I was given a copy of Wp Zon Builder to review and found myself being very impressed by this wordpress plugin. Thought I would post a copy of my review of Wp Zon Builder…..you can get a copy at WpZonBuilder.

IMHO, if you want to autoblog or autopost using Amazon products, WPZonBuilder will easily do it, suitable for newbie and advanced autobogger alike!

If you want to autoblog or autopost with Amazon products AND have the ability to create a unique store with unique templates with many customizing options….then grab a copy WPZonBuilder.

Follow me as I ramble on in an effort to describe my experience with this wordpress plugin.

We live in exciting times.

Creating an autoblog or autoposting site once was a task that wasn’t for the weak in heart……today there are many solutions. With each new solution comes a new twist, feature and possibilities.

We benefit by the abundance of autoblogging plugins and scripts by the fact that only the best and the best supported plugins will survive. I mention all this because, Louis, the creator of WPZonBuilder has gone out of his way to create a unique wordpress plugin for anyone wanting to get into autoblogging Amazon products. The best part is his attitude and desire the make this the best possible plugin, truly looking for suggestions to make it better and always looking to help the user that’s lost! Kudos for having that type of mindset.

I was lucky enough to get one of the review copies and agreed to share some of my thoughts here:

Installation couldn’t have been simpler. Standard wordpress plugin simplicity, I prefer to upload via ftp and activate in the plugins directory.

Adding Amazon id’s and affiliate code was a simple matter.

Next I’m ready to start creating blog posts and I do this by starting to add products to the queue. First I need to pick a keyword or keyword phrase.

I plugged in my keyword phrase (chicago bear jersey) and pulled up over 1000 results. Next you have the ability to check out each product and decide whether you want to add to the queue. As you can guess, clicking on 1000 links got old real quick….I decided to quit at 300 or so, well I got to about 280 or so and my browser froze up….now, it was my fault I had about 90 tabs open ….but I had spent around 45 minutes picking my products an now they were lost. I was pissed, it was late so I went to bed.

Next morning I thought I’d give it a go again and start over, so far I wasn’t too impressed…..much to my surprise, all my items were still in the queue!!!! So….what I thought was a pain in the butt way of picking products actually wasn’t so bad The more I think about it, this option of selecting products will really help you drill down and keep relevant products on your pages….very nice feature.

I understand the next version will have the ability to add all in one click…which I also would like since it would be a quick and dirty way to create a huge site if so desired and bypass clicking individual products to “add to queue”

Posting Schedule

Posting schedule is always important with any autoposter and this plugin has a unique way method of scheduling posts:

1. A simple option to dump all the posts now with the date of your choice.

2. A randomizing feature. Will allow you to take all your posts and drip them in randomly over a period of time. At the same time, you can take the group of posts and back date a percentage and schedule the rest of the posts. For instance. I had 300 posts, and choose the “Random Dates” feature, setting it to “-2 months” and “June 30, 2010″ …… that’s 300 posts over a 6 month period….so WPZon took about 1/3 of the posts and back dated them (random dates) and they were posted …..the other posts were randomly dated and scheduled over the next 4 months and it looks like they will post anywhere from 1 to 3 per day…..pretty cool feature !

I can stick all the posts in an existing “category” or WPZon will create a category or categories based on the keywords in the title. I need to experiment a little with this feature, but it has some interesting potential.

General Settings

This tab allows you to configure the way your posts will look. There are key features that will allow you to develop your own templates which can help to eliminate footprints. Don’t get scared if you’re a newbie because you can basically go with the default settings and you’ll have a great looking site. However, for the more advanced users you have everything you need to customize your own templates.

I’ll go over some of these settings….although it might confuse you, trust me, if you’ve been doing this a while, the settings are very intuitive.

First you choose a Template….you can use the default or a customized template.

Next you can determine the number of characters in the “Post Excerpt”. Louis if you read this, it would be awesome to be able to define the number of characters as a range….for instance 150-300…..anyway, as it is you simply plug in a number.

Link Text…..this is the typical “Read More” link text you usually see at the end of a post. You have full control over how you want the link text linked to the permalink of your product.

Where to Show Excerpts….tell the plugin where you want the “Excerpts to appear” such as the:

• homepage
• front page
• search results
• and so on…..

Product Descriptions:

This is pretty cool…you can tell the pluin to use the Amazone Editorial Review for the product description…(if available) talk about getting rid of footprints

Of course you can add customer reviews as post comments and you can limit the reviews to any number….you decide how many to include with each post.

Again….this is an awesome feature. You can determine the the order of the reviews by quite a few factors such as:

• overall rating (highest first)
• number of helpful votes
• submission date
• and more…….

You can “tag the products” with the original Amazon Tags or auto create tags from the post title.

Many more options under the “General Tab” all to help track, control and configure your new site….and one heck of a thorough way to create a unique site….definitely takes care of footprints.

Language Settings

Amazon has special wording when products aren’t available, price isn’t available, no list price, lowest price not available. Well…..change the standard phrasing and include your own. For instance:

Amazon —-> Lowest Price Is Not Available
You——–> Price is Ridiculous…Too Low to Display!

Just another way to get rid of foot prints and in this case, a way to encourage or create the desire for your visitor to click on a link.

Integration Settings

For me, this offers some of the most powerful methods of creating unique text or content for each post. I haven’t tried this yet, but I’ve got a couple of very unique ways to use this feature and can’t wait to give it a whirl.

Imagine your standard post.

Now imagine your stardard post with a snippet of text above the post. Or maybe an ebay auction above the post!

Add to the above with the ability to add image, content, snippet or auction to the bottom of the post.

In short, this feature allows you to use shortcodes to add content to the top and/or bottom of each post. If you use this feature, there simply isn’t anyone who is going to have a post similar to yours….so whether you believe in the duplicate content penalty or not…..You won’t have ANY duplicate content on your blog!

Imagine if you could rotate a snippet of text above each post that was relevant to the post. Write 3 sentences, use a spinner and spin a couple of hundred unique versions of the text and rotate them as intro’s. Or how about an rss feed, or image…if you use your imagination on this one, the world is your oyster

Click Reporting

This is a nice feature but I honestly haven’t had time to check it out. 24 hours after I put up my project I had 5 or 6 pages of click tracking info all from the same IP. I’m sure that many people didn’t click on the links so I’m assuming it was spiders or maybe an automatic click when the post was loaded. This feature would be nice if there was a date, info on the click…was it IE, FF or search engine. Otherwise it may not be very useful to you….interesting, yes,….useful, I doubt it.

Documentation

There’s a nice page of documentation to whet your appetite, however, I really think that in order to take advantage of the full power of this plugin it would be a big advantage to have a more detailed documentation. Perhaps a set of video screen capture videos along with a pdf explaining more thoroughly how to take advantage of all the advanced features.

For instance this is what you get for the explanation of Template Tags:

A little help by the author would be appreciated!

Final Thoughts

This plugin offers something for just about everybody. If you are a complete noob but you know how to set up a wordpress site and you know what a plugin is….and you’ve heard that autoposting or autoblogging is the newest craze….well, you can get started using all the basic settings of WPZonBuilder. You’ll have your first posts up within 30 minutes if not sooner.

To you guys who know your way around a blog, plugins and some coding….WPZonBuilder is an Autobloggers dream if you want to autopost Amazon products. At first glance it might seem like another wprobot or similar plugin….but, it’s much more. The more I study and use the plugin, the deeper you fall into the plugin’s magic. Duplicate content and footprints are some of our biggest concerns if you’re building autoblogs. I honestly think you have more options to create content unlike anything else on the internet with this baby….and I’ve used quite a few of them. I would say all, but it seems like every day a new autoposting plugin enters the scene. With that said, I really feel confident that Louis has the personality and ability to make this one of the top autoposters on the market…..can’t wait to see what he comes up with in the coming weeks and months!