However, all is not lost if you really can’t afford Scrapebox. I just found out today that there is a free alternative to Scrapebox for blog harvesting, comment scraper, and blog commenting. It’s called Comment Blaster v2 (the latest version as of today is v2.1).

Yes, it’s free as in free beer! Take a look at the screenshots and video below (all courtesy of Jangedoo, the developer).

Even if you already have Scrapebox, and alternative is always welcome so check out Comment Blaster website!

]]> http://AffiliateMarketingInsights.com/comment-blaster-v2-free-scrapebox-alternative/feed/ 0 http://AffiliateMarketingInsights.com/comment-blaster-v2-free-scrapebox-alternative/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/AffiliateMarketingInsights/~3/GZ-pCROMr9U/ http://AffiliateMarketingInsights.com/catalyst-theme-review-why-catalyst-theme-is-good-for-internet-marketing/#comments Thu, 08 Dec 2011 12:32:27 +0000 Battra http://AffiliateMarketingInsights.com/?p=322 A long, long time ago I was looking for a flexible WordPress theme for my personal website and came across Frugal Theme. It didn’t really ‘click’ with me so I gave it a pass and instead modified one of the free themes to suit my needs.

Recently I was on a theme hunt again, and this time it’s for my niche websites. I was looking for a theme that has design and layout flexibility, including plenty of sidebars or widget areas. Most of the themes I found only allows widgets to be inserted in the left/right sidebars or footer. And it has to be easily styled with plenty of design options in the admin panel.

A theme that so far has the most built-in widget areas is Heatmap Pro v5 with 23 widget areas. It’s targeted for AdSense websites so it allows you to insert ads in the header, footer, within contents, sidebars, etc. If you are looking for a quick solution to get your websites up and running, and the design look is close to what you want, it worths to take a look at Heatmap Pro v5.

However, although it has more widget areas that I actually need, getting it to look the way I wanted would mean lots of stylesheet modification and possibly creating child theme. So another option is to go with a theme that supports creating new widget area easily like Thesis and Genesis frameworks.

While looking for alternatives to Thesis (one of the most popular WordPress theme among internet marketers) and Genesis frameworks just for the sake of comparison, I came across Headway Theme and Frugal Theme that now has become Catalyst Theme. And to my surprise, based on what I saw in the demo area, screenshots, and various documentations and tutorials on the internet, Catalyst Theme seemed to be the most user-friendly and promising. So I decided to give it a try this time.

So here are the breakdown of its features that I like the most. This assumes you install the Catalyst Theme as the base framework and Dynamik Child Theme that comes free with Catalyst.

Changing The Overall Site Layout

By default you get a fixed-width layout with Dynamik theme out of the box. I already have a specific design concept in mind which includes having top navigations and header stretched across the browser page like on this website. Surprise, surprise! It can be done just by selecting where the wrapper container starts and ends from a list of options as shown below:

Selecting layout preference

Layout 1 has everything wrapped and therefore creating a fixed-width layout. By moving the wrapper to start after the hook ‘catalyst_hook_after_header’ in Layout 2, we let the top navigations and header to stretch across the page. The same thing goes for the footer. Easy!

What about sidebars? Catalyst Theme gives you few options too and you can even have different layout for different parts of your website. More on custom layouts later.

Assigning different layout for different section of the site

Then of course you can fine-tune most of the aspects of the layout like widths, colors, borders, etc through the admin panel.

Customizing width of each layout

Flexible Static Homepage Layout

Most WordPress websites nowadays have magazine-style homepage layout as opposed to blog-style listing chronological posts. It can’t be any easier to select the homepage layout than what Catalyst Theme offers. It has a special term for this, Static Homepage EZ-Widget Area.

Selecting the static homepage layout

If you look at the image above, ‘ez_home_1_3_3.php’ means you want the homepage to be split into 3 ‘rows’ with the top row having 1 widget area, the middle row having 3 widget area, and the bottom row having 3 widget area as well. Here is what it looks like on the front-end:

How the layout 1-3-3 looks on the front-end

Splitting the layout into widget areas mean you can then drag and drop widgets into each of these areas from the standard WordPress Appearance > Widgets menu.

Change your mind about the homepage layout? Just select a different layout from the dropdown list and re-use the widgets to fill up your homepage. Genius!

Needs slider to display featured posts? Catalyst Theme is giving free Nivo slider to all their customers.

Creating Custom Layout For Different Part Of The Site

Now here comes the juicy stuff. When you first decide and select the number of sidebars and their placements, you are most likely working on the default layout which will be applied to the entire website unless you tell Catalyst to use a different layout.

How do you create a different layout? An advanced feature of Catalyst Theme allows you to create as many layouts as you want, which you can then use for individual post or page, category page, archive page, specific post tag, etc. The possibilities are endless.

Creating custom layouts

Assigning a custom layout to individual page

In the screenshot above, I have created 3 custom layouts which then can be assigned even to individual post or page.

Creating New Widget Areas

In WordPress, creating a new widget area is achieved by attaching the widget area to one of the locations (or ‘hooks’) provided by WordPress. Think of it as if WordPress is asking you, where do you want me to display this widget area? Before the header? Inside the header? Before I display the post? After the post and before the comments? … etc.

Traditionally, you have to insert the PHP codes in the theme’s function.php file and this is what theme developers do. Catalyst Theme makes life easier for us by creating a user interface so we don’t have to mess up with any of the theme files.

Creating new widget area

Using the new widget area

Custom CSS Builder

If you are not very familiar with CSS, the Custom CSS Builder will help you a lot in styling your theme. You just need to select which element that you want to modify and select the styling (background, borders, margin, fonts, etc) from the dropdown lists. Even though I’m quite ok with writing the CSS directly most of the time, this is still very useful to get the elements’ IDs or class names.

Selecting an element to style

Styling the element

SEO Features

Lastly, the SEO features. Catalyst Theme comes with the mandatory set of SEO optimization features both at general level and per-post/page level. If you are using SEO plugins like All-in-One SEO or Platinum SEO then you can choose to disable Catalyst Theme’s SEO and your settings from the plugin will be used instead. Personally I prefer to set the SEO in a plugin because that gives me freedom to change to a different theme in the future and not having to re-do all of the SEO titles, descriptions, keywords, etc.

Catalyst Theme's general SEO options

So What’s The Conclusion?

Personally, I think Catalyst Theme is the most user-friendly among the rest of the WordPress theme frameworks. Is it the most flexible? maybe or maybe not but flexibility usually comes at the cost of more complicated way of achieving things. Catalyst Theme developers have done an excellent job at simplifying theme customization and the options given in the admin panel should be more than enough for most users.

If you are new to WordPress or to customizing themes, don’t be daunted by the admin panels. It looks scary at first but when you buy Catalyst Theme you will also get a PDF cheatsheet that will walk you through each and every options. You’ll get familiar with the admin panel in no time!

One thing I absolutely love about version 3 is the user interface. It looks much prettier than the current version and more intuitive. I wonder if SpinnerChief will update its interface too right after this considering SC started off by copying all TBS functionalities and they continue to be each other’s direct competition in terms of packing more features. All I can say that we as customers are the winner!

So hang on tight and don’t forget to grab The Best Spinner 3 on October 1!

Right now they are running a 60% off discount until 1 September 2011 and you pay only $27 (after ‘liking’ them in Facebook) instead of $77.  And if you’ve been wanting to get their Profits Theme then this is a good time to buy because you can also get $20 off Profits Theme if you buy Premium List Magnet.

I will let you know what I think about this plugin after I buy and test it, but if you want to check it out yourself, go straight to Premium List Magnet website.

For those not in the mailing list or have not purchase the theme, here are the new features added to version 1.1:

• Ability to create one-time or perpetual product launch
• Automatic launch funnel
• Integration of custom minisite design with landing page
• New landing page elements
• Improved membership features
• Unlimited products or membership levels – previously you can only have 10 products
• Ability to create free membership site
• You can add members to your list in Aweber, GetResponse, or Mailchimp automatically
• Protect both posts and pages – the old version protect membership pages
• Custom editor to modify blog CSS on the fly
• Support for HTML5 video player

If you have previous version of Profits Theme, you should have received the download link in the email broadcast. If you don’t own Profits Theme yet, the new features give you more reason to grab it now.

By default when you first activate Profits Theme, your site’s header uses Profits Theme’s logo which is linked to your site’s main or index page. On the admin panel, Profits Theme -> Design Options -> Header, you can choose if you want to use your own logo image or use the site title and tagline as defined in Dashboard -> Settings -> General.

The advantage of using logo image is that you can create and style nice logo using any graphic editor, and use fancy fonts and colors. I’m using ‘Wider 1.0′ skin in black and created a logo using letterpress effect in Photoshop. Here is what it looked like when I set Profits Theme to use custom header logo:

However, from on-site SEO’s point of view this is what the search engine will see:

<div id="header-image">
  <div id="logo">
    <h1>
      <a href="http://AffiliateMarketingInsights.com">
        <img src="http://AffiliateMarketingInsights.com/wp-content/uploads/logo.png" border="0">
      </a>
    </h1>
  </div>
</div>

So the header uses H1 tag to display the site title, which is good, but there is no text in between the H1 tag. It’s true that most if not all search engines now have no problem parsing and deciding what your page is about even without the site title but if you want to make all the little things matter, there is a workaround to this.

To make the site title appear between the H1 tags, I checked the box that said ‘Check this box to use Text Site Title instead of an Image Logo’. So now the HTML looks good from search engine’s point of view but the header turns into plain boring text.

<div id="header-image">
  <div id="logo">
    <h1>
      <a href="http://AffiliateMarketingInsights.com">Affiliate Marketing Insights</a>
    </h1>
    <div class="description"></div>
  </div>
</div>

So how can I have both a nice logo image but at the same time making search engines happy?

One option is to create letterpress effect purely using CSS text-shadow but it doesn’t always render nicely across all browsers. Another option is to move the logo image to the background and visually hide the text.

Where does the child theme come into the picture? A child theme has its own stylesheet file. Therefore, I can make any customization I want without touching Profits Theme‘s default stylesheet. In the future when the theme is upgraded, all my customization will stay intact. No more remembering and keeping track where I made the customizations to make sure they don’t get overridden or they are copied to the new version.

If you take a look again at the HTML code above, the H1 tags are wrapped in DIV elements. So I moved the logo image to be the background image of the ‘header-image’ DIV element.

#header-image {
background: url(/wp-content/uploads/logo.png) no-repeat top left;
}

Now the header looks like this:

To visually hide the title text, at first I used a large text-indent property for the H1 element (e.g. -9999) to shift the title far left, out of the visible browser window. However, while the text is now hidden, so is the link and I could not click the logo to go to the main or index page.

So what I finally did was to keep the site title there, adjust the font size so it more or less matches the size of the logo image on the background, and then set the color to be transparent.

#header #logo h1 a, #header #logo h1 a:hover {
color: transparent !important;
}

This way, hovering my mouse over the logo enables me to click on the now-invisible link as if the logo itself is a link. This may sound confusing but try to do Ctrl-A to highlight all texts on this page and you should see what I mean:

The title text is still there, but it’s now invisible. This method allows me to have both logo image while keeping the site title nicely wrapped in H1 tag to please the search engines.

I hope this post is useful. I’d be very interested to hear  if you are doing something similar with Profits Theme but using a different way to achieve it.

However, there are few cosmetic things that I want to do that requires me to edit the theme files. Right now I only need to modify the stylesheet but may need to tweak the template files as well. Actually, Profits Theme allows you to insert additional scripts in the header or footer so you can create your own CSS file, upload it somewhere in your WordPress directory, and link it from the Profits Theme option page.

This is definitely easier if you only need to change the stylesheet or insert some JavaScript codes. But in my opinion, creating a child theme is the better way of extending any theme. Checking on Profits Theme files, currently it doesn’t fully support child theme, e.g. child theme cannot override the parent theme’s PHP functions as explained in WordPress codex but you can customize the stylesheet just fine.

The main benefits of creating a child theme is:

• You don’t touch the parent theme’s files at all. This means that when there are Profits Theme updates in the future, you only need to upgrade the parent theme and your customization should still work (unless there are major changes to the structure of the theme).
• If you break anything in the child theme and not sure where the problem is, simply deactivate it and activate the parent theme to revert back to the default state. You can then create a new child theme and do the customization one by one so you can pinpoint exactly the part that was giving you the problem.
• You can create multiple child themes, e.g. seasonal themes or just experimenting with different designs.

Creating Profits Theme’s child theme is exactly the same as creating normal WordPress child theme. You start by creating a new style.css file and define the child theme details there (name, author, URL, parent theme).

/*
Theme Name: Profits Theme Child
Description: Child theme for the Profits Theme
Author: Your Name
Template: profitstheme
Version: 0.1
*/

@import url("../profitstheme/style.css");

Line 2 is where you define the child theme’s name and it can be anything. Line 5 is important, it’s where you tell WordPress the parent theme’s folder name so in this case, WordPress will look for the parent theme’s file in ‘profitstheme’ folder in the themes directory. The rest are optional, i.e. you can just not define the theme description or author.

Unless you want to re-do the entire style from scratch, you need to import the parent theme’s stylesheet so for anything that you don’t override in the child theme, WordPress will get the styles from the parent’s stylesheet. The importing is done on line 9 in the example above.

Once you are done creating the style.css file, create a new folder in your WordPress themes directory and upload the CSS file there. Then, on WordPress dashboard go to Appearance and you should see your child theme there. Activate the child theme and check if your site still looks and functions correctly.

If you don’t see your child theme, most probably there is problem with the style.css file. Either the template parent is not defined correctly or there is line break problem caused by your text editor. Try to re-open and save the style.css file again using Notepad and re-upload the file.

If everything looks ok, great! What happens at this point is WordPress will check your child theme first to see if there is any custom styles or templates that should override Profits Theme‘s styles or templates. If none found, it will then fall back gracefully to the parent theme.

In my next post, I will explain what I did to this site’s header to make it looks nice and SEO-friendly at the same time.

However, unlike physical products, information products are intangible (unless the seller is shipping out CDs or DVDs) so we can’t take their actual pictures. So the common practice is to market them as virtual books which means we need to create attractive book covers that entice people to (virtually) swipe their credit card.

And in my opinion, “don’t judge a book by its cover” does not apply here. Sleek and professional eBook cover conveys the image that the product is a high quality product and not just some low-quality PLRs merged together.

Unless you are a graphic designer and a Photoshop expert, most of us need a little help to create a convincing eBook cover. If you already have Adobe Photoshop, you can buy one of the Photoshop action scripts listed below and creating eBook cover becomes much, much easier.

Once installed, you can select the product you want to create from the Actions panel. The process of creating the cover is usually the same. Running step 1 of the script will create the 2D or flat version of the product and you will then design the cover by adding background, title, images and so on. Once ready, running step 2 will transform the 2D design into 3D end product.

The following eBook cover designers are not listed in any particular order. High price does not always mean better, the most important factor to consider is to think what are the products that you want to create and foresee yourself creating in the future. For example, if you plan to offer membership in the future, buying scripts that can create membership card may be a better option even if you have to spend a little bit more.

Cover Action Pro

Website: http://www.coveractionpro.com

The big daddy of eBook cover designer, Cover Action Pro is very popular among internet marketers and truly worth buying if you have spare money. It has 120 type of products including books, magazines, CD/DVD, boxes, business cards, membership cards, etc. The rendered images are very smooth and easily one of the best presentation among other action scripts. The price includes product catalog, the actions scripts, and video trainings which is very useful as it contains training on how to create product package or bundles. The also sell separate action scripts for creating more advanced product bundles.

eCover Suite Elite

Website: http://www.ecoversuiteelite.com

More than 60 type of products at half the price of Cover Action Pro. eCover Suite Elite also renders the product beautifully and it is the only one that I’ve come across that has book binding on the right side such as those found in Chinese or Japanese books. The scripts also comes in German and Spanish so this may be useful for some of you. There is no trial version but you can go to their blog and download a free software box action script

3D Cover Actions

Website: http://www.photoshopactionscripts.com

Another good script. Slightly cheaper than eCover Suite Elite, it has 50 type of products which includes iPod, USB drive, shopping bag, and even milk carton! The box with headphone is pretty funky too. Unlike Cover Action Pro that using code like BOX002 to name the script, at least 3D Cover Actions gives more meaningful names. The screenshot above was taken after loading 3D Cover Actions scripts to Photoshop.

Web 2.0 Covers

Website: http://www.web2covers.com

Web 2.0 Covers works slightly different in that it only comes with 8 type of products. However for each of the type, Web 2.0 Covers also supplies 55 “effects” (Photoshop layers that you can show/hide to create effects), 20 “shapes” (also layers for additional effects). So you can mix and match these effects to create nice covers. In addition, it also comes with 90 web 2.0 layer styles which will be loaded to the Photoshop’s Styles panel.

For someone with slightly below-average design skills like me, this is great as opposed to creating the design from scratch. However, what bugs me is that the sales page headline says “without Photoshop” but this is clearly Photoshop action scripts. Only at the bottom of the page it is mentioned that the scripts “work” with any program that opens PSD files such as Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and GIMP.

True BoxShot for Photoshop

Website: http://www.trueboxshot.com

True BoxShot has both standalone software and Photoshop plugin to create eBook cover called True BoxShot for Photoshop. It is a plugin rather than just action scripts so when launched, it will open a new window and you will work on that window when designing a cover. There are not many templates available but the preview window allows you to rotate, move and reshape the object, change the dimensions including the thickness of the book/box add some special effects. I don’t find this product to be very intuitive to use, but maybe that’s just me.

ProductShotPro

Website: http://www.productshotpro.com

This looks very much like Cover Action Pro with 100 product types with similar pricing. However, you can just buy individual set or a pack of 3 sets instead of buying the complete sets. If you want to buy 5 sets or more, it is more economical to just buy the complete sets. But ProductShotPro does not seem to come with training videos so Cover Action Pro is a better option if you are willing to spend the same amount of money.

eCover Go

Website: http://www.ecovergo.com

eCover Go looks like a value for money. With 150 type of products, it is only less than half the price of Cover Action Pro and it also works with older version of Photoshop. The scripts are the usual 3-step process and includes products like videotape, matchbox, can, gum package, PDA, baseball cap, etc while other scripts are usually limited strictly to information product types.

Cover Actions Premium

Website: http://www.coveractionspremium.com

Large amount of product types including beer bottle, vitamin bottle, and can. According to its website, Cover Actions Premium has 140 type of products and new type being added weekly. Trial is available but it’s not free. So for $3.95 you can get 3 scripts plus the PSD template file, but the 3 scripts are pre-selected. If you only need 1 script for creating eBook, the price is not bad at all compared to a single pack from ProductShotPro.

Of course there are many more Photoshop action scripts but I feel that the above are the most professional looking and offer value for money.

Its website claims that you can build “full-blown profit sites in minutes … without touching a single line of code and without knowing anything about design or Photoshop”. This claim is certainly very promising as a lot of internet marketers are business savvy people but have limited technical and design skills and knowledge.

It is therefore a typical challenge for many internet marketers to create a website or sales page that is both professional looking and converts well. Often these tasks have to be outsourced which means paying a designer for every site.

What Are The Available Solutions?

One solutions is to hire a designer to create the websites or sales pages, or to buy ready-made templates. Hiring a designer means you need to pay for each site that you are planning to build. As for ready-made templates, mane of them are already geared specifically for niche websites with relevant header images so there is no shortage of options especially if you are in evergreen niches. But these are often HTML-based which is good for mini sites, but can be difficult to maintain for medium or larger sites that are actively updated.

With the popularity of WordPress as a blog and CMS platform, more and more internet marketers are using WordPress to get the advantage of easy content management and the massive amount of free and premium themes and plugins. However, usually you need to install separate plugins for each of the functionality required such as optimizing on-page SEO, creating sales page, squeeze page, pop-up opt-in form, masking affiliate links, creating membership site, and so on. Some of these plugins are free with limited flexibilities, and some are premium which means you will end up spending a lot of money.

So a single theme that can do all of the above (in just minutes) and only require one-time payment is indeed very attractive. That’s actually the unique selling proposition of Profits Theme. Other similar system like Kajabi requires monthly payment and your sites are hosted with them which give you little control over your own content and data. Another plus point of Profits Theme is that you only need a single license to install the theme on unlimited domains that you own.

What Can Profits Theme Do?

In general, Profits Theme covers every aspect of building an internet marketing website and sales funnel. Some of the pages that it can create are:

• Landing/squeeze pages
• Sales pages
• Product launch pages
• One-Time-Offer pages
• Legal pages
• Autoresponder confirmation/thank you pages
• Multi-level membership site
• Download area
• Blog

All of the above are done through WordPress dashboard so you don’t have mess with the HTML/CSS/PHP codes. (Yes, the above list looks sales-y because I used the built-in bullets that comes with the theme and integrates nicely with the WYSIWYG editor. It’s a simple highlight-and-click.)

On top of that, Profits Theme also has features that usually require separate plugins such as:

• Opt-in form (pop-up and on-page form)
• SEO
• Basic ads management
• Link cloaking

Made to rival other internet marketing WordPress theme like OptimizePress and JVPress, it is clear that Profits Theme wants to pack a lot of features to become the ultimate all-in-one WordPress theme for internet marketing.

What’s The Verdict?

Front-end design

All of the 6 skins that come bundled with the theme are very slick and well-designed, giving the website a professional look. Out of the 6 skins, 5 comes with several color choices. The web elements such as button, boxes, landing page template also look very nice and this theme generously gives plenty of models and colors to choose.

Back-end interface

The theme has hundreds of customizable options starting from the layout, fonts, header image, navigation menu, featured posts thumbnails, and so on. All are done through the usual WordPress theme/plugin options interface. The drag-and-drop interface for creating landing/squeeze/sales page is however very impressive and convenient. Works like WordPage widget, you can drag and drop components such as headline, sub-headline, image, buttons to the 3 areas of the page (header, content, sidebar).

As I already mentioned above, some components like bullet list, Johnson box, badges, arrows are integrated into the WYSIWYG editor so inserting them into the content is very easy.

Features

The sales video on Profits Theme website goes over many of the features quickly but I was still surprised to find that it also comes with ads management (albeit a basic one) and pop-up opt-in form. The overall features are comparable to other internet marketing WordPress theme such as OptimizePress and JVPress.

The SEO features are very good and cover the common options of customizing the title, description, and keywords for the whole site, posts, pages, and various archive pages. You can also set each noindex/nofollow for every post and page which, in my opinion, a must-have feature that is sadly lacking in All-In-One SEO plugin. So if you don’t wont to use a separate SEO plugin, the SEO that comes with this theme is good enough.

Link cloaking is very basic and by default it will cloak all external links, if enabled. Customizing the link’s URL is done only by specifying a prefix that will be used in all of the cloaked links. There is no click tracking and reporting as well. If you just need something to mask affiliate links and not very particular about the URL, the built-in cloaking is good enough. Otherwise you still need a 3rd party plugin such as Pretty Link.

Ads management is also very basic. I guess that’s because this is a theme rather than a specialized plugin. You can upload banners to be placed at the top and sidebar, but there is no tracking and you can’t do banner rotation.

Membership site is currently only for paid members which means they have to go through payment gateway (PayPal or ClickBank) before they are added to the member list. There are a lot of requests for free membership site and at the time of writing, this feature should be available in April in the new version (which is always free once you purchase the theme). Setting up membership site is done through creating several pages for the homepage, sections/categories, and contents. I’m familiar with using WordPress but for this one I need to watch the tutorial video to understand how to structure the membership site.

Design Flexibility

Once you select a skin and the color theme, you can further customize the header image by uploading your own image or use a pre-defined images. The theme comes with 22 headers for 7 popular niches. All of the pre-defined headers have high-quality.

You can also customize the fonts for different part of the site (header, navigation menu, etc) by changing the font color, size, style, and the font family. If you need more elaborate customizations, you still need to write your own CSS which can be attached to the theme.

Overall, Profits Theme in the current version is an excellent solution to create landing & sales pages quickly, with or without a blog attached to the site. Few areas like the membership site is still a work in progress but when it’s done, this can be a real heavyweight champion of the internet marketing WordPress theme.

1. Link Cloaker Plugin

When you are promoting products as an affiliate, it’s much better to beautify your links because many affiliate links are super long and look very cryptic. You can use free service such as bit.ly or TinyURL, but it will look more professional if the shortened link contains your own domain name. For link cloaking or masking, the most popular plugins is Pretty Link (lite version is free, pro version is premium).

2. Google Analytics Plugin

You don’t really need a plugin to insert Google Analytics code on your site but a plugin usually comes with bells and whistles that can be handy. Popular plugins are Google Analyticator and Google Analytics For WordPress.

3. Social Media Plugin

Promoting your website through social media like Facebook and Twitter is the hot trend right now. BackType Tweetcount allows readers to re-tweet a link to your post and show how many times your posts have been linked to Twitter. OnlyWire for WordPress is the official plugin from OnlyWire.com that allows you to submit your post to 30 social networking sites simultaneously. To let your readers easily bookmark your posts on social bookmarking sites, get Sociable or Sociable for WordPress 3.0 plugin.

4. Sales Page Plugin

Makes life easier. Much, much easier. Otherwise creating a sales page that is actually good looking and converting well is a pain. Either you create all of the header image, buttons, and bullets for the list from scratch, buy image packs separately and manually inserting them on the page, or give up and hire a designer to do the sales page. If you Google “wordpress sales page plugin” you will find several plugins but so far the most professional looking is WP Sales Engine. It has a lot of graphics to choose from and it integrates nicely with WordPress editor.

5. Pop-up Opt-in Form Plugin

Most analysis show an increase conversion rate of opt-in when pop-up is used as opposed to just displaying the opt-in form on the page itself. Two big players are PopUp Domination and OptinPop (free with limited features). I think PopUp Domination‘s opt-in forms have more polished look. However, OptinPop Advanced can do split test which is a major feature to boost your conversion rate even more.

There you have it! For even more shortcut, Profits Theme has link cloaking, sales page creator, and pop-up opt-in form bundled in a single theme. Read my Profits Theme review to find out more about this theme.