Donna, what would I need if I wanted to create a [fill in the blank] type of site, using WordPress to manage it? What tools would you recommend I use to make it quick, easy, and profitable, and how much will it cost me to get those tools?

To be honest, it usually takes a lot of time to boil down the numerous questions into those two concise questions, because more often than not, the person asking isn’t sure what they are trying to ask. By now, though, I’ve answered it enough times that I can do it fairly easily, so I thought it would be useful to share it with everyone here.

My answer:

Of course, it depends upon what you choose to put into that [fill in the blank] spot in that question, but I can still make general recommendations, regardless. Naturally, you *could* do everything for almost no money at all, but you’d need to be pretty tech savvy with some programming skills, so I’d rather just recommend a few reasonably-priced products that will get anyone ready to roll quickly.

Generally speaking, I’d recommend getting both products from the first group below (Group A), and then pick just one product from the second group (Group B). That combination of 3 products will cost a little less than $200, in one time fees, with monthly fees ranging from $19-$46/month. In most cases, just one conversion per month will more than cover the costs.

Group A: Products I Recommend No Matter What You Put In The [fill in the blank] Spot

Market Samurai $149, or $97 if you grab their special offer more info…

OR

Raven Internet Marketing Tools from $19/mo more info…

Ninja Affiliate – affiliate link manager – $97 more info… (You can skip this if you won’t be promoting affiliate products on your site).

Group B: Choose One Product Below Based On The Type of Site You’re Creating

For A Generic Shopping Cart For Any Type of Site, Templatic eShop – $99 more info…

For either a Directory, or a Classifieds Site, or a Coupon Codes Site, or a Real Estate Site, PremiumPress – $79 more info…

For A Membership Site, Wishlist Member – $97 more info…

For A Review Site, WP Review Site – $97 more info…

For General Affiliate Products, Rich Affiliate Theme – $70 more info…

For Affiliate Datafeeds, Datafeedr – $27/mo more info…

Group C: Optional / Additional

For Anything That Can Benefit From A Killer Landing Page, Landing Page Plugin – $97 more info…

Note: I wish all of these products had been around years ago when I first began. Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad I was forced to learn how to do so many things all on my own. It’s been a great education. But wow, the time I would have saved (and the extra money I would have earned) if I’d had these years ago, just boggles my mind.

Additional Related Reading

List Building Glossary – Terms and Definitions

Intro To Membership Sites

Affiliate Datafeeds: An Introduction

Affiliate Review Sites: An Introduction

11 Ways to Make Money Online

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2010. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: affiliate, plugins, themes, tools, WordPress
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Easy Video Insertion Plugin: I currently use a WordPress plugin that makes it simple for me to drop a Youtube type video into any of my blog posts. I highly recommend it if you want to include a video in any of your posts. You can get it here.

Video Gallery Plugin: This allows you to create a gallery of an entire Youtube video collection. It does a few other things as well, such as:

• local thumbnail caching (youtube can be slow to display thumbnails)
• random thumbnail in your sidebar
• display an entire video collection as a gallery
• display your favorite videos as a gallery
• display a specific video in your post/page

You can get this cool plugin here.

Video Comments Plugin: Video Comments allows you to post video in your blog and let your users comment on it. A popup window displays the video and commenting area; as a video is viewed the comments associated with a current video time will be displayed, viewers can also see all comments and jump to a specific point in time. The comment area can accept a comment at given point in the video and saves itself in the existing word press database so no additional configuration is needed. All comments are listed in the individual post as a regular comments (with timecode) and can be easily modified or removed by the editor. (You really need to see this one to appreciate it).

As I play around with video more and more, I find it interesting to see what tools are available to make this media more accessible and interesting for everyone. I think all 3 of these plugins can help you create visual interest for your own blog and give your readers a little something extra to appreciate.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2007. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: caching, editor, plugins, video, video on your site, WordPress, Youtube
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I don’t know about you, but that seems to take forever. OneClick is an installer that does all of that for you, and it even comes with a Firefox extension to make things even easier. Right click on a link that points to a plugin, tell it to upload, and bam! Uploaded and ready to go in about 2 seconds flat. It’s just about the coolest plugin ever. I love it. Get it.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2007. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: essential, favorites, OneClick, plugins, widgets, WordPress
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.

First things first, if you are starting a new blog, choose a theme that is widget-compatible. Whether or not you intend to use sidebar widgets, you’ll eventually discover that you want to. So be prepared in advance. Now, on to the list.

Sidebar Widgets

Adds Sidebar Widgets panel under Presentation menu

Category Cloud Widget

Adds a sidebar widget to display the categories as a tag cloud.

Widgetize Anything

Provides a widget interface for any php code.

Enforce www. Preference

Provides 301 redirects to queries with /index.php and enforces your use or non-use of www.

Link Indication
Adds CSS class attributes to external links and optionally to any other link types such as flickr, wikipedia, imdb, etc.

MyAvatars

This plugin allows you to add MyBlogLog.com avatars to WordPress comments.

Sociable

Automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites.

WPVideo

Allows you to insert online videos in your post by providing the video url between the

Link To Me Textbox

This plugin will set up a “link to me textbox” with HTML code in your blog posts and increase your search engine rankings.

Compact Monthly Archive

Displays a compact montlhly archive instead of the default long list. Either display it as a block suitable for the body of a page or in a form compact enough for a sidebar.

Head Meta Description

Insert HTML META description tag: excerpt/content brief for post/Page, description for category, and blog tagline for everything else.

Random Redirect

Allows you to create a link to yourblog.example.com/?random which will redirect someone to a random post on your blog, in a StumbleUpon-like fashion.

Simple Tags

Allows you to create a list of Technorati tags at the bottom of your post by providing a comma separated list of tags between the [tags] tags. You can use it with any blogging tool/method, not just when posting from WordPress itself (doesn’t use custom fields). Supports multiple words within tags. Also allows in-post tagging of words by enclosing them in [tag] tags.

Subscribe To Comments

Allows readers to recieve notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.

WordPress Mobile Edition

Show a mobile view of the post/page if the visitor is on a known mobile device.

What Would Seth Godin Do

Displays a custom welcome message to new visitors

wp-cache

Cache module for those times you experience the Digg effect

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2007. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: favorites, HTML, non-blog site, online videos, php, plugins, search engine, search engine rankings, Seth Godin Do, widgets, WordPress
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.