Website conversions to your most desired goal is not talked about as much as website traffic and yet – I think it is highly important although sometimes more difficult for WordPress based sites. In this post I want to present couple plugins that allow you to present custom content based on which page, category, post your visitor is viewing using couple widgets.

Formula to getting more leads, customers is fairly simple and hasn’t changed since the web invented:

• Properly designed and optimized site
• Quality content that provides answers or solutions to your targeted niche
• Quality traffic through whatever sources you choose to implement
• Conversion of resulting visitors into repeat visitors / leads / customers

That s it! I don’t believe there is any need to overly complicate the process but getting it right is extremely important for success of your site or blog. Now, lets assume you got the first 3 parts of the equation right and concentrate on the last one – WordPress website conversions of visitors into subscriber and / or customers using a very simple strategy – presenting RELEVANT offers while they are viewing your blog.

Ingenuity of WordPress community is quite incredible and always provides solutions to whatever problem you might have. While there are some “paid” options I will not be discussing them here. Today I want to share couple different plugins that are absolutely free and while differ in how they do it – essentially give you couple excellent choices to present custom content based on page your visitor is viewing!

Advanced Text Widget

Advanced text widgets provides you with quite extensive options to display content: text, html, shortcodes,  php and javascript and present it based on different content: posts, pages, categories and allows you to exclude specific content.

While officially it has support only to WordPress 2.8, we have it successfully running on latest version of WordPress 3.0.4 in multi-site configuration. Just be sure to activate widget on each individual blog and not network and for security reasons you might want to edit code and remove PHP execution.

While I didn’t show all the options, what you see above is an exclusion of specific settings I wanted.

Dynamic Widgets

This plugin takes a different approach and allows you to actually control which widgets displayed on what pages. Here is an official quote of some of its capabilities, read the official page for more:

Dynamic Widgets gives you full control on which pages your widgets will appear. It lets you dynamicly place the widgets on WordPress pages by setting conditional rules with just a few mouse clicks by role, dates, language (WPML), for the homepage, single posts, pages, authors, categories, archives, error page, search page and custom post types.

In a nutshell – it lets you create a custom set of widgets for different pages. While I haven’t tried to combine it with first plugin mentioned in this post – it can open quite a bit of possibilities, if you don’t mind dealing with added complexity of multiple widgets on different pages or even different variations of same widget shown on different pages.

Conclusion

Whatever option you decide to implement – placing a proper offer on designated page can be a HUGE boost in your WordPress based website conversions.

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Last Tuesday, after careful evaluation and weighing in Pros VS Cons I have decided to add Intense Debate WordPress plugin to my blog and in this post I want to outline what lead to this decision and why you might want to consider doing same.

There is at least couple negative impacts I have already noticed and before you make the decision to switch – you might want to read about my discoveries and reasons.

One main thing you need to understand when thinking about switch to Intense Debate is that it works by replacing your WordPress standard Comment System through javascript. But if a visitor OR spam bot comes to your blog with Javascript disabled – they will be presented with a standard WordPress Comment System provided by your blog.

This approach has its own pluses and minuses you have to be aware off…

First I Want To Mention Negative Factors You Might Want To Consider

1. Loss of some CommentLuv generated links. An unfortunate side effect of installing Intense Debate plugin I have discovered is that some of the newest blog posts with a lot of comments lost all backlinks to commenters latest blog posts, generated by CommentLuv. I actually had to go back couple of months to locate comments where those links remained intact.

   I apologize to those impacted but I think that benefits that Intense Debate provides will overwrite this negative impact.

2. Increased Comment Moderation overhead. Or at least this is what I’m experiencing. As I explained above this plugin provides its comment options to all visitors with Javascript enabled in browser,  as well as simpler way to moderate comments using its own interface within your blog.

   Because I don’t like to jump from site-to-site just to moderate comments and reply, I choose to use Intense Debate comment moderation interface within my blog. But those comments made by people with browsers that have javascript disabled or even spam bots that still require moderation are not accessible and in order to moderate them I have to modify intense Debate plugin options and switch to WordPress Standard Moderation:

3. I still have to keep Anti-Spam plugins active on my blog. Directly associated with my point #2 – I have to keep Akismet and WP-SpamFree plugins active on blog to deal with spam bots and reduce moderation as much as possible.

Intense Debate Plugin Benefits

This list could be quite large as this plugins comes with a list of features that will blow your mind! I highly recommend you review the features yourself as I will provide only those that I considered as largely beneficial to my blog and reasons why I implemented it.

1. Your Blog Comments Are retained on your blog! Unlike many other similar plugins – Intense Debate simply keeps a copy of all of your comments and serves it with Javascript on appropriate posts and provides all the enhancements. But visitors without Javascript or if later you choose to disable ID plugin – all your comments are back and you don’t loose anything!

   To me this was HUGE! I’m strong believer that comments are a content that belongs to the blog where they were created, as it is discussion directly tied to the post even though authored by other people.

2. Intense Debate is part of the Automattic Network of services. To me that simply means that same people that develop WordPress put their weight behind this service and see it as essential and I can be sure it will continue to be developed and updates provided in timely manner!

   I don’t need to worry if developer choose to continue support or just sell of the company once it gets popular as I have seen before! Stability combined with functionality is very important!

3. I was able to replace a LARGE list of plugins previously used on my blog! If you already taken a look at ID Features you know that you can enable multiple options and even additional plugins that come with it.

   Functionality previously provided by plugins installed on my blog replaced by Intense Debate. Idea here is simple – less code is loaded from my hosting account – faster my blog loads. Since ID is hosted by Automattic – they have a LOT more hosting power

   Not only that means code loaded if from elsewhere but because they use CDN – it is geographically dispersed and provides optimal performance without me doing anything! Check out the list of plugins I was able to disable on my blog by ID functionality:

   I could have also disabled TweetMeme plugin but decided to keep it in order to display at the top of the blog post.

And here is some functionality now provided by Intense Debate on my blog:

• Anti-Spam: plugin has its own integration with Akismet and offloads that functionality off your blog. But please read my notes above on hwy you should still keep your own plugin enabled. It also has an internal filtering list that helps with reducing comment spam.
• All Links DoFollow: I believe in rewarding commenters for adding to my blog by providing backlinks. ID does it for me and I was able to disable custom plugin LLV I previously used.
• CommentLuv integration: Same as above but providing DoFollow link to latest blog post! It also allowed me to remove plugin from my own blog while still rewarding my commenters!
• Facebook and Twitter integration: You can now comment not only using standard option but also your Facebook account and Twitter account and have you comment posted on those networks, not counting ID login option. Gives option for people to keep all their social activity available to followers – word of mouth marketing for my blog.
• TweetMeme, Facebook Like, Google Buzz integration: Extra functionality I don’t need to have plugins for anymore! Pretty cool!
• Subscribe to Comments and Reply Notification: another plugin I can remove because now its all done via ID. Allows me to keep conversations active but notifying people.
• Ability To Rate Comments and commenters: Build your social authority by getting ranked by other people. No longer you comment is just another one. It can now add to your overall reputation score. I do recommend you get yourself Intense Debate account in order to benefit from it, even if you have no intentions to use plugin!

There are a lot more benefits that so far overwrite any negatives I have encountered but you be the judge!

Use The Intense Debate below And Let Me Know What You Think!

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WordPress backup plugin should be part of each and every blog install to ensure successful disaster recovery. In fact I consider WordPress database backup as well as unique files to be absolutely crucial part and it is the last part of concept I have pioneered and explained in “Triple ‘P’ of Total WordPress Security”

But with multitude of options available – What WordPress backup plugin should you use? Which one will be the best option for you?

In this post I want to go over couple plugins I have personally use successfully and will show you How To Backup WordPress automatically and ensure you can recover your blog IF disaster strikes and your blog becomes a victim of a hack.

When it comes to plugins that provide you with backup functionality you have multitude of options but today I will concentrate on 2 very specific plugins, not only because of the simplicity they offer but also because i have tested them personally and KNOW they produce the results, at least in standard host configurations…

My goal here is NOT to overload you with options and choices but give you information you can use – right now!

WordPress Database Backup Plugin

A solid performing plugin I have used on my blogs for at least couple of years. It does one thing and does it exceptionally well – creates a full database backup and gives you options to either store it locally, get a direct download or email it to you.

Obviously our goal is automation so email backup makes most sense and I personally use a dedicated gmail account that allows me to store large amount of data for free and most importantly – gives me access to daily backup no matter where disaster might find me!

If I need to restore database to previously working good configuration all I have to do is login into my gmail account, download “last known good” backup and restore it using phpMyAdmin. I teach the entire process in both “Lock Your Blog“ (free digital access) and “Expert WordPress” (members core training).

I recommend you also use a scheduled backup option, just be advised – anytime you add new plugins that create their own database tables – you need to revisit configuration and be sure to include it into daily backup!

I highlighted option in image below, you can find them under Tools->Backup menu:

I love this plugin for peace of mind it provides but you have to be aware that it only does WordPress Database backup, just as it name states and you are still left with manual work backing up important files from your blog.

Second plugin I want to talk about is also free but gives you pretty much complete solution, if you configure it correctly…

BackWPup Plugin

I have tested this plugin on both single standalone blog as well as latest WordPress 3.0.1 Multi-Site configuration. Once you install the plugin, and it could be done as always by simply searching for term through your admin panel, you need to configure its options.

By default it does a very good job of determining your blog host important information, such as location of files, your administrative email, etc., but I recommend you do some tweaking in at least a few places under Tools->BackWPup menu:

Change, if necessary sender email and sender name – you want to be sure you can easily recognize it.

Once you have configured general settings – you need to actually create the backup job and schedule it:

Once you click “Add New” you will be provided with interface to configure all available options. I will cover configuring your blog to be backed up to Amazon S3, as it provides super cheap storage and it is accessible to you from ANY place in the world, as long as you have internet connection. To me it makes most sense and this is how I personally tested it.

I will show below configuration options I used on one of my MU blogs and explain them, so you could make decision on what fits your needs.

1. Your backup job name, something that identifies it uniquely
2. Database tables to exclude – an option available to you although it makes no sense to exclude anything as you are trying to create a backup you can use to restore your blog
3. Job Type – I personally use WordPress database backup and WordPress files backup as it gives me everything I need to restore my blog back to full working configuration if something happens.
4. Job Schedule – this is where you pick time of the day for job to run and also how often to run it. I prefer to do it right around midnight and daily.
5. File Backup options – you are provided with list of WordPress folders to include into backup and right below it – EXCLUDE options. It is important to understand that by placing a check mark into those fields will tell plugin NOT TO BACK it up. And as you can see for nightly backup I choose not to backup a lot of folders, but that s because I choose to run complete backup on less frequent schedule as separate job.
6. If you have any custom folders you are provided with option to include them into back and also option to exclude some specific files or folders. “error_log” generated by Apache is a great candidate for exclusion.
7. Backup file template name – something that will uniquely identify which blog this backup is coming from.

In next screenshot we will discuss your “backup to” options. I will concentrate on Amazon S3 but important note here – everything else you are not going to use – delete all default data, to avoid creating backups where you are not intended, such as “Backup to directory”

First you need to provide email address where the log will be sent to – I recommend you do not choose to send email only on errors – you need to be aware that your backup job is running properly and doing its job.

Next – delete ALL text except in what you need, in case above, Amazon S3 Backup Options.

Fill your Amazon S3 Access Information, choose a bucket to store your backup into (choices will be provided as soon as access info verified by plugin), and choose storage options.

My Recommendation for Backing WordPress Up To Amazon S3

1. Create 2 different buckets – one for nightly backups of ONLY the files you know could be changed and database. Exclude all the non-changing directories, such as wp-admin, includes, plugins, themes, etc. Use second bucket for Weekly or Monthly backups and store COMPLETE blog backup there
2. Create 2 different jobs – one for nightly as discussed above and one for full backup, using whatever schedule fits you.

Using strategy above you can have a full backup storing only 2-3 files to save on storage expenses and yet giving you opportunity to recover your blog quickly and nightly backup that will contain any changes, consider it incremental backup.

IMPORTANT: both plugins I mentioned above provide only backup files and while second one gives you option to restore database – I do it always by hand. Not because I don’t trust them – I just prefer it that way.

Related WordPress articles

• Backup Your WordPress Blog Before You Upgrade: A Lesson Learned (thebloggersbulletin.org)
• 35 Security Plugins to Make Your WordPress Bulletproof (1stwebdesigner.com)

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You have a well-established blog with more than a hundred articles. Your recent publications are always hyped. But what happens with them after a few months pass and they become part of your archives? Are your readers able to find them?

This issue has been critical for many sites that publish reviews or articles that don’t necessarily have a crucial time span. The two fundamental solutions are to either make your archives attractive (which in itself are a challenging task) or draw attention to the content in your archives that is related to the newest articles.  This is where the concepts of related posts becomes important. Thankfully there are several plugins for WordPress that can help you interlink articles in your blog (which as an added benefit is good search engine optimization as well).

Some of the well-known and reputable plugins for related posts are:  Darren’s Related Posts plugin (relies on the keywords you have used in the various articles), Sphere Related Content and Yet Another Related Posts plugin. The third one is more reputable than the others mainly because of the flexibility of algorithm customization it provides.

Yet, in this post, I would like to bring to your attention another alternative that I have been using successfully on my site for the past year – The Outbrain Widget, which combines the best features of the tree plugins listed above, while adding an additional layer of interactivity to your site by letting users rate your articles and see related content based on the rates they have been given.

Ever since installing The Outbrain Widget,   I have noted an increased interaction with the site by visitors who clicked on the image thumbnails (auto generated by the service) to discover more about the topic they are interested in. While The Outbrain Widget provides a text based recommendation as well (it recommends your articles related to the one which your visitor is reading or voting for), the thumbnail recommendations works great for blogs and sites which feature a lot of well selected graphics, as they serve as an additional teaser to the readers. Best of all, The Outbrain Widget rating and recommendations widget is completely free of charge and provides valuable statistical information about the articles your readers found most useful.

How do you showcase your archive articles? What plugging or services do you use?

Guest Post By: SkyKid is the administrator of www.theskykid.com . TheSkyKid.com is a blog that focuses on coming of age movies and young talent in music and the performing arts.

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Ladies and Gentleman, today you life and your blogging habits, as you know them will change forever! And not necessary to the best as I’m about to show you how to get MORE information about your blog, how your visitors interact with your content and where they are coming from than most bloggers need to know!

In Fact – Stats Tracking is One Of The Most Addictive And Time Wasting Activities You, As A Blogger Can Participate In!

I highly recommend you stop reading RIGHT NOW and don’t click that “Read More..” link to save your sanity and time!

OK, so I see you are determined to know! Well, this could be a GREAT thing as well as BAD thing for you. You have to exercise the discipline and limit time you dedicate to stat tracking to avoid waste of time and if you manage to do so – you are going to be a MUCH MORE INFORMED blogger.

5 Stats Tracking Plugins

…presented in this post will allow you to see more details about your blog traffic, its source and how your visitors interact with your content than you ever thought possible!

1. WordPress.com Stats

Along with Google Analytic’s this plugin might be that is needed for the majority of bloggers as it allows you to re-use same WordPress.com API you are already using for Akismet and presents you with most of the useful statistics you need:

• Top Pages and posts for different time frames with default being today
• Your referrers, to help you see who sends you traffic
• What key phrases lead from Search Engines to your blog posts
• What links were clicked in your blog content
• List of incoming links, mentions of your blog url on other blogs

Because it is a plugin maintained by WordPress core team, it is always timely updated and you can be sure it will continue to be compatible with all the latest upgrades.

2. Google Analytic’s Integration Plugins

Instead of picking and choosing any specific plugin, I simply give you URL to search results in WordPress.org plugin repository. You choose which one gives you the options you need as this breed of plugins integrates Google Analytics into your blog.

I do believe that you MUST have Google Analytics on your blog for stats tracking and comprehensive reporting but I choose NOT to use plugins but simply manually insert code into fotter.php right before the </body> closing tag. Just inspect the source code of this blog and you see what I mean.

I like to use as few plugins as possible and by doing this manually I save on page load by not having an extra plugin for the task that can be easily accomplished by hand. But if you are not into modifying theme files or like to switch themes often – these plugins will make sure that you blog will be tracked no matter what you do!

3. Visitor Maps and Who’s Online

In my testing this plugin added to the page load speed and I eventually disabled it but if you want to know EXACTLY who is visiting your blog, what OS, Browser they are using, where they are coming from and what is it they are reading – this plugin will be a God sent!

I promise you that you can get more information than you ever bargained for by using this one but do pay attention if it impacts you blog loading speed, as implementation of this one might actually cause people to click away instead of waiting for your content to load and all you will see is How Many People Left Your Blog without reading it!

4. Lijit Statistics

This plugin allows you to integrate your WordPress blog with free Lijit account. Great option to enhance your blog search as well as to get a LOT of information about your blog. It does help you get more traffic as your blog becomes part of their searched network and presented on other blogs

Anytime I can get free traffic – I’m game, especially when it is integrated with my favorite time wasting exercise – Traffic Stats Checking!

Couple of the most important statistics I look for from this one is Last Searches Performed on My Blog and Last Searches That Returned No Results!

It opens up an opportunity for me to create content my readers and visitors are looking for and one that doesn’t exist yet. Obviously that the younger your blog – more opportunities you will have as with age it seems sometimes that we cover pretty much most of the important ideas

5. Feed Stats

Yeah, when we are talking about stats – your RSS readers information is VERY important. Number of RSS readers on the blog is in fact one of the aspects many bloggers, including myself always put forth as it shows Stable Readership Base that can be used when selling advertisement space on your blog among the few other things

This plugin give you easy access to see:

• Subscribers
• Hits
• Reach (see the FAQ section for more information about this)
• Item click-through
• Item Views

Pretty nice but it does require that you burn your feed through FeedBurner as it uses its data to provide you with stats.

Conclusion

5 plugins I have just shared with you can make you a lot more informed blogger and help you determine what works and what doesn’t in your promotional efforts but I recommend you use these plugins in moderation!

Just because something is available to you – doesn’t mean all of it have to be used. If you attempt to utilize all plugins at same time – more than likely your blog load speed will be impacted!

Choose what stats are important to you – use appropriate plugin to get it! Enjoy and as always – comment on this post and share it using options provided!

Related WordPress Plugins Articles

• Analytics 101 – Traditional Service Overview (piosocialmediatraining.com)
• My 45 must have WordPress plugins. Any to add to the list? (trishussey.com)

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Love Blogging but need a vacation? Perhaps your blog hasn’t become the *HOTTEST* spot on the net with hundreds of bloggers begging to allow them submit content to it? Or perhaps you are just suffering from brain freeze and need a bit of time to re-evaluate your options all the while making sure you don’t lose your readers?

• What Do You Do?

• How Do You Find Quality Content For Your Blog?

Obviously you can use an option provided to you by WordPress to schedule a bunch of posts for the future publishing, you can get some PLR content and re-write it, you can hire someone to create content for you or…

You can install and take advantage of the options provided to your by

Guest Blogger WordPress Plugin

I love the idea so nicely implemented by this plugin. It simply allows you to search for quality content on one of the leading Article Directories (eZineArticles.com) using your designated keywords and then post them as Guest Blog Posts on your blog!

Some of the important highlights:

1. TOS Compliant – this plugin allows you to be fully compliant with main requirement that eZineArticles.com sets – no more than 25 articles from their directory can be used on your site or blog (single domain) and it also retains all the links and properties of the links, as set in original article! Plugin simply counts and once 25 articles posted – it stops and while it does give you option to reset the counter – I don’t recommend it! You get FULLY LEGAL content, so please stay true to the “light side of force”
2. Automated – process can be completely automated and every imported article can be set to be either in Draft or Published mode. I love automation!
3. Quality Content – while not unique in this case, it will be a generally high quality content as people who submit to that directory do their best to keep content quality high and articles engaging to readers.

It does create a new user with same privileges as you have set under General Settings under “New User Default Role” – normally “Subscriber”. Just be aware of it so you don’t get alarmed when you see 25 new users created on your blog If you are a mindful of security – you might want to try using a =Current User= or =admin= as article author. See image below, as plugin used on one of my Niche Blogs:

You can download Guest Blogger plugin and see more details here or simply install it from the Add New Plugin interface, just do a search for “Guest Blogger” term.

Enjoy Your Well Deserved Vacation!

…and please let me know what you think and share this post if you liked it!

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Guest post by a pro-blogger and WordPress plugin author Nicola Jankovic:

I’ve used a lot of different affiliate marketing methods and find one of them to be the most effective.

Article marketing is cool, except the article directory gets to keep all the ad revenue and they are getting more particular about what articles they accept.

Review sites are OK, but does anyone really trust the reviews they read on those sites anymore? Most people know by now that review sites are just disguised sales pitches and aren’t honest reviews.

Social media is fun, but it has its limits. It’s more about socializing, less about doing business. Sure, you can make connections there but at the end of the day the lion’s share of your profits likely isn’t coming from social media. Social media sites are not the most important place on the web.

So what is?

Your own blog. In my opinion, there’s nothing like having your own blog, especially if you use WordPress. WordPress makes blogging much easier and more effective.

Your blog is your castle. YOU get to decide which content to put on it and don’t have to wait a week for someone else to approve it. YOU get to keep your ad revenue. If you use Google Adsense, however, chances are it’s more like Google Adcents. And don’t get me started on Google slaps.

That’s why it’s more effective to promote affiliate products on your blog rather than rely on Adsense. Affiliate commissions have a much higher payout than ad clicks.

One option is to have a “blog sponsor” section in your sidebar. Place ads here (preferably with eye-catching graphics rather than just text) that link to select affiliate products and also your own products if you have any.

Another option is to occasionally write a blog post that promotes an affiliate product. The posts should contain solid content in addition to the sales pitch. Write the post as if you were talking to a friend so that it doesn’t come across as too sales-y.

Don’t forget to have an opt-in form on your blog so that you can collect the email addresses of your blog readers. You can occasionally promote affiliate products through email to your list. You should also send out emails that contain helpful, engaging content. You can use your blog posts as content but you should also use original content in your emails too. Mix it up.

There’s one type of text ad that I highly recommend and that’s WordPress Affiliate plugin that automatically inserts professional-looking ads for Clickbank products on your blog.

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Links building software will always be in demand for as long as number of incoming links will continue to determine the ranking of your site and individual pages. While your blog permits you to build incoming links a more natural way – who wouldn’t like a little bit of automation? Huh?

Today I want to share a link building plugin I have learned about by reading Jack Humphrey’s post on WordPress Plugins for SEO and Link Building. I was wondering for a quite a bit what he was using to present Related Websites on his blog posts and now I got to experiment with that plugin myself. While the jury is still out on its usefulness – it seem to have a good promise…

Related Websites Plugin is free to download and install but before you get your API key that will make your blog full participant within the service – your blog have to be manually approved. I can tell you right away that Kevin Gillett, developer who also maintains the service is pretty strict and if you blog doesn’t publish unique content – you can just ignore this post all together.

Niche blogs filled with PLR content will not pass the manual validation – so please don’t try to submit it!

This very fact was what made me to continue using plugin even after I’m seeing some strange results. Getting incoming links from quality blogs is very important and manual approval process seem to ensure it, or so I continue to hope.

What Does Related Websites Plugin Do?

Main promise behind the plugin is a targeted traffic to your blog and it accomplishes it via several means:

1. Related Websites dynamic link exchange. You can either insert a code where you want the related websites to be shown on your blog post or it will do it on its own. It really is up to you. You can’t control which sites will appear but you do have control over number of sites and if you want to show excerpt or not as well as few styling options. Although name states “Related Websites” in my experience through observation on my own blog – relevance is not very high. And only the fact that blogs are decent quality makes me feel more comfortable about it.
2. Related Posts option. As a bonus you can display your own related posts on your posts and in your feed. Quite nice option if you don’t already use some form of Related Posts plugin, as it allows you to create highly relevant internal links structure. I haven’t tested this option as I use Simple Tags plugin to accomplish same but based on what I see on Jack’s blog – it works very well.
3. Boost your authority through the above. Yep – number of incoming links from quality blogs “theoretically” should help you become more authoritative. I don’t know how well this plugin will do for this option as I have been using for a short time and have no results to show.
4. Get you traffic. This one does work although I think it will greatly depend on quality of your headline writing. My own results are sub-par to say the least.

I have started using plugin about 2 weeks ago and while I have seen a quick and large boost of number of incoming links – it just dropped all of a sudden. I plan to give it a bit more of time to see if it improves but as you see in image below – I currently link out to more blogs then I get back.

I do have to say that there is a Paid version of the service that supposedly creates a more favorable spread of links and traffic but I haven’t tested it so I can’t speak on the fact. While I will continue to test the plugin – you might want to check it out for yourself, while free option is still available.

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UPDATE 08/19/09: While you are still welcome to test the plugin for yourself – I have disabled it on my blog since number of links to me dropped to Zero. While I understand the underlying idea as stated by Kevin in comment below – personally I’m not satisfied with re-distribution of links plugin currently provides.

My personal recommendation – until author figures out how to create a consistent, even distribution of links don’t install it or shoot for paid version as Kevin promises it will provide you with positive traffic flow. Big idea behind this plugin is to help you rank better and if Google were to use current numbers provided by this plugin – I link out to whole bunch of blogs getting nothing in return, sorry – not going to work for me.

Worry FREE Niche Content Each and Every Month! For Less Than A Price Of Pizza, You Get Over 300 Brand-New, Top Shelf Blog Posts Each Month… Without Having To Write A Single Word … Get PLR Content Super Cheap here!

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5. CommentLuv Plus DoFollow Equal Unlimited Link Love

I have been using SezWho universal profile service on my WordPress blog for a while now and I love the options they provide. Well, as everything else develops – these guys just came out with KILLER enhancements. I know that with announcement of Automattic acquiring Intense Debate it might be a choice you need to make yourself later but I love the options SezWho provides!

Lets first figure out What Is It SezWho Provides that makes it valuable option to you, as a blogger?

What is SezWho

SezWho is a universal profile service for the social web that improves community engagement and enables content discovery to be added to blogs, forums, message boards and other social sites. SezWho works with most social media platforms without taking over the content on the site.

Yeah, I quoted their explanation of the service because it does the job quite nicely! But I’m about to discuss the brand new version of the SezWho plugin for WordPress that Not Only ENHANCED my blog but also helped me decrease Page Load Speed by about 10%!

If you need to read the full details I recommend you visit their site and take the product tour but here are the things I want to note:

• ALL comments remain local to your blog – UNLIKE ALL other services that grab your comment and store it on THEIR services.
• Threaded Comments with several templates to choose from. Allows you to choose the look and feel most fitting for your blog!
• Local CSS and Java loading – greatly decreases page load speed! Instead of pulling the the remote server. On my blog with aver 40 plugins loaded using this option and disabling Brian’s Threaded Comments brought my page load speed from average 1.2sec to 0.8sec. Might not seem like much but it is HUGE!
• New ratings options – Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down. I love it and looks like so do the people who already used the options since I installed the new version of plugin.
• Superb Support! While testing I have discovered a small bug that is present in IE only. I posted about it on their blog and minutes later I got response from the Jitendra himself. These guys are awesome!

I know this might be a tough choice for many but I can only recommend one thing – test it. Configuration and install of the plugin is extremely simple and intuitive. Try different option – I guarantee you will love it!

Worry FREE Niche Content Each and Every Month! For Less Than A Price Of Pizza, You Get Over 300 Brand-New, Top Shelf Blog Posts Each Month… Without Having To Write A Single Word … Get PLR Content Super Cheap here!

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KeywordLuv is very useful plugin for your WordPress blog and for the longest time I have been using it to share link love to the commenters on my blog. I appreciate each and every one who took advantage of the feature and contributed to the content on my blog!

And yes, valid comments I consider a valuable content and love rewarding people for it! Link love is one of the easiest ways to reward.

But in my process of streamlining the blog I had to re-think a few features and many of you perhaps have noted that some of the features are gone completely from my blog – if you didn’t notice, than no need to worry

While features are important I had to think about one thing: WordPress is a platform of CONSTANT CHANGES! One of the perhaps most frequently updates CMS systems that allows it to grow in popularity by providing latest features to the users and integrating what used to be third-party options.

I can only say Kudos to WordPress development team for that!

But it also places a burden on us – bloggers. If you become reliant on a specific feature on your blog provided by plugin – you better be sure that this plugin is well supported and will be compatible with upgrades. What is even more important – be sure those changes more or less comply with standard features and if you disable plugin – it will not break you blog or screw up the format.

And while I hate to single out anyone – great example of plugin that many were relying on – Popularity Contest and than support stopped at 2.3.*, probably because Alex got bored with it. I mean i wish I could make up better excuse but he has stated that he knew the problem and knew how to fix it (see his comments) to be compliant with latest version but we never seen that fix released. I know many work around solutions were provided by community, which proves its resilience but the core issue remains – support from developer stopped.

The issue is quite common in Open Source because code provided under GPL and is supported on Best Effort bases. Perhaps developer didn’t have time – I don’t know but what I do know: We as bloggers need to be smart about features integrated into our blogs and themes!

Sorry for the long story but I’m getting to the point.

KeywordLuv enables people provide Name is format “Name@Keywords Of Choice” and have the “Keywords Of Choice” part hyperlinked to the link of their choosing! Superb idea that shares link juice with all important chosen anchor text.

But here comes the problem, which is two fold:

1. As a blog become popular more and more spammers come in and start abusing this feature by providing comments that do not contribute to conversation
2. Current state of Spam Defending plugins is not 100% proof and no matter what combination I try with Akismet – I’m still left with too much moderation!

And not because plugins I use are innefective, quite the opposite! Automated Comment Spam is nearly non-existent on my blog but because Spammers Got more involved! Same issue noted by Mark Gnosh at Weblog Tools Collection is hitting me as well. I have just implemented Simple Spam Filter plugin which does a very good job in addition to Akismet in identifyign the spam and if identified – it presents re-Cuptcha option to the commenter!

And since I’m seeing ever increasing number of Comment Spam that passes ALL filters, re-Cuptcha and submitted using KeywordLuv options, in format “Spammer@Spam Keywords” that is linked to sites that sometiems go beyond offencive – I have made the decision:

KeywordLuv plugin had to go!

All previously submitted comments with links will still retain their juice passing features and provide you with benefits but:

No New Comments Will Be Approved if the commenter is Not Using Name but keywords!

I still provide the PR juice sharing using CommentLuv plugin and control DoFollow using options defined by Lucia Linky Love plugin. If this proves to be inconveniece to someone – I apologize but will not change my decision!

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Worry FREE Niche Content Each and Every Month! For Less Than A Price Of Pizza, You Get Over 300 Brand-New, Top Shelf Blog Posts Each Month… Without Having To Write A Single Word … Get PLR Content Super Cheap here!

Copyright WordPress Guides Blog. All rights reserved. If reading this content on site other then origination blog – it was stolen and publisher is in direct violation of copyrights. Please report violation

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