Alternative to Wordpress Direct?

Hi all,

Wordpress Direct, if you don't know, is a service that automatically installs a wordpress blog for you, and it makes sure that it is SEO optimized. They have a free service, but am looking at the next level of service, which is silver and is over $60/month. That's too expensive for me, besides, I just started in IM, so am not making any good money as of yet. Does anyone know of a cheaper service that does the same thing as Wordpress Direct? Thanks.

 

Why would you pay someone to SEO an install if all the available plugins and mods are available for free? So yes, another alternative is FREE.

EDIT: after reviewing their site, I can tell they have absolutely NO difference between a regular WP install. They are charging people to upload free plugins. STAY AWAY from these people.

 

Thank you so much for looking into this. LOL. I am new to all this, set up my first blog using Wordpres Direct's free account. Was really tempted to upgrade to their Silver membership, but something told me to ask here first. And am soo glad that I did. Am going to now study how to set up Wordpress sites. Where do I find the plugins though? Where is a good site for those?

 

Check your PM, I'll help you out.

 

There is no need to pay someone for installing wordpress. It will take only 5 mins to install wordpress. Search for required plugins and ask others what they are using it and seach this forum. If you need any help PM me I am happy to help you

 

Yeah we need to shut those guys down, they are targeting people who don't know better and taking their money. Whomever is offended by these people please copy and paste the thread link and send it to them via their contact form. Maybe the will explain why they are cheating people.

Here is the link.

http://www.wordpressdirect.com/support/index.php?act=tickets&code=open

 

what a unpleasant way to make money
its like charging the sick and dying for medication

 

WordpressDirect conned a lot of people doing a thing called the Thirty Day Challenge. You
should have seen these newbies fall over each other trying to sign up to WPD.

Then the problems started and do you think anyone helped? No way.

Even if you tried to explain to others in the 30DC forum that other alternatives were
available (for free) the mods got all offended and accused you off trying to give out wrong info.

Basically all WPD is a Wordpress blog with different themes available and certain plugins already
installed.

There are plenty of free videos available that help you understand Wordpress, CPanel
and FTP. Even if there isn't, there is always great forums (like DP) where there are plenty
of people who can help.

 

This is funny, you people have no idea what you are talking about. The Thirty Day Challenge suggested WordPressDirect, because people that are new to IM and are unaware of how to set up a wordpress blog or editing code can use a service such as WordPressDirect to cut out the necessity of that step. Of course all of this can be done organically, but even to someone who knows how to, WPD saves a lot of time and effort. Its a great tool, and personally being #1 on google for my keywords because of WPD, I suppose I may be biased.

 

You guys REALLY don't know what you're talking about. The installation part of WordPressDirect is FREE! You can setup 3 sites and pay nothing. Doing the SEO on a WP blog takes the better part of a day, and with WPD you get a site where the SEO is proven to work for nothing! In fact you get 3 of them!!!

And the Free accounts are NOT TRIALS that expire. They are lifetime!

You pay only if you want more than 3 sites. IF SO, there is a bronze level account that is $37 a month, or $27 per month if you pre-pay.

Conned?!?! Not at all. It's a great service that helped lots of people who didn't want to mess with wp-config.php, MySQL databases and plugins get started with an SEO blog for NO COST!

(That is why it is in my signature)

 

The list of plugins was published back in August on the 30DC forum. The answer to DomainLoco's question about why you would pay a service is that configuring all this takes a lot of time. Plus you have to hack your template php code to change the title tagging and other items and also throw a BUNCH of other switches in WordPress settings to SEO it properly.

This is all OK for a WordPress expert (like me), but imagine a newbie who has never seen HTML trying to do it.

So you either spend a lot of time learning to do it, or you pay. If you value your time, then you pay. If not, then have at it - it will take a lot of time. There is no con here.

Here's the plugin list that WPD uses;

AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget (drop down)
Adsense Manager
Adserve
All-in-One SEO Pack
Category Posts widget
cForms
Ultimate Google Analytics
Google XML Sitemaps
Sale Offer Ads Plug-in (written by WPD)
Sale Offer Ads Widget (written by WPD)
Wordpress Duplicate Content Cure
Wordpress Video Plug-in
WP-PostRatings
WP-PostRatings Widget
WP admanager
WP-sticky (otherwise known as Stickyposts)
WP tags to Technorati

 

This is funny, you guys are actually doing the exact same thing as many people in this forum. Which is taking advantage of the newbies who don't know better. You are promising to have an easy blog full of free content and earning adsense which only gives false hope to the unsuspecting. Your value added services are basically taking content that does not belong to you and using it to profit, which in anyone's book ( or at least blogger's books ) is copyright infringement and simply annoying. Stop creating dependable and ignorant clients that think a blog is only good to have copied content and make easy money.

SEO takes how long? lol it's a matter of installing a couple of plugins and making sure your content and keywords are properly placed. How could you possibly make that any simpler, are you doing that for them automatically? This kind of suggestive service pisses me off, simply taking advantage of the people who are sincerely interested in starting a blog and hooking them on the "easy" drug. All I'm saying is that if you wanted to sell your services, maybe you should be targeting people who have both sides of the coin and not only see your option as a viable one.

Anyway, your entire site is NOT SEOed and I will make sure none of the newbies from this forum have to depend on that ridiculous sales letter to have a good blog.

ATTENTION NEWBIES/NEWCOMERS: If you need to set up a blog and you intend to work hard at producing quality content and relevant articles please PM me. I will help you get set up FOR FREE and will guide you through SEOing your first WP blog. DO NOT PM ME IF: you think copying content and using deceiving services is the best route to generate income online.

geez I needed to vent

WORDPRESSDIRECT.COM = SPLOGGING​

All your doing is committing plagiarism to a HUGE level and charging people to do so after "three free blogs". YOU ADD NO VALUE = YOU GET POSTED ON A FORUM AND DRILLED.

 

Wow someone is awfully angry with their big red letters. Yet trying to sell their own "free" service. Ironic.

 

What exactly am I trying to sell for free? How can you not be angry at people who use shilling techniques on this thread to pump their insignificant services? They are offering a service that holds no value and I feel compelled to clear up any doubts.

Mods, please check their IPs. Looks like three counts of shilling to me.

 

For those who don't know, I am the creator or WordPressDirect. I didn't post this thread (nor do I know the user who did) and I have never posted a thread about my own service on this forum.

DomainLoco - your post is bullshit and you don't know what you are talking about. You have never used the service. I think shouting in the forum is bad form and also childish.

I am surprised that you persist in spreading the dis-information in your posts, which are contrary to facts. Here they are;

FACT: We gave away the service, hosting and domains to participants in the Challenge (and we still do).

FACT: Of the 2000 people who finished the 30 Day Challenge using WPD as their publishing service, 1147 (57%) got on the FIRST PAGE of Google SERPS for their chosen search phrases.

FACT: NONE of these people used content aggregation to get there.

FACT: These sites continue to rank today and have not been flagged for dupe content.

FACT: The example site used to teach the 30DC users became PR4 after 45 days and is still a PR4 today.

FACT: The Free accounts are NOT TRIALS that expire. They are lifetime accounts!

FACT: You pay only if you want more than 3 sites.

FACT: The content software included with the paid accounts does not scrape content. It only takes content from services where people post their content for syndication, such as YouTube and eZine directories. So it basically automates what blog authors were doing manually.

FACT: We do not tell people to put Adsense on their sites. Actually, we discourage it (see our videos), and so does the 30DC teachings. So DomainLoco - you are just plain wrong in your statement above.

DP Members - You be the judge: Here is a well known example site (since it has been used to teach best practices to our users in the 30DC). Take a look at http://www.vintageelectricguitarblog.com

So tell me, if you were a guitar enthusiast who came across the site above would YOU think it was a spam blog? I hope not.

 

LOL again, there is no value in your services and you are targeting the wrong crowd. You are COPYING CONTENT from other sources, regardless of how you look at it, it's still SPAM. PR has nothing to do with the content you have, just the amount of links pointing at the domain which can easily be purchased. You are using a technique that takes other content (whether syndicated or not) and publishes it again on another site. That is enough to qualify your blog as a spam blog.

Your business model (freemium) is great! But you are targeting people who have no experience in WP and making them an advocate for spamming the internet with useless content. Which only hurts us, the REAL bloggers who bust their butts writing content or paying someone ALOT of money to write it for us.

All the real bloggers who are here to add value, please post! This is not about your service being free or not, it's about spamming the space and making easy money.

Here is the definition: Spam blogs, sometimes referred to by the neologism splogs, are artificially created weblog sites which the author uses to promote affiliated websites or to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites. The purpose of a splog can be to increase the PageRank or backlink portfolio of affiliate websites, to artificially inflate paid ad impressions from visitors, and/or use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed. Spam blogs are usually a type of scraper site, where content is often either inauthentic text or merely stolen (see blog scraping) from other websites. These blogs usually contain a high number of links to sites associated with the splog creator which are often disreputable or otherwise useless websites.

 

Yep agree with domainloco. The sites yoru creating are useless. I took a quick look around the Slog creator site and can't really see any benefit of using your site compared to installing it yourself.

If you or any of your clients stole my data/videos/posts or images or anything you could get yoru hands on. Then i'd be handing out DMCA notices until the cows come home.

DO you let your clients or whatever you call them know that they should give a link back to the source? Do you let them know that they should create content for their own sites rather than copying other peoples work?

I read an article about how much data was created on the net a few years ago. With sploggers like you at work, that number can only increase 100 fold.

 

Since the service was launched, we have received 2 copyright violation notices for content, and both were addressed immediately. These were caused by authors circulating content they didn't have permission for in eZine directories, not due to our methods.

Forget the content publishing for a second...We save people time and frustration in setting up a a search-engine optimized blog. Not just any old blog. A blog that would take you a day to build yourself. Worpress experts have said as much on the 30DC forum. We just make it easier for your content to get noticed by Google and Yahoo for your target phrase - and we do it for Free.

You keep discounting the fact that our users write their own content. Why?

It's as if we force users to use our content software on their blogs. We do not. We teach you how to do it correctly (see the example site) to add value to your uniquely written content. It is OK to find a YouTube video yourself and embed it in your blog, but not to have a peice of software to make it easier?

I can't understand the statement about how we don't provide value. We have given 1000's of newbies the ability to publish on a topic and get noticed. We have given people the ability to find related rich-media content so their sites can be a difinitive authority on a niche topic.

You guys are just haters. You have a pre-conceived notion about blogging and the use of such technology, and you are lumping WordPressDirect in with previous stupid attempts to game Adsense.

If you spam your own blog, using our stuff or anybody else's you are a fool. You will be de-indexed by Google and then nobody will notice your content.

Wake up.

 

Just a note to weigh in here - if you're installing WP via Fantastico or other "helper" services then you are leaving large, gaping security holes in your installation.

I'm NOT a WP expert, but Michael Savoie IS and warns that "bloggers should patch these security flaws to prevent hackers from easily guessing the database and username for their blog, because Fantastico uses the same username and database name, wrdp1, in all first installations of a Wordpress blog on a site. Subsequent installations are still easy to guess, with Fantastico just changing the number to wrdp2, wrdp3, etc."

You can read the entire article here (not an aff link): http://tinyurl.com/

As always, you should do your own non-emotionally-charged Due Diligence and verify this information, but my understanding is another advantage with WPDirect is that it does not leave these security risks open.

Kindly,
Lee Collins

 

Since the service was launched, we have received 2 copyright violation notices for content, and both were addressed immediately. These were caused by authors circulating content they didn't have permission for in eZine directories, not due to our methods.

Forget the content publishing for a second...We save people time and frustration in setting up a a search-engine optimized blog. Not just any old blog. A blog that would take you a day to build yourself. Worpress experts have said as much on the 30DC forum. We just make it easier for your content to get noticed by Google and Yahoo for your target phrase - and we do it for Free.

You keep discounting the fact that our users write their own content. Why?

Your post made absolutely NO sense. Your arguments are totally illegitimate and I guarantee you have lost the battle on this thread.


@ LeeColins: Can you say "ridiculously obvious advertising". Why would you post such a ridiculous assumption about hackers being able to access your database? I can find that out easily, regardless of whether I use fantastico or not. Plus the database's username and password are unique to the person who installed it and it usually would not be a breakable through a piece of software that uses randomly generated characters. Everyone knows you must be vigilant and have a secure username on every install, and the password has to be something you create and only you would know.

Plus, who says wordpressdirect is not using fantastico? They obviously promote HostGator (which offers Fantastico on their Linux accounts). This is seriously ridiculous and I can tell you that it is impossible for a hacker to guess your username and password simply by knowing your database's name. Don't be scared into buying a CHEAP product for the hope that nobody will hack into your WP. If a hacker decides to attack your blog, he will most likely succeed regardless of where your Database is or what you called it.