This is the third installment in the “Create a Niche Store” series!

Best WordPress Plugins

If you’re going to setup a WordPress powered site for a niche store to sell products as an affiliate, here’s a list of plugins that will be very helpful to you:

• Aizatto’s Related posts: this plugin will list related posts and pages, works great!
• All in One SEO Pack: target specific keywords on your posts and pages
• cForms II: the best contact form plugin there is
• Comment Luv: this plugin is a great way to encourage other bloggers to comment on our site
• EasyBay: our flagship product – of course
• Exclude Page from Navigation: This is a handy way to keep certain pages from being listed in page menus
• GoCodes: This plugin will be used to mask affiliate links and redirect them.  It’s better than a URL shortening service, and it tracks how many people click
• Google XML Sitemap: this is of course to manage our XML sitemap which we submit to the big 3 search engines
• Insights: this plugin will be used to add pictures, videos, and other things to pages to augment the original content
• Revision Control: this is used to limit WordPress’ revision feature, which stores unlimited versions of pages and posts when you edit them – I like to limit the revisions to 3
• Robots Meta: this plugin is used to add meta tags to posts and pages telling the search crawler robots what to, and not to index
• Subscribe to Comments: I believe that this should be a default feature of WordPress.  This allows people to subscribe to comments, so if they reply – when you (or anyone) replies after them they’ll get notification via email.
• WordPress.com Stats: We’ll use other ways to record stats, but wordpress stats are free, and if you have multiple wordpress blogs you can visit any of them via the wordpress.com dashboard.  It’s a good daily snapshot of what’s going on in your site.
• WP Spamfree: in my opinion, this plugin works better than Askimet and kills 3 times as much spam.  I wouldn’t be without it.

Widgets

On most of my affiliate and niche sites I have just a single sidebar because I want the focus to be on the products. But in that sidebar I usually have some simple widgets, wordpress pages, tags, categories, links, recent posts, and recent comments.

Default Pages

One of the first things I do is write some original content on the default “about” page, and then I delete the first “Hello World” post (which removes the default comment).    The next thing I do is setup a “contact” page with a contact form using the cforms II plugin.

This post is sponsored by WP-EASYBAY, the most advanced eBay Plugin for WordPress online!

The first thing you have to learn is that “Quality Design is an Indicator of Credibility” (read point #3).  You are looking for a design that is professional and that complements your products – not something that makes people think “this is a guy in his basement” (lol).  Appearance is EVERYTHING.

Next, the focus is on the PRODUCTS.  You’re not looking for a theme with a zillion sidebars of a 12 inch footer to add all kinds of banners, links, and what-not (all distractions!).  It’s ok to monetize a site in more than one way – but keep it simple!  You’re looking for clean professional designs that have mostly a single sidebar and enough for a list of a half dozen top level pages.

You might well find a good free theme – but be resigned to the fact that you might have to pay for one.  You can pay a high end designer upwards of $1,000 for a custom WordPress professional designed theme, but you might be surprised that you can get one for a little as $25 or $30 too.

Start your journey at the official WordPress Theme Repository and browse the designs.  You may find that none of them are well suited for niche store with products (but maybe you’ll get lucky).

Next peruse some of the countless WordPress theme directories online.  The best places to start is probably the WordPress Directory of WP Themes.  I happenned to find a decent theme to start with at EZWPThemes.  It should work great for my Thomas toys site, but it will need a little customizing before it’s ready – especially in the header images.  Here’s what it looks like so far:

Wordpress Toys Theme

You can’t see it here, but it has a cute toys on a bookshelf footer too!

Now then, there is one more way to go, and it’s one that I recommend to my clients when doing WordPress Consulting for them.  Visit Theme Forest.  They have some of the most incredible themes you’ll ever see for WordPress, and nearly all of them are $30 or less.  Look for the ones with the most ratings and downloads.  I have used plenty of free WordPress themes (and still do), but some of the most incredible theme designs I have of some of my WP powered sites are ones I got from Theme Forest.  In the next installment, we’ll talk about how to set up that WordPress theme for a niche store!

This post is sponsored by WP-EASYBAY, the most advanced eBay Plugin for WordPress online!

All you have to do is enter some keywords into the box to get ideas.  For instance, my son is VERY into Thomas the Tank Engine and he must have 4 dozen trains (he’s 3!).  I’ve paid a LOT of money for all his trains and thomas clothes and related accessories.  He just LOVES to get on YouTube and watch Thomas videos for hours!  A lot of the videos are other kids who make their own little thomas stories and tape them, but a lot of them are actualy advertisements for Thomas merchandise.  I’ve come to the conclusion that this little Thomas cottage industry would make a GREAT niche store – and my son would love it too!

So off I go to the google keyword research tool to find out how many people actually search for Thomas the train and related items each month.  To begin my search, I typed the following keywords into the box on my own that I had come up with:

“thomas the train, thomas the tank engine, thomas and friends, thomas wooden train, thomas track”

I got some good results back, but it occured to me that I left out a lot of obvious keywords, so I added following to my list:

“thomas toys, thomas video, thomas clothes, thomas dvd, thomas movie, thomas toy trains”

This generated a pretty good list of ideas in the google keyword tool:

Google Niche Store Keyword Research

As you can see in the image above, there were lots of good keyword phrases for me to use – and I wanted to choose one that wasn’t too long, that got a decent amount of searches per month, that had an available domain name – and most importantly, wasn’t blatant copyright infringement that would get me into legal troubles down the road.

I selected “thomas the tank toys” because it got a decent amount of searches per month, but for me there was one single important factor.  Many of you reading this now will wonder why I didn’t choose a keyword phrase with more searches per month, like thomas trains, or thomas movie.  It’s simple really.  I wanted a domain name that would be available, entirely relevant, and something an adult would search for!  That’s right, I wanted to choose a domain name an adult would search for when looking for children’s gifts!  It’s not my goal to get a 3 year old on the site looking at Thomas videos for hours, although that’s ok and might get some business through Mommy and Daddy watching their child online.  I wanted to target someone actually searching to buy Thomas toys online.  Always choose keywords more closely related to “buying” rather than “browsing” or “research” whenever you can – and you’ll get better results!

So, I promptly went and registered Thomas The Tank Toys to setup my niche store on.  I registered my domain name with Godaddy – which is where I register all my domain names (seems easier to manage with them all in one place).  In the next installment inthis series, we’ll talk about how to find the best WordPress theme for a niche store!

This post is sponsored by WP-EASYBAY, the most advanced eBay Plugin for WordPress online!