You’ll see from the latest site design and no fuss sales pages that we’re trying to keep things simple.

I always try to keep my business processes simple too, with as few steps as possible. Constant improvement is also required, revisiting the processes each time to see if they can be reduced further.

The idea is to have systems & software doing as much of the work as possible and NOT YOU. This is the essence of a Passive Income business.

Here’s an example.

Our product release process ends with these 4 final steps:

• Create blog post
• Create email broadcast
• Publish post
• Tweet post
• Send broadcast

The create blog post/broadcast should also be 2 separate steps so it’s really 5 actions.

My internal warning sign is a feeling of repetitiveness and perhaps even boredom. Whenever I get this feeling I re-examine the process steps and the systems I am using to see if things could be simpler.

This is exactly what happened whilst I complete these steps for the latest CSVPiG update. I re-examined the process and the features available from our systems and replaced the steps above with this:

• Create blog post

So 5 steps down to 1 step AND I still get all of the actions I require from the previous 5 step process. Pretty cool huh? Well if you’re a minimalism geek like me it’s pretty cool

This was achieved because our mailing provider, Mailchimp, allows you to setup RSS Driven campaigns that monitor your blog’s RSS feed for new posts and then send out an email containing the post. You control the format.

I had to tweak a few things to get it working exactly how I wanted it, full-text in RSS feed etc. But once it was done I had completely automated campaign setup in mailchimp.

In theory (and this is the first test) I should now be able to just create a post on my blog and it will automatically be sent as a new email to all my customers. It works on a daily schedule and if nothing new is posted nothing is sent.

Mailchimp also have a feature where they will send a tweet to your twitter account whenever a mail is sent. I’ve setup a plugin that tweets whenever a publish a new post on the blog so that’s the other step covered.

I have another list with Amember and have confirmed they offer exactly the same RSS driven campaign functionality too but they call it blog broadcast. I’m sure most companies do.

As an added bonus, the content that was previously sent out in emails is now also available in an archive on the blog so that it can be indexed by the search engines and bring in more traffic.

5 actions into 1 action equals less time but more functionality – that’s my kind of minimalism…

If you thought this was useful and would like to hear about how computers work harder than us please leave a comment or retweet on the blog.

- WYSIWYG Template Designer
- Parent/child categories
- new date, author, attachment & excerpt fields in the template designer
- Import CSV file from a URL
- Control CSVPiG remotely via cron jobs

Partner Program Launched

We’ve also launched are shiny new partner program in association with ClickBank. You can earn 50% commission on any sales of our products via your links. You can generate your own personal links to any page on the site HERE

Existing non-ClickBank partners should update their links to the new format as soon as possible.

New Help Desk is Live

After a few problems recently we’ve finished the move to our new helpdesk, it’s much simpler to use and you can even chat with other BlogPiG member’s, we’ll be publishing more FAQs over the coming weeks. Helpdesk is HERE

ClickPiG Slips Out

Finally we quietly launched and brand new product this week too, it’s called ClickPiG and it’s a hoplink manager for ClickBank vendors, you can:

- Cloak your payment links
- Cloak your affiliates’ hoplinks
- Let your affiliates send clicks to any page on your site
- Get full credit for all the backlinks your affiliates create

There is short (3 minute) video that explains everything about ClickPiG HERE

We’re using ClickPiG ourselves on the BlogPiG partner page so you can see it in action and try it out live.

CommentPiG update next week.

All the best.

Gary, Fiona & Alex
Your BlogPiG Team

The new system will allow us to publish popular questions and solutions – meaning you’ll potentially be able to find the answer to your query instantly yourself.  We’ll still be providing the same level of personal support, of course, but you might just get a quicker answer by searching the queries we’ve already answered. 

Those of you who had already registered a query on the old ticket system should have received an email asking you to click on a confirmation link – please oblige and click on it so your details get migrated! 

Please bear with us for a couple of days while the new system beds in and we find our feet with it!  We know you’re going to love it and we feel it will support our objective of being a community driven organisation.

Before I got involved in the blogosphere, I did not have an opinion either way on whether employing plugins to ‘boost’ rankings for or traffic to a blog was good or bad practice.  Until recently, a blog to me was just a means to publish online what I would normally drone onto friends and family about or at the greatest extreme, subject matter I’d normally restrict to a personal journal.  What did I care if anyone beyond a handful of curious folk read my ramblings?  In addition, my background in online marketing, in particular, search, meant that the idea of employing tools to help get a job done or to get more exposure for whichever corporate I was employed by was very familiar and very acceptable.  Why not use tools and automation – it allows me to get more done and to reach more people?  I had no idea this was a controversial concept in the world of blogging.

In my work for BlogPiG, I’ve had cause to look at blogs in depth and with a completely new perspective. I’ve discovered (and forgive me, dear reader, because you’ll be way ahead of me on this) that blogging isn’t just the next fad on the web or the next internet marketer’s direct route to fortune; blogging is an entire culture with etiquette and, well, emotion.  It seems that, rather like the black hat/white hat divide within search marketing, there is a clear line drawn in the sand between good blogging practice and bad blogging practice.  That line conjures up some pretty feisty debate.

In researching where people were talking about automation tools and what they were saying, I found an inflexible boundary between pro-automation and anti-automation camps of opinion.  If you held up your hand and declared yourself to be pro-automation, you were branded, directly or indirectly, a cheat and a thief. The purists would have you tarred and feathered for blighting the blogging landscape with disingenuous, even stolen content or time-wasting clap-trap all in the pursuit of ill-gotten dollars.  Those who were pro auto-blogging would often present the image of large-scale money-earners where sales and commission were the end game rather than providing good content to those interested in their blogs’ topics.

What I did not come across much of was a happy medium and I’d propose that it doesn’t have to be black and white – full automation or no automation.  I agree that quality matters and unique, hand crafted, genuine content is important (and is in many cases vital) but it takes a lot of time and isn’t always scalable – and scalability is what some bloggers need in order to make a living and carry on what they are doing.  Full automation meets the needs of some bloggers, 100% hands on work suits others, but a magic blend of automation and personal input can also work wonders.

Imagine automating all the time-consuming tasks like managing datafeeds or tagging your blogs so that your personal input goes into the more valuable tasks of crafting your thoughts, opinions and reviews or responding personally to those people generous enough to comment on your blog. Imagine getting enough comments on your blog to negate the ‘I don’t want to be first to comment’ syndrome or getting good enough rankings that people can find your blog in the first place!  You could have the most valuable blog out there which holds the fruit of someone’s desperate search but if they can’t find your blog which contains all this wonderful information….what service are you really providing?

I guess I’m saying that perhaps people should review their perspective on employing automation tools on blogs.  You don’t have to abandon your principles or your quality content, you can in fact bolster them by allowing yourself enough time to focus on what’s important – the information, thoughts and opinions you are publishing and the people who are engaging with them.  Let a clever plugin ‘keep shop’ for you and get your blog exposed while you concentrate on your content and your readers.

Don’t get caught in the trap of thinking you have to be ‘all’ automation or ‘no’ automation. Consider a happy blend.

This is the first paid version of TagPiG we’ve released and as you’d expect there are a bunch of great new features:

• Archive Tagging – Now you can have TagPiG auto tag you all your existing posts as well as new one
• New Tag Sources – We’ve added the Open Calais API to the list of text extractors with the option to include social & topic tags
• Preferred Tags – You can create you own list of word that should always be tagged if they appear in a post regardless of whether the TagPiG chooses them
• Tag Now Button – If you’re not running your blog on auto you can now manually tag posts using a new button within the edit post screen

TagPiG really can help your blog get indexed deeper and faster by the search engines. Remember every new tag you create equals a new page on your blog. TagPiG can auto tag more than 50 tags per post!

You can try TagPiG out right now with our new seven day trial.

See exactly how Auto Tagging with TagPiG can help your blogs….

Great news, we’ve just uploaded CSVPiG 2.2 to the BlogPiG members’ area! You should download it straight away and get it activated on your blogs.

Here’s the download link

We’ve also updated the User Guide which is available inside your members’ area.

Some of the new features will only be available if you have a CSVPiG Pro license – you can always upgrade inside the BlogPiG members’ area.

So what’s New in CSVPiG 2.2?

1. Well, along with all the usual tweaks and fixes we’ve added a great new feature that allows you to update existing posts with a new CSV import. You get to choose which unique field CSVPiG uses to match existing posts. We recommend using the post slug but you can use any unique field that you’ve included as a custom field, for example, ID number. To illustrate the benefit: this means that you could upload a thousand products from a golf merchant datafeed and then if in the future that merchant decides to drop their prices by 10% all you would have to do is upload the new datafeed and CVSPiG automatically alters ONLY the pricing information on all your published & scheduled posts. This feature was requested by CSVPiG Pro user Tod.

2. The Post Template Designer’s ‘drag & drop’ functionality now works in ALL browsers – previously only Firefox users had access to this slick system.

3. You can now import CSV files without column headers – your tokens in the Post Template Designer will simply be numbers rather than actual header text.

4. In addition you can also specify any field separator you want before uploading your CSV files. Are Clickbank datafeeds using pipe delimiters rather than commas? Not a problem, just enter the delimiter and CSVPiG takes care of the rest.

If you have feedback about any of the new features you can leave a comment below.

What’s next?

Development is really picking up pace here at BlogPiG and we have new releases of TagPiG & CommentPiG ready to go. Please don’t forget we’re a Community Driven Development company – you ask and we build (as long as we agree it’s a good idea of course!). The best place to discuss new ideas is in the support forums, so head on over and tell us want you want to see next.

What is CSVPiG?

CSVPiG is an affiliate datafeed import plugin for WordPress. You can read all about CSVPiG and download a free copy HERE. Don’t forget you’ll need your BlogPiG API key from the members’ area.

I just give you a quick a run through of the latest Post Templates feature available in CSVPiG Pro. We think it’s pretty nice!

With CSVPiG Pro you can import any number of columns and you do not need to specify any particular column headers.

Instead everything is controlled after uploading by mapping column headers to particular WordPress content elements.

Click on the add new template link in the Post Templates section

Assuming you have already uploaded your CSV file you will see a list of the available tokens which can be used to design your post template. These are the column headers of your CSV file.

You can drag and drop these tokens into any of the WordPress content elements you wish. For instance you can drag %title% into the Title field etc.

Title – the title of the WordPress post

Slug – the string that is used when displaying the URL of the post. You can import your own separate column for custom post slugs. I usually just use the title token. If you do decide to use custom post slugs try to focus on the keywords that are used on popular search queries, and remember that the fewer keywords you use, the higher their relative value.

Post – the main content body of your WordPress post. You can put any HTML or CSS you want in this area and then drag and drop the tokens into the appropriate places. Here’s an example of a typical post:

[text]
<h3>Movie review</h3>

%body%

<ul>
<li>Format: %media%</li>
<li>Rating: %rating%</li>
</ul>

Download this movie instantly from <a href=”%aff_link%”>NetFlix</a> now!
[/text]

You can include any markup you want inside the post template, images, css styles, bullets etc. Anything you can include in the usual WordPress HMTL post editor.

Category – the categories you want assigned to the post, multiple categories should be separated by commas in the CSV file. When saving as a CSV Excel will automatically enclose that whole field with quotes so the commas inside are not confused for field separators

Tags – the tags you assigned to the post, multiple tags should be separated by commas in the CSV file. When saving as a CSV Excel will enclose that whole field with quotes so the commas inside are not confused for field separators

Custom Fields – you can map any remaining columns to custom fields in blog posts. Custom fields are an extremely powerful feature of WordPress enabling you to include a lot of additional content within your posts. The basic guide to custom fields can be read here http://codex.wordpress.org/Custom_Fields . I often use custom fields to store product specific data such as price or id and of course my actual affiliate link. There are a variety of free WordPress plugins that can then be used to include the content of particular custom fields inside your posts automatically, often in a header or footer to each post. You should drag your chosen token into the value field and choose a name for each new custom field. If you need more custom fields simply click the add custom field link to add more.

You can create and save as many templates as you want. Once you’re happy with your template you should save it and then choose that particular template in the Publish section below.

More awesome features coming very soon!

FieldPiG – WordPress Custom Field Shortcodes Plugin

I wanted to be able to dynamically include data from any custom field in my post inside the actual post content.

This plugin lets you do just that by adding the name of the custom field that contains your content between the [fp]fieldname[/fp] shortcodes.

FieldPiG was extremely useful when I imported large CSV files into CSVPiG. I could use it to include the contents of custom fields inside the body field by just specifying the column header between [fp] tags.

Imagine I had the following custom fields in WordPress

[text]
name -> value
price -> $9.95
media -> blu-ray
length -> 180mins
rating -> 8
affiliate_link->http://blockbuster.com/1aty546gf
[/text]

Then we could have a post template that looked something like this:

[html]
<b>Forget the plot, the real delight is the army of oddballs that rotate around
the gamine Miss Tautou.</b> Hypochondriac tobacconists, tyrannical grocers,
kindly strippers, failed writers, all human life is here thanks to
<a href="[fp]affiliate_link[/fp]">Jean-Pierre Jeunet</a>’s stock company of character actors. With so many
colourful eccentrics and unlikely subplots, it’s perhaps inevitable that
"Amélie" is episodic and fractured. But this is a small price to pay for a
film <b>guaranteed to put a smile on your face and a chanson in your coeur.</b>

In French with English subtitles.
Available on [fp]media[/fp]
Running time – [fp]lenght[/fp]
Rating – [fp]rating[/fp]/10
Price – [fp]price[/fp] <a href="[fp]affiliate_link[/fp]">BUY NOW</a>
[/html]

As you can see the customisation options are extensive and you really can let your imagination run wild.

If you’re using the latest version of CSVPiG Pro you probably won’t need FieldPiG as the brand new post templating options already let you include custom fields directly into multiple post templates!

Have a play and let me know what you think.  If you need any additional features added just let me know!

You can download FieldPiG for free from the BlogPiG members area.

Next week we’ll (finally!) be releasing TagPiG Pro with the new tag archived posts feature!  Stay tuned.

All the best

The new features only apply to the Pro Version but the Free version should be updated too.

• Brand new post templating option replaces column mapping, now just paste tokens into the WP content elements you want. Post Content areas can contain tokens and HTML!
• Clone settings now includes your BlogPiG API key so that CSVPiG is ready to run with all your custom settings as soon as the plugin is activated
• You can now use commas inside text delimeters in the header row e.g. column1,column2,”column2,b”,column3
• CSVPiG now keeps the case of column headers (previously it changed headers to lowercase)

The last two features were added as a result of user requests.

Please don’t forget we’re a community driven development company. We build features and product that YOU ask for! So don’t be shy drop us a note with anything you think will help you work faster and make you more money.

You can download the updates of CSVPiG Pro & Free inside the BlogPiG members’ area.

CSVPiG Free can also use the auto plugin update in WP Admin.

More features coming soon.

This plugin forms the core of my autoblog business, I use it for every single blog I build, it really is an essential bit of kit.

With CSVPiG Pro you can:

• Unlock unlimited sources of free high quality content
• Import thousands of content rich posts to your blog easily & quickly
• Schedule those posts to appear naturally over time so search engines come back day after day
• Build automated blogs that last for years with no further intervention from you
• Even clone your custom settings across all the blogs in your network

Watch our 2 min CSVPiG Pro video promo here.

CSV feeds are a blog builders dream, imagine thousands of rows of content from every niche you can imagine just waiting to be imported and monetised on your blogs.

You can install any CSV file, with unlimited rows and unlimited columns, columns can have any headers and even be in any order! It doesn’t matter which affiliate network or merchant you’re downloading datafeeds from, CSVPiG Pro can import any of them.

Here are the basic steps:

• Download a CSV affiliate data feed from CJ, Buy.at, Sharesale etc.
• Upload the CSV file using CSVPiG
• Schedule the number of new posts you would like auto-posted per day
• Map the CSV column headers to the WordPress content elements such as title, post, categories, tags
• Publish the CSV file with one click

CSVPiG Pro is available as an instant download from the BlogPiG.com Members’ area. Here’s what is included:

• An unlimited license to use CSVPiG on as many sites as you own
• Free CSVPiG updates for life
• A comprehensive PDF user guide
• Full support from the BlogPiG team & community

CSVPiG is available in 2 versions – Free & Pro. The Free version is okay for small projects or just dumping CSV files into a WordPress blog. For serious power users we highly recommend CSVPiG Pro so you can really take full advantage of every advanced feature e.g. scheduling, mapping, ftp upload & cloning etc.

Watch our 2 min CSVPiG Pro video promo here.