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by on August 31, 2008 2 Comments

Review: BANS versus PhpBay Pro

I have been a fan of a product called Build a Niche Store (BANS) for a little while now.  I’ve personally had some nice success with building profitable eBay affiliate stores using BANS.  The BANS store menus are dynamically built based on the niche keywords you choose and articles can be included within your store easily to add additional content to your site.

But what if you use Word Press for your content management and need a way to highlight one or two of your eBay products within an article?  BANS can’t do this. At least not easily.  Don’t fear, there is another product that shines at this greatly.

PhpBay Pro

PhpBay Pro is another eBay affiliate product that is similar to BANS yet installs as a Word Press plugin.  The integration with Word Press is fantastic. It’s very easy to install and uses eBay categories and keywords to display products on your website.  You can highlight a single product or create an entire store front.  And since PhpBay Pro is written in php as well as uses cascading styles sheets it is highly configurable.

In contrast, to get complete integration of BANS with Word Press you are force to tweak your Word Press themes and BANS installation to have them interoperate seamlessly. Please don’t misunderstand. This is type of integration is very much possible and I do this all the time. But its not an easy task for new affiliate marketers.

Personally what I like to do it use both BANS and PhpBay Pro products.  To start, I use BANS to create a dynamic and robust store complete store product menu. I then use Word Press with the PhpBay Pro plug-in  to sprinkle in pertinent products within my articles and content throughout my web site. I can even create a nice Web site home page using PhpBay Pro.

When used in conjunction with each other these products provide a professional look to your web site and allows a quick and easy way for visitors to access the products they may be interested in.

Both PhpBay Pro and BANS have they’re place within your web site design  and both provide immense value for generating eBay affiliate product sales. For anyone wanting to start an eBay affiliate web site, both products will easily return your investment.

Filed Under: Reviews, WordPress
by on August 17, 2008 1 Comment

WordPress for easy content management

One of the simplest ways of adding, editing and managing content on your website has got to be WordPress. For those who are not familiar with WordPress, WordPress is a free blogging software that has really taken off like wildfire in the blogging community.  There are tons of free plug-ins and themes that allow you to change WordPress from a typical blog to a full blown content management system. You can strip it down to only a single sales page or build it out into a commercial e-commerce website.

I started using WordPress and continue to use it today to help with adding and managing content on my websites.  There are so many helpful features and plug-ins; I can’t even begin to tell you how helpful it is. It does take some getting use to though. The basic install is very plain. It requires a new template or skin to be installed to jazz it up.  Don’t worry they are freely downloadable and easy to install. 

Getting WordPress Installed

Most hosting providers, including Hostgator and GoDaddy, have WordPress available as an automated install. This greatly simplifies getting your website up and running much quicker. They even get the database stuff working for you so you dont have to worry about that. If your provider doesn’t offer this as an install simply head on over to WordPress.org and download the latest install package. There are tons of documentation to help you get WordPress going. If this seem a little too “techy” for you, you might consider switching hosting providers.

Integrate with Build a Niche Store

If you have BANS installed you can integrate it with WordPress to give your websites a nice interface for your content. Mark, over at The Niche Store Builder, has done a great job of integrating WordPress and BANS together into a seemless website and has lots of videos to show you how to tweek it to fit almost any WordPress theme. Now you can have the best of both worlds! A killer content system and a killer eBay store.

Personally I think adding WordPress to your websites adds a level of professionalism and gives you the flexability and easy content management you need to run a profitable website.

Filed Under: WordPress Tagged With: , , ,
by on August 17, 2008 Leave a Comment

John Cow presents the StoreStacker.com Giveaway

Hey Guys! I wanted to quickly let everyone know about a really cool give-away. Lots of awesome prizes from the folks at Johncow.com and Store Stacker!!

CHECK IT OUT

WIN Big Time with StoreStacker!!
Posted on August 11th, 2008 by John Cow under Ramblings
Announcing the StoreStacker Sponsored Give Away

http://www.johncow.com/win-big-time-with-storestacker/

With the click of a button, StoreStacker creates your own niche-based affiliate store, pouring targeted products into your website from Ebay, Amazon Shareasale, Overstock, ClickBank and more. Now thanks to StoreStacker you can also WIN the following Prizes…

* Xbox 360
* StoreStacker Full with all plugins
* RSStoblog
* ContentSolution

* Choice of an Ipod touch or Iphone 3G
* StoreStacker Full with all plugins
* RSStoblog
* ContentSolution

* Bose companion 3 speakers
* StoreStacker Base
* ContentSolution

* Bose around ear headphones
* StoreStacker Base
* ContentSolution

* Ipod shuffle
* StoreStacker Base
* ContentSolution

Registration into this fantastic giveaway is an absolute breeze PLUS you can also earn extra “Tickets” to dramatically increase your chances to win.

>>Registration and Earn 1 Ticket (This is mandatory for all participants)

* Step 1 – Subscribe to JohnCow.com via email. If you are already registered (have downloaded the ebook), you do not need to register again. Register here:
* Step 2 – Subscribe to http://storestacker.com/jcgiveaway.html

>>Earn an Extra 3 Tickets – Twitter or Pownce a post that links to this contest page (Must comment below with link to post to prove it)

>>Earn an Extra 3 Tickets – Twitter or Pownce a post that links to http://www.storestacker.com (Must comment below with link to post to prove it)

>>Earn an Extra 5 Tickets – Vote up and comment on the Squidoo page at http://www.squidoo.com/make-money-online-blogging (Must comment below with link to post to prove it)

>>Earn an Extra 15 Tickets – On a publicly accessible blog that you own, make a post about this contest and it must link directly to this page and must also link to http://www.storestacker.com (Must comment below with link to post to prove it)

If you perform all steps to earn all available tickets you will have earned a total of 27 tickets, which means you will have 27 times more chances to win then someone who just registers for the single ticket.

Give Away Dates:

* Registration for the “Give Away” begins on Monday August 10th and ends Friday August 24th at 11:59 midnight eastern time.

Rules:

* Participants must be at least 18 years of age
* All criteria for the registration must be completed in full
* No registrations will be accepted after the deadline
* Winners will be selected by random draw and each participant will have the opportunity to enter more then one “Ticket”

Prize Delivery:

* This physical products in this contest are only available in Canada and the USA. The contest itself is open to all areas, but physical prizes will only be delivered to a USA or Canadian address. If you are selected and live outside of the USA or Canada, you may donate the prize to a follow up contest. This follow up contest will have the website of your choice (pending our approval) as part of the contest registration criteria (lots of exposure).

Disclaimer:

*www.joesinternetmarketing.com and/or Johncow.com is not responsible for the delivery of the prizes, this will be handled directly from Scott Trimble and Halfagain LLC, the owner of StoreStacker. Prizes may take up to 30 days for delivery.

Filed Under: Random stuff Tagged With: , ,
by on August 16, 2008 Leave a Comment

PLR Content

Hey everyone! I’m back. Sorry for the break in posts but my family and I had to take a break and check out the beach for a week… It was awesome! If you ever get a chance to see South Padre Island you should do it!

So the next thing I wanted to talk about is Content and more specifically PLR Content.  When I first started doing this I had heard of PLR Content, but had no idea what “PLR” was!  So hopefully I can shed some light on this.

The Need for Content

It wasn’t long after I had several BANS sites up and running and making a little money did I realize that I needed content! But I’m not a writer and I really don’t like to write.  Even if I did, where would I get the time to write?  I needed more than just affiliate links and ads on the new websites.  Even more than that I wanted a way to keep visitors around longer or have a way to draw people to the web sites who weren’t necessarily shopping.

PLR Content

I had read about the use of PLR Content – I actually had to go to Wikipedia to find out what the “PLR” in PLR Content meant — lol.  SO to spare you all – PLR Content is “Private Label Rights Content”.  Basically meaning you have the right to publish the content as is, change the content, re-write the content, slap your name on the content, etc. When you buy PLR Content you buy the rights to do just about whatever you want with the content – sans resell it again as your own.. that would be Master Resell Rights.. but I’ll save that for another post.

Buyer Beware

You need to know upfront, there is some absolutely horrible PLR Content out there. Be very careful who you get your content from. Some PLR companies outsource the writing of content to non-English speaking countries and the result is less than what you may expect. Always ask for a sample article or some example of their work before buying. There are two excellent sources I have used – one is PLR PRo. These Aussie boys have got a very large PLR operation but always put out excellent PLR Content. Another writer who is excellent is Nicole Dean and EasyPLR. If neither of these folks have what your looking for you can always look out on the Digital Point Forums. There are lots of great writers out there who will come highly recommended.

Tips on PLR Content

If you decide to use PLR Content you should never post the content as is to your website. Many of the search engines check for duplicate content, and if someone else has posted the same PLR article that you do you PLR Process graphiccould lose serious ranking in the search engines or worse lose your indexing completely.

The bare minimum you should do when you get your content is to re-write the first and last paragraphs as well as the title the article. This is a very easy thing to do and will keep you from being penalized by Google or Yahoo for duplicate content. Also, this may sound silly but read the article before you post it to your website. You may be amazed at some of the errors you might find.

The PLR Process

If you would like to learn more about using PLR Content and the PLR process check out this free eBook from the folks at PLR PRo – The PLR PRocess. Its an excellent read and will cover most all part of using PLR Content on your website.

You will need adobe acrobat reader to view this file.
Filed Under: PLR Content Tagged With: , , , ,
by on August 7, 2008 Leave a Comment

Review: Godaddy Hosting versus HostGator

I’ve been with Godaddy for quite a while now. I use them as my registrar for my domains, as a hosting provider and as my dns provider. The service offierings are vast and the prices cannot be beat.

However as my business started to grow I really started to notice a few things about Godaddy that made me want to check out other hosting providers and see if I could improve my website performance without impacting the overhead of additional hosting costs.

Introducing Hostgator

I had read about HostGator.com from several folks online and saw that they had a fairly large customer base. I searched on Google looking for anyone having issues or complaints about Hosgator.com and didn’t find a one.  I checked their pricing and it was about average – at the time of this writing they offer the first month for $7.95 and each recurring month at $9.95/mo on a month to month basis.  I had sent several emails to the sales team and technical team and both responded very quickly which was very impressive.  My last concern was performance and I wouldn’t really know how that was going to be without actually being a customer and committing to at least one month.  At $7.95 I thought what the heck, let’s give them a try.

Trouble with Godaddy

Now my issues with Godaddy were several. As my websites started taking on more traffic I saw a dramatic slow down in performance of all of my websites.  I have a background in computer networks and was able to perform several onine tests to each of my websites. They all passed with flying colors indicating at least the network was not congested. However things were still slow. Either the webservers themselves or possibly the databases on the back end were overloaded.

I sent several emails to Godaddy support and like with most large companies I  didn’t get a response back for several days. When I did receive a response it was very curt and only stated no problems were visible on their end. Hmmph!  Well, something was not right and I needed to find out what it was. Visitors were starting to complain!

Hostgator.com Here I Come

Signing up for an account on Hostgator.com was very quick and very easy.  Everything was completed via their website and my new hosting account was completely going in a matter of minutes! (easy sign up – check!)

Next I uploaded my root domain to the new site and WOW!  I immediately noticed a GIANT difference! Even my ftp login was lightning fast. Files just flew up to the site even while using ftp and my first site was running in no time. (files uploaded – check!)

Finally I created my subdomains and setup virtual hosting for some of my other domains. Each domain was just as easy as the last. Before I knew it I had a good handful of domains transferred to Hostgator and those websites were unbelievably fast. (sorry for sounding so hypey – but it was such a relief and so exciting to have my websites perform as I thought they should!)

In summary – Godaddy is simple and easy and is fine for extremely low traffic sites that do not have customer concerns.  However if you want that same ease of use, friendly support, AND have the performance to keep up with the big boys you should move to HostGator – you wont be sorry you did!

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: , , ,
by on August 7, 2008 Leave a Comment

Review: Build a Niche Store

When I first heard about Build a Niche Store, or BANS as many people call it, I was extremely curious to see exactly what it was and how it could help me monetize some of my stagnant domains that I owned.

You see, when I first learned about BANS I was actually looking for a domain parking script. Many of my domains that I owned were simply parked with GoDaddy until I could get the time to build a site on them or figure out what I was going to do them. I was looking for  a script that would build a simple web page that could contain links or ads to other similar sites (And of course make a few pennys while I was at it).  My end goal was to hopefully just cover the cost of the domain registrations. I also really didn’t like the fact that GoDaddy was cashing in (even if it was just a few cents) on my dormant domains.

Then one day I came across http://www.domainparkingmoney.net. Brian Johnson, the owner of domainparkingmoney.net, had some very nicely done videos explaining about the benefits of BANS over domain parking scripts.

Now to start off, BANS isn’t cheap. It costs $97 and if you really don’t have an extra $100 bucks to spend it can be kind of tough to cough up.  But I decided to give it a try.  And to this day I’m so glad I did!  It has easily paid for itself several times over.

When I first got my BANS software, I was immediately impressed to find out that not only could I set this up for my .com, .nets, etc for my domains here in the United States, but I could also set it up for .co, .uk, .de and many domains in other International countries. Now I had my business hat on and I could really see the potential with this.

The installation was very simple for me, the documentation was very clear, and everything you needed to know to build your store was included. It walked you through every aspect of getting the files copied and getting your store initially configured.  The only slight issue I had was that my hosting provider was GoDaddy, and much of the documentation was not written for someone at Godaddy, but they did give some helpful tips if you were on a Godaddy server.

Probably the most confusing and scary part of the install, especially if you are new to websites and how they function, is the database creation piece. But I really feel the user manual walks you though this without any issues. Plus, BANS has a very large forum that is very active.  If you have any issues what-so-ever you can post a question there and someone will respond within an hour or so.

All-in-all, Build a Niche Store is a fantastic product, making setting up an eBay affiliate store a breeze. Most any niche will make at least a few dollars, and the software will easily pay for itself and the cost of your domains.  I highly recommend it for anymore who wants to start an online affiliate business or to put some unused domains to work.

Filed Under: BANS, Reviews Tagged With: , , , , ,
by on August 1, 2008 Leave a Comment

How It All Began

Well, to be honest, I never intended to venture into affiliate and Internet marketing.  I really was just looking for a good domain parking script. I just wanted a way to display ads on my unused domains and not have Godaddy get money for traffic going to my domains.

I happened to be lucky enough to run across a really great domainer and Internet marketer named Brian Johnson – http://www.domainparkingmoney.net. He had some really great information and was not trying to sell a bunch of useless software.

Brian had some great information for using a product called BANS (Build a Niche Site), instead of just using a domain parking script. Now, I had never heard of BANS, and had to google it just to get an idea of what it was about. But man, what a great product!  If you are just starting out in this business it’s a perfect way to start slow and make money quickly.

So I took several of my websites and put BANS on them. Before I knew it I was hooked. My domains were breaking even and easily paying for themselves.  Since then, it has become an obsession and my business is growing nicely.

Filed Under: BANS, Random stuff Tagged With: , , ,