EPN Niche Site 1: Working On My Next EPN Goal

Posted on February 8, 2010
Filed Under Niche Sites | 2 Comments

I really want to hit my next goal of $5,000 in one month! I have decided that I need to dedicate myself to this if I ever want to see it. My best month so far was last December at $3500+. I know that December is a good month. But January came in at almost $2500. So I think this can be done with a little dedication. I am thinking that February will come in around $1500 this month. The loss is due to me not putting any new sites out and stopping new posts on my old sites due to technical issues that I discussed in an early post.

I am kind of starting fresh. For now I am not going to go back and change those old sites to auto-post. I like my new system better and it would not be easy for me to introduce the new system into an old site.  As you can see I am numbering my sites going forward. This is mainly just a way to reference them and not have to have a ton of duplicate titles on my blog.

This site is Used Pellet Stoves and is a new registration. I am trying to find some good expired domains also but have not been having much luck lately. Usually when I find them I find several good ones all at once. Not really sure why it happens that way.

Gearing Up For More EPN Sites

Posted on February 7, 2010
Filed Under Niche Sites | 3 Comments

I know that I have been quite for a week or so. I have been really working hard to fix the problem I had a few months back. The problem as far as I could tell was that I was killing my hosting company by running cron jobs every 15 minutes that created new EPN posts to my sites. A few of these was ok but when I got to 50+ all doing this on the same schedule I started to have problems. So I think in the end of December or early January I turned off all my auto posting cron jobs. My traffic and earnings have dropped ever since. Plus I was not putting out new sites as often because I was not sure how I would handle the auto posting.

Well I studied other programs and figured that there are really 2 ways to handle this. One is to have wordpress or a cron job kick off the auto post. The second is to schedule the posts in wordpress. I was very interested in scheduling posts as I thought this would use less resources.

So I set off to tackle this. I wanted to run about  years worth of post all at once. The problem is that if I do that the auctions that I am pulling now will be ended in 7 days or so. So I thought about this long and hard. I decided that it was not really the auction that I was after but rather the keywords in the auctions title. So I wrote a plugin that allows me to pull eBay auction titles and setup scheduled posts in wordpress with that title. I have a start and end date range that the plugin chooses a random date and time from to schedule the post. Nothing is placed in the content of the scheduled post. I am thinking that I will schedule about 400-500 posts per site per year. I will run this with the domain renewals and if I renew the site I will load up another years worth of posts.

So then I created a second plugin that works in hand with the one above. This one reads the title of the post once it is published and displayed. It looks for new auctions with those keywords and displays just one. If none are available adsense is substituted. Then I run the Yahoo Term Extraction API on the title. This gives me a smaller keyword to work with. Then I display 3 more eBay auctions based on the smaller and related keyword.

I think this system is going to work very well for me. I setup everything this time around in wordpress via options panels. So I load up all my options in Wordpress. When setting up a new site I will not have to even launch DreamWeaver… my html/php editor of choice. I can use my ftp program to launch a text editor to set my database login and ftp the site over. The rest will all be done in Wordress.

I also made sure that non of my code is theme specific. This way I can change out my theme at any time and my plugins will work no problem. In the past I was a little sloppier with my code and found that when I switched themes my plugins would break because I needed to put stuff in the templates to launch the plugins. Now I found a way to run plugins in the header or content without even touching the themes header.php or any other pages.

The next thing that I want to do is figure out how to install Wordpress with all my plugins and themes already loaded, activated and configured. If anyone out there knows of an easy way to do this please let me know.

Here is how my first site using these new plugins turned out: Ventless Heater. This was a new domain I registered back in the end of December and never setup due to my cron problem I mentioned above.

I suspect that I might find a few bugs here and there. So far the ones that popped up are from special characters in the title from eBay. I am handling them as I find them. So let me know if you see any errors oon the site as you browse.

My New Theme

Posted on January 26, 2010
Filed Under Niche Sites | Leave a Comment

This is a new theme that I started from scratch, Buy Tools Online. This domain name was an expired domain that I bought almost a month ago and it was rated PR2. I am really liking the way the theme is turning out. The theme has a options page that I can turn things on and off like the tag-line. It is far from being finished but I need to get some new sites out so I am introducing it now and each new site I put out will add a little more functionality to the theme.

One new thing I am trying is pulling in some content using a tool called Caffeinated Content. This tool cost me $77.00 but should make me that back in no time. It is a great way to pull in Yahoo Answers as a post and the actual answers as comments. It also pulls from YouTube and articles. The author says it is great for “made for AdSense” sites… but I bet it will work even better for EPN. I added my own script to the single post page that uses the Yahoo term extract API. It reads the post title from Yahoo Answers and uses the API to determine the best keyword. Then I pass that keyword to the eBay API to pull auctions and display them. If no auctions are available for that keyword then AdSense is substituted in that place.

It is working pretty well. The only problem that I have noticed so far is that I am getting some posts that are spammy from youtube. They have my requested keyword there but the actual question or post is really not related. Maybe the answer is to just use yahoo answers.

I almost forgot to mention that I used Caffeinated Contentto populate 400+ posts back dated in 2009 and scheduled 400+ posts for 2010. So now this blog is on auto-pilot with new posts being created for a full year. I could have done even longer if I wanted. That is pretty cool in my book! It is even better that I don’t have any processor intensive cron jobs or anything that have to run to get the posts out.

I will keep you posted with my results with Caffeinated Content as I get more sites out and get more results back.

Who Needs a Search Function?

Posted on January 18, 2010
Filed Under Custom Affiliate Sites Blog | Leave a Comment

I guess I thought I didn’t!

I was trying to find a post I wrote a few months ago and man was it ever difficult without a search option. What was I thinking not putting a search form on this blog?

One will never know… but it is here now!

Dec 2009 MPLX MarkDown MakeGood

Posted on January 15, 2010
Filed Under EPN (eBay Partner Network) | Leave a Comment

I just went into my EPN account and looked at payment history and then clicked on my outstanding balance and it displayed this: Dec 2009 MPLX MarkDown makegood. That is the other make-good that eBay owes us from December. Mine came in at $15.40.

That is the only thing showing in my outstanding balance. Decembers commissions should be added into that shortly.

Quick everyone login to EPN and see what your make-good is!

Wordpress Affiliate Themes

Posted on January 14, 2010
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Niche Sites | 3 Comments

Since I am doing pretty well this month with my income I have been taking it somewhat easy. I was in search of a new Wordpress theme to use for a few more niche sites and thought I should just design my own. So that is what I am setting off to do. I started out on Google and found a great site about creating your own Wordpress theme.

Once I get a few of these setup and running I think I might release a few themes to my readers to use if you want. The way I see it so far the bulk of the files are going to be the same and I will be doing most of my modifications to graphics and css files. Most of the php files will be static for the most part once I set them up the way I want.

I figure that if I am using Wordpress to make money with EPN then I should know as much about Wordpress as I can. I want to expand my knowledge level of Wordpress this month and become somewhat of a guru. Then I plan to make my best niche site yet with all the bells and whistles. Some areas that I am currently lacking in are 404’s, expired auctions in posts and duplicate content.

Now having said all that I don’t want to spend all my time making it look pretty. A pretty site is not going to make me more money then a dull looking one. I just want to expand on what I already have with some better looks and more functionality in the lacking areas.

I am calling it a night and will pickup tomorrow evening where I left off with my first Wordpress theme from scratch.

Back on Track

Posted on January 10, 2010
Filed Under EPN (eBay Partner Network) | 6 Comments

Well my EPN earnings are back on track after my little host problem. They are not like they where in December but that is to be expected. Yesterday was my best day so far this month coming in at $82.79. Most days so far this month have been in the $60 dollar range. With the exception of my lowest day of $15.32 which was caused by my host issue.

So far this month I have been off to a slow start on site productions. I have about 4 sites in process but want to do new stuff with them. This requires some design and coding which is slowing me down a bit. One of the ideas I want to play with is PPC. I would like to try and buy some cheap traffic (5 cents) from like 7search.com and see what kind of results I can get. If I can buy traffic at .05 per click and maybe make .10 per click that is a .05 per click profit. Then I could determine how much traffic I want to send in a sense determining how much money I want to make. I am setting up a domain just for this purpose so that I can track every aspect to determine profitability. The last thing I want to do is lose money. I am not going to use AdWords because I feel I would have to pay too much for the traffic. Once I get this setup and running I will let everyone know my success or maybe failure.

Warning: simplexml_load_file() [function.simplexml-load-file]: I/O warning : failed to load external entity

Posted on January 6, 2010
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing | 5 Comments

Looks like I will be lucky today if I can get to 150 clicks. I am having an issue with my API calls with eBay and Amazon. I feel sure that this is a host problem with HostGator.com. I have not had any issues like this before. I opened a ticket about an hour ago and am hoping that the issue is resolved soon.

Funny thing about this error is that I can get it to fix itself by going to the wp-admin login screen and then just closing it and returning to the site. After doing this the error goes away for about 10 minutes and then returns. Not sure what that is about.

I found another site getting the error via google and then did WHOIS. Guess what? They are hosted with HostGator.com. I will let everyone know how fast their support is with this issue.

This is how the error message starts out:

Warning: simplexml_load_file() [function.simplexml-load-file]: I/O warning : failed to load external entity

Then it goes on to list the url that I use to generate the xml.

It sucks when I have no control over a problem like this. Almost makes me want to put a server rack in my garage and start my own hosting.

#### UPDATED  – RESOLUTION ####
This is the new php.ini file I had to use to resolve this problem.
This is the info I had to add to my .htaccess.

Wordpress CPU Load Issues

Posted on January 5, 2010
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing | 2 Comments

I am still experiencing Wordpress CPU load issues. My hosts says that wp-cron is the culprit and that plugins are to blame. I am not sold on this 100%. I did not start seeing these slow downs on my sites until I started using Cron jobs to automatically create posts. I think the cron jobs are to blame. The crons all go off every 15 minutes. If I visit one of my sites on the 15 minute mark I can tell something was not right.

My host asked me to load wp-super-cache on 2 more domains. I did this. Actually I like how fast the sites load after the page is cached. They asked me to look over my plugins and take action. Well I am not really sure what to do there. I don’t really have any plugins that I can drop. They all are required for my sites to function. I voluntarily decided to drop my cron jobs. I just decided to drop them all on all my sites.  I did that tonight and I can already tell a difference in my sites.

So my sites will survive for a while without cron posts. I still have the related searches API that gets me lots of longtails.  I am going back to the drawing board for some new ideas this month. I want to make things run smooth and efficient for my host and users as well as make my sites easily manageable for me.

As I am writing this I just got the email back from my host that the 2 domains in question today have been re-instated. This was the 3rd time this happened in the last 2 weeks. I am hoping to have put an end to it by removing the cron jobs today. Only time will tell.

December 2009 EPN Challenge

Posted on January 1, 2010
Filed Under EPN (eBay Partner Network) | Leave a Comment

Well here it is about an hour into 2010. I did not get my 31 sites in for this month like I wanted. Instead I got 24 finished. I am going to let it at that. I got some great ideas for some upgrades to my current sites. So I am going to take the first few days or maybe a week in January to work on those. Then you should see some more sites popping up.

I got 1 new domain and 2 expired domains already lined up and waiting to be developed. Those were going to be sites 25, 26 and 27 but I just ran out of time with the holidays and spending time with my family.

Once all of Decembers earnings are in I want to post all my expenses, earnings and profits for the month.

I really went out with a bang in 2009, earning just under $7,000 in the last quarter from EPN. I am just not sure what this new year will bring. Last year January was a good month for me. I am really hoping that I can top that $7,000 in the first quarter of 2010.

I contribute my success to finding something that earned me money and then duplicating it. Focus and commitment also played a big part. Every night after my family went to sleep I put in 1 – 3 hours of work. Very rarely did I stray and take a night off. Also don’t spend your time searching google for ways to make money online. I find myself doing this still to this day. You can do it… just get your work done first. Set yourself a goal for those few hours each night. Once you achieve that goal then you can google your extra time away.

Hoping everyone a prosperous 2010! Happy New Year!

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