Features:

• bbPress sidebar
• default wrapper for forum pages
• bbPress login links widget

bbPress sidebar – you can use different sidebar on bbpress forum pages. It will replace your default wordpress sidebar with bbpress specific sidebar. Supports most widgets enabled templates that use main sidebar.

default wrapper for forum pages – bbPRess uses wrapper file in your theme in this order: ‘bbpress.php’, ‘forum.php’, ‘page.php’, ‘single.php’, ‘index.php’. You can choose which template to check first. Most templates don’t have sidebar in ‘page.php’, ‘single.php’ files. ‘index.php’ always has sidebar. If you cannot see forum sidebar then change this value to index.php in plugin settings (settings -> bbPress WP Tweaks ) page.

bbPress login links widget – if you want to display login and register links instead of login form in your sidebar then use this widget. By default bbPress will not show login links to visitors if they want to post in forum. Use this widget instead of login form in your bbPress sidebar.

Back story of bbPress WP Tweaks plugin

I was using bbPress, version 1.0  and smaller versions, which was great as forum but separate from wordpress. Then they released version 2.0 of bbPress as a wordpress plugin which is great but it is missing some integration features to my wordpress theme. I redesigned my wordpress theme to match rest of my site using Teventy Eleven theme provided by worpdress. With some tweaks forum integrated correctly to it. Main disadvantage was sidebar which is shared with blog. You do not want to have exact same sidebar in forum and blog. You can if you want but in forum you need more forum centric sidebar with necessary widgets to login. I was running my forum without login not even knowing it. It was displaying ‘You must be logged in to reply to this topic.‘ message without login or register links. Which is must have links in every forum. So instead of adding them to my theme files I decided to create a plugin that will add those features in any wordpress theme.

I hope that this plugin will save lots of your time. bbPress WP Tweaks took me 3 days to understand wordpress, bbpress and plugin building process. I am open to suggestions and bug fixes. Feel free to put them in my blog or forum.

Demo of bbPress WP Tweaks plugin

Check out my forum that uses bbPress plugin.

Download plugin

bbPress WP Tweaks – latest version from wordpress.org repository.

Alternative download link from veppa.com site: bbpress-wp-tweaks

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Everyone in this newsletter business is happy using it.

• Subscribers get great opportunity to be featured on newspapers, magazines, digital media, TV, radio. Newsletter is completely free to receive and opens opportunity to free publicity for businesses of any size.
• Reporters reach to great resources to write about. Businesses, communities, celebrities, politicians and other important personnel subscribe to newsletter.
• Owner earns money from advertisement in newsletter
• Advertisers reach to huge audience of professionals who read newsletter daily.

As you see it is win-win situation for everybody. It is still not easy to create such a service in terms of reaching to required amount of interest and users.

Here are notes from interview that explain how email newsletter business works and generates money:

• Business grew out of facebook group , built in 2007, that was used by many people.  Moved to web in March of 2008.
• 100,000 subscribers receive 3 newsletters daily with 60 requests.
• This newsletter is time sensitive and needs to be delivered in 1-2 hour to everybody. Reporter may need article to be delivered by 17:00 today.
• Used AWeber at the beginning to send newsletter once per day. Aweber is not time sensitive it spreads delivery through time to reduce load on mail servers. It is not suitable for time sensitive newsletters. It is more useful for tracking usage and create sale funnels.
• Advertisement is 4 line text at the beginning of newsletter.
• Advertisement costs 1500$ – 2500$ per newsletter and booked 5-6 month ahead. Which means it has huge demand for it.
• Owner is negative about selling products in newsletter through recommendation. Thinks that advertisement is best fit and works well.
• Helped many business that was shrinking getting publicity and boost with business requests again.
• Owner speaks at conferences about using social media. This way gets trust and introduces his newsletter business as a useful tool. Reporters use this service because they trust that report request is not public but delivered directly to subscribers.
• Report requests cannot be published on a website revealing contact details of reporter.
• Subscribing to newsletter is very easy, it is simple online registration.
• In future subscribers can receive filtered requests by category that they subscribed.
• Competitors who bought email list is not succeeding because they have very few reporters that trust and request. Also many reporters are happy with speed and quality that HARO delivers to them and don’t need any other alternative to post a report request.
• 4 people working on this newsletter business.
• Advertisers have a great success by selling 200 books in 10 minutes and other measurable successes.

These are some key notes that I highlighted reading interview which can give some idea for your future business. It has many lessons to learn that can be applied to similar businesses and I know that by learning all successful businesses you can use them in your business in future. It will all be clear regarding how to use this information when you most need it. You can read full interview at mixergy.

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• 140 million page views per month, 9 million unique visitors, more than 1 million $ revenue per year. Has 15 websites.
• Started in 1999 when he was 12 years old.
• Started with simple html website hosted on free providers like Homestead, GeoCities.
• First banner advertisement brought 5000$ in 2001-2002.
• Emailed to all fan sites to promote his site and exchange links on one dedicated links page.
• Properties MuggleNet.com, OMGfacts.com, Sixbillionsecrets.com and more. Try to launch new website every month. Collect users of one specific topic in one site.
• Had 8 paid staff and 12 volunteers. Doing weekly meetings with paid staff, then they do meeting with their group. Discuss new ideas, how progress goes on each community.
• Community is very passionate, everyone wants to participate and show their own work on website.
• Used facebook to create funny groups like “I will walk slightly out of my way to step on an extra crunchy looking leaf.” and after reaching to some great number of followers post some content from their website and direct followers to their websites.
• Then facebook changed their pages, but they adapted and looked like a legit company for each fan group created a website. Then same method used on twitter.
• Communicate with users through social netowrks like facebook, twitter, youtube. Don’t get email address from users but publish news on facebook and twitter, grow their fan base there. Have 6 million fans and 10,000 adding daily.
• Tried digg to attract more users, they voted for their own content and encouraged their fans to vote. When they got on first page of digg then their website flooded with used content that came from digg. Which in return generated more traffic.
• Look on other industries and port /adapt features to your site.  Features that work on other sites have greater probability to work on yours if implemented correctly.
• Promote new sites on exiting sites and promote using social media.
• Wrote book about Harry Potter assumptions for 7nth book before 7 series published, sold 350,000 copies, was bestselling author for 6 month. Book is collection of ideas published on MuggleNet
• Every site should have mobile version.
• Third post in every website in network is from other site on network, to draw attention and traffic.
• Test everything, A-B tests, test it again and again, 35 different things. Constantly test and measure difference. You can tweet 2 titles for video and ask which one make you click.

Interesting method for remembering useful information that you read is reviewing it next day, next month and every 6 month after that regularly.

You can read full story on mixergy.

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Here are notes from interview with Andy Miller, founder of RocketThme:

• Making more than 2 million $ yearly
• 45,000 registered users/customers. Had total 80,000 users at all time.
• Forum is key part that attracts people. 600,000 posts in forum, 12 moderators free and paid ones.
• At the beginning was working 14 hours / day. Was active joomla template developer and community member. Was working after work hours for as freelance theme developer. Then noticed that it requires too many time to develop for one client. Decided to develop customizable themes that will sell many times.
• Pricing is 50$ for 3 month, 90$ per year.
• With subscription themes can be used on 2-3 live sites.
• Offers themes for Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, phpBB3 forum, Magento shopping cart CMS
• Publishing 1 theme every month. Each theme is developed in 3 weeks by 4 developers. At beginning themes were developed in 3-4 days by one person.
• Had first employee who modified and offered different colors for existing themes.
• Total 9 employees all work online from home. Located globally.
• Has GPL licensed Gantry theme framework . All themes built on this framework. It provides 960 pixel grid system, easy to position widgets in different size.
• Used name rockettheme to not stick with one platform. But has difficulty from SEO because didn’t have joomla in domain name. (I think you cannot use joomla in domain anyway, same with wordpress as well )
• Used adwords for attracting new customers, affiliate system as well.
• Generating tutorials and other related content to attract search clients from search engines.
• In theme business 5 years, then probably started in 2006.

Plus side of this business is it does not have technical scaling problems like in software as a service model. You do not have to handle file storage or database for your clients. It is mainly forum that takes a lot of time to track issues and help customers to solve their problems.

You can grow your theme development to other e commerce and content management platforms but that will require to expand your support and forum moderator team as well. For this reason some theme developers expand to different plugins within same platform. For example they add ecommerce, classifieds, job list, real estate, forum, question answer plugins and themes for them. Classipressis one of this type of business.

To read full interview visit mixergy site.

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Pros to this business model is you can start small and move to more powerful servers as you grow and earn money to cover costs. Feels like no downside at all. But once you gain some user base and page views then your scaling issues start being problem for you. But earning will not grow as you expect to expand properly.  Other problem is legal issues of user generated content. Even if you state that users are responsible for content you have to keep an eye on abuse reports. It also takes lot of time to track this reports and cleaning server content. Not mentioning database and application server crashes. To keep growing you need to control all this issues and stay profitable with your business.

This type of projects come to mind first because you use them and you feel that you can do better service. Also you expect that ad revenue will be huge to meet your expenses and efforts. I know that most people wanted to clone facebook , while one or two succeed like in Russia and Germany others in thousands who tried failed.

My point is big popular projects seem to be easy to build and bring great revenue is not true at all. Instead it takes a lot of effort and in most cases low revenue and fail at the end. Instead new entrepreneurs that want to succeed on internet business need to focus on niche ideas and solve problem for smaller more focused group of people. Even if that niche has some successful products your solution can also be successful regardless of other options. It is like pizza shops in city. There are many of them and all of them profitable. Huge unfocused traffic is no value for advertiser and product marketing instead small focused traffic to specific niche is profitable and easy to maintain.

Here are notes from Darek Halpern who tried to earn with huge traffic from celebrity gossip blog but then realized that it is possible to earn more with less but more business focused traffic.

• Earned 7000$ in single day with one million hits in 2007 with gossip blog.
  • Traffic can be built with having controversial opinion to the actual celebrity topic. Gaining more attention because you bring controversy to story and news blogs will mention your post in their story.
  • Used twitter to find different user opinion to create article and promoted twitters. They promote his post as a result because they are happy to be published on gossip blog.
  • His friend was earning 100,000$ with 30,000 people.
    • Build you mailing list loyal to your niche
    • Offer a free webinar and send invitations. Sent to 10,000 people, 1500 of them registered, 500 showed up on live webinar. Webinar is 45 minutes teaches to how to get more traffic and last 15 minutes explains product that they sell. This webinar got 10,000$ as a result.  Later webinar video is sent to all recipients in mailing list.
    • Used GoTo Webinar for their webinar. It is more user friendly and preferred for online webinars by marketers.
    • Add extra value to people who attended live webinar. It can be extra features, templates, tutorials. Price reduction is not good because other customers who bought before will feel uncomfortable.
    • Content videos are also good to sell, at the end of video explain your product and how to achieve same result using that featured product.
    • Send follow up emails to people who watched your video or read your article and say you can do your test using this product or you can subscribe to this master class to learn step by step building this business.
    • In marketing and user interface leave visual as simple as possible. It will keep visitors focused. If you have menu with 12 items then group them and show 3 groups, then expend to 4 submenus. It will make decision making easy and increase conversion rate. Best example for simple navigation is zappos.com site. There has been study that used 24 jam and 6 jam displays to promote jams. 6 jam banner sold 1000 times more than 24 jam banner because people has difficulty to make decision if there are too many choices. Learn more about increasing conversion on socialtriggers.com site.

You can read, view and listen to full interview at mixergy.

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There are 2 type of business ideas around niche sites.

First method: create hundreds niche sites

Create many niche sites periodically, generally 50-100 websites per month and grow them to 20-50$ per month income level. Reaching to 20$ level is normally 3-4 month. Then sell website or keep and continue earning. This type of sites has about 5 page content and not updated. If you have built say 1000 niche sites earning 20$ per month then you will have 20,000$ per month . To reach this point will take you 15 month on average. Also selling several good performing sites for 1,500-2000$ will bring you additional 5,000-10,000$ per month. An example for this business can be adsenseflippers.com, view October income report. Also check monthly reports by Spancer from nichepursuits.com may 2011 report. Spancer also built some software for keyword research.

Second method: continue building your niche site periodically

By adding relevant content to site monthly or weekly powering your niche topic will bring you additional traffic and grow your adsense income from 20$ per month to 2,000$ and more. To earn this amount it requires 150-300 articles. Articles should be at least 2000 words and relevant your niche. Also sell some affiliate products to your niche. Market content with newsletter subscription, blog content, webinars. Traffic to this type of niche site will grow steady because of additional content. Site will get more not exact targeted keyword traffic as well. Also you can get buyout offer in range of 25,000 or more after a year. An example for this niche site business can be smartpassiveincome.com, view October earnings report of their sites.

I prefer second method because it requires less time and effort to grow 10 niche sites than building and managing 1000. And from security of your income second method is more secure than first because it offers more content to readers and keeps site focused and growing. Third thing I like about second business model it earns lot more from affiliate sales, 6,000$ from adsense ads compared to 30,000$ from affiliate sales in October 2011. Also second model will get you more search engine traffic. If you rank #1 on google for your keyword then you get 40% click through, if you have more content then you can get as much or more search engine traffic from other related keywords found on your niche site.

I really like both sites that they share their tactics and experience on how they build niche sites, grow traffic, increase click through rate, ad placements and other tips to increase their income. Niche site building can be considered as lifetime business that can support you and your family leaving you plenty of time enjoy living and earning money without having day job.

More resources that I find useful to get sense of income potential of niche website business: napincome august 2011 income report. I will keep adding to this list as I come across to new income reports. If you want to share your income report from niche site then leave a comment to this post.

In most cases niche websites make %90 income from affiliate sales, and 10% from adsense. So far I am earning from adsense but will experiment with affiliates soon.

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Promotional codes is beneficial for all 3 participants: business who provide codes, buyer who uses code, affiliates who promote codes. Businesses who provide codes increase sales and compete with their competitors. Buyer get discount on online purchases. Affiliate earn money from business who provides codes and delivers code to mass buyers.

Here are some key notes from interview to learn how to build promotional code business.

• Test idea by building small websites and optimize for search engine. Get keywords from google adwords keyword tool.
• Register with affiliates like Affiliate Window, Buy At, Trade Doubler. They provide codes and affiliate links.
• Hide code and request click to view code and open website in new window to record that you have sent the visitor.
• Do SEO for website. Usually buyer comes to purchase page and then searches for affiliate code. Optimize for that.
• See what backlinks you competitor has using yahoo backlink search, strong backlinks listed ad top. Get those backlinks for your site as well. Get backlinks to specific page for each retailer. Do contests in related blogs to get quality backlinks.

This is huge success in for business as there is minimum expense and big profit. Key to success is SEO and marketing. It also can be lifetime business but depending on google for traffic is e bit risky as there are many factors that can damage your traffic like panda update or deindexing from google.

Learn more from interview on mixergy: Launching A Company With A Six-Month Ultimatum – with Julian Hearn | Business Tips.

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Forums are hot places to learn and forum owners can learn a lot as well. Here is what sitepoint owner Matt Mickiewicz learned from his forum, from his experience and decisions we can learn as well.

• Built a website in 1998 and published tutorials on how to build a website.
• Got great attention from PC magazine.
• Get lots of advertisers spending money pre 2000 boom. (bought his first car BMW in 1 year)
• Noticed site visitors printing site pages to learn coding. Created single topic books from tutorials. Sold 20,000 of it.
• Created 60 different books. (books are printed on demand I guess).
• Later started selling books in book stores, amazon, borders…
• Forum users started selling their sited in forum posts. Moderators were tired of work load on forum. Charged for site listing 10$. as result site selling requests doubled.
• Created separate site flippa.com. current site listing price is 20$ and commission on sale I think
• Users in forum did design contests. Some clients came and asked to design logo for them for 100$. Site 99designs.com created to serve such a need to design logo, stationary, websites. Pretty good website, paid more than 1 million $ last month in october 2011 to designers. Each order gets 90 design bids. Design prices can be learned from this page.

Pretty impressive and every business idea is lead by forum activity. If there discussion in forum and activity then there is a way to turn in into business. Look for those opportunities and use them.

Get mp3 of interview here. Read related article : Matt Mickiewicz, Founder Of Sitepoint, Flippa & 99Designs, Tells His Story.

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This are basic advantages of product and consulting driven revenue model from blogs:

1. Traffic don’t have to be in millions page view, but rather 10,000 focused traffic is enough to make 100K+ per year. This makes approximately 1$ per unique visitor.
2. You can start earning as soon as you get your first couple customers for you product.
3. You can get lots of customers attracted to your blog posts for free. Normally you would advertise to draw new customers but with blog your content will do all advertising for you.
4. You can see immediate income in 3-6 month. With advertising model you have to get to close to million page views in order to make close to 1000$  per month income which will need on average 1-2 years to develop. In most cases you will get tired and give up, in others your niche may not generate that much income even if you get 5 million page views per month. I had this experience with 30 million page view per month network.

Also keep in mind you have to know what is your product will be and easy do developed or almost completed product. Blog will help you market, develop and reach right audience.

This conclusions were made from personal experience and reading  The First Annual Traffic and Income Report  of thinktraffic.net and stevepavlina.com traffic and revenue report. Check both sources for revenue breakdown and traffic details.

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Here are basic steps by Steve Blank on how to build a web project.

1. Set up the logistics to manage your team
2. Craft company hypotheses
3. Write a value proposition statement that other people understand
4. Set up the Website Logistics
5. Build a “low-fidelity” web site
6. Get customers to the site
7. Add the backend code to make the site work
8. Test the “problem” with customer data
9. Test the “solution” by building the “high-fidelity” website
10. Ask for money

Sound simple isn’t it? These steps will help you to build project, evaluate it, see if it will get some revenue and learn along the way by mistakes that are done during process. At the end don’t spend too much time in project without seeing any profit. I would say 3-6 month is fair amount of time to get some sort of profit.

Main point is keep trying until you succeed. Also initially pick projects that can be built in a month and evaluated in 6 month. If that project works then continue on it and grow customers.

Here each step explained in detail – How To Build a Web Startup. Also check presentations about customer development and entrepreneurship.

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