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 »

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 »

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 »

It's been a while since I last posted about the BANS site build experiment so I wanted to write a post to let you all know how it's coming along.

For those of you who haven't been following then I will quickly bring you up to date; I wanted to look at and answer the question of 'Is BANS Really Dead?', this has basically involved me researching and building a BANS website from scratch over the last month and so far here's what's happened.

Updates Since I Last Posted

Slight Change of Direction

The site has come on quite a bit since I last posted, I have actually been a little delayed in getting the site completed mainly because I took a slightly different direction with it and so I had to do some additional research into the niche in order to get the site how I really wanted it. Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, so the long awaited product from the creators of Build A Niche Store is finally here and I have had chance to work my way through it over the last 24 hours and it's truly been an enjoying read.

I have been building niche product based affiliate websites online now for the last 3 years and as many of you know my first experiences were with BANS. I made a lot of mistakes with BANS but from those mistakes I was able to learn an awful lot, which has enabled me to have the success I have had with my own network of sites. So with that said I actually bought the guide more out of curiosity than through necessity, but I am very glad I did!
Read the rest of this entry »

The release of the new 9 step guide titled 'The Number 1 Way to Make Money Online' has yet again been delayed, this time we are assured that the final release date has been set as 8am EST. I understand the marketing tactic of delaying the release date to gain more interest but you also have to be extremely careful that you don't loose interest, in this case I think they may have ruffled a few feathers but will it affect their sales? Probably not.
Read the rest of this entry »

Well it's been two weeks now since I decided to build a new BANS site to answer the question 'Is BANS really Dead?' because a lot of people have been asking it. So I just wanted to write a short post to let you know how I've been getting on.

So far I haven't been able to progress as far as I would have liked because of one distraction or another, however this weekend I have really made good progress with the site and it's starting to take shape and look the way I want it to.  Below I have detailed exactly what I have done to the site so far:

BANS Site Build: Week 1 Update

Around three days after I made my first post announcing that I was going to build a new BANS website I decided to register a completely new domain name rather than one which I had lying around, my reason for this was so that I had a domain name with no traffic and which wasn't indexed. So on the 23rd of June I registered my new domain name, the name is a one word .com domain name just six letters long and fits perfectly with my chosen niche. Read the rest of this entry »

My first proper affiliate website was built using the platform known as Build A Niche Store (aka BANS). I say proper because I had actually toyed around with iFrames and Amazon aStores for a while before that, along with associateomatic, but all in all I didn't really know what I was doing and had little success with either of the latter. BANS was where I first started to learn how to make money through the eBay Affiliate Program and from that point of view I owe a lot of my basic knowledge to buying BANS back when it was first released, albeit somewhat different from the platform we see in front of us today.

I currently have no BANS sites left as the few remaining ones had 'died' off and just weren't making any money and so from then onwards I stopped using BANS. You may also have heard about BANS V3.0 sites being de-indexed from Google for....well little or no reason whatsoever other than the fact the Google algorithm does not like affiliate sites, or at least thin affiliate sites anyway. Read the rest of this entry »

For those of you who have been waiting for this I just wanted to let you know that phpZon has finally been released to the public as Version 1.0 as of this evening.

phpZon V1.0 comes in two forms, there is a Wordpress plugin release and an API release. The API version allows you to build a website based around the Amazon affiliate program, it gives you a huge amount of flexibility but also is not for beginners.

The version for use with Wordpress comes as a simple and easy to install plugin which allows you to add Amazon listings directly into your Wordpress pages and posts using a single line of code in the same way as you would with phpOStock or phpBay .

Read the rest of this entry »

First of all I would like to say a big thank you to those of you who wished me well after my accident, I am feeling a lot better than I was, I still feel quite bruised and I have to rest a lot but otherwise I'm doing okay. There is a lesson to be learnt I'm sure, don't try to keep fit :).

Again, another quick post today just to update you and let you know that phpOStock Pro is now back on sale and fully compatible with Overstock's new affiliate program over at CJ.com. Remember that you can try our plugin completely FREE by downloading phpOStock Lite which is available by visiting the sales page. The Lite version doesn't have as many features as the Pro version but it will allow you do add a few products to your store and give it a test run completely FREE, we also recommend that you download phpOStock Lite and use it on the site you are applying to the Overstock.com program with.

I have set up a demo site over at www.phpOStock.com/demo which allows you to see the plugin in action, you can get a feel of what the plugin allows you to do.

We will be introducing the new features as we go along and trickling them into the plugin's development but if there is anything specific you want to see please let us know and we will see what we can do.

For those of you who have previously purchase phpOStock Pro then you need to be aware that there have been some changes to the external template structure, unfortunately due to the changes Overstock implemented this was un-avoidable. It basicallymeans that any modifications you have already done to your external templates will need to be reflected in the new templates. If there had been a way to avoid this then we would have but unfortunately there wasn't.

For those of you who haven't tried out the light version of our phpOStock plugin for Wordpress, which is completely FREE, then I recommend you do so today! With the light version you can still try out the plugin and earn commissions from Overstock.com without having to pay a penny.

Currently the OVerstock.com affiliate program is run through Linkshare.com but this will only be the case for the next few weeks or so. At present Overstock.com are in the process of moving their affiliate program through to Comission Junction which I am reliably informed is due to happen at some point this week. During the change over there will obviously be a period where your Linkshare links will remain active whilst Overstock.com 'settle in' over at CJ.com. But what does this mean for phpOStock? Essentially it will mean that eventually the links through to OVerstock.com from Linkshare will no longer work which is why in a way the movement of Overstock to CJ.com is going to be of benefit to you, but why is that?

During the transition myself and Alan Lewis will be working to get the plugin updated in conjunction with the new Overstock links generated through CJ but what we have also decided to do is introduce some really cool updates into the plugin at the same time. The main updates are going to be:

1) Being able to post customer ratings next to products
2) Being able to post customer reviews next to products
3) Having cloaked search engine friendly URL's
4) The introduction of pagination - May come in the next version

I think you'll agree that these are going to be some pretty cool additions to the plugin. In the meantime as I have already said, get the FREE phpOStock Lite plugin and give it a try, afterall what have you got to lose - it's completely FREE!! You can get it here: www.phpOStock.com .

If there is anything in particular you want to see in the plugin, in addition to the things mentioned above, then feel free to comment here or contact me via my support desk.