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.

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. I make no bones about it – I really thing S2P is one of the top wordpress plugins available for people using EPN as a monitization method.

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.

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. You can email me but I prefer if you post a comment right here. If it’s a quick thing I will explain in the comments, and if it’s a complex solution I’ll create a new tutorial.

This series should have showed you all the basics so far, but there are a lot of nuiances in customizing your site, so please feel free to ask questions and I’ll be happy to elaborate on certain things.

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. I don’t make anything by recommending it, so this is 100% sincere.

Anyway, in a nutshell, the Search-2-Post plugin replaces the tradtional search box on your blog. It looks the same, but the functionality is a lot different. Basically whenever a visitor uses the search box on your site, the plugin will create a new page of auctions based on their search combined with the specifications you enter when configuring the plugin.

This is essential for 2 reasons – most importantly, it lets your visitors create new content for you, and you don’t have to do anything but sit back and watch. Second, by monitoring the searches visitors are making you can get a great feel for what kinds of products within your niche people are really looking for – which can help you create new content, or even completely new sub-niche sites.

This plugin is so versatile that setting it up can be a little complicated. In fact I’m not 100% sure I’ve even found the best possible way to fully harness it’s power, but I have some good ideas.

Let’s take a look through the configuration settings, so you can see what I like to do. You’ll need to go to Appearance -> Widgets for this one, there isn’t a settings page. If you haven’t already added it, make sure you’re on sidebar-top (if using the WP Commerce Steel theme) and drag it over. Then click Edit and we’ll go through each field in the configuration:

Widget Title

If you’re using the WP Commerce Steel Theme, I intended for there to be no title for this widget. To do this, you need to put 1 blank space in the widget title box. You can feel free to add a title if you want, but I think it looks better if you leave it blank. If you’re using any other theme where the search box is in a left or right sidebar, you can absolutely give the widget a title like “Search for Mini Laptops” or whatever you feel like.

Blank Lines to Insert

Pretty self-explanatory. If you’re using the WP Commerce Steel theme, you shouldn’t need any blank lines, if you use a different theme, you’ll have to experiment.

New Text Above Search Box

Again for the WP Commerce Steel theme I leave this blank, however on other sites, I like to put some basic instructions in this area, and I have found that it helps. For example if you’re selling shoes you could put something like: Example: Size 6, or Brown. This will help your visitors understand what to type in the search box, and I’ve found that it does seem to help.

Input Box Width

Another pretty self-explanatory one. I just left it blank and the width was fine for me. You should only need to change it, like the widget says, if your sidebar is too narrow.

Button Text

You can do whatever you want here, I usually just like to go with “Search” to keep it simple, unless I happen to have a lot of space to have a big button for some reason.

Make Posts or Pages?

This is where it gets interesting. You can really go either way, it depends on ultimately how you want your site laid out. One option, is you can make Pages. In this case, the pages won’t really be linked to you’re site, and they’ll just kind of be floating within your blog. The plus side is if you use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin, all these pages will still be included in your XML sitemap and have a chance to be indexed by search engines.

The other option is to make Posts. There’s nothing wrong with this, but you will need to have somewhere to store them. If you have a Blog attached to your site that you update often, you will have to modify the index.php file in your theme to stop the posts from the category you associate with PHPBay from displaying mixed into regular Blog content.

Actually, you don’t really have to, but you probably should or else your site won’t look good. The other option, I touched on in my last installment – if you aren’t using a Blog at all for your site, you can set your blog up as a Recent Searches page, integrate it with Search-2-Post, and even use the WordPress default Recent Posts plugin to display the most recent searches. I highly recommend this route if you don’t intend to feature a content rich blog on your site.

Either way, choose whichever you think will work best.

Parent Page

(Only matters if you choose Pages above) The only thing to note here, is that whatever page you select as the parent page will be included in the URL that is generated. So for example if you choose the Home page, you URL will look like www.yoursite.com/home/your-new-url.html. It doesn’t matter that much, but try to choose a page with a relevant name so that you don’t have something like /home/ included in hundreds of URLS you generate.

Post Category

Regardless of how you want to integrate these posts with the rest of your Blog, you probably want to create a Category called Recent Searches, or something to that effect and use that as your category.

New Page/Post Title

This field controls what the title of the newly generated page/post is. You have the option of putting in a ton of text using the operators provided to create long titles, but I usually like to keep it simple with this one and use  just %%keyword%%, which will make the title of the new post/page equal to the search term entered by the visitor. One of the reasons I do this is because a lot of the time I set these up as Posts, and use the Recent Posts widget in my sidebar. If you tell Search-2-Post to generate a long title, it will look really stupid when combined with the Recent Posts widget, so I like to keep it simple.

New Text Above Auctions

Another really important setting. You will probably want to use the options available so that your new pages will have several sentences of text at least before the auctions. You can start by using the following text:

[[Below are|The following are]] the results [[returned|we found|that we found|that we have located]] for you based on [[the keywords |the words ]] %%keyword%%, that you entered. If you [[get|see]] to few items then please [[broaden|change]] your [[search terms| keywords]] a little. If you see too many [[items|listings|options]] then please narrow your [[keywords|search words]] and search again.

This text will work for pretty much any site. I stripped the HTML out, but you could add a <  strong > tag around the keyword and also some line breaks to enhance the text. You can also modify the actual text however you like. If anyone comes up with any cool ideas on how to use this, please share in the comments below.

New PHPBay Tag

This is where you add your PHPBay tag. Here’s  what the tag I use on my Mini Laptops site looks like:

[phpbay]%%keyword%% mini laptop,1000,”",”"[/phpbay]

In the first parameter, we must use the %%keyword%% variable. I also added Mini Laptop so that the results are more accurate. For example if I did not add “mini laptop” to that parameter, someone could come to the site and search for “Dell” and get a page full of results for just about every product Dell sells including desktops, monitors, etc. So basically we want to make sure all auctions on the results page will have the word Mini Laptop in the title. In the second parameter, I usually just put 1000 for number of results just for the hell of it. You could put a higher number or a lower number, whatever works for you. The last two parameters I left blank. The 4th parameter is for negative keywords, which you may want to add, or as people start making searches on your site, you may find new ideas for negative keywords, so it is useful to have.

Capitalisation of %%keyword%% :

This is pretty much up to you. Most of the time I just keep it on Leave as Entered.

New Profanity Words

Here’s where you enter a list of profanity separated by commas to filter out any spam or malicious searches. You should be able to find such a list by googling for it.

Email

I like looking through searches as they come in, so I have these sent to my regular email. If you do not check your email regularly I would probably not recommend having these go to your main email because you will have a million emails to go through whenever you do check it. I stay on top of my email and delete these messages as they come in throughout the day, so it’s no problem for me and I like seeing what people are searching for.

AIOSP Installed?

Yes. If you’ve been following my tutorial you should absolutely have the All in One SEO plugin installed. If you aren’t checking Yes here, you may want to read through this tutorial series again.

Redirect Mode

I’m not sure that PHP redirects work with Bluehost because I think I had some trouble getting them working initially and I’ve used Java redirects ever since. You can certainly try PHP redirects, do a search, and as long as everything works go for it. Otherwise use Java.

Thats it!

You should be all ready to go and with this powerful plugin installed, you should be ready to start making some cash. We’ve gone over many details of researching a niche and setting up the actual site. Now it’s time to focus on content building, on-page optimization and link building strategy.

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.

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. They are independent of any of the other content on the site, and will remain in the top navigation unless I remove them. Alternatively, the rest of the content on this site is posts. Posts are the “blog” style content. They are added to the database in chronological order, and further organized by being placed into different categories.

When setting up your site, there is a definite right way and wrong way to do this. When I first started creating these kinds of sites, I added all my product pages as posts, and it has made it almost impossible to work on them ever since. Now that I know the right way to do things, hopefully you will read this and not make the same mistakes.

I already mentioned in a previous post that you should create a Home Page and a Blog Page. You do this by going into the Pages menu and clicking Add New. Then, you will want to go to Settings -> Reading and select “Front page displays a static page” option. Choose the Home Page for the front page and the Blog page for the Posts page. You must do this in order to continue with this step.

So if you haven’t already guessed, we’ll be building our product pages as PAGES not POSTS.

Now that you’ve got your home page and your blog page built, you’ll also want to note the ordering here. Go back into the Home page and make sure the Order is set to 0 (or 1). This will  make sure that the Home page is the first page in your menu. Then, go into the Blog page and set it to 99, or some other high number. This will ensure that the Blog page appears last in your menu.

Depending on what you’re niche is, you’ll probably want to have 4-8 additional main product pages. The horizontal nav bar at the top of the WP Commerce Steel theme can only hold a finite number of items, so you’ll want to keep this in mind. Also, again depending on your niche, you may want to have additional sub categories under each category. For example on my old demo site talking about Shabby Chic Bedding, you may want to have “Comforters” as a main category then sub pages like “Children’s Comforters”, “Queen Size Comforters”, etc. You can do this by setting Comforters as the main category, then creating the sub category pages and setting the Parent page as Comforters. This will keep the sub pages out of the main menu, and you can then use the Flexi-Pages widget to create the sub page hierarchy in the left menu.

Unfortunately I found out over the weekend that Shabby Chic is actually a trademarked term. I guess I should have done more research up front, but this one was a little tricky and there are a lot of exisiting sites that are in clear violation of their trademark, so that threw me off even further. Anyway, I will no longer be using ShabbyChicBedding.net as my example site, and instead I set up a new, non-trademark infringing site: minilaptopcomputers.biz.

This particular niche does not really command sub categories, but you can see how I’ve got the pages laid out. Once you’re ready to start adding your pages, be sure to set the Ordering parameter in each one, so you dictate how they appear in the menu. I always have the home page first, Blog page last, and if I have extra space in between, I like to add a “bargain” page to draw additional interest from visitors. In this case, I’ve set up an “Under $200″ page, and used a custom PHPBay tag to display only auctions currently under $200. More on that later.

So by now, you should have a site looking somewhat like minilaptopcomputers.biz and really you should just need some finishing touches at this point.

We still haven’t touched on what to do with the Blog section of the site, and I am also going to cover setting up the Search-2-Post plugin in detail. Both of these topics tie into each other. Last, we’ll talk about optimizing your product pages and then move into the on-page SEO phase of the tutorial.

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. Click on Settings, and find the link for PHPBay, you’ll be taken to the main PHPBay configuration page.

First and foremost, you’ll need to enter your PHPBay license key. You’ll also need an eBay Campaign ID. You can generate a new eBay campaign ID by logging into your eBay Partner Network account, clicking on the Campaigns tab, and then Create Campaign in the menu below. It should only take you a second. You should definitely be creating a new Campaign ID for every different site you have. This is obviously key for tracking which sites are performing well. You really shouldn’t need a Custom ID, so you can leave that field alone.  Once I’ve entered my license key and campaign ID, I always like to update the options right away to make sure that info is all cool. Occasionally there can be issues with the PHPBay license key, and you can easily find out how to get that working in one quick step by visiting the PHPBay forums.

Next, you’ll be prompted to select your default country. This is pretty self explanatory. Moving on you’ll see all the Basic Options next.

Basic Options

The first field in the Basic Options area is an important one – “Use SEO Friendly URLs”. You’ll definitely want to check this. You’ll also need to update your .htaccess file once you do.  Updating your .htaccess file is pretty easy. Once you’ve saved your configuration with this option checked, PHPBay will give you a code to insert into your .htaccess file. Just open up your file, copy the info from the settings page and paste into the .htaccess file, then upload. If you don’t have a .htaccess file on your site, just open up a notepad, copy the code and save the file as .htaccess, then upload.

The next options in the Basic Options section should look something like this:

I generally leave these all unchecked, however you can use your own discretion. For certain types of products and sites some of these may be more applicable than others. I have used Mod Rewrite on Images before, but as far as I can tell it hasn’t produced any amazing results, so I usually don’t bother. I don’t like displaying Buy it Now auctions only in most cases just because I like to have the largest selection possible, and regular auctions that have a lot of time left may have a low bid making it appear with a lower price which may entice visitors on your site to click. Display items with images only – I could definitely see where you would want to have this checked in most cases. I’ve found that these days there are very few auctions without images, so I’ve never encountered a problem with not checking it.  Checking Search Titles and Descriptions could be helpful if your niche does not have very many products listed in eBay, but in most cases it will probably just add irrelevant auctions to your product pages so I would generally not use this option unless you’re desperate for more auctions. Last,  the Only Show Auctions with Free Shipping option is a nice idea but may not be a great choice. If you’re in a niche with a great deal of products that offer free shipping, like cell phone cases, for example, you could actually try this out. I could only see  benefiting from this option if you were to heavily promote on your site the fact that all  items have free shipping. It could be something interesting to try, but in most cases I would leave it off.

Visual Display Options

This is a key area where you will really need to follow my settings if you want your product listings to display the same way as mine. You’ll probably see most people setting these up differently, but I have a very specific way I like my product pages to look. Here’s a screenshot of my settings (you’ll need to click to enlarge):

First off you see “Display Ebay Logo” and “Display Sort Options”. Some people really like to use these, but I think they make your listings look a lot less genuine and more cookie cutter. If you’ve ever seen BANs sites before, I feel they pretty much all look the same, and I don’t believe visitors will be as interested in browsing a site that looks blatently like an affiliate site. PHPBay has a lot more flexibility than BANS as far as formatting, in my opinion, so I like to take full advantage and leave both of these unchecked.

Next you’ll see the Display Altrenate Row Colors and A Hover color options. I always use both of these. It’s been one of my favorite additions to PHPBay since the original and I think it really helps break up the listings and give the page a far superior look and feel. Also, the default A Hover color will work with the WP Commerce Steel theme, and I find works well with almost any theme regardless of color scheme, so I usually don’t change the color, but you can if you like.

Last, another important option – number of columns. I really like this feature a lot, and I think the 4 column layout is great for the WP Commerce Steel theme. If you’re going to build a site with straight product pages, I strongly recommend going with a 4 or more column layout. Alternately, if you’re going to be inserting a few product listings within content on your blog, I would go with 4 or less columns.

Location

It’s nice that these options are available, however I think in most cases you will not need to alter these settings. I’ve seen people who create these kinds of sites promoting cars or motorcycles – large items that cannot be shipped. I honestly have no idea how well they work, but I’m not going to bother to find out. For strictly pragmatic reasons I would rather focus on products that do not have a location restriction attached to them, at least until I find out some reason why promoting location specific products is a great idea.

Advanced Options

There are some cool things in here, but nothing too major.

Select Sort Order – this is kind of a cool option. I generally go with Best Match, but there are some other interesting options – particularly Newly Listed and Price + Shipping: Lowest. Both of these would be great because your product pages will be showing the lowest priced items first which will hopefully give visitors increased incentive to click your ad. Remember that our goal is simply to get a visitor to click an ad and continue on to eBay. It makes no difference how much time a visitor spends on your site as long as they click through, so you want to be optimizing your product pages so that you give visitors as much incentive as possible to click your product listings.

Items Priced – This is a nice feature too. I use this, but more often as a parameter in the tag, not specified on this page. You probably won’t need to raise the minimum price ever. The only reason I could see would be to filter out auctions start at a low price. Otherwise you shouldn’t need to mess with this. I don’t see any real reason to globally set a max price in most cases. The main use I could see for this is if you wanted to have a themed site like – “Everything under 1.00″ or “$30 or Less MP3 Players”.

Number of Bids – I can’t really see any great applications for this feature, I would always leave it blank.

From Specific Seller – I could see this potentially being useful, but I’ve never used it.

Use Paging – This is a nice feature that I have used in the past, but in most cases I do not use paging. For one thing, I like to find very specific niches that generally don’t have enough products to really merit paging. Plus, going through pages is just another action your visitors perform, and could potentially turn them off to browsing your site. I hate to do anything that even gives the slight risk of turning visitors away.

Items within…zip code – I don’t ever use this, for most general applications I strongly recommend leaving it off.

PHPBay Pro Affiliate Settings

Last but not least, you can pretty much always just delete the link in the text box and leave it blank.

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.

Upload Your Theme and Plugins

If you haven’t already gotten the WordPress Elements you need, make sure to do that. Upload all of the plugins you need to your /plugins/ folder, and upload the WP Commerce theme (or whatever theme you want to use) to the /themes/ folder.

Update WordPress

You’ll probably want to make sure your WordPress version is current for no other reason than following along with this tutorial. I’m currently using WordPress 2.7.1. The easiest way to update WordPress is with the WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin. You really don’t have to update WordPress for any other reason than following this tutorial, but the auto update plugin makes it really fast and easy, so why not?

Update Your Permalinks

This is an absolute must. Permalinks are basically the way your URLS are configured. For example, the default WP permalink structure URLs look like this: http://shabbychicbedding.net/?p=1. We want our URLs to look like this  http://www.shabbychicbedding.com/pillows/. This is very important mainly for SEO purposes – search engines definintely take URLs into consideration, so take a minute and make this update:

• Go to Settings -> Permalinks
• Click the radio button next to “Custom Structure” and type in the following: /%postname%/
• Click Save Changes

This should be all you need to do. Bluehost is already configured so that you don’t need to make any changes to your .htaccess file, and I believe most other hosting companies also can support this function out of the box. I’ve had problems getting this to work in GoDaddy before, but I haven’t tried to set up a WP blog on GoDaddy in a long time so it may be easier now.

Update WordPress & Blog Address URLs

You don’t really have to do this, but I always do. Go to settings -> General, and update the WordPress and Blog Address URL fields to have the www. at the beginning of the URL, so instead of shabbychicbedding.net being URL, it will be www.shabbychicbedding.net.

I’m not sure if there is any real reason you would want to do this one way or the other, but I always do it.

Delete Default Install Data, Set Up Home Page and Blog Page

WordPress automatically adds the token Hello World post, About Us page and comment from Mr. WordPress. You’ll want to delete these for sure. I’ve come across a lot of blogs that haven’t deleted their Hello World or About page, which basically means there’s a ton of duplicate content out there and by leaving it on your site you’re running a small risk of being penalized by search engines.

To delete this sample data, first go to Edit Posts, and delete Hello World. The comment will go away along with it. Then, go to Edit Pages and delete the About page.  Stay there for a second so you can do the next step.

Add Home Page and Blog Page

We’re not really adding content yet, but we do need to have a home page and blog page set up to finish the configurations. First the home page. Under the Pages drop down menu on the left, click Add New. Call the page Home, and don’t worry about adding any content for now. Then, on the right under Attributes, select the Home template from the templates drop down, image below. Then click save.

The Home template is a template I created to accompany this theme. Basically it is exactly the same as the regular template except I’ve removed the code that automatically inserts the page title at the top of the page. that way, you won’t have a big heading that says “Home” in the middle of your home page. Instead you can add your own tag and put in a keyword which will help with search engines.

Next, create the blog page. Click Add New again and put Blog in the title field. You need not do anything else but publish the page.

Set Default Home and Blog Pages

This is a critical step that will make it so that your Blog page is in it’s own separate area of the site instead of being the home page. I will explain more on setting up your posts and pages soon, but just trust me that it’s important.

• Go to Settings -> Reading
• Under “Front Page Displays” heading, choose the “a Static Page…” option.
• Under “Front Page” select Home from the drop down list.
• Under “Posts Page” select Blog from the drop down list.
• Click save

Activate Plugins

Now that you’ve gotten the basic WP setup out of the way, you’ll need to activate your plugins. I’ll pretty much assume that you can figure that out on your own.

Set Up The Theme

This is where it will differ a little if you’re using a different theme than my WP Commerce theme. WP Commerce Steel has 3 sidebar positions. These all must be configured correctly or your theme won’t display properly.

After you’ve activated WP Commerce Steel, go to the Widgets manager. The first sidebar you see should be “sidebar-top”. This sidebar position was specifically developed for use with the Search-2-Post plugin. If you’ve got that activated, add it to that sidebar and save. I’ll provide a tutorial on configuring it soon. You can also place a regular search widget in this area, a Google Custom search bar, or a blank text widget and leave it empty.

Next, select “sidebar-left-1″. This sidebar position is the upper left sidebar that is enclosed in a blue background.  It is intended for placing your “store” navigation here. The only widget you need in this sidebar is the Flexi Pages widget, but you can also add additional widgets below if you choose. I will provide additional information on configuring the Flexi-Pages widget in an upcoming post.

Last, check out “sidebar-left-2″. I like to use the PHPBay Sidebar widget in this area to show a “featured product”. You can add whatever you like in this area.

What’s Next?

You’ve got all the basic configuration set, you’ve uploaded all the plugins and theme that I’ve recommended so far, and configured the sidebars according to my specs. If you’ve followed everything the right way up to this point, your site should have a normal appearance, and be ready for content. In my next post, I will cover configuring PHPBay in depth. After that, I’ll go over the difference between pages and posts, and how to set up your product pages. Last, I’ll cover configuring the Search-2-Post widget. Once we’ve gotten through all that, we’ll talk about optimizing your site for SEO, then go into some marketing strategy. Stay tuned, it’s sure to be interesting.

In this installment of creating an EPN affiliate site from start to finish, I’ll cover setting up WordPress using the Fantastico installer. This tutorial specifically covers how to do this via Bluehost hosting. If you still haven’t chosen a hosting package, I strongly recommend using Bluehost as I will be using it for all my tutorials. Most of the instructions here will work with any cPanel type of hosting. I believe places like GoDaddy and 1and1 also have Fantastico or some equivalent available as well.

Step 1 – Add Your Domain as an Addon Domain

You don’t need to do this if you signed up for a Bluehost account and used the domain you’re setting up as the primary domain. 99% of the time, this will not be the case, so even if you don’t need to do this step now, you will for every other site you set up after this.

Log in to your Bluehost admin. Under the domains icon you’ll see an icon for Add-On Domain. Click it to go to the add-on domain admin. See the graphic below:

Once inside the addon domain interface, you can choose from a domain associated with your hosting account, or an external domain. If you registered the domain within your same Bluehost account, it will appear in the drop down menu. If not, click the radio button next to the option: Choose a domain that is not already associated with your account. If you choose the latter, you will need to make sure you update your nameservers with the registrar ahead of time in order for Bluehost to verify the domain is yours.

Once you make your selection one way or another, the rest of the fields below will be populated based on your selection, and you shouldn’t need to edit them. Just click the Add domain button at the bottom and you should be good to go.

Step 2 – Locate Fantastico in your hosting account admin

Go back to your hosting admin. You should see a variety of different icons and options available. If you scroll down a ways, you should see the Fantastico icon, click on it. I’ve circled it below so you can get an idea of what it looks like.

Step 3- Locate the WordPress Installer and Choose a New WordPress Installation

Once inside the Fantastico admin, you should see a list of your current installations, if any, in the main column, and a long list of different programs in the left column. Click on WordPress in the left column, sort of near the top. You’ll be taken to the WordPress sub page which will show your current installations, and have an option to click for a new installation as shown in the graphic below:

Step 4 – Choose Your Install Domain and Enter Basic Information

You should now be on the new installation page. There will be a series of boxes you need to add information to. The graphic below shows what I did.

A couple things to note here – In the install in domain drop down box, they will give you an option to choose either yoursite.com, or yoursite.yourmainbluehostdomain.com. Always choose yoursite.com. Also, in most cases for sites like this you will want to leave the Install In Directory field blank. This will install WordPress in the root directory of your site. The base configuration information can always be changed later on, do don’t worry too much about the rest of it.

Step 5 – Check Out What You’ve Done

That’s all there is to it. Click the button and when the process is done, fantastico will provide a link to your blog so you can see it live on the net. It will be using the default theme, and populated with the default info.

You can log on to your blog’s admin by adding /wp-admin/ to the end of your URL.

Coming up, we’ll talk about mapping out your page structure, setting up your theme and configuring plugins.

Ok, we’re almost ready to begin building the actual site. The last thing you’ll need to do before actually getting started is go get all the WordPress elements you need to create the site. There are quite a few, but luckily almost all of them are free.  Here is a detailed list of all the elements we need to create our EPN affiliate site and where you can get them.

Essentials

WordPress – If you don’t have a fantastico installer as part of your hosting account, you’ll need to head over to WordPress.org and download the latest copy of WordPress. If you host with Bluehost you’ll have the fantastico installer and save yourself a huge hassle, but either way, this one is no big deal

A WordPress Theme – I strongly recommend giving the WP Commerce Steel theme a go, since it’s free, you can get it right here, and it’s specifically made for this tutorial. Really, you can use any theme you want, so if you don’t like the WP Commerce Steel theme, go ahead and find a theme that you think is right for your topic. There are thousands of free themes out there. FYI, I really discourage using premium themes in general, and I especially don’t think they work that well with EPN sites.

Plugins

Akismet – Akismet generally is included with every WordPress installation, however you will need to go get a WordPress API Key by creating an account at WordPress.org. This plugin is not technically essential, but you will pretty much be getting comment spamed from the minute you launch your site if you don’t have this activated.

All in One SEO Pack – This is an absolute must have, and by far the best SEO plugin you can get for WordPress. You’ll be able to completely customize your meta tags which is vital to grabbing good rankings – particularly the Title tag.  This plugin is free to download and easy to use. Grab yourself a copy here.

WordPress Flexi Pages Widget – Probably the most important plugin needed to manage the look and feel of your site on the front end.  This is a step people often miss. This is crucial for allowing you to create a dynamic page structure for your product pages that mimics that of an actual e-commerce site, and help keep your layout clean and easy to navigate. A must have. Pick up the Flexi Pages Widget here.

Google XML Sitemaps Generator – This is the other critical SEO related plugin. I feel this is probably one of the greatest WordPress plugins, and absolutely vital to any WordPress blog. What this plugin does, is it automatically creates an XML sitemap of your entire site, then submits it to Google and other search engines. Not only that, but whenever you add new content to your site, it automatically re-creates the sitemap and pings all the search engines to let them know you’ve updated your content. This plugin is so critical to the success of any WP blog. Get a copy here.

Paid Plugins

PHPBay Pro – You’ve absolutely got to have a copy of PHPBay pro. I believe it costs around $79.00, but you will make your money back on it so fast it will make your head spin. When I first bought my copy over a year ago, I literally made my money back within the first 3 days and I was only using it on one small blog at that time. I’m an open-source kind of guy, and I rarely pay for anything when there’s a free alternative, but this is just one thing you can’t be successful without. Don’t even bother with this tutorial if you aren’t prepared to grab a PHPbay license. You’ll be able to use it on every site you create from here on out, and it’s very well supported. Download PHPBay here.

PHPBay Search-2-Post Plugin – This is a lesser known plugin, but I think one of the coolest plugins available that has really boosted my earnings. What the Search-2-Post Plugin does, is creates a new search widget to replace the default WP search widget. When a visitor comes to your site and uses the search box, the plugin generates a NEW PAGE of ebay ads based on they keyword they used combined with your specifications you control in the widget administration. In a nutshell, this plugin makes it so your visitors are creating new content for you, not only that but it allows you to get a great feel for what kind of product people are really looking for in your niche. This plugin only costs $15.00. I don’t get any kind of commission for recommending it, but I’ve gotten so much mileage out of this plugin I’m happy to give Alan a free plug. This one is well worth your money. You can buy this plugin along with PHPBay Pro and be in for less than $100 on the whole deal. Purchase the plugin here.

That’s It.

There really isn’t much you need if you think about it. Once you’ve got all these things, save them in a folder together and reuse them over and over again.

Now that we’ve gotten all the prep out of the way, we can finally move on to the actual construction phase. Stay tuned, more videos and tutorials will be coming soon.