Gearing Up For More EPN Sites

Posted on February 7, 2010
Filed Under Niche Sites | 6 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.

Comments

6 Responses to “Gearing Up For More EPN Sites”

  1. EPN Affiliate Sites on February 8th, 2010 1:27 pm

    When will your plugins be available ;)

  2. EPN Affiliate Sites on February 8th, 2010 1:31 pm

    Genius… this in my opinion is better than even A2P. And, you are running using wp-cron and not the system crontab. I’m interested in seeing how you accomplish the task of adding the auctions to the blank post. Do you have an include of something hard coded in to single.php? I totally am digging this new method. The chance to duplicate content is low and you can also even add in more affiliate options by using the title. Great work!

  3. admin on February 8th, 2010 5:12 pm

    Thanks man!

    I had thoughts about starting an affiliate program around the plugins once I get all the bugs worked out and it is more stable.

    The nice thing is that I can change my plugin at anytime and switch from EPN to Amazon if I want. After editing the plugin every page on my site would be switched over and realted to the title of the post.

    I do run a check against the title before doing a new post to make sure that title does not already exist. So no duplicate titles should ever happen.

    Right now the plugin uses XMLRPC to do the posts. But I am thinking if I do a little digging I can do it internal to wordpress and not have to go out and back through as a remote post.

    Nope nothing is hard coded into any of the pages. I think it was called a filter on the content. When worpress calls for the content of the post it runs my code first and then returns whatever I tell it to.

  4. EPN Affiliate Sites on February 9th, 2010 11:35 am

    Hey, so are you actually doing an installable plugin, .zip file, using the WordPress methodology for creating a plugin?

  5. EPN Affiliate Sites on February 9th, 2010 11:38 am

    Are you editing something in wordpress? “When worpress calls for the content of the post it runs my code first and then returns whatever I tell it to.”

    http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/the_content

  6. admin on February 9th, 2010 3:49 pm

    Yes it is an actuall plugin that gets activated/deactivated. It is not a zip file though. I just have the php file in a folder that you just drop into the plugins directory.

    As for the_content… check this out: http://www.devlounge.net/code/wordpress-plugin-filters It sums up the filters nicely. As soon as you activate the plugin the content changes to your liking. Deactivate the plugin and the content goes back to the original in the post.

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