It seems that every time I go online these days some programming genius has developed a new plugin for wordpress. So I thought that it was time that Ii showed you 3 of my favorite ones of recent months.

The first is a Wordpress backup plugin that uploads to your Amazon S3 account.  Amazon S3 is an online storage facility provides by amazon that will cost you cents to implement, it really is a great option for backups at a cost that won’t break the bank. The plugin is called Automatic Wordpress Backup and is available  for free.  If you value your blogs then you really should be backing them up and an automatic system like this is ideal.

The second Plugin is one that was developed by a member of the Wordpress Goldmine forum in response to a problem we identified there.  Last month I posted a video which showed how sites like ezinearticles often failed to get all your articles indexed. You can read it and watch the video at: http://mjthompson.net/445/are-you-an-article-marketer/

As a result you are wasting up to half your articles as they weren’t getting back-links or generting traffic for you. You were literally throwing money away.

Peter developed an indexing plugin that fixed this problem, not only for ezinearticles but anyplace where you have content and a feed.  By simply adding your feed to the plugin you will help get those articles indexed quickly,  when they are indexed the plugin ignores them and moves onto the next article. Pure genius!

However thats not all as a bonus you get what is by far my favorite plugin at the moment. Install it in your blog and It will tell you what keywords are used to find your blog AND where you rank in google for that keyword. Allowing you to focus on promoting the keywords that matter.

You can get details Of peters plugins at: Indexing Tool

Here is  a short Video that will show you the Plugins in more detail

Micro Niche Finder Video looking at the new features.

I’ve been recommending Micro Niche Finder to my members and subscribers for several years now. yesterday there was an update that makes it a complete and total no brainer. If you want to make money online Micro Niche Finder will now make the job so much easier. In the video below it takes me less than 10 minutes to find a Niche i can rank at #1 for with very little work.

The key things you need to make money quickly are:

A niche with searches and very little competition.

A keyword based domain name

An indication of how much work you need to do to rank well.

MNF now delivers this with a few clicks of a button. Watch the video below where I find a good niche in a few minutes.

Once you find your niche there are several things you can do , expand it into a site with 5 to 10 related pages and work on getting all of them ranking well or why not try the simple and easy option. Create Micro Micro niches.

Micro Micro Niches are small sites that start out with just 1 or 2 pages. You create them then leverage your content until you rank #1 in google. You can then either leave them or add to them using the keywords that have been used to find your site. They are quick and simple sites that are designed to make you money , base them on the keyword phrase you are targetting and use good on page seo and they will rank well in a short time.

If you’d like to know how to leverage your content then grab my free report from this post Article Leverage Report

The outsourcing experiment I am currently running originally started out as a test of how effective back linking is. After 6 weeks I am finally getting a grasp on some of the intricacies involved in back linking.

First I suppose I had better let you know what my views on back linking were before I started.  I believed that all the talk about the power of back links was over rated and just something that SEO guys kept on promoting as they know normal people like us just can’t be bothered to do on a regular basis. I can pretty much generate all the traffic I want by choosing the right keywords , the right Domain,good on site SEO and writing the right sort of articles, so I have never really bothered with it.

So has my view changed in the last 6 weeks??  No not much.

I will admit that there is a place for “good quality” back links for long term results and I will admit that ” poor quality” back links will give you a boost in the short term.

So let’s look at types of back links and see if they have any long term value because long term is where you’ll make your money. It’s great having a site making $5 a day for a month because you got some back links to it but what you should want is a site that makes $5 every day for the next few years.

Back Link Packets.

I am sure most of you know what I am referring to here. Monthly lists of High PR sites that allow “do follow” links. They do work short term, every site I promoted with them had a big jump in rankings to start with. Often from the 200’s to the top 20 or 30. With these you could probably get a site into the top 10 of Google for most easy  difficulty search terms. But you can also probably do that with a few good articles.

Long term they don’t have much of a future and may even eventually damage your sites ranking. Google is not stupid they know what’s going on with these and they can instantly devalue the links. Many of the site owners aren’t stupid either and can quickly make your links worthless. Nor are the software developers stupid, want to bet the next version of the software they release uses “No follow”

The number of sites I look at that have posted links based on these packets but have no good on site seo is amazing I would say that 70%-80% aren’t optimized. By spending 10 miuntes optimizing the sites they would probably rank higer than they do with bad optimization and loads of back links.. Remember The O in SEO means OPTIMIZATION!!! If that’s not a clue nothing is!!

I do use these at the moment but am planning on cutting back and concentrating more permanent methods of getting back links.

Link Directories:

The less said the better about these. In the main low quality links and you have no control over what other sites are linking from the same site. Do you really want a link from a site with 80% porn and meds links? Avoid like the plague!

Social networking/Social book marking sites:

Generally good quality links and can give extra juice by using the link wheel method. They not only generate links but traffic as well and can be integrated into an article marketing strategy. Unfortunately getting Links is not easy and takes time and effort, not a bad thing because it keeps a lot of the spammers away.However there are ways of automating it and still getting good quality long lasting links. More of that another time after I’ve shared my methods with the Wordpress Goldmine members.

BTW in case you are wondering if the methods I teach in Wordpress Goldmine work, here is part of an email I received today.  The funny thing is , I’ve not done any SEO work on that site as of yet!!

For starters congratulations on some outstanding SEO work. That is actually the reason for my email. I am a hard working entrepreneur who is having the hardest time getting my website on the 1st page of Goggle.

I was sadly burned 3 times by SEO companies, and I just feel so close in giving up. But then I came across you and your site and if I am not mistaken, you are ranked so well on Google yet your site is new, and doesn’t seem to have an overload of back links and you are in a pretty competitive niche.

So to summarize do you need hundreds of back links? It depends on the competition, your keywords and the Domain name. There is no straight answer, but before you set out to get hundreds of low quality back links first ensure that all your on site SEO is set up properly on a page by page basis. Once you have that sorted , you’ll find where you rank, then you can plan your back linking strategy.