Google has made search history available to users for quite some time. If you have a Google Account since then, a plethora of great content awaits you! If you don’t have one, sign up for a Google Account and make sure you’re signed in when you search. To view your search history, just visit https://www.google.com/history.

If you use Google to search often, you may want to review your history frequently, perhaps once a week or once every few days. If you don’t Google much (something is wrong with you), you may be able to get away with searching once a month or once every couple of weeks.

As you flip through pages of searches and results you clicked on, you’ll recall the pressing questions you were looking to answer and the new and interesting knowledge you were seeking to acquire. Take note of those that will make good topics for blog posts. You may want to keep a running list on Google Docs like recently started.

Not all of your search activity will make for good blog content, but you might be surprised how much of it will. The best content will come from obscure information that you had to search for many different ways, and had to piece together from multiple sources of information. There are several reasons why these kinds of searches will do well as new content for your website or blog:

1. You’re probably looking for information on a topic you enjoy and interests you – You should always write about what you enjoy, because you probably know a lot about the topic already or aspire to learn more
2. If you’re searching for it, it is quite likely other people are searching for it
3. If you had to go through effort finding it, others are going through effort finding it
4. If everyone is having trouble finding it, that means there is very little competition for the keywords surrounding the subject matter you’re seeking – that bodes well for you, because it is much more likely your new content will rank high in search engine result pages (SERPs)

If your original content is well-organized and the information is hard to find, people looking for the info will flock to your page. Fundamentally, your new webpage will fulfill Google’s mission: “Organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” That just makes good sense.

Even if your searches aren’t necessarily on obscure topics with disparate information on the web, your search history will still provide a superb source of story ideas. When you search for subject matter you blog about, you’re either enhancing your existing knowledge or seeking information that is new (not to mention interesting) to you. That is exactly the stuff good posts are made of.

Plugin Overview

The plugin is quite easy to use and can be set up in three simple steps:

1. Set up the overall configuration for your store pages
2. Create new store pages
3. Select which products you want displayed

Store pages and product detail pages are all automatically generated for you, and are set up as regular WordPress pages. The Product Management screens allow you to quickly and easily place the product detail pages into published, draft, or trash status, rather than having to manually do this via the WordPress interface (although you can do that if you wish). You can also easily modify the detailed product descriptions by simply modifying the content of the detail product pages.

Plugin Features

• Support for international locales, including: USA, United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany and Japan.
• Easy creation of store pages and product detail pages at the click of a button
• Easy management of product selection
• Product detail pages are regular WordPress pages, making it easy to update descriptions
• Automatic pagination of store pages
• Ajax loading of paginated store pages, for quick loading and pleasant visitor experience
• Ajax submission and loading of items to the shopping cart

Change Log

• 1.0.0: Initial Release.
• 1.0.1: Fixed a cosmetic bug with store/cart displaying -1 when refreshed by Ajax.
• 1.0.2: Fixed a critical bug with cart submissions in Firefox and potentially other browsers.
• 1.0.3: Fixed a cosmetic bug with the bottom of the product display boxes being cut off on the store pages.
• 1.1.0: Updated code to add non-Wordpress.org hosted updates.

Download Version 1.1.0 of the Plugin

For more details on using the plugin, be sure to check out the readme.txt included with the plugin.

Special Notice

Similar to the Amazon Niche Store plugin, there is one condition of which you need to be aware. 10% of the time, when your site visitors check their cart, I will replace your Amazon Associates tracking ID with my own. The other 90% of the time your Amazon Associates tracking ID will be used for the cart checkout.

If you do not agree to this condition, then do not download and use the plugin.

Screenshots

• Amazon Store Configuration Page
• Product Management Screen
• Amazon Store Page
• Shopping Cart
• Message Displayed after User Clicks Proceed to Checkout
• Amazon Page that Appears after Shopping Cart is Submitted

Live Demo

If you’d like to see it in action, check out the live demo of the Free WordPress Store for Amazon Associates.

Suggestions and Bugs

If you encounter any bugs with the plugin, or have any suggestions as to how I can improve it, please feel free to post comments here. Before submitting a bug, be sure you have the latest version of the plugin.

Given that I recently had some success with my free eBay Store, I decided it would be a good idea to put together a similar WordPress plugin for Amazon.com. I’m pleased to present the Amazon Niche Store plugin. So why should you consider building a niche store with Amazon instead of eBay?

[amazon trackingid="gee0dd-20" keywords="wii" rows="3" columns="2"]

Good luck with your own Amazon Niche Store and happy affiliating! If you have any suggestions for the plugin or encounter any bugs, please feel free to comment on this post.

Market Leverage offers many different products, for which you can display advertisements on your blog. When people click on the links and order the products, you receive a commission. These transactions are referred to as CPA (Cost per Action). If the products are relevant to the information on your blog, such programs can be even more profitable than CPC (Cost per Click) advertising, such as AdWords.

To install the Affiliate Manager plugin:

• Join Market Leverage if you are not already a member.
• Download the Affiliate Manager Plugin, install, and activate it.
• Go to the Affiliate Manager options page under Tools, in the WordPress adminstration.
• Enter your Market Leverage email and password.



• Add new keywords to import ads that are relevant to your blog.



• You can either display ads by placing PHP code within your template, using widgets, or both.

There are three functions you can use for displaying ads in your template.

affiliate_manager_random_banner(size)

This function will display a banner for any keyword of the appropriate size. Just replace size with the size you wish to display in quotes. Example:
<?php affiliate_manager_random_banner("120x600"); ?>

affiliate_manager_by_keyword(keyword, size)

This function will display a banner for a specified keyword of the appropriate size. Replace keyword with the keyword for the banner, and replace size with the size you wish to display. Both parameters should be in quotes. Example:
<?php affiliate_manager_by_keyword("mortgage", "120x600"); ?>

affiliate_manager_displayAd(id)

This function will display a specific banner, according to the ad ID. Replace id with the id of the banner. This parameter should not be in quotes. Example:
<?php affiliate_manager_displayAd(15); ?>

To display banners within widgets:

1. Go to Appearance > Widgets in WordPress.
2. Select the section where you want the widget to appear and click Show.
3. Click the Add button next to the Affiliate Manager Widget widget.
4. Select the keyword for the banners displayed in the widget.
5. Select the size of the banners to be displayed in the widget.
6. Click Done in the widget options.
7. Click Save Changes to add the widget to your pages.

I used a somewhat generic name for the plugin with the intention of eventually adding other affiliates. I’ve also done my best to write the code so that I can later incorporate others. If you have any affiliates you would like me to add, just suggest them in a comment here. Please also free to make any suggestions that you think may help to make the Affiliate Manager plugin even better.

For instance, let’s say you have a photography blog and you are writing a review for the Canon Rebel XSi. You can use my free eBay store WordPress plugin to display relevant products right in the post! Here is the code you would place into your post (put it all on one line):

[ebay campaignid="5336304844" keywords="canon rebel xsi" rows="3" columns="1"]

And here is what your store would look like:

LP-E5 BATTERY CHARGER FOR CANON EOS Rebel T1i XSi XS + Car Charger Current Price: No bids yet. Bid now! End Time: 2 minutes Shipping: $4.25

Wide Angle Lens 0.43x HD for Canon Kiss F Kiss X2 Rebel XTi XSi w./ Macro $29.92 Current Price: No bids yet. Bid now! End Time: 6 minutes Free Shipping!

Wide Angle Lens 0.43x HD for Canon Kiss F Kiss X2 Rebel XTi XSi w./ Macro $29.93 Current Price: No bids yet. Bid now! End Time: 21 minutes Free Shipping!

Powered By the Free eBay Store

If you have many posts on your blog that discuss many products, you may wish to set up entire pages dedicated to relevant products. You can even place multiple stores on the same page for different keywords.

I’ve seen some products out there similar to my plugin (such as BANS), but they are not free. If they are free, then they want you to sign up for mailing lists and bombard you with solicitations via email. Why am I willing to give this away for free, when there are others charging for similar eBay stores?

Well, for one thing, people love free. It makes it easy to try something out when there is little or no risk involved. I’m confident that because my plugin is free, I’ll have many more takers than I would if I were to charge for it. I want my free eBay store plugin to become the plugin everyone uses for their blog’s eBay store. Making it free is essential for that to happen.

So what’s the catch? Two simple things I think you can probably live with:

• As you may have already noticed, the store displays a link back to this page. This will help to spread the word about this great plugin so that many others can also take advantage of it.
• Your campaign ID will used 90% of the time, and 10% of the time it will be my campaign ID. This will allow me to be compensated for my efforts, and help me spend more time making even more great plugins.

So how do you get started? First you need to sign up as an eBay affiliate for free. Once you’re signed up or if you’re already signed up, create a new campaign to use with your free eBay store. Then download, install, and activate the WordPress plugin.

Download the Plugin

Once you’ve activated the plugin, write up a post or page where you wish to display an eBay store. Then, enter the proper code to display a store (put it all on one line):

[ebay campaignid="YOUR-CAMPAIGN-ID" keywords="YOUR-STORE-KEYWORDS" rows="NUMBER-OF-ROWS-YOU-WANT-TO-DISPLAY" columns="NUMBER-OF-COLUMNS-YOU-WANT-TO-DISPLAY" pagination="yes" vertical="yes"]

campaignid and keywords are required parameters. Use spaces between the keywords, and if you want to exclude a word, prefix it with a minus (-). columns and rows are optional, and the store plugin will default to 2 columns x 5 rows (10 items in total). The maximum total product display is limited to 25 products.

The pagination and vertical parameters are also optional. The pagination parameter will allow the display of multiple pages of products when set to yes. You can see this demonstrated on my free eBay Store demo page. Setting the vertical parameter to yes will display the item info below the image, rather than to the right of it.

The plugin also comes with a widget, if you would like to display ebay Products within a widget. This would allow you to display advertisements for eBay items on every page on your blog. To use it, just log into your WordPress blog, go to Appearance > Widgets and add the Free eBay Store widget. The sidebar widget uses the vertical parameter to display the item information below the image.

Don’t forget to supply your eBay campaign ID and the keywords you want for the products displayed in your widget. If you want, you can display different types of products at random. To do this, use multiple sets of keywords and separate them with a pipe character (|). For example, to display teddy bears and inflatable pools, you enter teddy bear|inflatable pool as the keywords. The widget will select the pipe-separated keywords at random.

If you don’t have a blog, but you have access to a scripting language (such as PHP) on your host provider, feel free to use the following URL to access the store as a pseudo-service:

http://geeklad.com/tools/ebay.php?campaignid=YOUR-CAMPAIGN-ID&rows=NUMBER-OF-ROWS-YOU-WANT-TO-DISPLAY&columns=NUMBER-OF-COLUMNS-YOU-WANT-TO-DISPLAY&keyword=YOUR-STORE-KEYWORDS&pagination=yes

And of course, you need to replace the campaignid, rows, columns, and keyword parameters accordingly. The output is just regular HTML. For instance, to display a 3 x 4 store for products to make money online in PHP, you would use the following line of PHP code:

echo file_get_contents("http://geeklad.com/tools/ebay.php?campaignid=YOUR-CAMPAIGN-ID&rows=4&columns=3&pagination=yes&keyword=make+money+online"); And your store will be displayed right on the line within the webpage where you supply the code. If you want to reformat the display of the store on either your blog or a webpage, just enclose the store within a <div> HTML tag, and set the formatting for that div however you like.

Let me know if you encounter any bugs, have any questions, or have any suggestions on how I might be able to improve the free eBay Store. Enjoy!

A few weeks ago I wrote about Bankaholic, a one-man WordPress blog that last year was bought by Bankrate for nearly $15 million. In the article I analyzed why the blog might actually be worth the eye-popping sum that Bankrate paid. I won’t rehash all that here, but do want to focus on one very important aspect that led to Bankaholic’s success–backlinks.

To get started, let’s run a search on Google for the term, “credit cards.” While rankings change, even daily, Bankaholic typically ranks anywhere from the bottom of the first page to the top of the second. Not bad for a search that generated 174,000,000 results. On top of that, the Google Adwords keyword tool shows more than 450,000 monthly searches on the exact phrase each month (more than 2.2 million on broad search). Now Bankaholic’s credit card page, while perfectly fine, is nothing special. I have a very similar credit card page on The Dough Roller, it just doesn’t rank as well (yet!).

Bankaholic Home Page

You might not be focused on credit cards. But if you are trying to make money online, you are focused on some keywords. And you also know who your competitors are. So let’s see how we can leverage our competitors to (1) determine their backlink strategy, and (2) identify possible backlink opportunities. And we will use Bankaholic’s credit card page as an example.

Step one is to run the following search in Yahoo!: link:www.bankaholic.com/credit-cards/. Of course, you can substitute whatever page you want, depending on who your competitors are. The search will return a list of links to the given page. A drop down box at the top of the search results allows you to exclude links that come from the given domain, in this case Bankaholic. Excluding links from other parts of the Bankaholic site leaves 12,992 banklinks.

Yahoo! Search for Bankaholic Links

At this point it’s important to keep a couple things in mind. First, we used Yahoo! because Google doesn’t return all of the backlinks. Don’t ask why because I don’t know; maybe the Big G is throwing Yahoo! a bone. Second, the backlink count includes links to the credit card page, as well as links to pages in any credit card subpages. Third, when links are in the sidebar, header, or other section that appears on every page of a site, every page counts as a backlink. That means that a sidebar link on a large site can result in hundreds or even thousands of backlinks. So while nearly 13,000 backlinks is a good start, it’s not nearly as impressive as it may at first appear.

Step two is to skim the sites linking to your competitor to get an idea of the types of links they are getting. A quick visual inspection of Bankaholic’s backlinks shows several things. First, Bankaholic is taking full advantage of directory submissions. Without getting into the issue of the value of directories, most believe that the Yahoo! Directory still has value, and Bankaholic has submitted its site to several of Yahoo’s directories. Its worth noting that the links are to the credit card page, not the home page, and typically use the anchor text, “Bankaholic.com: credit cards.” Second, many links come from the sidebar, footer or the end of articles on blogs.

And this leads to step three–digging through the backlinks to find potential sources for your own backlinks. What’s interesting to me about many of the backlinks to Bankaholic’s credit card pages is that they come from blogs, many of which are not updated regular or highly trafficked. In other words, they are links any of us could get. I suspect not all of the links are purely editorial, but nobody can be sure. Still, Bankaholic did what you and I should be doing, so stop reading this article and go get some backlinks.

Photo Credit: Andres Rueda

In addition to the size of your market and existing competition, the quality of service you provide is a very important factor in making money online.  High quality will provide credibility for your content or service, and result in repeat visits and referrals. If your site is low quality, you may have a difficult time in earning the trust of those that visit your site.

My Failure in Quality of Service

I think another reason why ForeverSMS never took off is because of the design of the website. I designed the website myself, however, I should have relied on a professional to do the design for me.  I think I could have done more in terms of doing more search engine optimization, but the reality is that if the site had been higher quality and in a less competitive space, I would have seen greater success.

Improving My Quality of Service

I’ve hired someone to do the web design on my latest venture. I think it will help me to achieve greater success than I saw with ForeverSMS.  It is important to realize what you are good at, but probably more important to understand what you are not good at.  When you identify such areas, find others to do the work for you.

My Success in Quality of Service

The jury is still out. We shall see how my new venture does, which I will announce shortly.

Ensuring Quality of Service on Your Websites

If you have decided to make money online by blogging, a good blogging platform (WordPress, Drupal, TypePad, Blogger, etc.) with a nice selection of themes is a first good step towards developing a quality blog. The second most important factor in developing a quality of blog is of course developing quality content. Write about a topic you are passionate about. When you start thinking of topics for articles all the time, you know you’ve selected the right topic for your blog.

If you want to make money by developing a service, be sure to ask for help in areas in which you are lacking expertise. I’m pretty good at developing with PHP and MySQL, but I really suck at web design. Be honest with yourself and realize that you may not be able to do everything yourself.

You also need to ensure your site is fast and convenient to use. You may have the most gorgeous web design, but if the site is slow and complicated you may not achieve success. Try to keep it simple, yet appealing. This will help to maintain speed and convenience for your visitors.

Applying All Three Factors

It is important that you consider all three factors together: the size of your market, existing competition, and quality of service.  You need to understand how they relate to each other. You may have a very large market, but if there are many competitors it will be more difficult to make money. However, developing a high quality website can help to overtake the competition and achieve success.

On the other hand, you may develop a very high quality site in a market with very little competition. However if there is no one interested in the service you provide, you will be doomed to failure.  It is sometimes difficult to judge what sort of market there may be for services that do not yet exist.

You could try performing surveys to determine whether or not a particular type of service may appeal to a wide audience. You could also take a gamble and go ahead and develop the website, and see if it is well-received.  As long as you do not spend a lot of time and money in developing the service, there is little risk in just developing the site and see what happens.

It is important to be brutally honest with yourself and learn from your failures. There is no better way to achieve success than to fail and learn from your mistakes. If you do not initially attain the desired results, take a step back and try to understand why you failed.  You will be better prepared when you try again.

What’s Next

Once you’ve decided whether to provide content or service and you’ve taken into account size of market, existing competition, and quality of service, it is time to select a monetization method. In the next post in this series, I’ll discuss ways you can directly and indirectly monetize your website.

If you compete in a large market, you can expect to have a lot of competition. If there is little or no competition in your market, if you succeed you can expect competition to quickly appear. When Twitter hit the scene, it wasn’t long before competing services like FriendFeed, identi.ca, and others came to market to provide similar and improved services.

My Failure in Assessing Competition

Last year, I developed a free service for texting online. I felt as though it was a pretty decent service, but it never caught on like I had hoped. I believe a big reason for this was because there were already similar services such as Gizmo SMS and txtDrop.com. ForeverSMS really had very little to offer that these services didn’t already provide.

Improving My Assessment of Competition

I’ve learned alot with the less than stellar monetization of ForeverSMS. Lately I’ve been looking to develop services that do not exist yet or that have very little competition.

My Success in Assessing Competition

Well, the jury is still out for me on assessing competition. I am currently developing a service that I believe has very little competition. Whether or not it will succeed once I announce it is another story.  It depends on how I handle my assessment on the size of market, competition, and other factors as well.

Sizing Up Your Competition

I think the biggest reason that many bloggers fail early when they start, is that they fail to realize the amount of competition they face. There are countless bloggers out there writing about a tremendous variety of topics, and many of them do it quite well. Although it is easy to get started with blogging and it is easy to do, it is tremendously difficult to succeed.

That being said, do not be discouraged from blogging. You may find that you do it better than anyone else in the topic you decide to write about.  There are quite a few people that have managed to earn a living from blogging.  Although it is a long and difficult path, it is indeed possible to make money blogging.

It may be nearly impossible to find a topic to blog about where you would face little or no competition.  On the other hand, it is quite possible to develop new services that have no competition. The difficulty with creating new services is deciding on what they should be. Necessity is the mother of invention and often new services are born where individuals find a need for something that does not yet exist.

If you are developing a service and no such service exists yet, you will have a tremendous advantage.  It will increase the likelihood you will make money with it.  It is also easier to make money with blog posts where you provide information that does not exist or is difficult to find.  If you have scoured the net trying to solve a problem and you ended up developing your own solution, blog about it! It’s very likely there are others looking for the very same answer you could provide them.

What’s Next

The last of the three important factors I will be writing about in this series is the quality of service.  Quality of service does not just apply to services, it applies to content as well. If decide to make money with a blog, it needs to be informative as well as visually appealing.

Perhaps the three most important factors to consider in deciding what to put on your website are the size of your market, the competition you will face, and the quality of your content or service. In this article, I share some of my observations on size of market, including examples on how I’ve failed and succeeded in properly assessing it.

Without a doubt, size of market is the most important factor for making money online. There are millions of people using the Internet each and every day, which is why it has attracted so many as an opportunity to earn income. However, it is likely that only a very small fraction of them will be in the market you will be targeting.

My Failure in Assessing Size of Market

For the most part, I’ve not had a lot of organic traffic so far on my blog. I’ve come to realize that my eclectic mix of content does not really appeal to a wide range of individuals. Although there are a lot of other geeks out there in the world, most of them are not particularly interested in many of the things I write about and the tools I develop.

Improving My Assessment of Size of Market

Part of the reason I’ve decided to develop this series on making money online was to try to appeal to a wider audience. There is no doubt in my mind there are more people interested in making money online than there are people interested in things like a Greasemonkey script for Google Webmaster Tools.

I also decided to write about making money online because I recently had my first real big hit with organic results on this blog. Earlier this month I wrote an article on how to remove Antivirus 2009, Spyware Guard 2008 and other malware, and it definitely seemed to appeal to a wider audience than any of my other posts on GeekLad. I decided that sharing my success could provide some good information on how to make money online.

My Success in Assessing Size of Market

There are a lot of people that encounter problems with Antivirus 2009 and Spyware Guard 2008. I used Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware to remove those programs from my parents’ computer, and decided it would make a great blog post that would appeal to a wide audience. It is apparent by the amount of traffic I’ve received that I was right.

I also signed up for an affiliate account with Malwarebytes.  If anyone decides they would like to purchase the full version as a result of reading my article, I receive a commission for it. Signing up for the affiliate account and including an affiliate link within the article has allowed me to make some money with the article.

Selecting Your Audience

When deciding on a topic to blog about or the type of service you are going to provide, you need to take your audience into consideration. You need to figure out how many people that will be interested in your website.You can use the Google Keyword Tool to determine the amount of search volume there is in the areas you are considering for your blog or service. Keywords with higher search volume will provide you with a larger market.

If your content or service is very specialized, you can expect to have a small audience. If you decide to blog about a very popular topic or develop a service that would appeal to many individuals, you can expect to have a large audience. Having a small audience isn’t necessarily a bad thing, if you can convert visits into cash and each conversion is worth a lot of money.

What’s Next?

The size of your market should not be taken into consideration alone. It is also very important to consider existing competition. Although there may be millions of potential visitors in your audience, there may already be many competitors servicing that market. If the competition is fierce, you may find it difficult to make money.

In the next post in the series, I’ll be taking a more detailed look at sizing up the competition.

Photo Credit: Apreche

Much like Edison inventing the light bulb, I’ve found more ways how not to achieve the desired outcome. However, I’m glad to say that I’m starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I recently decided to share my experience in my quest with a multi-part post on how to make money online.

About a month ago, I reached out to Jesse Stay for help in my quest. Jesse is a successful entrepreneur, published technology author, and guest author for Louis Gray. He is the creative mind behind SocialToo, a web service that provides some handy tools for some popular social networks. I asked Jesse for advice on how to turn my hobbies (programming and blogging) into a career. He provided some great info and there was a series of questions he asked that really got me thinking:

What would you like to do? Are you looking to become a developer? Do you want to become a blogger? Do you want to be an Entrepreneur?

Very good questions indeed. I think that ultimately I would like to be an entrepreneur and offer web services that are high in demand but low in supply. If I ever get to the point where I’m creating demand, I’ll know I’ve made it. I think answering these questions led me to the first step in making money online: do you develop content or develop a service?

Content Development

Behind door number one, we have content development. This has become one of the most popular methods for earning a living online. There are countless individuals online providing eager readers with relevant and useful information. The majority of them in the form of blogs.

Blogs are a great way for enthusiasts and self-proclaimed experts on any topic to provide information to the masses. It has become quite apparent that blogs are probably the best and easiest way to provide information online. It has been observed by many that search engines have an affinity for blogs. If you are a decent writer and have a lot of great information to share that others are seeking, blogging is definitely the way to go.

Providing Services

The second choice you have for making money online is to provide services online. Just as there are millions of people seeking information online, there are many others seeking services as well. Of course, the majority of them prefer free services but there are plenty that are willing to pay too.

Providing services online does not necessarily mean you need to be a programmer or web developer. If you already have a business or are interested in starting one, providing services online can easily become an extension of your business. This is especially true if your business is not limited by your geographic location.

It is relatively easy to build a website to promote and even sell the services online. Even if you don’t know how to do it, there are plenty of people out there who provide such services. Alternatively, you could find the information online on how to build a website and do it yourself. I find the latter to be the most enjoyable as well as rewarding.

What’s Next?

Once you’ve decided whether you wish to provide content or services, you need to decide the topic of your content or the type of service to provide. There are three very important factors to consider when making this decision:

• Size of Market
• Competition
• Quality of Service

These will be the focus of my next post in this series.

Photo Credit: Tracy O