Archive for 'January, 2010'

Anu is the newest Online Marketing Intern, having been selected at the beginning of last week. She’s made it through Phase 1, which consists of learning how to secure your WordPress site, and setting up a foundation to be indexable and found online.

This is what she had to say:

Hello Everyone,

This is Anu back again with an update a week into the internship.
It has been quite a week – busy and informative.

Phase 1 was all about learning how to set up WordPress properly, get it indexed and secure the site. Bill’s post on Phase 1 is detailed and I am not going to bore you by repeating everything.

What I would like to share with you is that While I knew how to set up WordPress, set the permalink correctly, add the necessary plugins, I have always lacked the knowledge to secure the site properly and strongly. I knew enough to delete admin as user in WordPress, set a strong password, change it frequently and even move the .htacess file. However,I never knew how to modify the .htaccess file to block hackers, trojans and viruses or set up the robots.txt file correctly. I also never knew about some of the security plugins and how to set them up correctly.

There is lot of information out there online but not much about securing your site well, how to do it and most importantly, why. I have normally pulled bits and pieces of info from all over but nothing comprehensive. JT has laid all that out on the internship site in a organized fashion. He was always available to answers questions or just to help. Oh, I did need his help …. spent a few frustarting hours getting locked out of WordPress because of a plugin conflict and had to send out an SOS email. . If you have not read JT’s security guide, go back and read it. There is tons of valuable information.

It has been a long week but at the end of it, have gained much knowledge that I did not have before.
I am now 3 days into Phase 2 – Keyword research and analysis etc but will leave that for another post.

- Anu

I’m using my interns to create an entire Online Marketing Course using the exact same principles and techniques I use with small business and corporate clients every day. If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, signup to my email list using the form below. I’m not going to spam you with crazy “magic bullet” and “google cash” offers. I will only send you email every now and again about techniques and products I actually use (there’s a small handful), and later this year my Online Marketing Course when it’s available.

It’s been just over 2 months since I announced my Online Marketing Internships, and today LaShae’s going to update us on her progress in what I call “Phase 2″. I haven’t really talked a lot publicly about the way I’ve been training all 3 interns, but I have a special 4 phase process that I use to work with clients and their web sites. The 4 phases cover everything necessary to make any web site successful, and really (to me) there are no secrets here. The problem is if you haven’t done the work, and don’t have the experience, finding out what you need to know will take a couple years of trial and error and a couple thousand blog posts. I’m circumventing all that and teaching the interns how to take a brand new empty web site to successful money making web site in 5 months.

Here’s LaShae talking about what she’s learned in Phase 2:

LaShae again, with an update on Phase 2 of the intern program.

In Phase 1 I talked about learning how to set-up a wordpress site so it readily ranks in the search engines and hopefully gets on the first page of the SERPS, so people find you. I also talked about how to make sure your WordPress sites were secure, so when the search engines do begin ranking you and you’re getting traffic, your site loads quickly and is available.

So how do you get ranked on the first page of search results by the different search engines?

That is what Phase 2 – Competitive Analysis helps uncover.

The first thing to determine is which keyword phrase or phrases you want to rank for in the search engines. JT walks through the process in How to SEO. I used the same basic concept to locate 3 specific keyword phrases to target on my intern site.

Finding the keyword phrases for my site was decidedly more complicated due to the competitive nature of the CPA (Click Per Action) market I was entering.

So JT and I both located 3 keyword phrases each. After he put the phrases through the paces using a paid SEO tool (we’ll reveal later), he determined that our phrases would be extremely hard to rank for in the search engines. He then went on to locate 3 other keyword phrases using the same paid tool.

After the keyword phrases were decided upon, I began the full competitive analysis.

First, I completed an SEO competitive analysis, looking at rank on the first page of google search results, google pagerank, alexa ranking, backlinks, title, description, url and heading for each of the competitors on the first page of search results for each of the 3 keyword phrases.

There are tools, both paid and free, that can do this for you in an instant, but knowing how to do it manually is helpful. It provided me with information I would never get from a tool. It gave me an opportunity to view each of the pages in my browser and poke around on them looking at site design, layout, useability, appropriateness related to the keyword phrases, as well as the level of interaction and personality of the site.

Next I did even more competitive analysis this time for traffic statistics using free services online to learn how and where visitors were most likely coming to the site from and where they were going after leaving the site. I also looked at the demographics of the traffic – age range, income levels and education levels.

Using yet another free service, I learned that many of the competitors were using adwords to get traffic to their sites. And I learned whether they offered advertising directly on their sites and what the general ad sizes were on the sites.

Still, even with all this information, what did it mean for my assigned site?

Honestly not a whole lot, at first.

Initially it felt like information overload. And it was in many ways. However, without doing the competitor analysis, I might have spent months trying to find a way to get rankings and traffic in a niche that relies heavily on more than just SEO for traffic and conversions.

As it turns out, this niche is definitly suited to a long term plan far outside the scope of the 5 month intern program.

This sounds like a lot of time and energy to take researching. And it’s worth it to spend the time and energy up front, before spending any money, to figure out what the odds of ranking in the search engines are for your keywords.

Learning how to do both the data gathering and how to interpret the data is priceless and will certainly help me to use any paid tool I chose to use in the future.

What I know now about the CPA market is that it will take a year or more to unseat and outrank most of the sites in the top 10 on the search results pages, using an SEO strategy. That’s not unusual in the case of competitive and aggressive niches. It’s also not useful in meeting the objectives JT has set for the intern program.

It’s okay to change direction and it’s easier to do before money and months and months of time have been invested.

I specifically chose a market with lots of competition because I knew it would get JT to go deeper into his process and that means we all win in the end.

I learned how to chose appropriate keyword phrases to target. How to determine whether those keyword phrases are good or bad targets based on what other sites have done to target the same phrases. I learned how to determine the general source of competitors traffic and general demographic information about the visitors coming to their sites. I know how to do all this using free services to gather data. I also have a better understanding of how to interpret that data. The data doesn’t look or feel as overwhelming as it did before.

I’d say all in all Phase 2 is the most frustrating simply because it determines the strategy you’ll use for your site. And reading the data accurately truly determines if your strategy is destined for failure or success.

Since the internship is teaching interns how to make new sites profitable using SEO strategies, by the time you’re reading this I’ll have chosen another site to work on.

It will still be competitive enough to take JT deep into his mental knowledge databanks, while meeting the time constraints and strategy objectives of the intern program.

Stay tuned for the next update to see what happens.

LaShae talked about using different tools and methods for research, and one of the purposes for my intern program is document my 4 Phase program for success so later in 2010 I can make it available for anyone that wants to learn. If you’ve read any of my hundreds of posts on this site, you know my penchant not only for detail, but for complete and unabashed honest. I’m not one of those crazy IM gurus writing a 16 page emotional sales letter trying to hype and sell you on my “latest greatest” thing.

I’m using my interns to create an entire Online Marketing Course using the exact same principles and techniques I use with small business and corporate clients every day. If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, signup to my email list using the form below. I’m not going to spam you with crazy “magic bullet” and “google cash” offers. I will only send you email every now and again about techniques and products I actually use (there’s a small handful), and later this year my Online Marketing Course when it’s available.

Time for an update on my participation in the HAHD Challenge. I have 16 published and approved articles in the challenge, and 84 to go. I submitted 10 articles in this last batch, and all were approved. This time around I was luck enough to achive the coveted “Platimum Author” status with Ezine Articles. I’m told that this status cannot be purchased for any amount of money and only a very few EA authors ever achieve it. I’m been writing all my life, and this is a great honor. I’m going to continue to post my list of articles until we reach 100, so here they are for this batch…

Read my Guide to Article Directory Promotion to learn more about the benefits of article submission and more about Ezine Articles.

14 HAHD Published Posts

Article #100: eBay Quality Click Pricing Model: Good or Bad?

Article #99: Free Ways to Build More Backlinks

Article #98: Become a Blogging Good Samaritan

Article #97: How to Create a Checklist for Switching Themes

Article #96: What Did I do to Make Money today?

Article #95: The Importance of Pillar Articles

Article #94: HTC Hero Android Cell Phone Review

Article #93: Samsung BD P3600 Review

Article #92: No Web Site or Blog Should Be Without a Contact Form

Article #91: How to Build High Quality Backlinks by Guest Blogging

Article #90: 9 More Ways to get Juice from Blog Comments

Article #89: Change Change a Theme Change Search Engine Positions

Article #88: Can Bing Bring Your Web Site Back from the Dead?

Article #87: Does Google Hate Datafeedr WordPress Affiliate Stores?

Article #86: How to Build Your Own Authority Page

Article #85: 15 Ways to Save Water and Conserver Energy

Article #84: Polybutylene Piping or Blue Poly Problems

I didn’t think I would be introducing another Online Marketing Intern so soon, but I was persuaded by this applicant to make an exception. I had Bill Field interview her, and he was as impressed with her responses as I was from her initial application. Without further ado, I introduce online marketing intern Anu Pillai:

A little about me. My name is Anu. Home is in a quiet neighborhood in the Northern Virginia suburbs of the DC Metro area. I am in my early forties and have two children. The oldest is 21. He finished college and joined the army and is now in Afghanistan. The younger one is 13 and in middle school.

Grew up in tropical India in a coastal city in the south and completed my education there with Masters’ in English Literature, HR Management and Application Development. I am a Management Consultant by profession and run my own consulting company.  We do all manners of projects that are HR related from the Fortune 500s to midsized companies.  I lived the consulting lifestyle with the long hours and constant travel until about the beginning of 2008. I decided I wanted a different lifestyle, one that would let me work from home and spend time with family. Since then I have taken a break from real work, one where I get dressed, get into a car and drive miles to sit down at client place and open up my laptop to work or attend meetings. I have spent the past couple years exploring options, considering a complete career change, one that would let me work from home.
Yes, my work is interesting and the money is very good. However I have done this for nearly 20 years and it is no longer the driving passion it once was. I would eventually like to get away from Management Consulting and make a full time income from my various blogs. (Wouldn’t we all?

I have been exploring internet marketing and blogging now since 2007.  I am fascinated with the amount of knowledge that is out there. Reading is a passion, an obsession if you will and to me the internet appears to be this vast library of books. There are all these really wonderful blogs that are both informative and entertaining. What really surprises me is that people are making good money on the internet. I was raised with the notion that one has to excel at education to be able to have a profession that helps you make good money. The internet explosion and the successful bloggers that I have read about dispel that myth soundly.

Everything I know about internet marketing and blogging I learnt by surfing, reading and from forums. I love reading, writing, cooking, eco living and blogging and hope to combine my interests and begin a new career online. Of course, I will still have to pay the bills and keep the home fires burning, so I need to be successful at this or get back to being away from home 5 days a week.

The internship came along at the right moment. It interested me for various reasons. While I know how to install WordPress, tweak themes and plugins, write some PHP code and launch a good looking blog, I never really learnt or know well how to monetize. Additionally, all of this knowledge came from 3 plus years and hundreds of hours of surfing, reading dozens of books on the subject and breaking down any number of blogs and themes and rebuilding them again. I also know there is a lot more to learn in other areas as well before I can be successful. When I emailed JT a few days ago after stumbling on his blog, it was with the hope that I would be able to reduce this long curve and gain knowledge faster and have the opportunity to learn from someone who is successful at it.

Another thing that attracted me to this internship was JT’s obvious willingness to take on interns and give generously of his time. I have not seen much of that in my surfing and exploring online.

To everyone that is reading this, Good Luck with your own online journeys! Come back and visit, I will be posting updates regularly.
Cheers, Anu

You can track all her activities on the main Online Marketing Internships page.

I hope my helpful WP plugins for content and layout are handy for you as they have been for me! I was writing out some lesson posts for my Online Marketing Interns, and had to list out some plugins that would help them that they may not have used yet. I’m not a big fan of having tons of WordPress plugins installed. Plugins can have conflicts with other plugins. They can slow down your blog. Every time WordPress loads it has to check ALL plugins in the plugin diretory (whether activated or not) just to see which ones are on. Next it has to filter through each active one just to see if it has to do something before it renders a page. If your blog is slow, deactivate all plugins and see how much faster it is. Then reactivate them one by one to see which one is the culprit.

Having said all that, I usually can’t get away with less than 12-18 plugins installed per site. My main site has almost 3 dozen+ plugins installed at any given time. I’m going to give you some additional plugins that can really help you organize and plan and maintain your blog, just realize your mileage may vary – and only install the ones you think you will REALLY use. Don’t be the guy that installs everything just to check it out, and then just leaves them all installed. WordPress itself only has 13 database tables on a default install. Sometimes plugins create their own database tables for their options and data. I once had a client that had 48 database tables for his wordpress site because of all the plugin he installed over the years, half of which he was no longer using.

Backend Plugins

Broken Link Checker: I don’t use this in all my sites, but over time links get broken and this plugin can help. It monitors when people click on links going outside your site that are broken, and broken images. You get notified in the dashboard when you have a broken link. If nothing more, this plugin is handy because if you have affiliate links anywhere on your site and they break, this plugin will tell you the next time you login to the dashboard.

Pending Review: If you have people writing and submitting content for your review, or if you’re scheduling posts for your review later – this will give you a list in the dashboard.

Dashboard Scheduled Posts: This plugin lists your scheduled posts, great if you’re using WP Robot or datafeedr to stack up posts for you to rewrite and publish. I believe the current 2.9 WP dashboard shows you recent drafts, I don’t know how that compares to this.

Scheduled Posts Calendar: Maybe you have posts scheduled for the month and you’re more of a visual person. This plugin provides a calendar and shows all of your scheduled posts throughout the month.

Cross Linker: Cross Linker is a great plugin because it boost your blog “inlinks” automatically. Let’s say you are selling an ebook with a custom workout. Add the keyword “workout” in crosslinker and the page you want it to go to on your site. Then every time you use the word “workout” in a post it will automatically link your landing page. You just give the plugin a list of words and pages you want it to cross link, and it will do all the work for you.

Go Codes: Need to add an affiliate link, and you want to track how many times people click on it and you don’t want everyone to see your crazy referral code and URL? Ever wonder how everyone else is doing it? Go Codes! Enter what you want the redirect to be, and what the affiliate URL is, and whether you want it tracked or not and voila! you get site.com/go/link!

Layout Plugins

Privacy Page: Honestly you really don’t need a plugin for this – you could (and should) create this page on your own. Try the plugin, see what it generates, and then copy the text and make your own privacy page, and deactivate and remove the plugin, lol. Why do you need a privacy page? Adsense, eBay, and nearly every affiliate program out there requires that your have one to promote their products.

Breadcrumb NavXT: I’ve been creating and maintaining web sites for 15 years, and I still don’t understand why WordPress and most modern CMS system don’t have better navigation. If google isn’t a clue, EVERY SINGLE PAGE on your web site should have what we call “breadcrumbs” at the top. It gives visitors a way “home” at all times and it shows where they are in your site (if you have multiple levels or sub-pages). Users expect that. The biggest sites have it – why shouldn’t you? There is NOTHING wrong with having redundant navigation in your header, sidebars, footer, and breadcrumbs – so long as it doesn’t clutter your site and make it more confusing.

WP PageNavi: The last thing your blog needs is to have those nasty “previous” and “next” post links on your homepage and single post pages. Lester Chan’s WP PageNavi plugin adds a bottom page navigation more like google’s. This doesn’t work automatically – you have to edit your wordpress home or index.php and single.php theme files on your own.

Subscribe to Comments: If you haven’t already, install and activate the “Subscribe to Comments” plugin. When I comment on a site if I can’t “subscribe” to any replies to my comment, I just get really annoyed.

Customizing Your Theme

One thing that many wordpress web site owners don’t do is much more than create blog posts or an about page. I’ve written articles about the main things you should understand about your WordPress site(s) and customizing or creating main theme pages. I advise you start here first: Hacking WordPress Template Files

And then work your way through these:

Fixing your search results page: Custom Search Results Page and Template
Fixing your 404 Error page: Create a Custom 404 Error Page
Fixing your navigation: 10 Ways to improve your navigation
Fixing Categories: 9 things you can do with Categories
Fixing Tags: Hacking WordPress Tags and Hacking tag pages
Fixing your comments: Rock Star Comments in WordPress in 12 Steps

I’ve been writing reviews of products for affiliate and niche marketing for quite some time, and the one I probably refer people to the most is datafeedr. Datafeedr is two things, a WordPress plugin that creates an affiliate product store, and an online service to manage datafeedrs.

This post is part of the WordPress Affiliate Store series.

What is a datafeed? Let’s say I’m the US retailer Best Buy. I want to be able to allow online affiliates to promote my products, and I know that just providing text links and banner ads may not be enough. It may not be enough, because most affiliate and niche based marketers like to link directory to products and product pages whenever possible (it increases conversions). So I have my IT guys create a text file with all the products for sale at Best Buy, and this file is what we call a “datafeed”. Then I have my marketing people make this “datafeed” available through an online affiliate house, like Commission Junction, Google Affiliate Network, LinkShare, or ShareASale.

So, let’s say I own a web site and I want to use this “datafeed” to put images and descriptions of Best Buy products on my site. How do I do it? If you contact some of the affiliate networks they’ll make the datafeeds available, either by sending them to you in FTP, email, or allowing you to download them. So now you’ve got this raw data file, probably in CSV format – now what? You need a way to manage it. There are some scripts you can buy or download that will import datafeeds and manage them.

My experience that there is no “datafeed standard” and that your mileage may vary. What I mean is, the datafeed from Best Buy might work fine, but the one from Guitar Center might not. That’s because one company might have thumbnail images, and another only large images. Maybe one datafeed has 10 word descriptions, and another 1,000. No matter how good the software is, no two datafeeds are the same – and every scenario can’t be anticipated.

What datafeedr does is take the datafeeds from a merchant, they “massage” the datafeed to make it usable with common elements, and then put it into the “factory” – or the online portion of datafeedr. Once in the “factory” you can choose products from different merchants, create categories, and setup your own affiliate store. Datafeedr now has tens of thousands of merchants across dozens of affiliate houses, and millions and millions of products to choose from.

Once you create your affiliate store in the datafeedr factory, then you download your stores flat file, install and activate the “datafeedr WordPress plugin” and you can import that store inside of your WordPress powered web site or blog. The power of datafeedr is not only the ability to create and manage your own affiliate store, but the ability to import and manage it inside of WordPress.

If you’re a regular reader of my blog then you already know Online Marketing Intern Bill Field. He was the first one I selected in my Online Marketing Internship. He’s been through a lot in the last two months, working every day on his assigned web site. One of the things he was asked to do was setup a datafeedr affiliate store, so I asked him to write a review of that process (having never seen datafeedr before). I didn’t even explain to him what a datafeed was before it started, I just pointed him to my WordPress Affiliate Store series, and told him to get started.

Here’s his review of datafeedr:

As I’ve worked as an intern over these past couple months John has introduced me to various new techniques for SEO, site design, site optimization and affiliate networks. The most recent lesson was how to integrate Datafeedr into my assigned site.

One thing I’ll say before going any further, when you sign up for Datafeedr make sure you watch the introduction videos. They offer a lot of help and answer a lot of questions you might have. You might also want to browse through the support forums and check out questions other people are asking. They do have a tips and tricks section on the support forum that comes in handy. I did not see any questions in the support forum that were unanswered. It appears the support team is very responsive to all questions asked in the forum.

Datafeedr is a pay per month service that gives you access to hundreds of merchants and literally thousands and thousands of products. It doesn’t matter what you’re promoting on your site, it’s pretty much guaranteed you’ll find a merchant with the product on Datafeedr. When I first logged into Datafeedr to select my merchants and products I was overwhelmed with the process. There were just so many merchants available and I had to ensure I only chose those that we were approved for. Plus the number of products offered is staggering.

The first step is to select your merchants. This is a fairly easy process. You just need to be sure that you only select merchants that you are approved for. If you choose a merchant you’re not approved for, you won’t be getting any commissions for any products you sell. Overall, choosing the merchants was an easy process, even for a newbie like myself.

After you’ve selected your merchants the next step is to choose the products you want included in your datafeed. This was actually the most time consuming part of using Datafeedr for me. Because the site I’m assigned to covers such a broad range of products I had to use some pretty extensive search queries to sort through all the merchants and find the various products I was interested in. The search function in Datafeedr is very thorough and allows you to narrow down the list of products to exactly what you want to promote. It took me awhile to get really comfortable with the search function and how to properly narrow down my list of products. But once I’d spent some time with it I became more comfortable and was able to narrow down my list of products to exactly what I wanted.

After you’ve selected all your products you simply download the feed, which is just a text file, and then import that feed into the Datafeedr plugin installed on your site. From there it’s just a few simple steps and you have a nice looking, well stocked store. For a more thorough explanation of Datafeedr and walk through of the setup on your website you can visit John’s overview here – Series on building a WordPress affiliate store.

I’m still tweaking my store for layout. I just want to change the look of the posts a little bit. But my store is running and I now have thousands of products to offer up to my visitors. If I was to try and add all these products by hand, it would take years and years to do.

I have no qualms about recommending Datafeedr to anyone. I didn’t even know what a datafeed was before the lesson John gave me. But reading his post on how to integrate Datafeedr I was able to successfully build, import and setup my own store with thousands of products. I did have to ask for help from John a couple times, but they were minor problems that should not preclude anyone from thinking about using Datafeedr. Keep in mind, I’m totally new to data feeds and except for those couple minor problems I was able to get my store up and running by reading John’s review of Datafeedr and viewing the beginner’s videos on the Datafeedr website.

It’s quite amazing to think that a person like me, with no prior experience to data feeds, can, within an hour, have a store added to my WordPress website and offer such a wide variety of products to my visitors.

To see Bill’s work in action – check out his assigned Online Marketing Internship web site: Best Gifts For

If you’re interested in creating a WordPress Affiliate Store or Niche web site I strongly suggest you check out datafeedr. In addition, be sure to read the rest of the posts in the WordPress Affiliate Store series here on jtpratt.com. *Disclaimer: if you follow that link and signup I will get an affiliate commission for recommending you to the service. That’s how we pay the bills around here.

You’ll see in my right sidebar on every page of this site is an ad for my eBay plugin WP-Easybay. I wrote about the WP-Easybay launch last year. I just wanted to take the time to once again explain why I like this plugin so much.

WP-Easybay was created because I couldn’t find an eBay plugin online to do what I wanted it to do in WordPress. I had been endorsing BayRSS for about a year and then the programmer that authored it just seemed to disappear. There was no support and he didn’t even pay his affiliates commissions the last 6 months. Read my archives – I no longer endorse anything from that guy. There was always PHPBay, which is very popular online – but there were two things I didn’t like about it, the cost, and the fact it used the “IonCube loader” which encrypted the source code, and your web hosting server had to support that. At the time not all web hosts had it loaded, but many if not most do now.

Along came Fredrik Ahlen, a programmer with a promising eBay plugin called “UEAL”, and he asked me if I wanted to try it. I did, and then asked a string of questions, can you make it do this, and this, and this. He did add nearly all my suggestions, and a year later we actually decided to officially sell it through clickbank.

Believe it or not, we’re not through with the features yet – the original list I wrote is not yet complete. We have some things planned for 2010 for plugin that will simply AMAZE you! I’ll let you Visit the WP-Easybay site if you want to view the current features.

What I wanted to talk about in this post was why many people end up buying the WP-Easybay plugin, and their experience with it once they get it installed. Recently, I was asked through the contact form of the web site if the plugin would list auctions from an eBay store. I created this test page to show her it would. She bought the plugin 5 minutes later, and send me this testimonial the next day:

I had been searching for quite some time for an Ebay WP Plugin for my WordPress site. I needed something that would specifically target my Ebay Store items and most software that I found did not have the capability to do that. When I came across WP-EasyBay
I emailed the creator of the product and he replied within a few minutes. He actually did a test page for me using my Ebay Store url and it worked like a charm!

It is rare to find someone that stands behind their product and goes above and beyond to answer questions, and seeing exactly how the plugin would display my store items sold me for sure! I will be adding this plugin to my WordPress site and plan to utilize it on my other WP sites as well. It is easy to use and can be manipulated in so many different ways – It is actually far more versatile than many of the other Ebay WP Plugins on the market and very reasonably priced! You will not regret purchasing it as the possibilities are endless with this awesome plugin!

Thanks so much,
Kim H. in Missouri

http://stores.ebay.com/Personalized-Party-Creations

Sometimes when I get a testimonial like this – I forget to pass it along. I like a product that I don’t have to sell, because my customers sell it for me. That tells me that I did a good job getting the right features in it, documenting it, and supporting it. I like WP-Easybay because I designed it to be the most versatile eBay plugin on the market. Well, ok – Fred does do all the programming work (lol), but I did write the spec, ask for the features, and write the documentation (and do the support).

Click here to visit WP-Easybay.com

Since I first announced participation in the HAHD challenge – or Hundred Articles submitted to Ezine Articles in 100 days I’ve had a lot of comments ranging from “I don’t have the time” to “I can write an article in the time it takes to shower, that’s easy”.

Of course when you submit the articles it can take 3-5 days to get approved, and this challenge started on Jan 11th, but so far I only have 5 articles actually published – but more are pending review.

Here are the ones that have been published so far:

Article #100: eBay Quality Click Pricing Model: Good or Bad?

Article #99: Free Ways to Build More Backlinks

Article #98: Become a Blogging Good Samaritan

Article #97: How to Create a Checklist for Switching Themes

Article #96: What Did I do to Make Money today?

If you’re interested in taking part – it’s still not too late! Read my Original post about the HAHD challenge. Another great reference is my Guide to Article Marketing. Get writing!

There’s a new plugin called “Newsletter Booster” I’m reviewing today which is an Opt-In WordPress plugin with a twist. I think that you’ll like it, I’d hadn’t seen one that performed this function until I was told about this one.

All the online and Internet marketing gurus have a “list”. They spam all their unwitting list members with all kinds of garbage offers for crap that makes them rich for promoting it. It’s all hype, hype, hype – and mostly crap, crap, crap. They count on people that are down and out looking for any way to make cash online and prey on this particular demographic with long and very drawn out emotional please designed to “convert” to believers so that they will by the “next best thing” to make them rich online. If you’re getting the picture that I pretty much hate listbuilding and the “squeeze page” aspect of online marketing – I do. It’s only because those products never deliver what they promise at all – because if they were worth anything in the first place they wouldn’t have to hype it sooooo much. For gosh sakes, even the slap chop didn’t have as much hype as some of the garbage going around online.

Now that I’ve said that – let’s go over some of the positive aspects of listbuilding. Believe it or not, email based newsletters are still a viable source of marketing. It is, and it always will be. People generally don’t mind email they signed up for (unless they’re idiots that signup for everything), and you can’t beat targeted marketing. For example, I just signed up for AWeber last month to start managing my email based lists. You can find the signup form on the home of this blog. The majority of my visitors come to this site for one of two things – WordPress, or something to do with Online Marketing. I don’t feel a bit bad about building a new list through my site, because I won’t be sending the latest “Cash Cow Money System” garbage most sites do. I’ll be sending real tools, with real reviews, real results, and some of my own ebooks and products that I’ll be launching in 2010. Damn, now I sound like a hyped up marketer!

Ok, back to this plugin and why I like it so much. “Newsletter Booster” is a WordPress plugin that’s so simple you’ll kick yourself for not thinking of it before. Check out this image:

The image above is my comment form on this site. It’s been updated and you can see in the image above there’s a new checkbox entitled “please add me to your newsletter” and a spam disclaimer. You’re probably thinking – that’s it? I have to tell you – this could be the most profitable thing I’ll do in all of 2010! And here’s why…

This site has been online 2 1/2 years so far. I have 262 posts, 33 pages, and 2,795 comments to date. If I had had this plugin installed 2 1/2 years ago I could have potentially had 2,795 people on a email list. That would have been an incredible targeted list for people looking for WordPress products (free and premium), and honest online marketing materials.

So, when I got my hot little hands on the Newsletter Booster plugin the other day here’s what happened.

Here’s the main configuration screen of the plugin admin. You can choose whether to activate the checkbox on the comment form, the registration form (or both). I don’t take signups to this blog – so I chose to use the comment form option. If you had a membership site, it’s good to know this option is here. You can also choose whether or not to “pre-check” the box (not a good idea, and pretty shady I might add). You can choose to ignore suspected spam (and add them to the list anyway), I left that unchecked.

Next you can choose to only signup immediately approved comments (people that have commented before that are approved), I chose not to check this because I approve every single comment in this site by hand anyway (I trust no one, lol). Next I chose to be emailed every time somebody signs up for the newsletter. You can choose whether or not registered users see the signup checkbox, but for me (on this blog) I have no registered users so I left it blank, and the last option on this screen is submit to API.

Newsletter Booster has the ability to collect emails on it’s own inside the plugin. You can’t email them from the plugin, but you can export the emails and import them into another tool for emailing if you’d like. The API functionality is great because it allows you another method for collecting email signups for a marketing list, and like I have in this example – just enter the URL to your list formatted correctly and the signups with go directly to your service, like AWeber, MailChimp, etc.

The next tab in the plugin admin is the control of the comment form:

You have the ability to have the checkbox for newsletter signup above the comment field, or below it. You have total control over the pitch line and the disclaimer text and style. You can highlight the signup area by using html or style code before and after the checkbox and text. You can control the exact same things if you choose to place the checkbox on your registration form – I won’t show that screenshot since it’s exactly the same options as the comment box.

The signup tab shows the last 25 newsletter signups:

It records the email address, name, time, comments, post, comment ID, and IP address. There’s an export tab where you can export all signups in a CSV file, and it even saves a log. The log is handy because it shows whether or not the signup was forwarded properly (if you use the API feature), and you can see if a visitor has been signed up once – and checks the box again – it just says “[email address] has already been registered” – so you don’t have to worry about duplicates.

So, if you want to know my opinion of this plugin let me show you one last image:

I installed this plugin yesterday. Today I have 11 newsletter signups. That means by the end of the month I should have about 300 new subscribers to my list. Hopefully I’ll have 3,000+ by the end of the year. I just love premium plugins that do a job and do it well, but for $37 you can’t beat this one with a stick. If you’re building a brand, or a following – this plugin is a must have.

*Disclaimer: This is a premium plugin. If you click on the link below and buy it I will get a commission for the sale. That’s how we pay the bills around here.

Click Here to Get Newsletter Booster

As you read in the last post, just days ago over the weekend I started the HAHD challenge, writing 100 articles in 100 days to submit to Ezine Articles. This first day I submitted 2 articles, and since then I’ve submitted 5 more – that are awaiting review.

Here are the articles I’ve written to date that have been published for the HAHD challenge:

Article #100: eBay Quality Click Pricing Model: Good or Bad?

Article #99: Free Ways to Build More Backlinks

If you’re interested in taking part – it’s still not too late! Read my Original post about the HAHD challenge. Another great reference is my Guide to Article Marketing. Get writing!