The Amazon affiliate program is one of the best converting programs on the web. People trust Amazon, and they offer truly amazing discounts on thousands upon thousands of products. It really is a pain to set up pages and pages with affiliate links and having to go to Amazon, search products, then create different ads and creatives to place inside posts, and that is why Amazon Affiliate plugins are so handy.  In Affiliate Marketing time is always of the essence, we work hard long hours and anything that saves time and is also efficient at making money is welcome in my book.

Here are the two best Amazon Affiliate plugins for Wordress.

WpZon Amazon Affiliate Plugin - This is a great multi purpose plugin.

It creates complete pages or posts by pulling Amazon products, with ratings, descriptions and actual user reviews. The screenshot below is an example of the post. You can edit or add your own content to the product description. The More Information button and all review links take the visitor back to Amazon with your affiliate link.

WpZon Product Post

Insert small blocks anywhere in posts or pages with star user ratings for any products with a link back to Amazon to read reviews

WpZon Product Reviews Insert

Other Features Of The WPZon Affiliate Plugin

• Create entire sites very quickly
• Fancybox Image Galleries For Products
• Add YouTube videos from post editor
• Plugin admin interface pulls products by keyword or ASIN; Add Your Choices To Queue; Create Many Posts At Once (choice of pending, draft or publish immediately or a set date to publish)
• Has interface in the WordPress Post and Page Editors to create Amazon product posts.
• Sidebar Widgets
• Click Tracking
• SEO Features : Link Cloaking, Auto Integration with All In One SEO plugin, No Follow Amazon links, Auto Bold and more
• Commenters on your WordPress site can also leave their own reviews, with star ratings in comments.
• Can be used with any countries Amazon affiliate program.
• Easily translate product posts to other languages
• Integrates with other plugins, like PHPBay for eBay auction listings.
• Automatic Product Data Updates With Days To Update Set By User
• Excellent support
• Much more, see the video and learn more

Learn More, See The Video of WPZon In Action And Buy The Plugin

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EasyAzon Amazon Affiliate Plugin - Another great plugin for Amazon affiliates that has different uses and generates different ads than WPAzon above.

The EasyAzon Amazon affiliate Plugin creates image adds, text links or small ad blocks anywhere you choose inside pages or posts, the screenshot below is an example of an ad block displayed inside a post.

EasyAzon Affiliate Plugin Ad Block

Pulls products right from inside the post editor. Search with keywords or ASIN and the plugin displays various products to choose, then choose the type of add you want, position (none, center, left or right) and the add will be placed right into the post, as the screenshot below shows.

EasyAzon In Post Editor Product Pull

No more having to go to Amazon and search for products, then create ads, it's all inside the WordPress post editor with this plugin so you can quickly ad creatives into posts or pages. This is a really great plugin, very easy to use AND these ad blocks convert great as well.

LEARN MORE AND BUY EASYAZON PLUGIN

Which Amazon Plugin Is Best?

This really depends on what you want to do, both are different because they have different ads, different functions and uses. I use both and both are a huge time saver. I have found that the reviews generated onsite by WPZon Amazon affiliate plugin are great for conversions because people trust user reviews. The EasyAzon Amason plugin offers a quick way to add ads to any post or page for any product, and these ad blocks convert very well too, they show a link to reviews which is great for shoppers.

The other day I noticed one of my sites suddenly had a ton of new backlinks and when I went to check them out I realized that these were some spammy crap sites that were not only giving me useless links that I DO NOT want, they were actually image links, which meant they were also stealing my hosting bandwidth as well.

Basically what happens is that thieves go over and Right Click on images, select Copy Image Location and then use that link to place the images on their own sites. This means that YOU are hosting your own images on THEIR site, and so your bandwidth is being used.

Also, using the Right Click on images function they can steal your images by selecting Save Image As or Copy Image.

To protect your images on WordPress blogs from theft and protect your precious bandwidth on hosting use the No Right Click Images plugin!

This great plugin is easy to use, just activate and it's done, no settings to play with, all it does is disables the Rick Click MENU from images on your blog.

VERY COOL!!!

In case you guys haven't noticed I have redesigned the blog again and found the most amazing free premium WordPress theme, and it is really the best free premium WordPress theme that is available to date. After scouring for days and looking at hundreds of themes I happened upon the Atahualpa theme and instantly I knew this was the one.

Features

• 200+ options without coding
• Easy header images install/rotate images/customize transperancy and appearance of header images
• Easy logo add and editing
• Left sidebar/Right sidebar/Left and Right Sidebar or No sidebar
• 3 column or 2 column
• Easy customization of colors for the entire site, header, sidebars, text, top menu bars and more
• Style Widgets
• Style Sidebars
• Style Comments
• Style Footer
• Customization of the sidebar widths and layout
• Top Page Menu Navigation with exclude option
• Top Categories Navigation Bar with exclude option
• Fluid of Fixed Width Layout
• Clean display
• Full customization WITHOUT ANY coding all changes are made within an easy to use admin interface
• Users forum
• and much more
• and it's free!!!!

I love this theme, this is truly the best free premium wordpress theme and one of its most incredible features is that you can use the Export/Import option so once you have your settings as you like them, you can import this theme along with all settings to any number of blogs in your arsenal! Brilliant, cuts down on new blog design time by hours!!!! Check it out at Atahualpa Themes by Bytes for All.

Once again the spammers and link hunters are ruining things for the rest of us. This blog has been dofollow since I started it back in 2008, but these days it seems that spammers are getting smarter with their crafty comments and I have had an influx of what I call "drive by" commenters, those that only comment once to get some link juice for their keywords and mostly the "drive by's" leave useless comments.

Frankly, I'm tired of sitting here and trying to differentiate between the genuine comments and those others, so I found a better solution.

I have installed the No Follow Free plugin, which allows me to set the number of comments a person must have in order to get a dofollow link. I set the limit at 8.

So, this means that all my regular readers who have commented more than 8 times, and there are many of you, still have and will have your dofollow links.

All future commenters need to comment 8 times in order for their comment link to become dofollow, and in the meantime it will stay nofollow.

Respective numbers of comments will be displayed next to the commenters name.

I love dofollow, and do not want to change it, but this blog gets a lot of comments, and I am really tired of losing precious time trying to decipher who is a real commenter and who is not, so I feel this is the best compromise for everyone!

The No Follow Free plugin is fabulous, as it allows me to set parameters for making comments dofollow, like number of comments someone must have in order to get a dofollow link, parameters for registered users getting a dofollow link, a blacklist of emails list and also a nifty area where I can add certain words that if placed in the comment will make it nofollow.

Unacceptable Comments That Will Be Deleted

As always I reserve the right to delete any comments that I feel are not adding any value to my blog and all my readers, like..
"Great post" "thanks for this, keep it coming" "What a great read" "Wow, this is great, I'm subscribing right now" "you write great stuff, so glad to be here"...etc etc etc

It is always best for you to leave a useful contribution to any blog that you read and visit, the link juice is secondary to presenting yourself as an intelligent, interested and engaged contributor in the blogosphere, believe me you will get a lot more traffic and attention this way.

On a daily basis I get at least 10 of these types of comments and I usually delete them, as I think most bloggers do.

Good news for those that have been wanting to convert their pages to posts on WordPress blogs, as there is now a free plugin to do just that. Many times bloggers organize their blogs in various ways, and using pages as well as posts is a great way to achieve a good hierarchy and navigation on the site, but, pages on WordPress are not as well optimized as post pages because you cannot set tags or categories and they do not show up feeds or RSS directory displays.

Well now you can convert any pages you have on WordPress with Vice Versa.

This is a great plugin and has several features:

• Convert Pages to Posts
• Convert Posts to Pages
• NOT mass conversion - selection of pages and posts to convert
• Assign a Page or Post a parent or category while converting from one to the other
• Only use it as needed and then deactivate or uninstall the plugin

A blogger I know was hacked today, and it was pretty scary because I went to the blog and some nasty Malware tried to install on my computer, luckily, my PC is like a fortress and precluded the Rogue Spyware (full of rootkits and Trojans) from downloading, but still I spent some time scanning and making sure I was not infected which was annoying to say the least, I HATE HACKERS!!!

My Personal Computer Security Tools
All free and all work together beautifully to really protect my system from all the harmful crap that is found online.

• Spybot Search and Destroy
  
• Avast Anti Virus
• Comodo Firewall

Excellent Malware Removal
These detect and remove very difficult infections

• MalwareBytes
  I use the free version to regularly scan for infections.
• Hitman Pro 3
  Free trial for 30 days, then only $19.95 a month (much cheaper than that useless Norton). Detects and removes rootkits, worms and other very hard to detect infections.
  

Anyway back to WordPress security...

Hacking of blogs happens all the time, and when it does it's a total pain in the you know what, and worse yet if the blogger has no backup. So I did some research and made some big security changes to my blog sites and wanted to share with you some of the WordPress security and hacking prevention tools that I found.

1. Backup your Data

You can really sleep good at night and have no worries if you ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR DATA on a regular basis! Whatever may happen to your blog, there is no better security than having a current backup of all posts, pages, plugins. comments and basically the entire blog, just imagine if you lose everything!

There are two easy ways to do this...

1. Use the WordPress Database Backup Plugin, to automatically create backups to your WordPress database on a schedule you choose, re: daily, weekly, monthly...etc and you can choose to have the backup emailed to you, downloaded to your server or downloaded to your PC. I choose email, it's easy and automated.

I have mine set to daily, some may think this is paranoid, BUT, you never know when you might get hacked or have some loss of data, and since I update my blogs regularly it is much safer to just make sure I always have the most current backup available.

2. Option 2 and one that I do on a regular basis in addition to using the plugin above is to perform a full backup via my hosting cPanel. Every hosting provider should have this and some actually do weekly backups for you, so just check what your host offers. A full backup via cPanel offers a complete backup of all the blogs and sites in your hosting account, hosting home directory, mysql databases and email accounts as well.

2. Lock Out Multiple Login Attempts For Hacking

Login LockDown - This plugin is really great and I just installed it on all my blogs.

Login LockDown records the IP address and time stamp of every failed WordPress admin login attempt. If more than a certain number of attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range. This helps to prevent brute force password discovery that hackers often use.

You can set the number of attempts allowed, lock out time, and other options, really excellent protection.

3. Change Admin User Name

Change Admin User Name - Another useful plugin for WordPress security that bypasses WordPresse's inability to allow administrators to change their username.

Often times when installing WordPress admin is assigned as the username automatically and hackers know this, so with this plugin you can easily change your username to something much harder to detect, such as:

aKD#@$LJ!#$^JGHQTI2356KJSD#@I$%H@#$I%H@#$THNAKSLD@#

If you have admin as your username you should use this plugin to change it immediately.

4. Passwords That Keep Those Scum Hackers Out

Your passwords should look similar to the above user name example, with a super long string, full of all kinds of characters, caps and small letters and numbers AND passwords should be changed on a regular basis, believe me, it is much easier, faster and much less stresful to change passwords than to recover a hacked blog.

5. Only Download Plugins from Known Sources - Thanks to John Sullivan for reminding us in comments that you should not download plugins from unknown sources, plugins are freeware and shareware, which are notorious for carrying nasty viruses, so just be sure the source where you download the plugin is the actual developers page and not a download from some other site or always go to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ to get your plugins.

Get more WordPress security options at 10 Easy Tips To Keep WordPress Secure - this is a good guide, but be careful, a lot of the tips are based on modifying back end files, like .htaccess and if you don't know what you're doing you can mess up your sites configuration, ask you hosting for support, if you use Hostgator they are very helpful with these kinds of issues, as I am sure other hosting companies should be as well. And, whenever modifying any of the WordPress core files in cPanel ALWAYS make sure to make a copy of the original before editing.

If Your Blog Has Been Hacked

If your blog has been hacked, don't panic! Your first call should be to your hosting company, they will be your main resource for clean up, restoration and help. And read the guides below to learn more.

Additional Resources for Security and Hacking

• The best and complete step-by-step guide on how to clean a hacked blog
• FAQ - My Site Was Hacked
• What To Do When the Blog Is Cleaned

If you're goal is to make money online free, then inevitably you realize that you need more than one site, which many of us all ready have. Managing a wide array of websites is difficult and can get pretty crazy, since we are usually working alone in our online business ventures and do not have a team or marketers on hand, or even a secretary.

As I have said several times, I often wish I could clone myself

Because of this reality, it is crucial to work smarter and not harder!

WordPress and Blogging Versus Building Money Sites

WordPress is a great CMS (content management platform), referred to as  blogging software, but it can be used to build any kind of sites, not just those for the traditional purpose of blogging, and that includes making multiple money sites for free.  Traditional blogging is a much more personal endeavor that is mostly about connecting with readers and attending to subscribers. It is a social entity.

A blog can be about information, education, flagship for a particular niche or even just a personal life blog, whatever the topic, most bloggers "care" a lot of their audience versus the money sites where the goal is have them click on Adsense, or to perform whatever action is needed to make money.

While bloggers will make money, you don't have to be a traditional blogger to make money online, in fact the two venues are quite different. Most traditional bloggers want to be famous in their niche, and blogging is essentially a social entity on the web, while real Internet marketers could care less, we just want cash, and in reality, if you want to make money online for free using WordPress is a great option.

And,

WordPress software is an easy and very user-friendly platform to build niche sites quickly and easily for the purpose of making money online. Using WordPress over static website software is a much better alternative, as it is easy to create, update and promote content virally in WordPress than other website software and it is a great alternative to make money online for free.

So,

Since most marketers will have a multitude of money sites, as opposed to bloggers who usually focus on one blog, it is important to be able to build and launch these money sites quickly as time is always an issue and then get on with the all important promotion of those sites.

In this post, I am referring to using WordPress as simply a platform to build numerous money sites quickly  in order to make money online in an efficient and time saving manner, and NOT necessarily for the traditional blogging venue as described above, all though the two can overlap and most of these tips can be used to build traditional blogs quickly as well.

7 Tips to Build and Launch Multiple WordPress Money Blogs Quickly

1. Quickly Adding WordPress Platform to Domains

Use cPanel in your hosting account to add WordPress to your domain. All cPanels have automatic upload either via Fantastico or just named WordPress. Takes 1 minute to upload all the necessary files to begin building your money site. This can also be done manually, but who needs that when it can be done in minutes automatically and correctly, so no files are forgotten.

2. Familiar WordPress Themes

After some experience with WordPress, most everyone has a favorite theme, at least I do. This is the theme that you know, you have played with it, maybe gone into the Editor files and know how to edit the PHP files, and CSS. If you don't I suggest that you find one, or maybe two and learn them well.

This is the theme that is best used for the money sites and to make money online for free, as it will become a breeze to update the site and edit and style it according to specific site needs.

Also, always use professional themes and layouts that are pleasing to the eye and are not broken in some way, where for example Adsense is overlapping onto content, LOOKS REALLY LAME and will not aid you to make more money online.

3. Easy Plugin Install Option for Multiple Sites

As with themes there are standard plugins that we all use and need on all of our WordPress domains.

Some of mine are
All-In-One SEO, WordPress Automatic Database Backup, Google XML Sitemaps (sitemaps for Google), Dagon Design Sitemaps (sitemaps for visitors), Home Page Excerpts, WP-Cache, Similar Posts, Collapsing Categories and Akismet.

Yours maybe different.

To easily manage multiple site plugins, use your cPanel hosting File Manager

You don't have to upload the plugins one by one to each of your money sites WordPress blogs.

Go to your File Manager in cPanel of your hosting and copy the files from an existing site that has the same plugins. You can just copy over the files an existing domain's Plugins folder to another.

Takes just a few minutes. Then activate them in WordPress Admin.

By the way, you can do the same with other standard files, like Robots.txt, Disclaimers and Terms and Privacy Policies. Then just edit the site details and url's from the cPanel file manager.

4. WordPress Admin Setting

Once the theme and plugins are uploaded, I can quickly go through the Settings in Admin Dashboard of WordPress and set it up the same way I always do, when you've done it several times, it's a breeze because you know the interface so well. This includes, setting up sidebar widgets, footer links and other stuff.

5. Content Shortcuts

The content quality level for money sites is not necessarily as important as that for the "blogging" or flagship sites. It really isn't. The focus is to make money and not rivet readers (unless you have a review type site where you really want to pursuade someone to buy a product) the focus is monetization.

And, in order to make that money online and for free you want to target the correct longtails for as many inner pages as possible to get the most possible free search engine traffic to that site, as search traffic buys. If you need to learn more about accurate keyword research, then please visit this guide Step-By-Step Keyword Research.

For websites that you build to make money online you want someone to leave your site using an available form of monetazation, Adsense click, Banner click, or any other type of adds that you have, so Ad placement is crucial.

I am not saying to write crap...but do not worry so much about it. The most crucial aspect of content pages on money niche sites is keyword research because along with WordPress, which is a free software, that search traffic is also free, and so you will be making money online for free.

Find good longtails and write posts about those, it's the best way to get a long term stream of that previous search engine traffic. More details on that here: Higher Rankings with Proper Keyword Reasearch.

Time Saving Keyword Research

Don't over think it.

Use Free SEO Book KW Tool, search the main niche keywords of the site and note all the long tail results.

Then, Google, allintitle:"KW" to see the competition, for those longtails.

Crunch The Numbers:

a. Search numbers can be low for inner pages, as long as some exist.

b. Competition, I go for under 20,000 and 1st page of SERPS does not have more than 3 PR3+ pages (usually longtails have fairly low competition)

It should take less than an hour to get a list of several good longtails to target for content pages.

Then you can start creating some posts that target those longtails, usually 5 pages of inner content are enough to start with as you will want to update on a regular basis.

Content Tips To Manage Multiple Sites

Golden rule for content - Nauseatingly long posts work best!
If you want to make money online for free then you need that search traffic and 800+ word content pages on money sites attract search engines, and allow for appropriate keyword targeting, NOT stuffing, but targeting, as a 800 + word page will naturally mention them without needing to over do it. Also, because these are money sites, you want to have more content than affiliate pages or links, especially with a  new site, so those very long posts really boost favoritism from Google because they add value.

In reality, if you have several money sites writing these kinds of long pages by hand will be extremely time consuming and draining.

Save Time with Quality PLR

Using quality PLR (public label rights articles) that is written well and in good English will save you loads of time. But make sure that you do not just copy them into your sites. Because so many people use PLR, you have to rewrite them to make them unique and original, this is very important, as you do not want build a scraper looking site. You can buy PLR articles and you can also get them for free, just make sure they are quality articles and not a load of crap.

You can rewrite the PLR by hand, or use The Best Spinner, which I highly recommend you all check out because it is an excellent tool, and it now features the ability to post spun articles directly to your WordPress blogs from the tool's dashboard.

Good PLR Resources

Tons of PLR Downloads for All Niches - Excellent resource put together by George at Serradinho Blog.

Free PLR Articles - Excellent resource from Jonathan Scott, lots of niches, and well written content

5000 + Free PLR Packs

All Private Label Content - Some nice free packs

There are tons more sites with good PLR content online, you can also Google your niche + PLR and you will find relevant articles.

6. Quick Google Indexing for Finished Money Sites

Once your site is ready it is crucial to attract the search engines as quickly as possible and get the website indexed, especially by Google. Submit a content page (not home page) or two to Mixx, Jumptags and Stumble. Digg works great too, as long as there is an appropriate category for the niche. Google will always notice your site via those venues.

Every time I do this, my site is indexed within 2 days, all other on-site issues being equal, like proper on-site SEO, clean design and no tech issues.

7. Ongoing Promotion Methods

Then I submit the XML sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, write a couple of articles for it to submit to article directories, especially Ezine Articles, add some more social bookmarks, a few directory links, and let it rest and age for a couple of months before building any more links or doing heavy promotion. In the meantime I keep adding more content regularly.

Using the above methods I can create, design, and launch a new site in about a day or at most two and have unlimited possibilities to make money online for free! The more practice the easier it gets.

Anyone have any additional tips to save time when building their money sites?