Some Of Our Favorite Wordpress Plugins - Interview With Joe Anderson

Learn What Plugins We Use To Power Our Websites With Joe Anderson From Metaphor Creations

This week Jesse interviews Joe Anderson from Metaphor Creations, talking about WordPress plugins and taking a peek at some of the powerful plugins we use at Intrycks to power our websites. These plugins help to create dynamic content on your website, keeping them fresh and engaging for your customers and prospects. Plus we unveil our newest collaboration, Agile Alerts, and announce the free Beta Registration on the show.

Don’t miss an episode – listen on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and more!

YOU’LL LEARN

Interview with Joe Anderson of Metaphor Creations
Intrycks collaborates with Metaphor Creations on a regular basis to provide websites and digital marketing services to customers
Our new collaboration www.agilealerts.com is now live and taking beta users
Joe has been a WordPress developer since 2011
It’s very important to create good and “sticky” content for your website, to keep users engaged
Use the Content Duplicator plugin to quickly create new page or post templates for your WordPress website
Always change the page title, URL, and content on a duplicated page so as to avoid actual duplicate content
Use the Alternate Timed Content plugin to schedule when you want content and widgets to show, or be hidden, on your website
You can use the Ditty News Ticker to dynamically display scrolling, rotating, or other text and news on your website
The Ditty Facebook Ticker allows you to pull in your recent Facebook posts into your website and display them anywhere in your website

Here is the transcription from Episode 39 Some Of Our Favorite WordPress Plugins – Interview With Joe Anderson;

Jesse: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Local SEO Tactics. Jesse Dolan here with Joe Anderson. Usually, Bob Brennan is here, but this week, we got a special episode. We’re interviewing Joe. Not many people out there know who Joe is within the Intrycks world. Joe is a huge part of what we do at Intrycks though. I think everybody knows obviously we have this podcast where we talk about local SEO tactics, but we also have an actual agency business doing web development, SEO work, and things like that for our customers, and Joe’s really the guy under the hood. I mean, all of our backend, the development, and Joe is the man for all that. So, we’re finally ready to bring Joe on here, talk about some things that get a little bit more technical but very useful for everybody out there. So, definitely take some notes or play this again back later and kind of regurgitate some of this. We’re going to drop some pretty cool info for you guys.

We’re talking today about content creation. A lot of this stuff we’re going to be talking about here are some different plugins or things Joe has come up with that we utilize every single day here at Intrycks. So, Joe helps us a lot on our projects. Separate companies. Joe’s with Metaphor Creations. You can find him at metaphorcreations.com, but we collaborate a lot. So, we brought Joe in today to talk about some of the things that we’ve developed, some of the things that Joe has that we use for content creation, and things that really help you guys out with your websites. Some of the stuff we’re going to be talking about here are free plugins that Joe offers. Some are paid, and we’re going to kind of … We’ll let you know on each of those back and forth. But again, for all of these, if it’s a paid product, Joe’s going to give us $5 off for all of our customers. Use the coupon code, Intrycks, for anything we’re talking about here, and he’s going to hook you up with a little discount there.

So, let’s just start off, Joe, real quick. How long have you been doing WordPress plugin development and things like this?

Joe: I’ve been doing WordPress probably for about seven years now. I’m really just kind of a self-taught programmer. I got into WordPress as certain web ideas were dying out like Flash is what I initially got into. That went away and got into HTML and different content management systems as more of the web world revolved around having a site with a dashboard where you can go online and add content easily. So, I tried a few things throughout the years but really settled on WordPress as kind of the product of choice just sheerly for the amount of use it has, the number of users it has. I mean there’s tons of support out there, tons of articles on Google. Being a self-taught programmer, Google is my best friend.

Jesse: Right. Absolutely.

Joe: With the other CMS systems, content just wasn’t as available to learn, so I gravitated towards WordPress, and WordPress has grown throughout the years and become a very stable content management system, so-

Jesse: Yeah. I remember when we first started working with you a number of years ago, WordPress was still almost like a blogging platform. It was just starting to be search-engine friendly and things like that, and, yeah. I mean, it’s like the main thing now. Anybody that comes to us talking about, “I want to convert my website or start a new one,” we just say, “Use WordPress.” The thing we always say to them is, “You can throw a rock down the road and probably hit somebody who knows something about WordPress.” You’re not going to be locked into some technical guru who’s going to hold you hostage or whatever just for the day-to-day updates so absolutely agree. WordPress is by far the platform you want to be on.

Joe: Yep.

Jesse: So, yeah. You are plugin developer extraordinaire, a backend man extraordinaire. Let’s talk about some of these things, again, for today’s episode about content creation. Right?

So, one of the big things we know for SEO is you have to put out content for your website. If you want to rank high and maintain your rankings in search engines, it’s not just enough to put up a snazzy website and set it and forget it. You got to be active. Google wants to see fresh content. They want to know that you’re active as a business and legitimate. So, if you’re getting compared against a competitor, all things being equal, the person who is producing more relevant content and unique content on a regular basis should rank higher than the other person.

So, we’re going to share some things with you here today that hopefully make that content creation easier, make your web pages stickier. So, when people do hit your website, they stay on there longer and which, obviously, helps your rankings for reporting back to Google for bounce rates and things like that, and just how to make yourself more efficient for sharing the content that you’re creating and getting the most use out of it.

First thing, and I’ll let you speak to this a little bit more in depth, is the Post Duplicator plugin that you developed.

Joe: Yeah. So, the Post Duplicator plugin is one that you can find on the WordPress repository, and initially, I created this plugin just for my own personal use. I do have some themes that I sell that initially when just populating content for these themes, you’re putting up demos. You need to show people a bunch of different pages. It’s pretty tedious going in and creating a new page, then add another new page, add in all the content. So, I came up with this Post Duplicator plugin just to easily duplicate existing content, and then go back into each page I’ve duplicated and just change up one or two little things, just to easily populate a site.

So, we’ve actually been using this a lot with Intrycks kind of converting it from my own personal use to building websites and help make that content out there to get your web rankings without having to come up with everything just from scratch. So, right now, Post Duplicator on the WordPress repository has over 100,000 active installations, which-

Jesse: Nice.

Joe: … is pretty cool. Kind of don’t look at that number very much, so it’s interesting to see how high it gets up there.
Jesse: And you charge how much for that?

Joe: That is free.

Jesse: That’s a free one.

Joe: Yes.

Jesse: Yep.

Joe: Yep. So, like I said, since I made it for me, it’s a very simple plugin as far as what it does. My initial concept was have no settings whatsoever. It’s just simply duplicate the content that’s there. Throughout the years, I’ve added a few minor tweaks to let people to customize how the duplicated content shows up, but it’s a pretty slim and trim little plugin.

Jesse: And to share with everybody how we use it for our customer websites is it’s like Joe has said. You can take any page or post, and there’s other things you can do, but just to make it really simple here. You have a page or a post on your website, and you don’t want to have duplicate content, like straight-up duplicate content on your website. That’s not going to rank in Google, and it’s actually a bad thing. But what this does is shortcuts the process of creating a new page, right?

So, like Joe’s saying, if you have a page that’s looking good, the certain format. You got your headline at the top, some paragraph of text, some bullet points, and it just looks good. You want the next page you’re going to create to look the same, like it’s part of the same website, then you just go, and you pull up that page that you’re going to use kind of as your template. It’s just one little link. You click the button that says, “Duplicate.” Takes about a second or two, and now, that page is cloned. It’ll rename the page with the-

Joe: A copy of it.

Jesse: Copy. Yeah. Postfix or whatever at the end, copy, and then you edit that page. Now, obviously, technically from an SEO standpoint, you’re going to want to change as much is on that page as you can, right? I’m not recommending people just duplicate a page and maybe change the title and boom. You’ve got a new landing page for Widget A and now Widget B duplicated. This is really to jumpstart the process like Joe was saying of creating a page that looks similar, looks like it belongs, and then you’re going to want to modify that content as much as possible to make it unique and different from the pages.
But I got to tell you, it saves us a ton of time internally here at Intrycks for creating these new pages. Part of the service we offer for customers is content creation, and instead of jumping back and forth like we used to saying, “Okay. So, I got a paragraph here, and then my bullet points, and then my image on the right-hand side,” and kind of making the layouts all look the same, you just copy the son of a gun. You edit it, and then you’re off to the races. It’s super slick.

Joe: And it’s free.

Jesse: And it’s free.

Joe: So, give it a try.

Jesse: Like, right. It’s-

Joe: If you don’t like it, just disable it.

Jesse: Just disable it. It’s going to save you some time. The price is great. I mean, we literally use this every day. Every day here, so check that out. You guys are going to like that. So, I said, “It’s just pages and posts.” Is there other types of content you want to talk about real quick that it does?

Joe: Well, with WordPress, you can have custom post types, depending on the theme. If you’re just an average user, it’ll depend on what theme you’re using will have custom post types for different things like events or products. So, you can any post per se, whether it’s a page. A page is actually a post, but it’s just the name of the post type is a page, so you’ve got pages, posts, and any custom post types you can duplicate. It’ll copy the content. It’ll copy all the custom meta that’s associated with that page.

Jesse: Yeah. Good point.

Joe: That’s one of the benefits is copying all that data in one little button push because there’s a lot of page … I’m going to try to get-

Jesse: The formatting in the-

Joe: I’m going blank right now, but like Visual Page Builders out there.

Jesse: Yeah, right.

Joe: There’s a lot of set up, and most of them have some sort of duplicate this template. But that’s a little part of the page, where sometimes you want to duplicate everything, like the whole page layout and all the-

Jesse: With the exact same structure.

Joe: … other custom content on there.

Jesse: Yep.

Joe: Yep.

Jesse: Yeah. I mean, shoot, even if it saves you three minutes or five minutes creating a new page, what the heck?

So, another really cool plugin that we utilize with Joe’s development through Metaphor is Alternate Timed Content and Alternate Timed Widgets. I’m going to have Joe talk a little bit about those, and what they are are two distinct products. These are paid products. Right, Joe?

Joe: Yes. They are.

Jesse: Okay. So, use the coupon code if you’re going to check these out, and we’re going to put links to all of these in the show notes. So, don’t worry about recording these URLs down or anything else here. We’ll mention them as we go. But check out the show notes page when you’re done with this, and you’re going to get links to all of these products. Use the coupon code, Intrycks, for all these, and you’re going to get 5 bucks off of these. So, yeah. Alternate Timed Content and Alternate Timed Widgets. If you want to dive into exactly what those do?

Joe: Sure. Yeah. So, they’re two separate plugins, and they pretty much do the same things that you want. One is meant for actual posts and the post’s content, and one is for your widgets within WordPress. Most of the time your widgets are on your sidebar, on your footer. So, what the Alternate Timed Content and Widgets does is it allows you to create different content and time it out for either specific days of the week, like say you’re a restaurant, and you have different menus.

Jesse: Oh, sure.

Joe: And you have different days of the week, you could set up a menu on a page and just automatically set it to say, “This is only showing up on Mondays.” Then, you create another alternate content for the same page for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, so there’s different content. And then, once you set it up once, it just automatically displays what you want as the week goes forward.

Jesse: So, it’s kind of like scheduling. Scheduling for content in a sense, too. Right?

Joe: Yeah. So, what I have is you have the ability to set say a date range. You could set a range from like July 1st to July 31st if you want to have content shown for a whole month and then switch it out with something else the next month. You can set it for specific days of the week. You could also set it to be to just run daily from like 8:00 a.m. to noon. So, going back to the restaurant idea, if you’d want to show your breakfast menu and have it automatically switch to lunch. Kind of like looking at a McDonald’s menu when you watch it. As soon as lunch time hits, it swaps over, and all the menu items switch. So, instead of having to manually go in and have somebody updating constantly, you just pre set it up.

Joe: … and want to have somebody updating constantly. You just pre-set it up to these times and dates and …
Jesse: Well, I think that’s super useful from the user standpoint too because if it’s breakfast time, and I’m checking out a restaurant’s menu in this example, I’m probably looking for breakfast. I’m not super interested in dinner, right?

Joe: Yeah.

Jesse: So it’s really cool from the restaurant manager owner standpoint because it’s easy to show the different content, but from a user standpoint, and again, being relevant and sticking on the page, I’m looking for breakfast, but when I’m on your site, I got breakfast now, right?

Or probably another example is I’m having a sale, like a fourth of July sale and it’s going for this certain week. And I only want that promo to show for that certain week, maybe, right? I can set it all up today and then a week from now, let’s say, that’s done. I don’t have to go in and take that thing down, right? It’s just automatically-

Joe: Yes.

Jesse: … gone? It’s slick.

Joe: Yep. And schedule it correctly so you don’t have to worry that you’re going to miss …

Jesse: Right.

Joe: … ending your sale in time.

Jesse: Right. So how far ahead can you … let’s say I sit down on January 1st. If I had a calendar of events and other things, can I pre-populate all this for the next year ahead of time and just back off and it’s through the year going to automatically add and take down this content I’ve created based on the schedule?

Joe: Yep. You can set up the whole thing.

Jesse: Nice. Any other … so you’ve got days of the week schedule in, time of the day schedule in, and any combination there within, right?

Joe: And you can combine all those. So you can say … you can set it up to only show Monday, Wednesday, Friday, on a repeat every single week but you can also set up to say it only shows from 8:00 am to 10:00 pm …

Jesse: Okay.

Joe: … Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

So you can combine dates, individual weeks of the day, and individual times each specific day.

Jesse: Pretty configurable then.

Joe: It’s pretty flexible that way.

Jesse: And then your alternate time widgets is pretty similar to that? Just for widgets, I’m assuming then?

Joe: Yes, it’s just for widgets. It’s very similar format as far as scheduling things. What it does allow, the widgets … it’s a little set up different on the back end so that each individual widget, if you’re familiar with adding widgets into WordPress, you can enable alternate time widgets and you set the dates, days, and daily times, whatever you want.

Jesse: Okay.

Joe: But you can also, with the widgets, you can set your option to either show the widget or hide the widget. Which is kind of nice because sometimes you just want it to show most of time.

Jesse: Sure.

Joe: Like one specific widget say … I don’t know … just one … oh man. I don’t have a good example right now of what it would be..

Jesse: So, let’s say I just had in my top right hand corner on my webpage. Like you said, widgets are in the sidebar, right?

Joe: Yep.

Jesse: So, off on the right side, towards the top, “We’re Open”, right? Or “We’re Closed”. If it’s after hours, something as simple as that.

Joe: Yeah.

Jesse: Is that a good example? Right?

Joe: Yep.

Jesse: And you can run with that however you can think about it but …

Joe: Yeah.

Jesse: … same concept there. Days of the week, times of the day, specific calendar dates in the future. You can again, sit down and schedule all that out.

Joe: Yeah. I guess what I was … the difference I was trying to get between alternating content and widgets is with the alternate time content for your posts when you’re setting up the options, it’s really to set it up for when the content displays.

Jesse: Okay.

Joe: For the widgets, you can set it up to your timing to either display the content only at that time or to hide that content only at that time.

Jesse: Oh, okay.

Joe: If that makes sense.

Jesse: Yeah.

Joe: Widgets themselves, you add them onto the sidebar and you have multiple widgets …

Jesse: Sure.

Joe: … all stacked up. Whereas with a post, you just really have one element, which is your post content that you’re switching out …

Jesse: Yeah.

Joe: … that displays on the page.

Jesse: That makes sense. So if you have a certain time in the day you don’t want this thing to show in your widget bar …

Joe: Yeah.

Jesse: … you’d say afternoon, don’t show this anymore.

Joe: Yeah.

Jesse: Next day rolls back around as showing it at 8:00 am again or whatever, so …

Joe: Yeah.

Jesse: Question for you, rolling back to the alternate timed content, like you said, this is for posts. Now if I’m not mistaken, and if I am mistaken we can cut this out. The beauty of doing it like this. A lot of sliders, right? Like on a homepage? Or can be posts technically, right? Not all of them but a lot of my views.

Joe: Yep.

Jesse: So again, we’re talking about … you can show or not show effectively a post. You could also use a slick for a banner as a slider or something within a page or can you combine alternate timed content with maybe some of your ticker stuff to show? Because you can show or not a post but if you had within your homepage, could you use it to embed a certain sale as banner or a slider? You know what I mean? And show it or not show it for sale dates?

Joe: Yes. There’s different ways you can go about this. So you could use the alternate time content. Most of the time if you have a banner or something, you’re using it as say a short code in your content-

Jesse: Okay.

Joe: … to display it. So you can enable the alternate time content to show different sliders …

Jesse: Okay.

Joe: … at different times of the day.

Jesse: Sure.

Joe: Which would be one way. So if my ditty news ticker plug … and I do have alternate time ticker extensions, which is very similar to the alternate timed content …

Jesse: Okay.

Joe: … and widgets. So with the news ticker you could create scrolling ticker across your site. And going back to the restaurant idea, you can individually set up timing on each of your …

Jesse: Okay.

Joe: … ticks say to show your breakfast menu items and then once noon hits-

Jesse: Okay.

Joe: … it only displays the lunch menu items.

Jesse: Or if every Thursday is ladies’ night, or whatever again like on Thursdays, that could be the thing that’s scrolling.

Joe: Or every night is ladies’ night.

Jesse: Every night is ladies’ night. Interesting. I think there’s a lot of really cool use examples there. You should say too, if anybody has a question about, “Hey Joe. Can I do this, do that?”. How do they reach out to you?

Joe: I do have contact forms on my sites.

Jesse: Okay.

Joe: So, metaphorcreations.com,so just send me a form and I’ll get back to you.

Jesse: And I can tell everybody too is that the cool part about working with Joe over the years is if it’s an idea that’s valid, and it’s not some crazy one off high end production for one person ever … If there’s some legs to it too, and it’s not something that currently does, he’s willing to explore modifying it or evolving it.

Joe: Yeah, I like hearing ideas that people have come to me because as a developer, I’m only one person.

Jesse: Right.

Joe: And I do custom sites and builds and …

Jesse: Sure.

Joe: … I’ve figured out some ways here and there and am like, “Oh that would be a nice addition”. But for the most part once you get a plug and out in the world that hundreds or thousands of people are using …

Jesse: Right.

Joe: … you start hearing the way they’re using it-

Jesse: For sure.

Joe: … and ideas and …

Jesse: You can never imagine it.

Joe: Yeah.

Jesse: A 100,000 people, they’re going to have some ideas you never thought of.

Joe: Yeah.

Jesse: So, I think those are super cool. If you guys out there start thinking about, on your website, if there’s information you could dynamically display, depending on the time of the day, the date, things like that. What stuff you’d want to scroll. How would that impact your business? How would that impact your customers and what you want to get out there? Some pretty powerful stuff. Some of it’s for free. Some of it’s paid. Give us … do you have price range you can maybe offer up for what this paid stuff would be, just to give people some context?

Joe: Yeah. I can definitely do that.

Jesse: We’re not talking a 1000 dollars or anything here.

Joe: No, the most expensive product I have on my site is the ditty post ticker, which buying a single license of it is $20. I do have yearly subscriptions on my products at a discounted rate just for being able to keep up with-

Jesse: Sure.

Joe: … as WordPress progresses, there’s updates to the platform. I need to keep up with the plugins to make sure they’re performing and running correctly.

Jesse: Right.

Joe: As well as just enhancements, you know?

Jesse: So for your alternate time content, what are those plugins run?

Joe: Alternate time content, let me see. So that is $15 for alternate timed content and alternate timed widgets is $10.

Jesse: And that’s for a year license?

Joe: That’s a year license. I do have license options for mutliple sites, where the price goes up a bit.

Jesse: Okay. You guys out there, this is a heck of a deal. I mean if you think about being able to dynamically display this kind of stuff and have this kind of control for 10 bucks a year or 15 bucks a year. Even if you stacked some of these together, you’re talking 50 bucks a year just for a bunch of these. Think about the amount of time you’d spend manually going in and publishing, unpublishing these pages and making these changes. It’s pretty ridiculous.

We’ll give you a link to actually check out all Joe’s stuff. Go to intrycks.com/metaphor. If you do go through that, we should say too, that’s an affiliate link. Joe makes money off these when he sells them. If you go to our link, it doesn’t cost you anymore but Joe’s going to give us a few bucks for the effort here too. Just full disclosure here for everybody.

So, if you like what you’re hearing about what Joe has to offer and if you like this show, hey we can actually make a few bucks off this here, ourselves as a show if people go through that link.

So check it out: intrycks.com/metaphor and you’ll explore everything Joe has which we’re going to talk about it some more. But here we’re going to talk about some more in future episodes. But again the value on these plugins is just crazy for what you get.

Joe: And I’ll just also say, if you do end up getting one of these plugins, please contact me and let me know how you’re using it. Give me your thoughts and opinions on it both the alternate time content and alternate time widgets, which I think are very useful plugins.

Jesse: Yeah.

Joe: Whether it’s lack of marketing on my part but they’re not the greatest sellers out there.

Jesse: Sure.

Joe: It kind of surprised me because I feel that they’re very useful. So if you do purchase them and use them, please give me feedback. Let me know how you’re using them. Let me know ideas that you’d have to make them better.

Jesse: Yeah.

Joe: And make them more useful for everybody out there.

Jesse: I think they’re super cool. Again, for that kind of money to be able to just have a set it and forget it for what it’s going to display when. Maybe the hard part is that people just don’t understand how they can use it-

Joe: Yeah.

Jesse: … and what it is. But man. It’s crazy powerful. Glad we got to talk about that.

So, we’ll probably round it out with one of the other products you have. Your ditty tickers, which I know is something you’ve had for a while. Man, really robust. I don’t know if you’re going to get into all the niches that those are because I know you have variations of it.

Joe: Yep.

Jesse: But this is pretty, crazy, powerful, too.

Joe: Yeah. When it comes down to it, my ditty news ticker plugins … initially when I came up with it was ditty news ticker, which you can get for free on the WordPress repository. I would suggest anybody, who even before purchasing one of my plugins, go get the free news ticker.

Jesse: Yeah.

Joe: Put it on your site. Mess around with the settings. See how it works, see how it runs, see what you’re thoughts are. That basic functionality, you get with the free plugin is really how the rest of my extensions work.

Jesse: Okay.

Joe: What my extensions allow you to do is populate the content that is displayed.

Jesse: Right.

Joe: So with the free news ticker, you’re manually entering in, say a sentence to scroll across your page. Or multiple sentences to create a full news ticker. And you can display it in a news ticker feed going across your site. You can create a rotator out of there to rotate through the ticks. You can also just create a straight list-

Jesse: Sure.

Joe: … of items. So what my extensions allow you to do is automatically populate that content instead of having to manually-

Jesse: Right.

Joe: … enter everything. And I have some different categories of these items. I have some social extensions like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.

Jesse: Sure.

Joe: Where you can display your Facebook feed on your site. You’ve just got to login, set it up, allow Facebook or Twitter to …

Jesse: Connect your Facebook account.

Joe: … optimize your account, and then …

Jesse: Connect your Facebook account?

Joe: Authorize your account. And then a little bit of set up on the back end with your ticker, which you can choose different options on how you display your content. There’s no one set structure for displaying your content. If you only want to display a post title or just your content …

Jesse: So you say little bit of set up, put that into context for anybody out there, if they throw it out there and install it, activate it, what you do … three minutes? Five minutes? Twenty minutes?

Joe: Probably like five minutes, it’s pretty easy. But like I said, I would suggest going … get the free plug in first, get familiar just with the general set up, because once you then add in one of the extensions, you already know the basics of the different ticker modes of scrolling, rotating …

Jesse: Now do they have to … if somebody’s interest … they’re like “I like this Facebook thing”, which I want to come into in a little bit more for some use cases ’cause it’s pretty cool. Do you have to have the free one installed first anyways?

Joe: Yes.

Jesse: Yeah, so if you’re interested in any of this, get the first one first.

Joe: Yeah. Yeah. So most of the front end is functionality, to create the scroller across the screen, to create the rotator. That’s all included in the free ticker. So the extension just pulls in the data to display on the front end.

Jesse: So let’s dive into Facebook for a second, and then I’d love you to rattle off too all the different extensions for the different apps that you have out there. But diving into Facebook again, we’re talking about content creation here. I really like this one because we were talking about SEO. Facebook is awesome, I mean it’s crazy popular, huge, everybody’s got it. But, it’s not your website, right.

For SEO, one of the things again is bounce rate, or how sticky your site is, how many … average time on page, things like that, is pretty relevant. And the thing I like about the Ditty Facebook Ticker is you can pull your Facebook content into your website, let’s say maybe you or someone on your staff is active on Facebook every day, posting stuff for your company, which is important, you gotta do that. But now you can display that same Facebook content on your website. Not just as a link or ‘like us on Facebook’ or like a lot of people might see as a little things down on the corner. But legitimate taking your Facebook content, embedding it on the pages on your website, whether that’s your homepage or if you set up a new page or Facebook feed or whatever. However you want to get creative and use it, you can repurpose and take all your Facebook content, put onto your website, and now people don’t even have to leave your website to maybe engage and read some of that. And again they hang around your site longer, it’s a little stickier, and it also kind of shows your social activity on Facebook and enhances your brand and lets people know what you’re doing.

So that’s personally for me I think a very, very powerful and a great use-case on how to converge social media with your website. And again, our goal here, for this show, for what we’re talking about is we want to maximize our website. Maybe it’s somebody that’s more deep into Facebook and building a Facebook community doesn’t like to hear this because they want to push people straight over to Facebook, but quite frankly to get found in search engines for your local businesses you want to get people to your website, you want them to engage, and you want them to stay on your website, you don’t want to push them over to Facebook, and this Ditty Facebook Ticker is a great way to kinda merge those two worlds.

Joe: Yeah and one thing that Ditty also allows you to do is be more flexible with where you’re showing the content. I mean there are quite a few plug-ins out there to connect your Facebook feed and stuff, and you can throw your Ditty News Ticker within widget, put it in your sidebar, but it also gives you the flexibility of adding it anywhere in your content.

Jesse: Right. Which is not very common compared to the other ones, like you said you can have a little list on the side of recent posts and things like that. This is … it’s got a lot more horsepower to it.

What is the extension for the Facebook cost? Just to give everybody a reference point.

Joe: Let’s see here.

Alright the single license cost for the new Facebook ticker is $15.

Jesse: Again, that’s yearly right?

Joe: Yes.

Jesse: I mean for 15 bucks a year, 5 bucks off is you use the promocode Intrycks at checkout, and that’s super cheap to integrate that. So if you’re doing stuff on Facebook, you want to get that somehow in and embedded in your website to get everybody to see that, and check that out.

That’s Facebook right, so maybe if you can rattle off the other ones, and really for everybody else out there, we’re not gonna dive into each use-case here, but correct me if I’m wrong Joe, same concept for all these ones you’re gonna mention for abilities and stuff, right? So what other extensions do you have?

Joe: Yeah, so for social sites I have Twitter, so we got a Ditty Twitter Ticker extension. I have Ditty Instagram extension. I do have a Ditty Flicker Ticker, which …

Jesse: That sounds really cool.

Joe: Yeah. I’m not sure anybody’s using Flicker anymore, but if you are, it’s the plug-in to get.

Jesse: Right.

Joe: So that’s mainly it for social sites, currently. Again, this is … I’m continually adding in, not a new plug-in every month or anything, but I’m continually trying to figure out new plug-ins to add into this whole package of Ditty Tickers. But in addition to social sites, we also have a Ditty RSS Ticker, so if you eve RSS feeds you want to display you can use that. And you can also combine RSS feeds similar to Twitter and Facebook, you can combine multiple feeds into one. So it’s kind of an aggregator as well, which is nice.

What else do we got?

And we got Ditty Post Ticker, which is my favorite out of the bunch. If you’re a big WordPress user, it allows you to display your WordPress content in ways that you normally otherwise wouldn’t be able to.

Jesse: Saying Ditty Post Ticker, does that work for pages too? Or just posts?

Joe: Pages, and custom post types and everything, yup.

Jesse: And for anybody out there using WordPress, the two main types of pages … I don’t know how else to explain it, but a post and a page can both be essentially a webpage you’re visiting, right?

Joe: Yes.

Jesse: So just want to make that distinction because we keep saying Ditty Post Ticker, and things like that, but you can also use this for pages that you’re creating even if they’re not a post.

Joe: Yup in developer terminology for WordPress, a post is really any page that’s visible on your site. Whether it’s a page, a page is actually a post. A post is a name of a post type.

Jesse: Can you start all that over?

Joe: Yeah.

Jesse: That’s developer talk Joe. He’s said it on the beginning!

No, but for the most part any content that you produce on your website, for the most part, you’re with text and things like that.

Joe: Yeah, if you have an URL, it renders a page. If you’re just a user, you’re going to a page on a site, but that’s a type of post type. You’re not exactly sure what type it is when you’re a user going to the page. But so posts, pages, custom post types, whether it’s an event, a product …

Jesse: So this one of all your extensions, this has the most horsepower, bar none for what you want to do.

Joe: Yeah I think so. And I’ve gone through different iterations of how to make it more useful and user friendly because the whole core behind displaying posts on a WordPress site is using the WordPress’s WP query function where there’s lots of variables to target the post that you want to actually display. And trying to build that into a plug-in where anybody can go on and manually set up … I want to display a custom post type with this category and this tag, based on user comment counts, it can get pretty complex. I think …

Jesse: Which is good. Again we talked, circles back to creating content. You want to create content that’s as relevant and specific to the user that you’re trying to get on that page as possible, right. So the more you can tailor these things to kind of bring in this dynamic content, if you think about the intent of … again the content we’re creating needs to be found in search engines. So if you think about the intent of the person searching, for the type of page that they’re landing on, and then what kind of things you want to dynamically bring in here. To put more content on this page, that’s really what we’re talking about here at the end of the day. You got your base page, but you can use these plug-ins … this is not just here to be a commercial for Metaphor, right. We’re talking about the tools we use, the things we use, how to make more pages, how to make better pages, how to be efficient and cheaper, and doing this whole process. ‘Cause again, we’re all business owners, we’re all marketers, we don’t have a ton of time to sit here and write amazing pages. We’re looking for hacks, we’re looking for cheats, we’re looking to try and make this as efficient as possible.

Some of your stuff’s free, some of it’s paid. But we’re really trying to turn this inside out, what do we do at Intrycks, how do we develop pages, how do we rank in search engines. Again, Joe is a big part of that. His plug-ins in development are a big part of that. So we kind of wanted to share and put a little spotlight on it, share with you guys what it is that we’re using and you can enter all these right into your own website too.

Joe: And one of the benefits of the extensions I have for Ditty News Tickers, that it does dynamically update. Whether it’s a post ticker, Twitter, or Facebook, or RSS. As new content is available, whether it’s a WordPress pages that you’re trying to show, or new Facebook posts, your site will continually display the latest items, if that’s how you have it set up. You can choose to set it up differently as well. But it’s a good way to keep content current on your site without really having to do anything.

Jesse: Right, I think it’s super useful. Again, I guess we’d say if this is confusing to some of you out there, if it’s just a little bit too much, read the show notes page. We’re gonna break all this down, we’re kind have kind of some bullet points, some links to Joe’s products, obviously the transcript of this entire episode is on there to kind of read it back or highlight certain things to come back to.

And then if you want to reach out to us, Intrycks.com/show. If you got questions, you want to talk about this a little bit deeper, a lot of you out there have already contacted us directly. Many of you listen and I’ve had conversations with you, you know that. So we’re here, Joe’s the same way. He’s part of this team, we all kind of think the same way. We’re up here in Minnesota, we’re Minnesota-nice. So we’re gonna give you the time if you’re legit interested in what we have to offer and if we can help, and hopefully we can help you. You can reach out to Joe at MetaphorCreations.com or again, if you want to find him through us, we’re more than happy to connect you guys too, so don’t be bashful.

Anything else you want to drop?

Joe: No, I think that’s good for now.

Jesse: So hopefully that helps you guys all out. Some great stuff, thanks for sharing all that Joe. You guys are gonna hopefully hear Joe in some future episodes. We’ve been doing this now, we’re 30+ episodes into it. We’ve been doing it for I don’t know, seven or eight months, and we’re gonna be bringing Joe in more often to talk a little bit more on the development side. We’ve gotten some feedback on people out there that like us to dive deep into some topics, or get into more tools or things like that. This is where Joe comes in, so get used to his name, you’re gonna hear about him more. And also if you’re watching the video, he’s got some pretty sweet tattoos here you’re gonna want to check out. I have none so I’m very pale in comparison here, but we’ll probably see him evolve over the years here too. They’re not stopping it doesn’t look like.

Alright so, check it out, Intrycks.com/show drop us some comments. You can see all the episodes including this one. We’re gonna have links to all the different extensions and plug-ins that we’re talking about here with Joe. Again, use the keyword, I should say use the coupon code Intrycks at checkout, you’re gonna save some cash there too, and hopefully helps you guys out.

Check out the show notes below for resource links, guides, and a link to watch the episode in video format!

To share your thoughts:

Send us a comment or question in the section below.
Share this show on Facebook.

To help out the show:

Leave an honest review on iTunes. Your ratings and reviews really help and we read each one.
Subscribe on iTunes.
Subscribe on Google Play.
Subscribe on Stitcher.