A great video on SEO given by Google’s own Matt Cutts at this years WordCamp. Definitely a great video to teach both beginners and advanced users SEO techniques that are prevalent in todays world. The video is about an hour long and will provide some great insight for those that are interested in SEO. Enjoy!

Okay, so it’s been awhile since I dropped a knowledge bomb on you fools, and I figure I need to start writing quality content rather than posts on how much alcohol I was able to consume, or how many girls I was able to… well you get the point.  So I am gonna kick off my 2009 with a guide for the seasoned affiliate marketer looking to branch out and add another stream of income to their reservoir.

I have a “bunch” of automated blogs that I just leave on autopilot building themselves 3-4 posts a day using some nifty software (we’ll get to that), and slowly but surely increasing in organic rankings and traffic. One such blog I have done no promotion whatsoever, just some onsite SEO and blast off.  After about 2 months its already getting 150-180 unique’s daily consistently.  While this may be nothing to write home about, it still banks me a dollar a day ya heard. When it comes to online marketing, you should know by now that its a number game, and without the numbers you just wont have the moolah.

Now in terms of monetization I find it best to make sure the blog doesn’t look like a spammy automated blog (duh), so I don’t put ads on the homepage, I just scatter them on the inlay pages and hope that the surfer stays on the site long enough to click. Automated blogs are great for adsense earnings because they do all the work for you once you put the initial effort in. $30/month per blog is not bad either for no promotion. Note: On all of my blogs I make sure to only post 3-4 new posts daily, others have said you can get away with 6-8, but Im not greedy and I want them to look as natural as possible.

Installer Software

WP Mass Installer – One of the best mass installers for WP, just fill out the required fields and your up and running.

BlogSlammer – Recently came across this, purchased it and am loving it. It costs $129 and you can literally setup a blog in 2 minutes FLAT using Blog Creator. Which is great, and really helps when it comes to scaling your blogs. You also get 9000 articles when you buy it which come in handy for your content needs.

Now down to the nitty gritty insides of my wp-content\plugins folder. I’ve compiled a list as well as some of the software I use that make my life pretty easy, and hopefully yours too.

Content Generation / Scraping

Caffeinated Content for WordPress – Instant content. Targeted content. Automatic content. No this one isn’t free boys and girls, but what good things ever are.  $77 for this invaluable plugin that will give your blog a ton of legit content and serve it any way you want it.

WP Drip Feeder – This plugin automatically drips content onto your blog, this one isn’t free either, but more than affordable @ $45. Theoretically you only really need 1 of these, but I’d opt for both since it makes for a more natural looking site.

WP-o-matic – Takes fresh content from RSS feeds.  This one is free so you pretty much have to grab it.

WP VideoTube – If you drive traffic from youtube, or are in a niche that uses video heavily, then you cant go wrong with WP VideoTube. This one goes for $30 – $60 depending on how many keywords you want to target, I got the lite version for $30 and its fine for me, but you may want more functionality.

Content Spinning

Now you have a few options when it comes to spinning your content.

JetSpinner – I recently found out about JetSpinner which is a totally free article spinner that has worked pretty nice for me so far in testing, and for $37 a month you can use their JetSubmitter service to submit all those articles to 641 directories as well as some bonus features for JetSpinner. Not a bad deal at all.

WP Spinner – The end all of article spinning in wordpress.  I have been using this for almost a year and I love it. I believe it is $97, well worth the investment.

Must Have WP Plugins

Google Analytics – This is a freebie and a must have to track activity/statistics.

Google XML Sitemap Generator – . This creates a Google friendly sitemap for your blog, in seconds. It can also make a robots file, which is mega useful for Wordpress MU blogs.

Global Translator - Just because they speak another language doesn’t mean they can’t click our ads.

Platinum SEO Pack – There are few SEO packs that are available, I have used All-in-One for a long time, recently switching over to Platinum’s and I haven’t looked back since, a really sweet plugin that you must have.

StatPress – Way better than Awstats, WP Stats, Google Stats, hell I think Statpress is even better than Mint, which says a lot. This ones free as well, so you cant go wrong.  Statpress is a must have to make your sites better, and to know where your traffic is coming from, as well as which pages are doing better than others.

Privacy Policy - This free plugin keeps you from getting bitch slapped by Google. 99% of blogs/autoblogs, fail to add this simple yet vital plugin to their blogs, thereby disobeying Adsense’s Terms of Service.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade – A must have free plugin for busy marketers. Just a few clicks and your wordpress install is upgraded to the latest version, kinda makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside.

PingCrawler – A really nifty plugin by Eli over @ Bluehatseo, basically it automatically pings other blogs when you make a post, which is really useful for driving traffic to your blogs. Get Linkcurl for WP2.7 blogs.

WP-Affiliate – Automatically setup affiliate links for insertion into your posts on the fly.

Auto Social Poster – This is the first one on this list that isnt free, but thats for a good reason.  This plugin will allow your posts to be submitted to 18 social bookmarking accounts/sites.  You pay for posts.  5000 is $49 their most basic package, and for the guru there is a million for $299.  It really depends on how much you are pushing, but this one is a must have for building traffic & backlinks.

Adsense Deluxe – Obviously you might need some sort of Adsense ads management, and this does the job, better than Adsense Manager.

WP Database backup – A must incase you lose your database.

Redirection – A neat plugin that simply redirects your 404 pages to the page of your choice. *cough* affiliate link *cough*

Wordpress MU – Wordpress administration of all your blogs from one admin panel. Pretty freakin sweet.

There are a few others like akismet, and related posts, but those are so common place you should already have them by now.

Make sure that when your setting up your blogs, you make unique ad units for every blog, otherwise it will look odd that you have the same ads on every site. Go for 4-5 posts per day per blog, there is no need to rush your content creation as the crawlers usually index rather slowly anyway.  You risk being de-indexed if you rush, so you will have invested all your time for nothing.Also make sure to use unique class-c ip’s so your blogs are on different ips. Something I didnt touch base on is cloaking, so I’ll save that for another day, but it shouldn’t be too hard for you to lookup on the web now that you have all of this information.

If there is anything I missed or you guys know of other/better (or worse) plugins/software feel free to post them in the comments below.

So the time has come again where Wordpress decided to revamp their interface, and I must say this time I think it is for the better. The update comes with a much lighter feel to it, with an easier interface for navigation and even some nifty features added in. Be sure to check out a screencast of the new features.

Perhaps the most useful new feature is the customizable dashboard, allowing for you to see vital information about your blog including traffic stats, incoming links, and all the usual stuff you would expect to see on your dashboard. Another new feature that I like is the multi-file upload, combined with the new built-in galleries, makes for any gallery implementation for your posts a breeze. Other notable upgrades include one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, full information text feeds and of course faster load times.

So if you haven’t already upgrade now, and be sure your getting the most out of your wordpress blog.

Another year is upon us and we are all looking to upgrade and update our blogs. So when it comes to wordpress, what plugins will make your blog stand out and which are best?After blogging for over 2 years, and writing a few plugins myself, here is my list of the best of the best wordpress plugins. 15 Top notchwordpress plugins, guaranteed to make your blog if anything, a little nicer than it was before.

Show Top Commenters – A great way to get your readers more enthusiastic and develop more discussions, by displaying their name & number of comments they have left recently to your sidebar.

Akismet – Intelligently blocks spam comments. Checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they are spam or not.

Bad Behavior – prevents spambots from accessing your site by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles from known spambots.

Google XML Sitemaps Generator – creates a sitemap of all articles on your WordPress blog. Helps Google and other search engines index every article you write.

SEO Title Tag – Optimize your wordpress title tags for search engines. Enabling you to edit the title tags of posts, pages, category pages, tag pages etc.

Related Posts – Will show a list of posts related to keywords of your choosing in current posts. A nifty plugin to bring back older posts.

WP-Notable – displays a series of icons below each post allowing your readers to easily submit you to many different social bookmarking (Digg, Reddit, Sphinn, Facebook, Youtube, etc.) and networking sites.

WordPress.com Stats – Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key.

AdSense-Deluxe – is a WordPress plugin offering advanced options for managing the automatic insertion of Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) ads to your WordPress posts.

Global Translator – Translate your blog into multiple languages in a search engine friendly way.

Feedburner Feedsmith – Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while creating a randomized feed for Feedburner to pull from.

InstantUpgrade – A plugin that will upgrade your version of Wordpress to the most recent version (or any other version) with a click of the mouse! If you hate upgrading Wordpress, this plugin is for you.

Gregarious- A social bookmarking plugin that integrates the Share This plugin, the Digg API, and a slick AJAX interface. Gregarious is so easy to setup, it requires no template edits!

404 Notifier – This plugin allows you to see how much of your traffic is getting 404′d and what page(s) they are trying to access. You can retrieve this data via an RSS feed or email.

Manage Multiple Blogs – Otherwise known as MMB, this plugin allows you to manage all your wordpress blogs from one session, eliminating the need for 500 tabs and logging in to each admin panel repetitively. A definite must for any blog owner who is trying to administer more than 5 blogs.