A discussion of earning with Affiliate Programs, SEO, Wordpress Blogging and General Motivational Ideas for Internet Publishers

Everybody loves Wordpress plugins. After all, that’s what makes Wordpress such a great choice for blogging or CMS needs. Considering the tremendous appeal for the latest and greatest plugins it seemed like a good idea to post some of them every Sunday as a regular feature of this blog.

Today we have a handful of interesting new extensions for your Wordpress installation from creative minds who have given their time freely into the Wordpress community. Without further ado, here are today’s latest and greatest plugins.

Avatars for Comment Feeds - A new Wordpress plugin that adds avatars to your comment RSS feed. The plugin works off Gravatars using the bulit-in functionality added as of WordPress 2.5 release. The plugin lets you set the size of the avatar, between 10 and 96 pixels and it will even add a snapshot from websnapr.com to the pingbacks and trackbacks you receive on your blog.

G4B Photo Gallery Plugin - Created by Gavin Vickery, this plugin provides a minimalistic method to include a complete photo gallery anywhere on your blog. You can adjust thumbnail and photo size in settings page and the plugin crops or resizes photos proportionally to your settings. G4B Photo Gallery Plugin currently supports Wordpress 2.2 - 2.6.2 installs.

DashboardZone Plugin - This is a very creative plugin which aims to help you effectively track your blogging goals. Goals you can set to be tracked are total number of posts, average comments per post and posts per month. Tracking these facets of your blog can help you convert your blog visitors into regular readers which is the ultimate goal of any blogger.

Wordpress Help Desk - Although this plugin is currently in beta mode, it offers a comprehensive integrated help desk and trouble ticketing system that helps you support your blog visitors and resolve issues quickly. This plugin could be extremely helpful for any businesses using Wordpress as a CMS system.

Well, that’s it for this weeks plugins. Be sure to check back next week for more great Wordpress plugins or subscribe to our RSS feed to be alerted when we post another batch next Sunday !!

Happy Publishing,
Dave

         

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 It appears Google has been rolling out their pagerank updates with a frequency not seen since 2004/2005. Last year, pagerank updates were few and far between but this year we’ve been seeing them every few months. For the most part, these updates have been downgrades for the vast majority of bloggers and webmasters as seen here, here, here and here.

On the other hand, it seems some three month old blogs are being rewarded with a PR5 from a PR0 ??? I really think granting a three month old blog a PR5 authority simply because it’s distributing free Wordpress themes with links back to the blog in the footer is utterly ridiculous.

If the afformentioned scenario didn’t get your blood boiling and you want to have an aneurysm, check out this post about a network of bidding directories that have seen a significant increase in pagerank. Bidding directories? Google has been adamant about the fact that buying and selling text links for pagerank value is prohibited. Remember how Google destroyed PayPerPost bloggers last year? Ok, so somebody writing a paid blog post is essentially more improper in Google’s eyes than having people bid for text links on a site with no content ?

What the hell is Google thinking?

It seems more and more older, well established blogs are getting whacked in the pagerank department these days because Google is definitely not following up on policing natural link building, which they profess as a guideline for webmasters to follow. Google’s Matt Cutts has stated time and again that links should be relative to a blog or site’s niche, which means a “free template blog” getting backlinks from a “celebrity wallpaper blog” should not weigh in as relative. So why isn’t Google following their own standards which they have strongarmed white hat webmasters into following?

One blogger wrote about dofollow pagerank updates and how 3/5 of the blogs in his dofollow blog directory which were PR5 had dropped in this update. Looks like Google hates dofollow blogs so once again, webmasters and bloggers must bow down and alter their policies regarding dofollow comments as a reward to commentors.

Another blogger took it upon himself to do a fair value pagerank analysis of many of the various MMO (Make Money Online) bloggers. The assessment lists the blog, it’s current paregrank and what the blogger believes the pagerank should really be. hmmm, I wonder if he read 10 secret Confessions of the Super Affiliate?? Probably not.

I’m beginning to see that the old adage “nice people finish last” or “honest people never get ahead” certainly rings true, especially where anything related to Google is concerned. However, I refuse to be bullied into going “black hat” or changing the way I choose to operate my sites and blogs because Google wants to shoot themselves in the foot by alienating more experienced webmasters with their kindergarten “gold star” Google pagerank.

         

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Whether you’re researching keywords for a PPC campaign or you’re looking for long tail keywords to optimize your site or blog, keyword research and keyword suggestion tools are essential to your work. Using a solitary tool to do the work might be fine for most applications, however, if you’re serious about your business, you’ll want to use more than one tool in your efforts. I’ve taken the time to review several keyword tools using the search terms Best Affiliate Programs and provided screenshots of the various tools in action.

Please note: This article is not a “Top Ten” list and the tools reviewed here are not listed in any particular order. Each keyword tool offers a unique perspective and this review is solely for the purpose of comparison.

WordTracker Keyword Suggestion Tool - http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com

Wordtracker offers a free keyword suggestion tool that allows you to search their database of over 330 million search terms. The keywords in the database are collected from Dogpile and Metacrawler and are updated on a weekly basis. The free tool will return the first 100 keyword suggestions which should be sufficient for most SEO and PPC needs. Here’s a screenshot of a sample Wordtracker search for the terms “Best Affiliate Programs”

As you can see, Wordtracker gives you the most popular keywords related to your search terms as well as the number of times per month the keywords were searched for. Wordtracker offers a paid subscription service that allows you to go deeper and retrieve complete lists of keywords. They offer a 7 day free trial to the subscription service if you’re interested in taking Wordtracker for a test drive.

KeyCompete - http://www.keycompete.com

KeyCompete is an online tool that lets you identify and analyze keywords your competition is using in their PPC campaigns. When you use the KeyCompete tool, you can not only type in keywords to search for, you can type in a competitors url to search for the terms they’re bidding on with Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. Here’s a screenshot of a sample KeyCompete search for the terms “Best Affiliate Programs”

Given the results of the search shown above, you can click on a domain name and see exactly what terms the site is bidding on in Adwords. The advantage to KeyCompete is that you can quickly discover what keywords your competitor is using to drive PPC traffic to their site. The disadvantage is that if your competitor is not using PPC advertising, you will not be able to see their terms. KeyCompete offers only limited functionality for free, to get full access, you can either subscribe to their service or buy lists of specific searches for $10 a pop. Either way, KeyCompete is an essential tool for serious PPC marketers and SEOs.

Keyword Discovery - http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/

Keyword Discovery utilizes over 180 search engines world wide to compile keyword statistics into one of the most powerful Keyword Research tools available. Using this tool it is possible to generate huge lists of head and tail keyword terms for whatever niche you’re trying to market or optimize for. The reports generated by this tool are organized by search volume and start with the top head terms down to huge lists of relative tail terms. Below you can see a screenshot of a sample Keyword Discovery search for the terms “Best Affiliate Programs”.

The screenshot above is from the free search tool and you can see there is a great deal of information returned using it. The subscription tool is availabe for a monthly of yearly fee and in my opinion, Keyword Discovery is an essential expenditure for anybody looking to maximize their SEO or PPC efforts.

SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool - http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/

Aaron Wall and his SEO Book franchise are an industry standard. The SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool is no exception in that it certainly delivers word class data for keyword mining. First off, the tool will suggest the most popular keywords and it also show you how many searches are being made per month across the major search engines. Below you can see a screenshot of the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool for search terms “Best Affiliate Programs”.

As you can see, this tool is quite useful if you are setting up PPC campaigns for not only Google Adwords but it can benefit Yahoo search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter campaigns as well. Of course, this tool is also fantasatic if you are just mining keyword for organic SEO purposes. The tool is free and it provides a wealth of information at your fingertips.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool - https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

No keyword mining effort could be considered complete without a trip to Google’s own Adwords Keyword Tool. If you’re doing any type of SEO work or PPC marketing, Google’s tool is the alpha and the omega of a successful keyword search. Below you can see a screenshot of the Google Adwords Keyword Tool for the search terms “Best Affiliate Programs”.

As you can see above, Google’s tool returns related head and tail keywords as well as the average number of searches per month. The tool also shows volume trends per month which can be very useful if you’re planning seasonal PPC campaigns or if you want to optimize a site for holidays, seasons or specific times of year. The tool also tells you the month in which the highest number of searches has occurred. Google’s keyword tool is completely free of charge and is one of the most important tools for keyword research and analysis.

I’m sure there are many other keyword research and keyword suggestion tools available on the internet but the ones mentioned here are the ones I’ve used time and again when researching keywords for PPC or SEO. If you know of any other tools, please feel free to leave a comment here to share them with us.

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Happy Publishing,
Dave

         

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