My Favorite WordPress Plugins

by Mike on March 26, 2011

JoshKotsay.com is one of my favorite blogs I like to read. I just came across his best wordpress plugins post while searching around on Google, and I thought it would be a great idea to come up with my own list of favorite plugins. I’ve been using WordPress for a long time now, so these are the 6 plugins, I couldn’t live without.

W3 Total Cache – This is a great wordpress plugin that I install on all my sites. It speeds up your sites considerably by caching a static copy of your site. W3 Total Cache has tons of options if you want to tweak your site’s performance. But it also works great out of the box as well.

Pop Up Domination – The best WordPress plugin for collecting opt-in emails. It displays a nice looking pop-up on your site which asks your users to enter in their name and email. Popup Domination comes with several great looking templates where you can plug in your graphics and text that apply to your site. I found Josh’s good Popup Domination review here if you are looking for more detail about this plugin.

Popup Domination
OIO Publisher – If you want to show ads on your site, then OIO Publisher is the best wordpress plugin for managing your advertising. Whether you use banners, text links or paid reviews, OIO publisher will handle payments and much more.

Backup Buddy – My favorite backup wordpress plugin. While there are other backup plugins that will backup just your WP database, Backup Buddy is capable of doing full backups. If you ever need to transfer your sites between web hosts, this is the plugin to use. It literally takes about 3 minutes to do using Backup Buddy.

Greet Box – This is a cool little wordpress plugin. It identifies where your traffic is coming from, Google, Twitter, Youtube, etc and allows you to display a customizable greeting that shows up at the top or bottom of your post. It’s a great way to promote some of your content, or to get more Twitter followers or Feedburner subscribers.

WP Greet Box Plugin

No Self Ping – If you do a lot of internal linking to your own posts on your site, then you’ll notice that when you do this, you’ll start getting pings from your own site. This is super annoying because you’ll get notified by these in your email by default. By installing the No Self Ping plugin, you will stop WordPress for doing this.

Do you have your own top wordpress plugins you would like to share? Feel free to suggest some of your favorites in the comments.

{ 0 comments }

Adscend Media Review

by Mike on January 23, 2011

Adscend Media

There are really 4 major incentive networks that offer content gateway solutions. CPA Lead, BlamAds, Leadbolt, and Adscend media. With these networks, you can promote incentive offers using content locking technology called content gateways. By blocking your content through the use of these gateways, you can earn money when your traffic completes these short form offers. For certain types of traffic, this monetization option works quite well, and can often pay better compared with putting ads on your website.

While Adscend media is similar to the other 3 ad networks I mentioned, it does over a few things that make it stand out from the others.

First, Adscend Media’s content gateway solution is highly customizable. You can change the titles and colors of your content gateway, plus other important features like gateway size, overlay colors. This lets your content gateway stand out from the rest of the pack and can lead to better conversions. A well designed CPA gateway will often lead to better conversions in my experience. The only other incentive network that offers a content gateway that is as customizable is Blam Ads Excedo 3.0 content gateway.

Adscend Media also offers an interesting monetization option that it calls its “file gateway”. This is a unique twist on the content gateway concept. Basically it allows you to cloak your links and to uncloak these links, your visitors will have to complete one of your offers. This works really well with downloadable files that your visitors really want to access like ebooks, videos and stuff like that.

In terms of payouts, Adscend Media always pays out on time in my experience. You have the option to be paid via Paypal, Check, ACH and wire transfer on a net-30 basis. They also have a 3% referral bonus, so you get 3% of the earnings of any ad publisher you refer for their first 6 months. It’s not the best referral bonus out there, but it’s not the worst either.

Anyway, if you’re looking for an ad network to promote incentive offers, Adscend Media is a decent option. Their file gateways are unique to them, so check them out if you want to better monetize your traffic.

http://adscendmedia.com

{ 0 comments }

Bookmarking Demon Review

January 14, 2011

Bookmarking Demon is probably one of the most well known software products on the market. It’s been through many iterations and has been constantly updated over the years. If you haven’t heard of it yet, Bookmarking Demon is basically an automated social bookmarking tool. You can submit unlimited numbers of your urls and the software [...]

Read the full article →

Making Money with Incentive Offers

December 16, 2010

Many affiliate marketers have made good money with CPA marketing. But did you know there’s a type of CPA offers called incentive offers? It’s not something that’s encouraged in traditional CPA networks, and thus most affiliates don’t really know what they are about. However, there are certain incentive networks that allow you to run these [...]

Read the full article →

Exclusive Affiliit Offer – Try Affiliit Out For Free?

September 15, 2009

AffiliIt has been generating some fantastic word of mouth lately, and the site just recently passed the 100 member mark. That is amazing growth for a site that just recently opened. I have personally been kicking ass on some Facebook campaigns and I am certainly not alone. Success stories are cropping up all over forums [...]

Read the full article →

Affiliit Review – Affiliate Marketing Made Easy

September 10, 2009

Making money with affiliate marketing is a great way to start making money online. You can be your own boss, set your own schedule and generally live your life how you want. However, getting started as an affiliate marketer is not quite so easy. If you don’t know what you are doing, you can be [...]

Read the full article →