Much to my annoyance I was subjected to a site hacker attack on two of my newer Commission Ritual websites today, I'm not 100% sure how long they had been hacked for since I haven't checked either of the sites since the beginning of last week. It looks to me like they carried out some kind of SQL injection attack. The fix was simple enough, just a case of navigating into my site via FTP and replacing the affected files but it still created around an extra 1 hours work due to the fact I then had to go through and change my usernames and passwords all over again. How annoying!!

The reason the hacker was able to hack these two particular sites is simple, I hadn't secured them to my Read the rest of this entry »

Today, I just wanted to give you the heads up on a couple of plugins I use to make my life a lot easier when putting together a brand new Wordpress website.

There are two problems/issues I always seem to face when putting together a new Wordpress affiliate website. For example, if you look at my Mallet Putters website you can see that there is a huge amount of content on that site which I added and scheduled during the site build of just a few hours. The first problem was that adding that amound of content using the 'Add New Post' method would literally take hours to do. The second problem is that when I am working through these large site builds I almost always end up adding posts where I meant to add pages or vice versa which can be a real nightmare when you realise 5 or more of the posts you added were meant to be pages.

There are a couple of fantastic plugins I use which have enabled me to overcome both of these issues. Read the rest of this entry »

In the last post you'll remember that I spoke about using the FREE keyword tools available to you, such as Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery and the Google Keyword Tool to find article ideas for your niche website. In this post I just want to briefly touch on the main things to consider before pursuing one of these phrases.

Before you go after any keyword or phrase you are going to want to ask yourself a couple of questions before you spend the time trying to get your site to rank well for it:

1. What are the searchers intentions?
2. How will you 'monetize/convert' a visitor to a sale?
3. How well can you rank for your chosen phrase and is it worth it?

What are the searchers intentions?

This is probably the most important out of all factors to consider. If the person searching types a phrase which demonstrates no commerical intent whatsoever then there is going to be very little point in targeting it. By using our 'query' keywords and 'buying' keywords in the last post to search for a target phrase we should have been able to identify potential phrases which do offer some degree of commercial intent. Taking the phrase "how to buy a hybrid golf club" as an example, this phrase recieves around 20-30 daily searches, depending on which tool you use, which is a pretty decent volume Read the rest of this entry »

As we all know content is king, there is no denying that adding fresh, relevant content to your website will help with your rankings in the search engines providing it is done correctly. But one thing which people often struggle with is what content topics to use on their website, I know this is something I used to struggle with when I first started out online. But it doesn't have to be as hard as you think.

There are essentailly two things you need your content to have and they are:

1. Relevance to your reader and to the theme of your niche website
2. A demand for that content in the organic searches

This sort of content isn't at all hard to create and can be even easier to rank well for providing you know where to look for the right keyword phrases. Two excellent tools I love to use to find article ideas for my website are the FREE Wordtracker keyword tool and the FREE Keyword Discovery tool. Both of these tools generate some great long tail keyword phrases which can give you some great ideas for articles, better still because the phrases are longtail and very specific they are often very easy to rank for. Read the rest of this entry »

As you will notice by the date of my last post it has been around 3 weeks since I posted here and the main reason for that is really because I have been so busy preparing a new and exciting product for release very very soon. Testing, tweaking and simply putting this product through its paces has literally taken up the last month of my working and none working life but it’s certainly been worth it.

So what product am I talking about then? Well, for those of you who are subscribed to my list you will have had a 48 hour head start but for those of you who are not then this may be the first time you've heard anything about it. The product we have been working on for the past few months is something called Read the rest of this entry »

As we all know there are several ways for you to build an affiliate website, you can hand code it, build in in a CMS (content management system) like Joomla or Wordpress or use a built for purpose affiliate builder such as BANS, Storestacker, Multiprofit Websites, Blog profitz etc. When you are considering building an affiliate site which promotes Amazon products you need to consider the tools available to enable you to fully utilize the Amazon affiliate program.

Whilst I've used Joomla and a lot of the built for purpose site builders my favorite tool always has been Wordpress and it's the tools which integrate into Wordpress that I want to briefly cover today. It's important to point out that a tool is a tool, they won't research, build or promote your website for you and they certainly won't be the deciding factor in allowing you to succeed or fail. For this very reason I currently only use 2 Wordpress based tools which enable me to promote Amazon products. But after some research I did find a lot more which will also allow you to integrate Amazon products into Wordpress.

Read the rest of this entry »

I just wanted to let those of you who still use Build A Niche Store know that I've created a new BANS theme pack which you can download for FREE right here. If I'm honest I quite enjoy putting these templates together so it wasn't much of a hardship.

The theme pack consists of 4 main color variations which you can use on as many sites as you wish. These themes also come with a copy of the html used for the home page layout which you can see in the image preview below, perfect for your review style websites.

These themes are coded to W3C standards and there shouldn't be any issues but I did put them together quite late last night so if you do find any problems them please feel free to let me know via the comments section below and I'll rectify any issues. Also if you have any requests with regards to other versions of the theme then once again please feel free to comment below. Read the rest of this entry »

As I mentioned in my previous post, Amazon Associates has remained overshadowed for a while now by eBay's larger and more popular affiliate program, however due to many changes over the last 12 months all of this is likely to change.

The new QCP structure from eBay has alienated A LOT of affiliates and if you read around the internet on the large networks, blogs and forums (eBay's being one of them) you can get some idea of what a lot of affiliates are currently thinking. At present around 30% of affiliates are reporting that they are seeing increases in their earnings but a large percentage of affiliates are seeing a significant drop in earnings, to the point that many of them have vowed to drop eBay as an income stream other than for their 'no work' sites. Whilst I'm not one of these affiliates I have significantly reduced the amount of sites I am building targeted purely at ePN. The fact is though that these affiliates will look for the next best thing, whilst Adsense or Chitika can provide a steady stream, neither exactly lend themselves to the product based niche affiliate website model. This is where Amazon comes in. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the next few weeks I want to write a series of posts concentrated around the Amazon affiliate program. Originally I was going to cover this in a separate blog because it's so focused around Amazon but I have since changed my mind and opted to cover it here, I hope this doesn't alienate any of my readers.

I have spent the last 3 out of the 5 years I have been working online building and developing product based niche affiliate websites in conjunction with one affiliate program or another. Like many people I used eBay for around 25% of these sites and have made a lot of money utilizing their affiliate program as a monetization method. But one program for me which I still feel is underutilized is the Amazon affiliate program and there have been several reasons for this Read the rest of this entry »

16/10/09- UPDATED 1.7.5 - NOW INCLUDES CLICK TIMESTAMP METER READ MORE BELOW

Understanding your ePN stats and being able to make changes accordingly could be difficult enough at the best of times but now that ePN have changed their commission structure, the way that you interpret your reports has also changed. Personally, one of the major flaws with the new program, other than the program itself, is the layout of the ePN dashboard. The fact that you have to navigate in and out of screens quite honestly makes things a lot harder than they have to be. Alan Lewis has come up with a solution for this in the form of a Wordpress plugin known as PiggyBank.

Piggybank is not a new plugin by any means, it's been around for a while now but since the change of the ePN commission structure from % to EPC this plugin has really come into it's own. What this plugin allows you to do is see all of your important report data in one place, helping you to better understand which sites are failing and which ones aren't. I was lucky enough to beta test the new PiggyBank and I've personally spent the last 24 hours playing around with the latest version (1.7.3) which I think is fantastic. Read the rest of this entry »

Building a healthy portfolio of product based niche affiliate websites has been dubbed the N1Way to make money online. However, building a portfolio which is large enough to bring you in a significant amount of income is something which the majority of people struggle to achieve on their own. That said, it's entirely possible to build a portfolio of websites on your own which consistently bring you in enough money to work from home it's just going to take you significant longer to do so.

Outsourcing is a good way of speeding up this process and it's covered fully as a step in the N1Way e-guide. The entire process of site building can be outsourced from niche research right thought to actually putting the site together and submitting it to the first search engine, however outsourcing costs money! Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last couple of months I have been following the N1Way guide to put together several new websites, around 10 inf act, all are doing well so far and fitting in with the overall plan. You may remember that Mark over at N1Way Guide was kind enough to give away one of his Rank Spanker reports completely free on his website. This 'blueprint' contained full recommendations on a complete site structure including the niche itself, domain names, reviews and guides. I was lucky enough to snap up those domain names and build my first N1Way site and thanks to Mark, I had it completed a lot quicker than my other 9.

So without further a due, here is the site I completed first using N1Way and I wanted you to be able take a look for yourselves. The site was built around the niche of mallet putters. Read the rest of this entry »