How to Turn a WordPress Blog into an Article Directory in Under 30min

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010at11:06 pm 

Lately we’ve been working on new ways to generate traffic to our blogs and are starting to try online services that can generate backlinks through placing articles on other sites. You’ve probably seen some of these sites or even tried them – sites like 1WayLinks, Unique Article Wizard, Free Traffic System and so on. We will do a blog post on the various backlinking services available at a later date..

As part of these services you can submit what is called a donor blog to the system. What this means is that you create a blog (or use one you already have), submit it to the backlinking site and once it has been approved, content is automatically submitted to your blog on a regular basis. In some cases you can receive up to 10 articles a day on your blog. The articles are just drip fed to your blog and you often don’t need to do anything but watch the content go up.

This was the case with us and we now, after a couple of months, already have a blog with close to 400 articles on all sorts of subjects ranging from dog training right through to insurance, ps3 gaming, crafts, hobbies and more…with more coming in on a regular basis. So what do you do with a blog like this with such a diverse range of topics? We could just as easily leave it as is since it’s not like we need to do anything to maintain it.

But then we had a thought that maybe we could turn it into an article directory. Nice idea in theory but in practice it really looked like a lot of hard work. I could just imagine the time it would take to find an article directory script and set it all up and then somehow transfer 400 articles over. It just seemed like too much to do on top of our already full schedule.

But then a thought came to me…I wonder if there is a WordPress plugin that can turn a WordPress blog into an article directory. It only took me a few minutes of searching and I came up with a couple of possibilities…and both of them free! And in fact, I never got around to trying the second one because the first one did the job beautifully….and by the time I was done, I had turned that blog into a professional looking article directory in well under 30 minutes.

So if you have a blog with lots of diverse topics then this might work for you too.

Steps to Creating Your Own Article Directory

Step 1: Download the following files – these are all free by the way:

1. Article Directory Plugin – More info for this plugin can be found here
2. Article Directory Theme – More info for this theme can be found here
3. Role Manager Plugin – More info for this plugin can be found here
4. Post Corrector WordPress Plugin – this one is optional – it allows you to add categories quickly and easily and this is the sample file of categories which you can use with this plugin. More info for this plugin can be found here

Step 2: Upload the Article Directory Plugin and Activate It

The plugin is easy to upload and activate and it includes various options which you can change in the WordPress dashboard such as excluding certain categories from displaying and whether or not to show empty categories.

Step 3: Upload the Article Directory Theme and Activate It

Note that you don’t have to use this theme. You can use your own but I can’t provide instructions on what to do if you use your own. I just know that when using their theme it all works perfectly and the theme is quite clean and ready to use. If you need more info on using the Article Directory plugin with your own theme then check out the creators website  – Articlesss.com

Step 4: Add Categories

If you already have an existing blog then you won’t need to add any categories as you will have most likely added categories in the past. But if your blog is new then you can either manually add categories or use the Post Corrector WordPress plugin from Step 1 above. This will allow you to quickly add categories and subcategories especially if you use it in conjunction with the sample file of categories. This will create categories similar to EzineArticles.com.

Step 5: Upload the Role Manager Plugin and Activate It

To be quite honest we never got around to uploading this one. The articles we receive come straight from 1WayLinks and are automatically added to the one user account in WordPress. I think however that if you are wanting to get serious with your Article Directory then you really need to use this type of plugin so that you can better manage users wanting to submit articles to your directory.

Step 6: Your Done!

Your Article Directory should be up and running at this point. Your only job now is to adjust the sidebar widgets, header and footer to make it suit your blog.

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Filed under: Amazon, 30min, Article, Directory, Under, WordPress