Saturday Around The Web October 31st

Happy Halloween everyone. I am in the middle of treating little ghost and goblins with candy, but wanted to post some great stuff I found across the web for this week. I have already seen one little boy and girl dressed up in a Jon & Kate Gosselin costume. Now that was scary.

Google has posted their Twitter directory of all accounts and categories

Darren Rowse from Pro Blogger tells how he uses email newsletters to drive traffic and make money

Brian Solis addresses the Future of the Social Web

Hank from Money Code has a simple modification to the FD feedburner plugin that he uses along with Facebook. Quite an interesting concept he has going.

SeOverflow has an opinion post on why you should build nofollow links

A short, but to the point post on Everything I Needed to Know About Social Media I Learned From Spider-Man

EPN has a new post on Successful Search Engine Marketing – 1. Selecting and Organizing Your Keywords

Top 10 Lesser Known Affiliate Programs

I was asked a question by email about a some lesser known affiliate program companies that I use outside of EPN, Adsense, Linkshare, Commision Junction, Pepperjam and ShareASale. I have listed a few below that I also use off the top of my head. Just because they are lesser known, does not mean they do not perform. As always, if they represent products you can build a niche around or integrate into existing niche site, by all means you should give them a try. A lot of people really do not know that Google has a program that I listed below as well. I get emails at least once a week of new publishers and products that they have coming on board and they are growing fairly quickly. Have a look below and check them out for yourselves. You might be surprised.


http://www.clixgalore.com/
http://www.affiliatewindow.com/
http://www.affiliatefuture.com/
http://www.affili.net/
http://www.linkconnector.com/
http://www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork
http://www.bridaluxe.com
http://www.onenetworkdirect.com
http://www.tradedoubler.com
http://www.buy.at/us/

Matt Cutts Site Review Video

I came across an older video I had not seen before. Matt Cutts has live examples of websites and actual reviews them as well as takes questions from the audience. The video is quite long at 62 minutes, but well worth the watch. You will indeed pick up a few nuggets of information along the way.

Cool Ajax Domain Name Finder Tool

I came across a cool domain name finder tool today in my travels. It works off of Ajax technology and lets you know instantly if a domain name is available for registration. All you do is type in a domain name and its availability will appear instantly. You do not have to include an extension to your domain name if you do not want to. If none is specified, instant results are based on your preferred extensions settings on the right hand side. The site also list some coupon codes from Godaddy as well. Not that they are any secret, but just a little window dressing. This is not a must bookmark, but sure makes it quick and simply to see if something is registered already or not.

Get Your Good Stuff Out There

Bloggers are constantly looking for things to link to. If they do not know your great article on "insert your niche here" exist, it has little chance of getting linked to. You should be getting links to these articles out in as many social bookmarking places out there that you can. Nofollow, dofollow, does not matter. Spend a day bookmarking your good stuff. By good stuff I mean non-spammy articles and blog post. A few quality backlinks to these pages from other blogs or websites will go a long way in getting good link juice to your other site pages and help add to the domain authority. You never know when and who might link to it in a blog post, but if it is not promoted and put in front of their eyes, you have little chance it will ever be linked to.

Niche Site Building Network Now Online

Wow, that week went fast. In case you missed it, Kelvin and Adam have the new home base up now and the forum is back online. There was a bit of concern following the relaunch as the forum was allowed to be publicly read without being a member. Several members voiced concern, including myself, and Kelvin then changed the forum back to private. I understand what they were wanting to accomplish, but do not think they truly knew how valuable members of the forum regarded the privacy of the inner walls. It is sort of an exclusive club and there is both valuable information as well as post people have made thinking it would only be seen by other paid members. This was quickly resolved. The great thing is that they listened to the masses.

Going forward, on next Monday, they will be asking for feedback from all members regarding what their ideal niche site builder would include. I highly suggest you pay special attention to this discussion and put in your ideas. This will help them build the perfect beast so to speak. The Monday after that, they will be starting a weekly blog and synchronizing the weekly blog post and weekly newsletter as their primary communication channels over the longer term.

In the mean time, do not wait, it could be a while before something is ready and it will need to be beta tested as well. the worst thing you can do is wait on them. Do not let anything or anyone hold you back from succeeding rioght now.

Save 25% On ReviewAzon Wordpress Plugin

It has been a while since I posted about the ReviewAzon Wordpress plugin that lets you add reviews of products listed as well as product info and other features to Amazon listings. This plugin has served me very well over the months and will only get better from now until Christmas.

Also the uplifting news about Amazon stock reaching an all time high is great press at the right time as well It shows amazon has a lot of consumer trust.

If you use the promo code WARRIORFORUMDEAL at this LINK. You will get 25% off the plugin. It will not get any better than this savings wise on this plugin.

Did My Wife Buy Underwear From You?

As much as I know about affiliate marketing and making money online, my wife is on the opposite end of the spectrum. She likes the internet for one thing, shopping. I wonder how many commissions I have missed out on through the years by her random shopping habit. She needed help this afternoon with an Excel file, so I sat down at her computer to give her a hand. I could not help but notice a few browser windows open and peeked at what she had going on. She had just bought some underwear. I had to know where she bought it from and how she got there, so she showed me. She merely searched on Google for a long termed phrase that was product specific, clicked the 3rd link that LOOKED like the best result and landed on the exact page she hoped to land on. She clicked through to buy and ended up on a site that has an affiliate program run through Commission Junction. She of course bought.

I asked her why she bought from that site, she said it looked trust worthy and they had EXACTLY what she needed at a fair price. The lesson to be learned here is that this happens everyday. Give people what they are looking for with a trust worthy site and you will make the sale. The more specific the product pages can be, the better chance you close the sale. Don't just break your underwear site down by brand, go farther. Break the underwear down by type, color and size. Be thorough.

By the way, one of you owe me that commission on those 4 pair underwear she bought.

Made For Adsense Back In Vogue

OK, not really, but I get a kick out of how everyone turns on a dime. People used to swear Adsense was the devil and should not be used. Others said it would keep your BANS site from ranking well or will get you de-indexed. Others said it would take away from your eBay earnings. Yada, yada, yada. People, Adsense never went anywhere, I have consistently used Adsense from day one of signing up many years ago. Never dumped them, never had a problem with them.

A brief history of MFA sites (Made For Adsense), people used to scrape content, build sites with duplicate content and throw up Adsense banners. Other times they would spin content where it was very hard to read and offered no value to the reader. They would quickly get these sites a slew of backlinks in link directories and rise quickly in ranking to Spam up the SERPS. People made a ton of quick cash with these, but Google quickly caught on. If the sites did not get de-indexed, the Adsense account usually got terminated. These sites had zero value to the surfer.

Fast forward to now. Regardless of what you use to monetize your sites with, your site must have value of some sorts. Especially if you intend to try to rank in the SERPS. If your site is full of great content, feel free to monetize with Adsense only. If you want to monetize with just Amazon, monetize just with Amazon. If you feel EPN is cheating you, dump them. If you think Adsense is the devil, dump them too. The bottom line is the bottom line, however I think many quickly jump ship on programs without first looking at their traffic and where it comes from and where it goes. If you do not trust a program, you will not promote it properly. Your subconscious will not let you.

In closing, great niche sites can make money regardless of the way you monetize them. Many over think this whole process. Build a great site, monetize it, promote it, cash the checks. It really is that simply. Made For Adsense is not a bad term, it just depends on what is being used as content and if it is built with the surfer in mind first.

I am off to finish my new Made For Chitika site! LOL, remember you heard that term here first.

Just Build It

It amazes me how many people get stuck on getting "ready to go" that they never get anything done. They wander around aimlessly on the internet with no goals, no game plan and read so much stuff that it scares them off into the direction of doing nothing. Most are looking for a "just add water" process of making money with niche sites. Sorry folks, it takes a little more than adding water.

When many contact me to look at their sites and why they are not earning money, it is pretty obvious what I will see ahead of time. First, they usually only have a small handful of finished sites and second, these sites are god awful thin with probably less than 1000 words of unique content on the entire site. Mostly they are just domains with affiliate links.

Do not worry about building the perfect beast, just build it. You can refine after the fact any errors or oversights you make. Everything can usually be fixed. The main thing is to get it built and by built, I mean with good original content. At least 200 words a page. Excuse my French, but Shitty sites can make money. They are everywhere, the common thread of these sites are good content, content other people link to.

If you sit around and do nothing, you will have nothing. Get off your ass and build something you can work with. Stop waiting for the just add water method, it does not exist.

CJ Wordpress Plugin Tweeks

In the CJ Wordpress plugin I mentioned yesterday, I have uncovered that you can indeed pull from more than one approved advertiser. In the Advertiser Id section of the setup section, merely separate additional advertiser id's with a comma. So it would look like this: 12345678,87654321

I have tried with up to 3 advertiser numbers thus far and it worked fine.

Another thing you can do is to change the size of the images it displays. In some of my niches, the images were distorted by the default plugin image size. To change the size, go to the Plugins page in your Wordpress admin and click edit under the CjNiche Plugin for Wordpress listing. Then go to line 60 of that code and you will see were the width and height of the image commands are. You can edit these to whatever size you need to better display the product images of that particular niche. Click update File at the bottom when done and check your work.

Free CJ Commission Junction Wordpress Plugin

I am always on the lookout for free or paid items to help me with my niche sites. A reader recently sent me a link for a free Commission Junction Wordpress plugin to check out and I have gave it a try. What a nice little free plugin it is. The setup is quite easy, but please note you will need a CJ developer key. This long string goes in the middle box of the setup. The top box is called the CJ Websiteid and this number should be your PID number for whatever site you are using under the Web site Settings tab that is found under the Account tab in your Commission Junction dashboard. The last box in the plugin setup is the Advertiser Id. You can leave this blank to search all of CJ, but you must be an approved partner for any results it finds.

Say for example you are an approved affiliate through CJ for Overstock, you would enter in the number 2626374 in that box and can have listings from their inventory only. So in essence, this is an Overstock Wordpress plugin as well. To display listings on a page or post, you enter the below call in the content area:

[cjniche keywords="+red+dress" listing="3"]

The above statement would pull 3 listings with the keyword parameters of red dress. If you have any questions about this plugin, feel free to comment.

Build A Niche Store Forum Down For A Week

Unless you missed the news, the BANS Build A Niche Store forum will be down for a week while Build A Niche Store is being incorporated into TheNicheSiteBuildingNetwork.com . The move should be completed and is planned to be back online on Monday 26th October at 12pm (GMT Time).

If you are looking for a place to chat and hang out, Sonjay has started a forum at the link below. It is suggested that you use the same ID you had on the BANS site so you will be easily recognized and approved as a member.
http://florida-web-sites.com

Changing The Header Ad Banner In Wordpress Ads Theme Template

The next change is to change the default ad banner that sits in the header file. If you log into your Wordpress admin and click Appearance and then Editor and then header.php on the right hand side, you will see the code below:

<a href="http://www.linkworth.com?a=4155" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.linkworth.com/adm/affiliate_manager/affiliate_banners/bann-36.gif" border="0"></a>

Merely replace this code with your banner of choice and link to whatever you are promoting. You can also just delete this if you want no banner at all or what to add one at a later date. Make sure to save your changes and double check that your changes took when done.

Lost A Hard Drive Today

Not much to post about today, folks. Been restoring a key hard drive that went down this morning and reorganizing everything as I put everything back together. Been long overdue. Thank god I had a ghost backup. Never trust that a hard drive will never go down at any given time. It happens and always does it at the worst time. Always back up stuff, every night. Things will be back to normal on Sunday.

Changing The Google Adsense Ads In Wordpress Ads Theme Template

To continue on with editing the Wordpress Ads Theme Template, we will address the Adsense ads that are scattered throughout the template. There are 5 files that need editing. I have listed the 5 files below that need the default Adsense of the creator changed to your own ad. Listed next to the file name is the size ad that you need to replace it with. 4 files use the 468x60 size ad and one uses the 160x600 size add. You can edit all of these files in your Wordpress dashboard by clicking Appearance and then Editor and the the matching file on the left hand side. These is a very easy process and should not take you more than 30 minutes at most.


single.php 468x60
index.php 468x60
page.php 468x60
page-archive.php 468x60
sidebar.php 160x600

Changing The Header File In Wordpress Ads Theme Template

I meant to knock this out earlier for those using the Wordpress Ads theme. It has some coding issues in the header.php file. If you have already uploaded the theme, you will want to go to your Dashboard and click on Appearance and then Editor underneath that. Then on the far right you want to click on Header (header.php). You will then want to replace the code listed below with the second set of code in this post and click Update File. This will cure some bad coding in the header of the template.

REPLACE THIS:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" <?php if (wp_version()=='21') language_attributes(); ?>>

<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="<?php bloginfo('html_type'); ?>; charset=<?php bloginfo('charset'); ?>" />
<title><?php if (is_single() || is_page() || is_archive()) { wp_title('',true); } else { bloginfo('name'); echo(' &#8212; '); bloginfo('description'); } ?></title>

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress <?php bloginfo('version'); ?>" /> <!-- leave this for stats -->
<meta name="description" content="This is 2 or 3 column Ads Theme and it is totally free for download."/>
<meta name="keywords" content="theme, template, wordpress, wordpress theme, wordpress template, beautiful theme, beautiful template, beautiful wordpress theme, beautiful wordpress template, unique wordpress theme, professional wordpress theme, unique wordpress template, unique wordpress theme"/>

<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); ?>" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> RSS Feed" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />
<link rel="pingback" href="<?php bloginfo('pingback_url'); ?>" />
<link rel="Shortcut Icon" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory');?>/images/favicon-adstheme.ico" type="image/x-icon" />

<?php wp_head(); ?>
</head>

WITH THIS:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" <?php if (wp_version()=='21') language_attributes(); ?>>

<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="<?php bloginfo('html_type'); ?>; charset=<?php bloginfo('charset'); ?>" />

<title><?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> &raquo; Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress <?php bloginfo('version'); ?>" /> <!-- leave this for stats -->

<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); ?>" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />
<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="RSS .92" href="<?php bloginfo('rss_url'); ?>" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom 0.3" href="<?php bloginfo('atom_url'); ?>" />

<link rel="pingback" href="<?php bloginfo('pingback_url'); ?>" />

<link rel="Shortcut Icon" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory');?>/images/favicon-adstheme.ico" type="image/x-icon" />

<?php wp_head(); ?>
</head>

New Project Will Be Stand Alone Platform

As was mentioned yesterday, Adam & Kelvin will be having a new reincarnation coming soon for niche site builders. I have received word that this new project will indeed be a standalone platform. Many have speculated it being a Wordpress plugin of sorts, but this is not the case. Also, it appears BANS will still be available as part of the Niche Site Building Network. So as I suggested previously, if that is your comfort level, continue building with it. Also it may be a while until you see the new platform. Do not let it stop your progress waiting on it. Either use your time to plan more sites and write content or go ahead and build with either BANS or Wordpress until the new platform is ready. The worst thing you can do is sit and do nothing.

EDITED TO ADD: Folks that is all I know at this point. I am getting a few emails from people who are asking more questions that I do not have the answers for. Price? Upgrade capabilities from BANS? Sorry, I just do not know at this point. All I know is what I posted.

EDITED TO ADD AGAIN: Please note that this is their "intent"!!! Does not mean something could not be changed going forward. Just wanted to throw out that disclaimer on their behalf and mine.

The Niche Site Building Network Coming Soon

Hopefully you received the new email from Adam and Kelvin regarding the move forward they intend to make in regards to niche site building. I had said a while ago that it should be called "Build a niche site", instead of build a niche store as the landscape changed in regards to niche site building. It appears Adam and Kelvin have some developers in place to transform the current BANS platform into a modernized platform that may well include various other affiliate programs other than EPN. I think they clearly see what they had in BANS, but really did not know how to get it to the next phase in regards to branching out from an EPN platform only. The next phase I assume will be a more inclusive aspect of niche site building that will not be limited to just EPN. That of course is just me speculation at this point.

Sure, there are a ton of things uncertain at this point and time with there direction, but I am glad to see they have decided to go forward in some sort of fashion instead of just out right selling off their baby. Will it be good? Will it be worth the wait? I suspect yes, especially if it continues to be aimed at the person that is a novice or a newbie to the business. Time will tell.

Regardless of their direction, the thing that most people lose sight of is that a platform is a platform. It is not the magic bullet that makes a niche site successful. It is how you use the platform that makes the difference and sets your site apart in the niche world. Most of us remember the 1st version of BANS, nothing but product listings and meta tags. It took the search engines by storm and literally people were making money almost over night in some shape or form. The dynamic every changing product listings made for great organic search traps. Merely getting 25 or better backlinks from link directories pointing back with your keyword phrase could soar you quickly to the top of Google in most cases. What most did not plan on was that Google soon caught onto this push button, duplicated process. To say BANS was the cause of Google algorithm changes would be ludicrous, but it certainly had to be noticed in some sort of way by Google. Google does not hate affiliate links or niche sites, they just hate sites that add little or no value to the internet.

If you are looking for the The Niche Site Building Network to be a magic bean, you will likely be disappointed, but if you are looking for perhaps a platform and education to build better niche sites, then you will be in the right place. Look for the BANS forums to be down starting as early as next week and then just watch your email or check the new site for any new movement.
NicheSiteBuilding.com

I myself look forward to see the direction they go in.

Changing The Logo In Wordpress Ads Theme Template

As promised, I will address a few things in relation to the Wordpress Ads theme template that I mentioned last week. Today we will address changing the logo in the header.

The current logo looks like the one below:








It is referenced in the style.css file on line 52.

First you will want to create your own logo in a size of 440x100 pixels and save it as a logo.gif file. If you want to change it or save it as a .jpg file with a different file name, you will need to change line 52 of the style.css file. The current statement in the styles.css file reads:

background-image: url('images/logo.gif');

If you want your logo to be mystorelogo.jpg then you would edit that line in the style.css file to read:

background-image: url('images/mystorelogo.jpg');

Upload your newly created logo to the images folder located in the AdsTheme folder located in the themes folder of your Wordpress install.

Reload your site in the browser by pressing the F5 button on your keyboard. You should then see your new logo. Let me know if you have any questions with this process in the comments section.

Next Week, Wordpress Template Week

I have had quite a few email concerning Wordpress templates since I posted a recent favorite of mine. I wanted to let everyone know that next week will be dedicated to Wordpress templates and the editing of them. I will break it up into several days and try to be as thorough as possible. Check back starting on Monday. I am starting to put a few things together now.

Saturday Around The Web October 10th

Happy Saturday everyone. I hope everyone had another fantastic week. Below is my weekly around the web links of some great post and articles I have read this week. Enjoy!

Chris Brogran has a great little post on How to Blog Almost Every Day. I live to blog everyday as this very blog shows.

Louis Gray shows Distributing Quality With Impact, Intent as far as using syndication goes.

Sage Lewis from Search Engine Watch explains why affiliate links should have a nofollow tag attached.

Matt Cutts addresses in a recent video: Which is better: an HTML site map or XML Sitemap?

Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz once again overloads your senses with a post on: Terrible SEO Advice: Focus on Users, Not Engines

Jill Whalen from High Rankings, recaps the above Fishkin post on Search Engine Land.

Name.com Offering $5.99 .com & .net Domains Today

I just saw on Twitter that Name.com is offering new domain registrations on .com and .net domains for $5.99 all day long. I have used them quite a bit myself and they are a great domain registrar. Also they offer free domain privacy on new registrations as well. I plan on picking up about 10 or so new domains myself here in a bit. The .net REALLY is a great deal as they are usually a bit higher. Do not worry about it being .net unless you are truly worried about branding. If it is a site that predominately pull organic traffic or rank traffic, .net domains are just as good as .com. Go get you a handful today at this fantastic one day price.

POP Peeper Email Notifier Client

I have a ton of email accounts that get quite a bit of usage and I do not like forwarding messages into one email address. I like to keep each account separate and monitor accordingly. For the longest time I have used ePrompter. This did the job for a number of years until recently when it stopped working with Yahoo and Gmail.

I have now come across POP Peeper and used it for a few days. Man do love it. It is easy to set up and you can color code the accounts to easily let you know what email is from what account at a quick glance. This sits down in your task bar and alerts you whenever a new message arrives. It is a huge time saver for me as well. If you monitor multiple email accounts, give this great free email notifier a try.

RIP Meta Keyword Tag

Yahoo has now officially confirmed what many of us have come to speculate already was in effect. They no longer give any relevance to the meta keyword tag. Google, Bing and Yahoo all now ignore the tag which affectionately over the years had been called the spamming tag. I myself up until recently stop using the tag after many years of filling it in as habit. Now none of us have to worry about it all. One less thing to do when optimizing a page. Thanks to sonjay from the BANS forum for providing the link. RIP Meta Keyword Tag, you wasted a ton of my time over the years.

Should You Still Build BANS Sites?

I received 2 almost duplicate emails in the last 2 hours asking whether or not BANS users should continue to build niche sites in light of Adam and Kelvin having the platform up for sale. The short answer is, yes. Why wouldn't you? If you haven't advanced to Wordpress yet or just a ton more comfortable with BANS, use it. It could be 2 weeks or 2 months until we see any new version of BANS. Even when and if it is upgraded and improved in all likelihood it will be easy to upgrade from the current platform. If not, the hardest work you would have is just rebuilding and copying over the content. Sure, depending on the amount of sites you have it will cost you some time to do this, but it will also cost you time if you sit and do nothing.

If you are truly still freaked out about all of this and want to wait, at least do something productive like planning out your next site on paper as discussed in the N1Way BANS guide and get your content written. If you still have time, head over to Wordpress.tv and start brushing up on the Wordpress platform. It is not going anywhere anytime soon that I know of.

The one thing I blogged about a little while ago is that the life of an affiliate marketer is always changing. Platforms come and go, platforms get upgraded, new affiliate programs are launched daily and current affiliate programs will always change terms sooner or later. You have to be fluid.

In closing, if you are most comfortable using BANS, then use BANS. Should any problems arise, they will be temporary ones. Do not let someone else's game plan alter yours. If you do, you are in for a long, hard road in this business. Remember, be fluid.

Build A Niche Store Platform For Sale

As you should know already, Adam & Kelvin have officially put the BANS platform up for sale on Flippa. While I have known it was going to happen for a while, I did not know when only that it would likely be soon. Adam and Kelvin as they mentioned a while ago have taken BANS as far as they want to take it. Now it is time for the right person to take it farther. I have already had a few emails asking my opinion on it and really there is not much to say. It is their baby and they are moving on to other things the last I heard. Many may think I have something to do with BANS from an employee stand point, but I merely donate my time and try to give back. Sure, I get some traffic to this blog from BANS, but this blog has never been my main stay, never will be. I build niche sites, this blog is merely an outlet to help others and keeps me conditioned to both writing and marketing.

The BANS platform is a great opportunity for someone who is well versed in PHP and affiliate product feeds. While I have considered buying it in the past, I am just not fluent enough in PHP to take that on. Also after long consideration, I it does not fit my long term goals of what I do or want to do. Whoever buys it, needs to be married to it, just like any business. Just like everyone of you should be with your niche sites. There will be a ton of bridges to get across before dime one of profit is to be made, but it is there for the taking I truly believe.

As far as me remaining a moderator, it all depends on if the new owners want to keep us. I don't know why they wouldn't, but stranger things have happened. Rest assured this does not affect me one bit. I will continue to do what I do and blog as I always have.

To Adam & Kelvin, thank you for an awesome platform. I remember the early days. BANS opened up a whole new world to me. I had been a webmaster for a long time, but rededicated my efforts to learning how to do things the CORRECT way, the MODERN way. I wish you nothing but success with all you have planned and hope I helped ease your load along the way.

Now, back to my list that I am way behind in completing today. Below is the email you should of already received.

After much deliberation BANS, N1WAY and a host of supporting domains
and project concepts have been put up for sale.

We've done as much as we can in niche site building and are looking
for an enthusiastic individual or team that wants to build on the 3
year foundation we've put together.

If you are interested in participating in the auction then you can do
so at the following url:

http://flippa.com/auctions/76177/BANS-N1WAY-Plus-Big-Bag-Of-Goodies-In-Niche-Site-Building-Market

Once the sale has been completed a final email containing details of
the new owner and any associated down time during transfer will be
sent out.

Kelvin and Adam

A Great Wordpress Template For Niche Sites

I am pretty picky when it comes to templates I use for niche sites. I have learned the cleaner the better. I do use the Arthemia theme that is suggested in the new N1WAY BANS Guide among several others. I recently found another that fits the bill as far as what I look for in a theme. The theme is called the Ads Theme and a demo can be found here. The colors are easy to change in the CSS and it has top navigation as well. It looks great with niche sites and products. Give it a try on your next site.


EDITED TO ADD: Gerry reminded me I forgot add the correct download link: http://www.eblogtemplates.com/ads-theme/

Never Be Afraid To Test New Things

I received a concerned email concerning the post I made about using the Wordpress plugin I found to move eBay listings over into the sidebar. The reader took it as giving up on EPN. That could not be the farthest from the truth. What I am doing is testing on a medium traffic site, to see if I can earn even more by putting more focus on higher paying items from another affiliate program, while not dumping eBay auctions or pushing them down past the fold. It is merely a test, something everyone should not be afraid to do. You should never be afraid to test new things as there is sometimes a better way of doing things and improving income. You do not know until you try it. If my EPN earnings drop on that site and are not replaced with MORE earnings from the other affiliate program, than the test failed and everything will be put back in it's original place. If I ever think I find a better way through the testing, I tell my readers. Many test I do, fail. which is good because I know more things that do not work.

Saturday Around The Web October 3rd

Happy Saturday everyone. I hope you had as good of week as I have had. My list is small this week as far as links go, but full of other links to keep you busy. Most of what I worked on this week was Wordpress related, thus quite a few links are related to Wordpress. Here you go.

I could just posted this one link and it would of kept you busy. Here are 69 Tools to Improve Your Website.

Wordpress security is a must and here is a great blog post on how to keep Wordpress secure.

I am always looking at great Wordpress plugins. This is the newest WordPress Plugin Releases for 10/02.

Lorelle VanFossen of Lorelle on WordPress discusses challenges and opportunities in the tag and category structure of WordPress blogs and shares some tips for keeping yours organized and effective in this video from Wordcamp Portland 2009.

Widget Context Wordpress Plugin

I am setting up some testing on a few sites in which I will be using this Widget Context Wordpress Plugin to show Ebay listings in the sidebar for each different product page. Each page will have it's own tailored product listings depending on what product is being pushed on each page. I have not set it up yet, but I do believe it will fit my needs. Regardless, the plugin has a number of uses that I will explore as well. The whole idea is to put more focus on selling higher profit items via a few other affiliate programs in the main page portion, without pushing the auctions down past the fold and losing visibility. If anyone has used this plugin, please comment below. Or you might have seen a better plugin to do the same thing. I will report back on this soon.

Here is some more on what this plugin can do.

Great Variety Of Niche Affiliates Under Two Roofs

I wanted to point you to two networks under two affiliate programs that have a wide variety of stores to market for. The first group is affiliated with Pepperjam and are run by the Hayneedle company. Hayneedle was formally called NetShops. Here is the list of Hayneedle run sites.

The second group of is affiliated with ShareASale and are run by CSN Stores. Here is the list CSN run stores.

As you can see this are just a small part of both Pepperjam and ShareASale, a very small part, but they offer a great variety of stores to sell for or do some niche research on.