Archive for 'April, 2009'

There are so many WordPress themes for free online, now many designers and developers have started to give away their premium WordPress themes for free just to get exposure. This of course, makes it even harder to actually charge money for premium themes. I think that if you’re going to charge money for a WordPress theme it either better be a custom theme created just for your site as an original – or it better do something truly special that no other theme does.

This is part of our new series “Ways to Make Money Online” – this interview with Andrei Saoic you some insight into what it’s like to be a Premium WordPress Theme designer!

I recently found a couple of premium WordPress themes that do just that. Andrei Saioc owns Sitemile.com where he sells premium WordPress themes that help you take your site or blog to the next level! He has two WordPress themes, one that turns WordPress into an auction site, and another that turns it into a classifieds site. There are some plugins available that do try to do both of these things, but his WordPress themes really allow you take your site to that next level – without leaving WordPress.

Let’s find out from Andrei himself how this came to be…

Andrei Saioc owner of Sitemile.com

Tell us a little about your background and who you are:

A: My background is quite simple. All started with the passion for computers back in primary school, at that time I was hacking DOS PC games, then started to learn DOS programming. After that when it was time to get to high-school, I choose a programming oriented high-school… this is how I met C/C++ programming. Then after high-school I went to university (Automatics and Computers from Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest). At that time I started to learn HTML and PHP, which I already had contacts with since high-school. But I needed to take it to the next level so I can earn enough money to pay for my studies. First I worked as a freelancer on lots of freelancer websites out there. The greatest was getafreelancer.com, where I found a permanent job for some guys in England. Kinda long background huh? Also I am working online for 4 years as a professional, but have more than 6 years since I had contact with programming.

Do you work independantly, or with others in your online business?:

A: I work independently for now, but I am always open to new offers.

Why did you decide to create premium WordPress themes?:

A: Well, i decided that because WordPress is a very large open-source product and has a great market of users behind, so coming with such things brings you fast success.

Where did you get the idea for the classifieds and auction themes?:

A: The idea of classified theme i got it from some other sites that sell that stuff, but i made it better, more neat, more features, better support, more quality product. Thats the secret

I see you do the PHP coding, do you also do all the web design, SEO, and promotional work yourself?:

A: Yes PHP is my love! I do the coding, and all the designs and everything. I am good at everything.

Is it hard to “wear many hats” in an online business, or do you like being the guy that “does it all”?:

A: Yes is hard, but I think in first stages of a business is worth it, because there are risks, if you invest too much you risk to loose everything, and you can risk less in eventually of a loose you wont have that big damage on
your pocket.

Working online for yourself, do you find that you work more or less than the average person in a regular job?:

A: In the first stages of the business you work more and always need to come up with innovations and new ideas. But once you settle your business you will find that more relaxing than a regular job.

What’s the hardest thing about working online?:

A: The hardest thing is to find that niche or market, and to have that idea of the product that will sell. Coding the product is the easy part.

When you work for yourself online how do you plan for things like insurance, taxes, and retirement?:

A: Well you can work online and pay taxes and insurances. There are many private organizations that offer insurances and all that stuff. Important thing is to succeed in your business, then all the rest are details.

What’s the #1 goal you are striving for in the next year for your products?:

A: No1 goal is to have as many products as can be, so I can cover big areas of the market, so I can do more and more sales. The secondary goal is to buy a new car, a house, to quit my ordinary job and so on.

Will you create new additional products for release in the future?

A: Yes more product will come in the following months. I have a few ideas of wordpress themes and great things based on opensource scripts, because they offer a great market and usage behind.

What advice do you have for others wishing to work online or market and sell their own premium WordPress themes?:

A: My advice is to create something very solid, very premium and very professional, also the packaging of a product is very important.

This is great insight into the life of a real world (and world class) WordPress Premium theme designer. I highly suggest you read my post reviewing his “classifieds” WordPress theme entitled “How to Build a WordPress Craigslist!

Once I show you how to build your own “Wordpress Craigslist”, you won’t be searching the web for all those hoaky one-off scripts anymore. A lot of people still believe that WordPress is just for blogging, but those of us that have been using it for a few years or more know better. WordPress is a fully fledged CMS (content management system), and it’s potential is unlimited. It can be structured to do anything from a completely static web site to a blog that serves hundreds of thousands to millions per day. Check out Matt’s tags of Famous WordPress Blogs if you don’t believe me!

The World of Online Garage Sales

In Today’s economy people are trying to find new ways to make money as fast as people are selling this to try and generate cash. It’s no suprise that both eBay and Craigslist are favorite spots to do both of these with millions of visitors each and every day. You can cash in on this by building your own niche based “Craigslist”, quickly and easily. Craigslist capitalizes on “community” by being a (mostly) free classifieds based service allowing you to list and find things where you live.

I remember when I was a kid, (you know – back in the days when there was no cable and no Internet) one of the highlights of the day was when the newspaper was delivered. This was mainly because of the “classified ads”. That’s where you found pets people wanted to give away, jobs, items for sale, houses for rent, rummage sales, and used cars for sale. The way we live has changed, but the things we need have not. Now most people aren’t willing to pay $25-50 for a newspaper ad if they know about craigslist.

Why build Craigslist in WordPress?

Some of you might be reading this and saying “there’s already a Craigslist – why would I want to build my own?”.

Let me give you a few pointers:

• The economy is bad and people want great deals
• Millions of people search for things locally daily
• People like simple – not complicated
• Google favors “blogs”
• Google favors (and is now targeting) ‘local’ content
• Visitors posting to a classifieds site = FREE CONTENT for you!
• Charging money for some (or all) ads = PROFIT!

I wrote a post awhile back called Local Web Sites Produce Consistent Income. Read it if you need some ideas, but it should be pretty easy to come up with your own ideas for turning WordPress into a “classified ad” type of web site. I’ll even give you a few to get your brain thinking…

Membership club (Eagles, Moose, Biker club, Church, youth group, intermural sports, college fraternity or sorority, school alumni, camera, bird watching, sportsman, collectibles, etc), music or musicians, art or artists, rentals, housing, real estate, audio/video, video games or gamers, personals or dating, industrial or skilled tradesman, divorce, child support, therapy, support groups, volunteer or self-help groups, charities, and the list goes on and on and on…

I personally would pick something that you think you could get 500-1,000+ people per day to visit, something you personally know a lot about, something people search for now, and something that helps people find something they’re looking for. The whole idea her is to focus on ONE particular topic in a niche and just DOMINATE the hell out it. You don’t want to beat Craigslist at their own game. That would be futile. You want to own a niche in your local area.

Example: Gun Club – start the “Lake County Gun Club” site and setup categories for buying, selling, trading, certification classes, and events. Make posting in all categories free except buying/selling and charge $1 for each ad post. You have instant traffic and instant profit once you tell all the members. You could even call the local sporting goods store and charge them $50-$100 for a monthly ad. More profit (recurring). See how easy this is?

The Sitemile Classifieds WordPress Theme

Now that I’ve sold you on the idea of your very own WordPress Classifieds site, let me show you how it’s done. You might have thought that the best way to do this would be with a custom plugin. It’s true, that would be one way to do it – but a Theme is even better!

Enter the Sitemile Classifieds WordPress Theme! This is more advanced than any WordPress theme you’ve ever seen in the past. Normally you rely on a WordPress theme to change the look and feel of your site by using graphics and CSS. Some more advanced (and premium) themes come bundles with plugins that do special things. Sitemile has actually gone the “extra mile” and created a theme that doe sthings you’ve maybe never seen before – especially without the use of any extra plugins!

These are just some of the features the Classifieds WordPress theme has built in (without plugins):

• Custom fields for any classified site type
• Custom currency support
• Auto-delete posts longer than x days old
• Custom Fees for any category, sub-category
• Extra charge for “fetured” ads
• Post articles with ads
• Google Maps integration
• Google Analytics integration
• Paypal integration
• Plug and Play, install, setup, and use

I’ll show the setup of the theme in a second, but if you’re in a hurry to see a working demo WordPress classified site right now, just click the picture below now…

How to Setup a WordPress Classfied Site

Please keep in mind that everything I’m about to show you is a Premium WordPress theme. All the features and functions that I’m about to show you are available with simple installation of the Sitemile Classifieds Theme.

First of all – the Classifieds Theme costs $39, and that’s cheaper than a boatload of premium themes I’ve seen. AND – all those themes only change the look and feel of WordPress, most have few functions like this.

Once you download the Classifieds theme, you just upload it to your /wp-content/themes folder and activate it. Next, you have to proceed immediantly to the google maps site to Signup for a free API key.

If you don’t do this, when you visit your site you’ll get an error. If you try to use an API from another site (like I mistakenly did) you’ll get an error as well. Both look like this popup:

Once the theme is uploaded and activated you need to setup the options in your WordPress dashboard. Click on the link in the bottom left of your sidebar in WP Admin in WordPress 2.7+ (like the image to the left here). Then you’ll see the general settings:

Here you get to choose from 5 languages for the theme, English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish. You also get to choose whether or not to allow ads to be deleted, and how long a posting should last before “auto-deletion”. You can set whether or not people have to register on your blog or not to be able to post ads, or just keep it wide open. You can have a “display this” button that users can click to report objectionable content. You also get to choose whether or not ads are “auto-published”, or must be a draft that is reviewed and approved by an admin. The next section are the “custom inputs”.

Custom inputs are how you control what the user can enter when they go to post an ad. Maybe this would make more sense if I showed you the default “post an ad” form a visitor sees by default:

This form is the default action of the theme. Users can enter a title, choose a category, enter a price, name, location, email, description, and image. In the “other info” section you see those custom fields. This is so you can add special fields you might need depending on the nature of your site. For a rental classifieds site you might add custom inputs such as ‘bedrooms’, ‘square feet’, ‘lease’, etc. Now we move on to the payment options section.

In the payment options section you can choose your currency, from dollars to euros, canadian or australian dollars, to anything custom. You can choose to allow paypal (or not), disallowing it makes your ad posting free. I should mention that even if you make your add posting free, you can still charge for “premium” ads later on (give people the option to pay for the privelege of having their ad show first). Then you enter your paypal email, and whether to use paypal live or just test it in the sandbox while setting up your theme (by doing some test transactions). The next section is for Fee Options.

This is where you choose how much (if anything) to charge for your ads. Remember- even if your ads are free, you can still set an amount to charge for “featured ads” by entering an amount, and then choosing “yes” for the “allow free ads + pay for featured” field. As I said earlier, you can even charge different amounts for different categories (like craigslist does). This is a great way to get people to post (for free), while generating revenue for only a few categories. The next section for setup is Advertising space.

You enter your text in the box for any ads you wish to appear on the main page of your new WordPress classifieds site. Like adsense, a banner ad, text links, etc. This my only complaint so far – this features needs more options. Like the ability make the ad available on specific (or all) category pages, or the ability to add different ads on different categories, etc. In any event, you can easily find an advertiser for your niche classifieds site. The next (and last) section is special settings.

This is the section that you add your google maps API key into, in addition to your google analytics code. You can enable or disable both the top nav bar for the theme and the sidebar widgets here as well. You can even turn HTML code on or off.

Now you might be wondering – we went through all the settings here and there were no options for categories. That’s because you use WordPress’ normal category admin function to set these up. Just add the categories you need, and when visitors go to post a classified ad, the available categories in the drop down will be the ones you entered.

Managing Classified Ads

You’ve seen all the setup options for the Sitemile, now I’m going to show you how to actually manage the classified ads. I think you’re going to be surprised too, because usually the Classifieds theme doesn’t use the “custom fields” that so many themes and plugins do.

Check this out, once you install the theme your WordPress powered site has two very prominent buttons in the upper right hand corner to make it very easy for people to use your site. But first, you have to know how to use them yourself.

There’s a few things you need to know. First, you post classifed ads from the home page using that button or link “post new classified”. If you create a “new post” from within the WordPress dashboard what you are doing is creating an “article”. Don’t worry, wordpress “pages” still serve the same function.

Take a look at the “Manage Posts” screen:

The Classifieds theme actually changes the WordPress “manage posts” screen to make things effortless for you. The picture above shows that some new fields and a few graphics are added. It makes it very apparent whether the post is “an article” or “an ad”. As a test, I created one classified ad from my the homepage of this test site, and then I created a brand new post. That’s why I have one article and one ad. Here’s how that affects the layout of your homepage…

The image above shows the “recent articles” block in the top right of your site layout. If you get 50 classifieds per day, your latest articles will still show in the top right sidebar. This is great for posting notices and things people need to know, but more importantly (as a site owner) it’s great for posting some occasional “original content”! I really like this layout of articles vs. “ads”.

The ads and articles are listed in the main content area as well as in the example images above. Articles pretty much look like a normal post would in any other theme, but the “ad pages” are structured quite a bit differently:

The actual ad post page (as seen in the image above) show the details of the classified ad in addition to the automatic google map. On the right the price is prominently highlighted along with the seller details. The original poster (or admin) can delete ads, and anyone can report them (if your settings are setup this way). If you click on “send seller email” the panel slides out in very cool ajax style to give you a form to contact the seller without reveling their email address like this:

Conclusion

Sitemile Classifieds WordPress Theme is one of the most incredible WordPress themes I’ve ever seen. It does one thing, turn a WordPress web site into a completely fully functioning Classifieds Ad site, and it does it incredibly well. It requires no plugins at all to get the job done, and even your Grandmother could run a classified site with this them. It’s intuitive for both your visitors, and for you within the WordPress Admin interface. I’ve never seen a $39 premium theme do so much – EVER!

I recommend the Classifieds theme, and I will be using it in one of my sites very soon. I think that you’ll find a TON of uses for it.

Click here to Visit the Classifieds Theme web site

Sitemile also sells an “Auctions” and “E-Commerce” themes you should check out, they are definitely of just as high quality as this one.

Be sure to also read my interview with Andrei Saioc – owner of Sitemile.com, where he talks candidly about writing Premium WordPress themes for a living.

Brad Spencer does WordPress consulting as well as SEO work. It’s not often you find a well-rounded guy like this that has such a great handle on Internet marketing, SEO, web design, programming, and graphic design. I like what he has to say because he echoes some of the same sentiments I have…like in his profile where he says “It simply doesn’t make sense to pay a Web Designer $100/hour to design your website when your teenage son could do the same thing. The question is no longer how pretty your site is, but how relevant, useful, and profitable it is.” I couldn’t agree more!

So, as part of our new series “Ways to Make Money Online” – this interview with Brad will give you some insight into what it’s like to be an independant WordPress consultant!

Brad Spencer: WordPress Consultant

Brad, tell us about your background?:

Well I want to start out by thanking you for the invitation to be part of your series. Your blog is a great read and it’s a pleasure to talk with you. On to the question at hand… My background is pretty varied. I grew up in Columbus, Ohio and then after graduating high school in 2003 I moved around the USA a lot and did some travels abroad. After about five years of nomadic living I settled in New York and got to working online. I’ve had dozens of jobs… Landscaping, Director of Marketing and Communications for a Pilot TV Program, Chef, House Flipper, Dining Hall Manager at a Meditation Retreat, Fine Dining Server, Snowboarder, Book Store Dude, Coffee Shop Barista, and the list goes on and on. I just like lots of different stuff.

How did you get started working online?:

Well that’s a fun question. When my girlfriend (at the time) and I returned from a trip to Chile, Argentina, and Costa Rica around 2005 or 2006 or something, my girlfriend was returning to college. The school (one of the East Coast ones with endowments that make Ron Jeremy blush) gave us a nice apartment and everything was paid for. This freed me to try some things that could produce money in the long term without having to make money to pay rent each month. At about the same time I got the last payment from flipping houses in Phoenix before the great Real Estate bust. So with a small nest egg and free rent I went about making a Hookah enthusiast website and quickly learning exactly how much I didn’t know. Which, coincidently, I’m still reminded of each day.

Tell us how you went from “creating web sites” to being a WordPress consultant?:

My main hurdle to being a successful affiliate has always been that I don’t have much to say. Since blogs are mostly about saying something and the blog itself is simply a “frame” or “framework” for the content, not having something to say is a pretty big problem. It strikes me that some people just have more to say than others.

So I found myself working within the code and playing with how WordPress works much more than actually writing content. This is the worst way to build a successful blog, by the way, but ended up being a good way to learn the innards of WordPress.

A few years ago WordPress was a lot less glossy and refined as it is now. To really use it you had to work with it’s underlying technologies a lot more. I’m lucky because I learned how to use WordPress at that stage. So now when something doesn’t work in the glossy, user-friendly, wordpress 2.7 and beyond, it’s easy for me to figure out what went wrong.

How do you compare WordPress to other open source tools like Joomla, Mambo, Drupal, etc.?:

I’ve tried a few others, namely Joomla, Expression Engine, and Drupal. None of them compare to WordPress. And they never will. WordPress won. They got the user base, and they will continue to outpace the others in terms of plugins available, updates, etc. If there was a market for WordPress futures I’d drop some cash in it.

What’s your best method for obtaining clients?:

Being on the Official WordPress Consultant list has been a real boon to my business. I also think that using the skill you sell to get clients makes the most sense. In my case I have a Search Engine Optimized WordPress blog that gets a bunch of traffic. If someone arrives to my site, it means I know what I’m doing.

If you are going to be a professional twitterer, you should get your clients on twitter.

If you are going to be a copywriter, you should compel people with your copy.

That way you’ve already pre-sold your services. You can start negotiating with your clients without having to prove that you are competent.

How do you stay organized in your online business?:

It’s difficult. Basecamp is great for collaboration. I also have legal pads all over my desk with list after list of ToDo’s that somehow make sense. But I’ve tried to shy away from any computer-based todo system because I like to physically cross stuff off of my list. Haha.

Tell us about your daily work routine? How many hours, and what’s your schedule like?:

I like to wake up late and check email for an hour or so. Then I’ll do some errands and eat and grab a coffee for a few hours. Then in the evening I’ll do most of the work until the wee hours of the morning. I’ve always been a night-owl and get most of my creative ideas at night. If there is a big project due, then I’ll work during the day at a coffee shop too. Whatever it takes to get it done.

On this note: I think it’s crucial for Internet folks, like us, to take media fasts occasionally. That means no computer, no tv, no newspaper. Just chill outside and let your brain and nerves relax away from screens. I try to do some sort of computer fast every few weeks, if even only for a couple of days.

How has your business growth been from last year until now, and where do you see yourself in a year?:

Booming. It’s been exploding more each year. Keeping up with the workload requires new and inventive ways to provide more value in less time than I did last month.

Is being the “jack of all trades” guy overwhelming?:

Absolutely. But learning to say “No” has been very helpful. Telling a client that you are “Too Busy” may seem obnoxious in our capitalist society, but you have to stay sharp in this business. It is easy to beat a competitor who is overwhelmed, you know?

Have you ever had clients that want a swimming pool but want to pay for a bucket of water? How do you handle that?:

Well said. I’ve never had anyone get a quote and complain about the price. I think I tend to build swimming pools for the price of a bucket of water, and sometimes the low price makes people think they are going to get less than expected. I could likely raise my rates 50% and actually get more clients since the price would corroborate that they are buying a good product. But, alas, I like to make sure that people get a good deal.

I also try to work in verticals that stand to benefit most from SEO or getting new clients. A lawyer or doctor, for instance, can afford to pay 10k for a website overhaul and if they get a few clients out of it will still have a positive ROI. I shy away from industries that can’t make their money back quickly. Before I was a consultant, I was a hustler little entrepreneur and want to make sure that people come out ahead when they work with me. I’ve sent many potential clients away who have “vanity” projects or don’t have a chance of ranking because I never want anyone to even wonder if working with me was a good move on their part.

Will you create any “online products” in the future, or just stick to consulting?:

Great question. If you haven’t read Peter Drucker then start ASAP.

I’m trying to turn everything I do into a product. This includes consulting. People are more comfortable buying a product instead of a service. And if you can product-ize a service business, then you can also measure and improve the value, impact, and efficiency of that service.

So my consulting service has been turned into a One hour phone consultation for $99. That’s a product that you can buy on my site via paypal and get an expected result from. You take an ambiguous process and make it something you can touch and smell and buy. There is a reason why Walmart doesn’t sell insurance (or do they?).

What advice do you have for people that want to start working for themselves online?:

Model your business on something that works offline. Business is the same offline as online, but technical jargon can mask a poorly thought out business plan. You still have to sell something for more than it cost to make/buy it. That’s just business. I’m not saying you have to have a business plan, but just don’t expect something on the internet to make you rich simply because it’s the net.

And there is plenty of space to make huge stacks of money online. All the people who made lots of money online are rich now and not working on new projects. So look for the stuff on the horizon and get there before the mass does. I’d look at twitter right now.

Thanks Brad, for the great interview! You gave some great insight into your online job as a WordPress consultant!

Be sure to read the rest of the interviews in our series: “Ways to Make Money Online“

Free Blog Photos with Picapp WordPress Plugin

If you’re looking for free blog photos, free stock pictures, or free images gallery – I’ve got something even better for you! When you blog a lot it’s hard to get good images and pictures for each and every post and page. It takes time to find the picture, then resize it, then you have to upload it. It’s a real pain, and I have to admit – it’s such a pain that I find myself just writing posts with no images more often than not.

When I saw the WordPress Plugin PicApp, I had to install it and check it out because it seemed to solve this problem. The home page says you can search and find images to publish in your posts that are free and legal. These are “premium” images from the news wires and big sites like CNN and Reuters.

Well, let me back up a second. PicApp is a “web site image search service”.

You can go to the home page and choose to search either creative or editorial images like this:

Then, once you search for and find a pic you get the options for embedding it in your blog or web site like this:

They the pic is embedded in your site once you copy and paste the code, just like a YouTube video. Seems cool right? Well, Picapp web site has a WordPress plugin that will display on your WordPress write screen in posts and pages allowing you to search and find and embed images right from WordPress without having to separately visit the web site.

Seems cool right? Once you install and activate the plugin you get the search option from your write screen like this:

Then once you find the image you want, you click on it to get the options screen for embedding it into your post or page:

You get the options of 3 different sizes, and you you also get alignment options, in addition to the ability to wrap your text around the picture. On the left you get an example of what it will look like once you publish. Still looks cool, huh? Here’s the example of what it looked like once I embedded and published a pic on my blog using the PicApp WordPress plugin:

See anything different? I was kinda shocked to see that it embedded an adsense ad right below the pic! I guess I wouldn’t have minded this – had I known in advance. But I hate things that are done “sneakily”, if you know what I mean. I can’t find any mention of the adsense ad anywhere on the PicApp site, and the plugin certainly does NOT say “ad supported”.

In fact, on their WordPress plugin page – they have a demo video that conveniently never mentions the ad block at all, they don’t even scroll the screen up high enough to you can see it!! Here’s that demo so you can watch it for yourself:

PicApp WordPress Plugin from PicappAccount on Vimeo.

And here’s a live pic I chose to embed using code from their web site search directly (not the WP plugin):

See the big difference? I don’t know why they would choose to release a WordPress plugin that sneaks in an Adsense ad when their main web site doesn’t do this. If kind of makes me angry in a way, it’s like their saying “we going to screw you over a little bit because you’re using our WordPress plugin”. Hopefully they’ll remove that ad soon, because when they do I’ll be using this plugin on all my posts all the time!

Do you hate that Adsense ad as much as I do, and would you use this plugin if it wasn’t there? Tell PicApp by leaving a comment on their blog!

**UPDATE**

The PicApp team did email me just today as a result of this blog post – and it looks like they’ll be modifying their plugin to actually show the final image view before publishing, in addition to different formats and an “opt-out” of monetization formats. I’ll post again once the plugin is updated…it’s good to know that they’re interested in keeping bloggers happy!

I’ve written about the Datafeedr service in my WordPress Affiliate Store series. I’ve setup quite a few stores since then, and the service itself gets better with new features all the time. From time to time I get emails through my contact form asking for help, mentoring, consulting, and all kinds of other things.

WordPress Consulting

Sometimes people ask me to setup WordPress, and recently I was asked to setup a basic affiliate store for a particular niche using the datafeedr service. I’m writing this post to show you how that example turned out, and also to give you an idea of what you’re in for if you decide to do some consulting for someone else.

Years ago I did all kinds of consulting for businesses, a few corporations, and private individuals. Usually I did computer repair, taught how to use the Internet and email, or showed people how to build web sites. Doing a job for someone in person can be pretty cut and dry because they usually know they have to pay you for the time you spend with them. If you’re there 3 hours, and you charge $20 per hour – you get $60. Working virtually though – is a whole different situation. People expect to get things very cheaply (nowadays), and when they can’t see you physically working for 3 hours it’s more difficult for them to believe it takes that long to get something done. This is usually why I don’t do a lot of consulting, and I’m very picky about anyone I’ll deal with as a client.

Giving an Accurate Estimate

Another thing to think about is your ability to give an accurate estimate, and how to prevent “scope creep”. This is hard to do without experience, and takes some time to be able to do well. Let’s say someone says “I want you to setup WordPress on my web site”, and you think “I can do that in 15 minutes…”. Sounds easy – doesn’t it? What you don’t know is the level of understanding the client has of either WordPress or web site setup. Immediately I have questions like “do they have a domain?”, “do they have a theme?”, “what plugins do they want?”, “what webhost do they use?”, and more.

So when I was asked to setup a WordPress affiliate store, these are the things I asked right away:

• Who is your web host?
• Do you already have a domain?
• Is your domain already setup on the web host?
• Will you be able to setup the database for WordPress on your web host or do I need to do that?
• What kinds of plugins will you need? (contact form, SEO, Related Items, Stats, Askimet, Banner Ads, etc.)
• Do you already have Title, keywords, description info?
• Are you already signed up with datafeedr?
• Do you have your merchants picked out?
• Are you a member of those merchant programs at the proper affiliates?
• How many products do you initiall want from datafeedr to open your store with?
• Do you need custom theme work / header graphics, etc?
• Do you have knowledge of SEO?

The answers that you get to these kinds of questions give you a really good idea of the experience level your client has, and it will help you start an estimate. When figuring out how much time it will take to do something try and figure out how much time it will take you total, including time for questions in email exchanges. If you exchange 10 emails and that takes you 90 minutes total over a day or two, that’s unpaid time you could be using on another project.

What to do with Unanticipated Problems

With my lastest WordPress Consulting project, I was asked to setup WordPress on a new domain and populate it with a basic datafeedr affiliate store, a couple hundred products in a few categories to get it started. You can see the store at Unique Baby Gifts. I asked the previous list of questions first – and then got to work.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a project that didn’t have “unanticipated problems”, little things that just come up. There are many reasons for this. In this project I actually forgot to ask the database question, and when it came time to install WordPress I had nothing to install it on. So I had to send out an email describing how to set it up and then wait for the response to proceed. There were other little questions along the way, like when I went to setup Askimet and WordPress stats I realized I didn’t have their account info to set them up. I also remember that the theme picked out wasn’t widgitized at all, so getting the right things in there from the datafeedR store became difficult.

Generally when problems arise with a client you need to:

1. Explain the issue
2. Determine what it takes to fix it
3. Add to the estimate if required
4. Get a concensus from the client in writing about the additional work
5. Proceed and finish the project

Usually, most things can be worked out and many issues that arise don’t really take any additional time at all. The theme problem that I had had developed into too many hours, and I had to explain to my client that I could do the custom theme work to make the products display the way they wanted, but that would be additional work. In the end they picked a new theme and all was well.

Happy Clients Means Testimonials

When you do quality work and your clients are happy you’ll get some great feedback, and you should turn that into a testimonial you can use in your own blog. Link to your work and your clients will as happy for the one way link as you will be for the testimonial.

Here’s the testimonial I received for my WordPress Affiliate Store consulting:

I wanted to set up an affiliate site to promote unique baby gifts and had
heard good things about Datafeedr. I decided to give the service a try, but
was not familiar with using Datafeedr (which is a bit complex) or blogging
software (WordPress is required to use Datafeedr). After doing a bit of
research I came across John’s blog. I contacted John to inquire about
hiring him to set up my site, and I’m glad I did.

John is professional and very knowledgeable. He completely set up my
WordPress site and Datafeedr account without any problems, made useful
suggestions and answered all my questions in great detail (which I
appreciate very much).

I would not hesitate to use John’s services again — and I will — and I
would recommend John to anyone.

Signed,

D.A.

Read my entire WordPress Affiliate Store Series

Contact Me for WordPress Consulting

Have you ever wanted to add save or export as PDF capability to WordPress? A few years back I used to have a printer friendly page link on every page of this site. Then one day when I had to dust off my printer just to use the scanner portion – I realized that not too many people print things out anymore. Everything is digital nowadays! But the Internet is just SO full of digital information that sometimes you just can’t digest it all. I save bookmarks all the time, and copy and paste useful code – but half the time I lose it or forget where I put it.

The other day I came across a unique new little WordPress plugin called “Post2PDF” that will convert any post to a PDF file on the fly! I downloaded and installed it, and it didn’t even have an options page that I could find – it just works. In the plugin page description it has some comment code you can add to any page you want to be “exluded” from the “covert to PDF” option, but other that it works on every page and post in your blog.

Install the plugin and it adds this to your posts and pages:

When you click on it you are prompted to save or open the PDF file:

Once you open it the PDF file will vary depending on how the plugin could convert your page. It seems to convert links seamlessly, and bold and headings, but even thought it says the images tag (img) is supported, it didn’t covert any images for me. In fact on a few pages it refused to produce a PDF because it had a problem trying to find the image in my /wp-content/images directory.

Here’s an example of one of my posts converted to PDF:

The nice thing about this plugin is that it automatically puts timestamps at the beginning of the file and copyright information at the bottom of each page. I don’t like that it puts your admin WordPress email address in the beginning of the file though. Maybe that will change in future versions.

One of the features I hadn’t even mentioned yet was “category to PDF”! I don’t supposed this would work for every blog, but I really like the fact that it puts an icon next to your categories in your sidebar, and when you click it – it generates a PDF file with all the post from that category! This is VERY handy.

Personally, I’m going to wait until the plugin matures just a little bit – I’d prefer to see some setup options and the image function work a bit better. But this is definitely a plugin to watch – and I haven’t seen anything like this before.

Download Post2PDF here

Finding Your Competition with compete.com

Today we’re going to find out how to find your web site or blog competition using a compete.com pro account. There are many stat services out there, but not many have as much data as compete.com, or have as may ways to dissect it. There are quite a few ways to find the competition, but we’re going to try and make it as easy as we can.

This is the second installment of our compete.com review!

You might be surprised about today’s results and what you’re about to read, because sometimes the competition in search results aren’t as great as they appear to be. Being successful in a particular niche is nice, but the one thing a search engine never tells you is how many people are searching for the keywords you type in. No matter what keywords you try and target you still can’t get more traffic that segment is already getting.

What I mean is, if I want to dominate the keywords “red widgets”, but the search engines are only referring 5,000 visitors per month for that keyword phrase – I can never get more than 5K visitors per month on those keywords unless that market segment grows. There are ways to “create a market”, create a buzz, and work viral campaigns, but you can’t count on that. I’ll explain this more as we go…

Finding Competitors through Keywords

First of all you have to have a vague idea of what keword you’re trying to target, otherwise you have nothing to look up. I know I write about “blogging” so I looked that up, but I get massive results and sites like huffington post and things that don’t relate to me. I’m not really looking to compete directly with problogger.net anyway, so I’m probably barking up the wrong alley looking up “blogging”.

I’ve written about niche stores quite a bit, so I’ll punch in “niche store” to see the competition:

Wow! I only got 2 results, and those 2 COMBINED get less than 13,500 search referrals per month! You might say “but google gives 6.9 MILLION results for the keyword phrase ‘niche store’”! Touche! They do. But guess what, we just revealed through compete.com data that 6.9 millions sites are competing for less than 13,500 search referrals per month. Not a very smart plan is it? If you actually “want” to sell lots of niche stores then you need to target keywords that draw in a much larger audience if you want to be really successful.

Let’s check out another keyword phrase I’ve written about in a recent series “wordpress affiliate store”.

Check it out, I only get 5 results! I immediantly discount #2 (seoquake) because those stats are probably skewed by the firefox seoquake extension. The other 4 stats would be MUCH higher if that weren’t the case. Datafeedr is #1 (which I expected), and the 4 remaining results combined get MAYBE 6,000 search referrals per month. Again, google has 403,000 results for that keyword phrase (and I’m #3!). Once again I’ll state – when you are competing for a keyword phrase that doesn’t get many search referrals, how successful can you be? There’s nothing wrong with targeting (and dominating) low volume keywords like this, but don’t bet the success of your web site on dominating just one or two of them.

So far compete.com has shown me my competition for 2 of my main keyword phrases, but more importantly that those 2 keyword phrases are pretty low volume. I would need to have a couple dozen search phrases like that for the kind of traffic I need to be successful. I think I need to research my competing keywords better and rethink my strategy!

More Competitive Keywords

Now that I know that the few keyword phrases I was targeting aren’t good enough to try and draw the traffic I need to be successful, it’s time to think a little bit bigger. There’s no way I’m going to bother competing for the ubiquitos John Chow phrase “make money online”. But if I think about a good general description for my blog – I basically write articles about making money blogging with WordPress the majority of the time.

So, let’s check compete.com for the keywords “make money blogging”:

This seems like a much better keyword phrase to target. The compete.com reports shows 56 domains getting regular traffic from it. It’s actually way higher than that since the blogger results are lumped together (blogspot.com). But with about 4% of 65 million search referrals per month going to “make money blogging” that’s 2.6 million per month just being sent to blogger. I’m sure that’s spread over tens of thousands of blogs though. The number one result is doshdosh.com, because 6% of his search referrals per month come from those keywords (higher than anyone else). The seccond is bloggingexperiment.com and third is stevepavlina.com. Looks like I’ve started to uncover my competition! Compete.com can help you find your competition, but you have to do a bit of investigation to figure out what you’re competing for first (like we just did).

Spying on the Competition

Now that we found a good keyword phrase, it’s time to investigate the top 3 sites that get traffic from it currently to see what we can learn.

The first is doshdosh.com. Through the “site profile” tool I see that this domain gets 198,000 average visits per month on nearly a half million page views.

At the bottom of the profile page we get some quick stats on search and referral analytics:

In this quick view we see 25% of the traffic comes from google, and 6% from twitter, plus some from Sphinn and facebook. The person blogging on this site definitely uses “social media” as a tool to obtain traffic, out of the 357 sources listed for incoming traffic – many of “twitter” tool sites.

What I’m particularly interested in are the keywords that are referring traffic to doshdosh.com to see if I can get any other ideas to investigate. But first I’m going to check Yahoo and see how many backlinks doshdosh has. Compete doesn’t show this, but it’s something we can see free in Yahoo by doing the query linkdomain:doshdosh.com

Wow, I’m glad I did that check! doshdosh.com has an ASTOUNDING 1.2 MILLION backlinks! Are you kidding me? Holy hell, that’s unbelieveable. Let’s do a compete.com keyword report and see if we can figure out why:

Well, it’s no wonder that doshdosh has 1.2 million backlinks anymore, 4 out out of the top 10 keywords are for their “prosense” wordpress theme. They authored a wordpress theme and gave it away for free with their link in the footer, so every site using it has a link back to dosh dosh (apparently over a million pages). Is this a great case for creating your own WordPress theme or what?

Also in the top 10 is the phrase “link building tips”. That might be another good phrase to investigate. Let’s look at the next 10 keyword results for doshdosh.com:

Now we actually see “make money blogging” in spot #19 and it appears to be sending only about 10,000 search referrals a month. But “ways to make money blogging” is sending 5,000, “content monetization strategories” is sending another 5,000, “seo tips building new site” is sending another 5,000, etc. After looking through these keywords I’ve learned that the best thing I can do is take 10 phrases that send 5K or more search referrals per month and target them one by one in articles and posts to build traffic (just like dosh dosh did).

Now it’s time to check out my #2 competitor for make money blogging bloggingexperiment.com:

I looke liks this site was doing better last year and is just starting to come back a bit this month. At this point – I get more traffic here on jtpratt.com per month than they do. That doesn’t mean I can’t learn from them though.

Looking at their search and referral stats briefly this is what I see:

They get 32% of their traffic from google and an impressive 8% from yahoo. Nearly 5% comes from sitepoint.com, which means the owner of this site probably posts a lot in sitepoint forums to build links. 2% of the referrals come from ebay, which seems weird, until you see that the #3 spot is buyingandsellingwebsites.com, which means that they are no doubt selling web sites on eBay.

From the search analyics I see that their domain name is #1 and #2, but “make money blogging” is #3. On to the keyword report, it turns out they only get traffic from 27 main keyword phrases:

In their top 10 search referral phrases I see two additional ones, “make money”, and “how to make money” that might be worth targeting sometime in the future. I checked Yahoo, and bloggingexperiment.com has 8,400 backlinks (about as many as I do).

Now it’s time to check out the third competitor for “make money blogging” stevepavlina.com:

This site appears to be growing pretty consistently, let’s see what the quick search and refferal stats are:

31% of the traffic comes from google 2.5% from google and almost 2% from facebook. 3% is from blogger, which means many other blogges are linking to him. Out of the keyword section though, 4 out of the top 5 keywords appear to be about food. Let’s dig a little deeper…

It appears that stevepavlina.com gets traffic from 835 different keywords. Out of the first 10 most are about food and personal development. So lets take a look at the second set of 10:

Now we start to see more keywords related to our target market like “site build it” (a tool for building web sites), “web traffic”, “make money from blogging”, and “make money blog”. In results 21-30 (not shown here), there’s also “blog income”, “make money blogging”, and “blogging for money”! These all seem great, but the thing to remember her is that stevepavlina.com gets under 200,000 search referrals per month, and the majority of these phrases get less than half of one percent of search referrals per month (less than 1,000). It might be a good idea to use them organically in blog posts or titles, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to target them without futher investigation in compete’s keyword destination tool to see if other sites are getting more referrals for them. I checked Steve Pavlina’s backlinks in Yahoo and he has over 186,000!

What Have We Learned?

1. The keywords we targeted don’t get a lot of traffic
2. We researched and found a better main keyword phrase
3. We reviewed the 3 top competing sites
4. We found additional keyword phrases to target over time
5. We learned more successful sites get traffic from MANY keyword phrases
6. Most sites have similar “branched variations” of the same keyword phrase
7. The more backlinks you have the higher you rank for even the simplest keyword phrases

Conclusion

Compete.com has some great tools for discovering your competitor web sites, where they get their traffic, and which keywords are working best for them. The best way to become successful is by watching people that already are successful and learning from them. Viewing the competition’s statistics is also a great way to find out keyword trends that are more popular than what you’re already using. The data that compete.com has available isn’t something that you could dig out of search engines on your own. The information that I’ve gathered so far will help me to plan future posts, pages, meta descriptions, in addition to link building campaigns.

Click and Try compete.com Yourself

This is the first post in our “compete.com review” series, where we investigate what you can actually do with a pro account. The first thing I wanted to do with my compete.com pro account was to take a look at the site profile for my blog to learn what I could about where my web site stands and how to improve.

It’s nice to see that compete.com verifies my notion that this blog is growing. Everything is up from the number of pageviews, to unique visitors – and how long they’re staying.

Referral Analytics

Next I’m going to check out the “Referral Analytics” part of my profile to see where compete.com says my best traffic is coming from. This slice of data shows us which web sites are sending traffic to my blog. I get some details I really didn’t expect.

My #1 source of traffic is google (which I expected), but it says that my change in share is down 30% (bad). Some of the rest of the top 10 I expect to see from blog comments and sites that have linked to me, and others I don’t get at all. Like hab.la (a chat applet site) and MattHarward.com (there isn’t a single link on that site back to mine). My entrecard traffic is down 75%, which I expected since I really no longer used it. I also see that Yahoo traffic is down, 69%, which is bad as well. All in all compete says I get traffic from 53 sources, I’d rather that id be 500 sources!

Search Analytics

Now I’m moving on to check out the “Search Analytics” section of my profile, which will tell me what keyword phrases are bringing the most traffic to my blog.

It’s very interesting seeing what compete.com thinks my top incoming keyword search phrases are, since they are completely different than what my wordpress.com stats say each day. I have to remember though, this data is for the last 90 days, and wordpress.com stats are daily in my dashboard.

The one thing I learn right away is that I need to build more links for targeted keyword phrases, something I have to admit I don’t do enough of. From my top 10 keyword phrases, only one (eBay wordpress plugin) is something that I’ve actively worked on targeting. The rest are “natural keywords”, or phrases that have naturally risen from my blog postings through the search engines to bring me traffic.

It’s funny how some of these phrases (in the top 10) are from one-off posts I wrote that I never intended to bring me any traffic at all. Like “forum backlinks”, which I’m sure is from posts I wrote about posting in forums to get backlinks. Or “mysql import and export”, which comes from a post I wrote about about how to import and export huge mysql databases. It just shows that naturally writing a blog “will” bring you traffic, but once you have a little bit of information you can go well beyond that if you do some targeting.

Digging Deeper

I really like the fact that you can click on any keyword in the Search Analytics report and what other sites are getting traffic from it (and where you fall in the mix).

From my top 10 keywords in search analytics I clicked on “eBay WordPress plugin” since it was the only one I actually targeted myself, to see how well I had done. You can see in the report above that I’m #2 only to phpBay.com – which is pretty good considering they sell the #1 eBay plugin online. I also think it’s funny that it’s a larger part of my search traffic than phpbay.com, and it’s only a few blog posts of mine, but the crux of their entire business.

Even Deeper Than That

Now, I’m going to dig one level further even yet, and click on “phpbay.com” in this report to get information about that site, because if this keyword phrase is only 2% of their search traffic – I really want to see what other keywords are bringing them traffic.

I think it’s very interesting that the top 10 keywords bringing in traffic are all brand or domain names like “phpbay”, “phpbay pro” etc. I guess that’s expected to see the product name ranking high, but other than those first 2 brand search terms, the rest of the keywords seem to bring in a sparse amount of traffic. You can’t see it in the pic above, but the phrase “eBay wordpress” ranks #13.

I think this investigation was quite telling (for me), to know that I rank right up there in keyword traffic with phpBay and I only targeted one keyword phrase for one day to do that. This means that I could do much better with my blog by targeting other keyword phrases and actively going after search traffic. It also shows that some sites (like phpbay.com) could probably double their exposure and sales by doing a little SEO and online marketing.

Conclusion

You can get some great data about your site traffic and search referrals at compete.com. The nicest thing I think is the fact that you can look at this data without having to install any “analytics” or stats scripts (or plugins) – the data is just “there when you need it”. I can see why this is the tool of choice for many small businesses that now see the Internet as crucial to their business, like real estate companies and car dealerships. I will be posting more about compete.com and how to use their reports to spy on the competition and build a strategy for ranking better in the search engines myself.

Click and Try Compete.com for yourself

Last night I installed the Backtype WordPress plugin on this blog. It’s “yet another” comment enhancement plugin for your WordPress blog. You might be thinking “that’s just like Disqus and Sezwho…” – but really it’s not. If it was I wouldn’t have tried it.

Both Disqus and Sezwho try to capitalize on you by making you create an “account” and then tracking across the web your (and other’s) conversations. All your blog page loads are bogged down by lookups to “their” servers, and it’s just a big messy pain. In addition to that I thought I got an email last month that SezWho was going out of business anyway due to lack of funding. There’s a waste of my time, and a waste tracking all those comments down the toilet now.

What does “Backtype” do?

What Backtype does is different, it just discovers other comments about your blog pages in Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, Reddit, and even other blogs. Then it creates actual comments within your WordPress blog with that information adding to the coversation on your blog. You can choose to review and approve them (or not) and also whether to group them with your comments or in a block right after.

We all know that blogs that are more active get higher search rankings, and having more (valid) comments builds the credibility of your pages. Backtype naturally shows if there is a buzz about your pages and where that buzz is coming from by attributing the source each time.

Here’s an example of a comment Backtype added to my blog:

This is the format that Backtype adds the comments and you can see the last line “this comment was originaly posted on Twitter”. Backtype doesn’t interfere with other comment enhancing plugins like Subscribe to Comments or CommentLuv at all

The argument “against” Backtype

Check out the comments on this Backtype blog page and you’ll see that some people aren’t too happy about this plugin at all. They see what Backtype does as no different than “scraping” content from other pages without peoples permission.

I guess there’s a thread of truth to that – when you make a comment on someone’s blog you don’t expect to see that content lifted and posted yet again on another site. But then again, if I post say on WeblogtoolsCollection about a plugin and my comments is posted on the original plugin page (with attribution)- what’s the harm?

Really is there any difference between this and posting a tweet and having it accessible through 30,000 other tweet re-tweet and search-tweet sites? I guess that’s a debate for another day, just know that people are talking about it. I say when you comment anywhere anymore you know that you’re part of the “social conversation” of the web anyway.

Conclusion

I think that Backtype is a promising little plugin and I like what it does. In addition it doesn’t seem to slow down either my posting time or page loads like SezWho and Disqus did, and if I “ditch” Backtype in a month – I still get to keep all the additional comments that it created on my blog with nothing lost at all. I recommend you try it out – you’ve got nothing to lose.

Download Backtype Here

People come up with ideas for web sites all the time. Some of us (like me) come up with too many ideas for the time we have available. The concept you pick for a web site is the foundation for all the money you intend to make – so you better make it a good one!

This post is part of the Concept to Cash series.

Guidelines for Picking a Concept

Choose a concept that you know something about: When choosing a concept for a web site or blog it’s easier to turn that idea into cash if it’s something you are already knowledgeable about. It gives you experience to draw from when blogging, makes it easier to write articles, and easier to find and research keywords. It’s also easier to work for little or no money (in the beginning) because it’s something you’re passionate about already and interested in.

Choose something that gets enough traffic: You don’t want to go to all the trouble of setting up a web site or blog on a topic only to find out later that people only search for it 50 times per day. I think ideally to sell something each day, you need to try and get 1,000 visits per day or more.

Many people blindly setup web sites or blogs without doing any research at all to find out what the potential search volume for them will be. You can do basic research to figure this out, or spend a lot of time and money getting really in depth with the results. I recommend visiting compete.com’s Keyword Destination tool. You can find out which web sites get the most clicks from keywords. You get the first 4 results for free and further investigation requires a paid account. The top 5 results are enough for me to find out if my concept is good enough to get started.

For example, I have a domain that has been sitting for a very long time that will feature new and used laptops. I did researched the keywords “used laptop” at compete.com to see what kind of traffic that phrase gets and this is what came back:

Using the compete.com keyword query tool we see that my keywords seem to be pretty good with about 200 million people per month being referred on those search words to just the top 5 sites listed. I also got 4 domain name competitors to check out, but I got some other very telling stats as well. Check out the #1 results “usedlaptops.com”. They get 34,000 search referrals per month for the keyword phrase “used laptop”, but that’s only 2% of their total monthly traffic!! Do a little math and that means they’re getting a million and a half views per month! But now I’m very interested in finding out where the other 98% of their traffic comes from – what other keywords are they successfully using?

Choose keywords to get that traffic: Choosing a concept that gets a lot of searches is very important, but it’s even more important to know exactly what combinations of keywords to target to actually get a cut of those searches! Now that we know our keywords “used laptops” actually get traffic – we also found out the top 5 competing web sites. Using those domain names we can enter them in a web site called SEMRush to find out more about other keywords they’re using like this:

According to this report at SEMRush usedlaptops.com has a total of 1,190 keywords they rank for, and they’ll give you the top 10 for free. You not only get the keywords, but the position in google search pages in addition to monthly search volume. So in our original lookup at compete.com we found that “used laptop” sends 34,000 search referrals, but now at SEMRush we find “used laptops” sends 40,000 per month. We also see some keywords that might even be better such as “cheap laptops” which sends 74,000 searches per month.

It’s good to decide which keywords to target for your home page and domain name, but getting some additional keyword phrases to target in other sections of your site is also great ammunition you can use later.

Choose a domain name containing the keywords:

Now that you have your idea and some keyword phrases to target it’s time to find the right domain name. It’s kind of common knowledge now that getting a “keyword rich” domain name is best. This means that your main keyword phrase should be in the domain name. My keywords to target are “used laptops” for my main home page, and I already have the domain name used-new-laptops.info. It would have been ideal to get usedlaptops.com or .net (or .org), but of course they are all taken. I bought this domain name two years ago anyway and haven’t done a thing with it. I’m using for the purposes of this series, but if you’re buying a new domain name here are a few pointers:

• Use four or less words
• Don’t use unneccessary word (the, or, and, not, is, a)
• Try not to exceed 30-35 characters total
• Use dashes only if you have to
• Add a keyword if you have to
• Go for .com first, then .net, .org – try NEVER to use .info

Try and use common sense here, and please don’t register some godawful 58 character domain name. The shorter the better, use the best keywords you can, and in my case I wanted a domain “used laptops” but even with dashes couldn’t get it. I went with “used-new-laptops.info”, and even that (I now know) wasn’t very smart. I should have done something like “used laptops cheap”. For the purposes of this series I’ll use that domain as an example. The reason that you no longer want to use .info domains is because google deindexes them so quickly – especially if you have a BANS niche store. I register all my domains with goDaddy, it’s just my preference. I don’t have hosting there, but I like their domain manager and have all of them in one place to manage (even though I have 3 or 4 different hosting accounts).

In the next installment of the Concept to Cash series we’ll talk about setting up a web site or blog./