page.ly Dedicated WordPress Hosting and Management

When we wrote our original Page.ly review back in May of 2010 the company was about a year into its relaunch in 2009, although they have been around since 2006. Since then of course a number of services operating a similar model have sprung up but Page.ly have certainly not rested on their laurels and in 2012 remain a leading player in the filed of managed WordPress hosting services.

When our initial review was published it really concentrated on the attraction of the service for users who were new to WordPress and were concerned about the technical aspects of hosting a site on their own domain, something which Page.ly made far less onerous for the new user with their famous 2 minute setup.

It was apparent even then however that the service held a much wider appeal and was far from being something that appealed solely to a “newbie” WordPress users’ niche. The comments we received back then, all of which were positive about the service, indicated that more and more experienced users were switching to Page.ly for benefits which when far beyond the quick and simple set up of new sites.

Page.ly have gone from strength to strength in the intervening two years and the service has evolved into something which almost any WordPress user can appreciate, whether they are hosting a single low traffic site or a multitude of WordPress driven real estate.

As they only deal with WordPress powered sites, Page.ly staff are very well versed in the platform and as a result their support invariably garners praise – they know what they are doing. As anyone will tell you, this is invaluable and something that many general hosting companies fall down on when it comes to WordPress related issues. Some are worse than others but it is unreasonable to expect them to offer detailed support for any single third party software when their role is really just to look after servers. When all you host are WordPress powered websites and blogs, specialist knowledge is essential and support can concentrate on software issues fare more efficiently.

The features of the service that have made Page.ly so successful are many and varied but certainly, many users really appreciate the automatic WordPress core updates, plugin updates, speed optimization and a suite of custom tools to make the users’ WordPress experience better.

Customers always want their sites to perform well so Page.ly’s speed optimization is something which many webmasters say they just could not do without. Add to that the levels of security provided for your WordPress installation it is little wonder that users love the time that this saves them to concentrate on other things. Knowing that much of the admin burden is automatically taken care of for you is a huge benefit, particularly if you are maintaining a number of different sites. Optomization, security, secure backups, knowledgeable and reliable support – anyone who has ever hosted WordPress will tell you how important (and often frustrating) these things can be.

Page.ly have continued to refine and perfect their product since their early days and their constant improvements and additions, together with solid service and support have all contributed to their success. When it comes to recommending a hosting and management service it’s often an area fraught with uncertainties but Page.ly have proved time and time again that they are a capable, efficient and very popular choice.

Such managed services are invariably a little more costly, and sure, you could pay four dollars a month for hosting if you wish – that’s not in dispute. As we always point out, in the world of hosting, quality and value for money should always be put before cheapness. Page.ly have continued to expand and improve upon their service and yet remain extremely competitive on price when compared to some of the newer kids on the block. I have seen many criticisms of the cost of some alternative managed services, but Page.ly customers seem generally and genuinely happy with what they get for their money and that, in such a competitive field, has to count for a lot.

I also have to add that since our first dealings with the company, co-founder Joshua Striebel has been someone who goes above and beyond in his role and has always answered any questions and addressed all issues promptly and politely. Customer service takes priority at Page.ly and the general happiness of their customers and partners speaks volumes abut their commitment to offering a service that continues to grow and stay ahead of increasingly fierce competition. Looking back to our review two years ago, we see no reason to not continue supporting and recommending their services.

Visit Page.ly – The Dedicated WordPress Hosting & Management Solution

WordPress Membership Site Plugins

WordPress powered membership sites have become extremely popular in recent years and building membership sites with WordPress has been playing catch up to demand for some time.

It is probably safe to say that nowadays, the sophistication of WordPress membership site plugins has reached the point where virtually anyone with the will and a little investment can soon have their first membership site up and running.

Membership sites come in all shapes and sizes and you certainly don’t have to use WordPress as a platform if you don’t wish to. There are plenty of alternatives out there and some of these were powering membership websites long before WordPress got much of  a look in.

Having said that, with so many webmasters and bloggers now using WordPress, it is natural that for those among them thinking of building their first membership site that they will gravitate towards the platform with which they are most familiar.

There are various plugins available nowadays that can make the job much easier than it used to be and so we decided to compile a list of WordPress Membership Site plugins to assist users who are considering building such sites.

Wishlist Member is one of the better known premium plugins and  has gained a great following and a string of glowing testimonials. You can see a brief overview of the plugin in the following video presentation.

If you need features such as Sequential Content Delivery, Multi-Level Access, Secure RSS Feeds, Control Viewed Content, integrations with Mailchimp.com, file protection, infusionsoft and more, this plugin incorporates all these features and more as well as having its own API. Regular updates are free to purchasers too and the plugin continues to evolve and grow. You can find out a lot more about Wishlist Member at their website. Certain feature may require additional payments.

Magic Members is another popular plugin and many of its adherents claim it is better than Wishlist Member. That of course depends greatly on your own requirements and preferences.

Some of the key features of this plugin are a download manager, integration with Authorize.net and WorldPay, member only RSS feeds and more. If you want the ability to run an affiliate program from within your membership site, MagicMembers offers an additional plugin called MagicAffiliate which is fully integrated with MagicMembers and the WP Ecommerce plugin.

The plugin comes in at the same price point as Wishlist Member so the choice between the two comes down to available features and perhaps user interface and aesthetics based on personal preferences.

MemberWing is an extremely powerful membership plugin which combines most of the features offered by the previous two products and adds a whole swathe of its own. The power of this plugin is reflected in its price which is considerably higher than the aforementioned options too but if you need or want most of its functionality it is hard to beat.

The plugin can do so much that listing all its capabilities would require an entire post in itself but it supports more payment gateways, has its own API and enables you to build and launch virtually any kind of membership site your imagination can come up with.  Online stores selling access to digital downloads – ebooks, videos, podcasts etc. Integrate with autoresponders, such as Aweber and Mailchimp easily and build your mailing list automatically. Sell access to posts, pages and digital downloadable materials for a fixed fee or by flexible recurring subscriptions. Build opt-in list by offering automatic access to premium materials to free subscribers. Create and manage affiliate programs. Special SEO capabilities and powerful file protection functions that help you to protect your digital property against theft.

WP-Member offers a basic single site license for just $29.99 making it far cheaper than the the options mentioned above. However, if you want support there is an additional annual cost involved.

The plugin offers most of the features you would expect to find in a membership site but is not as comprehensive as MemberWing. It offers unlimited membership levels, unlimited subscriptions, free, trial and paid account types, content protection, content teasers, fall back and encryption protection and customizable registration and error messages. Payment gateway support for Google Checkout, PayPal and Authorize.net

WP-Member was once a subscription based plugin with recurring fees but now that it has moved to a one off fee for the single site license and added more features it represents much better value for money. There is a developer license too which costs $199 annually and can be used on up to thirty sites.

Digital Access Pass is another popular and highly regarded plugin with a multitude of features that rival MemberWing in terms of comprehensive options.

Payment processors supported include 1ShoppingCart (and all private labels), ClickBank and Paypal Standard, for shopping cart Digital Access Pass directly supports Authorize.net, Paypal Express Checkout and Paypal Payments Pro. There is no need for any third party shopping carts as Digital Access Pass itself becomes your Shopping Cart.

Other key features include a built in affiliate program that supports pay per lead and pay per sale so it is a good option for anyone who wants an easy way to offer their own affiliate program. The plugin also offers file protection, pay per view pricing and pay per download and subscription based memberships.

There are plenty more features that make this plugin worth a serious look.

WP-eMember is another attractive option and comes in at a very competitive price. Its affordability might suggest that it is somewhat short on features but that is actually far from the case.

WP-eMember costs less than $50 and includes unlimited licenses so you can use it on as many sites as you like.

The list of features is pretty impressive and although it doesn’t include a shopping cart or affiliate program the company offers its own in house plugins that will enable users to include these options if they wish. All the other expected options are present and correct including content protection, unlimited membership levels, autoresponder integration and real time reporting.

For a solid basic membership site WP-eMember offers a good package and you can customize it to suit your needs with a wide range of add on features as required.

WP-MU & BuddyPress is not strictly speaking a membership site plugin but we feel that it should be mentioned in this article because it does offer many things that  users might be looking for when considering their options. WP.MU is an installation and hosting service for WordPress Multisite (MU) + Custom themes and plugins + BuddyPress + bbPress.

WP-MU or WordPress Multi User offers a complete range of themes, plugins and hosting options which enable users to build things like social networking sites and forums. Depending on your your plans you might want to take a look at this option which is why we have included it here as a well established and respected platform.

This is only a very brief rundown of some of the most popular and well known membership site plugins for WordPress and there are others available which may or may not be better suited to your budget and/or purposes. If you think we have missed any that deserve a mention please feel free to leave your own recommendations and feedback in the comments section.

Below we have also embedded a 56 page guide to running a profitable membership which contains some useful information, tools and links. If you prefer to download a copy to read at leisure and for future reference go ahead. You are also free to share the report on your own sites.

Once upon a time it was fairly simple to promote affiliate links in all manner of places without a problem and the more work you put in the more money you could make. Gradually however, those who I like to refer to as the “affiliate nazis” have gradually managed to force their (in my opinion) totally misguided “anti” stance into virtually all corners of the web. They have gone about this with the zeal of others of a similar ilk – the anti smoking extremists come to mind but there are plenty of “anti” driven zealots out there attacking others for all manner of things that they don’t happen to agree with and many who just seem to select a cause and jump on the bandwagon.

Nowadays, typing an affiliate link anywhere other than on your own web properties brings with it an almost inevitable pause for thought because somewhere out there the affiliate haters are just waiting to pounce. What I find quite amazing is how the general antagonism towards affiliates and affiliate marketing has been adopted by so many prominent websites and online services. It is almost as if they endorse and promote the image of an affiliate as some kind of dubious and underhanded criminal, the lowest of the low, without really thinking about why but simply to please and appease the relatively small minority who wage their campaigns of righteous indignation and disapproval against people who are engaged in a perfectly legitimate and commonplace online activity in an attempt to earn a living or some much needed extra money.

I  recently (although not for the first time) became a target for the kind of unprovoked online abuse reserved for affiliates in a forum. I don’t make a habit of joining too many forums and only visit a couple on a regular basis. In one of these where I have been a contributing member for about a year or so, a thread I had started was rudely hijacked by some clown who took exception to my signature file which included an affiliate link to a company I use myself and one which I cannot praise highly enough. This particular forum had no rules against affiliate links in signature files (I have since been exonerated completely by the forum owners of any wrongdoing in their eyes). However, this did not prevent the self appointed forum Nazi policeman from posting offensive remarks about me, my general character, morals and ethics all expressed in language befitting a docker or fish wife. Forget the fact that he knows absolutely nothing about me, my life or anything else. In his twisted and hate filled little mind and from the safety of the “keyboard warrior” mentality he took it upon himself to act as judge, jury and executioner – a crusader against the cancer of affiliates! What a hero.  This individual was not, I should add,  a moderator or someone who held any kind of official position on the site in question but another regular member who could not apparently understand the heavy irony in his personal attack, bad manners and gutter language as he lectured me about the concept of being a “guest” on the forum and behaving accordingly – this was all on a thread that I had started and a discussion on a completely unrelated issue. His own lack of manners and civility didn’t apparently strike him as the least bit hypocritical but then all extremists are the same when you get right down to it and they crawl out from under countless stones on the internet to spew their venom.

As a result of this, the forum owners have decided to clarify their rules and have amended them to ask people not to use affiliate links anywhere on the forum. I do not have a problem with this and was happy to comply but it is unfortunate that such things have to happen this way. I’m sure the coward behind the username would not behave like this if they were sitting in the same room as me or anyone else they feel they have a right to abuse in such a manner for fear of a well deserved punch in the mouth!

Elsewhere the attack on affiliates continues apace. We are constantly told that Google does not like affiliate sites any longer and haven’t for some time. Too many ads on your site will result in penalization blah blah blah. True? I’ve no idea but I know it comes as a result of all the “thin” affiliate sites that were created in droves at one time, sites that offered no content or useful information. Forums, article directories, social media sites, all have caved to those who cry “spammer” (one of the most overused and misused words ever) at the slightest hint of anyone trying to promote anything at all. twitter is a case in point. I have used the micro blogging service from its very early days and my primary account had been steadily built over the years to around 12,000 followers. What now seems to be the almost inevitable suspension came as quite a blow and once an account is suspended by the Twitter bots it seems that the chances of reinstatement have become slimmer and slimmer. On this occasion (as is apparently commonplace) I did not receive any email notifying me of the suspension or the reason behind it. With Twitter you are left to guess. I filed the appeal through the proper channels and after a lengthy wait was told that “prohibited third party services” which had been given access to my account were the reason. I looked at all the programs to which I had allowed access but there were only a handful and none were doing anything onerous as far as I could see but to be on the safe side I revoked all permissions and advised Twitter of the actions I had taken. Twitter then informed me that my account was reinstated – but it wasn’t. I waited 48 hours but the suspension was still not lifted and when I reopened the ticket, in a complete 180 reversal I was told the account would not be reactivated, ever. No reason was given, either for the turnaround or the closure of the account.

I am far from alone in this and it’s frustrating, but as with any free third party service there is little you can do other than say “it’s your world boss” and move on. The new account I opened lasted around three months, during which time I was extremely cautious in light of my suspension experience. Out of the blue this account is suspended too, again with no explanation. The appeal takes several weeks and this time I am genuinely surprised by the reason I am finally given. Apparently, if the majority of your tweets include URL’s it is only a matter of time before you will be flagged and booted. I think this a rather overzealous “rule” but what can you do? I spend most of my time on Twitter answering other user’s questions and requests for help on WordPress related matters for the most part and yes, I post affiliate links to products and services in some of those tweets. Seems this is no longer acceptable on Twitter. Because I do not waste my time and that of others on Twitter posting inane one liners about my day, my personal problems, what colour underwear I’m wearing or which latest vacuous celebrity is sleeping with whom, I’m not using the service in the spirit for which it is apparently intended. It matters not that my inbox is full of thanks from others for my help or answers and appreciation of a recommendation that solved their problems. The fact that most of my tweets are not “personal” and contain links identifies me as a spammer! I’m still undecided about opening another Twitter account and I think that’s a shame.

I wrote this because I am sick and tired of people who constantly crusade against something with no real knowledge of the subject, just a spiteful and hateful attitude based on nothing concrete. The fact is that virtually all affiliate programs, and there are hundreds of thousands of them, do not penalize the customer in any way if they arrive via an affiliate link as opposed to landing there directly. The end user or customer pays the same regardless. So why do some people reserve such venom for the affiliate, who after all is doing something perfectly legal and above board (excepting those who blatantly spam via email or deliberately ignore rules) and is legitimately trying to earn some money. For me, my affiliate marketing helps to feed my family, pay my bills and sometimes brings in enough here and there for some little luxury or another. Generally though it’s just a much needed and far from excessive income.  Apparently, to some people, I should not  have the right, the desire or the opportunity to provide for my wife and son, put gas in my truck, keep the lights on and a roof over our heads through such methods!

I guess when you look at it that way it’s pretty disgraceful what I do huh?

When the U.S. announced the FTC guidelines it was imposing on affiliates I was quite astounded and yet most people mutely accepted one more totalitarian interference into their personal freedoms. The guidelines are ridiculously draconian and as far as I can see, their sole aim is to make it virtually impossible for the little guy to earn a buck. It has gradually crept into more and more corners of the affiliate marketing world and although I have disclaimers on all my sites, I do not see why I should have to put a disclaimer under every single article I write on my website, which I pay for and maintain, to the effect that I am a sleaze ball who will earn a few pennies if you click on my link and subsequently buy something. Excuse me but screw that. When a “celebrity” of some flavour or another is paid huge sums of money to wear a particular brand of anything, or to endorse something they have never, and would never use, does everyone demand they make a grovelling statement justifying their actions? Of course they don’t, because in this world their are rules and laws for some but a completely different set for others. The FTC has basically attempted to criminalize anyone who promotes a product or service and receives a commission for doing the work. Do we criminalize companies for working for commissions? Of course we don’t. Is an insurance broker required to tell every customer that if they use their services they, lowlifes that they are, will be paid a commission? Of course they don’t. So why are the rules different for the little guy, sitting at home and promoting products and services on behalf of another party in consideration of some relatively small financial reward should they make sales or referrals? The hypocrisy and double standards are disgusting in my opinion. Add to that the fact that I am not a US citizen, what right does the FTC have to dictate what is “law” to me?

A lot of this of course is down to some of the extremely poor quality products that are peddled by some people but there seems to no longer be any kind if distinction between those who will try to push all kinds of rubbish to make a buck and those who promote quality products and services. I realize there is a big difference between promoting every rehashed ebook or latest potions, lotions and other such scams and introducing people to decent and useful products and services that are actually worth spending money on. Speaking personally I can’t afford to buy and test every single item I may promote but I do actually purchase and use many of the things I sell as an affiiliate and for the things  don’t have direct experience of I try to do my research carefully in an honest attempt to avoid the rubbish.

Before I sat down to create this post I did a littleonline research and read several articles and blog posts painting all affiliates and the products they promote with such a broad brush it was laughable. Sadly though a lot of people will read such sweeping generalizations and stereotypes and repeat them parrot fashion to anyone who will listen. One critic even went as far as to say that nothing available to buy online that is promoted by affiliates is worth buying and is all crap. Interesting. I would guess that huge retailers such as Amazon might contest that little pearl of wisdom. It is all very well to bash affiliates but give only a very narrow definition of the topic as the majority of  articles did – invariably choosing the kind of person,  “products” and outright scams being pushed at the sleazy end of the scale. Affiliates sell all manner of physical and digital products and services and it is simply disingenuous to publish sensationalist anti affiliate propaganda citing one affiliate, one product, one shady method etc. and use that to insinuate that it is a remotely fair or balanced summary of the affiliate marketing model.

Nowadays, if you decide you want to try your hand at affiliate marketing, there are far more obstacles in your way than there were ten years ago. Every day new affiliate programs come online and for good reason. It makes sense to leverage the potential millions of users online today to spread the word about your business, service or products. At the same time however, those running the affiliate networks do little to protect such a valuable resource. It is no wonder that many who set out on the path, eventually give up or earn so little it is hardly worth their time or effort. If you are considering giving it a go, it is more important now than ever to own your own sites because virtually every third party service out there today will not have your best interests at heart and unless you control and own your own virtual real estate you will struggle constantly. It seems the affiliate Nazis have got their way. One can only hope they will move on in time and find some other poor unfortunates to marginalize, hate and attack. Maybe in the future they will find themselves in such a group, singled out for the bile and vitriol of others. After all, every one of us is in a minority of some kind or another. Those with extreme views (often ill advised or rooted in ignorance) and who adopt the “anti anything I don’t happen to agree with or even necessarily understand”, would do well to remember that when they engage in their obnoxious persecutions based on their twisted need to feel superior to others.

WordPress for Absolute Beginners is brand new free PDF ebook that can be downloaded now and comes with full giveaway rights, allowing you to share it freely with others.

Unlike many WordPress basics type books, this 20 page PDF cuts through all the jargon and explains all the things that so perplex many who are completely new to WordPress.

It explains what WordPress is, how to use it, the differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org, the requirements for each and exactly how to get up and running.

It was written in light of the huge number of misguided, albeit often well meaning, comments that are regularly thrown around online telling people “Get WordPress, it’s easy” so casually thrown out as “advice”. Such advice often comes from such a wide variety of WordPress users that it soon becomes apparent that the value of such advice might often be somewhat questionable. Someone who uses WordPress.com for example, who has never even heard of WordPress.org is hardly in a position to remark on how simple the self hosted path might or might not be and are often completely unaware of the difference. An experienced hard core WordPress designer or coder is equally reckless if they tell a beginner how easy WordPress is to customize or manage without even considering the recipient’s knowledge level.  This is the problem – most people who post throwaway one liners on twitter and other social networks do so without considering either a). the knowledge and experience of the person to whom they give the advice or b). their own knowledge and experience in relation to the advice.

It is not uncommon to see pleas from people who have spent money on a premium theme or plugin only to discover that they can’t use them on WordPress.com. Others tell people they can host their own domain name on WordPress.com (true) but do not understand that this is completely different from hosting WordPress on your own domain with a hosting company. The list is endless and it is hardly surprising that so many people end up lost and confused. As the saying goes, free advice is so often worth what you pay for it.

In simple terms this book explains things such as getting a domain name, a hosting account, installing WordPress, and the basic first steps you should take as a brand new user with your first WordPress installation.

It is aimed squarely at the complete novice although a few nuggets will also be enlightening for more seasoned users – most people can learn something from this ebook. It’s free to download and you can give it away to others, the only proviso being that the content remains unaltered in any way.

If you have an audience you think might benefit please feel free to offer it as a gift to them – blog readers, newsletter subscribers – you can even add the book to giveaway events and similar.

Download Your Copy Of An Introduction To WordPress For Absolute Beginners Here

PDFBrander is an excellent server side PDF rebranding solution for webmasters and bloggers. Unlike traditional rebranding tools which invariably require the end user to download a PDF file and an executable rebranding program, PDFBrander offers a much cleaner and simpler solution.

PDFBrander is a script that requires installation on your server but it is extremely simple to set up and there is no need to mess with databases or anything very technical at all.  The script is well supported with very thorough video and PDF documentation so even the less technical should have no difficulties getting it set up.

Once installed PDFBrander is also simple to use from the built in control panel.

Once you have created your PDF, the script will find all the hyperlinks within the document and offers you complete control over which of those links will be rebrandable. You can choose to let the end user replace both full URL’s or a selected segment.

After completing the simple form, your rebrandable documents are then ready for people to download and can be integrated into your website in a variety of ways. You can see an example of how this works on a WordPress powered site at the following link on one of our own articles here – it will open in a new window for you:   Twitter & WordPress Marketing

As you can see, all the end user has to do is add their own affiliate links, click a button and their personalized copy becomes immediately available for download. There is no complicated software for them to install and no messing about figuring out “placeholders” or how to format their links. This ease of use makes it much more likely that your affiliates and visitors will make use of the service and that others will do the same.

viral marketing of this nature is extremely effective but only if it is made as simple as possible for people to use. PDFBrander provides that simplicity. If you have an affiliate program of your own, think how much this will help your affiliates to promote on your behalf and the likely increase in exposure and traffic you can generate. Even if you don’t have an affiliate program, rebrandable reports are a great way to encourage others to promote your PDF’s as they have an incentive to do so in the form of their own links being contained in the reports.

You can read the official promotional material below. Overall we can highly recommend the script to affiliate program owners and anyone who is interested in generating more traffic through viral marketing with rebrandable PDF documents and you know that this comes from a customer with genuine hands on experience of the product.

You can use existing PDF documents or create new ones. If you are looking for a good PDF creation software we use a free program which makes it extremely easy to create PDF’s and in the spirit of sharing we have made it available for you to download through the following link:

Get Easy PDF Maker Here.

You can download your copy of PDFBrander Here

Free PDF Report You Can Rebrand and Share

If you are using either Twitter or WordPress or both, this new short report will help you to get the most out of both. Whether you are looking to drive more traffic to your WordPress powered sites or to your affiliate marketing offers, the tips and tools in this concise guide will help.

The report is 18 pages in length and introduces some of my own tried and tested methods but will hopefully inspire you to do some creative thinking yourself.

You can download a copy of the Twitter and WordPress marketing report, rebranded with your own affiliate links (See the form below) and you are free to use your branded copy in your own promotional and marketing efforts. Rebranding is a simple case of adding your own affiliate links in the boxes filling out the captcha and downloading your PDF.

When you give away your branded copy containing your links, you can pass on the same rebranding rights to your visitors, subscribers, readers and customers.

Such rebrandable PDF books and reports can be a great draw and the simplicity of the brand new server side branding method we have installed makes the whole process far less painful than the more traditional branders that made people jump through so many hoops that they often lost heart and never rebranded anything.

With a few mouse clicks this report can be personalized and downloaded ready to be shared. No complicated brander software to download to your machine and no learning curve. This will encourage your visitors to rebrand and pass along the report and heightens interest in your own blogs and sites by virtue of the fact that you offer something of perceived value.

Try it for yourself and see how simple it is.

You can then use the report in a variety of ways – add it to your blog as a gift, share i with your subscriber list, add it to giveaway events, use it as an opt-in reward to build your own list, write a post about it and link to the download. Those are just a few of the things you can do to increase the viral effect of your report and how you can achieve a viral effect for your affiliate links. Think creatively!

We will be offering more ebooks and reports as time goes by so please subscribe and be the first to know – the early bird catches the  worm!

(IMPORTANT NOTE: If you do not have a Clickbank affiliate link you can get one here and you can get a free SocialOomph account here

If you leave any of the boxes empty the links in your PDF will not work correctly)

The WP Mail Ads plugin is an excellent addition for almost any WordPress user. Most people are familiar with WordPress and the different emails sent out by the system – you get an email for a new account, for a lost password, for comments etc…..not to mention all the other plugins that tie in with the WordPress email system. Think of all these emails going out to your customers and all they are getting is a boring WordPress system message..

They get it, look at it quickly and then go off and do their thing. The power here is, people almost ALWAYS read WordPress system emails because they usually contain important information. For example, if someone signs up for your site, they are going to want to read their username and password email, right?.

With WP Mail Ads you can now add whatever message you want to the end of every message sent by your WordPress site(s). Just take a second and think of the opportunities here. You can use it to add links to related offers, add support messages, get people like your FB profile, sell advertising space….and loads more, all from the built in WordPress email system where people are automatically drawn to opening the emails.

Your WP Mail Ads Plugin comes with a multi site license so you can use it on an unlimited number of sites. The uses are only limited by your imagination but how about using WP Mail Ads in some of the following ways….

• Cross promote other sites
• Sell it as a branding service to your clients!
• Link to affiliate products
• Add a Follow me link for twitter/Facebook
• Add a “Made by” message
• Link to your product FAW
• Add an Upsell offer
• Add an extra newsletter subscribe link
• “Thanks for commenting” message
• Add a custom signature
• Add a link to your favourite post
• Ask a question to encourage interaction
• Add a survey link, Feature a users site
• Top commentator of the month…..and really there are so many more ideas you might come up with!

There is no other WordPress plugin out there that does what WP Mail Ads can do.

It works with all major plugins that trigger WordPress to send emails and will keep a record of all stats for up to 12 months. So, wjy not start to take full advantage of all the emails that WordPress sends out – for a very low one time cost you can have this neat plugin up and working for you just minutes from now.

You can order your copy of WP Mail Ads Below – Payment Is Via PayPal and your download will be delivered to you immediately after payment is received.

QR Codes are gradually becoming more and more familiar both online and off and they can be extremely useful and profitable. Now that they are mor

e widely recognized, they are becoming even more so.

If you are not familiar with QR Codes yet, they are basically a simple bar code that can be scanned using modern smart phones and you can embed within those codes all kinds of messages, web addresses, phone numbers etc. They are commonly used to provide exclusive offers and many big name companies are now utilizing them on offline advertising materials. You can use them online, add them to signatures, use

them as profile images, print them and distribute them offline, use them on business cards, posters, flyers etc.

Sample QR Code

For the non technical it might seem like wizardry and seemingly complex but if you know how to create codes you can often sell them to local businesses anxious to mimic the big boys or simply to widen their audience.

There are plenty of online generators now but what we have here are two QR Code generators that you can install on your computer enabling you to create unlimited codes containing whatever you choose. One is a WordPress plugin and will work right from you WP dashboard allowing you to quickly create multiple QR codes of various types which will then be easily accessible from within your WordPress admin area.

I hope you will find them useful – with a bit of imagination, QR Codes can be extremely good tools to have in your marketing arsenal. I’ve also thrown in some great little niche marketing bonuses within each download which you’ll have access to when you download either software.

Download QR Code Easy – Click Here

The following video is a quick demo of the WPTagz plugin. This version is not rebrandable but is fully functional and works exactly as shown in the video.

Download WPTagz QR Code Generator For WordPress

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• Codee Software Launches Business Edition QR Code Product (prweb.com)

Our Limitless Profits review is based on our actual experience of the product which we purchased simply in order to prepare an honest and fair assessment of what the program offers.

Like many Clickbank products, the sales page offers only slight clues as to what  you might expect to find inside and makes many of the usual claims although the presentation video is keen to point out that this is not a “push button” software – let’s face it, most of us know that that kind of thing doesn’t really exist.

Limitless Profits is aimed squarely at those who are just entering the world of affiliate marketing and after watching the sales video we were keen to take a look inside and see what they were offering, particularly as it is sold on the basis that you will not need a domain, hosting, or a website.

I’m pleased to say that this claim is true. The system that they are offering relies far more on viral marketing methods and is delivered via a WordPress powered membership site. Once logged in you will have access to a thorough video training section which clearly lays out what you need to do and it is basically pretty simple stuff.

The membership costs $47 one time, or, if you click to close the window, you will get the $10 discount on the second page, so, basically, it’s going to cost you $37.  Is it worth it?

To be honest, yes, it’s worth the small one time investment. Some of the content might not be new to the more experienced marketer but such customers will still find it useful as the software will save you a lot of time in setting up viral marketing campaigns. It really is just a case of point and click. Many of the affiliate programs you will be utilizing are well known and you may well be using them already.

The system offers some clever and useful ideas into how to achieve everything you need without shelling out any additional money whatsoever. There are a couple of minor problems which I can’t really talk about without giving too much away but they are minor and do not detract from the total package.

So, does it do what it claims? Well, we spent an evening going through the videos, skipping some of the stuff we already knew but we did indeed learn some new things and were impressed with the content and the software that is the key – certainly in a time saving sense. We set up all our campaigns within an hour or so and then began the promotion process. There is absolutely no reason why the program shouldn’t deliver what it claims it can. How fast it will do so is dependent on many factors but in terms of returns vs time and effort spent it is well worth it.

After purchase you can expect the usual upsell and it’s an expensive one although probably worth it if you can afford it. However there is absolutely no need to buy anything other than the product itself which, in these days of deceit and misdirection, is a refreshing change.

If you are a struggling Clickbank affiliate, this program will certainly help you make sales but it’s not restricted to Clickbank by any means. Expect to spend a short time watching the videos, completing the necessary affiliate account registrations if you’re not already using them and then the rest of the time promoting your campaigns – the more you put in to spreading your viral campaigns the better but this can be spread out over days or weeks or you can get stuck in and spend some intensive online time setting up the promotions.

Limitless Profits – Click Here Now To Visit

Overall we’d say it’s a good product for the price and worth investing in. We will watch our own affiliate campaigns carefully and see how well it performs in the real world but we have reasonable expectations that it will deliver sales and commissions over the course of time.

Related articles

• How To Achieve Higher Revenue as A Clickbank Product Vendor (articles.thecaymanhost.com)
• How To Make Bigger Profits With ClickBank (ronmedlin.com)

Free PDF niche marketing reports and ebooks for bloggers and affiliate marketers are extremely useful in a variety of ways and as it’s been a while since I gave anything away I thought it might be nice to share a collection of niche reports that you can download immediately and use to promote your own site, opt-in list or whatever.

There’s no catch here, you can use any of these free reports as your own giveaways and rewards, you can even add them to free giveaway events if you choose.

No opt-in is required. The link below is a direct download.

The free reports cover a variety of niches so hopefully there is something useful for everyone. They are all contained in one zip folder that can be downloaded from the link below:

 Click To Download Your Free PDF Ebooks Here

Inside you will find the following free reports, all of which you may give away or even sell if you wish. You may use them in free marketing giveaway events, use them to build your list, offer them to your own website visitors and social networks. I hope you will find some of them useful and as you can see, some of the most popular niche markets are catered for.

Below is a sample of just one of the titles to give you an idea of the type of content you can expect – this is the Membership To The Bank report and is best viewed by clicking on the full screen mode:

The other included titles are listed below:
twitter Marketing Mastery
JV Fast Profits
Membership To The Bank
Domain Flipping Treasure Map
Work At Home Maximum Profit
Facebook Marketing Profits
Hand Over Fist Moneymakers
Work  At Home Maximum Profit
PLR Godfather
Building The Business Brain
Offline Super Cash
Fitness Resolution Fortress
The Basics Of Bodybuilding
The Beginners Guide To Golf
The Basics Of Forex
Energy Efficient Home Ideas
Super Speed Dating Secrets
Authority Anthem
Courage and Confidence
How To Make Her Fall For You On The First Date
10 Sure Shot Ways To Get Your Ex Back Within One Week

Catalyst WordPress Marketplace

Catalyst WordPress theme framework has been thoroughly reviewed by me already (Catalyst WordPress Theme Review) but the company recently introduced the Catalyst Marketplace and with that comes some exciting news.

Firstly, to celebrate the launch, you can get all editions of Catalyst, including the developer licence for a massive 25% discount until the end of October 2011. If that’s enough to spur you into action click here to download Catalyst now.

The marketplace is available only to Catalyst members and users and will contain an ever growing collection of themes, plugins etc. and many of these will be free for all users. As time goes by, the marketplace will be populated with more and more official content in addition to user generated content.

If you build your sites with WordPress and are not using Catalyst already, now is the time to get your licence. You will never need another WordPress theme again and once you discover the power of this framework, you will never look back. The addition of the marketplace is just going to make you, as a Catalyst user, even happier if that’s possible!

If you want to build great sites fast, I highly recommend Catalyst to every level of WordPress user and the Marketplace is just more icing on an already accomplished WordPress cake.

The following videos give a taste of what the Marketplace offers and some examples of what you can expect as a Catalyst user. For a more thorough run through visit the Catalyst website where you can watch a number of demo videos and look at the entire range of features.

The first video shows one of the newest Child themes recently added to the Marketplace.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Marketplace will be user driven to a large extent and if you are interested in becoming a contributor, the following video gives a basic introduction to how it works and how you can get involved.

Click here to view the embedded video.

WordPress Custom Widgets Plugin

A WordPress custom widgets plugin may not sound very exciting but if you are using a free or premium theme that does not include custom widget area functionality, this WordPress plugin could be just what you need.

So what are custom widget areas?

Most WordPress users are familiar with widgets and using them to add content to their sidebars but many people don’t know that widgets can also be used within the content of their blog or website too.

If you use a theme framework such as the excellent Catalyst you will have very flexible custom widget options already available to you within your WP-admin dashboard, and a good number of premium themes may also include some sort of custom widget options but if you don’t have them, this is where this plugin comes in.

Until you have used custom widget areas you probably won’t miss them much, but, like so many things, once you’ve used them it’s hard to do without them. You can use custom widgets just the same as you use your regular sidebar widgets to display all manner of things including javascript, banners, advertisements, sign up and opt-in forms etc. This ability becomes extremely useful when writing posts, building pages and tweaking the overall design and functionality of your site.

The plugin is simple to install and use. Once you have uploaded to your site you will see a new menu item under “Settings” titled “Custom Widget Area” where you can create your new custom widgets. You can then visit your widgets page where you can add widgets within those new custom widget area – let’s say you want to place an adblock or banner withing your post content as an example – you create a text widget containing the relevant code and then drag it into your newly created custom widget area and you’re set to go.

As you create your content, using the visual editor, you will see a new icon in the menu bar at the top. Place your cursor where you want to embed the custom widget area, click the icon, choose the desired custom widget and preferred layout and click add. The plugin will create and insert a shortcode to generate the desired content.

Once you are familiar with this simple process, creating and adding custom widget areas is fast and easy and you can use them anywhere on new and existing posts.

Full Details of This Plugin can be found at WordPress Custom Widget Areas Plugin

More Related WordPress Plugins

Widget Ninja

WordPress Widget Bundle

WP Pro Advertising System

Google Plus Widgets Collection

WP Social Lock is a WordPress plugin that was originally sold, I believe, as a WSO through the Warrior Forum but we came across it more recently when trying to solve the problem of locking specific content on a WordPress site until the visitor took a specific action – we wanted to make content available only after the visitor shared a specific page or post either via Facebook, twitter or Google +1.

This is not a new concept and marketers have been employing such “social content locking” methods for some time now but despite the fact that there are a variety of options on offer we constantly found that either the solutions didn’t work or were capable of only fulfilling part of our requirements.

We’ve listed most of the things we tried at the end of this review so that you won’t have to search as hard as we did!

The good news is that we found a winner in WP Social Lock, a neat little plugin now owned and distributed by Marc Hennes who has proved to be a very helpful and responsive plugin developer.

The video below sums up WP Social Lock in a nutshell if you don’t wish to read our entire post.

As you can see from the above demo, the idea behind WP Social Lock is to restrict certain areas of your site from public view, much as you would do with the various content locking plugins available as stand alone scripts or features of membership plugins, whereby only registered or logged in members can see certain content on your site. There are plenty of free plugins that can do this in the WordPress plugin repository. However, what this plugin allows you to do is restrict your selected content to only those who share your selected URL via one of the three main social networking sites and at present there are not any free plugins that do this as far as we know.

The benefits of this are obvious. First and foremost it will generate traffic from all three of the social networks as people Tweet, Like and +1 your page/post and give it exposure to potentially unlimited new visitors. It has excellent viral potential and used wisely can gain you a lot of visitors and perhaps a lot of customers or subscribers, whatever you are looking for in essence.

The claim that you will generate huge numbers of backlinks is perhaps true in part, although how much weight Facebook and Twitter links really carry is anyone’s guess to be honest and as for Google +1 it’s perhaps too early to tell how much an increased number of likes is going to impact your ranking or SERPS results. Ultimately though, none of these increases will do your sites any harm and you will get more traffic.

WP Social Lock has been around for a while now but its usage is still not as widespread as you might expect for such a neat little WordPress plugin. As we’ve already said, there are several others around, most more expensive and invariably incapable of offering shares on the big three networks. There are several Facebook only plugins but despite Facebook‘s massive reach there are still plenty of people who don’t use it. Restricting content based on a Facebook “Like” is a little tough on those folks, as indeed is restricting it to just Twitter. By using the three options in WP Social Lock you probably have the majority of internet users covered.

The plugin is easy to install and use – entering a simple shortcode before the content you wish to lock is all there is to it really.

So what about problems? Well, like many WordPress plugins, conflicts can arise with themes, other plugins you may be running etc. but Marc is helpful and responsive with his support so if you do encounter any issues they should be resolved fairly quickly. When you run other plugins that rely on the API’s of sites like Facebook and Twitter it’s not always the plugin’s fault when odd behaviour strikes.

One question that was raised frequently when the plugin was first launched and only offered Facebook and Twitter options was whether it would affect the spidering of your content by search engines. The answer to this is no – even though human visitors cannot see the content until they complete the required action, the spiders are granted full access to read and crawl the entire post or page so there should be no detrimental effects on the SERPS performance.

We had one minor issue with another plugin we were using on the site where we first tested WP Social Lock but after a quick process of elimination we isolated the conflict and informed Marc, who immediately set to work in the quest for a solution. We found our own fix in the end but our emails were all answered promptly and helpfully.

(If you would like to see a real world example of a page on which we deployed WP Social Lock here is one you can check out).

Overall, we love this plugin and recommend it to anyone who is looking for ways to boost their traffic. All we would add is that it isn’t something you should use indiscriminately. Selective restriction of your best/most valuable content is quite reasonable but overdoing it could be a real turnoff for a lot of people if you demand they share too much before allowing them access and they will be more likely to move on if you get too heavy handed.

If you would like to try WP Social Lock for free you can download WP Social Lock Lite free from here. (The Lite version allows you to lock content subject to a tweet on Twitter).

We hunted high and low for both free and paid solutions to social content locking on WordPress and came up with quite a few but in terms of value for money, user experience, layout, ease of use and features, WP Social Lock was a clear winner. Here are just a few others that we looked at, tried or rejected. All have their pros and cons, and as you will see, most are not quite as simple or well featured. We are going to be looking at a free plugin in the course of the next few weeks which although not really a competitor to WP Social Lock is pretty cool in its own right so watch this space for that one.

Other Social Content Locking plugin options for WordPress users:

WP Like Lockout – we haven’t personally tested this one but the sales page itself employs the lockout which seems a bit counter productive if you ask us. It would appear to be an OK plugin if you want to use Facebook likes alone but it uses popups which are a lot more intrusive and potentially frustrating for visitors than WP Social Lock’s interface. Much will depend on the settings you elect to use on the popup. It is also more expensive by around ten bucks so in terms of value for money it’s in last place here on that basis alone – there are better and cheaper choices as you can see. If you want to see it in action there is a video at this link WP Like Lockout

Google +1 Content Locker – simple, easy to use and cheap at just $7.00. If you’re going to go for a single content locking option Google might be the best bet as opposed to Facebook. Only time will tell. You can get Google +1 Content Locker here.

WordPress Like Locker – from the same author as the above and also cheap at $7.00. We have used this in the past and it’s effective enough, not overly intrusive and simple to use. If all you care about is Facebook likes it’s a good enough choice. See the details at WordPress Like Locker

Social Traffic Pop  – the third option from the same stable as the previous two plugins. Works on all three major networks – Google +1, Facebook and Twitter. Comes in at $18.00. We like this one and have used it in the past but still prefer the non pop up approach to content locking overall. Having said that, this is the cheapest of the plugins that support all three networks and represents good value for money. Read more about Social Traffic Pop.

This list is not exhaustive and there are other products out there which may or may not float your boat but if you want an easy professional looking social content locking plugin, our recommendation for WP Social Lock is one we are happy to make.

Please let us know what you think in the comments section. Have you ever used WP Social Lock? What do you think about social content locking in general? Would you ever try it or do you think it would  put off your visitors? Do you have any experience of other WordPress solutions that we haven’t mentioned?

WordPress SEO tips are everywhere nowadays and discussions of the subject invariably leave me cold. Frequently, the people giving the advice seem to be doing so from very insecure positions, often having sites that rank nowhere in the SERPS and have very little traffic.

For this reason I thought I’d not only help to dispel a few myths but to tell you exactly what I do when I want to rank for a particular keyword. This is not rocket science but instead of giving you a load of waffle and hypothetical fluff I will tell you exactly what I do and give you a quick case study too.

Before I go on, remember that not all WordPress sites are equal when it comes to optimization, but if you follow these  simple guidelines you should find that your rankings in the SERPS will improve in a lot of cases.

If you have a free theme that is not SEO optimized, use a plugin like All In One SEO or Yoast’s excellent SEO plugin to give you the basics for your site and the options to tweak your posts and pages. If you’re already familiar with these SEO plugins or have your own favourite installed, great, and if you have a decent theme with built in SEO options even better. There is still more you can do so read on…….

When you write a post on a WordPress site, decide what keyword you want to optimize for. In the example I give below we were writing a review of a product so we wanted to target the keyword/phrase “Virtual Sports Cash Review”.

Simple enough so far? I didn’t need to do a whole heap of research on competition etc. for this one, it’s not exactly something for which multitudes of people will be searching. The point is, it is a review and therefore we only need to think about what people who already know about the product are likely to search for when they are thinking of buying it – most people will go and seek out reviews and we want them to find ours. Unlike the thousands of lame posts out there that talk about optimizing for the term “weight loss” we’re going to show you how to tweak your SEO for real world results on realistic keywords and phrases.

The obvious title of the post is going to be our keywords or, if you prefer, keyphrase. You can add more to the title if it’s needed to make a coherent heading but your keywords should come first. For example, we could title our post “Virtual Sports Cash Review – A Customer’s Experience. You get the idea. Having entered that it’s time to write the post itself. There is no need to pepper the article with your keyword – write naturally, for human visitors. You can add some refinements later as you will see, without the need to sound like a broken record.

A few more basics to remember:Your permalink structure – get it right from the outset. Don’t use defaults. I prefer just postname but some lean towards category | postname. Either is OK, your choice, just be sure when you set up a WP site that it’s one of the first things you do as changing them later has detrimental effects even if only short term.

If you are including any images, be sure to name them with your keyphrase too – in the title and, if you like in the “alt” attribute of the image as well. I tend to vary the “alt” slightly but it’s up to you, just be sure to use them both and don’t leave them empty or filled with meaningless characters.

As we will be linking to a product we will choose our anchor text for any links carefully “Virtual Sports Cash” will suffice in this case.

When you’re done writing, use the additional fields offered by your SEO plugin of choice to refine your keywords and meta tags and in the excerpt or description field (as in All In One SEO), use your keyword first. The keyword field provided by many SEO plugins isn’t all that important any more, particularly to Google but fill it in anyway, using your main keyword first and add as many related and variations on your theme as you see fit. Then copy all those keywords and paste them into the “tags” section on the right hand side of your WordPress dashboard. Tags are important, don’t neglect them.

By now you might well be thinking; “Is that it? I read this post for that?” Well, yes and no, that’s the basics and you may well be doing most or all of that already but here is where I give you that extra something that will improve your rankings much further.

You will need to install a copy of the SEO software I use regularly it’s a free download from this link: Download Free S-E-O Software – it will open in a new window for you. Just hit the free download button and then install it once you’re done.

Once you have written and proofed your post, publish it to the web. When you’ve done so, open up your new free software and click on the “Page Analysis” button in the left hand menu. You will then be presented with a screen like the one below:

Enter the full URL of your post and then your chosen keywords/phrase in the keyword box alongside it. Hit the “analyze page” button at top right. After a few seconds the job is done and you need to click on the “Report Summary” tab. You will then be presented with the results and recommendations by the software and your page will have been given a “grade” “- just like school A being higher than F

What you want is an A or even an A+ so follow the advice given in the summary – if your post does not meet the criteria the software tells you it should, then change it so that it does. Normally, with WordPress, you will need to add things like an additional H1 tag to your post and probably tweak your meta keywords and description – just do what the software recommends and with each change you make according to its suggestions your grade will increase. Run the URL through the software again each time you make a change and you will see your grade improving with each little tweak. When you get an A or better you’re done.

You can see from the screenshots above that we made these simple minor changes to our post , and we achieved our A rating. Even though our initial post was written with a keyword in mind, those little extra tweaks make all the difference, even in a WordPress installation already built on a well optimized theme framework.

Here is a quick video overview of the very latest version of the software. The Pro version contains a whole lot more tools for analysis but the free version will let you do all the basics and you can always upgrade later if you find it helpful and want even more SEO features:

If you check Google for our keyword you will find the page in question in first place, on Yahoo and Bing we have the number two spot.

Did we do anything else? Well, I tend to go over to Pingler and ping certain new posts even though I have a good list of sites already loaded into WordPress. We did a bit of tweeting and sharing on Facebook and added a few select social bookmarks but other than that, no, nothing in particular. The SEO was taken care of and there’s no need to get hung up on all the other stuff when you could better use the time to write some more quality optimized content.

You can see the post and exactly how it is laid out at Virtual Sports Cash Review. For the record, the site does not use any SEO plugins as it is built on the excellent Catalyst Theme Framework which is optimized extremely well in its own right. The link will take you to our review of Catalyst and at the time of writing offers a massive 25% discount coupon – it’s one of the best WordPress investments you will ever make, guaranteed.

OK, this may not be a keyword for which there is much competition, we concede that, but the point is we achieved our aim of good rankings on all three major search platforms and as Google offers up over 2.2M results for that particular search, it shows what can be done with just a little extra planning and implementation.

Bear in mind too that the domain in question is virtually brand new and has practically zero backlinks so don’t let the SEO “experts” tell you how much more complicated than this it needs to be. Write good original content, make sure you have sitemaps submitted to Google, Bing and Yahoo – get the Google XML Sitemaps Plugin if you haven’t already and use Google and Bing webmaster tools to monitor your sites. Google indexes far faster than the other two but put in a little extra effort via Bing’s webmaster tools and you’ll soon get any decent site indexed pretty smartly. I’m not telling you that this will work on a hugely competitive term with thousands of searches every five minutes and that it will be your key to earning mountains of easy cash – I’ll leave that to the marketers, SEO experts and snake oil salesmen whom you can choose to believe or not.

If you write your posts this way you will improve your rankings – the more competitive your keywords the harder it will be to get on the front page but you will definitely do better than if you rely on complete randomness. It’s worth that little bit of extra work I reckon. There are actually a lot more things you can do but we’ve covered enough in this one post, enough to give anyone SEO brain freeze so we’ll talk more about some other clever stuff another day.

You don’t need to spend a ton of money on SEO, you don’t need to worry about building massive numbers of links, just concentrate on the simple stuff. Write good content and people will read it and link to it voluntarily. Monitor your sites regularly using the webmaster tools offered by the search engines and be patient. In all the years I’ve been online I’ve learned that tearing out your hair over algorithms, sandboxes, slaps, link building and all the other nonsense is invariably a fruitless exercise destined to end only in exasperation.

One last thing worth mentioning about SEO in this post – the speed of a site is now taken into consideration by Google at least. If you’re concerned about that or have no idea what it might mean for your site head over to our recent post titled “WordPress Speed | Faster Load Times” for more information.

Need More Quality Backlinks? Try Our Backlinks Search Engine

Would you like to sell your ebook on Clickbank for free – without the normal upfront registration costs, marketing costs, website and sales pages creation and all that hassle? I got an email recently from Harvey Segal and I always have time to read emails from this guy because his advice is invariably good.

If you’re ready to submit your book and start making money and don’t want to read all this stuff just click here to sell your ebooks online for free

If you’ve never heard of Mr Segal he’s the man behind such gems as Clickbank For Newbies and the Ultimate Supertip both of which have helped a lot of people to make money online. When it comes to Clickbank this is on expert you should take notice of, he runs the Ultimate Guide To Clickbank and it’s as valuable and relevant today as it was when he first launched the site – don’t be fooled by the simple, some might say ugly website design – the content outshines the look and lets you get right to the meat of making money on Clickbank fast. I’ve made money with all of Harvey’s products and recommend them highly.

Anyway, on to the latest email, the reason you came here you want to publish an ebook, sell an ebook online, perhaps sell an ebook on Clickbank and leverage the huge power offered by their affiliate network.

The problem is you’re on a very tight budget, maybe you’re great at writing, you have a great subject and valuable information, but you’re not so hot on how to publish and sell online.

Want To Sell Your Book On Clickbank? Click Me Now

Well,  you’re in luck having landed on this page today. If you’re comfortable with setting up a sales page, marketing and paying a fee to get your books published in the Clickbank marketplace you might like to read my post about Creating Your First Ebook but if all that is too much trouble and is just standing in the way of selling what you have written we can take care of it all for you with a brand new service.

This brand new service isn’t going to cost you anything up front. That’s right, we’re going to show you how to submit your ebook to this new site where they will take care of all the technical, nerdy marketing and up front costs for you.

Sound good? You bet it’s good – that’s why we’re recommending you check it out now if you have a book you’ve been wanting to sell already but just haven’t got past the final hurdles or if you are looking to sell a book you’re working on right now or planning for the future.

Head over to We Sell Your Books – it’s a simple looking site but it’s consequently easy to navigate. You could submit your book in the next couple of minutes and be making money this week.

Good luck and please let us know if you found this post useful – share it and help your friends and readers make some money online.

A new direction? Well, no, just taking in a few more sights and expanding on some existing places really.

The hosting directory and reviews section of the site have been consigned to the history bin.  After several years it has become apparent that this kind of information is no longer much in demand from sites like ours and we were rarely getting review submissions. So many hosting companies come and go that it was also becoming a chore to try and keep things relevant and to be honest, many of the companies we were giving space were so plagued with negative feedback it seemed ridiculous to continue sending them traffic. So ,it’s all gone for good. We recommend that anyone shopping for hosting check out the major forums such as WebHostingTalk.com

We will keep our hosting recommendations simple. These are the companies we still support and recommend, not just for WordPress hosting but for whatever you have in mind as a website owner because all of them have a proven track record of reliability and service.

Hostgator – Shared, VPS and Dedicated

Knownhost – Shared, Dedicated and VPS (Our own provider)

LiquidWeb – Shared Dedicated and VPS

Page.ly – WordPress total hosting and management solution ideal for the non technical.

You will still find plenty of archived material in the Hosting News category and we will continue to add relevant content to that section of the site. However, going forward we will be shifting our focus far more towards WordPress, SEO, Affiliate Marketing and Social Media and networking which is what we feel our existing audience  are most interested in.

With such a major cleaning operation you may stumble across the odd broken link in the short term but we are cleaning those up and hopefully the revised design will help you navigate the site a little more easily.

Your feedback is always welcomed in the comments section so if there is anything on your mind let us know!

WordPress speed and load times have become increasingly important, particularly since Google decided that the speed of a website would be included in their search ranking algorithm. If your site is very slow to load, not only will this now put off a percentage of your visitors, it might conceivably affect your ability to achieve certain ranking levels in the SERPS for your chosen keywords. It’s just one more thing to consider if you run WordPress powered sites.

WordPress is a great dynamic platform but it is easy to forget that as time goes by, the more content and features you add, edit and remove, the more you need to keep on top of your sites’ performance. Housekeeping is a boring and tedious task but we’ve put together some resources designed to make the chores a little easier.

So, how do you know if your sites are running too slowly in the first place? The first thing we recommend you do is open a Google Webmastertools account if you don’t have one already.  This is something that everyone running any kind of website should have for the wealth of important information and diagnostics it provides you with.

Next, add both the Firebug and Page Speed extensions to your Firefox. (Also available for Chrome if you prefer Google’s browser).

You can now go ahead and load your page and test it with the extensions you have just added. If the results are horrible and don’t mean a thing to you, never fear, read on to discover a number of ways to bring your website up to speed.

WordPress Plugins for Performance

The following WordPress plugins can all be useful in your quest for greater performance and are listed in no particular order aside from the first one which we highly recommend all WordPress users should install on all sites.

W3 Total Cache Plugin – download and install W3 Total Cache and follow the instructions carefully. It is probably the most complete and stable caching plugin currently available but, it needs to be set up carefully because some settings may actually make your site perform worse in certain areas. This will depend on several factors including your hosting arrangements and everything that is running on your site, themes plugins etc.

The good news is that there is plenty of help available if you need it. As you tweak the settings, check the effects it has on your page speed performance using Firebug or the Google Page Speed option that W3 Total Cache can install on your WP-admin dashboard if you select that option. W3TC can be tweaked for shared hosting, VPS users and dedicated servers. It places a new set of options in the left hand menu of your WP-admin panel.

Also check to make sure that all the features of your page are still displaying correctly and if you are using any kind of pop ups check that they are working – often the minify settings can mess with such things.

It is a great cache plugin but the options available also make it easy to end up with conflicts or even slowing down your site – there is a great guide already published on Zemalf.com and we highly recommend you read it and follow the set up instructions provided at their site – W3 Total Cache WordPress Plugin Setup Guide

IF things go wrong the important thing is not to panic! We have had a situation where all we got after configuring the plugin was the dreaded white screen = no admin dashboard and no site. If this happens the simple fix can be found at HackTrix – How To Fix The Blank Page Or Blank Screen In WordPress

If you find yourself having major problems with the plugin – and some sites do seem to have them, so be warned, there are alternatives. We installed and configured W3TC on one site and it seemed to be performing fine until we saw the error logs on cpanel which had grown to over 2GB!We can’t tell you what happened but the site was throwing up 500 internal server errors and that was enough for us to uninstall the plugin. We did try messing with the settings but all was to no avail, so it had to go. After deleting the plugin there were several display problems and only after much frustration and head scratching did we get things working normally again. If you have this problem it might be worth waiting a while to see if your site returns to normal after uninstalling W3TC because in our case it seemed to fix itself  after a couple of hours so maybe there was some residual caching going on – we really don’t know.

If you do have issues we would recommend you give  Hyper Cache for WordPress a try instead. This is a far less intimidating plugin to install and works straight out of the box in our experience. When we installed it on the aforementioned site the page speed ratings were within one or two points of those achieved with W3TC  and we didn’t have to spend ages carefully configuring it. We will monitor it carefully but so far it’s looking very capable indeed and isn’t causing any obvious problems at all. Top marks for Hyper Cache. This is the plugin that we use on this site and although it is not as effective as W3 Total Cache, it gave us far less issues. With W3TC, if you are using manual settings to minify javascript and CSS, you will have to keep those settings up to date each time you add/remove plugins etc. and to be honest, the speed advantage over Hypercache wasn’t worth the hassle but that is just a personal preference, and, as the saying goes, your mileage may vary!

In addition to W3 Total Cache, or Hyper Cache or even in isolation the following plugins can also be helpful in speeding up your WordPress page speed.

Clean Options WordPress Plugin – If your blog has been around for some time you’ve probably added and removed all kinds of plugins, themes etc. This plugin Finds orphaned options and allows for their removal from the wp_options table. You could have hundreds of orphaned options and this will help you clean house in that area. Be careful and make sure you are definitely only removing genuinely orphaned items though. You might be well advised to back up before you make any changes just as a precaution but on the whole the plugin is reliable and does a good job.

Better Delete Revisions WordPress Plugin – use this plugin to delete the revisions that WordPress automatically creates and stores every time you create ot alter posts and pages. These files can build up over time and take up space and impact on performance. This plugin makes it simple to find a delete all the revisions clogging up your WordPress. If you want to prevent revisions being stored in future you could install the Revision Control plugin to make the job easy. If you do this, you can remove the Better Delete plugin once you have set Revision Control to not save revisions in future.

If you have access to PHPMyAdmin through your hosting account you can then optimize your MySQL database. It’s easy to do – just click on the db name (WDRP1 or similar) highlight all the tables and select optimize from the drop down box at the bottom. That’s it, done. This can make a surprising difference to your site’s performance all by itself.

If you prefer not to mess with your databases in this way, try installing the TentBlogger Optimize WordPress Database plugin and do it from your WordPress admin with one click. The plugin will always tell you when your database is optimized and if not how much space you can shave off by optimizing. Couldn’t be simpler. It works on most sites although we did have a poblem with it on one WP site but to be fair, it’s an old site and the theme conflicts with a fair number of plugins so that was probably the culprit as opposed to the plugin itself.

Another useful plugin is WP Smush.it, basically an image compression plugin that will reduce the size of all the images in your WordPress media library and consequently improve load times. The quality of the images is not adversely affected and once installed it will automatically compress any images you add to your pages and posts. You can also apply it to all existing images in your library. Worth looking at if you have an image intensive site.

As you implement these things you should find your performance rating in Page Speed / Firebug starting to improve after each step. Take note too of the other recommendations that Firebug offers in respect of optimization. You may not be able to achieve a green check mark against every item, but the more you can get, the better.

There are various online services that will test the load time of any webpage although the disparity in the results that you will get prove that in reality they can only give a vague indication of how quickly your visitors will see your page load. This is because there are so many factors that affect that load time – their physical location, their equipment, their connection to the web, their browser type and version etc. etc. If you want to try some of them however there is a list available at PCDrome.com – 10+ Best Web Tools to Check Website Loading Time

While you’re doing all this housekeeping and tweaking, it is also a good idea to check for broken links on your site, particularly if you’ve never done so or haven’t had a clean up in a long time. We use Xenu’s Link Sleuth  for this (which can be downloaded for free) but there is also a WordPress plugin (isn’t there always?) that can check your WordPress sites for links that are  no longer functioning. It may not be compatible with the latest version of WordPress yet you can give it a try and see if it works for you. WordPress Plugin Broken Link Checker.

If you those results spend a lot of time tweaking your on page SEO, don’t let the results of your hard work be negatively impacted by ignoring the performance factors of your site(s)

If you are seeking an easy way to incorporate attractive and effective links to all your social networking and bookmarking sites in your email signature, this Firefox extension is going to be right up your alley.

Wisestamp is a free add on for your Firefox browser which enables you to easily create a professional looking email signature that features links and icons to not only your twitter, Facebook and YouTube accounts but will also let you display links to your latest blog posts and sites you have recently bookmarked on a wide range of social bookmarking services.

As you can see from the screen shot to your left, (click it for a larger view) once you install and configure the add on, all your social networking and bookmarking links will be automatically displayed in your signature whenever you compose a new email. In this case it is a Yahoo mail account but the extension will do exactly the same for Gmail, Hotmail and AOL mail.

If that wasn’t enough it will also allow you to add your signature to just about any webpage (as long as it supports HTML), such as Google Docs, Zoho Docs and similar.

Setting up the service is as easy as 1-2-3 and once you’ve spent a couple of minutes configuring the options you can forget about it. If you want different signatures for personal and business emails, no problem, it can do that too.

Once again Firefox gives us another great way to improve the browsing experience and a surefire method of spreading the word about your social networking activity, be it business related or not.

To get the extension and start socializing your email signatures just head over to WiseStamp and get started.

Facebook pages  have become a great way to promote all manner of things online and to help drive traffic via the huge social network.

Facebook allows anyone to sign up for a developer account and create customized fan pages where content can be inserted into an iframe to serve all manner of content to page visitors. However, with more and more users now using Facebook via a secure https, unless you are delivering your iframe tab or page content over SSL visitors will no longer be able to see your carefully crafted content without clicking on a link that asks them to revert to non-secure browsing in order to see the page. Most users won’t do this of course because they will feel threatened simply by the warning.

At the moment, your pages remain live but at the end of October 2011 Facebook will insist that you server a secure version of your iframe. It hasn’t yet been made clear what will happen if you do not do so.

SSL certificates are expensive and if you don’t have one this represents a bit of a dilemma.

However, there is now a free and easy way to make your Facebook iFrame  tabs and pages available over SSL and it is  very quick and easy to set up.

Head over to the website of Social-Server.com, register with  your name and email, and all you have to do is enter your URL, click a button or two and presto, you will be given a shiny new https: URL which you can add in the relevant field on your Facebook page or app options and your iframe will be served perfectly to anyone whether they are using https: or not.

An awesome free service that will save Facebook developers and fan page owners huge headaches and not inconsiderable sums of money.

If you have any iframe content on Facebook pages, now is the time to fix this and ensure that your visitors always see what you want them to. Don’t wait until October, you could be losing a lot of traffic already.

If you know anyone else who might benefit from this great free service please share this article with them to help them out and we welcome your feedback in the comments section below.

I am pleased that after our intervention, both organizations were willing to liaise with one another in order to fix something that was outside the control of all the Clickbank affiliates who would have been adversely affected. Thanks for listening, SmallRivers.com and Clickbank!

–

Paper.li is, on the face of it, a great service and a cool idea.

Basically the service allows users to produce a daily, weekly or monthly newspaper style webpage on the fly using managed content from various social networks including twitter and Facebook. After signing up for a free account all the user has to do is specify a few parameters instructing the site where to pull content from and it will do the rest.

The service will also auto tweet each new issue and mention Twitter users whose content has been featured.

It is proving popular because it is easy to set it and forget it and it does give some great fresh exposure on Twitter in particular.

BUT, and it is a big BUT, there is a problem under the hood of Paper.li and it affects affiliate marketers in a big way, certainly if you are a Clickbank affiliate. Paper.li does not parse affiliate links correctly and appears to strip out affiliate ID’s, so when your link is featured on ANY Paper.li page, you will not get credit for the sale.

As you have no control over when and where your affiliate links might appear, the service is, in theory, robbing every Clickbank affiliate of their rightful sales and income.

Every time you tweet a CB link, either raw or redirected, it can appear on a Paper’li page, of which there are now a huge number and which is growing all the time. All that nice free exposure however will not do you one bit of good.

We have been exchanging emails with the company for almost two months but still there has been no resolution and invariably as soon as we stop writing they just go back to ignoring the problem.

If you are affected by this, we suggest you check any links you can find that are syndicated on Paper.li sites and then write to the company yourself if you see the same issues. To do this just click on the article title and then click through to the Clickbank secure order page for the product – your affiliate ID should be visible at the foot of the page but in all likelihood it will say “none” if you have arrived via Paper.li.

The problem may affect other affiliate links too although we are still testing results from other networks – we advise you to do the same.

After a fruitless exchange of emails with Paper.li representatives who have confirmed that it is a bug, the situation remains unchanged as of September 8 2011.  Having opened a ticket with @ClickBank we are reminded once again how frustrating it is to deal with their support system an customer service reps who seem to have no idea when it comes to technical issues. So far all I have had back from them is canned instructions on how to create a hoplink!!!

I think I’ve been at this game long enough to have figured that one out guys! I have tested this on three different machines using various browsers and the end result is always the same. Paper.li takes the link that was originally posted on Twitter, shortened or otherwise and it works as it should if you click through from the hover popup by the author icon. Most Paper.li visitors won’t do this of course, they will just click on the article title and that is where the problem lies as for some strange reason the Paper.li platform breaks those links and strips out the referring affiliate‘s ID.

I hope that both parties will get together and address this issue as it is affecting every single Clickbank affiliate out there even if they have never even heard of Paper.li.

Having mentioned this on Twitter, the initial response from Clickbank was, quote:

“@caymanhost Sorry, but unfortunately we don’t have any control over how paper.li handles affiliate links! Not much we can do there”.

Fortunately this response was not indicative of Clickbank’s view eventually and as you can see from the update at the beginning of this post they stepped up and resolved matters in conjunction with Paper.li and SmallRivers.com.

For some people it is and if you are one of those people, the aim of this hub is to give you a very quick and bare bones guide on the subject along with the tools you’ll need to get the job done.

Keyword research is important if you are involved in niche marketing or article marketing, pay per click advertising, search engine optimization, or even if you are an Adsense publisher.

The problem with the whole keyword research topic is that although quite a bit has been written about it and how important it is, there are not many really good explanations about what you should actually be doing. Sure there are plenty of links to keyword tools and software, but very little on how to use them to your advantage.

I’m going to try and give you a concise explanation that was given to me by someone who has a lot of experience in niche marketing and Adsense. Don’t worry, you are not going to need to be an SEO expert to follow these methods and neither will you need any expensive tools.

Photo Credit : Practicalowl

When doing your keyword research you are basically looking for two things:

1) Search Volume

2) Competition

This is vitally important and what a lot of people misunderstand and unless you research both properly, your results are likely to be mediocre a lot of the time. So, here is the quick down and dirty way to find your keywords and rank well for them.

Keyword Tools & Keyword Software

Go to SpyFu.com and type in a broad keyword covering your chosen topic and it will give you an idea of how much advertisers are paying for clicks in that given market. If you are an Adsense publisher for example, it’s a good way to see roughly what you might expect to earn for clicks on your ads. It’s a rough guide, but it will sort out the wheat from the chaff and help you avoid those five cent clicks and help you find the bigger green

Firstly you are going to need a keyword research tool. Google’s Keyword Tool is about as good as anything else, although I sometimes use the SEO Book Keyword Tool too. Both are free.

(No keyword research tool is 100% accurate by the way, they are guides that work on past data and that data is an ever shifting sea, but they are the best you’ve got).

Now you need to type in some keywords that broadly match the subject you are researching. Google will find you all the keywords it feels are relevant and make additional suggestions too. What you are looking for are those with good search volume – “good” will depend on how narrow and focused your niche is. For niche sites and articles, anything with a daily search volume of a hundred or more is worth looking at. For less long tail phrases you will probably raise that number. It’s something that you will learn with experience, but it’s not hard to pick out keywords that are getting high volume searches.

Add every one of your selected phrases to a text or csv file – you can do this easily in Google’s tool by clicking on the download links at the right hand side of the page.

Next comes the fun part. This method is not claimed to be laser targeted in terms of accuracy, it’s a bit rough really, but it works reasonably well most of the time.

Go to Google and search for each keyword you have saved to your text file. Look at the top ten results and work out the average page rank. If it is below three, keep the phrase but if it’s above four, don’t pay it any more attention. (Hint, use Firefox and download the SEOQuake add on which will then display PR and a lot more besides for each search result in Google, otherwise your research will take forever and a day).

I told you it was rough, but this competition analysis works well enough a lot of the time although there will be misses as well as hits. After you’ve narrowed down your keyword list in this way you will be working with terms that have high search volume and less competition.

By taking these steps, you will stand more chance of good SERPS results for your niche sites or articles, you will probably enjoy better Adsense revenue, and at this point you will be smiling!

That, in a nutshell, is all you need. However I’ve added some further resources that may be of interest to those who want to get even more serious with the whole keyword and SEO aspects of their site building and marketing efforts. I will probably add to these as I think of them.

Before you go there though, here are a couple of final thoughts on the whole keyword circus.

Keywords are important, that is accepted wisdom. However, there is a lot of misunderstanding about how to use them and this results in a lot of problems. Most people online are not SEO focused and therefore, you see a lot of uninformed, although sometimes justified, complaints about the whole subject of keywords. This usually arises because equally uninformed people completely misuse keywords by producing writing that they believe is aimed at search engine robots but is basically awful to read for humans.

Constructing an article or web page around keywords can often result in a mangled mess. It’s usually a result of mixing a little knowledge of basic SEO with someone who can’t write very well, with or without keywords.

Don’t overdo or “stuff” any piece of writing with so many targeted phrases that the work becomes unreadable. Repeating the same term over and over would have got you an English language fail in high school and it will return the same result from your online audience.

Oh and don’t ever write about one subject and try and keyword optimize it for something completely different. Just because you find that your proposed article generates low paying PPC ads for example. It won’t work. If someone comes looking for tips on recipes, that’s what they hope to find. Even if you could persuade Adsense that ads from ambulance chasing lawyers were relevant to your content about making the perfect rock cake, your visitors are hardly likely to click on them.

All you have to do is write a well constructed piece with a few targeted keywords thrown in, and you will get more targeted Adsense ads on your pages, better search engine ranking, and hopefully more targeted visitors.

Keyword Tools & Resources

Keyword Elite Software | Commercial Keyword Research Tool

MSN Commercial Intent Tool

Free Search Based Keyword Tool From Google

Free GTrends Tool From Wordtracker

NicheBOT | Keywords | Keyword Phrases From Wordtracker

SEMRush FREE SEO Tool For Adwords & Keyword Research

Free Report For Niche Marketers & Adsense Publishers

Clickbank CDR is something many affiliates and vendors often know little about. Clickbank articles have become commonplace but there is still a lot of misinformation spread around about the Internet’s largest digital information product retailer.

I see a lot of newbie related questions and a fair amount of unsubstantiated claims along with the usual scam type accusations being thrown around. If you are new to Clickbank or thinking about signing up as an affiliate in an attempt to make some money I hope this hub will be helpful.

Let’s get something out of the way right at the outset. There are people who make a lot of money with Clickbank, but they are almost certainly in the minority of the 100,000 plus affiliates who have a Clickbank account. It is unlikely that you are going to become one of these “super affiliates” in your first month, despite all the products out there that claim they can do just that for you.

However, if you are looking to earn some extra income, Clickbank is just another affiliate network that can help you do it. As with most affiliate networks it costs nothing to sign up, but if you are going to earn any commissions you are going to have to do some work. This is where most people fall at the first hurdle. If you are starting from a position of zero knowledge of internet and affiliate marketing, you have a lot to learn and it is going to take time.

Having said that, I am going to address an issue that is extremely controversial and has caused a lot of nonsense to be written about Clickbank claiming that it is a scam etc. etc. These claims are often made by disgruntled people who are prone to signing up for anything and everything on the web without really understanding what they are doing and, 99% of the time never reading any site’s terms of service or conditions of participation. These are the people who click on the “OK” button every time and then cry when they fall foul of a site’s rules.

You will see the relevance of this shortly, I promise

I have also seen claims by Clickbank affiliates that they are being cheated out of commissions but it all seems to be based on the number of “hops” they are getting in relation to the number of sales/conversions. From this they deduce that someone must be robbing them??? Unfortunately, in my experience, conversion rates can vary so wildly on a given product and are dependent on so many other factors that it’s a shaky foundation to base such accusations against the affiliate network. However, I digress, so let’s move on to this controversial issue….

Clickbank’s Customer Distribution Requirement or CDR

Did you know that a large percentage of Clickbank affiliate accounts, supposedly around 90%, are
inactive? It is quite a shocking statistic if it is accurate. The main reason for
this high number of dormant or inactive accounts is something that few people know or even talk about. It is however a very important part of Clickbank’s terms of service and it often proves to be a killer for many
hopeful Clickbank affiliates.

If you manage to sell an item or two on Clickbank, hold the celebrations. Before getting paid you need to need to meet the Clickbank Customer Distribution Requirement. Here is what that means, taken directly from Clickbank’s site:

“In compliance with US law, ClickBank will withhold payment of any account balance until the following criteria
is met:
* Sales made with 5 or more different credit card numbers and
* Sales made with two different payment methods (either Visa, MasterCard, or PayPal). Note: PayPal
purchases do not count toward the minimum 5 different credit card numbers”.

That seems pretty clear. Most affiliate networks will require you to generate a minimum amount of commissions before you get paid but the Clickbank CDR specifically states that you must record sales from five different credit card accounts as well as sales from at least one other form of payment such as Paypal. (I find that a lot of my CB sales are through Paypal and credit cards lag a fair way behind). This in itself is not too bad if you can generate those initial sales, but the problems arise when you don’t and find your account marked as “dormant”. Basically here is what Clickbank say…

“Accounts
with a positive balance but no earnings for an extended period of time
are considered dormant. Dormant accounts are subject to a charge of $1
per pay period after 90 days of inactivity, $5 per pay period after 180
days of inactivity, and $15 per pay period after 365 days of inactivity”

This is the major cause of Clickbank affiliates losing heart and giving up. Many disgruntled people then sound off and complain bitterly of mistreatment by Clickbank. In short, they didn’t read the terms and fail to understand why those terms exist.

Clickbank are not perfect by any means. One of the other biggest complaints you will hear about them from both vendors and affiliates is that they stubbornly insist on allowing people to buy through their own affiliate link. Because of this policy, they came up with CDR, to prevent people from opening an affiliate account just to buy through their own link and pay a fraction of the product’s cost by earning commissions on each purchase.

So, you could say that CDR is a band-aid to fix a problem of the company’s own making.

Whatever your view, that’s the way it is for now so you have to work within those parameters. If you are suffering with a dormant account or think that you could well find yourself in the position at some point in time, you are going to need to make more sales, more quickly and that’s probably easier said than done of you are already struggling.

In an attempt to address the problem faced by so many, Harvey Segal, the author of many Clickbank ebooksand owner of a Clickbank dedicated site, the CBGuide, has come up with an ingenious answer. It is a short free report and you will not need to give out any personal information to get your copy.

I consider this an essential read for anyone working as a Clickbank affiliate or publisher/vendor. As with all of Harvey’s
offerings, it’s a very well thought out and executed product that will
genuinely help people to succeed with Clickbank. It also contains a very clever viral twist.

Download Your Copy of Clickbank For Newbies Here.

I am sure that when you have read the report you will see how it can change your Clickbank luck and help you and help you to help others. This is not another “make millions on Clickbank” publication, just a clever and simple way for struggling affiliates to get past the first hurdle and pick up their first check in the mail. Let’s face it, it’s a check you deserve if you have promoted products and made a handful of sales, and beats seeing your earnings steadily decline and dwindle away along with those aspirations and hopes of making some money online with Clickbank.

I certainly hope you will find it useful along with the other excellent resources I have listed below. These will give you further insights into affiliate marketing and Clickbank and are well worth a visit.

Now, go and earn those commissions and enjoy your first payment.

Catalyst Theme For WordPress Review

The Catalyst Theme is really a lot more than a traditional bolt on WordPress theme – it’s actually a framework that enables you to do some pretty amazing things when it comes to designing and building WordPress driven sites, whether they are blogs, static or dynamic sites or a combination of all three.

There are no longer any coupon codes published by Catalyst – sorry. However, they are currently having a one year anniversary sale and you can grab a lifetime Personal Edition membership for just $77.00 if you order during this special offer.

With Catalyst Theme, you are not limited to a single layout, one, two or three sidebars, one widget area or all the other restrictions that come with a single WordPress theme. With the Catalyst theme framework you can basically build unlimited custom page layouts, custom widgets, custom hook boxes and more, enabling you to design and construct every page and post template on your site exactly as you want them. You can have an individual header or footer for every single page if you so desire!  The real beauty of it though is not just the almost limitless customization available to you, but the ease with which you can implement them all.

Catalyst Theme - Order Your Copy Now

Firstly, Catalyst comes with 22 custom skins, which in and of itself might not sound like much, but with the Dynamik Child Theme that comes as part of the Catalyst bundle you then have over 600 No-Coding Design Options, meaning that combined with the base skins, you have at your fingertips an absolutely huge range of design options. Whether you are a beginner or an accomplished WordPress user, customizing your WordPress sites has never been easier or more efficient.

Once you have installed the Catalyst theme and the Dynamik Child Theme you can start to explore the power and flexibility of the framework using any of the Dynamik child themes as starting points, using those from the marketplace or just creating your own. Catalyst makes design very straightforward and intuitive.

At this point it might be prudent to show you an example of what Catalyst can do, and bear in mind this site was built over the course of a couple of days, starting completely from scratch after a request for a redesign of an existing WordPress website – Catalyst Theme Powered Site – Arteccentrix

You can even create your own custom child themes with a single mouse click, something you will not find anywhere else, not even with the mighty Thesis.

All the following features come with the Catalyst WordPress theme:

22 Custom Skins on which to base site design.

600+ Dynamik design options to tweak your site’s design to perfection. (no manual coding or CSS required)

Add any Custom CSS you likeBuilt-In Image Uploader to add the images that make your site shine.

Fill in a few fields, click a single button and download the themes you build. Use them for anything you want – your own sites, client’s sites etc. You can even sell them for profit if you wish.

Huge range of  Custom Widgets including Excerpt Widget, Author Bio Widget, Ad Widget a PHP  Widget and lots more!

Catalyst works with WordPress and WordPress MU (Multi-User)

Receive Free Updates for Life ( with automatic update feature)

You will also have access to the new “MarketPlace” where you will find more custom themes, skins and other add ons for your Catalyst powered sites that have been created by the Catalyst members themselves. Many of these are free but there are also premium products available within the store.

All this sounds impressive but if it’s also a little overwhelming don’t worry. Installing the theme is pretty much the same as you would follow for any other theme,the only real difference is that you actually install it in two steps, first the Catalyst Theme Framework followed by the Dynamik Child Theme.

Once you’ve done that you will be able to access all the theme‘s options from within your WP-Admin area. There is a lot to explore, and the more you look the more you find but you will also find an excellent support forum and some pretty comprehensive video demos and members support area that answers all the most common questions and shows you exactly how to use the powerful features.

Once you start to play around with the options you’ll soon feel comfortable and it’ all accomplished from within the theme itself so if you’re not CSS savvy, don’t worry. Things that can be a huge headache when working with regular WordPress themes are amazingly easy to achieve with Catalyst’s user friendly and clearly laid out interface.

I should add that when it comes to SEO, Catalyst has been fitted out with a pretty decent set of options that will ensure every post and page you write can be quickly and simply optimized for the search engines at the time of writing and can be easily tweaked at a later stage. Since using Catalyst I have, for the first time in my WordPress career, not bothered to use any SEO plugin and judging by the results, Catalyst does a very nice job at optimizing for targeted keywords.

A lot of thought has gone into the entire package and the developers have delivered a clean, logical and well laid out admin interface which is very intuitive to use and the tutorial videos are all anyone will need to understand and use the multiple options available.

For a good overview take a look at the following video while you’re here:

To sum up, I am so happy with my own purchase of Catalyst that I intend to eventually move the majority of my WordPress sites across to the platform. It is really that good and will make tweaking my sites in the future a whole lot easier. The latest release which came out a couple of days ago includes even more goodies that I have yet to explore.

Don’t think that this all comes at a premium price either – an unlimited site license for the Catalyst Theme comes in at just $77.00 (Basic Edition) or $127.00 (Personal Edition) and this includes lifetime updates. In that sense alone it is a genuine bargain. There are other frameworks out there but Catalyst is not only powerful and extremely flexible it is also fantastic value for money. Visit the site to understand the differences between the aforementioned license options which are extremely generous.

For those who need or want even more there is a developer edition ($197) which gives you access to an exclusive forum and more special features that are not available to regular members. Full details can be found at the site, so we’ll leave you to decide if the developer license is something you need.

Order now and take advantage of the special anniversary pricing options.

You Can Find Our More and Download Catalyst WordPress Theme Framework here

If you would like to see some of the sites built using Catalyst have a browse through the Catalyst Showcase

Image via Wikipedia

The announcement of Google’s latest algorithm changes designed to weed out poor quality content from what have commonly become known as “content farms” poses some interesting questions.

Early figures suggest that a number of well known and long established sites have been hit quite hard in the SERPS.  Some early indications of sites affected by Google’s content farm algorithm changes have already been published.

Certainly, the knock on effects of the change will take some time to become apparent but certainly, those who use article marketing are going to have to up their game when it comes to producing content.

Over two years ago I wrote a post entitled “article directories must raise standards” because it was only ever going to be a matter of time before the chickens came home to roost over the absolute garbage that was being passed off as content by authors, publishers, and the article directories and their editors.

It would seem that this is exactly what the latest algorithm updates are targeting – not by domain per se, but by individual pages on  those domains. With Ezinearticles marked as one of the heavy losers in the SERPS, my complaints about the decline in editorial quality control at what was once the  market leader in its field and loved by the search engines, is getting a slap for falling asleep at the wheel.

Based on early results though, if you are using article marketing as an SEO tool, there isn’t any reason to panic as long as you are submitting quality, well written articles. If on the other hand you spin crap into more crap, use rehashed PLR drivel that thousands of others have mangled before you, well, don’t expect your results to be much to write home about any longer. The abuse of what was once a wonderful system for all concerned, has, as predicted not only by me but many others, finally been tackled by Google.

It’s probably going to upset a lot of people. It will mean a lot of changes for some and hopefully it will allow article directories who publish only solid content a fair chance to rank well against the big boys who have been so dominant in the past. Good editorial practice should be rewarded, good content writing should be rewarded, and the tons of spammy, useless, marketing driven nonsense will be consigned to irrelevancy as it should have been a long time ago.

Article directory owners will need to get their act together, marketers will need to totally re-evaluate their content writing and syndication. The message is nothing new from Google – write good content for human readers and you will have no problems – we (Google) are all about producing the best, most relevant search results for our users.

I had a quick look at a couple of recent articles I had published at a few article directories, particularly those mentioned as big losers in the article linked to above. I’m pleased to say that they still appear to be ranking in the top three results for my chosen keywords which seems to endorse the view and the intention not to penalize domains in a blanket slap, only to penalize poor content published on those domains to improve the search experience.

Update: March 1st 2011

I carried out a small experiment over the last few days which seems to indicate that although most article directories are likely to be affected, some do seem to have been hit much harder than others, and although some people are claiming to understand the reasons and to predict the long term impact, things like this serve to prove that none of them are doing any more than guessing – probably a fruitless exercise,

Anyway, I wrote an article a few days ago, just before the algorithm changes hit, and submitted it to a handful of some of the top directories. The first of these was GoArticles and, as is often the case, it was published there first, literally within a few minutes. The next to approve it were ArticlesBase and Amazines, on the same day but several hours after GoArticles. Most of the others have not yet approved it.

That same day, the article was appearing high on the page one results for the targeted keyword from both ArticlesBase and GoArticles (this keyword was not particularly long tail, but was in a very particular niche with little competition or real search volume).

Today however, the GoArticles version had disappeared completely. The article was completely original and unique, and was written by myself, it was over 1000 words and, if I say so myself, very well written in terms of spelling, grammar and punctuation and not stuffed with keywords but written very much with human readers in mind.

The ArticlesBase copy is holding at number four on page one of the Google SERPS.  There are absolutely no differences from the article that was published first at GoArticles – they were identical throughout.

The Amazines version has also slipped out of the first 100 results having originally been indexed on page three.

The screen shots from Alexa’s data on GoArticles are inconclusive this early after the Google changes, but although they show some notable percentage losses a day or so in in terms of reach and page views they indicate an increase in terms of their percentage of visitors from search engines since the algorithm was implemented. Looking over the longer term though, the ups and downs don’t appear to be drastically abnormal.

Fig1 -

Fig 2

Fig 3

To add even more interest to the experiment, I bookmarked the articles in a few places too and republished the article at a limited number of third party sites (content farms if you wish).

At Thoughts.com, only submitted today (several days after the article directory submissions) the post is being ranked fifth, right below the ArticlesBase item.

The Goarticles URL, bookmarked at Faves is showing up at the top of the third page of results i.e 21st position.

I didn’t post the article on the WordPress site to which the article was linking – this site already performs extremely strongly in all three major search engines and I’m sure, if I did republish it on that site it would outperform the content farms, and, if I intended to post it on the main site prior to syndicating and bookmarking it would still do so. I’m hoping that this is really what Google is trying to ensure happens going forward so that original authors and their domains rank first for their content.

So, the algorithm is definitely making its mark but is it really rather a case of  over exuberance or clumsy heavy handedness? This particular article was in the fine art niche and was a fairly in depth look at the intricacies of the fine art market in a specific country and region. I’m all for getting rid of the crappy, spun a million times dross that is the staple of many article directories and distribution services but in this case, a good and very relevant piece has been lost to Google’s visitors. To add insult to injury, the bulk of the results now showing on page after page are for sites selling posters – literally hundreds of them. This is not really a balanced search result and probably not at all what searchers would be looking for if they used the keywords/keyphrase targeted in my article.

Overall, it does seem apparent that those involved in article marketing will have to make some adjustments. My guess is that article marketing does have a future, but not for those who are not prepared to write their own quality content and restrain themselves from submitting to hundreds of directories. The article directories themselves will almost certainly have to undergo some serious quality control changes too, and doubtless, a good many will go the way of the dodo if they do not adapt. As for the countless marketers who have spent time building backlinks and traffic via rubbish articles whether or not they are about to see their efforts come unraveled only time will tell.

Do I agree with Google’s stance? In part yes, if it genuinely improves the search results and enables decently written useful content from individual bloggers as well as the big boys to beat out the shotgun approach of some of the directories and associated spammers but to be honest I’m reserving judgment until a little more time has allowed the dust to settle.

Related articles

• Google Kills eHow Competitors, eHow Rankings Up (seobook.com)
• Google Aims To Take Out Content Farms (technologyreview.com)
• Google Rolls Out Search Algorithm, Targets Content Farms (ghacks.net)
• What Google’s Crackdown on Content Farms Means for Bloggers (blogworld.com)

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