Just recently we were lucky enough to be given a copy of an Amazon WordPress plugin to review. To be honest, we had never heard of this plugin so when the owner asked us to review it, we really weren’t expecting too much. After all, we have used the ReviewAzon plugin for quite some time on a few of our blogs and are very happy with it. We didn’t think anything could match it….that is until we actually tried WP Zon Builder.

This is one feature packed plugin and at this point we think it just nudges out ReviewAzon as our top Amazon plugin….not by much mind you, but just enough that we can say that we prefer WP Zon Builder over ReviewAzon. And I actually don’t like saying that because ReviewAzon is such a great plugin and you won’t regret buying it but for us the WP Zon Builder has a few extra features that have won us over.

As anyone who has read this blog knows, we make a nice income from promoting Amazon products and we are always on the lookout for anything to make our lives easier. And although we don’t really use these types of plugins in a big way, we still like them because they allow us to add reviews that automatically include all of that extra data from Amazon like images, prices, specifications, weights, measurements and so on. This means we don’t have to manually add this data ourselves.

You can use these types of plugins in one of two ways:

1. Adding products using the content from Amazon without making changes – This involves adding Amazon products to your blog without you making any changes to the content that comes over from Amazon. You can literally spend an hour or so using this plugin to add thousands of Amazon products to your blog and take the rest of the year off as the content is drip fed  to your site. I’ll show you how this works a little later in this article.

2. Adding products using the content from Amazon BUT you make changes – What this means is that you use this plugin to bring over the content from Amazon but you make changes to that content and replace it with your own product review. This plugin allows you to do that so the content isn’t just a duplication of what is on the Amazon product page.

We use both options but we definitely prefer the second option. If you can add your own review then you will be streets ahead of the rest of others using these types of plugins.

How Does the WP Zon Amazon Plugin Work?

You can add Amazon products in one of two ways with this plugin:

1. The first method involves creating a new post

You pretty much create a new post as you would any other post on your blog and add the product details there. I actually like this method because it gives me a little more control over what is in the post. What I do with this method is simply click on Posts –> Add New and under the text box is a section that I can enter an Amazon ASIN (each product on Amazon has an ASIN number) and then I click Insert. This automatically places a piece of code in my text box which displays an image of the product, a title of the product with a link to Amazon using my affiliate link, the average rating and the total number of reviews. This is what it would look like:

Then once I add my own unique content my post will look like this:

2. The second method involves adding posts en-masse.

With this method you can add hundreds, if not thousands, of posts in less than half an hour. Not my sort of style personally but great for those wanting quick, massive amounts of content added to a site.You can even stagger those posts so that they go up randomly for any period of time you set. You can even back-date them so that they are posted with dates in the past.

You can also use this method, as we do, for finding products based on a specific criteria that you set. This is one of the features we really love about WP Zon Builder. The filtering system is excellent and allows you to narrow down the search based on category, keyword, maximum and minimum price, average rating and the number of customer reviews. You can also sort those results by Featured Items, Bestselling, Relevance, Price, Newest Items and items On Sale.

This is a view of the Find Products page in the WordPress dashboard.

From this page you select your products and add them to a Queue. Once you’ve added 1 or more items you then click on the Post Products link from the dashboard menu and select the dates you want those posts to go up on. You can let them all go up straight away or select from and to dates so that they go up randomly during that period. There’s also a check box that you can select which prevents duplicate products from being posted.

This is what the posts look like if you select this method. If you notice it has brought all of the details over from Amazon. I haven’t changed a thing. However, the beauty of this is that I can change it if I like. I just go in and edit the post and add or change what I like.

Notice also that it has also automatically brought over the consumer reviews from Amazon and added them as comments. I really like that feature. You have the option of turning that off if you like or if you decide to keep the customer reviews you can change the settings so that you can select how many comments are displayed and only show comments that have a minimum rating. You can also sort those reviews by rating, most helpful, and submission date.

There are so many features that this post could go forever so I am just going to summarize the main ones below:

• You can automatically use Amazon tags as your post tags or alternatively create post tags from the Amazon product title or use neither if you like and just create your own.
• There is an option for creating ‘pretty’ links so that your links to Amazon look like regular links and not long affiliate type links.
• The plugin links with the All in One SEO Pack plugin so that it will automatically set your All-In-One SEO Pack post titles, meta keywords, and meta descriptions for any Amazon product posts. Y0u can turn this option on or off.
• An update button within each post so that you can update the product details that have come over from Amazon at any time. The creator of this plugin tells me that he will be adding an automatic update feature in a future release of this plugin.
• You can make the links to Amazon nofollow if you like.
• This plugin will work with any theme. We use the Flexsqueeze theme for most of our sites but this will work on anything according to the creator of this plugin.
• This works with any Amazon country affiliate program.
• It includes widgets so you can add products to your sidebars.
• Click Reporting which provides stats on which products are getting clicks through to Amazon.
• You can use more than one Amazon Associate ID and if you need to you can easily change the Associate ID for the entire site.
• It integrates with other plugins like phpOStock, phpBay, Auction2Post, and other plugins that display Overstock.com and eBay products. We haven’t tried this function as yet so we can’t advise on how it works.
• You can search for and add Youtube video reviews from within the post itself.

This is a great plugin and we highly recommend it whether you want to add mass product posts or individual unique product reviews.

For more info click here – WP Zon Builder

FINALLY RELEASED - Our complete guide to making money online by promoting Amazon products. Head over to the AMAZONIAN PROFIT PLAN website for all the latest info.

We’ve been writing articles for other blogs and websites for years now. It is actually one of our top traffic building techniques. We originally got the idea from James Martell when we were learning the basics of internet marketing from him back in the early days. In those days, it actually took a lot of work as we weren’t submitting articles to blogs but to websites who were less inclined to take an article.

These days there is a  huge influx of bloggers who just love content, so it is a lot easier to get an article published. This is even more so if you have an internet marketing type blog, after all other internet marketers know the value of content and will even come to you for an article. This was the case with our latest guest post for Maxblogpress.

Maxblogpress are the creators of some great plugins including the Ninja Affiliate plugin that we use and recommend. They also have a great blog  that was created to highlight the success stories of affiliate marketers and which is definitely worth a visit. We were approached and asked to write up a blog post which you can read here.

From that one blog post we received over 1200 unique visitors, had around 150 sign-ups for our email list, some nice backlinks, around 50 new RSS subscribers and 3 sales of affiliate products, one of those for a membership site with ongoing commissions. Hey don’t laugh, those sales are a lot for this website – considering we don’t make that much money from it since we really don’t promote it, so three sales is pretty good. (I think at some point I am going to have to start promoting this site as it seems to be gaining in popularity without me even trying…but now I am getting sidetracked.)

So as you can see, we got some really good value from that one guest post, and it wasn’t as if it was difficult to write. In fact it was just like I was writing for my own blog, and that is the sort of work I enjoy doing.

For our niche blogs we have always used guest articles as a means of getting backlinks. This is how we can manage to rank so well for some difficult keywords. Getting quality backlinks from related websites can boost your ranking in Google and that in turn can bring in traffic.

If you aren’t guest posting, particularly if you have an internet marketing type blog, then you really are missing out on some great opportunities. If I was promoting this blog, that would be one of my key ways to generate traffic and interest in my blog and I would be making it my goal to get at least one guest blog post published per week. Yes of course the traffic is only temporary from these types of posts but as you can see from our experience it brought in other long term benefits, like the 150 people signing up to our newsletter for instance.

If you’ve never done any guest blogging before then you need to keep in mind the following before you approach another website to offer them an article:

1. Ensure that your website looks reasonably professional - The owner of the blog who is going to take your article will be linking to your website and any self respecting blogger will want to ensure that they are linking to a quality website. In other words, they may not accept your article if it looks like your website is full of spammy ads, is poorly put together or is overly amateurish. In this day and age when fantastic looking blogging themes are freely available this shouldn’t be an issue.

2. Ensure that the content on your site is of the best quality you can deliver – BEFORE you approach another blogger to see if they are interested in taking an article, spend some time writing between 6 to 10 really good solid articles and posting them on your blog

Once you have some quality content and a reasonably professional site you will be ready to start emailing  prospective bloggers to see if they will take your article. Once you have found a blog that you think might take your article then ensure that you take some time to read some of their blog posts to get an idea of the type of articles they are writing before emailing them. Look at their style of writing and also the topics covered – you don’t want to offer them an article about a topic that they have only just written about themselves.

We also tend to email blogs that are fairly active ie. they get a bit of traffic and lots of comments. This will ensure that we will get some traffic to our blog.

Emailing prospective bloggers can be done in one of two ways:

1. Emailing the blogger before you write the article.
2. Emailing the blogger and attaching an already completed article.

I personally prefer the first method although I know that others have had good success with the second. The reason I am not as keen on the second method is that sometimes you just don’t hear back from them and then you have to decide whether to offer the article to another blogger.  But, if you do that however and the first blogger finally gets back to you and says they will take the article then you have to tell the second blogger that they can no longer have it. Too many issues with this so I just use the first method.

What we normally do when we email a blogger is provide article topic suggestions but also say that they can choose their own article topic if they prefer. This provides them with more options so there is a lesser chance of them declining the offer.

We also ensure that we tell them that we are offering the article for free and in return we are just requesting a couple of links in the article or in the author bio at the end of the article back to our website.

Just remember that this is a numbers game and you will be declined more times than you are accepted. The trick is to just keep finding sites and emailing them. As I said before, if your blog is an internet marketing blog then you will have more chance of being accepted. Other niches may be a little tougher.

Once you’ve been accepted it is simply a matter of writing up an article and submitting it to the blogger once finished. Remember to include links in the article or in the author bio at the end.

Guest blogging is definitely worth the effort and if you are consistent in your efforts it won’t be long before you will notice your site ranking better and your traffic increasing.