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.

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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 nofollow them which is excellent.

Lately we’ve been working on new ways to generate traffic to our blogs and are starting to try online services that can generate backlinks through placing articles on other sites. You’ve probably seen some of these sites or even tried them – sites like 1WayLinks, Unique Article Wizard, Free Traffic System and so on. We will do a blog post on the various backlinking services available at a later date..

As part of these services you can submit what is called a donor blog to the system. What this means is that you create a blog (or use one you already have), submit it to the backlinking site and once it has been approved, content is automatically submitted to your blog on a regular basis. In some cases you can receive up to 10 articles a day on your blog. The articles are just drip fed to your blog and you often don’t need to do anything but watch the content go up.

This was the case with us and we now, after a couple of months, already have a blog with close to 400 articles on all sorts of subjects ranging from dog training right through to insurance, ps3 gaming, crafts, hobbies and more…with more coming in on a regular basis. So what do you do with a blog like this with such a diverse range of topics? We could just as easily leave it as is since it’s not like we need to do anything to maintain it.

But then we had a thought that maybe we could turn it into an article directory. Nice idea in theory but in practice it really looked like a lot of hard work. I could just imagine the time it would take to find an article directory script and set it all up and then somehow transfer 400 articles over. It just seemed like too much to do on top of our already full schedule.

But then a thought came to me…I wonder if there is a WordPress plugin that can turn a WordPress blog into an article directory. It only took me a few minutes of searching and I came up with a couple of possibilities…and both of them free! And in fact, I never got around to trying the second one because the first one did the job beautifully….and by the time I was done, I had turned that blog into a professional looking article directory in well under 30 minutes.

So if you have a blog with lots of diverse topics then this might work for you too.

Steps to Creating Your Own Article Directory

Step 1: Download the following files – these are all free by the way:

1. Article Directory Plugin – More info for this plugin can be found here
2. Article Directory Theme – More info for this theme can be found here
3. Role Manager Plugin – More info for this plugin can be found here
4. Post Corrector WordPress Plugin – this one is optional – it allows you to add categories quickly and easily and this is the sample file of categories which you can use with this plugin. More info for this plugin can be found here

Step 2: Upload the Article Directory Plugin and Activate It

The plugin is easy to upload and activate and it includes various options which you can change in the WordPress dashboard such as excluding certain categories from displaying and whether or not to show empty categories.

Step 3: Upload the Article Directory Theme and Activate It

Note that you don’t have to use this theme. You can use your own but I can’t provide instructions on what to do if you use your own. I just know that when using their theme it all works perfectly and the theme is quite clean and ready to use. If you need more info on using the Article Directory plugin with your own theme then check out the creators website  – Articlesss.com

Step 4: Add Categories

If you already have an existing blog then you won’t need to add any categories as you will have most likely added categories in the past. But if your blog is new then you can either manually add categories or use the Post Corrector WordPress plugin from Step 1 above. This will allow you to quickly add categories and subcategories especially if you use it in conjunction with the sample file of categories. This will create categories similar to EzineArticles.com.

Step 5: Upload the Role Manager Plugin and Activate It

To be quite honest we never got around to uploading this one. The articles we receive come straight from 1WayLinks and are automatically added to the one user account in WordPress. I think however that if you are wanting to get serious with your Article Directory then you really need to use this type of plugin so that you can better manage users wanting to submit articles to your directory.

Step 6: Your Done!

Your Article Directory should be up and running at this point. Your only job now is to adjust the sidebar widgets, header and footer to make it suit your blog.

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

For some reason, we have always been a bit reluctant to add advertisements to our blogs…and when I say ‘advertisements’ I mean the square 125×125 ads that you normally see in the sidebar of most blogs.  But since we have just recently signed up with Yaro Starak’s Blog Mastermind and as he recommends it, we thought it was about time to do so.

I see it as another way of diversifying our income. We tend to make most of our money on affiliate links. It’s worked well for us but we’re kind of putting all our eggs in the one basket by doing this. So it’s time to start making money from a few more sources.

So Where Did We Start?

The first thing we needed to do was find a plugin that does all the work of receiving payments. In the Blog Mastermind course Yaro recommends using a free piece of software called OpenX. I had a quick look at it on their website and it looked okay but it wasn’t quite what we were looking for and in fact it looked like it required a bit of work to maintain. We wanted something that did everything from start to finish so all we really needed to do was approve the payment.

In the meantime Wanda had found a product called OIO Publisher. This wasn’t free but  as I was to find out later it was an absolute bargain. The piece of software has an enormous number of features and can be used on both blogs and regular websites. 

I loaded it up on this blog and you can see it to the right in the sidebar. It just loads as a plugin if you are using it on a blog or if you have a website then OIO has an automatic installer to make it real easy to upload.

Once installed it was simply a matter of editing the settings in the admin area and then dragging the widgets over to the sidebar.

Here are just some of the features:

• it allows you to use a nofollow tag on all your ads (or remove it if you prefer)
• the ability to add both banner and text links PLUS inline ads ie. ads within blog posts
• you can charge more for ads with the nofollow tag removed
• you can choose the size of your ads
• you can choose how many ads to display
• payment test mode option – to test if it is all working correctly without making a payment
• an inbuilt affiliate program which you can opt into in order to make money from referring people to OIO Publisher
• the ability to change the currency code for payments
• subscription payment option
• the ability to allow image uploads by the person buying the ad space
• the ability to redirect buyers to another page rather than the standard payment form
• you can choose to include your own banners and text links – this is a good way of filling up ad spaces that are empty
• a space to add purchase instructions for buyers
• a variety of payment methods – you can use one or more of the following Paypal, Google Checkout, EntreCard, Offline Payments, Authorize.net, 2Checkout
• you can change the email templates that are sent out automatically when a purchase submitted, approved or rejected. 
• there are 3 options to change the theme for the actual payment page and if you can also make your own custom changes to the theme if you like
• you can set your own ad prices and the number of days the ads will run for that price AND you can set multiple prices for different lengths of time
• you can choose to rotate ads ie. in the same ad spot you can have two ads rotating
• purchasers can reserve ad spots in advance
• you can set up ads to display in certain categories (WordPress only)
• you can create a link exchange text links which will display a persons link as long as they are linking back to you
• you can choose the amount of spacing between ads
• you can choose to show ads in your RSS feed
• I also just noticed a Posts tab – this is supposed to enable you to sell posts or paid reviews directly through your website – I haven’t looked into that yet so can’t comment at this point in time but I like the idea
• lastly it has a Custom section which allows you to sell whatever you like – this is great if you have an ebook

I just love this piece of software! CLICK HERE to read more…

So How Do You Go About Getting Advertisers

Well you could just sit back and wait for them to come to you. This can work well if you have a high-traffic blog but if your traffic is limited then your next step is to go actively searching for advertisers. This is what we will be doing over the coming weeks to fill up our ad slots not only for this blog but some of our other niche blogs and websites.

One of the best ways of doing this is to find blogs that already have paid advertisers and email those advertisers to see if they want to advertise on your blog. If they are already putting their ads up on websites around the net then they are more open to the concept and therefore more likely to accept your offer.

Another way is to do a search in Google for your keyword. Then take a look at the Google ads that show up on the page. These advertisers obviously have some sort of advertising budget so would be in the right frame of mind to receive an email from you asking if they would like to advertise on your blog.

You can also just type a related keyword into Google and just trawl through the businesses that come up in your niche.

How Much Should I Charge for Ad Spaces?

Good question and one that is hard to answer. The reason being is that there are so many factors involved that can affect the price including:

• your blog/website topic
• how much traffic your site receives
• your sites pagerank
• your Alexa rank
• the size of the ad
• whether the ad is a text link, banner ad, inline ad
• whether the links are nofollow or not

For this blog we are going to start with $30 for a 125×125 ad for 30 days. That may be too much or it may be too little. We won’t really know until we get any bites. If nobody is interested in that sort of rate then we will reduce it. If instead we get a lot of interest then we may increase it.

For one of our other blogs which has very high traffic and good pagerank we are going to start at $80 for a 125×125 ad for 30 days. Again, we will see how it goes before adjusting the price if needed.

For some of the blogs that are getting low traffic volumes we might stick with around $10 a month.

So there you have it. Adding advertisements to your site is not difficult especially if you use the right software that does everything for you.

Do you advertise on your blog? Let us know in the comments below…

Just recently, Wanda and I have been discussing our blogs and which ones we want to work on. We have over 20 blogs/websites and even with the two of us, it is way too many to work on at the one time. So we decided to concentrate on just a couple over the next few months one of which is the blog you are now reading.

In the past, we haven’t really promoted this blog all that much – in fact, hardly at all. I just enjoy writing posts for it so wasn’t all that concerned that we weren’t getting much traffic. So now that we have had a change of mindset we have started looking at ways to increase traffic and comments to this blog.

We already know of quite a few different methods to do this but we are always on the look out for new ideas. To really succeed in this business you have to be prepared to be a continual student and learn as much as possible in order to stay ahead of the pack. So with this in mind, I went scouring the net for any new tips on how to increase blog comments.

I didn’t have to look far as one of the blogs I like to regularly drop in on is Zebida.com and on this blog I found a post about a WordPress plugin called Comment Luv.  Comment Luv is a WordPress plugin that extracts the url of the last blog post of the person leaving the comment. This assumes that they have a blog of course. It then posts the title of that blog post with a link below the comment they have left on your blog. This encourages people to leave comments as in return for the comment they get a link back to their website.

Now I’ve heard about this plugin before and in fact I was recommended it sometime back as a result of a post I wrote on the Top 20 Plugins to Increase Traffic to Your Blog.

The only problem I had with this plugin was the fact that I felt it would just encourage spammers. I had used a dofollow plugin in the past and had a similar problem so removed it. But from what Hesham was saying, it looked like it made a big increase in the number of comments he started receiving on his blog and they didn’t look like spammers to me.

So I have decided to give Comment Luv a go. I installed it yesterday so will give it a couple of months to see how it develops. It will be interesting to see if it does in fact make a difference.