Being a WordPress addict myself, I already knew about the most popular plugins for the best blog  in the whole world, or at least I thought I was semi-updated in that department. Then Jason Keith of WP Internet Marketing drops this wonderful list in the War Room and everybody goes wow!

When someone new to blogging and Internet Marketing decide to launch their first WP blog, finding the right plugins to aid their efforts to build something from scratch can prove an exhaustive challenge, as if having to learn a new blog system they had no prior experience with, was not enough. The proverbial jungle of WP plugins doesn’t make it any easier, which is where this guide comes in handy.

Browsing Jason’s list, I learned about many plugins I have not used or heard of before, and they are all ideal for IM purposes. Very nice. Also visit Jason’s website and subscribe to his updates list; he is currently developing some new IM-optimized WP themes, and it sounds interesting enough.

Without much further ado, click the link below to grab your copy of this e-book providing a list of the best free WordPress plugins for Internet Marketing. I promise that you’ll like what you see, and $0 is a nice price. Thanks to Jason Keith for sharing.

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When you thought Blogspot a.k.a. Blogger was the perfect way to build your Adsense blog empire without initial expenses, along comes someone snatching your blog’s sub-domain with content and re-publishes it with a slight typo in the sub-domain suffix.

Your new blog was most likely cloned at birth, your Adsense ID replaced with that of the perpetrator’s and/or new ad code injected automatically. Copy your Blogspot URL and paste it into your web browser’s URL field, replace blogspot with blogsopt and see what you get. You have my sympathy in advance. And that’s only one of many scrapers.

Clever? Maybe. Smart? Not so much; Google will soon be all over this guy, giving him a red hot spanking for abusing their Adsense program in conjunction with cloned/stolen content. Other, less dim-witted content scrapers don’t risk awakening the G. beast. They do it ninja-style.

This kind of actions is commonly referred to as “splogging” or “blog scraping” and is not limited to Blogspot, but WordPress as well, and Squidoo, Weebly, e.t.c. According to a BHW member, the perpetrator might be using some kind of reverse HTTP Proxy script to fetch the target blog’s content, replace the URL and inject their own links. The content is then returned using a slightly different URL, and receives traffic from mistypers. Easy, huh?

I noticed in a Blogspot blog I had created the other day, which of course has been cloned as well, my other affiliate links remain untouched. So, basically my affiliate links get more publicity.

If you want to find out whether your blog has been cloned and what to do about it:

• Stolen Content – and yes, his blog has been cloned, too: Stolen Content (blogsopt)
• Has your Website been Cloned?
• How long will it take to catch the clones? – Blogger support discussion with elaborate guides
• Jamie Spencer on Splogging

There is little we can do to prevent this from happening, but on the other hand: someone scraping your blog means more publicity for your articles, which can be a good thing, especially if you put affiliate links in your articles. You can also contact the perpetrator with a Cease & Desist message, which may have a sobering effect.

Either way: until Google finds a way to deal with this phenomenon, we’ll just have to live with it.

I must admit, I was oblivious to how much effort something like this requires of a newbie like yours truly. The best part was creating the graphics, then came the coding. I’ve had a few headaches with all the tags I had to look up to see what they did and how to prevent plug-ins from injecting lots of un-necessary code into the template.

The template is roughly 95% done and the code is pretty clean, I dare say. Still polishing the CSS to get a decent look, and I’m aware of some of the most common Internet Explorer bugs. Even though I haven’t tested it with Internet Explorer 6 yet (why oh why are people using IE anyway?), I will make sure it looks OK before releasing it.

What I have learned since I started on this journey to learn the basics of WP coding:

• Templates rule!
• The WordPress community is large and, for the most part, supportive.
• Creating your own custom WP template from scratch requires a good bit of effort.
• I have a lot more respect for WP theme designers doing everything from scratch.

Check back later, as I hopefully will have it ready in the next couple of days. I really should get back to tweaking the Flexibility 2 theme as well. Right now it’s still “out of the box” and looks very feature-less and naked. In due time!

Haavard