Archive for 'March, 2009'

Recently I’ve blogged about Free eBay WordPress plugins and BANS success in 2009. My favorite affiliate program is definitely eBay and I’m always looking for new ways to promote it. Since I already explored Free eBay WordPress plugins (and only found one that was full featured and easy to use) I decided to try out some new premium eBay affiliate plugins. Nothing against the free plugin authors – I’m glad that they do what they do and that there are free options for eBay affiliates, but money is definitely a motivator for people to program new and innovative plugins. Some people avoid paying any money for WordPress plugins like the plague – but if you can get something that does exactly what you want for a one time nominal fee, isn’t it worth paying for?

Most of the eBay affiliate plugins for WordPress (both free and pay) tend to enable to you to add ebay auctions within blog posts and pages. This is great, and do it all the time on the majority of my blogs to make affiliate income. But not all blogs are easy to monetize this way, and not all posts are either. Case and point – I have a recipe blog and I’ve posted to for the last few years and it’s not exactly the greatest candidate for posting live eBay auctions. On my tech gadget blog when I write about a digital camera, I just add a tag with some keywords for the model and voila! it displays digital camera auctions. If I did the same for a recipe for “chocolate mousse cake” what would the auction keywords be? Cake? eBay doesn’t even allow food to be sold.

Enter Auction Thumbs. The reason I named this post “eBay Affiliate Auto-Pilot” is because once I installed it on my recipe blog I found that it was such a great “set it and forget it” plugin, I’ll probably end up using it on ALL my blogs (even the ones that already have eBay plugins).

Here’s how “Auction Thumbs” setup works:

1. Upload it to your server
2. Enter your ePN campaign ID’s
3. Set very basic options
4. Enable the sidebar widget
5. Set the widget options
6. Make commissions without further work!

The beauty of Auction Thumbs is the “set it and forget it” nature of the plugin. I can’t believe I just set this up on my recipe blog and I never have to worry about doing anything with it at all! As long as my blog is getting traffic I should make money with this plugin. Also – this is the first eBay auction plugin I’ve seen that has a sidebar widget! Let’s take a look at the ease of setup in great detail.

Auction Thumbs Plugin Options

The first 4 options are for entering your campaign ID. As you can see below you actually enter separate campaign ID numbers for eBay Partner Network (ePN) for your post footer, widget, gallery, etc.

The next options are for the border of the thumbnail pictures and options to control which auctions display. You can enter a default eBay category to search from and some keywords, as well as a minimum price. This is handy if you want to make sure that only higher priced items are displayed (higher cost means higher commissions for you). You can also control the size of the thumbnails and how many thumbnails are displayed. For the width of the content area of my blog I chose 5 and left the rest of these options blank. You’ll see why in the next set options.

In the last set of options you can control the text beneath the thumbnails – I chose “click for details”. You can also choose to use the post tags as your search keywords when the previous search box is blank, and this is what I chose to do. I can limit the number of tags to randomize and also choose only to display thumbs on single pages. This is what I did since I don’t want to show them on my blog home or category pages. The last 2 options are for thumbnail size in the sidebar and how many options to show in the sidebar. That’s it!

In the next screen shot you’ll see what my blog looks like with 5 auction thumbs displayed. Once a person mouses over the thumbnail pic like mine did you get an info box with the title of the auction, country, price, time, and number of bids!

This last screenshot pic shows what the auction thumbs look like when displayed in your sidebar using the widget.

I almost forgot to mention, besides the plugin setup options the sidbar widget for auction thumbs has options as well – and you can enter search keywords, category, and minimum price for the sidebar widget as well. This way you have complete control if you want different items displayed in the sidebar. You can even use the checkbox to search descriptions too!

Increase your eBay earnings!

I love premium WordPress plugins, especially ones that do something useful I haven’t seen before. Auction Thumbs is only $47, and I thought that was pretty reasonable considering once I set the options on a blog it just displays the auctions without my intervention at all. Also – I can use it on an unlimited amount of sites and I can use it in addition to the other eBay plugins I currently have installed. I highly encourage you to take advantage of this plugin – I think you’ll be as happy with it as I am!

Click Here to Purchase “Auction Thumbs”

There are 3 Steps to BANS or Build a Nice Store Success, even in 2009 – do you follow them?

This post is part of the Watch Me Build a BANS Niche Site from Scratch series! Be sure to read all the posts for more information!

The Last year with Build a Niche Store

I haven’t blogged about BANS sites in awhile and it’s funny because I’ve seen some posts that try and say “BANS is dead”, niche store scripts aren’t a viable way to make money online anymore. Meanwhile there are lots of people quietly making a small fortune with their little empire of niche stores. I can see why some of them don’t blog about it – because BANS and niche stores in general just completely saturated the market, so much in fact that google took aim at niche stores and practically deindexed everything on a .info domain with eBay auctions of any kind.

When I started this series nearly a year ago I didn’t know a lot about BANS or niche stores at all. I purchased BANS for $97 and it the main attraction was the fact that you got an unlimited site license, and lifetime upgrades. Pay once, and use it forever on as many sites as you want seemed pretty attractive at the time. Problem was spammers saw this opportunity and paid $97 one time and wrote scripts to auto-setup 1,000 .info domains from godaddy for $.99 cents each. Those guys were just raking in cash before eBay moved the affiliate program from Commission Junction to in house (now the eBay Partner Network and before google attacked the problem of “thin affiliate sites”. This term (although not exclusive to) was kind of derived from a BANS site with nothing but eBay auctions and no content at all. While BANS has a section to add “content pages” it’s most certainly not the main focus of the software. Google’s targeting of BANS actually lead to a huge movement of setting up a WordPress blog in the root of a domain and then BANS in a subfolder and adding a theme that had some WordPress BANS integration.

Whether or not you have BANS installed on a web domain by itself, or as a subsection you can still make money. It’s not fair to unilaterally blame BANS and say “you can’t make money with it anymore”. Sure you can. eBay is a billion dollar business with hundreds of millions of visitors each and every day in every country of the world. But I’m not going to lie (like many bloggers) and say you can cash in and make riches over night. You have to put in the time to build up the site once you install BANS it’s not magic. It’s not rocket science either – you just need to follow a plan and take the time to work out all the details you need in order to be successful.

It’s also not like I’m claiming to be uber-successful with BANS like some, but I do get an eBay check each month and have for the last year since I first purchased BANS. I did start thinking about it again in the last month because my time got occupied with some other projects so I emailed some other “niche store owners” that I made contact with over the last year and asked them how they were doing. Everyone was having success, and actually much greater than mine to my surprise. The amounts varied from $1,500-$10,000 per month. I employed a few very basic techniques for just one week, and doubled the amount of eBay commissions I’ll receive this month. I won’t divulge exactly how much, but it’s more than a car payment and less than a mortgage.

How to Succeed with BANS in 2009

Whether you’re going to buy Build a Niche Store, or already have it setup you can benefit for my recipe for success (even if you’re already making money):

3 Steps to BANS Success

1. Register with Google, MSN, and Yahoo! search engines
2. Make Regular Updates
3. Constantly work on Promotion

Let me break down these steps for you so they make more sense:

1. Register with Google, MSN, and Yahoo! search engines: Probably the biggest mistake I see in BANS sites is that the owners don’t register the sitemap file with the search engines. Many people dropped their .info sites once google started targeting BANS, but I kept mine. I still make money on it (even though it’s not listed in google) – mainly from MSN and Yahoo. I talked to one niche store owner last week that makes $1,500 a month from his niche store from MSN traffic alone! Your sitemap is how the search engines know of any changes of updates to your site. BANS version 3.0 has a feature that creates a “sitemap.xml” file in the root of your BANS store just like this one. Google might look for that file even if you don’t submit it, but in my experience MSN and Yahoo don’t always. I didn’t see any MSN traffic at all until I registered with MSN Live Search and submitted my sitemap. I wrote about this along time ago – you can find out in my previous post Increase Traffic with MSN, Yahoo, and Google!

2. Make Regular Updates: This is another (nearly constanly) missed step. I even do it (all the time). Search engines like activity, and to them activity equals current information. I’ve learned some weird things about this too – completely by accident. I always thought with BANS sites that I had to write new content pages to get more traffic. While that is definitely the best source or more visitors, if you just login to your BANS site every day and change a few words on one page, or maybe add a paragraph and a Youtube video to an existing page – that updates your sitemap. An updated sitemap gives the search engines something new to index, only if you physically took 60 seconds to add a few words. Viewing my stats I realized that I got more visitors every single time I made an update – no matter how simple. Don’t just make updates (when you can) – make “regular updates”. If you let your site get stagnant for a month or more with no update, you’re just asking the search engines to drop you down in the results.

3. Constantly work on Promotion: Many of you will read this point and be like “yeah, yeah, I know – build links, comment on blogs, write articles, exchange links, I know, I know…”. Let me be clear on this – if you’re not making money – you don’t have the traffic. I’ve not heard from a SINGLE BANS owner “I get 5,000 visits a day and I make no money…” The people that make very little money get very little traffic!!

So – I’m telling you to go back and re-evaluate your activities. I don’t care what you “think” you did to promote your BANS site, it’s obviously not enough to get the money YOU wanted or you wouldn’t still be reading this article – would you? I read something the other day that really hit home with me, it was about bloggers promoting a particular program on Clickbank, in fact it was about “super affiliates”. A “super affiliate” is someone consistently making $10-100,000 per month – and I’m not talking about people “building lists” or hyping the next garbage eBook either. I’m talking about people promoting eBay, Amazon, LinkShare, Commission Junction, etc. The article said that they “uber-successful” affiliates did all kinds of online promotion but many thought article marketing worked best. In fact they felt it was the best link building exercise (for them). In their particular page they had a landing page for a particular product to promote, and to be successful indicated that they needed a MINIMUM of 50-100 articles to promote that ONE page.

Now I’ve always thought of myself as pretty good in the linkbuilding and promotional department. But in over 2 years of using EzineArticles.com to submit articles I only have 35 articles live. Looking at them again today I realize that all 35 combined promote maybe a total of 7 different pages (sites). If I wanted to be like one of those super affiliates, for those 7 pages or sites I have used article marketing only 5 times each – and the super affiliates use a minimum of 50-100 articles per page promoted. I guess I’m about 315 articles short aren’t I? But then again, the very first BANS site I started with this series Used Cell Phones only gets a couple hundred visits per day. I make money with it, and nearly every day it has a sale. But if I’d written 45 more articles to promote it I’d probably have 9 times more traffic, nearly several thousand per day, which would probably amount to 10 sales per day and probably $1,000 per month in income from just that site.

In the beginning I commented on a log of blogs and forums and did link building for that BANS site, but stopped after 4-6 months maybe. Constant promotion is just that, and my biggest flaw it looks like was not only stopping the promotion but not using any goals to quantify it.

Calculation of Results

Now that I’ve slapped you in the face with little dose of reality let me remind you that these goals are actually achievable if you (and I) are willing to put in the time. You (like me) should be evaluating where you are at right now on your main BANS sites and projects online.

Take your main BANS site:

1. How many visitors does it get per day?
2. How much does it make per month?
3. How many articles did you write to promote it?
4. How often do you update it (in any way)?
5. How many links did you build (forums, comments, etc)?

All the Super Affiliates (and successful BANS owners I know) get more than 1,000 visitors per day, and the better ones all get 5-10,000 per day. NOT ENOUGH VISITORS – is probably the one reason you aren’t making the money you want to. To be successful in 2009 you need a plan to get from point A to point B.

MAKE THE PLAN:

For my site (for example) I have 5 articles and need 45 more. I probably need to build at least 40+ links as well, and update 4-5 times per week. I would like to execute this plan within 30-60 days.

MAP OUT THE TIME:

- writing 45 quality articles would probably take 45 hours (an hour each)
- building 40 links is roughly about 5 hours work (for quality comments and not auto-commenting spam programs)
- updates 4-5 times per week is 5-15 minutes each time

This means (for my work schedule) writing an article per day 5-6 days per week for 2 months, doing small updates 4-5 days per week and building links every day. We’re talking about basically 2 hours constant work 5-6 days per week for two months one just ONE page of ONE BANS site for success.

Procrastination and Distraction HELL

Like I posted last week in blogging diligence, the worst problems I have are putting things off, too many projects, and distractions. If I own 40 domains and maintain 20 working web sites the work I put in every day is a little bit on as many as I can. I haven’t concentrated enough focused effort on “just one site” to get incredible results. Figure out what you want and how to get there, and then work the roadmap you laid out diligently. It’s funny when I think about it, because really Forrest Gump could make money with this kind of plan (and probably would be better at it). Mainly because he wouldn’t question “why” – he would just plod along and do it, and success would follow. Did you ever have a teacher in high school tell you that if you saved 10% of every pay check you earned and banked that money (and never touched it) by age 30 you’d be a millionaire? You could have been a millionaire by now from your regular 9-5 job but just weren’t diligent enough to do it. Now do you understand why there are so few “super affiliates” out there?

After you read this article check out my eBay plugin!

You’re bound to run across some Free eBay WordPress Plugins if you’re going to monetize your blog or web site. The question is – are they worth using? You know the old adage – “you get what you pay for”! Last week I wrote about the Affomatic free eBay Plugin, but I wasn’t very impressed with it at all. It didn’t have hardly any features at all and after installation I couldn’t even get it to work.

I have another couple of candidates today to try out, let’s see if they work out any better.

TWP Auctions

TWP Auctions is a free eBay plugin for WordPress that displays auctions on your pages and posts. If you want to see how it displays auctions check out their example page.

Here are the pros and cons of TWP Auctions:

Pros:

• It’s Free!
• Very Configurable by country, sellerid, category, etc.
• Layout is Clean

Cons:

• Auctions contain “Powered by TWP Auctions link”
• Auctions are posted by using PHP code
• eBay links are rover and not masked or SEO
• No advanced options for zip code or category filtering

I don’t like this plugin because they encourage you to download and use the PHP-Exec plugin to actually paste PHP code into your posts to make the eBay auctions appear. Adding PHP code to posts or pages directly is both dangerous and counter-productive. The PHP-Exec plugin can conflict with other plugins (I know from experience), and the more plugins you have installed the slower your blog will be. If you’re going to use PHP code, the normal (and accepted) way to do this is by using page or post templates and adding the code there. The fact that this eBay plugin doesn’t allow you to use keyword tags in posts and pages to display auctions is mind boggling.

In addition to that it appears to only work with the eBay Partner Program and not with Pepperjam. Couple that with that fact that the auctions display rover links and you can’t mask the URL’s or benefit from using SEO links with keywords – that’s enough to make me not want to use this plugin. Granted, it’s free – but hopefully in the future this plugin will improve and become easier to use.

Open Auctions

Open Auctions is another free eBay affiliate WordPress plugin, and at least this one claims to be compatible with eBay Parter Network, Pepperjam, and even Auction Ads (now called Shopping Ads).

Here are the pros and cons of Open Auctions:

Pros:

• It’s Free!
• It’s Very Hackable
• URL’s are masked (no rover links)

Cons:

• Auctions are posted by using PHP code
• Very few configuration options at all

Open auctions is more for users that are advanced and familiar with hacking HTML, PHP, and WordPress. If you want a basic starting point and something you can hack a bit with – this might be for you. You can even drastically change the auction display using CSS, but the fact that you have to use PHP code and that there are little if any configuration options for category, sellerid, and other options means that this plugin is also not for me.

eBay Sales Lister

eBay Sales Lister is another free eBay affiliate plugin for WordPress, and it’s actually been around a couple years with a very recent update. Once I downloaded it I found out that this plugin only displays auctions in a sidebar using a widget, but on top of that it’s only for displaying your own eBay auctions if you’re selling things, and not for the eBay Partner Network. I only listed this one because it’s the only thing I could find that displayed auctions in the sidebar – I don’t know why any of the plugins I’ve tried so far (free or premium) don’t seem to have any options at all for this.

Wordbay

Wordbay is another free eBay affiliate plugin, and it’s actually one I tried in the past. It was very basic when it first came out, I’m actually excited to see how much better it is now. Once I downloaded and installed the plugin I was shocked at all the new options, the programmer has been very active since I last saw Wordbay. Let’s take a look at what it does…

Here are the pros and cons of Wordbay:

Pros:

• It’s Free!
• URL’s are masked (no rover links
• Auctions can be displayed in multiple columns
• Geotargetting (show auctions for user locale)
• Ability to choose specific categories “by country”
• Option to display “click for details” icon
• Option to show eBay signup link
• Option to show eBay search box after auctions
• Option to show “expanded search” link after filtered auctions
• Add auctions to posts and pages with simple tags
• Ability to completely control auction display with CSS file

Cons:

• eBay links have no keywords for SEO
• Does not appear to have any options for Pepperjam Network
• No options to show auctions from specific sellerid
• No ability to filter by zip code
• No options for sidebar display or widgets
• No ability to override default options with additional parameters in keyword tag

To see the auctions in action check this Wordbay example site. Out of all the free WordPress plugins I have to say this one has the most options including the ability to quickly and easily add auctions by adding a simple tag with keywords in blog posts and pages. It would be nice to override the default options on some posts, and filter results to specific sellerid’s or zip code. I don’t see any SEO in the eBay links (although they are masked), and this plugin does not support Pepperjam network at this time. The geotargetting ability is awesome, and something you don’t see in some of the premium pay for plugins.

WP ZinText

WP ZinText is a free WordPress affiliate plugin, but isn’t like any of the others at all. Actually it’s quite refreshing to see a free plugin do something different for a change. You’ve probably seen all the services that provide contextual links like Kontera and Intellilinks. Once you add the script, once a page loads on your site it underlines all kinds of keyword phrases and when you mouseover them a little bubble appears with a text link ad.

ZinText creates contextual links on your WordPress blog too, but after you setup the options with your eBay Partner Network ID is shows little auctions thumbnails in that mouseover bubble instead of a text ad.

Here’s what it looks like:

Here are the pros and cons of WP ZinText eBay Plugin:

Pros:

• It’s Free!
• Refreshing new way to display eBay auctions
• Can replace low-paying contextual links programs
• mouseover bubble has 9 auctions thumbs and one larger preview
• mouseover bubble has search eBay box
• Will make an awesome addition to other eBay affiliate plugins

Cons:

• plugin only works for contextual linking
• only links keywords you manually add in setup options
• uses flash and some users disable that in their browsers
• clicking auctions in mouseover bubble opens a popup window, and some people have that disabled in their browser.

I hope you enjoyed these free eBay WordPress plugins, and in my opinion there are only really 2 usable ones here, Wordbay and WP ZinText. They would complement each other nicely on the same blog. One of the main reasons I went through the exercise of reviewing all the free eBay plugins for WordPress I could find online was because I wanted to see all the different features available. Next I will be reviewing all the options in all the premium eBay plugins I can find for a comparison.

I do have an ulterior motive to all this research though – because behind the scenes I’m working on having a professional programmer build the ultimate eBay wordpress plugin, one that does more than anything free or premium on the market today.  Please view my new eBay Plugin: WP-EASYBAY!

Many bloggers just concentrate of creating posts of content, and most of the other features of WordPress are often overlooked. If you started a brand new blog tomorrow, hopefully within 2-3 months your homepage would have a google pagerank – and your site would be indexed in all the search engines. Over time, if you keep posting content and build links, your homepage will become your main “authority” page, with pagerank and search engine listings. The more content you write, over time some posts will bubble up to the top as “most popular” and some of those with gain pagerank themselves and become high in the search results pages – like your homepage. They will organically and naturally become “authority pages”.

In the past I’ve called these kinds of posts “pillar articles”, and the more a site or blog has the better. Today I read a post on another blog that called these “money pages” (because they bring the traffic) – and I like that description. So, rather than keep writing posts and lets the odds of fate determine how many and what kind of authority pages to have in your site, why not build your own?

That’s right – you can actually write your own authority pages. Basically all you need to do is figure out what it should be about. It could be just a roundup page categorizing certain posts on your site, it could actually be a category or tag page itself, a WordPress “page” you created, or even a post if you want it to be. After you figure out what page it should be, try to come up with some good keywords you’d like to rank for to drive traffic to it. Do a little keyword research to get some good ones, because you’re going to use them over and over and over again.

Now that you have decided what URL to make the authority page and what keywords to use drive traffic to it – it’s time to start building links. What I usually do is come up with 2-3 keyword phrases, and use the first version the majority of the time but alternately use versions 2 and 3 some of the time.

Awhile back one of my blogs I wanted to start an authority page for “Tech Reviews”, and I used the keywords “Tech Reviews”, “best tech reviews”, and “gadget tech reviews”. Then when I created the page I named it “Tech Reviews” and used it again in the first few sentences of original content on the page. Then I added it into my site navigation. Next I listed all the pages I had done tech reviews on that site for, with the title, and an excerpt of the content. I went to each and every one of those reviews and added a sentence in the first paragraph “This is part of the ‘tech reviews’ series” (and linked the keywords “tech reviews” to my authority page. The I wrote a blog post about the new tech reviews page and linked it. All of these things combined were my “internal linking stragegy“.

Next I started building links on other sites. I wrote about my authority page on some of my other blogs and linked back. I added it to some of my forum signatures and wrote some posts. I created pages on squidoo.com and hubpages.com and linked back there too. I posted some blog comments and used the authority page URL and keywords. All of these things combined were my “external linking stragegy“

An analogy I like to use is that your blog is like the mall. At the mall the owners know traffic patterns and psychology of how people think, and that’s why they choose 3-6 “pillar stores” and place them at main entrances. In the US a small mall might have a Sears, JC Penney’s, Macy’s, Elder Beerman, etc. These huge department stores are meant to draw in the majority of the traffic to the mall, in good times and in bad. Without these “draws” the smaller stores would suffer because they aren’t large enough to draw enough traffic on their own to survive. This is why I tell most new bloggers that they have to post at least 60-100 times to a new blog until it starts to blossom and become successful, because the authority pages have to be established. The difference is, most blog owners don’t understand that (like the mall) you have direct control over how many and which authority pages are within your blog. Don’t wait for them to “rise to the top” of your blog naturally – directly create them yourself!

Since this week I’ve committed to blogging on my 10 main blogs I own each and every day Monday – Friday, that means that I have 10 blogs posts to write each and every day for five days in a row. I thought you might want some insight as to how I’m accomplishing this without killing myself timewise, but also without producing thin and short 100 word posts as well.

How to Come Up with Blog Post Ideas

Social Media Web Sites: Social media web sites are a great place to come up with new blog post ideas since what’s popular is usually very interesting! You could spend hours and hours trolling sites like digg.com and del.icio.us for new content – but I prefer sites like popurls.com that aggregate the top stories from all the social media outlets, in addition to video and traditional news sources.

RSS Readers: If you subscribe to a hundred of your favorite feeds in Google Reader or bloglines.com – then it’s not hard to get post ideas in a jiffy each and every day.

Groups: I haven’t used newsgroups in years, but something that’s still alive are the email based “list” type groups. The major ones are at Google Groups, and Yahoo Groups. Just search for a group with a topic or interest you might like, such as gardening, jokes, crafts, auto repair, etc. Sign up for the group, and once you start getting posts you’ll start getting ideas!

Magazines and Catalogs: I get a lot of post ideas from snail mail believe it or not. I have blogs in topics I have interests in like technology, gadgets, and music. I get catalogs and magazines in the mail like guitar magazines, CompUSA catalogs, and even newspaper ads from Best Buy and Radio Shack. If something catches my eye – I blog about it. I purposely sign up for free catalogs in the same interests as my blogs to have a constant stream of potential ideas. I stack them up at the edge of my desk and go through them whenever I need to.

Ask for Guest Posters: Some of the most successful blogs are run and owned by multiple authors. If you are in need of new ideas and quality content, why not solicit guest authors? Add a form to your site and specifically ask for new ideas and guest posters. You could even contact your favorite blog authors and outright ask them to guest post on your site!

Automating the Blogging Process

I am a HUGE procrastinator, and I’m easily distracted and I have really, REALLY bad Attention Deficit Disorder, and I’m a bit Obsessive Compulsive as well. Automating some of the blogging process has really helped me to make sure that I get some work done in an organized fashion each and every day.

Datafeedr: Datafeedr is a both an affiliate service and WordPress plugin you can purchase to create affiliate stores in WordPress. I write about this in great detail in my article series “How to Create an Affiliate Store in WordPress“. One of the features I love in datafeedr is “product dripping”. When you create an affiliate store with hundreds of products you an create posts automatically each day and have them auto-publish or “drip” to the homepage. This forces me to go back each day and re-write the dripped posts with better titles and some original content every day – and is a great way to jumpstart blog posting. Read more about product dripping here, and check out datafeedr here.

Write Multiple Posts and Schedule Days in Advance: Not a day goes by that I don’t get some sort of blog post idea. Once you get in the habit of writing these down, you’ll also start writing draft posts days ahead. This can be as simple as just writing a title and a sentence or two and saving the post as a draft, or actually writing multiple posts (alone or in a series) days ahead and scheduling them to post automatically in the future. The new scheduling feature of WordPress is awesome!

Automatically Schedule and Reuse Old Posts: I’ve written about this before, but the Scheduled Post Plugin by Dagon Design is one of my favorites! Basically it takes the oldest post in your blog and changes the timestamp to today and rotates it to the top spot on your homepage! On my blogs where I have hundreds of posts (especially the ones I don’t write a lot for anymore) – I rotate the posts and recycle them. This also forces me to check them out on a daily basis and make sure that they aren’t outdated and don’t need rewriting. This works especially well on sites that have content like jokes, recipes, or content that never really gets old. It also gives me a second chance to look them over and make sure there isn’t a new or better way to re-monetize them. This helps me to reuse all my old content AND keep the old posts fresh, clean – AND making money!

That’s it – these are the main things I do to help me write 10+ blog posts per day. If you have specific things you to help you write for your blogs everyday – please post them and share with all of us in comments below!

I’ll never understand why people say that making money with Amazon is soooo hard. I’ve heard many bloggers both write and say that they quit using Amazon long ago because they either never made much or anything at all. Amazon was actually the first affiliate program I ever signed up for. I have to admit, at first I really didn’t make anything either, probably for about the first year. I don’t make thousands like some people do, but I do get a payment from them each and every month. I could probably earn even more if I were a more diligent blogger!

I believe that the keys to making money with Amazon are pretty easy:

Two Steps to Amazon Cash:

1. Always be Selling Something
2. Make it Personal

Let’s break it down so I can explain each point…

1. Always Be Selling Something: You don’t know it, but if you’re blogging you can always be selling something. Did you rent a movie? Buy some furniture? Read a book? Listen to some music? By simply blogging about your everday life you can find things you can not only write about, but monetize and not feel shameful about selling. Last year my wife and I were looking for some modern shelves to put our audio and video components on because our TV is mounted on the wall and using a TV stand is really stupid (since there is no TV on it). After I found what I needed, I blogged about floating shelves, and it turned out to be a long tail keyword that I made quite a few sales per month from. We got a new Blu-Ray player for Xmas, so when Blu-Ray sale last week it was time to stock up! Guess what – other people stocked up through my affiliate link too and I made commissions!

2. Make it Personal: The most important thing I could ever teach you about blogging is to make each post and page personal. Write in your own style, about your own life, and your own experiences. Why do you think reality TV is so popular? Why are the gossip rags at the checkout read so much? People LOVE to read and know about other people and what they’re doing. If you can manage to talk about yourself AND tie in a product you can get conversions at 10x the rate of a spammy feeling blog! And if you make it personal and draw people in, you build TRUST and REPEAT visitors too!

Amazon is the ultimate online store because they have about everything. The thing I love is people that say you don’t make any money, and not only are they not promoting the program on a regular basis – but they are missing the point entirely! The entire reason for getting someone to Amazon is so that they will hopefully see something they like……anything! Amazon will give you commission no matter what (or how much) they buy! Sure you might only get $1.28 commission on book, but if they buy a $200 kiddie stroller you might get an additional $12 commission! I have sold grills, bicycle pumps, dentist office tools, car seats, blenders, sweaters, bikinis, watches, and a ton of really weird stuff – all from simple links to books and electronics. Amazon has the better mousetrap, believe me – just set the bait and they will reward you! Click here for the Amazon Associates program.

The most frequently asked question I get his “how do I make money online – how do I become successful?” I can now boil it down to one single word diligence. There are hundreds of millions of blogs online and of those only so many thousand are bringing in enough cash to call their blogging a business. There are many ways that success can be obtained, or even bought – but the tried and true method that will never fail is pure hard work.

Most of the blogs I read have popular posts that try and explain some sort of trick or shortcut to online riches. Many “gurus” are selling the next best thing and the only key to their online success is finding a few thousand more fresh suckers to believe their hype, sign up for their list, and buy the garbage they recommend.

I have had some moderate online success, but realize now that the only thing that has been holding me back is….well – ME!! Over the last 2 years I’ve been working on a little of this, a little of that, some blogging here, some linkbuilding there, buying all kinds of new domains and only setting up a handful. There just hasn’t been enough work on concentrated things. I should know better really, because I’ve blogged about building online income and success for years, but when it comes down to it I’m just not as good at following my own advice. In fact a few weeks back I worked about a day and a half diligently, and it even brought immediate results and my income skyrocketed for just a few days – but then fell back again.

This week I’m putting a new recipe for diligence in action:

1. Post to each of my main 10 blogs every day this week Monday – Friday
2. Build at least one link per day for each of the 10 blogs
3. Monetize something 4 out of the 5 times for each of the 10 blogs this week
4. Submit at least one article per blog this week

I believe this recipe will bear fruit in increased eBay revenue, adsense revenue, other affiliate income, and increased traffic. Today is Tuesday, yesterday I did post to each of my 10 blogs (and one BANS site), and I did leave at least 2 blog comments on other blogs for each to build new links as well.

It’s funny too, I read a post to that reaffirmed my belief in dilgence entitled How to become a Super Affiliate. It points out that “high VOLUME is the key…” How many times have you visited a blog only to see they haven’t posted in months or years? Even on this blog I (like an idiot) took a two month break. At least I came back – most don’t! Even an idiot can make money online by never stopping, never quitting, even with the worst content, spammiest sites, and worst designs. If you never stop, at some point you will simple force success to boil to the top – whether you like it or not.

One blog I’ve been reading since the beginning of my journey making money online is ShoeMoney. I always found his honest straightforward approach to blogging and blog monetization refreshing. Especially because he revealed not only his successes, but his failures. He put out a video the other day entitled “Blog Monetization Soup to Nuts” that gives you a brief overview of everything you need to know to make money in a blog – with no strings attached. I embedded it below for you to view, it’s 20 minutes well spent!

Since I recently found out that my WordPress eBay plugin BayRSS page has become outdated since the plugin author really isn’t supporting it anymore I’ve decided to explore some other eBay affiliate options for you (and for me)! Last time I checked the free options available for eBay plugins and affiliates store scripts weren’t that great – but that was probably 12-18 month ago. There have to be some decent free products out there by now!

The first ones I came across, and heard about late last year are from the Affomatic Network. They have 2 products available completely for free, and one is a WordPress plugin for blog posts and the other is for creating a standalone “eBay store” with no database required at all. Let’s check them out!

Affomatic Free WordPress Plugin Review

The Affomatic Free eBay WordPress plugin doesn’t cost a thing – all you have to do is “subscribe” to their affiliate mailing list to get the download link. I guess you just as easily unsubscribe after you get the download if you wanted. It’s pretty basic, a one file plugin install, and the readme file doesn’t even instructions – just the link to the download page. You place auctions on pages or posts by using the appropriate tag (listed on the setup page).

You get some pretty basic options, here’s what the setup screen looks like:

So you can control the number of auctions that display, one single category, the country, how to sort them, and that’s about it. You can’t display by zip code, or default category, multiple categories, and any of the other advanced options you might be used to with the pay-for eBay WordPress plugins. You want to see what the auctions look like when displayed? So would I, but when I installed it on this blog I didn’t get any no matter what keywords I used. Affomatic does have an examples site for this plugin, but the only page I could find auctions on was this page on Bonsai Training. The eBay auctions shown are in a 2-column style, something that’s not even an option in the free download plugin. If you have better results than I did, please comment below.

Affomatic Free eBay Store

The Affomatic Free eBay store is basically the same as my free niche store script, which originally was the 45n5 script that this is based on anyway, minus the amazon and youtube items that made it a “mashup”. It’s very basic and just about what you would expect for free. Once downloaded you just enter your eBay affiliate ID in the setup file and one set of keywords per line in the products file and you have an instant eBay store! I guess that’s all good and well if you have a way to drive traffic to it, but if you’re looking to get any kind of organic traffic or search engine listings – this script is not going to help you in any way shape or form. This is was the main reason I re-wrote the original 45n5 niche store script anway, so I could include a blurb of original content at the beginning of each page. It you could rewrite the template (like I did the original) I guess to do whatever you want, but just know that this thing out of the box is very VERY basic. I set up an eBay store here in about 5 minutes.

Both the WordPress plugin and eBay store are kinda cool at first glance, but after downloading and installing them I don’t think either one I’ll be utilizing personally any time soon. Try them both yourself and post back here what you thought! Click here to download Affomatic Free eBay Scripts.

I was driving down the road yesterday afternoon when I heard a radio ad for a web site called “Cars for A Grand. The ad said the web site had all cars under $1,000 – some ran good and some were better for project cars to work on. I’m actually in the market for a junker, so I called my wife and left her a voicemail to check out the site before I got back home. The ad specifically said “cars for sale in your area under $1,000″ – it made me take notice.

I went to an appointment and then went home and asked my wife if she checked out the web site or not and she said “yeah, but all the cars are eBay…” I thought that was kinda weird, and had to check it out for myself. The web site was nothing more than a bunch of listings from eBay motors – basically a BANS niche store for cars. It was setup to punch in your zip code and it would show you listings in your area.

Most people would look at that and think “so what?” I thought “wow, that was pretty damn smart!” I mean, the eBay affiliate that did that was really thinking (and willing to invest a little bit of money). He setup a great eBay affiliate site, and then instead of taking the time to build traffic, links, pagerank (it doesn’t even have one) – he put an ad on the radio to generate INSTANT traffic! And you know, I believe eBay motors pays $25 commission per car sold!

Do you have a unique web site marketing technique to share? What’s the strangest way you’ve ever seen a web site or blog promoted?