No Excuses - Part 2

I'm in.

I have a fresh domain I'm building a wordpress-based site on, though I am hoping to minimize it's wordpress-i-ness.

The theme I've uploaded, though, I am having a bear trying to customize. My knowledge of pHp is admittedly limited... I need to change the color scheme throughout, add a new header, add in my own sponsor buttons and get this thing traffic ASAP.

What I have going for me:
A. I have, as of this writing, 15 original articles written and 17 more article topics to write on, each of which are over 100 words.
B. I also managed to score a .com two-word domain that has some moderate search volume according to Google's Keyword Tool- but almost no competition.
C. I am actually interested in this topic (possibly an understatement) and can continue to work on site development, content development, niche research etc. at a relentless pace.
D. It will probably have it's peak traffic of the year soon because of current events (the WSOP).
E. I've gotten pretty good at navigating the ins and outs of wordpress, plugins, etc.

What I have going against me:
1. It's a terribly saturated market (poker).
2. Limited command of php/ html.
3. Not a lot of money to throw at PPC, but I do have a bunch of coupons for Yahoo and MSN... and one for adwords to throw in there.
4. Right in the middle of this contest I'm going to be moving. Granted... not very far... but my place will be a wreck and I'll be devoting most of my non 9-5 hours towards packing, moving, or unpacking.

I'll keep you posted on further developments.
 


Site Update

Here is where I'm at on my No More Excuses Part 2 Project

Domain Home : MMA Ringtones and MMA Entrance Songs - MMARingtones.com
Currently #3 and #4 for mma ringtones in google search
Adding all UFC fighter songs to site
Adding MMA News to site every day or at least every other day
Adding MP3 box from Amazon.com for preview/buy the fighter's song

Been submitting answers to questions on ask.com and yahoo questions when people ask 'what song did ______ come out to at UFC ____'

Installed Google Analytics and so far have had 52 unique vistors (and 15 have come from WF)

Is this a type a site that is worth getting put in directories?

Also, conversions so far.....None
 
cheapestman said:
Here is where I'm at on my No More Excuses Part 2 Project

Domain Home : MMA Ringtones and MMA Entrance Songs - MMARingtones.com
Currently #3 and #4 for mma ringtones in google search
Adding all UFC fighter songs to site
Adding MMA News to site every day or at least every other day
Adding MP3 box from Amazon.com for preview/buy the fighter's song

Been submitting answers to questions on ask.com and yahoo questions when people ask 'what song did ______ come out to at UFC ____'

Installed Google Analytics and so far have had 52 unique vistors (and 15 have come from WF)

Is this a type a site that is worth getting put in directories?

Also, conversions so far.....None
Click to expand...

no adsense ?
 
Okay, I'm gonna get in on this and then maybe I can finally get my ass moving on
one of my sites.

The site: DogsRule.us (haven't heard from M&M Mars yet ;) ).
The Niche: Pet Supplies (Dogs specifically).
The Products: Data feed from PetFood Direct.

This is a wordpress based site using a theme I created based on an oscommerce theme I liked.
As you can see from the fromt page, This thing has been sitting un-finnished since February.
I fell into the "Getting too many projects going at once" issue so for now, I'm gonna drop everything else and get this thing finished.

I have an upload script that I've been tweaking to get the data feed in there. The problem I'm runnning into is that the
categories that come over in the feed are a disaster.
Once I get that straightened out I can start the uplaods.

If all goes as planned, by next week I should be done and have 5K+ pages of products.
Good luck all!

JerseyGirl,
if you need help with your theme let me know or just post in the design & development forum.
I'm by no means a wordpress/php guru but I manage to muddle my way through.
 
Still here, still working. I'm trying to get some code to work, and I'm making some progress. Nothing to add as of yet.
 
Cheers for doing this Mike.

Hope im not too late to reserve FINANCIALSTUFF.INFO.

I have nearly sorted out my hosting, so i should be able to provide name servers soon. Although i might need a hand with it.

Cheers again.
 
Ady2k said:
Damnit, I cant seem to fix this problem with my wordpress. The posts dont seem to wanna break. Ive tried using <br> and <p>, but none of these work. Anyone care to point me to a solution to this?

Ultra Green Tea Review
Click to expand...

Copy the article to Notepad, repaste it, and try putting in the breaks again. My guess is that you have some messy HTML code that needs to be cleaned up.

Site looks good though. Really matches the landing page well.
 
Ady2k said:
Damnit, I cant seem to fix this problem with my wordpress. The posts dont seem to wanna break. Ive tried using <br> and <p>, but none of these work. Anyone care to point me to a solution to this?

Ultra Green Tea Review
Click to expand...

Try turning off the crappy Visual Editor. Even if you post in HTML mode if the visual editor is on and you go back in to edit the post, It seems to break or just strip some tags completely.

edit: From your dashboard. Users > your user name > uncheck "Use the visual editor when writing"
 
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This would be a blog/affiliate dating review site based on a fictional woman called 'Jackie Logan'. I've read that dating/ringtones/diet products etc are saturated markets really hard to break into, but it seems that doesn't put people off and I guess because of that I'll probably learn a lot from trying it out. At this stage, I just want to learn as much as possible.
Click to expand...

This is an exceptional idea and I'm kicking myself for not thinking of it.

I'm enjoying this thread.
 
Thanks for the tips. I've now looked through Flickr and found a couple of girls that could be suitable, but then noticed all the pics seem to have 'some rights reserved'. This states that You are free:
to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work to make derivative works
Under the following conditions:
Attribution. You must give the original author credit.
Attribute this work:The page you came from contained embedded licensing metadata, including how the creator wishes to be attributed for re-use. You can use the HTML here to cite the work. Doing so will also include metadata on your page so that others can find the original work as well. Non-Commercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a licence identical to this one.
For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the licence terms of this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder. Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the author's moral rights.

OK - pretty boring - so what do you guys suggest?
• Should I be including an attribution to the original author somewhere on the site?
• Go out and take photos myself?
• Seek out a volunteer to pose for the pics
• Approach a number of the Flickr girls asking if they'd like their pics to be included in a dating blog?
• Or should I just ignore all the rules and go ahead and use them anyway?

I'm not expecting this site to be making me millions so maybe I shouldn't be getting too hung up on it, but I'm interested to know what other people do, I can use photoshop for the basics, but I've never sussed out to change hair or edit people to look realistic and it's not something I want to learn right now.

How many would you say I should have (I mean of the actual girl) before getting started? 10, 20 or more?
Getting pics of food, venues, etc will be easy, it's just choosing the character that's tricky.

Other than that, I've started taking notes on what sort of content I'm going to include. I've got a few affiliate offers approved and I've uploaded and made some amendments to the wordpress prosense theme. I find choosing a theme to be one of the hardest things to do, so for now I've just gone for a basic theme with adsense. But come to think of it, that was maybe a bad idea because if I'm promoting dating offers, I maybe shouldn't have adsense on my site - what do you think?




Abhorrent, I like your dogsrule site - it looks very professional.

I'm going to be away for a week from tomorrow, so I won't get to post or update the site, but I will have my notebook with me and I plan to get stuck in when I return.
 
Quick update: I've noticed that the few users I've had visit (still at c. 40/day) are searching for bands that I haven't reviewed. So, I've hacked up my search results page, and if no results are found, it now searches YouTube via their API and attempts to find at three videos that match what the user searched for. It then displays these videos with "How do these do, now buy a bloody ringtone"-type text.

I'm still looking at options to drive traffic, and have made tentative steps to get other music blogs to link to me. Ringtones are hugely popular amongst schoolkids in the UK, and I'm looking at using Facebook to target some kiddy-friendly ads that offer the latest free videos to watch... and doesn't mention them being surrounded by "RINGTONE! RINGTONE! RINGTONE!" ads.

Any other advice on traffic would be most appreciated, thanks guys.
 
Wow! Everyone's busy as bees. Great to see there is a lot of sharing of ideas and information.

Some quick pointers: even if you struggle with HTML / PHP / ASP / whatever, keep at it. I'm no programmer, but I understand enough to make changes to scripts and write some really simple ones. Even that little bit of knowledge has helped immensely. Like most of you, I learn by doing. So, everyday I push my coding abilities as far as I can. I try to do as much of the script writing as possible. If I get stuck, I hire someone to finish it.

Which brings me to my second point, make sure you put a value on your time. It's one thing to try and learn new things, it's another thing to beat your head against the wall when you don't need to. If you can't afford to hire someone, then trade services. Sex for coding usually works if you're a female... Errrr... Just kidding, but content for code is often a good trade. I know a lot of coders that can write some complex code, but can't write good sales copy to save their lives.

Anyhow, always make it a habit to look for ways around your limitations. We are all handicapped. Just in different ways. My handicaps: not a good copywriter, poor coder, and horrible graphic artist. No big deal, there are people out there that I can either hire or trade services with. My point is this: you have all the skills you need, the ones you don't have - others do. Network with each other. Go to Affiliate Summit and shake hands with people. Talk on the phone. However you want to do it, it doesn't matter, just do it. (Nike paid me for that ;))

Okay, enough "Rah Rah" pep talk. Let's get into advertising / marketing.

Ever hear of the Four P's of Marketing? In case you missed Marketing 101, here they are (ripped from Wikipedia):
  • Product: The product aspects of marketing deal with the specifications of the actual goods or services, and how it relates to the end-user's needs and wants. The scope of a product generally includes supporting elements such as warranties, guarantees, and support.
  • Pricing: This refers to the process of setting a price for a product, including discounts. The price need not be monetary - it can simply be what is exchanged for the product or services, e.g. time, energy, psychology or attention.
  • Promotion: This includes advertising, sales promotion, publicity, and personal selling, branding and refers to the various methods of promoting the product, brand, or company.
  • Placement (or distribution): refers to how the product gets to the customer; for example, point of sale placement or retailing. This fourth P has also sometimes been called Place, referring to the channel by which a product or services is sold (e.g. online vs. retail), which geographic region or industry, to which segment (young adults, families, business people), etc. also referring to how the environment in which the product is sold in can affect sales.
Here's how you can relate the 4 P's to Internet Marketing:
  • Product - what product or service are you pushing? How does it relate to your website's demographic? Is is incentivizable? If so, should you incentivize it?
  • Pricing - Pricing can affect how well the item converts. Often new internet marketers (notice I didn't call you n00bs) want to push the item that has the highest payout. But if it has a high payout, does it have a high cost to the consumer? Either through a long, multi page offer (time cost) or through an actual purchase (monetary cost)
  • Promotion - Pretty self explanatory. How are you going to promote your site? SEO, PPC, YouTube, social networks, banner ads, CPM ads, etc... Also, what type of promotion would be best suited for your audience? Video, banner, text? Are you going to focus on branding your site, or just pushing a product?
  • Placement - an extension of promotion. What's your demographic? What sites do they visit? Do the sites they frequent have lots of flash, music, etc or are the sites fairly static (no moving images, no music)? What times of day are they most likely to buy? What kind of language do they respond to? "Hip hoppers" are more likely to respond to slang than a white collar executive.
Lot's of questions, but you need to be asking yourself questions all the time. The more questions you ask, the more you will learn. The more you learn, the better you can narrow down on you target audience. The better you target that audience, the more you make. The more you make...you get the idea.

Homework assignment: Write out a list of at least 10 questions. Things you need to know about your site, niche, audience. Then go research and find the answers. Then look at your site again, and apply that knowledge. There will be things you'll want to change (most likely). Don't take the easy way out and say "Yeah, yeah, I already know all the answers", because, if you do know all the answers, share them with me. I certainly don't, and I know that I would be much richer if I did.

Last, share at least one of your questions with the class and what you learned through your research AND how it applied to your site.

That will be all. Go forth and discover.

Oops, almost forgot, Google's Adplanner kicks ass at helping you figure out what your potential demographic is by studying your competitors demographics.
 
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great post seo_mike, im learn a lot here :D

anyway, lately im focus building install joomla service. It's take time to make the website, i hope i can done by tomorrow :)

so how about everyone else ? :)
 
I wonder. Any one have an opinion on the various Ebay php scrips. Is phpbay pro(50$) worth it over mcjiffy or phpbay lite ? Im trying to get a classy look going and im pretty clueless when it comes to php(trying to learn php actualy).
 
puroz said:
I wonder. Any one have an opinion on the various Ebay php scrips. Is phpbay pro(50$) worth it over mcjiffy or phpbay lite ? Im trying to get a classy look going and im pretty clueless when it comes to php(trying to learn php actualy).
Click to expand...

Go phpBay Pro and don't look back if you have the coin. Looks sweet, integrates well, targeted searches, nice templates w/ column view.

UPDATE:

Going to try and make a sick home page for epnStore today/tonight.
 
I it a good idea to direct link to an offer just to test if it will convert before i build a landing page?
 
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