Free Word Bank Clickbank Ads Wordpress Plugin

I ran across a Wordpress plugin called Word Bank Ads last night that allows you to show ClickBank ads on your blog with an Adsense style, you can change the ads in any way you want so they suit your blog, this plugin is 100% Free and comes with a huge amount of features and options that takes seconds to setup and use. There is a Premium option as well, but I have not bought it yet. This plugin is not for every niche of course, but you would be amazed at the products that might be on Clickbank related to your niche. You just have to dig around for them. I only have one days use on one site, so I do not have much to give you as far as information that it does indeed function properly and is indeed free. Everyone likes free, right?

But What About Unique Wordpress Themes?

After posting the my top 40 Wordpress plugins yesterday, there was a comment about buying or using a uniquely coded Wordpress template. There are so many sites out there that are both good and spammy that use the same templates, I find it hard to see Google punish a site merely because it uses a certain template. Am I ruling it out on ALL templates though? Absolutely not as I too have see certain templates used primarily for auto blogs or spam sites, but I am sure there is the one person out there that might have a thick blog on "chess openings" that has a page rank of 6 and does well in all types of long and short tail organic searches and knows no better about using that theme.

The best thing to do is use common sense. If you see a certain theme showing up on spammy sites, don't use it as your subconscious will try to use it as reason should your site do poorly in the SERPS. Along the same lines, Yoast has a nearly 2 year old post on 10 Checks to the Perfect WordPress theme that I always point people to. If you can fit into your budget having a theme personalized just for you and a group of your sites, by all means do it. I preach uniqueness, the more you can be less associated with spam the better. Is it a must to succeed? Not in my eyes, but it never hurts in branding though. Just look at the theme of the link I just sent you to. Down at the bottom it says Theme by W3 EDGE, WordPress Experts with a link. I bet that theme is unique and has more than the 10 checks included as Yoast is a Wordpress master.

Just be careful and check the little things, including the RSS feed as I found an error I talked about in the Keyword To Websites included theme. Little things like that might not look like much, but cam hurt you in more ways than one.

Top 40 Wordpress Plugins For Niche Site Building

I have recently received some emails from readers wanting to know what plugins I use on Wordpress built sites. I re-built my list of plugins I use, both paid and free below and decided to just post for everyone to save me future emails. Mind you I do not use every plugin below on every site as it all depends on what type of site and many other factors. I would not install any plugin below on any site until you know exactly what it does and how to use it. Do not install all the free ones, just to have them installed. Have a purpose for each and every one. I am linking to the plugins home page, but every free plugin should be able to be installed from your Install Plugins admin page within your Wordpress admin. Just use the search on that page and copy and paste the names below to find and install very safe and easily. I have left a few fringe ones off the list, but here are my top 40 Wordpress plugins. Enjoy!

Paid Wordpress Plugins

PHPBay Pro - This plugin has made me a ton of money since I bought it. The best invstment an eBay EPN affiliate running Wordpress will ever make. You never need to worry if EPN updates URL's as Wade is always on top of things.

PHPZon - The Amazon version of the plugin above. Once again, I can not imagine not having this plugin as it brings me a kings ransom every month. There are free ones out there, but is it worth the risk?

ReviewAZON - The easy and simple way to add Amazon product reviews to your Wordpress blog. This can be used in various ways in addition to the plugin above. Great support as well.

Commission Junction Plugin for Wordpress - Commission Junction Edition allows you to quickly and easily display products from your Commission Junction affiliate partners by simply adding a shortcode (a tag name inside of square brackets) to your website pages or blog posts. Cheap, price, but not a cheap plugin.

WP Robot 3 - If you build auto blogs, this is the Cadillac of auto blogging plugins. Buy the full version, you will need it.

Keywords To Websites - One of the newest plugins to build a turnkey keyword list website. a classic SPAM builder that should be around a while and only get better over time. New on the market.

WP Syndicator - Another fairly new plugin I use on the blog type sites and auto blogs. Auto publishes to your network of web 2.0 sites with ease and automatically.

Free Wordpress Plugins

Audio player - Audio Player is a highly configurable but simple mp3 player for all your audio needs. You can customize the player's color scheme to match your blog theme, have it automatically show track information from the encoded ID3 tags and more.

All in One SEO Pack - While not my top SEO choice for a WP plugin, it is stable and I still use it on several sites. This plugin is streamlined for some best practices for WordPress SEO. While it gives you many options the defaults reflect the settings I recommend using.


Advertising Manager - Control and arrange your Advertising and Referral blocks on your Wordpress blog. With Widget and inline post support, integration with all major ad networks. Great ad plugin.

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator - This plugin creates a sitemap for your WordPress powered site. This is not just another XML sitemap plugin, but rather a true sitemap generator which is highly customizable from its own options page in the WordPress admin panel. Need an easy surf-able sitemap for the surfers? This is it.

Easy Contact - Easy Contact is a simple, semantic contact form that utilizes the Sandbox design patterns. Insert using [easy-contact]. Easy & simply. I set mine with a math question.

Exclude Pages from Navigation - Provides a checkbox on the editing page which you can check to exclude pages from the primary navigation. IMPORTANT NOTE: This will remove the pages from any "consumer" side page listings, which may not be limited to your page navigation listings.

Exec-PHP - This plugin enables you the ability to run actual PHP code in a single post or page in Wordpress. Very very handy to have installed.

Facebook Social Plugins - Provides Facebook Social Plugins as widgets and Like button in articles.

FLV Embed - Standards compliant FLV embedding in your blog posts using SWFObject by Geoff and FLV Player. Supports Video Sitemap generation which is a huge feature.

Frame Buster Plugin For WordPress - The Frame Buster plugin for WordPress will thwart any attempt to load your site in a frame.

GD Press Tools - A must have for every site. GD Press Tools is a collection of various administration, seo, maintenance and security related tools that can help with everyday blog tasks and blog optimizations.

Google XML Sitemaps - Been around a while and a must have for every site. Makes a perfect and stable xml sitemap.

Light SEO - My new favorite WordPress SEO plugin. Focused in creating a clean plugin, with emphasis in source code's good practices. Automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines.

Login LockDown - Adds some extra security to WordPress by restricting the rate at which failed logins can be re-attempted from a given IP range. Some sites you may need this on, you never know.

Most Commented Widget - Widget to display posts/pages with the most comments.

MultiFeedSnap - Plugin for displaying multiple RSS Feeds. Great for displaying niche related news feeds.

Open in New Window Plugin - Opens external links in a new window, keeping your blog page in the browser so you don't lose surfers to another site.

Ozh' Who Sees Ads - Who Sees Ads is an advanced ad management plugin that lets you decide who will see your ads, for instance Adsense, depending on user defined conditions.

Privacy Policy - Automatically adds an AdSense-compliant privacy page. Must have for nearly every site.

Redirection - Manage all your 301 redirects and monitor 404 errors.

SEO Friendly Images - SEO Friendly Images is a WordPress optimization plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes.

SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2 - The purpose of this plugin is to strengthen on page SEO by adding new internal linking to the blog post using the most popular keywords used by search engine visitors to find the blog post from a search engine ( incoming search terms ). Great plugin.

SexyBookmarks - SexyBookmarks adds a (X)HTML compliant list of social bookmarking icons to each of your posts.

SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam - Adds CAPTCHA anti-spam methods to WordPress on the comment form, registration form, login, or all. In order to post comments or register, users will have to type in the code shown on the image. This prevents spam from automated bots.

Similar Posts - Displays a highly configurable list of related posts. Similarity can be based on any combination of word usage in the content, title, or tags. Don't be disturbed if it takes a few moments to complete the installation -- the plugin is indexing your posts.

StatPress - Real time stats for your Wordpress blog.

Twitter Tools - This plugin integrates your WordPress blog with your Twitter account allowing you to send new blog posts to Twitter as a tweet and and vice versa. Cross-promotion of a blog posts to Twitter is fairly common and can be automatically achieved with Twitter Tools. You can also create digests that consolidate all of your tweets

Vice Versa - Vice Versa allows you to easily convert WordPress Posts to Pages and Pages to Posts.

W3 Total Cache - The fastest and most complete WordPress performance plugin. Dramatically improve the speed and user experience of your site. Add browser, page, object and database caching as well as minify and content delivery network (CDN) to WordPress.

What Would Seth Godin Do - Displays a custom welcome message to new visitors and another to return visitors.

WordPress Database Backup - WordPress database backup creates backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database.

WordPress Mobile Edition - WordPress Mobile Edition enhances your site’s interface for visitors using a mobile device. By automatically detecting mobile browsers, this plugin gives your blog a mobile/phone/PDA- friendly interface with progressive enhancement for advanced mobile browsers.

WP Greet Box - Show a different message to your visitor depending on which site they are coming from. For example, you can ask Digg visitors to Digg your post, Google visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed, and more! Best of all, this plugin is compatible with various WordPress cache plugins.

Writing Great Product Descriptions & Sales Copy

We will do a complete 180 from turnkey keyword sites talked about yesterday and go back to thick product review, store like niche sites. Karon Thackston has an excellent article on Webmaster World entitled Seven Steps To Writing Enticing Product Descriptions where she covers the art of e-commerce copywriting. Now I farm out a ton of my writing to a few writers and specifically have trained them to the type reviews and descriptions I want. My ideal stuff is 200-300 words, any more is just too long in my opinion. You can pick up several tips to use yourself or hold your own writers to as well as how to display it on site. If need be, forward the link above to your writers. When it comes to keyword phrases in the 5th tip, don't let your writers stuff the same phrase in order to meet a word count. Over time you can train your writers to know exactly what is acceptable and what is not. Remember, they work for you. Karon has a new ebook on the way as well that looks to be a winner. You can pre order it now. Good stuff.

Keywords To Websites Theme RSS Modification

Not sure if Mark corrected this in his default giveaway template in the Keywords To Websites Wordpress plugin since I purchased it, but you need to make sure you are showing the proper RSS feed in that template. I hate a note about that, but forgot to mention it in the previous post.

if you click on Appearance and then Editor in your Wordpress admin, you will then Main Index Template(index.php) on the right of the page. Click on that link and then edit the line of code below:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="http://feed.affiliatemarketer.info/affiliatemarketerinfo" />

and replace with the code below and press update file:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />
<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="RSS .92" href="<?php bloginfo('rss_url'); ?>" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom 0.3" href="<?php bloginfo('atom_url'); ?>" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> RSS Comments Feed" href="<?php bloginfo('comments_rss2_url'); ?>" />

The current way it is coded shows his sites RSS feed and not yours.

Making Thin Aggregated Sites & Auto Blogs Look More Unique

Until Google gets a better hold on sites like Mahalo from Jason Calacanis, there will remain a huge hole for thin, aggregated type sites. This is not new as you without a doubt have heard of WP Robot and most recently the Keywords To Websites Wordpress plugin by Mark of the old site 45n5.com fame. A few of my readers pestered me a while back to buy WP Robot and I have been playing with it on the side after several full site revamps of mine. It is quite an intriguing plugin, especially with the recent addon modules of Commission Junction listings, Shopzilla comparisons and Twitter tweets.

The difference between thin and aggregated type sites can be a little confusing. The more unlinked text the better, the more aggregated from different sources the better, but all in all if you think about it, they both are thin and both are aggregated or scraped so to speak. The Keywords To Websites plugin I bought a few days ago when I saw it on the Warrior Forum and while it is a bit on the crude side and clunky, it does build as advertised and I expect Mark will slowly evolve it on along.

Now with the sudden popularity of this plugin on the Warrior Forum and the WP Robot plugin now in full swing for a while, you can only imagine how quick the web will inundated with these type of sites. Will they earn? Will they stay in the index? These are the biggest questions. I can attest that WP Robot sites earn, especially if you feed these into Twitter and other sites and backlink with spun articles. The newer Keywords To Websites plugin just has not been out long enough to get a long running test on, but it is, what it is in appearance. It is pretty straight forward.

The key with any of what we will call "auto blogs" and "turnkey keyword aggregated sites" is to try to make them as unique as possible. Sounds like an oxymoronic statement I know, but hang with me. To do this, I suggest adding the SEO Search Terms Tagging 2 plugin and Recent Searches widget for starters that I talked about not long ago. I like to set the SEO Search Terms Tagging 2 plugin to not be linked either, just the text only. In addition, the Twitter for WordPress plugin works well as a widget and you can show Tweets in the sidebar.

The basic plugins like the XML Sitemap Generator, Privacy Policy and Easy Contact are a must as well as free. The Sitemap Generator Plugin for Wordpress is also recommended by me, but not a must. You may seriously think about linking out in a sidebar Blogroll to like sites or reputable authority sites like Wikipedia pages or eHow pages in addition. This shows you are trying to link out to reputable sites to provide a better user experience. This will help a bit in getting it to look like a little more unique in nature as well.

No one likes to hear this part, but if you can throw up 4-10 pages of truly unique content or article type pages, it can help. Also perhaps a news page that aggregates several of the niche headlines using the Yoast RSS short code plugin as well. Just adds one more page that others likely will not go to the trouble to do.

If using WP Robot you can shoot the RSS feed out using Ping.fm and the WP Syndicate plugin that I talked about here recently. In fact the WP Syndicate plugin was just updated and now automatically post to the exterior sites once a post is published where as before you had to push a button in the admin. Everything now goes automatically. A few spun articles using the Best Spinner and through the Article Ranks Network and SEO Link Vine, which I have long advertised and sit back and cross your fingers.

Do I advocate building your whole site profile this way? Absolutely not. In fact I would start small and watch what does and does not work and how the SERPS respond to your setup. If you are going to do a ton of these sites, you better be on a VPS server and not a shared server as you will be expelled quickly if you try to run a ton of these type of sites. Just a warning up front. If you buy either through my links and need a quick one and one just let know. WP Robot is easier than the videos make it out to be. lol. I tried to watch them and my head nearly exploded. Once I just installed and played with it, it was easy to understand.

These sites are what they are. Crap, for the most part. It is just another way to build sites. The lazy folks love it, but you have to wonder about their long term life. If you are looking for long term, you need to build a traditional content heavy, review type site or authority blog site. These crap sites can make money and the more you can get them embedded in exterior 2.0 sites and social media type sites and less reliant on Google, the better off you will be when Google decides they have had enough of the Calacanis type sites.

As I always preach, the more natural you can look and the less you can look like what every lazy niche site builder is trying to do, the better chance you have to stick around a while. If you expect to do anything right out of the box and expect it to stick like the 1000's of other webmasters are doing with either of these products, you are better off not buying either. There is a Keywords To Websites Coupon Code that will save you 30 bucks. Just type use coupon code WSO at checkout to get the discount.

Twitter Fall & Tweep Search Twitter Tools

I love Twitter and have made it very clear in the past. There are some good paid tools out there to increase your followers and I stumbled across a few good free ones as well, but you do have to dedicate about 30 minutes a day to them on days you want to increase your followers. The first free tool is called Twitter Fall and if you use the searches filters to show only the Twitter user you are hunting, you can follow the target users and hope the reciprocate. Below is video that shows you the settings and it will take you some playing to get the feel for it. The second tool is Tweep Search and you can use it to do a bio search of all Twitter users to find those that list your target interest in their bio. If you use these two tools for about 30 minutes in total every day. You can build up followers in all of your Twitter accounts over time and increase traffic to your websites in the process with targeted surfers.