This weekend was bit frustrating for me.  I spent way too much time setting up a new niche site using a new premium WordPress theme that eventually I abandoned and re-built using a free theme.  The most frustrating part was the fact I spent so much time and some decent money for the premium theme AND I wasn’t able to get a refund.

You see, early last week I had someone recommend to me a new premium theme that was designed to allow webmasters to build custom affiliate websites faster.   I’m all for anything that helps me to build my sites faster so I checked it out and it looked like it was pretty cool.  I decided to spring for the license, which was well over $100 and downloaded it.

After getting it installed, I began configuring the super cool affiliate theme and was real excited to get my new niche site up and running in record time.  I had the content I just needed to get the site up.  Needless to say I spent several days, and hours each day fiddling with  the darn thing.  Eventually I really felt like this new theme wasn’t for me.

I’m a fairly technical guy and have no trouble diving into the html, css, or the php within a theme or WordPress itself in order to get the site to layout, function, and appear the way I want it to. I guess that may be MY problem.  With this super fast configuration theme I was bound by the theme itself to place page elements in pre-defined locations, use specific banner sizes, page widths etc. Needless to say it wasn’t saving me any time at all!

I quickly shot an email off to the creator asking very politely for a refund. I figured hey this is IM and everyone offers a refund, or so I thought.  I guess I’m spoiled by the onslaught of offers I see everyday offering an IRONCLAD Guarantee and such.  Because I was a bit shocked to see that the creator was not going to refund my money.

Honestly I can totally understand the authors point of view as there is no way for him to know that I will never use the product again or to “return” the product.  He would just have to trust me.

So here I am again, stuck with a product that I’m never going to use and I’ve wasted another $100+ bucks on hype and hyperbole.

Am I just spoiled with all the current guarantees and refunds?  Should the creator take the loss and give refunds?  Should I just accept it for what it is and deal with it?   We all loose money in this business, many folks hundreds more than my mere $100.

What are your thoughts?  What are your horror stories of lost money on IM products, software, and “SECRETS to overnight success”?  Leave a comment and let me know. Misery loves company and I’d love to hear your story!

Many people who have WordPress blogs or websites that are created using WordPress will often get notifications or emails telling them that they have a ping back.  But what is a ping back and how should you handle them?

When WordPress was first created, the developers added a feature called a ping back that notified webmasters when another website or blog linked back to an article on their website. This was great back in the days when reciprocal links were a big deal and really helped your site popularity. But today the searches engines don’t treat reciprocal links with the same weight as they once did.  Now it all about natural One Way Links. Don’t get me wrong reciprocal links aren’t totally bad but you should limit the amount of reciprocal linking you are doing in the promotion of your website.

So what do you you do when you get a ping back?

Like most people who receive a ping back, you’re excited that someone has linked to your article or blog. Your first instinct is to accept the ping back and allow the comment to be posted on your blog.  But, the danger here is that when you accept a ping back, WordPress will  add a comment on the post that was linked to and a reciprocal link is created.

In most cases you DO NOT want to approve a ping back. There are exceptions to this of course, especially when you actually know the person who is linking to you and you WANT to send link juice their way. But, for the most part, accepting a ping back only causes your article or blog to loose link juice.

What are you thoughts about ping backs?  Do you agree? Let me know your opinion.  Its comments like yours that make website come alive.

There’s a lot of ways to promote your website. Social Marketing, Search Engines, PPC, Directories, Squidoo, and Hubpages.  But the best way to get your site indexed, ranked by the search engines and get great back links can be achieved for free through Article Marketing.

So what is Article Marketing? Article Marketing (also somtimes called Bum Marketing) is simply the act of submitting articles with links back to your site to article directories. These article directories get crawled frequently by search engines and your articles get ranked by the search engines for the popular keywords and keyphrases you targeted in your article.

Where to Start?

First you write a post or article focused around a highly searched keyword or keyphrase. Its easy to do and only takes a few minutes.  At the bottom of your article you include an author resource box that contains links back to your product or web page.  You then submit your article to an Article Directory for inclusion into their database. These article directories usually step you through the submission process by a form on their website. Once submitted the article gets indexed by the search engines and depending on the keyword or phrase will often rank highly in the results pages.

The Bad News

Though article marketing is the best, cheapest and easiest way to get traffic to your site.  The hard part is actually doing the submission itself.  Article directories make it easy with a step by step form, but it can take several minutes to submit your article to just one of the directory.  For each article directory you have to create an account and step the the form submission to get your article posted to their database.  Now take this and multiply it by hundreds.  It gets to be a real time consuming process.

Making things easy

Luckily software programmers have created Article Submitters that make the job of submitting your articles a breeze.  Article submitter software will usually have a built in list of hundreds of the most popular article directories.  You add your article to the submitter software and the software does the rest. But be careful.  Not all Article Directory Submitter software is the same. Not all are automatic and many do have the most popular or highest ranking directories in their directory list.

I’ve put together a review of some of the best article submitter software products available. I’ve created comparisons between each product, listing the price and functions.  Want to know which Article Submitter is the best?  Go to http://www.ArticleSubmitter-Review.com and see.  You’re gonna be surprised at what you find out!!

Disagree which ones is the best?  Then leave your own review.  Don’t see your favorite software? Send me an email and I’ll include it.

Have you ever wanted to build a niche website but you weren’t sure which niche to target? A lot of people hit this wall and start wasting a lot time building niche blogs that either have too much competition or the niche is not hot enough to make any money.

The Guru’s out there will try to convince you that you need to buy their cool new “secret sauce” or spend a bunch money on their new software just to find these hidden markets. The is just NOT True. There are lots of resources out there that are totally free that you can use to find these hot trends, even places to host your website for free too.

I have a great series of videos I want to share with you that will show you how to find these hot trends and target upcoming niches before other people do.  These are the same techniques I use for find great niche ideas.   These video’s take you step by step through the process of finding the hot trends and build a great money making site.

And the videos are free too! So check them out … you don’t have anything to loose! And let me know what you think.  Have you used trends to find a hot market? Do you have an easier way?  Let us know!  Its comments like your make a website come alive.  Thanks for reading!