Feed your WordPress Demons!
If you are involved in the Wordpress community on a daily basis, you have probably heard about all the buzz that WordPress Direct has generated. WordPress Direct is a Wordpress auto installer that allows you to log on to your hosting interface and install and run multiple Wordpress blogs with no problem. Wordpress Direct product one key issue for bloggers, content generation. If you have a single blog that is making you a lot of money, you probably know how tough it is to keep providing good content on your blog to not only keep the users coming in, but also keep the search engines satisfied. Wordpress Direct creators claim that you can get around this problem easily, so I decided to take a closer look to see what’s true and what’s not.
We logged on to Wordpress Direct website to figure out who we can achieve the hundred thousands of traffic that is apparently possible using this service. The promise of the service is simple: just set it or forget it. In fact, you can see the claim on the website: you pick a theme, you pick a keyword, and your blog will be updated with relevant content periodically (you can define the period). The good news is there is a free demo available. That will get you three website installations, which should be more than enough for us to figure out if this product is what it claims to be. So let’s jump in.
Once you sign up, you are offered with two sales letters, which we found annoying to say the least. But the offers did look attractive on the paper. Once you get past those, you will see a dashboard that will show your current installed sites.
The selection of themes available right out of the box is just impressive. Most of the themes are free themes, but a lot of them are rare, which make for great testing. Once you choose a theme and decide to install, you will get the option to choose your hosting account or allow WordpressDirect to host it for you using free web services. If you have accounts with Hostgator or Dreamhost, you can use WordpressDirect to install the Wordpress on your web space automatically. But for testing purposes, we used the free account service.
The word Mixed Martial Arts was available as the starting point for our domain. 
The system is sophisticated enough to allow us to enter the keywords that we want to target and the type of content that we want to post per keyword. Very interesting indeed! You can also put your Google Adsense and Google Analytics information into the system here. So far so good. Once the installation is complete, you get the chance to setup the autoposter software (set the type of content you are looking for and the period in which you want posts to be sent to your Wordpress blog automatically).
So here is our site after posting a bunch of videos with WordpressDirect to it automatically. Best of all, we absolutely had to do nothing, and the whole process took about 3 minutes. You can post ezine articles, private label rights articles, and of course videos from YouTube, VEOH, and other sites to your blog if you decide to get a paid membmership.
The Cons:
There were a few issues that kept us from giving this service 5 stars. Understanding that no system is perfect, Wordpress Direct came closely to the ultimate blogging solution. Here are things that can be improved:
Verdict: 4.25 out of 5 stars.
The system is perfect. We had to do nothing to start a blog with comments and content in under 3 minutes. The posts were sent to our blog automatically. This service can be a powerful link-building tool as well. But the high cost as well as minor glitches, doesn’t justify a 5 for 5 score for this product. But right now, Wordpress Direct is the best automated Wordpress blogging system.
If you are into blogging, and I mean heavy blogging, you have probably thought about running multiple blogs. But you know better than I do that blogging takes a lot of time, and you need to do a lot of research in order to make sure you provide good solid content to your readers. Now taking on a new blog is a whole different challenge really. Â It often more than doubles the effort that you have to put in to avoid doing injustice to each of your blogs. But here is the thing most people don’t know about. About 80% of posts that you read everyday are scheduled in advance. In fact, most pro bloggers only blog about the news for an hour a day, having scheduled months of posts in advance. Now that’s how you can run a business on autopilot (your work for 3 months and take 6 months off and spend the other 3 months planning for the next).
If you are using Wordpress, you can use it to schedule posts in advance. I personally do it all the time and have had no trouble with it. But what if you are not running Wordpress on your blogs. More importantly, what if you run 30 blogs. You will have to log in to each blog and posts in advance. There are passwords to remember, and the process is inconvenient.
Well, that’s exactly why I signed up for Post Later service. Not only can you post to multiple platforms, you can use Post from a central location, and that is very convenient:
Not only can you post to platforms that don’t support future dating, you can also schedule posts for Twitter. Now that’s what I call incredible. But there is more. You can also schedule recurring posts. For instance, you can schedule your posts to go live every 6 months. I don’t know about you but I rather blog in a more convenient way than going through the pain of having to deal with multiple blog platform technicalities and limitations. The service is affordable too ($9.95 a month). Multibloggers should definitely check it out (Postlater.com).
You all have probably heard of analytics packages such as Google Analytics by now. These are simply powerful tools that allow you to track visitors that come to your blog and help you find out how they get there and what they used to get to your site. But Google Analytics and Omniture are simply not for everyone. Unless you have your own dedicated analytics team or you understand how to read Google Analytics, you are going to have a hard time analyzing data.
That’s where Hittail comes in. With HitTail, you can pretty much outsource your analytics, sort of. What HitTail does is give you a live overview of the keyword that people are searching to get to your Wordpress site.
Best of all, you also get keywords suggestions and that is extremely helpful if you are looking for longtail and specific keywords to target on your blog (see picture below).
The service is extremely useful if you are not into delving deep into your analytics data on a daily basis. Best of all for $99 a year, you can’t ask for more. You can find the pricing here. This is a must have if you can afford it.
If you have done any search engine optimization for your blog or others, you have probably heard of the concept of XML sitemaps. Whether you have a site built on Ruby on Rails (ROR), or you are just looking to create an HTML sitemap for your dynamic Joomla or Wordpress site, having search engine sitemaps can help robots find their way through your website.
Now if you know XML (which by the way is not that difficult), you can come up with a decent sitemap for your Wordpress site. But if you are like me and post frequently to your sites, you’d be surprised how much time it will take to create a sitemap for your blog. Now keep in mind that if you have a very small blog, you may want to stick with the free version of this software, but if you have a huge website, you can save yourself a lot of time and trouble as XML-Sitemaps:
I have personally used the paid version of this program, and it has saved me a ton of time by automating things and minimizing the effort on my part. But a lot of my friends have not graduated to the paid version. You can create site-maps for websites with less than 500 pages. Believe it or not, a lot of my clients have less than 200, so the free version will do. You get all the formats when the process is done:
A lot of people talk about how sitemaps are overrated, and I even heard from my former boss that he thought sitemaps would hurt our ranking. But that usually comes from people who don’t want to put the effort to create sitemaps. But with this script, you can do everything automatically, so there is no excuse. Check it out for yourself here.
I hear this story a lot. “I am thinking about starting my own blog, but I am no good with design. I don’t know any Photoshop and don’t have the money to pay a professional designer to create a logo for me.” Well, fear no more my friends. I can tell you from the experience that you either get the whole design thing or you don’t. I am a proud member of design-handicapped club, which means I can’t design any thing to save my life. I have even tried learning Photoshop and Illustrator but I am not creative enough to do anything with what I have learned. But with LogoMaker, I have pretty much don’t have to do anything.
LogoMaker is an innovative self-service logo design service that allows you to design your logo on the fly. You basically sign up for a free account, and you can use pre-designed logos and change them to make your own unique logo.
You can change fonts, add images, and do all kinds of stuff with the template that HP has with LogoMaker. Here is what I was able to create in less than 40 seconds.
Now you can buy logos that you design for only $49. You can then download the gif, jpeg, and the EPS file, and you can change your logo if you know illustrator or Photoshop. But the great thing about Logomaker is that you don’t have to buy your logo. You can use it for free by providing a link back to LogoMaker service. It can’t get any better than that. Now a lot of the gurus may say that buying a $1000 logo gives you more credibility. I don’t necessarily agree with that. A whole lot of startups don’t have the resources to buy expensive logos, and these logos do just fine as far as I am concerned. Best of all, the risk is none or minimal (if you decide to buy). I do encourage you to play with the templates as they are very addictive. After playing with it for a year now, I now regret spending so much time learning everything there is to know about Photoshop (it’s a nice skill for a designer but is not for everyone).
