If you have been on the fence about getting 30 Minute Backlinks then this may sway you.  Michelle MacPhearson is offering a limited time discount on her program.  You have just two days to purchase 30 Minute Backlinks at a discount by going to http://www.30minutebacklinks.com/sale.php. 

Rochelle

Wow.  There is nothing quite like a crisis to make you realize you should have been doing something all along.  In my case, I now realize I should have some way to monitor my sites and make sure they are not down. 

I have close to 100 sites and if one (or more) goes down, I probably would not have a clue unless someone contacted me about it.  The thing is, it is highly unlikely someone will notify me because my ‘Contact Me’ info would also be down.

Lesson learned.

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For several weeks I’ve been saying how I’m going to write about how to add blogging to niche stores.  Well, consider this my first official post about it.  Before I go into how to add blogging to your sites I thought it would be a good idea to start off with why it’s a good idea.

Note: I use Wordpress for my blogging so any references to a blog is actually referring to a Wordpress blog.  There are other blogging programs but I haven’t used them so I can’t speak about them.

Advantages of combinging BANS with blogging:

1. Build A Niche Store is a great product, but it’s not a good idea to use it straight out of the box.  Several blogging posts this week have discussed the fact that Google doesn’t like thin affiliate sites (see Mark’s “Death of Thin Affiliate Sites” and JT Pratt’s “Why BANS Niche Sites get Banned from Google” for more details on this).  Adding a blog to a BANS site means you are adding content.  Content on a site means it is no longer a thin affiliate site.
2. Google loves blogs.  I don’t know why, though I’m sure someone reading this could give the details of why, but it is commonly known that Google (and other search engines) like blogs.  This means your niche store has a better chance of being indexed (and quickly) when you add a blog to it.
3. You can schedule your blog posts.  Wordpress allows you to write posts and then set them to be published at your specified dates and times.  This is great because you can write multiple posts but have them published whenever you want, instead of as you write them.  This is also great because it allows your sites to grow slowly, which search engines prefer, instead of having a huge amount of content added in a single day.
4. Wordpress has a huge amount of free plugins.  Plugins are tools that allow you to do even more with your blog.  There is a plugin for almost anything you want to do with your blog.  This means you can customize your blogs to suite your needs/tastes.  Plugins make customizing very easy.  I’ll list the must have plugins I use in a later post.
5. Mark at TheNicheStoreBuilder has created templates that easily integrate blogging and BANS into a single site.  This means you can use the same template for your blog as for your BANS on a site.  Cbeck out his Blog/BANS templates to see how easy it is to integrate blogging and BANS.
6. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of free Wordpress templates.  To find them just go to Google and enter ‘free wordpress (or wp) templates’.  Mark at TheNicheStoreBuilder will convert ANY Wordpress template to BANS for a very reasonable price.
7. You can create blog posts that link to pages within the BANS side of your site.  This is good because it helps search engines ‘find’ the pages you link to from your blog.  It is best to link deeply within your BANS pages when you do this, to help these deep links get indexed.  In other words, don’t link to a top category page; link to a sub-sub-sub-sub category page.
8. New blog posts ping search engines (ping = tells) whenever new posts are listed.  This means whenever your blog post is published, search engines are told there is a new post so they can come and index the new post.  You don’t have to do anything more than publish new posts to have search engines coming to your site.

Certainly there are more reasons to add blogging to niche stores but these are the main reasons I could think of this morning.  I’d love to know any additional reasons you can think of.

Rochelle

Recently I received an email from JT Pratt telling me he created a free niche store script.  I’ve looked at it (though I haven’t tried it yet, just too darn busy) and it looks really interesting.  If you’d like to check it out then go to http://www.jtpratt.com/free-niche-site-script/ and give it a try.  It could be a good way to diversify your affiliate empire.

I’d love to hear feedback from anyone who tries this.  It looks like an interesting way to get a few more affiliate revenues.  Just don’t forget to add a ‘Privacy Policy’ page, per eBay’s TOS.

For those who don’t already read it, it is worth it to spend some time at JT Pratt’s blog. There is excellent information there: http://www.jtpratt.com

Rochelle