6 Wordpress Social Media Optimization Plugins

February 26, 2008

Yes, I know I’ve been away for an eternity…maybe even longer.  Many major technical screwups aside, my blog’s severe downtime can be attributed to a malicious function that created over 100,000 redundant entries into my wp_options table for the blog database. Well, now that I’m back up and running, I hope you haven’t forgotten who I am or what I write about.

That said, I bring to you 6 of the best new Social Media Optimization plugins for 2008, as I’ve compiled on my original post from Search Engine People. So here you go

Photodropper -Photo Dropper is a Wordpress plugin that lets you add Flickr photos to your posts.

Slideshare - This plugin allows you to easily add SlideShare presentations to your blog by just copy pasting the default WordPress embed code.

Enhanced Sociable - Joost de Valk rejuvinates this highly useful plugin by adding social media buttons for Sphinn, Mixx, Google Bookmarks, Live, and Twitter.

Wordpress Crawl Rate Tracker - Patrick Altoft releases a plugin for Wordpress that allows you to track crawl activity for MSN, Yahoo & Google from your dashboard.

RSS Footer - This very simple plugin let’s you add an extra line of content to articles in your feed, defaulting to “Post from: ” and then a link back to your blog, with your blog’s name as it’s anchor tex. It’s meant to prevent scrapers from unduly stealing your content.

Automatic Keyword Insertion - This plugin is pure gold for affiliate marketers (especially for niche sites!). The plugin works by taking the keyword that a visitor used to find your site in any major search engine and turns it into an affiliate link.

There’s a wealth of SMO possible through all of the plugins I’ve talked about above, and I’m sure there’s many more that I’ve missed. Do you know of any others? Add to this conversation by leaving a comment and letting me know about your favorite wordpress plugin

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Posted in Plugins 25 Comments »

Read Which Lord of the Rings Character You Are

February 19, 2008

If you’re a certified geek ( not a nerd ) , its quite likely that you’ve grown up with epic classics such as the Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien. After going on a 9 hour Lord of the Rings triology marathon, I was wondering what the how Frodo, Gandalf, Gimli and Sam would do SEO in the land of Google.

Sméagol the Spammer - Smigol the spammer type’s can often be found lurking on the Digital Point forums, offering spammy services to unwary customers in search of search optimization services.

Tortured and wrought wretched by the lure of the western union payments, Smigol is a withered, piteous creature. Driven mad and twisted by the close of his Paypal account ages ago, he is compelled to haunt SEO forums, unable to be anything beyond a ’snake oil salesman’
I’ve been gone for a while, but you can read the rest of the post at my work blog -

Which SEO Lord of The Rings Character Are You?

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How to Avoid Hesistant Webmaster Syndrome

February 1, 2008

Over at the Search Engine People blog, I just wrote a post on ‘SEO and the Hestitant Webmaster Syndrome‘. Playing safe in the world of SEO will only bring about mediocre results, and doing nothing is akin to being a sitting duck. Here’s an excerpt of the post I wrote, which I hope you’ll give a read:

Are you afraid to implement the SEO techniques you’ve spent hours learning because you fear you may lose your existing rankings? God forbid your SERPs get knocked to the next page, but you can prevent such an event by taking some simple SEO leaps of faith

Low Risk, Low Return

This adage holds particularly true for any financial investment, and your investment of time and money in SEO should be no different. Playing safe will only work for so long, and inevitably you’ll find the need to innovate on your SEO game plan. I’m not suggesting a major overhaul or drastic change that confuses those smarty spiders from Google, but rather a phased approach of changes that will lead to better results in the long term.

Read the full post on SEO and the Hestitant Webmaster Syndrome .

In other news, I just suffered some nasty downtime for this blog due to a folder permissions issue related to a recent apache upgrade my host did. Luckily, host monster’s support was pretty good at figuring out the problem and getting me back up and running!

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Backup Platinum Review

January 28, 2008

Recently, I made a switch from my old Compaq R4010 laptop to a spankin’ new HP DV3000. While my sleek new laptop is worth a pretty penny, the data I housed on my old Compaq is worth its weight in gold. So when the time came to backup and synchronize my priceless office documents, music, videos, and pictures, Backup Platinum came along at just the right time.

Backing up and restoring data is certainly not rocket science, but it can certainly be intimidating and tedious to backup and restore huge chunks of data. With software that manages the process, it’s much easier to manage the entire process of seamlessly transitioning between computers. Backup Platinum 3.0 was my ticket to a smooth transition between my computers, and today we’ll be looking at what makes this nifty utility tick.

Backup Platinum is priced at $67 for the full version, and you can test drive the software for free for a 30 day period. At $67 Backup Platinum is a bit pricy, but is much more versatile than the regular backup software built into Windows. The software is also relatively small at 2.4mb and makes for a quick download. The installation is equally smooth and effortless.

One of the neat things about Backup Platinum is that it employs a ‘wizard’ approach towards backing up data. This really takes any guess work out of the process, and creates a very user friendly interface.

You can set schedule for the backup process and this is a automated process. Backup Platinum offers compression features that save disk space and is also equipped with a secure 128k blowfish encryption algorithm to prevent data misuse from prying eyes.

A fair number of options are presented to backup to, including local drive, LAN, CD writing device or a remote FTP server and even you can removable media backup to DVD.

Backup Platinum also features disk spanning and can split up larger file chunks across multiple disks.

Summarized Features:

Main features of Backup Platinum

• Full CD-RW and DVD support with disc spanning
• Backup and synchronize with LAN and FTP
• Integrated ZIP compression
• 128-bit encryption with Blowfish
• Flexible and powerful scheduler

Conclusion - Backup Platinum is worth the money in my opinion, as your data is priceless at the end of the day. I’d much rather pay $67 and know my data is secure, than stand to lose my memorable pictures, videos and valuable office data to a hard drive crash or power failure. Try out Backup Platinum and do let me know how it works for you.

*Disclaimer: This post is an honest representation of editorial review. It is a sp0nsored review*

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How I Plan and Execute on My Internet Marketing Goals

January 18, 2008

Part of being a professional search engine marketer involves dealing with very large scale projects for optimization and promotion. Success in such endeavours certainly doesn’t come without a great deal of planning and strategizing, and I’ve written a complete guide to Internet Marketing Goals and Planning 101 on the Search Engine People blog.

I strongly suggest you go give it a read (and vote for the story) if you feel its resourceful to you. Here’s an excerpt:

As a follow-up to my previous post about the Just Do It Philosophy in Search Marketing, I will devote today’s article on how I go about planning and executing on my SEO goals. By following a theory of GOPST, or Goals, Objectives, Plans, Strategies, and Tactics, I am able to have a clear path in my mind towards achieving my short term and long term goals. Let’s begin my an overall look at this methodology

Goals

Goals are the proverbial ‘end of the road’ situations that most people try to reach. In my view, goals are transient in nature, and only serve as significant milestones in planning and executing on even more expansive goals. But for the sake of simplicity, let’s define our goal as something fairly simple. Let’s say our goal was to be ‘the most popular online retailer for video game systems’ (something near and dear to every geek at heart )…

Read the full post on Internet Marketing Goals and Planning 101, and subscribe to my feed for more internet marketing tips.

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PepperJam Network is The Future Of Affiliate Marketing

January 17, 2008

Affiliate marketing wouldn’t work as a business model without proper affiliate networks in place to act as a medium between merchants and affiliates. Of course, with any middleman involved, things fall between the cracks and what results is a mediocre usability experience. Not so with Pepperjam Network though, which launched in full fervour yesterday.

Pepperjam promises to the ‘next generation in affiliate marketing’ and certainly brings its own unique flavour in terms of features and advertisers. Pepperjam, a two-time Inc. Magazine fastest growing company and industry leading full-service internet marketing agency, today announced the launch of Pepperjam Network, a proprietary next generation affiliate marketing network.

Features

Pepperjam does a great job at integrating web 2.0 features into what has always been a low-engagement experience for affiliates. By connecting
affiliates and advertisers with an easy-to-use, cutting-edge interface designed to facilitate and optimize the affiliate marketing process, Pepperjam has really excelled in achieving a competitive advantage over networks such as Commission Junction. Pepperjam is also well equipped for Pay Per Click affiliate marketers and offers SID tracking for campaigns down to the keyword level.

One of the major innovations of the network allows affiliates and advertisers to chat with each other regarding mutually beneficial promotional tactics in the Pepperjam chat room.

Aside from regular affiliate marketing modules such as text links, images, and dynamic content, Pepperjam also offers a nifty contextually relevant widget that displays appropriate ads from Pepperjam advertisers.

Is it Worth My Time?

Trust plays a huge part in building a relationship with a new business. Pepperjam is not only a trusted name in the internet marketing industry but a huge innovator in optimizing marketing practices. According to their company bio :

Pepperjam is an industry leading full-service internet marketing agency offering marketing services and advanced technology in the areas of pay-per-click, search-engine optimization, affiliate marketing, and online media planning and buying. The company was founded in 1999 by internet marketing expert, conference speaker, and published author Kristopher B. Jones. Pepperjam has received numerous awards and achievements, including recognition by Inc. Magazine for two consecutive years as one of the fastest growing privately-held businesses in the United States.

Pepperjam Advertiser Signup Window
My Top 3 Reasons For Using PepperJam are:

1. Save Time - With other networks I had to waste time trying to find the right partners, and then wait for various approvals and sign agreements. With Pepperjam its easy!
2. More Transparency - I didn’t feel a connection with advertisers on Commission Junction and other such networks. I feel motivated as an affiliate when an advertiser or merchant is willing to work with me to create a win-win situation.
3. Pepperjam Knowledge Vault - Pepperjam Network contains a knowledge vault, which is exclusive to Pepperjam affiliates. The vault contains exclusive access to a list of tools and educational resources used by Super Affiliates.

Pepperjam network offers a ton of features you are already used to and a whole lot more that you’re yet to find out. With huge buzz about its launch, I highly suggest you sign up as a publisher today

http://www.pepperjamnetwork.com/

*Disclosure: The review posted above is a sponsored post. All views are purely objective and honest*

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Posted in Affiliate Marketing 2 Comments »

TNX Review

January 15, 2008

With paid links being hit hard by Google in the past few months, link trading is at an all time low due to fears of Google penalizing websites participating in buying and selling paid links. Amidst the chaos, one company seems to have come up with a way of flying under the G-radar by offering its users a secure and confidential way for buying and selling links.

TNX.Net has caused quite the stir in the paid links industry by intriguing webmasters on the Digital Point forums by offering free money for trading links. As a service, any website owner with a minimum number of Page Rank (PR) 0 + can register as a publisher. Once registering you include the TNX code (which is changed from time to time to ensure confidentiality) into your site’s template and let the system crawl your pages and then you are ready to sell text links on your site.

The main advantage of the system for webmasters is that they are able to sell links on every page of their websites, instead of just the main page. This is potentially more profitable for webmasters, especially if the websites they own contain hundreds and hundreds of indexed pages. Webmaster can even choose their advertisers themselves, placing only links that are relevant to every page of their sites. Instead of operating in purely monetary units, TNX chooses to go with a points system to allow publishers and advertisers to trade links.

One can utilize these points to solely buy high Page Rank links or choose to diversify their investment buy buying many PR0 and PR1 links and a few quality PR 4+ links. TNX offers targeting by website’s subject (or category), there is also a targeting using the site’s region and Google PR of each page. TNX makes it possible to combine different types of targeting and compare the efficiency with different setups.

If you are an advertiser, you can buy 20,000 points with 20$ (1,000points = 1$)
With these 20,000 points you can buy static links for a month on (subject to availability)

- 20 000 different PR0 pages from different websites (1point/link)
- 400 different PR1 pages from different websites (50points/link)
- 200 different PR2 pages from different websites (100 points/link)
- 100 different PR3 pages from different websites (200points/link)
- 40 different PR4 pages from different websites (500points/link)
- 20 different PR5 pages from different websites (1,000points/link)

TNX has also been very keen to emulate completely natural growth of links, and offers a link anchor generator to prevent any search engine filters picking up unusual website activity. You can read more about the tool and its application at this Digital Point thread. As you can see, the system has grown fairly fast, and from what I hear in the webmaster community it is a feasible work around to the paid link penalties imposed by Google.

I’d certainly advice trying out TNX.net through the Digital Point offer for free links. TNX only charges 12.5% in link trading commissions and is quite affordable compared to other services that charge 50% or more. You can also participate in their affiliate program and earn some moolah by simply promoting the service to other webmasters you may know.

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