BookmarkingDemon Doesn’t Support Vista

I recently purchased BookmarkingDemon because I wanted a tool to help me social bookmark my sites. This is a process I could certainly do by hand, but anytime a software tool can speed things up, it’s sometimes worth the investment. Especially when you consider I’m only working part-time on my affiliate marketing business.

However it didn’t work for me. I was able to install it on my computer, but I can’t run the software. I’m running Windows Vista, and as it turns out, they don’t have good Vista support yet. Apparently some people have gotten it to work under Vista, but others including myself, have not been able to get it to work.

For the record, BookmarkingDemon’s technical support has been very fair and helpful in trying to resolve the issue. They’ve even offered to give me a refund.

I haven’t accepted the refund yet because I’m not sure if I want to keep the software. I was able to get it running on a Windows 2003 virtual machine I have under Microsoft’s VirtualPC software. I just really don’t find it very practical to have to launch a virtual machine just to run one piece of software. So I have to decide if I want to keep it and run it under a virtual machine, or if I should ask for the refund.

I’ll let you know what I decide in a future post.

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January 2008 Earnings Update

My earnings have dropped off significantly the past two weeks. I’m not sure what to attribute this to, other than the Christmas shopping season is over. I will definitely be keeping an eye on things, and hopefully this will turn around.

On a bright note, Commission Junction just issued a payment to me. It wasn’t for as much as I had hoped, but anytime you get commissions is a good thing. It’s very encouraging and motivational to keep going. I’ve been at this since September–only working part time–and I still feel like I have a lot left to learn and even more left to implement. So making money where I’m at… which I feel is still somewhat at the beginning stages… is very encouraging. How much more can I make when I keep plugging away and get a chance to implement more and more of my ideas?

Hopefully the sky’s the limit!

On another note, I’ve recently been experimenting with a few different methods for getting backlinks and traffic to my sites. I’m still somewhat in the “experimental” phase, so I’m not quite ready to talk about them. Stay tuned though, because whether the methods succeed or fail, I plan to discuss them here. For the most part, I plan to let you know what I tried and whether or not it worked.

Well, until then…

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BANS User Forum

Until this moment, I would have said nothing but positive things about the BANS user forum. I really have learned a ton there, and it’s a huge bonus that’s included with the Build a Niche Store software. Unfortunately, I just had my first bad experience there…

Now some may think this is ticky-tacky on my part, but someone wrote a long post about a recession and whatnot, and they had to throw in some jabs about the war in Iraq. I responded in a not-so-subtle manner that there were better places to talk about that stuff than the BANS forum. As expected, the response back was how it was posted in the “general discussion” board, and they had the right to talk about it.

I’m sure they’re probably correct that they have the “right” to talk about the Iraq war there, however having a “right” to do something isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be. I mean, I have the right to be a jerk, but if I exercise that right… well that just means I’m being a jerk. See what I mean?

Enough digressing…

Maybe I overreacted, but I really don’t want to talk about politics or anything like that at a place like the BANS forum. I checked, and there are over 19 million forums that show up on Google that deal with politics. Certainly these would be better places to talk about such divisive topics. And I realize it was just one comment in one post, but where does the slippery slope end? Should we talk about Democrats versus Republicans, religion, abortion, class warfare… where would it end?

So I wrote back and basically said “goodbye.”

Did I overreact? I don’t know, maybe… probably… But the thread also made me realize that I was spending way too much time posting to that forum… time I should have been spending developing my affiliate marketing business. Time I could have used to build new BANS sites, optimizing and promoting them. Time I could have used to build up this blog (where I can truly help people).

So I think it’s a good thing this happened, because it made me realize I was spending too much time posting to the forum, and not enough time taking action on my business. Which leads me to a valuable lesson I’ve already learned in the past, but apparently keep forgetting…

Take action!

It’s so easy to get caught up watching another “how to” video… or participating in the “affiliate marketing forums”… or “learning” or “experimenting”…

Let me say unequivocally that there is nothing wrong with any of those activities. However if all you do is watch, post, learn, experiment, then you’re not taking action to further your business. There always comes a point where the learning has to stop, and the doing has to begin.

That time has come–yet again–for me.

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Build a Niche Store - Getting an Edge Over Your Competition

Here’s a great trick for getting an edge over your competition using your Build a Niche Store sites…

1. Go to Google Alerts and enter in a search term for your niche. For example, if your niche was the “Nintendo Wii” then your search term might be “Nintendo Wii” or maybe even just “Nintendo.”
    
2. Next tell Google what types of alerts you want. “News” is good if you just want to see news items relating to your niche. “Blogs” is a great way to stay updated on the latest blogging activity surrounding your niche. “Comprehensive” gives you everything. Just pick one and try it, you can always change it later.
    
3. Next tell Google how often you want the alerts. I suggest you choose either “once a day” or “once a week,” again depending on your own preference.
    
4. Finally enter in your e-mail address that you want Google to send the alerts to.
    

Now here’s how this gives you a jump on your competition…

Let’s say that Nintendo is coming out with a brand-new controller for the Nintendo Wii. It’s not out yet and won’t be released for a few months, but Nintendo has announced it early in order to start creating buzz. This controller is going to be hot, and you’re going to want to feature it on your BANS site once it comes out and there’s auctions for it on eBay, won’t you?

Well why wait! Do some keyword research or at least take your best guess on some good keywords for the new product (the actual product name itself does wonders) and create a new store landing page on your site for it. Configure it as though there were auctions for it on eBay, even if there aren’t any at the moment. Maybe even put some text on the page with information about the product. In the example I’ve been using, you’d go to Nintendo’s site and get information on the controller and add it to your store page.

Now here’s what you’ve just done… you’ve just created a keyword optimized store page on your BANS site for an upcoming product. Do you think the search engines are going to notice that? You bet they will. So when the product is actually released and available on eBay, you’ll already have an established store page that’s been indexed by the search engines. This gives you an advantage because the moment the product becomes available, you’ll already be positioned to get organic search engine traffic. In addition, as people search for the product before it’s released, they have a good chance of finding your store. Imagine… someone interested in the specs for the new upcoming controller finds your site and then orders something.

If you really wanted to take this up a notch, you could include an opt-in form inviting visitors to join your mailing list to get notified the moment the controller is available for sale. That way you can reel them back in when there are sales to be made, and you’ve just obtained a new lead for your mailing list that you can use for e-mail marketing.

Hopefully you can see the possibilities here, and maybe even come up with some creative ideas of your own. The point is that if you utilize Google Alerts to stay informed on the latest news and buzz surrounding your niche, you can use that knowledge to give yourself an edge over your competition.

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Finding the Right Product to Promote

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How to Find Profitable Niches

It’s the million dollar question… How do you find profitable niches? Well back around Thanksgiving, the guys behind Wealthy Affiliate released a free PDF that discusses some great free ways to find a niche to promote. You can grab a copy of it over at their site: http://www.wealthyaffiliate.com/downloads/nichefeast.pdf.

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Build a Niche Store Mods

I found a great post over on the Build a Niche Store user forum that lists out all of the best mods. These are modifications you can make to BANS that adds or improves upon it’s functionality.

Here’s the link to that post:

http://buildanichestore.com/members/viewtopic.php?t=7560

Enjoy!

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Submit Your Site to Search Engines

I’m going to start a new series titled “Build a Niche Store Checklist.” Basically it will be a series of posts that lists the steps I take when building a new Build a Niche Store web site. My first entry in the series is a step I just performed 5 minutes ago for my most recent BANS site: submitting the site to the search engines.

(Note: I’m going to focus on BANS sites in this post, but you can perform these same steps for any of your web sites.)

Each of the three main search engines–Google, Yahoo, and Windows Live Search–have webmaster portals where you can tell the search engine about your web site, authenticate it so that they know it’s really your site, submit your sitemap.xml file, and more.

I’m getting ahead of myself though. There’s a few steps you need to take before you start working with the search engines.

First things first… make sure your site is finished before you proceed with these steps. Now I didn’t say make sure your site was perfect, rather just make sure it’s finished. What I mean by that is make sure your site is finished to the point where you are ready for visitors to come and start buying stuff. Obviously no site is perfect, and undoubtedly you’ll change and improve things over time, but you will want your site functional before asking the search engines to start indexing it. The most important part of this is to make sure you don’t have any unfinished or broken pages, and that you don’t plan on making any major changes to your site’s navigation structure anytime soon.

On my very first BANS web site, I changed the home page from “home” to the title of my niche. This changed every link on my site from www.domain.com/home/subpage to www.domain.com/niche/subpage. Months later Google still hasn’t fixed all of the links to show the new path. I’m not trying to tell you that you can’t make such a change on your site if it’s needed… just that if you have plans to do a change like that anytime soon, make your changes first, then work with the search engines.

Alright, now that we have that out of the way, here’s the process I follow to submit my BANS sites to the search engines. I’m going to stick with the 1, 2, 3 step approach, so hopefully that works for everyone to follow along easily.

1. Create a SITEMAP.XML file.
   A sitemap.xml file is an industry standard file you upload to the root of your web site. It helps search engines discover all of the pages on your web site. I use a free program called Vigos Gsitemap to generate my sitemap.xml files. This is a Windows program, so Mac users will have to find an alternative. (If you know of a good Mac alternative let me know and I’ll link it here.)I won’t get into the specifics of how to use Gsitemap, but basically it will spider your BANS site. Once that process is complete, you can tell it to generate a sitemap file, and then save that file to your desktop. Once the sitemap.xml file is saved to your desktop, I upload it to the root of my web site using Filezilla.
    
2. Create a ROBOTS.TXT file.
   This is another industry standard file that you also upload to the root of your web site. Making this file is really easy. Just open up your favorite text editor (on Windows I use Notepad). Inside the text file add the following text:

   User-agent: *
   Sitemap: http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml

   Obviously change the sitemap path to be the URL for your web site. When you’re done, save the file with the filename “robots.txt” and upload it to the root of your web site.

   Having a robots.txt file does the following three things:

   a) all search engines automatically look for one, so having it will eliminate a bunch of 404 errors in your web stats;
   b) the User-agent: * line invites any and all search engine spiders to index your site;
   c) the Sitemap: http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml line (modified for your web site URL) tells all of the search engines where to find your sitemap.xml file.

   There’s a lot more you can do with a robots.txt file, but that’s pretty much all I use it for with my BANS sites. Actually, once you’ve done those two steps you could call it good and move on, because every search engine that finds your site will look for the robots.txt file, find that it’s welcome to index everything on the site, and be shown where to find your sitemap.xml file to aid it in discovering all of your site’s pages. I like to take it a step further however…
    

3. Authenticate your site with Google.
   Go to Google Webmaster Tools and click “Get Started” to login with your Google account. Once you log in, you’ll be at the dashboard where you can enter your site’s URL and click “Add Site.” Now Google will want you to authenticate your site. I always use the Meta Tag verification method. Simply copy the meta tag they provide. Next open up a new browser window, log into your BANS site’s admin page and go to the the templates area, and paste the meta tag you copied from Google into the header.php right below these existing tags:

   <?=$front->meta();?>
   <meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″ />

   Once you have Google’s meta tag pasted into header.php, click save and go back over to the browser window  you still have open for Google’s webmaster tools site. Click the button to verify. If everything worked, Google will now recognize that you have verified the site.

   Next click the “Sitemaps” button on the left and add a “General Web Sitemap.” It defaults to your main site URL, so just add in the name of your sitemap file (most likely “sitemap.xml”).

   Finally, click on the “Tools” button on the left, and then click on the “Set preferred domain” link. This tells Google your preference on whether or not to display “www” in their index. I prefer to have Google always display the “www” for the majority of my sites. Don’t forget to click the “Ok” button to save your choice. Now you’re finished with Google.
    

4. Authenticate your site with Yahoo.
   Authenticating your site with Yahoo is very similar to authenticating with Google. Go to Yahoo Site Explorer and use the link in the top left of the page to login with your Yahoo account. Once you’re logged in, just like with Google, you enter your site’s URL and click the “Add My Site” button. After you add your site it shows up in the main list.Next click on the “Authenticate” button on the right site of your site’s listing. Again I prefer using the Meta Tag verification method, so I copy the meta tag that’s displayed and paste it into my site’s header.php below the Google meta tag I already added. After I save my header.php file, I go back to Yahoo and click “Ready to Authenticate.”

   Yahoo does not authenticate sites immediately like Google does, but that’s okay, you can still submit your sitemap.xml file in the meantime. Click on the “Manage” button next to your site. Just like at Google, enter in the name of your sitemap file, keeping the default type as “Web Site Feed,” and click the “Add Feed” button. This submits your sitemap file to Yahoo. Now you’re done with both Google and Yahoo.
    

5. Authenticate your site with Windows Live Search (MSN).
   Not as many people bother authenticating with Windows Live, but I like to do this because… well… why not? Anything I can do to help my site with the search engines is a good thing in my book, and Windows Live is the third most popular search engine.Go to Live Search Webmaster Center and click the “Sign in to use the tools” button to login with your Windows Live ID. Next click the “Add a Site” button. Next enter in the URL of your web site and the full URL of your sitemap.xml file. So for example you’d enter http://www.domain.com/ for the web site address, and http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml for the sitemap address. Don’t worry because if you type in either path incorrectly, it will warn you when you try to submit. As always, I choose the Meta Tag verification method. You need to enter in a valid e-mail address, and signing up for the newsletter is up to you. Go ahead and click “Submit.”

   Next you’ll copy the meta tag and paste it into your site’s header.php file below the Google and Yahoo meta tags. After you copy it to your header.php and save, go back to Live Search Webmaster Center and click the “OK” button to finish adding your site. Now you’re finished with Windows Live Search.

 
Now You’re Finished!
Let’s recap everything you just did…

…you generated a sitemap.xml file and uploaded it to the root of your site. This file helps all search engines know where to find all the pages on your site.

…you created a robots.txt file and uploaded it to the root of your site. This file invites all search engines to index all of the pages on your site. It also tells them where to find your sitemap.xml file.

…you submitted and authenticated your site with Google. Now Google knows about your site and your sitemap file. It also knows whether or not you prefer “www” for your site address. You can go back to Google from time to time and check for errors, see how many pages on your site Google has indexed, etc.

…you submitted and authenticated your site with Yahoo. Now Yahoo knows about your site and your sitemap file. You can check back with Yahoo from time to time as it’s a great place to see what other sites on the web are linking back to your site.

…you submitted and authenticated your site with Windows Live Search. Now Live Search knows about your site and your sitemap file. You can check back with Live Search from time to time to see how well your site is ranking in their search engine.

This may seem like a lot of work, but once you’ve done it a few times, it gets easier. I just followed these steps for my most recent BANS site, and the whole process took less than 10 minutes from start to finish. So this procedure is an easy and quick way to jump start your BANS site–or any of your web sites for that matter–with the search engines.

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Social Bookmarking Widgets

Social marketing and Web 2.0 are important to your affiliate marketing efforts. I’ve had a lot of success using social bookmarking to promote my web sites and articles. Imagine how powerful it would be if your visitors helped promote your site through social bookmarks too!

I found a couple new widgets that adds a handy bookmark widget to your web sites. They make it super easy for visitors to submit your site to popular social bookmark sites.

Both widgets are completely free, and each give you a snippet of HTML code that you add to whatever pages on your web site that you want the widget to appear.

Add This - http://www.addthis.com/
This widget adds a small button to your web site that can either prompt the reader to “bookmark” the page, or “subscribe” to your site’s RSS feed. It makes it extremely easy for visitors to add the page to their favorites, or add the page to one of several popular social bookmarking sites. It does not allow visitors to e-mail the page to others. I’m currently adding the Add This bookmark button to my Build a Niche Store web sites. I add the widget in the header.php template, so the button automatically appears on every page.

Share This - http://www.sharethis.com/
This widget is similar to Add This, as it adds a button to your site. Unlike Add This, there are not options to bookmark or subscribe to an RSS feed, it only supports bookmarking. It also does not support adding the page to the visitor’s local browser favorites, but it does support all of the most popular social bookmarking sites. What makes Share This stand apart is that a visitor can use it to e-mail the current web page to their friends and family. I’m currently using the Share This widget on my Affiliate Marketing Blog, so you can check it out at the bottom of this post. I added the widget to the blog’s templates, so it automatically appears beneath every blog post.

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BANS Landing Pages

A recent thread on the Build a Niche Store user forum was discussing how to setup landing pages on your BANS sites. This is something I’ve been doing on all of my BANS sites ever since I got started, so I’d like to share my method with you.

What is a Landing Page?

First things first… what is a landing page? (If you already know the answer, you can skip ahead to the next section.) A landing page is a term used quite frequently in online marketing. In a nutshell, it’s the page you want a visitor to “land on” when they click on a link somewhere else. It’s basically the first page you want them to come to when they click on a specific link to your web site.

This is important when you’re dealing with online marketing efforts. Let’s say you have a BANS store selling Nintendo products. Now you write an article at HubPages about how great the Nintendo Wii console is, and provide a link back to your site. If you just link to your main site, someone specifically interested in the Nintendo Wii is going to get a site that’s generic to Nintendo (including the DS, GameBoy, games, accessories, etc). When you’re trying to get a visitor to buy something from your site, you don’t want to lose their focus like that.

So instead, you would create a page on your BANS site that just lists auctions for the Nintendo Wii console specifically. Then you would link directly to that page from that article you wrote, making your Nintendo Wii page the “landing page” for your article.

Landing pages are important for all sorts of marketing efforts: articles, pay per click (PPC), online classified ads, and so on.

Creating a Landing Page in BANS

Okay so now that you know what a landing page is, how do you set one up in BANS. There are probably many ways to do this, but here is my method:

1. I determine how many landing pages I want to setup, and for which products. 

   Other niches will have too many products to make this practical. In those niches you will want to setup landing pages for your most popular products, and/or individual products you’re targeting through marketing efforts (e.g. PPC, articles).
    

   There are some niches where it might make sense to make a landing page for every product in the niche. For example, in the Nintendo niche you might setup a landing page for “wii consoles,” “wii remotes,” “wii numchucks,”etc.

2. I check to see if eBay already has a sub-category for the product.Sometimes an individual product is so popular, it will already have it’s own sub-category in eBay. Other times the product has it’s own category, but you can break it down further by model number.

   An example of this would be the TomTom GPS navigation system. It has it’s own sub-category in eBay, but you could create separate landing pages for the “TomTom GO 720,” “TomTom GO 920,” “TomTom ONE XL,” and so on.

   Just be sure to do your research so you’re only setting up landing pages for individual products that have a high sell-through volume on eBay.
    

3. Create a BANS store page for your landing page.
   
   Once I have identified what landing pages I want to create, I go into the BANS admin area and create a new store page for each landing page. I fill out all of the information on the page so that it looks nice (title, meta info, etc.). Make sure to give it an H1 title in the content area. Enter in the category number from eBay that your product appears inside of, and then enter in your product name in the search query field.An example search query would be: (tomtom,tom tom) 920 -(antenna,screen protector,charger,mount)

   This sample query will pull up any product listing from eBay that has either “tomtom” or “tom tom” in the title, has “920″ in the title, but does not have any of the words “antenna,” “screen protector,” “charger,” or “mount.” So the query would pull up a listing titled “Brand New TomTom GO 920 GPS Navigator,” but it would not pull up “TomTom 920 Car Mount.”
    

4. Test that the landing page works in BANS.
   
   The next step I take is saving the page and viewing it in my BANS site. I’m looking to make sure it’s pulling up only the individual products I want. If any wrong products appear, I modify the store page’s search query until I have it right. I also make sure the title of the web page and the content I added before the product listings all look okay.
    
5. Add more to the page to increase you conversion rates.This step is optional. Once you have completed steps 1-4 you have a good enough landing page that you can be confident if someone clicks through directly to that page, looking for that product, they’ll find what they came to find.

   However I like to add more value to the visitor and increase my chance to make a conversion. What I do is head over to Commission Junction to see if there is an advertiser selling the same product, to possibly add an affiliate to them within the content area of the page.

   Or I frequently go to Amazon and see if they have the product listed there. If they do, I’ll add a link in the content area of the landing page (above the auction listings) that says something like “Amazon’s Retail Price: $295.” This does two things…

   First, it gives the visitor an option to buy from Amazon, and if they do I’ll earn a commission from Amazon.

   Second, it gives the visitor options and information. Think about how you shop for products… you compare prices! How does your visitor know they’re getting a good deal buying an auction from eBay if you don’t show it to them? A lot of people get cynical about the prices at eBay (especially around Christmas… Nintendo Wii prices ring a bell?), so I like to show them what a great deal they’re getting in the hopes they won’t click off my site and go somewhere else to find that information.

   Here’s a real story from one of my BANS sites: I setup a landing page for a product that sells on Amazon for around $325. You can get the same product on eBay for a little over $200. I put a link at the top of the page with my affiliate information (of course) that said “Amazon Price: $325.” Now I setup a PPC marketing campaign for this product at Google, and did really well making my eBay commissions. Wouldn’t you know it, though, that I got a few sales over at Amazon too!

   Here’s the real kicker… my average commission for this product at eBay was like around $3.50 for each one sold through my site. Amazon, on the other hand, gave me 4% of the $325 as a commission for each sale there. That’s a $13 commission for each one sold at Amazon.

   So by adding the Amazon link to my landing page, not only did I give my visitors more options and buying confidence that they were getting a great price, but I actually converted some of them through Amazon for even higher commissions than I get from eBay!

   Now like I said this step is optional, and it is labor intensive. You have to go to Amazon or CJ, find the product, build your affiliate link to it, and then put that link in the content section of the landing page and make sure it’s all formatted properly. However for really popular products or products I’m specifically targeting through marketing efforts, I find that this step pays off in the end.

Well there you have it. Those are the steps I use to build landing pages on my BANS sites. If you have any questions or comments, please leave a comment.

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