Modern blogs have to perform a lot of different functions that are not native to WordPress.  Over the years, I have tried literally hundreds of different plugins in order to extend the functionality of my own blog, promote better search engine optimization, and to extend value to my visitors.  Since WordPress’s inception, there have literally been thousands of “top free WordPress plugin” post published in the blogosphere.  So today, in that tradition, I’m going to tell you about the best free WordPress plugins I have encountered.  Be warned: a few of these plugins require some level of technical proficiency to use.  Enjoy!

Post,  Page and Sidebar Customization WordPress Plugins

• Add Widgets to Page – This plugin allows you to add widgets to pages or posts using an easy to insert shortcode.  This is handy when you want to add the same images, text, and other elements to a group of pages or posts to create a uniform look.
• AVH Extended Categories Widget – Sometimes you need more power than WordPress’s standard category widgets can provide.  This plugin gives you just that in a way that is highly customizable.  AVH Extended Categories Widget plugin also has advanced features that allow to designate “category” groups for better fine-tuning of the display of categories in your sidebar.
• Flash Video Player with HTML5 – This allows you to add a highly configurable video player to your blog. It’s easy to use once you get the hang of using the different shortcode parameters.
• Flexi Pages Widget – Another highly configurable WordPress widget that allows you to lists pages and subpages in the sidebar of your blog.
• Simple Post Template – WordPress allows webmasters to specify a template for a page but not for a post. This plugin allows you to assign a template to a post. It takes technical knowledge to use it properly, but if you want to do some advance things such as create a landing page or squeeze page without a sidebar then you should give this a try.
• Subheading – This plugin gives you the ability to add a subtitle to your posts and pages. You’ll have to make some adjustments to your WordPress templates, but it’s an easy way to add an engaging subhead or SEO keywords to the start of your blog post. Moderate WordPress and HTML knowledge is required to set this one up.
• WP Hide Posts – Sometimes you need to create a post or a page that you just don’t won’t users finding. This plugin adds itself to the post editor page. If you wish to conceal your post or page, simply check the “hide post” box and no one will be able to find it unless they have a direct link to the page.
• Frontpage-Slideshow – If you are looking to add a professional looking slideshow to your homepage, consider using this WordPress plugin. This Frontpage Slideshow allows you to designate images from posts and pages to display in a dazzling interactive slideshow. The blogmaster is given full control over the buttons, colors, size, and timing of the slideshow.

Search Engine Optimization WordPress Plugins

• Dragon Design Sitemap Generator – this is by far the easiest way to create an HTML sitemap that will enhance your SEO by helping all your pages and posts to get indexed by Google and other search engine.  It packs a ton of great features, yet remains easy to use.  This is highly recommended for all blogs.
• Google XML Sitemaps – Google, Yahoo, and Bing allows webmaster to report the location of new pages through the use of a feed called the XML sitemap.  The Google XML Sitemaps plugin allows you to establish this feed and to connect it with your Webmaster account.  This plugin is recommended for all WordPress blogs.
• Plus One – In June 2011, Google announced it’s answer to the ubiquitous Facebook Like button – called the Plus One button. Plus One has an impact on your blog’s search engine optimization. When a user clicks the Plus One button on your site, people within the voter’s Google social network see it as a vote for the webpage’s content, just like on Facebook. This plugin allows you to add this feature to your blog with ease.
• HeadSpace2 – Now this is the mother of all SEO meta data management plugins.  This is free plugin, but like many of this list, it’s probably shouldn’t be.  First of all, it integrates with most major SEO WordPress plugins like All-In-One-SEO and pulls in the customizations to your post’s meta tags that you’ve already made.  It then uses a highly sophisticated command console to allow you to set meta tag information at the global, group, and post/page level.  HeadSpace2 also has a rich lists of other features that lets you get greater control of your WordPress SEO.  INSTALL THIS PLUGIN RIGHT AWAY AND RID YOURSELF OF BULK ALL-IN-ONE-SEO.
• SEO Friendly Images – This plugin automatically adds alt and title attributes to images in your post/pages so that you can be more productive and do more critical tasks. This plugin allows for the placement of several variables to assist your image optimization efforts.
• SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2 – Here’s another free SEO WordPress plugin that is a bit out-of-the-box. When a visitors comes to your blog using a search engine this plugin records the referring keyword and adds it to the bottom of your post page automatically. SEO SearchTerm Tagging 2 also has the ability to add the search term to your post tags. Going one step further, this plugin installs widgets that allow you to display your top search engine keywords with a link back to the post at the category level. Webmasters can set their own filters to guard against profane search terms. This plugin gives you a great way to add keywords to your post pages… just don’t overdo it.
• Redirection – Time to get some real control over the SEO of your WordPress blog with the free Redirection plugin. Redirection allows you to set up 301, 302, 307 HTTP redirects fast. Additionally, it has modules for monitoring 404 errors, reporting, and managing your .htaccess file. This plugin takes some getting use to, but just reference the documentation. Once you get the hang of it you’ll be ready to install redirects and resolve 404 errors without hesitation. The Redirection plugin was engineered by the same folks who gave us Headspace2. I encourage you to donate to the developer of this plugin.
• SEO Smart Links – Don’t attempt to do SEO on your blog posts without this free plugin handy. SEO Smart Links saves you the haste of having to manually create links within your blog posts and pages by doing it automatically based on options you set. In other words, you can use it to quickly link every instance of a keyword in your blog posts to any location you desire across your entire WordPress blog. It has a lot of options you can toggle to get the desired results.

Social Networking WordPress Plugins

• Feedburner Feedsmith – Chances are if you’re using Feedburner than you’re already using this plugin. If you’re not using Feedburner to manage your RSS feeds then you may want to take a look at it. Anyway, this plugin detects all the ways to access your original WordPress feed and redirects it through Feedburner.
• BlogGlue Related Posts Network Plugin – This plugin is designed to be used with a blog traffic exchange network called BlogGlue. At the end of your blog posts (and optionally, pages) it suggests related posts on your blog. It then connects your website to the BlogGlue network and syndicates links to your blog posts on other people’s blogs in exchange for allowing other people to place links to their posts on your blog. The technology is a little clumpy and it takes you about 72 hours for your posts to get indexed and begin appearing on the network but nevertheless it does send an appreciable amount of referral traffic to your blog.
• RSS Footer – Use this plugin to amend a message to the top or bottom of your RSS feed. It’s a straightforward plugin that can be used to encourage readers who may be signed up for your RSS feed to register for your website and become a lead. The plugin also allows the use of variables such as “postname” – so you can do some pretty creative things with your feed. This plugin is free.
• Odiogo Listen Button – The Odiogo plugin is nothing short of amazing. After you register for a free account install the Odiogo plugin and listen in awe as this plugin translates your blog post from text to speech and reads itself to you. Your blog post is also made downloadable as a podcast.
• Simple Facebook Connect – I give high praise to this free plugin.  Simple Facebook Connect takes the agony out of trying to connect with Facebook.  It’s actually a package of 20 or so mini-plugins that help you to easily do things like add a facebook “like” button, allow users to register for your blog using Facebook Connect, add a user status widget, and lot’s more.

Administration WordPress Plugins

• Header and Footer – Stop downloading plugins to allow you to install Google Analytics, conversion optimization code, CSS, Javascript and all the other types of code that need to be inserted between the <head> and <body> tags of your webpage. This plugin is all you need. It’s clean and highly effective.
• My FTP – This free WordPress plugin adds FTP capabilities right inside the admin area of your WordPress installation.  No more downloading desktop FTP programs to upload and download items to your server,  My FTP provides an easy-to-use interface that lets you do just that as well as to edit files right inside WordPress.
• Exec – PHP – This is a simple yet robust plugin that allows for the execution of PHP code in your posts, pages, and text widgets. If you’re looking to do more advanced things on your website with PHP then you’ll need to install this one.
• Crony Cronjob Manager – If you need to schedule regular maintenance for your blog, I’d recommend using this plugin. There are several extremely powerful membership management platforms that require to set-up of cron-jobs as part of their installation. Rather than going through the trouble of setting up the cron-job using SSH, you may be able to use this plugin to simulate a cron-job at the WordPress level rather than on the server level. One of the set back of this plugin is that it appears to be a bit server intensive and there doesn’t seem to be any identifiable way to disable event reporting.
• Users to CSV – Need to get a quick export of the people who have registered for your blog or left a comment but don’t want to mess with your WordPress database?  Download this handy little plugin and export your members in a handy CSV or TSV file.
• WordPress HTTPs – Adding HTTP to your WordPress installation can be a bit tricky.  That’s why you should download WordPress HTTPS.  This free plugin helps you to adjust your blog so that you can use SSL on your website.
• Contact Form 7 – Form creation used to be tedious and difficult.  Contact Form 7 is the go-to form creation plugin.  This plugin utilizes a powerful administration console that allows you to easily create rich HTML forms.  After you save the form, you then add the resulting shortcode to the post or page of your choice.  And just like that you have an instant contact form.  You can have the plugin email the form information to the address of your choice.  The list of possible things you can do with this plugin is virtually endless.  Contact Form 7 is another plugin that we should all be thankful is available for free.

Other Plugins

• Quick Adsense – Right now should uninstall whatever your using to manage your Google Adsense placement because I’m confident it has nowhere near the power of the Quick Adsense plugin. This plugin is highly versatile and it allows you to rotate Adsense code, precisely control where your ad code should be placed, as well as the number of ad units to be placed on the page. It says it’s designed for Adsense, but you can plug code from any ad network you wish in there. INSTALLING THIS PLUGIN WILL LIKELY BOOST YOUR ADSENSE REVENUE.

*Bonus Paid Plugin

• PopUp Domination – This is a paid plugin that allows you to great visitors to your blog with professional designed pop-ups that encourage them to sign up for your newsletter. PopUp Domination comes with about a dozen templates that blend seamlessly with the look and feel of your blog. When and how often the popup appears is up to you. This plugin is great for building your email list and works flawlessly with major email list management services like Aweber.

In early December, Danny Sullivan wrote the article What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count.  You should read it now to understand the context of Matt Cutts response in the video and this blog entry.

So I’ll let Matt Cutts speak for himself:

The Full Transcript of the Video Is Below.

Matt Cutts: Alright we’re back for another round of Webmaster questions. A lot of questions today, we got almost 500, so we won’t get to all of those, but there were a lot of really interesting ones. Let’s start off with the most popular one, which came from WebSEOAnalytics, they asked, “Hello Matt, a recent article of Danny Sullivan suggests that Google uses Twitter and Facebook links as a ranking signal. Can you confirm this? Can you elaborate a little bit more on this?”

Yes I can confirm it. We do use Twitter and Facebook links in ranking as we always have in our web search rankings, but in addition we’re also trying to figure out a little bit about the reputation of an author or a creator on Twitter or Facebook. And let me just give you a little background on that, I filmed a video back in May 2010, where I said that we didn’t use that as a signal and at the time we did not use that as a signal, but now we’re taping this in December 2010 and we are using that as a signal. So the exhaustive place if you really want comprehensive information is to go look up Danny Sullivan’s article and we can leave that as a link in the description of the video.

But essentially, to give you a little more background, a little bit more color, the web search quality team has a lot of different groups and a lot of different offices so people, including the original blog search team, people who worked on real time search, have been working on using these sorts of things as a signal. So primarily it has been used a little bit more in the real time sort of search, where you might see individual tweets or other links showing up and streaming up on the page. We’re studying how much sense it makes to use it a little more widely within our web search rankings.

Now there’s a few things to remember, number one is if we can’t crawl a page, if we can’t see a page, then we can’t really assign page rank to it and it doesn’t really count. So if we are able to obtain the data then we can use it, but if for some reason a page is forbidden for us to crawl or we’re not able to obtain it somehow, then we wouldn’t be able to use that within our rankings. This is something that is used relatively lightly for now and we’ll see how much we use it over time depending on how useful it is and how robust it ends up being.

The one thing I would caution people about is don’t necessarily say to yourself, “Ah Ha! Now I’m going to go out and get reciprocal follows and I’m going to get a ton of followers,” just like people used to get a ton of links. In the same way that page rank depends on not just the number of links but the quality of those links, you have to think about what are the followers who mean quality? Who are the people who are actually, are not just bots, or some software programmer, things like that.

So it is a signal that we’re starting to use a little bit more, you’ll see it most within our sort of real time search as it’s streaming through but we’re looking at it more broadly within web search as well.

– Matt Cutts
“Does Google Use Social Sites In Rankings“
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofhwPC-5Ub4

The New Search Engine Optimization Is Coming

In actually, it makes sense for Google to add social signals into the mix of ranking factors that it already uses.  It gives Google an additional set of information that can help it to return more accurate results in response to a user query.  I envision something like this: say, I tweet a link, Google will evaluate the reputation of my Twitter account; conduct some sort of sentiment analysis to understand how I feel about the content; and weight my overall social network influence.  From there Google, will aggregate my individual report with that of other individuals who have also tweeted the link in other to calculate an overall ‘social set score’.  The social set score is then combined with traditional SEO factors to compute a ranking for the page.  Of course, this is my own speculation.

Needless to say, this new plot twist presents a challenge to search engine optimization as we know it.  The future (or more correctly ‘modern’) SEO must be able to understand and influence social signals to affect search engine rankings.  It adds an entirely new dimension to our craft.

I leave with this question to website optimizers who may be reading this article.  Are you ready for such a radical change in how you practice SEO?

Download the Internet Marketing Guide for Nonprofits in PDF format

Today, as an accompaniment to the start of New England’s GiveCamp weekend in which I will be participating, I am releasing A Nonprofit’s Guide to Internet Marketing: Cost-Effective Opportunities to Accelerate Online Marketing Success for Your Nonprofit. This is a 15-page guide designed to help nonprofit organizations activate or to accelerate their online marketing efforts. The Nonprofit’s Guide to Internet Marketing contains information about:

• Why nonprofits should consider Internet marketing and how it can help to expand membership rolls, event participation, donation collection, and to increase awareness
• A brief overview of the main disciplines within online marketing and how nonprofits cans get started, including search engine optimization (SEO), paid search marketing (pay-per-click) , and social media marketing (SMM)
• Specific programs offered by companies like Google and Flickr to assist nonprofits in marketing online
• Additional opportunities within emarketing and a brief look at how to implement each grassroots style
• Guidelines for vetting and working with online marketing agencies

The guide is totally free, but if you like it kindly donate to any of the charities that will be present at New England GiveCamp. Here’s the list of nonprofits scheduled to attend the event.

Also, if you know a nonprofit or charity that can use this guide, please feel free to share a copy of it with them or refer them to this site.

If you have any questions about the content of this document, please feel free to comment to this post and I reply there. If you are looking to retain my services for any of the online marketing programs mentioned, please use this form to contact me.

and I’m going to show you how you can easily create your own too.  But first, here’s a little background about URL shortening and why it’s an important aspect of your social media, affiliate marketing, press release, and even search engine optimization strategy.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with URL shortening, here’s a quick example of when you may want to chop a long URL down to something smaller.  Let’s say you want to post a link to a specific page on a shopping website for home office furniture in your tweet on Twitter. Unfortunately, the URL you want to include is 133 characters long which doesn’t leave space to talk about much else in your tweet.  You can reduce the length of the link by submitting it a URL shortening service which outputs a shorter URL that takes the user to the same exact page for you to use in your tweet, as in the example below:

Original URL (133 characters): http://www.thehomeofficedepot.com/shop.php?c=500&n=1069102&i=B00252CGL2&x=Cherry_Finish_Home_Office_Corner_
Workstation_Computer_Desk

New Short URL (17 characters): http://xurls.us/3

As you can see, the new URL is 116 characters shorter than the original link, resolves to the exact same pages, and is now Twitter friendly.

Lately, I have been doing a lot with Twitter and affiliate marketing.  In doing so, I’ve come to recognize the importance of “URL control” in posting links on social media networks and within my own affiliate promotional pieces.  There are many services out there that allow people to shorten URLs.  The most well known of these websites are bit.ly and TinyURL, but there are tons of others, each with its own unique features.

It occurred to me that given the relative simplicity of these services that it would be easy to set-up and host my own URL shortening/redirection services using a domain I own.  Having my own URL reduction website gives me the ability to shorten URLs, incorporate keywords of my choosing, view click statistics and user information, set my own redirection rules, and add advertising.  In other words, as a web marketer, I now have the ability to abbreviate links with custom characteristics while gaining valuable analytical insight.

Steps To Create Your Own Domain Redirection Service

What follows is a basic overview of how to get your URL shortening website up and running pretty quickly.

1.  Find the shortest available domain name you can

I’ve been using Bustaname.com to help find some very good unregistered website domain names for a while now.  It was Bustaname.com that enable me to find xURLs.us (the URL for my domain name shortening service) which is a beautifully short and descriptive 8 character (including the period) domain name.  Many URL reduction websites use exotic two-letter, top level domains (TLD) like .al, .cc, .ly.  These are great because they are shorter than the classic “.com” TLD, but they can cost you anywhere from $10 – $90 to reserve.  Please note: many of country-specific TLDs have special criteria that must be met in order to reserve them.  You can also use the little domain availability tool below to quickly check if a website name is available. 

Once you’ve settled on a short domain name, the next step is to register it.  I use 1&1 Internet for domain registration.  It’s quick, easy, and cheap.  Others may prefer www.GoDaddy.com .

2.  Get reliable hosting

Most of the URL shortening services I came across researching this project are built upon PHP and MySQL, so I’d recommend a server host that comes with these two already installed.  Again, I use 1&1 Internet for server hosting, but you should use the web host you feel most comfortable using.

3.  Select a URL shortening script

It seems to be fairly easy for experienced web programmers to write their own custom URL redirection script, but why reinvent the wheel?  There are a few dozen free URL shortening scripts out there and some paid applications for you to select from.

xURLs is built upon a simple PHP script called Yourls.  I chose Yourls as my redirection platform because it’s free, has an easy installation, a straightforward admin interface, and a decent statistics package.

The admin console for Yourls:

The stat package in Yourls:

Some other URL shortening scripts include: Kissa.be, Shorty, and TightURL.

Each script has its own mini-URL creation procedures.  For example, some present the target page in an iframe of a dynamically generated page, while others use a 301 HTTP redirect or even a Meta refresh as the mechanism to get users to the intended page.  Some scripts allow you to create multiple mini-URLs which point to a single long URL.  You should demo, research, and analyze how each script works and select the one that fits your needs.

4.  Install and customize the shortening script

Next, after you have selected a domain shortening script, you’ll need to install it in your web host environment.  You should review the installation documentation for the specific URL shortening script you selected, but for the most part they all involve roughly the same steps:  (1)create a SQL database (2)populate database connection parameters in a PHP set-up file (3)toggle settings in a configuration file (4)upload the files for the URL shortening application to your web server via FTP (5)initiate an installation/customization script.

If you’re using Yourls, you should review its installation instructions and this important note about installing Yourls on a 1&1 web server.  Also, some of you may not want your URL shortening service to be available for public use.  In this case, you will need to password protect your website.  Yourls allows you to do this quickly by changing the line “define(‘YOURLS_PRIVATE’, true);” in the config-sample.php to “true”.

As a nice little feature to get your started, Yourls includes a file called sample-public-front-page.php.txt to give you an idea about how to construct the homepage for your URL shortening website.  You can customize the contents of this file to your liking.  When you’re finished designing your homepage, change the file name to index.php and upload it to the root directory of your website.  I’d recommend designing a decent looking homepage and installing visitor tracking (i.e. Google Analytics, GoStats) for your URL reduction website – you never know when curious users may come-a-knocking.

5.  Start posting your short links

Now that your URL redirection script is up and running under your own domain, it’s time to start posting your short links on Twitter, Facebook, and your own affiliate websites.  Here’s an image of xURLs, my own URL chopping website, at work in the wild.

If you want to see something amazing, try posting a link routed through your URL shortening/redirection service in a tweet and immediately jump over to the statistics screen and watch how fast the clicks accumulate.

A few minutes ago, I saw something on TV I don’t think I’ve ever seen before – a nonpolitical commercial that advocates a plan to detoxify this country from its dependence on foreign oil.  Have a look-see for yourself.  Although, I instantly recognized the old fellow in the video as mega-billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens – this being the election season – I still expected to hear the phrase “Paid for by supporters of ____”.  Imagine my surprise when no such endorsement came (did you feel the same way?).  Curious to find out more information about the so called “PickensPlan”, I jumped over to PickensPlan.com and did some clicking around.

Now, regardless of what you may think about T. Boone Pickens as a human being, or his political beliefs, business practices or philanthropy, you have to admire the way he (or his online marketing agency) is putting the power of Internet social media to work.  It’s all there right down to the web 2.0 blue color scheme of the website.  With chicklets leading to every social media network that matters, a video blog, a forum, badges for webmasters to post to their site, he’s making savvier use of social media elements than a group of teenage girls the day after a high school prom.  And this is exactly how it’s supposed to be done.

I’m willing to bet Mr. Pickens’ social media blitz won’t play any small role in getting people to do verbs such as write, organize, and collaborate once they’ve viewed the print and television commercials.  Despite budgeting nearly $60 million to promote his plan, the site has all the look and feel of a true online grassroots movement. The main page is designed as a gateway to get people interested and educated about the PickensPlan, while offsite islands of social networking pages on Facebook and MySpace serve to help new evangelist spread the message to members of their personal network.  It’s hub marketing.  Pretty clever.  I urge folks not to be so quick to chalk this up as an act of charity from a kind old businessman who has had a good run and now wants to do something good for the rest of us.  Pickens’ company has a considerable amount to gain if the plan comes to fruition. However, I’m sure you’ll agree with me when I say fossil fuel won’t last forever.

Here’s the PickensPlan in case you were wondering what all the hype is about:

I heard these two stories on NPR (“On The Media”) over the weekend, and they so tied psychology and sociology to interactive buzz marketing that I had to share them here.  Give them a listen, before you read on.

Peruse any job board for positions relating to interactive marketing and almost always under the desired education requirement you’ll see computer science, IT, business administration, or the narrower disciplines of marketing and public relations.  It seems the interactive marketing community as a whole has severely underestimated the application of a social science degree to an online marketing career.  My undergraduate degrees are in psychology and sociology, and on more than one occasion I have found myself explaining how my training in the social sciences is applicable to a career in marketing.

To me it’s not a big leap; to others it’s implausible.  When people think about psychology, they picture a comfortable room with two people – one sitting in an arm chair taking notes, and the other laying on his back spilling his guts while paying $200 an hour for the privilege to do so.  I didn’t pick psychology out of the list of majors to become a clinical psychologist like the one in this example.  I could care less about a stranger’s relationship with his or her mother.  I started in the field with the desire to become an experimental psychologist and through empirical hypothesis testing I wanted to explore the mysteries of human behavior and mental processes.  If it helps, picture a guy in a white lab coat holding a clipboard observing people through a two-way mirror.

Similarly, I find that people are often misinformed about what sociology involves.  They confuse the discipline with social work or social advocacy when in fact sociology is nowhere as benevolent.  Sociology, in brief, is about investigating the behavior of groups and their interrelationship with the individual.  I have even argued that marketing is a hybrid of applied sociology and business administration, given marketing’s high level goal of influence and persuasion.  It’s pretty well accepted that the multibillion dollar a year industry of market research is a type of applied sociology.

You’d be hard pressed to find someone active in online marketing that would dispute the statement that social media is where it’s at.  With big brands flocking to Facebook and MySpace to transform latent customers in to brand advocates, interactive marketing firms are scrambling to adopt in this new environment.  As much in SEO or PPC, if not more so, interactive marketers that practice social media channel development must ask questions like:

1. How do we influence customers to buy our products?
2. How do we influence customers to promote our brand?
3. How do we enter into a new online community and interact with members effectively?
4. How do we leverage these social networks to create buzz?
5. How do we encourage long term retention in our customers
6. What are our customers saying to us?
7. How do we respond?
8. How do we track the reach of our message?

To my ears, at their core, these are social science questions, not computer science questions.  How companies can actually leverage observations from social science research to generate ROI is the business marketing extension of each of the questions listed above.  Unless marketers first try to understand the questions (and answers) above in the light of the specific community they aspire to influence, they will not be successful in their efforts to generate ROI.  Just because a community or culture exists online, doesn’t make it less of a community or culture.  A person trained in psychology and sociology may be more effective in uncovering deep insights about the types of people behind the screen names used on social networking/media websites than a person with a traditional marketing background.  For example, during my undergraduate years, I took classes in community psychology, social psychology, social problems, psychological anthropology, and methodology of social research.  The sum of all these courses was a solid background in how to systematically dissect, investigate, and influence the inner workings of a community.

Although, I relied on the social media example to make my argument, a social science degree is strongly conducive to success in other areas of online marketing.  In conclusion, folks with psychology and sociology backgrounds have taken courses relating to influence, motivation, perception, group dynamics, cultural studies, demographics, statistical analysis, survey design, consumer psychology, and research – all of which are important in Internet marketing.