These review sites convert like crazy and using WordPress and a slick plugin by Dan Grossman make them pretty simple to setup. It’s not like a review site where you give your opinion about 3-5 similar products and create a Buy Now link for each one (which is also a high converting type of site), it’s quite a bit different. The reviews on these sites are actually from customers of the products (or services). The example given on the Review Site Plugin page is a review site for web hosting providers, but it can be for virtually anything. You can go very micro niche on these types of sites. You could have a review site for just Windows Hosting Providers for example or hotels in Windsor, Ontario, Canada as another viable example.

After you have decided on a product or service you need a theme. A one-column theme works best. The plugin includes customized themes with the download. They are customized for easy integration of each element of the review plugin. Additionally, the themes have built-in support for the hReview microformat! If you aren’t sure what that is, I’ll tell you this, it equates to loads more traffic from the search engines!

On the actual post page is where you will put the description of the product. In the comments area is where a past customer of the product leaves their reviews….or a customer that returns after purchasing it through your site, or in the case of the hotel site…booking a hotel room online.

The comments display like they normally would but the the ratings are integrated into the theme files. You decide before hand using the review plugin admin interface as to what you would like the customer to base the ratings on and what the maximum values are. It’s pretty flexible. The software will then calculate and display an average of the ratings. It will also determine by the ratings if it was a positive or negative review and add those up as well.

To get the ball rolling on the reviews, depending on the niche, there should be a forum for the company or service you are promoting. For example, if you have a hosting company reviews site, you might go to the LunarPages and the GoDaddy forums and ask customers to drop by and tell you what they think about their hosting package. You will get mixed reviews naturally. Do not filter out the bad ones. It’s important that the reviews are genuine. It will improve conversions if there are also bad reviews, believe me.

If you decide to set one of these up and run into any snags, leave a comment and I will try to lend a hand. If you like the hotel idea (and it works well) and you want to set one up for your city, I use TravelNow.com as the affiliate in case you are wondering (same company as Hotels.com). Good luck!

Take a look at some of the other features of the plugin here or download it here…. OR…. TRY THIS REVIEW THEME

More info: Create A Review Site Using WordPress

I just setup WordPress MU with sub domains in my shared hosting account on GoDaddy and it wasn’t as straight forward as I would’ve hoped… so now that I got it down to a science I figured I’d write out a quick tutorial in case someone else is attempting to do the same thing.

OK, WordPress MU isn’t what it used to be, it’s no longer a stand alone product, it comes packaged (albeit hidden by default) starting with WordPress 3.0. It might also be called a WordPress Network or WordPress Multisite. Essentially it allows you to run multiple blogs under one domain. There are a ton of reasons why you might want to do that, limited to your imagination.

The straight forward steps to follow to setup MU on most hosts can be found here. However, GoDaddy of course is another animal.

GoDaddy offers a brief tutorial for enabling WordPress 3.0 Multisites here, which may be helpful if you want to setup your WP network using sub-directories. This is the part that I didn’t like…

I personally don’t like the idea of using sub-directories to install new blogs to because then you are limited on what you can name your posts on your main (root) blog when you are using /%postname%/ for permalinks, among other things… so I was bound and determined to get this working with sub-domains and I finally did.

Note: For these instructions I started from a fresh install of WordPress 3.1. Also, I am using the GoDaddy Deluxe Shared Hosting package on Linux, which offers unlimited domains attached to your account and unlimited bandwidth…

…although at the moment the Ultimate Plan is almost half off making it very close to the same price. The Ultimate Plan allows unlimited storage and databases as well, plus it includes an SSL certificate.

These instructions will work for both of the above mentioned packages.

Also worth mentioning… this work around might only be feasible if the admin (or assistant) will personally be adding the new blogs to the network. If you plan to allow auto-creation of accounts and blogs (like is done at WordPress.com) this method may not be ideal.

Setup WordPress Multisite on GoDaddy

1. Be sure you have the latest version of WP installed in the root of your domain (not in a subfolder or subdomain)
2. Edit the wp-config.php file and just above the line that reads:
   /* That's all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */
   add this line:
   define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true);
3. We won’t be installing wildcard subdomains so you can ignore any warnings that you may get.
4. Login or re-login to the WP Admin and under Tools, click Network. Fill in all the info (be sure to choose subdomains), and click Install.
5. Follow the instructions for creating the blogs.dir directory under /wp-content/, and pasting in the code for .htaccess and wp-config.php. Permissions should be setup properly by default so don’t worry about that.
6. Remove the following line of code from wp-config.php that you created earlier:
   define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true);
7. Now after re-logging into WP you should see a “Super Admin” panel to allow to add/edit sites in your network.
8. Here’s the kicker. For every site that you create you have to manually add a subdomain in the GoDaddy Control Panel. Had wildcard subdomains worked on GoDaddy this extra step wouldn’t be necessary. Read below for the steps.

Adding Subdomains on GoDaddy

1. Login to GoDaddy.
2. From the left side click Hosting, then click the green “Launch” button.
3. Go to Settings, then Domain Management.
4. Under Subdomains next to your domain click “Add” or “Manage”.
5. Name your subdomain exactly the same as you named it in WP.

Choose the option to “Create or select a folder” and type in the path to your site.

If the site you are working with is an add-on domain and you followed my steps for setting up multiple sites in your GoDaddy account then the path would be:

/_sites/domain.com/

And if the domain is not an add-on domain (i.e. it is the main domain attached to your hosting account), then just leave the / in there.

Semi-technical note: Now what happens is… when someone visits the subdomain it redirects back to your main site… and the rules that you pasted in .htaccess earlier will forward the user to the proper site in the network. Basically after GoDaddy shoves them off to the main WP install.. WP handles the rest.

MU-Plugins

On the same level as the “plugins” folder you can create a folder called “mu-plugins” if you like. It stands for “must use”. Basically, any plugin in there will already be ready to go for the new sites. However, not all plugins work with MU, so you should read the readme.txt file that comes with plugin to be sure. Some plugins have to have files in different spots in order to work.

I haven’t played around much with the mu-plugins but I did find a couple that I like so far.

There’s a cool plugin that allows you setup defaults for each new site added to the network. It’s called “New Blog Defaults”. You can download it here.

Akismet is another good one to throw in there. You can hard-code the API Key in the akismet.php file. Then upload the folder to the mu-plugins folder. Then drag the akismet.php out of it’s folder into mu-plugins.

That’s it for now… I’ll post more as I play around with my WordPress network more. Hope this post has been helpful for you.

More info: Setting Up WordPress MU (Multisite) with Subdomains on GoDaddy Shared Hosting

A lot of bloggers suggest premium themes because less people have them and there usually coded very well, have SEO value and sometimes have functions built in that eliminate the need for extra plugins. Also, they usually have an admin control panel making it easy to customize. Woo Themes are a great choice.. I’ve used many from that collection… and Elegant Themes aren’t too bad either <-- just $20 for them all... however.. I came across a site today that offers premium-style themes but for free!

I haven't tried them just yet.. but I will be adding one to my new blog shortly. I read that the admin panels are great and they are coded very well. One thing is for sure, most of them look really really good. There are currently close to 200 available, and these themes offer live demos so you can see them in action. It’s easy, once in demo mode, to switch to new themes to demo. The selector tool is similar to Woo’s if you are familiar with it.

More info: WordPress Themes Free Collection

There seems to be growing pains for a lot of people when something big and significant changes (like the FaceBook interface or an Operating System for example), and WP is no different. But for me I’m excited when WP updates and I get my hands dirty right away.. Let me know if you run into any issues, I’ll do my best to help out.

Check out some of the new cool features in the video below or view the official post here.

More info: WPMU Now Merged In WP 3.0

Do you use BANS or WordPress with phpBay? My answer… WordPress with phpBay 99% of the time.

Do you use posts or pages when using WordPress? My answer… Posts 100% of the time (think RSS)… plus there’s way less manual work, use the archives page for what it is meant for.

Where do you get the content? For some of the sites that I want to test or just set on auto-pilot I will use free, unique, automated content. With the automated content, sometimes I check each article before publishing and integrate the appropriate auctions into the posts. For some, the real auto-pilots, I will just insert some generic phpBay code into the post template file.

For 100% unique content (without the backlinks that are in the free automated content), I either look to DigitalPoint forums, TextBroker.com or write it myself. Then I will integrate the auctions in as I publish them.

What about comments?

Sometimes I use comments, sometimes I don’t. Depends on the niche and if it seems to go well with it. Plus, as you may know, monitoring comments can be a bit of a pain sometimes, so with the auto-pilot sites, I just turn them off. Also, if your post ranks for a certain keyword, then some say it may lose the ranking of that keyword if there ends up being several comments over time because the page becomes diluted. Even though that may be valid, on the sites that I consider the most important, the ones I pay the most attention to, I will leave comments on but with a twist…

The WordPress Review Plugin

There is this amazing plugin (I discussed it in the post: Create A Review Site Using WordPress) that can be integrated very well with the sites that you build following the N1Way guide. With this plugin, previous customers of the product that you are promoting, can leave a review and a rating. The plugin takes over the comments in your blog to gather this data. It will also calculate averages, etc. and show Amazon-style ratings on the product posts. It will even put in the necessary microtags that the search engines can read when trying to review data for certain queries! If you aren’t sure what I mean, look up hReview, more search engines are looking at this data and showing preference to sites that implement it. With the WP Review plugin, the microtags are all automatically integrated.

You could probably get fancy with custom fields and some changes to your template file to include auctions below the comments as well. A bit advanced. If enough people ask I will post on how to do it.

More info: Review Site With eBay Auctions And Customer Reviews

Table Of Contents

• Introduction
• Installation/Activation
• Configuration
• Testing
• Per-Post/Per-Page Settings
• Geo-Targeting
• Making The Images Clickable
• Replacing WordPress Search With eBay Search
• Inserting phpBay Code Into Theme Files
• Buy phpBay Pro (20% off coupon: DA9CD69F42)
• From Picking A Market To Building/Managing Your phpBay (Or BANS) Site

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

Firstly…

1. Download the plugin to your desktop
2. 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)

1. 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.
2. Upload the ‘auction.php’ file to the root of your blog.
3. 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

I very well may have been over-marketing my sites, wasting my efforts, according to what I read in this guide. Anyway, it is a step by step guide, very well written, and gives instructions for both BANS and WordPress (with phpBay). Here’s an example site that they created with WordPress: http://forgedgolfirons.com/

You see, the auctions aren’t up front and in your face. They want to promote VALUE, and that is in the reviews and guides they wrote. They say they want to give value, then just bring the targeted customer closer to the till to make the purchase without focusing on any mind tricks or voodoo (my words, highly paraphrased). They want to fill a need, then the sales just follow.

They focus mostly on development. They don’t market like crazy and scramble for backlinks and setup tons of profiles on social sites. I venture to say that they almost have the “build it and they will come mentality”. They walk the walk. They’ve been doing it for over 4 years. These guys (BANS guys remember) aren’t going to lay out lies for obvious reasons. I have to honestly say that without the reputation behind them I wouldn’t believe it would work. I am a big advocate of creating lots and lots and lots backlinks. I spend a good part of my day doing it for some of my partnered sites.

Perhaps it’s time to switch more to this model. It suits me more to be honest. It’s the part that I’m good at and that I love. I’m actually seeking partners for this right now. Someone to create the content and I would do the rest. Build 2 sites, 1 site for me, 1 for the writer. If you are a writer, get the guide, get on the same page with me with this thing, then get a hold of me. If you are a marketer, get the guide, then make some loot!

More info: Niche Sites 9 Step Guide