Need some advice on wordpress

[deadgoodundies]

Mrs DGU is a well known and respected Journalist who's main area of expertise is within the fashion industry and she want's to start up a blog to post about what the latest fashions are, what's coming out, what to look out for etc. with a view to generate a modest income via direct online advertising and affiliate links.

I've had very little experience with wordpress myself and although we've already decided on the designer for the blog (someone who via a business contact did a very good design for them) I could do with some advice on what plugins we should be using to maximise ease of use in the backend to manage the advertising and affiliate marketing side of things.

She's already got quite a few advertisers already on board for the project when it's finished which is always a plus and also off page advertising for the blog sorted out with some magazines to get the word out (plus of course looking into google adwords to give it a step forward whilst we would work on the link building and SEO as we all know SEO is an ongoing process)

So can anyone recommend any plugins for wordpress that they would use for such a project (we've already looked at all in one SEO plugin for optimising page, titles, descriptions, meta etc.)

 

[Raw Rob]

A related posts plugin is often a good idea. So when someone has finished reading a post, at the bottom it autogenerates a list of posts which are related to help keep people on your site. I use YARP but there are seveal.

Rob

 

[deadgoodundies]

Cheers, i've seen that type of module in action but how accurate is the auto generation? i've seen some that have no relevance to the preceding post but is that down to the author not tagging correctly? and can you override the auto generation or I can just not be so lazy and go to the link you provided and take a look myself but then that means I have to delete all the previous words i've typed and that would be a waste

 

[Raw Rob]

With YARP, there are settings you can adjust. So I set mine up and looked at a cross section of posts to see what it had generated, and adjusted the settings until I was happy. There is no option to manually overide for a particular post. If you tag all your posts you can get it to take the tags into consideration so you might get better results.

Rob

 

[DanHarrison]

Your question is pretty open-ended, and there are many answers to what you're trying to do. It would help to answer some specific questions, as there are many plugins, but different ones have different strengths based on what you're trying to achieve. If you can be more specific, I can try to help.

e.g. with affiliate marketing, what's important to you? masking URLs? easy management of products? using product feeds? what sort of tracking do you need etc.

Dan

 

[deadgoodundies]

Hi,
Yes it's pretty open ended at the moment as im just putting feelers out on behalf of the missus as im not getting involved in the project (otherwise much arguments on look and feel will ensue with the result of a frying pan and a comical Bong!!! sound as it hits my noggin)

The way im looking at it revenue wise would be a plugin that would deal with the direct ad display (rather than affiliate based), have the ability for rotations and also provide us with stats of click thrus so if and when any direct advertisor asks we can provide stats. I used some banner software many moons ago which was called phpmyads at the time but I think has changed name now which was great but overkill for my needs at the time but may be worth a revisit.

Affiliate side of things the site would be content drived so rather than using content units we would use images given to us by the brands inserted into the copy with a call to action for that particular item that the article was based around. So looking at easy insertion of affiliate code into a post with the link cloaked plus be able to record click thrus again.

Main site tracking would be via google analytics as im most familair with that.

of course there is loads that hasn't been thought about yet and I could probably reel off 100 more things given more thought but at this early stage it would be prudent for me to just get the basics and then build up the ideas from there.

 

[DanHarrison]

The way im looking at it revenue wise would be a plugin that would deal with the direct ad display (rather than affiliate based), have the ability for rotations and also provide us with stats of click thrus so if and when any direct advertisor asks we can provide stats. I used some banner software many moons ago which was called phpmyads at the time but I think has changed name now which was great but overkill for my needs at the time but may be worth a revisit.

I suggest http://www.oiopublisher.com/ (paid plugin), but does give lots of control over banner adverts and it has a market place where you can sell ad space.

You might also want to look at http://buysellads.com/ - which provides code to display the adverts (there is a Wordpress plugin too), and then advertises your space on the BuySellAds network too.

Affiliate side of things the site would be content drived so rather than using content units we would use images given to us by the brands inserted into the copy with a call to action for that particular item that the article was based around. So looking at easy insertion of affiliate code into a post with the link cloaked plus be able to record click thrus again.

Most redirection plugins work well for affiliates. I use my own custom affiate tracking code (which will be available to buy later this year). However, GoCodes (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gocodes/) is a good redirection plugin where you mask the affiliate URL with something like:

http://www.mysite.com/go/something-short

Additionally, here are some more plugins I'd recommend:

Contact Form (send email via the website. Very reliable code, just no longer maintained).
http://yoast.com/wordpress/enhanced-wordpress-contact-form/

Google XML Sitemaps (Create a list of every single page so that the search engines can find every page)
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

Ultimate Google Analytics (Very good plugin for customising what GA tracks)
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ultimate-google-analytics/

WP Super Cache (reduces page load times)
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/

Hope that helps
Dan