How to Show eBay Auctions in Wordpress - The Quick and Easy Way with phpBay Pro
By admin | June 18, 2008
How to show eBay auctions in Wordpress is the subject of many emails that I receive from my clients. Most of my users are non-technical. They start researching this subject and quickly see “scary” words like API, RSS and XML.
Instantly they hit a mental block, and dismiss it as too difficult.
I am telling you here today that there is a SIMPLE way. It does not require you hiring a propellor-head, techie type, nerd boy, computer expert.
The solution is called - phpBay Pro.
It is quite simply the best solution I have ever seen for easily displaying auctions on your WP blog.
The software presents itself as a WP plugin. The installation is trivial even for a non-technical person. If you know how to use your FTP software, and you know how to install a WP plugin then you already have all the skills you need to successfully get this running.
The documentation bundled with the script is very comprehensive, and also includes some instructional videos that have been put together by Wade (the software author).
There is also a very active phpBay private community forum where many of the users get together on a daily basis to exchange ideas on different ways to use phpBay, and to maximise the profits from using it. Wade is always around as well, and fixes any problems you may have very quickly. I swear the guy does not sleep.
What I love about this script is that you can integrate it completely into your own theme very easily. The other solutions that I have tried (including the popular BANS script) forces you into using a very generic type theme, and most BANS stores all look very similar. I am sure it would be very easy for Google to detect these cookie-cutter type site footprints, and to reduce their rankings in the search engines.
phpBay works completely differently. Its not possible for any of the search engines to detect that your site is using an eBay script as it leaves no footprint at all.
Using phpBay Pro, all it takes to display auction listings is to add a single line of text into your post, or your page, wherever you want the auctions to show.
Here is an example of a phpBay command that will display a nicely formatted block of 12 auctions of used golf balls on your post - [phpbay]used golf balls,12,”",”"[/phpbay]
Thats all there is to it. No worrying about RSS feeds. No fighting with your WP theme files.
The above example is a very simple one, and as you learn more about phpBay Pro you will make use of many of the other more advanced features that the script offers.
If you are interested in making some money on the internet then all you need to do is -
- Sign up for eBays Affiliate program here.
- Buy yourself a copy of phpBay Pro here.
- Build yourself a few niche stores.
I paid $49 for an UNLIMITED license. This means that you can use the script to build as many sites as you like. It also includes a lifetime of free upgrades.
My software paid for itself within 5 days of putting my very first site online.
Now you know how to show eBay auctions in Wordpress quickly and easily.
Topics: Recommendations, Site Tips & Tricks | No Comments »
Back Up Your Web Site - This is Critical
By admin | March 7, 2008
*** This post is intended for everybody ***
Backup your web site is critical. Its common sense I know, but I also know its human nature to think “it will never happen to me”. Sods Law says it will :-(
Disk drives are mechanical … and they break.
We do an automatic, global, daily backup of the entire contents of our server … ie. all websites. This is necessary if we ever have a hardware failure and our disk drives crash, and we have to restore everything.
I do not do backups of individual sites.
Keeping a backup of your site is your own responsibility as a webmaster.
Topics: Server Info, Site Tips & Tricks | No Comments »
Keyword Research Tools - Your Choices are Critical for Your Pages to Succeed
By admin | March 5, 2008
Keyword research tools are what I would like to cover today.
There is debate in the internet marketing community as to which comes first, keyword selection, or niche selection. Do you find nice keywords first and then find the market and build your site around them, or do you find a niche with a nice hungry market first and then research the keywords relating to that. Personally I am in the latter camp.
But, most of you already have a web site in some particular niche, so I am going to jump straight into how to select your keywords.
You should be steadily adding new content (ie. pages) to your site all the time, even if you only do 1 per week that is fine (thats 50+ pages of new content per year, it adds up steadily).
Why ? Well search engines love content.
Read the rest of this entry »
Topics: Free Traffic Methods, Recommendations, Site Tips & Tricks, Traffic Generation | No Comments »
Pingoat for Fast Site Indexing on Search Engines
By admin | February 28, 2008
Pingoat, a very weird name for a very handy service.
If you have built websites then you know that you can wait absolute ages for your site to appear in the search engines. Thats the old web. Nowadays, it is possible to have your site spidered by search engines very quickly and easily.
In the case of Google it is possible to have your site visited and spidered sometimes within minutes. This does not mean that you will appear in their index within minutes, but at least they have spidered you and you are in their queue for a full indexing.
Using this exact method I have had a new web site of mine appear in the index, and be getting organic search traffic, within 24 hours.
The method uses a technique pioneered by the blog industry … called “pinging“.
You can use this method for any web site though, not only for blog sites.
Topics: Free Traffic Methods, Site Tips & Tricks, Traffic Generation | No Comments »
Peel Away Ads - Highly Effective Advertising on Your Web Site
By admin | February 25, 2008
Hi Everyone
Its been a while since my last post, so today I would like to share with you something that I have recently found, and that I think will help just about any site.
One of the hardest things to do with your web site is to quickly capture your visitors attention, and to get them to take some sort of “action”. That action could be something like getting them to click on an affiliate link, navigate to your products page, view a “special offer”, etc.
Visitors have developed “ad block” over the last few years, and they literally filter out the adverts on your site almost instantly and unconsciously. The only thing they still see is something they are not used to seeing yet.
Enter the “peel away ad“.
Topics: Free Traffic Methods, Recommendations, Site Tips & Tricks | No Comments »
The robots.txt and favicon.ico files
By admin | January 8, 2008
This post is intended for everyone.
These are 2 little known files that the huge majority of webmasters forget to include in their web sites. I think the reason why most people forget about them is that they need to be created manually … none of the HTML editors that I know of create them automatically.
ROBOTS.TXT
The robots.txt is a small text file that you load into the root folder of your website ie. the same folder where your homepage is stored. Its purpose is to tell a search engine spider what it can and cannot index within your site.
Read the rest of this entry »
Topics: Site Tips & Tricks | No Comments »
WebMail, and other Mailbox Options
By admin | December 19, 2007
This post is intended for our Linux hosted sites.
Today I would like to show you some other features on your mail server.
One of these features is Webmail … which may be especially important to you at this time of the year when you may find yourself away from home and your own PC/email.
Note .. If you are not using your email addresses in your own domain name then you really should be. It creates much more of a brand awareness in your clients mind if your website and email addresses correspond.
Mail boxes, aliases and email forwarders are all configured from within the “email” icon in your server control panel.
There are some other functions that can be performed on each individual mail box. To access these functions you need to navigate to the webmail interface for that mailbox.
All email boxes can also be accessed via the web … perfect for when you are not at home.
Topics: Server Info | No Comments »
Checking your Website Stats
By admin | December 17, 2007
This post is relevant for our Linux hosted sites.
Todays post is another in a series designed to teach you more about your server, and the various things it can do.
I will soon be writing posts on various methods that you can use to attract traffic to your website. But, before I do that, I want to show you where/how you can measure the fruits of your labours.
It is very important that you keep an eye on your statistics. The information that can be mined from them is absolute marketing “gold”.
The pretty graphs showing the steady stream of traffic that is coming to my sites is always fun to watch. Usually because the traffic volume is proportional to my earnings.
Simple rule -> MORE TRAFFIC = MORE MONEY
Topics: Server Info | No Comments »
NO SPAM is actually possible
By admin | December 14, 2007
This post is relevant for everyone.
Yesterdays post was all about reducing the amount of spam that you receive into your mailbox. Spam is such a pervasive problem nowadays that I decided to make todays post on the same topic.
The system we covered yesterday (Spam Assassin) is a rules based system … one that looks at each incoming email and then evaluates it against a set of rules common to spam messages.
While this is a very good way to detect spam, it does suffer from 2 disadvantages …
- It can let some spam through.
- It can sometimes mark valid email as spam (called “false positives”).
Topics: Recommendations | No Comments »
Your Mail Server, Spam and Anti Virus
By admin | December 13, 2007
This post is intended for our Linux hosted clients.
We hate spam as much as everybody else, so we give you the best tools to kill it :-)
Spam Assassin is an award winning, “rules based” spam detector that is already installed on your server. This software has been around for a long time now and has matured into a very stable and reliable product that works very well indeed.
Basically, it works by using a huge table of rules. A team of people sat down and came up with a long list of all the common characteristics of a spam email, and then assigned a particular score to each characteristic. Spam Assassin checks each incoming email and totals up the scores for all rules that the email violates … and, if the total score is above a certain threshold (default value is 5, but you can change it) then that particular email is flagged as possible spam.
Topics: Server Info | No Comments »