The What Would Seth Godin Do Wordpress Plugin

I have been meaning to post about this plugin for quite a while. As many know, Seth Godin is the brains behind Squidoo and the author of many books as well. Godin advocates the use of cookies to distinguish between new and returning visitors to your web site. Richard K Miller, used this concept to develop a Wordpress plugin to show a custom welcome message to new visitors and a different one to return visitors on your blog. The plugin is called, What Would Seth Godin Do. You can use this to promote subscribing to your blogs feed, show a certain ad or any other message you want a new visitor or returning visitor to see. You can set it to show a new surfer or returning surfer as many times as you like and I have found it quite effective in promoting my blogs feeds. You will not be disappointed with it.

When You Learn To Juggle, You Start With One Ball

I have started to learn how juggle now in my spare time (which aint much) as I need to force myself away from the computer a little more. I gre up playing sports and guitar, so you think it would be easy for me. WRONG! When you start learning how to juggle, you just do not pick up 3 balls and go. You need to start with the basics and just one ball. After you master that, you move on to two balls, then three etc. etc. The same goes for building niche sites, you need to start with one and master it.

In the early days of BANS, most of us would rush off and keyword hunt and build two, three, four stores a week. admittedly most of these were very thin and not much attention was paid to link building or promotion. I have close to 200 stores in my inventory and only about 40 or honestly were they need to be. A few others rank and pull in some income, but nothing like the 40 big dogs I dominate the SERPS with. Not all of those 40 were done right initially as well.

So where am I going with this? It will be far better for you to learn to complete ONE site and get it ranking and earning before moving on to the next one. Sure it is boring working on the same site for 30 straight days, but if done right, it will produce like a big dog. On top of that, you will learn the process, which will make it a ton easier on future stores. If you can not rank one store and get it earning, how do you figure you can make future sites rank and earn? It is much easier to concentrate ALL of your efforts in one place, then to spread out between multiple sites. I know I have more time than most of you being as I do this full time and I know how thin I am spread, so I can only imagine how thin most of you are with multiple sites and only dedicating a few hours a day.

So where do you start? start with the site that you know most about and the most passionate about. If it means rebuilding it, so be it. Get it ranking and earning properly and move on. Do not try to learn to juggle four balls when you have trouble juggling just one.

Now if you please excuse me, I am off to practice juggling my one ball technique!!!

Stop Worrying AboutThe Platform, Conentrate On Traffic

It does not really matter whether you use straight BANS, straight Wordpress or BANS Wordpress. All three platforms do exactly what they are designed to do. If the platform fits your needs, use it. The Wordpress aspect gives you access to more product options from different affiliates and a vast endless supply of FREE plugins, however BANS can also be used to show other products as well with a little more modification.

So many people think that merely switching platforms will be a magic key to success. That is the farthest thing from the truth. A good looking site with products from 80 different affiliate programs will do you no good unless the surfer sees it. Stop getting hung up on the platform and start driving traffic to your sites. I could build a straight HTML website using notepad and code in different affiliate products and still achieve the same thing, the platform merely makes it easier.

Everyone likes new toys and gadgets, but the reason so many people fail to make serious money on the internet is the failure to get targeted traffic to their site. Plain and simple. So stop worrying about the platform you use and start concentrating more on driving traffic to whatever platform you use.

How Urgent Is Your Urgency?

I treat every day to the best of my ability as day one. I never like to take my foot off the gas pedal. If some one told you that you had 120 days to get your site or sites to produce a $300.00 month income or else you would be imprisoned for the rest of your life, I bet your urgency level would be through the roof. Sure it is an unreal scenario, but the urgency level is believable. Everything can be learned, from SEO, article writing, backlink building and promotion. Many of you reading this blog, know the basics, your urgency level though, is no where close to where it needs to be. Many just do not have the faith that increasing the urgency level will pay off. There are no secret success formulas in this business. Just hard, solid, consistent work along with a few basics which are taught here and thousands of other free blogs on the internet. Increase your urgency to learn these things and start putting them to use and the income will follow.

How Urgent Is Your Urgency?

Not Every Surfer Knows They Really Want To Buy

People use the internet for information and entertainment just as much as they do for shopping, perhaps more. That is not a news flash, but often times surfers just do not know what they want or need until they see it. Congratulations, you just passed Advertising 101. Not rocket science by any stretch of the imagination. With television, people are shown commercials during their favorite show or sporting event. Advertisers try to match ads with the demographics for the show being shown. Congratulations, you just passed Advertising 102. You likely will not see an Ensure commercial during an episode of the Real World. Common sense, right?

So where am i going with this? Just a basic refresher of making sure you match your ads to the content of a particular page. More importantly blog post or articles. You could have BANS site focused on NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt Jr., but have a blog post about what he was wearing in a commercial or an awards show. If the blog post was about what leather jacket he was wearing, it would make more sense to show ads or eBay listings about that jacket. PHPBay is fantastic for this chore by the way. If your BANS store is attached to a blog, you can always give them links in that post to the collectibles end of things. You may never make another post about that brand jacket again, but if someone was surfing for the leather jacket Earnhardt was wearing and you ranked for that in the SERPS, odds are they really like the jacket more so than Earnhardt.

Back to the main focus of this post though. They may just be curious of what he wore and not so much about buying it.... that is until they see it in their face. Get the drift? Now you do not want to create a whole BANS store page for a type jacket that you only will likely dedicate one post to, but you gave the surfer the opportunity to instantly react on impulse in a niche that you overall are not targeting and in just one click. Plus the post is likely timely and relative.

Get creative in your content page and blog post and start micro marketing within. One finally example in closing, If Earnhardt was to show up in a commercial for a new electric razor and you posted a link to the commercial or found a Youtube video of it, what do suppose your PHPBay listings in that post would be? You guessed it...that electric razor. Congratulations, you now have your internet degree in Advertising.

Social Bookmark Everything & I Mean Everything

Social bookmark marketing is very effective as many should know by now. Often times, most will bookmark there own sites, but fail to bookmark other things like Kaboodle pages, Squidoo pages, Hub pages, Ezine Articles and even other social bookmarks. If you Digg something, bookmark that Digg with another Social Bookmark platform. Spread them out though through different usernames and in a timely fashion or sure enough you will likely be spam reported. If it passes link juice, bookmark it. Overtime it will build a very sticky web and page rank and or rankings should follow. Get creative, even some directory submissions will flow some juice. It's out there, just go squeeze it.

Happy Birthday To This Blog!!

WOW. I almost forgot that one year ago, I started this blog. 447 post later, here we are. I have to be honest, I do not think I missed a single day posting. Maybe I did. Not sure. I have made some hoorible post, some good post, some post that did not help the web at all. One thing is for sure. I have written more in one year, than I have in my entire life, twice over. As I have said many many times, this very blog has taught me more than I can imagine about SEO, traffic, linking, ranking and much much more. It also produced a pretty nice income along the way. All for free. If you read this blog, I thank you and hope it helps you or sends you in the right direction. If you do not read this blog, then you probably left a long time ago and this blog did not help you one bit. So, Happy Birthday, Build A Niche Store Blog, 365 days of pure goodness if you ask me. Thanks also to Blogger for providing a very usable platform for me to work on.

Why In God's Name Would Anyone Link To Your Site?

Sometimes you really need to step away and take a good hard look at your sites without being emotionally attached to it. You need to ask yourself, what makes my site so special that anyone would ever want to link to it? Is there any special content, reviews or articles that would entice someone to link to you? It is no secret, that some of the best backlinks you will ever get, are backlinks you never ask for or do not know you have gotten. This is harsh reality to most new webmasters. If you are just a store front and are not doing paid advertising, then natural backlinks will show up very very slowly. If you have a site that features movie posters and have articles about how to care for movie posters, or the top selling movie posters of all time or the making of a particular poster: odds are someone will find it useful and link to it. Sure MSN Live and Yahoo can still be manipulated with perfect SEO, link directory submissions and article directory backlinks, but rest assured there will come a time when they too will use some sort of page rank or value system of backlinks. Great SEO can be learned, but solid natural backlinks must be earned. Make that your new motto. Next chance you get, ask yourself if your site deserves being linked to. If not, you deep down inside already know the path you need to take to get it where other people WILL want to link to it.

Micro Niche Finder Review

I have used several keyword and niche finder tools in the past and mainly have used a combination of many of them along with the Google keyword tool to get the job done in the past. Last week I decided to buy the Micro Niche Finder tool to test and review. I played with it off and on for the last few days and am thoroughly impressed with it. It incorporates to the Google tool as well which is very comforting. Some other of the highlights include strength of competition score, commercial intent score, LSI values, Amazon search and related E-Zine articles lin ks. The strength of competition score includes inAnchor Count, intitle Count and inurl Count links which is great as well. Micro Niche Finder is a desktop application as well and it lets you save projects and also export the data in several formats. Overall I would rate it 9 out of 10 and it seems they are committed to taking it a bit further. I plan on using this as my primary niche and keyword tool from here forward as it has a great feel to it. It really has integrated most of my favorite aspects into one easy to use tool. The user manual is also easy to understand for the newbies to the veterans. I have no problems recommending this product to anyone.

The Benefits Of Blogging

I have many, many, many blogs attached to several of my niche sites. Some are very good and have picked up a great following, while several others are still maturing a bit. On one of my more popular sites, I got an email from a newspaper reporter wanting to do an interview with me concerning my niche. He had also contacted a few other sites that were related to the niche as well, but I was the first to respond and thus got the interview. I asked how he came across my site and he said he noticed my Twitter feed and followed his way in that way. While Twitter traffic is hit or miss sometimes, it did lead to an interview for a newspaper that also has a website. Which means that I will have a backlink from another high authority source. Those links are gold, not only do you get the traffic that comes with it for a week or so, you get a shot at capturing long term readers and also get a permanent golden backlink. The lesson is that if you are passionate and knowledgeable about your niche, it will show through and over time, you never know what it will lead to. People like linking to authorative sites. Plain and simple. Add value, get value in return.

If Google Shut Off Your Water Supply, Would You Die Of Thirst?

Google traffic is great! No strike that! Google traffic is superb! No strike that too! Google traffic is euphoric!

Now that I have clarified my feelings on their traffic, what would you do if you lost it? Much like a water company shutting off your supply of water, could you still get water? De indexing and rank fluctuations happen! When times are good, they're good, when times are bad, it can still be good. Gaming Yahoo and MSN Live is a start. If you are ranking well in Google, odds are you are equal too or not far behind in either of the other two search engines. Regardless, you still need traffic. While Yahoo and MSN surfers still convert, it just is not the same as owning your keywords in Google, regardless of what other people say.

So how do you weather a Google water supply shortage? You need to first start while you are ranking good and in good graces with Big G. Always be pointing people to your RSS feeds if you are running a blog. Also you should be maximizing your social networks like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and even YouTube. You can create a hefty following if promoted correctly. Always be working towards making a surfer a life long reader, browser or shopper. Use feedburner to get them to subscribe to email updates or run a free contest and capture their email for use in marketing future new products or site updates. Constantly be working towards getting at least one good backlink a week, from a site relative or fairly relative to yours. If you maximize all these things, plus get a little more creative, it will give you a backlog of water supply while you work on getting the water turned back on.

Wordpress TV

I continue to get quite a few emails regarding the use of Wordpress, and while I have pointed to some Youtube videos in recent post, I somehow overlooked the announcement of Wordpress TV. This quite a useful site to learn Wordpress on. I bounced around few videos myself and am quite impressed and sure anyone new to Wordpress will find it very useful.

Squidoo Revisited

It has been a while since I have posted about Squidoo, but it should not be ignored. Not only can you make a little income from it, but it is a great opportunity to get a back link or two to your BANS sites as well. I make some income off my pages, but I am more concerned with the link juice. if you get creative, you can link from free articles submitted to ezines and such and create a pretty hefty page rank for your Squidoo page and then pass that PR on to your BANS site as well. I will include links to other authority sites as well in my pages, but I add the nofollow tag as to make sure I sculpt the PR as best I can to go to my sites that need it.

Below is some great reading from Seth Godin, the creator of Squidoo. Make sure to download these eBooks and read them twice.

http://www.salted.com/unsalted/files/knockknock.pdf
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/files/whos_there.pdf
http://cobrand.squidoo.com/EveryoneIsAnExpert.pdf

How Well Do You Know Your Surfer?

I tribute a ton of my success now to knowing my surfer and my niche and how the two intersect. Just doing keyword hunting and properly SEOing the page will get you traffic, but converting the traffic is a totally different animal. Now ranking well will get you conversions, but are you leaving more on the table? Knowing your niche inside and out will let you better understand what the surfer is looking for. I have found by reading more on other authoritative sites in my niche and TRULY understanding the niche has led me to write better focused content and blog post, thus conversions have increased percentage wise. Studying your traffic and what they typed in the search engines to organically lead to you will tell you a ton as well. So often we concentrate TOO much on the perfect keyword search and not what the surfer is actually looking for.

How well do you know your surfer?

More Kudos For The Blogger Blog Platform

I suspect after the upcoming anniversary of this blog, at the end of this month, I will get around to converting this blog over to Wordpress. I do not really have a good reason why just yet, other than just making sure I have better control over a few things with it. The Blogger platform is excellent and has always intrigued me, but I believe I have pushed it as far as it can go, but more importantly I just do not have the time to keep pushing the platform forward. Rest assured though, if you are a newbie, you can still make money with it and get it to rank without much effort.

As of this date, if you do a Google search for Make Money Online, you will see what I believe is one of Griz's sites, ranked number one.

moneymakerinfo.blogspot.com

As you can see it is on the Blogger platform as well, and I can assure you it rakes in the money and the traffic. With a little creativity and the EPN javascript tool, you can turn it into a niche store with relative ease. So in closing, if you are new to the blogging world, get started with Blogger. It is newbie friendly and can be used to make money online.

Need Original Content & Articles? Try Niche Store Content!

I recently had my online buddy, Jonathon, write an article for me for one of my BANS sites and was thoroughly impressed with his quality of work. depending on my time factor and knowledge of my niche, I often times will out source some writing. You just can not put a price on great original content. A ten dollar investment could bring in income for a lifetime and really helps make your site stand out in it's niche and also makes for great food for the search engines. Jonathon's work passed Copyscape with flying colors and was easy to read and understand. On top of everything else, Jonathon needs the work. He is a stand up honest guy and I have no problem referring readers to him. I am sure you can get a bulk rate as well if you ask him.

You can visit his website at http://nichestorecontent.com and please tell him that Dave sent you, I am sure he would like to know where his customers are coming from. You better hurry, as I will be putting in a big order myself in a few days.

Wordpress 2.7 Video Tutorials

More and more people who are integrating Wordpress into their BANS stores have often never used Wordpress and are a little overwhelmed with it at first. As I mentioned a few post ago, Youtube is a great source for video tutorials. Below is a link to some.

Wordpress 2.7 Youtube Tutorials

While I have not taken the time to watch each and every one of them, most of them are pretty thorough and you should get the hang of it pretty quick. Make sure to learn the difference between creating a page versus creating post and how to use the categories and the tags. In no time you will see how powerful and effective blogging with Wordpress can be.

Comma Fix For BANS Pages Not Saving

If you are hosted with Hostgator, you may have noticed that pages with commas in them will not save properly after editing. This is due mostly to changes I believe Hostgator has made to the magic_quotes_gpc setting. The fix is quite simple as pointed out by BANS forum member ReneeT. To fix and solve this...

Go to your Hostgator Cpanel and under "Software / Services", click on "php.ini quick config", find "magic_quotes_gpc" and set it to "On" without the quotations.

As always, make sure to test it out and notate this change you made somewhere you can easily locate it.

Improving Rankings By Using Video

Ever since PubCon, you notice I have been posting more about video and how it will play a big part in not only engagement, but in ranking. I cam across a great article by Chris Crum of WebProNews entitled, How to Use Video to Improve Google Ranking & Conversions. Chris gives some do's and dont's and tips on how to better use video. If you haven't started, you need to get on the bus now. I have seen huge jumps in traffic myself on several sites that I have started making a habit to include videos in post or content pages.

First Sentence In Every Wordpress Post Or Page Could Be Important

If you have delved into Wordpress and are not using the SEO Wordpress plugin, then Google and the other SERPS may be using your first sentence of your post or page for use as the description tag in your Google listing for your page. It does not happen every time, but odds are they are. Just check your your pages in Google by using the site command:

site:yourdomainname.com

Now mind you do not have to use the plugin mentioned above, but remember that your description is your selling tag as I like to call it and could be the difference in the surfer clicking your listing versus your competitors. Make sure your first sentence includes some keywords or LSI terms and you should be fine.

The Most Important Files In Wordpress

When dealing with Wordpress at first it can be overwhelming, especially if you need to upgrade or get hacked on the server side of things and not the database side. Wordpress is getting more and more secure, especially when installed properly. I myself have not had problems for several versions. The are a few important files and folders that you need to be aware of and there importance to your Wordpress platform. The wp-content folder houses all of you plugins, uploads and themes in internal folders. This folder should be backed up in case you were to get hacked or have a server failure. The other main file that needs to be watched and protected is the wp-config.php file. This is the file that houses your database login info. Outside of those two important sections of Wordpress, pretty everything could be overwritten, deleted or reinstalled as they are merely files that make Wordpress work. This is evident in the manual way of upgrading your Wordpress version. You could delete the wp-includes and wp-admin folders and replace them with a fresh copy on every upgrade and you will not hurt your Wordpress install. All of this does not apply however if you heavily modify your Wordpress files to perform patched in functions, but of course if that applied to you, you probably stopped reading this post a while ago. Just pay close attention to the wp-content folder and the wp-config.php file and restoring a hacked or crashed Wordpress platform is a breeze.

Duplicate Content Explained By Google

I am a bit under the weather tonight, but came across a Google bookmark I had from the Google Webmaster blog explaining their views on duplicate content. This post should clear up what is and is not penalized by Google. It is very easy to fall into one of the areas they are talking about with BANS sites if you are not careful though. Read it and bookmark it and make sure you understand it.

When Trademark Domain Lawyers Attack

I received an email from a regular reader named Pedro yesterday. Pedro recently received an email from a representative of the Lego group claiming a domain he owns that uses the word Lego in it, violated their trademark. The representative has said that Pedro must turn over the domain name to them. I think Pedro learned a good reason, but know must move on and move quickly. He does not intend to fight it, but I gave him a suggestion. I told him to hurry and register a new domain and use LSI terms instead of the word Lego, like maybe bricks and then transfer over all content to the new site and 301 redirect all the old domains to the new domains. The quicker you can do this the better, as to hopefully get the SERPS to quickly index the new domain and maybe get a temporary rush of the good page rank he had. Then I told him he should wait for the second notice before relinquishing the domain name. The longer you can hold them off, the better. Now I am no lawyer, so do this at your own risk. They second notice will likely follow in a few weeks. Hopefully in that time frame you will at least be able to get everything indexed and have a bit of time to change whatever backlinks you have control of to point to the new domain. You can read about Paul's ordeal on his blog post here. And here is a link to Pedro' Blog.

Using Google Analytics To Track Rankings

I have played around with Google Analytics for a while and am far from exploring all of it's capabilities. Fortunately there are way smarter people than me to learn from. I myself have tried to track rank with the filters but have been way off. Enter SEO mastermind, André Scholten, who made a guest post on the Joost de Valk blog about how Track SEO rankings with Google Analytics. Very nicely done and is definitely worth doing. Make sure you go to the directions on how to set up a filter as well. Let me know how you like it after playing with it.

Best Performing Adsense Ad Size?

Staying on the Google Adsense theme this week, I came across a great little post on the Webmaster Magazine site, discussing the best performing Adsense ad types. According to Google, they suggests that the wider ad formats tend to outperform their taller ads. The wider formatted ads enable the surfer to read more text at a single glance without needing to skip a line and return to the left margin every few words as they would probably do with a narrower ad. The most effective ad formats according to Google, are the 336x280 Large Rectangle, the 300x250 Medium Rectangle, and the 160x600 Wide Skyscraper. As always you should test what works and looks best on your site.

Protect Your Adsense Account

Sometimes evil people do evil things. Mostly it is caused by jealousy or plain out evilness. Some people will try to get others Adsense accounts terminated by using their publisher code. To avoid others from doing this, log into your Adsense account and click AdSense Setup and then click Allowed Sites. From there, you can choose the second option that reads....

Only allow certain sites to show ads for my account
In the field provided, list URLs of sites you want to show your ads. Then click "Save changes". If you put your ad code on a page not on this list, ads will still show, but impressions and clicks will not be recorded.

Then enter in ALL of your domains that have permission to run Adsense and click Save Changes at the bottom. Now only those allowed sites will be able to use your Adsense publisher ID number.

One Solid Backlink Can Make A Big Difference

I have been playing around with a blogspot blog I created and gave it a backlink from a related site I own that has a PR3 pagerank. After letting Google do it's thing and the latest page rank updating, the blog now has a PR2 rank and ranks page 1 of Google for it's target term. Just goes to show the power of a good backlinks from sites related to yours. The good backlinks are always out there and getting them from related sites should be an ongoing process. Depending on your niche and phrase you are trying to rank for, you would be surprised at how few it can take to catapult you up the rankings. Always, always, always be on the look out for sites related or parent related to yours and do not be afraid to consummate a link trade with sites that add value to yours and yours to them.

Use The News To Your Advantage

Setting up Google news alerts in relation to your niche will alert you every time a news story is posted in relation to the niche or keywords you have set it up to follow. You can then formulate the news into your own words and make a very timely and topical blog post in relation to your niche. I do this quite a bit with some of my own niches and you would be surprised at the traffic it yields. This is sometimes termed, piggybacking. Often times you will want to link to the news article itself as it will add credibility to your own post as well. Google news alertsare very easy to set up and will be sent straight to your email of choice. Be as specific as you can in what you want to be alerted to as to save yourself time thumbing through stories totally unrelated. You can also use this for blog alerts as well.

Youtube Is Very Useful For Learning

Youtube is not only good for content on your site, but also a fine source for tutorials on just about anything computer related. I was wanting to learn a new video editing program I downloaded and low and behold there was a great 5 minute video by someone on Youtube. Everything from installing Wordpress to transfering your nameservers to 301 redirects to the new software you just downloaded. There probably is a good tutorial video waiting for you on Youtube. Make sure to sort the results by date added, as this will give you the latest videos related to what you are searching for.

Avinash Kaushik Explains Bounce Rate

Avinash Kaushik, Google Analytics guru has a great older post on bounce rate and explanations on what it is and how to deal with it. Basically your bounce rate measures the percentage of surfers who visit your website and leave instantly. Of course there is a ton of speculation on whether it does or doesn't factor into ranking. Whether it does or doesn't really isn't the concern as much as it is important to keep your surfers engaged and not giving them what they are looking for. If they are bouncing back to Google from a search term, then perhaps you would likely look at that page to see why they are not finding what they are looking for and better construct the page for future visitors. Get in tune with your sites bounce rate, to better understand your traffic.

Free Software To Create Your Own Header Images

I keep forgetting to post this link to this free software that will let you create your own banners and header images. Luckily rickblackmon posted the link again in the BANS forum and it jogged my memory. The software is called XHeader. I use Adobe Photoshop myself, but have played around with XHeader a few times to see if it was easy for users. It indeed is. Like anything else, you will want to watch the video and play around with it, but it will certainly save you from having to pay someone to create one. Once you get the hang of it, you can make some dynamite logos and headers for free.

Design Your Own Themes & Templates With Artisteer

As you get more in tune with how to build your niche sites, you will no doubt get pickier about how you want them to look. I often times have a design in my head, but just can't find a suitable design out there to match it. If you are looking to design your own Wordpress or straight html type templates, you might want to consider Artisteer. It is pretty easy to get just the look you want with this program. You will want to play with it for about an hour to get all the features of it, but you can really make some great looking templates with it. Also after creating a Wordpress template, it is fairly easy to turn it into a straight BANS template buy combining the sidebar with either the header or the footer and then calling in the BANS includes. I do not suggest this for a newbie, but if you have been working with templates for a little while and are familiar with BANS, this will be right up your alley.