John Evans asked:


There are lots of web site software tools out there but one of the very best is free and provides lots of excellent features and benefits especially if you are building affiliate websites. It’s called Wordpress and you can download it for free at www.Wordpress.org. Now being free is in itself not a massive advantage if you are serious about developing a long term affiliate strategy and want to have websites that you feel sure can be supported. The last thing you need are websites that go down and cannot be resurrected. However, Wordpress solves the critical support issue by having a fabulous user and developer community.

Now, let’s talk about some of the key benefits offered by Wordpress. The software itself can best be described as content management software (CMS) and some of the key benefits for affiliate marketers are as follows:

1. Easy to install especially if you have web hosting using Fantastico. If not, fear not, it really is simple. All you need is a web hosting account and a suitable domain name.

2. Easy to use and it has a great WYSWYG (what you see what you get) interface that converts your text into html. Just write your articles and simply enter into the article box.

3. Automatic archiving functionality so you don’t need to use a sitemap. Your articles are stored automatically.

4. A wide variety of free themes so you can change and amend the look and feel of the web site to suit your affiliate promotions.

5. A wide range of plug-ins are available so you can further customize your Wordpress site. E.g. web stats, anti-spam tools, automatic related posts links etc.

6. Excellent backup and security features so you can ensure the stability of your web site.

7. RSS feeds are built in so you can update various news and blog sites when you add new content. This helps get your content indexed very, very quickly.

8. Ability to have other authors add content to your website remotely, as long as they can access the internet. This is a huge benefit.

9. You can create posts or pages of content, the choice is yours. No need to worry about formatting in html. All the work is done for you.

You can spend a great deal of money on website building software but like most things there is a learning curve and I have yet to see any that have the same breadth of features combined with a relatively simple learning curve. I use it for most of my affiliate websites and because I employ writers I can have them upload the content directly via their own login access details from the comfort of their own homes. It’s a fantastic free software tool and not just for bloggers.

Go check it out today and start adding to your growing affiliate income.

Prakash Singh asked:


The “Top Posts” area is increasing in popularity all the time on the most well-known and popular blogs and for good reason. If you don’t yet have such a feature running on your blog, I’m here to spend just a minute to tell you exactly why you need to implement this powerful strategy as quickly as possible.

The first factor to remember is just how many blogs there are these days. This means you need to stand out from the crowd and offer something new and interesting.

Secondly, most internet users are time-poor – in other words you need to grab their attention as soon as they arrive at your blog and show them enough interesting, relevant content that they stick around and have a read. Also, you hope, they will keep coming back for more.

Finally is the factor of “link bait” to consider. In the blogosphere, a particularly interesting or note worthy blog post will quickly attract links from other bloggers as well as the social bookmarking networks like Digg and Reddit.

So let’s look at these three factors in combination. You want to stand out from the crowd, you want to make it easy for first-time visitors to your blog to find your very best posts and you also want to maximize the chances of these posts receiving links from other websites.

In short, this means you need to be ruthless. You need to work hard on creating a small number of posts that are so good you could charge money for them. These are your link bait pieces, and the posts that really can make your name.

Because let’s be honest, on *any* blog there are posts that only fall into the “acceptable” category. Not everything you write is excellent.In fact quite the reverse is true in my experience. Most blogs consist of 90% average posts, with maybe 5% rubbish and 5% gems.

It’s those gems you want people to be able to find as quickly and easily as is humanly possible, and the way to do this, of course, is by providing a list of your best posts nice and clearly at the top for your blog.

Sometimes these are posts that you specify; other bloggers let their readers decide on what the top posts are but either way you’ve got to have this feature enabled on your blog.

So how to implement the Top Posts area?

Well you could of course just manually add them to your navigation bar. Just stick them near the top and manually hyperlink them to the individual posts.

If you’re using Wordpress, the most popular blogging software at present, you could add a new category to your links and call it “Top Posts” then add in your top 5-10 posts.

Or arguably the best, shiniest and most impressive solution is to use one of the top posts Wordpress plugins currently available free of charge.

Popularity Contest – this plug in allows your visitors to vote on your content showing which are the most popular on your site. You can then just add a few lines of code to whatever Wordpress theme you’re using and those posts voted as most popular by your visitors will be shown.

Top Posts By Category – very similar to the above plugin except this one looks at the category level.

Daily Top 10 Posts – tracks which posts on your blog have received the most readers in the last 24 hours and displays a list of these.

Adhesive – lets you tag your top posts so they will always appear at the top of your Wordpress blog.

These are of course just a tiny selection of the options available so feel free to take a look around, try a few on your blog and see which you like best. And I hope you enjoy the new visitors you’ll be generating as a result of implementing your Top Posts feature!

Kamal Kaushal asked:


If you are getting an internet business off the ground, or you have been in the game for a while, but don’t understand why you can’t get a good response from your clients or prospective clients, than you already know that communication is one of the most important currencies around when it comes to doing businesses online. When you are looking to communicate with the people involved in your business, you will soon learn that one of the most easy ways to do so is with a blog, and that WordPress is one of the easiest blogs to set up! Essentially, when you put up a weblog, you are putting up material that feels a great deal more intimate when it comes to your clients learning about the ins and outs of your business.

You are also allowing them a chance to respond to what you put up, and you’ll realize that the more personal that they find you, the more likely they are to think about you when you they need your services. Take advantage of what WordPress offers when it comes to helping you get a real rapport with your customers. You’ll find that WordPress is a great way to get started, especially if you don’t have a lot of web-knowhow. Even if you don’t have a webpage of your own, or your own domain and hosting, you can get a free WordPress blog what will host for you. You’ll find that you can simply go to your site and choose the option that allows you to start Your WordPress Blog. After that, you will create your username, which will be part of the address of your blog as well as part of your blog’s title. This should represent you, so choose wisely. You’ll need to give a valid e-mail address and to create a password, but then you’ll be able to create your blog.

Your blog at WordPress will have the URL of username.wordpress com and you’ll find that that you’ll be asked to choose things like theme, layout and various other small details. Remember that it is important that your blog be readable and easily navigated, so take a look at other similar WordPress blogs. You’ll find that they have the same tools to work with as you do, and look at them not for content, but for their layouts and how easy they are to use. If you are thinking about finding a great way to interact with your customers, you can even look for further ways to make your WordPress blogging account more accessible. Remember that content is always key, but that there are many ways to facilitate the use of your blog and to make it more useful for you. You can earn more by using Wordpress as your main platform. Install SEO Wordpress Blogs easily with this tutorial Wordpress video set so that you can start to blog Wordpress right away. Many professional bloggers are using Wordpress as their top choice of blogging platform now and so should you!

Gen Wright asked:


WordPress first appeared in 2003, is now on thousands of websites. This is a simple open-source blogging tool that in two ways, both hosted option or download free software option.

WordPress offers many additional features that might otherwise know as a WordPress plugin. This WordPress plugin allows you to create your blog to both the public and the gender of your site.

There are many WordPress plugin to choose from, if you are new to blogging is not possible to know what is best for you. Here is a list and explanation only to some of the most popular WordPress plugin available.

Top WordPress Plugin:

? All in one SEO – WordPress this thorn in optimizing for search engines, and automatic generation META tag. It gives you the opportunity to cancel the licenses and all the META description and keywords you want. Depending on the version of WordPress that you are using 2 / 3, you can simply install this plugin for WordPress and it works now.

? Akismet – this is a fantastic tool that helps in resolving the confusion of spam. Once installed, this WordPress plug-examine all of your comments against the Akismet web service to analyze whether or spam look like something real, which then allows you to check what has been found in the “comments” section of your blog in WordPress so that you can we decide whether you want to delete or not.

? Statistics WordPress – although there are many ways to acquire data and statistics about your site, most also offer many details, especially if you are new to blogging. The statistics WordPress system was specifically designed to get more information “needs a popular blogger.

? Twitter tools – this plugin integrates your Twitter account to your WordPress blog. Twitter is a micro-blogging and social networking service.

? Get Recent Comments – This plugin gives you full control over the appearance of excerpts of comments included in your sidebar. You can determine the order, the number of tracks and duration.

? DMSGuestbook – The guest book can be easily customized, which allows you to change not only color, but allows you to set mandatory fields, in which a user must provide a range of information. You can completely manage user entries and edit / remove the bodies before they are displayed.

? Video All in One Pack – This plugin for WordPress offers all necessary functions for video and rich media. It allows you to record / upload videos and import directly to your elected post.

Each of WordPress plugin has its unique advantages and can really help your blog to something easy to use. With so many to choose from plug-in value of spending some time searching through the offer and the selection of the plugin will benefit both you, your website and your readers.

New additions are constantly being added and developed to ensure that you control, so you do not miss something that could be beneficial.

Cynthia Mosher asked:


If you are just getting started creating an affiliate marketing business online one of the easiest was to do so is to get a blog at Wordpress.com. It’s free, it’s easy, and you can be up and running in minutes. However, an affiliate marketing blog on Wordpress.com can be shut down before you can say why. Why? because of the Wordpress definitions of a spam blog that are often overlooked. So, do you splog or blog? Are you a splogger or a blogger?

A blog that is operating with the primary purpose of driving traffic to affiliate programs fall into the Wordpress category of “splog.” Wordpress defines an affiliate marketing blog as one it will ban. Wordpress states:

Affiliate marketing blogs: Blogs with the primary purpose of driving traffic to affiliate programs. To be clear, examples like people writing original book or movie reviews and linking them to Amazon, or people linking to their own products on Etsy do NOT fall into this category. We’re only talking about blogs that are primarily designed to promote different affiliate programs.

If this is your blogging strategy, get thy self your own domain and hosting company and get Wordpress installed on it. By doing so you avoid the risk of having your website removed. Nick at Wordpress Support told me that the Wordpress.com Terms of Service do not apply to the self-hosted version of Wordpress that you download at Wordpress.org. That software is free for you to use as you please with no restrictions or requirements regarding splogging or blogging in any way. Good news for those of us on our own websites. Good information for you if you are just getting ready to build a blog and use it for affiliate marketing information and sales.

As for affiliate marketers already established on a Wordpress.com host blog site, certainly you have concerns about moving to a new website as that would entail changing all of your URLs and losing the pagerank and traffic avenues you have established with your links. I suggest you write to the folks at Wordpress and ask them what you can do to comply with their terms of service to avoid being banned as a splogger. Do it now. It will give you peace of mind and if you are at threat you can begin restructuring your site to comply with what Wordpress will require of you to be able to keep your blog.