What Plugins Do We Use on Our WordPress Blogs?

“>Our Favorite Plugin – MaxBlog Ninja Affiliate – 33% Discount Available for 1 Week OnlyWhat Would You Do Differently If You Were Starting Out Again?Can I See an Example of Your Website?How to Add a Tracking ID to Your Amazon Product ReviewPopular PostsHow Much Did We Make on Amazon This Month? How to Write Product Reviews That Convert How Many Product Reviews Do You Need to Write to Start Making Money Online ? How to Write a Product Review When You Don’t Own the Product 20 WordPress Plugins to Increase Blog Traffic Saturday, September 4th, 2010at9:01 pm 

We’ve used a lot of plugins over the years but there are a handful of them that are our favorites and whenever we create a new blog, these are the plugins we automatically upload.

1. TinyMCE Advanced – This one we can’t do without. The TinyMCE Advanced plugin does a multitude of things but what we use it for mainly is the ability to add extra formatting options to our posts, in particular font size and font family selections. We also use it to easily add nofollow to our affiliate links. A definite must.

2. MaxBlog Ninja Affiliate – My absolute favorite plugin of all time. I love this one, however there is a catch – it’s not free. But it has paid for itself over and over. The Ninja Affiliate plugin allows you to create affiliate links quickly and easily.

So let’s say your site is about fishing rods, and over the years you’ve created hundreds of blog posts all about a particular brand of fishing rod. Then one day you decided that it would be a good idea to add affiliate links to all of those posts. This would probably take you many hours of work.  But, with the Maxblog Ninja Affiliate plugin you can easily do it in about 5 minutes. You simply enter the affiliate link once in the backend along with the keywords that you want to add an affiliate link to, and this plugin does the rest. Wherever it sees those keywords on your posts, it adds an affiliate link behind them. It also automatically adds affiliate links to any new posts you add. One other benefit of this plugin is that it can cloak your affiliate links so they look like regular links on your site.

Read our MaxBlog Ninja Affiliate plugin review.

3. All in One SEO Pack – we have used this plugin for years on our blogs. It basically helps with optimizing your posts and pages for the search engines. We have always just used the default settings but I am sure if you studied this plugin you could get a lot more out of it.

4. OIO Publisher – this is another paid plugin but if you want to advertise on your blog then this is a must have. It makes the process so easy – all you need to do once this plugin is set up, is approve the ads. It’s so simple and a huge time saver.

5. WordPress Database Backup – This is another must have. If for some unforeseen reason, you lose your site then having a backup of your WordPress database will make getting your website back a whole lot easier. This plugin will email you a regular backup of your database which you can store on your computer.

6. Adsense Target – On our product review sites, we will often add Adsense adds to our articles. These are extra informational type articles that we add to boost our blog/website content.Note: we do not add Adsense to the product reviews themselves, this would defeat the purpose of our plan, we just put Adsense on the articles.We use this plugin to increase the quality of the Adsense ads displayed. It helps to better match the Google ads to the content on your blog and hence result in a higher click through rate.

7. Internal Link Building – This is another favorite. This plugin automatically creates internal links on your blog. In other words, links from one page on your site to another page on your site. This can really help to boost your site. This plugin is particular good if you have a huge site and haven’t been particularly diligent in linking between posts. You simply assign keywords

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Filed under: Amazon, Blogs..., Plugins, WordPress

Amazon WordPress Plugins – Our Review of WP Zon Builder

Just recently we were lucky enough to be given a copy of an Amazon WordPress plugin to review. To be honest, we had never heard of this plugin so when the owner asked us to review it, we really weren’t expecting too much. After all, we have used the ReviewAzon plugin for quite some time on a few of our blogs and are very happy with it. We didn’t think anything could match it….that is until we actually tried WP Zon Builder.

This is one feature packed plugin and at this point we think it just nudges out ReviewAzon as our top Amazon plugin….not by much mind you, but just enough that we can say that we prefer WP Zon Builder over ReviewAzon. And I actually don’t like saying that because ReviewAzon is such a great plugin and you won’t regret buying it but for us the WP Zon Builder has a few extra features that have won us over.

As anyone who has read this blog knows, we make a nice income from promoting Amazon products and we are always on the lookout for anything to make our lives easier. And although we don’t really use these types of plugins in a big way, we still like them because they allow us to add reviews that automatically include all of that extra data from Amazon like images, prices, specifications, weights, measurements and so on. This means we don’t have to manually add this data ourselves.

You can use these types of plugins in one of two ways:

1. Adding products using the content from Amazon without making changes – This involves adding Amazon products to your blog without you making any changes to the content that comes over from Amazon. You can literally spend an hour or so using this plugin to add thousands of Amazon products to your blog and take the rest of the year off as the content is drip fed  to your site. I’ll show you how this works a little later in this article.

2. Adding products using the content from Amazon BUT you make changes – What this means is that you use this plugin to bring over the content from Amazon but you make changes to that content and replace it with your own product review. This plugin allows you to do that so the content isn’t just a duplication of what is on the Amazon product page.

We use both options but we definitely prefer the second option. If you can add your own review then you will be streets ahead of the rest of others using these types of plugins.

How Does the WP Zon Amazon Plugin Work?

You can add Amazon products in one of two ways with this plugin:

1. The first method involves creating a new post

You pretty much create a new post as you would any other post on your blog and add the product details there. I actually like this method because it gives me a little more control over what is in the post. What I do with this method is simply click on Posts –> Add New and under the text box is a section that I can enter an Amazon ASIN (each product on Amazon has an ASIN number) and then I click Insert. This automatically places a piece of code in my text box which displays an image of the product, a title of the product with a link to Amazon using my affiliate link, the average rating and the total number of reviews. This is what it would look like:

Then once I add my own unique content my post will look like this:

2. The second method involves adding posts en-masse.

With this method you can add hundreds, if not thousands, of posts in less than half an hour. Not my sort of style personally but great for those wanting quick, massive amounts of content added to a site.You can even stagger those posts so that they go up randomly for any period of time you set. You can even back-date them so that they are posted with dates in the past.

You can also use this method, as we do, for finding products based on a specific criteria that you set. This is one of the features we really love about WP Zon Builder. The filtering system is excellent and allows you to narrow down the search based on category, keyword, maximum and minimum price, average rating and the number of customer reviews. You can also sort those results by Featured Items, Bestselling, Relevance, Price, Newest Items and items On Sale.

This is a view of the Find Products page in the WordPress dashboard.

From this page you select your products and add them to a Queue. Once you’ve added 1 or more items you then click on the Post Products link from the dashboard menu and select the dates you want those posts to go up on. You can let them all go up straight away or select from and to dates so that they go up randomly during that period. There’s also a check box that you can select which prevents duplicate products from being posted.

This is what the posts look like if you select this method. If you notice it has brought all of the details over from Amazon. I haven’t changed a thing. However, the beauty of this is that I can change it if I like. I just go in and edit the post and add or change what I like.

Notice also that it has also automatically brought over the consumer reviews from Amazon and added them as comments. I really like that feature. You have the option of turning that off if you like or if you decide to keep the customer reviews you can change the settings so that you can select how many comments are displayed and only show comments that have a minimum rating. You can also sort those reviews by rating, most helpful, and submission date.

There are so many features that this post could go forever so I am just going to summarize the main ones below:

You can automatically use Amazon tags as your post tags or alternatively create post tags from the Amazon product title or use neither if you like and just create your own.There is an option for creating ‘pretty’ links so that your links to Amazon look like regular links and not long affiliate type links.The plugin links with the All in One SEO Pack plugin so that it will automatically set your All-In-One SEO Pack post titles, meta keywords, and meta descriptions for any Amazon product posts. Y0u can turn this option on or off.An update button within each post so that you can update the product details that have come over from Amazon at any time. The creator of this plugin tells me that he will be adding an automatic update feature in a future release of this plugin.You can make the links to Amazon nofollow if you like.This plugin will work with any theme. We use the Flexsqueeze theme for most of our sites but this will work on anything according to the creator of this plugin.This works with any Amazon country affiliate program.It includes widgets so you can add products to your sidebars.Click Reporting which provides stats on which products are getting clicks through to Amazon.You can use more than one Amazon Associate ID and if you need to you can easily change the Associate ID for the entire site.It integrates with other plugins like phpOStock, phpBay, Auction2Post, and other plugins that display Overstock.com and eBay products. We haven’t tried this function as yet so we can’t advise on how it works.You can search for and add Youtube video reviews from within the post itself.

This is a great plugin and we highly recommend it whether you want to add mass product posts or individual unique product reviews.

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Filed under: Amazon, Amazon, Builder, Plugins, Review, WordPress