The 2nd site was one t hat was intended to have a “sticky post” at the top as  a site introduction. Well that sticky post got bumped down in a site redesign without me realizing it.  I still have to go back and fix that one.  The point is that you need to periodocially revisit your sites from the point of vew of a first time visitor and see what it looks like. You may have a few items to clean up.

Regarding control of page rank flow…each p age needs a minimum amount of page rank just to get indexed. Too many outgoing links will dilute the page rank of each page and risk enough outflow so that the page itself may not get indexed.

Controlling the flow of Pagerank means putting more flow of PR into the important pages of the site…the ones that will make you money.  With regard to WordPress, one of the popular widgets available is “archives”.  Depending on whether you have your archives listed monthly, weekly or yearly, t his list can get quite long.

Thank about it from a user point of view. Does having a monthly list of archives help them find old posts when there is almost always a “search” feature on the site?  Is it helpful to have each month of archives listed on the front page?  Probably not.  It would be just as sufficient to have a single link to the “Archives” from the front page, and have that link be “no-follow” as well.

Perhaps this simple strategy can help control the  page flow so that it does not leak to less important pages, and instead you can send it where it needs to go…to the pages that “pay the rent”.

UPDATE:  Looks like this solution has already been solved with a quick piece of header.php code fix. You can either do it yourself, or use the Duplicate cure plugin. Here are some references:

Addicott Web

Fix your page header – You should insert the following code into your theme’s header file to make sure that certain pages (such as the homepage, posts, pages and category pages) are indexed by search engines spiders, while certain others (feeds, archives, etc.) are excluded

If you want to learn more search engine tips like this, you can sign up for my mailing list over thre ot the right, or just go sign up for Stomping the Search engines 2.0 right now (it’s free!)

The rule of 72 is a quick equation used to determine the doubling time of investments. IN other words, if you had a savings account at 5% interest, how many years would it take to double your money?

Divide 72 by 5(%) to get 14…14 years to double your investment at 5% interest.

The rule can be manipulated several ways. I have not checked the math on this, but recently learned how to apply this to marketing to double your income in a year from your current projects.

First determine the number of different factors that lead to your income. In my case, I used this list for my Build a Niche Store sites:

Number of sites
Number of unique articles on each site
Numbef of backlinks from article directories
Number of backlinks from blogs

So that’s 4 factors, and some of them are interrelated, but all of them are needed in order to continue getting traffic and profits.

Now you take 72 and divide it by 4 to get 18%. If I make an 18% improvement in each area, I should double my profits in the next year.

I currently have 7 sites making money on Build a Niche Store…18% is less than 2 sites. So in the next year (probably next month), I plan to put up 2 additional Build a Niche Store sites

I went through each site adn determined how many unique articles I had posted ON the site. Guess what? Only about 3 per site! I tend to get bored and move on to the next one. So…18% of 3 is way less than 1, so just 1 new article per site will get me toward my goal…that’s pretty easy.

Same story with backlinks and blogs…just calculate 18% (or whatever %age you came up with) of your current efforts adn make a plan to implement those changes.

Can I make those changes in 1 month instead of over 1 year? Sure can!

I’m not a financial math wizard, but hopefully you can see from tehse examples that it’s not too hard to DOUBLE your business by planning ahead and making small improvements across your marketing efforts.

So today I took some success focused action, posted 2 articles to ezines, put a new page of unique content on one of my sites, created a “store” page with that kewywrd and interlinked them all. EZines doesn’t seem to have a problem sending traffic to a BANS content page, only to a thin bans front page or store page.

You can apply these prinicipals to ANY model of affiliate income…

So what are YOU planning to do?

So the totals are…

BANS $2880 (through EPN), $525 (through Commission Junction),

Text Link Ads $725

Wealthy Affiliate Commissions $860

Total(ish) :  $4187.00

Holy cow.  I never would have thought a year ago that I’d be telling you I earned over $4000 doing affiliate marketing!

What about expenses?

Well there were some…hosting ($9.95/month), domain names (bunches), Wealthy Affiliate membership fees ($290).  I’m not including advertising fees here because those were all for clickbank products and the whole package there was pretty much break even.

I did spend a good part of my earnings reinvesting…things like buying article packs, hiring a site designer…but so far everything has paid for itself easily.

I’m having a blast doing this and here’s hoping this coming year is exponentially better!

Visitors arriving at these sites may find what they are looking for, but there is one thing for sure.  If you do not regularly add content to your site in the form of valuable information, your site will simply get pushed further and further down in the search engines.

Creating content takes time…either from you or somebody else.  For the time being, I prefer to write my own content.  Most of my enterprises thus far, are in niches that I currently, or at sometime in the past, have had an interest in, making it a bit easier to spend time creating original articles.

Tonight, for example, I spent about an hour in total researching a new topic, writing an original article, posting it to my website, then submitting it to several “social” sites, such as Digg, Stumble, Facebook, Propellar and Delicious.

I have been cultivating a network of friends on Digg.  In addition to helping them out and Digging newsarticles that I like, whenever I submit a new content article to one of my websites, I send a “shout” to all my Digg friends…most of whom will Digg it as well.  This usually gets me about 10 diggs, and is enough to get my article to hang out the “upcoming” section of the site, gets me several new visitors who may (or may not) be interested in my products.  But most importantly, these activities get your new post indexed quickly by the major search engines, and get backlinks “deep” into your site, to inside articles.

In all this took me an hour (plus some time to post about it), but I hope to speed that process up in the future.  It obvously depends on how much research I do vs. how much of the knowledge is already in my head.  Frequently, the knowledge is already there, but by browsing manufacturers websites I get some great ideas about how to organize my thoughts.

What kinds of activities do you do to increase traffic to your site?

US Free Ads is basically a classified site that has both free and paid subscriptions. The free version allows you to run only 2 ads at a time, but for only $10 a year, you can run 25 ads at a time. I am doing a 7 day free trial for the premium version at $10 a month for unlimted ads running. I figure if I get even one sale a month, at the rate my commissions seem to by paying, it will pay for itself.

It seemed like a no-brainer to at least subscribe to the free version for only $10 a year. Go ahead and check out the US Free Ads website and look around a bit.

But before you make your decision, take this into consideration…it’s not just running a classified ad that you may benefit from. The US Free Ads website really seems to do well with Google organic searches. Many Build a Niche Store users are finding their US Free Ads listings when they do a regular google search on their keywords for the ad.

So there you have it. I signed up for a 7 day free trial of the premium version, $10 a month, and I placed my first ad.

In the next post, I’ll talk about how I set up my landing page for the ad I placed on US Free Ads, and of course, I’ll keep you updated on the traffic results!

In the meantime, keep in touch by letting me know how you are getting traffic to YOUR sites. Be well!

By adding a CPC campaign with AdWords or US FreeAds for example, I could drive a lot of traffic through these sites and my sales would multilply!

On the horizontal nav menu across the top is a link directly to my referral site, a web site that sells live plants. I receive a 5% commission for each order placed. Based on my commissions, the orders are averaging about $100 each, which is exactly what they advertised.

On a different front, I’ve got two BANS sites set up (Build a Niche Store), and am getting trickles of comissions on those as well. Again, daily hits are only in the 10-20 range, and I’m still seeing some comissions. The great thing about the BANS sites is that the ebay cookie remains active. If a user who clicked through to eBay from your site purchases anything in the next seven days, you get a commission!

So if you haven’t already, check out both of these things. The Thirty Day Challenge is 100% free, you can start it anytime, and it is packed with incredible information about internet marketing that is easily worth hundreds if not a few thousand in “tuition”…and years of real life experience.

As far as the Build a Niche Store goes, Shoemoney recently did a paid review on it, set up a crappy looking store, and there has been a big influx of new users on the forums. The majority of the sites look just as crappy as Shoemoney’s site.  Mine, however, look fantastic, because I don’t use the default template but instead customize free wordpress templates to make mine stand out.

If you decide to purchase BANS, I’d appreciate it if you used my link above…after all…you heard it here first!  (Maybe).  I also have some recommendations for hosting & domain registration if you have any questions about those aspects, let me know and I can help guide you through your very first domain purchase

I am starting to realize that “affiliate marketing” is really just internet marketing. There are so many products available that you can market on your own and receive commissions for…ebay, commission junction, clickbank, etc. Learning all the different internet marketing tools is really where your success or failure comes in.

All you need is a website, and it can be a free website ala the Thirty Day Challenge, or you can create your own domain name and install a blog or even a script to help you get started.

I’m seeing a slow trickle of money start to come in. Far from Problogger or Shoemoney numbers, but $1 a day, can turn into $10 a day, into $100 a day. Set up half a dozen sites and we’re starting to talk about a few thousand dollars a month.

As you keep reading this entry, you’ll soon understand why I really, really like this product. Be sure you check out my Build a Niche Store project, I think you’ll agree that it looks like a unique, robust, content filled site. You can see my in-progress Build a Niche Store here at Angled Reviews (It’s a live site, but I’m still working on customizations, etc, so if you notice anything funny going on, please leave a comment below. Thanks)

It’s all in The Manual

The Build a Niche Store product includes a detailed 74 page PDF Manual that takes the absolute beginner through all the steps required to install the software on your first site, starting with purchasing a domain name, thru installing the software, all the way to fine tuning your content.

However, many people purchasing the product are not absolute beginners and have already set up several websites. I’d like to provide a more concise summary for those of you who are considering purchasing Build a Niche Store so that you can evaluate the amount of work required to get it up and running before making your purchasing decision.
Step 1: Purchase a domain name and set up a hosting account. If this is foreign to you, see my article on “Finding a Good Host”

Step 2: Upload the Store files to your root directory. This is a simple step requiring knowledge of how to use FTP. If this is unfamiliar to you, see my article on Using FTP to your Advantage.

Step 3: Change permissions on a single file to ensure read & write access to everyone. This step also uses FTP, it’s simple depending on your FTP program, but worth reviewing the help seciton of your FTP software for how to “Change Mode” or “Change Permissins”

Step 4: Create a new MySQL Database. Simple if your hosting company has a CPanel, or similar interface with the SQL Administration tool called PHPMySQLAdmin. This step was the most involved, as all my previous databases have been automatically installed for me. But if your host uses CPanel (I recommend using LunarPages), it’s all poitn and click. I selected the name of my database to match with LunarPages existing patter of naming the database, so that if I add additional ones, I won’t lose track of each niche store database.

Step 5: Visit your new domain URL and the rest of the installation is point and click in your browser window.

Your Build a Niche Site is now installed, and hopefully, it took less than 20 minutes.

The remainder of the valuable Manual covers customization and content creation for your store. Since customizing your niche store can take up as much time as you let it, I have decided not to cover it here, the manual does a great job. Enjoy the process of discovery and let me know what your results are!

Go hear to see the Build a Niche Store Homepage and see some of the other features offered.