WPMarketer

Wordpress Founder Matt Mullenweg is a Stand Up Guy

Yesterday I had the pleasure of listening to what turned out to be an all day online meetup on talkshoe.com with host Jeff Chandler (aka Jeffro). The supposed interview with Matt Mullenweg was nearly canceled with [Ma.tt] being [@M.ia] for over an hour. Some imposter said he was Matt and having trouble logging onto the call. In reality Matt had the time zone wrong and was just late calling in.

Jeff and crew switched things up and decided to forge ahead once Matt was on the line. Brian Gardner, Dave Coveny, Andy Peatling and a who’s who of Wordpress junkies were on hand for the live interview, which Matt participated in an “open mic” format with the entire community. I have never seen something like it with a CEO of a highly respected company and open source initiative like Wordpress! I have to say that after having the chance to hear Matt’s views on GPL and his viewpoints, open communication style and complete transparency were refreshing.

Can you imagine Steve Ballmer doing a call like this? The topic was the recent removal of 201 themes from the wordpress.org themes directory but topics ranged widely after Matt opened questions to over 200 participants and before you knew it 2 hours were gone. Matt answered every question and was very clear and logical in the discussion.

Any Matt Mullenweg conspiracy theories I might have subscribed to previously are debunked completely. Matt is doing what he thinks is best for the Wordpress community in the long term and his views on closed, proprietary software licensing models versus the open model of GPL.

People who think Matt and Automattic are against others profiting from Wordpress should definitely listen to this interview; it should convince any rational person that these conspiracy theories about Matt are way off base.

Thanks Jeff and Matt for the great interview. If you haven’t listened to it yet, check it out at weblogtoolscollection.com

Wordpress Plugin Compatibility Can Be Hairy

Has anyone noticed lately the plethora of plugins for Wordpress? And with the recent release of Wordpress 2.7 the frequency of plugin updates has skyrocketed! Issues including namespace collisions, public and private classes, etc. can cause real problems with a plugin like WPMarketer, which is indexing and replacing keywords in the Wordpress Content Loop with code to produce your affiliate links … dynamically when you enable the Auto Link feature. Please understand the complexity of code this operation requires. This is not Hello Dolly.

We have spent more hours testing compatibility with other plugins than any almost any other aspect of shaking down WPMarketer since releasing version 1.0.0 just 10 days ago now. Thanks to comments and feedback from our users we have been able to debug several issues reported and continue to work on compatibility with as many other plugins as possible. Obviously we are focusing on the more popular plugins and can not possible test all of them; nobody in the Wordpress plugin development community probably can at this point unfortunately.

The other challenge we have faced is the question of PHP 4.x compatibility. After much testing and deliberation, we have decided not to make WPMarketer backward compatible with PHP 4. While we understand this means some people will simply choose not to use the plugin, we feel that the added Features and potential of using classes that only work in PHP 5 is more important.

Basically, since PHP 4 is basically at end of life, if your hosting provider can not upgrade your server to PHP 5 you should switch to another provider. You will soon find that not even Wordpress will run on PHP 4; rumor has it that 2.7 is the last version that will be PHP 4 compatible. Also, a growing number of plugin developers will also be arriving at the same decision not to support PHP 4 any longer.

Please keep your comments and feedback coming so we can make WPMarketer more useful. If you make money or want to make money in Performance Marketing we think it will become a must-have tool for anybody who wants to move beyond Adsense monetization into affiliate marketing and direct advertising revenue streams.

Affiliate Marketers Banned From Wordpress.com

We have read several reports recently about Wordpress.com suspending blogs that are used for affiliate marketing purposes. Please know that this does NOT affect the majority of Wordpress.org users; only those who host on Wordpress.com are being affected. For those not familiar, Wordpress.com offers free hosting to Bloggers, but there are some restrictions and limitations, one of which being they discourage the use of the service for sites that make substantial use of affiliate marketing offers and links.

While it seems unlikely that many serious affiliate marketers would be using Wordpress.com anyway, it’s worth noting that they discourage using it heavily for affiliate marketing offers. You can sign up for free hosting or very cheap hosting with so many providers these days that using wordpress.com is really only for Bloggers with little or no technical skills.

If you are running WPMarketer or want to use it soon you really want to register your own domain names and get an inexpensive hosting provider so that you can use the Wordpress CMS to do whatever you want with your blog, including monetization with Google Adsense, affiliate offers and direct advertising. You can sign up with services such as qoozz.com for shared server hosting starting at about $8 per month. You also have the advantage of building your own brand and domain authority over time by registering a domain name and setting your site up on a shared server instead of spending time and energy building your site on the wordpress.com domain name.

When shopping for a hosting service, be sure to look for one that offers the WHM and CPANEL tools and that runs PHP 5.x since many of the advanced plugins for Wordpress do not run on PHP 4 or lower. Also, it seems that Wordpress 2.7  may be the last major release that will run on PHP 4, which has not actively been developed since December 11th, 2007 and is end of life anyway.

Affililate marketers using Wordpress may want to prepare for future releases and advanced plugins such as WPMarketer now by checking their server for PHP version 5 or higher. If yours is still on PHP 4 or lower, request that they upgrade to PHP 5.x or consider switching providers!

Looking for WPMarketer Testers

Grunt Research Grant Research1 Since we released WPMarketer 1.0.0 on December 5th 2008, it has been downloaded over 100 times as a FREE plugin for Wordpress that is designed with the needs of Affiliate Marketing and Web site/blog monetization.

We want to thank everyone who has tried the tool. We have had reports of a couple errors we suspect relate to WP-Cache and/or other installed plugins. Over 100 development and testing hours went into the 1.0.0 release and rest assured we are working diligently to resolve bugs and plan to release an update very shortly.

We have also heard from many people who have successfully installed WPMarketer and like the Features we have included in this initial release. Now, we want to ask for your help improving this Marketing new tool set. All we ask is that you try downloading the FREE WPMarketer plugin, install it on your site and let us know what you think. Specifically, here is the information we’d love to have you share with our development team and growing user base:

• Did the plugin activate without errors?
• If not, what was the specific error message when you tried to activate?
• What version of Wordpress are you running?
• If possible, provide a list of other plugins you are running so we can test further.
• What version of PHP is your Web server running?

Thank you for replying to this post and taking time to comment and give us your feedback; we hope to show you just how useful WPMarketer will be in helping you monetize your Wordpress web site and are committed to improving it. We really want to hear your feedback; the good, the bad and the ugly.

Thanks,

Steve

Wordpress Affiliate Marketing Plugins Comparison

With he rapid evolution of tools aimed at helping Performance Marketers earn more money, you’ll want to be sure you invest in the right tools since switching won’t be simple once you’ve built a solid web site with dozens, hundreds or even thousands of affiliate links and ad placements to manage, track and earn money.

To help you decide which Wordpress Affiliate Marketing plugin is right for you we have put together a feature comparison:

Wordpress Affiliate Marketing Plugin Comparison

WPMarketer Link Examples

WPM Links can be any type of link or ad, whether it’s a plain old HTML link, an image or banner link or even a JavaScript code snippet such as many Affiliate Networks offer. Here are examples of the three basic link types you can use to set up your WPM Links:

HTML Text Links

Inserted manually, dofollow, no link masking: Grant Research1

Inserted with Auto Linking, nofollow link masking and open in new window enabled: Grunt Research

Image Links

Inserted manually, no link masking:

Inserted manually with link masking and open in new window enabled:

JavaScript Links

Adsense Example:

Amazon Product Widget Example:

CJ JavaScript Button: