Archive for 'October, 2008'

How to install the DatafeedR plugin for managing datafeeds and adding affiliate products and links to WordPress blogs

This is the third installment of the series “How to Build an Affiliate Store in WordPress“

The next step in creating an affiliate store in WordPress is to actually setup the datafeedR WordPress plugin and configure it’s options. In the first installment how to build an affiliate store I talked briefly about why datafeedR is one of the best solutions, and in the second installment Setting up WordPress for an affiliate store, I gave an overview of how to setup WordPress and get it ready to use the blog as an affiliate store type of web site. Next, I will show you how to setup datafeedR itself.

What is DatafeedR?

DatafeedR is an “affiliate datafeed management service”. They will do for you what you can’t do on your own. DatafeedR is the only product or service I’ve ever recommended (other than web hosting) that has a monthly fee. I’ve already had a few questions about why in the world I would use or promote a product like this that cost money month after month. The answer is, it’s worth every penny and there isn’t anything else like it ANYWHERE online that I’ve found to date. Their service saves me more time than anything else I’ve ever used.

DatafeedR manages the datafeeds

They have datafeeds for 200+ merchants through Commission Junction, ShareASale, LinkShare, and Clickbank – which contain more than 30 million products. They strip all the garbage from the datafeeds and give you tools to easily add the products to your WordPress blog, in ways you never thought possible.

DatafeedR has a WordPress plugin

Part of the DatafeedR service is the downloadable WordPress plugin that comes with it. The plugin is the bridge between your blog and the datafeedR service. In the Datafeedr online members area you can setup stores in the “factory” area. Basically you will be creating categories and subcategories for products, and choosing products from various merchants. When you are down you download the store in a text file. Using the “import” feature of the DatafeedR wordpress plugin the store you created is setup in your blog, complete with home page, categories, search, and more.

Key Datafeedr WordPress Plugin Features

• Store structure including categories and pages
• Completely control over all permalinks, titles, and descriptions
• Ability to create and modify templates at any level
• Search functionality
• Give products multiple attributes such as “featured”, “best selling” or “on sale”
• Delete or edit individual products from your blog admin without going back to the “factory”
• Ability to add original content ANYWHERE
• Assign images to categories
• Sidebar widgets with search, categories, products, or pages navigation
• Exclusive “product drip” feature, which creates blog posts from store products are specified intervals

DatafeedR is a Complete Service

DatafeedR charges a montly fee because they have ongoing maintenance. It’s not a plugin you download and configure and use one time only. As merchants add and remove new products to their data feeds, DatafeedR updates it’s data feeds adding new products from merchants and removing old products that are no longer for sale. If you used to copy and paste link code from affiliate sites and placed in your blog before, you would have no way of knowing which ones were still for sale and which ones were not. With datafeedR if you export a copy of your store from the “factory” on a regular basis – you will constantly be updating the store by importing the feed within your blog to have the latest products available. By the same token, if you tried DatafeedR for a month or two and build a store with 1,000+ products, the store does not go bad after you cancel the datafeedR service – the links just get slowly outdated over time and go bad one by one as merchants update their product listings and links. If you are serious about making money online as an affiliate, I don’t know why you wouldn’t want this service – or why anyone would ever cancel. I will show you why as I go through this series.

Initial Setup of the DatafeedR Plugin in WordPress

Uploading the plugin

After you signup for the service, you just upload the files to the proper places per the readme.txt file. This includes uploading the /dfr directory to the root of your blog, and uploading the contents of the DFR-Plugin/wp-content/ to the /wp-content directory of your blog.

Activation and Affiliate ID’s

Next you active both the datafeedR plugin and widgets in your WordPress dashboard under “Plugins” on the top right. You will need to add in your affiliate ID’s and set the initial store options. As in the picture below, just add your affiliate ID’s in the proper places – you only need to add the ones that you know you will be using. I entered them all except for Bridalux and NetShops.

Next in the store options are breadcrumbs and global settings. You have the choice of breadcrumbs on or off, the root name of the store, what you want the separator to be, and whether or not to display them on the home page of the store. You can choose to mask (or cloak) your affiliate URL’s (or not), and whether or not to resize product images.

You have complete control over permalinks and rewrite values specifically for your datafeedr store, including category, product, and search pages. You can even change the images and redirect URL directory name.

You can choose if products appear when accessed from specific WordPress pages, including the front page, single posts, category pages, archive pages, feeds, trackbacks, search results pages, and just pages. It’s great to have this kind of fine grained control.

The last section for general store options are the “drip settings”. I previously mentioned that datafeedR had the ability to “drip” products, which essentially takes a single product page and creates a blog post from it. This of course moves it to your blog home and pings the blog engine crawlers that you have new content available, as well as places a new post on your RSS feed for subscribers to read.

If you are a blogger, you know how invaluable this feature is (if used wisely). It’s not meant for you to setup a spamblog or autoblog (although you could) – that will just get you thrown out of google eventually. What this could be used for is to review the products of your store one by one, and when they are dripped to your home page, add original content to each and every one! If you blog multiple times per week with completely original content, you could also use these posts to fill in the days and times you don’t have hand written content (just don’t overdo it!).

You see here from the options that you can turn it on and off, you can set the time based interval, you can even choose to copy your datafeedr store category structure into your blog categories (or just place those posts in one category).

The nice thing about this feature is that datafeedR keeps track of what products are dripped, so the same ones aren’t used twice. Once they are all used up you have the option of getting email notification, disabling the drip, or repeating the products again. You can even have comments and pings turned off for the dripped product posts.

These are all the general “store options” for datafeedr, and once you have configured them all you have to do is login to the DatafeedR members area and create your store in the “factory” so you can upload it into your blog and populate your new datafeedR store with products.

Creating your first DatafeedR Affiliate Store

I’m going to show you how I created an affiliate store with 6,000 products for my guitar blog in about 20 minutes.

Before you do this there are 2 requirements:

1. Make sure DatafeedR has the feeds you want
2. Make sure you are signed up for and approved for the merchants of those feeds

I wanted to add products for several music merchants, so I checked what DatafeedR had. There were two I wanted, but one wasn’t in their list. I contacted them and asked them to include it, and 48 hours later it was available. They may not be able to grant all requests, but in my experience they were very accomodating (and quick!). Next I logged into my Commission Junction and ShareASale accounts to make sure I had applied for (and was approved for) those merchants. Remember – you can’t build links and include products from merchants you aren’t signed up for (you won’t get the commissions!).

Once in the members area, you just click on the big “Build Your Store” link. This takes you to the “factory” homepage, where you can watch 2 videos describing how to build a shop (or just go straight to your shops). I liked the fact that these videos were available (the first time), they answered a lot of questions right up front before I even got started.

You can create up to 99,999 shops – and if you ever reach that limit, God help you! I’m creating a new shop called “Guitars”.

Now I create a category called “Electric” and click to “add products to this category”.

Next I choose what affiliate service to use. I could have chosen “any” to get results across all 200+ merchants at all affiliate houses, but I specifically wanted to choose ShareASale Merchant “SameDayMusic”. I entered “fender” into as a text keyword (to search product titles and descriptions).

My search for products returned 264 records. You can see in the images below that not all the products listed are actually guitars. In addition, each results has some “tags” listed at the bottom you can use to additionally filter your product results.

I refined my search a bit by adding the tag “electric-guitar” and making the minimum price 200 dollars to weed out all the accessories that were coming up (and were also tagged with “electric guitar”). This quickly whittled down the selection to just 66 guitars – exactly what I wanted!

Now I have some very flexible options for adding these products to my store. If I wanted to I could just go through one by one and click “+ add to category” to each and every individual one I want to add. But that’s time consuming – and I got exactly the results I wanted. So – all I have to do is click on “subscribe to this search” to add all 66 products to the “Electric” category of my store. I can even add these to a new category right now if I want, and I can rename, modify, or edit my categories at any time, at any level.

The beauty of using the “Factory” to create shops and stores in the DatafeedR site is that you can do all kinds of products searches across multiple affiliate houses and merchants, and add them to whatever categories you want. As you can see in this image, you can also go back to any category and edit, copy, or delete those subscribed to searches at any time. You can also individually remove any products one by one as well.

So, in about 20 minutes I was able to setup a very nice category and subcategory structure like this for my store:

I was able to add over 6,000 products from 5 different merchants, and I even get a detailed listing of how many products I added to each category. Now all I have to do is click the “download shop” link at the top to get the text file containing all my store’s products to import into my blog.

Importing Your New DatafeedR Store into WordPress the First Time

Once you have created your first store in the members section of the DatafeedR web site (the “Factory”), and you’ve downloaded it to your desktop, all you have to do is login to your WordPress blog (with the DatafeedR plugin enabled) and go to “DatafeedR -> Import Feed”.

Once you’ve done this, you have instantly created an affiliate store in your blog. Now of course, there are hundreds of additional options for you to explore and setup, like sidebar widgets and navigation, adding original content, category and page templates, and dripping products into posts. You can even take it one step further (which I will) and add things like YouTube videos, amazon products, eBay auctions, and more throughout the store.

The next post will explain and explore some of these options in greater detail. You can view the store I created in 20 minutes in this example by clicking here.

Building affiliate stores in WordPress using datafeedR is both time saving and profitable

I will describe the process of setting up WordPress on a brand new domain with the intention of creating an affiliate store within a blog that you will post to on a regular basis to build online income over time.

This is the post #2 of the series How to Build an Affiliate Store in WordPress

If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you would realize that I try to feed you information one chunk at a time. All my posts together, are a recipe for creating online monthly income working online regularly, and the more experienced you get, and the bigger your sites get – the more money you will make. I got a very timely email last night from a nice person in Norway who is starting out and wants to know how to get (new sites) indexed and ranked in search engines. I’ve talked about this before, but some of these posts may be buried in the archives by now. I’ve also blogged a LOT about setting up WordPress too, but much of that is now a year old – and probably in dire need of refreshing.

Why Use WordPress to Make Money?

If you don’t already know the answer to this question – you have some reading to do. My post Should I Use a Blog or A Niche Store? talks about this in great detail and provides my best case as to why you should be using a blog to make money in the root of all your domains instead of BANS, or StoreStacker. Notice I didn’t say not to use BANS or Storestacker – I just said don’t use them in the root of a domain.

Google Loves Blogs. Google Hates Cheaters.

To google a blog is a person. It’s a person that writes original content. If you blog regularly and people link to you – you will gain authority (and traffic). Google also likes RSS and RSS subscribers (they own Feedburner for god’s sake). Don’t you think they keep track of how people get to your site, and who views what pages? Remember, they own analytics too, AND they keep track of everyone’s search history (unless you opt-out). If you create and maintain a quality blog, you will always stay on Google’s good side and within their TOS and “quality guidelines”. I don’t mean to be sappy here and talk about their “Don’t Be Evil” philosophy too – but my advice as an online affiliate and marketer is “Don’t Be Spammy”. This will always keep you out of google’s target for being a “thin affiliate” site (heavy on affiliate links and light on content). Only create web properties that you would read and shop at yourself!

There’s nothing like the immediacy of a blog post getting indexed in less than 5 minutes. If you want to make money online – WordPress is your best bet for a starting point in the root of your domain. You can build any domain or site out from that point forward over time any way you like.

Getting Started with WordPress

Wordpress is easy to use, and easy to learn. It’s free, and easy to setup. There are thousands of free themes and plugins to do just about anything you want. I have WordPress installed on nearly every domain I own. I’ve set it up so many times in fact, I wrote Best Practices for Setting Up a New WordPress Blog in 60 Minutes or Less last year (and it’s been viewed almost 5,000+ times). That post is a great quick and dirty list to get WordPress up and running on your new domain in no time.

Your goal with a new domain is almost always the same…

• Get WordPress uploaded to the new domain
• Create the database and set the config file
• Upload a new theme
• Upload the plugins
• Write some content
• Create some backlinks, work on getting indexed

The Best Practices guide I linked above will help you get WordPress and the basic required plugins setup. What it doesn’t tell you is how to setup WordPress up specifically for an Affiliate store.

WordPress Specific Plugins for an Affiliate Store

If you’re going to create a blog with the intention of making money, than you want to place relevant things for sale on your blog that people (reading your content) will want to buy. You can do this in your sidebar, header, footer, and even in the blog posts and pages themselves. You can even revolve posts around reviewing and price comparing actual products with your own expertise too. To do this – you need to have the right plugins installed, and a LOT of options available.

The best options (for me) are usually eBay, Amazon, and Commission Junction as a base, and then anything else that’s relevant and beneficial. I also like a couple of different plugins for ad management – depending on the blog, theme, and type of visitor. If you’re reading yesterday’s post you might be confused since all I talked about was “datafeeds” and how powerful they were to add products to blogs. They sure are, but you should get used to always using every single thing that’s available to you at all times. There’s no reason a blog can’t have merchant products, amazon items, eBay auctions, and more if they’re all relevant to the niche topic of your blog.

datafeedR: I mentioned yesterday that this was my new holy grail of WordPress affiliate plugins. You can add products, pages, and categories within WordPress from Clickbank, Commission Junction, ShareASale, AND LinkShare with this little gem. I will be doing in more in depth posts on how to set it up and use it as part of building affiliate stores. This plugin has a monthly subscription fee (but it’s well worth it).

*update: I no longer recommend BayRSS – follow the link if you want to know why. I now have my own eBay plugin, visit the WP-Easybay web site.
BayRSS: BayRSS is currently my eBay affiliate plugin of choice for WordPress. It’s half the cost of PHPBay and works great. There are other options available, but most aren’t as featured (especially the free ones).

Amazon Machine Tags: This is a great plugin for adding Amazon items to blog posts with just the ASIN number in a tag. This plugin is free.

Max Banner Ads: Manage multiple banner ad campaigns for your header, sidebar, footer – it even tracks clicks! This plugin is free.

OIO Publisher: OIO Publisher can manage banner ad campaigns in your header, footer, or sidebar just like Max Banner Ads, but it can also manage “selling” ad space on your blog – including subscriptions, paypayl payment form, and more. You can also sell text links with it, and many other things. This plugin is $47.

MaxBlogPress Stripe Ad: A great unique way to add text ads to any blog, I get clicks (and sales) from it every month. This plugin is free.

Psychic Search: This plugin is essential for keeping track of what people search for on your blog, and provides detailed search and keyword stats beyond what WP-Stats and Google Analytics provides. This plugin is free.

Getting your new WordPress Blog Indexed in Search Engines

Creating an affiliate store is no good without content, and content is no good if your domain isn’t even indexed in the search engines. Before you do anything – write at least 2 quality posts, fill out your “about” page, setup a “contact” page, delete the WordPress default “blogroll” links – and replace them with other relevant blogs in your niche. Setup your blog with an SEO plugin like WP-SEO or All in One SEO Pack, and then start the process of getting your blog indexed. You want to have your blog as setup as possible before calling on the army of search crawlers.

How to get a new blog indexed in Search in 12 Steps or Less

1. Create 2 quality posts as listed above
2. Fill our your about page, and create a “contact” page as listed above
3. Create a “privacy policy” page, as required by both eBay and Adsense
4. Register your site with google webmaster console, Yahoo! Site Explorer, and MSN Webmaster Tools
5. Claim your blog with Technorati
6. Save a bookmark to one of the posts at del.icio.us, Furl, Propeller, etc.
7. Create a Feedburner Feed for your blog
8. Setup your robots.txt file for WordPress
9. Add a MyBlogLog widgets, maybe BlogCatalog too.
10. Add an entreCard widget “above the fold”, not because you want either the traffic or the exposure, but more because an “above the card” entreCard widget will get you on card droppers lists, which will get you bookmarked, visited, linked, AND indexed!
11. Blog in a half dozen forums using they keywords in your domain name as text and your new blog URL as a signature link
12. Leave comments on a half dozen blogs using your domain name as the “Name” (separated by spaces of course), and your new blog URL

I know I promised to tell you how to setup datafeedR today, but I almost forgot, you can’t put the cart before the horse. Stay tuned for more affiliate store goodness!

To build monthly income, building an affiliate store in WordPress blog is like putting money in the bank. Every post is like an investment that will pay you back again, and again, and again…

The next 8 weeks will be the busiest time of the year online. More people will search, shop, and buy than ANY OTHER TIME OF YEAR! What you do for these 2 months will determine how much income YOU WILL EARN during that period. Some bloggers and affiliates spend nearly the entire year getting ready for just these 2 months. I have used just about every affiliate product, service, and plugin out there – and for the next two months I’m going to post a lot about which ones work (and which ones don’t).

I consider this post to be the first in the “How to Build an Affiliate Store in WordPress” series, but I kind of consider it a sub-section of both How to Build Income Online, and How to Monetize Your Blog series. There will be soooo many posts about setting up an affiliate store, I felt an entire series devoted to it was in order.

What is an Affiliate Datafeed?

In the past I’ve blogged briefly about data feeds twice: Create an Affiliate Store in 5 Minutes From a Data Feed, and Monetize Search Results with Data Feeds in WordPress. I will explain once again what a affiliate merchant “datafeed” is. If you are already an affiliate for Commission Junction, Google Affiliates, LinkShare, Pepperjam Network, or ShareASale you already know that you can sign up for Merchants that sell products. You can put up banner ads and text links on your blog or web site, and if someone clicks (and buys) – you get a small percentage commission on that sale for the referral. Most merchants now also allow you to find products on these affiliate sites, and will give you the copy and paste code to place actual products and descriptions on your blog or web site. Most of us have been blogging, and adding relevant products to our posts, reviews, and web pages for years.

Imagine if you had access to every product in a merchants store without having to copy and paste them all one by one by one? What if you could add thousands of products, pages, and categories turning your blog into a virtual store? When you visit Google Affiliates, ShareASale, LinkShare, and Commission Junction and view merchants product descriptions and links, what you see is just the result of a “merchant datafeed”. In other words, when you look for merchant product links for say – Target, Best Buy, or Sharper Image when you’re logged in to LinkShare or another affiliate program, the merchant supplied those products to them in a datafeed file. Nearly all affiliate programs will give the datafeed to YOU if you ask. Some now have tools where you can download the datafeed directly, or set it up to email to you or FTP to your web server. Depending on how many products that merchant has, the datafeed file can range from a few megabytes to hundreds of MB’s. Each datafeed file typically contains fields like title, product number or sku, description, keywords, image URL, buy URL, and more.

Problems Trying to Manage a Datafeed on Your Own

Problem #1: Actually getting the datafeed file

Once I first found out about datafeeds I was enthralled. I thought that I could use this data for all kinds of virtual online storefronts and I began to collect datafeeds from all over to see what I could do with them. Apparently, some affiliate programs were inundated with requests too – some datafeeds I didn’t get access to for months. Some affiliate programs wanted to charge a “setup fee” to get the datafeed to me, anywhere from $50 – $250 (per feed).

Problem #2: Finding software, scripts, and plugins to parse the merchant datafeed files

I did a lot of research to find software and scripts to setup BANS like niche stores from data files, as well as WordPress plugins, scripts, and downloadable software. Some were free, and others cost up to a few hundred dollars. Most had some useful qualities, but none did nearly as much as I was looking for (or had hoped).

Problem #3: Inconsistent or Bad Data

The worst thing about a data feed is the fact that merchants constantly update and remove products, so the data changes all the time. In addition, no two merchants use the same format. Some have descriptions, some don’t. Some have both a large image and a preview thumbnail, some don’t. Everybody names their fields differently, and every merchant has them in a different order. On top of that, merchants can their format at any time, name the datafeed file something new, or send a corrupted file my mistake (hosing up your entire virtual store). I had one merchant have all kinds of weird characters in their datafeed, probably something that didn’t translate well from another language to latin encoding.

How to Create an Affiliate Store Without Touching Datafeed Files

If you had wasted as many hours on this as I have you would most likely come to the same conclusion, manipulating these merchant datafeeds on your own (unless you’re a genius programmer) isn’t really much of an option. You know of the power that a datafeed could provide as an affiliate, but for some reason none of the affiliate programs like Commission Junction and ShareASale offer any tools at all other than copy and paste code for individual products. That’s pretty moronic if you ask me, I’ve always said that was an absolutely HUGE missed opportunity. I had (a glimmer) of hope earlier this year when I thought Pepperjam was developing some tools like this, but so far they have only made datafeed downloads available (like everyone else).

There are quite a few third party developers out there that have created products, and/or services for affiliate datafeeds. As I said – I’ve tried nearly of them that I could find. I’m going to give you a short list of affiliate datafeed tools I think you should look at – followed up by the one I think is better than anything I’ve ever seen…

GoldenCan: GoldenCAN is a datafeed integration service. They get the datafeeds, parse them, remove the garbage, and give you some copy and paste code to add little shops to your blog for merchant products. It’s free, costs no money, and is paid for by taking every “4th” click generated from your site. There are, however, 75 or so merchants that have paid to make their feed completely free (and you get all the clicks). Great little service for being free – not enough (in my opinion) to build a fully featured affiliate store.

PopShops: I only got interested in PopShops because I found out they had a Blogger, Typepad, and WordPress Widget. Their basic account is free, and the “Pro” version with SEO friendly URL’s is only $5 per month. With the widget, when you blog in WordPress using the visual editor, you can popup a window that allows you to search for products, and the results that come back are from all the merchant’s datafeeds they have in their database (some 20 million products). I liked their service (and still use it), but the only cons for me were the fact that you can only look up and add one product at a time, and you had to be very careful that you were signed up for the merchant the product came from (or no commissions for you!).

WebMerge: WebMerge is downloadable software that you install on your computer to parse a merchant affiliate datafeed file and created static web pages from it. It’s $99 for a single user license. I’m sure it can do what it says, but I’ve been building web sites for 13 years and I found it hard to use, hard to setup, and the static pages I created were pretty piss poor, even after creating a “template”.

My Datafeed Scripts: This site sells scripts that parse ShareASale datafeeds (only). I’m sure they work fine, but I wouldn’t pay a hundred bucks for scripts that only work for ShareASale merchants.

Feedshare: Feedshare seems to have a great service, with the ability to build mini-shops as well. You can also setup products and shops using both JavaScript and PHP. The drawback seems to be they only have 45 merchants listed, and the only one who I even knew was Overstock.com. This service appears to be free, so there’s your “pro”.

AffiliStore: When I found Affilistore I really thought I had the holy grail. This free downloadable script sets up an affiliate store that sucks up datafeed files and creates products, categories, and pages including seo titles and descriptions. The sample stores look great, but I found the script provided very mixed results depending on your datafeed format. In the end, it was too much work, categories weren’t working right, some links were breaking, and it was just taking completely too much time for what it was worth. It basically would have been a BANS like niche store, but with affiliate links from a datafeed. I’m glad this never worked out (for me), now that google is attacking “thin affiliate” sites anyway. You’re welcome to try it out, but be warned – “your mileage may vary…”.

How I Recommend Setting Up an Affiliate Store

DatafeedR: Having tried just about everything I could find to setup an affiliate store from a data feed, I think that I may finally HAVE found the Holy Grail of tools! DatafeedR is a service that you can sign up for to build affiliate stores from merchant datafeeds. They get the feeds, remove all the crap and format them so you can add them to your web site or blog. You can add products from Commission Junction, ShareASale, LinkShare, NetShops, Bridalux, AND Clickbank (something none of the previously mentioned products will do).

I just couldn’t believe when I found DatafeedR that it did nearly everything I’d been looking for, for so long…

Features of DatafeedR:

• Create unlimited affiliate stores
• Drip feed products into blog posts
• Products Sidebar Widget
• Unbranded (no “powered by” text or links
• Pick products from multiple merchants and networks
• Include up to 100,000 products per store
• Product categories
• Breadcrumbs
• SEO friendly URL’s
• Meta Description and keywords tags
• Editing of product titles and descriptions
• Add original content to ANY product, category, or store page
• Product “tagging”
• full HTML and CSS control
• Choose what to display (description, image, URL, etc.)

I will be using DatafeedR for the next 2 months to prepare all my blogs and web sites for the holiday season. I will blog about everything I’m doing with DatafeedR multiple times per week. I encourage you to follow this series to see if you can benefit from it as well. The next installment will show how to set DatafeedR up and all the customization options that are available. Stay Tuned!

To build online income you need to understand how to diversify where you generate your revenue. There is a time and a place for a blog, a static web site, and a “niche store”. Each has it’s place, and purpose within your portfolio of sites.

This post is part of the How to Build Income Online series.

I’ve seen the discussions a thousand times in forums “should I use a niche store (BANS), or should I use WordPress”. Some say “static pages are best for mini-sites”. Some say – “I use a blog and an affiliate plugin”.

I’ve blogged about creating mini-sites.
I have written about using BANS.
This is how I blog with an eBay plugin.

What I’m going to do in this post is explain once and for all the clear differences between those three things, including when to use them. My opinions may or may not be popular with some of the so-called “gurus” – but my advice is aimed at those of you still trying to build a monthly income over time, and it’s not to position myself to “sell” you something. When I use affiliate links on this blog, it’s because it’s a product that I use myself to build sites and generate income.

First, let me say that the 3 methods today I’ll talk about for building sites all use “affiliate links”. In my right sidebar is a section entitled “Earn Money Online” that contains links to “affiliate programs” you can sign up for. If you aren’t already – you should at bare minimum be signed up for Amazon, eBay Partner Network, LinkShare, ShareASale, Google Affiliate Network, and Google Adsense.

Method #1: Creating (Authority) Mini-Sites

The first method you can use to promote services or products as an “affiliate” is to create a mini web site or what’s commonly called an “authority” site. This type of site is usually under 20 pages (many are under 10), and the pages are either static HTML, or generated using a small script with no database like the 19 pages software I blogged about last week.

Pros and Cons of Mini-Sites

• Pro: Quick to Setup
• Pro: Small Amount of content required
• Pro: No database or plugins required
• Pro: Low or no maintenance once setup
• Pro: Easy to target a “niche” topic or product
• Con: Lower conversion rates
• Con: One time purchase – no returning visitors
• Con: Tougher to build “authority” (links) for
• Con: Constant ongoing linkbuilding for organic traffic
• Con: Best results with “paid” search traffic

Mini-sites have their place. Quick and dirty sites are attractive, especially to those using targeted search traffic through and adwords campaign and PPC (pay per click) marketers. You can build a profitable authority site manually to get organic (free) search traffic, but it takes a bit longer than other methods. A good time to create an authority mini-site are for short term offers, trends, fads, or for things that have gone “viral” but may soon fade out. Many mini-sites do well for a short period of time, and then slowly die out. Then you can sell the site, or re-work it to be profitable again.

Mini-Site: small investment of time up front for short term profit…

Method #2: Creating a “Niche Store”

The second method is to create a “Niche Store” using a script, software, or service. I’m NOT talking about using a plugin within a blog (yet) – this is strictly for standalone scripts – like Build a Niche Store, and StoreStacker. Niche Stores are becoming very popular. I even posted JTPratt’s Free Niche Site Script earlier this year. A niche store is a web site that contains (links to) lots of products in a particular area or topic with original content in those same areas.

For instance, a niche site about “dog training” would have all kinds of articles about training dogs, and links to videos, books, courses, accessories, and more. There has been a lot of furor in this area this year, since google has been attacking (removing from it’s index) niche sites they feel violate their “quality guidelines” and are “thin affiliate sites” (low on content, high in affiliate links). This is largely due to the popularity of BANS software, and lots of spammers setting up sites with no content and all eBay auctions.

Pros and Cons of Niche Stores

• Pro: Easy to build pages and mashups with affiliate links
• Pro: High commissions of many links (eBay)
• Pro: Very high conversion rates
• Pro: Auctions, videos, and other items complement your content
• Pro: You can be a “virtual” store without selling anything at all
• Pro: Support forum for paid products are major source of free help
• Pro: Customers may come back for additional content or additional shopping
• Con: Nearly all niche store scripts cost money
• Con: Some niche stores (scripts) are difficult to setup for those not technically inclined
• Con: LOTS of original content required
• Con: Constant maintenance required (of both software and content)
• Con: Linkbuilding or paid search traffic required
• Con: Niche sites can be wiped out in google search EVEN if you have lots of quality original content
• Con: eBay Partner Network has been kicking out some affiliates that don’t send “quality” traffic

Niche stores are an EXCELLENT way to diversify and build your monthly online income. They are more work than a mini-site, but less than a blog. Your profits can last a long, long time as long as that niche is still popular. I tell most people that it’s best to start building niche stores in areas that you are experienced and passionate about. If you’ve been a lifelong golfer, the least path of resistance would be a golfing site. Following this route makes it quick and painless to create original content since you can write all kinds of pages from your own experiences. You can also setup the categories and products better as well, since you have shopped for items in your niche for many years.

Even though some niche site owners have been adversely caught in the crosshairs of either ePN (eBay Partner Network) or Google cancelling accounts or deindexing, most with quality original content and established sites are still enjoying high profits. I once read a post by a niche store owner that said “the entire goal of every niche store page is to make an affiliate sale”, and that’s just NOT my philosophy at all. If you follow that mentality, you WILL be one of the niche store owners complaining about a canceled account eventually.

Google and eBay don’t mind you making money (that’s why they exist), but their first goal is to provide a service to people. That should be your goal too. If you create a niche store that YOU would shop at and that YOU would come back to read original content at over and over again, and that YOU would bookmark or tell other people about – then you will (over time) create not only an “authority niche site”, but LOYAL visitors who visit repeatedly. The reason niche stores have such high conversion rates compared to traditional authority sites, are because it goes beyond the normal “price comparison” site. You don’t just offer options to buy the products, but real world grass roots info people are looking for when shopping online. The less your niche site looks like “yet another spammy store” and more like an informational resource – the more money it will make.

Niche Stores: long term investment in a knowlegeable area for long term profit…

Method #3: Blogging with Affiliate Plugins

Blogging with affiliate plugins is becoming more and more popular each and every day. Blogging while trying to make money as an affiliate is also one of the most cumbersome and time consuming things that you can do. It requires the most setup and up front work to get up and running, and definitely requires the most mainenance over time. If you do the right things, I think that it can be the most profitable – and it’s also the most flexible solution you can create.

First let’s talk about why a blog is optimal for marketing and promotion. Usually niche stores by definition have no “RSS feeds” because they don’t have regular updates. Even if they did, unlike a blog – they don’t have “ping” mechanism. When you post to or update a blog it sends out a “ping” to crawlers and search engines that says “look I have new content”. It’s an announcement type feature that traditional web sites, and niche store scripts, don’t have. Google (and search engines in general) love blogs, because they (are supposed to) have regularly updated content.

I’ll give you an example. Last week I added an announcement paragraph to the top of the homepage on a blog I own. Three days later I searched for (local and very specific) keywords that should have come up in top few pages of search results. The keywords didn’t come up AT ALL, on any page, even with quotes and my site specified. That paragraph hadn’t even been indexed by the search crawler. I realized at that moment what I had done. I added the announcement into the template of the homepage itself (so it was first on the page). I did this because I wanted it at the top of the page for a week. This was great for my visitors – but it didn’t use the power features that a “blog” provides. Next, I removed it from the template, and then created a “blog post” with the exact same content and published it. WITHIN 5 MINUTES I WAS THE #1 SEARCH RESULT FOR THE EXACT SAME KEYWORDS.

Now do you understand the unrivaled value that a blog can provide for promoting affiliate offers?

By blogging with an affiliate plugin you combine the power of blogging and creating authority within a niche with the flexibility of monetizing all of those posts and pages with affiliate products and links. You COULD blog and just make money with Adsense. Or you COULD blog and login into Commission Junction manually find links and copy and paste into your blog posts one by one. But with the multitude of (both paid and free) affiliate plugins available – you can quickly and easily monetize your blog posts with affiliate products and links with very little effort at all. The only problem is – you have to continue to blog consistently to fully take advantage of all this has to offer.

Pros and Cons of Blogging with Affiliate Plugins

• Pro: Highly profitable once established
• Pro: Ability to promote nearly anything as an affiliate
• Pro: Can setup multiple sections / categories / pages / series within the blog to monetize
• Pro: Can promote niche stores and mini-sites once established
• Pro: Possible to do everything for free (except for your own time)
• Pro: LOTS of blogs and forums worldwide to help
• Pro: Even with no linkbuilding at all a blog can and will get organic search traffic (over time)
• Pro: Paid search campaigns can accelerate profits
• Pro: Social traffic can come from Stumble, Digg, etc.
• Con: Technical knowledge required (can learn as you go)
• Con: Large initial setup required (blog software, theme, plugins
• Con: Constant maintenance required (for blog / plugins / content)
• Con: Required multiple weekly posts
• Con: Some (better) affiliate plugins cost money
• Con: Some research required (HTML, CSS, plugins, blogging, SEO, etc.)
• Con: New blogs and domains can be “sandboxed” (penalized) in google for growing too quickly at first
• Con: Having many blogs to maintain can be simply overwhelming

Blogging with an Affiliate Plugin: Large setup and maintenance, constant work, most flexible and profitable option…

Next Steps…

I’ve had this post in mind, and the “How to Build Income Online Series” as an idea for a very long time. My goal in this series is to give you every different way I can think of to make money online, so you can pick which ones are best suited for you. I chose to talk about these 3 areas today, because in the coming months I will be reviewing every single free and paid for way to blog and setup niche sites you can think of. I will show you plugins and scripts that you probabaly have never even seen or heard of. I have found these things spending hundreds of hours online over the last few years – and my goal is to create an informational resource for you that puts it all in one place to save you all the time I have invested.

I also have some exciting things in the works. Because of what I’ve found, and because so many of these products, plugins, and scripts don’t do everything I want them to – I am in the process of creating both a WordPress theme and an affiliate plugin that will be available in the near future. Some very, very exciting things will be coming from JTPratt’s Blogging Mistakes – if you haven’t already subscribed to our RSS feed or subscribed to posts via email – do it today!

Organize your wordpress blog by setting up a post series people can follow for specific topics.

When you blog I think the most important 2 things are the usability of your theme and the organization of your content. If people can’t find their way around and use your navigation, and if they can’t similar and related content they need – they will leave. One of the best things I ever did for this blog was to start some article series on related topics.

This is installment #20 of 30 WordPress Hacks in 30 days.

Writing posts in a “series” has many benefits…

Benefits of a Post Series

• Readers come back for new installments
• RSS subscriptions increase
• Easier to come up with new blog posts
• Easier to monetize a “series” than individual posts
• You can seek out “sponsors” for the series
• You could solicit “guest authors” for the series
• You can promote the series with article marketing and backlinks
• A series gives you rankings for new keywords
• A series “home page” is another indexable page for search, and can be an SEO goldmine

I’ve been asked “What’s the difference between a ‘post series’ and just adding posts to categories or tags?” The answer to that question is “original content”. You could write a series of posts in WordPress and just assign them to the same tag or category. Then, all you would have to do is create “tag-slug.php” file or “category-id.php” file to add original content to that page before “the loop” of posts. That page would then contain your intro paragraph, and then listings of posts (either full or excerpts).

What I prefer to do is to create a WordPress “page” manually instead. What I did on this blog was to create the page “series”, and then ALL posts series are children of that, so they become /series/name-of-this-series. Then, in my Sidebar’s list of pages, it has “Article Series” and then the list of the series are automatically added as I create them. If you took the tag or category approach, the series would be listed either in a tag could or category list (which I don’t like).

The other reason I like the WP page approach to series, is because you can list the posts one by one, and instead of full posts or “excerpts” you can create an original content description for each and every one of them. This can be tedious (I know), but the SEO benefits of creating a brand new description of every post in a series are innumerable. Your series home page (can over time) become much greater in SERP’s than any individual article ever could. Also – what would you rather have dugg or stumbled, a page listing a dozen+ posts, or a single post?

I wrote this post because I want you to think about your blog over the long haul. If you create a plan for a post series, you can set it up to be most beneficial from the very beginning.

Planning for a Post Series

• Create a WordPress theme template for the series home page. Read Hacking WordPress Template files.
• When creating the template, add a “file include” before and after the loop (see below)
• Create a WordPress “page” and assign the template you just created and uploaded
• Make the first paragraph a brief 20 word synopsis of the series, then write 1 to 3 paragraphs of original content “before the loop”
• In additional paragraphs, write one “header” with the title of each post, and then a paragraph or original content describing it after each

Using “file includes” for posts

The reason I like to create a template for the post home page is because this way I can add 2 “includes” to the post series home page, which can also be used in each an every post. All you do is create the files in notepad, and name one “common-series-name-before.php” and the other “common-series-name-after.php” like this:

<?php include('common-series-name-before.php'); ?>

<?php include('common-series-name-after.php'); ?>

In your theme template, place the first with the before file “before the loop”, and the second line with the after file “after the loop”. Save and upload to your theme directory. Now all you have to do is create those files in Notepad and upload to your theme directory for it all to work.

The only thing I haven’t told you yet is what to put in those files! It can be anything you want, text, html, you name it. The goal is this, you have an area before and after the content of your series home that you can use to monetize, add affiliate offers, promote other sections of your site, add adsense – or anything else. You could also use select that same template for each post in the series, and monetize them all with exactly the same ads.

These included files are a great way to re-monetize posts and series with new offers, or even announce to readers (without deleting the content and losing indexed SEO pages) that the content is no longer valid – please visit page ABC now for new info.

Additional Ways to setup WordPress Post Series

I have described to you in detail the way that I like to setup post series in WordPress, and the reasons I do it this way. I personally (now) avoid plugins when I can when you can use native features and functions instead, because the more plugins you add to WordPress – the slower it becomes. The good news is, for those of you that aren’t as comfortable hacking templates and code, there is an easier way (you just might not get as many SEO benefits). There are several WordPress plugins that are capable or organizing posts series.

In Series: is a WordPress plugin for managing a series of posts in WordPress, including next and previous links for each posts, tables of content, and more without editing any theme files. Unfortunately the highest version of WordPress listed (tested) with is 2.3. It is not listed on the WordPress 2.5 or 2.6 Plugin Compatibility lists.

Organize Series: is a WordPress plugin that actually adds a new taxonomy to your blog so you can add either “tags” or “categories” or “series” to posts. It provides better organiztion by allowing you to access and list series posts directly from the “Manage” page, and it’s (currently) on the WP 2.5 Plugin Compatibility list.

I hope you start (or continue) to use posts series within your blog. Your readers will visit more often, you will attract more new readers, and it will be easier for you to continue to write new posts!

Stolen content? This is “How to Submit a DMCA Takedown Notice”!

Who hasn’t had stolen content? One of the signs that your blog is starting to become successful is that other people have found you and plagiarized your content. That sure doesn’t mean that I’m going to sit idly by and let that happen. For the most part, this blog hasn’t had a lot of splogs stop by, although I’ve had a rash of BS comments from auto-commenting software the last few months.

The nice thing about WordPress is that it has the “pingback” or “trackback” feature that tells you of other posts linking to yours. When I write posts, often I’ll refer to previous posts, and I always use the fully qualified domain name, so I’m not surprised when I get a trackback from my own posts as a comment. I AM SURPRISED however to get a trackback from another site with an article of the same name as mine! I saw a dozen of those come in yesterday – and when I checked the web site out they were coming from, sure enough entire posts had been ripped from my RSS feed (including the RSS footer I added that says “this post copyright 2008, originally from jtpratt.com”!

I don’t bother much with all the splogs that excerpt my posts, but the ones that take the entire article is another matter altogether. I went to google to find a sample DMCA takedown form, and I’m writing this post (for you) because it took awhile to find the one I wanted. If this happens to you – this is what you need to do…

How to Fight Copyright Infringement online and stolen content

• Find out where the web site (that stole your content) is hosted by doing a Whois Lookup
• This will give you the “Registrant”, and “Administrative” and “Technical” contact information you need for the request (as well as who the domain name was registered through)
• Often you can Traceroute a domain name, and the last few “hops” will reveal the URL of the web hosting company the domain is on
• If that doesn’t work do a DNS lookup to see if that reveals who the web host is (in the authority or additional sections)
• Next, you want to download and fill out a DMCA Takedown Request form. Use the ISP version if you’re going to submit a DMCA taketown to the offending site’s web host and / or domain registrar. Use the search engine forms to get them removed from search indexes as well
• Visit their web host’s web site, find their support or legal section of the site and get the contact info (usually an email address or contact form) and send them your completed DMCA Takedown form – by law they have 24 hours to respond.
• If the web host does not respond within 24 hours, do the traceroute again, and get the URL of THEIR PROVIDOR and submit the DMCA takedown to them. This gets their attention 99.9% of the time if you didn’t get it the first time!

It’s very easy to submit a DMCA takedown request when you know how, and it’s only a few minutes taken to get your own copyrighted material off of spammers sites. For the record, when I found my stolen content yesterday, I did try to email them from their listed “contact email” on their web site – and it bounced back to me 5 seconds later! So, I had to resort to submitting the DMCA takedown request today. Hopefully this information helps you do the same if you are in the same position!

After keyword research, the next step is figuring out how to rank well in SERP’s (search engine result pages) for the specific keywords you picked out. This article is for both new and experienced bloggers.

This post is part of the How to Build Income Online series.

I have a lot of info about keyword research on this blog, How to Perform Keyword Research Day #1, and How to perform keyword research Day #2 are part of this article series, and my Keyword Research Cheat Sheet has lots of links to get you started as well. I find when talking to bloggers that many, whether beginner or experienced, don’t have a solid strategy in hand for what to do with those specific keywords to get good search result listings – which ultimately result in traffic (and profit!).

I’m going to give you an example scenario of how to rank well for a completely new set of keywords, meaning your blog URL, title, description, and keywords you’re using now are something different. For instance – let’s say your domain name is “cookinghealthy dot com”, but you want to start coming up for the phrase “free recipes”. You found that keyword phrase gets 20,000 searches a month and you want to grab some of that exposure (without diluting the SERP’s you already position well on).

It’s very important that you understand what you are doing here, and why you are doing it. If you have a brand new blog (under 100 posts) – continue to hammer away at your main keywords used in your home page title, description, and domain name until you get good search results for it. Then, slowly develop a list of additional keyword phrases to work on over time. The theory of “not putting all your eggs in one basket” is why it’s best to do this. Just like having multiple blogs and multiple monetization streams, multiple keyword phrases (for one blog) generating traffic make sure that your always getting traffic, and over time these keyword phrases are like sowing seeds in a garden. With care, some will grow beyond your wildest imagination.

So, in this scenario I want to come up as high as possible for “free recipes”, but the competition is pretty stiff. I would come up with a game plan to change that, and this is what I would do:

10 Step Keyword Ranking Process

1. Write a recipe post and make the title “Free Recipes: Recipe-Name-Here”
2. In the first 15-20 words of the post say something like “My collection of <b>free recipes</b>: Recipe-Name-Here is so delicious you’ll want to make it again and again” (use different description phrase each time)
3. Write a post 5 days a week for a month using the same “Free Recipes: Recipe-Name-Here” title and intro sentence strategy
4. After the first post create a WordPress “page” simply titled “Free Recipes” with 1-2 paragraphs of original content (100-200 words), and create a linked list of the recipes posts – adding them as you go
5. Add a “related posts” block to the bottom of posts, so all the free recipe posts show other ones
6. In other posts (that aren’t about free recipes), add a sentence somewhere in there like “I’ve been addiing a lot of <b>free recipes</b> to the site lately (and link the full URL to your free recipes page like cooking healthy dot com slash free recipes
7. Comment on other food blogs, and use “Free Recipes” as your name and the URL to the free recipes page on your blog as the link
8. Comment in lots of forums, and use “Free Recipes” as the text and the URL to your free recipes page
9. Submit every single recipe you wrote (with the first paragraph of text change a bit) to an article directory and use “Free Recipes” as the text and the URL to your free recipes page as the signature / byline / footer, etc.
10. Post additional free recipes at least 1-2 times per month for 6-12 months for outstanding results!

The 10 step process I outlined is nothing more than basic SEO and linkbuilding. Notice in the intro sentence of the blog I put the keyword phrase in bold tags. This is an old SEO trick (that may not work as well anymore). You could use this process with any web site or blog, but my version assumes a few things.

Assumptions:

• You’re using WordPress
• You have an SEO plugin installed that automatically uses the first xx words in a post as your meta description (like All in one SEO pack)
• You’re using a “related posts” WordPress plugin
• You know how to do linkbuilding
• You know how to do article marketing

Ranking well for keywords is like cooking a good pot of soup. The individual ingredients aren’t nearly as good until you put them all together. And over time the longer you let them cook in the pot – the better the blend together and taste! Also, as I mentioned earlier – doing this with a domain that has at least 100 posts and good indexing (and some kind of pagerank) will yield the best results.

Many people make a pretty good living designing “pay for” custom premium WordPress themes, but has the bell just tolled for those designers?

It’s a funny thing the Internet, something that’s only an idea one minute can bubble up to the awareness of tens of thousands the next. It’s distribution qualities are unlike any kind of media that has come before it. Many big companies have arisen out of small ideas, like Amazon, eBay, Google, YouTube, Flickr, del.icio.us – you name it. Some of those ideas have spawned multi-million (and billion) dollar companies, and many web entrepreneurs have learned how to make a good living from their services, API’s, and affiliate programs.

Wordpress has sprung far ahead in the “blogging” space paradigm, spawning an entire cottage industry of theme designers and plugin developers that grows more every day. I’ve read some recent posts that question whether profiting from products built within, on, and around WordPress itself aren’t “evil” and maybe not even legal.

Let’s back up here a bit and talk about WordPress. WordPress is “open source software” built on the “GPL“, or the “General Public License”. What’s unique about the GPL is that GPL requires released improved versions be free software. Many of those who are very “pro” open source will point out that WordPress has grown like a brushfire in usage largely because of the fact that it’s FREE, and the huge burgeoning base of free themes and free plugins – not to mention the hundreds of thousands of “wordpress how-to” articles and tutorials (like mine).

Then again, everything reaches it’s tipping point of “critical mass” – doesn’t it? WordPress was primarily used in it’s earlier days by those familiar with HTML and some PHP hackery – which is why we used the “my hacks” file for custom features (before plugins). As the usage base for WordPress expanded beyond the typical “Webmaster/designer/hacker” to the tens of thousands of “mommy and make-money-in-your-spare-time-like-me bloggers” the improvements over time have made it where anyone with a mouse and a keyboard can blog for free.

This is great, and it really says a lot about the success and direction of WordPress itself – but it’s had an unforeseen and unintended side affect. Now a great percentage of WordPress bloggers are able to blog with little to no technical knowledge of HTML, CSS, PHP, RSS feeds, web hosting, etc. A need may arise that isn’t (currently) covered by WordPress. A blogger may want to know “How do I add podcasts to my posts”, or “How can I video Blog”, of “Why can’t my theme do X, Y, and Z?”. There may well be a completely free way to do these things, but first the blogger has to find it – and then he/she needs to be able to implement it (copy and paste code, who knows what else…). Enter the “Wordpress cottage industry” I spoke of before, to the rescue! For only $29, or $49, or maybe even $99 (or more) you can probably find buy a WordPress theme or plugin to do exactly what you want.

In many circumstances – taking advantage of this kind of opportunity could get you the “Entrepreneur of the Year” award! Except, with WordPress – the software is built on the “GPL”, which states “improved versions must be free software”. Remember that? Guess what – _ALL_ WordPress themes and plugins use WordPress code. If they didn’t, they couldn’t interact with WordPress and work properly. This means that (at least in theory), ALL WordPress themes and plugins for sale must violate the GPL, and maybe aren’t even legal to sell.

I’ve read a lot of posts and comments about this, and some agree and some disagree. Many liken it to an “aftermarket” much like cars – where thousands of accessories are sold by third parties outside of the dealer. But cars are sold for profit (they aren’t open source), and they aren’t “released through the GPL” either. If they were, you would be able to get a car for free, and regardless of the improvements you made to it, you would have to give your revision or enhancement of it away as well – as a condition of getting it in the first place.

Will this stop people from selling WordPress themes and plugins? Hell no. Will Matt Mullenweg prosecute the entire cottage industry profiting off the back of WordPress? Probably not (although I bet he has mixed feelings about it). I think that there will be lively discussions about this, and maybe some changes ahead in the future though. One of the most famous WordPress ‘Premium’ themes, Revolution, is going open source. They are changing their business model to have free open source themes, and purchased packages will be available for support, tutorials, customizations, etc. Very interesting to say the least.

It’s funny – if you read the February 28, 2008 post “The Future of WordPress Premium Themes“, it blatantly predicts this change. In a way, it should have been expected as part of the “cycle of life”. You have an idea, which blossoms into a grassroots effort that only some are privy to and can use, and eventually it becomes the “pet rock” for the masses. Those “in the know” quickly find ways to sell and profit from their expertise (which works for awhile) – and the more the “knowledge” becomes widespread, those jealous of the profiteering going on decide to “release the knowledge for free”. That’s why you see so many “free premium themes” out there right now (and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that).

What do you think? What IS acceptable to sell and profit from on and within open source WordPress on a GPL license?

If you want more to think about before commenting here – read these posts and comments:

The Ethics of Premium WordPress Themes
When Premium WordPress Themes and Ethics Collide
Thinking of Selling Premium Themes?

Most of the “make money online” blogs teach various ways to earn online income, but I very seldom see posts that teach how to earn online income consistently. I’m not rich, I don’t make thousands and thousands of dollars every month – but each month I do seem to make more than the last. My web sites and blogs grow, my income grows, and I learn more as I go along the way.

If you’re thinking of building your own “online empire”, you need to be ready for the harsh reality of how hard it is – especially for one person to do alone. I own 48 domains, and less than 2 dozen are even live and running. I am not a very organized person, and yet the little bit of structure I have been able to apply to my work routine has greatly increased both my productivity and montly profit. I’m going to give you a glimpse into the daily life of a blogger / web worker / blog owner, so you can compare it to your own schedule and gauge where you possibly need improvement.

Here’s a running list of things that I did yesterday:

1. Create a running list of items to work on for the day (which blogs need posts
2. Create a new weekly list of goals to complete by week’s end
3. Read and answer emails
4. Approve Entercard ads
5. Approve blog comments
6. Check various stats (Feedburner, Adsense, etc.)
7. Read other blogs
8. Comments on other blogs
9. Read and comments on forum posts
10. Create graphic for blog sidebar
11. Write new posts for articles series
12. Edit guest post for submission to another blog
13. Write 6 quick posts for 3 different blogs
14. Write email for 2 WordPress projects partnering with blog owners on
15. Do 10 minutes research for blog posts
16. Write new blog post for 1 blog
17. Send MySpace comments for web site that has companion MySpace profile
18. Check blog (page view) stats
19. Post pictures on one blog
20. Check eBay product availability for post monetization
21. Add 20 events to calender on one blog
22. Answer MySpace messages for one blog
23. Approve and reply to blog comments for one blog
24. Respond to incoming emails for the day
25. Edit existing blog page
26. Approve and answer 10 comments on one blog
27. Upgrade 6 WordPress plugins for one blog
28. Write post for one blog
29. Finish writing article series post and publish
30. Write out notes for work to do later in the week
31. Review design for WordPress Theme partner project
32. Review design spec for WordPress Plugin partner project
33. Place links for new merchant affiliate sale for the week

This list is basically what I did during one 5 hour work period. Now, I work on blogs more than 5 hours a day – but I wanted you to get the picture of how much work it can actually be. I wish I had seen somebody’s “to do list” for full time blogging a few years back so I knew what I was in for. I would have started getting more organized way back then.

If you want to be successful building monthly online income – you need to have definite plans for how to get there. You need to make sure your money comes from various sources, and you need to put in some time each and every day working on the basics:

1. Writing Content
2. Building Links
3. Monetizing
4. Doing Maintenance
5. Doing Analysis (what’s working – what’s not)

If you aren’t writing both daily and weekly goals, AND keeping track of exactly what you do throughout the week – you may actually FOOL YOURSELF into believing that you are working hard when really you didn’t do as much as you thought (in areas that generate income). As I stated before in previous posts, I maintain a daily spreadsheet in google docs of what I do throughout the week – so I can review it at the end of the week to see how I did. It’s also good starting out a new week, so I can pick up where I left off.

When you work online, and work for yourself you basically are running a small business. You are the boss, you are in charge, and you give yourself your own work assignments, and you need to evaluate your performance and work just like a boss would of their employee. Are you making the grade – or do you need to be fired? Are you an invaluable employee, or do you need to be fired?

I don’t claim to be the most organized person, or the most effective worker. But I do know I have a pretty good handle on whether or not my “online business” is on the road to profitability or not.

In my last post Backyard Local Web Sites Produce Consistent Income, I talked about taking a small concept or theme and creating a site based in your local area. I also mentioned that you don’t have to use WordPress or be a rocket scientist to created a “Mini-Site” that produces online income.

This post is part of the How to Build Income Online Series!

Awhile back I stumbled on 19 Pages, a completely FREE script to product mini web sites in record time. It cost NOTHING, and you don’t have to sign up for somebody’s “list” just to get it either. It’s a one-click simple honest download you’ll be proud to tell your friends about. You can have a mini-web site setup with quality content in under 30 minutes (if you can write!). Sometimes WordPress and other scripts (BANS) is just WAY TOO overblown for a simple idea you can quickly create a mini web site for.

Literally, just follow these steps:

• Download the zip file (free)
• Upload to your server
• Load up the site in a browser (as admin/admin)
• Change your password
• Edit your homepage
• Choose your theme (any of the 5 free included ones
• Add additional content pages
• Monetize sidebar / header / footer
• You’re Done!

I want you to understand how EASY this software is to use. After your first upload in this is what you see:

There is absolutely NO database required AT ALL. This script is lightweight, has pretty (permalink like) URL’s, and is FAST!

Here’s the very basic admin screen:

19 Pages contains only the essentials necessary for mini-site development. You can use one of 5 included templates, and add and edit pages and content. Pages added are included in navigation. The entire site can be easily monetized by modifying the template with banners, ads, or adsense in the header, footer, sidebar, or above or below the content.

Editing pages is simple and easy. Give them a title, edit the content, and you can even add custom meta descriptions and keywords for each page.

I’m sorry – this is the easiest NO BRAINER I’ve ever seen! My GRANDMA could make mini-sites with 19 pages! You have nothing to lose and everything to gain – try this software out for quick and easy web sites today.

I made a test web site in just 10 minutes (haven’t monetized it yet), check it out here: Toledo Hall Rental