I discovered a new WordPress plugin called OptinSkin today and wanted to write a quick review giving you my first impressions.

What is OptinSkin?

OptinSkin is a plugin that makes it really simple for you to produce cool looking optin boxes for your blog. There are a few similar plugins around, but they don’t make it as simple as this one does. It also provides some templates to enable people to share your posts via social media.

Do you need OptinSkin?

OptinSkin is a means to an end – it makes it easier to build an email list. If you’re not interested in building an email list, don’t bother with OptinSkin. If you are interested, then read on!

I’m mentioned numerous times that my HTML and CSS skills are very limited, so the thought of producing a cool looking optin box scares me to the point where I’ve been putting it off for months. Up until now I’ve been using the Aweber template as well as PopUp Domination to build my subscriber list. It’s worked ok, but I’ve been looking at the optin boxes that other bloggers had created, and wanted to do something similar.

The OptinSkin plugin makes it easy to build good looking optin boxes.

Using OptinSkin

Once you purchase the plugin, you install it the same way you install any WordPress plugin. When you use it for the first time, you need to register it – that’s simple.

You can then get to work building your own optin boxes.

You have the choice of 18 templates to begin working with. Simply choose one of the  templates and start customising it. You can change the titles and text as well as the fonts and the text size. Don’t like the colour of the sign up button – change it!  You can change a whole stack of the design elements and you have complete control over the colours as well.

It integrates very well with all the major email list providers – I use Aweber and it was as simple as entering my list name into the plugin and OptinSkin does the rest.

It took me around 5 minutes to design my first optin box.

Where does it go?

You’ve got a few options around where the finished optin box goes.

As part of the set-up, you can choose from some standard placements such as below a post, at the top of your posts, below the first paragraph or floated to the right of the second paragraph. Knowing Glenn Allsop (the creator) like I do, he’s tested placement of optin boxes for a while and these would be the ideal locations.

You’ve also got the option to leave these options blank and instead insert the OptinSkin shortcode anywhere you want in your blog.

OptinSkin Review Video

I spent a while tonight recording this video review of OptinSkin. I show you all the main features and also how you can customise all the key parts of the plugin.

If you’re reading this in an RSS Reader, here’s the link to the OptinSkin Review Video.

First Impressions

I like the plugin because it’s made it simple for me to produce good looking optin boxes.

I haven’t started to look at the social sharing options and how I could combine that in the optin box, but that opens up some interesting possibilities.

Overall, I think this plugin is good value for money.

Visit the OptinSkin website for more information. They also offer a 60 money back guarantee, so if it doesn’t work for you, return it.

A while ago I discovered a great Firefox plugin called SEOQuake. I wrote an article about how to use SEO Quake to find high pagerank sites and it’s become one of the most popular articles on my site.

But lately, I’ve been having some trouble with SEOQuake.

It still does the basics well – it’ll show you a site’s pagerank, links to the domain etc. But it’s stopped sorting by pagerank.

One of the ways I like to use SEOQuake is outlined in my old blog post. I like to search in Google for sites on a topic (or pages in YouTube), and then sort the results by pagerank so I’m able to see all the high pagerank sites. I can then click on each link and leave a comment.

Lately, SEOQuake has stopped sorting by pagerank and I’ve noticed more people landing on my site because they’ve found my old article, and they’re looking for answers.

I sent an email off to the SEOQuake folks, and here’s their reply:

This is a known issue, due to a recent change Google has made in its results display pages.  We are working on a fix, and will have it out in the near future as an update.

It seems to be a problem with the way Google displays its results. Hopefully there’s a fix and an update soon, because this is one of the main features I love about SEOQuake.

I’ll keep you posted on when an update occurs. In the meantime, if you know of any other plugins that enable us to search by pagerank, leave a comment and let me know.

UPDATE : 23 December 2011. There’s an updated version of SeoQuake available and the problem is fixed! We can search by pagerank again.

photo credit: aussiegall

This is a review of the Headway theme 3.0 – due to be released on November 25th 2011.  Headway 3.0 is a complete change to the Headway theme. The guys had already produced an innovative WordPress theme, now they’ve completely increased the functionality and the value this theme provides.

This blog uses Headway theme and I’ve been using it since it was released in 2009. I’ve mentioned in previous posts how easy Headway is to use, and how it gives you a lot of extra options.

As an example, I used to use one of the WordPress SEO plugins to help customise my post SEO. Once I started using Headway I could stop using the plugin because Headway gave me all those options.

The thing I like most about Headway theme is how easy it is to customise the look of my site. I’ve set up my own templates for blog posts, the main page and other pages. I’m not stuck with a standard look (like you are with other templates).

I’ve created pages that look completely different to other ones. For example if you subscribe to my email list, you’ll be taken to a download page. That page doesn’t have a sidebar so it looks different to the other pages. Was this hard to do? No. I simply took my standard template, removed the sidebar and extended the width of the content leaf.

So, what’s changing in Headway Theme 3.0?

I’ve been using the Beta version of Headway Theme 3.0 for the past month on a test site. Whilst I’m still getting used to it, it’s a huge step forward over version 2.0 (and I’m very happy with Headway 2.0!).

The main change is that they’ve moved to a grid system. In the past Headway has used content ‘leafs’. These leafs could be positioned on your page and would display text, pictures etc. With version 2.0, Headway introduced columns. This enabled you to position your leafs within a column structure – this was great and made positioning of leafs a lot better.

With Headway Theme 3.0, they’re introducing a grid system. This is so easy to use, and makes designing a site so easy.

With the Headway grid system, you simply click and draw your box on the grid, and then select the type of box you want – is it a header or navigation bar? Perhaps it’s content or a picture? It’s so simple to quickly position a bunch of boxes on your page.

Here’s a screenshot of the grid system found in Headway theme 3.0.

Headway Theme 3.0 showing the grid layout system

And once you’ve got that page looking the way you want it to, you can easily change the look of it. What fonts do you want to use? What about the font size? Header fonts and sizes? There’s so much that can easily be changed.

Make each page different in Headway 3.0

Sometimes you want your pages to look different. You may want a home page that’s got a lot of content summaries on it with the intention that readers click through to read full articles. That page will probably look different to your About page.

And maybe you want to produce a squeeze page. You probably don’t want a sidebar on that page, or any distracting navigation options. You probably just want a page full of text and images. It’s easy in Headway. Tick a couple of boxes to remove the header and navigation and the rest is easy.

How about the ability to customise individual blog posts? I haven’t looked deeply into this but it looks like a winner. You’ve probably got a few blog posts that get a lot of traffic. Maybe you could add some extra content boxes to this individual blog article – perhaps an affiliate offer or an extra sign up box. You can do this at the individual article level in Headway 3.0.

And of course there are the Headway ‘hooks’. These enable you to insert content in various locations throughout your pages. I’ve got my financial planning website and need to put a disclaimer under every article. I could include it when I write the article, but then it forms part of the article text. Instead, I include it as a hook. A while back the disclaimer needed to change. Instead of having to manually edit each article (over 50!) I simply changed the hook. It was a one minute job and instantly updated the disclaimer throughout my site.

Here’s a short video from the Headway developers showing some of the features of Headway Theme 3.0.

Headway Theme 3.0 Pricing

Headway Theme 3.0 is released on the 25th November. But you’ll need to buy it before then. Here’s why.

Up to now, Headway has operated on a once-only fee to purchase the theme. There’s a Personal option and a Developer’s option, but either way, there’s a one-off cost to purchase the theme. Once you’ve got your licence, you get unlimited support and access to their forums (which rock!), and upgrades for life.

Once Headway 3.0 is released, the pricing changes. To upgrade to a Developer’s licence will cost more, and they’re moving to an annual renewal fee to cover access to upgrades and support. The way I understand this, is that if you buy after the 25th and don’t pay the annual fee when it falls due, you won’t get any upgraded versions and won’t get any support.

So, if you’ve sitting on the fence about buying Headway theme, it’s time to make a decision.

If you purchase before Headway 3.0 is released on the 25th, you’ll be able to buy it under the ‘old’ pricing structure – a once only fee and access to upgrades and support for life. If you buy it on or after the 25th, you’ll be paying an yearly fee if you want upgrades (and you will want them!).

I’ve been very happy with Headway. I’ve learnt a lot about customising it with only a limited knowledge of CSS and HTML but even that’s not necessary to build a good looking site. The drag and drop concept allows you to build good looking sites without any programming knowledge.

Head over to the Headway site today and buy your copy before the 25th and beat the price rise.

If you have any questions, leave a comment below and I’ll answer them.

We all want more comments on our blogs but how do you encourage people to leave comments? I’ve recently started using the CommentLuv Premium plugin in my blog. I’ve seen it used on other blogs and jumped at the chance to get a copy during it’s recent 7 day pre-launch. I’ve now had a chance to use it so I’ll tell you what I think of it in this CommentLuv Premium review.

What Is CommentLuv Premium?

You may have seen the CommentLuv plugin on some sites over the past few years. It was a plugin that gave the commenter a link back to their most recent blog post. When you entered your blog’s URL as part of leaving a comment, the plugin would retrieve your RSS feed and place a link back to your most recent post, with the post title as the anchor text.

CommentLuv Premium takes it to the next level, and adds some features from the other plugins that the CommentLuv creators have made. When you purchase CommentLuv Premium, you get access to four plugins:

1. CommentLuv Premium
2. Twitterlink
3. GASP
4. Keyword Names

We’ll look at each one in more detail.

CommentLuv Premium – How it works

When you’ve installed the plugin, there’s a comprehensive dashboard that enables you to tweak it the way you want it.

You have the choice to use it on Posts, Pages, or both. At the moment I’ve only got it set up on my Posts, as I don’t have comments on Pages (easy to do this using the Headway Theme!).

You also have a couple of CommentLuv badges to use, and you can make them clickable with your affiliate link (you can see the example in the comments section below).

The rest of the options deal with the messages and enticements that people receive. It can get a bit complicated, but I’ll try and simplify it for this CommentLuv Premium review.

The free CommentLuv plugin shows the most recent blog post someone has made. The CommentLuv Premium plugin can be set up to give them 10 blog posts to chose from (or some more options if you’re a CommentLuv Premium owner).

It can be set up to automatically give new posters the choice of their last ten posts, or you can structure it that they need to have a certain number of approved posts before they get access to their last ten posts.

On Blogger Business Plan, I’ve got it set up so that when you have three approved comments, you’ll then get access to your last ten posts for every subsequent comment you leave. I’ve set it up like this because I want to reward people who keep visiting and commenting on my blog. If you’re new here, I wrote this post last week on how to set up a blog commenting system using Google Reader – you should read it and bookmark my blog!

So, if you’ve never left a comment here, CommentLuv will automatically post a link to your latest blog post when you leave a comment. Go ahead – try it. And as you’re doing it, you should see a message that tells you that you’ll get 10 posts to choose from once you’ve got three approved comments.

I can change these settings. If I wanted to make you have 10 approved comments before you get access to your last ten posts, that’s easy to change from the dashboard. If I wanted to change the text you see about how many blog posts you need to get approved, that’s also easy to change.

The next option is about whether those links are DoFollow links or not. Before you get the required number of approved comments, the links aren’t DoFollow. But once the 3 approved comments are in place, you can tick a box so all subsequent links are DoFollow links.

Get social with CommentLuv Premium

The next set of options are all about social networks. As a further enticement, you can give people another option to get ten recent posts to choose from when they leave a comment. If they +1 the post in Google, Re-Tweet it or ‘Like’ it on Facebook, this can also give them access to their last ten blog posts. This will over-ride the need to have a certain number of blog posts approved.

Once again, you can set this up so the links can be DoFollow or not. You can also customise the text around this area on the comment form. You can see this on my comments section. Go ahead – use these social enticements to see how they work and get ten posts to choose from in the process.

One of the other things I like about the social enticements is that if someone Tweets about your post, the tweet will include your Twitter username, and they will also get asked whether they want to start following you on Twitter.  This is a great bonus as people in their Twitter stream will see their tweet and possibly click on your name within that tweet to start following you.

The benefits of being a CommentLuv Premium owner

There are some extra benefits for those who own the plugin.

One is that ability to set up an ‘info box’ that tells people more about who you are and what you blog about. When you comment on someone else’s blog, people can hover their mouse over the link to your last blog post, and the info box will appear on the page. This box shows a picture of you, has a bit about you, and also shows links to more posts.

You have some choice in what displays here. You can show your five most recent posts, some of your favourite’s, or a mixture.

The ‘Favourites’ section is interesting. It allows you to pick five posts or pages from your site that will display in the info box. I’ve added my ‘About’ and ‘Subscribe’ pages as well as three other blog posts that I want to promote.

The plugin will also show some recent posts that you’ve commented on.

The idea of the Info Box is great – it’s a good way for people to find out more about you, and gives people more options of content to click on.

TwitterLink

TwitterLink is a separate plugin which is included in CommentLuv Premium. It’s quite simple – it allows people to include their Twitter username which will then appear as a clickable link on their comment. This is a great way to encourage people to follow each other on Twitter.

G.A.S.P.

No-one likes spam and one of the problems with the free CommentLuv plugin was that it seemed to attract spammers. It was simple to search for CommentLuv powered blogs and leave spammy comments in order to get a backlink with anchor text that in some cases was a DoFollow link.

The GASP plugin was built to counteract that. I’ve been using this plugin and had no problem with spam.

You’ll see in my comments section I’ve got the tick box that says ‘Confirm you are NOT a spammer’. You can change this text if you prefer to make it say something else.

CommentLuv also includes a hidden email field that can only be seen by spam bots. They’ll see this field and enter an email address. The plugin will then know that a spam bot has entered the comment, not a real person.

It’s simple, but it seems to work.

Keyword Names and CommentLuv

The final plugin is the Keyword Name plugin. This is an improvement from the KeywordLuv plugin.

It allows people to put keywords after their name when they comment.

You can adjust the rules around this – you nominate how many comments they need to have approved before this option is made available, how many keywords they can use, and whether they’re NoFollow or DoFollow links.

It’s very simple to set up, and is an additional incentive for people to comment – they get a backlink with pertinent anchor text.

CommentLuvPremium Review – Summary

I’ve found CommentLuv Premium to be very easy to use. I’ve noticed they’ve put out several updates over the past few weeks – always a good sign that they’re listening to feedback and trying to improve. I had to lodge a support ticket and they responded within 12 hours with a solution.

I’m using the plugin because I want to encourage more comments on my blog. I want people to feel that they’re getting something a bit more special than the usual backlink to their site. When you look over the comments section and see the latest blog post names, you may see something you like and click through. You’re probably more likely to do that when you can see the anchor text that CommentLuv provides.

It’s not for everyone. It works on blogs like this one, because most of the people who read it own blogs. They understand the benefits of links back to their own blogs and are more likely to comment.

I read one article from someone who uses this plugin on a blog in a completely different niche. Very few of their readers actually had web sites, so the plugin became more confusing to those commentators.

My advice is to think about your target market. If they have blogs and would like to get meaningful backlinks, then CommentLuv Premium will probably suit.

Hope you learnt a lot from the CommentLuv Premium review. The plugin is currently in pre-launch stage – you can register at the site to get access to it in a few days. And don’t forget to leave a comment below and see how it works!

In this tutorial I’ll show you how easy it is to use the Headway WordPress theme to create new pages that are hidden from the usual site navigation.

In WordPress, when you create a new page, it’s automatically added to your navigation menu.  This is fine sometimes, but there are also occasions where you don’t want those pages in your navigation bar. For example, on this site I’ve created a page called ‘Affiliate Disclosure‘ which discloses the fact that some of the links in my blog are affiliate links. Now, I don’t want this page title appearing in my main navigation bar – I want to limit the pages that appear there. Instead, I’ve placed a link to it in my footer – this appears on every page.

In this example, the page is excluded from the navigation bar, but links to the page still appear on my blog.

On other occasions you may want to create a page that’s completely hidden. I’ve done that on this site with a couple of pages. When you subscribe to my newsletter and enter your email details, you’re taken to a page on my blog that tells you what to expect next. Once you’ve confirmed your subscription, you’re directed to another hidden page that contains the e-book download.  I created these pages the same way that I created the affiliate disclosure page.

How Do You Hide A Page In WordPress?

I’ve used a few different themes, and in a lot of them it’s a pain to hide a page.  They seem to work on the assumption that every page you create needs to appear in the navigation bar and don’t give you an option to hide them.

I’ve used Headway theme for a couple of years now, and it’s so easy to hide a page using Headway.  Here’s how to do it.

Step 1 – Create your page as usual. In WordPress, create a new page and add your content as usual.

Step 2 – No Index and No Follow the page. On the ‘New Page’ screen, towards the bottom, Headway gives you some options.

I tend to tick all three boxes although you don’t need to.

The important one to tick is the first box – ‘noindex this page’.

What this box does is to tell Headway to exclude this page from your blog sitemap. It also adds the noindex tag to the page so Google’s robots don’t crawl the page and don’t index it.

If you didn’t tick this box, then Google would index the page (it’d find it via the sitemap). Once the site was indexed, people could find it by doing a Google search. So if you’ve created a great product and set up a hidden page for it to be downloaded from, people could find that page by searching Google, instead of paying for the product.

So, as a general rule of thumb, any page you want hidden needs to be hidden not just from your navigation, but also from Google and this box does that.

Step 3 – Hide the page from the navigation bar.

On the right hand side toolbar options when you’re creating a new page is a box called ‘Navigation’.

This one is pretty self-explanatory. The screen shot on the left shows the default option – Show In Navigation. This means that the new page will appear in your navigation bar.

Because we want to hide this particular page, we select the ‘Hide From Navigation’ box. When the page is saved and live on your blog, the page exists, but it won’t appear anywhere in your navigation bar.

If you change your mind in the future, you can select the other box instead and it’ll appear in your navigation menu.

Step 4 – Make a note of the new URL.

You’ll need to know the URL of the page, so you can link to it in the future.  In Headway you’re able to change the page name to whatever you want. Why would you do this?  Let’s assume you’ve set up a page where people can download your new ebook. You call the page ‘Download’. Some people will come to your site and try random URL’s to find the page. And can you guess how common it is for people to use ‘Download’ as the name of their download page? I tend to call it something completely random like ‘lfoeio490fndsw’ so no-one can guess it. Again, this is very easy to do within Headway.

Setting up e-book delivery

I recently helped a friend set up his blog so people could purchase his e-book and download it from his site.  The first step was to set up some hidden pages using this process. The next step was to link these pages together with PayPal.

In my next article I’ll explain how I set this up for him and how easy it is to do within Headway.

Bring The Fresh which looks at ways to build  niche sites to sell affiliate products.

Bring The Fresh Overview

Most of the Bring The Fresh content is delivered by video. There are two elements to the product – one is the video training, and the other is the Member Forum.

Essentially the product trains you to build websites that target specific products and shows you how to get those websites ranking well in Google and other search engines. Through your website you sell affiliate products from places like ClickBank and gain a percentage of those sales.

Bring The Fresh Review – Video Training

The Bring The Fresh members area contains all the video training, and a PDF file called the Fast Start Guide.  I found this area a little confusing at first, because there was no clear direction to take with the training. They tell you to download the Fast Start Guide first to gain a better understanding of the Bring The Fresh system and this does provide a good overview of the process, however it’s still confusing to work out which set of videos to watch first.

Once you’ve read through the Fast Start Guide the first set of videos to watch are the Fast Start Videos. These videos show you how to do your keyword research and select suitable products and also show you how to set up a WordPress site optimised for SEO purposes. In addition, there are two other videos showing their concept known as Launch Jacking.

There is another set of videos called the Core Interviews.  In these interviews Mike and Kelly talk about setting up their websites, provide some basic philosophies on Internet marketing and talk a bit about some of the mental aspects of Internet marketing.

In the Behind The Scenes section Mike and Kelly both share some of the stories behind the Rich Jerk website (Kelly) and also Mike’s past internet businesses. I haven’t finished watching these videos but I have found it interesting so far to learn a bit more to learn of the history behind both Mike and Kelly.

There is an additional set of videos called the One Article To Rule Them All Bonus. There are three videos in this section, where Mike shows you how he writes an article and then spins it to submit it to place such as Unique Article Wizard and Link Juicer.

Bring The Fresh Review – The Member Forum

I mentioned there is also a member’s forum for Bring The Fresh.  Unlike some membership programs, this forum is reasonably active, and there are a number of good conversations going on at any one time. It’s a good place to ask questions about the program, as well as other Internet marketing questions that people have.

The people who use the forum are all very friendly and helpful and it’s a pleasing aspect of the Bring The Fresh programme that people are willing to help each other.

Bring The Fresh Review – The Process

The Bring The Fresh process is is all about finding products that you can sell, and setting up a website with the domain name closely related to the product name. Having the product name within the domain name makes it easier for your site to be found within Google.

Once the site is set up, Mike and Kelly suggest ways that you can obtain back links to your site to help it rate better.

They also focus on a concept they call ‘Launch Jacking‘. This involves setting up sites to capitalise on upcoming product launches. So if you new that a product called ‘Speed Guitar’ was being released in a month’s time, you’d create a site called SpeedGuitarReview.com, add a few pages of content to it and then create a lot of backlinks to it to get it ranking well. When the product is released, you hope to be ranking well in Google search terms for people who are looking to buy the product.

Some of the BTF members have had some very good results from launch jacking. In this Bring The Fresh review I won’t go into much more detail about Launch Jacking, but I am studying the concept a bit more to see if it could become a sustainable part of my internet marketing process.

The Good

There are a number of good points to Bring The Fresh.

• For a beginner, it provides a good overview of how to do your niche research and build a site.
• They have some good ideas around getting backlinks and making those backlinks more effective.
• From what I’ve seen so far, I believe it would be possible to follow the the Bring The Fresh process and begin to make some money. I’m still creating my first site that I’ve built around their methods, so I can’t claim to have made any money yet.

The Not So Good

There are a few things that I’m not so excited about.

• As I mentioned earlier, it is a bit hard for a new user to work out what videos to watch first.
• There is a lot of video on the site, and they needed to edit it. Whilst there’s some great content, I’ve found myself watching 40 minutes of video to get 20 minutes of ideas. I guess it depends on how you like to learn things – I don’t mind looking over the shoulder of someone while they’re doing something, but I don’t want to have to see all the boring bits.
• I’d prefer more pdf’s to download. Apart from the Fast Start Guide there isn’t much else that’s written. I’d love to see more notes giving a summary of the details in the videos.
• In one of the videos they talk about buying domain names that feature the brand name i.e. ipodtouch etc. This is not a great idea as you’re likely to face legal action from the product owner. They seem to have clarified this in the forum, but they should update the video to reflect this.
• It looks a lot like Google Sniper. The Google Sniper product is very similar to Bring The Fresh, the main difference being that BTF also involves backlinking.
• Also, they don’t talk about list building as a strategy. The Bring The Fresh model is built around creating a site, getting traffic to that site and then getting that traffic to click through to a product via your affiliate link. This is ok in the short term, but I personally believe there’s more value in getting them to sign up for your email list as part of the process of sending them to the affiliate web site. This way you’re building up a list of customers for future sales. At the time of preparing this Bring The Fresh Review they have begun talking about building a list on the forums, but as far as I can see the training hasn’t changed.

None of the points I’ve raised here are big issues. I raise them because I want to be honest so if you buy this product you know what you’re getting.

Extra Bring The Fresh

There’s an extra add-on to the Bring The Fresh product called Full Disclosure. For an extra $67 per month for a six-month term, you receive access to extra videos and a special forum area.

Full Disclosure is not necessary to implement the BTF methods, and is something that you can upgrade to at any point in the future. I’m not a Full Disclosure member so I can’t talk any more about it in this Bring The Fresh review.

The Verdict

I’ll provide some more updates when I’ve had a chance to view more of the videos. For now I’ll say that Bring The Fresh does provide good value for money for most people.

Whilst my main focus is on blogging and consulting, there is enough information in this course to help me with some aspects of improving my SEO and getting more traffic to my site. It’s also inspired me to start a niche site using their methods.

Some of the videos are too long and need to be edited, but there are some great ideas in there that you can implement in your web site.

I’m wary of blindly following one method only. With any kind of training like this approach it with an open mind, and use the bits that work for you.

It’s sold through ClickBank, so you’ve got the security of their refund policy. If you buy it and decide it’s not for you, you can get your money back.

Take a look at the Bring The Fresh website and watch the videos they have on the front page. You’ll get some great ideas from watching the free video – that’s a good indicator of what’s inside.

Leave your comments below. Have you used Bring The Fresh or Google Sniper? What do you think of this concept? What questions do you have that I didn’t cover in this Bring The Fresh Review?

I’ve been using Market Samurai for a while now and have found it very helpful in doing keyword research and assessing the viability of targeting particular keywords or phrases.  Over the past few days I’ve been digging deeper into the product and have discovered the Monetization module.

The Market Samurai Monetization module allows you to search for products in Amazon, ClickBank and Commission Junction that are related to your keyword. Market Samurai searches through the product database and finds suitable products for you to recommend. Because you’ve already entered your affiliate account details into the program, it’ll generate links to the products that already contain your affiliate code.

Once you’ve selected the product (or products) you’re then taken to a page where you’re able to create the article / sidebar widget or banner. I usually use it to create articles.

You’re able to drag and drop information from the product web page that has been imported into Market Samurai.  It’s very easy to set up a basic review article using the information that’s been brought across.  I usually only use it to review products I’m familiar with, so I’ll always add my own text and insights.

Once you’re done, you’re able to publish the finished product to your blog.  I usually publish it as a draft so I can do any further formatting within WordPress. I also prefer to write articles in advance and schedule them for the future.

I apologise to those of you who subscribe via RSS who may have seen an article get posted to this blog in error yesterday – it was me playing around with Market Samurai. I forget to change the details of the blog it was posting to and it went here instead of a music site I own. Sorry!

I’ve prepared a short video showing how easy it is to use the Market Samurai Monetization Module.

There's a lot more to Market Samurai than just a keyword research tool - I'm finding it very useful for different purposes across a few of my websites.

You can download a demo version of Market Samurai at their website. Have a look at it and see how valuable it is.

Please leave a comment below – do you think this is a useful product? Would you have a use for it?

In September I was interviewed by Srini from BlogCastFM. It was a lot of fun to do and I learnt a lot from the experience.  Well, this week sees the launch of their new project – BlogCastFM Premium.

What is BlogCastFM Premium?

For a while now Srini and Sid have been interviewing a range of bloggers and internet marketers on their podcast. They usually release one or two interviews a week which are freely available via their blog or iTunes.

With BlogCastFM Premium they’ve dramatically improved the quality and content.

Every week, they’ll add three interviews to the members area – that’s 12 interviews a month.

In addition to the interviews, you’ll also be able to download an action worksheet and a mindmap. The mindmap will give a summary of the main points of the interview and the action worksheet will give you some action steps to actually do something.

As well as the interview material they are also giving you access to their BlogCastFM Green Room – an online forum where you can interact with other like-minded people.

I’ve been having a look at the website and already they’ve got great content featuring Yaro Starak, Michael Martine from Remarkablogger, Adam Baker from ManVsDebt and Dave Navarro as well as a few others. I’ve been listening to the Yaro interview and using the mind map and I’ve generated a few good ideas for my blogs already.

You can see from the screenshot on the left some of the page featuring the Yaro interview.

You can see the summary of the topics they cover, and the links to download the interview and worksheet.

I’ve cropped the photo – you can’t see the additional links to the mindmap.

Also, below each download section they include a bunch of links to people, blogs or products mentioned in the interview.

What I Like About BlogCastFM Premium

I can see some great uses for the Premium material.

Firstly, I listen to their podcasts usually when I’m in the car driving to or from work. I learn a lot from hearing the different interviews, but I find that sometimes I forget things because I can’t take notes.  Being able to download mindmaps and action sheets for each interview makes it a bit easier to get more value from the interviews and to make sure I don’t forget some of the important bits.

Also, there’s a lot of detail in the notes on each interview. I find this really useful for when I’m trying to find information or learn about something new. If you don’t have time to listed (or re-listen) to an interview, just look at the mind-map instead. If you’ve forgotten something, the was said, refer to the action worksheet or the mindmap to jolt your memory.

I’ve felt for a while that Srini and Sid were giving away a lot of valuable content through the free podcasts. BlogCastFM Premium takes it to a new level. Instead of just charging for the interviews they’re also including tools that will help you implement some of the concepts and strategies that you learn.

Find Out More

For the next few days the guys are offering introductory pricing for the premium podcast. You can find out more at the BlogCastFM Premium website.

There’s also a couple of other ways to find out more.

• You can access a free sample here.
• The guys are running a free webinar on Thursday November the 18th titled “How I Grew a Blog to 20K Pages Views in 60 Days – My Secret That’s More Important Than Content”.  You can register here for the webinar.

I don’t promote a lot of products on this blog, and I’ll only promote things I believe in. I think this is a good service that can help a lot of people take their blogging to another level.  Check it out before the low pricing is finished.

I’ve been using the Headway WordPress Theme for the past year on a couple of my blogs and I love it. The Headway guys are releasing version 2 soon. The Beta version has been available to those of us with developers licenses for the past month. I’ve been using it on one blog and I’m very excited by the new features it provides.

One of the cool things about the Headway theme has been watching the Headway community grow over the past year. One of the benefits of this is that there’s a sizeable pool of people who can beta test the new versions.  The current beta version of Headway has been around for the past month and has gone through a few updates in that time. Whilst the beta version has probably been in existence for longer than the Headway developers intended, the longer beta testing time should ensure that there are less bugs in the new version once it is released.

Another exciting thing to be aware of is that the Headway guys are calling this new version ‘Version 2′. Rather than just see it as a continuation of the existing version 1, they see it as a significant enhancement to the Headway theme and have chosen to call at version 2.

Here’s a rundown of some of the new features to be found in Headway theme version 2:

New Headway templates. one of the criticisms of Headway in the past, has been that it is difficult to set up if you’re using it for the first time. This changes with the new version. When you’re setting up the theme for the first time, it allows you to choose from a number of predefined templates i.e. single column, two column etc. In addition, you can upload your logo as part of this process and Headway will base the colours of the new templates on the colours in your existing logo. This makes it very easy to get a good looking site up and running in no time.

Introducing Headway Columns. In the past, some people have found it difficult to align their leaves properly. in this new version of Headway there is an option to set up your pages based on a number of columns. For example, you may want to set up a blog page with a left and right sidebar as well as a middle content area. To do this now, you would use the visual editor to set up a three column page and you would resize the outside columns to the correct width of your sidebars. Adding leaf is now becomes really simple, as you drag the leaf into the column where you want it to be displayed.

Extra Leaf Containers. Another interesting feature of the new version of Headway is the ability to add a top and /or bottom leaf container to your pages. you may want to add a line of advertising to the top page of your blog. you can simply add a top leaf container to your page and add a HTML leaf to this container to insert the code for the ads.

Search Engine Results Preview. This new feature shows up when you are writing a new posts or adding a new page. in the SEO section below the post, Headway will provide a preview of how the article could appear in the Google search engine results. This gives you a good idea of how the title and description will appear.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the changes to the Headway theme. There are a bunch of other changes and enhancements that will make this WordPress theme even better.

At this point there is no definite release date of this new version of Headway – I hope it will be released later this month. Now, I’m happy using the beta version on one site and getting used to the new features.

I understand that once new release is out, the price of Headway will be increasing. Personally, I think it’s a bargain at the current price. There are two options — a personal option and a developer option. Have a look at the Headway site to see which option best suits your needs. When you buy Headway, not only do you gain access to the excellent forums and support, but you’ll also receive lifetime upgrades.  So, buy it now and beat the price rise.

Over the next few months, I’ll be writing a number of Headway tutorials and producing some videos to show you more of how I’m using this excellent WordPress theme.

A few months ago I had some problems with Internet Explorer on my laptop so I started using Firefox as my browser. Whilst it was a bit of a learning curve, I discovered there were some excellent plugins that I could use with it to help with my internet marketing.

In today’s article I want to show you how I use the SEO Quake plugin for Firefox, along with Google’s advanced search to find websites with high page rank that I can comment on.

Firstly, head on over to the SEO Quake website and download the plugin. You’ll need to restart Firefox to get it to work.

Open up google, and click on the ‘Advanced Search’ text.

This will open up the Advanced Search screen which provides you with a lot of additional options.

For the purpose of this article, we’ll be searching within YouTube to find sites with high page rank that you can comment on.

Comments on You Tube channel pages link back to your You Tube channel, and provide you with backlinks.

Once you get the hang of advanced search and SEO Quake, you’ll discover how to use it to find blogs or forums in your niche that will allow you to leave comments and backlinks to your site.

Google Advanced Search

Let’s assume we’re in the ‘guitar lessons’ niche and want to find some You Tube channels we can comment on to provide links back to our You Tube channel.

Within Advanced Search, look at the section that says ‘find web pages that have… and go to the line that says ‘all these words’. Enter the phrase ‘guitar lessons’.

Below that line, where it says ‘this exact wording or phrase’, enter the words ‘channel comments’.

Further down the page, change the Results per page box to 100.

Below that it says ‘Search within a site or domain’. Enter YouTube.com here to restrict your search to YouTube only.

Once this is all done, click on the Advanced Search button and wait.

You’ll now see a list of 100 pages from YouTube that relate to Guitar Lessons. Here’s where SEO Quake becomes useful.

Once the page has loaded, click on the ‘Request Parameters’ button on the SEO Quake toolbar. This tells it to get the desired information for the 100 pages that have loaded in the search result. The information you want is the pagerank of each site.

Scroll to the bottom of the page to make sure it’s finished loaded the PR information for each of the 100 sites. Go back to the top of the page. Below the ‘Request Parameters’ button is a PR icon with up and down arrows beside it. Click on the arrow pointing down – this will re-order the page results with the highest PR sites being shown first and the lowest at the bottom.

You now have a list of 100 You Tube channels that allow comments. Find the ones with the highest PR and leave meaningful comments that link back to your channel page. Don’t spam and don’t leave stupid comments – make the internet a better place for your comment!

Once you’ve done this a few times, go back to advanced search and experiment. Search for blogs in your niche that allow comments and use SEO Quake to sort them by page rank.

Remember, page rank applies page-by-page to a website, so a website may have a PR of 5 on the home page, but it’s internal pages will probably have lower PR. Always check the PR of the page you’re leaving a comment on – SEO Quake makes this so easy to do.

Do you use SEO Quake already, or did you realise google’s Advanced Search gave you so many options?

Leave a comment below and let me know what you think of this article. If you already use SEO Quake, what other uses have you found for it?

UPDATE : 7 December 2011. I’ve been having problems sorting the search results by pagerank using SEOQuake. This post has all the details and the response I received from the folks at SEOQuake.

23 December – problem fixed. You can now sort by pagerank again.