I’ve been a big proponent and user of WordPress for a variety of sites for years now. I like using WordPress 4 Internet Marketing in e-commerce sites, blogs (of course) and even simple content sites with AdSense and affiliate links. The beauty of WordPress is that its simple installation routine and easy-to-use admin interface allows people with even minimal technical knowledge to launch and manage a website on their own. Once you factor in the thousands of available themes and plugins that offer even more flexibility to your site it becomes a no brainer for anyone looking to enter into the vast world of Internet Marketing to use WordPress.

Two of the most common WordPress affiliate centered sites are reviews and online shopping. A WordPress review site plugin let’s you build a site that focuses on product reviews that are laced with affiliate marketing links that give you a cut of each sale the site generates. By using a WordPress plugin to manage the site you get an incredible level of control over the site’s content. On the other end, using a WordPress shopping cart plugin will let you build a store to sell physical or digital products in a matter of minutes. I know how hard it is to get an online shopping cart up and running and a WordPress plugin will go a long ways to making your life easier.

I’ve been trying to post all of my WordPress thoughts over on the new blog at WordPressings but this post kind of treads the line between both sites.

I recently took on a small site project for a local client and we decided to save time and money and use WordPress as the site’s backend. Normally, I would use a stripped down version of my own custom-built CMS for this kind of site but I was interested in trying something new.

So far I have the basic template made and the next step is converting it into a WordPress theme. After that, we’ll have some brief WordPress training and the site should be live.

What’s interesting about this project is that we won’t be using any of the blog features associated with WordPress. The only portion of the WordPress admin we’ll be taking advantage of is the “Pages” interface. All of the site’s content will be controlled with pages, and not posts, because we don’t want this site to look or function like a blog.

I’ve debated in the past whether or not WordPress (especially the 2.5 release) was ready for primetime as a content management system. I’m still not 100% sure it is but I’ll learn a lot with this local client. I’ll report back in a few months on how this all worked out.

I’ll normally leave the link building tips to Mixed Market Arts but the other day I came across a neat use of Google and CommentLuv that I wanted to share. This technique is pretty smooth and I’m upset that I didn’t think of this myself weeks, if not months, ago when I first wrote about CommentLuv.

For those of you who don’t remember, CommentLuv is a plugin for WordPress that will append a link to the latest blog post a person has made to any comment they leave on your site. I use the plugin here so if anyone wants to see how it works just leave a comment on this or any other post.

It’s a cool little plugin that may or may not inspire more people to leave comments on your posts. The clever trick though is something I came upon while going through my stat logs here. It turns out with a really simple Google query you can find blog posts related to specific keywords you are interested in that have CommentLuv enabled.

In the Google search box type something like this: commentluv inurl:golf

Replace the word golf with whatever keyword you’re looking for and you’ll be presented with a list of blog posts that have that word in the URL and have CommentLuv enabled. Visit one of the posts and leave a comment to get an easy link to your latest post. It’s that simple.

I’ve been using WordPress 2.5 since the day of its release on this and several other blogs and so far I absolutely love it. The new admin is such a huge leap above and beyond previous iterations that it doesn’t even look or feel like the same program anymore. It’s transitioned from horrible open-source interface to a professional looking product smoothly.

Still Not Enough

I still think WordPress isn’t right for any of my clients at the moment. I really wish it was flexible enough to be used in all of the situations I run into in my freelancing work and maybe 2.5 is a step in that direction.

Part of the problem is that I have a very strong “do it yourself” mentality and would much rather invest the time in building my own content management programs than waste energy forcing a program like WordPress to meet my demands.

Now if a client wanted a blog (side note: not once have I been asked to build a blog for any of my clients) I wouldn’t hesitate to use WordPress with a custom theme built to match their current site design. WordPress is, without a doubt, still the best blogging platform available today and with 2.5 it’s gotten even better. There’s no denying that.

If you haven’t given 2.5 a try you need to find the time to download and install it soon.

I’m on the record as saying the current WordPress admin and dashboard are white hot awful. So I’ve been keeping an eye on the impending 2.5 release with it’s brand new admin designed by the folks at Happy Cog.

Yesterday, Matt Mullenweg posted a short introductory video on the WordPress.org blog showing the new admin. It looks like a huge improvement over the current release so I’m pretty excited for 2.5.

The current admin is just so terrible that I’ve long been on the fence about switching to another blogging platform. In the end, I always stick with what I’ve got and just grin and bear WordPress’ faults.

This new look and feel for WordPress is a pretty big step for the project in my opinion. The easier WordPress is to use for the “common man” the better chance it has of finally crushing its competition like MoveableType once and for all.