WordPress blogs are even more flexible that you could create membership sites.

Yes, your existing information rich blog can be easily converted to membership based site. The end result, your resources are restricted to public, people has to join and pay so that they could get access to your blog content.

This is one of the interesting revenue model, where you release a portion of content as free and giving access to full content only for registered users.

I searched the plugin directory and found few of the wordpress plugins which helps you to create membership wordpress blogs instantly.

Free WP-Membership Plugin

An easy to use wordpress plugin which instantly restricts the access of your blog post and pages.

• You could set different access levels you each of your pages, posts.
• It has the option to restrict the access to categories and tags.
• You could create levels basically, groups where certain people will get access to your blog content and the public won’t get access.

It has the option to integrate payment gateways as well like Google Checkout, Paypal etc. (not sure it is active now)

• More information on WP-Membership.

Membership WordPress Plugin

Yet another membership plugin which is available as free version as well as pro version. It has the capability to turn your wordpress blog into a complete membership website.

• It has option to create membership levels and based on your configuration it provides access to your content, downloads, comments, Categories, Galleries etc.
• The free version has 2 levels of membership access where you could configure what to restrict to public users.
• It works with wordpress multi-site system too.

The pro-version of this membership plugin has:

• unlimited membership levels
• unlimited subscriber levels
• compatible with Buddypress system.

Have a look on Free version or Pro Version

WP-Members Plugins

Another great plugin which is the best FREE plugin to create membership sites. It enables registration to view full content and makes people to register on-page (that means, it doesn’t goes to the wp-admin registration form).

• This plugin allows you to configure each of the blog posts, pages to restrict access that to control at individual post/page level.
• You could quickly add a sidebar login widget (don’t need to show the ugly wp-admin registration form).
• You could individually approve each of the registered members or hold them from approval.
• You could close the registration process, if you want to stop members registering to your site.
• It restricts content however, shows excerpt of posts/pages for the purpose of SEO.
• It has CAPTCHA support to avoid spam members registration.

This is a perfect wordpress plugin for membership sites – more information on WP-members.

Few other membership wordpress plugins:

• Membermouse
• TWG members plugin
• SubZane Member Pages
• Maven Member

Hope these plugins are helpful to setup a member ship based wordpress site.

Please share below and help others – How do you setup membership sites ?

image:as

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As of today, Guest blogging is one of the best method to promote your business or blog online. There are lot of benefits for writing guest posts on great blogs which creates maximum exposure to your own blog as well as increases the authority of your blog in the market.

However, on the other side, as a blogger we should encourage guest blogging in our own blogs. People do expect a great blog to write a guest post and we should not be an exception here. There are lot of ways to encourage guest blogging in your own blog.

It actually creates a “source of content” for your blog and you could keep your blog up-to-date with lot of information. This increases the traffic as well as helps you in money making as a business…

Further, when more than one author writes for a blog – it creates more value to the readers because different people have different experiences and views.

Basically, encouraging guest bloggers in your own blog benefits you as well as the guest blogger – yes, mutually benefited.

In my recent article on 5 Reasons to allow guest post in your blog, i explained the methods to encourage guest blogging in your blog and one of the method is – showing the recent guest posts on the sidebar/footer bar.

• Showing the recent guest articles in your blog grabs the attention of readers as well as those who are looking to write guest articles.
• This way, you could gain more guest authors to your blog naturally without much efforts.
• Also, you could write guest post for my blog (check the Guest post guidelines here) to mutually benefit.

Okay, lets get into the code.

The following PHP code displays the recent guest posts, all you need to copy and paste it wherever required.

<h6>Recent Guest Posts</h6>
 <ul>
   <?php query_posts('author=-1&showposts=5'); ?>
   <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
      <li>
         <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" title="<?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
      </li>
   <?php endwhile;?>
</ul>

The API query_posts() takes the argument “author” and we are using it to exclude the admin (that is you the owner of blog). Now query_posts() gives the list of recent posts which are not written by you the admin – hence the output is list of blog posts written by guest authors.

In this code snippet, my author ID is ’1′ and I excluded myself using ‘-1′.

• Example: If your author ID is 10, you could exclude your blog posts using query_posts(‘author=-10&showposts=5′).

Similarly, if your blog has multiple admin authors, you could exclude multiple authors by separating the list with ‘comma’.

• Example: query_posts(‘author=-1,-10,-230,-22&showposts=5′);

This example excludes the authors 1, 10, 230, 22 and shows the blog posts written by other authors.

Also, you could vary the ‘showposts’ variable to control the number of blog posts to show – in this example i have requested the recent 5 guest posts.

Hope it is clearly explained, let me know if you have any doubts in using this code snippet.

Do this useful ? Do you think this method encourages guest authors in your blog ?

• Note: You could write guest post for this blog – please check the Guest post guidelines here.

image:jjpacres

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Amazon is one of the well known brand in this Internet world and they dominate almost the entire shopping industry. When it comes to buying online, people do prefer Amazon for various good reason. Interestingly, you will find almost all the products right from physical to digital products on Amazon.

There are many successful people who are making more money and living life out of Amazon. Yes, i am speaking about their Affiliate program, Amazon Associates.

Even i have made few sales with Amazon digital products (esp, through hubpages) and the conversion from Amazon is really amazing.

However, affiliate niche sites are profitable than anything because they are more focused on the topic and ranks well in search engines. You could purely targeted visitors who are looking to buy products or about to buy products.

Long back, i published an article on Amazon wordpress plugins to increase Amazon affiliate earnings. I recommended few of the best free wordpress plugins in that article. There are lot of free plugins available to easily promote Amazon products as an affiliate.

One of the major drawback of free plugins is that, they are not up-to-date.

Even one of my reader Thomas from everydayhowto.net said:

I’ve had very mixed experiences with Amazon plugins and I’m still looking for one that I can rely on, which is why I’m here. I guess the problem with some of the plugins is the Amazon API, when it changes a lot of plugins using it aren’t updated to reflect those changes.

Amazon affiliate plugins are more dependent on the Amazon web APIs which are used to query the product information like description, title, price etc. or even the Amazon affiliate link.

Since it is dependent on external APIs, any changes in Amazon API has to reflect in the wordpress plugin API calls.

Basically, the Amazon affiliate wordpress plugin needs be compatible with the latest updates on Amazon API. Most of the free plugins are not up-to-date and hence it may not work well with your wordpress blog.

There comes the Amazon affiliate premium wordpress plugins which are mostly up-to-date because they are business products. People do pay for these plugins and hence the developer is more responsible to make the plugin compatible to Amazon APIs.

Today, i gone through the marketplace and shared you the following premium wordpress plugins along with their affiliate links which i see good.

Easy Azon Premium WordPress Plugin.

This is a premium wordpress plugin which has the capability to quickly monetize your wordpress blog with Amazon affiliate links. They have a support team which promises to respond you in 24-48 hours.

Also, they are offering life time free updates for the plugin that means, this plugin will be compatible to work with Amazon any time in future.

Further, you will get unlimited site license, that means you could use this plugin on any number of wordpress blogs (most of the premium plugin restrict this and Easy Azon is an exception).

• More information on Easy Azon.

Product Style Amazon WordPress Plugin.

This is not only an Amazon affiliate plugin, it works with other affiliate networks like CJ, Clickbank etc. It has the capability to embed product descriptions and other information directly from Amazon store as well as you could localize the links to different geographical locations.

Further, you could make product comparison charts using this plugin which definitely helps increases your affiliate income.

This plugin has life time update available and also, it comes with single-site license and multi-site license versions.

• More information on Product Style Amazon.

Sterlings’ WP-Amazon Monetizer.

Yet another Amazon plugin suitable for those looking to automatically build Amazon product sites.

This plugin has the access to content spinner which grabs the Product information from Amazon store, re-spins and then adds them as blog posts. All you have to configure the plugin and the remaining works are done automatically by this plugin right from category creation to content publishing.

It also adds your affiliate links for the each product page automatically. It comes with multi-site license so that you could use this plugin on any number of your own wordpress blogs.

• More information on WP-Amazon Monetizer.

Convertazon Premium WordPress Plugin.

The next plugin is Convertazon which helps to quickly monetize your wordpress blog by adding pop-up based affiliate links as well as simple call-to-action widgets.

The widget runs an animation to load the product description which the author claims it attracts the visitors attention and then, it shows the affiliate link along with short description + product image.

It has the split test feature where you could play around to increase your conversion.

• More information on Convertazon Plugin.

Conclusion…

These are 4 plugins that i could see in the market doing good. Apart from these there are other plugins like Affiliatebang, Reviewazon which are suited to automatically build Amazon niche stores.

• My advice is, don’t prefer automatic store builder because it creates duplicate/re-spinned content which 101% won’t rank in search engines especially on Google.
• Instead pick, Easy Azon or Convertazon – create valuable content in your blog and monetize it well with these premium wordpress plugins.

Are you still using free plugins ? or which is the best premium Amazon plugin that you use ?

image:varantes

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It is important for a blog or an online business site to track the position in SERP (Search Engine Result Page) especially with Google. Almost every site gets majority of its visitors from Google. And SEO plays a major role in business growth over Internet.

When it comes to blogs, apart from other sources of traffic like social media tools and referral traffic – search engine traffic takes the major share (even this blog gets about 70-80% of its traffic from Search Engines).

Tracking the performance of your blog esp. on Google is a tough process, if you do manually. You have to search keywords and note down the position every day – its a head cracking task and you may get frustrated many times (say, you get a surge in position or if you want to track 100′s or 1000′s of keywords). However, when there are tools available to track the position – you could sit and watch your growth.

It is important to track your position on SERP at least once in a week (that i used to do).

For wordpress blog users, there are great number of plugins which helps to easily track your position in Google directly from Dashboard. Today, i did a bit of research in the wordess plugins directory and found the following 3 plugins which helps any wordpress blogger to track their position in Google for a given keyword.

Lets get into the list….

SEO Rank Reporter Plugin

SEO Rank Reporter is a wordpress plugin designed to track the performance of your blog on Google. Just give the keywords and it periodically checks the position in Google every 3 days.

• It also shows the position as a graph which clearly tells whether you are moving up or down for the given keywords.
• It calculates the number of hits you get for a particular keyword search and it helps to understand, how much traffic it affects for the current position in Google. Basically, you could measure the traffic fluctuations which are directly proportional to the current position in SERP.
• Apart from these features, you could configure this plugin to send email updates. For example, when there is a change in position either +10 or -10, this plugin updates you immediately by email.
• Further, it shows the list of all keywords that drives traffic along with that you could download these keywords data to a .csv file for any reference.

SEO Rank Reporter - Stats

Google Keyword Tracker Plugin

Google Keyword Tracker is another wordpress plugin which helps to track multiple keywords and to monitor, how visitors are coming to your pages from Google (basically, by searching what keywords). It also shows the position as a graph so that you could easily find whether you are moving up or down in SERP.

• This plugin has no limit that it handles unlimited number of keywords, you could add/delete keywords from the tracking list.
• Looks like, this plugin monitors through the 20 pages of SERP and finds your position for various keywords.
• Apart from these features, you could configure this plugin to check the ranking on various geographical servers like google.com or google.co.in or google.fr etc…

Google Keyword Tracker - Stats

WP Google Ranking Plugin

WP Google Ranking is a tiny plugin which checks the Google position every day for the given keyword. It helps to track down the fluctuations in SERP on various data servers of Google. For example, it tracks the position in following different geographical SERP’s like: google.com, google.co.uk, google.de, google.es, google.it, google.fr etc.

These are few of the wordpress plugins which helps to quickly track your position on Google SERP.

• Go for SEO Rank Reporter Plugin or Google Keyword Tracker Plugin – if you want to perform detailed analysis or
• Go for WP Google Ranking Plugin – if you want a simple one…

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Membership based wordpress blogs are meant for profits. It all depends on for what purpose you are empowering a membership site. Either to create a private circle of members around your wordpress blog or simply, to offer something valuable for registered users only. However, when you use it for business purpose, you could make a lot out of membership web sites – by integrating a payment system which helps in making money too.

Here is another wordpress plugin, released recently TheWebGears – Members wordpress plugin (TWG members).

• The purpose of this plugin is to maintain registered users around your wordpress blog. This is totally outside the regular wordpress users list.
• It allows you to maintain a separate list of users and their profiles never tied with regular wordpress users.
• The greatest advantage of this plugin, i could see is – ability to customize the registration fields.
• That means, not just user name and password – you could extent the registration form to collect much more details about the users through this plugin.

There are shortcodes created which helps you to quickly create registration forms or pages, login form, profile management page and to create customized login error messages. It allows to create a users profile page which you could make it public and make it visible to other visitors also.

• TWG members plugin page – Plugin Support Page (login not working).

This wordpress plugin is in the earlier stage of development and definitely, you could give a try especially if you are looking to get more details from the registered user which are not available in regular wordpress registration system.

I will take you through the list of membership management plugins in one of the upcoming article. Stay tuned !

image: adrian

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Last time, i discussed hardly about this Keyword Winner wordpress plugin in a blog post and revealed the exact purpose of it. The debate was whether this plugin will be worth for the money or not ? There are too many SEO plugins available in the market and Keyword winner is specially designed for “keyword research” in mind.

To quickly summarize the benefits of this plugin (for wordpress users):

• Easy integration into the wordpress dashboard
• Get suggestions, competition analysis, search trends on the blog post titles or keywords
• Identifying low competition keywords which are easy to rank
• Back link analysis & statistics which towards search engine ranking

Yesterday, i got an email from Daniel, the founder of Keyword winner saying that, the SEO plugin is available for a free trial & you have to pay just $7 to make use of it.

Click Here for $7 Trial

Further the email says:

he wants to get this in the hands of people who are really not sure on the full potential of this and rather then taking his word or other people’s word for it, he thinks its a good idea to put it to the test yourself.

My suggestion is: if you are seriously interested in SEO & search engine traffic then you could take a trial of this plugin. Otherwise, don’t bother….

This time, i found there are couple of videos from their official web site which shows, how to use keyword winner plugin ?

I thought of sharing those videos here which definitely, helps you to understand this plugin first before you take any trials….

How to use keyword winner for keyword research ?

A case study on, choosing keywords using keyword winner ? (with proof)

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WordPress is one of the best open source Content Management Service. Almost all the popular blogs are running on wordpress system. Its meant for the simplicity as well as the powerful features. WordPress plugins are the life safer which helps to make anything possible with your wordpress blog.

In fact, wordpress plugins are the big problem solvers and feature enhancers. Now for your idea to start a forum, you could use wordpress without any hassles. Forums are meant for automatic growth provided you are marketing good in the earlier stage to attract more members. Once grown, you could see tremendous growth in your forum site.

Okay, lets see what are those plugins to start a forum with wordpress….

Simple Press WordPress Forum Plugin.

Check the Simple Press site and FAQ page for more information.

Few videos which may help to understand Simple Press:

Installing WordPress Forum Plugin

Installing Simple:Press Forum

Creating Groups and Forums in Simple:Press Forum

Bbpress Forum Plugin.

Check bbpress website for more information and the documentation page.

Few videos which may help to understand bbpress:

bbPress Installation Tutorial

how to setup buddypress, bbpress forum

bbPress/Wordpress Intergration

Hope these plugins will help you to start your own forum website using wordpress. Have a look on these installation videos which helps step-by-step in setting up your new forum.

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Showing categories in wordpress blog “as usual” is boring. How it looks, when you show them as tree view with expand, shrink options ? Its looks pretty good especially for the visitors to browse through all the categories and sub-categories with a mouse click.

• When your blog has more number of categories or sub-categories, showing them as a tree view is best choice.

It allows the visitors to expand a particular category and view all the sub-categories. And also, it shrinks the tree back when the visitor clicks on another category. Basically, category navigation will become smoother and comfortable.

Lets see how to show your blog categories as a tree-view ?

We all know that WordPress blogs are best powered by “free to use” plugins. After trying out many such category listing plugins (for my another blog), i finally got the best plugin to show categories as a tree view.

That’s WP-dTree dynamic tree-widgets plugin, which helps to quickly add widgets to the sidebar as tree view. Using this plugin is simple, just drag-and-drop the widget to sidebar and configure the options to your style.

See the screen shot which shows how the categories are listed:

WP-dTree plugin has multiple features like you could list not only categories but also pages, archives, list of links as treeview. The following are the features of WP-dTree plugin:

• It has the option to enable/disable “open all”, “close all” links.
• Exclude, include particular category or sub-category from the list.
• To display only categories which has posts available.
• Option to show all categories irrespective of posts availability.
• Make parent category as link or just a text.
• Controlling the navigation option on clicking category links.
• And options to sort down the categories.

I tried out many other plugins and i felt WP-dTree has best options to make a configurable tree view category listing. Not only for categories, you could use this plugin for listing pages, archives as well list of favorite links.

Check the WP-dTree plugin FAQ page for more information.

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There are situations were you need to create bulk number of categories in your wordpress blog. If there is an automatic method or plugin available then i would be helpful right ? Recently, i was looking to create bulk number of categories in one my blog and i was totally helpless.

I tried many plugin’s and methods but could not easily make that to work. So I thought of sharing you all on, how to add bulk categories that too automatically into your wordpress blog ?

Its really painful, if you want to create say 50 new categories. For example, this kind of requirement may come when you are launching your own article directories using wordpress or simpler situations.

Cooking with WordPress

• I tried many useless plugins and after spending hours, Category Import is the best choice. This plugin is easy to use.

Once installed, all you have to do is follow the below steps to create categories:

• Go to Posts -> Category Import from your wordpress dashboard.
• There is only one text box where you have to add all your categories one per line.
• You could create sub-categories also using the “/” option. For example, “WordPress\SEO Tips” will create you a sub-category named “SEO Tips” under the parent category “WordPress”.
• Then click “Add categories”, you are done.

Manually adding bulk number of categories is a painful task and with Category Import wordpress plugin, you could do in minutes especially without Stress.

• To mention, i tried the Post Corrector plugin too but looks like the author has not updated it for the latest versions of wordpress. You could try that if you are using the older 2+ versions of wordpress, it may work.

More information about this plugin from Category Import FAQ.

You could share below in comments, how do you create bulk categories ? Do this plugin works ? and what are all the issues you are facing to get help from other minds….

image:kusanagistudio

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WordPress/blogger blogs are popular in nature because of many reasons. And its quite easy to keep it free from errors like HTML errors, CSS errors etc. If you are running a blog then you must work a bit to keep your blog clean. Keeping it free from errors may help your blog to appear properly across different web browsers and platforms.

• An error free site gives better reading experience for your users as well as optimized for search engines.

Its more important to have a compatible web site across clients especially for your business. Its a challenge with robustness of your business site towards the visitors. In fact, search engines may rank your pages well which have valid CSS and HTML coding done. Today, i was looking through the web regarding the CSS, HTML validators. There are plenty of tools available to validate your web page.

To mention, W3C has the QA Toolbox which helps you to validate your blog/site in minutes. Its free to use those tools and helps to analyze your site towards coding errors, compatibility issues etc.

• Markup Validator which helps to validate the HTML coding of your site. It finds the errors, warnings and gives your correction suggestions.
• Link Validator helps to find out broken links in your site. Search engines like Google are more concerned about web pages having broken links. A healthy webpage should not have broken links in it.
• CSS Validator helps to check the correctness and compatibility of CSS coding, this ensures that your site design appears good/perfect across different platforms.

Also, i found an interesting article written from WordPress codex which speaks in detail about validating a website. It has many useful information to understand.

At last, spend few minutes to run all these tools. Its worth for the time you spend towards improving your blog, to keep it free from errors. Hence making a readable, clean web pages optimized for user as well as for stupid search engines.

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