When customers want to make a purchase, they usually look for a review website or blog first. People like to read reviews on the Internet to make the best choice. If your web site or blog provides those reviews, you earn the commissions. Many super affiliates earn thousands of dollars each month month with review sites.

For example, the Award Winning Hosts website has earned thousands of dollars in affiliate commissions just by letting people review their web hosting companies. Each time someone clicks a link to a host reviewed on the site and makes a purchase, an affiliate fee of $100, $150 or more is paid to the website owner. And search engines love user reviews – just think about how many top results Amazon.com has with all the product reviews they’ve collected.

WP Review Site is flexible enough to power complete affiliate review sites, or to add star ratings to any existing WordPress-powered website, using any theme.

WP Review Site was formerly called “WP DG Review Site”. WP Review site has been downloaded hundreds of times and is the powers behind many successful user-powered review sites. The all new version 3.0 has just been released, making it easier to use, and more powerful than ever.

If you are ready to start making money with your own Wordpress WP Review Site, just purchase the plugin and all the extras it comes with. You can also read more about everything this package will add to your WordPress-powered site.

>> CLICK HERE TO GET WP REVIEW SITE

The new version 3.0 also includes bonus affiliate marketing tools! These are the same abilities you’d have to pay $67 for elsewhere, adding affiliate link management to your WordPress administration panels. Specify an affiliate link for each post, an optional post image/icon, automatically add Google Maps and more.

WP Review Site, comes with a complete premium WordPress theme and bonus affiliate marketing tools.

Features:

• Add Star Ratings To Your Comment Forms. Your visitors can write a review and set ratings in any number of categories. You define the categories!

• Automatically Create Comparison Tables. Easily create “Top 10″ style comparison tables powered by your posts and user reviews.

• Flexible Display Options. WP Review Site’s display is completely customizable to fit your design.

• Sorts Your Posts by Rating or Number of Reviews. Show the highest rated listings first, not the chronological listing of default WordPress. WP Review Site can optionally re-order all your posts by weighted average rating or by number of reviews.

• Add Ratings to Your Whole Website or Just Parts You Want. You have complete fine-grained control over where ratings appear in your blog.

• Automatically Embed Google Maps For Business Listings. WP Review Site can automatically add a Google Map to the post or page showing that address.

• Rating Widgets For Your Sidebar. Add a list of top rated items to your site’s sidebar, or a list of recent reviews with the average user rating.

• Microformat Support for More Google Traffic. WP Review Site is the only user ratings plugin for WordPress with built-in support for the hReview microformat in the included themes. This is a new technology Google recently adopted to extract reviews from webpages, and highlight review sites in search results with specially formatted listings.

• Totally Integrated With WordPress. WP Review Site integrates with your WP Admin area, displaying ratings left with comments in the comment moderation lists and allowing you to configure the plugin through the settings panel.

>> CLICK HERE TO GET WP REVIEW SITE

Always on the lookout for ways to make my life easier and more convenient, I found this nifty Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin that upgrades Wordpress to the latest version automatically. Naturally I was skeptical about it actually working, and prepared for the worst! The Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin worked like a charm!

Installation of the Wordpress Automatic upgrade plugin is easy!

1. Download the wordpress-automatic-upgrade zip file to your local machine.
2. Unzip the file.
3. Upload wordpress-automatic-upgrade folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
4. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.

Now you are ready to either step through the upgrade or let it run on its own. I decided to step through the upgrade. During the upgrade, you are asked to provide your FTP credentials — the plugin makes sure that whichever files it writes can be deleted by the user without having to contact the system administrator.

This plugin goes out and grabs the latest Wordpress version from Wordpress.org. You also have the option to download it prior to performing the upgrade and uploading it from your local computer. Along the way, Wordpress DB backups are created which you can download to your local computer. Your blog is also placed into maintenance mode which the upgrade completes.

The Wordpress Automatic Upgrade Plugin also deactivates all plugins. I had to reactivate all the plugins when the upgrade finished. The good news is that all my plugin settings were saved so there was nothing further to do with plugins except to reactivate.

The whole process of upgrading Wordpress to 2.5 was smooth as silk with the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin. I highly recommend it if you are looking to upgrade your blog to the latest version. After upgrading to the latest Wordpress version, you will get to experience the new and improved user interface, plus a bunch of new features:

• Cleaner, faster, less cluttered dashboard
• Dashboard Widgets
• Multi-file upload with progress bar
• Bonus: EXIF extraction
• Search posts and pages
• Tag management
• Password strength meter
• Concurrent editing protection
• Friendlier visual post editor (yay!)
• and much more!

If you don’t want to use the plugin you can always do your upgrade the “old-fashioned” way. Just visit Wordpress.org’s upgrade page for instructions.

I’d love to hear about your Wordpress upgrade experience!

When you hover your mouse cursor over a button, the button highlights in full color.

Sociable is so easy to use, it’s nearly a no-brainer. You can download Sociable version 2.5.3 from the WordPress plugin repository.

1. Just upload the plugin to your Wordpress plugins directory.
2. Activate the Sociable plugin.
3. Click the Sociable tab in the Admin Options menu.
4. Select the sites you want to appear in your blog postings.
5. Drag and drop sites to reorder them.

Next, select where you want the Social bookmarking icons to appear in your blog:

• Front page of the blog
• Individual blog posts
• Individual WordPress “Pages”
• Category archives
• Date-based archives
• Search results

That’s it! You will be all setup to automatically add up to 77 different ways for your readers to add your blog postings to social bookmarking sites!

P.S. Sociable plugin for Wordpress doesn’t work well with Wordpress 2.2. A blogging buddy of mine is using Wordpress version 2.2 and the Sociable plugin didn’t work. The backend was totally messed up. During research, we discovered that many people who used the 2.2 version had the same problem!

Other than that – we love it! Get sociable!

WP Auctions is a sweet Wordpress Plugin developed by Hyder over at WPAuctions and released on February 22, 2008. With the WP Auctions plugin, you have complete control of your auctions on your blog. Buyers can place real time bids on your site with no registration required.

As an added bonus, you can also get free traffic for your auctions by registering your auctions RSS feed on the WP Auctions Live page.


The WP Auctions plugin is easy to use:

1. Download the WP Auctions Plugin.
2. Upload to your Wordpress Plugins folder.
3. Activate the WP Auctions Plugin.
4. The WP Auctions widget will appear in your “Widgets” panel in the Wordpress. Drag it to the sidebar.

Do a little customization in the WP Auctions tab and you will be set to add and manage your auctions.

The WP Auctions plugin is a welcome treat to the blogging community. What are you waiting for? Download the WP Auctions plugin and start your own auction. Don’t forget to register your auction RSS feed on the WP Auctions live page.

Titles, descriptions, and keywords are important factors for search engine indexing. The All in One SEO Pack takes care of these for you.

Features of the Wordpress Plugin All in One SEO Pack:

Don’t miss out on any more Internet traffic. Head over to the All in One SEO Pack download page.

• Download the uploads folder (wp-content/uploads) to my computer harddrive. The uploads folder contains all the images that you uploaded to individual posts. Without this folder, your blog articles will be missing all their images. Use an FTP program to grab the folder and files.
• Download the Themes and Plugins folders. You’ll need the latest version of your theme in case you modified it. Take note of what’s in the sidebars if you use widgets. You will have to rebuild the sidebar widgets on the other side. To accomplish this, I grabbed the source of the blog to ensure I had the latest sidebar information ready to pop into a widget. Don’t forget your plugins! If you have customized certain options in the plugins, be sure to write down what you did or take screen shots. Else you will be scratching your head about it later.
• Export the blog and save to my computer harddrive. Be sure to export the most updated information from your blog. In the Wordpress Admin panel, select Manage > Export. Wordpress Export will create an XML file that you save to your computer. This Wordpress eXtended RSS or WXR file will contain your posts, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags (tags are a HUGE problem!)
• Set up the domain on the new Web host provider and install Wordpress. Here is where some of my problems began. Once I installed Wordpress, I was unable to access the Admin panel because behind the scenes, Wordpress is looking for successspace.com, when at that moment, I have not yet transferred the DNS so I want it to look for an IP address only. I was not able to do accomplish this. So, I did what any good techie would do, I took a leap of faith! Read on.
• Transfer the DNS for the domain to the new Web host provider. I sat in front of my computer and kept reloading the page waiting for that magic moment when the DNS pointed to the new Web host. Not fun.
• Transfer the uploads, Themes, and Plugins folder to the new server. While waiting for the DNS to propagate, I uploaded, via FTP, these folders to their proper location on the new Web server.
• Import the Wordpress WXR file. Ahh…almost there! In the Wordpress Admin panel, select Manage > Import, then select Wordpress from the bottom of the list. Once the DNS propagated, the domain kept flip flopping back and forth between the two Web host providers – that was fun. I was able to import the Wordpress WXR file to the new Wordpress blog but got the dreaded error message: “the upload file cannot be moved to <long path name>. This continued to happen so I did some quick research and discovered many people had this same problem. No one person seemed to have a clear solution so I tried a few things and finally, after changing the permissions  of the uploads folder parent, the file successfully imported.

It didn’t end there. I had to select the Wordpress theme, enable the sidebar widgets and ensure that the correct content was showing on my blog, activate the plugins and setup any custom options, and then tweak!

All in all, it was not a horrible experience but not the best. A lot of what I read made it sound like snap, crackle, pop and you are done! Not so! It take a lot of organization, time, and patience to transfer a Wordpress blog using this Export/Import method.

Now the best part. After everything settled down, I  randoming looked at some posts from inside the Wordpress Admin panel to make sure everything looked right. And what do you think I found? My tags, that I so carefully created for each post had turned into numbers. As you can see in the image to the left, that says it all. This example previously had four tags. Now it has four numbers. Now I have to go through every post and delete the numbers and add the tags.

I did a little research and found that this is an issue that many people have experienced.

Lessons learned. Enjoy.

How do we do it? With a unique little plug-in, Theme Test Drive by Vladimir.

How often did you want to updated an existing theme with new colors, header, or reorganize some other elements? Not a problem except for the fact that your blog’s visitors get to see all the changes, and mistakes in action. We’ve all made the mistake of deleting one too many lines of PHP code and totally obliterating the blog! A bit of a turn off, don’t you think?

That is where Theme Test Drive comes in.

The Success Space is using Theme Test Drive right now and we love it! Theme Test Drive Wordpress plugin allows you to safely test drive any theme on your blog as administrator, while visitors still see and use the default theme. It is transparent to anyone who is NOT logged in as Administrator. Visitors will never know that you (the Admin) are running a totally different theme for yourself. And that is not all – you can even set the testing theme’s options (if it has them) in the Admin panel while you are test driving the theme.

Hands down, we highly recommend the Theme Test Drive. You can customize your theme and get it working and looking perfects before anyone sees it.

It’s easy to use:

1. Upload the plugin folder to your /wp-content/plugins/ folder.
2. Go to the Plugins page and activate the plugin.
3. Use the Options page to set the theme you want to test drive.

The Theme Test Drive plugin is free. Go get yours!

As a confessed, long-time affiliate marketer, I can tell you that creating lots of small web sites can be a very tedious task. Don’t get me wrong. I love getting checks in the mail as much as the next person but I knew there had to be a better, more efficient way to create these niche web sites.

I heard lots of blogosphere chatter about using Wordpress to create static web sites. Wordpress is a fantastic Content Management System (CMS) that is typically used for blogs and ongoing conversations with the people who read them. It’s easy to manage because once you write the articles, the hyperlinks (like monthly archives, categories, and pages) take care of themselve. Everything in a tidy neat little package.

Usually, when I select a new affiliate marketing niche, I look at profitable keywords or products, and build a site around it. High maintenance is out of the question! Who has the time for that. I like sites that bring in two things: traffic and money!

I had the good fortune to meet Caroline Middlebrook. Caroline has done the hard work friends, and written an ebook about creating the very thing I wanted to create. A low-to-no maintenance niche web site using Wordpress. I like it already!

I downloaded the ebook with no expectations but was pleasantly surprised. Caroline has a technical background but has written her ebook so mere mortals can actually understand it!

She starts out introducing the subject about niche sites and then launches into a nice overview and how-to about installing Wordpress. Caroline also targets the important points in the Wordpress Admin panel and how to get your Wordpress theme going.

It was a nice Wordpress refresher but then she reveals the real gems of creating your niche static web site with Wordpress:

• Setting up Adsense
• Essential Wordpress plugins and how to install them
• Site subject and monetization
• Static pages
• Link structure
• And much more!

All in all the “How to Develop Money-Making Niche Sites with Wordpress” ebook is a quick read with some great information and tips. Your mind will be flowing with new ideas when you finish this one!

Download it for FREE at Caroline’s blog.

Check out  iThemes Wordpress Themes, my favorite Wordpress themes for creating niche affiliate sites.

Wordpress is the ultimate blogging software. There are hundreds of Wordpress Plugin tools available to make your Wordpress blogging experience smoother, better, and really cool. Head over to the Wordpress plugin respository and have a look around – so many plugins to choose from! If you are just getting started with blogging, and not sure which blog platform to use, read my article. “Get Your Own Domain Name and Host for Blogging“.Here are nine Wordpress plugins to drop-in and start using to maximize your blogging experience for both you and your readers:

Akismet – the ultimate spam killer
Akismet is a default, preinstalled Wordpress plugin. Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You can review the spam it catches under “Manage” and it automatically deletes old spam after 15 days.  Youll need an API key. Get a free one by heading over to Wordpress.com and signing up for an account. Have you ever been excited to see comments in your Moderation queue only to find they were all spam!

Daiko’s YouTube Video Widget
This super cool YouTube Video plugin adds a sidebar widget to display random YouTube videos of your own choice. Make your own videolist in the widget-control-panel and  add your favorite tag(s), user(s). It’s easy to set up and gives your readers something to do in case they get bored. The YouTube video widget is also  great way to share your favorite YouTube videos with your readers. You can view in the sidebar.

Recent Comments
The Recent Comments plugin shows  excerpts of the most recent comments and / or trackbacks posted to the articles in your blog. This is a great way to increase readership and page views on your blog. It is part of Wordpress already, so use it!

Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form
The Internet is all about community and communicating so it makes sense that you should provide a way for people in the blogosphere to contact you. The Secure & Accessible contact form is designed to make contacting you from your website easy, accessible, and secure. It will definitely deter spam emails from arriving in your mail box! It’s super easy to install too – a must have Wordpress plugin.

Digg This
The Digg This Wordpress plugin detects incoming links from Digg.com to your Wordpress post and automatically display a link back to the digg post. Then, people can easily digg your story. When a digg is first recognized an email is sent to the blog administrator. The detection is based on the referrer URL, which has to come from digg. Not sure what Digg is? Head over to my article, “Eleven Awesome Social Bookmarking Site” and start digging!

Google (XML) Sitemap Generator for Wordpress
This Google Sitemap plugin generates an XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your Wordpress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO, and MSN Search. Wondering what a sitemap is and why you need it? Head over to Sitemaps.org. Be sure to check out Google Webmaster Tools as well. The Google Sitemap tools are great for knowing exactly where you stand with Google search.

Wasabi Related Posts
The Related Posts plugin will display a series of “related” entries (based on keyword matching) for an individual blog article. The Related Posts plugin is yet another great tool to keep readers on your site and gain even more exposure to more article. Increased pageviews for you! 

Wordpress Database Backup
Yes, you need to backup your Wordpress database! What would happen if some huge Web server crash destroyed your entire database and all known backups? With this plugin, you will still have a backup of your Wordpress blog! You can have the backup file emailed to you or download on the spot for convenience. The Database Backup plugin is preinstalled with Wordpress, so use it!

Adsense Deluxe
If you are a fan of Adsense then you need the Adsense Deluxe plugin for Wordpress. AdSense-Deluxe provides advanced options for managing the automatic insertion of Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) ads to your WordPress posts.

What’s your favorite plugin?

What does passion have to do with it? I just want to make money!

Well making money might be a good reason for starting a blog and money CAN be made, but in the end creating and maintaining a blog that is going to last is more about your passion or your driving force. Ask yourself this question:

“What would I do everyday, for the rest of my life, without ever being paid to do it?”

Whatever answer you come up with is your passion. That is what your blog should be about; YOUR PASSION. That is what you should be blogging about. Write for yourself before you right for someone else. Money and fame are just icing on the cake.

See, when you first start writing your blog, there most likely WILL NOT be any money returned from your time investment. Making money  is usually a result of long hours invested in gaining subscribers and avid readers and becoming known as an “expert”. You might decide to monetize your blog, but without people reading your blog, how are you going to make money?

Remember this: THERE ARE NO GET-RICH-QUICK SCHEMES RELATED TO BUILDING AN A+ BLOG!!! Sorry to dash your dreams but if you are looking for the “key” to riches beyond your wildest dreams, then please go somewhere else; you won’t find it here.

Step 2: Write Down Your Goals

Most likely if you write down your goals those goals will happen. This is because making yourself actually think about what you want to accomplish is half of the battle already won. “Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail.” ~ English Proverb What do you want to accomplish? How are you going to deliver your message? When you are finished, what is it going to look like?

Step 3: Visit Some Other Blogs

Do some research and check out what other people are doing with their blogs. Learn what blogging is in general. Don’t just search for blogs in your niche, but also in general. There is alot to be learned from others that have already put up there own blogs. Posts some comments so that you can start to get a feel of what the whole blogging process is. While you are researching be sure to bookmark those blogs that you have visited and write down interesting ideas that pop into your head. You might not remember where you have been only a day or two earlier.

Step 4: Choose a Blogging Software

There a bunch of options when looking for your blogging software. I would start by doing a search on Google for Blogging Software. Don’t be intimidated by the 62,000,000 + results returned back to you.

For the scope of the article, I am going to talk about WordPress (http://www.wordpress.com). I chose WordPress for my blog not only because it is the most popular, but also because it is backed by a huge community, has some really useful plugins, gives you loads of control and is easy to use. You can either signup for at WordPress or find your own hosting provider to host the blog for you. If you are new to blogging then signing-up at WordPress might be your best bet. There are many of bulit-in extras like stats that track your visitors that are beneficial. Best of all it is FREE!!

Step 5: Buy a Domain Name

Buying a domain from a domain registry such as GoDaddy
will make your blog appear more professional. Choose a domain name that not only fits your blog’s purpose but also has keywords in it. For instance, if your blog is about gardening, then choose a domain such as “MyGardeningBlog.com” or “My-Gardening-Blog.com”. The .com, .net, .org, etc extension is not important although .com extensions are generally recognized as the default.

Step 6: Customize Your Blog

Customizing your blog is very easy with WordPress. If you choose to host your blog with WordPress then you can choose from dozens of pre-installed templates. You can also Search Google for additional templates that are either FREE or low cost for around $45 a template. If you find a template that is not provided by the hosted service then you can simply upload the new template to your account. The control panel that comes with the hosted service is very easy to use.

If you are daring enough to modify the template by hand you can do so. WordPress is built in a web site scripting language called PHP. If you are not familiar with PHP then this route is not for you. You can, however, find additional resources online either at the WordPress website or by doing a Google search.

Step 7: Install Helpful Plugins

WordPress is easily expandable by the use of “Plugins”. Plugins are little pieces of software that are created by a 3rd-Party developer that accomplish simple tasks such as helping you manage your Google Adsense(http://www.google.com/adsense) ads or backing up your WordPress installation. There are many plugins to choose from and you can search for them at WordPress.org.

Step 8: Write Your “About” Page

When you are ready, you can describe the blog and its purpose in an “About” page. Be as descriptive as you can about the target audience and what you will be providing in the blog.

Step 9: Start Posting to Your Blog

This is actually the hardest part. If you have done your homework on what your passion was and you did some research, then you most likely did some blog posts in your head. Don’t sweat coming up with great and astounding ideas or intricate essays. Remember the KISS method and Keep It Simple Stupid! (OK I had to break this rule for this article but you know what I mean…)

Need Help? Download Blogging to the Bank to learn how to give yourself the blogging advantage and profit from your blog.

You have to remember who your audience is in general. Most people read blogs rather than other forms of information because they are short and to-the-point snippets of information that can be easily digested. I think this is just normal human behavior in a conventional society. There is far too much information on the internet and too little time to try to consume it all. Blogs satisfy our normal curiosity like small little squares of chocolate would satisfy our sweet-tooth.

Step 10: Marketing (and maybe Monetizing) Your Blog

Since you have been blogging your little heart away, wouldn’t it be nice if people actually read it? Here are a few ways, among many, to go about marketing your blog.

Google Website Submittal (http://www.google.com/addurl/) – This allows you to easily add your new blog (or website) to Google. I also suggest you submit to Yahoo and AltaVista and any other search engine or directory you can find.

Google Adsense and Adwords – Adwords allows you to advertise on Google and Adsense allows you display ads on your blog that match your content. If any visitors to your blog click on the advertisements you get paid for it. What a concept!! Be sure to check the other suggested affiliates and ad networks under the “Money Makers” section of this blog.

Google Sitemap – This is a FREE plugin for WordPress that you can install that will create a Google Sitemap of your blog that can be used to allow your blog to be better indexed by Google.

FeedBurner – Another plugin and service that is FREE that allows you to do some really neat things with your blog’s feed. The feed of your blog is what allows someone to subscribe to your blog. It is a file that contains all of your posts in a specific file format called RSS that an “aggregator” (or “feed reader”) such as Google Reader can read and keep track of. You would want to use an aggregator because it keeps track of the different blog feeds that you have subscribed to and allows you to read those blog feeds all in one place. Although you do not need FeedBurner to allow your blog to be subscribed to, it has some really great features that you need to check out.

Comments – Visit alot of blogs and subscribe to them. Try to be the first to leave a comment with a link back to your blog.

Forums – Forums are the same way. Just be careful that you are truly leaving a comment about the thread and not just trying to advertise your blog.

Signatures – When you leave a comment or send an email make sure you use a signature that has your blog address.

Write Articles – Turn you blog posts into an expanded article that you can put on a tutorial or eZine (Electronic or Online Magazine) website such as eZineArticles.com. Make sure to add a link back to your blog.

Word of Mouth – Don’t forget to tell the people you know about your new blog and keep them updated on what is going on. Ask them to become subscribers to your blog.

I hope you have enjoyed this introduction into the world of blogging and I hope that you find your passion. Please be sure to comment on this blog post and leave me some feedback. Also be sure to ask me any questions that you might have. I will be glad to help you in any way that I can.

Jason Cochran is an internet guru with over 10 years experience with website design and development, marketing and advertising. His blogging website is at http://blogging.jasonleecochran.com