I have been building automated blogs (autoblogs) for several years. One issue that is faced from time to time is that of duplicated posts. I did not have a real solution. Some autopost plugins can look for duplicated content but most do not. As a result I tended to accept that duplicated posts would happen and lived with it.

Anyway, today I found a plugin that watches for duplicated post titles and will not post a new post if it has the same title as a previous post.

Dead simple but should do the trick.

The plugin is written by a French speaking bloke and his blog/download page is in French but if you need help Google Translate can pick up the slack.

The plugin is called Duplicate Posts Eraser and is available to download from here: BlackMelvyn’s Blog.

Have a good day!

WordPress blogs are cool, once you know how to install and configure them they are quick to set up and easy to manage. I really like that I can avoid most of the design work of a static site by simply changing or tweaking a theme that somebody else made.

One thing though has been a problem. How to make a WordPress blog suitable for use as the platform for a membership site. There have been several shots at the task but until recently I had not found anything that worked for me. Some WordPress membership site plugins were badly coded and did not do what they were supposed to. Some WordPress membership software packages had very clunky interfaces that were offputting to site visitors and some did not have the basic kinds of functionality that I needed.

Recently though things seems to have changed for the better. I am now using a new plugin set called Micro Membership on one of my sites here: Marketers College, online business training for the time being the site is not live and I am still working on the layout and content before transfering over the training vids from their current home. The Micro Membership plugin set is ONLY available through the Warrior Forum at this time but I understand that it will be going on general sale, but at a higher price, in the near future.

Lo and behold though! This morning I got an email from Matt over at Mass-Automation. He has just released a new plugin to manage WordPress membership sites as well. I have not yet tried this one but I am happy to point it out as, in my experience, any product under the Mass-Automation brand is always well made and worth serious consideration.

It looks as though both tools cover much of the same ground in basic terms. People sign up and pay money according to the schedule that you set. Micro-Membeship has a very useful future posting facility so that the webmaster can add content to the site for future months meaning that sites can be, to some degree, set and forget contentwise.

Matt’s WP Membership Tool lacks the future posting facility but there are ways to handle this function within WordPress anyway and seems to offer a little more from the perspective of managing users. There is quite a difference in cost though. Ralph Pruitts Micro-Membership tool costs, for the time being, just $17.95 for unlimited use on any domain that you own. The Mass-Automation tool is priced at $49.99 for any number of sites but with a maximum number of members of 100 - OR - $99.99 for a maximum number of members of 1000. So, much more costly but in comparison with some of the market leading WordPress membership packages this is still very good value for money given that more than one package charges $100 or more for a single install on a single domain.

For the time being I am going to stick with Micro-Memberships from Ralph Pruitt, if for no other reason than I already have the software. I will probably get hold of the Mass-Automation product as well so that I can play with it.

Bottom line, there are now several ways to make you WordPress blog able to support the ongoing revenue stream that a membership site can provide and, in my opinion, either of these relatively low cost tools will be able to meet the needs of most WordPress webmasters seeking to run subscription/membership sites.

Building Quality backlinks is one of the most important factors in Search Engine Optimization.
It is not enough just to have a lot of backlinks, it is the Quality of backlinks along with the Quantity that help you rank better in Search Engines.

A backlink could be considered as a Quality Backlink if
1. The Theme of the backlinking website is the same as your website.
2. It links to your website with the keyword (keyphrase) that you are trying to optimize for.

This tools searches for websites of the theme you specify that contain keyphrases like “Add link”, “Add site”, “Add URL”, “Add URL”, “Submit URL”, “Add Article” etc. Most of the results could be quality potential backlinks.

Backlink Builder Enter Keyword (Theme)

Google has launched an online service designed to make it easy to add various bits of Google goodness onto your webpages. The service is called Google Web Elements and was launched just a few hours ago.
At the start you can use Google Maps, Google News feeds, and YouTube videos, custom search and a couple of others.

it has been possible to add these things before but not too easy. This is pretty much copy/paste so now we can have fun with maps, documents, comments and such without needing tech skills.

http://www.google.com/webelements/

If you have used the YouTube ‘embed’ option then using Google’s Web Elements will be a piece of cake.

I expect to see all kinds of blogs with maps and spreadsheets in them popping up like mushrooms on a damp spring morning!

When we were building lots of blogs for other people we discovered that the search engines seemed to particularly relish content on the static pages.
We would add content to static pages that defined the style and theme of the site and once the pages were indexed they’d often be among the best ranked pages on the sites we made.

There is a problem though - our basic promotion strategy was to syndicate the rss feeds from these sites to a network of rss directories and aggregators and, as you probably already know, WordPress does not include pages within the feeds it produces. This meant that the first pages to be indexed were rarely the best quality content for which we wanted the sites to be known.

The normal way round this is to make a short post that links to the page but this can be quite time consuming.

Today I came across a plugin that helps a lot. This plugin, when activated, adds pages to one’s rss feeds. Rss Includes Pages is by Marios Alexandrou and works on Wordpress versions from 2.5 onward.
Here is a link to Marios’ blog where there are user comments on the plugin.

One important point, if you want to use the plugin to publicise pages on a new site but do not want to continue having pages in your feeds then you simply deactivate the plugin and pages will no longer be shown. No muss, no fuss!

I had an email from a reader the other day:

What is the benefit of me adding an rss feed to my WordPress blog…..how does it work and what do I do?

This is a big question but one that might help quite a few readers so here is a brief overview that will help you get started.
The purpose of RSS feeds is to be able to add fresh content to a site giving fresh content on an ongoing basis without additional work from the webmaster.

IMHO the first thing you need to consider is why you are adding the content.

Do you simply want to freshen up static content on pages that never change?

Do you want to provide a resource for your readers so that you become a kind of news aggregator within your niche?

These are the two basic reasons for having rss on your pages and your response will tend to affect how you implement rss.

I used to add keyword based feeds to my blogs knowing that the content was going to be a bit poor but also knowing that it gave search engines a good reason to visit. It always seemed that humans were bright enough to avoid the rubbish.

Nowadays I try to provide decent quality content for the benefit of real readers. Done well this can also serve to meet the needs of option one, above, but it can be harder to find the feeds you want. I have published a list of sources for keyword based rss feeds, it is a little out of date but is still a good starting point.

These days we have more choices than simply hoisting in rss feeds, we have blog networks such as Article Marketing Automation or Syndicate Kahuna, tools that scrape article directories and other content syndication tools. These latter may well provide a good source of on theme content and are probably worth a good look.

When considering automated feeding, be it rss or other forms you might want to think about whether the content is self contained or is just a snippet of a larger item hosted elsewhere. If you get complete articles are you also hosting somebody else’s links and if so is this an issue. Basically, how well does the source and content match with your business objectives.

Of course you need to have a way of adding feeds to your blog, one of my favourites is SmartRss, a WordPress plugin from DevPlug. I like this one because it enables me to easily use several feeds at once and even turn them on or off frm the plugin management page.

I’d strongly recommend using rss feeds to add content to your WordPress blog. If done well rss feeds will add interest for your readers and search engine spiders and save loads of work for you, the webmaster. One final point, I’d not use rss feeds as the sole content source, use them as seasoning for an already wholesome meal.

Google has made a fundamental change to the manner in which they present Adsense to users and it affects us. In truth this is a fairly far reaching change in search engine technology overall but for now, lets look at Adsense!

What is now starting to happen is that Adsense will be presented to our site users based upon the user’s previous actions and search history. The implications are far reaching and represent the start of a new paradigm in SEO/SEM.

Anyway, for now, we need to update our privacy policies on all our websites that use Adsense in any form. Here is a link to info, in case you did not see the email from the Adsense team this morning: Google Adsense now includes search history to provide targeted ads.

We have until April 8th to get this change made. Sadly, Google are sloping the shoulder as to suggested wordings becasue this change has significant privacy issues and laws vary from country to country.

Have fun!
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=20310&hl=en_GB

We had been using Zookoda to enable site visitors to follow new posts on the site through their email accounts. Sadly late last year they announced that the service would be pulled as from December 2009.
Even more sadly they actually pulled the service a few days ago and without any notice.

Zookoda was a neat service that took the rss feed from a website and sent the content out as emails to subscribers, we had quite a few readers but sadly I no longer have access to the records of who they were. I hope that some of you folks who were reading the irregular posts here by email find your way back.

I will be looking for an alternative service, if anyone has suggestions please let me know!

Andrew.

OK, so they may not be new as in ‘written yesterday’ but they are new to me.

There are two that I have been looking at over the past couple of days. The first is One Click Plugin Updater

I hear the collective cry ‘but Andrew, WordPress already has an updater!’ and I would say ‘yes, but not like this one!’

Actually this one allows users to add plugins and themes to their blog from within WordPress thus saving a bit of messing around. The author notes that the plugion is moving toward obsolesence as WP takes the functionality of the plugin and makes part of the core WP application.

The second is called ‘Better Blogroll Widget’ and this is a cool tool. With this you can have your blogroll links changing at random and even use it as a basic ad rotator. I’ll let the developer tell you all about it though.

The Blogroll widget excites me because I can see how to use my blogrolls to provide links to my other sites without having to have a huge long blogroll making the sidebars look ugly. I also like the idea of being able to easily sell text links to other webmasters and companies and BBW certianly makes that easier, especially as I can even use to manage image ads.

In the worlds of internet marketing and SEO there is one theme that stands out above all others. It has been around for years and will be around for years to come.
The concept is called the “Big Red Button” or alternatively the “Big Green Button”. To put it simply, a lot of folks just want an easy one step solution to their problem.
Over the course of internet marketing history there have been many tries to make such a tool. An enabler so that people can make a large amount of cash with their skills and knowledge but with minimal work.

Some readers might remember Traffic Equalizer, some may have used PortalFeeder, others probably tried many of the less successful imitators.

So now it is Peter Drew who has a tilt at the target. The question is this: Has he got what it takes wrapped up in the form of his Brute Force SEO system?

To be honest, at the moment we do not have much to go on but what we do have seems positive.
Firstly - and to my mind (because I am a little big headed) he is doing stuff that I have already done and know works. That means his toolbox simply has to deliver what he claims because the strategies and techniques DO work.
I’ll explain… Over the past few years, I’ve developed tactics that have allowed me to earn very good money from certain types of product launches. My results filled the search engine rankings for the search terms that I was certain would be used by prospects and buyers of these products. I was showing colleagues results where I was getting 16 of the first 20 results in Google for absolutely key terms. If you wanted info on a product in which I was interested then you were coming to one of my pages!

My system was time consuming and almost entirely manual, but very profitable.

Then, a while back Pete Drew started selling a set of tools that duplicated some of the stuff I was doing by hand. I bought them as they came out. All the time I was wondering when he’d get around to packaging them all up as a single toolkit.

Finally he did it. It is called Brute Force SEO

Anyway, gotta go.

Next post we will start to look at just what Bruteforce SEO has to offer us.