Archive for 'October, 2009'

Have you ever wanted to change your WordPress web site or blog URL to an IP address, subdirectory, or new domain name? Why would you want to do this? Well, maybe you want to move to a new domain name. Maybe you want to setup a test or development version of WordPress in a subdirectory, another server on an IP address, or a different URL while you test and make changes. How do you do this?

It’s pretty easy, in fact so easy – you might kick yourself. All you have to is add these 2 lines to your wp-config.php file:

define('WP_HOME','http://example.com');
define('WP_SITEURL','http://example.com');

That worked for me! There are other fixes (like going into the database), but if the easy one works – why do something that requires more work? If that doesn’t work for you – check out these other options in the WP Codex.

Since I first wrote about the FTP blogging rules for endorsements, I’ve read some interesting posts on other blogs about it. Shoemoney held a “town hall chat” with John Chow and other bloggers, and he talks about it in his post What you don’t know about the new FTC rules on Disclosure. He basically thinks that the fake news sites and obvious guru bad guys (lying about income and results to make sales) will be made a into a scapegoat – one way or ther other. Those of us using affiliate links and being honest probably won’t be affect at all.

It’s interesting to see Matt Cutts’ put up a page about disclosure too. His basically says that he’s a google employee, he owns google stock, he doesn’t take any free gifts or money (even travel expenses to conferences). I guess you have to say that if you’re an employee blogger. It’s kind of the reverse of someone disclosing they make money or how the endorse something.

In the spirit of things, I’ve created my own disclosure page. Check it out. If you review or endorse anything online (or make money online and blog about it), AND you live in the U.S. – you should probably create your own disclosure page.

Do you have a contact form installed on your web site? Some do, some don’t. I find many people don’t have one, or it’s in the wrong place, it’s hard to find, hard to use, or hard to read. First of all – let me tell you a little story. I maintain, fix, and create WordPress web sites for a living. I own about 25 WordPress web sites of my own, and I work on about a dozen+ client WordPress web sites per week. Some are blogs, some niche and affiliate stores, many are for small business and corporate use.

If you have a WordPress powered web site probably the most important page on your web site is your contact page. I’m a WordPress consultant – and sometimes even I forget this. Case and point, I have one web site that gets 25,000 pageviews per day. Two days ago I got a post comment that said “I want to advertise on your site and have no way to contact you – please get ahold of me at this email”. doh! It was also a blog I’m not in every day and the comment was 3 WEEKS OLD! I was just lucky he was still interested when I contacted him, and it was a $400 advertising sale! Not having a contact form almost lost me a sale!

On another web site I had a contact form, but it was on my about page. I wanted to get approval to get my product on that web site listed on Clickbank – so I applied. They said I had to have a page called “Contact”, and I had to link to it from both my sales and features page. I did that, but I did one better – I placed the contact form in my sidebar as well. Guess what, within 48 hours I got 3 emails asking questions about the plugin (before they purchased). All 3 people that asked questions bought the product. Who knows how many other sales I lost by not having a contact form that was easy to find and use!

You have no idea how many people might want to contact you – or what for. Sometimes people want to trade or exchange links, some want to hire you, others want reviews, some want to buy advertising, some people just have a question. You never know, maybe some big corporation wants to buy you out (if your site is really popular). You NEED a contact form on your web site, and not having one (or having one that’s hard to find) is like not having a mailbox on the front of your house!

If a future post I’ll go over my favorite contact plugins details in depth, but for now here’s 2 links:

Contact Form 7: This contact form is lightweight, easy to use, and updated frequently. Many people are very happy with it, and it is popular.

Cforms II: Hands down – this is the best contact form plugin I’ve ever used. But it has TONS of features. If all you want is a single form with a name, email, and comment field – go back and use Contact Form 7. With Cforms II you can build anything from small forms to big surveys. It has a dozen+ styled forms (including one for the sidebar). It has a refer a friend feature, it can save form submissions in the database for review on a reports page later either in place of – or in addition to getting form results in email (which can fail). You can even have this plugin handle all the comments on your web site! It’s my favorite, but it’s a heavy duty plugin for heavy duty work!

Do you have a contact form on your web site?

Does Google Hate Datafeedr? Seems like kind of a weird question doesn’t it? For some reason believe it or not – that exact search phrase was in my top 10 results yesterday. There seems to be a lot of people googling for information related to that – probably because there’s been a lot of google penalties and de-indexing going around regarding datafeedr WordPress affiliate stores.

I wrote a series late last year called “How to Build an Affiliate Store in WordPress“. In that series, if you read all the articles – I was very specific about both creating original content AND how if you didn’t you would run the risk of a google penalty.

What is a google Penalty?

If you have a web site, it’s ranked in google on a ‘pagerank’ scale of 1-10. The higher your number, the greater your authority, the more searches you come up for, the more traffic you get, the more money you make. Google likes web sites and blogs with original content. Google likes stores with original content that sell their own products. Google hates affiliates that get a datafeed or some links and build an online store with no content and scraped or copied content just for the purpose of making affiliate commissions. To google you’re no better than a scalper or spammer. Google doesn’t mind if you have a site with original content where you link to, review, or suggest products – AS LONG AS your products DON’T OVERWHELM your content. If it does google calls you a “thin affiliate” site – heavy on affiliate links, and light on content.

IF Google finds you (and some sites go years without getting caught for some reason) to be a ‘thin affiliate’, any number of things could happen:

1. You could get banned from adsense (if you use it on that site), or at least get your ads pulled from displaying on that site
2. You could lose pagerank
3. You could become “unranked” or pagerank zero
4. You could remain ranked, but not show up in search results
5. You could be unranked, appear in search results, but get no traffic
6. You could could be temporarily (or permanently) removed from google search results altogether (deindexed)
7. You could receive any of the above for 30, 60, 90, or 120 days – or even up to one year

I have received EVERY SINGLE ONE of the above penalties over the last 2 years on one of my web sites, and ALL OF THEM are now back on the google index and in good standing.

How do I keep My datafeedr affiliate store (or any site) from getting a google penalty?

If you have a datafeedr affiliate store in WordPress my advice to you is this. In your robots.txt file set your store URL to disallow indexing. Nofollow all links to your store. In your google XML Sitemap plugin setup enter your store URL to NOT be included in your sitemap. If you have been deindexed in google – request reinclusion and state that you have an affiliate store and set it up not to be indexed – only your original content (and you should get back in).

Don’t try and cheat google – and you won’t get the shaft, plain and simple. DO NOT RELY on a piss poor product store to get organic results and traffic in google to make you money. Rather – create a GREAT site with AWESOME original content and let IT DRAW the traffic, which will naturally visit your store (and make you money).

Why has MY datafeedr store FAILED?

I get this every now and again. 99% of the time a datafeedr store fails because a site or blog is centered around it. I have had clients in the past ask me to setup a datafeedr store, and then THEY DO NOTHING WITH IT, and wonder why they made no money. This is ONLY ok when you’re going to send paid traffic or do Adwords PPC to the datafeedr store. If you want to be indexed in google – you have to do all the normal things you would have to do for any site to be promoted online. Write content. Gain subscribers. Build Links. Get Authority. Get traffic. Make Money.

If you’re just looking to throw up a store and wait for the buckets of money to roll in…sorry. That doesn’t work in the real world – why the hell would it work online?

Did I ever tell you that I have ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder)? I can’t focus very well on just one thing for a long period of time, and I tend to jump from thing, to thing, to thing. That’s why being a freelance consultant, blogger, and affiliate marketer works well for me – I’m not under some big bosses thumb, and I don’t have to meet any crazy deadlines set by someone else.

On the other hand, the only one in charge of me is “me”, and sometimes I do more of what I like to do, and less of what I “need” to do. The Internet is one of the greatest sources of information (and ways to make money), but (unfortunately for me) it’s one of the greatest sources of distraction as well. I think I’ve tried everything I can to be as organized as possible to stay on track with my existing projects. I’ve tried sticky notes, time tracking software, a big dry erase board over my computer, web applications – all kinds of crazy things.

I’m also a big “list maker” (my wife hates this). I create endless lists of things to get done. Lists for the store, lists of things to do around the house, lists for the holidays, lists for long and short term projects, lists for my dry erase board, lists of things I need to pay, etc. Sometimes they work, and other days I only get a few things done out of the entire list. At least I ‘tried’ to stay on track.

I am not perfect. I waste a lot of time (every day) – but I’m getting better. In a couple hours it will be the end of the normal work day (here in Eastern time), and the end of the work week.

I want you to ask yourself one question: “What did I do to make money today?“

Ask yourself that question every day – and then write down the answer in a notepad somewhere (now I’ve got you making lists! lol). If you are having trouble making the kind of money you want online, maybe you aren’t doing enough daily to make money! Maybe you’re not spending enough time writing content, building links, article marketing, writing ebooks, and guest posting. Maybe you’re distracted by “shiny objects”, like google, twitter, facebook, trying new wordpress plugins, and so on…

What Do I Do?

Set goals, both long and short term – and work on them daily. But don’t create a list of 10-20 tasks that are impossible to do at once. Instead limit yourself to 3-5 tasks per day and leave an hour or so to do something new or unplanned. Turn off twitter, email, IM, facebook, and other distractions for a few hours while you complete a task or two. Then (and ONLY then) reward yourself with a little distraction time. LIMIT it to 30 minutes or less (before time slips away again), and move on to a new task.

At the end of the day you’ll thank yourself, because you will have accomplished something that directly relates to making money. Do this on a daily basis – and eventually you WILL be making money online, because every task is little putting a little deposit in the bank.

What did YOU do to make money today? I wrote this post…it was one of my tasks!

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) says bloggers can now be fined for undisclosed endorsements. What does this mean? It means if you are a gaming review site and you get a free copy of the next Halo game to review (and you don’t disclose that you got it for free to review) – you can be fined up to $11,000 (per blog post). So what if you get a free software download or free premium access to a web site and review it (and don’t disclose it) – can you get fined for that too? Celebrities that endorse products without disclosure can be fined as well.

What this video from a Boston news channel that explains this in greater depth, and then we’ll come back and talk about this some more…

Now then, the Internet has made it much easier for people to lie, cheat, and steal. Years ago, when everybody had the local newspaper delivered to their doorstep the way you found out about products was in the ads inside the paper. Particularly on Sunday, I can remember years ago as a kid the greatest thing about the newspaper was the Sunday funnies, and all the advertisements from all the stores with the following week’s sales. Whether it was video games, toys, clothes, or electronics (in our house), this was how we knew about all the things that were on sale.

Some retail stores would put loss leaders on sale (items where they break even and make no money), just to get you through the door. Other stores might do the old “bait and switch” – and old time scam where you advertise one thing, but when people get to the store you replace it with something else. Maybe the original item never existed, maybe the store only had 5 of them to sell (but never disclosed that in the ad). Over the years, this has lead to many “truth in advertising” laws being put on the books. I don’t know how much good it’s done, since I still see infomercials for losing 10 lbs in a week with “results not typical” in such tiny print at the screen bottom I can’t even make it out.

The Internet has matured to the point now where, for the first time since 1980, the American federal government has felt the need to update the laws of “endorsement and disclosure” to include online bloggers. This is to keep the “bait and switch” from happenning online in a different way. It’s to keep a company from giving 100 bloggers free access to their product in exchange for something. For a coupon, a free account, actual money, free software, even free products mailed to their house. It’s to keep Sony from sending 50 top profile bloggers a free next-generation Playstation 4 in exchange for a favorable review. It’s to keep the record companies from paying 100 twitterers from tweeting how much they love the new Lady Gaga album. It’s also to keep bloggers from giving a favorable review to the latest “keyword crap” software just because they got a free copy and affiliate commissions from any sales made from the blog post.

This is all very noble (and necessary), but I’m sorry – this are no “Internet Police”. The government can barely find all the sex offenders and pervs online that need to be locked up (we’ve all seen Dateline: To Catch a Predator). The FTC admins they can’t police 100 million blogs, they can’t even police 1,000 blogs. I have to imagine that they will only prosecute the most egregious cases. Like my Grandma always used to say “they don’t make signs unless there was a problem”. Well, they didn’t update the rules for endorsements because there were no problems online. The updated it because there are MAJOR problems online, and they intend to prosecute and fine some of the biggest cases that they find.

So – if you’re a blogger does this make you rethink the ways that you do things? It should. Like you saw in the video, some people still believe that blogging is a “conversation” – and it’s true, in it’s purest form – it is. But when that conversation can be hijacked by media or advertisers than it’s unfair. It’s unfair for the public to think that people actually like or endorse something because 100 bloggers (that got it for free) said it was good. The problem is, I can get free stuff, disclose that I got it for free, and STILL completely fabricate a positive review because I got it for free, and I want to get more stuff for free. How do you police that?

Items to read:

FTC Official Guidelines for bloggers

NYTimes.com: Bloggers must disclose gifts

Washington Post: FTC Sets Endorsement Rules for Blogs

FTC to Bloggers: Disclose Freebies or face $11,000 fine

You might remember that image above from my post a few days back EPIC FAIL: Build a Niche Store Kelvin and Adam are Morons. It looks like they are taking their own stupidity right to the bank! That’s right, the official BANS – or “Build a Niche Store” is for sale on flippa.com for $200,000 starting bid, OR “Buy it Now” for $500,000! Honestly – someone ought to grab that up ASAP! The site (as dead as BANS is) STILL makes $10,000 per month. To anyone with a decent development team and marketing skills – this is a literally HUGE opportunity!

Like I said in my last post – I never really understood why Kelvin and Adam never did more with BANS. Why they never built more featured, expanded on the platform, never created an API, never partnered with anyone, never added tools to manage content or media, never created direct hooks into WordPress, and what I call the “river of lost opportunity” just runs on and on and on.

Maybe they have enough FU money to not have to worry about it, maybe they just weren’t smart enough to take it to the next level, or maybe they just don’t care. At least they were smart enough to figure out that what they DO have is still (at the present time) worth some money – and they should cash out while they still can.

Do you have the money to take advantage of this HUGE opportunity? I sure wish I did – because in the right hands, that product is just a GOLDMINE waiting to happen…view the Build a Niche Store auction, it will end Oct 15th, 2009.

My name is John T. Pratt (JTPratt), co-owner of the new WP EASYBAY ebay affiliate plugin for WordPress! I’m proud to say that the product is now for sale at WP-EASYBAY.com!

WP EASYBAY™ is an eBay affiliate plugin that places auctions in eBay posts and pages. You can augment your content and make extra money, OR even build an entire affiliate store! There are other eBay auction plugins for WordPress on the market, but none have all the features we do (and we’re adding more!).

Check out the BONUS Sidebar widget (at left)! You can add auctions in row or column layouts (or both on the same page)! You can set default settings for all auctions in plugin admin, OR OVERRIDE any individual setting with advanced parameters in single tags – you have TOTAL Control!

Look at all the features:

• Tracking Provider: choose from Be Free, Affilinet, TradeDoubler, MediaPlex, DoubleClick, Allyes, BJMT, or eBay Partner Network
• Affiliate ID: enter your affiliate or campaign ID number
• eBay Site: choose from 16 countries
• sellerid: include and/or exclude sellerid’s to list your own or a specific seller’s eBay auctions
• Bid Count: minimum and/or maximum bid count to filter auctions by
• Items Located in Country: choose which country for items to be located in by default
• Items Available in Country: limit auctions to those available in a particular country
• Postal Code: limit auctions to a particular postal code (only works with Max Distance)
• Max Distance: only show auctions with xx miles or kilometers of a postal code
• Number of Rows: number of auction rows to show by default
• Column or Row Display: display auctions in columns, rows (or both!)
• Image Only: only show auctions with images
• Show Buy It Now: shows buy it now links when available
• Date Format: choose up to 5 date formats when displaying auctions
• Localization options: Translate the words “Bid”, “Bids”, “End Time”, and “Buy It Now” to your language if necessary
• Advanced Programming Options: any parameter can be passed to EASYBAY tags using POST or GET allowing you to setup specific advanced search forms where visitors can enter their own specific search parameter(s) (such as zip code or bid amount). See below for live example.

The advanced programming options is a feature you won’t find in ANY OTHER PLUGIN!  Check this out – with just a little programming ability, you can build a form and pass vars into the WP EASYBAY™ tag and let visitors customize their OWN AUCTION RESULTS!

Just take a look at the image below, or view it live here!

In the very near future I’ll be writing a series on how to build up an entirely new niche store using WP EASYBAY™.

Key Things About WP EASYBAY™ you need to know

1. So easy a monkey could use it
2. Sidebar Widget
3. Advanced control of every option at the tag level
4. Advanced programming options
5. LIFETIME FREE Upgrades!
6. Affiliate program (signup to make money now!)
7. ONLY $39!!!

You can read more about WP EASYBAY here!