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.

Being in the internet marketing game we are always on the lookout for products to make our lives easier. This can include ebooks, themes, software programs, membership sites or WordPress plugins. With this in mind, I decided to write up a post on the products we actually use and recommend.

1. Ninja Affiliate

I love this plugin! What it does is add affiliate links automatically to keywords in your posts. You simply add your keywords and affiliate links in the backend on your WordPress dashboard and Ninja Affiliate will automatically add affiliate links to those keywords wherever they appear on your blog – for both old and new posts. So you don’t have to spend hours adding affiliate links to every blog post you write. Just add once in the dashboard and they are automatically added to both old and new posts.

You also have the option for nofollow links, and to choose how many links you want in each post. It also provides statistics so you can see how many times the links have been clicked on for each keyword. If you take a look at the links in this post, most of them apart from the internal links have been added automatically by Ninja Affiliate. I don’t have to add them every time I create a post. This saves me a heap of time.

It can also cloaks the links so that they don’t appear as long affiliate urls but instead they look like internal links.

Highly recommended!

Click to read our full review – Maxblog Ninja Affiliate Review

2. OIO Publisher

If you want to make money from advertising on your blog then this is definitely the plugin to go with. It makes the whole process sooo much easier. The initial set up is all you will need to do and once done everything is handled for you. You simply have to approve the ads with a few clicks and the ads go up automatically on your site. This is a bargain for the price as it will save you a heap of time doing it all manually.

Click to read our full review – OIO Publisher Review

3. Affiliate Organizer

We have used the Affiliate Organizer for years now. It is the one program I use on a daily basis. What this program does is store all of your user names and passwords. But that’s not all it does, it has a calender function to include upcoming events and tasks; a category to store websites including DNS settings, ftp settings, passwords etc; a section to add affiliate merchant details, a category where you can details for forums that you have signed up with and even a section to keep track of tasks you’ve outsourced. I really couldn’t live without it.

Click to read our full review – Affiliate Organizer Review

4. Flexsqueeze Theme

This would have to be my favorite theme at the moment. I know everyone raves over the Thesis theme but I much prefer the Flexsqueeze theme. It is so much easier to use and is perfect for the type of product review sites we use. It allows you to create a full page review without the sidebar displaying. So there are no distractions for the reader to click away. They stay focused on the review and click on the links in the review. The developer of this theme made it so easy to change colors, the blog width, the header and footer and pretty much anything else in the theme from fonts through to the background color so you can make the theme look completely unique with just a few clicks of your mouse.

Read More…FlexSqueeze Theme

5. aWeber

aWeber is a must have for anyone wanting to develop a email list. We have been using aWeber for a number of years now and have had no issues. Their pricing goes up with the more subscribers you get up to the maximum of $130 a month if you have 10,000 subscribers or more…but then if you have that many subscribers you should be able to easily make the money each month to cover the fee. If you can’t then you are in the wrong business.

You can create unlimited email lists, send email newsletters using their templates or your own, create autoresponders and more.

Read More…AWeber

6. The Best Spinner

I’ve never been a fan of spinning articles only because the spinners I have used in the past have been pretty pathetic in terms of creating a readable article. This one is different. It’s not called The Best Spinner for nothing – this is really a quality product and produces really well spun articles. It probably takes about half an hour to spin a 400 word article but from that one article you can get up to 100 other articles. This one is definitely a winner with me.

Read More…The Best Spinner

7. ReviewAZON

This is a great plugin for anyone wanting to promote Amazon products. We use it to a limited extent in that we only use it on blogs we aren’t currently working it. It is just a way for us to quickly get content on our blogs so that they stay active. For our reviews written from scratch we don’t use this plugin. Even so, if you want to get content up fast then it really is an excellent program. What ReviewAzon does is allow you to create product pages in minutes using the content from Amazon. You can literally create a blog full of content in just a few hours.

So there you have it, 7 products that we use regularly that we would recommend to others. What are your thoughts?

Read More… ReviewAzon

When it comes to blogging one of the things I find the most difficult is finding ideas for blog posts. I seem to get a block every now and then where I sit and wonder what to write about next. I’m sure it happens to most bloggers at certain times.

So what I have done is develop a process that enables me to have plenty of ideas on hand when I need them. Now I’m not about to tell you anything new that you haven’t heard before because my process is simply a matter of writing down any ideas as I think of them. Actually I don’t write them down, I just add them to my iPod Touch so I can access them at any time.

Prior to this, I would think of an idea at the most inopportune time and then by the time I got around to needing to write up a blog post, I would have forgotten that fantastic idea and I’d be back to staring out the window again wondering what to write about. So since I carry my iPod Touch everywhere I go, there is no excuse for me not to keep track of those light bulb moments.

My ideas don’t always just come out of the blue however. A lot of the time, I get ideas from other bloggers. So I’ll keep note of these ideas as well as I visit other blogs on the net.

So my list of potential ideas is growing but even so, I thought it might be worth checking out other methods to see if there are other worthwhile techniques used by bloggers around the net. Here is what I came up with:

• 101 Great Posting Ideas That Will Make Your Blog Sizzle – This is a great one to start with. If you can’t find ideas here then you are really in trouble.
• 45 Blog Post Ideas that Always Generate Buzz – Another list of ideas that is worth checking out. I’ll be using at least a couple of these.
• 100 Ways to Find Ideas for Your Blog Posts – You should be able to find a few ideas from this long list. I particularly like the idea of going to wikianswers to look for questions.
• 50 Blog Post Ideas You Can Use – This is focused towards business blogs but I think the ideas will work on most blogs.
• 82 Blog Post Ideas For Desperate People – If you like complaining about stuff then you will like this list.

Well it’s been a while since my last post. It’s not that I’ve been busy…it’s more the fact that I couldn’t be bothered writing for this blog.  Sounds bad doesn’t it? But when it comes down to it, this blog isn’t how we make our money. In fact, it makes us nothing at all except when we write up a review for something (which is few and far between) or when someone pays for advertising space.

For now, this blog really is just a way of expressing my views of this online business I am in and also provide advice to others who are wanting to make a living online.  So I personally don’t want to have to feel forced to write every day for it simply to keep the traffic coming in order to make sales.

But not only that, I find this business model for making money online quite time consuming. It also requires consistent action in order to maintain the momentum and quite a bit of networking in order to build a following.

In contrast, I find that the model we use to make money online is so much easier and once set up requires minimal work.

For instance, to get this particular blog up and running to a level of making a consistent income I would probably need to do the following on a consistent basis:

• leave blog comments on other peoples websites
• leave forum posts
• tweet regularly
• regularly post on Facebook
• write at least one blog post a day
• network, network, network!
• regularly post to my email list
• check RSS feeds on a daily basis (something that I don’t do at all by the way)
• write guest posts
• work on JV’s

That to me is a lot of work.

On the other hand our model requires the following:

• find a product in Amazon
• do a bit of keyword research
• write up a really good review for that product and post to one of our blogs
• get traffic to it

The difference between the two is that the first model requires consistent effort (usually daily) whereas the second model requires a one-off amount of work. The only consistent work involved with this is getting the traffic and even then once a level of traffic is achieved we don’t have to worry too much about it.

So we can take a week off and not do any work without it affecting our business. In fact, we can take a month off because the pages we have set up already get traffic and don’t need constant work to maintain that traffic. Obviously we can’t neglect those pages totally but the work involved with maintaining them doesn’t have to be done on a daily basis nor on a weekly basis once the traffic is there.

When it comes down to it, you only need a handful of good pages to make a full time income online. We have individual pages that consistently make over $500 a week and that is without ongoing effort on our part. So we don’t need to blog consistently or leave blog comments or check RSS feeds or post regularly on forums or Twitter constantly. All we really need to do is get traffic to our top product review pages and that really is just a handful of pages per website.

I’m on a mission at the moment to simplify everything we do. I want the The 4-Hour Workweek lifestyle…who wouldn’t?…but the only way we are going to get that is to consistenly analyze what we do to see what is working and what isn’t and then refine the process.

What me and Wanda do is get out the butchers paper and write down the tasks we do on a regular basis. We then go through each to see whether each task is actually worth the effort. For instance, at this moment in time we don’t see the value in spending hours a day on Twitter. It brings in minimal traffic for the amount of time and work that is involved. So you’ll notice the Twitter account for this blog has been pretty quiet these days as has the rest of our Twitter accounts. That’s not to say that Twitter doesn’t have value but for us it’s too much work for the results we are getting.

So what about you? Have you thought about the effort you put into your online business? If you are new to making money online then obviously you are going to have to do a bit of work before you see results but what about those that have been online for a while. Are you actually making any money for all the work you are putting into it? If not, then you need to step back and look at exactly what tasks you are doing on a daily basis and see if they are getting you the results you desire.

I remember sometime back listening to a conversation I heard at work between two colleagues who were discussing what they would do if they won the lottery. I listened with interest to this conversation as each told the other about all the great things they would do if they won a large sum of money. And as the conversation progressed, I could see that much of what they wanted to do, they could do right now if they really wanted to. They didn’t really need to win the lottery to achieve it.

So often you hear people discussing what they would do if they won the lottery or had the time to follow their dreams. In fact its something you hear constantly from people around you and it goes a bit like this…”when I win the lottery” or  “someday I’ll do it” or “when the kids are a little older” or when the “kids have left home” or “when I retire”.

You know when it all boils down to it, each of these statements is simply an excuse for not taking action because taking action may require a bit of effort or it might involve taking some risks. So, it’s much easier to just continue on day after day doing the same things over and over until eventually you get stuck in a rut and come to accept that you will never do all the things you really want to. At some stage you may even reach a point where you don’t even dream about doing these things anymore.

We are creatures of habit. This is both a good and a bad thing. Good because it means that a lot of those regular tasks we do can be done without even thinking about them. It’s like when you get in the car – you don’t think about how you are going to drive the car, it’s an automatic process because you have had years of practice. Unfortunately though, the bad is that your life can settle quite comfortably into a rut.  You know how it goes –  you wake up, get the kids ready for school, go to work, come home, make dinner, get the kids to bed, watch a bit of tv and go to bed.

Even the weekends become  a routine, you take the kids to soccer practice, go grocery shopping and if you are lucky maybe do something different like go to a movie or to dinner. Then on Monday you wake up and get the kids ready for school, go to work, come home, make dinner…and so it goes, on and on, day after day until the day you retire. And at that stage, your life has settled into its daily routine and as you are older you are not ready to take risks, so your retirement isn’t happy because you have lost the enthusiasm or the will to try new things and perhaps follow those long lost dreams.

Would you call this an extraordinary life? I wouldn’t. And don’t be blaming your kids here either, you can have a mundane life with or without kids.

If you want to have an extraordinary life then you need to start taking risks. The most successful people in life are the risk takers. This doesn’t mean taking stupid risks. Obviously you still need to do your research before taking on any risk but don’t go too crazy either….you can get bogged down with too much analysis and then you will start to focus on the negatives and that becomes scary, so eventually you decide its safer to stay at home and you never go anywhere or try anything new.

Now I am by no means an expert at this but I do have a tendency to take risks…  I’ve thrown in my job before I was making a decent income in order to work from home, I moved to a new city where I had no family or friends, I’ve gone overseas when I barely had enough to feed myself while I was away, I bought that ebook when I knew nothing about making money on the internet and it cost a staggering $197 and it could have all been just a scam.

Even as business partners, Wanda and I take a hell of a lot of risks – we have been overseas countless times, even though there have been times when we really weren’t making a huge amount of money from this business and funds were tight. We didn’t dwell on where the money was going to come from – we just booked our fares and off we went.  This is something we still do and now we only book our return airfare and book all other travel as we go when we are overseas. We  both have a can do attitude and truly believed  that we were going to succeed and so we live life accordingly. We could have said “someday we’ll go to Affiliate Summit” or “someday we’ll see the Colesseum” but instead we just did it.

Wanda has a quote from “The 4  Hour Work week” by Timothy Ferriss, on the wall in her office that sums it up nicely:

SOMEDAY

Is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.

If it’s important to you and you want to do it ‘eventually’

JUST DO IT

and correct course along the way.

Taking action and taking risks go hand in hand with being successful and having that extraordinary life. This doesn’t mean that you won’t fail. Failure is a part of life but the difference between those that succeed and those that fail is that those who succeed see failure as just being part of the road to success.

Don’t settle for less in life. We decided early on that we each wanted an extraordinary life, we don’t want our lives to be mundane and boring. We don’t want the 9 to 5 grind that most people take for granted and ultimately why we know that working online is the ultimate lifestyle…at least for us.

Don’t wait to win the lottery in order to do all the things you want to do. Take action now to live an extraordinary life – it’s fun, its risky, its exhilarating but most of all its fulfilling.

My internet business gives me an extraordinary life and I am more than happy to take whatever action is required to keep it this way.