Weekly Web Tools

Update on Tawk.to I started using Tawk.to for chat. This thing is awesome. I am super impressed with their tons of features. As a self-professed stat junkie, I love seeing where my visitors and where they came from. You get a ton of information including what they typed into Google to get to your site, how long they've been on the site, what page they are viewing. In two words: it's cool. I was using Rhino Support for the ticketing system and their live chat. If I left Rhino, what would I use for my knowledge base and ticketing? Then I remembered a few episodes ago I had taken a look at Freshdesk. It's super easy, and powerful. So I am moving my chat to Tawk.to and I'm moving my knowledge base/ticketing to Freshdesk. The bad side of this equation is both of these are free. How is that bad? Well Freshdesk does have a paid version (that I don't need) so I assume they will stay in business. I'm not sure how Tawk.to is going to stay in business (although their website states they will be charging businesses in the future. Video Intro Plugin If you really want to grab your visitors attention when they show up, this might be the Wordpress plugin for you. It's called Video Intro and as you might expect when your video arrives it plays a video intro. You can set it up to play every time someone shows up on your site, or only on the first visit (you can also choose never - which makes me scratch me head). At the end of the video, your visitor is redirected to a page. It's simple, and their demo page show it off nicely. You can add skip buttons, our logo, and customize how it looks. You can use your own hosted video, or use a video on YouTube. It's works on Mobile as well. Check it out on Code Canyon. It's only $16

Thanks to Steve Stewart for this tip. Today we have a cool free chat tool with a very impressive feature set. There seems to be more catch... Monitor website visitors in real time Answer chats from your Mobile Device Proactively engage visitors with Triggers Customize your Visitor Widget to suit your site Localize greetings and messages in your Language Respond quickly with Predefined Shortcuts Integrate with Wordpress, Joomla, Magento, etc.. Check it out at www.tawk.to https://youtu.be/jrAfMaeSggQ

I hear about this plugin on my friend Daniel's show. He spoke about social warfare plugin for Wordpress. The Social Warfare plugin unique in a few ways. * It only focuses on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. (but really, do you use others?) * You can dictate what image is shared on FaceBook * You can completel control what is tweeted out including hastags, mentions, etc * The retweet button looks awesome (pull quote) * Customize the description and picture of Pinterest. The price is $24/yr for one website. I have not purchased this plugin yet, but probably will be in the future. Also, I recently moved Weekly Web Tools to BlueHost just to try them out. I'll keep you posted.

Monarch is a great tool for spreading your message on the Internet via social media. This is from the people at elegant themes. The more I look into the products of this company the more impressed I am with everything they create. You can choose everything about how the social buttons look, how they line up, what triggers them, it's got an amazing set of options that allow you to be super creative. It also (if you want) will display your followers and your likes, stats, etc. Behind in the dashboard you can go in and see all of your stats in one place. The best thing of all is its designed to be super responsive, and super fast. To purchase the plugin, it's $69 a year, and you get 80+ themes and plugins along with it. This is a great business plan and it working for Elegant Themes as the continue to peruse and create awesome plugins and themes as the business is paying for developers and support staff. Here is a video just showing one aspect of the Monarch plugin.   Check out more at Elegant Themes

Tweetjukebox is a free (currently) tool that allows you to create a list of tweets that just gets repeated over and over (or not) at a schedule that you pick. Here is a quick video https://youtu.be/Ow5qWJzD7JA

Today I'm sharing some insights about ThriveThemes.com as I explain updates about Elegant Themes (Wordpress Themes and Plugins), Digital Access Pass (Data Protection) and Gumroad (e-commerce) Digital Access Pass Updates Digital Access Pass (DAP) is one of my favorite membership site tools. I LOVE their dripping feature. In the past you could not only drip content, but you could drip email (auto respond). The somewhat bad news is when you send email with your shared hosting server it may be seen as spam. Recently Digital Access Pass now integrates with Aweber. This uses Awebers API and thus enables you to bypass the double opt in. You can pass the password to Aweber and Aweber can send it to the customer. DAP also now seamlessly integrates with Clickbank, JVZoo and WarriorPlus. Now when people purchase your product and get taken back to your site they will automatically be signed in. A rarely-mentioned feature of DAP, is that DAP lets you take advantage of all of these different Affiliate Networks and sell the EXACT… SAME.. PRODUCT… on all of these networks… ALL the at same time! Digital Access Pass is a membership script, affiliate script, shopping cart, all in one. Pricing starts at $167 (one time fee) or $40 a month. Value Add On Takes Stripe Usage Up a Few Notches I talked about Value Add On in the past. The problem I had with my membership site wasn't protecting it, but the layout. After beating my head against the wall with OptimizePress 2.0 I switched to ValueAdd on to make the layout of my membership site. New Feature: Paid Trials and Payment Plans Allowed Posted on June 25, 2015 in Updates If you’re using Stripe.com to process payments, watch this video above and learn how we’ve totally re-written our built-in shopping cart to give you even more options to accept payments from your membership subscribers and customers. We’re excited to announce that your ValueAddon membership site has been upgraded to accept even more payment options including Paid Trials, Recurring payments with an end period, and more flexible payment plan options. By using Stripe.com and ValueAddon.com, you can create: * Paid trials * Multi-pay options * Payment plans * Split pay * Paid trials to recurring * Paid trials to split pay * and much more… ThriveThemes Page Builder I was checking out Thrivethemes.com A friend of mine told me that these were cool and flexible themes. I watched a ton of videos and they seem to focus on flexibility and fast loading themes. They offer a monthly ($20) or yearly ($147). that is for sites you own. If you want to put these themes on a clients site it's more. Their content builder is impressive. It just seems like I'm back in the 80's and I can't tell the difference between Faster Pussycat, Poison, Cinderella, and LA Guns. Different names with the same results. Thrive has some cool integrations to optimize your images automatically which will speed up your website and save you bandwidth. If I had to pick a motto for them it is speed and flexibility. They have lots of documentation, and videos. I was surprised that in one video the person doing the demo couldn't get the color of the text to stay white. While I appreciate the honesty, I did scratch my head. Here is a video showing of their Content Builder Divi 2.4 Have the Kitchen Sink As a creative person, I love that someone can draw me a layout and I can probably reproduce it with

I have been using Harvest for tracking my time. Then in another Excel spreadsheet I track things like affiliate sales, books sales and other ventures that I have going on. I thought storing the Excel Spreadsheet on Microsoft One Drive would make it easier, and it did. But report meant pivot tables, and all sort of stuff. It wasn't hard, but I felt like I was painting with peanut butter. The price of Freshbooks if you want to have unlimited clients $29.  This is more than Harvest, but then again it does more than Harvest. I can track time with Freshbooks just like I did with Harvest. First Impressions It took next to no time to setup my company, my preferences, etc. It integrates with Paypal and Stripe (you can use them as a processor if you'd like 2.9% + .30). You can customize the colors, emails that are sent, set up taxes, and track all your expenses. There is also an app which makes it super cool. Harvest has an app, but for me I would get notified that an old domain renewed and I would have to login to onedrive, find my file, now I just open the app and add it. You can track pricing by the employee, by the job, by the skill. The best part if they have tons of little help bubbles to walk you through   Not As Pretty, But Not As Ugly Harvest invoices look better, but that doesn't mean Freshbooks Invoices are ugly. There are little things that I'm still searching for like how to adjust my signature in my emails. Support is Good I received an email from someone assigned to my account. I emailed her two days later and I thought it was cool that she was out of the office for a few days, and another employee jumped into make sure I got a speedy answer. My question was what about digital sales (I sell a spreadsheet for Companies looking to hold their own Biggest Loser contest). I have affiliate sales. These are already invoiced or don't need an invoice. Their support explained how I can set up a dummy customer for "Affiliate Sales" create an invoice, and save it as a draft and then mark it paid. This way I can track my income. Expenses Made Easy When I looked at their free app, I was super pleased by its simple design that's going to make tracking expenses a snap. I can also track time if I'm doing consulting on the road. Everything feeds back to the cloud so it stays accurate. Features I Won't Use But are Cool There is a ticket support system so if someone has a problem with their bill, they can open a ticket. I use Rhino Support for my ticketing system. You can use a document system, this would be like your own private Google Docs or OneDrive. You can have administrators and staff each with different rights to different areas. What's Missing? I think the software will work for me. They have videos to show you how to track time, and create invoices, but that's about it. Their help system seems extensive, but I guess I was looking for more videos. They do offer beginner level webinars at many different times to match your schedule. Here is a Freshboooks Video Overview To start your 30 day trial go to Freshbooks.com  

I'm not sure how I found out about Fresh Store Builder, but I'm glad I did. I used it to create Best Podcasting Gear, and it was super easy to setup and it's already converting and earning income. What Is it? It's a script (not WordPress - but more on that later), that makes it super easy to create an Amazon affiliate store. Top Features 90 Day cookie (instead of 24 hour) Great looking Site Super Easy to Add Products and Categories Completely Customization You can setup your store, but keep it offline (so when you flip the switch you don't blow your fist impression) Supports all Amazon websites USA, UK, Germany, France, Spain, Canada, Italy, India, China, Japan and more! Your products are automatically added (if desired) and updated for you. Your store will run itself Is it a WordPress Thing? If you purchase the Fresh Store Builder, you can purchase a Wordpress Plugin that allows you to run your store on Wordpress (this is great for those who want to have a blog in addition to their store).  They have demos of their sites on their website using their script and using Wordpress. I will probably be purchasing the WordPress plugin ($37) and moving the site to WordPress (I'm familiar with WordPress). Fresh Store Builder Overview If you're interested in it, check out Freshstorebuilder.com  

If you read any article about getting more traffic, they will say to include images in your posts. Today we have two tools that make great looking images and they cost next to nothing. Pablo By Buffer This is a great tool that allows you to create images with text, multi-line if needed, and you can add an icon. Their images are limited, but you can upload your own. It's free, and you can make a great looking image in next to no time. weeklywebtools.com/pablo Share As Image Share as image is more versatile, and it can be used without going to the Pablo site. You can use it on any browser (including IE). The cost is $12 unless you buy a year in advance. In that case it is only $8 a month. Here is a video For more information go to weeklywebtools.com/shareasimage Special Note: this podcast was recorded a while ago, but for whatever reason - it never go released.

We hear it over and over and Blog Post Titles, Podcast Titles are the headlines to your story. It's what gets your audience's attention. The problem is most of the time, its the thing we do last. We are tired, we just want to hit post, and we come up with something "that will do" and hit post. I just spent a few bucks to get a tool called Headlinr that installs in Google or Firefox and it gives you HUNDREDS of examples of headlines. It provides a swipe file of some of the most popular headlines. So when you're tired, maybe a little cranky, and creativity is at a low, this tool comes to the rescue. What's the catch? Well they are going to try to upsell you to another product called Winnr which is a split testing tool. So now you can make great headlines and then use winnr to test and see which one works best (or you can skip it and stick with just headlinr. This is a one time fee ((not monthly) and I'm glad I purchased it. Here is a video of me using for the first time. For more information go to headlinr.com (aff link)

I've spoken about Wistia in the past, and I love it. I use Lead Player on this page, but what if you want an alternative? (Lead Player is not available any more). Well I found one that has all the functionality of Wistia player without the monthly fees. It's call intelliplayer. Here is an overview video. The best part its (as of now) $59. for multiple sites. How is it so inexpensive? Because you will be greated with an upsale for more templates (so you can make your video in something that looks like an ipad, etc - some pretty cool stuff). You don't need to purchase the upsale. You get all the features without the upgrade. For more information go to Intelliplayer  

Today I found a cool chat system that can be used to do a chat for site visitors, or a chat for a group of people. It works on your phone as well and you can customize the whole system. Different pay scales provides more room for more users.

Piktochart.com is an interesting service that allows you to create an infographic. It is super easy, and when I played with it I would guess that it would take around an hour to crate your first infographic (the good news is the tool is versatile, but there is a learning curve). WP Scroll Depth is a free plugin that works with Google Analytics to help you see how far down your visitors are scrolling. You also have the option to track events of three different types: * Percentage: Percentage events are fired at the 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% scrolling points. There’s also a Baseline event which fires as soon as the page loads. * Pixel Depth: Pixel Depth events record the scroll distance in pixels, rounded down to the nearest 250px increment. While the percentage events provide a relative measure of scroll depth, pixel depth events provide an absolute measure. This can be useful for comparing across devices where the relative percentage heights vary greatly (e.g., desktop vs mobile). * Elements: You can also track when specific elements on the page are scrolled into view. On a blog, for example, you could send a Scroll Depth event whenever the user reaches the end of a post. https://youtu.be/SzI9RzvnwZA

Slack is an interesting tool for those people who work on teams. It enables you to have all of your communication in one place. All of your items in Google Docs, Dropbox, and many other tools can be organized and made searchable with Slack. You can make a team, and then have categories (public or private so if you have different levels for team members you can have a category just for management). It's easy to sign up. For me, its kind of hard to bring team members into the fold (I can make it recognize an domain, so here again it is made for businesses - not podcasters). I was bmmered there is no way (that I could see after using it for 10 minutes) to make a page where people could go in an request to join my team (there is a tool for that it's call facebook). It turns out that Slack is from one of the co-founders of Flickr. It has been growing quickly for just being around a little over a year. The more I play with it, the more I see its potential. I do with they had more of a "step by step" video If you're interested in playing with my Weekly Web Tools team, send an email to weeklywebtools@gmail.com and put the word SLACK in the subject. If you are looking to start your own Slack team go to weeklywebtools.com/slack https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6zVzWU95Sw&t=46  

Canva is a great tool for creating graphics online. They have an ipad app, and some great graphics. If you use one of the stock photos, the charge is $1. I recently made some artwork for a podcast that cost me $1. Now if I was a person that blogged frequently, tweeted frequently, and created youtube videos frequently, this could add up. YouZign is also an online tool for creating graphics. It is (currently) $47. It is a one time fee. When I tried it out, it is very flexible, and easy to use, but the graphics that they include are more clip are than photographs. If you're making flyers, and such for the Church cookie sale this might work, but not so much in online business. The cute little cartoons might work in video, but my jury is still out for using them in marketing materials. The way they keep the price low is they are building more templates and you can get $100 more for around $65. They do have a nice preview so you can see how the graphic would work (for example) on an  actual Facebook page. Conclusion: If you make LOTS of graphics, the price savings would make it a wise choice. In the video below I used it for about 5 minutes (so you may be seeing operator error). I wanted to show you the learning curve (if there is one). Here is the Sample Video Here is the video I created For more information go to weeklywebtools.com/youzign