WP Review Site Theme/Plugin Set Review

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Customers looking for validation of their choice before making a purchase will turn to review sites. It’s a simple fact. You may have searched for and read through countless reviews outlining the pros and cons of – lets say that new laptop you’ve been lusting for – before making that big important buy. And the good news is, with WordPress and a little tweaking with WP Review Site, you can make any site of yours into a powerful review engine.

WP Review Site is one of those plugins that turns WordPress into something more powerful than it already is. Use WP Review Site to turn WordPress into a powerful review site engine. It allows you to easily create niche review sites about anything and everything you want, be it products, computers, gadgets, music, movies, services, websites, restaurants, hotels, credit cards or even beer.

WP Review Site combines has these features:

Add a star rating system to your comment forms – This enables visitors to your WP blog do more than just leave comments: they can write a review and rate it via mousing over star icons. You define the categories, and your visitors can rate between 1 to 5 stars. And WP Review Site is completely customizable to fit your blog’s design; you can display rankings as you see fit, whether you use tables or CSS.

And WP Review Site lets you sort reviews by weighted average rating: you can set it to display reviews by the highest/lowest-rated, and not in chronological order. You can even choose to not show the rating system in some parts of your site. WP Review Site even has various sidebar widgets for you to add a list of top rated items to your site’s sidebar, or a list of recent reviews with the average rating that user left.

And what makes WP Review Site even better for me is that it already comes with seven themes preconfigured to work with the plugin:

  • WP Review Site
  • WPRS: Aqua Featured
  • WPRS: Award Winning Hosts
  • WPRS: Bonus Black
  • WPRS: Double Silver
  • WPRS: Green Featured
  • WPRS: Ocean

And even better, WP Review Site has already got its own affiliate link management system that will let you configure your links easier. Instead of inserting the URL for the same anchor text over and over, you can set your review blog to automatically insert affiliate links.

What I don’t care for, however, is the fact that the customization features of WP Review Site is spread over two options pages. I’d like to have everything in one configuration page.

For $97 dollars, you’d get free upgrades for life along with all the features mentioned above.

Pros:

  • WP Review Site does the work of many different plugins to make WordPress work as a powerful affiliate review site.
  • It comes with seven preconfigured themes
  • Affiliate link management system is powerful

Cons:

  • Too many separate options pages
  • Switching themes would clear the sidebar of widgets

This review was written upon request by the creators of WP Review Site.

Originally posted on October 31, 2008 @ 3:00 pm

Economy in Shambles: Blogger Opportunity

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Despite the economy not heading in the direct that we would like it to head in, this shift has created many new opportunities for bloggers and web workers in general. While marketing and advertising budgets will be the first to go in many companies, the side effect might be an increasing number of affiliate programs, where bloggers can start promoting the sale of various brand name products for a cut of the proceeds, becoming, in effect, the new marketing and sales team for many companies struggling to maintain a profitable balance sheet.

If you have ideas on how to make money online, your opportunity is at hand. You might have been or be looking at a potential layoff, so why not find some free time and spend it on building a blog, website, affiliate portal, or something that could, eventually, contribute to freeing you from office desk slavery.

With low startup costs, the only thing you have to loose is some time and energy, and the distraction might not be such a bad thing if the economy tumbles further.

Pick your favourite products or services, and contact them about some affiliate deal. Even if they don’t have a system in place yet, they might just say yet, in order to capitalize on the potential skills, energy and intelligence of content producers online.

Originally posted on October 16, 2008 @ 5:27 pm

Back on Blogging Pro

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For those of you that don’t follow me around like crazed stalkers, you may not have heard that I am back blogging on Blogging Pro, one of the sites that originally made my career what it is today. I recently got contacted by Mark Saunders, CEO of Splashpress Media, and he wanted me to help bring the site back to its former glory. I give much credit to the Splashpress guys for keeping the ship running, but with every change in author, it felt like it was slipping, and so in reaching out to me, hopefully, I can bring some people back, make new fans, and get the site really chugging along again.

I can’t say how excited I am to be back on there posting about WordPress. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed the subject. It should be interesting to see how the readers respond to it. For me, it is like slipping back on the most comfortable shoes ever. Blogging Pro has always felt like home, and many people I’ve met have assumed that I own the site, despite facts plastered to the contrary on the site. I enjoyed being associated with the Blogging Pro brand, and hope to once again.

I have already written over a dozen posts on there, and I am looking forward to doing more, so please check it out, let me know what you think.

Originally posted on January 30, 2009 @ 7:59 am

Recieved My iPod Touch

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I am all excited as I write this post from the iPod. I am slowly getting better at typing but I will have a full report on my initial use soon.

Thanks again to the great people that helped make this happen.

Originally posted on September 12, 2008 @ 7:13 pm

Gary’s Blog World Expo Keynote in More Formats

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For those of you that have been complaining about the huge file, or the bad quality of the Viddler upload in my previous post, a friend of mine, Tom Leroux, has created some more great ways for you guys to have access to Gary’s great keynote speech from Blog World Expo.

A nice compact 230MB Quicktime Movie version.
A MP3 version and a M4A version as the audio is the most important part.

Very cool stuff for those that haven’t checked this out yet.

Originally posted on September 29, 2008 @ 8:17 pm