PHP Bay is an eBay affiliate script that comes in two forms.   The first is a stand-alone API version which allows non-WordPress PHP based websites to quickly and easily add eBay keyword based content advertisements to their website.  The second version is the one which will apply to our readers, and that is the easy to use PHP Bay WordPress plugin.

PHP Bay Pro lets you take advantage of the 80 million auctions on eBay by adding relevant auctions to your WordPress blog.   When users click on the auctions, they are taken to that auction on eBay.   Then once people buy ANY item on eBay, you earn a commission, even if it wasn’t what you referred them for.  In fact, you get commission for any auctions won over the next 7 days by that person.   If that wasn’t enough, if someone signs up for an eBay account within 7 days of clicking on your eBay auction link, you also get a very nice commission (can be as high as $40.00 I believe, but usually around $15.00 each).

Here is the feature list you get with PHP Bay:

• Earn revenue through the Ebay Partner Network or other popular programs like PepperJam, Mediaplex, TradeDoubler or Affilinet!
• Add keyword rich Ebay items to your php based web site that encourage impulsive buys!
• Easily Integrate into any New or Existing WordPress Blog!
• Thousands of free WordPress templates available across the web to create virtually any type of site!
• Not Javascript based! Auction listings are 100% pure html based creating additional targeted content for your site!
• List auction items regionally from 17 different countries!
• List items by postal code (zip code) for localized results.
• List items from specific Ebay categories.
• Listings displayed in language and currency of selected country.
• Listings displayed in rows or specified number of columns for a Web 2.0 look and feel!
• Access to our active members only forum that offers a tremendous value in how to get more out of phpBay Pro, strategies, tips and tricks and much more!
• Use on as many sites as you own! phpBay Pro is not limited to one domain. It can be used on one, or hundreds of sites with one license!
• Comprehensive user manual with illustrations, in PDF format, for both the WordPress version and the API version, that will walk you through, step-by-step, to install and get working quickly with phpBay Pro!
• Upgrades are free for the life of the product! phpBay Pro is nearly two years old with three major upgrades made with suggestions from our user base!

If you are considering buying this WordPress plugin, make sure the topic your WordPress blog(s) covers will convert well on eBay.  Product based websites which cover something that is often bought on eBay seems to convert the best (electronics, pictures, etc.).   If your blog covers free products or some sort of service, chances are using a WordPress plugin like this won’t be worth your effort and will annoy your readers.

If you decide you’re interested in PHP Bay Pro, it looks like it is currently available for $79.00.  I believe they used to have a free version as well, but I’ve not been able to track that down so they may have removed it since I bought my copy of this plugin last year.

With this premium theme and plugin combination (you get both), you can easily create a bunch of small niche review sites by simply uploading and activating the plugin/theme combination!  The theme has everything setup upon activation, so there is no need to do anything.

WP Review Site Plugin Features:

• JavaScript star rating system added to comment forms
• Posts sorted by weighted average
• Works for posts or pages
• Powers an entire website, or just selected parts of it
• Horizontal/List or Vertical/Table displays
• WordPress Affiliate Link Management
• Complete Premium WordPress Theme
• Admin panel integration (Ratings show up in comment moderation screens, and only approved comments influence the average ratings displayed on any post or page.)
• Free Upgrades for Life

Here is a sample of how WP Review Site will look using the default theme:

In order to get a copy of this premium WordPress plugin (and theme), you can now purchase a copy.

Single Use Package: $97, Multi Use Package: $199, & Developer Package: $299

At first glance, WP Ninja Affiliate might seem a lot like the WP Affiliate Pro plugin due to the many similarities, but in testing I’ve found that in many ways, it is a more advanced version of that plugin. It does the things you’ve come to expect from WP Affiliate Pro, such as managing your affiliate links, adding cloaked affiliate links to your existing blog posts, and even provide you with click statistics.

In addition to all that good stuff, you’ll also be able to:

1. Assign Multiple Keywords – If you want to use multiple anchor text for an individual affiliate link, you can do so with this plugin.
2. Group Affiliates – Group your affiliate links for easy management.
3. Enjoy Smart Caching – This plugin uses a smart caching feature to prevent your blog from slowing down.

I also found that many of the functions are easier to do than WP Affiliate Pro. Also, in the time that I’ve owned this plugin, it has already seen updates, leading me to believe it is very well supported by the author. If you aren’t happy with your purchase for some reason, you have an eight week money back guarantee!

Overall, I am very happy with my acquisition of this premium WordPress plugin I plan on using it on a few of my WordPress blogs. If you find you are managing a lot of affiliate links on your blogs, I recommend you check out the WP Ninja Affiliate splash page.

I have been in contact with Simon, the creator of OIO Publisher, and he has generously agreed to offer two copies of the OIO Publisher plugin to two of our readers. In order to be considered for one of the plugins, here are the two simple requirements you’ll need to follow to enter into this contest:

1. Review the blog demo, the admin demo, and then write a post on your blog explaining what you feel is the biggest strength of the plugin and what you feel is missing that you’d like to see added in a future update of the plugin.
2. Place a link to both this post (so I can track entries) and the OIO Publisher’s homepage somewhere in your post.

This way Simon can get feedback on what features you like and also find out what things he can do to improve the plugin. All posts must be published by June 5, 2008. We will then review the posts and announce the two plugin winners on June 7, 2008. Good luck!

Update: If your blog post is not in English, please send the translation to Kyle AT HackWordPress DOT com.

One of the many problems with selling direct advertising is that it can sometimes be a pain to manage, and it often takes you away from what you love to do, which is blogging. It is kind of like small business owners who love their job, but hate all the paperwork and accounting that is involved with running and managing their own business.

Fortunately as WordPress bloggers, there is a solution available to us in the form of a WordPress plugin called OIO Publisher. This is an incredible premium WordPress plugin that will completely automate the entire advertising process on your blog. In fact, chances are that you have seen people using it (including many high profile bloggers), but just not realized this plugin is what they were using to control the entire process from their WordPress dashboard.

When you download OIO Publisher, you’ll receive a WordPress plugin and be able to get an API key for each blog you want to use it on. The plugin will create an OIO Publisher tab in your dashboard where you can manage your blogs advertisements (designate how many links, paid reviews, inline ads, banners, or custom advertising your blog will have available), create and manage an affiliate program for products or services on your blog from your dashboard, and even see statistics regarding your advertisements!  Possibly my favorite feature of this plugin is that you can even set the plugin to send weekly reports to your advertisers or place your statistical information into their marketplace.

The best part about this premium plugin is that it will just about manage everything for you for a one-time fee of $37.00. Once purchased, you then have access to use the plugin on as many blogs as you would like, as well as get access to their downloadable sales platform, marketplace, and all of the other features mentioned above!  You also get free updates each time the plugin is updated.

In my opinion, the value of this plugin heavily outweighs the low price, but if you’d like to see for yourself the plugin in action, I recommend you check out a demo of OIOPublisher and purchase your copy today. The demonstation allows you to view how it will look on your blog and how you can manage everything from your WordPress dashboard.

There are a few different strategies you can use to manage your affiliate profile, but as users of WordPress, we are at a significant advantage because we have access to some great WordPress plugins.   There are a few plugins available that are designed to do something with your affiliate links, but I had yet to find one that really worked well and the way I wanted it to.   One that I tried even caused me some significant problems, requiring me to use a database backup.  

After all of my testing, so far the clear leader and only one that really worked well was the premium WordPress plugin WP-Affiliate Pro.  This plugin has a fee associated with it, but in my opinion it is totally worth it because it allows you to manage everything within your WordPress dashboard.  If you can up your affiliate income quickly, it will quickly pay for itself.

Here are a summy list of features I’ve thrown together based upon my experiences with this plugin:

• Control Your Affiliate Links From the Dashboard – With this plugin, you can instantly add affiliate links to specific keywords on your blog.  The plugin will search through old posts and update them with your affiliate links.  If you only want to do 1-2 per post, you can set it to only do that as well.  It is fully customizable from the WordPress dashboard.
• Tracks Your Affiliate Traffic – Each time an affiliate link is clicked, it is counted and will be displayed in real time within your WordPress dashboard.   This way you can figure out what products are working and which ones aren’t.  
• Masks Affiliate Links – This software will mask your affiliate links and also make it so people can’t hover their mouse over a link to see the destination.   The only way to find out is to click on the link.
• Customize Affiliate LInks – With this plugin, you can customize the look and style of your affiliate links to match your specifications.  This way you can make them stand out, use different fonts, or whatever you want to try to see what works. 
• Compatible with Other Advertising Methods - Whether you monetize your blog with Google AdSense or other advertising methods, this plugin is fully compatible.

So, as you can see, it is much more than your standard WordPress plugin.   If you’d like to see a video demonstration of these features, the authors have provided these two quick videos: 

• Video #1
• Video #2

You can also see the plugin in action on several top blogs that use WordPress, including affiliate marketing pro Zac Johnson’s blog. 

If you’d like to read more, I recommend you check out the WP-Affiliate Pro WordPress plugin page.

As this site is dedicated to WordPress, I thought it would be a good idea to have a featured post dedicated to the best WordPress plugins available. This post is a constant work in progress, and will continue to be updated as I feature more plugins on this website. After each plugin, you should find a quick description, as well as a link to the full review. I have also broken the plugins down into categories for easy reference.

Premium WordPress Plugins

- Advertising -

• Billboard + Rotating Images – Two Premium WordPress plugins that allow you to easily add images like advertisements, photos, featured homes and social icons to your widget-ready sidebars and feature areas.
• OIO Publisher – Complete plugin that removes all hassle for bloggers who manage advertising. Automates banners, text links, paid reviews, and collects the money for you. [Full Review]

- Affiliates -

• Auction Thumbs – Plugin that allows you to easily integrate eBay Partner Network ads into your WordPress Blog. [Full Review]
• PHP Bay Pro – Premium plugin that integrates eBay auction ads into your WordPress blog. [Full Review]
• WP Affiliate Pro – Allows you to manage your affiliate links from within your WordPress dashboard. Also allows you to mask links and a number of other features. [Full Review]
• WP Ninja Affiliate – Similar to WP Affiliate Pro plugin, but provides some additional features including  multiple keywords and caching. [Full Review]

- App/Mobile -

• WiziApp – WordPress plugin that allows you to build a fully featured iPhone, iPad and/or mobile app from within your WordPress dashboard.  No Apple developer account required! [Full Review]

- Maintenance -

• Backup Buddy – All-in-one solution for backups, restoration, and migration. The single backup file created by the plugin can be used with the importer script to quickly and easily restore your site on the same server or even migrate to a new host with different settings. Whether you’re an end user or a developer, this plugin is sure to bring you peace of mind and added safety in the event of data loss.
• Email Buddy – EmailBuddy is an email newsletter solution for WordPress. Building email lists around your blog, or your products and services, is a vital marketing function. Despite the popularity of social media like Twitter and Facebook, email marketing is not dead. You can’t rely on people coming back to your site or knowing about your new launches. Simple text-based group emails are extremely effective at getting your message out to the right audience. With EmailBuddy, you can do that and more!
• Genesis Connect -Build a social network for your company, school, sports team or niche community all based on the power and flexibility of the Genesis Framework and WordPress.  Activate the free BuddyPress plugin along with Genesis Connect and instantly your website becomes a social network!
• Gravity Forms – Premium WordPress plugin which allows you to build a completely custom contact form for your WordPress websites/blogs.

- Media -

• Display Buddy – DisplayBuddy is a collection of plugins designed to showcase images, video, and text uniquely and easily on your WordPress site in a visually pleasing way. Each individual plugin is designed to allow easy customization controls and ways to put your content groups onto your site with features such as widget and shortcode support. All plugins include automatic upgrades & quality support.
• My Video Poster – Premium plugin that automatically publishes any videos you upload to YouTube on your WordPress website/blog.
• VidEmbed – VidEmbed is a powerful simple to use solution to adding videos inline within your WordPress posts, pages, and widget areas. With support for both self-hosted videos as well as YouTube and Vimeo you can quickly add videos from many sources. With the explosion of media on the web it is important to be able to easily and quickly provide video content to your site visitors.

- SEO -

• Scribe SEO – Incredible full featured WordPress plugin which analyzes your posts and offers tips for improving search engine optimization. [Full Review]
• WP SEO Sniper – Extreme SEO plugin designed to give people conscious of SEO full control over their blogs from the WordPress dashboard. Significant upgrade to the All-in-One SEO Pack plugin. [Full Review]

- Social -

• Facebook Page Themes – WordPress plugin that allows you to create a custom Facebook page for your website or business all from within your WordPress dashboard! [Full Review]

- Websites -

• Thumbs Up – ThumbsUp is an idea ranking solution that allows users to up/down vote a group of items (topics, videos, and images).
• WP Review Engine – Theme and plugin combination that allows you to create a fully featured website which makes it easy to provide information on a range of products, include thumbnail images, and link out the products.   Ideal for affiliate websites/blogs.
• WP Review Site - Simply activate theme and plugin to create a full-featured review website.  No additional work needed, allowing you to make a number of these sites quickly!  [Full Review]

Free WordPress Plugins

- Admin Tools -

• Gamer’s Pack – Makes your blog viewable using the Nintendo DS, Nintendo Wii, and PSP gaming systems. [Full Review]
• GoCodes – Easily create redirects from your WordPress Dashboard that point anywhere. Great for hiding affiliate links. [Full Review]
• Google Sitemap – Creates a fully-compliant sitemap for search engines. [Full Review]
• Greet Box – Identifies where traffic is being referred from and displays the appropriate welcome message to them, encouraging to subscribe to your feed, Digg or Stumble your posts, etc. [Full Review]
• In Series – Allows you to easily group a series of posts into a series. [Full Review]
• Jetpack – Supercharges your self-hosted WordPress site with the awesome cloud power of WordPress.com. [Full Review]
• MobilePress – Optimizes your WordPress blog for mobile phones including the popular iPhone. [Full Review]
• No Self Ping – Prevents your blog from sending pingbacks internally to your other posts. [Full Review]
• WP-o-Matic – Allows users to collect feeds and auto-generate posts on your blog. [Full Review]
• WordPress Backup – Plugin that backups up your WordPress themes, WordPress plugins, images, and other non-database stuff.  Works with WP-DB Manager.  [Full Review]
• WP-DB Manager – Plugin that gives you full control over your WordPress database backups.  Works with the WordPress Backup plugin. [Full Review]
• WP Sticky – Allows users to feature a post at the top of their homepage for a day or permanently. [Full Review]
• WP-Super Cache – Creates a cache of your posts to avoid server load. Great for surviving a Digg. [Full Review]
• WPTouch – Creates a cache of your posts to avoid server load. Great for surviving a Digg. [Full Review]

- Advertising -

• Chitika Premium Ads – Plugin that allows you to easily integrate Chitika premium ads into your WordPress blog.  [Full Review]
• Got Banners – Plugin allows you to randomize your advertising banners. Ideal for 125×125 banners. [Full Review]
• Max Banner Ads – Plugin that lets you control your advertising from the WordPress dashboard.  Also allows you to rotate multiple advertisements in a single spot.  [Full Review]
• Show125 – Plugin that specializes in managing your 125×125 block advertisements. [Full Review]
• Shylock AdSense – Allows you to easily insert Google AdSense code into your WordPress blog. [Full Review]

- Authors -

• Author Exposed – Adds a full featured display of the authors profile. Great for multi-author blogs. [Full Review]
• Role Manager Plugin – Allows you to control the various WordPress user roles can and cannot do.  [Full Review]

- Comments -

• CubePoints – CubePoints allows you to choose a certain amount of points for each comment posted by a certain commentator. You can offer premium content, allow readers to purchase merchandise or maybe even an advertisement for your blog with a certain amount of points. [Full Review]
• Keyword Luv – Adds an extra field to your comments where people can enter their website so they don’t add their website’s name in the name field for SEO anchor text purposes. [Full Review]
• Liz Comment Count – Displays a comment count in a similar fashion to the Feedburner feed count widget. [Full Review]
• MyAvatars – Automatically inserts the commentators MyBlogLog avatar next to their comment using the e-mail address provided. If unavailable, it will attempt to pull the bloggers Gravatar. [Full Review]
• Show Top Commentators – Allows you to display your top commentators automatically in a place of your choosing. Great for encouraging comments. [Full Review]
• Smilies Themer – Plugin that offers a variety of smilies styles to place in the comments section of your blog. [Full Review]
• Subscribe to Comments – Allows readers to receive e-mail notifications when a follow up comment is left. [Full Review]

- Domaining -

• Domain Name Portfolio – This plugin automatically creates a page in WordPress that domainers can use to display their domain portfolio. Everything is controlled from the dashboard. [Full Review]

- Downloads -

• Download Manager – Plugin that allows you to manage your downloads from the WordPress dashboard.  [Full Review]

- Feeds -

• Add Related Posts To Your Feed – Will automatically add related posts to your blog’s feed. [Full Review]
• FeedCount – Allows you to display a numerical version of your Feedburner feed count without using the Feedburner chicklet. [Full Review]
• Feed Footer – Allows you to use HTML to add a custom footer to your blog’s feed. Plugin also supports randomizing up to 10 different footers. [Full Review]
• RSS Footer – Basic plugin that allows you to easily add copyright notice, etc. [Full Review]

- Forums -

• RS Discuss – Plugin that allows you to easily integrate a forum into your existing WordPress blog. [Full Review]

- Maintenance -

• Server Buddy – ServerBuddy tests server configuration to look for problems with hosting configuration and determine compatibility with various WordPress themes and plugins. Additionally it provides easy to understand explanations of various server settings and generates reports and samples of what to ask your hosting provider if a problem is found with any server configuration that needs fixed. ServerBuddy is designed to be extremely powerful but still provide information in an easy to understand way for even a novice.
• WordPress Automatic Upgrade – Allows you to easily upgrade your WordPress installation to the latest version. **No longer needed in WordPress 2.7+**[Full Review]

- Miscellaneous -

• Best Posts Summary – Automatically generates a daily, weekly, or monthly review post.  Includes both post titles and brief descriptions. [Full Review]
• BreadCrumb Navigation XT – Allows you to provide your readers with additional blog navigation. [Full Review]
• Get Firefox Banner – Shows a banner to IE6 and IE7 web browser users recommending they switch to Firefox. Great for blogs whose WordPress theme is optimized for Firefox. [Full Review]
• Popularity Contest – Monitors your website traffic and gives you reports on your popular posts. Plugin is fully customizable allowing you to set the values used to calculate your posts popularity. [Full Review]
• WP-eCommerce – Plugin that allows you to create an online shop on your WordPress blog [Full Review]
• WP-Email – Allows you to add an “Email This!” button to your WordPress blog. [Full Review]
• WP-Submission – Creates a submission page then places all submissions into a post draft. Ideal for group writing projects. [Full Review]

- Related Posts -

• Related Posts – Uses keywords in your post URL’s to display a designated number of related posts. [Full Review]
• Related Posts by Category – Uses category to locate and display related posts. [Full Review]
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) – Currently the ultimate/best related posts plugin available for WordPress users.  Includes related posts for your feed! [Full Review]

- SEO –

• All-in-One SEO Pack – The Ultimate SEO WordPress plugin. Allows you to set your homepage meta information and automatically generate custom meta information for your individual posts. [Full Review]
• Permalink Redirect – Creates a 301 Redirect to avoid duplicate content penalties with search engines. Also includes a Feedburner redirect. [Full Review]

- Tags -

• Better Tags Manager – Allows you to better manage your tags, as well as convert your categories to tags. [Full Review]
• Recommended Tags – Looks at your post’s content and recommends tags. Includes additional features. [Full Review]

- Video -

• All-in-One Video Pack – All-in-One Video Pack includes every functionality you might need for video and rich-media, including the ability to upload/ record/import videos directly to your post, edit and remix content with an online video editor, enable video responses, manage and track your video content, create playlists, etc. [Full Review]