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phpBay Pro: The Extended Manual – Inserting phpBay Code Into Theme Files

Keith Lock — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 05:05:16 +0000

It’s been about a week since my last addition to the phpBay extended manual. My intention was to post a new piece of the manual each day until completion, but you know how things go. I’ve been quite busy. And, well, I’m going a bit out of order as well. I was going to write about phpBay keyword tracking, and I still will, just not today. I’ll get to it soon enough.

This post covers inserting phpBay code into theme files. I came up with a cool idea for using it and thought I’d share it. I have a couple blogs that are 99% hands off, and have automated content, and I wanted a way to insert some auctions to the end of the posts without having to do it manually. Doing it this way you will end up with exactly the same auctions at the end of each post, which won’t be as targeted, but it’s still proven to work.

You could add some extra php code to show different auctions based on the current category, but I won’t get into that here. If I get enough requests in the comments I’ll edit this post.

This will be handy if you have an auto-blog on one main topic. I’m sure you can think of some other applications for it, this is just one purpose.

Look through the table of contents below if you want to jump to a different section first. Below the TOC are the quick steps to add phpBay code to your theme files.

Table Of Contents

Remember, phpBay has a sidebar widget you can use, but if you want more control, and want to add auction listings to the bottom of all posts, follow these steps…

In your WordPress admin panel, go to Appearance -> Editor.
On the right side you should see a file called Single Post (single.php), click it to open up the file in the editor on the left.
In this file there should be a command to show the post content. Look for the_content(). Just below that you can insert the phpBay code.
You can use any and all parameters here just like you would in a post or page, the example below shows just the keyword and the number of posts.

EDIT (June 9th, 2010): Use the code below if you want to show different auctions based on Category ID or Post/Page ID…

First.. you want to get the ID, to do that for the catgeory, under the ‘Posts’ menu click ‘Categories’, hover over the category name and in the status bar (bottom of browser) you will see a URL. The URL links to a page that allows you to edit the category. Don’t click it, instead just look at the end of the URL… the catgeory ID is after the ‘cat_ID=’ part.

It’s a similar process for posts/pages. Go to ‘Edit’ under ‘Posts’ or ‘Pages’. Hover over the post or page name and in the status bar at the end of the URL you’ll find the ID just after the ‘post=’ portion.

Now.. for most themes you can use the Category ID and/or Post ID values in single.php. For pages, use page.php.

The code for showing phpBay ads for a specific category… (replace {ID} with the actual Category ID that you found using the steps above)

NOTE: I just remembered… you can also use the category name rather than the ID if you prefer.

Text File With Code

For displaying ads for a specific post you usually just add proper phpBay code to the post add/edit screen. However if you want to show ads for a specific post but have more control of where it goes (instead of just the body of the post) then you can do that by editing the theme. Just use the code above but instead of the ‘in_category’ command use ‘is_single’.

More info: phpBay Pro: The Extended Manual – Inserting phpBay Code Into Theme Files

phpBay Pro: The Extended Manual – Replacing WordPress Search

Keith Lock — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:30:16 +0000

We’ve come a long way in the extended manual for phpBay, but there’s still a lot of good stuff coming up. We’ve already covered what I think are the basics, features that I believe should be part of the core. We got into phpBay geo ip targeting and of course making the images link over to the auctions as well.

Today I want to cover converting the WordPress search to a search which shows eBay results using phpBay instead. It’s not something you would want to do on all of your sites though. For example, on this blog, I still want people to find post content when doing a search, although I still use phpBay on some of the pages of this blog. This change is more for sites that are strictly designed as eBay stores. Also if you use the Search2Post plugin from psp-tubes.net, then you will already have a plugin that performs this task, and then some. In addition to showing eBay results, Search2Post also creates a post on-the-fly with the search results. That way, new content is created over time. Anyway, let’s get into it…

Table Of Contents

Replacing WordPress Search With eBay Search

You may want to replace the WordPress search function to show eBay listings rather than regular search results for the sites existing content. To do this you just have to replace some text in your theme’s search.php file. Note: This doesn’t work for all themes, so be sure to do a backup in case it doesn’t work for you. Here are the steps…

Go to your theme folder with your FTP program (FileZilla). The theme folder will be located here: ‘/wp-content/themes/{theme name}/’ where {theme name} is the name of your theme of course :)
We want to edit the search.php file but we should make a quick backup first. One way is to download the file to your computer. Rename it. Upload it again. Now you have a backup on the server in case you need to fall back to it.
Go to your Theme Editor (Appearance > Editor) in your WordPress Control Panel.
Open the file ‘Search Results – search.php’ from the right side.
Locate the line:

and then scroll down near the bottom and look for:

You will need to remove all the code between (and including) those 2 lines and replace it with:

Click here to get this code in a text file.
Click ‘Update File’.
Go test the search function on your site. You should see a list of auctions as the result of a search. If not, and you get errors, check back through the code. Worse case scenario you can just restore your backup search file. To do that, go to your theme folder in your FTP software. Delete the file search.php. Locate your backup file (the one you renamed earlier) and rename it back to search.php. You can rename it right on the server. Just right-click and click ‘Rename’.

That should do it. The next step is going to cover keyword tracking for SEO. In other words, you could see which keywords are used in the search engines to find your auctions, and that ultimately end in a sale. This upgrade is also FREE!

Any questions, please post below.

More info: phpBay Pro: The Extended Manual – Replacing WordPress Search

phpBay Pro: The Extended Manual – Geo-Targeting

Keith Lock — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 04:01:14 +0000

This post is a continuation of the phpBay Pro Extended Manual. You can use Table of Contents below if you want to start from the beginning or jump to a different section.

Table Of Contents

There is a free plugin available that will automatically display auctions for the country of your visitor when they arrive on your site. Note: This is different than the WordPress Geo-Targeting Script that can be used for displaying any type of content to visitors from other countries. This one is specific to phpBay.

The plugin was created by Alan (a phpBay Pro user) and is available free (donation-ware) from his blog after opting-in to his newsletter. Let’s get the plugin now…

Visit http://www.psp-tubes.net/wordpress/phpbay-plugin
Scroll to the very bottom because it is mostly an out-dated post.
Enter your name and email and click ‘Send me the plugin’. You may be brought to a page that says ‘Whoops! That Page Isn’t Here’. Don’t worry, there is just something funky going on with his subscription pages. Perhaps he should switch to Aweber ;) At any rate, you should quickly get an email with the Subject: ‘ACTION REQUIRED: Confirm your subscription.’. Click the link in the email to confirm your subscription. You will again probably be brought to a page that says ‘Whoops! That Page Isn’t Here’. Again, don’t worry. You should be receiving another email shortly with the link for the plugin.
Open the email with the Subject: ‘phpBay plugin download details’.
Click the 2nd link in the email to download the plugin.

Now that we have the plugin, let’s get it installed…

Unzip the file
Upload ‘geo.php’, ‘combo.php’, ‘country.php’ and ‘geoip.inc’ to ‘/wp-content/plugins/phpBay/includes/’ on your server. Note: You will be overwriting 2 files, ‘geo.php’ and ‘combo.php’, so you may want to backup the ones on the server first. Renaming them on the sever before uploading the new ones will work.
Download the free database file from maxmind.com. Click here. Under the ‘Binary Format’ section, click the link ‘Download the latest GeoLite Country Binary Format’ to save the database to your computer. It will be compressed in .gz format. The free tool WinRAR can decompress the file, much like unzipping a file.
You will be left with a file called ‘GeoIP.dat’. It needs to be uploaded to ‘/wp-content/plugins/phpBay/includes/’ in Binary mode. If using FileZilla to upload, go to Transfer > Transfer type > Binary. You can check maxmind.com for a new version each month. I, myself, just update it every 6 months. When updating, just overwrite the existing file on the server.

That should do it! To be certain it works, switch the default country in the phpBay settings to one other than your own temporarily. Make sure the sorting options or the eBay logo is displayed (discussed earlier) because having one or both of those turned on will also turn on the country dropdown box. Now visit the test page that you created earlier. You should be now viewing auctions in your own country rather than the default country. If you still see the default country it might be because the page is cached. If using Firefox you can usually press Ctrl+F5 to fix that.

Notice something about the auctions? The darn images aren’t clickable. We’ll get to that next.

More info: phpBay Pro: The Extended Manual – Geo-Targeting

What Keyword Are You Targeting? Want Some Help?

Keith Lock — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 23:08:11 +0000

Most of the information and instruction on building niche websites that I have come across talks about targeting one particular keyword or keyphrase. Ideally, the keyword would be highly searched and with little/weak competition.

It is suggested to use the keyword in your domain name, the H1 tag, the title tag, etc. for on-site SEO. That way, search engines get a clear picture of what your site is about.

One big off-site SEO factor, of course, is backlinks. A highly valuable backlink is one that uses the anchor text of the keyword that you are targeting. Also, if the backlink is one-way and do-follow, it is much more valuable.

Today I launched a niche website directory that is hosted here on this blog. It covers a broad range of categories. I will be manually approving all submissions and won’t allow any junk to come through.

I’m only going to allow a keyword to be used just one time in the directory. In other words, if you and a competitor are targeting the exact same keyword/keyphrase, the listing will be given to the first one to submit their site.

You can submit as many sites as you like, but you cannot submit the same site more than once trying to target more than one keyword. Pick your best one and go with that. Feel free to submit an internal page of your site, but I am only going to accept one site submission per domain. Check it out.

More info: What Keyword Are You Targeting? Want Some Help?

phpBay Pro: The Extended Manual – Installation and Activation

Keith Lock — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 15:37:11 +0000

Continuing on from phpBay Pro: The Extended Manual – Introduction…

Table Of Contents

phpBay installs just about like any other plugin for WordPress, but there are a few extra files.

Firstly…

Download the plugin to your desktop
Unzip it (free unzipper: WinRAR)

After unzipping the package you will see…

An ‘images’ folder, a ‘wp-content’ folder, an ‘auction.php’ file, the instruction manual and a troubleshooting text file.

Upload/FTP Steps (free FTP’er: FileZilla)

Upload all the images from the ‘images’ folder to the ‘images’ folder in the root of your blog. If you don’t have an ‘images’ folder in the root, just upload the entire folder.
Upload the ‘auction.php’ file to the root of your blog.
Upload the entire ‘phpBay’ folder that is inside of the ‘wp-content/plugins/’ folder, to the ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ folder of your blog.

Now, login to your WordPress Control Panel, click ‘Plugins’ from the left menu, and Activate ‘phpBay Pro Plugin for WordPress’.

Now, phpBay is installed and activated! Good job! Move on to: phpBay Pro Configuration

More info: phpBay Pro: The Extended Manual – Installation and Activation

Converting 2 Articles Into 90 Unique Versions And Getting Auto-Backlink Love

Keith Lock — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 05:12:49 +0000

If you have a niche blog or site, or even a Squidoo lens, etc. that you want to rank for a certain keyword, keep reading… I have discovered an amazing strategy that will save you lots of time and money.

You understand that having links back to your site can improve your rankings in search engines right? You also understand that using varied related keywords as the anchor text surrounded by related information helps a great deal right? You probably have heard of and may even use article marketing techniques to help with your SEO efforts. It has been said that submitting UNIQUE content to niche related web sites with links back to your site will help your rankings climb in the SERPS. Well, let me tell you about a way that has been helping me rank for some high traffic keywords. I pay a lot less than I used to for content and it’s also less manual effort saving me a ton of time.

The Process In A Nutshell…

I basically have 2 articles written from a ghost writer, merge them with some special formatting, submit them to a content syndication network and then rinse and repeat for other sites, pages, hubs, lenses etc. that I want to rank for my chosen keywords.

There are several ways that you can prepare your articles for submission but here I will describe the method that I have been using and that has been working well for me. I have someone write a 100% unique article for me on a particular topic. How many links it can contain depends on the number of words it is. 300 words or more will allow 2 links. You can go as high as 3 links. I usually pay a writer from the DigitalPoint forum around $1.50 to $2.00 per 100 words.

Then I have someone “spin” the article. Spinning the article involves rewriting each sentence and heading of the original article. The sentences should be around the same length and mean EXACTLY the same thing as the original, just using different words. Then I create a text file merging the 2 articles with special formatting. It’s simple, you wrap the original and rewritten sentence in [spin] tags and separate them with the pipe “|” symbol like this: [spin]Original 1st sentence.|Rewritten 1st sentence.[/spin] [spin]Original 2nd sentence.|Rewritten 2nd sentence.[/spin]

I then submit the specially formatted file to the content syndication network and it does the rest. You will have to provide the list of keywords that you want to be linked and where they are to be linked to and then replace the keyword in your article with a special code. The system will replace that special code with a random keyword and make it a link. The system will also randomly grab a sentence, either the original or a rewrite, for each sentence, generating several unique versions of the article. You are left with 90+ unique versions of your original article ready to be gradually and automatically submitted to niche related blogs, with dofollow links back to your content! It’s a gradual process making it more natural.

This is just a simple example, and really it is all I often ever do. But you could write several alternate sentences if you wish, it doesn’t have to be just 1. Just separate them all with pipes. You can also show a random YouTube video and random lists in your articles among other things. There are clear instructions on how to do accomplish all of this in the support files of the network.

Picture it…you could have a 250 word article written and “spun” for around 5 or 6 dollars. Spend about 1/2 hour setting up the submission and you can have over 90 backlinks to your blog on auto-pilot over the next few months. Do that once a week and you have a crap load of backlinks coming in.. including deeplinks if you choose! With your paid subscription to Syndicate Kahuna you can submit as many articles as you want! No limits. Promote all of your sites and content pages. Some say it’s ALL you need for SEO.

Stay tuned because I will be introducing a tool that I had written that makes the “spinning” process extremely simple and less prone to formatting errors (because it’s done by the program rather than a human). It works like a charm.

Keep your receipt if you subscribe through my Syndicate Kahuna link, because I have a special offer coming up! Also, make sure you subscribe to get my posts by email so you don’t miss it.

More info: Converting 2 Articles Into 90 Unique Versions And Getting Auto-Backlink Love

2 Great Ways To Increase The Value Of A New Blog That You Want To Flip

Keith Lock — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 22:25:20 +0000

Just last month I sold a new WP blog on SitePoint and my profit after the sale was just over $800.00. The blog that I sold I would normally get around $100-$150 but I did a couple extra things to make it much more valuable. I’ll explain in detail below.

Create Some Quick Feeder Blogs

First what I did, which might change the way you look at it, is I created 2 extra blogs to add to the sale. But, truthfully, I put both of the extra blogs together in just a couple of hours. I didn’t do any extras to them like I do on the main blog. They were used solely as feeder blogs to the main money blog. I dressed them up with a nice theme from WooThemes…and why not? It takes just as much time to add a premium theme as it does a free one. Actually, it’s usually much quicker to configure a WooTheme using the built-in administration area, but you would only know what I mean if you ever used one.

Anyway… I added a block of AdSense to the feeder blogs although I’m thinking now it might have best to leave it out. Also, I added the RSS feed of the main blog to a widget in the sidebar of the feeder blogs. Other than that I just created some basic red, white, black and blue text banners and linked them to the main money blog. I added one to the sidebar, 1 floating to the right of each post and one below the featured post. Really, using a WooTheme can dictate the placement of the banners, I just fill in the gaps. It’s very simple. Oh, and for content, I used Syndicate Kahuna (or Article Marketing Automation) to get free, unique, niche specific content. Get the max allowed articles per day until you reach 10 or 15, then change it to 1 a day and your blogs are ready to go.

Install Geo Targeting So That Your Money Blog Is Monetized For Practically Any Country

The first thing I do to maximize the monetization to as many countries as possible is add a one page eBay store to the main blog using the phpBay pro WP plugin. Almost every niche has products being sold on eBay. Typically when I build a blog using phpBay, I break things down into categories and create one “post” per category. I use posts so that when I submit my RSS feed to the RSS directories, the auctions may be included in the listings. But for the niche blogs that I intend to sell, I simply add a one page listing using one generic keyword. Sometimes I have to add some negative keywords to filter my results. For the most part, this “upgrade” takes about 10 minutes.

Geo Targeting For CPA Offer Ad Placement

Ok, this simple addition to the blog is very powerful and adds quite a bit of value.

As an example of how I used this in the past… I was promoting a certain offer on my main blog which paid $35 but was only for U.S. traffic. The same product, but on a different CPA network paid $30 but catered to both U.S. and Canadian traffic. Then I found another similar offer paying $29 which catered to U.S., Canada and the U.K.

I could have simply chose the $29 offer which allowed me to promote to all 3 countries but instead I chose all 3 offers and used a custom geo targeting script so I knew which offer to show based on the customers country.

Here’s how it works in a nutshell. I added one line of code to the very top of the “header” file in my theme. This line of code triggered a script (and since it is in the header, it is triggered on ALL pages) that looked at the IP Address of the visitor, compared it to a database of IP Addresses to determine the visitors country. The script stores the 2 letter country code in a variable. Now, if I want to place an ad in the sidebar for example, I run a simple if-test to say something like… if the country is “US” show the HTML for the US ad, if it is “CA” then show the HTML for the Canadian ad…and so on. It’s actually very very simple to implement. I will be giving away my custom script (with instructions) later today or tomorrow to the readers of my newsletter, but you can get everything that you need for it to create your own from the MaxMind web site, specifically this page here.

MaxMind GeoLite Country Free IP Address to Country DB

Regardless of whether you use my script or create your own, if you use the MaxMind approach, you may want to keep your IP address DB up-to-date. It gets updated monthly. Personally, I don’t sweat it too much. I might update it every few months if that. There is a DB that they offer for sale, as well as a free one. The free open source database that MaxMind provides offers 99.5% accuracy which is good enough for me :) I guess it returns “US” for all AOL users, but for my purposes that’s fine.

Customizing The Ad For Each Country

A cool easy thing to do for your ads is to customize them for each country. For example, you might put something like “Now available in Canada…” and/or display a small Canadian flag on the ad for Canadian users.

What To Do When You Don’t Have An Offer For A Specific Country

Obviously with the example above I am only able to present my offer to 3 different countries. What do I do with the rest of the traffic to squeeze out the money making potential? I do one of two things. Sometimes I display an ad promoting the auctions. Since the auctions are on a page and generally there is just one small link in the navigation bar pointing to it, it doesn’t hurt to display an ad promoting the auctions to all of the “extra” countries. eBay allows you to promote to several major countries and with the geo-trageting in place in your phpBay plugin it will automatically show auctions specific to the country of the visitor. Incidentally, the free geo-trageting upgrade to phpBay uses the same MaxMind database discussed above.

Now, if you don’t want to promote the auctions for whatever reason or your niche doesn’t have any products available on eBay you can just display AdSense ads to all of the extra countries.

There you have it…those 2 things, I believe, increased the value of the blog(s) to the point where I could command a much higher amount. Hope this post helps you and gives you a bit of interest in blog flipping. Best of luck.

More info: 2 Great Ways To Increase The Value Of A New Blog That You Want To Flip