CJ Niche Store Wordpress Plugin Search Results Template Mod

While browsing the PHPBay forum, I came across an interesting mod you can make while using the CJ Niche Store Wordpress Plugin to your Search Results page (search.php) in your Wordpress template to show items from Commission Junction based on search terms a surfer uses. The code below will go in place of everything between the <div class="postarea"> and closing </div> tag. It will of course differ from template to template that are using with Wordpress, but the main code piece is below.



Here's <? echo $_GET["s"]?> for sale at YOUR STORE NAME HERE.
<p>
<?php
function cjnichesearch($term) {
$keywords = $term;
$text .= '[cjniche keywords="'.$keywords.'" listing="10"]';
echo do_shortcode($text);
}
cjnichesearch($_GET["s"]);
?></p>

Convert Your Foreign Traffic With Geo BANS

If you are a BANS user, you might want to pay close attention. Whatever country you are in, you are likely getting some form of foreign traffic. Depending on what niche you are in, you might get more in one niche versus the other. If you have a US store for example, you are likely only showing US eBay ads and if you get a UK surfer, odds are you will not be converting them via EPN. BANS user Tao has a great fix for this problem and it is called GEO BANS. In just a few easy steps, you can have your BANS store Geo target ads from different eBay platforms for whatever country your surfer hails from. This will give you a greater chance at converting the foreign surfer. Tao has addressed all 248 possible countries that can be detected and assigned them all to their nearest eBay country listings. For the price of a couple of pizzas, this mod will pay for itself in no time flat.

I have personally tried this out myself and notice a difference in more earnings, all from foreign surfers I was missing converting before. I have seen the benefits first hand on geo targeting my traffic and i think you will as well.

Here is a PDF on the complete rundown of GEO BANS. Tell Tao I sent you when you order.

IE6 Transparent PNG Fix For New BANS Templates

OK, we have all seen the new BANS templates with the transparent PNG images that gives Internet Explorer 6 fits. There is a workaround or at least a livable fix I have found that at least makes the site look decent in IE6.

the fix home page can be found here.

Download this zip file to your harddrive.

Copy and paste the below code in front of the last </head> tag in your header.php file.

<!--[if lt IE 7]>
<script type="text/javascript" src="unitpngfix.js"></script>
<![endif]-->

Upload the unitpngfix.js file to the root of your site.

Upload the clear.gif image file to the images folder.

Reload your site in IE6 and see if you are now seeing color where once was clear. If you do not see that it is fixed, open the unitpngfix.js file in a text editor and make sure all the paths are correct. Make sure it points to the image folder and file that you uploaded the clear.gif image file to.

lastly you should urge all your friends, enemies, pastor, ex wives, mistresses and anyone else that they should upgrade from IE6 to IE8 or make the jump to Firefox. Coders are caring less and less about Internet Explorer 6 as it is a farce of a browser.

Build A Niche Store Google Sitemap Errors

If you are using Google webmasters tools (and you should be), you may have noticed getting some errors with your sitemaps the last few days. Build A Niche Store creates it's own sitemap on the fly. You can see your own sitemap at http://yoursitename.com/sitemap.xml if you set up your store in the root folder. What Google seems to be throwing errors on is the fact that the auto generated sitemap gives a priority of 1 to every page. Google does not seem to like this now. Below is a little more on priority from sitemaps.org.

The priority of this URL relative to other URLs on your site. Valid values range from 0.0 to 1.0. This value does not affect how your pages are compared to pages on other sites—it only lets the search engines know which pages you deem most important for the crawlers.

The default priority of a page is 0.5.

Please note that the priority you assign to a page is not likely to influence the position of your URLs in a search engine's result pages. Search engines may use this information when selecting between URLs on the same site, so you can use this tag to increase the likelihood that your most important pages are present in a search index.

Also, please note that assigning a high priority to all of the URLs on your site is not likely to help you. Since the priority is relative, it is only used to select between URLs on your site.

You can edit the priority to each and every page to default by opening the sitemap.php file you have on your harddrive from the latest BANS download and browse down to the bottom until you find:

function sitemap($cat_url, $update) {
echo '<url>';
echo '<loc>'.URL_PATH.'/'.$cat_url.'</loc>';
echo '<changefreq>'.$update.'</changefreq>';
echo '<priority>1</priority>';
echo '</url>';

You can then change the number 1 in the priority section to 0.5 it will then look like below.

function sitemap($cat_url, $update) {
echo '<url>';
echo '<loc>'.URL_PATH.'/'.$cat_url.'</loc>';
echo '<changefreq>'.$update.'</changefreq>';
echo '<priority>0.5</priority>';
echo '</url>';

Sonjay and Bob also have fixes in this thread for those that want to designate different priority numbers to certain pages. I am currently split testing these.

Overall both these fixes are probably not of HUGE importance, but any time Google flashes red letters at me, I try to sort them out. Perhaps in future BANS releases there will be an option to easily set the priority of each page and have it show in the sitemap.

Powered By Build A Niche Store

You probably have already figured out what this post is about, but I am going to post it the rest anyway. The little link at the bottom of 90% of the Build A Niche Stores out there can cost you. First a mere search in Google for "powered by build a niche store" as of today brings up 559,000 search results. This means it is very easy to track down your store for fellow niche store builders or even competitor non BANS users. If you have a heavy hitting producing store this is inviting being copied and outranked by a more experienced webmaster. Secondly, in all of my time building BANS stores I have had much better success promoting the BANS software through my own make money blogs. Even this blog makes a handful of sales a month. If someone is coming to your niche store to buy an item associated with your niche, odds on they will not even notice the link. Thirdly this is the last anchor link on most stores and should be used to point to your own site to with solid keyword anchor text to fortify with the SERPs what your store is about. If you are still headstrong about linking to BANS, I highly suggest changing the wording or using a banner in one of the sidebar boxes. So take my advice and lets make the results in Google go down by next update time.

EPN Report Tracker For Your BANS Store

Sonjay from the Build A Niche Store forum has provided a great tool for reading your EPN reports for your BANS stores. You can run this own your own server and it will give you the peace of mind that your data will stay only with you. This is great for tracking your EPN eBay sales.

Monitor Your Niche Store Server

As promised, I will show you how to monitor your Build A Niche Store server changes. Let me first say that this tutorial is based on you hosting your BANS stores on Hostgator. The script can be cgi script can be modified for any server, but I will cover the installation for Hostgator.

First you will need to create a directory in your top level of your server named "scripts". Not in your public_html directory, but in your root of your server. Next in the directory of scripts create another directory named "custom".

You will next need to download these 2 files. directories.txt and PWSmonitorchanges.txt to your hard drive.

Open up directories.txt and change the word username to whatever your Hostgator username is. Save the file back to your harddrive.

Next open up the file PWSmonitorchanges.txt and look for the 3 entries below:

$sendto_email = 'You ';

$sender_email = 'You ';

$path = "/home/username/scripts/custom";

The first 2 entries are your email address where you want the emails sent when changes are made on your server.

The last entry is the path, change the word username to your Hostgator username.

After these edits have been made save the file back to your harddrive as PWSmonitorchanges.cgi not PWSmonitorchanges.txt

Next you want to upload both of these files directories.txt and PWSmonitorchanges.cgi to your custom folder which is in the scripts folder you created. Next you want to chmod the PWSmonitorchanges.cgi file to 700. The script and directories.txt should now be installed.

Next you need to create a cron job that will run this script at whatever interval you choose. I suggest every 6 hours. Log into your cPanel of your Hostgator account and click on Cron jobs and then click on Standard. Copy the below string into the command box, but change the word username to your Hostgator username.

/usr/bin/perl /home/username/scripts/custom/PWSmonitorchanges.cgi

underneath that you can select how often to run it. Like I said I would click Every Six Hours, Every Day, Every Weekday, Every Month. When done, click Save Crontab.

That is it, now every time you are anyone or an error happens it will email you any changes to any files made on any sites on your server. It will be normal to see some error logs pop up in the report, but you are looking for any unauthorized file changes or file uploads that YOU did not make. This will also track all of the changes you make as well. I hope I have explained this well enough for you and it should be simple to uninstall should you feel you do not need it.

The script comes courtesy of Premier Website Solutions.

EDIT

One of the blog readers left a great comment I will add here:

Thanks Mike!

The cron job can be set for every 6 hours as stated, or any frequency you want, BUT make sure you also change the variable:
$minutes = 15;
in the script to the same.

If minutes is left at 15 and cron is set to run every 6 hours, it means every 6 hours the script will look for files altered within the last 15 minutes, so it would miss anything altered more than 15 minutes and less than 6 hours ago. Miss pretty much everything. ;-)

New search box in your niche store

If you have ever wanted to move your search box to the 3rd column in the 3 column template, this is how you do it:

I suggest backing up your frontcontrol.php file first in case you want to go back to the original file in the future.

Then open frontcontrol.php in notepad and replace the searchside function with this code posted in this thread:
http://www.buildanichestore.com/members/viewtopic.php?p=29581#29581

save and ftp your new frontcontrol.php file back to your server.

Find the following piece of code inside your styles.css file:

Code:

.searchform { padding:0; margin:0; width:390px; }

And change it to:

Code:

.searchform { padding:0; margin:0; width:143px; }

Also change search select to 200px

#search select {
width: 200px;
}

Delete search();?> from your header.php. Open your footer.php and find this line:

Sponsored Links

Directly underneath that add this code like this:

Sponsored Links>

searchside();?>