Wishlist Member

I’m sure you’ve heard of Gary Vaynerchuk, THE “social media” expert behind the now famous WineLibrary.tv. Gary has a new book out called “Crush It” – and you can get a free copy when you purchase Wishlist Member.

But – you can only get the book free when you purchase in October 2009.

Wishlist Member will also be conducting an interview with Gary which is also included with this offer.

There have been a number of improvements with Wishlist Member – which is the sign of a great product with excellent support. The new improvements include:

Full InfusionSoft Integration: You can now run shopping cart fully integrated with WishList Member.

Run Your Own Affiliate Program: Wishlist is now integrated with iDev Affiliate Tracking Software, which means anyone running a membership site can now incorporate a full affiliate program into their site.

Chris Garrett (a high profile blogger) was interviewed on how he has developed several
membership sites using WordPress. You can listen to Part 1 of the interview below:

Wishlist Member now integrates with:

• Clickbank
• Paypal
• Aweber
• 1 Shopping Cart
• InfusionSoft
• iDevAffiliate

and takes less than 10 minutes to install and configure your first membership level.

If you are considering creating a membership site – consider using Wordpress and Wishlist Member – and consider it for October 2009, you will pick up some wonderful bonuses.

When I started building an online business, I heard people saying ‘control your traffic’, use redirects or cloak your links – and I had no idea what they were talking about.

Over time, the reason for this became a lot clearer but it wasn’t until recently that I really understood the absolute importance of using redirects to control my traffic.

Recently, one of the the affiliate programs I participate in closed down.  When they closed down, all of my affiliate links were disabled and anyone who clicks through is sent to a dead page.  This looks really bad and, if I had heeded the advice above, would have been really easy to fix.

As it is, I have linked my raw affiliate link ‘all over the place’ and I can’t remember where!  I now keep getting notices from the affiliate program saying that  I’m sending traffic to a ‘dead link’, but the reporting isn’t detailed enough for me to find out where they are originating, so I can change them.

If I had used redirects through my own website, fixing this issue would be as simple as going to the redirect, changing the target location and saving it.  Problem fixed….  So here’s some advice for you.

Keep Control Of Your Traffic

You need to maintain control of your traffic.  The question is how do you do it? The best way is to setup one link that you use to direct traffic to your third party or affiliate link.  These are called Redirect Links and will allow you to manage your affiliate links and send them whereever you want.

There are third party services that will allow you to redirect your affiliate links, like BUDURL, Viral URL, Tiny URL  however, if you have your website I strongly recommend you redirect your links through website.

By redirecting links through your website, you maintain full control of those links and cement your branding.

Link Redirects Through Your Website

Redirecting links from (or through) your website is a great way of maintaining control of your traffic and maintaining your branding.

When you use redirects through your website, these links will look like:

http://mysite.com/recommends/myfaveproduct or

http://mysite.com/myfaveproduct

and when you click on these links you are taken to another site entirely, generally an affliate link.

You can achieve a link redirect using a html file or through the .htaccess file (if you are running an Apache server).  These methods are effective, but can be cumbersome to manage, put in place and require a degree of knowledge in editing html files.

Wordpress Blog Users

If you have a self hosted Wordpress Blog, there is a neater solution.  The Redirection Plugin.  This is a great plugin that will allow you to easily add redirects to your site and track the number of hits, using the wordpress graphical interface.

Domain Redirects

Using a domain name to redirect to an affiliate link is a popular practice.  This is one of the strategies outlined in the One Week Marketing Plan and can be very effective.

When you register a domain name, many registrars provide the ability to ‘point’ the domain to another url, like your affiliate link.

Given that you can purchase .info domain for $1.99 per year, this is an excellent strategy.

The only thing that I do have some reservations with this strategy is that you can have one link per domain – which might mean you end up with a number of domain names.

You Be The Director

Once you start using redirect links, you will be able to control where your traffic goes – and if your affiliate programs change, you can make that change quickly and easy.

I also recommend that you use redirect links to control your Social Network links too – that way, if you decide to exit that social network you can still connect with your followers.

We have received multiple reports that a new, convincing, and dangerous worm and phishing scam is making the rounds on Twitter. Hacked accounts are sending DMs to users and stealing their login information. In fact, one of our own has received one of these direct messages.

They go on to state that the virus is dangerous because the login page is believable and the DM’s are being received from people you know.

Avoid being caught – If you receive this DM, Do Not click the link.  Ignore the DM.

For full details, see WARNING: Twitter Worm Spreading via Direct Messages

There are over 1400 training videos in the StomperNet Library, so I figure they can afford to give a *lot* of stuff away.

While you’re there, you should also check out their new StomperCommerce software – this makes it easy to build a search-engine friendly shopping cart.

I love the fact that the StomperNet team are providing daily webinars on those topics.  The webinars are proving very popular – so make sure you go check out the webinar page and sign up for those as well.

The greatest thing is the freebies you can get just be joining in the launch fun.  Take a look at all their free videos, and the Seven Deadly SEO Mistakes download as well (this is a great learning tool).  And… they’re giving away Stomping the Search Engines 2 for free as part of their amazing Stomper 09/09/09 launch.

There’s no doubt they know this stuff – they were teaching SEO before anybody even KNEW about SEO.

And they also announced something called StomperSyndicator, yet another free tool you’d get when you joined.  Apparently, this thing is the mac daddy of syndicating and distributing content for SEO.

So go check out Day 3 of StomperNet’s launch. If you’ve missed Days 1 and 2, easy to get caught up while you’re there.

Stompernet for Everything SEO

This is where I find Private Label products to be very helpful.  Whilst you shouldn’t necessarily use a Private Label product ‘as it comes’, they are certainly a great place to start… I find that they prompt me along and give me material to work with and create something.

The issue that I have with a lot of Private Label products, is that they are poorly written and / or poorly researched.  They don’t help with removing my ‘writers block’, just end up frustrating me further!  Even more frustrating is that, particularly in the Internet Marketing Niche, ‘everyone’ seems to have the products and just use them in their raw format. I’ve also found finding quality niche Private Label Products to be difficult.

So when I was approach by Dee Ferdinand about their new site, Niche Empire, I was very interested to look at it.  Actually, my initial reaction was – ‘not another one’, but as Dee had approached me personally I took the time to ask some questions.  Dee provided some great information about what they are doing with Niche Empire and even gave me access to the members area so I could see for myself the type and quality of the products that they are creating.

I was fairly impressed… The products shown were well written and put together, the formatting  is well done (something that frustrates me no end!) and the graphics amazing.

The offer for Niche Empire is pretty good too… It is a monthly membership – and for the price you get:

-    2 * 20 page ebooks that are written in a hot HOW-TO niche
-    2 * graphical minisites with a salesletter
-    2 * video squeeze pages
-    2 * sets of autoresponder messages
-    2 * sets of keyword research for each product
-    Non-trasferrable PLR rights to the products
-    Training area
-    Additional PLR material
-    A business blueprint for the Niche Empire products

That will give you two products each month with a good base.  Getting the autoresponder messages is a great bonus – it really means that you can implement a full lead capture and follow up system effectively…. something that I find quite tedious.

I also like that the PLR are non transferable.  This means that you won’t be competing within a niche to sell the Private Label Rights to the product…  a real bonus is my mind.

At the time of writing, Niche Empire is offering a 7 day trial membership for $1.  You pay $1 and gain access to the months content… so you can check out the quality for yourself, at no real cost and decide if this is really for you.

I don’t like recommending anything I haven’t ’seen’ for myself, or comes highly recommended from someone that I trust implicitly…  If you do decide to check it out, please let me know what you think too by commenting here — share your views with my readers, it’s the only way to help others make informed decisions.

Admittedly, it has taken a bit of time for me to evaluate the software – but I have and I’m going to share my observations and thoughts here.

As an avid Wordpress Blogger – I was fairly intrigued about anything that will help traffic to my site.  However, I was wary – I’m really only interested in getting targeted traffic to my blog, not just ‘any old traffic’.  After all, I would rather 100,000 visits and 1 sale than 1 million visits and nothing.

I installed this plug-in on one niche blogs that is doing fairly well and ran through the process.  I really was less than impressed….

The plugin – Traffic Getting SEO reviews your blog settings and gives you a rating for the level of SEO you achieved.  In the version I tested, it did not give any reasons for the level – it prompted me to allow the SEO changes to be made though….

Word of Warning: Back Your Wordpress Installation up before running this process.

Not that the plug-in stopped my blog working – I just have no idea all the changes that are made.

One change that is made by the plug-in is the permalink structure.  The permalink structure is modified to:

/%post-id%/%postname%/ - putting the numerical post id into the permalink (url) of the blog post.

This immediately rang alarm bells for – for two reasons:

1. It had modified my urls for ALL of my blog posts.  As my site is existing, a number (all) of my posts are indexed by Google.  Changing the permalink structure means that the links in the search engine results WILL NOT work…

There are plug-ins available that help you migrate your permalink structure – care needs to be taken.

2. This is not a recommended permalink structure, by many blogging and SEO gurus.

Let’s look at this… one of the key tips for SEO is to ensure that your keywords are included in the url for your stie / post.  Therefore, including the postname as part of the link is wise.  The inclusion of the post-id seems to extraneous and just adds to the length of the permalink.

Checking the SERPS myself – looking for the term – which permalink structure is best to use with Wordpress? – I found several interesting posts.

AUBlog:  from 2007 in a post titled Choosing the Best URL Permalink Structure for your Wordpress Blog states:

5/29/08 update: After having used the above formatting (id added to end or beginning, I would not recommend it. Use just the post id OR post name, don’t combine them).

I’ve seen a lot of bloggers recommend using the “/category/postname” structure
/%category%/%postname%/

but from experience, one potential issue to think about is if you ever want to reorganize or edit your categories, you’ll need to redirect your existing posts to the new category structure. I recommend avoiding this situation – redirecting tons of posts can be a pain.

Therefore this is the permalink structure I recommend 9 times out of 10

/%postname%/

A small thing to note: you can use a trailing slash at the end or you can leave it off. Personally I think it looks nicer with it off, however, it does give a very tiny boost to your webserver’s performance and is technically the right way to specify URL’s.

At Wordcamp 2007, Matt Cutts shares that youshouldn’t include the post date in your URL.

The SEO Blogger also recommends only using /%postname%/ as the permalink

Sure, these pieces of advice are dated and we know that the search engine algorithms change from time to time – but if the impact of your Permalink was a factor, there would be more recent information available….

This factor alone caused me some concerns about the effectiveness of the plug-in.

The second ‘function’ of the plug-in is to find ‘SEO’ plugins to improve your blog.  The report lists the fact that I wasn’t running specific plugins – Sociable, MaxPressBlog Pinger, Auto Tags, Backup and Captcha.

O.K – this was somewhat helpful, but I was running a Ping Updater and a Social bookmarking tool – I think that the Share This bookmarking plug-in coupled with an embedded ‘Bookmark With Onlywire‘ link is just as effective and a better use of space on my pages.

Overall, I didn’t consider the ‘Traffic Getting SEO Plugin’ to be all that helpful.  You still have to manually configure the plug-ins it recommends you use and the modification of the permalink structure on a live blog is a major concern.

Optimizing your blog for SEO is important – and there are any number of great plug-ins available to help you out.  I’ve listed my fave Wordpress PlugIns here

If you really want to ‘pull traffic to your site’ – certainly optimize for SEO but also remember that you need to have content that is of interest to your Target market.