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!
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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.
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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 .

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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.

If you are like me then the part of the site building you hate is getting all the initial installation and setup done ready to build the actual affiliate site and get things moving. I have been testing a using a neat little plugin called WP-Cloner which in a nut shell completely eliminates the time it takes to create new WordPress affiliate sites.

So what does it allow you to do?

The plugin basically does what it says on the tin; it allows you to completely clone almost every aspect of your WordPress blog. I know some of you will be asking why you would want to, well here's why:

1) Many people like to build their WordPress affiliate site away from their actual intended domain name and get things all setup before actually announcing the site.

2) If you have built a WordPress site before you will know how many plugins there are to choose from which can help enhance your site's performace, such as the All in One SEO plugin for example. However, when I build a standard WordPress e-commerce style affiliate site there is always a set of standard plugins which I use along with a main theme, main permalink settings and a few other things. Whilst it is not hard to set a site up initially, it can be quite time consuming, especially if you are setting up more than one.

The plugin gives you complete control of what you want to clone over to your new site and what you don't with a simple checkbox interface. Here are a few of the main things which you can clone below:

WordPress Settings - To include the following:
- General
- Writing
- Reading
- Discussion
- Media
- Privacy
- Permalinks
- Misc
- Active Plugins
- Active Theme
- Other Settings

WordPress Content - To include the following:
- Posts, pages & attachments
- Links
- Comments
- Categories
- Users

WordPress Files - To include the following:
- Core Files
- Plugins
- Themes
- Uploads

Other Files - To include any other files inside your /public_html directory of the site to be cloned.

How does it work?

It's really simple to use, simply add in the master site details which you wish to clone, you then go ahead and add in the details of all the sites you wish to clone too, click clone and within a few seconds your master site, along with all of the specified settings, have been cloned and you are ready to get to work on your new sites.

What do you need for the plug-in to work?

When I am using the plugin I install a copy of WordPress onto the site(s) I am cloning to which using fantastico takes around 30 seconds. You will also need spare MySQL database for the plugin to work off.

My thoughts:

Overall I think it's a great little plugin and it will save you a lot of time if you are setting up a few WordPress affiliate sites or if you want to have a base copy of the WordPress affiliate site settings you want to appear in all of your future sites, this is particuarly useful with WordPress plugins and basic settings.

Installation:

Installation of the plugin is done onto one domain. I have it set inside a sub directory of a test site I have knocking around and when I am building a new site I simply run the WP Cloner and within a few seconds my new site is ready to build on.

The installation process is not completely simple for newbies as you will need to change a few file permissions and create a database from your cpanel, this isn't hard but if you haven't done it before then it maybe more difficult at first.

Lastly, be very careful when you are using this pluign, once you clone a site you cannot undo it, therefore don't do what I did the first time I used it and clone in the wrong direction, overwriting the site I wanted to clone from. It's always worth double checking your settings before you clone and also ensuring that you have a backup of your WordPress database to hand. If you are building multiple sites then backups are something you should be making regularly anyway.

Read More Or Buy It Here

The New Search To Post Plugin

Alan Lewis released his new version of the Search to Post plugin for phpBay last week, it has a few new features which have made the plugin even better than it was before.

For those of you who have never used phpBay or Alan's Search to Post plugin then you really are  missing out. phpBay is a WordPress plugin developed by Wade Wells which basically allows you to display listings from eBay directly in your WordPress pages, posts and sidebar, you then earn comissions through the eBay affiliate program. Here is one of my sites using phpBay and Search to Post, feel free to try it out but please make it relevant to the site:

www.bestpricebeads.com

phpBay is a fantastic plugin and combined with WordPress it makes for a very powerful affiliate site builder which can bring you in a decent affiliate income. However, one of the downsides to the plugin was the fact that there was no easy way to allow customers to search your site for eBay results, in order to do this you needed to add custom code into your theme's search form. The Search to  Post plugin not only solved this problem but it went one step further. When a visitor enters a keyword string into your search box, the plugin automatically adds a brand new page or post (you specify which) onto your site, and loads this page for the visitor. This new page contains some text (which you can also specify), as well as some phpbay auctions for whatever the visitor searched for. You can choose to display links to these pages/posts on your site as you would with any other.

Updates in this Version

Update 1

The first and perhap biggest change to this plugin is the fact that it no longer depends on having phpBay installed to use it. The plugin will now work with any of the following installed: phpBay, phpOStock or phpZon. If you choose to have all three installed then when a customer searches on your site they will be presented with a page of listings from eBay, Amazon and Overstock, a very powerful and useful feature.

Update 2

If a user clicks the search button on your site without entering some search terms then a page or post will not be created automatically and they will be redirected back to the page they were on previously, preventing you from having useless empty pages or posts on your site.

Update 3

The old "body text" field which existed before in the configuration screen has now been removed and replaced with a similar templating system to phpOStock. There is a very powerful external templating feature which includes and external style sheet if needed which allows you to have complete control over the output text on your site. You can choose to randomize the text using certain words meaning you don't get a problem with duplicate content.

Update 4

You are now able to choose whether or not you want the new pages/posts to carry the 'no-index' feature, this allows you to review the page/post before it gets indexed by the search engines.

Update 5

A forced keyword feature has been added which means that you can force a specific keyword before or after a potential customer's search term, so on a pandora bead site when they type red, instead of them getting a load of irrelevant listings I can choose to place the word 'pandora' after every search so that the results they get returned are much more targeted to what they are looking for and so they are more likely to click through and buy.

Update 6

Alan has added the keywords which a customer searches for into the subject of the notifcation email you get sent, meaning that you no longer have to open your email to see what the keyword search was.

Overall, I would like to say a big thank you to Alan for such fantastic value for money, all of these updates alone are worth more than what he is charging for the entire plugin.

If you do have any phpBay websites and you are not using this plugin I seriously recommend that you rethink. If you want to buy Alan's Search to Post plugin then you can do so here.

Alan Lewis - Search to Post Plugin For phpBay, phpOStock & phpZon.

I have just created this very basic video to show you the phpOStock plugin for WordPress in action. This plugin allows you to build complete Overstock affiliate websites using the Overstock API and their affiliate program. You can earn up to 7% comission on sales and Overstock provides a 14 day cookie length.

[youtube csQpnG4g_fA Click Here to View it in Large Size]

Buy phpOStock here or try our FREE lite version

I want to spend the time in today's post talking about the basic components of  WordPress. I know that when you first start using WordPress it can be a little hard to understand, particularly for the newbie web users. I hope this post will make things a little clearer for you and hopefully gives you more confidence to go ahead and start using WordPress.

Installing WordPress

There are two ways to install your WordPress affiliate site, there is the long way and the short way. If you have cpanel web hosting and you have a program called Fantastico installed then installing WordPress will take around 2 minutes, no more than that. If you don't have cpanel web hosting or you don't have Fantastico installed then I'm afraid you will have to install it the long way. This will involve downloading the WordPress script directly from here, once you have done that you will need to follow the installation instructions accompanied along with it. It's not too complicated to install and if you have never installed a web script before you may find it difficult but its worth learning so that you don't have to rely on other people to do it for you in the future.If you do have any problems installing the script then feel free to drop me an email and I will happily try and help you out. There is also a large community of WordPress users and developers over in the WordPress community who I am sure will be more than happy to talk you through any problems which you come across.

Following Your WordPress Install

Once you have installed WordPress on your new domain name then you are ready to get started configuring your WordPress backend. The first thing you need to do is login to your admin area, by default this will have been set to www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin unless you changed it during the installation process. Once in your WordPress admin area it's quite a good idea to take the time to familiarise yourself with its overall layout and with some of the main WordPress functions, I will go through most of these during the rest of today's post and also in a future post.

Understanding Your WordPress File Structure

Understanding how your WordPress site is structured in the way of folders, i.e. what goes where, can be quite useful. If you connect to your site via ftp (file transfer protocol) you will see your core files in the root of your WordPress site, the folders you should familiarize yourself with are the 'templates' folder and the 'plugins' folder since these are the ones which you will most probably be uploading to the most. Generally you will locate these folders by navigating through the folders in ftp and looking for:

Plugins - wp-content/plugins
Templates - wp-content/themes

Understanding WordPress Themes

There are a massive range of WordPress themes available for FREE in the WordPress community. By default your site will have two themes already installed, these are both pretty basic themes and so you will probably want to search and find your own theme. If you do a Google search for 'Free WordPress Themes' then you will find there are lots of sites out there offering free WordPress templates for download. All of the themes usually come with full installation instructions, again try and learn to do this yourself as it will save you having to pay or rely on someone else to do it for you. Themes will differ from each other not only in the way that they look, i.e. colors, images etc, but they will also differ in the way they are structured, one example of that is where themes allow you to display widgets. Widgets are essentially blocks which can be added into a section of your site (usually the sidebars) and display & arrange content. You can look at the widgets you have installed by going to the Appearances > Widgets option in your WordPress admin area from the left sidebar content. It's then as easy as clicking add into the section of the theme you want to add your widget to.

Understanding Pages & Posts

In the WordPress platform you can insert content into your site in the form of WordPress posts and WordPress pages but what's the difference? WordPress pages will contain static content, pages do not contain the dates & times when they were created and do not show details of the author who wrote the page. In addition pages do not contain WordPress tags, tags will be discussed shortly. Pages will contain information which will remain static on your site, so this will be something like an 'About Us' page or a 'Contact Us' page. You can easily add a page to your site from the admin area by clicking on the Pages > Add New link in the left hand menu of your site. Most page fields are pretty self explanatory, you will need to add a page title and content, in addition you will see an attributes box over on the right hand side of the screen, this allows you to add a 'page parent' if you want a particular page to appear under the heading of another, it also allows you to set page order. You can display a list of pages in your left or right navigation bar using the 'Pages' widget in the Appearances > Widgets option of your WordPress admin area.

WordPress posts are completely different to pages, posts by default are listed in chronological order in the blog home page. A post will contain the post date, time and author within the top content of the post. Links to your WordPress posts can be displayed in your left navigation bar by using the 'Recent Posts' widget in the Appearances > Widgets option of your WordPress admin area. In addition posts can also be categorised into your own custom categories, these can be managed in the Posts > Categories option of your WordPress admin area, you can then display a list of these categories in your left or right navigation by using the 'Categories' widget which can be added in the Appearances > Widgets option.

WordPress Tags & Categories

WordPress tags are different to WordPress categories but generally it doesn't matter if you use one or the other or both, but what is important is that you use them in the right way. Categories should have longer worded names which help your visitors find categorized information on your site, so for example if you had a site on grill reviews then one of the categories may be Weber Gas Grills or Black Gas Grills.

Tags should be more specific and should only include 1 or 2 keywords which are related to the post you have made, so in the case of the grill site you would have the model name of the grill you were reviewing in that particular post. The most important thing is that you shouldn't be using the same names for your tags as your categories. You can display your tags on your site using a 'Tags' widget which can be added in the same way as a 'Categories' or 'Pages' widget.

Overall these are the main parts of WordPress which you need to know about first. There are other areas which I haven't covered here like 'Custom Fields& 'Trackbacks' but I will cover these another day. What I wanted you to do was to get a basic understanding of WordPress and the WordPress admin area before you start building your site. I know all of this information is going to be a bit daunting but essentially the more you use WordPress the more comfortable with it you will become.

In the next few posts I will be covering setting your WordPress options & choosing the right plugins.

It's been a long time coming but after a lot of hard work and preparation we are happy to announce the release of phpOStock. phpOStock is a new and powerful WordPress affiliate plugin that has been developed by myself and Alan Lewis. For those of you who use phpBay you will know Alan as the creator of the fantastic accompanying plugins to phpBay such as search2Post, piggy bank, revenue share & the phpBay auction title re-formatter.

We have been working on this plugin for around the last six months now, trying to perfect it, in that time we have added a bunch of fantastic features to it which make it an easy to use and highly configurable plugin.

Why Affiliate With Overstock.com

The first question I know some of you are going to be asking is who are Overstock and what are the benefits of affiliating with them. Overstock.com are a massive online retailer who specialize in close down and liquidation stock, they stock a wide range of items from well known and less well known brands from around the globe. Their main categories include Furniture, Bedding, Clothing & Shoes, Electronics, Sports, Jewelry & Watches, Electronics, Sports, Books and much more, they stock over 600,000 items, have an alexa traffic rank of 616, a google PR of 6 and rising and supply a number of countries worldwide. View their sitemap here: http://www.overstock.com/sitemap

So now you know who they are but what about their affiliate program? Their affiliate program is available through linkshare.com, its main features are:

1) Earn up to 7% commission on sales
2) Take advantage of a long (14 day) cookie life
3) Lots of weekly discounts
4) A range of affiliate banners and promotions to complement phpOStock

The Plugin

We have created the plugin so it should be really easy for anyone to set up and use but it also has a good deal of features to go with it including a range of FREE template listing styles. We have released the plugin in a Pro version and a lite version, the lite version is available completely FREE and the Pro version for a small introductory price of $30. phpOStock Pro will allow you to list up to 50 items per page/post/sidebar widget in your WordPress site using any of the following parameters to specify your listings:

* The item keywords (can be left blank to list whole categories plus negative keywords can also be used)

* The maximum number of items to display

* The store number

* The department number

* The category number

* The sub-category number

* The minimum price of the items that you wish to display

* The maximum price of the items that you wish to display

You can also display a range of information in the returned listings which is all controlled either by the code you place in your posts/pages/sidebar or by the global configuration screen in the admin section of your WordPress site. To read more about these you can visit our sales page at www.phpOStock.com.

Something for Affiliates

Of course this being a plugin which is designed to be used by affiliates we couldn't leave out our own affiliate program could we. We have set up a FREE affiliate program which will allow you to earn 20% on all phpOStock sales generated through your link. To read more about the program, join or take advantage of some of the great banners we have provided for you then please visit our affiliate page: www.phpOStock.com/affiliates.

Customer Support

If you have any problems or questions we have also setup a support ticket center which can be reached via: www.phpOStock.com/help-desk. We will always treat your support tickets as a priority and will always answer as soon as possible.

Buying the Plugin

If you don't want to purchase the Pro version first but you want to have a play around with the Lite version you can get it on our sales page by simply entering your email into the signup form towards the bottom of the page.

If you would like to take advantage of this fantastic opportunity then again you can purchase the plugin by visiting our sales page here: www.phpOStock.com.

We would just like to take this opportunity to thank you for taking the time to look at phpOStock, we hope you enjoy using it as much as we have. We appreciate any customer feedback so if you have any comments or suggestions, functions you would like to see then please email us through our support desk and we will consider any suggestions for future versions.

Ben & Alan