Earlier today I wrote a new entry into the Super Simple Marketing newsletter about why I use Premium WordPress Themes instead of the gazillion free ones that are available out there in the blogosphere.

Thought I’d share 3 reasons why I avoid using free wordpress themes:

1. Free themes may well have malicious code in the theme – this actually happens more often than not. And often it’s not added by the theme author, but by the site distributing the theme! In this Super Simple Marketing Newsletter Entry I share a simple tip on how to spot malicious code in your free wordpress theme.
2. Lack of updates – imagine this, you’ve built a full fledged blog and a new version of WordPress comes out. You upgrade… and your site breaks and the theme author has stopped updating the theme. Now you have to re-design the entire site… wasting needless time on it when you could have prevented it by using a Premium theme that is constantly updated.
3. Lack of support – Free themes lack support. Period. Very few free themes developers will help you if something happens to your blog. With a premium theme

Make sure you check out my newsletter entry on the 6 reasons why you should use Premium WordPress Themes.

Have fun!

Post from: Affiliate Internet Marketing

3 Reasons Why I Avoid Free WordPress Themes

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If you have a WordPress blog, you may want to double check your plugins. I’m a niche blogger, so I have gobs of WordPress installs… and one of the things I try to keep an eye on are security vulnerabilities in plugins and themes so my sites don’t get hacked.

There are 15 plugins that have been removed from the WordPress Plug-In directory recently due to SQL Injection Vulnerabilities in the plugin (which was considered one of the worst application vulnerabilities last year).

Here are the 15 plugins that just got removed from the WordPress Directory:

• WordPress Zotpress
• WordPress Facebook Opengraph Meta
• WordPress VideoWhisper Presentation
• WordPress Couponer
• WordPress PureHTML
• WordPress wp audio gallery
• WordPress Event Registration
• WordPress Advertizer
• WordPress Profiles
• WordPress mySTAT plugin
• WordPress Collision Testimonials
• WordPress Super CAPTCHA
• WordPress Ajax Gallery
• WordPress Easy Contact Form Lite
• WordPress IP-Logger

If you’d like more information on these vulnerabilites, check out the “Unconcious Mind”.

I’d recommend you double-check your plugins to make sure you don’t have any of these on your blog.  In the event you do, remove them to get rid of the security vulnerability.

Post from: Affiliate Internet Marketing

15 WordPress Plugins Removed From Directory

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3. Wow… It’s been crazy

Yesterday I was reading a blog post on the official Google blog regarding how they intend to combat the increase in Search Engine Spam since their Caffeine Algo Change (which I wrote a bit about elsewhere on this blog).

When reading it, the first thing that came to mind was those individuals who spend a lot of their time and money to from creating pure auto blogs.

The article from their blog (they meaning “big G”) regarding this change in the algorithm can be found in it’s entirety here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-search-and-search-engine-spam.html

It’s relatively short, but it pretty much says what you think it’ll say relative to duplicate content, low quality content, spammy content that give low visitor value and the need to reduce the number of these sorts of sites from their search results.

Just after reading this post I stumbled upon a pretty decent write up about this on Mashable (a news blog about various social media and web happenings). You can read their blog post from yesterday here: http://mashable.com/2011/01/21/google-combat-search-spam/

The bottomline is this: Google will be putting even more effort in getting rid of sites that they consider SPAM. In Google’s words:

“…affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.”

So, if you and your auto blogs got affected by the May-day algo change last May, then you may want to buckle up because I think you’re in for another ride.

So, is this the end of auto blogs?

No…

And while I don’t create traditional autoblogs personally, I will be watching the few that I do still own to see what happens. It will be interesting to see if some of the little things I mention in regards to the addition of unique content I talk about in StealthBlogger.com (and more so in the now sold out Stealth Blogger Black Book) will help against getting your site flagged as spam and shut down.

I guess time will tell.

Until next time…

Post from: Affiliate Internet Marketing

Is This The End of Auto Blogs?

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If you’re a niche site builder you’ve probably run across Xsite Pro at one time or another (by Paul Smithson). If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a Wysiwyg HTML editor that built with the affiliate marketer in mind (it’s a great tool and you can find it at http://xsitepro.com).

Some time ago around the time Xsite Pro 2.0 was released Paul released a software called XHeader, a totally free design tool specifically for building website and blog header graphics. It works quite well and I even created a video tutorial on how to create a header graphic with this tool about 6 months ago (if you’re interested, the video can be found here: http://supersimpleblogging.com/wordpress-installation/ – look for video 14).

In any event, Paul is just about to release a PRO version of XHeader for $37 (it opens on March 11th, 2010).

The main difference between the free and the PRO version?

The new version includes 5000 headers! (wow!)

So if you’re doing a lot of website building, it may be worth checking out. You can find it here: http://xheader.com

If you want a different alternative to creating headers and other graphical elements for your website, you may want to check out GFXwriter.

I created a short video on how to create a header graphic (for Blogger) some time ago that you may find helpful as well. Check it out:

If you want to learn more about GFXWriter, go here: http://verysimplemarketing.com/GFXwriter/

Have fun!

Disclaimer: This blog contains affiliate links that compensate my company should you make a purchase.

Post from: Affiliate Internet Marketing

Paul Smithson & Xsite Pro team just launched Xheader Pro!

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