins do I use on this blog. Or, what are my favorite plu­g­ins. Some­times, I post about them. But these lists usu­ally become stale fast, because I test new plu­g­ins and change them all the time.

So I wanted to post an update and list some of my favorite plu­g­ins. How­ever, it was cum­ber­some to pick and choose which ones I wanted to post about because there are so many. So I’ve decided to do some­thing dif­fer­ent this year.

Using a plu­gin that lists all the plu­g­ins in use on a par­tic­u­lar blog (I’ll share that one with you in a moment), I man­aged to print a list of all my plu­g­ins in a sin­gle post.

How­ever, the descrip­tions you will read are those of the plu­gin authors. Some of them are poor and insuf­fi­cient. Oth­ers don’t explain how I use them specif­i­cally on this blog.

So I’ve also added a mini-​​description with addi­tional com­ments to each plu­gin to explain why, how, or where I’ve used it on this blog. I sin­cerely hope this list is use­ful to you. If it is, con­sider it a Christ­mas gift from me.

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One of my coach­ing stu­dents recently asked me whether it’s bet­ter to offer a free trial or a $1 lim­ited time trial as an incen­tive to sign up for a paid newslet­ter subscription.

The answer involves the vital role of track­ing and test­ing through­out your entire sales funnel.

Gen­er­ally speak­ing, a free trial is likely to con­vert more vis­i­tors ini­tially, but the $1 trial may be the bet­ter choice over the long term. Such gen­er­al­iza­tions have lit­tle place in busi­ness. The only way to deter­mine the right answer for your busi­ness is to track and test the process from begin­ning to end.

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Want to upload and share your video on sites like YouTube, Revver, Meta­Cafe, Google Video, and more, but it’s too cum­ber­some since you have to log into each one and upload mul­ti­ple times?

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could do it all in just one step?

Recently, I stum­bled upon a free — yes, free! — video sub­mis­sion ser­vice, which allows for auto­mated sub­mis­sion of your video to not one, not two or three, but to all the 12 big video sites all at once — includ­ing YouTube, MySpace, Meta­Cafe, Revver, Google Video, AOL, Yahoo!, and more.

Plus, there’s no setup, and it’s free to boot! It’s…

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Some of the tests results I love to fol­low are those from The Poyn­ter Insti­tute. Their eye­track­ing stud­ies are some of the largest ever con­ducted in this space.

While their tests are pri­mar­ily done for, and funded by, major news­pa­pers, their stud­ies are incred­i­bly reveal­ing nonethe­less. For instance, they’ve tested how read­ers read sto­ries in three dif­fer­ent for­mats: tabloid-​​style (folded ver­ti­cally), broad­sheet (larger size, folded hor­i­zon­tally), and online.

Of course, my inter­est is cer­tainly focused on the online ver­sion. But their news­pa­per stud­ies are very reveal­ing in terms of what cap­tures people’s atten­tion, how they read, and how much of it they do read.

Their web­site has come out with five key find­ings. (Their full report is due out in a few more weeks from now.) But let’s take a closer look at these find­ings, and my inter­pre­ta­tion of what they mean for the web.

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Just a quick message.

I’m going to post a new arti­cle later this after­noon. But I real­ize that some­times I don’t broad­cast an email notice to you. Either I sim­ply for­get, or I don’t have the time.

The RSS-​​to-​​email noti­fi­ca­tion is still being upgraded, so until then, the only way to make sure you’re noti­fied of any new blog posts is to sub­scribe to my RSS feed.

RSS feeds allow you to add the blog to your favorite RSS reader (like Feed­De­mon, News­ga­tor, etc), or start page (Page­Flakes, NetVibes, YahooWeb, Google Reader, etc).

I highly rec­om­mend that you add my feed.

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Something’s been going on. Some­thing behind the scenes that you may not know about. Some­thing that’s been help­ing me increase the effec­tive­ness of my web­sites and blogs.

Right under your nose. Er, I mean finger.

As you know, I’m a fanat­i­cal tester. And I test con­stantly. But what you may not know is that, it is not only lim­ited to split-​​testing copy.

Well, let me let you in on a secret.

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Hold on tight.

On Thurs­day night, I will be on a con­fer­ence call with Armand Morin and Marc Quar­les in prepa­ra­tion for the launch of a new prod­uct so rev­o­lu­tion­ary, it’s going to com­pletely change the way you look at copy­writ­ing for the web, write your copy, split-​​test your copy and opti­mize it.

And no, it’s not “Video Generator.”

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