Article marketing can generate massive amounts of authority and backlinks for your web site or blog. You can get more exposure, more traffic, and this is something you can do for FREE! I have a story I often tell about the largest diet affiliate program on Clickbank. Out of $12 million dollars paid out in the last year to affiliates, 95% of the commissions were paid to less than a few dozen people (from thousands of affiliates). When surveyed, the main difference between the successful and those that didn’t earn much – it was article marketing. Nearly all of the handful of successful affiliate marketers had performed article marketing to build links. The shocker is they all submitted from 100-500 articles EACH for their target sites!

Have you ever submitted 100 articles? Odds are you never submitted more than a dozen or more (if that) for the same project. I’ve had my Ezine Articles account for about 2 years now, and I’ve only submitted 40 articles in all. I’ve received over 99,199 views for them to date, imagine my exposure if I would have submitted 140?

I’m going to do it, I’m committing to the 100 articles in 100 days. Follow the link above to signup – blog about it, tweet about it, comment below about it – and follow my blog as I’ll be writing about it every step of the way!

Read my Guide to Article Marketing if you’re ready to get started! It will teach you all about how article marketing works, and the best ways to write and submit content!

Building Quality Backlinks is easy when you follow my diy tutorial guide on how to promote your blog or web site with article directories!

There are tons of ways to promote your web site and blog, and I outline quite a few of them in my Link Building Cheat Sheet. In this guide we’re going to focus on the art of “article marketing”, or submitting original content to article directories in exchange for promotion and free linkbuilding.

What is an Article Directory?

An article directory is a repository for people who write content. But it’s not a web site for “budding writers” per se. It’s for people who have something to promote. It’s a “quid quo pro” (this for that) arrangement. The owner of the article directory needs content to draw visitors. You need to build links across the web to get better search rankings so you can get traffic to your web site or blog. If you write quality content and follow their guidelines and rules, the article directories will let you publish there. And at the end of each article you can put a short bio as author, and include 3 or 4 links to landing pages of your choice. That’s the exchange. In addition, article directories allow anyone to “republish” the content as long as the title, body, and links are kept intact. So in addition to getting links in the article diretory in exchange for your content, you also get them across the web if many sites republish your articles as well.

Article Directory Rules and Guidelines

There are hundreds of article directories across the web that you can submit your articles to, and each one has it’s own rules and guidelines. I’m going to go over the most important things you should know about submitting articles to one of the more reputable and well known article directories EzineArticles.com.

EzineArticles.com is one of the most well known aticle directories on the web. They have a google pagerank or 6 and an Alexa rating of 143. Not bad for an article directory to be in the top 200 web sites online! Any one can sign up for membership – it’s free. They get hundreds of thousands of visitor’s per day, and all the articles are read and approved by hand by living breathing editors. There is a list of very important things you need to know before submitting your first article:

• You must be 100% sole author of the content you submit
• You cannot use any direct affiliate links. You can direct readers to your site and give them an affiliate link there, but not directly in an article
• No public domain or “private label rights” content
• Must have proper English grammer, spelling, and punctuation
• Nothing obscene or adult can be used
• Cannot contain content that violates the law or is libelous in any way
• Cannot be a duplicate of content you already submitted
• Must not contain excessive bold keyword and phrases, bolding is limited to headings and subheadings
• Must be unique and share your expertise, like tips, strategies, techniques, analysis, opinions and commentary
• You cannot use more than 5 lines of quoted or sourced material

In addition to those basic rules (most of which are common sense) there are some “formatting” rules as well you need to know:

• You can’t use all caps in your article title
• You can’t use quotes in your title
• You can’t end your title with a period
• You can’t use excessive punctuation, you get one ! or ? at a time
• You can’t use your web site name or URL in a title
• Titles must be two unique words or more
• Your author name must be your actual name
• Articles must be at least 250 words, but less than 5,000 words
• Do not repeat your article title in the article body
• Copyrights must be at the bottom of the article
• The article body must deliver what is promised in the article title
• Too much blatant self promotion (in the body) and the article will be tossed
• The HTML tags you can use are pretty basic for formatting only: bold, italic, underline, pre, ol, ul, and li
• Everything else is not allowed, such as Javascript, images, font size colors and changes, H heading tags, or the HR horizontal rule

How to submit articles

The first time I submitted an article I made the mistake of using quotes in the title. It also had a bunch of URL’s in the body (I didn’t know you couldn’t do that). Then they made me remove the excessive bold and italics I had, and then I think finally it went through. The next article I submitted was rejected because it sounded to much “like a blog post”. I had to rewrite it and remove references eluding to other posts and parts of my blog. I got nailed once for inadvertantly using an affiliate link, and another time because I linked to my own blog in the body of the article when it should have been in the footer. I’ve had some articles only have one problem I need to revise before it was approved, and others have 6 different revisions. I seem to learn something every time I submit, and the last so many I’ve submitted have sailed right through.

My basic advice to you is to put a lot of thought into your articles. Make them keyword rich in both the titles and the body, and use good linkbait in the title and the first few sentences of the body. Write compelling, authoritative, detailed articles of at least 500-1,000+ words. I’ve read so many articles that were just utter crap. A good example was when I was looking for some good mobile or cell phone articles, and the only ones I seemed to find were trash that just reiterated the spec sheet of a phone and how hip and cool it was. There was no opinion, no real world experience, and absolutely nothing to lead me to believe that the author was an expert in much of anything.  These are articles with no real value.

EzineArticles has also been cracking down on what they call  “derivitave content”.  That’s where you rehash an article and turn it into many different versions just for the purpose of submitting to the directory.  You don’t want this, they have derivitave content filters in place now to find these articles and remove them from the directory.  In addition, they found that 90% of the derivitave content they found was only 300-400 words and poor quality.

I want to take this opportunity (once again) to remind you that you’re building a “brand”. You want someone to read your article and think “wow – they really know what the hell they’re talking about, I want to read more by them…”. Don’t think of article submission as an opportunity to just “build links”. It’s an entire online marketing mission to show people how strong your “brand” really is. You building a reputation as an author that will compell readers to want to read your byline and find out what else you have to offer. You have an opportunity to do this from both the Ezine Articles site, but also from all the sites that republish your content. And the better your content is – the more sites that will want to republish it.

It isn’t easy to make sure your article contains all the elements required for success. But, as usual – I will give you a checklist to consider:

Before submission your article should:

• Conform to the article directory guidelines
• Contain a keyword rich catchy (but not lengthy) title enticing readers to click and publishers to want to republish you
• Have a body that begins with a keyword rich 2-3 sentence synopsis of what the article is about and what makes it useful
• Be very detailed and compelling tip, tutorial, opinion, analysis, technique, or strategy outlining your expertise
• Be straighforward giving detailed action points readers can put into use
• Have a very subtle hook towards the end compelling people to read your bio (which could be as simple as “to see all the pictures/audio/video associated with the original version of this article click here)
• Contain a very well thought out bio with at least 3-4 keyword laden links leading to important landing pages you need to direct traffic to
• Contain enough keywords and linkbait (on a popular topic) to entice many site owners to republish your article

What to Expect from Article Directory Promotion

EzineArticle 3/2008 stats

All in all I have been very pleased with Article Directory promotion and what it’s done for me.   When I originally wrote this post over a year and a half ago – I’d only been using it for 6 weeks. The image to the left shows that for my 20 submitted articles to EzineArticles.com at the time over 2,500 people had read them. I had thought that was great since I’ve viewed many author profiles that have 4-5,000 views for 10 or less articles over the last 3-4 years. My 2,500+ views had been in less than 2 months. The stats say that 65 people have click my footer links back to one of my web sites, but more importantly my articles have been published 56 times. With at least 3 links in each footer, that means I built at least 150 backlinks to my sites – and that’s in addition to the original 60 backlinks in the footers right here on Ezine Articles. One time someone has emailed my article to a friend, and two people have “voted” for my articles (5 stars – w00t!).

EzineArticles 11/2009 stats

Now let’s see what the stats are 18 months later!  Wow!  My stats have really grown! 193 articles published, 90,000+ article views – I’d say this was a pretty good investment of my time!  And in my opinion, when you build these kinds of links they normally have a longer shelf-life than regular blog comments.

Now, a year and a half later – time has shown how effective of a tool that was.  The SERP’s for the links I built improved driving even more traffic to my site(s). I can give you a real world example of how it helped at least one of my sites right off the bat. On Feb 22nd, I submitted The Best Blonde Jokes as my 5th article to Ezine Articles. Under “Author Tools” in your profile, Ezine Articles provides some more detailed stats on everything you’ve published. It’s here where you can get numbers on the individual articles themselves. I checked for this article, and to date it’s been republished only 2 times. But those two times and the article here on Ezine Articles must’ve done something – because a very low activity web site I built the links for with this article came back to life from the grave. Check out these stats from my Wordpress dashboard:

My site Top Jokes rarely got more than 100 views per day (usually 10-20) and about a week after publishing the blonde joke article it came alive again out of the blue. I have nothing to attribute this growth to except for that lone article submission. I can’t say that this will happen every time for every article you submit and build links for, but over time your bound to have more success than failure.

It’s Easier Than You Think

You’re probably thinking that writing completely original content just to submit to article directories is a very tedious and time consuming task!  You’re right!  However, you can use existing articles you’ve already written on your own blog or web site and submit them to Ezine Articles and other article directories.  I’ve done this personally for a very long time, and there have been detractors that have screamed “duplicate content!” from the highest hill – and yet it has not affected me one Iota.

If you don’t believe me, read these quotes from the last Ezine Articles newsletter I received from article directory owner Christopher M. Knight:

“Let me be clear:  You SHOULD submit existing articles and content from your web site or blog”

“Repackaging Existing Articles On Your Website Now and Submitting Them To EzineArticles Does NOT Trigger Our Derivative Content Filters”

“Find a New Audience by Submitting Your Existing Content AND Your Brand New, Original Articles to EzineArticles.com”

It couldn’t be any clearer than that – could it?

Where else can I submit Articles?

Well, I’m glad you asked. Personally I only submit articles to Ezine Articles, GoArticles.com, and ArticleBlast.com.  Actually, the last so many I’ve done I’ve gotten REALLY lazy with and only submitted to Ezine Articles, but I really should follow up and submit to the other 2 as well. GoArticles is really lax with their submissions, it’s almost a free for all, and articles are published immediately when you click “submit”. Article Blast has at least a few basic requirements, but it’s very easy to submit to as well.

Here’s a list of the top 20 article directories according to Alexa ranking and pagerank.  Of course, you want to stay away from any of the ones that are NF! or that nofollow your links in the author byline box (rendering them useless).  If you want the full list, visit the Top 50 list of article directories – that’s where I took this top 15 list from.

Automated Article Submission?

Use that list wisely. Whatever you do, don’t get sucked into one of these hairbrained schemes (software or service) that spams your article to hundreds (or god-forbid thousands!) of directories at once. Look – you’re practically spamming your content if you do that and just plain devalueing it as well. Don’t write your own google penalty. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is, stick to submitting what you can manage and and handle by hand – don’t go automated.

How Many Articles Should I Submit?

This is the one well most people fall flat – and I have to admint that I haven’t taken advantage of article marketing nearly as much as I should have in the last year and a half.  I only have 38 articles listed in EzineArticles , and I should have a minimum of 150.  That’s about 2 a week.  Let me illustrate the difference between success and mediocrity with article marketing.  I read a post a few months back about the most successful diet program on Clickbank which had paid more than 12 million in commissions in a single calendar year.  Out of 2,600 affiliates the top 30 earned nearly all the commissions for that year.  When asked about their promotional methods, every single one had utilized article marketing and all had published from 150-500+ articles each.  That’s a lot of work, but that’s also a lot of commission!  It’s the difference between success and failure, and why usually only a small percentage of affiliates in any program or network make the bulk of the commissions.

If you have success promoting your web site or blog because of my “Guide to Article Marketing” – I’d like to hear about it. Have a question? Same thing – please comment now below!

This post is part of the Managing Wordpress More Effectively series.

I’ve long been a proponent of “original content”, and even thought a lot of the content within this web site is about setting up Wordpress powered affiliate stores, niche stores, and trying to make money with Wordpress, we all know that to be successful you must have completely original and unique content. There’s nothing worse than going to a site with 3 sentence posts and links to affiliate content. Then again, on a site rich with media and content – I don’t even seem to notice if they have affiliate links.

Insights might just be the best Wordpress plugins I’ve installed in a very long time. That’s saying a lot, because I’ve been on a roll lately gettig rid of old plugins that I no longer need. That coupled with the fact that Wordpress now does a lot of things out of the box that it didn’t used do – has meant that I’ve been able to remove and permanently delete at least a dozen plugins that were formerly a staple in every WP powered site that I owned.  This is why I’m so geeked about what it does…

It’s better if I show you an example.  I play guitar, and I have a blog about guitar gear called Guitar Review.  I put all kinds of guitar related things on that web site, and there was a time when I’d post videos I liked with information about certain guitar players.  I haven’t done that in a long time because it’s time consuming, I have soooo many blogs now, and lots of client work.  I just installed “Insights” on that blog and I’m going to take you through creating  a new post about Billy Gibbons – the guitar player from ZZ Top (whom I love!).

Adding Images

The insights dialogue box appears below your content box for each post.  I selected “image” and did a search for “Billy Gibbons, and got results from flickr.  I choose a Medium 500px picture I liked and clicked on it, and it auto-added it to my posts.  This works in either HTML or Visual Editor mode.  In settings you can adjust the amount of search results you want to get.  Keep in mind that the page doesn’t have to refresh, this is all Ajax and the search results come up in real-time on your new posts creation page as you’re writing!

Adding Video

In this example I clicked on “video” and searched for Billy Gibbons.  When you click on one of the videos it actually comes up above the search results, and you can play it to see if it’s what you want.  When you find a suitable video, just click “Add Video” and it automatically adds the code to your posts!  If you’ve ever had to find YouTube videos for your posts, you should immediately know what a time saver this is to be able to search, view, and add videos right from a post creation page!

Search Wikipedia, Google, News, Blogs, and Books

The ability to do research within a post now is just incredible.  You can search wikipedia, and add the links directly to your post quickly and easily. You can also search google, google news, or google blog search.  Of course these are all available invidually – but I think sometimes when you’re writing a posts you might do research strictly in google, and forgot about search just official news outlets or what bloggers have to say.  The one that got me was google book search.  This is a search that I just never perform, and there are nuggets of gold available in there you probably have no clue about.  Let me give you an example.

I did a quick search of  billy gibbons using the “books” option in insights and got these results.  The one from “Texas Monthly” seemed interesting so I clicked on it, and this is what popped up in a new window:

Check it out, it’s an article about ZZ Top from the “Texas Montly” magazine originally published in 1976 – when they were just starting to grow beards!  I was aware of the fact that google scanned in books for some libraries and universities – but when did they start scanning all sorts of old magazines?  A bunch of the results are from old guitar magazines as well!  I’m sorry, whatever your niche is – this is an awesome source for research and new content!

Finding Your Own Posts

One of the habits you should get into is regularly linking your past posts whenever possible.  It keeps people reading your blog for longer periods of time, it’s helpful in building backlinks for your site, and helps readers out too when you specifically link directly related posts that a “related posts plugin” might not pickup.  The only problem is – you have to FIND those posts!  And if you’re a prolific blogger the only hope you might have is searching your own blog!  I think that this one feature of Insights is worth having the plugin for alone.  I mean, the other features are AWESOME, but I would have downloaded the plugin for this single feature by itself.  On my example post I’ve been working with, I did a Search for Billy Gibbons to find my past posts about him in the Guitar Review blog – BAM there they were!  Not only can you click to add the link to your new posts, but you can also click to view, and click to “edit” the post, how awesome is that?

Conclusion

I love this plugin, I can’t say enough good things about it! It’s completely free, and I’ve seen plugins like this for sale before. It’s created by Vladimir Prevolac, view his other Wordpress Plugins. He’s also the creator of 18 other Wordpress plugins, including Theme Test Drive. He has 2 free WP themes for download as well. Thank you Vladimir, for the plugin I’ve been waiting for – for a very long time!  I didn’t even mention in the post that this plugin also has a “google maps” feature where you can add google maps to blog posts – making it even more valuable!

Download Insights Wordpress Plugin here

You can view the posts I created while writing this article here: Billy Gibbons:  Guitar Player of the Week

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

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

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!).

The World of Online Garage Sales

In Today’s economy people are trying to find new ways to make money as fast as people are selling this to try and generate cash. It’s no suprise that both eBay and Craigslist are favorite spots to do both of these with millions of visitors each and every day. You can cash in on this by building your own niche based “Craigslist”, quickly and easily. Craigslist capitalizes on “community” by being a (mostly) free classifieds based service allowing you to list and find things where you live.

I remember when I was a kid, (you know – back in the days when there was no cable and no Internet) one of the highlights of the day was when the newspaper was delivered. This was mainly because of the “classified ads”. That’s where you found pets people wanted to give away, jobs, items for sale, houses for rent, rummage sales, and used cars for sale. The way we live has changed, but the things we need have not. Now most people aren’t willing to pay $25-50 for a newspaper ad if they know about craigslist.

Why build Craigslist in Wordpress?

Some of you might be reading this and saying “there’s already a Craigslist – why would I want to build my own?”.

Let me give you a few pointers:

• The economy is bad and people want great deals
• Millions of people search for things locally daily
• People like simple – not complicated
• Google favors “blogs”
• Google favors (and is now targeting) ‘local’ content
• Visitors posting to a classifieds site FREE CONTENT for you!
• Charging money for some (or all) ads PROFIT!

I wrote a post awhile back called Local Web Sites Produce Consistent Income. Read it if you need some ideas, but it should be pretty easy to come up with your own ideas for turning Wordpress into a “classified ad” type of web site. I’ll even give you a few to get your brain thinking…

Membership club (Eagles, Moose, Biker club, Church, youth group, intermural sports, college fraternity or sorority, school alumni, camera, bird watching, sportsman, collectibles, etc), music or musicians, art or artists, rentals, housing, real estate, audio/video, video games or gamers, personals or dating, industrial or skilled tradesman, divorce, child support, therapy, support groups, volunteer or self-help groups, charities, and the list goes on and on and on…

I personally would pick something that you think you could get 500-1,000+ people per day to visit, something you personally know a lot about, something people search for now, and something that helps people find something they’re looking for. The whole idea her is to focus on ONE particular topic in a niche and just DOMINATE the hell out it. You don’t want to beat Craigslist at their own game. That would be futile. You want to own a niche in your local area.

Example: Gun Club – start the “Lake County Gun Club” site and setup categories for buying, selling, trading, certification classes, and events. Make posting in all categories free except buying/selling and charge $1 for each ad post. You have instant traffic and instant profit once you tell all the members. You could even call the local sporting goods store and charge them $50-$100 for a monthly ad. More profit (recurring). See how easy this is?

The Sitemile Classifieds Wordpress Theme

Now that I’ve sold you on the idea of your very own Wordpress Classifieds site, let me show you how it’s done. You might have thought that the best way to do this would be with a custom plugin. It’s true, that would be one way to do it – but a Theme is even better!

Enter the Sitemile Classifieds Wordpress Theme! This is more advanced than any Wordpress theme you’ve ever seen in the past. Normally you rely on a Wordpress theme to change the look and feel of your site by using graphics and CSS. Some more advanced (and premium) themes come bundles with plugins that do special things. Sitemile has actually gone the “extra mile” and created a theme that doe sthings you’ve maybe never seen before – especially without the use of any extra plugins!

These are just some of the features the Classifieds Wordpress theme has built in (without plugins):

• Custom fields for any classified site type
• Custom currency support
• Auto-delete posts longer than x days old
• Custom Fees for any category, sub-category
• Extra charge for “fetured” ads
• Post articles with ads
• Google Maps integration
• Google Analytics integration
• Paypal integration
• Plug and Play, install, setup, and use

I’ll show the setup of the theme in a second, but if you’re in a hurry to see a working demo Wordpress classified site right now, just click the picture below now…

How to Setup a Wordpress Classfied Site

Please keep in mind that everything I’m about to show you is a Premium Wordpress theme. All the features and functions that I’m about to show you are available with simple installation of the Sitemile Classifieds Theme.

First of all – the Classifieds Theme costs $39, and that’s cheaper than a boatload of premium themes I’ve seen. AND – all those themes only change the look and feel of Wordpress, most have few functions like this.

Once you download the Classifieds theme, you just upload it to your /wp-content/themes folder and activate it. Next, you have to proceed immediantly to the google maps site to Signup for a free API key.

If you don’t do this, when you visit your site you’ll get an error. If you try to use an API from another site (like I mistakenly did) you’ll get an error as well. Both look like this popup:

Once the theme is uploaded and activated you need to setup the options in your Wordpress dashboard. Click on the link in the bottom left of your sidebar in WP Admin in Wordpress 2.7+ (like the image to the left here). Then you’ll see the general settings:

Here you get to choose from 5 languages for the theme, English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish. You also get to choose whether or not to allow ads to be deleted, and how long a posting should last before “auto-deletion”. You can set whether or not people have to register on your blog or not to be able to post ads, or just keep it wide open. You can have a “display this” button that users can click to report objectionable content. You also get to choose whether or not ads are “auto-published”, or must be a draft that is reviewed and approved by an admin. The next section are the “custom inputs”.

Custom inputs are how you control what the user can enter when they go to post an ad. Maybe this would make more sense if I showed you the default “post an ad” form a visitor sees by default:

This form is the default action of the theme. Users can enter a title, choose a category, enter a price, name, location, email, description, and image. In the “other info” section you see those custom fields. This is so you can add special fields you might need depending on the nature of your site. For a rental classifieds site you might add custom inputs such as ‘bedrooms’, ’square feet’, ‘lease’, etc. Now we move on to the payment options section.

In the payment options section you can choose your currency, from dollars to euros, canadian or australian dollars, to anything custom. You can choose to allow paypal (or not), disallowing it makes your ad posting free. I should mention that even if you make your add posting free, you can still charge for “premium” ads later on (give people the option to pay for the privelege of having their ad show first). Then you enter your paypal email, and whether to use paypal live or just test it in the sandbox while setting up your theme (by doing some test transactions). The next section is for Fee Options.

This is where you choose how much (if anything) to charge for your ads. Remember- even if your ads are free, you can still set an amount to charge for “featured ads” by entering an amount, and then choosing “yes” for the “allow free ads + pay for featured” field. As I said earlier, you can even charge different amounts for different categories (like craigslist does). This is a great way to get people to post (for free), while generating revenue for only a few categories. The next section for setup is Advertising space.

You enter your text in the box for any ads you wish to appear on the main page of your new Wordpress classifieds site. Like adsense, a banner ad, text links, etc. This my only complaint so far – this features needs more options. Like the ability make the ad available on specific (or all) category pages, or the ability to add different ads on different categories, etc. In any event, you can easily find an advertiser for your niche classifieds site. The next (and last) section is special settings.

This is the section that you add your google maps API key into, in addition to your google analytics code. You can enable or disable both the top nav bar for the theme and the sidebar widgets here as well. You can even turn HTML code on or off.

Now you might be wondering – we went through all the settings here and there were no options for categories. That’s because you use Wordpress’ normal category admin function to set these up. Just add the categories you need, and when visitors go to post a classified ad, the available categories in the drop down will be the ones you entered.

Managing Classified Ads

You’ve seen all the setup options for the Sitemile, now I’m going to show you how to actually manage the classified ads. I think you’re going to be surprised too, because usually the Classifieds theme doesn’t use the “custom fields” that so many themes and plugins do.

Check this out, once you install the theme your Wordpress powered site has two very prominent buttons in the upper right hand corner to make it very easy for people to use your site. But first, you have to know how to use them yourself.

There’s a few things you need to know. First, you post classifed ads from the home page using that button or link “post new classified”. If you create a “new post” from within the Wordpress dashboard what you are doing is creating an “article”. Don’t worry, wordpress “pages” still serve the same function.

Take a look at the “Manage Posts” screen:

The Classifieds theme actually changes the Wordpress “manage posts” screen to make things effortless for you. The picture above shows that some new fields and a few graphics are added. It makes it very apparent whether the post is “an article” or “an ad”. As a test, I created one classified ad from my the homepage of this test site, and then I created a brand new post. That’s why I have one article and one ad. Here’s how that affects the layout of your homepage…

The image above shows the “recent articles” block in the top right of your site layout. If you get 50 classifieds per day, your latest articles will still show in the top right sidebar. This is great for posting notices and things people need to know, but more importantly (as a site owner) it’s great for posting some occasional “original content”! I really like this layout of articles vs. “ads”.

The ads and articles are listed in the main content area as well as in the example images above. Articles pretty much look like a normal post would in any other theme, but the “ad pages” are structured quite a bit differently:

The actual ad post page (as seen in the image above) show the details of the classified ad in addition to the automatic google map. On the right the price is prominently highlighted along with the seller details. The original poster (or admin) can delete ads, and anyone can report them (if your settings are setup this way). If you click on “send seller email” the panel slides out in very cool ajax style to give you a form to contact the seller without reveling their email address like this:

Conclusion

Sitemile Classifieds Wordpress Theme is one of the most incredible Wordpress themes I’ve ever seen. It does one thing, turn a Wordpress web site into a completely fully functioning Classifieds Ad site, and it does it incredibly well. It requires no plugins at all to get the job done, and even your Grandmother could run a classified site with this them. It’s intuitive for both your visitors, and for you within the Wordpress Admin interface. I’ve never seen a $39 premium theme do so much – EVER!

I recommend the Classifieds theme, and I will be using it in one of my sites very soon. I think that you’ll find a TON of uses for it.

Click here to Visit the Classifieds Theme web site

Sitemile also sells an “Auctions” and “E-Commerce” themes you should check out, they are definitely of just as high quality as this one.

Be sure to also read my interview with Andrei Saioc – owner of Sitemile.com, where he talks candidly about writing Premium Wordpress themes for a living.