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Add-ons

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Website Add-ons is such a broad category that I’ve already had to break it down into a few sub categories already. Contextual add helpers are definitely Add-ons, and so is most of what you’ll find in the Security sub-category. All it really means is some sort of program or script that is added to a website to give users more functionality.

In some cases, like with Directories, Content Management Systems, most kinds of membership sites, forums, & Blogs, you might not even see any HTML website, the whole user interface could be database-generated as it is called for. This isn’t a very good structure for getting Search Engines to index the site, but it makes it really easy on the webmaster to administrate a lot of user features. 

One great approach is to have, just like this website is, a dual approach. I’ve got lots of content that is easily indexed, as you can see, but I also have more than my share of Add-ons here, totaling more than half the bulk of this site!

There is a membership section, (The Vault) the HBF Forum, our AdSense wrapper Generator, our Pop-up maker, and our Keyword Explorer list generator, and a few instant comment fields for user page interaction. All of these are individual add-ons, and that’s really just the tip of the iceberg. I’ve used 20 times that many Add-ons over the last few years, and more are made every day to do new and exciting things online.

Sometimes it’s difficult to install or administrate add-ons, sometimes it’s no harder than clicking on an installer icon. The difficulty level all depends on whether or not you have to use a server database to run the application with. (Databases, like MySQL, would be needed if you need to sort and interlink large amounts of data, such as a membership list.) Generally, if an application isn’t so specialized that it doesn’t even allow user logins, then you probably won’t need to use a database. However, don’t hold me to that, these things are so different and unique now that there is just no way to know until you’re installing it.

The lifespan of these scripts usually goes something like this: When a webmaster gets creative and wants to offer a new functionality to his users, they find a programmer some place like rentacoder.com and post a job and how much they’re willing to pay.

Some PHP scripter offers to do it, and they work for a few days to a few weeks on it, and decide that they’ve got a saleable product, so they try to sell it as well as use it for the original intent.

At that point they have the option to either build a sales site for it and spend money getting traffic to that site, or they can simply offer it up with some kind of Resell Rights, which saves them a lot of trouble.

If they sell it themselves, they’ve started a business that keeps them busy, so if it goes under, we’ll find the software as unsupported freeware in a script directory later.

If they offer it up as a RR product, then well see it in membership sites, and usually It will only take a couple of months until it is offered as a free product with Resell Rights.

Either way, Add-ons will always wind up free unless a software giant like Microsoft snaps them up and makes it proprietary software… Now you know why so many programmers really hate Microsoft. 

Ok, so let’s get specific to your needs. The success of the site you are planning to run will depend greatly on choosing the right Add-on for its’ functionality. There is quite a lot of crap out there that will waste more time than save it, so I’m trying hard to make sure I don’t mention anything that falls in that category. At the same time, please realize that I don’t have time to test many of these scripts as I’m spending too much time doing MRR product reviews and writing content like this.

So please keep in mind, that there are no guarantees and any add-ons mentioned on this website are to be tried at your own risk.

Let’s hit the major types by section:

Directories:

Both traditional link directories, like Yahoo.com, and Article directories, like ezinearticles.com, both run the same way, a huge, database-driven add-on that stores and serves content (either in the form of articles or link reviews) with membership access.

This is probably the greatest way to build content that ever existed. Think about it, you actually get to charge people money to give you content to put on your website. Then they usually tell their friends and colleagues to look at their content, on your site, so you get tons of traffic, too! Just throw some ads on it and you’ve got a literal online ATM spitting out money.

Still, there are two big drawbacks. The most obvious is that it takes time to administrate one. To leave one of these things running hands-free is to guarantee that you’ll get some illegal content or tons of spam added to your site in no time. Therefore you or someone you appoint will have to approve each submission to the site.   

The other drawback is much worse on article directories than it is on link directories: Search Engines have lots of trouble indexing content that is generated by databases… A simple HTML page is very easy to spider, but those PHP pages that are created by databases each time you ask for them confuses or makes it impossible for Googlebot and it’s fellows to read.

The best way to combat this problem, although it’s no guarantee, is to ensure that your directory supports “permalinks,” which is just a way of naming the page files so that they are named the same thing every time you call it up. (The way HTML files do.) If you are looking for a directory to run, don’t accept anything that doesn’t use or support permalinks, unless of course you don’t ever care if traffic comes from off-site or not.

The competition for link directories is pretty steep right now, so to start up a new one of those would be really tough unless you already have a traffic network in place to send it tons of members immediately. That’s because Yahoo!, the first directory that is still around, has been growing since 1993 or thereabouts despite having thousands of competitors. Even still, the free Link Directories with any PageRank to them at all numbers only about 400 or so… I know because I submit every site I ever make to all 400 of them!

The market for Article directories is still competitive, and there’s a great new software package out by Simon Hodgkinson, called ArticleManagerPro that meets our needs pretty well. It’s very powerful for only $97, and he’s throwing in tons of video training and thousands of PLR articles for you to get it started with.

When I find a good, free article Directory that supports permalinks, I’ll post it on this page too. So far, no luck in my search.   

Content Management Systems:

There are a hundred or so different database-driven CMSs out there for different purposes, many of which are even free, with support provided by an open-source community forum. eCommerce Sites, which are notoriously difficult to develop, can be online & selling within minutes, all with free software! (OSCommerce is becoming industry standard, in fact.)

Lately, the trend has been for server hosting companies, at least for shared hosting accounts, to add in a self-installing version of a few CMSs so that webmasters don’t even have to know how to set it up… Just plug and play.

CMSs are wonderfully flexible in ways that are hard to imagine, but the problem for our needs is that Search Engines can’t seem to penetrate very far into their content. The same problem as with directories, you need to ensure it can use permalinks for decent SEO-ability.

Still, if your needs don’t require strong SEOing, and you do need to run a database-driven membership site, I advise you to go weigh the options for your needs among Open-Source (free) scripts at www.opensourceCMS.com.

Forums

Many website forums are add-ons that don’t run your whole site like a CMS does. Most of them are free as well, eve with great support and their own skins, languages, and add-ins supported.

Any Add-in can get your users involved in generating your content for you, but nothing has generated the sheer bulk of original visitor content that Forums have.

A great forum to start with is PhpBB.com, as it has one of the largest support communities around and the most flexibility. Also, it’s likely that your server host can install it for you, and best of all, there is a permalink option that Google can pretty successfully spider.

And the rest…

Since there are too many to give each their own section, I’ll just say this about the rest of them: There’s a lot!

One of the best things about Add-ons is that you can usually find one for free to do whatever you need it to do! Even in our specialized marketing niche, you can find one to do just about anything you need, for free.

All of the add-ons for this whole site I picked up for free, either as a script in a place like hotscripts.com, or as an MRR Software Product that was offered in a free membership downloads section.

Keep your eye on this page for more Add-on MRR products in the future, It’s sure to be an area that grows faster than others.

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