Archive for July, 2010

Posted on July 7, 2010 - by Kelly Verge

WP Syndicator – Great Product, Great Price, Great Cause

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Recently Andy Fletcher asked me to test a new product that he’s created. It’s called WP Syndicator, and it’s a plugin that syndicates your posts across 15 different web 2.0 properties. But that’s not all…

Andy is donating 100% of the sale of this plugin to Asthma research.

Even better, he’s offering WP Syndicator for $10 from now through July 19th! He’s running this insane sale because he’s trying to reach $10,000 by the 19th.

OK, enough about the cause and the deal. Here are the details on the plugin:

WP Syndicator

The WP Syndicator plugin was created to very nearly automatically syndicate your WordPress posts across 15 top Web 2.0 properties. What this means is that when you create a new post (or edit an old post) there’s an option to “syndicate” the post. When you click on that link, a snippet of your article will be posted to all 15 properties (or a subset of these if you choose). At the bottom of each snippet is a “Read more…” link back to your article/blog.

The good:

• First, each time you syndicate a post, that post gets 15 backlinks. Some are no-follow, but in the scheme of things, that’s of minimal importance.
• Next, many of these properties will bring in a certain amount of exposure in addition to the backlink. This means that they have the potential to bring in some traffic on their own. When this happens, the visitor is interested in the snipet, he clicks the “read more” link, then he sees the entire article on your blog. It’s a very normal user experience, so your visitors are happy.
• The plugin takes very little effort. Once you set up accounts at each of the properties (15 minutes if you’re SLOW), you simply click the syndicate link when you want to syndicate the article.
• The length of the snippet is configurable. If you want a longer/shorter snippet, just enter the number of characters in an option box.
• The plugin strips out all html formatting. I think this is good since I tend to place an image and an affiliate link near the tops of my posts. If my Blogger or WordPress snippets contained an affiliate link, they wouldn’t stay up long.
• Again, you can choose which properties to sign up for and even which of those you wish to syndicate to for each of your posts.
• All of this is done through the properties’ API’s, so there is no captcha nor are they as likely to change/break as frequently as those programs that are trying to do underhanded things. Andy says that he’ll keep the software updated if things stop working.
• For the few properties that have odd requirements, Andy has linked to detailed instructions (video) to show what needs to be done. It’s easy, and Andy has made it even easier.

The not-so-good:

• The plugin doesn’t/won’t syndicate automatically. If you have scheduled posts or use an autoblogging tool, the plugin won’t syndicate your posts by itself. You have to click a link in order to syndicate. Andy made this decision in order to keep this program from being abused by spammy bloggers. I completely agree with the decision, and in the long term it will help ensure than WP Syndicator doesn’t get slapped by these properties. However, since it’s a nice-to-have feature, regardless, It’s a small negative.
• The links back to your blog post aren’t keyword-based-links. Again, that’s not a huge deal if you’re doing other backlinking. In fact, this will help your backlinks look more natural.

When Andy told me how much he was going to charge for this plugin, I was stunned. It’s a one-time payment for a plugin that you can use to syndicate all of your blogs to 15 web 2.0 properties. Really at this price it’s a no-brainer. The small negatives really both have an upside, so I highly recommend WP Syndicator to anyone who runs WordPress blogs.

Get WP Syndicator Here!

Just a side note. The above links are “affiliate links” simply so that Andy will know who’s helping him with this charity effort. 100% of the sale of WP Syndicator goes to Asthma research.