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:

Building Better Affiliate Marketing Landing Pages

Shoemoney, always a favorite MMO Guru of mine, did a post in March, 2007 titled “When To Make A Landing Page – Affiliate FAQ“. It is still a good read today. One thing he said that strikes me is that the top Performance Marketing earners have unique landing pages, often functional. In his example he shows a ringtones affiliate marketing page that lets the user choose a carrier, input his cell number and choose a registration option.

In fact, these days the top earning marketers are getting far more creative in building dynamic and functional landing pages. Using Wordpress to make your landing pages has the benefit of letting you leverage a large and ever-expanding library of premium plugins and themes. You can use something like CFORMSII for instance, to easily set up forms that will collect user data.

Performance Marketing Simplified with Wordpress Premium Plugins

The WPMarketer FREE plugin for Wordpress is another great example of how using Wordpress to build your landing pages and sites can save you time and help increase your earnings. With WPMarketer you no longer have to create separate pages to mask affiliate links, track your PPC converions and redirect users to the correct affiliate links. All this is done with simple link configuration tools within the Wordpress admin panel.

With Wordpress 2.7 coming soon, this open source CMS is quickly becoming a phenomenon that extends well beyond the “blogging” world. It is simply a tool that can be used to create nearly any Web site quickly. And if you don’t have Web design skills, you have literally tens of thousands of free themes from which to choose.

Or, for a few bucks you can buy something like One-Theme, which lets you set up any site with a totally unique look and feel in about 10 minutes. You can completely customize the colors, layout and whaat content appears on the site. Version 2.0 is due out before the end of 2008 and promises even more dynamic theme configuration options. Starting at only $97, One-Theme, billed as not just a theme but a “Wordpress Enhancement” is definitely worth checking out.

Review Sites Create User Generated Content

Another trend in Performance Marketing these days is to create entire sites for specific niches. Review sites have become easier than ever to create thanks to the WP Site Review plugin by Dan Grossman. This plugin enables you to leverage user generated content with no programming and a super simple setup process.

So, whatever your niche, Wordpress will help you build better landing pages and complete affiliate marketing blogs and Web sites more easily, more quickly and with more functionality than you can ever achieve using disparate PHP scripts and paying your landing page designer to set up each new site.

Speed is the way to higher earnings, while testing and tracking are the real keys to success. Try using Wordpress and investing in a few of these premium tools and take your Performance Marketing results to the next level.

Why You Should Build Landing Pages in Wordpress

Most affiliate marketers are still building their landing pages as static web pages but these days a one page affiliate offer probably isn’t enough to close the sale so a full blown CMS becomes the way to get to the next level of Performance Marketing, where quality content, CPC, CPA, CPM, In Text and all types of online advertising can be implemented without having to resort to hand coding pages.

The reasons you should use Wordpress to build your landing pages are simple:

1. Speed; why spend time hand coding your LPs when you can manage everything using a powerful database-driven CMS?
2. Easier to do split testing; want to try several versions of your offer? Using Wordpress its quick and easy to set up multiple landing pages to test your creative and offer messaging.
3. Link Masking; using the WPMarketer plugin you can control all aspects of your affiliate links, which means users, bots and competitors see your affiliate links as “pretty” internal links and the only way they can tell where a link leads is by clicking on it!
4. Tracking; with WPMarketer you can easily insert your Google Analytics conversion tracking code for every affiliate link you create … without any coding required!

Building your landing pages in Wordpress is simple. GarryConn.com did a great tutorial on how to build simple affiliate marketing landing pages. But if you really want to leverage the full power of Wordpress you can build a complete Performance Marketing site that can take your landing pages to a whole new level by giving users a reason to bookmark your site and return.

These days the one hit affiliate landing page is losing it’s luster quickly; users can spot a spammy landing page from a mile away and more and more often they simply hit the back button and you’ve spent 10 cents or even a dollar on your Pay-per-click budget for nought! The key to successful performance marketing these days is to offer users a real site with depth and content, a contact form, about us page, privacy policy page and more.

The complexity of building such a site is just too time consuming and unmanageable using static web pages, which is why you want to use a solid CMS like Wordpress if you’re serious about attracting visitors and converting your offers! And, with the WPMarketer plugin, managing and tracking affiliate links is no longer a time suck; now you can set up and track all your offers directly from within the Wordpress dashboard.

What is WPMarketer?

Performance Marketing with WordPress

WPMarketer is a powerful suite of tools that extend the WordPress platform, enabling you to manage and track all of your online marketing and advertising efforts directly from your WordPress admin panel.

Manage all of your affiliate links and conversions without having to use multiple tools to set up ads in posts and landing pages, manage your inventory and track results. Now you can manage your online marketing with greater control and ease of use than ever before.

What are the Benefits?  [ View all Features ]

• WPMarketer is absolutely free to download and install on your Wordpress site
• Install and configure WPMarketer on your WordPress site in less than 5 minutes
• Select keywords on your posts and pages and let WPMarketer automatically convert them into in text ads and affiliate marketing links or insert text ads yourself wherever you choose
• Give your affiliate links ‘pretty’ internal URLs and let WPMarketer automatically convert them into external links and track the clicks without exposing either the external URLs or tracking code to users or bots
• Control all text link options, including where and how many times links should appear on your site, whether links should be ‘dofollow’ or ‘nofollow’, whether external links should be displayed or masked and whether links should open in the same or a new browser window
• WPMarketer saves you time and improves the results of your in text and performance marketing effort