Category Archives: Reviews

reviews of tools for adsense, ypn, wordpress, blogging

Make Money with Free Magazines

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I've been a member of the TradePub partner program for several years now. I thought it's about time for me to share my thoughts on the program. Let me begin by telling you that TradePub offers free trade publication subscriptions to your readers. You get pay for each qualified subscription. How can you go wrong with that? Your readers get free magazines and you get paid for it!

Here's the catch. The magazines are very specialized (ie – engineering, pharmaceuticals, information technology, etc). Go to my free magazines site to see for yourself. The magazines doesn't have mass appeal and you have to have the right web audience to make this work. In addition, I should stress that you only get paid for qualified subscriptions. Each magazine publisher has their own qualification criteria. For instance, if you groom dogs for a living, you will not qualify for a free engineering journal. Based on my experience, about half of the people who apply for a free magazine are rejected.

I'm not sure if I am allow to say how much the payout is, so I will speak in generality. Each subscription pays better than what most people earn for an Adsense click. However, it's less than the commission for a typical Amazon book purchased from your site. Partners are paid monthly, but there's a two month lag. One month to audit (like I said before, about 50% are rejected) and another month before they send the check. I think you need to accumulate at least $50 before they issue you a check. I don't earn a lot from this program, but every little bit helps. Here are some more pro's and con's about the TradePub partner program.

free creative and multimedia magazines

Pro's

  • The ads are not contextual so there's no conflict with Adsense and YPN
  • You get to give your readers something useful for free
  • TradePub does not have any restrictions on ad placement
  • TradePub ads are great for Adsense alternative ads (instead of PSA ads)
  • There are a lot of banners to choose from (the ad above is one of their banners)

[Update: TradePub now offers real-time stats]

Con's

  • Hosted off of your site
  • No tracking channels
  • No real-time stats (you get weekly email updates and a monthly audit report)
  • No referral program
  • You're competing with TradePub once readers apply for a free magazine
  • You have to code the links yourself (can be simple)

[Update: Today, I noticed FeedBruner is running TradePub ads in ProBlogger's feed.]

Similar Posts WordPress Plugin

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If you are a fan of the Related Posts plugin, then I think you will like the Similar Posts WordPress plugin. The Similar Posts plugin is based on the Related Posts plugin, but with extra functionality. Rob Marsh, the developer, even used a couple of my ideas (excluding categories and unrelated pages) in his plugin.

But Rob didn't just stop there, he improved my hacks by placing the "exclude pages and categories" options in the admin menu. No more messing with the code. I was actually planning on doing the same thing, just not sure when. Now I don't have to write my own plugin. Rob already did it.

Another nice feature of the Similar Posts plugin is that you can tweak the similar keywords for each post when you are writing the post. This gives you the ability to fine-tune the keywords to your liking. In addition, if you have previously used the Related Posts plugin to assign keywords to posts you can now import them all from the Options page. I didn't even know you could assign keywords with the Related Posts plugin.

Here's my little comparison of the two:

  Related Posts Similar Posts
Can set the number of posts to show yes yes
Customize before/after post yes yes
Show excerpt yes yes
Customize before/after excerpt yes yes
Show password protected posts yes yes
Exclude static pages no yes
Exclude certain categories no yes
Checks title for match yes yes
Checks content for match no yes

The plugin is great, but I would suggest changing the "no similar posts" result when there's no related posts. Instead, it would be nice if the plugin could display a set of user-defined posts when the plugin can't find a related post. I have not seen "no related posts" on my site recently, but it will eventually show up again when I write an oddball post.

free computer magazines

Audio Player WordPress Plugin

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Last week was not a good week for me. Many times when I tried to save a post, I would get a server error message. The ISP eventually fixed the problem, but it was a very frustrating experience and resulted in a very unproductive week (I have six sites hosted with them and they were all having the same problem). However, I did find a mp3 player plugin for WordPress. It works really nice. This is how the player looks like (feel free to click on the play arrow):

[plugin has been disabled]
(lyrics here)

You can customize the colors of the player, pre/post appended clips (ie – "a word from our sponsor"), and configure it for podcasting. There are also options to determine what is included in the RSS feed. The plugin isn't suppose to place a player instance in the feed. Instead, you are suppose to choose what the plugin inserts into the feed. However, I noticed that even though the plugin defaults to "nothing" (meaning the feed shouldn't contain any reference to the audio file), there's a working player in both Bloglines and the new Google Reader. In Newsgator, there's no player but it does show a link to the mp3 file at the bottom of the post. Google Reader also has a link to the mp3 file. I like having the player in the feed, I'm just not sure how that is happening.

I did encounter two problems during the installation. First, after extracting the plugin, there's an audio-player folder and a file (audio-player.php) that sits outside of the audio-player folder. The first time I tried installing the plugin, I didn't see the file outside of the audio-player folder so I didn't ftp it over to the plugin directory. So, if you don't see the audio player in your plugin menu, you need to ftp "audio-player.php" to your plugin directory.

The second problem had to do with the code syntax (I left out the brackets):

audio:reasonforliving.mp3

Even though the mp3 file is located in the default "audio" directory, the file would not play. However, when I used the URL instead, the file plays (I left out the brackets):

audio:http://izachy.com/audio/reasonforliving.mp3

I'm happy with the plugin and would recommend it to anyone who wants to embed some audio files into their posts.

Feedvertising vs phpAdsNew Ad Server

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TLA rolled out their new Feedvertising service today. Feedvertising enables publishers to run text link ads in their RSS feed. Feedvertising can display ads from TLA, publishers' in-house ads, or affiliate links. They even have a WordPress 2.0 plugin to make setup relatively easy. An extra bonus is that TLA can even sell RSS text link ads for you. Which is great because Google RSS ads are still in beta (the last I heard) and Yahoo RSS ads don't seem to work with WordPress/FeedBurner-powered sites.

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