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Automate Social Bookmarking with Auto Social Poster

October 19th in Premium Plug-ins by Wordpress Jedi .

I don’t know about you but posting my WordPress blog to social bookmarking sites takes me a whole lot of time. I even tried hiring a few people to do that for me, but that really cuts into your profit. After all, why would you want to outsource a task that can be done in-house with a software package.

That’s where Auto Social Poster from Mass Automation comes in. These guys are serial WordPress plug-in makers, and they have done it again with Auto Social Poster plugin. Auto social poster is the first fully-automated service that i have seen for submitting WordPress blogs to social bookmarking sites. The package comes for both Joomla and WordPress, so don’t worry if you are not yet a believer in WordPress.
Here is how the program works. You provide it with information about your bookmarking accounts. Then you define your tags for each post and publish your posts.That’s really all there is to it. The software will grab your tags and submit your posts to your bookmarking sites. You can also do a little social gaming and post to multiple accounts from one blog. Now I don’t recommend doing that, but it’s a possibility.

What I like about Auto Social Poster is the fact that the programmers understand the issue of spam. Social bookmarking sites have become sophisticated over the years in fighting spammers, and the last thing you want to do is look like you are spamming the system. Auto Social Poster has measures to protect you against that such as posting gradually instead of posting a mass number of pages to social bookmarking sites.

The software is not cheap however. You can use this social wordpress plug-in for 100,000 posts, but it will cost you $199, which is about 5 pages for a cent. For me, that is why way more than worth it. Some rent a coder guy charged me $100 to 3 of my sites to 100 social book marking sites, so if I wanted him to do that for 100,000 posts, I would’ve had to pay him a fortune. But with this web application, you are in control, and everything’s done automatically. If you have lots of content, and you are tired of contracting people to do your social bookmarking, this WordPress plugin may be for you. But if you are just starting with blogging, then you may want to settle down before getting Auto Social Poster plug-in.

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Clone Your WordPress Blog with WP Clone

October 5th in Premium Plug-ins by Wordpress Jedi .

I don’t know about you, but I have always wanted to have the ability to clone my blog in a different location just in case. I usually do that on my all shared hosting accounts, but before I got WP Clone, things were a bit more difficult. I had to deal with MySQL and my FTP accounts, and often things went wrong during the process. That’s until I found WP Clone.

WP Clone basically does what a disk image does on your PC. If you have Norton Ghost, you probably know what I am talking about. When Windows breaks, it’d be awesome to have the ability to pop 4 DVDs in and restore everything back to normal, and you can do that with Norton Ghost. WP Clone does that and more for your WordPress blog. Let’s say you spend a few months figuring out the best plug-ins for a single WordPress blog. Then you decide to create a new blog in a different place. Wouldn’t it be easy if you could do that with just a few clicks? You betcha!

That’s why I love WP Clone. You can clone pretty much anything on your WordPress blog. Whether it’s general settings, reading, writing, or even Permalinks settings, you can do it all. Best of all, it takes only a few clicks:

But here are the reasons you should consider getting WP Clone:

You can create a template for all your blogs: once you find the optimal setting for one WordPress blog, you can apply it all others. This is very handy if you have multiple blogs.
You can create your center of distribution: a bit similar to the ASP software model, you can distribute updates to your themes or plug-ins to all others by changing the master copy. You can also only change one blog at the time. You can also distribute posts to all your blogs.
You can move your blog without hassle: this is really the single reason I bought this premium plug-in. I had so much trouble with my hosting companies that I dumped two in a matter of weeks. You can tell how much of a hassle it is to move a huge blog twice in 3 weeks. I knew that from my past experience, so WP Clone saved me a ton of time. All other features were good bonuses.

WP Clone is an easy to use plug-in, and it does what it promises. This process doesn’t achieve full automation, but comes very close to it. It’s a little bit pricey, but if you have multiple blogs, it’s worth it. I highly encourage you to watch the video by the authors before making a decision on this.

Verdict: 4.25/5 stars

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Show Related Posts On Your WordPress Blog with Similar Posts Plugin

October 3rd in Free Plug-ins by Wordpress Jedi .

Say you run a WordPress blog, and you have a thousand posts on your blog. Now let’s imagine someone gets to your WordPress blog for the very first time and read one of your post. The prospect of going through all your posts to figure out related posts is simply daunting, and people who have the potential to be your loyal readers for years to come may leave your site and never come back as they never got the chance to read the other 10 great articles that you had written about their topic of interest.

That’s where the concept of related posts comes in. To be able to show similar posts on your blog right after every entry can help you gain and retain more readers. Besides, a lot of big blogs have so many gems hidden inside them, and you’d be surprised how your blog can explode by offering related posts on your blog.

I have tried many plugins that offer the related posts feature, but none comes close to Similar Posts plugin. It’s a free plugin that is pretty much plug and play. All you have to do is activate the plugin and bam! You’ll have related posts after your entries. The reason I like this plugin is not its convenience but rather how it goes about showing related posts. With so many similar plugins, you get similar posts based on how you tag your posts. However, this plugin is using a sophisticated search algorithm that compare posts based on the words in them, and that’s how similar posts are displayed. The author says it the best:

The results can be tweaked in several ways to tailor them for you blog. By default the plugin chooses the 20 most frequent words to make its matches but the number is adjustable. It is worth experimenting to see how many words gives the best results for your blog â€” it has hardly any impact on speed, even if you set the value high enough to include the whole post. The relative importance given to words in your title may be adjusted so that well-chosen titles can be used to advantage or titles with little relevance downplayed. Similarly, tags can be used to improve matching or not according to your blog and itâ€™s needs.

I have personally used 50 and have not seen better results on my blog. I think the law of diminishing returns really apply here. For my technology blog, 50 words has given the best results, but the improvements are not that remarkable. What this means is that the plugin comes with a very decent default setting right out of the box, but if you are picky, you can even use custom fields to modify the behavior of the plugin.

This is a very smart plugin regardless of how you look at it. But it is particulary useful if you are running a WordPress Job site or an online comparison site. Think about how much you can improve your site’s stickiness by showing people other jobs that they may be interested in. The good news is that the plugin is for free. The bad news is that the plugin is for free, so I do recommend you testing it out so you can differentiate yourself from your competitors. Here is where you can get more information on Similar Posts plugin.

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SEO Plugin: Virtual Silo Advanced SEO Plugin

September 25th in Plugins For SEO, Premium Plug-ins by Wordpress Jedi .

I don’t know if you have heard of the concept of creating silos for your webpages instead of just creating sitemaps. Silos are arguably more search-engine friendly, and at the end of the day, they give search engine robots pathways to go through your pages more easily. In case you don’t know what a Silo look like, please take a look at below:

As you may know, search engine robots discover relevance based on numerous factors such as keywords, anchor texts, LSI (related terms that you can figure out using Adwords Keyword tool), and other factors. By only having one link in and one link out, you can not only pass PR effectively through your pages, you can also pass relevance more effectively. Bleeding PR has been one of my biggest headaches and that’s why I started reading on the concept of Silos. Silos are in essence one level below Blackholes (no we are not talking about astronomy here). But before you get to the Blackhole level, you want to make sure you implement the Silos technique to pass rank through your pages.

If you have a thousand pages, then changing your structure to make Silo happen is time consuming and next to impossible. That’s why I am grateful to the creator of Virtual Silo. The plugin is so easy to use, and it works right out of the box. Best of all, no programming is required to implement the Silo structure for your WordPress blog in a second.

Virtual Silo comes with many options, but you can see from above that you don’t have to do any programming whatsoever. You check a set of radiobuttons, and you are on your way. Keep in mind that the above values are what I use for my blog and may have to be different for you blog. My WordPress blog was a mess so I had to change the default values to account for a few problems.

Virtual WordPress Silo is one of the best and worthy SEO plugins that I have found on the web. The goal here is not to smash atoms, but to do a simple process for a huge blogs. And Virtual Silo accomplishes that brilliantly. You can also get Silo for Joomla but that’s outside the scope of this blog…

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Create Ultimate Contact Forms With Cforms II 8.7

September 23rd in Free Plug-ins by Wordpress Jedi .

I got to admit that I had heard of cforms II when it came out a while back, but I never bothered to try it out as I never saw the need to create contact forms for my blog. After all, I could just put my e-mail and other information on “about me” page and forget it. But since I have used it on my business blog, I have been hooked. And I can’t believe it’s for free. But if you are looking ot create professional contact forms such as the one below, then you should definitely check out cforms WordPress form plugin.

The guys at deliciousday have done a magnificant job of designing this form plugin. When you install the plugin, it shows up next to your comments tab on your WordPress dashboard. So it’s very convenient to find unlike a few other plug-ins that are tough to figure out.

Once you click on that link, you are going to get a host of features that allow you to design your desired form. For instance, you can define read only fields, checkboxes, radioboxes, file-upload boxes, radio groups, select boxes, and password fields for your form. In addition, you can disable fields, make them read only, or even clear them on focus. The possibilities are limitless in that regard.

But that’s not all. You can customize your messages (success or failure) or change the text and button labels easily with cforms. Not only that, you can define the email address that your readers will see when they fill a form on your blog. You can also redirect them to a whole different page once they have completed your form, which is great as you can walk your readers through your sales funnel.

But what I liked the most about this plug-in was the tell-a-friend feature for some of my WordPress blog. That’s one way to go viral, and a lot of people do take time to e-mail about your service to their friends if you over deliver.

The plug-in is very easy to use, and essentially does what it’s supposed to do, create brilliant contact forms. I can’t believe that the programmers have released this for free, but then again, I am glad they did. Version 9.0 is going to be even better, so watch this space for that. You can get more technical details about cforms II form WordPress pluging on the author’s page.

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Run An Auction Right From Your WordPress Blog with Wp Auctions

September 14th in Premium Plug-ins by Wordpress Jedi .

Have you ever thought about running an auction from your WordPress site? I am going to be honest with you. I have and I have actually done that too. The problem with running an auction on eBay is that you end up paying a chunk of your hard earned money for them to host your auction page. With Wp Auctions Premium WordPress plug-in, you get the profit for yourself, 100% of it.

Wp Auctions plug-in comes with two types of auctions: 1. Sidebar auctions 2. Pop-up auctions.

Wp Auctions’ sidebar option allows you to run an auction right from your sidebar. You can also host multiple auctions on your side and provide an RSS feed for them. The auction template is very customizable and the sky is the limit as far as the changes that you can make to this page. You can set up a minimum bid, an end date, and all the good things that you can do on an auction on eBay.

In my opinion, the best feature about this plugin is the fact that you don’t have to settle for a set of pre-determined designs for your sidebar widget. You can design and customize your widget to look exactly like a part of your theme. So your widget will not jumpt out or look out of place.

The pop-up widget a little bit more intrusive and I don’t personally like using. But I have seen many bloggers use that, so it depends what your audience can tolerate on your WordPress site. You can also use it to show third-party ads, so depending on what you want to do with this widget, you can monetize your blog with banners ads and so on.

Wp-auctions is a very useful plug-in if you are into running auctions from your blog. It integrates well with WordPress and can be used to monetize blogs in more ways than one. I am still not sold on the idea of using this plug-in heavily, but as far as functionality, it is one of the best plug-ins out there. You can buy it for $24.99 which is not that expensive.

Verdict: 4 out of 5 stars. The plug-in is great and works with PayPal. However, I am not sold on the idea of traffic generation through this plug-in. But overall, this is a decent premium WordPress Plugin and it’s not expensive at all. It’s definitely worth a try if auctions are your thing.

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How To Add Breadcrumbs To Your WordPress Theme with NavXT Plugin

September 12th in Free Plug-ins, Plugins For SEO by Wordpress Jedi .

I am sure you are familiar with the concept of breadcrumbs. These are those little handy links that show up at the top or bottom of pages and help you navigate through websites. Breadcrumbs are highly recommended for SEO, but they are not necessarily easy to generate for WordPress blogs. Now I say that as it is possible to implement a customized Breadcrumb system for your WordPress plug if you know PHP inside and out. But if you are just a blogger who want to take advantage of breadcrumbs to make your site easier to use, then you should check out Breadcrumb NavXT.

NavXT allows you to create highly customizable crumbs for your WordPress blog without too much fuss. Now some WordPress themes may not quite work easily with this plug-in but most of them do. Basically, all you need to do is to add the following code to your header.php file:

The administration panel for this plugin is very easy to use and allows you to customize all pages such as archives, author pages, and even static front pages. You get to define what you want to see on your breadcrumb here.

Now if you are an advanced user, I highly recommend activating the Core version of this plugin instead of the administration version. The reason is that you can make this plugin perform faster without the administration panel. But you will need the following code to make it work:

The breadcrumbs are often used to boost search engine rankings. The search engine robots love these, and you should definitely consider having them if your theme fits one of these. This plug-in is for free and you can download it right here.

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