He released the plugin earlier this week and I’ve been messing with it the past few days. I bothered Nick at least once a week, asking about the release of the plugin, and it is finally here. So far I’m more than satisified. The plugin isn’t over the top and is easy to integrate. But what I really love about this plugin is the easy content generation. I’m building a bunch of local review sites (hotels, bars, restaurants, etc.). With the help of a scraper and Review Plugin for Wordpress I’ll be able to populate my sites with at least 2000 records at a time, and then randomly generate ratings for each post.

The plugin doesn’t require any code modifications, and this simple implementation allows for easy customization of generated posts.

This plugin will play a vital role in the domination of my local SERPS. In my next post, I’ll explain how I’m using this plugin  and other tools to quickly create a bunch of local content and valuable information for my visitors.

Support

There were a few bugs I had to deal with when I first installed Review Plugin for Wordpress. Nick or Ryan the developer were there to answer all my questions in the forums. They even released a few patches in the few days that the plugin has been available.

Possible Uses

There are many uses for such a plugin. I’ll be using the plugin to review local business for the most part, but there’s far more you can do with it.

Just a few:

• Product Reviews: Music, electronics, books, movies, etc – You could build a review oriented site, or just use it from time to time to add to your own reviews.
• Massive Product Review Creation: If an affiliate program allows you to download a CSV of their product catalog you could easily generate thousands of product focused pages.
• Directories: Local businesses, national, niche service directory – Endless possibilites. With a scraper, these sites can be built really fast.
• Landing Pages: If you’re a fan of review landers, this plugin should be able to speed the process up for you.

What I’d like to see in the future…

Google Maps
I still haven’t found an easy way to add maps to my posts, but I’m sure Ryan or someone else from the forums will come up with a solution soon.

Code Examples
I’d like to see some creatives uses of this plugin. So far I haven’t found a way to display my “top rated [whatevers]” in my sidebar for example. I don’t even know if this is possible yet with this plugin.

Open Source
I’m sure Nick wants to protect his investment, but at this point you have to rely on Nick and Ryan for support and improvements. This isn’t really a big deal since they are quick to respond to support questions, but I could do without the ioncube encoding.

The basic concept of the book is to teach you to perform like a big guy, even if you are on the smallest of budgets. As somebody that fits this description, I found the book rather informative.

The books is quite good overall. It has a lot of interesting points for the novice, as well as the advanced internet marketer. However, some sections of the book were so basic that I wasn’t even able to finish reading them. The perfect example of this is a section in Chapter 3 titled “Choosing your Domain Name and Hosting Company”. This book definitely seems more geared towards the brick and mortar business looking to take their marketing efforts online.

Other bland sections are dedicated to proper site navigation, different types of pages/sites, RSS, and basic SEO. There is also a whole chapter dedicated to “Web 2.0″ which consists of definitions of web2.0 terms like tags and open source, not really a web2.0 thing, but whatever. A lot of this book is for complete noobs. But it wasn’t all bad. In fact, there actually is a lot of good information for intermediate/advanced internet marketers.

By far the most intriguing part of this book were the chapters covering media (video/audio). They give you just about everything you need to know to get started recording audio and video and how to make the most of it. I will be applying a lot of the concepts in this chapter to my local efforts. It should be no surprise that people would prefer watching a video over reading. Using these mediums makes it much easier to connect with potential clients compared to text.

Autoresponders are also a big part of this book. Included is a basic workflow and displays the transition of a passerby to a returning customer. If autoresponders are something you aren’t all that familiar with, there is definately a lot to be learned.

Other things I liked:

• Perfect for the noob trying to grasp basic concepts.
• Plenty of reminders of things seasoned marketers and affiliates should be doing.
• Podcasting, audio, and video production. Bannerblindness.com should read this section.
• Lots of information regarding writing sales copy. Though nothing you can’t learn on Copyblogger.

Not so good:

• They provide links for all kinds of different resources, I have a pretty good feeling these are links to their own affiliate sites. Though I guess the book is all about getting the best returns for the smallest costs. So I guess I can’t blame em.
• The affiliate program section isn’t all that great. Though if you are starting your own affiliate program, a chapter can’t even begin to cover it.
• The sections covering outsourcing and building a “virtual team” need a lot of work. For a more detailed guide read 4 Hour Work Week.

The goal is to become a local topix editor this will give you freedom to publish whatever the hell you want, but of course we will be posting our own links. There is a small catch though, you need to be approved. My guess is that larger cities will be a little more difficult to get approved as an editor for. But you never know till you give it a try. I’m going to be venturing into a larger city for my local projects soon, and hopefully I get approved.

The traffic however, isn’t so great, at least not in smaller cities. I’ve posted 2 local stories in the last couple days and I’ve got only a small handful of visitors. But better than nothing I suppose. Again, bigger cities will probably give you better results.

I’ll also be posting an update to the Local SEO series in coming days.

My plan of attack is to create a number of various, high traffic, web properties for my “hometown” of Gaithersburg, Maryland. I hope to make some valuable connections with local small businesses, by offering low cost, high traffic, ad spots across my network. But where will they direct this traffic? Ah-hah! That’s where I come in. Not only can I offer my customers low cost, highly targeted, local traffic, but I can also provide them with a full blown web presence, and internet marketing campaign. In other words, the cheap ads will be my foot in the door.

Gaithersburg Local

My first project is GaithersburgLocal.com, which will be my main hub. I’m honestly not quite sure how I’ll be keeping it full of fresh content, but maybe November is just the start of many 50k word months, thanks to WebWriMo… we shall see. Working on a local project will hopefully get me in touch with some people that will be happy to help out too.

Anyway, the goal is to compete with the local newspaper(s), and hopefully I will gain the advantage as newspapers become obsolete. I plan to be providing news, business, entertainment, sports, dining, and event coverage. I’m still not sure if all these different super-mini-niches will be contained under the GaithersburgLocal title, or if I will migrate them over to their own domains. Wordpress probably isn’t capable of everything I want to do, so it will likely be the only option. Again, we shall see.

Day 1:

I justed started working on this a couple hours ago, but I’ve gotten a good chunk of work done already.

• I got another sexy theme from Elegant Themes. I’ve actually used a few themes from Nick, the owner already. I figured I would take advantage of it since it’s only $19/yr. The theme still needs a lot of changes, but it’s hard to work with without much content to fill it with. Many changes will be made in coming days.
• I got a post up about a Veteran’s Day event being held in downtown Gaithersburg. I plan to stop by tomorrow, during the event, so I can take pictures and such. Community involvement is going to play a big role in the success of this site, so I figured I’d start sooner than later.

Whats Next?

I obviously need to add more content so the site can start looking worth the $8.81 I payed for the domain. Once the site fills out a little more I’ll be able to present it to local business owners, and properly promoting it.

I know a few business owners in the area, and am going to try to strike a deal for free ads on the site, in exchange for some in store ads, that will hopefully bring some traffic in. I also plan on taking a page from Shoemoney’s book (though I doubt this is in anyway original), and try to collect emails by offering coupons from local merchants.

I’d really like a community of some sort to go along with it, but it may be one of those features that deserves it’s own site. Speaking of which, has anyone ever tried phpizabi? I used it when it was still very unstable, and it caused me nothing but trouble. However, it looks much more promising than before. Glowleaf recommends phpfox, but I almost always prefer to go open source (because I’m cheap and like the faster development).

The other option is to go with a forum, and I’ve always wanted to use Vanilla or bbpress.

Anywho… I’m just rambling at this point, and I doubt anyone wants to continue to read my frantic brainstorming. I’ll try to update you guys on the progress of my local efforts, the results in particular.

I wish I knew exactly what was next, but then again, this industry wouldn’t be as fun if I did.