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.

This is the third and final video in the series choosing a niche for your ebay affiliate blog. In this last segment we’ll discuss how to properly choose a domain name for your EPN Blog once you’ve found your niche. It will cover some do’s and dont’s and some tips on what to do if your first choice isn’t available.

The following is the second video walkthrough of the content from last week’s article on choosing a niche for your ebay affiliate blog. This video will walk you through the process of taking an idea from eBay Pulse and running it through some traffic and competiton analysis to determine how much traffic a keyword is getting and how easy it will be to rank for. This is a crucial step in the process. Enjoy!

My first ever video tutorial is finally available. I’m very new to video production, so my apologies in advance if the quality isn’t up to par. I plan on producing many more video tutorials, and hopefully the quality will improve as I gain experience.

Anyway, this video is the first video installment in my EPN Blog Start to Finish series. It’s a video walkthrough of part 1 of the complete article I posted last week on choosing a niche for your ebay affiliate blog.  This video covers the first part, which is using eBay Pulse to get ideas for your niche. Please enjoy and feel free to leave feedback below.