abhorrent

Try turning off the crappy Visual Editor. Even if you post in HTML mode if the visual editor is on and you go back in to edit the post, It seems to break or just strip some tags completely.

edit: From your dashboard. Users > your user name > uncheck "Use the visual editor when writing"

Vingold

This is an exceptional idea and I'm kicking myself for not thinking of it.

I'm enjoying this thread.

__________________
Vinny

janwonders

Thanks for the tips. I've now looked through Flickr and found a couple of girls that could be suitable, but then noticed all the pics seem to have 'some rights reserved'. This states that You are free:
to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work to make derivative works
Under the following conditions:
Attribution. You must give the original author credit.
Attribute this work:The page you came from contained embedded licensing metadata, including how the creator wishes to be attributed for re-use. You can use the HTML here to cite the work. Doing so will also include metadata on your page so that others can find the original work as well. Non-Commercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a licence identical to this one.
For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the licence terms of this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder. Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the author's moral rights.

OK - pretty boring - so what do you guys suggest?
• Should I be including an attribution to the original author somewhere on the site?
• Go out and take photos myself?
• Seek out a volunteer to pose for the pics
• Approach a number of the Flickr girls asking if they'd like their pics to be included in a dating blog?
• Or should I just ignore all the rules and go ahead and use them anyway?

I'm not expecting this site to be making me millions so maybe I shouldn't be getting too hung up on it, but I'm interested to know what other people do, I can use photoshop for the basics, but I've never sussed out to change hair or edit people to look realistic and it's not something I want to learn right now.

How many would you say I should have (I mean of the actual girl) before getting started? 10, 20 or more?
Getting pics of food, venues, etc will be easy, it's just choosing the character that's tricky.

Other than that, I've started taking notes on what sort of content I'm going to include. I've got a few affiliate offers approved and I've uploaded and made some amendments to the wordpress prosense theme. I find choosing a theme to be one of the hardest things to do, so for now I've just gone for a basic theme with adsense. But come to think of it, that was maybe a bad idea because if I'm promoting dating offers, I maybe shouldn't have adsense on my site - what do you think?




Abhorrent, I like your dogsrule site - it looks very professional.

I'm going to be away for a week from tomorrow, so I won't get to post or update the site, but I will have my notebook with me and I plan to get stuck in when I return.

moomycow

Quick update: I've noticed that the few users I've had visit (still at c. 40/day) are searching for bands that I haven't reviewed. So, I've hacked up my search results page, and if no results are found, it now searches YouTube via their API and attempts to find at three videos that match what the user searched for. It then displays these videos with "How do these do, now buy a bloody ringtone"-type text.

I'm still looking at options to drive traffic, and have made tentative steps to get other music blogs to link to me. Ringtones are hugely popular amongst schoolkids in the UK, and I'm looking at using Facebook to target some kiddy-friendly ads that offer the latest free videos to watch... and doesn't mention them being surrounded by "RINGTONE! RINGTONE! RINGTONE!" ads.

Any other advice on traffic would be most appreciated, thanks guys.

radio

I just spent the day working on a stupid script - hard to say if it was worth it. But I learned a good deal so whatever. Will be implementing it on my site here shortly.

SEO_Mike

Wow! Everyone's busy as bees. Great to see there is a lot of sharing of ideas and information.

Some quick pointers: even if you struggle with HTML / PHP / ASP / whatever, keep at it. I'm no programmer, but I understand enough to make changes to scripts and write some really simple ones. Even that little bit of knowledge has helped immensely. Like most of you, I learn by doing. So, everyday I push my coding abilities as far as I can. I try to do as much of the script writing as possible. If I get stuck, I hire someone to finish it.

Which brings me to my second point, make sure you put a value on your time. It's one thing to try and learn new things, it's another thing to beat your head against the wall when you don't need to. If you can't afford to hire someone, then trade services. Sex for coding usually works if you're a female... Errrr... Just kidding, but content for code is often a good trade. I know a lot of coders that can write some complex code, but can't write good sales copy to save their lives.

Anyhow, always make it a habit to look for ways around your limitations. We are all handicapped. Just in different ways. My handicaps: not a good copywriter, poor coder, and horrible graphic artist. No big deal, there are people out there that I can either hire or trade services with. My point is this: you have all the skills you need, the ones you don't have - others do. Network with each other. Go to Affiliate Summit and shake hands with people. Talk on the phone. However you want to do it, it doesn't matter, just do it. (Nike paid me for that )

Okay, enough "Rah Rah" pep talk. Let's get into advertising / marketing.

Ever hear of the Four P's of Marketing? In case you missed Marketing 101, here they are (ripped from Wikipedia):

• Product: The product aspects of marketing deal with the specifications of the actual goods or services, and how it relates to the end-user's needs and wants. The scope of a product generally includes supporting elements such as warranties, guarantees, and support.
• Pricing: This refers to the process of setting a price for a product, including discounts. The price need not be monetary - it can simply be what is exchanged for the product or services, e.g. time, energy, psychology or attention.
• Promotion: This includes advertising, sales promotion, publicity, and personal selling, branding and refers to the various methods of promoting the product, brand, or company.
• Placement (or distribution): refers to how the product gets to the customer; for example, point of sale placement or retailing. This fourth P has also sometimes been called Place, referring to the channel by which a product or services is sold (e.g. online vs. retail), which geographic region or industry, to which segment (young adults, families, business people), etc. also referring to how the environment in which the product is sold in can affect sales.

Here's how you can relate the 4 P's to Internet Marketing:

• Product - what product or service are you pushing? How does it relate to your website's demographic? Is is incentivizable? If so, should you incentivize it?
• Pricing - Pricing can affect how well the item converts. Often new internet marketers (notice I didn't call you n00bs) want to push the item that has the highest payout. But if it has a high payout, does it have a high cost to the consumer? Either through a long, multi page offer (time cost) or through an actual purchase (monetary cost)
• Promotion - Pretty self explanatory. How are you going to promote your site? SEO, PPC, YouTube, social networks, banner ads, CPM ads, etc... Also, what type of promotion would be best suited for your audience? Video, banner, text? Are you going to focus on branding your site, or just pushing a product?
• Placement - an extension of promotion. What's your demographic? What sites do they visit? Do the sites they frequent have lots of flash, music, etc or are the sites fairly static (no moving images, no music)? What times of day are they most likely to buy? What kind of language do they respond to? "Hip hoppers" are more likely to respond to slang than a white collar executive.

Lot's of questions, but you need to be asking yourself questions all the time. The more questions you ask, the more you will learn. The more you learn, the better you can narrow down on you target audience. The better you target that audience, the more you make. The more you make...you get the idea.

Homework assignment: Write out a list of at least 10 questions. Things you need to know about your site, niche, audience. Then go research and find the answers. Then look at your site again, and apply that knowledge. There will be things you'll want to change (most likely). Don't take the easy way out and say "Yeah, yeah, I already know all the answers", because, if you do know all the answers, share them with me. I certainly don't, and I know that I would be much richer if I did.

Last, share at least one of your questions with the class and what you learned through your research AND how it applied to your site.

That will be all. Go forth and discover.

Oops, almost forgot, Google's Adplanner kicks ass at helping you figure out what your potential demographic is by studying your competitors demographics.

__________________

Copeac Mutha Fucka's. That will be all.
Auggie's the shiz-nit for Design Work!
"How are you going to get things done if you spend so much time planning to get things done?" - chatmasta

whathell

great post seo_mike, im learn a lot here

anyway, lately im focus building install joomla service. It's take time to make the website, i hope i can done by tomorrow

so how about everyone else ?

puroz

I wonder. Any one have an opinion on the various Ebay php scrips. Is phpbay pro(50$) worth it over mcjiffy or phpbay lite ? Im trying to get a classy look going and im pretty clueless when it comes to php(trying to learn php actualy).

__________________
Gotta love A4D and COPEAC and Neverblueads and your mom

radio

Go phpBay Pro and don't look back if you have the coin. Looks sweet, integrates well, targeted searches, nice templates w/ column view.

UPDATE:

Going to try and make a sick home page for epnStore today/tonight.

Lingo

I it a good idea to direct link to an offer just to test if it will convert before i build a landing page?

jryan54

Quick question for all you wordpress geeks out there. Is there a way to order the categories that I create. I know I can swap it around in mysql but wondered if there was a simple way to change the order they appear on my main page directly through the wordpress gui.

abhorrent

This plug-in will let you order by Category Name, Category ID, Category Slug or Post count.

There is also This One but I've never used it so...

You can also do...
In the template if you want and can switch "name for ID or Count.

A plug-in is gonna be the way to go really.

radio

here's what I worked on tonight. epnStore - need to integrate it into a theme and I'll make the registration and login look the same. wonder if ebay would complain about it. i'll be adding some links across the bottom for contact, terms, etc. Feedback appreciated.

puroz

Looks like a winner to me. How are you going to monetize it ?

__________________
Gotta love A4D and COPEAC and Neverblueads and your mom

radio

I'll have my ebay aff link at the base of every page, might incorporate adsense into the themes, perhaps they all get a page peel similar to this - but that gets a bit invasive. perhaps it's something to generate backlinks where I can update the footer and bam - as many backlinks as there are stores. maybe i have "featured" stores on the epnstore homepage for a subscription fee.

Open to ideas of monetizing and design. Thanks!

puroz

Well, Ive finally found the project to do for this contest. At first i was going to make my RSS feed compiled site but that sounds to risky for now. I had a tutorial site planed as well but it would take to much time writing up tons of content on a subject that im a beginner on(lol).

So finally i will use 1 of my old blogger blogs that has pretty much 0 organic trafic and only a few backlinks and move it over to my hosted sites. Redesign it put some ebaystore action on it and just completely redo it and use it as a guinee pig for things to come.

__________________
Gotta love A4D and COPEAC and Neverblueads and your mom

puroz

So i have a General site up now with lots of ebay and some content. Gaming Equipment » Pro Gaming Equipment. Any feedback on what i should change or add would be appreciated.

__________________
Gotta love A4D and COPEAC and Neverblueads and your mom

radio

I would suggest adding a hover color in your phpBay admin panel and then doing this: phpBay: enlarge clickable zone | Rule One Blog (spamming my blog since it has the file download). Consider splitting your content - paragraph, auctions, rest of entry.

Check out one of the cheap logo designers on here for $10 get a screaming header logo - you need a sharp and clean logo / header for that category and your current one isn't cutting it.

Lose the bloggy feeling by removing the dates, get comments out of there... if you're trying to be a 'shop' vs. a blog (have to do that by editing the theme).

Check this tutorial for good ideas - you don't have to follow it exactly, but he explains why you're taking out the comments and date - if you can't figure it out on your theme - use the limauorange for the time being... or better, delve into the code and figure it out.

radio

Spending my Friday night working on the site. Have gone through and removed most indications of Wordpress. People setting up "stores" don't need the latest Wordpress news to distract them - get in there and generate some content!

I'm going to write up a very basic tutorial on how to publish a store and make that the Dashboard body - how to best use categories and pages. Going to make a page explaining the process in more detail (signing up for epnStore / EPN, writing content, publishing, etc.) for those who need a bit more info before pulling the trigger.

Have an idea of a great group to market this to - basically it will be a signature on my posts in their forums "Save up to 75% on your listing fees! - Click here for details." - can you guess the market? HA! Wait, my math is wrong - they could earn more than just a fraction of their listing fee... heh - even better!

SEO_Mike: I see your homework assignment, I'll spend a bit of time with it this weekend.

jdubsf