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.

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.

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.

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 could 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.