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. Set up your Blog page as a Blog
This is great if you have a niche that you feel you can come up with a fair amount of content on. For example if your niche is something really broad like iPhones, there are a ton of YouTube videos you can add, product reviews you can do, tutorials, news and many more possibilities, so you can really take full advantage of a blog. This is probably the best case scenario if your niche will accommodate it, and if you feel you can generate enough content to make it worthwhile.
2. Set up your Blog page as a Product Review section
You can do this really easily. If you want the name of the page to be Reviews or Product Reviews, just delete the Blog PAGE that I told you to build before, create a new PAGE called Reviews or whatever you want it to be called, and go to Settings -> Reading and update it as your posts page. This isn’t really that much different than leaving it as a blog, but could be good if there isn’t a lot of video and news content for your niche. For most niches, you should be able to come up with at least a handful of product reviews and it will definitely help with search engines. A Blog isn’t appropriate for every niche, so this is a good intermediate option if you don’t want either a full blog, or the next option.
3. Make Your Blog a Recent Searches Page with the Search-2-Post Plugin
This is a really nice way to go if you’re in a very targeted niche and there isn’t a lot of content available, or you don’t plan on ever adding product reviews, news or videos, which is absolutely fine. When you get to the point where you have 10 -20 of these sites going you’ll start to see that adding content on a regular basis to all of your sites is just not a sensible solution, so this is great if you want to put your site on autopilot. You can do this by first creating a CATEGORY called Recent Searches. Then create a PAGE called Recent Searches. Then follow the steps from #2 above to set Recent Searches as your posts page. In the Search-2-Post configuration set it up to create new pages as POSTS in the Recent Searches category. Then you can also add the Recent Posts widget to your left sidebar as well. We’ll get into the Search-2-Post widget in the next article.
Popularity: 32% [?]
Tags: Ebay Partner Network, EPN, epn blog, PHPBay, Search2Post, Wordpress Tutorials, WP Commerce, wp commerce steel
How do you get your search-2-post box and the search button to both be on the same line. I am using your theme, but button sits below the search text field. I tried shrinking the width of the text field, but the button still sits below the text field.
Good question. I created the theme so that the search box would be formatted with the button next to it, not under it. I did recently discover there is a newer version of Search-2-Post from what I’ve been using, so I suppose it’s possible things have changed. I will check that out and let you know what the results are. You should also be able to tweak the searchform template and css to format the search box manually.
Thanks, I look forward to your reply. Yes, you should download the newer version of S2P. It allows for much more customization.
I would first like to say thanks for the very detailed tutorials. It has helped me tremendously. I was reading the phpbay forum and they were saying that you should have a least 25 categories for you niche. Do you agree and wouldn’t it be hard to do with you niche selection.
No, I couldn’t disagree more. Having a large number of categories is one strategy, but it is in no way the key to success. In fact I have many sites like this that only have 3 or 4 total pages. If you were in a very general niche that could actually support that many categories, I’m sure it would help to include as many as possible on your site, but if you’re in a niche like that in the first place, it tells me you didn’t spend a lot of time doing niche research which is really where you make your money.
For an auto-pilot option, do you think it would be better to go with option #3 (using Search2Post for a Recent Searches page) or keep that to make new pages while in addition to that using an auto-post script via cron-job to post review videos, etc. from RSS feeds? Thanks!
Dan I think that would be the perfect way to go. In most cases, you aren’t going to want a lot of time on these sites, so that would be the best strategy if you just want to get the site up and leave it.
Thanks for the fast response, Sam! That’s what I’ll do then. Thanks for the help. You’re the best!
Sam
I’ve followed your tutorials and I’m reasonably happy with my site.
If you’re using the Search2Post plugin, what happens when the ‘search’ produces a title which is the same as an existing page or post – will it overwrite it?
Also, I got advised on the phpBay forum to reduce the number of ebay items for each category – any thoughts on this or what is an optimum number?
Hey Paul,
I’m pretty sure if the title is exactly the same it won’t create a duplicate post.
The number of items is really up to you. A lot of the niches I use don’t have that many items in a particular category anyway, but I usually go with 1000 by default. If you’re noticing a poor page loading time or something you can certainly reduce it.