It’s been a while since I’ve last posted here. I’ve been having an incredibly busy spring with more new clients than ever before, so I simply haven’t had a lot of time to invest in the blog lately. I’m still committed to keeping this thing going, so I’ve got quite a few new things planned for the next 2 months.

1st off - For those who have been following my EPN series, no I haven’t abandoned it. I originally intended to have completely gone through the marketing process by now, however I’m still in the process of split testing, and I want to make sure I’m backing up my instructions with accurate information so I may be a while out on this yet.  I will cover promotion in detail at some point in the near future and I have a lot more EPN tips to share.

Also, I’ve been kind of annoyed by EPN lately because of their vague campaign quality details, which I really feel is doing a disservice to all of their affiliates. I will go into detail on this soon.

Second - I’ve been hinting at a second WP Commerce theme coming soon, and I plan to have that up and ready for release within the next couple weeks. I also have another magazine theme and a theme specifically made for adsense that will also be coming soon.

I’ve got a few new plugin recommendations I plan to be covering soon, and I have even found a Premium Wordpress Theme that I really like, something I thought would never happen, so I will be sharing more on that.

Last, I’m not 100% sure whether I will or not, but I am strongly considering adding a forum to this site. If anyone has any feedback on that one way or another I would be interested to hear it.

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If you’re an advertiser with Google Adsense, you’ve probably been receiving a few emails over the last week or so in regards to Adsense video units being retired at the end of April. According to Google:

“…we’ve decided to focus our efforts on other opportunities to help publishers monetize their sites”

If you’re not familiar with Google Video Units, I’m not surprised. Google even admits that these ads have not been performing well, which is the main reason for their retirement, and I have rarely seen these being used on any other sites. In fact, I cannot think of another site I’ve ever seen using these.

Basically a Google Video Unit is an ad that looks similar to a regular video. It’s content is meant to match up with the content on your blog, so for example if you had a blog about mac products, you could set your video unit to display mac related content.

Anyway, my main reason for writing this was to share my brief experience with Video Units. I have a site getting betweeen 1000 - 3000 unique visits per day. The topic is technology related, and the content is 90% videos. I thought that video units would be a perfect match for this site.  I placed the video unit on the single.php template in my WP theme under the main post content, so basically the video units will only display on the post pages - not on the home page or any other pages, and layout wise, the page will have the main video, followed by the video unit below.

I thought this would be a pretty clever layout since it’s common for visitors to finish the video they originally came to your site to see, then check out the next video below. Here’s the basic breakdown of about 9 months of this:

Overall, considering the amount of page impressions, this is obviously a terrible result. Thankfully I only used it on one site. Generally if you get that many page impressions on a regular video blog your earnings should be a LOT higher than that - and I know this for a fact.

So hopefully now that Google is going to be focusing their efforts on better ways for publisher to monitize their sites, they will come up with a more creative way to mix video and contextual advertising. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Here is my first ever free magazine style Wordpress theme. I’ve got several more in the works, so this is just the beginning of many great themes to come. One of the key things I’ve been looking for is a better solution to the Featured Content Gallery plugin. I personally don’t care for the look and feel of the featured content gallery. This theme uses a jQuery slideshow that is incredibly easy to use for the end user, and is not based on a plugin.

Here are the features:

• Easy to use featured content slider on home page with admin options page.
• Integrated video in sidebar
• 3 adsense positions built in and easy to edit
• Dynamic page navigation menu
• Integrated social bookmarking

View a live demo of Deepest Blue

Creating intra-site links is a great way of optimizing your blog for search engines and controlling page rank. Then there are all your affiliate links. You’ve probably got your banners in the sidebar, but you also want to pepper your affiliate links throughout your copy as well.

Both of these things can take a lot of time away from working on more productive things. I know that there have been times when I’ve referenced other posts on this blog and haven’t even bothered to link to them just because I don’t want to have to go through the process of opening up the site in a new window, navigating to the page I want to link to, copying the URL and adding it as a hyperlink in my new post. It’s just a pain, plain and simple. Same thing with affiliate links - in fact that can be even worse.

Anyway - the good news is, there is an amazing solution - SEO Smart Links, by Vladimir Prelovac.

I’ve been using this plugin for quite a while, and I have to say it’s probably one of the most useful plugins I’ve ever seen, particularly if you’re dealing with a Blog that has a ton of content. The best part of all, it’s totally free.

Here’s a basic overview - you define keywords combined with a URL and this plugin will parse your blog’s content and automatically add the hyperlinks for you. So for example, on this blog I would set up one link like this:

WP Commerce Steel, http://www.wpcontempo.com/wp-contempo-steel-free-wordpress-theme-for-ebay-affiliate-sites/

By doing this, the plugin will automatically add that link to any instance of the keyword WP Commerce Steel in my blog.  This saves me a tremendous amount of time.

It also works the same way if I want to hyperlink words like PHPBay or Bluehost using my affiliate link.

There are also a ton of other configuration options that come with this plugin as well. Many are pretty self explanitory so I won’t go into detail, but if you’ve got questions don’t hesitate to ask.

I’ve been running this site since the end of October or so, and so far I’ve managed to get my Alexa under 100k, get some nice PR pages, a ton of backlinks and a very nice stream of daily organic traffic. Outside of 3 PhpBay commissions, I haven’t really made any money at all off the site. In fact, this is probably one of my lowest earning sites that I own.

I’m not really looking to make a fortune off this site. My initial goal was to develop an authority site, and so far I’m well on my way. Last week, just for kicks, I decided to add adsense on my post pages. I added a large square block at the beginning and end of the post. I’ve found that while this format does not look the best layout-wise, it is really effective and I have quite a few other sites using the same adsense format that make a LOT of money.

Anyway, after a week of testing and a huge amout of page impressions, I can now report that AdSense is completely ineffective on this site. I would have to go back and check, but I believe I have not received even a single actual click. I think I’ve made a total of less than 10 cents for the week, and that was all from CPM AdSense.

I didn’t have high expectations going into it, but I have to say I’m pretty dissapointed. The good thing is, now I can take the AdSense back off the site and it will look much nicer. Then I’ll never wonder what I’d been missing.

The bottom line - there are a lot better ways to monitize this kind of blog. If you’re running an internet marketing related blog, don’t expect AdSense to put your kids through college.

The newest version of the Search-2-Post plugin has been released, and as promised, I will cover some of the new features that are different from the older version my previous tutorial covered.

Templates

The biggest difference is the template system. The good thing is, Search-2-Post will still function like the old version without having to do too much work on the template, and there are all kinds of enhancement options now. If you’re just starting out, here’s what I would suggest:

Open up the default template provided with the plugin. Delete the first 2 table rows that have the PHPOStock tags. To keep it simple starting out, let’s just show PHP results. For the text at the top, the default stuff in there is a little light on words. I suggest you go back to my previous Search-2-Post tutorial and use that block of text I provide as a starting point, then customize from there.  The more text the better, so I highly recommend adding to it, but also keep it general so you can use it for a lot of your sites without having to go back and change it.

Below the big block of text, display your Ebay results. I usually display as many results as possible, but I’m also in a lot of small niches that don’t usually have more than 40-50 products for searches. I usually use 1000 as the default amount of products to display, but this is something you should test and tweak yourself.

Another key thing here that I really like is the ability to put some more text below the auctions. What I did was pretty much leave the default text in the template in there. All I added was a link to the home page wrapped around the %%keyword%% tag. I think this is a great feature because every time a new page is made, it will up your internal links and also give you a ton of relevant new keywords pointing to your home page. Another thing you can do here is periodically go in and change the page you’re linking to. This will help get more of your site indexed over time.

There’s obviously a lot of potential for using the templates and this is just a start. You can experiment with showing PhpOStock and PHPZon results, additional adsense and other affiliate offers, as well as finding more ways to add additional content and links throughout your new pages.

Compulsory Words

This is truly a great feature. In the previous Search-2-Post I was using, I had to manually add this in, so it really saves a lot of time. This is pretty much self-explanitory as far as use goes - just insert your primary keywords as the compulsory words to avoid irrelevant auction results. Probably one of the best overall enhancements.

Analysis

There’s no real reason to go too far into the other additional improvements as they are all pretty self explanitory. The above 2 are by far the most important. Overall the new version of Search-2-Post has exceeded my expectations. I’m also really looking forward to using the PhpOStock and PhpZon plugins in conjunction with this plugin and seeing how well it works out.

The only negative is that the new plugin breaks the search bar layout in the top sidebar on my WP Commerce Steel theme. As a workaround, you can place a blank text widget in the top sidebar and move the search bar to the left.

• Big Things Coming in the Next Two Weeks
  Posted on Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 in News - Comments: (1)
  Well it’s been a couple weeks now since my last installment in my creating an EPN affiliate site start to finish series. Frankly I’ve just not had the time to do it lately and these next few installments will take a high level of detail to cover all the information necessary. Anyway, the good news is I will be working on  several new installments due this week, and more on the horizon next week.
• Building an EPN Affiliate Site from Start to Finish: What to do with the Blog
  Posted on Friday, March 13th, 2009 in EPN Blog Start to Finish - Comments: (8)
  Ok so if you’ve been following my tutorial so far, you’ve probably at least got something looking close to my example site: minilaptopcomputers.biz. In my last installment we discussed setting up your product pages - as PAGES, not POSTS.Now you’re probably left with a Blog page and wondering what to do with it. There are quite a few different options, but there are a few that I consider main choices:1.
• Building an EPN Site from Start to Finish: Structuring Pages and Posts
  Posted on Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 in EPN Blog Start to Finish - Comments: (5)
  This is a critical part of this process, where it’s really important to set up the foundation for your site properly. There are 2 ways you can add content to your site - Pages and Posts. The differences between the two are many. For example, using my site www.wpcontempo as an example, the Pages on this site are in the navigation at the top - About, Free Wordpress Themes, Contact, etc.
• Configuring PHPBay Pro for your EPN Affiliate Site
  Posted on Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 in EPN Blog Start to Finish - Comments: (7)
  In this installment of creating an EPN affiliate site from start to finish, we’ll cover configuring PHPBay. Much of this is going to be pretty self explanitory, especially if you’ve done it before, but there are a few crucial steps that you may be surprised to learn about.Most of the PHPBay configuration magic happens on the Settings page in your WP Admin area.
• EPN Affiliate Site from Start to Finish: Configuring Wordpress
  Posted on Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 in EPN Blog Start to Finish - Comments: (4)
  Ok so you’ve got your hosting account, you’ve set up Wordpress and followed all my instructions so far. Now it’s finally time to get started setting up your blog. Before we can get into creating the actual pages, there are several important steps to configuring your Wordpress site that you’ll need to do every time you set up a site like this.
• EPN Series 2/3 Complete
  Posted on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 in EPN Blog Start to Finish - Comments: (9)
  Now that I’ve showed you how to configure the Search-2-Post widget, you should have a complete EPN affiliate site. Thate means it’s time to focus on content building, optimization and link building. In the coming weeks I will be covering all these things in detail, so stay tuned.For now, if you feel like there’s anything I’ve missed up to this point in the series, please let me know.
• Need Suggestions for New Theme Previews
  Posted on Monday, March 30th, 2009 in News - Comments: (1)
  I’ve got 2 new free WP themes ready for release. The first is going to be a new WP Commerce theme for use with EPN and Amazon affiliate sites. The second is a magazine style theme with some cool features.The problem - I’ve been using the Theme Switcher plugin to display my theme previews, and it works great in some cases, but themes that have an unconventional sidebar setup don’t display well.
• Setting up the Search-2-Post Widget
  Posted on Monday, March 16th, 2009 in EPN Blog Start to Finish - Comments: (1)
  NOTE - This covers version 0.9, I am working on an update that will cover the additional features in later versions.This is a pretty interesting and important part of this whole tutorial series. You really need to have this plugin if you are serious about being an eBay Partner Network affiliate. You can purchase the plugin here: http://www.psp-tubes.net/wordpress/auto-content-generator-using-the-search-function-of-your-phpbay-site.