The other day I was watching a home improvement show on cable. The remodeler was installing a new deck, with an awesome built-in grill. I could practically taste the burgers and barbeque already.

But then he said something like, “Backyard parties and dinners from the grill won't happen unless you begin building your deck with the right tools.”

The right tools… that's what my grandfather always said when I was growing up.

It didn't matter if I was making a soap box derby car, a napkin holder for a mother's day present, or helping him install a new roof on our house. If he caught me trying to slide by with a tool that wasn't right for the job he made me hustle and get the right one.

Usually these tools were very inexpensive, yet when I used them they saved me a ton of time because I could work so much faster. It's like that in affiliate marketing too.

It doesn't matter if you're following the blueprints given to you in a $2000 course and have all the head knowledge in the world about affiliate marketing. If you don't use the right tools it will take you much longer to achieve your goals.

So here are a few tools that will save you time as an affiliate marketer:

* Using WordPress to create your blog. You do have a blog, right? I hope so, because a blog is one of the best ways to develop a following and build trust, which leads to increased sales. WordPress is the quickest way to set up a blog and a WordPress blog will show up in the search engines more quickly.

* Google Alerts and Google News. One of the fastest way to find ideas for content for your blog is to go to Google News and type in search terms for your niche. For example, I just typed “golf drives” into Google News. A story popped up about Tiger Woods and how he has maintained focus despite extra distractions this year. If I had a blog in the golf niche this would be good material for a post about how to remain focused. You can also sign up to have Google Alerts send you an email with stories for certain phrases.

* WordPress plugins. From SEO to getting rid of spam comments, plugins are tools that will ensure that your blog operates at maximum efficiency.

Most of the above tools are free (some plugins have a small fee). All of them save you valuable time.

For one of the best “set it and forget it” tools for WordPress blogs, check out this plugin that will automatically insert Clickbank ads onto your blog:

WpAffiliate Affiliate Plugin

For some years now, Internet business gurus accept been admonition that changeless websites are a affair of the accomplished and anybody acquisitive to accumulation from chargeless seek engine cartage should body their websites application a WordPress blog.

I abhorrence to let the cat out of the bag, and if you wish to body any websites in my markets I achievement you avoid this article, but in my assessment this is not true. First of all, if Google loves blogs just because they’re blogs, you’d anticipate they’d accord aboriginal antecedence to Blogger blogs, because they own Blogger. But they don’t.

Granted, WordPress is a lot niftier than Blogger. It has an astronomic ambit of plugins and themes. No austere blogger should use annihilation except WordPress. But there’s no built-in acumen why a WordPress blog should automatically be adopted by Google for its seek rankings.
At this point, WordPress advocates point out that WordPress has plugins to optimize your blog for the seek engines. The a lot of acclaimed one allows you to acclimatize your column names, and adapt the appellation tag and put in the keyword and description meta tag.

Fine — but you do that with a changeless web page. In fact, planning your agenda anatomy and names pages and so on is a heck of a lot easier than customizing the All in One SEO plugin. Yes, there’s a Google sitemap plugin. But you can do that for your website automatically with online software. Personally, I anticipate that what Google loves is WordPress blogs that break on one affair or topic. If you adulation bodies and so every day you blog about bodies and advice about bodies and annihilation abroad but cats, again Google can analyse your blog and see that it’s about cats. You’ll rank able-bodied for cat keywords because you stick to that subject, not because you’re application WordPress.

However, if you address about your pet cat today, and tomorrow about a cine you watched and next anniversary about your adherent breaking up with you… again Google sees that your blog is not focused on annihilation and you won’t rank for annihilation admitting getting a WordPress blog.

Most websites aren’t so personal, but a lot of are not organized well, and that’s why they don’t do as able-bodied as they could. For example, my website on computer careers contains a lot of pages on assorted computer capacity and technologies, but I didn’t adapt the directories. I accumulated online writing on programming languages on top of operating systems on top of accouterments on top of database terms. When one agenda had about 100 pages, I started addition one. The one advantage WordPress has is the adeptness of visitors to collaborate with your website and leave comments. If that is important to your business model, again you charge a blog.

But if you just wish to put up a baby website on a deeply authentic accountable so you can accomplish money, changeless sites are easier and, I believe, just as effective. You’ll rank as able-bodied as your onpage enhancement and off page links.

Chances are, you’ve heard of “WordPress” and you’re likely using it for your blog or website.  If I’m right then you probably discovered many unique ways you can use WordPress – especially when you start adding various plugins.

If you’d like to discover some more WordPress “tricks”, take a look at the Wishlist software.

If you do anything with WordPress, it’s worthtaking a look.  Infact I just watched their great video on “membership models”.  You can watch the whole thing here  I was really impressed.  Honestly I have never seen software so versatile and ideal for you whether you are marketing online for a few extra pounds, a work from home person who likes make a second income, sole traders, entrepreneurs, to larger businesses. 

It outlines 10 of the most popular kinds of membership sites (and some of them don’t even have content inside!).  People are signing up for memberships sites and various programs daily.  How many have you signed up for?

I often wondered how the sites were created, it looked so complex.  Now I know the secret, honestly I am amazed at what this can do and the potential it has to be weaved into various areas of my own business.

Just thought you might like it.  Let me know what you thought of the video.

Enjoy! The Geordie Coach

P.S After watching this video you’re bound to have lots of “membership site” ideas – I know I did

Today i found new wordpress plugin “WP-Robot”, this wp-plugin Automatically post Youtube Videos, Amazon Products, eBay auctions, Clickbank ads and much more to your blog without lifting a finger.

WP Robot Demo:

If you want to try the plugin yourself feel free to download the demo version & Screen Shorts!

Related Posts

• Top WordPress Plugins to Promote Your Social Media Profiles
• 30+ WordPress Plugins | Download WordPress PlugIns
• Huddle Launch Microsoft Office Plug-In, iPhone App, And Web Conferencing Tools
• 40 Most Wanted WordPress Tricks and Hacks
• Make Your Blog Safe and Secure with WordPress Anti-Virus Plugin

Though the name may be a little “edgy” for some, SexyBookmarks has proven time and time again to be an extremely useful and successful tool in getting your readers to actually submit your articles to numerous social bookmarking sites.

screenshot

Our sole aim was to stray away from the “in the box” thinking behind most social bookmarking plugins, and add a little flair that would entice your readers, rather than deterring them with microscopic icons that get lost in pages heavy laden with content.

Recent Updates / Fixes

• Optimized/Reduced file sizes
• Plugin now uses sprite for all icons in dashboard
• Custom mods feature added to prevent mods from being lost during upgrade
• Got rid of feedity and replaced top contributors list with custom function
• Optimized dashboard jQuery functions to be less redundant
• Added wishlist to sidebar

Authors: eight7teen, normanyung

Please visit: wordpress.org – sexybookmarks for more info.

Contact Form 7 2.0.7 has been released. This update includes several security fixes, so upgrading quickly is highly recommended.

Contact Form 7 2.0.7

Support Tickets 1.0.1 is now available.

Changelog

• Bug fix: Additional fields don’t show up.
• Bug fix: Backslashes disappear.
• Call $captcha->cleanup() if callable. Shorten cleanup period to 1h.

Download | Support Forum

Really Simple CAPTCHA 1.1 is now available.

Changelog

• The required WordPress version changed to 2.8 and higher.
• cleanup() method added. This method cleans up dead files older than 60 minutes (default) in the tmp folder.

Download | Support Forum

The Akismet plugin comes by default with wordpress. This plugin protects your blog against the worst of comment spammers, and unfortunately this plugin is a necessity. Without it your blog will soon be bombarded with gibberish comments with links to suspicious websites.

To activate Akismet you’ll have to go to your plugin settings, and click on Akismet » Activate. Then you will be prompted to enter your WordPress API key. If you don’t have a WordPress API yet, then simply acquire one by signing up to wordpress.com

Howdy! Here’s a list of top recommended SEO plugins for WordPress.

SEO

Meta Robots WordPress plugin – Adds meta tags automatically to posts

Aizatto’s Related Posts – Adds related post information to posts and feeds

Cross-Linker – Set up commonly used words to link to posts or redirects (also useful for affiliate links)

Sitemap Generator – Automatically builds and HTML style sitemap

Google (XML) Sitemaps – Automatically build and ping multiple sitemap services with an XML file

HeadSpace 2 – A monster plugin that lets you rewrite titles, meta data, and host of other features watch the video on the page for the full list of features

SEO Title Tag – Don’t need all the power of Headspace try SEO title tag

SEO Slugs – keeps slugs from becoming too long

Utilities

Secure Form Mailer – makes building and integrating multiple and custom forms easy

FeedBurner FeedSmith – Makes integrating with feedburner easy

Feed Footer – Adds advertising, copyright or other custom messages into feeds

Flickr Photo Album – Integrate your flickr photo’s, albums, sets, and groups into your website

flickrRSS for WordPress – add photos from any flickr RSS feed into your website

Future Posts Calendar Plugin – A calendar that shows which days you have posts scheduled to publish, very helpful for multiple authors and scheduled posts.

Full Text Feed – Lets you use the “more” tag and still publish full feeds

GoCodes Redirection Plugin – Add tiny URL style functionality into your blog

Got Banners – Makes adding advertising banners quick and easy without having to monkey with the template

Highlight Author Comments – Makes giving authors comments a different style much easier

Objection Redirection! – Makes setting 301’s (especially lots of them) easy as pie

WordPress Organizer – Makes adding and managing uploads and images easier

Who Sees Ads – Makes ads or other elements conditionally displayed

Absolute Comments – Makes replying to comments and managing them much easier

Photo Dropper – Makes adding Creative Commons licensed photos from flickr quick and easy

Search Pages – Lets the search box search both posts and pages

Permalink Redirect – Keep urls with parameters from being indexed

WordPress Mobile Edition – Display a simple stripped down version of your site to mobile users

WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin – Save yourself thousands of hours of time upgrading wordpress

WordPress Database Backup – Automate backups of your blog

Social

Increase Sociability WordPress Plugin – Display custom messages for people who came from social sites like Digg and stumbleupon

Share This – add buttons for social networks under the share this icon

Subscribe to Comments – let people subscribe and be notified when new and follow up comments are made

What Would Seth Godin Do – Display a message to a new visitor on your blog

Twitter Tools – Integrate twitter functionality into your blog

Maintenance

Close Old Posts – Closes old posts keeps them from becoming spam targets and maintenance issues

Search and Replace – Lets you easily search and replace information in your database

Simple Tags – Manage and get tag suggestions for all posts

Reports and Analytics

Blog Metrics – Gives you comments and stats on monthly and author levels

Google Analytics and Feedburner Reports – get feedburner and google analytics in your wordpress admin section

Search Meter – Find out what people are searching for on your site

Essential WordPress Plugins 2006

These plugins go on 99% of the wordpress installs I do. I’ll only leave one off if there’s a very specific reason for it not to be there.

Akismet – This one actually comes with wordpress you only need to get a liscence to activate it. Unless you have need for spam in your blog this is one the most effective tools for stopping it. Very little actually gets through and very little gets flagged as a false positive.

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator – Let’s be honest once you’ve got a site over 50 pages maintaining a sitemap by hand is tedious and inefficient. This plugin has quite a few options and takes care of all the grunt work for you.

Organizer – This plugin allows you to create and upload files from the web browser without having to fire up your FTP program. It’s especially helpful on blogs with multiple users who aren’t tech savvy. The only downside is if they don’t know the “rules” things can get messy and disorgainzed very quickly.

Feedburner Replacement Plugin – Let’s you keep your feedburner feed on your domain.

Objection Redirection – This plugin by Dax is one of the most powerful and useful plugins I use. It let’s you redirect old and broken url’s to clean and fresh url’s without you having to touch an htaccess file.

Google Sitemaps The Google Sitemaps Webmaster Central program by Google is absolutely one of the most helpful things Google has ever put out. If you are fixing your own site or someone else’s there’s no better way to figure out what a search engine thinks about your site. This plugin updates and rebuilds the XML file everytime you make a new post and ping’s google to tell them about it. It’s especially helpful if you publish on a predetermined schedule. Warning make sure you have the file permissions set correctly or this won’t work properly.

WordPress Database Backup – If there is one wordpress plugin you absolutely need this is it. It gives you the ability to backup the core database tables and any other tables you specify. The backups happen on demand or on a nightly schedule. While it might be against TOS what I do is set up a dedicated gmail account for each wordpress blog. I then set this plugin to backup the tables every night and email the file to a gmail account. Viola a free daily incremental offsite backup.

Permalink Redirect – In the event some wise guy tries to mess up your blog this keeps things neat and tidy.

Highly Reccomended Plugins

These plugins go on most of my installs but not all of them

Search Pages – This plugin ties the built in search function in wordpress to the pages. The default installation only searches blog posts. This is an absolute neccesity if you are using wordpress as a CMS and not a blogging tool.

Search Meter – Looking at search logs to find out who’s searching for what can be a valuable tool for figuring out what’s right and what’s wrong on your site.

Static Homepage – If you want to use wordpres as a CMS instead of a blog this plugin makes the homepage magic happen.

Cool Stuff

Not necessary but sometimes pretty helpful

Adhesive – Allows you to stick a posting to the top overriding the standard chronological order of things.

Adsense Deluxe – A powerful way to control adsense from a master level on your blog.

Adsense Injection – Another Dax special that randomly inserts Adsense somewhere in each posting. Not advisable for the control freaks, definitely advisable for sites with lots of returning readers who don’t normally click on Adsense.

Bunny’s Technorati Tags – A simple and easy interface for tagging in each blog post.

Bread Crumb Trail Generator – A little tricky to configure but very useful once you do. Especially nice when used on a static website.

Feed Copyrighter – Let’s you add copyright info to your feed. Makes it easy to track and follow scrapers.

Moderate Trackbacks – Not used as much as it once was Akismet catches most of the spam, but I keep it around as a backup.

Postie – A very powerful tool if you do remote posting via email. Takes a little tinkering to get it set up right but once you do it’s hands off. Combine with cronless postie for regular automated checking.

Related Posts – Automagically creates a list of related posts.

Recent Posts and Recent Comments – Shockingly these two plugins give you a list of recent posts and recent comments, go figure.

Flickr Photosets – If you are doing anything with flickr this plugin kicks ass letting you tie it into your wordpress bog. Especially nice if you’ve upgraded to flickr pro and have multiple albums, see an example.

Top 10 Posts – gives you the top 10 posts by views, very hackable see my top 100 posts for an example.

WP Cron – Makes all sorts of wordpress housekeeping features happen automagically. Just be sure to activate the main plugin first before any of the others or things may not work properly.

WP – Admin Bar – Puts a really nice navigation bar up for users who are logged in.

WP Contact Form – A very simple no frills contact form.

Use with Extreme Caution

These are specialty plugins that you really should know what the heck you are doing before you touch them as they could seriously mess things up if you aren’t careful.

Bad Behavior – Does a really good job at keeping out robot scrappers. Also does an excellent job at blocking people who have their user agent set as bot. Also does an amazing job of blocking bots that you may want to let in. Not very configurable.

Custom Query String – Let’s you set the number of posts to appear in a category or monthly archive page. Can result in some really huge files.

Subdomains by Category – Very cool but also dangerous if you don’t know what the heck you are doing.

I stumbled across this by accident – the top 10 best must-have wordpress plugins. Take a look at it – it offers everything from a full SEO suite to a plugin that will allow you to create an email form to keep your email addy from getting spammed.