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This tutorial will teach you the essentials about wordpress template files and their hierarchy when hacking your theme.

This post is part of 30 WordPress hacks in 30 days.

In my last WordPress Hack Templates for Alternate Sidebar Layouts I touched on how you can create a theme template file for a page that has different sidebars for the rest of your blog. Answering some questions and comments for that article showed me that I need to write a more in-depth article about how the WordPress Template Hierarchy Works and the choices you have available to your when you create custom template files. This article should change the way you think about your WordPress theme FOREVER!

Wordpress is a blogging system that has greatly evolved over. It’s evolved as much as bloggers and blogging itself has. Now, you can use it as a full fledged “Content Management System”, you can even use it to create a static web site with no blog at all. I would say that most of us use it as a blog, where the home page has a running “list of posts” from the newest to oldest. You can add those posts to “categories”, and now with WordPress 2.3x+ you can also “tag” them.

I’m going to explain to your how WordPress works “out of the box”. Keep in mind that this blog has been heavily customized, and I don’t even have blog posts on my homepage anymore – I’ve moved them to “/blog” on this site (which is something you can change in your WordPress dashboard under “Settings”).

When a web browser visits a WordPress blog, the software looks in your theme directory (/wp-content/theme) for the assigned theme. It’s either “default” (out of the box), or a custom one that you picked out and uploaded to your theme directory. WordPress then iterates through your theme files looking for which one to use in a specific order. That search order might change depending on what WordPress has been asked to do (show the homepage, show a category page, show search results, show an archive page, etc.). Your understanding of this search order (called the “template hierarchy”) is vitally important to your understanding of how WordPress Themes work. If you understand the template hierarchy in WordPress, you can build custom theme template files and make your blog 100 times more effective, indexable (by search engines), and in the end more profitable.

The WordPress Codex has an image of the template hierarchy that spells it all out. Since that is too big for this page, I created a custom one that is a bit more simplistic for display here:

When I said “simplistic”, I really meant it – didn’t I? As the pictures shows, when a web browser calls a site with WordPress installed it asks itself “which (template) page do I need (to show the content)?” I’ll explain these php files in depth in a few minutes, but first generally WordPress asks, is it a date.php (archive) page, is it a category page, is it a tag page, is it the “home” (or blog) page, is it a single (post) page, is it a WordPress “page” (that you wrote), is it an error 404 (page not found) or seach page, and last is it some kind of attachment. You can see in the examples that if the right file is not found, with the exception of attachments, WordPress will just default to the index.php to display what it needs.

The WordPress Home Page template or “home.php”

Now, let’s dig a little deeper – shall we? Let’s say that you want to customize your “home” page of your WordPress blog – the one that by default shows your blog posts. MOST themes I’ve dealt with just use “index.php” to show your home page content. But if you look at the template hierarchy you see that the first page WordPress looks for (for the home page) is “home.php”. Your theme may or may not contain this file. If you don’t have one, just open index.php and “save as” home.php – customize it to your liking and now you have a custom theme home page template file. If you want your blog posts to be somewhere else other than your “home” page you will need to create a different template file for a “page” (instructions below), and then assign that “page” the proper template in “Manage->Pages-Pagename” in your WordPress dashboard. Then delete “home.php” and in your WordPress dashboard “Settings”, assign a different page to home to display what you want.

You should also read WordPress Hack #1: Query Posts, and WordPress Hack #15: 12 Ways to Hack Your Home Page.

WordPress Category Template Pages

When you write a post you can assign it to a “category”, which is one way of organizing your content. It’s also a way for your visitors to filter through your past content. When your categories are listed in your sidebar, and you click on one, WordPress will filter and show only posts that were assigned to that category. This is very handy. WordPress has two ways it can show you post content on pages like this, one is an “excerpt” and the other is the full post. Either way – you have some of the same content listed on this page as you do your (blog) home page, your archive (past post) pages, and (if you’re using them) also tag pages. This is a horrible, horrible thing to google as they see “duplicate content”. That means that all your pages (while useful to visitors) like this probably won’t be indexed by google and may even count against you.

Now, when it comes to google, and search engines in general – the object is to get as many pages as you can indexed. The more pages indexed, the more chances you have of somebody finding your blog. Most themes that I’ve seen don’t have any category page at all and just index.php is used to display category content. This is ok as a category.php file would be used for every single category you have added content too. If you want “original content” on each and every category page then you will need to create a template file for each and every catetgory you have created (I hope you haven’t gone wild).

If your WordPress dashboard go to “Manage->Categories”. If you put your mouse over any category name (without clicking), in the bottom of your web browser in the status bar will appear the “category ID”.

If your theme doesn’t have a “category.php” file (if it does – use it), open up your “index.php” file and “save as “category-18.php” (using your category ID of course), and create one category template file for each category you have in your blog. In each file add a few paragraphs of original content to each category file, and then when search engines come around to index you – you’ll have some original content on each and every category page!!

Also, see this as an opportunity (not work). Why? Because it’s an opportunity to make more money. You can place different relevant targeted niche ads on each and every category page! Look at home many additional monetization opportunities you just created!

Regarding Category Templates, you should also read WordPress Theme Hack: Show Category Images, and WordPress Hack: 9 Things You can do with Categories.

WordPress Tag Template Pages

Wordpress Template Tag pages work the exact same way as category template pages, with the exception that they use the “slug” (tag keywords) instead of the ID (I don’t know why category template can’t do this too!). So, if you tagged a post “wordpress hacks”, then your tag template file would be “tag-wordpress-hacks.php”. In the organization of a blog, categories should be very broad, and tags should be descriptive. A good example of a category would be “news”, or “code”. Tags could be “9-11″ or “css web design”. That’s why optimally you should have maybe a dozen or two categories, but you might have hundreds (even thousands!) or tags. Since I’ve had the same categories since this blog started, but I add new tags all the time – I probably won’t create a custom tag template page for every tag I have. I WILL, however, create one for all the tags I feel are most-used, most-important, and most-monetizable!

You should also read WordPress Hack #15: Hacking WordPress Tags.

WordPress Author Template Pages

This is a template page I seldom see used, because most blogs have one author. Many blogs though have multiple contributors and authors – and each post can have an “authored by” link which takes them to the author page. If “author.php” doesn’t exist, index.php will be used by default.

The author.php page can list pages written by that author, all authors, it can list the authors – and be customize any number of ways. As I said, most themes don’t have this – but if you want a blog with multiple authors you probably want to create a custom author page. For more information on what’s possible read the WordPress Codex page on Author Templates.

WordPress Single Post Page Templates

When you write a post in WordPress, it’s gets listed on your home (blog) page, your archive page, and the appropriate category and tag pages. But is also has it’s own (full) page, which is what we call the “single.php” or single post page. Nearly every theme has a single.php file, but if it doesn’t then (of course) the single post is displayed using the default index.php theme file.

If your theme doesn’t have a “single.php” create one (based on index.php), if it does – consider customizing it. If you use Adsense I think that the single post is a great place to add a 336×280 block just before your content.

WordPress “Page” Templates

I think that a WordPress “Page” is the most mis-understood thing in the entire blogging software. When you go to “Write” in the WordPress dashboard you have options to write a “Post” or a “Page”. The choice to write one or the other is a choice basically to use the “blogging paradigm” or not. By writing a “post” you are writing not only a “single” page post, but it also will be listed on the home (blog) page, and archive page, as well as category and post pages. The choice to author a “page” is like an “about page” – it’s static in the sense that it won’t be listed on blog type pages. It will only be listed in the navigation of your theme or a list of “pages” in the sidebar.

Pages can be anything, an about page, an advertise with us page, a contact page, or even a series page where you provide descriptions of posts and link to them on one central location. Pages are a great way to organize content in your blog, and the more you create – the more you’ll find the need to create custom layouts. On this blog I created a page template with a custom sidebar for my forum. I also created a special one for my archived posts sitemap, and testimonials. On one of my other blogs I created one with no sidebar at all for my find cheapest gas page.

If you want to create a custom template theme file for that you can assign to any “page” that you write in WordPress all you need to do is open your index.php file and “save as” whatever name you want (like sitemap-template.php or whatever). I try to name all mine something-template.php, just to keep them straight.

In the top of that page you are going to need to add the following code (copy and paste) so it gets identified as a template in WordPress:

<?php
/*
Template Name: My Template Page
*/
?>

Change “My Template Page” to whatever you’re naming your template, and then customize the page by creating a master archive index template, create a custom 404 error page template, or even create templates with alternate sidebar layouts.

In your WordPress dashboard to assign a template, just scroll down past the post text box and under “template”, just find your custom template in the drop down and choose it to apply that particular template to your page and “save”!

The possibilities are endles…

Creating a Custom WordPress Search Page

In WordPress when someone searches your content, “search.php” is used for the results. You could create a custom search results template so people find what they need each and every time. You could also monetize this page with an ad if you wished, or just provide links to your top content on top of the search results. If your theme doesn’t have a search.php, just create one based on index.php.

Creating a Custom 404 Error Page in WordPress

I think that one of the most important things is not just what people see when they find your content, it’s what they see what they don’t find anything at all. If someone gets a “404 page not found” error on your WordPress blog, WordPress looks for the “404.php” file first, and if you don’t have one it uses index.php by default. If you don’t have one, create it based on your index.php file – and then customize it right away! Most themes just have some bogus default message like “error – not found”.

The first thing you want ot do is to erase that and put a nicer message. Write a paragraph and include some links to your top areas AND your contact form in case they want to get ahold of you. Next, install a plugin that gives them automatically the best results it can – for details read WordPress Hack #4: Create a Custom Error 404 Page.

Wrapping it Up…

No matter where you got your WordPress theme, and whether it was basic or a Premium one you paid top dollar for – it CAN and SHOULD be customized to it’s fullest possible extent. A theme designer often is worried about the web design and layout aspect ONLY with no consideration for organization of your blog, it’s content, SEO and search indexing capabilities – let alone error messages or search pages. Do your self (and your visitors) a favor and make sure that you have ALL areas of your WordPress template hierarchy covered!

I hope I didn’t give you too much work to do, but by the time you’re done with everything I just taught you you will have a much better understanding of how WordPress and WordPress Themes work. When you’re done you might be interested in moving on an reading How to Create Your Own WordPress Theme

Monetize what’s in your brain, by selling your own eBook, premium theme, script, download, video, or mp3 through your web site. It’s easier to do than you ever thought imaginable, very affordable, and you can be making profits in no time!

I’ve been sitting on this post for quite awhile, and quite honestly forgot about it. As I’ve stated before, I get asked a lot of questions through this site and in forums – and one that’s come up recently a few times was “How do I sell an eBook through my web site?”. I’ve also been asked “How do I sell a Premium WordPress Theme”, “How do I sell a WordPress plugin”, and “How do I sell a BANS niche store theme”? In each and every case I sent them to e-junkie. It’s the fastest turn-key solution I know of to sell anything digital through your blog or web site. Sell an eBook, a script, theme, plugin, mp3, video – anything downloadable.

You may not currently have anything to sell, but let me ask you this…how many pages does your blog have? Do you have at least 50-100? Then you are probably knowledgeable in at least ONE area of making money online. Write your expertise up in an eBook and sell it for profit! Don’t leave it in your head locked away.

Your next thought is probably “I only have xx RSS readers – how many would I reallly sell anyway?” Let me tell you, that’s the beauty of e-junkie, once you signup ANYONE can resell your digital content through affiliate links the second you add your first product! That means that you can enable an army of online affiliates to sell your content for you!

Without any hype or garbage, here are the actual features of e-junkie, and why I use it each and every day -

• Free shopping cart that works inside your site
• Digital storage and delivery. Upload your files and they handle the transaction and deliver the download to the customer for you.
• Inventory Management. You can limit sales if you need to, say if you only want to sell a theme to the first 50 customers, etc.
• Discount Management. Create special offers and codes that people can use for any discount you want.
• Package Deal Management. Sell items individually, or create combo packages in any way you want.
• Google Adwords and Analytics tracking
• Promo copies. Send out promo copies for review using free download link
• Multiple currency and language
• Affiliate Management. Enable anyone to resell your products
• Promote products with google base and google sitemap feeds

I told you I use e-junkie every day – and I do. I use them as an affiliate to promote WordPress themes, WordPress Plugins, and now BANS WordPress themes. Coming up very soon – I will also be using them to sell my very first eBook, and you, as readers, will be able to resell my work through e-junkie.

Every person I have sent to them was selling their digital products the SAME DAY. They have 100 times more features than Clickbank or any service I have ever seen. You can get an account for as little as $5 per month. And the one thing I didn’t even tell you about yet was the fact that there are NO TRANSACTION FEES at all. That’s because they handle the buying process itself, the stats, links, affiliate credits, and digital delivery. They payment occurs through services you already use. People can pay using Paypal, Google Checkout, 2CheckOut, Authorize.net, or even Clickbank. So it uses services that you (and your potential customers) are already completely familiar with.

I want you to know that I am really excited about this service because I like it, and use it myself. Even if you don’t want to create your first eBook and sell it online through an army of affiliates – I suggest that you signup through e-junkie anyway AS AN AFFILIATE. Why? Because it’s FREE, and you can promote any product from their marketplace and make MONEY just like clickbank. Did I mention it was FREE and you could make MONEY? I’ve made a couple hundred dollars this month promoting products in just 2 posts on this blog. You could be too…if nothing more – when I finish my first eBook – you can be an affiliate for me!

Signup for e-junkie and sell your knowledge today!

Has you BANS niche store been de-indexed from google and dropped like a hot rock? Do you think google is attacking all BANS sites?

This post is part of the Watch Me Build a BANS Niche Site from Scratch series!

I’m tired of hearing all the people in the Digital Point forums, Build a Niche Store forums, and in blog comments about BANS sites being targeted by google – and they just heard about somebody who had “50 sites manually de-indexed this morning”. Look – IMHO, google isn’t targeting BANS sites at all. It just so happens that the majority of BANS sites are crap sites, practically no better than spam. Read Thin Affiliate Sites are Dead by Mark, The Niche Store Builder.

First he defines what a “thin affiliate” is. It’s a page that exists to forward you to another page so you can make money. And what is “BANS” software in the first place? It’s an entire “thin affiliate site in a box” script – isn’t it? So, right out of the box, google hates BANS niche stores! There are two more important pieces of information in that post, one is that the thin affiliate page has “no value added content”, and if the scraped content (product or eBay info) was removed from the page – all that would remain would be spam.

Now, a lot of you reading this may think I’m telling you not to buy BANS and not to build niche stores anymore. That couldn’t be further from the truth. You CAN do it, and you CAN STILL be profitable, and you CAN STILL STAY INDEXED in google. You just have to work harder, and more honestly than you maybe have in the past. I’ve been trying to change this blog a bit and make it more realistic when it comes to the work required to build a monthly income online. You may already have noticed my graphic on the homepage to that effect. There is no “golden goose” or “money tree” online. Even if you find some loophole to short term success, your money stream will dry up and you will be left with nothing once you are found out.

Let me be very clear about BANS “Build a Niche Store” software…

You can make money from it…

But, a fresh BANS store is nothing more than “spam in a box…” for your web site.

Why BANS stores get banned from google:

BANS stores get “banned” or “de-indexed” by google for having no value at all beyond the “scraped” auctions from eBay. If your only intent is to make money promoting eBay auctions google WILL FIND YOU and manually REMOVE YOU from their index. If you purchase traffic through Adwords or other means you have NOTHING to worry about, but if you get ORGANIC traffic and want to CONTINUE to get organic google search traffic – you MUST ADD SIGINIFICANT VALUE and CONTENT to your BANS site beyond the auctions to succeed!

Now then, unless you plan to just keep on complaining – this is what I suggest you do immediately…before the rest of your BANS stores get jerked from the big G index.

• Remove auctions from your BANS home page: Fill your front end with content, content, content!
• Prune your store navigation down to the most essential pages: This is especially true if your store pages are like 50-100, but your content pages are under 10!
• Ditch Adsense: If you’re using Adsense on your BANS site – ditch it for now unless your BANS site is really content heavy. Some people have been getting emails from Adsense about potentially shutting their account down because they had really this BANS pages with Adsense on them
• Strive for 50% content+ sitewide: This may be a VERY high mark to strive for (especially if your BANS site has dozens of store pages – but let’s face it…if you do this you won’t only be making google happy. That many content pages will get you GOOD organic traffic and increase the value of your site 10-fold anyway.
• Have MORE on a domain than just BANS: What – did you think that you could setup 50+ keyword-laden domains and just slap BANS up there, and then the cash would start rolling in? Don’t be an IDIOT, put MORE on those domains than just BANS. Protect your niche – add a blog and integrate BANS into WordPress – that way if BANS or eBay affiliations in general become taboo or no longer profitable, you still have a niche site with REAL content to promote 900 other ways!

If you remember only ONE thing from this post – let it be this…if you removed all the auctions from your BANS store would there be anything left of value at all? If you can honestly say “Yes!”, you have a good BANS store that deserves to be in the google index. If you say “No.” – then I think you either have some work to do, or just resign yourself to the fact that from now on all your traffic will only be coming in through Yahoo! and MSN Live Search.

You can easily create a custom theme template to have alternate sidebar layouts.

This post is part of 30 WordPress hacks in 30 days.

Whether you’re installing a new WordPress theme or creating one from scratch, changing the sidebar seems to be one of the first things you do. Like most things in WordPress, you are only limited by your imagination. Different themes have different sidebar layouts. You can have one sidebar, or two, or even three or four. You can have one sidebar on the left, or right, two on the left or right, or one on each side.

How WordPress Pages Work

If you’re going to learn how to hack up your sidebar – I have to teach you how pretty much all WordPress pages function first.

From the WordPress Codex, let’s look at the world’s simplest WordPress index page -

<?php
get_header();
if (have_posts()) :
   while (have_posts()) :
      the_post();
      the_content();
   endwhile;
endif;
get_sidebar();
get_footer();
?>

Basically (in code) this says, “get my header, get my content, get my sidebar, and last get my footer”. Those are pretty much the 4 major areas of every WordPress page. Also, as I previously said – those 4 areas can be defined literally any way you want. WordPress uses a templated system, and the reason that it uses “get_sidebar” in every single templated page is so it gets the SAME sidebar content for each and every page. That way you define a sidebar (or header, or footer) ONE TIME, and every page on your blogs shows it the same.

Where is MY sidebar file?

By default “get_sidebar” gets the “sidebar.php” file from your theme directory. As of versio 2.5 of WordPress, you can also specify a particular sidebar file to be included. That’s probably not the case with your theme, most of the WordPress themes available were created before 2.5, and they usually have one sidebar file that includes additional sidebars either by div tag or another included file.

How is a sidebar coded?

Like I said before, when WordPress runs “get_sidebar” it looks for the file “sidebar.php” in your theme directory. That file then usually contains blocks of code to retrieve sections of information, like your blogroll, categories, archives, pages, etc. Each block is laid out in (html) “list ordered fashion” nearly always something like this -

<div id="sidebar-section">
<h2>Sidebar Heading</h2>
  <ul>
    <li>get some content here</li>
  </ul>
</div>

Each theme styles sidebars and sidebar sections differently, with different font sizes, backgrounds colors, borders, spacing, and more in the theme stylesheet – but each block in the sidebar is written in that same code format.

What About sidebar widgets?

Widgets were added in WordPress 2.x so people wouldn’t have to muck around in the code anymore. A “widget” is basicly just a block of code that does something. Like using a widget to display categories, pages, or a search box. Widgets are great, because you can just choose the ones you want to enable and “save”. To use widgets in your sidebar, your sidebar.php (or other sidebar files) has to be “widgitized”. Read “widgitizing themes if your theme isn’t already widgitized.

How do I hack my sidebar layout?

There are two extremes to this. Most people would just change their theme until they find the page and sidebar layout they want. Web designers and coders would probably just rewrite the theme HTML and CSS code to their liking. Most people I know are somewhere between the two. They don’t want to change their entire theme, but they aren’t techie enough to be able to rewrite all the code themselves. To go around hacking in your sidebar code – I’m going to assume that you already have at least basic HTML and CSS skills.

This post isn’t about adding blocks of content or widgets to your sidebar, it’s about hacking the layout of your sidebar(s). For instance, I’m a big fan of the three column layout, with the content on the left and 2 sidebars on the right. Awhile back I installed a forum on this blog, and the main content area wasn’t big enough to accomodate it. I wasn’t about to change my theme just to change the sidebar layout…so this is what I did.

The first thing I did was download a copy of my “page.php” file.

Next I added the code to the top of the file to turn it into a template file -

<?php
/*
Template Name: Forum Template Page
*/
?>

Then I removed this line -

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

and I replaced it with just the code to display the left sidebar. I saved it as “forum-template.php” and uploaded it to my theme directory. Then in my WordPress dashboard, I went created a new page and used “Forum Template Page” for the page template. Once I save this page, I will have created a custom template page for my forum that just displays my left sidebar. This opens up the content section of the page to be large enough to accomodate width of the forum. I could have used the right sidebar instead, or just had no sidebar at all (only a header and footer).

You could create multiple template that use an alternate sidebar structure, and “include” those pages by using code like this -

<?php include(TEMPLATEPATH . '/sidebar-file.php'); ?>

just change the name of the file to the one you’re using. You can have as many template files and as many sidebar files as you want, I would just keep it to a minimum so you can keep track of them all.
Have you created custom sidebary layouts? Comment now!

Wordpress 2.6 has been out a couple days now – here’s a review of the new features and why you should upgrade now! I have to say, when I upgraded to 2.5 I thought it would be better than it was. I liked the UI improvements, and the ability to upgrade plugins from the dashboard is awesome – but it just seemed like there could have been more. Will WP 2.6 upgrade be better? I just installed it, so let’s see!

Upgrading to a new version of WordPress is spectacularly easy. Just upload the new 2.6 files to your site in FTP, and then run /wp-admin/upgrade one time, and that’s it! Then I logged in the dashboard, and the first thing I saw was an orange bubble over “plugins” so I clicked on that. It turns out that the bubbled contained a “6″, which was the number of plugins that need upgrading. So – now you have plugin upgrade notification in your dashboard!

WordPress Plugin Upgrades

If you haven’t upgraded to at least WordPress 2.5 yet, you don’t know what you’re missing. Under “plugins” you get detailed notifications and specifics about new versions of plugins when they’re available, directly from the WordPress repository. Then, all you have to do is click to upgrade them right there! You get the latest official version from the WordPress repository, no downloading, no unzipping, no uploading – none of that.

New for WordPress 2.6 is the way that the plugins are listed. First you see the plugins that you’re using. Then you see the recently active plugins, ones that have been deactivated in the last 7 days, and last you see all the inactive plugins. You can now deactivate AND reactivate them all at once or some at a time.

WordPress Post Revisions

Also new in WordPress 2.6 is “Post Revisions”. Make a change to one of your posts and it’s saved, and much like Wikipedia you can go back and see what was changed AND who made the change (if you have multi-authors). Although it’s more crap stored in the database – I think this is a great feature. I can’t count the number of times I screwed up a post and need to see a previous version.

Word Counts

I always wondered why there was no word count when you wrote posts and pages – this is something that’s so easy to implement in JavaScript, and that’s been around forever. This will be handy.

Theme Preview

Well, now I can get rid of the Themedrive plugin, because WordPress finally has native support for a theme preview. It’s about time they did this – we’re always hacking up their themes, and I hate it when the (botched) changes have to be seen live by visitors.

Secure Config and Content

FINALLY – WordPress now has the option to move your wp-config file and wp-content directory OUTSIDE of the root. What this means is, say your blog is in your /html/ or /public_html/ directory. You could move your config file and wp-content directories out of the “root” of your site, meaning they would only be available to WordPress to access, and people couldn’t bring them up alone in a web browser. This addresses a huge security concern that’s been around fovever!

Google Gears for WordPress

I saved what I consider to be the best for last, it’s Google Gears integration for WordPress. If you download google gears and install it on your computer, you can use it with Firefox to speed up your blogging. Gears is like a little local web server on your PC, but the way it works with Firefox and your WordPress blog is it can download and save local copies of CSS files and scripts, kinda like a “mega-browser-cache”. It’ll speed up the load time where the pages come up lightning quick – and if you have multiple blogs like me, this can saves mega-time!

*UPDATE* read this post – where it says this feature is part of wordpress.com hosted blogs. I was confused at first – because I installed “gears” and couldn’t figure out how to get it to work – or IF it would work on my self-hosted blogs. I finally figured it out. All you have to do is install WP 2.6, and then go to your dashboard and in the top right (just like in wordpress.com blogs) click “turbo” to enable it to work with google gears. If you have multiple blogs, YES – you have to download the files after enabling for each and every blog you own and use gears with.

WordPress 2.6 video review

Here’s the official video from WordPress.com about all the new 2.6 changes – give it a watch, it’s a nice overview!

Display RSS fees to a WordPress page, or create posts or pages from RSS in WordPress and profit by better monetization and addition user content

This is installment #16 of 30 WordPress Hacks in 30 days

I’m going to show you how to take an ordinary RSS feed today and turn it into cash. I’m not talking about being a scraper, creating a splog, or doing anything spammy at all. I’m talking about creating added value for visitors and your blog while making money. We all know what a “splog” is. It’s a “spam blog”…or someone who takes RSS feeds and generates pages and posts from them and tries to profit using say Adsense or affiliate ads. The pages are just excerpts and titles from RSS feeds (sometimes full posts), and while they do link bank to your site (usually) – they’re not the type of links you want to get. These spam blogs don’t have any redeeming value at all, no contact information, and certainly no original content at all.

Now – let’s take your blog, let’s say you have a birdwatching club in Buffalo, New York. You’ve developed a great site with loads of original content, bunches of articles, and your members visit regularly. The two things that you and other members talk about regularly are binoculars and digital cameras. This is what you could do…

Craigslist is America’s garage sale. If you don’t live in America, I’m sure something like this is in your region. Craigslist offers RSS feeds on each and every page. Here’s how the birdwatching club could benefit from that.

First – create a page template. From your WordPress theme directory, download “single.php” (or the theme template that creates post pages) to your desktop. Open it in Notepad or any text editor, and add the following lines of code to the top:

/*
Template Name: Craigslist Template
*/
?>

This is the tricky part, because each and every theme is different. You need to look for the following block of code (which is what prints the page content out):

    <div class="entry">
      <?php the_content(__('Read more &raquo;')); ?>
    </div>

Right after those lines in your template, you want to copy and paste this code:

<?php include_once(ABSPATH . WPINC . '/rss.php');
wp_rss('http://example.com/rss/feed/goes/here', 5); ?>

That code comes from this page in the WordPress Codex. WordPress has a built in “RSS Parser” that will read any RSS feed and spit out a list of links is list ordered fashion to a page. So, if you visit the Buffalo Craigslist Photo page, you’ll find at the bottom of the page a little orange RSS icon. Click on that link, and then copy the URL, and paste it over the example URL in your template. Save the template, and upload it back to your theme directory of your WordPress blog.

In your WordPress Dashboard, go to “Write -> Page”. Type some original content in the box, and scroll down to the bottom (in WordPress 2.5, on the sidebar in <2.5) and select "Craigslist Template". Title your page "Craigslist", and then save and publish the page. Now if you go to www.yourblog.com/craigslist you should see a listing of things from craiglist with your original content on top.

Look what you did, now the Buffalo Birdwatchers Club won’t can look at photo equipment right on the member web site without having to go to Craigslist unless they see an item they like. You can add multiple feeds to the same page, just copy and paste that code block in multiple times with different RSS feed URL’s. Just remember, the more your add, the longer they take to parse, and the longer the page will take to load. I loaded 6 feeds @ 20 items per feed, and the page took about 20 seconds or so to load.

This Craigslist example is just that – an example. If you want to see how this looks in realtime, look at this Craiglist RSS example I just built. You could use RSS feeds from just about anything, digg, google news – any site that has a feed. As long as you’re only using headline feeds and not stealing content – nobody should ever think you’re plagiarising them in any way, you’re sending them traffic.

Now, how do you monetize this? Well, use your noggin and add some affiliate banners, adsense, or other items above, below, or in your sidebar. There is a better way to monetize without using these though…

eBay has RSS feeds – don’t they! All you have to do is add your affiliate code to an eBay RSS feed, and you could use it instead of the Craigslist feed for a list of eBay items, and every time someone clicks, bids, and buys an auction you profit! First you have to be a member of the eBay Partner Network (EPN). Once logged in go to “Tools->Widgets->RSS Feed Generator”. Then just enter in what you’re looking for. Like Craigslist, you can “geo-target” what you want by scrolling down and checking “Items within 50 miles of xxxxx zip code”. Then click “search” and the page you get should be auctions for only that area. Again, scroll to the bottom of the page and see the orange RSS icon. Click on it and copy the URL and use that as the URL in the code block in your template, save the page now your blog page will list eBay auctions! The difference between these listings and Craigslist is that you profit from each won auction click on these.

I’ve just given you a few ideas, the sky’s the limit with these. You could probably do the exact same thing with Amazon. Now, there’s one thing I did tell you, often people want to know how to take an RSS feed an automatically create blog posts from the feed and publish them, kind of like what’s called an “auto-blog”. Let me state first that there are very few legit reasons to do this, because of duplicate content issues in google, etc. Most people want to use this to try and create quick spammy blogs with no original content, but there are (just a very few) legit reasons to want to create posts from an RSS feed. You can do that easily (and freely) with RadGeek’s Feed WordPress Plugin

Now, get hacking, come back to comment and tell me what you come up with!

How to make big money picking the most profitable niche is easy – you just don’t know it yet.

I must apologize to my loyal readers, it’s been nearly a week since my last post. This isn’t normal for me, but I’ve been hard at work on a new site day and night – so far investing more than 50 hours in about 6 days. This is a new web site, a new venture, a new blog I’ve been setting up and now that it’s almost done I think that I can use it to teach you how to pick the best niche for your next venture.

I read in webmaster forums a lot, and blog comments, and I get a lot of email. It always seems like one of the top most frequently asked questions is “how do I pick the best niche for my web site or blog (or BANS niche store, or mashup, or Squidoo lens, etc.)”. I hear this OVER, and over and over again. Usually the comments that follow are all kinds of ways to pick the hottest keywords. There are all kinds of lists you can buy, eBooks you can get, software to purchase, or “guru” programs to follow – but I’m telling you that the most profitable niche is easily found not in these things – but IN YOU! Don’t think at this point that this will be one of those fluff motivational posts, because I will show you directly how I have used this techniques in the past week to create what may become the most profitable web site I’ve launched to date.

Quit reading all the hype, all the garbage, and non-sense because they don’t know what you know. What I’m saying is (and I’ve talked about this before in many, many posts) – you are already good at something, and you can make more money at that than any “hot keyword” on the market. And that’s because of two things – sacrifice, and passion.

You’re not going to have nearly the passion for say, the latest LCD TV as you would Golden Retrievers (if you breed them). You wouldn’t sacrifice nearly as many hours working on a web site for say Air Purifiers if you loved to purchase and smoke the best Cuban cigars.

Sacrifice and Passion are characteristics that you normally don’t see or use that often, unless you’re in love for the first time or having your first child. With sacrifice and passion you’ll work harder, longer, and be more innovative that for regular tasks. Think about this for a second. What things in life interest you the most? You surely have some hobbies, or skills, or traits that interest you outside of work. Do you like baseball? Do you love to cook? Do you love animals? Trade stocks? Go hunting? Like guns? Gardening? Work out or run excessively? Collect figurines? Addicted to porn? Obsessed with Sesame Street? Teach homeschool? Love to remodel? Go garage saleing or clip coupons a lot?

I once saw a woman who had collected over 2,000 Precious moments figurines and had them displayed on over 200 custom shelves and lighted cabinets in her home. I knew a guy who spent two years translating and comparing the entire bible from the original Hebrew text into English to compare to King James Bible. Obsession. Sacrifice. Passion. Compulsion. It’s these things that drive us to “go the extra mile” for things that we already love to do.

Why on god’s green earth would you want to create a dozen web sites about plasma tv’s, digital cameras, ipods, and laptops if your day job was an insurance salesman and your hobby was collecting coins? See what I’m getting at?

The Most Profitable Niche is the One that YOU can IMMERSE yourself in

In the beginning of my Internet money making journey I made the mistake of buying dozens of domain names based on “hot keywords” like myspace, ringtones, song lyrics, ipods, and the like. I could have setup a bunch of cookie cutter web sites with minimal content hoping to convert some sales – ever worrying about getting a google penalty and constantly trying to send traffic to them and build links for them. It occured to me that this model is BACKWARDS. At good site ATTRACTS visitors, and you should constantly be coming up with ways and schemes to get traffic.

Now, having said that it’s true that not absolutely everything can be monetized like a digital camera. But there are ways…

Now, about what I’ve been working on for the last week. If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile you know that I’ve been in a live cover band for the last 3 years playing 2-3 weekends per month in area bars. At the beginning of the summer I quit the band to take some time off, regroup, and form a more modern band later this year. I live 30 minutes from Toledo, Ohio – which around her is often called “T-Town”. The name of my band was called “T-Town Sound”, which many say sounded like a DJ or something. Now that I’m out of that band I had to figure out what to do with the web site.

I started that band and I did all the booking. It was a constant struggle to figure out all the bars, directions to the bars, who was playing at what bars (to give us ideas where to play at next), and being a “web guy” I just spend hours and hours and hours online surfing band sites to try and research it all. The bars were even worse, since 99% don’t have web sites. Most bands and bars now may have a MySpace profile, but have you ever tried viewing 100 odd MySpace pages?

I decided to use T-Town Sound to create a live music listing web site, a local “band calendar” if you will. I’m much better suited to something like this than I am say blogging about “cruise ships” – because this is something I know about, I am involved in, and I have first hand knowledge of what will get used most. I think that the most successful blogs are heavily visited because they supply knowledge in some way to people that need it. They “solve a problem”.

How can you profit from using your knowledge to “solve a problem”?

I’m going to keep an updated online calendar of local events (which is tedious), and that’s something you can’t find anywhere. But I’m going to add to that by providing directions to all the venues and descriptions of all the bands. I have a forum where fans can talk about the bands, you can find a band or advertise for band members, and you can buy and sell gear. I have dozens of ways to monetize this site, 10x more than I would have for a BANS site. Heck – I could include a BANS store IN this site!

My advice to you is to take your knowledge and build a blog or niche site and provides knowledge or solves a problem or provides a service you can really get behind. Flesh out how to do this on paper and build from there. The most profitable project you create won’t end up being a niche store selling laptops. It will be something very near and dear to your heart.

Yesterday I had a record income day from my blogs and niche sites of $295.20. This is not normal, I don’t make this much every day – I normally don’t even make $100 per day (yet). But it does come in spurts sometimes, and the more spurts you have the better month you’ll have. I figured since I was reading about Affiliate Confessions June 2008 income, I should write about mine too.

Before I was making any money online – it seemed like all I read about was people making thousands and people making nothing. I never seemed to read about the guys making say a couple hundred, five hundred, or just under a thousand per month. Nobody blogs about the struggle of getting from here to there. I get a LOT of comments on this blog now, upwards of a dozen per day or more now whether I post or not. The thing I hear the most, over and over again – is that people appreciate me being very honest and candid about my struggles trying to make money online. I didn’t call this blog “blogging mistakes” for nothing – that’s for sure. For all of you wondering how you’ll get from where you are now to building your online empire – this post is for you. I will give you the details you never read about anywhere else, even from those that disclose income numbers.

Breakdown of a $300 income day

The first thing you’re wanting to know is where the income came from, so here’s a breakdown –

• $100 Commission Junction – This is from one sale, a single commission. For my blogs and niches sites I have one dedicated server I lease, and I also have a Hostgator Swamp account. I got the Hostgator account when I started using BANS – and the ability to have unlimited databases, unlimited web sites, a fast connection, and 99.999% uptime have been unbelievable. I am proud to promote Hostgator because I use their services each and every day, but getting a $100 commission per sale isn’t bad either. I have gotten at least one per month, each month, for the last 3 months in a row.
• $103.21 Adbrite (30 day nofollow text ad) – On just a few of my sites I use AdBrite instead of Adsense. This also isn’t probably what you think it is, I was paid $100 from someone who ordered a 30-day text ad (nofollow of course), and the remaining $3.21 was for clicks on network ads.
• $2.54 Adsense – This was a very crappy Adsense day. I usually Make $5-12 per day in the summer, and the winter it’s $20-$30 per day. I do get an Adsense check each and every month.
• $44.36 Clickbank – This is one commission, I earned this for a BANS or Build a Niche Store sale. Yes, when you promote BANS, out of the $97 purchase price you get paid $44 for each sale. Some people just slap up affiliate links all over and hype crap hoping for sale. The difference between them and me is – I use BANS to build sites and I’ve spent more than 50 hours (so far) writing a dozen articles on How I Use BANS. In each and every one I ask readers, if they don’t already have BANS and decide to purchase – to buy it from me if they benefited from my BANS series. I don’t feel a bit guilty, I sell one or two per month – and that keeps me writing more articles teaching people how to make money with Build a Niche Store.
• $12.00 Amazon – This is also from a single sale, one product. As I’ve stated before, Amazon Still Makes Me Money. I don’t always make money with them every day, but I do make something nearly every month. Some of the commissions are pennies, but most are $5-25 each. That’s because I specifically try to promote high value items whenever I can.
• $23.44 eBay Partner Network – This isn’t the best eBay day I’ve had, and it’s not the worst. I believe this was from a half dozen sales that came in from 3 different sites. 2 were blogs I use the WordPress plugin BayRss to add eBay auctions to, one was a BANS store.
• $2.65 Kontera – Kontera is contextual link advertising. I only use it on a couple sites, and it’s only good for a few bucks per day. There was a time when I made $30-40/day with this, but that was on a site that was getting 8-10K unique visitors per day. To make decent money with Kontera you need 2 things. Traffic, and a consumer-centric site that draws people that aren’t so “clued in” about the web. Like flash game sites, song lyric sites, celebrity news sites, joke sites, etc. These kind of visitors click these ads more often.
• $7.00 Pepperjam Network – I made one commission on Pepperjam, and ironicly it was for promoting Pepperjam! For each new signup you get, Pepperjam (currently) pays $7 each. If you aren’t already signed up for Pepperjam – you should be if you are an eBay affiliate. Pepperjam pays more than EPN if you get more than $100 per month in commissions. I’m in the process of setting up eBay promoted sites on Pepperjam so I can compare to EPN. They pay 55% if you get $100 or more per month, EPN only pays 50%. That’s not the only reason though – Pepperjam has a ton of other stuff to promote too, they are the fastest growing affiliate network around. Tons of advertisers are jumping from Commission Junction (CJ) to Pepperjam (PPJ). Read about Pepperjam and eBay here.

Breakdown of Sites and Visitors

Now for the usual questions…

How many sites do I have online live? – About 12, which are 2 BANS, 1 Drupal, 1 Static, and 8 WordPress. I have 8 more half setup in various stages getting ready to go online, and I own about 30 other domains that are just waiting to be setup.

How many visitors do these sites get? – Well the site with the Hostgator commission gets 600-800 uniques per day, the Adbrite site gets 16,000 uniques per day. Adsense is on about 6 sites getting from 50-500 uniques per day. The BANS sale was from this site, which gets 500-600 uniques per day, and the eBay commissions came from one BANS site getting 100 or less uniques per day, one blog getting 600-800 uniques per day, and another blog getting about 100 uniques per day or less. The Amazon sale was also the 600-800 uniques per day site, and the Kontera money mainly came from that site as well. The Pepperjam click came from this site – as I said 500-600 uniques per day.

How big is each site? – every site has 100+ posts now or more.

Do you pay for any traffic or promotion? – No. I don’t do any PPC, or advertising in any way whatsoever. Every blog I have is only promoted by my own personal linkbuilding, posting in forums, Entrecard, leaving comments on blogs, and original content article submissions. The traffic I get is TRULY organic from search engines. That’s probably why it’s taken 10 months to get to this $300 day, but hopefully it will come more frequently.

Can I see these sites, for examples? – Yes. This blog, The Smorgasbord, Top Jokes, Handbag Whores, Used Cell Phones, According to Kieli, Cell Phone How To, and Guitar Review.

Breakdown of the Types of Ads

I thought I would talk about the types of ads so you could get an idea how you can promote items and earn these types of commissions. The Hostgator commision came from some ads I was rotating on The Smorgasbord using the MaxBlogPress Plugin “Stripe Ad”. When I first blogged about Stripe Ad I didn’t get a lot of reaction to it. One guy sent me a comment saying how stupid and ridiculous it looked on a blog. I swear I’ve made some kind of sale from that plugin each and every month for the last 6 months. I try to rotate text links in it that are products I believe in or use, as well as things that pay good commissions. That way it doesn’t matter if I only get a sale or two per month – it’s worth it. The only thing I’m going to change by using Stripe Ad in the future is to make all the links go to landing pages on my blog where I talk about and pre-sell the products a bit first.

The Adbrite site, I use a 468×60 ad block before titles on every page in the blog to display text ads. The Adsense ads I use are almost always the same, the 336×280 blocks. The Smorgasbord probably has the best examples on all pages. If you want to see how I promote BANS, take a look at my BANS series if you haven’t already. I have the same or similar block on every page.

Amazon is something that I tend to promote on any blog page I add eBay auctions to with BayRSS. I find that if I blog about something, my monetization works better if I promote from multiple sources giving the reader more options. If you want to see how I do this, view the page the actual Amazon commission came from – Asus EEE PC Review.

The Ebay Partner Network, or EPN money came from the Used Cell Phones BANS site, this Wireless Hard Drive post, and about 3 of these Gustto Baca Handbags.

Kontera you can see in action on The Smorgasbord and the Top Jokes blogs. The Pepperjam click came from this Pepperjam and eBay post I linked to earlier.

The Balance of Original Content

I want to stress the fact that on every one of my blogs and sites I have a LOT of original content. I don’t think google or anyone else could ever say that my blogs and sites were either spammy or top heavy with ads and non-value added crap to the visitor. My main goal is to overwhelf my visitors with useful content on every blog I own to keep them coming back. Once they are comfortable with my site and content – they will be comfortable clicking on my links and recommendations.

If you want to do what I’m doing, and make what I’m making – there is no shortcut, no mistake, no way to go around it. Well there is…but you have to have $$ to pay to drive traffic to your sites. And usually once you quit paying, the traffic quits coming. If you build sites like mine, organically and over time, the visitors and traffic just grows and grows as long as you keep posting quality content. And it’s free, and consistent, and usually people click or buy more often because they came from a search engine and found what they were looking for.

Building income online is about building a stream of wealth, a monthly paycheck that in some degree you can count on. Every day you should be working on something to build your monthly amount into more of a paycheck and steady stream of payments.

How You can Benefit from What You Just Read

I don’t want you to come away from reading this post and think I was bragging about “oooh – I made $300 in one day”. If you think that you’ve already missed the point. I want to make this kind of money more often – and you should too.

My advice to you is – first, track what you make for progress. Celebrate your good days and try to figure out why you don’t have more of them.

Also, have something to monetize each and every day. I DO NOT make money on every post. But I post SO MUCH that it’s inevitable I’ll make something each day now.

Sign up for many affiliate programs – and use them all. Diversify your income as many ways as you can.

Work on a daily or weekly plan to organize your posting and monetization schedule. If you plan your work – you will work your plan.

I hope this post was of value to you. What’s the best day you ever had for online income and how did you do it?

Ever wonder if you could integrate your BANS niche store into WordPress? Yes you CAN! Watch me add a new BANS site into a WordPress blog and show you how to do it too!

This is installment #10 in the Watch me build a BANS niche site from Scratch series!

I have many WordPress blogs, and I have a few BANS sites. In my honest opinion, I think that the best possible scenario for Build a Niche Store is to install it into a subfolder of a domain and promote it from there, and then develop the root of the domain up as a blog. Why? Well, there are several reasons I believe this is better…

• It’s more profitable: On the blog you can use adsense or other forms of monetization
• It’s safer for indexing: If google goes ape-sh*t on BANS sites, you’ve still got your blog to promote
• It’s more flexible: You can do 1,000 more things in WordPress than in BANS, like have guest authors, add a forum, syndicate content via RSS, and much, much, more
• It divests your income: If eBay commissions dry up – just close the BANS store and keep the blog. As far as that goes, as new “affiliate fads” come out – install them in subdirectories too (but keep the blog)

So, I’ve had the thought of integrating and adding a BANS niche store into WordPress for a while – but no way to do it. Then, I came accross Mark Hansen – who has already authored some killer WordPress themes for BANS! He has something called the “BANS-Flex” theme for just $29, and it’s worth every penny if you want to integrate BANS into your WordPress blog. I decided to try by setting up a new site so you can see how it works step by step.

The first thing I did was setup a brand new WordPress blog in the root of a domain, and then I setup a BANS installation in a sub-directory. This site is going to be about weight loss and diets – so after adding my primary category my store now has a half-dozen pages that were auto-created. I added some content to the home page for good measure.

Next, after I setup the WordPress blog – I modified and uploaded the BANS-flex files per detailed instructions I received with the download. You don’t have to be technical – just follow the directions. After doing that and created my first “Welcome” post, I see that my BANS site is indeed integrated into my WordPress blog by using the new BANS-flex theme. The two red circles indicate where, the BANS store pages are listed at right, and if you click on “products” listed at left that page link takes you directly to the BANS store. In addition, the search box is a drop down allowing visitors to search either “articles” or “store”, and of course a “store” search inputs the keyword directly into my BANS niche store bringing up search results.

Visit Fastest Weight Loss Diet to view the new blog / BANS niche store.

The BANS-Flex Theme for WordPress has placeholders for affiliate adverts built in – you can see the banner at top, and then the 3 – 125×125 placeholders above the right sidebar. I want to replace the top banner placeholder first, so in my WordPress dashboard I click on “Design->Theme Editor” and open “header.php”. All you have to do is replace the image code within the “this section controls the 468×60 banner code” comments and your new affiliate banner ad will display. Then open “sidebar.php” and do the same under the “code for 3 125×125 ad images” to replace those 3 placeholders.

So – this is only the beginning. Now I have a brand new WordPress blog and a brand new BANS store to promote, isn’t that double the work? I have two sitemaps to register, 2 sites (on one domain) to promote and build links for, and 2 sites to write original content for. Yes I do – but I think one will complement the other. The WordPress blog should get indexed faster than the BANS site, but then it will pull it in the index as well. Visitors will read the blog and keep coming back, and get used to the fact that we have a “store” where we sell things. I think it will “pre-sell” the BANS site a bit, and the traffic on the blog will earn adsense revenue in addition to affiliate monetizations for ads, etc.

This new site will become part of the series – be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed or by email (top of the page) so you don’t miss a bit! I’ll be posting more as I work on this new BANS/Wordpress creation!

Do you want to try to integrate your BANS Build a Niche Store in your WordPress blog? Click Here to learn more about the BANS-Flex WordPress Theme! There are also new themes now available through that link for BANS and WordPress in addition to the one that I used for this post.

The Simple CSS WordPress BANS theme is now available as well! It looks sharp, and will go well with just about any niche. But let’s say that you want to add your BANS site into your WordPress blog, but you don’t want to change your theme at all. I mean – it’s rather inconvenient to just switch your theme from one you like (and have been using) to just one or two choices – isn’t it? You’re in luck – this is your lucky day! Mark at “The Niche Store Builder” has arranged to convert ANY WordPress Theme to BANS for only $49. That’s right – ANY WordPress theme.

Don’t have “Build a Niche Store” yet? Click here:

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

Also – if BANS isn’t for you, consider using PHPBay Pro. With BANS you build content basically around eBay auctions, but with PHPBayPRo you place eBay auctions in your posts and pages. Check it out, I use (and make money) with both BANS and PHPBayPro!

Entrecard has changed quite a bit since I first signed up. There are probably a couple dozen more categories, and a thousand of more blogs signed up. One of the better new features is the one where you can add multiple blogs to your account. I have quite a few blogs, and keeping separate accounts at Entrecard was nothing short of a pain. Also dropping Entrecards can be a big pain too, but now you get 25 credits for every blog post you make up to 3 per week. So you can get advertising credits without dropping a thing.

Today was a day like any other, I dropped some Entrecards and did some advertising. I don’t spend a lot of time doing it, but once or twice per week I like to stay a bit active in the community. When people ask me what Entrecard does (beyond waste time), I tell them that it’s good for branding, getting your name out there, you can get new readers and RSS subs from it, and over time the exposure is pretty positive.

For quite a while I’ve only had 2 blogs listed in my Entrecard account, and today I felt a need to add a third. It was good to go through this process, because it led me to think about the benefits of blogging beyond the advertising aspect. These are the things that most bloggers see, but don’t talk about. It’s not like the benefits are hidden – you just might not think about them.

Add a new blog to Entrecard (or start a new account for the first time) and then…

Drop 30 Entrecards in your category

Immediately after you add your new account and place the Entrecard code in your template to display ads, the first thing you want to do is drop about 30 Entrecards on blogs in the category you signed up in. I use Firefox, and open all the blogs in new tabs so I can look at them one by one. Drop your card on each one as you view them.

Look for Advertising Widgets

As you’re looking at the blogs and dropping cards, the first thing you’ll probably see are different types of advertising widgets. Take note of who’s using what, which ones are more popular, and which ones you haven’t heard of yet and might be interested in signing up for. I did this today and I found some things I’d never seen before.

125 Exchange is a service like Entrecard, the only difference is it works a bit like blogrush – since they give you 2 free ad views every time 3 people click and ad from your site. I signed up because when you signup for the first time, you get 5,000 free impressions – who can’t use that?

I also found Link Referral, which seems to be like a free “ReviewMe”. I haven’t dug into the details yet, but it seems like it could be a good one to signup for.

Look for New Online Communities

It’s true that there are more online and social communities than you can shake a stick at – but sometimes just when you think you know them all, new niche communities crop up that could be very beneficial. For example, my first two blogs added in Entrecard were in the Make Money Online and Technology categories. The third blog was in the Cooking and Dining category. When I surfed 30 blogs and dropped my card I found blogging networks that niche I never even knew existed.

I found FoodBuzz to be a really cool niche community. BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog are great, but there are soooo many blogs, and most of them don’t have anything to do with your niche. In FoodBuzz, I know for sure that every site is about cooking, recipes, and food. Is there something like this for your niche?

The Foodie Blog Roll was another site I found for my niche, but they specialize in a BlogRoll widget of other food-related sites. That’s really cool, and this is another site I need to sign up for right away.

Look for Niche Content Directories and Tools

I already use Ezine Articles to submit food articles and recipes, so it never crossed my mind to look for food specific directories or tools. I found one site right off the bat called Tastebook that let’s you build your own online cookbook for free. They say it’s like an “iTunes for Recipes”, because you can build and sell your own cookbook. How can you beat that?

I also found Associated Content, which isn’t niche specific, but I saw that a lot of food blogs were using it. This is a service I’ll probably have to check out too.

My Free Copyright is also another site that surprised me, because I thought that Creative Commons was the only type of site for things like this.

How it Benefits You

Look at all the new sites and tools I found today for my food blog that I never knew existed. If I sign up for and use the best ones I found, I’ll get 10-fold the exposure I would have through Entrecard alone, but if I hadn’t signed up for Entrecard with the new blog and dropped 30 card, I never would have known these services (or blogs) even existed. Entrecard can benefit you beyond advertising – register a new blog of yours today!