6 WordPress Plugins to Increase Earnings
Have no fear I haven’t forgotten about my $100 a day blogging project. I will update in the near future. For now though I’ve been working on another project which has allowed me to discover a few great new (to me) plugins that I believe can, at least indirectly boost blog earnings.
404 Notifier -having a site that tosses 404 Page Not Founds out all over the place is bad for search engine rankings. This plugin sends you an email everytime you site goes 404 so you can fix the problem.
[Note: while you're on Alex King's site, check out his donation system, it is very impressively set up to coax you into domaining a few bucks. I kicked in just so I could travel the entire length of a well designed business process.]
Add Meta Tags – Allows you to, mostly automatically, but you will need to setup category descriptions to take full advantage, have unique meta tags on all your category and post pages. This can help a lot in avoiding Google’s supplemental index and lead to higher ranking for more pages on your site.
Dean’s Permalinks Migration – This plugin allows you to change your permalinks structure. Due to a fairly severe bug in WordPress 2.2 I decided to change my permalinks structure away from using the category in my URLs. This plugin made the switch over a breeze.
What Would Seth Godin Do? – This plugin displays a custom message (commonly a nag to subscribe to a site’s feed with a brief welcome message) to new visitors to your site. Its intention is to convert new visitors into return readers.
Google Website Optimizer Plugin – This plugin works with Google’s Website Optimizer (which allows you to split or multivariable test your sales pages) and allow you to use the optimizer with WordPress. To be honest I’ve been dying to try it out. The most obvious thing I can think of is to test an article with cloaked vs. raw affiliate links to see which ones get the most clicks.
WordPress Text Ads – Don’t enjoy paying Text Link Ads 50% of all your ad sales? This plugin allows you to cut out the middle man and sell them directly off of your site. It costs $127, but there is a free version which is enough to get you started and pay for the full version.
All amazing plugins that can improve your SEO efforts and also make you more money. Any other plugins that you know of that we should take a look at? Leave a comment, I’m sure there are more.
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Comments ( 9 )
nick added these pithy words on Jun 27 07 at 8:40 pmunder my options for permalinks migration all I have is “Old permalinks structure:”
Where does it let you update it? I feel like I’m missing something…
Jon added these pithy words on Jun 27 07 at 8:50 pmnick, don’t forget the last resort (read the instructions)
From the source website:Usage
1. goto admin panel->options->PermalinksMigration.set the old permanlink structure of your site.
2. goto admin panel->options->Permalinks.change the new permalink structure to what you want. (personally I recommend /%category%/postname%/)
3. Done,enjoy it.
nick added these pithy words on Jun 27 07 at 9:07 pmI’ve read the instructions about ten times now haha.. here’s my screenshot
http://img151.imageshack.us/img151/4943/screenyi2.jpgI don’t see permalinksmigration.set anywhere…or permalinks.change.. ?
Jon added these pithy words on Jun 27 07 at 9:18 pmYour screen shot is showing this section:
admin panel->options->PermalinksMigration
so you have found the place to enter your old permalinks structure. If you are working on the site that your name is linking to, your old structure is:
/%year%/%postname%/
So just enter that into the place where you took the screenshot.
Now just go back to this section:
admin panel->options->Permalinks
and put in the new permalinks structure that you’d like to use.
nick added these pithy words on Jun 27 07 at 9:33 pmokay?? way too easy. feel free to delete these comments to save me the embarrassment lol
nice site btw
Alex Choo added these pithy words on Jul 18 07 at 12:54 amHi,
I’m the developer of WordPress Text Ads. Thanks for mentioning about it.
Another reason why WP Text Ads benefits advertisers is that yhey can buy ads blog-wide, home page or per-post.
With more options, they can pay less to target the relevant posts.
If you’d like to contact me, I am at alexchoowk at wptextads dot com.
Alex
Jon added these pithy words on Jul 18 07 at 9:30 amHi Alex, I’d be curious why you aren’t running an affiliate program for your WP Text Ads? I can’t see any reason not to, it would probably increase your sales dramatically, as then many many more people would promote it.
Alex Choo added these pithy words on Jul 28 07 at 8:07 amJon,
Thanks for the reminder.
http://www.wptextads.com/faq#q7
The link above describes the reason for and against an affiliate program. Basically, I’m a purist and people should use and love WP Text Ads before they start recommending it.
Jon added these pithy words on Jul 28 07 at 5:17 pmAlex,
I’m not sure I get it. If 75% of the affiliates who promote your product “love it” and 25% are just trying to make a buck and don’t really care…
1.) Why deprive yourself of all the extra income based on the actions of 25% who are not really worth anything to you?
2.) Why deprive the 75% of people who want to promote the product and do love it an opportunity just because a small percentage don’t “love it.”
Seems like bad business to me to be a purist. The world isn’t a pure place and your stance isn’t going to change that, it is only going to limit the potential of your product and your income.
You are in a very competitive market place, if someone wanted to develop a similar product and offer 50% commissions to affiliates, they could easily dominate you. Right now you are first in the market and you have had a lot of publicity, but I still see a huge achilles heal in the lack of marketing power.
Not trying to bust your balls, just a few thoughts that come to my mind.
If you’re not really into doing it for the money, then my comments are completely mute. If so carry on with the quest for purity…
Jon