Angela Natcus

I have been a user of SubmitEaze for over a year now and until Version 10 was released I was very happy indeed with the ease of use and the great results I was getting. As soon as version 10 was released I had problems submitting my articles. I decided that I needed to find new software to submit my articles. The hunt was on.

I then read a very interesting forum post over on Digital Point suggesting that I try a product called Article Marketing Robot. The first thing that I liked about Article Marketing Robot was the fact that you can use a fully functioning version of the software for 5 full days without having to pay. Free trails of software are great, it allows you to fully test the software to see if it meets your needs. If it does then you can buy the software if not you are free to walk away without spending any of your hard earned cash. I also find that software firms who offer free trials are confident that their software does what it says it will and the titles are typically good sellers.

I promptly downloaded the trial version and installed it onto my Windows 7 desktop. The install was a breeze it was soon asking for my 5 day free trial activation code which was easy to obtain via the Article Marketing Robot website.

Once activated I was up and running. Registering with the article directories was very easy and quick. The whole process is fully automated with the occasional popup window asking for a DeCapture code. With AMR it is also possible to automate the DeCapture part of the process by signing up with DeCapture for an account. This will cost you money but you may find it is worth the extra cost as it saves you time and in this business just like any other time is money.

After using Article Marketing Robot for 5 days I have decided to buy the software and I will use it to submit articles instead of SubmitEaze. In those 5 days I submitted 25 PLR articles to around 200 sites each. On day 5 I used the inbuilt feature of AMR to find that over 1000 of my articles were now live. Next job was to use AMR to create an xml feed and submit it to XML Feed sites. The XML export feature is worth it weight in gold, after submitting your articles this is a great way of letting many websites including Google and Yahoo know that your articles are live, this means that your backlinks are found much quicker.

The only restriction with the trial version is that there are only 500 article directories in the list. In my trials I found that my articles were only successfully submitted to ~200 article directories. The fully registered version of Article Marketing Robot contains ~2500 article directories although the number of successful article submissions is likely to be much less. This can be due to many reasons but I find that it mostly relates to the quality of your article. If you submit a commonly used PLR Article from somewhere like http://www.freeplrarticles.net then expect the success rate to be very low indeed. If however you create a well-written unique article of more than 500 words then I would expect your success rate to be much higher.

The other great feature of AMR is it allows you to ‘spin’ your articles. AMR also stores a list of previously used spun words with their variations to easily add the ‘spun’ words to future articles. This makes the process of turning PLR Articles into unique content very easy indeed.

If you are going to submit articles to article directories in the charge to boost your backlinks then my advice to you is to Buy Article Marketing Robot

The WordPress Theme that you choose to use on your blog will heavily affect how popular your blog becomes. The theme that you choose to use will define almost the entire look and feel of your site. To enable easy administration it must also fully support Widgets and Plugins. For this reason I suggest that you spend time researching which WordPress Theme is the one for you. To help you decide which theme to use here are some features that I suggest you look for: -

Featured Content – Choosing a theme that fully supports the Featured Content Plugin will allow you to highlight blogposts on your Home Page and you can then add images to help promote them.

Featured Video – Find a theme that allows you to place a video on your home page this makes your blog more interactive.

Facebook and Twitter Integration – Select a theme that allows for easy integration with the leading Social Media websites.

Adverts – Think about banner placement. I would suggest a theme where there is a 468×60 Banner on every page in the top right hand corner and as a bonus find a theme that supports the very popular 125×125 Square Adverts.

Logo – Having the logo made available as a PSD file will allow you to easily edit it to meet your needs.

Widget Ready – Make sure the theme fully supports widgets as this makes it easy for you to add almost anything to your Blog Side Bar.

Gravatar Support – Allows your readers to identify themselves with an image when posting comments – this makes your comments look far more personal.

Recently I wrote a Blog Post discussing The Benefits Of Sponsoring WordPress Theme’s. The reason that I choose to Sponsor the Luxury WordPress Theme is because I believe it is ideal for Internet Marketing WordPress Blogs. The Luxury Theme meets all of my ‘suggested features’ as listed above. I plan to use this theme myself on future WordPress Blogs that I create.

There are what seems to be an endless list of sites that freely share or sell WordPress Themes. Here is a list of sites that I visit when looking for Quality WordPress Themes: -
Theme Pix

Also I suggest that you also use ‘Google’ to find WordPress Theme’s, here are some of the search terms that I use: -
‘Free WordPress Themes’

WordPress Theme Sponsorship is a little known but very effective way to drive long term one way back links to your site. The way this works is you pay an amount of money to a WordPress Theme Designer who then adds a link to your website to the bottom of the theme he (or she) has created. The link can not be altered due to the files being securely encrypted. The theme is then uploaded to popular websites that offer Free WordPress Themes. Other blog users can then use the theme free on their WordPress Blog. Remember that the theme contains a one way link to your website.

It’s easy to see how over time a high number of back links will appear all over the internet and they will all be linking back to your website with the anchor text that you chose.

So today I decided to put this to the test and sponsored the Designer link on THIS THEME at a cost of $33.

I decided to promote the URL – Free WordPress Themes using the Anchor Text of Free WordPress Themes. My plan is to now offer the theme on my blog as a free download.

Tomorrow the theme will be sent by the designer to over 100 Free WordPress Theme sites and they will then all be sharing a theme that contains a link to my website.

If you want to Sponsor A WordPress Theme then head over to Digital Point. I choose to buy from KLO, I can tell you that he has delivered everything as promised and he also runs Theme Pix.

Permalinks are the “Permanent Links” to pages, posts, categories or other lists on your  WordPress Blog. To help describe this further here are 2 examples and they both link to the same blogpost: -

http://www.onlinetrafficdriver.com/?p=38

http://www.onlinetrafficdriver.com/submitting-your-site-to-search-engines

WordPress consider the permalink ending in ?p=109 as being ‘ugly’ and the more descriptive version of the Permalink as being ‘almost pretty’

As you can image if http://www.onlinetrafficdriver.com/?p=38 was returned in a list of search results in Google you would have no idea what the post is all about whereas if you saw http://www.onlinetrafficdriver.com/submitting-your-site-to-search-engines
in the list you would have a pretty good idea.

Also when Google and other search engines ‘spider’ your site they will use the permalink to help decide what kind of content is on the page or post that the permalink is linking to.

Although I consider that there is no right or wrong way to setup your Permalinks I do feel that by using the post or page name in the Permalink will not only improve the look and feel of your blog but it will also go someway to improving the overall SEO of your  WordPress Blog.

Here is a screenshot of the Permalink settings within the WordPress Admin area of one of my live blogs. You will find this page by logging into your Admin are of your WordPress blog and clicking on the Permalinks link which can be found under Settings on the left hand menu.

As you can see settings that I have chosen are /%postname%/. I don’t use the date or category. This is my own personal preference and I am not saying that this is right or wrong, it’s just what I find works well for me. On another of my blogs I use the settings /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ and the reason for this is on that blog I post around 10/15 blogposts a week. As I post so many blogposts on that site I fell that users would benefit from being able to search for my posts using the month that the blogpost was published.

Update – As another example here is the Permalink of the post that you are now reading which is all about how to configure your Permalinks – http://angelanatcus.com/how-to-configure-your-wordpress-permalinks

I am sure you will agree that looks so much better than – http://angelanatcus.com/?p=81.
Not only does it look better but image if you saw that Permanlink returned in a set of Google results which of the 2 would you be more likely to click?

There are 1000′s of free and premium plugins available for the WordPress blogging platform. Knowing which ones to use can be confusing. To make your life easier I have listed here the plugins that I consider to be the most important plugins and I use these on ALL of the Niche WordPress blogs that I run.

Date Exclusion SEO
This Plugin stops the date the blogpost was published from being displayed on the blog. This can stop your blog from appearing to be old and out of date. The plugin can be configured in many ways including displaying the date of the post for the first x days and then after that the date will not be displayed.

Contextual Related Posts
This is one of my favorite plugins. It adds to the bottom of every blog post a list of related posts based on keyword or catagory. So if someone is reading posts of a particular topic then at the end of the blogpost this plugin displays a list of related posts.

All in One SEO Pack
The free version of this plugin meets my key list of essentials for effectivly SEO’ing a WordPress blog. The default SEO capabilities of WordPress are fantastic but this plugin inproves that greatly. Installing this plugin is a must for all Bloggers.

Sociable for WordPress 3.0
Given the way that social networking has increased in recent years it seems only right that your WordPress blog should make it easy for visitors to share your blogposts with people in their own network. This plugin allows users to easily share your blog with over 100 social bookmarking sites including Facebook, Blogger, del.icio.us and Digg.

StatPress Reloaded
Statpress reloaded allows the blog administrator to view realtime and historical stats for your WordPress blog.

Google XML Sitemaps
This essential WordPress plugin generates a unique XML sitemap which will automatically keep the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com informed about the content on your site. The allows the search engines to easily index your WordPress blog.