ePN have recently made some big changes to their RSS feed links and this has resulted in broken cloaked/SEO friendly links to eBay. It's not really a shock that this issue hasn't been properly communicated throughout the eBay community or with third party developers. It just re-inforces my beleif that most big corporations have a VERY BIG issue with communication.

Anyway, rant aside, make sure you check your ePN cloaked links on ALL of your sites. At the moment it's only my BANS sites which are having issues and so I have turned cloaked links OFF, my phpBay sites seem to be okay and I'm sure Wade will be onto the issue in any case.

Link to the ePN forum thread.

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 »

UPDATE: After spending some time going through the Shoemoney System Sales page AND seeing the monthly price I will NOT be investing - Links removed!

I would imagine 99% of you have heard of Shoemoney.com and Jeremy Shoemaker. If you haven't already heard he will be releasing his new Shoemoney System to the world tomorrow around 2pm.

Shoemoney's story really is one of rags to riches and he went from being overweight and unemployed to building and running a successful multi million dollar business. But don't let that influence your decision on whether you invest in the Shoemoney system or not, I'll tell you now that this system won't make you rich over night. In fact as far as I am aware there isn't any system out there which will make you rich overnight, if there is then the creator won't be sharing it any time soon I can tell you that now. 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 »

I got this email through today which informs us that The Niche Site Building Network (AKA Build A Niche Store & N1Way etc) WILL be going up for sale after all. It looks like Adam and Kelvin have decided to move on and branch out into wider projects which aren't limited to Affiliate Website development.

I wish them the best of luck for the future and for their future endeavours.

Here is the email which was sent out: Read the rest of this entry »

Ultimately if you want traffic from the search engines you MUST get your website listed within the first 20 listings for your chosen keyword phrase, to do this you simply cannot get away from the fact you are going to have to get backlinks to your website. There was a time when building as many backlinks to your websites as humanly possible was the thing to do. If you were trying to rank above competitors in the search engines for a given keyword or phrase one of the factors you looked at was the number of backlinks that site had.  Now, whilst we still look at the number of backlinks a site has when trying to rank above it, amongst many other factors, the emphasis should be on quality rather than quantity. While this sounds obvious to many of you, you would be surprised the amount of people who are still concentrating on the quantity rather than quality. Read the rest of this entry »