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CSVPiG – CSV Import Plugin
CSVPiG is a WordPress plugin which manages affiliate data feeds or in fact any CSV data source. Affiliate datafeeds are widely available from the major affiliate networks and allow you to sell vendor’s products via a blog. You may also have your own product database in a CSV file which you need to import into your autoblog.
You already know that autoblogging income is very reliant on scale i.e. you need content rich blogs and ideally a lot of them to make the big bucks. This plugin will help you achieve that scale by allowing you very quickly to turn affiliate data feeds (CSV files) into online stores that virtually run themselves. In fact, the acronym PiG actually stands for ‘Passive Income Generation,’ giving you some idea of the product’s purpose!
One of the reasons we wanted to review this plugin was our disappointment with some other products which claimed to be able to cope with high volume CSV files but which in reality fell over when importing files with thousands of items in them. CSVPiG stood up to the test and proved itself robust enough to cope with importing and scheduling thousands of posts. It uses native WordPress publishing functions rather than direct database access to achieve this.
Aside from the advantage of being able to cope with large CSV files, CSVPiG is laden with features, some of them expected, others a bit more advanced. You can do the obvious things like schedule posts and specify the number of posts you want per day, but we like that you can also stipulate a percentage of posts to be posted in the past and in the future. This means you can front load your autoblog with content rather than having to wait for posts to publish before it gets picked up by the search engines – your autoblog can get earning a bit more quickly!
There are other useful time savers in there too, like batch processing CSV files in the background while you get on with other things, or copying your CSVPiG settings from one blog across to any other blogs you have, bringing set-up times down to seconds for new or additional blogs.
One of our favourite features of this product is the WYSIWYG* template designer, so you can quickly and easily adapt the look of your posts, seeing the changes as you make them in the interface. In addition, CSVPiG gives you the ability to rotate templates randomly for each post published to give each post a truly unique or organic feel. So, to follow their example of a blog reviewing and selling DVDs, you could have the DVD box shot appear top left in one post but bottom right in another; you can move buy now links around, move bullet points – all per post so each one looks unique. It creates a good user experience and keeps the blog looking natural.
If you’re a very advanced autoblogger then you might be disappointed with the fact that CSVPiG is not currently compatible with the WordPress Multi-User platform. The guys at BlogPiG are, however, working on this and plan to release it as a feature soon.
So, there are plenty of cool features within this plugin which will support a good, income-generating autoblog and which will let you run an autoblog or autoblogs on a large scale and it sounds like there are more improvements on the way. These features are wrapped up in a tidy and intuitive user interface, too, so it is a user-friendly product which we think autobloggers could be up and running with competently in no time.
All in all this plug-in is a really worthwhile purchase– it’s loaded with features and functionality, seems robust and the user interface is very friendly. On top of that, BlogPiG appear to offer very good customer support, they’re clearly aiming to be in this for the long game and we look forward to seeing more of their products in the future.
*What you see is what you get
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