Since writing this review a couple of years ago, some things have changed. Wordpress Direct still remains a viable option for anyone wanting to set up Wordpress blogs quickly and schedule automatic content (please use this functionality with some discernment). Prices are slightly different to below at $47, $97 and $197 per month.

I have also found another option. I recently became a member of the Wealthy Affiliate University and they have released a new tool called Wordpress Express. This doesn’t offer the automatic content of WPD but it does offer different benefits:

1. Quick and easy set-up of Wordpress blogs with the 60-second installer
2. Unlimited hosting included (buy the domain and point it at the hosting)
3. All the important Wordpress plugins already installed
4. Easy domain manager
5. Unlimited sites (for a limited time – that’s the current offer as of 07/07/10)

On top of this they also include full membership to the WAU with all the training, tools and support that goes with this. All for $97 per month.

While on the surface the 2 tools have a similar premise they are actually aimed at people with different needs and priorities.

Hopefully one of them will offer the functions and extras you are looking for

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Numerous people have been asking me what I really think of Wordpress Direct. I am one of those who has been lucky enough to use this as part of the Thirty Day Challenge, where it enabled thousands of challengers to get new blogs online quickly (and contributed to some excellent and fast rankings). But, with the big launch now taking place, the question I am being asked is, what uses does Wordpress Direct have and is this system right for my needs?

What is Wordpress Direct?

Wordpress Direct is a system that quickly creates multiple Wordpress blogs. You can set them up in seconds, once you have researched your main keywords, and the blogs come with the most useful plugins and are fully optimised. Unlike many other blog creation systems, all the blogs are hosted with your own blog host and you own the domains and overall control of the blogs (should you ever cancel).

Wordpress Direct will also create automated posts for you, legally gathering the information from other websites, so your blog can always look active to the search engines even if you don’t have much time to put into them.

Who is Wordpress Direct for?

Wordpress Direct is the perfect tool for anyone who: wants to create multiple niche blogs quickly and easily; wants their blog to be optimised for their keyword phrases; and isn’t concerned with every post being 100% original.

Who is Wordpress Direct NOT for?

Wordpress Direct is not for anyone who is creating one or two personal/business blogs that they want full control over and intend to write for and build-up over time. While it would still work for setting-up your blog quickly and provides a good optimisation structure, it probably wouldn’t be an effective use of your money. You would be better to pay to have someone create a blog that is unique to you.

Can I Create Multiple Wordpress Blogs like these without WPD?

Yes, these are essentially Wordpress blogs with a number of carefully selected plugins. If you know how to set up a Wordpress blog then you could create multiple blogs yourself (there is even software to enable you to clone previous blogs so you can do it quicker). The automated content is drawn from different places online (Youtube, Yahoo Answers etc.), which you can do yourself or pay someone else to do. You will also need to re-create the linking and blog structure for optimisation.

What Can I do with Wordpress Direct?

Wordpress Direct is perfect for: creating multiple Wordpress sites if you don’t know how and don’t have the time to learn; reviving old websites and/or domains that have been sitting gathering dust but which you don’t have the time or interest to build-up; creating blog networks each focused on a different microniche to build traffic and authority to a niche blog/website/ecommerce/service site. If you

You can then sell the individual blogs or networks based on traffic and/or PR, or use them to bolster your main business.

And, as the Thirty Day Challenge has shown, the system can be used to test microniche keywords quickly for traffic and commercial potential, without needing to invest too much time or money.

What are the Wordpress Direct Membership Levels and are there any other expenses?

The current offer is:

$1 trial for 45 days leading to the Bronze package at $37 per month (up to 10 blogs)

Silver is $97 per month for up to 20 blogs

Gold is $127 per month for 100 blogs

Platinum (currently unavailable)

As well as these subscriptions you will need to pay for domain names and hosting with one of the accepted cpanel hosts (I use Hostgator and Bluehost).

Pros of Wordpress Direct

* Wordpress Direct is quick and easy to set up. Doing this yourself will take a lot of time and continuous effort.

* There is no need to create new, original content all the time (those worried about duplicate content should know that the content is presented in such a way that doesn’t appear to receive any penalty – even if duplicate content is a true issue, which is another blog post in itself)

* Blogs are optimised for you

* You can add banner ads, one-off offers and adsense

* You can still monitor and select the auto content you like (and set it to supervised content)

* There are a number of useful videos that show you exactly how to set-up your blogs and automated content.

* You can easily install Google analytics and track your ranking within the dashboard.

Negatives of Wordpress Direct

* Some monitoring of auto content is needed to prevent odd stuff appearing or suddenly seeing 15 posts appearing all at the same time

* Wordpress Direct can only work with a limited number of hosting companies

* My own support issues were answered relatively quickly and satisfactorily, but I know others that have had genuine problems with the support system.

* There are still quirks in the system that need ironing out, such as multiple themes not working well with the system and/or having funky code in them (Wordpress Direct is working at pulling out or amending the dodgy themes)

* You cannot set up posting to go out at specific times or days like you can with Wordpress blogs (Wordpress Direct have said this feature will be implemented within the next few months)

* Images do not always format properly (I usually have to login to my main Wordpress admin to re-format the pictures).

* This is not a blogging panacea. While I had one blog rank well for a phrase match keyword phrase just from sitting there minus content, this is not to be expected in every case. You still need to implement a backlink strategy.

Would I Recommend Wordpress Direct?

A number of people have asked me this question and I find it difficult to answer, because it really depends on you and how you will use it.

Yes, I recommend Wordpress Direct if you are keen to build your own network of multiple Wordpress microniche blogs and/or revive old sites/domains with minimal effort (both of which I am doing). If your business model require blog clusters and siloing techniques then this is ideal for you.

You still need to monitor the sites and content and you still need to be prepared to build up backlinks and authority in order to rank well for your keywords. You will also need to be prepared to work with the quirks and not expect great things when you require support (that’s not to be unkind to WPD, just to point out that customer service has not been an overall strength so far).

I wouldn’t recommend Wordpress Direct if you don’t have a strategy in place to use the software to its full potential. If you only want a few blogs or hate the idea of allowing automated content onto your sites, then you have probably not grasped the concept and value of the system. These are not the sort of blogs that will gain you problogger status. The blogs are not “pretty” – you are not going to win any design awards for them, and some people can’t bear creating unremarkable websites. That said, they are not “ugly” but the themes are all fairly standard.*

Many people are going to hate the notion of Wordpress Direct because the blogs it creates are not personal, unique blogs like this one. There is no (or should be no) emotional attachment. This is another tool to test niches, build traffic and PR, and assist your linking strategies.

I am happy to recommend Wordpress Direct as a system for creating and maintaining multiple Wordpress blogs if you are going to use the system to its fullest, but if you simply want one or two blogs then I would suggest finding a good Wordpress course (there are some excellent free and paid tutorials available) and/or spending the money to have someone create a blog for you that you can update yourself on a regular basis.

There is a 45 day $1 trial, so if you are still undecided you can trial the system before you make your final decision.

*Since writing this, a number of people have pointed out that Wordpress Direct blogs can be personalised and made to look more ‘pretty’ and have even shown me evidence of this. So, I back down on this one and agree that there is scope for making your WPD blogs unique and personal. This involves logging into your admin panel and playing with the theme design, which will depend on your experience level with Wordpress blogs. I haven’t done much to mine as that isn’t the object of my use of Wordpress Direct.

One marketing concept Dan Kennedy often talks about is to take an idea that is working in another market or business and apply it to your own.

I notice that recently in Internet Marketing the trend is to give away a lot of stuff for free (or nearly free). To lose out on the front end with the long term plan of making money on the back-end. Actually, this isn’t new even by IM terms but marketers are now giving stuff away on a MASSIVE scale (see the recent Stompernet promotion). These promotions cause a major buzz and news spreads virally. It may take 6 months or a year (or longer) to start profiting from an event like this, but the investment will be worth it for future profits.

Of course, anything that is done online has probably been done successfully offline – good marketing is good marketing and will work as well now as it did 100 years ago. Dentists will give away free or virtually free tooth whitening to bring in new clients who will eventually pay high premiums for cosmetic work on their teeth. Housing companies will pay for you to move into your new home because eventually they will see huge profits from your purchase.

And yet, it surprises me that with this marketing tactic working so well for so many years that more companies don’t employ it.

When I worked at TopShop one Christmas 15 years ago, we were told that a customer should always be given a carrier bag when they buy something. In fact, no customer should leave the shop without a TopShop carrier bag. This is another great marketing tactic. As much as we like to think of ourselves as individuals and free thinkers, humans are actually conditioned to follow the crowd, so the more people who are seen with TopShop bags, the more likely others will come in and shop there too.

In this era of environmental ‘friendliness’, it would be silly for a company to insist someone use a plastic carrier bag, and all the supermarkets in the UK now sell bags made of cloth, jute and strong plastic so customers can use them again and again. They also reward customers with pennies off (or loyalty points) for using their own bags, so it’s not unusual for a customer to use Sainsburys branded cloth bags in Tesco and vice versa.

I was thinking last year that it would make a lot of sense for one of the supermarkets to have a Big Green Bag giveaway, where every customer was given at least one re-useable shopping bag. If that bag was branded with their supermarket name, it would create the same effect as the TopShop bags were supposed to create 15 years ago. It wouldn’t matter where they actually shopped, other people would think they were regular shoppers at XXX supermarket. Plus, the goodwill it would create would be enormous.

I waited and waited for a supermarket to run with that idea (OK, maybe I should have contacted my favourite, but that’s what they have marketing departments for). I believe Sainsburys did do something similar back in 2006 but only for customers who bought a certain number of items from their organic range (close but no cigar).

Eventually, Morrisons had the right idea. Only problem was that they gave away strong plastic bags instead of cloth or jute bags. They may last longer but plastic is still plastic and when the bag splits it will still take centuries to biodegrade. They chose the cheap option.

Maybe Sainsburys or Tesco will eventually take a hint from the Stompernet launch and realise the value of giving away stuff on a massive scale i.e. great quality shopping bags, fully branded with their name. When they do, remember you heard it here first (unless I simply missed them do it already) and I will expect my fee from their marketing budget.

In the meantime, think about what you can learn from the Stompernet launch or any other good marketing tactic you see online or offline. How could you apply it to your business?

Now that the Thirty Day Challenge has ended, many people’s thoughts turn to the Immediate Edge and whether this paid membership/subscription program might be right for them.

It’s a subject I get asked about a lot so I thought it wise to give my honest opinion about the Immediate Edge.

First, I think I should explain what the Immediate Edge is for those who don’t already know. It was the brainchild of Dan Raine, an exceptional online marketer, who now with Ed Dale and their combined teams teaches online business and marketing strategies and tips, as well as provides excellent tools members can use to make life easier.

Basically, a program that gives its members the “edge” over their online competitors.

Secondly, for folks who don’t know me, and in the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that Ed and Dan are two of the people I respect the most online. They are excellent businessmen and have an equally talented team of staff and interns. As a result of the respect I have for them, I volunteer as a moderator on their Thirty Day Challenge forum, and I have been a paid-up member of the Immediate Edge since its creation (note that I pay for it and have been happy to pay for it even during the Beta trial).

Naturally, I am going to be writing quite positive stuff about the program…

But I hope this review will also explain why the Immediate Edge won’t be for everyone.

The Immediate Edge is for you if:

• You are a Thirty Day Challenger who has grasped the concepts of the Challenge , made some money/found a good niche, and are ready to move on to the next level.

• You are in Internet Marketing, whether running a niche business or promoting an offline business, and need more strategies for growing your business, as well as the tools to make it easier.

• You are ready to take massive continuous action on your IM business.

It is worth noting that the strategies taught by Dan, Ed and the team are usually “borrowed” by others and appear 6 to 12 months later being taught in a different guise, so you really are ahead in the game (a particular bonus if you are in a fiercely competitive niche).

The Immediate Edge is NOT for you if:

• You have found the Thirty Day Challenge concepts and process hard to grasp and are still not making it work (please go back over all the free training).

• You (whether Thirty Day Challenge or otherwise) need a lot of hand holding and guidance. If you rely heavily on membership forums to help you, you are probably not going to find that support in the Immediate Edge. The Edge has just introduced a members’ forum but it is not aimed at being a support mechanism or offering extra training. It is simply a place for a meeting of minds and some discussion. Dan and Ed’s ethos for the Immediate Edge is very much about taking action and not using the site to socialise.

• You need things to appear at a regular time or when promised. Dan and Ed try to keep to agendas but they are not well-known for their “punctuality”. This is partly due to behind-the-scenes work and testing strategies or creating tools (these things never run to plan). When they do deliver, they well and truly OVER deliver, but if you are going to become frustrated expecting training and updates to appear on certain days, you probably shouldn’t join.

Nowadays, I don’t subscribe to any other membership sites apart from the Immediate Edge. Most of my subscriptions are tool based. There comes a time when you have to stop learning and start doing, and I find that the Immediate Edge offers me more than enough to do and implement (and I still haven’t done it all).

Feel free to ask any further questions about the Immediate Edge in the comments section – I’m sure I will have missed something. If you already feel the Immediate Edge will be a good ‘fit’ for you and your needs then they are offering a free 14 day trial for a limited time – I suggest you head over there and check it out.

Another Thirty Day Challenge (number 4) has come to an end, so how did I do?

On the plus side, I followed and finished all the training and enjoyed using the new tools and learning an excellent strategy for researching and testing markets (and finding micro-niches).

On the downside, I didn’t put enough time and effort into creating enough content and backlinks, so I didn’t get enough traffic to fully test my niches or make my dollar.

In the end I put up 4 micro-niche sites in 2 niches (yes, I probably overstretched myself again – when will I ever learn?). The last of these sites only attracted my focus 2 days ago when I realised it was number 3 in Google for phrase match and didn’t even have any content on it (good ole Wordpress Direct).

This site and the other that ranked quickly just don’t appear to be getting the traffic in those positions, and the other 2 sites haven’t ranked high enough yet.

They did prove an interesting point that I had already been conscious of but wanted to test further. As long as all the other criteria are right in the market research, keyword phrases with more than 2 words seem to rank quicker and better than phrases with just 2 words.

Also, the lower the competition the better. That may seen obvious but sometimes it’s worth dropping the expected traffic numbers in order to find a lot more phrases with low competition, that you can use to create a number of blogs or web pages to draw traffic for a much more competitive niche. I would rather have 3 sites ranking at the top of Google for their keywords with only 30-40 visitors per day than 1 site that only ranks at number 4 and so only receives a small fraction of the expected 140 visitors each day. Your analytics will then provide you with more good keywords you can use and you can build more traffic from there. Once you have tested the niche with the longer tail keywords you can always target a better traffic phrase with more competition, knowing that the extra time and effort to get it ranked will be profitable.

The most important part of the Challenge for me is that it has set me up with a strategy for taking my old domains and tired sites that see little input from me, and building them up using more focussed keywords (found using Market Samurai). I have already set up a bunch of domains each on separate hosting (within my Hostgator reseller account) and started to use Wordpress Direct on them. The aim is to get good rankings on some long tail keywords, start to build up traffic, and either sell them or leverage the eventual good PR and age.

Talking to Ed Dale in London yesterday about this strategy, he said this is something the Immediate Edge will also be focusing on in the coming months – showing exactly how to employ this effectively. Hooray! I had already planned to use some of the great Edge strategies that were not covered in the Thirty Day Challenge to improve my rankings and traffic on the Challenge sites and my new projects (if you are wondering whether the Immediate Edge is right for you, they have a $1 trial at the moment and I will be giving you my honest review of the program later today).

On a separate note, being a moderator on the Thirty Day Challenge forum this August (as well as for the past year) has been a tough but rewarding job and I love doing it.

Major props to: Ed Dale, Dan Raine (you didn’t see much of him but he was always there behind the scenes), Robert Somerville (for the training and overall organisation and concepts), Super Moderator Caro, Nez, Asbjorn, Paul, Collette, Kenny, the guys at Noble Samurai for the Market Samurai tool, the Wordpress Direct team, all the other moderators, those who helped on the forums just because they like the community, God, the Academy, my mother, my dog Jenny who was the best childhood pet a person could want, and anyone else I have forgotten….

That’s not really the end for the Thirty Day Challenge for this year. The main August challenge may be over, but the forum continues and anyone can take the training at any time they want, so I hope to see you there.