The BIG problem I have with free plugins is that most of them have a short shelf life. The hard working developers who create WordPress plugins sometimes get too many complaints and curses (and no donations), that they eventually abandon their plugins.

That’s not to say that some paid plugins suffer the same too. But overall, if a plugin is complex in nature, a commercial version of it tends to be better and longer lasting.

So here’s my list of the best 7 commercial WordPress plugins ever:

1. Max Banner Ads Plugin – Allows you to display banner ads easily on your blog. You can also get complete stats to see how well each ad is performing, and it support Adsense or other Javascript based ads as well. A free version is available, with credits back to the plugin page.
2. Ninja Affiliate Plugin – Allows you to automatically convert keywords on your blog to affiliate links. Extremely useful to automate affiliate marketing on your blogs, and even more useful if you have multiple blogs to manage.
3. LightPop Plugin – Allows you to create a “lightbox” popup on your blog, which can be used to get new subscribers, display an ad, announce important information, or anything you want.
4. Auto Social Poster – Allows you to automatically submit blog posts to a number of social bookmarking services. Te time-delay and random submission feature helps you
5. WP Review Site –
6. WP Blaster – Allows you to create a product review blog using WordPress, complete with themes and additional stuff. You can automatically rank products on your main page, and you can choose to apply the plugin to certain categories only.
7. Synonymizer Plugin – Probably better known among niche blogging marketers, who use a lot of Private Label articles. Synonymizer automatically creates unique articles by replacing words with synonyms, and youo have complete control over how words are replaced.

I’m sure there are many other plugins that I’m missing out, some newer ones that I have never used, etc. Please feel free to mention them.

Once you’ve installed the plugin, you can configure it based on keywords, categories or a particular YouTube profile. Then, you can select to publish content every X days / X hours, and also to “humanize” it.

You can assign videos to a particular category, and you can choose to also grab the comments if you want to. This is how ac actual page generated from WPVideoTube will look like:

You can see the actual title and video from YouTube. The keywords used for that video will be imported as “tags” in your WordPress blog. Below is how the syndicated comments will look like:

Should you get this plugin?

Well, that really depends on what type of blogger you are and what you want to achieve. If you’re into niche blogging or autopilot blogging then this plugin will definitely help you either add content to an existing blog, or create a new one from scratch.

You can get WPVideoTube for as little $29.95 for the Lite version, or the developer version for $299. Get more info here.

This is a clear example of why you need to have your main keywords as part of your domain name. A lot of the major web directories are still human edited (or at least human approved) and they will not allow words or promotional text that is not a part of your domain name.

If you already have a blog using your own name or a non-keyword name, there’s nothing much you can do about it. However if you’re starting a new blog, it’s really worth the money to get a proper domain name. Read my post about getting premium domain names as a guide to snap up great domains at cheap prices.

Although there are many directories around, some of the best like DMOZ and Yahoo Directory are out of reach for most people. DMOZ is basically defunct and the only way to get in right now is if you know an insider. Yahoo asks you to pay them more than $290 for non-refundable “consideration” fees. That don;st leave you with much options does it?

Best of The Web is a directory that has been around since 1996 – that’s a like half a century in Internet speed. It’s probably one of the last few “old school” web directories left that you can still make use of. The original directory now accepts submissions for websites only, so all blog submissions will end up in the BOTW blog directory.

How much does it cost?

For $99.95 a year or $299.95 one time fee, it’s still cheaper than Yahoo’s no-guarantee submission fees.

However, submission to BOTW is not the magic pill you’ve been promised. It will only count for a small part of your entire SEO campaign. You should also consider also using tools like 1WayLinks, 3WayLinks or other useful linking methods.

As far as link building is concerned, article marketing has always been one of the fastest and most cost-effective ways of doing it. On ProfitBlogger I already covered Article Marketing Automation, 1 Way Links, 3 Way Links, FirePow and other useful tools for submitting articles via “blog networks”. Now lets take a look at traditional article marketing, which has been around for much, much longer.

With traditional article marketing there are a few key differences:

1. Your articles will be published on sites with higher authority and ranking, for example EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com
2. You cannot get a way with writing crappy articles, since most sites worth submitting to will manually approve your articles
3. Instead of creating hyperlinks within the article content, you will only get a link back to your site in your author “resource box”

For niche blogging sites, article marketing has always worked beautifully and will always continue to do so. Article marketing by itself will not get you much direct traffic, but regularly submitting articles over time will get you indirect traffic from pretty awesome search engine rankings.

One software that I have used over the years is Submit Your Article by Steve Shaw. It’s one of the most advanced article submission programs around, with two unique features:

• Article Leverage – When you enter an article, you’ll be asked to enter many variations for individual sentences and the article title. When your articles are submitted to traditional article marketing sites, each site gets a unique version of your article.
• Article Trickle – Your articles are submitted slowly, so you get a more natural effect over time. Articles are queued and submitted automatically without your involvement.

Recently, Submit Your Article has changed it’s features drastically. Instead of limiting your articles to 8 / month, you can now submit an unlimited amount of articles. At just $37 month it’s definitely one of the tools you’ll want to have in your Internet marketing arsenal.

When you publish an article using the system, it gets published on:

• The SYA article directory itself, giving you an instant link back
• Popular article directories like EzineArticles, GoArticles, IdeaMarketers and more
• Article submission groups that accept email submissions
• Sites that syndicate content from the above mentioned article directories and groups

One article can get you at least 100-200 links back to your site. Plus, since SYA allows you to create unique variations, it helps to avoid the duplicate content penalty as as a result you get more valid links that are recognized by Google as being “unique”.

Info / Signup : Submit Your Article.

Affiliate marketing has taken a high for the past few years and is a major source of income for a plethora of webmasters. Various websites have their affiliate programs running and they usually pay off a decent commission per sale.

However, just as every game has a few rules, Affiliate marketers should adhere to a few of them as well. We shall check out a few mistakes which an entry level affiliate marker usually makes;

• Not dedicating yourself to one before starting another – Many Affiliate marketers tend to start affiliating for several different websites to make easy money from each of them. But this is not an advisable practice especially when you are a beginner. You should try to first learn the basics of Affiliate Marketing and concentrate and grow your business. In order to understand what Affiliate marketing can offer you should first dedicate yourself to one program before starting another.

• Not concentrating on the pre-sale – An Affiliate marketer’s job is not to just sell the product but to concentrate on the pre-sale activity as well. Providing too much information on your website about your client will leave your client nothing to describe about his product. Alongside, providing too little information about your client’s product would end up visitor leaving the page without a deal. An Affiliates job is to describe the client’s product in such a manner that he feels inquisitive to click on your client’s link.

• Not using the product – Whenever you are selling a product you should be confident about it. “People buy from people you and not from the company”. You should have at least tried the product before you to sell it; this would give you a higher degree of confidence while selling the same.

• Not understanding pay-per-click – One should have a sound understanding of the pay per click if you want to become a successful Affiliate marketer. Pay per click advertisers use search engines to place their ads, but they pay only when the user finds their ad compelling and clicks on the ads to visit the advertisers web page. By using keywords, each advertiser can actually customize his/her pay per click advertising for a specific market of potential clients.

• Not choosing the right product for you - Very often Affiliate marketers choose the highest paying program which may not be right for them. While choosing the right program 3 things should be kept in mind: Time, Payout and Usability. Before deciding an affiliate program, it is important to understand how much time you will dedicate on it to make yourself successful.

• Not believing in yourself – If you think you can, you can. If you think you can’t, you’re right! You may feel a bit of apprehension in the beginning but later on once you understand the basics of Affiliate marketing and master them, you will become more confident and you could make it a successful business. Your excitement needs to translate confidence in yourself.

• Not committing yourself for affiliate marketing program – There are many affiliate programs out there out of which some are very popular and some are not . You need to do a lot of research in finding out the best one’s for you. You need to be committed and focused towards building your affiliate program.

Affiliate marketing is all about building a strong consumer base, finding the niche products and their prospective consumers and marketing the product efficiently over the web. Let’s hope these pointers do some good for you as an affiliate marketer.

Image courtesy: DoobyBrain

Looking for a WordPress blog host? I’m sure there are tons of alternatives out there, each with a more confusing pricing scheme that the other, each offering you what seems to be something truly unique but in reality is the same old shit.

With Host Commando however, we are aiming to be the best blog web hosting service ever.

Unlike other blog hosting packages, Host Commando really gives you everything you need to start your first WordPress blog in record time:

1. Blog web hosting at competitive rates
2. Free WordPress blog installation & setup
3. Free Search Engine Optimization service
4. Free access to a massive collection of WordPress themes
5. Free “Blogging for Profits” guide
6. Free web marketing software and tools
7. Much more to come soon..

The Premium Blog Web Hosting plan is the best deal for new bloggers, but existing bloggers can also try the Basic Blog Web Hosting plan which is a cheaper “self-help” option.

A lot of our subscribers have been asking us to install and optimize WordPress for them, and Host Commando offers just that with their blog web hosting plans. Just fill up a simple form, and we do the rest.

It’s especially frustrating if you’re trying to create a highly formatted post or sales page with WordPress, and you’ve been using something much better (like Dreamweaver) to do it all this while. With the TinyMCE Advanced plugin for WordPress however, this problem is largely solved.

The truth is, the TinyMCE user interface you see in WordPress is only half (or less) than the full set of features offered by the popular open source web editor. All the other functions have been hidden or disabled since the average blogger won’t need them anyway.

Once you install the TinyMCE Advanced plugin, you can access these “missing” buttons and put them back where they belong.

As you can see from the screenshot above, it’s easy to drag and drop buttons into and out of your TinyMCE editor. You can put the buttons you use most often right on top for easier access. The one feature you absolutely must enable is the buttons to create, edit and manage tables.

There are more features that you ca add, and you can even remove features in the default WordPress TinyMCE if you don’t really need them. Lastly, you can also choose to display all HTML tags in the “HTML view” of TinyMCE. If you’re familiar with HTML you’ll know that be default TinyMCE hides all paragraph (<p> and </p>) and line break (</br>) tags, as well as many others. Now you can choose to show them so you know exactly what’s going on in the HTML formatting of your post.

Download TinyMCE plugin for WordPress and give it a try. I’m sure you’ll fall in love with it.

So how about spreading this tweet that a new WordPress theme called LiveTwit is up for grabs? This is made simple by the theme itself which allows streaming live news of a topic or streaming tweets from a particular twitter user. All we are required to do is configure the theme to do its bit.

Layout

• LiveTwit is a typical two column layout theme with the left column making up the descriptive part of the website, i.e.; it contains the logo and a message to convey the highlight of the site. Also we would find the FriendMeUp box where the user may provide links to some external social media profiles.
• The right column is where all the streamed tweets are posted. This is continuously updated ensuring the reader follows the tweets as and when they are posted.
• The theme also has 5 vibrant color schemes to choose from depending upon the mood of the topic posted on the site.

Control Panel

Now to the all important question- how do we configure the theme to spread the word? This is very simple, just manipulate some 100 lines of code and we are all set to go. Already thinking of disowning this theme?

Well manipulating 100 lines of code is definitely not the way to go, for this very reason this theme offers a very simple built-in theme control panel which helps the user to setup and change any aspect of the theme. A few tweaks in the color scheme, search criterion – be it a particular topic or a particular twitter user, logo URL and the social media links and the site is up and running with all the tweets related to the search criterion being displayed.

This theme is definitely the easiest way to create a quick site to give a heads-up on some hot ongoing topics, events or even businesses.

View the demo of this theme and ofcourse it is free, so go ahead and download it.

Tweet!

With the power of words and the underlying expertise, this opinion is converted to a principle and hence one starts making money. For professional bloggers, it becomes highly significant to not only create good content but also get good traffic, just because most monetization programs do not depend on content but traffic. Both of these factors are extremely important for a blogger to mint money.

Web traffic is such a paradoxical term which makes people dread about it offline, but get into its amorous embracement online. More the traffic on a blog, more are the chances to generate money.

Out of million bloggers on the web today, a very miniscule percentage of them are able to earn money out of their blogs. This is because most of the bloggers do not know the the correct way of presenting stuff to their audience.

Today, we shall check out some of the proven ways to work on, in case you’ve decided to quit your day job;

You got to research well to know the kind of topics that people like to read online. A small work around over the web will make you know that technology focused or product oriented blogs are the most read. This is one of the most targeted niche by bloggers, both amateurs and experienced. There are various others which you need to find out. Remember to write on topics which people like to read more as it increases your chances to make money. However, content is the king!

1. Implement traffic building strategies for your blog by registering at various forums, social networking sites and communities like twitter, reaching out to other bloggers, posting quality content and regularly updating of the content. More importantly, if there is an increase in traffic; it is important to sustain it by working harder.
2. Making ‘coffee money’ is not a big deal. So placing ads on your blog when it is new will not help anyone much. But, again this is a debatable topic and many would disagree with me by saying that ads should be displayed from the initial days. But, I would always prefer a strategy of ‘wait to monetize.’
3. If you’re thinking of minting money through ads, Google Adsense is one of the most widely used methods to monetize your content. The money that a blog generates depends on the category of the blog and the related ads being displayed on the page. The Adsense program has made many a bloggers rich and been one of the most effective mediums to make money from a blog.
4. A blogger can also look for paid writing positions on different blogs. If you have carved a niche for yourself, it becomes easy to write for others and your own successful blog becomes a testimony of your blogging skills. The motivation here should be to bring good name to your blog with exposure and experience on writing at top blogs, the additional income being an icing over the cake.
5. Determine new ways of income apart from the traditional ones. Look for new contracts that will fetch you a lucrative income. Publishing a book, selling personalized products and services, etc. are some of the methods by which a lot of established bloggers make money.
6. Indulge into Affiliate Marketing. It is good to initialize your affiliate marketing skills by promoting products that you like. R.T. Butcher clarifies the practical application of affiliate marketing when he writes, “Just find a merchant on one of the many affiliate networks (search Google) and place a link or banner on your blog. Whenever someone leaves your blog through the banner or link and purchases that product you can earn a commission”.
7. One of the hottest methods to earn money is by selling ad space on your blog. An ever increasing number of companies act as an interface between a blogger and an advertiser to get relevant ads on your blog that will become another money making tool for you. The key here is to strike a good balance between the ads and the content; otherwise the results can be disastrous.
8. If there is a demand of the various posts you write on your blog, you can sell fresh content to other blogs and make money. Selling content has made quite a few bloggers help run their businesses better. SEOmoz is one of the leading SEO firms which have successfully sold memberships on their site which gives an access to quality content.
9. It is also advisable to have a good set of widgets on your blog as they can augment your blog. Joining a site such as BuySellAds, WidgetBucks helps a blogger get advertising widgets to display in addition to being in rich media format which increases the aesthetics of your blog.

These were a few methods which have been tried and tested in the blog-o-sphere. One needs to be highly active and must be a quick learner to accommodate with the dynamics of money minting strategies on the web.