Phrase

Over the last week I’ve been reading some fascinating books on persuasion and influence that were recommended to me by Jeffery Combs. They are by an author by the name of Robert B Cialdini in 2007 and 2008 respectively. He is a doctor of psychology and has a litany of credentials to match. He has written many books on the topic and is the most cited social psychologist in the world today on the subject.

There’s a lot to learn here. Much of his research has been clinical in nature but has revealed many innate and predictable patterns of behavior when it comes to marketing. Most bring you ‘ah-ha’ moments and cause you to ponder out ways to incorporate them into your marketing. These innate triggers in most cases, are not actually psychological in nature but instinctual. They are in your DNA.

So I’ll share one of his concepts here. One of his research experiments was to determine if a person were asked to inconvenience themselves by allowing someone to cut in line ahead of them how many would do so. The inconvenience of course was time. The experiment went this way. In a line at a library, there was a copy machine where they planted people to wait for it. Then when someone would need to use it, there was a line. Then while waiting, someone would come up to the machine and say, “I need to make some copies. I have 5 copies to make. I’m in a rush?” Surprisingly to me, almost 60% said, “OK”. I’m saying I was surprised because I thought it would be less. Now there is something that was changed that brought that percentage up to almost 93%. That was quite a jump. It was almost 50% jump. What was it that made that big a difference? What would you do when asking someone that people might seem inconvenient?

The only difference was that the second experiment had the person also say, “Because I have to make some copies”. So the extra phrase consisting of the word, “because” caused an increase. He later found that because “anything” also increased the percentage. Knowing this, anytime you have to make a request or ask somebody something, wouldn’t it be wise to use the word “because”?

I know you found this interesting so I”m asking you to reciprocate and either tweet, share, or comment. Because I know it’s something you want to do, you’ll do it.

I had promised that I was going to provide you with some WordPress plugins I use for page and site optimization. Instead of having a huge list I thought I’d give a few of the 6-7 plugins that I use for SEO purposes each of the next few days or so. While most of these are no-brainers and will never have to worry about again, some will have to work in conjunction with a few minutes of extra time per post. I will explain each in detail. These plugins are for on-page and on-site SEO Optimization. Because the nature of SEO is always evolving, the use of these plugins sometimes go obsolete because they get incorporated into other plugins and sometimes into the WordPress base product itself. So feast your eyes on these first two:

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer The ability to PING is what makes blog software highly favorable to static sites. So what is the definition of the word PING?

What WordPress does is it PINGS or notifys various web servers/sites that you have published a new blog post. These PING sites then do a variety of things. Some add your blog to their directory. Some notify the search engines to come and index your new content. Some add and update blog directories. Basically pinging notifies sites that there is new content. By default, WordPress give you ONE site that does the pinging. That is http://rpc.pingomatic.com . To be honest this site then notifies several other sites, but I prefer a more comprehensive list. I use 147! Here’s the list. (Do a right click Save As)

So if your like me, right after you figure you’ve got your post completed and hit the Publish button, you go to look at what it looks like. Firstly you should be using preview to see what it looks like, but I know we still forget something, discover a mis-spelling, want to add boldness to a phrase, create space between a paragraph, you name it. So when you hit publish, you are pinging to the list. Then when you bold some text and click update, you are pinging your list. When you add an image and updating you are pinging your list. In fact every time you publish or update you are pinging. This tends to create several pings within a very short time. What can end up happening is the ping sites can BAN you for excessive pinging. Not if you install MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer. With the plugin you can limit excessive pinging and control how many times you can ping in a given duration. I have mine set at 1 every 15 minutes is the maximum. You do have to register to get the plugin. You can find it here.

SEO Slugs
Wordpress has come a long way since it early versions with the use of permalinks and url structures. As great as using %postname% is, there is still something that you can do to even further optimize your urls. Enter SEO slugs. What does SEO slugs do? This plugin strips several of the common words like “what”, “you” or “can” out of your post slug to make it more search engine friendly. With SEO Slugs plugin activated, the slugs appear optimized for SEO. As an example, a post titled “What You Can Do Immediately For Higher Rankings” will become http://www.chriskilber.com/immediately-higher-rankings/. You still have the ability to override it by editing your url slug.

I’ll be back tomorrow with a few more.
Enjoy and have a remarkable day.