Just when you think you have it figured out… the bar is once again moved, and you have to relearn a few new strategies in order to succeed!

1 – Starting Without a Plan!

We have all done this and still do! If you start without a solid plan for your website, you are aimlessly heading nowhere! At minimum, your website plan should be able to tell you if you can expect to earn anything from your new site, the exact pages your site will launch with, and many additional pages that may bring traffic for the future! In addition, you should have a basic understanding of the type of information BUYERS within your niche seek out information. Whether that is reviews, product comparisons, specific features of the products, or any other measurable methods they use to make a buying decision.

Here are a couple posts to read:

• 5 Reasons to Avoid a Niche market
• Maximizing the Usability of your Content

2 – Using Site Navigation Links as LongTail Links

This is one VERY common mistake I have made myself and see quite a bit of in others websites. Site Navigation links should be short and sweet, doing nothing more than inviting your visitor to the [brand] or [product] page. Many times, we try to use the site nav links for long tail phrases and it comes out looking like spam!

Save the long tail for in-content links… and keep your navigation links to the point. Look at these examples:

Good Navigation Links:

• Callaway (Leading to several Callaway Items)
• Callaway Odyssey 2-ball (Leading to the Specific item)
• Ping (Leading to several Ping Items)
• Ping Anser (Leading to the Specific item)

Bad Navigation Links:

• Callaway Golf Putter Reviews and Guides
• Callaway Odyssey 2-ball Putter Review (Leading to the Specific item)
• Ping Golf Putter Reviews and Guides (Leading to several Ping Items)
• Ping Anser Putter Review (Leading to the Specific item)

If you find yourself repeating the SAME PHRASE over and over in your Sitewide Navigation links, you have to admit that it even looks kinda spammy to you! Just imagine how search engines and others see it! Save your long tail links for “In Content” and article links, and keep your site navigation as simple as possible!

3 – Building Pages that Have No Benefit to the Buying Process!

I make this mistake as often as anyone – but if your site is attracting people looking to “maintain or fix” something they ALREADY OWN, its not only going to provide you with non-targeted traffic, its going to hurt your new QPC score if they start clicking over to eBay to look at things they already own!

IF you have replacement parts on your site that’s another story… but if you have a site about cars, don’t include articles on washing the car, unless you have a specific section with cleaning supplies, that you use the related content to leverage the buying process!

If your site is focused on attracting buyers – don’t attract non-buyers just to have more traffic! Try to make sure EVERY PAGE supports the sale.

4 – Mixing SEO and Site Planning into the Same Process!

As much as this will be unpopular and present more questions than answers… its the truth! If you start worrying about search optimization as part of your planning process, you are setting yourself up for a failure before you even start! Skip your way OUT of the keyword demand process until AFTER you have the plan for the content in place! Its OK to look and see if there is basic demand for your niche market, but don’t get caught up in the trap of building pages to attract search visitors!

Once you know WHAT PRODUCTS people are buying, only then should you worry about getting them to your site! If you build your site around keyphrase demand first, you may just find that the phrase with a million searches only has $25,000 worth of sales in a month!

What are The Most Common Mistakes You think You Make when Building?

Separating Tasks for Best Results and Least Frustration!

Shhh… this is a secret! A secret that will not only save you time, but makes sure your niche product website will do its best, right out of the gate!

1 – Building The Site Blueprint- If you Have No BluePrint, You Have no Plan!

When you start planning your website – do ONLY that! Plan your site based on what people are buying and what your site is about! The ONLY important aspect of planning your website is that when you are done, you have a list of ALL the pages and ALL the Product Reviews & Guides your site will contain.

ELIMINATE SEO from this part of your site building… that comes LATER! You are not building a site for search engines, you are building a site that provides information for readers, and every page of your site should support the READER, not the search traffic!! (This step is a featured section of the RankSpankers Website – Stay Tuned!)

If you are outsourcing your content, submit it to your writer and forget about it, for now.

Step 1 Complete – 2 Hours.

2 – Build Your Site Structure

Once you have settled on your site blueprint, the next logical step is to build the foundation for your site. When I use WordPress, (Most Often) this is when I handle the install through Fantastico, install my plugins, create the category structure and almost every aspect of building a site on the WordPress backend.

Keep in mind that WordPress has a “Privacy” setting (Admin > Settings > Privacy) that you can use to block ALL search engine spiders for now, as a matter of fact… its now turned ON by default!

Step 2 Complete – 1 Hour.

3 – Create Your Content Titles

After you have the backend completely setup the way I want, I actually populate ALL of my page and post titles in place! Copying them from my BluePrint is simple and easy enough, and within 1-2 hours, ALL of my sites structure is completed, and I can review how it will flow to visitors.

Again, I am NOT paying any attention to SEO at this point in my page or post titles! They are what they are… and the main thing, is that they need to instruct a visitor to EXACTLY what content is included on that page! SEO is a separate process… that we will get to AFTER the site building is complete!

Step 3 Completed – 1-2 Hours.

4 – Source, Edit and Upload ALL Product Images

At this point in my site build, I usually spend a few hours sourcing ALL images at one sitting! It makes it much easier, since I am not piecing it together on the fly… opening new windows, tasking between applications, etc.

I Sit down with my Site BluePrint and go on the hunt! By the time I am done, usually 2-3 hours later, I have 100% of all my product review images uploaded and applied to their respective posts.

Step 4 – Completed in 2-3 Hours.

5 – Add the Post Content Once you Have ALL Of It!!

If you use a service like TextBroker, you can expect to have all your content back within a day or two, unless you choose a specific author for ALL your content. (Which is what I do)

Store your content in a text file as it is coming in… and ONLY when you have all of it, should you jump over and put it onto the site. You would be surprized how much time you waste opening and closing windows, when you post it as it arrives. I use my site blueprint for storing ALL the content to the site and once its complete, only then do I jump back into the admin and post it all to the respective titles.

Step 5 – Completed in 3-4 Hours.

The End Result…

For myself, I like breaking these tasks into separate days or sessions for many reasons:

1. I Don’t Get Bored with one Site when I break it into several days!
2. I STILL get things done while waiting for Content!
3. I am never jumping from window to window, task to task in the same session! Its like working in a factory… doing piece assembly… focusing on ONE SMALL part at a time!
4. I don’t lose a full day on one site, and can work on several sites in one day!
5. I OFTEN come up with different ideas during one step or another, that are easily implemented sitewide!
6. I am very Task Oriented, and have a starting and ending point to each task, thus I feel like I have accomplished something!
7. Its EASIER to track where you are on a site build!

I could go on and on… but the bottom line is that “It Just Works!” By following a repetitive protocal on every site build, you will begin to get super-efficient at each task you complete, taking far less time on the next site!

Repetition turns to habit… habit turns to productivity… increased productivity turns to money!

Before anyone gets started on this, as much as I wish I could,  I simply cannot answer “site specific” support requests on it, due to EVERY site being different! It will take me 30-60 minutes to help each person! I changed this theme to work for myself, and it relies heavily on using the posts and pages in WordPress, the same way I have done on my own site.

The directions below assume you already have your post reviews in place, as well as the phpBay plugin installed. Also, if you are not familiar with how to use the “Image” custom field in Arthemia, you should read the read me file in the theme as well. The theme itself relies heavily on the custom field, and this theme edit uses it in several places also.

1. Download and Install the Slightly Modded version of Arthemia to your WordPress backend.
2. Download and Install the List Tags Plugin.
3. Make SURE you already have your site setup with categories and pages in place.

Edit for Clarification – In the video, I show how to use a custom field for displaying phpBay plugin driven results on your site, the way the theme is coded. You DO NOT HAVE to use this method… it WILL work just fine if you use phpBay as it is intended. It is simply a shortcut I USE, to make the site more flexible for my own needs.

Edit 2 For Further Clarification – If you prefer to use the phpBay code within your posts like you are used to doing, it works perfectly fine! You are NOT required to use it if you have a market that comes from several different categories.

Watch the Video for Configuring the Theme to Work with your Website

Video Length - 19 Minutes
(Sorry for the long runtime – I tried to explain alot of things)

Links for working with Arthemia

• Original Arthemia Theme

Images FAQ For Arthemia (Also at the link above)

im-FAQ 1 : How to get the thumbnail image resizer working??

Actually the explanation above is clear enough for you to get the thumbnail working, but in case you missed something, you could read these step-by-step to-do list. Before you start, make sure that the image is already there, located in your own server. The script can not generate thumbnails if your image is located outside your server (eg. Flickr photos, Picassa, etc.)

1. Add a custom field in the post. The custom field key MUST be Image (letter cases are important).
2. Fill the custom field value with the path of your image. It MUST start with wp-content I repeat it MUST start with wp-content. If you have the image located at http://www.yourblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/file_name.jpg then the key value of the custom field MUST be wp-content/uploads/2008/06/file_name.jpg (Notice there is no http://www.yourblog.com/ in the value)

What is Working Backwards?

If you get to section 5 of the N1Way Guide, you will see that when they talk about a launch, Adam and Kelvin are very specific in stating that your HOME page should be the LAST Page you build. The reason for this is pretty simple to understand… WHY do you want anyone coming into your site when its not done?

Working Backwards is the process of building your site from the bottom up… in other words:

• Build your Review Pages FIRST (Whether its 5, 10, 25, or 100, make sure your reviews are up first!)
• Build Your Review Category Pages Second (Linking to your reviews)
• Build Your Guide Pages Next (Also linking within your guides, to your reviews)
• Build your Content Pages (about, links, privacy, etc) Next
• Finally… When ALL of this content is done and ready for action, build your Home page!

As you build the site – each “next” section gets easier to build on its own, because you already have all of the content in place to draw from.

Preventing Indexing Before You are Ready

If you want to prevent a site from being indexed before its ready – add a robots.txt file to the root of your domain folder. In other words, it will come up with www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt. Inside the file, place two simple lines for now:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

That tells all robots who pay attention to it – “Hey, I’m not ready for you yet – Go Away”

As soon as your site is DONE and the homepage is completed (LAST), you just remove the / from the disallow line, and add a sitemap reference, and you are done! When you do launch, your robots.txt will be:

User-agent: *
Disallow:
sitemap: http://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml

Then you head to a place like Pingler, and submit your site to search engines and directories that follow the ping.

(Note: If you want to block admin pages, add them to the disallow line: Disallow: /admin)

Signs Your Site is NOT Ready to Launch

• You Have ANY Blank Pages!
• You Have Any Pages saying “Coming Soon”
• You Have Adsense and its Showing Public Service Ads
• You Have ANY Broken Image Links
• You have Less than 200 Words on EVERY Review page

The Bottom Line

Building your site from the bottom up will assure you never prematurely launch a site! When the robots come, they will have a wide selection to index, when visitors come, they will see exactly what they were looking for and increase the probability of your site being a success, from day 1!

I had contacted Kelvin and Adam directly to discuss this last week, and this post should answer many of the questions… based on their own replies, along with sharing how I have built my own new WordPress driven N1Way site!

WordPress Pages or Posts – Which Is Better?

I have at least 100 emails on this topic, to the point that I have considered creating an auto-responder! The main thing to keep in mind about pages and posts, is that “Pages are Static”, “Posts are Dynamic, or Newsworthy”. In a nutshell, when you use a page on wordpress, you are saying that this stuff rarely or never changes… like your contact or about pages. Posts on the other hand have a tendency to be timely, dated, and often change as comments are added, etc.

The other MAIN difference between a page and post in WordPress… Pages are NOT included in your RSS feed, unless you install a plugin that puts them there! In addition to the RSS inclusion, with PAGES, you DO GET a better structured URL, which will be explained below.

In the N1Way Guide, Section 4, it’s clear to see that they chose to build their site using the PAGES function of WordPress.

When I asked if there was a specific technical reason why…Kelvin responded: (They also included this in their email to everyone)

There’s no great underlying reason here. WP is an extremely flexible
site development tool and as our background is in “static” sites and
not “blogs” our interpretation of the WP platform in accordance with
our goals led us to prefer pages over posts. That’s all.

So… whether you choose pages or posts is purely your own preference, based on whats easier for you! (I have heard that before!)

How I Built My Own New N1Way Guided Site

I have previously mentioned that I started and am well into the development of a second (or 3rd) site, using the WordPress platform to build the site. When I started it, i tried to remain as close to the guide as possible, and built all the pages in the page format. As many of you who got the emails from me know, I switched from Pages to Posts, before anything was published.

The PRO Reasons:

• I Prefer to Publish a post once – and have it link everywhere automatically.
• Posts are IN the RSS feed and Indexed faster
• I can make better use of the Custom Fields without much coding. (Used for the images in my case)
• I am VERY familiar with WordPress and have developed more than 200 websites, including ecommerce sites with it.
• Time Savings are Dramatic!

What Did I Sacrifice Using Pages versus Posts?

• Slight diversion from the Guide
• URLs are a bit less properly structured

Just to pull all this into focus…

When using the posts and category structure – I have essentially eliminated ALL extra steps in creating the summary pages, the image reposts, etc. I write the review, and everything else occurs as a function of WordPress! In addition, I can use the tagging system to further pinpoint the exact targets I want users to reach, with little to no effort!

Assume for a second the site is a review site on specific products… (That’s a joke)

In the “Permalink” settings section, I set my category base to “reviews”.

WordPress Pages:

• Home (Automatic)
• About (Custom written)
• Contact (Custom written)
• Guides (Can be automated with a little code)
• Reviews (Can be automated with a little code)

WordPress Categories:

• [Brand 1] – Automatically generated page of the review POSTS
• [Brand 2] – Automatically generated page of the review POSTS
• [Brand 3] – Automatically generated page of the review POSTS
• etc for all brands

This results in a URL structure like: domain .com/reviews/brand/

WordPress Posts:

• [Brand - Product Review] – This is the ULTIMATE Landing page
• [Brand - Product Review] – This is the ULTIMATE Landing page
• [Brand - Product Review] – This is the ULTIMATE Landing page
• etc for all reviews

As the posts are written, I DO LOSE the reviews/ portion of my URL, but its not overly important… and the URL ends up as: domain .com/brand/product-review/

IF I had stayed with a paged structure, the urls would have resulted in:

domain .com/reviews/[brand]/[brand-product-review]/

BUT – I would have had to hand code alot of the pages, or write the code to do it on its own… and lost some of the functionality of the WordPress system for posts.

The Bottom Line

For myself, the bottom line was time savings! While wordpress pages could be just as effective as using posts, I want to do things once… and walk away. I write my post once – everything else occurs automatically by using the category/post system.

If you choose to build with pages, you have the extra step of building your pages to show the summary of each child, or review page OR coding yourself a custom page to do it all for you.

Both are equally effective in the end…

The Hurdles of Writing Your Own Content

I am no different than anyone else – writing content is one of my biggest challenges on Niche sites!

• Writing Content is Time Consuming!
  If you recall, I value my time at $75/hour. Writing a 200-300 word article can take me up to an hour between researching the product and writing the actual article. When you can buy a quality article starting at $3, why bother writing it yourself?!
• I May Not be Knowledgeable in the Niche Market
  This is probably the biggest hurdle we face when writing content. What if we don’t know about the market? The research, as mentioned above, can take alot of time, and you may also look like a fool, when you get it wrong, hurting the credibility of your review.

Time = Money! The more time you spend on the content generation “Task”, the longer it will take for the site to reach a potential profitability!

Finding the Best Content Provider

I have literally used 25-30 different writers over the years of site development! From my kids who want to earn money, to many commercial services. Finding the right mix of affordability and quality is a challenge you WILL face if you plan to farm out some or all of your sites content!

When I started using TextBroker for my content, it actually took a while to find the right Author who wrote the content in the style I wanted! I probably went through 4-5 Authors before I settled on a man named Rob from Michigan. Now, he is probably the only Author I use! If you go into your own textbroker account, just search out the Author named “Rob”, he has hundreds of completed articles and everyone is satisfied with his work from what I can tell!

(I may regret giving you all his name now, since it may make him too busy for my stuff! )

Ordering Your Content

Setting up your Text Broker account is free… and once you have confirmed your email address, you have to fund your account. They require a minimum of $25 to fund your account and accept Paypal or any major credit card. After your account is setup, you simply create a Project, then add the content titles to that project, and send it out to Authors to be completed. The cost you pay will vary, depending on the level of quality you want to achieve.

If you use a specific Author like Rob, he will set a preferred rate for you, and all of your content will then be priced at that cost. In my case, its .02 cents per word. If you choose to send it out to ALL Authors, the price will range from .014 (1.4 cents) and up, depending on the quality level. I recommend you experiment with different quality levels on your first batch, find the author that writes to your liking and ask them for a rate, if you send them a specific batch of XX articles to write.

After you place your content order – the articles actually start rolling in within the first hour! My first batch of 25 reviews were all completed within 36 hours… and posted on the site the following day!

When they arrive, you have the coice of accepting them the way they are, or returning them to the writer for revisions. Only after you are fully satisfied with the content do you accept and pay for it!

How Much Does TextBroker Content Cost?

One of the best features of the TextBroker system, is that YOU choose what you want to pay for your content, based on the quality you want to receive! For the review pages on the Golf Putter site, I chose:

• 200-250 Word Articles (You supply the range of words you want)
• Specific Author in this case (.02 cents per word)
• 15% service fee – paid to TextBroker

So – 25 articles, averaging 220 words each, cost roughly $112.00 plus the service fee. If I was to write 25 articles myself, it would not only take a full week, the cost of my time would be MANY hundreds of dollars!

TIP – Order Your Review Content First – Use it to Build Your Guides!

I found that by ordering the reviews, or money pages, first… the rest of the site will actually build itself! How, you ask?

Once you have the 25-50 or however many “Review Pages” written, you just start creating guides! I have 4 additional guide pages ready to post now, that are nothing but a compilation of the reviews. For example: the first guide on the site is the different types of putters guide. After all the review pages are done, I will return to that page and add 2-3 “Top Choices” to each category, linked to the reviews.

Does TextBroker offer an Affiliate Program?

No! If they did offer an affiliate program, the cost of their content would naturally go up!

You can see to the left, I have decided to create a simple and basic logo, that really just states what the site is about, and nothing much more! I really want to keep this as simple as possible, without causing any confusion to those of you who are following along and rebuilding or building a new site of your own following the Build a Niche Store guide.

Do We have a Launch Date Yet?

While I don’t have a definitive date on paper yet, you can expect to see a site launch within 7-10 days. The site itself will launch with 5 “Guides” and 20-25 “Product Reviews”, which are being written right now.

After the site is live, My goal is to follow along with the guide and trickle feed new content throughout the first 90 days, and supply the winner with a plan for new content they should add throughout the first year!

How Can You Keep Up?

If you have looked around this site at all, you may have spotted the sidebar status area, showing my time and money spent on this new site, as it accumulates. Someone will ask.. WHY are you spending money on the site if you are just giving it away? (OK, my wife will also ask)

The answer is simple… It would take me roughly 30-45 minutes to write each of the product reviews on my own, so what I have done is outsourced them! Many of you may recall, I value my own time at $75/hour, so spending a few dollars each for the articles is well worth it!

Site Contest Content Sponsors

While the product review pages themselves are pretty standard, there are other sections of the site that I truly want the utmost and highest quality content! I am in conversation with a few different places to become the content sponsor for these high quality articles, and before site launch, will reveal them to you!

The N1WAY Guide Price Freeze!

Many of you already have the guide, but for those who have not yet jumped aboard, the price change to $44 was eliminated! Kelvin and Adam decided to leave the price at $24, and let it fly!

Have You Got your Guide? Got Questions?

I have probably answered every bit of 100 email questions from users who may not understand specific areas of the guide completely. Is something stumping you? If so, post a comment below… lets tackle it together!

Mark

Why am I Choosing BANS?

Someone will surely ask… Why are you going to use BANS when you and many others have previously had some bad luck with the software? To answer that elephant sized question, you have to assume that every site previously built was done correctly! Which, as Kelvin and Adam prove with one of their sample sites, the Blade Irons site, BANS itself is not the issue!

I too have a few BANS sites that are still earning money every month… so its not the software itself that causes the issues, but the way we have been using the software.

Also – I could hardly name this site Build a Niche Store Guide and Prove the Concept on any other platform!

What is Build a Niche Store?

If you are not familiar with the Build a Niche Store software, you need to head over to the main BANS site and read more about it! To cover the basics however, Build a Niche Store is a standalone application that allows relatively novice users, the ability to build a website that is monetized primarily through the eBay Partner Network.

In other words – You build a website with the software, then you display related products that match your sites topic, which are automatically fed from eBay.

Will You Learn Anything New About BANS?

If you have been using BANS for any given amount of time, chances are pretty good that you have been through the paces with the software, followed along at several knowledgeable blogs, or used the BANS forum, to get the ins and outs of the software already.

Places to learn more about BANS

• Niche Store Builder (My other site)
• Niche Store Strategies (Rochelle’s Site)
• Build a Niche Store Blog (Soggy Dave’s site)
• BANS Today (Mikes site)
• Affiliate Marketing with BANS (Ben Johnson’s Blog)
• Money Making Ideas (Suzanne Franco’s (Land) site)
• Jakes Internet Marketing Blog (Jake the CPU Nut!)
• Strategies for Success (Bill Grants Site)

These are just a few places to start your hunt for information on BANS. The list represents a range from very skilled marketers, to people just like yourself who may just be regular folks with no html, php, or programming knowledge, so you can get different views.

If you know of others, please make sure you let me know, so I can add them to the list above! (I know for sure I forgot some of my own favorites also!)

Would You Use BANS?

Tell us… would YOU use BANS to build a new Niche Website? If so, WHY? If not… Why Not?