Archive for 'March, 2008'

Today eBay decided to disallow all digital downloads from sale at month’s end. No more eBooks, PDF files, or software….basically anything that is a direct download after the sale.

I don’t often comments on things “in the news” that make the usual rounds on blogs because that’s not why you came here. But I just read something that I could not resist commenting on and I felt the need to post and let you know about it. I just read on Alan’s blog Affilliate Confession, his latest post is about eBay killing digital downloads. You can find the official eBay announcement here.

So – what’s all the hubub about? If you read that announcement, you’ll find that it indicates that eBay has a problem with people “manipulating the feedback system” by using thousands of low cost digital download product listings. Rather than address the problem – eBay has chosen to remove all digital download products as of March 31st, 2008 – and their only option is to pay $9.95 for a 30 day “classified ad” listing (which isn’t even an auction at all).

The audacity and ineptness of eBay with the announcement is unbelievable. I do not make a living selling eBooks, PDF files, software, or other digital downloads on eBay. For many people though, they have (over the years) built up an entire income or business by selling digital products on eBay. I had actually thought about creating and selling several eBooks on eBay in the future. The thing about eBooks, or PDF files, or even software is that it has a “perceived value”. Other than the fact that it’s digital and doesn’t take resources to duplicate (like a book, magazine, CD, or DVD) – the perception of it’s value lies in the eye of the beholder. I mean honestly, a country cookbook with “100 ways to Cook a Squirrel” is probably not for me, but I would buy a Jimi Hendrix biography any day. What makes eBooks or software any different? They aren’t valuable unless you can find a buyer who finds value in them.

eBay appararently doesn’t find much value in digital products because they “are often reproduced at little to no cost to the seller“. What!? Wow, if you used that analogy I guess the latest “Guitar Hero 3″ video game isn’t of much value because it can be reproduced at little or no cost. Never mind the fact that it took millions of dollars and thousands of hours to create, and on the street will run you $60-80 to get a copy. What makes eBook sellers second class citizens? As Alan points out in his post where I first found out about this, he has a Vegan Meal Planner that he and his wife poured 70 hours into, and it’s very valuable to people looking for that information. Just because it’s not sold in Barnes and Noble or being wrapped in a fancy box by a major corporation with thousands of employees doesn’t mean that it’s not a product, or that Alan doesn’t have a valid company, or that Alan shouldn’t be able to sell his digital product on eBay.

I also think that eBay is overlooking one completely huge point here as well, and it’s the fact that they left one of the biggest loopholes wide open. It’s called a “box”. That’s right a “box”. What’s the difference between Alan’s Vegan Meal Planner eBook and the latest copy of Windows Vista? A box. That’s it – nothing more and nothing less. Remember, eBay only killed “digital downloads” or things that were downloadable only after purchase. If you have a great product you can still burn it to CD, put it in a box (or any wrapper), and ship it to anyone and list all the auctions you want. This is a real PITA I admit, but there are ways around it.

In the end, I think that eBay is being really short-sighted here, and they sure had no problems accepting millions and millions of dollars over the years for digital download listings. They have billions of dollars and a crack team of developers on staff. There’s no reason they couldn’t have fixed the problem in a way other than removing all digital downloads. The easiest of which would have been to temporarily suspended feedback on all digital downloads until a better solution was found. I can’t count the number of great eBooks and products I bought on eBay for online marketing, and while I’m sure that there are some shady sellers – every one I bought from was upstanding and had quality products.

Good job eBay – so much for thinking about the customer (or your sellers for that matter)…

My Process for Setting up and Configuring a new WordPress blog in 60 Minutes or less

*UPDATE 2008*
My routine for setting up WordPress sites has changed a bit. Mainly because I now have so many WordPress sites that I’ve found better plugins to use, and some of the ones I used to love aren’t good anymore. In addition to that I’ve learned more about SEO and how to manage wordpress more effectively, which is why I started the series Managing WordPress More Effectively. For the purposes of this article alone it’s limited to what you can do to setup a blog in an hour or less. For more detailed instructions, please read the entire series! I’ve updated this article and republished it today because it’s one of the most viewed on this site (and it was getting a lot of activity this week).

I’ve setup a few dozen wordpress blog sites in the last year, and it’s led to developing a standard routine for getting it done in the quickest and most effective way. I decided to post this in an ordered list, and hopefully it helps someone – but this is also self serving as I can reference this myself if I don’t set one up again for awhile. These are tips I’ve learned from dozens of other sites, and it really gets the site ready for publishing in short order. It takes care of a little bit of seo, your feeds and stats, you’ll be ready for any kind of media upload or download tracking, you’ll have both comments and related posts, more control over your home page, better archives, comment subscription, rss by email, ready to add amazon affiliate links by drag and drop, sitemaps for both google and Yahoo, you’ll be ‘digg ready’ and more! This is the process I followed to setup this site, and I’m hoping that eventually we can get some great comments to add update and add even more value to this post. I’ve provided links to everything I thought you might need more info on. Of course all info is regarding a wordpress self-hosted web site. Here we go!

*UPDATE* I’m not linking plugins on this list anymore – just visit my WordPress Plugins Used page to get all the links you need after you read the checklist.

1. Get the lastest version of WordPress, download and install
2. Find a new wordpress theme with a good layout and upload
3. Login for the first time and activate askimet module with API key. I also upload and enable WordPress.com Stats plugin using the exact same API key.
4. Add first “welcome to the site” post, delete default post
5. Delete first comment and “hello dolly” plugin
6. Under “Options->Permalinks” enable “custom” /%postname%/ for clean SEO friendly url’s
7. Click update to .htaccess file, if it fails make .htaccess writeable
8. Update the list of ‘ping’ services in ‘options->writing’. Be default there only one, and you want to notify as many services as possible every time you post. Here is the the most up to date list of ping services I could find.

Add third party plugins, this is my current list, but the ones here are the ones I favor most and “have to have” on each and ever default install. Get the links from the current plugin list page:

• Aizatto’s Related Posts
• Askimet
• Author Highlight
• Breadcrumb
• Brian’s Threaded Comments
• cForms II
• Code Auto Escape
• Commentluv
• Comment Relish
• Custom Smilies
• Digg This
• Digital Fingerprint
• Dofollow
• Enforce www. preference
• Feedburner Feedsmith
• Feedcount
• Full Feed Text
• Google Analytics
• Google XML Sitemaps
• Homepage Excerpts
• RSS Feed Signature
• Subscribe to Comments
• WP-DB Manager
• WP-PageNavi
• WP-PostViews
• WP-Print
• wpSEO
• WP-Amazon

In no particular order:

9. Activate Amazon module, enter id in setup and choose setup options. This particular module is the best I’ve seen, once setup it allows you to search for amazon items directly from you ‘Write’ page in wordpress admin (in a sidebar) – and you can drag and drop the pics and link text right into your post. No more copy and pasting amazon affiliate code!
10. Active google analytics module, enter id in setup choose setup options. If you don’t already have a google analytics account – get one!
11. Activate google sitemap plugin and add entry in webmaster console
12. Add sitemap url and feed url in Yahoo! Site Explorer console
13. Add sitemap URL in MSN Live Webmaster Tools
14. Create Feedburner feed and activate Feedburner Feedsmith to redirect RSS feed from your site directly to feedburner every time
15. Activate Feedcount and add custom code to sidebar for subscriber count
16. Activate Digg This plugin. You’ll never know this plugin is doing anything (unless one of your pages gets dugg). If and when it does – this plugin comes alive, detecting traffic from digg.com – it displays a link back to digg (to digg the post) and also emails the site’s admin that ‘you’ve been dugg’! Very handy – just in case! You have to add the code to your single.php file for everyting to work properly.
17. Activate the Enforce www. plugin. Basically this is going to solve your duplicate content problems with www.site.com/page and site.com/page problems. The search crawlers could index the same page twice otherwise one with www. and one without.
18. Activate the Subscribe to Comments plugin. How many times have you been to a post and found yourself going back to the page repeatedly to see the latest comments? Some sites have options for getting email when you post a comment, but what if you don’t post and still want to be notified when there are new comments? Solution – Subscribe to comments!
19. Activate Aizatto’s Related Posts (no code to add, works automatically)
20. Activate Author Highlight (highlights admin comments when you reply)
21. Activate Brian’s Threaded Comments, and replace comments.php with the one supplied in the plugin
22. Activate cforms II and create a contact form for the site and contact page to add it to
23. Activate Code Auto Escape (if you will be posting code snippets for people to read)
24. Activate Commentluv, which when people comment will parse their RSS feed for the URL listed in their comment and list and link the last post from their blog as a byline beneath their comment (very nice!)
25. Activate Comment Relish and create a new message for the options page to be displayed to new visitors to your site
26. Activate Custom Smilies and add the code to your comments form for them to display
27. Activate Digital Fingerprint and on the options page add a unique text identifier that you can google to see if people are stealing your content or scraping your site
28. Activate Dofollow (if you want dofollow throughout your site)
29. Activate Full Feed Text (if you want your RSS feed to contain full posts instead of the default “more” provided by WordPress
30. Activate Homepage Excerpts (if you don’t want every post on your homepage to be full. Be default I only have 1 full post, and 9 excerpts.
31. Activate DBManager so you can backup and do maintenance on your database when necessary
32. Activate PageNavi and replace the “previous” and “next” links in your page.php, index.php, and archive.php with the PageNavi code for MUCH better navigation options where visitor’s can see how many pages there are, and go to the beginning or end at any time
33. Activate WP-Print to give your readers a printer friendly link for all posts
34. Activate WP-PostViews so you can add a view counter to your posts and pages
35. Activate wpSEO and setup complete SEO options for your site including meta descriptions, keywords, and defaults
36. Create a robots.txt for specifically for WordPress. The reason for this is – you want to help the search crawlers out and avoid content duplication problems (again). You’ll come up better in search results, and keep the crawler from trying to follow permalinks, admin pages, includes, javascript and css files, your rss feed, and category pages. Do this before you post anything!
37. Claim your blog in your technorati profile. This way you can see your blog’s popularity build and watch your authority factor grow.
38. Add tags, badges, chiclets, and widgets. I usually add one to add to technorati favorites, and sometimes (for more established sites) the Yahoo badge for incoming links. I use the feedcount module, so I don’t need the feedburner chiclet. But I do setup my feedburner feed to list subscription, email, delicious, digg and stumble links to the feed itself. I also enabled the copyright footer (in the feed) in case someone tries to hijack or repurpose my posts. I added the custom code (from feedburner) to my theme to have the sub, email, digg, etc. links at the end of each post as well. Feedburner is awesome! I added the myBlogLog widget, and a buzzfeed one as well, because I like them both. Customize your blog with the ones that you like and that will service your visitors best!

Ok, now you are ready to write posts in your blog!! Post away, post every day, or at least regularly. Your blog is now going to work really hard behind the scenes for you, announcing your new articles via ping and sitemap, waiting for that fateful day when you get dugg, tracking activity in reports in bsuite, and much, much more. Choosing the right plugins that will do work for you, or better serve your readers is just working smarter, not harder. If you have something to add to this article that really works for you when setting up a new wordpress blog – please, please add it in the comments below. If I change my routine or learn something new, I’ll be sure to update this page asap!

This is installment #1 of the series “Managing WordPress More Effectively“. I will show you how to wring every last drop out of your content so you can get the most out of your web site (and your time) each and every day..

*UPDATED* I’ve added a new section at the end that I originally forgot when I posted this article that explains a few page specific features you have in your dashboard before publishing.

The overwhelming majority of people “blogging” online are using “Wordpress” for their self-hosted blogs and web sites. Most bloggers learn by watching what other bloggers do (I know I have). If you see some cool nested comments, or an “entrecard”, or most viewed comments or posts, or a neat way to layout your footer, maybe allowing people to subscribe via email to your rss feed – chances are if you see another blogger doing something cool, you’ll try and figure out how to do that on your blog.

What you can’t learn from looking at the layout of a page or it’s widgets is how to effectively manage your content. Today I’m going to teach you the difference between a “Page” and a “Post”. You may think you already know, but judging from the blogs I’ve been reading 98% of your are “posting” everything and not creating any “pages” at all.

We use WordPress to “blog“. A blog is a “web log” or an online journal. A journal is something you make (nearly) daily entries making observations of your experiences and life. You may not know it, but there are many differences between a blog and a normal web site. What’s a normal web site?

How a Static Web Sites Works

Take a look at this “Web Site Hierarchy“:

I’ve been creating web sites now for more than 13 years. I’ve been blogging and using blogging software since 2001. The six years prior to that I had created static and dynamic web sites. Some for personal use, some for business, and some for e-commerce. The thing they all had in common was the “hierarchy” or the structure. The ‘hierarchy’ mimics the navigation paths that a visitor can follow. They start at a particular page (usually the home page) and visit certain “sections”. Usually you would think of the “home” page as the parent, and the “sub-parent” pages were high level category index pages. In this example after the home page the 4 “sub-parent” pages are login, profile, contact, and products. Going deeper in the hierarchy those pages would have child pages.

Because of the nature of a “static” web site, usually for different sub-indexes we (webmasters) would create separate sub-folders for each. In the case of the example above, there probably would have been separate “/login”, “/profile”, “/contact”, and “/products” physical folders on the server containing one index.html file for each section, and sub-pages and graphics. This type of setup meant that each page had a separate indexable URL the search crawler could find. The basic list of URL’s for this web site looked something like this:

www.site.com/index.html

www.site.com/login/index.html

www.site.com/company/index.html
www.site.com/company/executive.html
www.site.com/company/history.html

www.site.com/contact/index.html

www.site.com/products/index.html
www.site.com/products/hardware.html
www.site.com/products/applications/index.html
www.site.com/products/applications/point-of-sale.html
www.site.com/products/contact.html

Web Sites build on blogging platforms run on a different “paradigm”…

How a “Blog” web site Works

The first difference between a blog and a static web site is the blog stores all of it’s information, posts, and pages in a database. Unless your storing images, media, or documents within your web site – there are no folders to speak of. Within “Wordpress” all the information (and how to serve it to visitor’s in a browser) is physically stored in the WordPress mySQL database backend. You don’t have to know anything about how this happens – you can just go happily on believing that it’s ‘computer magic’. What you need to know is that you can make your blog more like a static web site in many ways – and organizing your data will help both you and your readers. The most horrible thing about a blog is the fact that all the content is buried somewhere and findable only through search, tag, and content pages.

This is a graphic of WordPress blogging heirarchy:

In a blog, as you see in that example everything revolves around a “post” by default. On the “home” page you see a running log of the last 10 posts you’ve written. By clicking on any of them the “single post” page shows that entire post – and then it’s comments (if it has any). Users can subscribe to the RSS feed and read the posts in a feed reader, and by clicking on any of them they are brought back to the “single post” page. All posts can be accessed through “archive” pages. The blog “sidebar” may list arhive pages any number of ways, and archive pages for daily, monthly, and yearly archive pages can be viewed – listing the appropriate “posts” (10 per page). You can also “tag” pages as a way or organizing them. If you tag 6 pages “product x”, then when you view the “product x tag page” those 6 “posts” will show. You can also assign posts to “categories” which are listed in the sidebar. Assigning posts to categories is another methods of categorization, and each individual category page lists the “posts” assigned to it.

So, I went to the trouble of explaining all this to illustrate how blogging completely revolves around “posts”. And yet, in WordPress you have the ability to create a “page”. By default every WordPress blog has an “about page” created for them (but that’s it). The majority of blogs usually have both an about and a contact page at bare minimum. Beyond that – I very rarely see anyone use the “page” function as it was intended.

Using WordPress pages for Better Organization

To me the difference between a post and a page is that a post is transient information. It’s uselful today – it may or may not be tomorrow. One post could be how to lose 10 lbs in a week, and the next might be what you had for lunch. Clearly one has more value than the other. Over the course of time you might write many posts in a similar theme or topic that hold more value collectively than alone.

Using WordPress “pages” to Organize a Series or a Theme:
Like everyone else I have a contact and about page in my WordPress blog. But drawing on my web design experience before blogging I’ve always been frustrated that all my articles are just a bunch of posts. My first stab at organizing this content was to create a “featured” block on the homepage pointing to my most useful writings. In addition, I created wordpress category templates for each category so I could have original content on each category page. And yet, that was still not enough for me because I still feel a lack of structure.

As in the blog heirarchy above, there is nothing attached to a “page” and by default it’s blank. There are no posts or anything listed, you are free to create and write anything you want. In addition, your “page” will be listed in your sidebar as well under the page heading. The first page I decided to make was a “theme page”, with a lot of information I felt that would be used over and over again. The content wasn’t well suited for a post, it was a bit more permanent than that. I ended up creating my Keyword Research Cheat Sheet as my first “page”. You can find it in my sidebar now, and it has lots of links and descriptions of ways to do keyword research – this is a great “resource page”. You’ll also find a link building cheat sheet there, as well as a page listing all of the WordPress plugins that I use. These are all examples of pages that revolve around a theme or a topic. WordPress pages are “nestable”, and in the future if I create more “cheat sheets” I’ll probably create a master Cheat Sheet Home page as the parent, and make the rest children or sub-pages attached to it.

I want you to take a look at the link in my sidebar under pages entitled Article Series. I have started to organize my important posts into different “series”. I created a Article Series Home which which lists all the series I currently have available. By clicking on each heading, you’ll see that each individual articles series has it’s own index page as well – like this one.

For that example you will also see that the “series home” is the parent and “individual series” is a sub-section or child page. You can see that in the URL as well as the “breadcrumbs” at the top of the page.

I’ve done several things here:

• Article Series Home has “original content” describing each individual series page
• Each individual series page has “original content” describing each post of the series
• The links on each series page lead back to “posts” (one for each installment in the series)

This may seem like a lot of trouble, but it’s not that bad. Think like you’re organizing a book, and you have to create the front cover, the index, and then the individual chapters. You should be very excited about using pages in this way from an SEO perspective, will all these opportunities to write original content laden with keywords, and all these different pages that you could place ads on if you wanted to monetize them further. You could also manually place “recommended articles” within these pages to point people to other popular content that you have. The very powerful “pages” feature of WordPress allows you to organize your site any way you wish, permanently highlighting, featuring, and organizing your most important content. You can very easily change your sidebar code to remove any pages you don’t want listed, or to always show “sub-pages”. Pages are also perfect for creating “landing pages” for different marketing campaigns. Create a page to direct your entrecard (or other blog network) default to. Promote different landing pages in your forum signatures or blog comments. The possibilities are endless.

*Update*: I should have originally mentioned a few page specific things when I wrote this article.

When you create a “page” instead of a “post” before you publish it, you have some options in the right hand side of your dashboard. For this example, the graphic to the right represents the options I had when editing one of my “article index” pages. All of the option headers have a “plus” or “minus” which you can click to expand it when you are editing. Your first option is “discussion” where you can choose to turn commenting on or off for your page. It also controls whether or not people can “ping” you back or use “trackbacks”. The next one is for page status, which of course you can use to switch a page from draft to public, or to private. The third option I think is very underutilized, it’s the “page password” option. Did you know you had this ability? It would be very easy to create a quick Christmas or birthday wish list and password protect it, and send to your friends and family. Another useful technique would be to create your own “notes” page. Add everything to that page you are thinking of writing about (all your post ideas), password protect it, and only you have access. Put links to all your affiliate programs, create lists of “to-do’s”, you name it. I wonder how long it will be now before a bunch of you have your own “www.site.com/notes” page!

The next option is “page parent”, which of course you use to organize content with one index page for a group of sub-pages. What you probably didn’t know was that you could create your own “wordpress page template“. You can do this with any page (like an archive page), but what I did was to just take the “page.php” for my theme and “saved as” a new name like “article-index.php”. To be able to use this new page in my dashboard while editing, all you have to do is add just a little bit of code to the very beginning of the file (before the get_header function) like this:

<?php
/*
Template Name: ArticleIndex
*/
?>

Just change “ArticleIndex” to whatever you want your template to be called. Now you can edit this template and use it for specific landing pages, or to put certain ads on sections, the possibilities are endless. The “page slug” option is pretty apparent, but keep in mind that what you name the title of the page, doesn’t have to end up being the URL. For instance on my Article Series index page the title of the page is “Article Series”, but the URL is www.jtpratt.com/series because I changed the slug before I published the page. The “slug” is what becomes the URL. If you have parent pages, then come first which is why the index page for this series is jtpratt.com/series/managing-wordpress-more-effectively. “Page Author” can be changed, but that’s only useful if you have multiple blog author’s. And last, “Page Order” is never used unless you’re manually changing the order of your pages, in which case you have to change your sidebar code for wp_list_pages.

I hope that you begin to use WordPress pages to organize your site. In the future in another installment I’ll show you a myriad of options for listing pages in your sidebar. If you have questions, or something to add about how you use “pages” in your WordPress blog, please comment now!

You’ll make more money selling yourself than trying to directly sell products. Mix in YouTube and eBay and you have a perfect recipe for “Personal Profits”.

What I don’t like about other blogs

One of the things that I hate about other blogs is that they don’t always tell you the ways they “make money online”. I think of the web as an appreticeship of web marketing (yes Laney – I stole that phrase from you!). I mean come on – I’m going to figure your “secrets” out sooner or later anyway, if not from you than from someone else. I’m always more fascinated by people that describe how they get things done than those that plastically recite the same old garbage stories. I used to be one of those “news parrots” that posted something as soon as I read about it on the A-List blogger’s sites. Now, I kind of prefer to write strictly about thing I myself do. A good for instance was today everyone was writing about the new google “ad manager” that’s come out. It’s big news, and I did sign up for it. But I’m still on the waiting list, and rather than be “pete and repeat” about the news, I’m just going to wait and post about it when I’m actually able to login and use it. Then I’ll show you experiences with it and how I’m using it. I always value reviews like that instead of “headline” type news.

Online Marketing is Selling Yourself

I just made a post on one of my other blogs just a few minutes ago, and I’ve talked about many different ways to monetize your blog before – but I realized as soon as I posted it that it would be easy to describe how I did it and why. If you’ve been reading my blog awhile you know that I own quite a few web sites, and I monetize them with adsense, eBay, and amazon – amongst other affiliate programs. I’ve mentioned that I’m in a classic rock cover band, I’m writing a series on Build a Niche Store, and I have quite a few web sites. What you don’t know is that I have quite a bit of sales experience. All kinds of sales too, like retail sales, direct sales, insurance sales, telemarketing, and more. I apply that sales knowledge on the web whenever I get the chance, because let’s face it – online marketing is just another form of sales. Any experience you have in any other line of sales can be applied online. I’ve been applying my previous sales experience online for 13 years now.

The easiest sale you can make is by “selling someone” without them even knowing it. I’ve always been quite good at sales, and I’ve sold shoes, food, vacuum cleaners, hurricane survival kits, insurance, lawn care, and lots of other things. When you’re “selling someone” the first thing you have to do is gain their trust. You do this by starting a conversation with them that has nothing to do with the sale itself. Instead of talking about something stupid like the weather you key in on something about them and make it personal. It could be the car they drive, something they wear that tells you about where they work, something that clues you in about their family, and the conversation that ensues builds their trust. The best salesman do this without you even having a clue, and while they’re putting you at ease and gaining your trust they are “selling you” and you don’t even know it. But the main part of this process is the fact that the salesman is “selling himself” to you. No one likes to feel like they’ve “been taken for a ride”. That’s why the salesman wants you to feel like he truly cares about you, and that he’s going to “help you”, and he’s an honest person.

Blogging is Selling Yourself

When you blog, you are that salesman. It’s your job to be engaging and write as if you were having a normal conversation with the reader in person. Use “sales techniques” but don’t talk like a salesman. This should be pretty easy if you use your own experiences, make a “story” out of how you do things, and blog about things you already know about. I’ve read lots of posts in webmaster forums where people are trying to figure out what “niche” is for them. You already have a “niche”, and it’s all the things in life you love and know about already. Nearly all those can be turned into some kind of blog or web site. When you truly know what you are talking about it shows, and the “game” of selling yourself is more natural. This is the vein where you will make the most sales of all.

Turn Your Blog Posts to Conversational Sales

Now that I’ve taught you a slight bit about sales, let me show you how to put these sales skills into action in your blog. I’m sure you’re already blogging if you’re reading this. All you have to do is find something to conversationally sell in each post. Another key to sales is making sure that you have lots of sales “pitches”. For instance, when I sold insurance “door to door” years ago we always tried to make sure that we gave 20 “sales pitches” per day. You were guaranteed to sell something each and every day with that many pitches. Somedays more, and sometimes less – but you always sold. You can’t complain about not making enough money online if you haven’t been consisently “trying to sell”. If you tried to sell something each and every day, that would be 30 “pitches” per month. You would have to make a sale or two that month. But the online world is so unlike traditional sales, because when I sold insurance if I failed to sell on one “pitch”, I still had 19 more to do that day. The next day, 20 more, and the next day….over time I was only as good as my last sale. Online, once you make a post or “pitch” it remains online selling itself for years. If you posted a pitch every day for a year, you would eventually reach a “critical mass” point with over 300 pitches online selling 24 hours a day!

Ok – I’ve explained why constant posts or “pitching” is important, let me show you (finally!) the one I just finished earlier. I play guitar in a band, so it would figure that I have a blog about guitars. Tonight I posted about Blues guitarist Gary Moore on my blog “Guitar Review”. I didn’t have anything to post about today but I heard one of my favorite songs from Gary Moore on the radio on the way home this afternoon. I did a quick search on YouTube – and found a live performance of it. I took 10 minutes to find 3 other videos about Gary Moore. It was very easy to write a paragraph of “original content” before each video about how I remembered it and when I first heard that song, in addition to why I like Gary Moore as a guitar player. At the end of the post I slipped in some eBay auctions with hard to find Gary Moore merchandise. I could have used Amazon or any affiliate for this. This was a quick 15 minute post, but I accomplished a lot:

I used good indexable keywords

I used free engaging content from YouTube

I wrote about my personal experiences in a conversational style

I monetized the post with relevant items from eBay as part of the converstation

It may look really simple, and it was a quick post – but there is a lot of thought behind it based on other successful posts I’ve made. How do I know this technique works? Well I’m glad you asked, because I have a good example. I wrote a post back in December about a personalized guitar strap in the same way, and I make sales from that page each and every month. I should – currently that post is listed on the first page in google for those keywords. I also sold a guitar from my Agile Guitar page netting more than $25 in commissions for just that one sale.

You could have a blog about just about anything and relate items to it at the end without “cheapening your blog”. Blog about it like a value added service, other things readers may like, talk about bargains you’ve bought in the process, etc. Like I said, I’ve used all kinds of affilliate programs to do this in posts, but eBay has consistently worked for me best and paid the most (over time). It’s probably because I have the ability to put eBay auctions live in my posts with a special plugin that I use. Every time you visit a page or post I’ve done this on, the latest auctions show from eBay RSS feeds, so visitors always see the latest deals. I’ve had some people bookmark my post pages and come back again and again because the eBay auctions are live. If you’re interested in placing eBay auctions in your WordPress posts (like me), you might want to read my third most popular post of all time Make Money as an eBay Affiliate in WordPress.

If you have questions or good ways you monetize your posts – please comment now below and share with everyone! If you liked this post, please stumble or digg it so even more people can read it and benefit!

Blogging is NOT a GET RICH QUICK scheme! To be a “Pro-blogger” you have to work like an “A-List blogger“! This is why YOU and I aren’t (yet) A-List bloggers…

I think every now and then we all wonder why we’re not an “A-list blogger”. That’s kind of like wishing you were in professional sports, or a rockstar, a celebrity, or a politician. It’s probably becaue few people realize what it takes to get there, and even fewer are willing to do the work required to get there. Usually what happens is that jealously sets in or even worse resentment. It’s at that point bloggers start giving reasons why that person “had it easy”. A lot of people resent John Chow for being able to make money talking about how much money he makes. Your time would probably be better spent analyzing the reasons that they are successful and you’re not!

I don’t claim to be a Problogger or A-List blogger, but I can stand back and at least analyze what they’re doing right to draw up a “blogging plan for success” that will eventually get me to that level.

Let’s look at what an “A-List Blogger” has that YOU (and I) currently don’t:

• Something they’re known for: It seems like every big A-List blogger is known for something that got them to the “critical mass” point of success. I know that with shoemoney the thing most know about is his $132,994.97 30 day adsense check from way back when. That’s how I first found his site. With John Chow, he was the first blogger I ever remember disclosing how much money he made online on his blog. With Problogger, I remember Darren Rowse as the first blogger to go full time and claim himself as a “pro” blogger. He also co-founded B5 Media because of this.
• A Distinctive Voice: This may be better described as a “writing style” but to me every blogger has their own distinctive “blogging voice”. It nearly the same as book authors that write in a style that’s pleasing and engaging to read. I read blogs I learn from. I read blogs that make me want to know more. I read blogs where the blogger gives me details and insight that others don’t. When you have a distinctive blogging voice people become loyal readers because they want to know more about your business, your life, and what you’re going to do next.
• Traffic: Big-time bloggers have lots of traffic, but I always watch what they do with it. John Chow was the first one I remembered having a little dancing (banana) animation by his “releated posts” drawing your attention to them. Shoemoney is the first one I remember putting next to his post titles how many comments there were (most have it at the end). Both those guys have strategically recommended and reviewed different things just raking in commissions with their traffic. They actively work on “converting” their traffic into dollars in every way possible.
• A Brand: Successful bloggers have built their blog in to a brand that you would know anywhere. Shoemoney’s got his blue Superman logo that you would know anywhere, and Probloggers “atom P” logo stands out as well. I noticed that John Chow only recently got a nice looking “JC” logo for his blog as well. John Chow has his famous “Make Money Online” eBook, Shoemoney just did Elite Retreat and own “Shoemoney Media”, Problogger helps fun “B5 Media”. For these top-notch bloggers their blogs have become household names and “brands” known by thousands yearning for online success. These three have even taken those brands to the next level and created million dollar companies.
• Authority: The “top bloggers” have authority, and I don’t just mean ‘Technorati authority’ either. If I told you to put “widget x” on your site you may or may not – but when an A-list blogger recommends it, it must be “the next big thing”. The more successful you are the more authority you have with visitors and readers. Especially if you have a track record of useful recommendations, tutorials, help articles, and making money.
• Loyal Followers: When you get to the “uber-success” level of blogging you attract ‘loyal followers’. These are people that will link to and review and recommend your posts all the time. They will digg you, stumble you, and quote what you write in their posts. They will comment on your site every day and ask lots of questions.
• A Successful Niche: Every big-time blogger has something that they’re most knowledgable in. It usually has something to do with the success that they’ve achieved. Whether it’s PPC, adsense, affiliate marketing, eBooks, arbitrage, SEO, themes, or plugins – everybody has a niche that they’re known for, some have several niches.

So now we’ve talked about the A-List bloggers and what they have. Without theorizing what they did to get there, it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out what you need to do to strive for that level of success. First of all you have to snap yourself out of the notion that blogging will “get you rich quick”. That’s just not going to happen. Did you ever watch any of those “Driven” shows that aired on Mtv the last few years? They were 30 minute shows about ultra-successful musicians and stars. Each program interviewed their family, colleagues, and friends to try and find out why they were so “driven” to success. Even though each episode was about a different successful person – the qualities in nearly every episode rang true.

“(they) wanted to do this since they were a child…”
“(they) tirelessly worked until they got it right…”
“(they) were perfectionists…”
“(they) were passionate about their work…”
“(they) cared about other people…”
“(they) ate and slept their work 24 hours a day…”

I’m sure a lot of the same qualities ring true with very successful bloggers. What you have to ask yourself first is – if you want to be that successful, are you willing to have that kind of commitment to it? Because if you don’t, than telling you the steps required to get there is fruitless. In my post “I am the Most Successful Blogger in the World” I talked at a very high level about having a plan to manage where you spent your time. You’re (and I) aren’t A-List bloggers because we haven’t created a plan to get us there. Along the lines of the 7 Habits of Highly Successul People – I give to you…

7 Habits of Highly Successful Bloggers

1. Become known for something people remember: Constantly blog about your successes and failures and something will boil up to the surface. Whether it’s a particular article series, being an expert in an area, making extraordinary money in a particular area, software, online tooks, video, hacks – you can and will stand out once you become known for something that makes you stand out. When you find that certain “thing” be sure to key in on it.
2. Find your blogging voice: I think very few bloggers find their “blogging voice”. Involve your readers in every aspect of your success and failure. Tell them about sites you own and what you’re working on. Blog about where you live and your family. Mention your hobbies every now and again. Give people insight into why you do what you do. Describe everything in great detail. Write your posts as if you had a person right in front of you and you were talking to them in person. Always be honest, and never pretend to be somebody or something that you’re not.
3. Constantly Build Traffic But Plan to Convert it Now: The worst thing you can do is post and post and post to get readers but make no plans to monetize or convert traffic once you get it. Obviously you’re blogging to make money and you wish you had more traffic than you do now. If you had 10,000 visitors per day how would you make more money with that? Would you offer an eBook chock full of how you make money and lots of affiliate links? Would you sell more ads? What kind of ads and where would you place them? How would you manage them? Would you use adsense or not? What about clickbank products or software of some kind? To be successful you have to constantly visualize the success and plan the road to get there. Start treating your site as if you had 10,000 visitors so you don’t have to “figure it out someday”. If you’re not working on this now, than maybe you don’t believe you ever will get to that level.
4. Create a Brand: Your brand represents who you are, what you’re knowledgeable in, and why people should remember you. This is possibly the most important thing you have to do if you are planning for success. Here’s short checklist of ‘branding’ items:
   • Create a “favicon” (google it) to brand your page every time it loads in a browser
   • Create “brand name” that you will forever use. “Shoemoney”, “Problogger”, “Make Money Online” – you know who these all belong to. Create a short and descriptive name that you will forever use on every comment form and forum post you make, and that will be on every single page of your web site
   • Create a “catch phrase” or slogan for your site. Again – “keywords” are key here…
   • Create some kind of graphical “logo” that people will recognize the instant they see it…
   • Combine that logo and brand name into a 125×125 ad that can become your profile pic, avatar, gravatar in every place you are a member of (mybloglog, entrecard, blogcatalog, bumpzee, youtube, myspace, linkedin, facebook, google, yahoo, etc…)
5. Become an “Authority”: Believe it or not you can become an “authority” in anything. Read, Research, Work, and Document what you are doing all the time. Blog about success and failure. Write an “article series” on something you do really well. When you’re done release it as a “free eBook” and maybe even give Private Label Rights to it for exposure. As long as you have articles and posts to back it up you can easily highlight or feature yourself as an “authority” in your niche.
6. Create a Following: Successful bloggers already have a following, but you have to build your “congregation” up yourself until you get to that level. It’s easy to build a following if you work at it every day. Do this by commenting on other blogs insightfully, post in forums diligently, offer to help other bloggers, offer to guest post, accept guest postings, submit to article directories, become active in digg, blogCatalog, stumble upon, or any other community. To create a following is no different than building a church congregation, politicking, or promoting. You just have to “get out there” and network! Ask for help, offer to help, talk to people, comment on your own comments on your site – and you will make friends, meet people, network with other bloggers, attract advertisers and start to build your following!
7. Find a Niche: To become successful you obviously have to be good at something, and the quicker you can focus in on what that “something” is the quicker you will be successful. No one can be an expert in everything. Focus on what you know, what you like, what interests you, and what you’re passionate about. This is the last of the 7 habits because it ties it all together. Without a niche you won’t build authority, or followers, or a solid brand, etc. Keep in mind that you can have several niches as well, but usually it’s easier to master one, and then use that to branch out to others. Become the best you can be at one thing first before branching out and taking on the world. Your path to success will be quicker, you will be more confident, and you can use both the money and the traffic to more rapidly build the next next. This is how successful companies all over the world have grown from “mom and pop” shops to global organizations.

Work to become an “A-List Blogger” every day, and eventually you will become one!

If you want “BANS Success” you have to have a strategy for building quality backlinks. This will get your good search listings and better traffic (and in the end make you more money).

This is installment #4 of the Watch Me Build A BANS Niche Site from Scratch Series. We have a good BANS Niche site setup with eBay auctions and some original content. Now we need to build some links so we can drive organic search engine traffic to it. Today I start building a strategy to build specific targeted keyword backlinks to my BANS site.

If we want “BANS Success” and to make money with our “niche store” we have to drive traffic to it. The other day I talked about building backlinks in forums. I’ve been doing that every day now for the niche store for this series used-cell-phones.info. I’m not going to repeat that info here, you go read that article and learn how I build 24 backlinks (or more) per day posting in forums.

The next way to “build backlinks” for BANS Success is by commenting on other web sites. Some people worry about whether a site does “dofollow” or not, I just want to make sure that the blogs I post comments for are established, important, and have lots of traffic.

When I post comments it’s my intent to accomplish many things at once:

• Create a quality backlink for search indexing purposes
• Use Keywords in that link for better search engine placement
• Use Keywords that are “linkbait” where possible to entice people to click
• Read the posts on quality blogs daily for blogging tips and help and ideas
• Blog in the same blog to get “top commenter” spots and hold them for sitewide backlinks on popular blogs
• Blog on the same blogs so often frequent commenters recognize me, building a brand name

So today I made a list of blogs I thought would fit the bill to regularly post comments (and here they are):

shoemoney.com
johntp.com
dailyblogtips.com
johnchow.com
johncow.com

I can add more later, but I commented on these 5 blogs today for the first time using our BANS niche site as the url and “Used Cell Phones” as the name (keywords). I got pretty lucky that a few of the posts had few or no comments at the time I posted, it’s always better to be either the first commentor or one of the first few. Why – because on high traffic sites nearly everyone sees your link and reads your comment! If the site parse’s your last post, or you can wrangle a link to your site in the comments – BONUS!

**BETTER COMMENTS GET BETTER EXPOSURE**
Look – I’m going to coin a term here (and get on the soapbox), for lack of a better phrase – “Don’t be a COMMENT P*SSY!!” I just made that term up for all the people idiots and morons who post comments like “nice site here”, and “love your blog, keep it up…”. You stupid comment wh0res – you’re creating a backlink and diluting your brand!! Don’t you understand that people actually read these comments? A backlink is fine and dandy, but the other readers that comment and read comments – they own blogs too! Idiots – they ARE YOUR AUDIENCE TOO! If you make an INTELLIGENT and INSIGHTFUL comment that actually adds value to that you become as valuable as the post itself because you’re contributing to ORIGINAL CONTENT.

Ok, I can come down off the soapbox now. Look, comments are important – and you should comment as you would want people to comment on your blog. It’s a little extra work – but well worth the effort. In addition, many blogs have a “comments RSS feed”. That means each comment is treated with a distinct URL. This means normal search indexing rules apply, and comments with better content should carry more weight in the search engines when the comment is indexed.

Here are the comments I made today so you can take a look at them to get some inspiration:

From JohnChow.com today:

From JohnCow.com today

On Shoemoney.com today

The comments I made on both johntp.com and dailyblogtips.com haven’t been approved yet, they should be by tomorrow, and they we’ll have 5 quality new backlinks for our BANS niche site! I posted the images of my comments and linked the posts so you could see (what I think) good comments are. A good comment is as important to your linkbuilding strategy as the keywords you use and where you post them – comment wisely!

If you’re reading this page to try and figure out is Build a Niche Site for you or not – please consider buying BANS through my affiliate link. I make a small commission, which would help defray some of my time and expense for putting together this BANS tutorial (and future BANS success articles) for you! I purchased my copy through an affiliate link in gratitude to the blogger who talked of his success with this niche building site script.

Also – if BANS isn’t for you, please consider reading How to earn money using Affiliate eBay WordPress Plugin BAYRss. With BANS you build content basically around eBay auctions, but with BAYRss you place eBay auctions in your posts and pages. Check it out, I use (and make money) with both BANS and BayRSS!

As always – if you have any thing to add that would make this article better (or a question), please comment now below, or Contact Me!

Anyone can make money with Amazon. You may think that those days are over – but I’ll show you that they’re not!

This is installment #2 in the How to Monetize Your Blog series, where I teach you step by step – how to make more money from your blog or web site in every way imaginable.

There are many different ways to monetize your blog. I think that more important than “which associate programs to use”, it’s more important to know “how to use affiliate programs together more effectively. I think you can make good money monetizing with adsense, but to me google adsense is money that you make with your “bounced traffic” (people that didn’t find what they wanted on your site and quickly left). I find that the most effective way to “sell” things on your blog or web site is by recommending them as naturally as you can without being invasive, intrusive, or annoying.

There are many people who don’t like amazon associates. Amazon was the very first affiliate program I signed up for many years ago. I had a little banner in my sidebar (on another site) for a very long time – and every know and then I made a dollar or two. It wasn’t until after I monetized with adsense for the first time that I even tried to make better use of my amazon account. I create and maintain web sites, so some of the first “articles” I wrote online were web design. The first time(s) I utilized amazon associates was adding simple links at the end of those articles for how-to web design books. I was quite happy to make $20 or $30 here and there from those links.

What Can I Promote with Amazon Associates?

Over time Amazon has expanded it’s offerings to music, electronics, household goods, and now even groceries! With the addition of it’s Amazon Marketplace for third party stores – if they don’t have it, the Marketplace will. What this means is that no matter what your web page, article, or post is about you could find something on amazon to relate to it. It’s that type of relationship that makes it easy to promote Amazon Associates in your content. Especially if you blog about your daily life. Here’s my recipe (look at these recipe books or kitchen utensils from amazon). I like this new CD (add link here). Here’s how to convert video (and the book that taught me how). I mean, come on – the possibilities are limitless with Amazon. The even have on demand video you can see now (amazon unboxed), and digital books and subscriptions (kindle).

Anything (I mean anything) that you can find through Amazon.com you can promote as an associate (affiliate). Every item has a unique “ASIN” code attached that you use when building links. I have promoted and sold books, cd’s, cell phones, cell accessories, videos and dvd’s, electronics and gadgets, computer parts, clothes, shoes, handbags, tools, lawn furniture, grills, ebooks, and even adult novelties through Amazon.

I Thought Amazon Sales Had Dried Up?

You mean you heard that, and since YOU weren’t selling anything you thought it was true.

FACT: You don’t make sales when you don’t try to sell.
FACT: You can catch more fish when you use a wider net.
FACT: With enough attempts, the law of averages alone will give you sales.

How Much Can I Make with Amazon Associates

You can choose between the “classic” or “performance based” commission structure. I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t choose performance based, since the more you sell, the more you make. Amazon pays you 4% on anything you sell up to 10 things per month. Once you sell at least 6 things your commission goes up to 6%. This is basically to encourage people to at least try and market the program all the time, because selling 6 things per month shouldn’t be all that hard, and getting an extra 2% commission is a healthy increase. There are of course a few exceptions.

Here’s their current commission table:

In the second column you see that all the CE (consumer electronics) products are capped at 4%. Some people would say that’s to screw us out of commissions because those products cost the most and are the most popular. Personally, I was in retail so I know from experience that these products have the lowest profit margin and are the most competitive to sell. The next column over you see you can make 10% from all Amazon MP3′s, Unboxed (video on demand), and Kindle (ebook and e-subscriptions). For everything else the money you make is based on how much you sell. You should always strive for at least 6% every month.

I’ll use my earnings this week as an example:

In the image above you’ll see that I’ve sold 3 things. I made 4% because I haven’t sold 6 things yet. One was a book that cost just under $20, and I made $0.79 cents commission on that. Not a lot, but not bad considering it’s 10 times what you make on an adsense click. Obviously with any commission based affiliate programs – you make more money with items that cost more money. You see above I made $28.50 from 2 items, which are basically just external hard drives for a home or small business network. Was this a fluke – someone that just happenned to click a link from one of my pages and then bought this? Well, it has happenned before, I’ve had people click on one of my book links and then buy camping gear or silver flatware and I got commission. When you refer people from your site to amazon you get commission no matter what they buy. I got commission one time in 2007 for someone who purchased Dentist surgical tools (a dentist’s office I hope!).

No – I made the $28.50 commission because I wrote this page on Network Storage a few months back. You’ll see it’s one of the first products I reviewed. I got the idea for this post one day when I was in the market to buy an external hard drive and surfing online. I saw these network storage drives, so I wrote a one page review for them and linked the actual products through amazon, and after each set of amazon links you can see I also link eBay auctions (through eBay’s affiliate program). I’ll tell you how to do that in a few minutes. It’s important to note that when you do “affiliate marketing” that you do it in context. On “review” pages like this I usually state a problem, describe a solution, and then list and recommend products that fix it. I give as many options as I can, and usually amazon and eBay together work best. If I have other options (through other affiliate programs) I list them as well. Remember, “you catch more fish with a bigger net“!

The Easiest Methods for Placing Amazon Links in Your Blog

I’m going to give you 2 ways that I place Amazon links in my web sites that are quick and painless. The first is an old method I still use on 2 Drupal web sites (all my sites are WordPress except these two). If you use the Drupal CMS to manage your site, you can get a “drupal module” called “Amazon Associate Tools” that makes adding amazon items painless and quick. When you create a post or page there’s a field like this one, and you just enter in the “ASIN” code I talked about earlier:

When you do this, Drupal incredibly creates a whole additional page, drawing from amazon the title and description (and picture) of the item – and then it embed that information (and your associate links) into your post. I don’t use Drupal much anymore except for on 2 remaining web sites I have it installed on, but I wish I had that ability in WordPress.

And speaking of WordPress, I use the WP-Amazon WordPress Plugin for Amazon Associates which is simply amazing! I wish that it was this easy to use all my affiliate programs in WordPress. I’m going to use a post as an example that wasn’t monetized by amazon before, for my Patty Melt Recipe. When you use WP-Amazon in WordPress you have to use the “visual” editor for it to work, and it creates a tiny little Amazon “A” icon in the top right of the page when you write any new post or page in WordPress. Click on that icon, and a little sidebar pops out like this one:

I already did a search for beef recipes and these are the results. The plugin only shows the top 3 results, but it does display multiple categories which expand when you click on the headers. This column appears on the right hand side of your “write” page in WordPress, and when you find the results you want you just “drag and drop” the images and the text links from that column to your post content. You can even choose from small, medium, or large images. To see a video of how WP-Amazon drag and drop works, just visit the WP-Amazon home page.

WP-Amazon Plugin Drawbacks: You only get 3 search results per category, and when you drag and drop the images and text links they aren’t “nofollowed”. If you care about that (like I do), you need to go into the “code” tab of your wordpress post before you publish and add rel=nofolllow. Also, text doesn’t wrap with images, so you’ll have to add your own align tag as well if you care about that.

Amazon has many different was once you login to their admin panel as an associate. I do use some of their widgets and links created from this section on some of my site. However, most of the time I use the methods and described above because I’m pressed for time and want to monetize both effetively AND quickly.

Start Using Amazon Associates (again) Today!

Monetize your blog in all the ways you can. Don’t “leave money on the table”! There are many different tasteful and relevant ways to monetize a blog or web site, and Amazon is a very flexible option. First – people trust amazon, but second – they have about every product imaginable! I forget sometimes the power of amazon, but I’ll be using it more often now that I’m reminded of the earning potential – and I hope you do too!

If you have questions or things to add about the Amazon Associates affiliate program, please comment below now!

If you aren’t alreay a member – signup for Amazon Associates here:

I’ll show you how to get better backlinks by posting in forums with an “SEO Optimized signature”! Even if you feel you know this, read my post – you may learn something new!

I do a lot of linkbuilding, most of the things in my “linkbuilding cheat sheet” I do every week. Posting in forums is one thing I’ve neglected for awhile now, it just wasn’t in my current routine. I post comments on other blogs, I do article marketing, I link to myself, and all kinds of other things. When I wrote yesterday’s article about BANS makes money with no content one of the activities I did to build links (for my BANS site) was to post 6 times in the digital point forums. It was the first time I’d posted there in maybe 6 months or more. And something really weird happenned that freaked me out…

I had one site I own that did ok during December 2007 but since (due to my lack of work) has gone down from several hundred visitor’s per day to less than 20. I have had so many projects going on that I didn’t have time to worry about it. Yesterday, when I posted at Digital Point Forums – I updated my signature first. When you signup and become a member at Digital Point (it’s free) you can create a “signature file” that will display beneath every single post you make. There are of course signature file requirements, which include “less than 250 characters”, “no more than 3 lines”, “no more than 4 links”, and “images and adult links aren’t allowed”.

So, for my “4 signature links” I made one this site, one my new BANS niche site, one my free online recipe site, and one my designer handbag site. I did this yesterday morning (can’t remember exactly what time). By mid-afternoon adsense stats showed the designer handbag site (the one I hadn’t worked on since last December) had 80 unique visits and was making (adsense) money. By the end of the day, it had received several hundred uniques. This is the first time it had shown up in adsense stats in about 2 months. The designer handbag site had no google penalty, was indexed well, and appeared to be ok in search results, just not ranked very high. The only only thing I can attribute to the sudden burst of traffic was posting 6 times in digital point with a link in my signature to that site. And this morning when I checked my stats, only 3 hits came directly from my digital point postings. All the rest of the traffic came directly from google from unique visitors to pages all throughout the site.

I had heard before about the minty fresh indexing of google’s index. I did not think however that this also meant back links (and how they affect your SERP’s). Clearly I got traffic because I moved farther up in search results and attribute that to the 6 backlinks in my forum postings.

You can believe me or not, this excercise has renewed my faith in forum postings and signature links. Based on that I have resolved my self to posting at least 6 times per day from now on in digital point – every day without fail as part of my “linkbuilding” or “backlink building” efforts for my sites. You could do this with any forum (with good authority and pagerank), I happen to like digital point. I have thought about what I did yesterday, and today updated my signature once again to create the best SEO optimized signature for forum posting I could think of. Here’s what I did…

Thought process for creating the best SEO optimized signature for forum posting

• You get 4 links in your digital point signature – so I thought “what 4 things are most important for me to promote today?”
• What keywords will give me the best search indexing?
• What phrasing might entice people to click?
• What can I do to distinquish the 4 separate links?

I started by trial and error, the first so many signatures I built didn’t work because they were more than 250 characters. You can’t have more than 250 including html and BB (bulletin board) code. In the first 2 links I wanted to promot to pages with longer URL’s, so the first thing I did was go to Tinyurl.com and make them much shorter. Then I had to trim a keyword or two and I had just enough characters. I got to thinking that I could make certain words bold, or larger sizes, or different colors, but all that put my back over 250 characters. I settled on putting a smilie beside each link to make the 4 different links stand out. Then I made the top link red do draw your eyes to it, and hopefully readers will then read the other 3. That’s all I could do with less than 250 characters. If you had less keywords you could probably do more with formatting.

When it came to doing the SEO to pick out the right keywords I relied on my experience from my trusty keyword research cheat sheet, and tried to pick more popular search terms and phrases to use not only as SEO but also as “linkbait”. We’ll see what happens, but I think I’ve created the best forum signature I possibly can.

What I’m going to do now is to build 6 or 7 different versions of my signature, so I can change it every day of the week. If I’m going to post every day at digital point 6 times at least (creating 24 or more backlinks per day) than I should spread the wealth around all my blogs and sites that need it. Do you realize that if you do this every day for an entire year that you would create a minimum of 8,760 backlinks? What are you waiting for – get posting!!

**UPDATE**
I don’t know why I didn’t realize this until today, but there are a few additional things that you can do in digital point I forgot about (and for some reason never did before). In digital point forums you have a “profile” when you get an account. In your profile you have the abilty to setup both a profile picture and an avatar. The profile picture is only viewed by people when they visit your profile page. Your avatar, however is placed beside your login nickname on every single post that you make. Much like entrecard on a web site, you can place anything you want in that avatar picture to “entice” people to view your profile, check out your web site – and begin to “brand” your identity on digital point. The more posts you make, the more times people see your avatar – the more popular you become and better people will remember who you are and indentify you just by viewing that picture. I made my avatar my entrecard 125×125 ad – because a lot of people already know me from that, why not continue the branding here?

The second is that in profile you can also add your “RSS Feed” URL, and each time you post the name of your last post will get parsed and the link will be the URL to your site listed in your profile. This means that in your forum postings you don’t need to use one of your 4 sig links up for your main site, because you get an auto-link every time you post to that. It also means (I believe) that you could change your profile feed URL daily if you wanted, and your new posts would have different links to other sites you own.

This is what a posting looks like when you have an avatar and your blog URL listed in your profile:

It gives you an all-new reason to start making forum posts doesn’t it?

If you have a question, or would like to add a link to forums you post in regularly with great success – please comment now!

Can a barely out of the box BANS niche store make money with no original content at all? Just read and find out…

This is installment #3 of the Watch me Build a BANS Niche Store From Scratch! Today we’ve figured out that we’re already making money, even though we’ve barely this BANS site up. So we’re going to explore where the traffic is coming from, some google analytics stats, and create some original content. We’ll also do some link building!

About a week ago I added google anayltics to the footer of our BANS template. We really need that in there so we can track how we’re doing over time getting new visitors to our new web site. The BANS store we’ve built is already populated with all kinds of used cell phones and accessories that will sell well if we can manage to drive traffic to it. In fact – this site has been promoted a single bit in the since I first built it quite a few weeks back – and I’ve already had a few commissions even though this site hasn’t been promoted in any way, and last I checked it only had the home page even indexed in google.

You know something weird? It’s ALREADY making money! I have so many things to do across the multiple web sites I own that writing this “BANS Series” hasn’t honestly been at the top of my list of “things to do” daily. It’s been on the list, just not at the top. I haven’t thought much about it, because I figured that it was ok to do things little by little, and make sure the site was getting spidered and indexed by google. I was kinda waiting for the new BANS 3.0 to be released too, since this site is built on BANS 2.0.

You’ve heard people say that you can “make money doing nothing” or build “passive income” web sites haven’t you? Well, it’s a good thing that I installed google analytics a week ago, because this BANS niche store has been making money for the last 5 days straight now! That’s right, not a single backlink listed yet, I only have linked the URL once or twice in these “Watch me build a BANS niche site series” themselves.

On the 29th of February I logged into Commission Junction and found out that I had made $14! The sales had all come from our niche site, and for some reason each and every one of the 12 sales (yes twelve!) logged that day were made in the “Phone SIM Cards” category of the site. I’m going to show you two pics so you can see what the commissions look like when they come in – it was too wide for this page so I broke it up into 2 graphics and placed them one after the other.

So, we’re making money already – and we haven’t even done any link building or traffic building. In fact we’ve made money every day for the last 5 days (somehow):

1. Feb 29th: $14.07
2. Mar 1st: $5.02
3. Mar 2nd: $0.40
4. Mar 3rd: $0.52
5. Mar 4th: $0.22

Now, the weird thing is that first every day we’ve made money it’s gone down from the previous day. But when I look at the commission detail from every single day it shows the commisions coming from “Phone SIM Cards” each and every time. Somehow, somewhere we must’ve gotten indexed well for that category page in a search engine. So, I fire up google analytics to see what I can find out.

So in the picture above we see traffic growing every day. The graph may look impressive, but it only amounts to under 30 unique visits for all the days listed. The thing that IS VERY impressive is the fact that most of the visitor’s are new, the bounce rate is REALLY low (it means they’re finding what they came for), and the average visitor spends at least a minute on the site.

This is also a great stat – we’ve only had 23 visits in the last week, but 68 “pageviews”. This means that the average visitor has viewed just under 3 pages when they visit.

This is an important stat as well, it shows what people were viewing on the web site. The homepage is the most, but cell phone technoloy and an article page are the next highest viewed. I’ll tell you why this is important in a few minutes.

The stats above show that we got a few referrals from the first 2 BANS setup articles here on jtpratt.com, but we’re actually getting a little trickle of search engine traffic (which is probably where the sales are coming from).

So, I drilled a bit deeper, and the image above shows the 5 keywords that tracked visitor’s into the site from a search engine. They’re kind of all over the map – but the world “SIM” is used in 2 of the keyword phrases. So the mystery isn’t solved here of why all the sale are happening in “Phone SIM Cards”, but the keywords shown here are what someone typed into google to find our niche site. It doesn’t reflect what someone might have typed directly into the BANS search box once they got to our site. It would be nice to know, but BANS doesn’t track that yet (that I know of).

Now, moving on from the commissions and statistics, when we left you a few weeks back we were in installment #2 of this BANS setup tutorial I only had time to add original content on 4 “store” pages after doing my keyword research. This meant that I had NO time to create any “original content” pages. In other words, last time I added content to the actual main ebay auction pages with products, and that was it.

They key to being successful in any affiliate site is that you have original content, and more content than affiliate links (if you can). Google wants to know that you have information people are actually looking for, and not just a slew of sales pages. Once again pressed for time, today I didn’t have enough time to write all the original content I would’ve liked too, so I used an old trusty friend Ezine Articles to get some content to re-publish. People write articles everyday and submit them to Ezine Articles where they are free for you to copy and use (provided you keep the footer and Ezine Article link intact as well as the title). So I searched for “cell phone” articles that I could use.

I settled in 6 cell phone reviews, and 6 cell phone technology articles (12 in all) to publish in our niche site. Then I created 2 top level pages to make the parents of these: Cell Phone Reviews, and Cell Phone Technology. You can see from Used Cell Phones home page that these are now top level pages in the left hand side navigation. So, we now have 14 new “content pages”, 2 top level category pages, and 12 child pages with cell phone articles that target certain keywords people would be searching for related to content, such as mp3, ringtones, multimedia, unlock, reverse lookup, cell accessories, blackberry, iPhone, review, prepaid, and RAZR.

In creating these pages we’ve put some food out there for the search crawlers to come and index that should start to build some traffic. We built on the keyword research from the last lesson when we picked these articles out and setup the page titles, descriptions, and keywords. I told you a bit back in this article that in the “content overview” section of the stats I’d explain a significant factor in a few minutes. About a week ago, when I added the google analytics code, I first created the “cell phone technology” index page and then added just one article as a test that I linked on that page GPS Cell Phone Tracking. Back in the stats this page was the third visited page, it only had 8 visits, and it’s parent page (the index I created) Cell Phone Technology had 11 visits. What does all this mean? It means that those 2 single pages of original content actually brought in visitors! And (in turn) those visitors have purchased things through eBay auctions and we’ve made money!

In fact: in only 5 days with less than 10 visitors per day we’ve consecutively made money with our BANS niche site…

So – all this is pretty exciting isn’t it? If just one page and one article did this in less than a week – I wonder what the other index page and 11 articles I added today will bring in the coming week? To ensure some degree of success, I did some additional link building today. I went to digital point forums and changed my signature links. When you post (more than 20 times I think) at digital point you can add a “signature” to the bottom of your posts. In that signature file you can include up to 3 text links of your choice, and it’s a good way to build “backlinks” in the search engines. I changed one of my links to our BANS niche site home and replied to six different forum postings (which gives us now 6 different backlinks to our niche site).

I also went back to Ezine Articles and I had some (existing) content from my site(s) that I was going to “publish” there anyway. Now earlier we “re-published” content from Ezine Articles to put some content in our niche site. But, you can also submit articles to eZine Articles – and when other people publish them on their sites, you get 3 links in the bottom of every articles you can add. I published a bunch of articles that also point back to our Used Cell Phones niche site. I have 17 articles published (as of today) at Ezine Articles, and I submitted 9 new articles that had a link at the bottom like this Baked Beans Recipe. 9 Articles with that link at the bottom gives us 9 new backlinks to our BANS niche site. But wait – that’s not all! The beauty of Ezine Articles is that anyone can re-publish your content as long as they keep the links.

The image above is taken from my Ezine Articles publisher admin panel for the last 9 articles I published. See the stats for “Ezine Publisher”? These are the number of people that have “re-published” my article content on their web site. These numbers add up to “37″ (as of today’s writing) – so now we have 37 additional “backlinks” for our BANS niche store. 37 plus the 9 from originally publishing the articles in Ezine Articles gives us 46, and the forum posts give us 6 more. With the handful of links in these BANS setup tutorial pages pushes our backlink total over 60 now for the BANS site.

So now – we have new original content and we have backlinks, and we’re tracking in google analytics as well. That’s enough for today – in the next installment we’re going to monetize the site and do some more link and traffic building.

If you’re reading this page to try and figure out is Build a Niche Site for you or not – please consider buying BANS through my affiliate link. I make a small commission, which would help defray some of my time and expense for putting together this BANS tutorial (and future BANS success articles) for you! I purchased my copy through an affiliate link in gratitude to the blogger who talked of his success with this niche building site script.

Also – if BANS isn’t for you, please consider reading How to earn money using Affiliate eBay WordPress Plugin BAYRss. With BANS you build content basically around eBay auctions, but with BAYRss you place eBay auctions in your posts and pages. Check it out, I use (and make money) with both BANS and BayRSS!

As always – if you have any thing to add that would make this article better (or a question), please comment now below, or Contact Me!

Did you know you could get a “google penalty” just for writing about or linking to certain sites? Even if you “nofollow” the links? I had a google penalty for one year, and I didn’t even know why until just now…”

I’ve been very surprised lately at the number of bloggers that don’t check their search engine results pages or “SERP’s” for their sites. If you’re going to be a blogger, webmaster, or affiliate marketer for the long haul you have to know where you stand at all times, and knowing how you rank in search results has a direct impact not only on your activities – but how much traffic you actually get.

Google has been very aggressive about “quality content” over the last year, and they even have “webmaster guidelines they expect you to follow. It’s google’s basic belief that if someone performs a search (in google) they should be able to provide good results at all times. While the “google algorithm” is not perfect, it’s always been pretty good at giving relatively accurate search results quickly. But they have to be a moving target, because as soon as someone figures out how to “game” (or beat) the search algorithm to get the top spots, search results start to get “polluted” again with spammy pages.

It’s for this reason that google (unofficially) invented the “google penalty”. Google won’t talk about it officially, and there is no documentation of it – but we all know that google penalties of different magnitudes exist. All you have to do is start perusing the posts of Google Webmaster Help, digital point forums, or webmaster world to figure this out. Usually the penalties talked about refer to a number of days, like the “google 50 penalty”, or the 90, 120, 180, or even 360. Or (revised) there’s the “google 50″ penalty which refers to being struck down 50 slots in SERP’s (search engine results pages). There’s also that duplicate content penalty (that some say is a myth), and probably some others I’m forgetting.

Normally a “google penalty” is given for something they feel you did wrong on your web site. You sold links, you did paid reviews, you had non-relevant links for your content, you were members of a network they have penalized (TNX or TLA), you were scraping or stealing content, and on and on and on… The number of the penalty is a “number of days” that you will be penalized, or the “number of rankings” you will be knocked down. For instance, in a “google 50″ penalty, if your site normally ranked in the top few pages of google (where nearly all searches stop) – it will be “knocked down” to results #50 or later. This is basically to ensure that most people won’t find you in search results. I myself have received a “google 90″ penalty where essentially my site was in the index, but wouldn’t come up for any results at all for 90 days. After the 3 month wait – it “came out of penalty” and everything was fine.

When I first started hearing about google penalties it seemed they were mostly for sites doing very spammy type things, like the old-school “link farms” (basically things with no value). But just today I read a forum post that surprised me where they were talking about google penalty for the top commenters plugin and sidebar block. That’s right – since that block appear on every page of your site (encouraging people to comment), it’s possible that google may not like it.

The reason I wrote this article today was because of a situation I had on another of my web sites, in fact the first one I ever built for myself: reinclusion request 3 times over 3 months with no response. The links at the bottom of the page for my “Smorgasbord Network” are in a javascript js file – and the search crawler doesn’t follow javascript so they’re ok. All my affiliate links are “nofollowed”. I even removed my blogroll for many months. I removed every sidebar ad I had except for one, but all the links in that block were “nofollowed” too. After about 6 months I just quit worry about it, since there seemed to be nothing I could do.

The block that contained the ads were placed on my site by a company called “Bizrate”. They run a shopping site (shopzilla) that has price comparisons. They paid me to place that ad block there for 6 months, and renewed the contract once for an additional 6 months (1 year in all). These were indeed “paid links” – BUT they were all nofollowed. This shouldn’t have concerned google one bit. I used the “nofollow” attribute on my links to tell the search crawler to ignore them and “do not follow”. However, google must have thought that I was “guilty by association” because my contract with bizrate expired last week so removed the block of links from my sidebar. Last Sunday night I checked the site and now I’ve gone from PR0 to PR 4 and I’m back in the google main index again! Nothing I did over the last year seemed to make a difference, but that one change and in less than a week I have full pagerank back and I’m in the index again, and all for “nofollowed” links!

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard of something this crazy. It wasn’t too long ago that every blogger who had anything to do with Pay Per post was penalized and reduced to PR 0. In fact – one blogger (who I can’t find at the moment) had posted about getting a google penalty just for blogging about the recent pay per post problems – he didn’t have an account or any paid reviews at all! In other words – he got a google penalty for being “guilty by association” – just like I appeared to be with my BizRate incident.

How to you know if you have a google penalty?

Whenever I’m looking at a site for someone or doing some consulting work – the first thing I do is do some very basic google searches on their domain.

www.site.com: First – just google your domain name and see what you get. You should always come in on the first page of results for your own domain name (hopefully the #1 spot).

site:www.site.com: Next google your domain name pre-pended with “site:” to see how many pages of your web site or blog are indexed. If you have indexed pages, but in the first check googling only your domain name you didn’t show up – you have some type of penalty.

duplicate content penalty: If you’re checking your search results and ever get the this message:

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 18 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

…you probably have a “duplicate content” google penalty. Normally duplicate content is the text on a page, like the body content of an article. If you re-use your content in more than one place you’ll probably see a “main index” result in google, and the rest relegated to the “omitted results” section (the “supplemental index”). Duplicate content is supposed to solve the problems of content thieves or “scrapers”. This is where a spam, splog, or “scraper” site aggregates your RSS feed and publishes the content on their blog as if it was their own. Google is supposed to figure out that since your site had the content online first, the scraper site gets sent to the “supplemental index” and your results stays in the main SERP’s index.

But the duplicate content penalty can also occur if you have duplicate titles and / or descriptions on pages. I saw a blog just the other day that had search results where in SERP’s out of 144 indexed pages every single one had the same title and same description. This was a problem with their blog setup of course, but in the SERP’s only the home page was in the main index, and all 143 other pages went to the “supplemental index”. That’s why sometimes it’s called “supplemental index hell”. Just remember to always be on the lookout for any “omitted results” for your site – and always look at them to determine whether or not you’ve accidentally caused some of your pages to go into the supplemental index.

keyword density penalty: basically this is a penalty for using the same keywords to many times on a page in relation to the amount of content – otherwise known as “keyword spamming” or “keyword stuffing”. Hopefully I don’t get one for this page for using the words “google penalty” too many times! Without enough “original content” you can get sent to the “supplemental index” very easily!

the google sandbox: this is a strange penalty, and it’s just for new sites. Google is often accused of placing brand new sites into the “google sandbox” to keep them out of the main index until they are sure they aren’t “spammy”. This is also called the google sandbox affect. I can attest to this being true, because last year I started a new American Idol fan site a week before idol began for the season, and the site didn’t show up in the index until 3 months later.

How to erase or come out of a google penalty

Basically quit doing anything that would incur the wrath of google for thinking that you’re doing something to either rank better by doing the wrong things or avoiding actually having quality original content. Here’s a Recipe to get your pagerank back Robin Good put together with some of the basic steps. If you think you’ve been doing all the right things, then post in a forum like digital point, and ask questions of fellow bloggers and webmasters. Google Webmaster Help Groups are also a great place for questions.

Looking forward, you should probably subscribe to and read Matt Cutts’ blog if you haven’t already. Check your search results pages regularly, and keep doing the right things. Hopefully you won’t incur a “1 year google penalty” like I did and your traffic will continue to flow. Have you ever had a google penalty? Do you have a question about a google penalty? Please – comment now below!