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Today, March 1st, was designated WordPress Plugin Donation Day.

WordPress is the best blogging platform available, and one of the things that makes it so awesome as a tool for developing rich web sites are the plugins. If there’s anything you need you blog site to do and it’s not available in the base WordPress system, there’s a good chance that there’s a plugin available to extend the usability of WP for you.

Best of all, both WordPress itself and most of the plugins are FREE. Thousands of developers donate their time for fame and glory developing these little — and not so little — chunks of code to make our lives easier, so today is the day to give some love back.

I just donated to:

• Jodi Diehl for her WP-Testimonials plugin which helps me manage a few dozen testimonials I received from clients. Thanks Jodi!
• Arne Brachhold for Google XML Sitemaps plugin which, for example, alerts Google and other search engines as soon as I publish a new blog post.
• Michael Torbert for his WP Security Admin Tools and All in One SEO Pack plugins. The SEO plugin lets me control one of the most important aspects of creating a web page.

If you donate to your favourite plugin developer, please tweet about it using the #wppdd hash tag, and/or comment on this blog post.

I must admit I was a reluctant blogger. I knew if I started a blog I would have to publish on it regularly, and being already busy with publishing my award-winning ezine and working with clients, I thought I’d never be able to keep up.

Good thing I found the time!

Now I not only love it, but I recommend it to all my business contacts and especially my clients. As an Email Marketing Coach I love email marketing, which still delivers a great rate of return on investment, but I’m the first to say: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket! If you’re a solo professional, or small business owner, you must publish an email newsletter, have an auto-responder, write on your blog, have a Facebook profile, do live business networking, etc.

Here are just three reasons why I love blogging:

1. It allows me to reach a much wider audience than by just publishing an email newsletter. Blogs have built-in features that basically “push” my content to search engines and blog directories. This would be hard, if not impossible, to accomplish by a “web 1.0″ web site. My blog site now allows me to reach out to my audience in 3 different ways: using RSS, RSS feed delivered by email, and via ezine subscription. This enables my audience to get my articles the way they prefer.

2. Deciding to build my new web site using WordPress, enabled me to create what I call a blog site: a combination of a static, web 1.0 web site, with the power and versatility of the Web 2.0 blog. My blog site is now search engine optimized, and every time I hit “Publish”, soon after, Google, Yahoo! and dozens of other services get “pinged” and my content gets indexed immediately.

3. Having a blog has also enabled me to attract the right type of prospects. Before starting a blog, my whole web presence was a 1-page “squeeze page.” It served its purpose well — it created a lot of subscribers to my e-newsletter — but after a while I realized that I wanted to attract a different type of prospect, one who’d like to get to know me a little bit before considering hiring me. A visitor to my blog site can now read my articles which build my credibility, so I don’t have to “sell” my self, my content does it for me.

Finally, blogging makes it really easy and fun to connect with other great professionals in the wider blogosphere.

Here are five people I’d like to see write a quick blog post on this topic:

Charmaine Idzerda
Sandy McMullen
Dr. Kiya L. Immergluck
Grace Yvonne Attard
Cheryl Scoffield

I invite YOU, the reader, too, to share here by commenting or on your own blog! Please send me the link if you post on your own blog. BTW, this whole thing started on TypePad.com – get the “official” guidelines.

Thank you Patsi Krakoff, for inspiring me to write this entry.

This last Monday, I was having a coffee at the Williams Coffee Bar on Trafalgar and Dundas, in Oakville, writing an article for this week’s ezine, when an email came in from “Writing That Works” announcing the APEX 2008 Awards.

I eagerly opened it, because this year I entered my biweekly ezine, Contacts2Clients, in the competition.

As I was reading through the list of winners I felt like I was 18 again. I remember, a long time ago when I was going through the list of students who made it through the entrance exams to university – going one line at a time, hoping to find my name on the list.

Unlike the university list, the APEX awards list was much shorter, however my name was last, because they sorted it by business name, and Your Ezine Coach, as you can imagine, comes pretty close to the end of the list.

Anyway, what I wanted to say is that I’m now an award-winning e-newsletter publisher!

If you’re publishing an e-newsletter, I’d highly recommend you enter the competition for 2009.

To celebrate this honour, I am giving away five (5) free Email Service Account set up, worth $199 each to 5 people who sign up for any monthly email production package or coaching.

You’ll have to call me or email me to set it up. You will also receive this added bonus – free Massive List Building Platinum Package - a value of $37.

Call me at 1-905-844-4247 (Mon-Fri 10am-4pm EST) to get your spot.

Things have been a bit crazy here at YourEzineCoach.com since my wife reluctantly decided to try on the entrepreneurial hat for size. We now share “my” office and I can tell you, it’s working out quite nicely – better than I expected, to be frank :-)

After less than 3 months since the decision was made to start up her own business, work is now coming in regularly. I might even say she’s my lates success story! That’s because we used email marketing to get her business off the ground.

I have to say that my wife turned out the be one of my toughest clients. Not in the sense that she was difficult, but because she a reluctant entrepreneur. Although I keep telling her it sure beats working, it’s hard to let go of the perceived job security that 20+ years of corporate career brings.

In case you’re interested in professional digital photo retouching, or know of a professional photographer who might be looking for a virtual digital assistant take a look at her site PhotoRetouchingPro.com

Last Saturday my wife and I took the kids to Ontario Place, Toronto. It was a rainy day, but that didn’t stop us from having some fun.

Too bad it didn’t rain in Greece, where lives are being lost to wild fires. Please consider contacting your local Red Cross or similar organization to help with relief.

Just returned from a week-long vacation! At least once a year we visit Ted and Irene’s Birch View B&B, near Lion’s Head, smack in the middle of Bruce Peninsula (Ontario). This elderly couple make us feel like family.

The kids and our dog had a blast on the sandy beaches of Lake Huron. In a couple of years we’ll be able to venture to the other side of the peninsula, where the colder, deeper waters of Georgian Bay beckon with their majestic beauty. OK, I got carried away a bit here, but it’s a really gorgeous place :-)

Back in April, just after Earth Day, I wrote about switching my house (and my biz) to Bullfrog Power, a green energy retailer. Now that the summer is finally delivering higher temperatures I feel much better turning on the A/C knowing that the electricity it uses comes from 100% renewable sources.

Recently, to reduce my family’s carbon footprint even further, I purchased offsets for our vehicle emissions, through the Cool Drive Pass program. We’re now almost carbon neutral – how about you?

Not all of our efforts should go towards reduction, though: As ezine publishers and email marketers, we want to grow our list of subscribers, not reduce it. Today’s article should provide some effective means of achieving your list-building goals.

July 1st is Canada Day, a public holiday in this country. My family celebrated it by going strawberry picking and making home-made jam on Saturday, then on Sunday we spent the day doing fun things with the kids around town.

Monday we took the kids to African Lion Safari, a special kind of zoo where you can actually drive your car among the wild animals. Since baboons have no fear, they climb up on passing vehicles and sometimes take souvenirs with them, like wipers. Worst yet, they sometimes leave their own souvenirs on the cars! That’s why we opted for the bus tour :-)

It took us almost half an hour to even get in the park, and that with five lanes coming in! Same thing with every tour – throngs of people = long waits. That’s what gave me the inspiration to this issue’s main article: driving traffic to your web site.

If generating traffic to your site feels like a hard nut to crack, implementing some or all of the ideas presented here will surely create a steady stream of people lining up to see you site.

It’s been very strange two weeks since the last issue of my ezine. My wife took our kids overseas to meet their grandparents, so I’ve been a bachelor of sorts for a while.

Only a few days after my family returns, I’ll be flying to Irvine, California, for Adam Urbanski’s Attract Clients Like Crazy Boot Camp (that’s Adam and me in the photo). Then, in early June, it’s Montreal, for a one day Small Business Big Thinking conference, hosted by Visa Canada.

Attending live events and training seminars is not only a great way to learn, it’s also fabulous for business and personal development, business networking and meeting new people, who may become your joint venture partners, or clients.

If you’re planning to offer live seminars or retreats to your own clients, attend a few similar events yourself to see how it’s done. Why re-invent the wheel, right

So, what have you done for the good old Earth, lately? I am referring to Earth Day, April 22, of course.

I’ve been an environmentally conscious earthling for years. My wife even calls me “David Suzuki” (in reference to the famous Canadian environmentalist). I recycle religiously, turn off my car’s engine every chance I get, use compact fluorescent light-bulbs (CFLs), etc. Even so, I must admit I was falling behind on my eco-education, being busy running a business and a household with my wife, two kids, plus a dog and a cat.

Recently, after months of waiting for Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” DVD from the local library, I was really shocked by what I learned watching it. If you haven’t seen this documentary yet, please borrow it today (notice I didn’t say buy it). Then do something about global warming, now.

Last Sunday I learned about BullfrogPower, a green electricity retailer operating in Ontario. They now supply my home with power that comes 100% from renewable sources, such as wind and hydro.

What has this got to do with ezine publishing, you may ask? Well, nothing and everything. If we don’t fix our polluting ways – quickly – weather we publish an ezine or not will be irrelevant, because there will be no economy. Perhaps not in my lifetime, but in my kids’ lifetime for sure.

Also, you can always reduce, repurpose and recycle in your newsletter as well: reduce the amount of hype; repurpose articles you wrote, by publishing them together in an e-book; recycle an article you wrote two years ago in your next issue, if it still reads fresh and appropriate.