It’s for the Vocalyze plugin. Vocalyze creates a widget for your blog which you can place in your sidebar that when clicked will read out your blog posts to visitors.

It’s as simple as that.

The reading is not perfect. It pronounces “plugin” a bit funny, for example. But it seems to be right 90% of the time.

And that’s it really, No complex install. No fiddling about. It just works.

You can see the plugin in action on this site – scroll to the bottom of the sidebar and click on the Vocalyze link. It’ll then let you choose a bog post to read out.

If you set up a Vocalyze account, you can also choose your favourite blogs and get them read out too – regardless of whether they’re running Vocalyze.

Why would you want blog posts read out?

Well I’ve found it works quite well to allow me to do other stuff on my computer (admin work, searching, etc.) while Vocalyze is reading me a blog post. Saves me a good bit of time.

It’s so easy to do, I can’t see a downside to it.

The makers of the plugins claim that you get higher optins (as Facebook is “trusted”) and that the emails you get are higher quality (as they’re the emails they use for Facebook rather than throwaway ones).

But does it work? Do you really get higher optins? Is there a risk an extra button or the mention of Facebook could actually confuse or scare off potential subscribers?

Optin App is on of the more recent releases. it has the advantage of being able to create squeeze pages and optin boxes with both a Facebook button and an email capture form. That’s certainly necessary for my primary niche as many of my prospects don’t have Facebook accounts, preferring Linkedin instead.

I put Optin App to a thorough test using Google Website Optimizer to test it vs my old optin form. Here are the results:

Your results, may of course be different: your website visitors are different to mine, they may have different attitudes to Facebook.

With something as important as your optin form I definitely recommend using Google Website Optimizer or Visual Website Optimizer to test alternatives if you’re considering some new type of optin.

Not to mention the value of getting Google “+1″s for your search engine rankings.

The trouble is, it’s takes time and effort to install all the button code on your sites. And when they change the code you have to do it all over again.

There are many social sharing plugins from the venerable “Share This” to the more modern (but memory hungry) “Sexy Bookmarks”.

However, the one I like best of all is the Digg Digg plugin.

Digg Digg has 21 social sharing/like buttons installed, including all the biggies – Google +1, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, etc. It also integrates with other services like Topsy, Tweetmeme and URL shorteners like bit.ly.

When the new Google +1 button came out, there was a Digg Digg verion available in a couple of days.

You have three options for display. Normal display (with the buttons inside the post), floating display (where they float to the left or right of the post, a technique pioneered by the Mashable blog), or you can manually insert them wherever you want in your theme.

Within these options you can have big or small icons, have them right aligned or left aligned, and stack them horizontally or vetically. And, of course, you can change the order of the icons.

The top picture on this post shows a manual placement I use on my main site to show the icons on every post on my home page.

This second picture shows the per post placement where I have them float to the left. You can see this in action on this site too. If you scroll down, the icons follow you. Meaning that if you finish reading an article and are thinking about maybe sharing it, you don’t have to scroll all the way back up to the top again to do so.

Digg Digg is easy to use, and can certainly help your posts get more traffic. I have it running on all my main blogs.

You can grab it here:

Digg Digg Plugin

or by Clicking on Add New in the Plugins section of your WordPress dashboard and searching for Digg Digg.

One such case is where someone leaves a comment on your blog.

A simple way to get more optins is after they’ve left the comment, to send them to a page that thanks them for the comment, then suggests they opt in to your list and shows them an optin box.

Simple stuff – but it can provide a nice boost.

There are two plugins that do this.

The original is Joost de Valk’s Comment Redirect, available here:

Comment Redirect Plugin

Or by choosing “Add New” from the Plugins section on your WordPress dashboard and searching for “Comment Redirect”

Comment Redirect sends commenters to your optin page the very first time they leave a comment.

The other option is MSMC – Redirect After Comment, available here:

MSMC – Redirect After Comment Plugin

The only difference with this plugin is that it sends the commenter to your optin page every time they leave a comment. I use this one.

I recommend you install one of these plugins. It’s 5 minutes work to install and create a comments thank you page with an optin box.

Two of my friends have had their wordpress sites hacked in the last few months. One had to hire someone to fix it and recover her site. The other had his site repeatedly hacked and has spent literally days of time undoign the hacks and eventually moving hosting.

Think of the damage to your reputation and revenues if instead of your site, visitors ended up on a page redirecting to spam sites or worse.

There are a number of things you can do to improve the security of your site. Many of them are technically complex and involve manipulating your wordpress database.

But one simple thing you can do is install the Login Lockdown plugin.

It implements the “n attempts to get your password right or you’re locked out” type of security that many sites use. You can configure the number of attempts, the length of time they’re locked out for etc.

The goal is to stop “brute force” hacks of your site by individuals or bots just tyring out random or guessed passwords. This makes it too painful to try, so they move on.

You can grab it from the wordpress plugin directory by Clicking Add New from the Plugins section of your dashboard, and searching for “login lockdown”.

Quick and easy. It’s a no-brainer. Just get it and install it.

If you’ve been in Internet Marketing for a while you’ll know just how difficult and costly it can be to get a big increase in traffic to your site. So something which promises to get you the same results (more sign-ups) as a big bump in traffic – but for a lot less pain – is incredibly valuable.

The trouble is, I’ve tested multiple popups over the years and I’ve never seen any improvement in optin rates. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Aweber’s free Lightbox or the latest and greatest plugin for wordpress. I’ve never seen any improvements.

You see, my niche is very conservative. In my main business I sell to lawyers, accountants, consultants and the like. They get one glimpse of a popup and they immediately think “scam”" and click away.

Normally I use a slide-up for opt-ins. It’s more discrete, and doesn’t produce the same “eeugh” effect as being presented with a popup normally does.

But I do know that others have seen good results from popups in their niches – so I test whatever new popup comes out.

The latest popup to be released is Popup Domination. It’s different for two reasons:

Firstly, most normal popups require you to create your the “page” that is popped up yourself and to paste the html or a link to the page into the popup. This is where the problems start. Firstly it takes ages to design a decent looking optin box. Secondly, most of us doen’t have the design talent to do it – so we end up with an ugly looking popup that raises all sorts of “scam” concerns with visitors.

Popup Domination is different. Like many tools, it says you can be up and running in 2 minutes. But in this case it’s actually true. You just type in the header text and the bullets you want. Select your color scheme, upload a picture of your giveaway (if you have one) and you’re done.

Secondly, because Popup Domination popups look, well, so damn pretty, they don’t raise all the “scam” concerns that normal popups do. The popup makes your site look more professional, not less. So as a result, you don’t scare off potential sign-ups.

Here’s an example of what the popup box looks like: pretty neat, huh?
But the million dollar question is: does it work?

Well, the sales page for the product says that blogger Michael Dunlop got an increase in optin rates of 429%.

What did I get?

Well, not quite the same. I’ve been running the popup for the last 2 weeks on my main site and my optin rate has gone up by a massive 130%. And I was already using a slideup rather than nothing at all.

So all-in-all, pretty damn good. In fact, I’m over the moon with it. What it means is that with no extra traffic I can get over twice as many subscribers than I used to. And in the long run twice as many subscribers means twice as many clients.

As well as being easy to use, it’s easy to install. There’s a wordpress plugin you just upload – or there’s now a manual version you can use if you’re not running wordpress.

There are 7 different optin templates you can choose from, with 15 colour options. It works “cut and paste” with all the major autoresponders (aweber, mailchimp, icontact, constant contact, get response and campaign monitor).

You can also select which pages it appears on and when it appears. And it can be used an an exit popup. It’s got a 60 day no quibble guarantee too.

If you buy right now, you get a free video optin box popup theme too.

The only downside at the moment is that it doesn’t have the option to recognise when a visitor has already subscribed and not show them the popup. This might get annoying for regular subscribers over time if they keep coming back to the pages or blog posts with the popup on.

But overall that’s a minor gripe compared to just how easily and how well this thing works.

Popup Domination gets my highest recommendation: go get it now at Popup Domination.