So I have used a number of the free plugins available for WordPress from wpmudev.org to build a website using Buddypress because they have such a great selection of themes and plugins for WordPress Multisite configurations. It was only recentl.ly that I had one site in particulr that I really wanted to push and so I decided to drop the money on the premium themes and plugins page as a Pro membner and I must confiess that this has been a great investment.

With such awesome WordPress plugins as Ultimate Facebook and Multi Domains have made site creation and content syndication mu easier for the team here at Affordable Web Pro. We use anywhere from 6 to as avmany as 14 and more plugins from WPMU Dev for each of our new sites and it has made a real difference not only in the streamlined workflow but also in the quality of websites we have been able to provide in a rapid development platform.

If you are a webmaster who builds on the WordPress platform and has at least one multi site configuration than you should really take a look at the Premium Themes from WPMU DEV for building a robust application for yourself and your clients.

Head over to http://premium.wpmudev.org/wordpress-plugins/ and check out the list of premium plugins and build yourself a better WordPress website.

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I have been building WordPress blogs for about 5 years now and I have set them up in many different configurations. Most of my blogs are single author websites with one topic and some of my blogs are used more like a true CMS with a variety of content types and themes to write on. Some of my blogs have more than one author but almost all of them are used for the specific use of generating leads for new business clients.

I think Wordress is the ultimate platform for lead generation when you consider how fast and easy you can build a robust website on any topic. The SEO features of a WordPress blog make it a marketing machine that can automate the content syndication and marketing campaigns so many leads sites need.

A WordPress Blog can scale up to a huge website so a simple 3 page website can one day become a huge multi-user environment with 1000′s of subscribers. WordPress makes a great squeeze page with a direct link to your call to action and the ease of integrating a number of communication tools such as Contact forms, CRM systems and social media make it the ultimate communication platform for your business.

Do you use WordPress blogs for leads websites?

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So I got a subscription to Woothemes for a new client and I have been installing the popular WordPress themes on a string of blogs over the last few days. I must admit the paid themes are so much more robust and powerful over some of these free WordPress themes that so many of us use on our professional websites.

yes, a paid WordPress theme is worth the money if you are serous about your business and want the power and features that premium WordPress themes offer. The Woothemes framework makes building a customized blog fast and easy and can save many hours of development time on one single blog. When you build as many websites as I do this can be a real life saver. In the last week I have configured about 12 new WordPress blogs using the Woothemes premium WordPress themes framework and I must confess that I will most likely never stop using them on all of my sites.

For just $20 per month I can have an up to date web development platform and build top quality websites for all my clients. Wht more would you want in a Premium WordPress theme?

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I suppose the biggest issue most face with blogs has to be the comments but there are ways to deal with them. I personally embrace all comments on my blogs. I have come to realize that Google likes comments on your blog and they usually rank pages based on how many people are using that page as a resource. If you have pages on your site that seem to get more comments you may also notice that these pages will also have lots of traffic being sent to them.

Basically it seems Google wants to give their users the best experience possible by sending them to a page that users actually enjoy. If your page has been shared on social networks like Facebook or Twiiter than the more references it has the more popular it will become.

WP for keeping Spammy Comments

Of course comments can be an issue when you allow others topost content to your website. Spammers will promote their spammy pages by sharing links in your comments but the DoFollow WP WordPress Plugin makes it easier to control things by giving you total control over what outbound links have the NoFollow or the DoFollow tags. Making your comments links NoFollow should dissuade the commenter from hammering your blog with spammy comments. It also allows you to go ahead and let the comments flow on your blog with no worry about penalties from Google for linking to spam websites. This to me is the easiest and best solution.

Delete Pending Comments

The WordPress Plugin Delete Pending Comments offers a quick and simple way to deal with an overload of pending spam comments. By default you can only manage 20 pending comments per page. Well with 100′s or even 1000′s of spam comments to manage you need a lot of time to delete them all. With this plugin you can easily delete all Pending Comments at one time.

Facebook Comments for WordPress

This WordPress Plugin integrates the Facebook commenting system right into your website. If a reader is logged into Facebook while viewing any comment-enabled page or post, they’ll be able to leave a comment using their Facebook profile. Non-Facebook users can post anonymously with a valid email address and still comment on your blog without need for Facebook.

Using Disqus for WordPress Comments

Disqus, pronounced “discuss”, is a service and tool for web comments and discussions that makes it pretty hard to spam users. Disqus makes commenting easier and more interactive, while connecting websites and commenters across a thriving discussion community and allows a user to comment on any number of sites using the same account.

There are a number of ways to deal with comment spam on WordPress including shutting off comments altogether but you will miss out on the added social benefits of allowing your readers to interact with your blog or website and also hurt your frankings on major search engines like Google and Yahoo.

With the right set of WordPress plugins you can run a spam free blog and still keep your users engaged and sharing your valuable website content.

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WordPress is a powerful blog platform for individuals who want to write on any subject. It can also be used by webmasters who want to build auto blogs, or automatic blogs for autoblogging, that post on a regular schedule using content available online. Autoblogs, or splogs, have been called a scourge or bloodsuckers for scraping and stealing content from legitimate publishers who take the time to create fresh unique content. For years now black hat webmasters have been scraping and scrambling content from top ranked websites and churning our useless text to feed the search engines insatiable appetite for the latest and greatest.

Things are a bit different now. Syndicated content is a legitimate website business model and publishers have established that proper attribution of the original source is a value to both the syndicater and also the source which gains a valuable inbound link for every syndicated post. Giant content farms like AssociatedContent.com or any of the many article directories warehouse tons of free website content that webmasters can use to mix in with original content to create a larger more useful resource for readers.

Using WordPress, a webmaster can build a blog that syndicates news on any keyword topic from a huge range of sources. With a few simple and free WordPress plugins you can build an automatic blog to syndicate relevant content and automagically update your website. Pure autoblogs are limited in how much traffic they will draw using only duplicate content and you’ll have to really mix things up with articles from many sources in order to gain any respect with Google. Of course all content needs links so having some inbound links to your syndicated content is key to real performance but if you want a quick and esy way to setup a free auto blog you have to check out Wp-O-Matic.

Using the Wp-O-Matic WordPress Plugin to AutoBlog

Our first and most important plugin is Wp-O-Matic which “makes autoblogging a snap by automatically creating posts from the RSS/Atom feeds you choose, which are organized into campaigns” and can be installed from your plugins administration panel.

Wp-O-Matic Setup Step One – Create and Add Campaign

Your campaign title can be used as a keyword variable in the content of the posting template so pick your title to reflect a targeted keyword phrase such as Hollywood California Apartments which I am using for an apartment related domain I have. These template variables are important to building a unique and seo ready blog post so choose your text wisely.

Wp-O-Matic Setup Step Two – Add RSS Feeds for Syndication

The second step requires a bit of pre-planning. You’ll need some available RSS feeds that you can most likely find in a good RSS Directory. Test and then use these feeds to import content to your blog. You can import any blog you want and risk the owner complaining or you can do a little research and see if they have a specific copyright notice on their website which will usually be included in the site footer. Understand we will only be using a portion of the syndicated article and we will be referring the reader to the full article at the original source should they be interested in knowing more.

Wp-O-Matic Setup Step Three – Select WordPress Categories for Syndicated Articles

As you can see I have a WordPress Category made to match my targeted keyword. You can chose to do the same or you can integrate the posts into your existing categories for established blogs or even better you can create a new category for syndicated posts and manage them all with the built in WordPress category features or even a separate Category plugin.

Wp-O-Matic Setup Step Four – Rewrite Content With Regular Expression

Wp-O-Matic is a powerful tool with a built in Regex  engine for searching and replacing selected text including keywords, urls, affiliate id numbers and even Google Publisher codes for more complete personalization. Use this tool to create truly unique articles for syndication and better search engine indexing by replacing identifying code in the source article but please abide by copyright restrictions and leave source referrals in place.

Wp-O-Matic Setup Step Five – Template Setup and First Import of Wp-O-Matic Content

Wp-O-Matic offers a posting template with variables that can be used to create very unique and professional looking article imports. Using the {campaigntitle} from the first step we can mix the targeted keyword phrase Hollywood California Apartments into the blog post along with the syndicated content, blog title and source feed url. Using the available template variables you can build any number of unique article formats.

After setting up your template you can complete other settings such as desired post frequency or feed date based based on how you want the posts to show up in your blog.

The final steps in the setup listed below will allow you to chose how many blog posts to create on each run and who the author for each post should be. Each campaign can only have one Author so you can create an account for each syndicated source if you wish or you can just assign them all to the Admin account. “Post links to source” will set the WordPress blog title Permanent link to the source url which is the best way to stay clear of the Google Duplcate Content Filters because you don’t have any internal pages of content and only refer each blog title to the original source. Of course doing this creates a 100% bounce back ratio on all visitors and you never get to keep any of your traffic so most people instead create a link to an internal page by unchecking this box. Discussion options determines if you want to have comments open or not and trackbacks of course help secure more inbound links so use as you wish on those.

Wp-O-Matic Setup – Content Tools and Post Management

Wp-O-Matic offers you the option to Remove All blog posts by Campaign so you can use a campaign for each content source. This way if someone complains about you syndicating their content you can easily remove it all with one click on the mouse. Even if you have permission to syndicate an article people change their mind and if you had to manually remove 100′s of blog posts it would be a real hassle. Leave yourself a way to fix any mistakes by breaking up your syndicated content by source so its easier to remove if necessary.

Use these other WordPress Plugins to Customize your AutoBlog

Wp-O-Matic alone is an awesome tool but for autoblogging but for best results you’ll want to use a few other plugins to make your autoblog perfect. Look for reviews on Simple Tags for autotagging blog content and Delete Duplicate Posts in the next two posts for running a clean seo friendly autoblog.

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The social web has gotten out of control with most power users having upwards of 10 or more social profiles to manage. Not only do we have MySpace and Facebook but many web professionals have LinkedIn, Digg, Stumbleupon or Reddit accounts to manage. If you like pictures you probably have a Flickr account and maybe you use Picasa for web albums. If you listen to music you may have iLast.fm to go with your Zune card or maybe you’re a simple kind of person and you just have MSN or GMAIL as your contacts manager.

If you are reading this blog then odds are you have all of these and more to manage and bringing it all together in one place is kinda cool. The wordppress plugin Lifestream makes this happen and keeps all your social activity in one location with a few simple clicks. Your social feed can be used as an online resume with a history of everything you do online as a bit of job history for those of us who live and work online.

My Lifestream shows you that I spend much of my time online reading news sites and promoting stories from not only my own websites but the millions of other websites I read each day. I use my del.icio.us account to list my favorite urls and my Facebook account includes links to lots of this as well. I’m looking forward to see what new social networking opportunities my Facebook account brings to me once I start using the new Facebook Connect feature.

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I have a few websites built using WordPress as my CMS but there is one feature WordPress is lacking and that’s a decent forum for robust discussion on topics with features like file sharing and all the other wonderful toys bulletin boards have to offer. BBpress.org is weak at best and not even compliant with the latest version of WordPress.

I have been using Simple Machines Forum for my message boards for over 2 years now and it’s a wicked piece of software you can download for free and build a great website with. I love the admin features you find in SMF and I really like the packages feature that allows you to so easily add on features and even updates. Downloading new packages and adding a new feature to your forum has never been easier and the online template mods make site changes fast and easy. The ease of use and numerous features has allowed me to make some heavy modifications to my default forum installations.

One of my favorite mods is to combine my two favorite site building software applications using some modified software bridges to join them. The first is a WordPress plugin that merges the WordPress login and creates a new forum member for each blog user who to join. The combined accounts allow one login to post comments on the blog and topics in the forum. This plugin is the one I use to bridge my WordPress blog users and SMF forum members but its modified using some tips I got here in the SMF forums and it only works by using the SMF_Wordpress package installed in your forum that you can download here.

This setup allows my members to use both sections of the site with one login but they do still have two profile pages. The bridge links select fields from the WordPress users page with the SMF members profile. The SMF profile has more options but with a little custom coding you can add these to your WordPress blog and create a very customized look.

This worked fine for me until I came to realize that what I really wanted was for each new blog post to have a forum topic for discussion of each article and to handle comments from the blog. I found a plugin for wordpress that does just that and now I am hoping to have it customized to do even more. The SMF Commenter takes each new post from your blog and creates a new topic for your forum so long as they are installed in the same local database. It creates a link back between the post and the topic and helps move traffic from both sides of the site. I’m hoping to show the discussion of each topic on the blog home page with some future modifications but for now I have to settle for a simple link between the two.

It is however really nice to have the automatic topic creation for each new post. This only works on posts made from within WordPress Admin. If I make a post using something like Performancing for Firefox then I have to save it as a draft and then manually post from within WordPress to get the plugin to create the topic but that’s good enough for the sites I have that need this.

If you have any other ideas on integrating WordPress and Simple Machines please make a comment and let me know.

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I’m not very good at schedules and I have been neglecting some of my better performing blogs because I don’t have time to write. A lot of my time has been spent on offline projects and my online time recently has been buying and selling domains. I’m going to write more on that soon.

My blog posting has been sporadic and even non existent on a number of my blogs. I had most of my sites up and running on a normal posting schedule but my personal life was suffering. I was writing many of my posts live and not taking advantage of the scheduling features available in WordPress.

If I had taken better care to plan out my writing I could have made the articles I already wrote last a bit longer and made a more consistent posting pattern. I don;t know if it matters but I would think its better to be regular with the blog posting and content updates. Blogs are supposed to be the latest and greatest or fresh news so why let your blog go stale?

I’m going to write a bunch of articles and then post them out at least a couple weeks in advance so we can try to keep up with the content delivery you have come to expect from us.

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I’m tired of having some domains that have been parked for over 2 years now as I was never able to get them all developed and now I want to go back and build out the rest of my domain portfolio. I need to hire a web savvy person locally to train to manage some of this work load for me because with over 500 domains and 350+ sites to manage I’m overwhelmed already.

I have been partial to building blogs lately and I guess I’ll probably keep doing the same thing with lots of new blogs for my keyword targeted domains. I’ll need some content writers to spin up some new articles for these blogs because I can’t write much more than I am already. I think I’m burned out and I have found many of my articles are starting to sound the same.

Anyone want to write a few thousand articles for me?

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I’ve been building a lot of blogs lately with great success on most of my sites. I’ve been able to use them to kick start a number of new websites and boost traffic to what used to be some parked domains.

I started to work with some musicians here in Jamaica that were in need of more than a website. I’m hoping to use the blog as a communication platform for a group of Jamaican musicians who want to post their music, videos as well as sell music online. The music selling is going to be a trick I think but I’ll get to it over the next few weeks.

The first three sites are still in early content stages and I am hoping to have the artists and their fans help us with the content development because I simply cannot do it myself. My first blog was for my bredren Ras Slick who turned out to be a much better performer than I expected. His live shows are great and he has a way with the crowd that seems to set him above so many other musicians around here.

I’m looking for the best solution to allow music downloads from these blogs. Anyone got a tip on the ebst way to sell mp3 files in a wordpress blog?

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