On top of customer support, my family and my day job, I’ve been working with Alex Shalman and John Chow to build an awesome plugin for comments on WordPress sites. Standout Comments is now up to version 0.95 and has been quite popular with those who use it.

As with most things WordPress, it’s been a community effort. Not only with John and Alex helping me get it done and marketed, but also with the awesome users of the plugin sending in bug reports, feature requests and suggestions. It’s truly amazing in a way I hadn’t imagined.

It’s also quite challenging as the number of variations of WordPress themes and installation situations start to emerge. Wow. Talk about “I hadn’t thought of that.”

StandoutComments generally let’s you integrate your marketing efforts into your comment form and take advantage of the fact the user is entering their email, but not in a sneaky way. The user is given the option to opt-in to your auto-responder and/or your Feedburner email feed. They can also follow you on Twitter.

StandoutComments features:

• Full integration and customization with any WordPress theme
• Subscribe to notifications of new comments on posts
• Integrate with any auto-responder to grow your list
• Integrate with FeedBurner email to notify users of new posts
• Integrate with Twitter:
  • Users enter Twitter ID to show Twitter avatar instead of Gravatar
  • Display Follow site owner on Twitter below comment form
  • OR Integrate with Twitter’s @anywhere to display a Twitter Follow button
  • Use Twitter’s @anywhere to link Twitter IDs in your entire blog with hovercards (@installedforyou)
  • Use popular short url providers to display a Tweetback URL
  • Track Tweetbacks and integrate them as comments
• Nearly all text and styles can be customized to suit your blog.

Anyway, version 0.95 was just released today and expands on the features we have, and finally includes the Unsubscribe option. Yeah, it should have been there from day 1 but wasn’t.

Next up I’m making sure it’s ready for WordPress 3.0 in general (ie: still works), enhanced features for 3.0, and also the WordPress 3.0 multisite option, which may be important now that WordPress mu is integrated with core.

ReviewAZON

A while back I purchased a WordPress plugin, which I had never done before. With such an abundance of good plugins available in the repository, I’ve never felt the need. Part of doing this website and consulting with various clients in various fields, I am asked regularly to evaluate a plugin or to recommend a specific one for a given task.

I purchased the ReviewAZON plugin by Brad Hanson and started building a few sites with it. I’m pretty impressed over all.

Generally, what it does is insert content from Amazon into WordPress posts or pages. You can do single product posts, multi-product inserts and even bulk important entire ranges. In fact, the book reviews on InstalledForYou.com are being auto-posted over time by the plugin.

Here’s the feature list as posted on their site:

• Get Lifetime updates – Pay once and get lifetime updates and product enhancements for the life of the product.
• Use ReviewAZON on UNLIMITED Domains! Buy it and use it on some or all of your domains.
• Access to the ReviewAZON Support Forum: Join our community of ReviewAZON users and get the latest product updates, support information as well as user tips and tricks to make your blog a success!
• ReviewAZON allows you to display over 25 different pieces of product content such as average customer rating, product description, customer reviews, pricing, brand, manufacturer, product details and more!
• Detailed product user guide helps you every step of the way when it comes to installing, configuring and using the ReviewAZON Wordpress plug-in. Also learn how to make your own custom templates quickly and easily.
• Build complete blogs in a matter of hours instead of days or weeks allowing you to focus on other things such as promotion and creating additional blogs.
• Easy to use and intuitive administrative tools make configuring ReviewAZON a snap!
• Ajax driven product search dialog screen allows you to search by product category, custom sort parameter and product keywords to find just the products you are looking for quickly to add quality content to your blog in just minutes.
• Support for all the Amazon Affiliate programs including Canada, United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany and Japan.
• Flexible HTML templates let you control the output of Amazon data to your users with virtually unlimited ways to display pertinent and meaningful content to your blog readers.
• Custom YouTube video search screen allows you to search for YouTube product reviews and add them to your blog to enhance the reader experience.
• Display Product Accessories and Similar Product listings along side your product post pages by showing them in-line or by using the custom sidebar widgets that come out of the box with ReviewAZON.
• Use the built in Custom Template Manager interface to make custom template changes on the fly and update all your blog posts with a single save!
• Custom Template Token Reference tool allows you to see exactly what tokens are available for use with that particular template without having to reference the manual each time you make a change.
• eBay integration with PhpBayLite or PhpBayPro enables you to display eBay listings along side the products you are promoting to help increase your ROI and affiliate commissions.
• Built in custom Sidebar Widgets helps you to display information such as product Brands, Price Ranges and Featured Products to your customers to better help them find the information they need on your blog.
• Use the built in Tabbed product listing interface to display product information to your users in a tab layout instead of the normal vertical layout.
• SEO friendly image and product URLs can be configured to display human readable links that not only help your readers but also boost on page SEO for your blog.
• Output Caching allows you to speed up the rendering of product content to your blog readers by reducing the load time and the number of calls to the Amazon web service.
• Make your blog product content stand out by providing your readers with timely and informative customer reviews on the products you are promoting.
• Continuously add product posts to your blog by “Drip Feeding” them over a defined set of time by using the Bulk Product Post feature of ReviewAZON. You can have products automatically post to your blog over the course of days, weeks and even months allowing you to focus on promotion rather than content creation.

I’ve got 3 sites right now running the plugin and although I haven’t made any money from them, the plugin does work spectacularly as advertised.

ReviewAZON is easy to setup and does offer several configuration options. You will need to have Amazon Affiliate keys in order to access the Amazon web services. These keys are free, and just about anyone can get them.

Posting can be done manually, instantly or automatically using what is called “drip feeding” meaning that content is posted overtime. This allows search engines to gradually find new content and it appears the site has grown more naturally. This feature works brilliantly. A few of the options on this page could use a bit of clarification and may be overwhelming at first. The plugin comes with a good manual and the support and support forum are first rate. Brad is quick to respond and fix problems for his clients.

The plugin also allows for inserting a single item into a post, so if you have a product you’re talking about or a topic, and Amazon has something that matches, you can include it. The single item insert is nicely formatted, as are all of the plugin’s features. ReviewAZON also comes with a few different template options, all of which you can change, and also uses short-codes so you can include parts of it’s content anywhere.

It also allows you to integrate Overstock and eBay listings for even more affiliate power.

ReviewAZON is currently priced at $79, which sounds a bit pricey. Depending on the market you enter via Amazon, you could easily make that back in a month or much less!

As with any affiliate method, this plugin itself WON’T make you money! You still have to drive traffic, get the search engines looking and work on other methods of getting conversions, but this will allow you to quickly get up and running before the holiday season.