The Automatic Blogging Plugin is a great piece of software which interfaces with the article directory “Article Base”. It’s a WordPress plugin which you upload & install in the usual way, once you have purchased it.

(Note: it is not available through the WordPress 2.7.+ “Add New Plugins” function, as this is premium (paid for) software.)

Pro’s:

• There is a long list of categories (over 300) from which to choose articles – for example, Antiques, Home Business, Education, Personal Finance, Internet Marketing, and many more.
• You can super-niche by adding in keywords e.g. within the category of Blogging, you could add the keyword “Traffic” – this means only articles about blogging and traffic will be posted to your blog.
  Warning : be careful of the combinations you use; if you become too prescriptive you might not find any matching articles, which means no posts!
• If you’re comfortable editing PHP files you could conceivably add more of your own categories. (Backup the plugin files before you do any editing!)
• You can set the post frequency to vary the time of day, so it looks less automated.
• TIP: If you go to the sales page and then exit, you get an offer to get $10 off the current price

Con’s:

• Article Base is a good article directory, but doesn’t have quite such rigorous editorial controls as EzineArticles, so I find I need to check the articles that are being posted in case small grammar changes need to be made. It’s a small price to pay though, for the convenience of the automatically generated content.
• As with all Article Directory’s TOS, you need to leave the author bio in place; you do however have the option to reduce the font size of this area so it’s a little less obvious to your blog readers.

Conclusion

Money well spent if it frees up your time to do other Marketing activities!

“Hmmm, interesting!”

The plugin “Pretty Link” has been rated 4/5 stars; you can read more about it, and download it, here.

To quote the plugin page, “Pretty Link tracks each hit on your URL and provides a full, detailed report of where the hit came from, the browser, os and host. Pretty Link is a killer plugin for people who want to mask their affiliate links, track clicks from emails, increase the reach of their website by spreading these links via Twitter, forums or comments on other blogs.”

I’ve created short URLs & have put them out on Twitter to see what happens – it’s very simple to install & administer, so worth a look. It’s too soon to check out the stats and so on, but I’ll update this post when I have some more info for you.

Hope this is useful!

Cheers

Tracey

I gave a talk at Daniel Wagner’s monthly Mastermind Even on April 16th. It went well!

As promised, I’m publishing the Resource List from my talk the other day. I do hope you enjoyed it if you were able to attend.

• Resource list: click here

Self-hosted WordPress has certainly been the front-runner of the blogging platforms, being used by such heavy-weights in Internet Marketing as Yaro Starak , Darren Rowse and the team at Copyblogger.

Apart from ease of setting up, legions of coders have created some beautiful WordPress themes, and fantastic plugins (or add-ons or accessories) to take the basic “vanilla flavour” WordPress and jazz it up beyond all recognition. So you may have the same base as many other businesses, but not many people would know it.

Some of these clever coders are now evening adding the ability (in some of the the premium themes) to have sales pages within WordPress – without the sidebars and navigation buttons. This takes the simplicity to a whole new level.

So don’t delay – speak to me about how we can help YOU realise you internet dream… of a simple affordable website that you can maintain yourself.