Archive for 'May, 2009'

Amazon Autoposter is a premium wordpress plugin that is very simple and yet VERY powerful. It does something that I always wanted to be able to do – it grabs content from Amazon for you and turns it into WordPress blog posts. Now before you go thinking that this plugin is for spamming, scraping, and splogs – I want you to hear me out on how YOU can use this plugin in your blog to make money blogging.

Amazon and I go waaaay back. Amazon Associates is the first affiliate program I ever signed up for, and I didn’t really make anything the first year I had my account. I found out about it through a couple A-list bloggers who were using it to recommend things in blog posts and were making an absolute killing through the affiliate links. I mean, come on – what other program can you link to a few books and then somebody ends up surfing Amazon for a half hour and when they buy a $400 printer you get $12-24?

My first blog was a tech site, and when I would write about techie things and gadgets, I’d place a link to Amazon to the items to try and generate a little money. This was a few years before I even decided to try and make money blogging! Over the years I’ve placed quite a few affiliate links, and I’ve used more than my fair share of Amazon WordPress plugins. Most were designed to use tags, shortcodes, and keywords to add amazon producs at the end of a post. Some were a little more automatic than others – but none of them did what Amazon Autoposter does.

What is Auto Posting?

Without a definition you might think that auto posting is nothing more than scraping Amazon to create blog posts with products. If that’s all you do with it, that’s pretty much what it is. But it doesn’t have to be. As a full time blogger, the biggest problem I have is coming up with things to write about consistently. Some blogs are easier than others, but many times I fall behind in my blogging just because I don’t have time to do enough research to have a post every day (or at least multiple times per week).

I personally use “Auto-Posting” as a way to come up with new content and blog posts. I use a WordPress plugin called datafeedR in my series about creating a full blown WordPress affiliate store. What makes Amazon Auto-Poster a bit different is it’s ease of use in addition to the fact that nearly anyone can get an Amazon affiliate account.

I’m going to show you how to use these auto-posts to generate both blog posts and content. You will then “enhance” each post before it’s published with your own original content, spruce it up with “SEO”, and maybe even monetize it in additional ways if you so choose.

Setting up the Amazon Auto Poster Plugin

Once you purchase and install the plugin the options are very simple:

Enter your affiliate ID in the top, and check the box if you want thumbnail pics with your posts. Then choose whether or not to use amazon product reviews and whether to use full, mixed, or excerpts of them. You can also choose how long the description is, and you can even choose from Amazon, Amazon UK, or Amazone DE. Then you save these options.

The next section is only used when you want to generate posts. I like the fact that this plugin is not “automatic”. You will only generate new posts from Amazon products when you come to this page and create them. You can choose to generate as many as you want – but I would suggest that you don’t go hog wild and try to generate 30 at once. That’s pretty resource intensive and would probably cause all kinds of problems with your (shared) webhost. I would suggest trying a week’s worth of posts at a time.

The first thing you do is enter some keywords. These should be keywords that you’ve already tested at amazon.com to bring back product results you want to use. The field after that is “category” – which are your blog categories that these posts will be auto-assigned to (you can update with more later if you so choose). The third option is where to start, meaning which search result to start at. This is handy if you do 7 posts on particular keywords the first time, and want to “start” with post 8 the next time you do it. Fourth you chooose the number of posts to create from products. Fifth is the number of days between posts, and you can choose from 1-9 days. But you can also choose to publish them all right now or as “draft” (which is what we’re going to use today). The final option is what department of Amazon to search.

When you create some posts, the results are posted back to the page to let you know they are complete:

Modifying Auto-Posts

As I mentioned before, I chose to generate my Amazon Auto-posts as “drafts” – because as-is they aren’t ready to be published. They are setup nicely though, with a category automatically assigned, auto-generated tags, and saved as drafts. I’m going to do three things to these auto-posts to make them work better within my blog:

- Replace titles with a better SEO title
- Add Original Content
- Add eBay auctions

Before any of these posts are published for public view I’m going to edit them one by one. I just created a weeks worth of posts, so I can edit them all right now, and then schedule for the next week to post one per day.

The first order of business is to replace the auto-generated product title with your own SEO friendly one. You NEVER want to leave the original title in place – Amazon’s own original product page already uses it, why would you want to duplicate it?

In this example post I just generated the title of the post was generated from the original product listing on Amazon “Linksys Media Center Extender with DVD”. Using that title would not be very smart since Amazon already uses it for their product page and they have the #1 listing on google with those keywords:

What you want to do is change both the post title and permalink to something using keywords you desire. I didn’t change this post a whole lot, it’s now “Linksys Wireless Media Center”.

Next, we’re going to add some original content to the beginning of the post so the text isn’t just an auto generated product description. The best thing to do is read the amazon product page to learn about the product. Then google a review or two. Usually within 5 minutes you can have enough for at least a few sentences to a few paragraphs. The more original content you can add – the better. Google will not like you very much if all you have is duplicate content from Amazon and an affiliate link. You’re just a target for duplicate content AND thin affiliate search engine penalties. I added about 130 words of original content to this example post.

Publishing the Amazon Auto-Posts

The only other things I did after adding the original content were to nofollow both of the Amazon links and remove the first bit of the product description stating “from the manufacturer”. Then I added a sentence and a few eBay auctions to further monetize the post. Before publishing I changed the tags around a bit too. That was it!

As I stated before, you could simple auto-blog with this plugin and not do a thing, but that’s not going to get you any traffic at all and penalties in the search engines. People use affiliate links and blog about products the review all the time, all you have to do is spend a little time re-working the posts with better titles and original content and you’re good to go! Another thing you could do is to place YouTube video reviews in the posts as well.

Here’s what a post looks like on my blog:

Everything looks good from the image to the link, my additional content, and the eBay auctions. What you haven’t seen yet is how this plugin takes the Amazon Reviews and actually creates comments out of the them (awesome!). Check this out…

I just published this articles minutes ago but I have 10 comments! This is great!

Conclusion

If you ever wondered about how to make more money with Amazon, or how to come up with more content and blog post ideas – the Amazon Auto Poster plugin does both with one stone. You have complete control over how many articles you create and how they are published. Certainly this plugin can be abused, but it can be used to your advantage as well. There is no difference between using this plugin and just finding a product on Amazon to blog about if you use it right. I’ve shown in the example above how easy it is to use, and how to use it to monetize a blog and make money. Now all you have to do is start creating blog posts!

Amazon Auto-Post is a premium WordPress plugin that costs ONLY $29.95. I’ve bought a lot of premium plugins before, but none that cost this little and did this much! You can make that back your very first month.

Click to Visit the Amazon Auto Post Web Site

Have you ever wanted to create a directory in WordPress? I’ve had a need for a good directory plugin quite a few times. There are a few free ones available, and I’ve tried them all at one time or another, but none of them has worked as well as WP Directory Pro. It IS a premium plugin, and the cost is $39 – but after seeing what it can do, I think you’ll agree that it’s an INCREDIBLE value.

WordPress Directory

I used the WP Directory Pro plugin to launch my newest web site WordPress Directory. At the writing of this post it’s only been live for about 3 days now, and it’s already had 1,600 pageviews, 90 directory submissions – and already more than 500 twitter followers. Now, I can’t attribute all that initial success to the plugin, because most of it was my own hard work. But the plugin sure did make it easy to create a very usable and easy to manage web directory within WordPress itself in under a day.

How the Directory works

WP Directory Pro is a premium WordPress plugin that you can use with any theme. The end result is the ability to turn a portion of your WP powered site into a web directory listing web sites by categories like the phone book.

Here’s an example of the directory I just created:

That image is of the top level of the directory, and each category can have subcategories as well.

Here’s an example of a directory category with links added to it:

Each link that’s added to the directory has a title, description, link, google pagerank, and thumbnail screenshot. Each one also has a link to it’s own “details” page. Subcategories and breadcrumbs are listed at the top of the category page.

Because WP Directory Pro is a WordPress plugin, the major navigation and stat components are four different “widgets” that you can add to your sidebar. Since your sidebar can be anywhere (top, bottom, left, or right), these widgets can as well – as long as your theme permits.

Two out of the four widgets are for navigation and submissions. The Directory menu allows users to go back to the home page, and add, update, and even upgrade (to paid) listings. The directory widget lists the top-most level categories with a count of how many links are in each.

The last two widgets are for stats. The Directory Statistics widget lists total categories, links, and outgoing hits. The Pagerank widget lists the count of the number of links under each pagerank 0-10. You can of course choose to utilize any, all, or none of these widgets. If you don’t use any of them, you will at least need to manually add the links for visitors to add submissions – unless in your directory all links will be added completely by admins or contributors of the blog, which is completely possible.

Behind the Scenes

When you visit the WP Directory Pro admin in the WordPress dashboard, the first thing you see are some stats by default:

These stats are nice because you can quickly where the highest activity is – both by link and by category. I with that this feature were available to add on the public side of the directory as well (maybe in a future version it will be!).

Adding Categories: The Add Categories page has all the features you would need. It lists categories and details for each, whether it has a parent, whether it’s visible, permission (to add), the number of child categories, and the number of links assigned to each.

I won’t show you the actual add categories page because it’s pretty straightforward, but I did want to highlight the “setup” page with the category admin. When you’re in category admin there’s link beside “add new category” that says “setup”. It isn’t very intuitive, but you have to go here to update your category paths (when new ones are added), and to update the link “counts” so your directory lists the appropriate numbers of links listed in the directory. If I hadn’t pointed this out to you – you might not have seen it and wondered (like me) why these two things weren’t updating.

Link Admin: In link admin you can manually add links if you so chose, and you can edit existing links as well. I find myself manually editing links usually when links are submitted to wrong categories and I have to update them. Which brings me to validation of links.

When users submit a link from the web it goes into the waiting queue and you get sent an email as admin. There is an option to allow links to be published without admin review, but I wouldn’t recommend that. My only complaint here is that when I approve the link I can’t “edit” anything (or change the category) as admin. My only option is to approve it, and then go back and edit it and save.

Email Templates: In email template admin you have total control over the emails that go out regarding the directory, confirmations that go out for new submissions, admin notifications, upgrades, etc.

Other settings: There are also settings for the name of the directory and admin email (in case you want it to be different than the blog admin), and you can enter your paypal email as well. An additional setup screen has options to completely uninstall database tables, or export them for backup purposes – which is really handy. WP Directory Pro also comes with a plugin called “WP Dir Tags” which populates a colored tag cloud on your directory home page if you enable it as well.

Conclusion

WP Directory Pro is a very full featured premium WordPress plugin that is well worth $39. It gives you abilities that no other current WP directory plugin has and with the ability to charge for premium or updated listings – you could build a very profitable WordPress directory!

I’ve been saying for a long time that WordPress has the ability to do just about anything, and this premium plugin is a good example of that. In the past you used to have to purchase custom coded PHP scripts for things of this nature, but with this plugin you can have a directory in WordPress AND still use all the WP blogging features to enhance it!

Visit the WP Directory Pro web site

WordPress Directory is now live! If you’ve been wondering why I haven’t posted anything this week, it’s because I’ve spent about 40 hours setting up my latest site WP-Dir.com! I call it “Wordpress Directory” because I have created a standard online “directory” to submit wordpress powered and related sites “WITHIN” wordpress. That’s key, because most WP directories I’ve seen were run on some PHP script or something. Because I’m running the directory in WordPress – it of course also has a blog!

I think it’s going to be an awesome site, and I do so much wordpress related research for plugins, themes, hacks, tips, and help – I figured this would be a great place to post it all. 90% (or more) of you reading this blog own a WordPress powered site – so go submit your site for FREE today!

Visit WP-Dir

I’ve done a lot of reviews of WordPress plugins over the years, but none that claimed to automatically build links. As backlinks become like gold, it’s no surprise that there are now all kinds of plugins coming out to try and help you automate the link building process.

SEO Booster Lite

SEO Booster Lite has almost no documentation, and the plugin author’s site only says:

This plugin detects posts/pages you have placed on page two on Google, and attempts to lift them from page two to page one by creating sitewide anchored links on your blog.

It does not make any mention as to “how” or “where” on your blog it does this. On the plugin author’s blog, one post is the first results from SEO Booster, but that’s the only example there is.

After 10 minutes of using it only this blog, it did log some searches, and I do like the fact that it actually tells me which page on google they came from.

I guess according to the plugin description, I won’t be able to see how or where it creates “sitewide anchored links” until it actually finds a page 2 google search result to work with. If that happens, I’ll post back here. In the meantime, if you’re interested you can download SEO Booster Lite here. The web site does mention a future “pro” version, but the next plugin was created by the same author – so who knows if he’ll have time to come out with this in the future or not.

Link Launder

Link Launder is an automated link building WP plugin that acts as a free “service”. Basically, all you do is install the plugin as a “set it and forget it” mechanism. It uploads information about your blog and your posts to the central server, and then gives you free one-way links on other blogs back to yours. In return, it places other blog links on yours on random posts and pages. Here are the only setup options:

You can see, besides your username and password, the only thing you have control over is the name of the div the links will be in. You have the option to change the random name so google can’t try and block all blogs containing a div with that name to penalize users of the service.

This doesn’t mean, however, that you won’t eventually be penalized by google or the search engines for using such a service if they somehow find out. You may never be found it – it’s just the risk you take if you decide to use a type of service like this. I think the plugin author has gone to great pains to try and make sure using this service will pretty much go undetected. In addition, the service is growing with 809 users and 204,000 indexed posts. This might be a good choice for one of your up and coming blog, to see how it works for you! I can’t give you any examples on this plugin just yet, as I’ve just installed it on one of my lesser blogs to try it out myself. You can download Link Launder here

Do you have any linkbuilding or SEO plugins that you use? Post them in the comments so we can all check them out!

**UPDATE** I just heard back from Brienna at Shoemoney Tools and for ANYONE reading this post – you can TRY Shoemoney Tools for ONLY $3.95 for the first month by using the special PROMO code for my readers: PRATT

When I fist heard that Shoemoney was coming out with his own set of online SEO and PPC “tools” for Internet Marketing – I was not surprised. I was however, very curious as to what would be included and how much they would cost to use. My review of these new tools will show you exactly what you’re going to get should you sign up, and the many different ways you can utilize the different reports. It doesn’t matter if you’re a blogger, affiliate marketer, an adwords or PPC guy, or other kind of online “make money” person – you can benefit greatly from what this suite has to offer.

The web site is divided into easy to use sections to make it easier to find your way around. You’ll see from the home page sections, PPC, free guides, and a forum. The forum is a great place to ask questions and connect with other Internet Marketers, but the hidden gem (besides the tools) are the free information guides that are available.

I think a lot of times online tools and subscription services forget about the varied levels of experience and sometimes they cater only to experts. Shoemoney has painstakingly taken the time to blueprint not only his own success, but principles for making yourself successful. Even if you are an expert, you will gain new insight and get instant new ideas from reading his completely free guides. He has 4 currently available, “Beginner’s Guide to Internet Marketing”, “The Complete Guide to Local Affiliate Marketing” (a “must” read), “How to Valuate an Internet Property”, and “Tips for Success”. If you signup for Shoemoney Tools I would highly recommend reading each one.

There are 10 SEO Tools that are available for you to use, I’ll go through these one by one so you can see how you would apply them within your own site:

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Tools

Backlink Analzer Tool

The first tool is the backlink analyzer, and a fair warning, these jobs can take some time to run depending on the size of your web site. I usually just punch in a domain name and then as I do othe things, the sidebar will tell me in a percentage how far along the jobs is. The nice thing is, once you run a report they’re stored in your profile and you can access them at any time by coming back to this page.

I’m doing some research for my client Hype IMD, so this backlink report is for their web site. The first thing you see on the backlink report are some pie charts with stats like this:

You can see this is a great snapshot of the top anchor text that’s used in the text links, but also the second chart shoes the top domains linking back. Then after the charts you get the complete breakdown:

You can see from just the top 10 anchor texts from my client has purposely only targeted just a few keyword phrases. The other ones are so sporadic that they are more than likely all natural. It’s nice that you get both the count (of links) and percentage in these reports.

Next we get to see the complete breakdown by domain like this:

You can quickly see which domains are providing the bulk of your backlinks here. But there is a third report as well, that could be equally as important. You need backlinks to get traffic to your blog and come up in search results. Increasingly though, the quality of your links are just as important. Here’s a bit of that third report:

The third report is the reciprocal linking analysis. First, it’s helpful to know if you have reciprical links because the traditional “link exchange” doesn’t work well anymore. What everyone covets now are “one-way links”. But that last column tells you the number of in and out links as well as the ratio for that site linking to you. If you want to know why these numbers are important I would suggest reading the post “What is Link Juice“. This is important because if you want your backlinks to actually “work for you” (boost your rankings) – then you need to know what these numbers mean and whether the sites linking back to you are actually helping or hurting you.

Domain Marketplace Tool

In the domain marketplace you can find domains that have expired but already have backlinks that are generating traffic. Some people buy many of these domains up and point them to their own to get more backlinks and better rankings. I haven’t bought any of these myself, but I have to say the prices are very reasonable.

Backlinks Finder Tool

The backlinks finder is a unique tool. Once you type in keywords, the first thing you get is a list of the top results in google for them like this:

Then it breaks down by site like this:

It takes the results from google for the keywords you are researching and then gives you the competitor information you need. You basically find out exactly WHY they rank in the first page of google for those keywords. You get the pagerank, domain name, and alexa ranking of their top backlinks. In the first 2 domains listed above for the first two google results I’m seeing top 100,000 sites in Alexa as well as multiple backlinks from PR4 and PR5 sites. See a pattern here? This tool shows you exactly how your competitors get their backlinks so you can easily beat them at their own game.

Keyword Density Tool

Next is the keyword density tool. This tool gives you some great information as well, because it tells you what your keyword density is on your site for a search keyword phrase, but it also shows you what your top competition in google has as well. That makes it pretty easy to figure out if you need more or less keywords – doesn’t it? If that wasn’t enough, you can see in this image that the tool also figures out exactly WHERE they put they keywords (title, meta description, meta keywords, or headers). Whoa!

Most Linked Pages Tool

Do you know where the most linked pages within your web site are? This tool quickly shows you that information – you can see from this pic that my client has virtually all links pointing to just two pages within their site:

Related Blog Posts Tool

The related blog posts tool is something that you can use each and every day. One of the most underutilized features of WordPress (IMHO) is the “trackback”. Normally if you link someone (a WordPress blog) in your posts his blog will automatically be “notified” or “pinged”. Then this will be added to your comments (if you approve it). It’s a GREAT way to build backlinks.

But what if you could add a few related blog posts every time you wrote something? Where would you get these blog URL’s from to add to either your posts or the “permalink” field? AHA! This tool automatically and generates 100 of them for you in both linked and non-linked format. I wouldn’t recommend adding all 100 to each of your posts, but you get the picture – this is a VERY powerful tool.

SEO Competition Tool

This is where you can really get down to the nitty gritty of who you’re up against in the search engines. Take a look at the first part of the report:

I looked up the keyword phrase Miami Web Design for my client – and appears that the average pagerank of google page 1 listings is PR4. The number of people competing in Adwords for that phrase is 11. The drill down report inclues details on each of the top 10 results on the first page of google including pagerank and alexa ranking for the backlinks of each top result. Want to know why a competitor ranks higher than you? Just study their backlinks!

Text Optimizer Tool

The text optimizer can help you check your own content for keyword density. Just plugin some keywords and paste in your text and voila – you get the stats!

Outgoing Links Tool

You can easily check your outgoing links by simply enterering your domain name on this tool to get a quick report.

Keyword Tracker Tool

The keyword tracker tool is the only SEO tool that I can’t show you because it requires installing a script on your web server (which I haven’t done yet). Once you do this though, you can track your keywords using information gathered directly from live stats on your blog!

PPC (Pay Per Click) Tools

PPC Ad Generator Tool

If you are going to do any paid advertisement, then the ad generator tool can be very helpful. Just plugin your keywords and URL’s, and it will dynamically generate all kinds of ready made ads – using information from ads currently placed by your competitors!

PPC Ad Manager Tool

Using the PPC Ad Manager you can create your own ad invetory, and save it for use within MS AdCenter or AdWords.

PPC Keyword Manager Tool

The keyword manager works the same way – create, edit, and save all your keyword lists here.

Keyword Generator Tool

The next tool is the keyword generator, and you can cetainly use this for PPC – but it works great for anything you need to generate keywords for, like your blog, web site, niche sites, etc. Remember, it’s one thing to get a list of great keyword suggestions – but you still have to check and see which ones actually get search traffic.

Keword Grabber Tool

Have you ever wondered what keywords other sites use in their advertising campaigns? With this keyword grabber all you have to do is punch in a domain name – and it will return all the keywords being currently bid on by that site. This competitor of my client is currently bidding on more than 225 keywords in the miami area (most of which have nothing to do with web design).

Keyword Suggestions Tool

The keyword suggestion tool gives you ideas for keywords without having to come up with them yourself. Using data from 5 different search engines you can quickly get some new ideas.

Instant PPC Campaign Tool

You can easily generate ad campaigns for use in Yahoo, MSN, and google by entering your keywords, ad lists, and CPC. They keywords and ad lists available are ones you previously generated and saved in the ad and keyword manager tools.

Local Keyword Tool

The local keyword tool is pretty cool – even if you’re not doing PPC. Just enter a zip code and a radius, some keywords, and some exclusions (if you have any) – and instantly get a list of localized keywords to use.

Local Brand Tool

The local brand tool allows you to find competitors. Unlike the keyword grabber which tells you what keywords a domain is bidding on, if you give this tool a keyword phrase and a zip code, it gives you a list of keywords that people are bidding on in your local area.

Google Adwords Campaign Builder

This tool will help you build an Adwords campaign, after you’ve done the necessary research using all the other tools.

Adsense Crawler Tool

The Adsense crawler is a report that takes some time to run, but give it some keyword phrases and it will give you a report of potential sites you can target in adsense to get some good returns.

Conclusion

Shoemoney Tools are worth their weight in gold, and it’s no surprise that companies like Facebook, Viacom, Google, MySpace, Yahoo, and Intel are all using them. The great thing is that these tools are affordable enough for a full time blogger, niche store owner, affiliate marketing, or anyone working online to use!

You get real stats that you can actually use for SEO work, link building, competition analysis, and more! I figured that anything Shoemoney puts out has to be good, but I never expected 21 world class tools all in one place.

**UPDATE** I just heard back from Brienna at Shoemoney Tools and for ANYONE reading this post – you can TRY Shoemoney Tools for ONLY $3.95 for the first month by using the special PROMO code for my readers: PRATT

Check out Shoemoney Tools

Do you need a WordPress consultant? Good news – you can now hire me through Live Person. If you are in need of WordPress help, theme or plugin installation, custom theme work, SEO work, help ranking in the search engines, affiliate help, content or copy writing (or editing), help with your Build a Niche Store, eBay plugins, making money on Amazon, article marketing, graphic design, HTML and CSS, or any general help making money blogging or online – I’m your guy!

Visit my virtual Office on LivePerson

If you learn how to to turn problems into blogs posts, you may never need to think of good topics for content again! Personally, I have so many unused blog topics that I could probably blog for 2 years non-stop without coming up with anything new. I have more written down that I could ever possibly write about. That’s because I know how easy it is to turn everyday things into blog posts.

For example, I have a recipe blog. When I think of new things to cook – I post them. I have a geeky tech site. When I get new gadgets, or looks at phones or computers – I post about them. I like jokes – I post them to my joke site. I blog a lot, and on this blog I write about blogging! Are you getting the picture?

Today I’m going to show you an actual real world example. I’m having some people over tonight for a party. I have some pro-sound equipment and we’re going to do some karaoke and listen to music, I guess I’ll be the “DJ”! So I gathered my song files onto an external hard drive only to find that I couldn’t really get a decent song list for people to choose from. Then I played some of the songs and some of the volume levels were way up or way down.

I figured out how to solve my problem pretty quickly – and I threw together a blog post about it entitled How to Fix MP3′s! I turned my problem INTO a blog post. Hopefully that problem will translate into traffic (and into cash)!

I’d said this a thousand times –

• Write about what you know about
• Use your own expertise
• Write in your own voice
• Help people solve problems
• Blog about your everyday life

If you follow these simple steps – you may never have to come up with content ever again AND you will make it much easier for you to write content (EVEN if you’re not much of a writer!).