If you’re not already familiar with phpbay, I’ll give you a moment to slap yourself.

Go on. Right in the face.

Phpbay is an incredibly useful WordPress plugin (API is also available) that allows you to display relevant ebay listings on your websites to earn a commission. In order to use it, you’ll need to be signed up with the Ebay Partner Network. Some people have reported difficulty getting approved by EPN, but there are alternatives available. You can also join the Ebay affiliate program through the Pepperjam Network.

There’s a reason you’ve heard about Phpbay so much around various internet marketing portals: it’s awesome. But instead of just praising it like a lunatic in hopes that you will purchase it through one of my sneakily masked affiliate links, I will instead give you some other useful info that I myself use that will make your phpbay stores even more awesomer.

Ebay Search Results
Depending on the nature of your site, a lot of times users will land on your site and not realize that you’re simply serving them eBay results. As far as I’m concerned, this is a good thing. However, they may try to search for items that you don’t have listings for on your site. If you just have a regular old wordpress sidebar search bar, it’s not going to find what they are looking for unless you’ve included matching content on your site. Wouldn’t it be nice to display ebay results on your site that match their query?

All you have to do is go into search.php and replace some code. Starting with the line:

Delete everything up to:

(including that string) Replace with the following code:

Ta-da. That piece of code is brought to you by Wade himself, creator of PhpBay Pro.

In some cases, your particular theme may not have a search.php, but rather a searchform.php. I have not yet devised a way to make this work with this sort of rogue theme, but as soon as I figure it out, you’ll be the first to know.

Make the Entire Listing Clickable
By default, only the text of your phpbay listings are clickable. Poo on that. Why not make the whole thing clickable? Depending on whether or not you are displaying results in rows or columns, you will need to make the following adjustment to the respective file.

If you’re using row results, you’ll want to edit the file called template.ebay.results, which is located in the “templates” folder inside the phpbay plugin folder. The original file looks like this:

The new, edited file should look like this:

Now, for those of you using column results, you’ll want to be editing template.column.results, located in the same place as the other template file. The original file will look like this:

Go ahead and replace all that with the following code:

There you have it. Now your auction results are completely clickable. Mo’ clicks = mo’ money. But beware, mo’ money = mo’ problems.

Removing Icons
On some sites, I like to go the extra mile to minimize the ebayness of the results displayed. To do this, I simply remove those pesky icons that are so reminiscent of ebay. I almost always get rid of the “But it Now” icons, and I sometimes get rid of the paypal logo. To do so is really simple. You’ll need to edit the same files talked about above, except all you’ll need to do is delete the line of code that calls that particular icon.

In template.ebay.results, you’ll see a string of text that says:

Deleting that line entirely will remove the paypal logo from your listings and not adversely affect anything else. Similarly, deleting:

will effectively remove the bid/buy it now logo.

In template.column.results, you’d simply need to delete

to remove the paypal logo, and so on and so forth.

In a future post I’ll go into detail about how to construct your Phpbay sites in such a way to minimize your bounce rate and maximize your CTR. But for now, it is time to open another bottle of Martinelli’s award winning apple cider.

I know this is old news to some folks, but lately a couple people I’ve spoken to about this particular method of quickly generating original content were surprised by the idea, so I guess it may be worth sharing with my GIGANTIC READER BASE anyway.

As you may already know, Google is a little bit retarded when it comes to sorting out quality content from absolute nonsense. There are some that will disagree, and coincidentally those same people disagreeing are also complete morons. Google doesn’t know the difference. I’m not saying you shouldn’t write or pay for QUALITY content for your sites, but if you’re just trying to amass a network of sites to push link juice to one or two money sites, you probably don’t give a shit how quality the content is on those small, expendable sites.

The solution is rather simple. Let’s say you’re promoting a site about weight loss (how original of you). Now let’s say your primary keyword is “lose weight fast”. If you don’t remember anything from that high school Spanish class (the one you got an A in), then head over to the Google translator and translate it. The result will be “perder peso rapido”. Go ahead and copy that text, then go and do a regular Google search for that exact string of text.

Now, as we all know, the SERPs are always changing. But on this day of our Lord, when I searched “perder peso rapido” (without quotes), the first result was this article. So then I went ahead and took that text, and then copy + pasted it in yet another Google translation, this time with the Spanish and English variables swapped. Since Google is a well-oiled machine, it only takes a moment to translate the text. I then took the first line of translated text, “We tend not to advise methods of rapid weight loss”, and then searched that exact string (with quotes) on Google to see if any indexed pages had that exact same string. The result? Nope. 100% unique.

If you want to be more thorough, of course, you could search other strings of text in that same article to be sure. Once you post your article you can go ahead and check it against Copyscape for further verification.

Now, you should know that this is not 100% foolproof. For instance, sites like Wikipedia have Spanish versions of their pages translated that are exact if not very near matches, and content translated from there will likely be duplicate. Ideal sites are those which are actually based in the country from which the language you are searching is from, as these are most likely to have been originally written in that language.

And don’t just depend on Spanish, this will theoretically work with any language you can translate. However, the quality of the translation will vary, especially with more obscure languages. German is actually very close to English in structure, so you might have success using German as well.

This concludes your linguistics lesson for the day.

eThug Diaries

Seriously. Recently in #cakes chat, some BHW folks were defending E-Whoring, saying it is a no different method of making money than creating “so and so’s” weight loss blog.

First of all, I don’t promote weight loss crap, and I never have. I don’t have a problem with it, it’s just not something I ever got into. Luckily, however, I have a couple referrals that have been actively slanging them berries. But I digress…

The very first money making forum I ever encountered was Wickedfire. I was referred by my girlfriend’s brother who is a designer/coder. It was sort of a sink or swim experience, and one I’m grateful for. However, the first thread I really got into was in the newbie section, and it was basically a step-by-step tutorial on e-whoring.

I didn’t know anyone in the community, so I didn’t know who to listen to or who to trust. But I went ahead and dove right in, signed up for Dating Gold under some schmuck’s affiliate link (okay, maybe I was the schmuck) and started e-whoring on MySpace.

If you don’t already know what e-whoring is, good. But if you insist on asking, it’s basically the practice of impersonating women online in an effort to get guys to sign up to your dating offers.

I was never able to break more than around $60/day. That’s about the same as what I supposed I would make working some mundane hourly job. However, it really took its toll on me, reading all of the terribly pathetic messages from some of the loneliest and most depraved people around. Eventually I learned ways to go about it that didn’t require as much manual interaction, but the vibe was still there. The whole concept just never sat well with me. And all that moral bullshit aside, it doesn’t generate enough money to even be worth it.

Fortunately, I never gave up, and I read the shit out of the golden stickies on Wickedfire. If you’re still banging your head against the wall trying to figure out ways to make money online, it’s because you haven’t taken the time to educate yourself there. I still promote dating off and on, but not like that. There are so many better ways for you to utilize your time and to apply yourself online. Don’t get caught up in that e-whoring bullshit. Even if you find that you are fantastic at it, you’re just going to get dropped from your network when they find out. It’s just not worth it. Not to mention it’s totally gay.