If you have a Build A Niche Store (BANS) that has a sidebar menu on one side of your store but you would rather have it on the other side, then keep reading. You may be surprised at how simple this is.

This will be easiest to achieve if you are using a template that has sidebars on both the left and right, so my instructions will be based on using this type of template.

There are some mods that are very easy to do, but not so easy to tell how to do. This is one of those mods. There are a few variables that will make writing these instructions challenging for me, but they are not a reflection of difficulty in your doing this mod. These instructions may look difficult but they really aren’t, especially after you have done it a few times.

1. You need to know where the menu you want to move is currently located:

• If the menu you want to move is currently on the left side of your template, then it is located in the header.php.
• If the menu you want to move is currently on the right side of your template, then it is located in the footer.php.

2. You need to know the name of the menu you want. The following are the default template names, but you may have renamed them. If you changed your names then look for whatever you named them, not the default terms:

• Content pages menu = <h2>Site Navigation</h2>
• Store pages menu = <h2>Store Navigation</h2>
• Sponsored links menu = <h2>Sponsored Links</h2>

See? The instructions look harder than this actually is.

Once you get the hang of this you can move other aspects of your menus. Would you rather have your sponsored links above your content pages? You can do that by moving the sponsored link code ABOVE the content pages code. And so on.

Rochelle

Doing keyword research is vital to getting traffic to any website, not just niche store sites.  Today I received an email from Michelle stating that she is having a webinar on nothing but keyword research tomorrow, June 24, 2008.  I’m going to sign up for this and wanted to pass the information along in case you want to, too.

If you are interested go to http://www.michellemacphearson.com/onemistake/.  The webinar will be free and I’ve sure it will be full of solid information.  Also, she will record the webinar and make it available for those who’ve signed up to listen to later.  Michelle will probably post it as a link so you can hear it, as this is what she’s done in the past.

Rochelle

A few months ago I wrote about How to Add a ‘Contact Us’ Form to Your Site, a mod created by BANS forum member, mistermickster. If you follow those instructions you will end up with a ‘Contact Us’ link in your Site Navigation’s sidebar menu.

After I posted these instructions many people said they prefered to add their ‘Contact Us’ link to the footer of their sites. Both Holly and mistermickster shared how to achieve this. But some people where confused so I am clarifying with detailed instructions here on how to do this.

As I said above, all emails are sent to the address you entered in your site’s Admin Security tab. If you are like me you have entered the same email address for every site you have. You won’t want emails from various sites sent to one email because you’ll have no idea what site the emails are coming from or referring to.

There are several ways to deal with this. The solution I have chosen is a simple one that will allow you to add unique email address for every niche store you have and let you check them all in a single place. No, I don’t mean your inbox, such as Outlook or Outlook Express. This is even easier than that.

What I suggest requires creating multiple accounts with Google’s gmail. For those who may be worried, you are allowed to have multiple gmail accounts as long as your purpose for the accounts doesn’t violate Google’s TOS. Using your email accounts for ‘Contact Us’ purposes only is an acceptable use of multiple accounts.

I realize not everyone will want to use Google’s gmail. If you don’t want to do this then I’m afraid I’m leaving it up to you to figure out how to deal with the email address aspect of creating ‘Contact Us’ forms. I apologize but I simply don’t have the time to write instructions for every method available for doing this.

Now that you have created a primary email account and unique variations of this account for each niche store you need to periodically check your primary account for messages. When you log in you will see all your emails in one centralized place. But you won’t know which niche store your emails have come from just by looking at your inbox:

To figure out which store your email came from you need to click on an email to open it. Once you have done this you need to click the ‘show details‘ link:

Now you can see what email address the message was sent to, and this tells you what store the email is coming from and referring to:

That’s it. You now have a ‘Contact Us’ link that you can add to your site’s footer, a unique email address set up for each of your niche stores, and an easy way to read any messages you receive. Go ahead and click it to send yourself an email to verify that it works. Pretty nifty, eh?

Rochelle

Have you ever wanted to change the wording that displays when no auction results are available? Me, too.

The default wording is, “No products matching your query have been found in our store. Please bookmark this page and come back soon to see if we have what you want.” I don’t like this wording because there is no way to bookmark searches, and this wording will also display when searches have no results. I feel like I’m misleading visitors by encouraging them to bookmark searches.

Rochelle