Monetize Your Site

I have been using WordPress for my blogging software for some time. In addition to blogs WordPress is used extensively for the bed for other websites. This is a trend that I have observed to be on the rise.

There are some advantages to using the WordPress software for a site or a blog. WordPress has some automation that helps get the word out. Whenever there is a post to a WP site there is an automatic ping sent to an RSS aggregator. This is a flashing light telling the world that there is new content available. The various search bots are attracted to the flashing light and the new content can get indexed very rapidly (no promises on this, but I have seen it happen within hours). The sooner your content is indexed the sooner it can show up in search results.

Basic to the WordPress experience is the theme. A theme is a skin for your WP site. There are many, many options available. I use one called the untheme-two-column that is an adaptation of the default theme designed to be easily edited. I use this because I want to make my blogs match my simple sites of which they are a part. There are many free themes available as well as paid themes. There are also people who specialize in modding and producing themes. They can give you a truly unique theme for your WP site.

There is also a built in comment system with the package. Comments can add content to your site and make it a more interesting place to visit. There is also a blog comment spam industry, so I would recommend that you either moderate all comments or turn commenting off in your control panel. There is a good spam filter plug-in that comes with the package. Be sure to activate the plug-in if you leave commenting turned on. I do recommend that you leave commenting on in most cases, but be aware that you will need to check what is going on with your comments on a regular schedule.

WordPress can be hosted on your hosting space as long as you have file upload access, php, and a MySQL database available. Most paid hosting plans will include these basic requirements. Many paid hosts offer a one click install for WP through their cPanel. There may even be some free hosts that offer the required features. If you don’t have a one-click install option and don’t want to do the installation yourself there are people that would do the installation for you for a nominal charge.

As well as themes there are many plug-ins available for WordPress. These can extend the utility of the software for your particular purpose. Plug-in installation is usually straight forward and easy. There will probably be a plug-in available to do whatever you want to do. Some of the latest and most useful will be listed in a section of your control panel  dashboard along with other announcements by the WP team.

Some of the advantages to using WordPress are:

• Easy installation
• Changeable look through the Skin System
• Extensive Plug-in library
• Quick Indexing by the search engines
• Built in comment system
• Built in RSS feeds for posts and comments
• Email notifications of comments

These things combine to make a WordPress site a good choice for the bed for your site or blog.

The new blogs at the audioart musicplayer and webpickups sites are live. (That reminds me that I need to update navigation on both and add links on the blogs.) I installed the KeyWordLuv and DoFollow plug-ins on both of these new blogs. They both incorporate the Deep Link Engine and iSnare content distribution system.

The About Music Blog under the AudioArt MusicPlayer domain is signed up with the category of entertainment. I am also inviting guest bloggers to submit material for this blog. An interesting experience transpired when I updated the post. DLE found a post on my main business blog among the links returned as related to the post. I received a ping and approved the trackback.

The WebPickUps Blog incorporated into the WebPickUps site is due to receive articles in the humor and sexuality categories. This will draw the right traffic for that site if the linking scheme works. Overall it is an interesting experiment. I have seen traffic increases on all of the blogs where I have incorporated the system, but the jury is still out on the value of the effort.

At any rate, stop by the new blogs and say hello! Leave a comment and say that I sent you.  Thanks!

I have been fussing with the Deep Link Engine for about a week. It is not everything that I hoped that it would be, but it does collect links and add them to your posts.

I have all but quite fussing with the interface except in the rare instance that the generated keyword list is too short. I had tried deleting various keywords. It now appears that the only control left over the plug-in is to add some keywords to the list produced by DLE.

This software was developed as an introduction to a product, auto content cash, that the team has just launched. While the plug does gather links there is no manual control as was mentioned on the download page. I suspect that the intention when developing the plug was to give the manual control as stated. The plug-in needed to be fully automatic for use with the various auto-blogging packages including their new offering. This means that the meaningful search is done after the publish button is clicked. What is really needed is a manual/automatic switch in the options. This could default to automatic, but give us the option to manually select the blogs to which we wish to link.

In using the plug-in I have seen some immediate results. Most of the immediate results that you will see are the better blog operators visiting your blog to see who the heck linked to their blog. This is low quality traffic, but it is a traffic boost. I have seen the trackback on a few blogs and they have all been nofollow. Anyone interested can still click on the link, so there will be some incremental traffic produced. With enough of these scattered around there could be a long term traffic boost. How targeted that traffic is remains to be seen, but could be improved with the ability to hand pick the links. It is too bad that is not currently possible.

I discontinued using the plug on this blog and any of my blogs where I am producing most of the content. If I could hand pick the links I would use the plug-in here. I do have it installed on several blogs where I am populating a good bit of the content with iSnare articles. I have found that they have a good automated content distribution system, and most of the articles are of reasonably good quality. The resolution of the articles sent is not as good as it could be because of the limited number of categories, but they do not auto-post, so you do have control of what you print. This is the best distribution system that I have found to date, but I have not searched long and hard. If they could set it up with some keyword filters it could be significantly improved. I intend to set up two more blogs using this system this evening.

Do you know of other content distribution systems? Please tell us in a comment.

I am beginning to see articles trickle in to other sites on which I have installed the scripts. It does appear that this will work as I had hoped. When I saw that I was actually getting some articles I signed up two more blogs. I will keep you updated on the progress and results.

I expect that I will see some curiosity seeker traffic as I do have the Deep Link Engine active on all of these sites. There will be a percentage of those sites that are pinged that will check on the site sending the ping. I did see one trackback resulting from a ping by the DLE. It was set as nofollow, but the search engines don’t always follow that rule. I will be watching traffic and SERP to see if this strategy has value. To some extent more traffic means more clicks, but it is really targeted traffic that is needed to make money.

The previous post updated without changing the links after the post. That is a good thing, because I can probably  go into the HTML view  and delete links after a post is loaded. I am going to try this post without touching the Deep Link Engine. The thought occurred to me that the plug was cycling after the publish button was clicked and that was the source of  the extraneous links. If you see links after this post I will have learned something else about the plug-in.

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Here is something that I have come up with as a work around for the problems that I have found with the Deep Link Engine plug-in. Before I make the blog post I have a good idea of the subject. I use the add keyword/tag function to put a few keywords into the first grid. I then hit refresh on the second grid and the software goes about searching for relevant blogs. After I have initiated the blog search I begin my post. I can be writing my post while the plug searches for blogs. This is still not an ideal situation as I don’t really have control over which blogs are linked, but I am searching only with my keywords of choice. This seems to improve the quality of the links nearly to the point of usability if your choice of keywords is good.

Look over the link titles of this and the previous post and tell me if you agree. Thanks!

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I went back to the download page for the Deep Link Engine  and checked things out again. It does state that you can select the blogs to use with your post. I have been unable to do that in practice. I have been able to add tags, but tags that I have deleted still appear to show up in the blog search.

I read through a couple of pages of comments on the page. There were a couple of users who had noted the same problem that I see. I wrote up my experiences in a comment to add to the list. I have not yet checked back to see if the developer has replied to the comment. He has replied to a couple of comments that I have seen, but these are primarily for installation problems.

I have installed the plug on several blogs and the installation has been no problem. The plug-in does search and find blog posts with relevant tags, although that does not always mean that the post is actually relevant. If I were able to actually select the posts to which I wished to link I would think this is a great plug. I have seen some traffic as a result of the few times that I have used the software and the effect could build with further use.

I have thought of a possible work-around and am trying it with this post. If it works I will let you in on my secret sauce. If not I will hope for an update to the plug-in that will make it perform in the way the site states that it should work.

Have you checked this plug-in out yet? What has your experience been?

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I have continued to work with the Deep Link Engine. I still have complaints and will need to contact the developer, I think.

I have now tried deleting non/less relevant blogs and selecting the relevant ones in the list before I hit the publish button. The plug-in is retaining the deleted options and posting links no matter what I do. I also noted on a post that I just completed that selecting the tags for the blog search does not produce the expected results. The blog search returned blogs using the unselected tags as readily as the selected one. I did not delete the tags that I did not want to search from that list, but the way that the UI is set up it would appear that you could just select the specific tags to use.

I like the idea of linking to other blogs. I have seen traffic to all the blogs on which I have activated the plug-in, although those are probably just blog owners checking to see who it is that linked to them. I do think that the idea has merit. It does take some extra time to publish a post, but if it builds traffic the time could be well spent.

If I can’t get the Deep Link Engine to work I will try to find an alternative. There was something that appeared to do the same thing listed on my dashboard page. Are you using a blog linking plug-in? Do you know of one that works better than what I have experienced with the Deep Link Engine? Please tell me about it in a comment. Thanks!

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I have now installed the Deep Link Engine on this and several other blogs. I have used it on new posts and have updated some existing posts to add links to other blogs. The engine does find a good number of blogs with somewhat relative content.

Perhaps it is just my learning curve, but I have run into one problem using the plug-in. There will be a list of blogs generated by the plug. There is a check-box by each listing and a remove button. The remove button does remove the entries from the list, but when I publish many of those blogs that I have removed still show up in the link list. I tried refreshing the list after I had removed the less relative entries but when I published the links were still included. Unless this is a problem with my understanding of the way this should work this is a serious shortcoming of the plug-in, in my opinion.

I would like to post the links that I feel have the most relative content to my blog post. If the titles returned don’t sound relevant I would prefer that they do not show up in the link list. I also feel that there would be greater acceptance of the ping-backs if my post sounded relevant to those blogs that receive the pings.

I will continue to work with the plug and see if I can discover a method that will function as I think that it should. I may contact the author of the plug and ask if this is possible.

Have you tried the Deep Link Engine? Did you want to choose the blogs to which you link? Were you able to accomplish this with the plug-in? Please leave a comment telling of your experience or thoughts about this plug-in.  Thanks!

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I have been made aware of a plug-in for WordPress Blogs that is being offered free for a limited time. This plug-in searches the web for relevant content on other blogs and adds links to your post. It sends a pingback to the other blog. Some of those blogs will provide a trackback to your post giving you a backlink to your site. For now I will just be installing the plug on this site. I already have KeyWordLuv and Do Follow plugs installed to encourage quality comments on my posts. I do moderate all posts but will approve nearly anything that adds value to the site and does not link to things that Google does not like.

I will keep an eye on the results and give you a review in this blog at some point in the future. Check back or subscribe to the RSS feed to keep up to date.

Do you think that this would be of value to you? The Site offering the free download for the Deep Link engine is http://autocontentcash.com/dle1/ Check it out and leave a comment with your thoughts.

I had mentioned the update to my sister site Before You Buy a Website in a previous post. I have taken the articles in the WebSite Basics section and produced my first PDF ebook. The PDF is available as a FREE download on the site. Opt-in to my mailing list is optional on this PDF. While I would appreciate a sign-up to my list it is not required. Just click the download link at the bottom of the page.

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