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What Plugins Do We Use on Our WordPress Blogs?

Saturday, September 4th, 2010 at 9:01 pm

Comments (35)

We’ve used a lot of plugins over the years but there are a handful of them that are our favorites and whenever we create a new blog, these are the plugins we automatically upload.

1. TinyMCE Advanced – This one we can’t do without. The TinyMCE Advanced plugin does a multitude of things but what we use it for mainly is the ability to add extra formatting options to our posts, in particular font size and font family selections. We also use it to easily add nofollow to our affiliate links. A definite must.

2. MaxBlog Ninja Affiliate – My absolute favorite plugin of all time. I love this one, however there is a catch – it’s not free. But it has paid for itself over and over. The Ninja Affiliate plugin allows you to create affiliate links quickly and easily.

So let’s say your site is about fishing rods, and over the years you’ve created hundreds of blog posts all about a particular brand of fishing rod. Then one day you decided that it would be a good idea to add affiliate links to all of those posts. This would probably take you many hours of work. But, with the Maxblog Ninja Affiliate plugin you can easily do it in about 5 minutes. You simply enter the affiliate link once in the backend along with the keywords that you want to add an affiliate link to, and this plugin does the rest. Wherever it sees those keywords on your posts, it adds an affiliate link behind them. It also automatically adds affiliate links to any new posts you add. One other benefit of this plugin is that it can cloak your affiliate links so they look like regular links on your site.

Read our MaxBlog Ninja Affiliate plugin review.

3. All in One SEO Pack – we have used this plugin for years on our blogs. It basically helps with optimizing your posts and pages for the search engines. We have always just used the default settings but I am sure if you studied this plugin you could get a lot more out of it.

4. OIO Publisher – this is another paid plugin but if you want to advertise on your blog then this is a must have. It makes the process so easy – all you need to do once this plugin is set up, is approve the ads. It’s so simple and a huge time saver.

5. WordPress Database Backup – This is another must have. If for some unforeseen reason, you lose your site then having a backup of your WordPress database will make getting your website back a whole lot easier. This plugin will email you a regular backup of your database which you can store on your computer.

6. Adsense Target – On our product review sites, we will often add Adsense adds to our articles. These are extra informational type articles that we add to boost our blog/website content.Note: we do not add Adsense to the product reviews themselves, this would defeat the purpose of our plan, we just put Adsense on the articles.We use this plugin to increase the quality of the Adsense ads displayed. It helps to better match the Google ads to the content on your blog and hence result in a higher click through rate.

7. Internal Link Building – This is another favorite. This plugin automatically creates internal links on your blog. In other words, links from one page on your site to another page on your site. This can really help to boost your site. This plugin is particularly good if you have a huge site and haven’t been particularly diligent in linking between posts. Update: The developer tells me that it can also be used for affiliate links and you can no follow them which is excellent.

What Would You Do Differently If You Were Starting Out Again?

Sunday, August 15th, 2010 at 12:23 am

Comments (45)

I recently saw this question on an internet marketing forum. The writer was specifically looking for responses from ‘successful internet marketers and veterans’ to see what they would do if they had to start out from scratch again. I thought it was a really good question for a newbie to ask.

Most people spend years becoming truly successful online and most will have made every mistake known to man to get there so asking them what they would do if they had to start again from scratch is an ideal question.

Interestingly enough, all of the responses were different. So what does that say?…well, to me it simply says that there are plenty of ways to make money online. How wonderful is that?! You don’t need to worry if it will work or not because once you find a system or method that suits you; it WILL work if you keep at it. Persistence is the key with this business but most people don’t have it in them to keep at it until they do eventually succeed. And they keep buying the next “big thing’ hoping it will help them make money overnight, and of course that doesn’t work for them either because they don’t put the time in.

So let’s look at some of the responses to that post to see what some of the ‘successful’ internet marketers would do:

1. ‘Create your own product’– in other words, write your own ebook, create a membership site, create and sell your own WordPress theme, build a plugin etc. Now prior to us releasing our ebook we wouldn’t have put much stock into this one but I can say with hand on heart that this is one that I would recommend, to someone with experience on the web. However, for someone new to it all, it’s not an easy one to start with and personally I wouldn’t suggest it to someone brand new on the internet. Others may disagree on that one but I really think you need to know the basics on how to build a website and how to market a product on the internet before you get into something like this.

2. ‘Give value in everything you do’ – now I love that response because that has become our philosophy. If I were starting again I would make certain that I have that line floating around in my head instead of ‘How can I make money online’.

3. ‘Approach article marketing differently’ – basically this poster said that he wouldn’t have wasted his time posting to Ezine etc and instead would have created a relationship with a couple of authority sites and submitted his articles to them exclusively. Personally I wouldn’t just stick to one or two but the basic idea is there. If you can get your articles on authority sites or blogs that relate to your niche then you will be streets ahead of the rest of those who simply submit to article directories.

4. ‘Create an email list’ – this one was a common response. This is the one thing we have been a bit slow to take on although that is changing now. If you have a nice list of people who follow the same things you follow then you can promote products to the list and make money that way. One of the main advantages of a list is if your websites suddenly disappeared overnight then you will still have a following of people and it won’t take long to get back up and running.

5. ‘Create a plan’ – as the poster said, most newbies don’t have a plan or a set of goals – all they think about is the money. Setting goals is extremely important. We have a roll of butchers’ paper that we roll out and write our plans, ideas, and goals. And we do this at the very least once a week. Its not set in concrete, we can make adjustments to suit what is happening but by doing this we always know exactly what we need to do in the coming days, weeks and months.

6. And finally my response to the question was that if I were starting out again I would create only one website instead of many and would create 5 really good product reviews for that site using Amazon products. I would then spend 80% working on getting traffic and backlinks to those 5 pages and the other 20% of my time writing informational type articles to add to the site. That’s all I would do. Nice and simple and this is the one method that I know absolutely works.

Can I See an Example of Your Website?

Saturday, August 7th, 2010 at 12:15 am

Comments (37)

This is a post that we actually send out to one of our email lists but we thought it was worth while posting to our blog here as well as it is a question we get asked regularly. Our answer to that question is always the same: NO. Actually we say it a lot nicer than that but that in essence is our response.

Why?…well for a couple of reasons actually. The first is the age old problem of people copying the site. We’ve had the experience of people not only copying individual pages but also in some instances copying the whole site. And although the old adage says ‘being copied is the greatest form of flattery’ when it comes to the internet, this doesn’t hold true. Copying our site doesn’t help anyone and no one benefits, not the person copying our site and certainly not us.

The other reason is that we have made so many mistakes in the past that giving someone one of our websites to look at will only result in them making the same mistakes we did. I have already read reviews from people who have obviously copied the format of some of our reviews. Unfortunately the particular format they copied didn’t work for us and I know it won’t work for them either.

Then there are others that attempt to follow our site structure because they found one of our websites and think they should structure it the same way. They are wasting their time because the site structure has very little to do with our success. We have sites structured in all sorts of different ways and the reviews still work regardless of how the site is structured.

And one more reason that we don’t give out our websites is that we are forever testing different things. We might try an Amazon plugin out for example. And because we are trying it out, it doesn’t mean that it is actually working for us, but people who visit the site may assume that because we are using that plugin then they should do the same.

What made this all work for us in the end wasn’t how our sites were structured or the plugins we used, the niche we chose, or whether we used a blog or a html site – what worked was creating quality reviews and working our butts off getting traffic to those reviews.

We want you to be thinking in the same way. Just create a fantastic content for your site and spend the rest of your time getting traffic/backlinks to that content. That should be your primary goal. You don’t need to see our websites for this to work. You don’t need to see anyone’s website for this to work. You simply need to focus on your website, provide value and work on getting traffic.

How to Add a Tracking ID to Your Amazon Product Review

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010 at 11:22 pm

Comments (24)

We have a number of affiliate marketing websites. These are a hangover from when we first came into affiliate marketing when we felt that having more websites meant making more money. If we were starting out now we would only have a couple as it is so much more manageable. But having lots of websites means we have lots of product reviews and we realized early on that if we were going to keep track of where sales were coming from that we needed to start using Amazon tracking ids.

If you have begun to add product reviews to your own website and are using Amazon then you should really be doing the same thing. This will make it so much easier to check your sales on Amazon as you will be able to see exactly from which pages on your website the sales came from.

Choose Your Tracking IDs Carefully

Be very selective in how you want your tracking ID’s to look as you cannot delete or change them once they have been approved by Amazon. Bummer I know.

We found this out the hard way, we had started using a set of ID’s and then found it didn’t really help us when we came to determining which products were performing the best and we had to start over, but the original ID’s could not be deleted or changed, and keep in mind that you can only have 100 tracking ID’s per account. This may sound a lot but once you get started you will find it doesn’t take long to start using up your quota. Having said that, we haven’t used ours up yet but that is because we track a mix of websites and products. So we only bother about tracking products that meet our product review criteria.

We use one tracking ID per product review page so it will be used for both the images and the text links on that page. However, if you want to go even deeper and see which individual links are performing the best, you can use a tracking id for each individual link. So you might have a tracking id for the image link, a different tracking id for the first link in your product review, a different tracking id for the second link and so on. But as we said previously, you only ever get 100 tracking ids per Amazon account so doing it this way will mean that you have the potential for running out of tracking ids fairly quickly.

So how do you Create a Tracking ID in Amazon?

1. Sign into your Amazon Associates account.

2. Click on Account Settings in the top right hand corner of your screen.

3. In the Account Information Section find the bullet point “Manage your tracking IDs” and click on it.

4. Click the Add Tracking ID button and you will be presented with a page where you can add a tracking ID (see image below). Add the tracking ID that you have decided to use for a particular product or website in the blank box. We usually type in a word that relates to the product we are promoting. So for instance, say that we have written a product review for the iPod Touch. If we wanted to create a tracking ID for that page we might enter the words “ipod-touch” into that tracking ID field. So the tracking ID would look like this - ipod-touch-20 (Note that Amazon IDs end in ’20′ in North America).

5. Click the search button and Amazon will do a search to make sure the Tracking ID is unique. Amazon will let you know straight away whether the ID is available and if it is you can start using it on your product review page.

How to Add the Tracking ID to the Product Review

1. Open your product review post in WordPress. Also open your Amazon Product page in a new tab or window, whichever suits the way you work with multiple internet windows.

2. On the top line of the product page in Amazon you will find the words “Link to this page”. Click on that link. This will open the ‘Customize and Get HTML’ pop-up.

3.You will see two drop-down boxes – one says “Signed in as” and the other says “Tracking ID” Click the down arrow and select the Tracking ID for the product review you just created (see image below). Amazon will automatically change the code in the HTML code box so that it now includes your tracking ID.

4. Now, you can simply grab the code and add it to either your image or text links as you would normally do and the tracking id will be included. (For instructions on adding Amazon links to images click here.)

So there you have it a quick and easy way to keep track of where your clicks and conversions are coming from as your Tracking ID will show in your Amazon Tracking ID Summary report.

You will be able to see at a glance, how many clicks, items ordered, items shipped, shipped item revenue and commissions or Advertising Fees each product is producing.