WordPress Affiliate Mailer Plugin

This is a quick post to let the users of the WordPress Affiliate Software know that the developer over at www.rapidsuccesspartners.com have developed a useful little plugin that extends the functionality of the WP Affiliate Platform plugin.


Basically, if you want to send emails to all your affiliates then the only option the affiliate platform offers at the moment is to get an email list (comma separated) of all your affiliates from the “Affiliate Emails” tab and use your email management software to do the actual sending of the email. So, if you want to send emails to your affiliates from the WordPress dashboard then you can download this WP Affiliate Mailer plugin and use it.
I hope this will be of some use to some of the users who have requested me to include a similar feature in the product.

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10 Plugins to Improve the Usability of WordPress Blogs

WordPress is a quality platform that many of us use. It is very popular and has much to offer. In fact, there are almost too many options in terms of plugins and widgets to add to our blogs. These may make our sites look great and add value to what we are offering, but they can bloat the blogs making them slow to load and at times producing a cluttered look and other problems.

The good news is that there are plugins that address this problem and improve the performance and user friendliness of our blogs. Since usability is an essential for maximum profitability these are well worth considering. Here are 10 plugins that will surely improve the usability of your WordPress blog.


1. Lightbox 2: Images can make or break a blog as you well know from your experience with your own blog and from your perusal of other blogosphere stops. This nifty plugin uses Colorbox to overlay images in a lightbox. One advantage is that your users can view larger images without being taken to another page, streamlining their experience which they will most definitely appreciate. With this plugin you also have the option of auto-lightboxing all the images.


2. WP-Print: While going paperless is a great idea, sometimes your visitors will simply want to print something for easier access later. This plugin allows them to hit print and then go on to other parts of your blog, saving them time and perhaps encouraging deeper interaction with your site that may lead to the kind of conversions you want. This plugin is a freebie.


3. Akismet: Spammers are the bane of bloggers. This plugin will banish them and garner greater trust from those who read your blog. It’s good for nothing in terms of cost.


4. Smart 404: When a user gets a 404 error he or she might think your site is old, down or otherwise problematic when all that happened was a URL was miss-typed. Prevent click-aways by nipping in the bud many of these error messages. This plugin uses keywords from the requested URL to automatically redirect visitors to a page that matches most closely. It offers a very high success rate and it is yours for the asking.


5. WordPress Popular Posts: This will increase page reads and put your best stuff before your visitors by featuring it at the side of each page. This free widget offers great customization and usability.


6. W3 Total Cache: W3 Total Cache is the fastest and most complete WordPress performance optimization plugin. This talented plugin creates a static html pages from your dynamic blog and dishes out that page to users. This functionality allows pages to load faster because a static page is much lighter than a dynamic page and less expensive. There’s lots more this plugin will do for you.


7. Post Teaser: Rather than having to scroll below the fold to see a post this plugin allows them to see a preview of the post and provides a link to the full post. It costs nothing but will save your visitors hassle and earn you their appreciation.


8. Search Everything: Keep things smooth and easy for your visitors and they will continue coming back for more. Search Everything delivers additional search capabilities so they can easily find the content they want. The plugin accomplishes this by ramping up the default search on your WordPress blog so users can search every non-password protected page, tag, post, comment, category, taxonomy and much more.


9. Outbound Links: Users won’t leave your site when they click on an outbound link because this plugin will open it in a new window leaving your blog window open and available. Its free and easy.


10. Subscribe to Comments: Build community around your blog by inviting readers to choose to be notified by email when someone adds a comment. It offers your commenters a tailored approach to staying in the discussion. Download it for nothing and gain quite a bit.
If you want to do 10 things today to give your blog visitors a better experience these deserve strong consideration. Each one will contribute to a more usable blog and all else being equal, that is what gives you a competitive edge. The price is right and the performance upgrade is outstanding.

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Choosing Hosting for Multiple WordPress Sites

Creating a network of blogs or sites is one good strategy to earn dependable online income. However, managing multiple sites naturally demand far greater resources than when running just one site or blog. It’s also not as simple as launching several simple HTML info/hobby sites back then in the earlier days of the Internet.
You’d also meet plenty of competition from established, well-funded blog networks (such as online spin-offs of print newspapers). As a matter of fact, you’ll be competing with all the millions of sites out there (a total of 234 million sites by December 2009 compared to 162 million sites in 2008, Pingdom reports).
If you’re a website owner, or just planning to become one, you’d want to have the edge, or at the very least, ensure that your well-designed sites are running optimally (or running at all!).
The good news is that there are plenty of easy-to-use sophisticated content management solutions (CMS) that will allow you to create and manage a lot of sites from one powerful administrator dashboard.

Use WordPress

Worth trying if you haven’t yet is WordPress 3.0 (multisite), which absorbed the abilities of the old WordPress MU (multiuser). It lets you install and manage many sites once from one location instead of you separately installing each site on your server.
WordPress has matured from a blogging platform into a very powerful yet easy to use publishing platform, which is why it is highly recommended for running a network of sites or blogs. WordPress is a very robust system that runs on PHP and MySQL, two most popular web programming and database systems today.
You can’t go wrong with WordPress. Since it is an Open Source project, hundreds of programming experts around the globe continually improve its code, helping ensure that even a novice user can learn to use it in just a matter of few minutes. You don’t even have to learn how to install WordPress because your web host will be more than happy to get it up and running for you immediately.

Recommended Hosts

Some companies that offer reliable WordPress hosting are the following:
1. Dreamhost is one of the very best web hosting companies that offer compatible WordPress hosting. Its popular features include: unlimited storage space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited email, and unlimited domain hosting. Dreamhost offers tremendous value for a low monthly price. It is a perfect solution for many small businesses that are just beginning or updating their existing content management system solution.
2. Myhosting is an affordable WordPress hosting solution for multiple domains. They are one of the few hosts that proudly offer a 100% up-time guarantee to their customers. Myhosting is an easy to use solution and includes tools to successfully self-install content management systems without error. The inclusion of unlimited email, free domain name, unlimited storage space, and unlimited bandwidth make handling the most demanding WordPress multisite management easier.
3. Justhost is a fantastic provider of hosting for multiple sites. A standard package includes a free domain for life and instant setup. Unlimited SQL databases are a good option for WordPress hosting decisions. The reliability and simplicity of Justhost allow easy transitions when creating new websites. A free site builder can help you create your new website fast and easy. Additional features includes add on scripts and shopping cart solutions.
4. HostGator is one of the most popular web hosts available. The easy and affordable packages make hosting a website seem effortless. In addition to many unlimited features, they are one of the few hosts to also provide reseller hosting, VPN hosting, and dedicated hosting. The reseller hosting is perfect for website designers who offer hosting to their clients. HostGator makes it easy for WordPress hosting, business class hosting, or simple website creation.

Two Things to Consider

When shopping for the best deals, aside from looking at the cost, consider the storage and bandwidth requirements of your site network with an eye on the long term benefits:

1) Storage

A fully functional website is composed of many files that work together, and the bigger the site, the larger the storage space requirement. Multiply this by the number of sites you have, and you’ve got several hundreds of megabytes of web pages, images, video and audio, scripts, and executable files all taking up space in your web server.
It would be wise to figure out early in your planning how much storage space you’d need, and allow for any future expansion. It would be less expensive, for instance, to select one that grows with your needs rather than mass-migrate a hundred sites to a more powerful server once your sites outgrow their old servers.

2) Bandwidth

When a user visits a website, information is retrieved from the web server and sent to the user’s computer. The space occupied by the data transfer is known as bandwidth (to understand this concept better, it may help to imagine cars on a busy interstate highway).
If you have or expect a lot of visitors who use applications, stream videos, or interact with other visitors, then it is wise to purchase greater bandwidth to avoid costly server errors and missed business opportunities. If your current shared hosting plan can’t keep up with your sites, then it may be time to switch to cheap dedicated hosting that can support multiple sites very well.
Creating and running your own network of sites is not easy, but not impossible, thanks to numerous options available. Make the right long-term decisions at the very beginning to help make your dream of a solid revenue-generating content network become a reality. Choosing the right web host at the start will also save you a lot of hassle down the path.

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