Affiliate Marketing Diary » blogging

3 Reasons Why I Avoid Free WordPress Themes

Steven — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 07:53:59 +0000

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:

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.
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.
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

15 WordPress Plugins Removed From Directory

Steven — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 04:32:13 +0000

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

4 Simple Steps To More Traffic

Steven — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 03:45:05 +0000

Getting traffic to a new blog can be a serious challenge for a brand new blogger.

You can have the coolest looking blog in the world, with the best content… but ultimately the question you will have to ask yourself is “Am I going to make money with this?”

And it all comes down to one thing…

Traffic.

There are many ways to get traffic to your blog, from guest posts on popular blogs and online publications to other published content in more traditional venues (think magazines, journals etc.) to paid traffic sources to social media….

But, did you know that there’s a “trick” that most seasoned SEO (search engine optimization) pros use to drive traffic to blogs WITHOUT creating brand new content all the time?

The method is called “Content Multiplication”, and is in some ways similar to “syndication”, with a twist.

The definition of “Syndication” according to Dictionary.com is:

“to publish simultaneously, or supply for simultaneous publication, in a number of newspapers or other periodicals in different places”

…and the idea here is for you to do something quite similar online, BUT by using different modalities.

In other words, instead of publishing the same blog post on a host of other ‘blogs’, which is more like traditional syndication (which can be penalized by the search engines for what they call the “duplicate content penalty”)… you would turn your original blog post into slightly different types of content by:

re-formatting the content slightly into an article for publication in an online article directory like: EzineArticles.com. EzineArticles.com is arguably the largest and most popular article directory on the internet with an Alexa.com rank of 228 (note: Alexa.com ranks sites based on traffic volume).
re-formatting the blog post into simple power point slides or photo slide show, and submit to video submissions sites such as YouTube.com. Youtube, in case you’re wondering, is ranked the #3 site in the world according to Alexa (just after Google and Facebook). You can also use services such as Tubemogul.com which allows you to submit your video to several video submission sites from one dashboard.
re-writing the content into a press release format and submit it to some free (or paid) press release services such as PR.com or PRWeb.com (paid).
and finally, if you are motivated, you can also turn your blog post into an audio by either recording yourself (or someone else) reading the post OR by using a service such as Odiogo.com, which will turn your blog posts from text into speech automatically (not quite ‘human’ sounding but still ok). Once it’s been converted, you can submit your audio to podcasting directories (even iTunes) for even more exposure.

Each of these steps allows your new pieces of content to be viewed (heard) and potentially syndicated to hundreds if not thousands of additional sites, which in turn will create buzz, links and ultimately more visitors back to your blog.

The really cool thing is that you don’t have to stop there.

You can now take each piece of this re-formatted content and truly syndicate the information using the power of “social media”, in other words, platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and the like.

Once you’ve signed up for each of the services, you can simplify your life by using a social dashboard such as Hellotxt.com or Ping.fm to post each piece of your “new” content to various web 2.0 properties.

Yes, it takes a bit of work to set up the accounts.

And yes, it takes a little extra elbow grease to convert the original blog post into an article, video, audio and a press release.

But the benefits outweigh the little bit of extra time that this process takes. Once you have done this a handful of times you will find that the conversion process will take much less time and it becomes routine.

And eventually you could outsource these tasks relatively easily to a virtual assistant or on Fiverr.com.

Ask yourself this question, if you’ve already spent hours crafting your blog post, why not spend the 30 – 60 minutes to re-purpose the content using content multiplication in order to get more visibility and potential “celebrity status” in your niche…

Post from: Affiliate Internet Marketing

4 Simple Steps To More Traffic