BUILD A NICHE STORE FOR THE HOLIDAYS: Shoemoney wrote a great introduction to Build a Niche Store, software that sells for only $97 that can be used to setup an eBay based store in minutes. This can be a great way to add a store to your niche website without a significant investment of time or money, provided that eBay sells goods that are of interest to your niche.

LOGOS FOR THE PRICE OF A COUPLE DOUBLE LATTES: Courtney Tuttle found a source over at DigitalPoint that has been cranking out logos for $10. If you’ve got numerous niche sites, it might be worth it to get in on the action. A nice, clean logo is probably the number one thing that you can do to improve upon a default WordPress theme. I think customization of a theme to some extent is near essential in order to establish a tiny beachhead in the brain of people that live on the web, as they’ll have likely seen your theme a dozen times before. There are other options for cheap logos of course, such as GetAFreelancer, but make sure your confident in the designer’s portfolio or you may find that the double lattes would have been more useful. Also, there is a reason why many designers charge a lot more than $10. If your niche website or blog is a critical part of your business, or you seek to make it into an authority site, consider opening up the wallet a bit further and explore all your options.

There are some great themes out there to choose from, such as Brian Gardner’s Revolution News that are tooled to handle the needs of a complex blog or a niche website. For only $99.95, it is a pretty good deal.

The theme that you choose for your website is one of the most critical pieces of your online brand. If you can budget it, a company like Unique Blog Designs that specializes in blog design can tailor a theme that fits with your unique needs.

Goodbye Kubrick, we hardly knew thee

As I am no stranger to Photoshop, I’ve banged out the new Bizquarium theme myself. This is a first cut — a beta theme. There is still a fair amount of fine tuning I need to do and I’m aware that it runs into a few problems on older browsers. I’ll work out the kinks over the next few weeks.

I’d love to hear what you think of the new theme as well as to find out if you are having any problems viewing it. If so, please let me know what OS and which browser version you are running and I’ll take a crack at those problems first.

Looking for a great way to test the compatibility of your website?

Bonus tip: – One of the services that I use to see how the websites I develop look in other platforms is Browsershots. This handy service will take screenshots of your website in multiple platforms to help you debug things. Even better, it is currently free.

If you are looking for a premium service that does pretty much the same thing but has a few extra bells and whistles and is a bit faster, take a look at BrowserCam.

There is so much out there, it’s awfully easy to get distracted.

What’s worse – I’m decaffeinated and sleepbrowsing at 7am

I usually like to work on my sites early in the morning and spend the business hours on client work. The only problem is that in the morning I’m still half asleep. The coffee hasn’t kicked in yet and I need all the help I can get.

One of the things that has helped me to keep on top of my websites is putting together a “no-brainer” routine that holds my hand and leads me through everything I want to look at.

Firefox Bookmark Folders to the rescue

A critical part of my morning website overviews is to bookmark every page that I’d want to review into a Firefox Bookmark Folder that sits on the bookmark toolbar. I call mine the “Overview” folder. This includes all the stats dashboards, news sites, blog aggregators – anything that is on my agenda to track at the time.

I’m constantly shuffling these around, adding and removing things and ordering them in the way that I want to review them.

OK, so I’ve got a bunch of bookmarks – big deal…

Actually, keeping all of these locations in one folder is really helpful in and of itself, but the real Firefox magic comes next.

At the bottom of every bookmark folder is an option to “Open All in Tabs”. One click and every page I’ve bookmarked quickly opens, one by one, in tabs. Now I’ve got everything I want to look at all sprawled in front of me and I can sleepily click through them tab by tab in the order I pre-selected without requiring an ounce of real brainpower. There’s no more forgetting to check something and it gives me a visual check so that I can see how far I’ve got left in my review by looking at the number of tabs I have open.

Truly devout statsaholics can use the same methods to make a “Quickie Overview” folder that opens everything that they want to check throughout the day (I’m looking at you AdSense…).

Give it a try and let me know what you think!

I’d say the biggest hassle of affiliate programs is managing the links. These are ugly critters and if you recommend a wide variety of things on your blog, you’ve got a lot to keep track of.

Show me the ugly!

There is really no good reason to link to something like this:

http://www.bidvertiser.com/bdv/bidvertiser/
bdv_ref_publisher.dbm?Ref_Option=pub&Ref_PID=83233

(sheesh I had to use a line break on that one!)

.. when you can do it like this:

http://www.bizquarium.com/go/bidvertiser

There are lots of good reasons to use redirects when linking to your affiliates:

• Sometimes affiliate links change. Rather than have to go back through thousands of posts and hunt the little buggers down, you’ve got the ability to mange them in a central location.
• Your link looks like an internal link within your site. This puts many people more at ease subconsciously.
• By using something like “go/affiliateprogram” or “recommends/affiliateprogram” you show your readers exactly what is going on.
• Affiliate links are usually long, messy looking and impossible to remember. This forces you to keep copying and pasting from your notes each time you want to build a link using. Precious moments of your life that are better spent elsewhere.
• These long and messy affiliate links tend to scare people away from clicking them. Boo!
• Some people, for deep seated psychological reasons that are still being studied, love to take the extra time to avoid clicking on a naked affiliate link and to retype the web address into their browser.
• Search engines are beginning to get snippy and throw penalties at people if they don’t happen to like the ways in which you make money online. Anything you can do to obfuscate things is probably in your best interest.
• Some affiliate links use JavaScript. These are a pain to deal with in general and within WordPress in particular.
• You end up spending less time and making more money – Tim Ferris would be proud!

OK, how do we skin this cat (and get our 10% of all the cat skin sold!)

The way we accomplish this is by redirecting a simply and clear web address on your website to the complicated and confusing affiliate link.

There are a variety of ways of doing this. If you are not using WordPress you can make a basic webpage in PHP and include code that looks like this:

Ah, but as with most things, it all gets easier with WordPress

One of the great things about using WordPress as a content management system for you blog or your website is that it has a plugin architecture which makes most anything possible if your pour enough programmers into it. It also has an ubertalented and enormous development community happily whittling away at the Web’s problems. This case is no exception.

Mihai Secasiu of Patchlog has written a plugin for WordPress called Hidden Affiliate Links that handles all of this easily. You can download the plugin here (version 0.2), but make sure you read about it on the original post.

There are a few installation difficulties

The plugin is pretty easy to use. The only problem is that in installation there is at least one minor glitch to solve. You need to go into the Plugin Editor or use your favorite text editor to change line 16 of the file hidden-affiliate-links.php to reflect the proper version by changing:

to read:

(if yours already reads 0.2 then Mihai’s already fixed it)

Also, if you are like me and have WordPress installed in a subdirectory to keep thing clean you’ll need to fix another glitch on lines 279-281 by changing:

to read (includes the ABSPATH):

I have a doctored version of this file ready for download to make this easier.

Once you get this all solved, you install it and activate it in typical WordPress fashion. This will create a new menu under Manage in your control panel titled Hidden Affiliate Links which looks like this:

As in the above example, you want to put the path you want to use under Match Slug, the affiliate link or JavaScript snippet under Redirect to Link/Code, and a description for the link under Description.

There are a few advanced features as well, such as the ability to type in a keyword in your post and have it replaced by your affiliate link. I’ll talk about these in a future post.

When you’re all done you’ll have nice looking affiliate links like this one.

There are quite a few options out there that are either free or low cost that give you a details about your website’s traffic. The best of the free options is clearly Google Analytics, as long as you aren’t too queasy about the Gevil getting it’s claws into your most intimate data.

We’ve already given the Google Devil access to our email, so…

… let’s take the plunge and go Google. The advantages of Google’s Analytics are:

• Easy setup with little time fretting about it – it just works.
• Doesn’t place a load on your server, which is big bonus in a shared server environment as more and more web hosting companies monitor processing time.
• Can interface with Google AdWords very closely – if you use AdWords to promote your website this is a very valuable feature.
• Has a configurable dashboard so that you can get the stats that you care about right there on the opening page.

Google Analytics isn’t quite real time – there is a lag in when your data is reported, unlike in a server-side application such as Mint. Mint only costs a onetime fee of $30 per website and may be more appropriate if you need full, up to the minute statistics.

However with Mint, you do have a bit more to worry about as it all runs on your web server which involves a significant amount of additional processing on every single webpage request. You can read a great back and forth story of David Seah’s experiences making Mint work and keeping his web host happy.

Getting Google Analytics working with WordPress

After signing up for Google Analytics, you get a little piece of tracking code. This tracking code needs to make its way into WordPress. One way of doing this is to open up your WordPress theme in the Theme Editor and simply paste the code right before the closing body tag on all the templates that have one.

A much more powerful option is to use a plugin for Google Analytics like Google Analyticator. While there are many plugins out there that work with Google Analytics, this one has a number of advantages that help to separate it from the pack:

• It can make it so that you can track outbound links in your reports as well as your page views. This helps give you an idea of what your visitors really like.
• It doesn’t track visits to the website from you or your administrators, as long as they are logged into WordPress. This is important as you want your data as pure as possible.
• It helps your website load faster by placing the tracking code in your WordPress footer as long as your theme designer has properly coded their theme. Most plugins simply place it in the header to avoid complications due to poorly architected themes.

Once you are all setup with Google Analytics and have configured your plugin you are going to want to spend some time looking through all of the options you have in Google Analytics to review your data and “pinning” the ones that are most relevant to you to the website Dashboard so that you can keep things efficient.

Most webmasters and bloggers get a bit addicted to statistics at some point. Putting the things you care about on the Dashboard saves lots of clicking and at least makes this addiction a little more manageable. A minute or two saved every day adds up to more free time and more money in the long run.

When considering how to setup permalinks, you want to put some thought into how you want the web addresses on your website to look to both your users and your search engine spidery friends.

By default, WordPress numbers your blog posts and includes those in the permalinks. The problem with numbers is that they don’t convey much information to anyone and instill dread in people that come across a naked link and get anxiety about what may be found on the other side.

Doesn’t a link like this look scary:

http://www.yoursite.com/?p=234

On to the wonderful things a permalink should do

A permalink should:

• Convey information about what to expect on the other side of the link. This puts people at ease and keeps the fear of the unknown at bay when they see your link in the wild – such as in the little green print below a Google listing.
• Include keywords relevant to the content of the page. This can provide benefits in search engine ranking. Even if Google waters this down due to spammers some people will link to you with your full URL. In those cases, you are more likely to get some good keywords into the link text which is an SEO plus.
• Use dashes instead of something like underscores to serve as spaces between words as Google views dashes as word separators and equivalent to a space.
• Be short. Short web addresses are not only nicer on the eye, they don’t get cut off and rendered unclickable when passed around in emails.

You want to get on changing your permalinks quick before Google starts indexing you and people start linking to you, otherwise you run the risk of the default WordPress permalinks seeping into the network at large and causing you all kinds of SEO pain down the road. This is the very first thing I do in a new WordPress install.

Let’s make these links warm, fuzzy and superfriendly

To change your permalinks, go to Options > Permalinks in your WordPress console, choose Custom and include a pattern like this one:

/%postname%

You should have something that looks like this:

This will lead to URLs that look like:

http://www.bizquarium.com/optimize-your-permalinks

When writing your posts…

… you’ll want to edit the thing called the post slug on the Write New Post screen to show the text you want for the permalink. In this case, I chose optimize-your-permalinks. If you leave this out WordPress won’t crash and burn – it will just dashify your title and effectively turn it into a post slug. In many cases this is fine, but if the titles of your posts are long or a little mysterious then letting it happen automagically won’t be optimal.

I’m talking about where the actual files are located. In both cases, you’ll be able to setup your WordPress site so that it works at a location like http://www.yoursite.com/

The Pros and Cons of Subdirectories

There are a couple of major advantages I see to installing WordPress in a subdirectory:

• It keeps your web root folder neat and tidy. If the needs of your website are anything like this one you’ll want the freedom and flexibility to introduce other web applications into the mix without making a big mess of your file structure. Putting WordPress in its own folder tucks almost all of the files associated with it away in a simple and clear location.
• It makes it easy to add an additional layer of security to your admin directory. Well, that is unless you are stupid enough to write about it as I’m doing. The security bonus is accomplished by renaming your WordPress subfolder to something that is hard to guess, making it more difficult to hack into.

Here is how you get it done

First, you are going to want to install your WordPress blog per the standard WordPress instructions. The only difference here is that you’ll want to make a subdirectory to install to instead of installing directly into the root folder of your website. While the natural name for this subfolder would be wordpress or wp I like to make it a little bit harder to guess and make it something a bit more unique. Here at Bizquarium I have used _wp (shhh! Please keep my secret folks!).

Then you are going to want to move (not copy) the index.php file from the main folder of the WordPress install to the root of your website and open up it in a text editor. You’ll need to change the path on line 4 to look like this:

Of course, instead of _wp use whatever super-secret folder name you picked.

Next, you need to login to the WordPress administrator. Remember, that is going to look something like:

http://www.yoursite.com/folder-name-you-picked/wp-admin/

Once you are logged in head over to Options > General and change your WordPress Address (URL) so that it includes the folder name you used. When you are done it should look something like this:

That’s it! You should be all done and ready to really get cooking with WordPress.

When keeping fish, there are so many variables. You’ve got to have the right fish together in the right size tank. You need to have the right type of filtration, and the right temperature of water. When it all comes together, it’s magical. I can sit there for hours and watch fish swim.

I can’t find a better analogy for business on the Internet. There are so many things that need to be optimized and working right in order maximize your website’s potential – and its profits.

And when everything comes together – when can sit back at your desk and look into that little rectangle and watch your websites thriving in cyberspace and making money for you – it’s magic.

And what about the fish?

Oh, and we’ll get plenty of fish for the website soon enough

If you are a blogger, run a niche website or are looking for interesting ways to use the Internet to your advantage, I hope you’ll stick around.

If you work at home on the Internet, this website is 100% for you. For most of my life as a web developer, I’ve run things out of a 9 to 5 office. No more. I’m either in my home office, the neighborhood café or out of the country. Here we will have the opportunity to talk about everything from how to remotely manage your source code from a few thousand miles away to what to do when your trying to blog and your toddler keeps coming in asking for another ice cream.

If you’re dream is to make your money over the Internet while you work on a balcony overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, well, that’s my dream too. Sign up for my RSS feed or bookmark this site and let’s make that dream come true together.

I’ve got a pretty detailed plan for Bizquarium, but rather than build it out and launch it. I’ve decided to build it up one step at a time and share everything with you.

So, we are starting from square one. Just another WordPress weblog…

While there’s nothing like the sweet smell of fresh pixels on a squeaky clean WordPress install, it’s obvious that we have a lot of work to do to make this website something different from the many millions of other default installations that there are out there.

I’d like you to subscribe to my RSS feed or bookmark this site and join me as we take this WordPress installation, rip its guts out and put it all back together again.

When we’re through you won’t be sure whether this is a blog or this is a website. These days, that’s often how it should be.

One last thing – a website can’t attain its maximum potential unless it has been thoroughly optimized to meet its goals. The default installation you see here isn’t even close.

Um, did I miss something? Just what is the goal of this website?

For that, you’ll have to wait a few seconds for my next post…