Stop Trying To Be Ebay & Amazon, Because Your Not

I was asked via email to take a look at a site done with Wordpress, PHPBay and PHPZon this morning. The site was very attractive and was laid out very nicely. The main problem was that it was fluffed with regurgitated content and still very thin content wise. What original content WAS there, was not enough to offset everything else. The site was merely a mirror of eBay and Amazon.

Let us suppose the site does make a sale or two, is there a reason for the surfer to ever return? In this case probably not. The art of building great niche sites has evolved. Every where you look now, Wordpress sites integrated with the two Wade plugins or some form of the plugins exist. You MUST stand out from the crowd, not only to rank, but to engage the surfer. You are not eBay or Amazon, so stop trying to be.

Saturday Around The Web June 13th

We will start with an interesting question that surfaced on the BANS forum about capitalization and search in Google. I will not point to thread as there is a ton of bickering going on in it and it has moved far off of subject. However, I came across an article from Search Engine Land by Barry Schwartz on Google search results based on the case sensitivity. The article is now nearly a year old, but you should be able to draw your own conclusions on this.

If you are a Facebook user, hopefully you nailed down your username for your friendly URL last night. I personally stayed up late to make sure I got the ones I needed for my accounts. Here is the URL once logged into Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/username/.

Came across a great article on an innovation lesson from childhood about multi tasking. It is short and to the point.

Twitter has begun to launch it's verified accounts process. It is only for high profile people to start with, but is the beginning stage hopefully to reduce some fraud and spam in the near future as Twitter is becoming a mine field of spam as of late.

Speaking of micro blogging, Google is in the process of launching a microblogging search engine, soon. Personally I would like to see them better filter their own blog search engine better to weed out spam, before tackling this.

Finally thanks for all of the feedback on the blog redesign. I had a few emailed questions about where to find good Blogger templates for Blogspot blogs. Blogger posted about this themselves recently. They have some great resources for Blogger themes listed.

If you are a coder and want to find and fix my missing div tags, I will pay the first person who comes up with the fix 20 bucks via PayPal. I just do not have the time to crawl through it myself as I have many more important task that need attention. You can see the problem first hand on individual post pages that have short post. The two sidebars do not stay floated on the right, but instead drop down under the post body itself. Use my contact page to let me know if you have a fix.

If Building Niche Sites Was Your Job, Would You Be Fired?

Pretty profound question, but one you should ask yourself on a daily basis. Like it or not, this is work, hard work. If you do not work at it and treat it like you own it, you will not be rewarded. The best thing about niche site building is the fact that you can can give yourself a raise every day. You have complete control of your actions. You set your own schedule and answer to yourself. If you treat it like a hobby or a sideline business, you will be paid accordingly. It is very very easy to catch paralysis by analysis in this business and your production will grind to a standstill. Do not be that person. As you go into this weekend, make the decision to treat your sites like a business, a fortune 500 company that you run, where millions of people are affected with every move you make and every task you undertake. To succeed in niche site building, you need to be striving to be the authority on your niche. SEO, link building and promotion can all be learned over time. Your authority will speak louder than you can even imagine. Tons of people make a ton of money on the web and get tons of natural traffic because they have great sites, not because they are the master at SEO or link building.

Is 64 Cents A Day Too Much To Build A Better Niche Blog?

I just purchased the new ebook from Darren Rowse called 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. You should recognize his name as the author of ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income. The new ebook takes you through 31 days of task to help revitalize your niche blog. He uses a well laid out format for newbies to veterans alike. The investment is a minimal 64 cents per day when you break it down.





Who is this Workbook for?

This ebook is for bloggers at different stages of their blogging including:

• those who have just started a blog but who don’t know what to do next
• those who have had a blog for a while but it’s stalled in its growth
• bloggers with bloggers block and lacking inspiration

I HIGHLY suggest this ebook if you can afford it. You will not be disappointed.

A Little More On HubPages

I received a few emails on my Hubpages post I made a few days ago and wanted to clarify a few things for those who are thinking of using it. First, yes it is free to use. Just make sure you follow the rules. Second question I received was asking if you can really make money with Hubpages? I certainly do and only been at it for a month or so, since re-acquainting myself with it. The key is writing good pages targeted around a keyword phrase and exploit it. These pages rank real well because of their authority, so within minutes of publishing a page, you could be on page 1 of Google. The key is the keyword phrase targeting. Another question I got was for me to explain the scoring of the Hubpages and the author rating. If you just do a little digging, it is not hard to find the answers to these questions.

I am not going to dwell much more on them, but if it interest you, you should read everything starting here and you will get a much clearer picture of what they are and how to create great hubs. If you rush right in and start without reading, you will likely get frustrated and quite. As my dad always said, read the dam directions, son.

Another Facelift For Build A Niche Store Blog

Well, it has been almost a full year since I gave my blog a well needed re-design. I was going to wait until post #600, but some images went AWOL so I decided now was as good of time as any.

I would like to take the time to thank eBlog Templates for the PassionDuo Red Blogger Template. It served me very well for the year. Now I moved on to the Revolution Two Church theme by Brian Gardner. It was converted for the Blogger platform by Bloganol dot com. There are quite a few tweeks I still need to accomplish to fit my SEO and look needs, but I think this one will serve me well for a while. after a few modifications, I will see how it performs and will likely keep it for at least a year.

Let me know what you think of the new design thus far.

Don't Forget About Hubpages

Hubpages can be very aggravating for a new user. What aggravates them most about it is their failure to understand how to properly use it. If you rush right in thinking you can backlink directly to your niche sites, you are not understanding the process. Your first few hubs, should be those with no links out. Consider them one page websites that are focused around a keyword phrase. You can monetize it with Adsense, EPN and Amazon, but you should practice a few hub pages to understand how to use it properly and better both your hubber score and your hub page score. Once you get the hang of it, it is useful for both earning income directly from the hub page and getting link juice passed to your niche sites. When you do start mixing in links to your own sites, make sure you are linking out to some sites you do not own as well. Read through all of the tutorials, you will get a better understanding on how hubpages are designed to work. I personally try to add 2 hubpages a week myself. The more you do, the better you will learn to target the keyword phrases and earn money within the hubpages system. Do not be afraid to build backlinks to these pages either, as they rank very well in Google with a few well crafted backlinks. Understand HOW to use it and you will make money using it.