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Third-party app lets you run Alexa on your Apple Watch from a complication

If you prefer Alexa to Siri, you’ve been able to use Amazon’s voice assistant on your iPhone for more than a year now.
There’s no official support yet on the Apple Watch, but a third-party app now lets you do it via a watch complication …
Netgear offers cloud-based subscriptions to add features to Arlo security cameras
Sonos and Ikea show us possible designs for their budget speaker range

Ikea teased a collaboration with Sonos back in December, but didn’t share any details of what to expect. It has now revealed that the plan is for a range of budget speakers which are compatible with both existing Sonos setups and Ikea’s Tradfri smart home devices …
iPad gains market share in Middle East and Africa, but still fell to third place
Best Buy Father’s Day sale has up to $350 off MacBooks, Beats Headphones, TVs, much more

Father’s Day is just around the corner and Best Buy is celebrating with a new three-day sale that includes deals on MacBooks, Apple TV, Powerbeats, TVs, smart home gear and more. Free shipping is available on orders of $35+ or you can opt for in-store pickup if you want your new gear this weekend. You’ll find our top picks below.
Taiwanese company offers clunky wireless charging adapter for AirPods case

It’s now nine months since Apple announced that a new wireless AirPods charging case was on the way, alongside its AirPower mat designed to provide simultaneous wireless charging to that, an iPhone 8/X and Apple Watch.
There’s as yet no sign of either product, despite multiple rumors of a release back in February, but if you want to charge your existing AirPods case wirelessly, a Taiwanese company is promising a solution ‘soon’ …
Latest class action lawsuit alleges all Apple Watches are defective
15 of the Best WordPress Contact Form Plugins for 2018
Web forms are not necessarily a new technology, but they’re the gold standard for collecting leads and information from website visitors. And there are no shortage of options for WordPress contact form plugins.
That said, online form builders have come a long way since their early internet roots.
Now, depending on what software you use, you can integrate with email and marketing automation software, automatically enrich lead data with more contact properties, automatically sync touch points to your CRM, and even personalize form fields and placement based on website behavior.
There are tons of options out there, though. To demystify the selection process and help you select a tool, here are 15 WordPress form plugins.
The Best Free WordPress Form Plugins
1. HubSpot – Free Marketing Plugin for WordPress
When it comes to WordPress form plugins, HubSpot’s very own plugin offers some special advantages.
First, it’s more than just your traditional form builder. It includes tools to help you convert visitors on your site, tool that help you in building an email list, generating and tracking leads, and tracking user behavior on your website.
These include a lead generation dashboard, lead capture tools like pop-ups, slide-ins, and exit intent forms, a static form builder tool, a contact database, and lead insights for the first seven days of website activity after lead capture. All these features work immediately, right out of the box, with no dev help required.
You’ve also got the benefit of a native integration with the free HubSpot CRM, so you can track and manage all of your leads’ touch points across the customer journey.
2. Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms is quite a powerful option for a WordPress contact form builder.
With Gravity Forms, you can build out multi-page/multi-step forms, create rules to limit which domains are acceptable on your forms (excluding gmail and competition for instance), and schedule forms to be implemented during a set time period.
In addition, they offer a deep integration library with email software, automation software like Zapier, and payment processors like Stripe and PayPal so you can accept payment with your forms.
In my experience, Gravity Forms is a bit complicated from the end-user perspective. Setting up custom integrations and even some basic design options can be somewhat difficult to set up, but if you want something highly customizable and advanced, this may be worth the effort.
3. FormCraft
FormCraft is WordPress form plugin that focuses on ease of use and design. Basically, they make sure all the forms made with FormCraft are as stylish and beautiful, and you can make them that way with ease.
It’s responsive, somewhat customizable, and includes email notifications so you don’t need to log in to monitor your lead generation process. The premium version has a lot more features, such as conditional logic, auto-save form progress, form analytics, and more. The free version is somewhat limited, but again, it’s easy to use and makes nice looking forms.
4. Qu Form
Qu Form is another WordPress form builder that bills itself as “advanced.” It’s primarily a drag and drop editor that can build out a variety of form types, from contact us forms to billing forms.
This one comes with most features you’d want, including multi-page forms and smart branching logic, and it’s also pretty customizable on the style and design side of things (also pretty easy to do so).
Plans start at $29.
5. Ninja Forms
Ninja Forms is one of the more powerful WordPress form builders. It’s free. It’s easy to use. It’s got no limitations on form fields, forms, or submissions.
It also has several native integrations with popular email service providers as well as payment processors, so you can easily sync of your systems and automate much of the administrative process usually inherent with forms tools.
It also contains a pretty easy to use drag-and-drop editor.
6. Jetpack’s Contact Form
Jetpack is a popular WordPress plugin that comes with many templates. It’s actually made by Automattic, and it includes more than just a form builder. Some of its features include:
- Site stats and analytics
- Automated social media posting and scheduling in advance
- Elasticsearch-powered related content and site search
- SEO tools for Google, Bing, Twitter, Facebook, and WordPress.com
- Advertising program that includes the best of AdSense, Facebook Ads, AOL, Amazon, Google AdX, and Yahoo
- Simple PayPal payment buttons
Its WordPress contact form feature is relatively limited in scope, but if you’re already using Jetpack and just want something simple, this is a good place to start.
7. Form Maker
Form Maker by WebDorado is an easy to use and intuitive form builder. It has a drag and drop editor, and they have several functionalities for their forms, including questionnaires, contact forms, surveys, and quizzes.
The free version, however, is limited to seven fields. Their integrations are somewhat limited as well.
3. Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 is one of the most popular WordPress form plugins. Its main focus (no surprise here) is on contact forms.
The big benefit is that it is super simple to create contact forms and deploy different forms across your site. The downside is that its use cases are limited compared to other WordPress form plugins.
9. WP Forms
WP Forms is another widely used form builder that offers advanced branching logic, customizability, and a drag and drop editor.
They emphasize their ability to work across many use cases, and offer templates and ready to use workflows for payments, contact forms, registration, subscription, and more.
As far as I know, they don’t offer any free plans, but they’re basic plan is $49 per year.
10. eForm
eForm, but WPQuark, is probably one of the more feature rich solutions for WordPress forms.
They have advanced implementations for most common uses cases, notably their eCommerce setup which includes full checkout and payment flows and native integrations with Stripe, PayPal, and WooCommerce.
There’s no free plan, but it starts at $38. This is a form builder if you have highly specific feature requirements and a desire to tweak things so they’re precisely the way you want them. It’s not necessarily the easiest tool to use.
11. Nex Forms
Nex Forms is a feature-rich form builder that has many interesting functions, like interactive forms, personalization, and pretty robust form analytics.
12. Visual Form Builder
Visual Form Builder is a WordPress plugin that allows you to build and manage many different kinds of forms for your website in a single application. It’s easy to use for non-developers, and you can build a pretty nice looking form without writing any PHP, CSS, or HTML (though it doesn’t hurt if you can hack together some CSS).
13. Caldera Form Builder
Caldera Form Builder is designed to be responsive and to have an intuitive, visual creator.
It’s got tons of native integrations as well as conditional logic and smart spam detection. There’s no free plan, though. Prices start at $14.99 per month.
14. Formidable Forms
Formidable Forms prides itself on simplicity; it’s got a nice drag and drop visual editor, easy and automatic email notifications for form submissions, and all your basic pre-built form templates.
This is one of the easier tools to use and set up, but it’s a bit limited in its feature set (though to their credit, they have tons of add-ons you can download depending on what you want to do with your online form).
15. Pirate Forms
Pirate Forms is easy to set up, includes Recaptcha and SMTP, and has all the basic field properties you’d expect in a WordPress contact form.
The free version is super limited, though. To get multiple forms, or even basic integrations, you have to upgrade to pro.
The options are endless for WordPress form plugins.
The choice is ultimately up to you which one fits your personal workflow and your specific website needs. Most form builders include the basics – popular contact properties like email and name, multiple forms across your site, and some native integrations.
It just depends how simple versus customizable you want things, or if you care about things like automatically enriching your leads or analyzing their website behavior.
If you’re looking for a solution that is simple, inherently beautiful and designed with the user experience in mind, and that includes built-in lead intelligence mechanisms that sync to a free CRM, check out HubSpot’s free form builder software.
10 Facebook Event FAQs: Answers for Marketers

Do you use Facebook Events for business or networking? Are you confused by some of the features and functions of Facebook Events? In this article, you’ll discover answers to 10 questions marketers ask about creating, promoting, and managing successful Facebook events. #1: What Types of Events Can I Promote With Facebook Events? Most types of […]
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11 of the Best Free Google Sheets Templates for 2018
Whether your marketing position requires you to send invoices to clients, track website analytics, or create budget and expense reports, you’ve undoubtedly found yourself working with spreadsheets in some form.
And if you’re anything like me, those spreadsheets can feel frustratingly tedious when you’re under a time crunch.
Fortunately, Google Sheets offers 26 pre-built templates, allowing you to create reports and analyze data in spreadsheets faster and more effectively.
Best of all, Google Sheets templates cater to specific categories — if you click the Paid Traffic Report template, for instance, your spreadsheet is already organized into Overview, 12-month Trends, and Medium Breakdown categories. It knows what you need, and offers it without any manual input.
Here, we’ll delve into 11 of the best free Google Sheets Templates for any marketing role in 2018, so you can create better spreadsheets while saving valuable time to focus on more important things — like the data itself.
Google Sheets Templates for Finances
If you’re a freelancer or work for a small business, you probably use invoices to bill clients for services. This invoice template makes the process simple — it provides space for all the necessary information, and looks more professional than a plain spreadsheet. Plus, the template is customizable, so you can create a theme that aligns well with your brand image.

This template is more in-depth than it initially appears. There are tabs at the bottom — setup, income, expenses, summary — and each one includes a number of subcategories. “Expenses”, for instance, covers everything from taxes and insurance, to travel and customer acquisition. The final tab, “summary”, takes your income, subtracts your expenses, and automatically updates to display your ending balance each month. This template is a good option if your budget requires a lot of customization and has a lot of moving parts.
The financial statements template truly is an all-in-one resource to keep track of business transactions, profits, and losses. The “profit & loss” tab automatically summarizes revenue, costs, and expenses for the year, and can display your growth rate percentage. If you work for a small business and need to manage much of your own finances, this template offers resources and guidance to make the process easier, and less prone to human error.
Google Sheet Templates for Reporting and Analytics
If your role requires you to analyze website traffic using Google Analytics, this template is a fantastic supplemental tool to pull that data into an organized report, saving you tons of time. Better still, you can use the template with Supermetrics Google Sheets add-on to monitor and analyze data from PPC, SEO, social media, and website analytics.
5. Website Paid Traffic Report
This template makes the process of analyzing and reporting on paid traffic relatively seamless. It automatically collects data on your paid sources from Google Analytics, and provides a clean chart with important information, including PPC’s percentage of goal conversions, total traffic, and bounce rate. You can also adjust it to compare different time periods, or different channels or segments. If you’re looking for a way to demonstrate paid’s influence on your business, this is the tool to do it.
Google Sheet Templates for Customers
To organize your contacts and automate an effective sales and marketing process, it’s important you have a CRM — but if you’re a small company just starting out, you might not feel ready to implement a fully-established CRM with all the features. This CRM template is a great place to get your feet wet. It saves automatically so you never lose data, and the share feature allows you to work with coworkers within the CRM, which is helpful for encouraging collaboration between your sales and marketing departments.
Google Sheet Templates for Project Management
Whether this is your first major project or you’ve been managing projects for years, the project timeline template is a useful tool for organizing and implementing each project step. The template helps you visually break-up a daunting project into smaller pieces, ideally making it easier and less stressful to organize and delegate tasks.
If you’re juggling a bunch of projects simultaneously, this project tracking template could become your new best friend. It enables you to organize your projects into categories by date, deliverables, status, cost, and hours — best of all, it lets you prioritize your projects. Hopefully, simply visualizing what needs to get done first will alleviate time-management stress.
The event marketing template offers organization and structure if you’re implementing an upcoming business event or campaign. It offers categories you might’ve forgotten to consider, including local and national marketing, PR, and web, with subcategories ranging from email newsletter to impact studies. The template is already organized with all necessary categories for planning an event, reducing the time you spend on tedious manual input.
The Gantt chart template helps you alleviate any concern you might have over timing — and, when you’ve got a complex project with overlapping components, I’m willing to bet timing is one of your major concerns. Using the Gantt chart template helps you visualize all steps and delegate important tasks more efficiently — labelling the task with an owner on one chart is certainly easier than individually following up via email, and by sharing the template with coworkers, everyone is on the same page.
Google Sheet Templates for Leading a Team
Keeping track of who works what hours, and how much each employee gets paid, can feel confusing, especially if you lead a team of part-time contractors or seasonal interns. This template includes slots for employee’s names, hours worked, and monthly wages, making your paycheck process straightforward and organized.
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This could be why Apple has yet to make FaceTime an open-standard like it promised

When Steve Jobs originally introduced FaceTime in 2010, he promised that the feature would be an open industry standard, allowing other companies and smartphone makers to adopt it. 8 years later, however, FaceTime remains closed and exclusive to the Apple ecosystem. An interesting new piece from CNET delves into why this is likely the case…
iOS 12: How to enable Do Not Disturb at Bedtime

One thing I personally struggle with is putting my phone down right before bed. This is mostly due to the constant text conversations I have back and forth with various people.
Instagram plans new long-form video hub to compete with YouTube & Snapchat Discover

Following a report yesterday suggesting Instagram was adding support for videos up to 1 hour in length, TechCrunch now offers additional details on the company’s video plans. The report likens Instagram’s video plans to Snapchat’s Discover feature…
iOS 12 tidbits: AirDrop saved passwords, new 3D Touch options, more

Smaller, useful enhancements in iOS 12 continue to surface as beta testers spend quality time with the update. While we previously highlighted features such as easier Face ID rescans and Apple Music lyric search, read on for a few additional iOS 12 tidbits…
Hands-on with the new Home app & HomeKit Siri control on macOS 10.14

For many Mac users, one of the top features of macOS 10.14 Mojave will be the new Home app and support for controlling HomeKit devices with Siri on the Mac. Both of these have been sorely missed in previous versions of macOS, but Mojave is finally changes things…
Shawn Mendes surpasses 1B streams on Apple Music, latest album now biggest pop release of 2018

19-year-old pop star Shawn Mendes just had his week rocked. With the debut of his self-titled new album, the artist was able to capture the largest first week for a pop album on Apple Music in 2018 thus far.
iOS 12: How to enable quiet notifications on iPhone and iPad

iOS 12 brings many subtle refinements that may have flown under your radar. One of these new features is the ability to receive notifications quietly. Follow along for how to turn this option on.




