MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate for WordPress Review

Monday, June 7th, 2010

If you have any hopes of earning money from affiliate products, MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate is one high-priced plugin that you must have.

The program automatically replaces words and phrases on your blog with affiliate links, allowing you to earn a commission every time someone purchases a product through those links.  For example, I set the key phrase “ninja affiliate” to link to the official product sales page. Should you purchase the product through my link, I would earn a commission on the $97 purchase price. I have a maximum of 3 linkable key phrases set, so not every occurrence of the “ninja affiliate” keyphrase will be automatically linked in this post.

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Tags: affiliate marketing, blogging for money, clickbank, plugins, product reviews, wordpress plugins
Posted in Blog Marketing, Blogging Tools, WordPress Blogging | 6 Comments »

The Many Reasons Why You Should Allow DoFollow Commenting on Your Blog (I’ll be Frank)

Friday, May 28th, 2010

Blogtap has officially gone dofollow commenting today. That means that anyone can steal Blogtap’s precious PR juice simply by commenting with a website link.

Yup, the PR vampires will be here any minute now. They will bombard my comment queue with their under-thought and overly appreciative (e.g. “great post man!”), witless comments. I say bring it on. I say open the floodgate. And here’s why:

• A mindless gang of middle-eastern SEOers is better company than none.*
• Although many of the comments will be vapid and unsubstantial, I need commenters to get the conversation going, to break the ice on uncommented posts. I might be able to tell the difference between a comment posted for the sake of building backlinks to another site but many drive-by visitors will not. (more…)

Tags: link building, plugins, traffic
Posted in Blog Marketing | 22 Comments »

How to install a contact page on WordPress

Sunday, March 21st, 2010

Up until a few days ago I had no contact page on this WordPress blog. It didn’t hit me at first but not having a contact page can seriously damage the development of a blog. Not only can individuals submit feedback and ask questions through a contact form but they can also offer to:

• Purchase ad space
• Guest blog on your blog
• Have you guest post on their blog
• Create partnerships/joint ventures
• Exchanges blogroll links

Come to think of it, there are a lot of offers I may have missed out on during the first few weeks of this blog while it had no contact form. Even though I have very little traffic, there is no telling who might have come across my blog.

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Tags: creating your blog, plugins
Posted in WordPress Blogging | No Comments »

What is Akismet?

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

So, you’ve just installed WordPress and you are wondering what that little inactive plugin named Akismet is doing in your installed plugins list. You’ve probably already guessed that the WordPress developers would not include a plugin, with the version of WordPress you installed, unless it added some kick-ass functionality to your blog.

A beautiful can of whoop-ass, courtesy of spreadthewhoop.com.

You’ve guessed right. Activating the Akismet plugin is like opening a can of whoop-ass on spammers and, once activated, you will never have to deal with faux comments again.

Comments that are filtered through Akismet are processed in an underground colony of gnomes that specialize in identifying spam … just kidding of course, but it does seem that way. Akismet filters comments by using data collected by WordPress bloggers. The comments are sent to the Akismet web service and literally undergo hundreds of tests before they are approved as comments and posted on your blog.

You don’t need to worry about Akismet catching comments that are actually not spam — it rarely happens — and when it does, you can always approve the comment[s] manually after clicking the spam link on your dashboard. If a comment gets approved that is spam, you can mark it as spam and Akismet will learn and adopt from its mistakes … that’s the kind of technology that could lead to Akismet becoming the next SkyNet.

So what does the word ‘Akismet’ mean?

Akismet is actually a contraction of Automattic (the corporation that develops WordPress) and Kismet as chosen by Matt Mullenweg’s (the founding developer of WordPress) little sister. Kismet is “the magnetic attractive force that actualizes the playing out of karma; often used in the positive sense,” according to Akismet’s website.

Looking for cheap web hosting for your WordPress blog? Check out glowhost for a good balance of quality and economical web hosting.

Tags: plugins
Posted in WordPress Blogging | 4 Comments »

How to get WordPress to stop removing your break tags

Monday, February 15th, 2010

http://www.flickr.com/photos/zachklein/ / CC BY 2.0

Oh the joy of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors. They make all of the difficult things involved in editing an HTML/PHP page easy but they make all of the easy things impossible. One such easy-thing-turned-impossible is the ability to insert <br> tags to create line breaks.

It seems the WordPress developers did not think the average blogger wise enough to use discretion with <br> tags. The TinyMCE editor that comes with WordPress, at its default setting, will automatically remove <br> and <p> tags (that are empty). Although this may simplify the editing process, it proves to be a major pain in the ass for users who may need the <br> tag to push text further down a post so it doesn’t align horizontally with an image or if they just plain like to see giant spaces between their paragraphs (who doesn’t?).

To remove this wonderful feature in WordPress, you will need to download the TinyMCE Advanced Plugin. This amazing little plugin is the best thing since Akismet (the WordPress equivalent of sliced bread). With the plugin, you will be able to:

• Deactivate the removal of <br> and <p> tags after saving in TinyMCE
• Change the button arrangement of your buttons in TinyMCE
• Add over 20 buttons onto your TinyMCE editor that did not exist before
• Imports all CSS classes from the main theme’s stylesheet and add them to a drop-down list
• Do search and replace editing
• Add inline CSS styles to your elements
• And more

The TincyMCE Advanced Plugin for WordPress Screenshot

That said, TinyMCE Advanced is a must-have plugin for the adept blogger.

Tags: html, plugins
Posted in WordPress Blogging | No Comments »