WordPress has always been my favorite blogging platform since the beginning of my blogging journey. I always admire WordPress because of its flexibility and functionality. I would like to tell you the story of my first e-commerce website which I launched last month.

Since very long time I have dreamed of an e-commerce website powered by WordPress. I have tried various WordPress plugins throughout my journey. However none of them did not satisfy me. I decided to postpone my dream to future.

One day while I was surfing the web, I discovered ShopperPress by luck. Basically it is a premium WordPress plugin (with various theme options) that lets you setup your own shopping cart / online store quickly and easily in 10 minutes. It turns a standard WordPress blog into a feature rich shopping cart website used by thousands of people worldwide for many purposes.

Well, I was excited with the idea of having my first e-commerce website with ShopperPress that I immediately downloaded the free version. The theme was performing very well, thus I decided to purchase the VIP version.

Bearing in mind that the Christmas shopping rush was so close, I decided to launch my website at the beginning of December. Even though there wasn’t enough time to compete with other websites, I thought it was one of the best periods of the year in terms of testing a shopping website.

Having spent a few hours in Google Adwords Keyword tool, I came out with a nice name for a shopping website: Web Shopping Bag. I checked name.com and found out that the domain was free.  Bull’s eye! I grabbed the domain, installed WordPress via cpanel, and then installed the ShopperPress plugin. It took 3-4 hours in total to decide the domain name, grab it,  install WordPress&ShopperPress.  Finally my dream came true: Web Shopping Bag

It’s been only three weeks since I launched the website, but the number of visitors increase day by day. This can be expected from a WordPress driven website. All search engines like WordPress blogs. ShopperPress themes are also SEO ready. That is why it performs better than a standard WordPress blog.

If you are looking for an easy and flexible WordPress shopping cart plugin, ShopperPress could be the best solution.

Back in December 2008 I posted How To Create A Custom Twitter Background. Basically it was a step by step tutorial for creating a custom Twitter background.  I received very positive feedback on the post since then. It became so popular that many bloggers commented on or linked to it. When you Google “custom twitter background“,  you can find it on the first page now. When I wrote this post, the idea of offering custom Twitter background design was at the beginning stage. In accordance with the popularity of Twitter, there are almost thousands of online and offline custom twitter background  designers. Which one is the best?

After having checked various online and offline custom Twitter background designers, my choice is TwitrBackgrounds.com. Let me tell you why I prefer them.

In addition to problogging I  provide social media consultancy for my customers. When I have so many customers who are desperately seeking for a custom Twitter background at the same time (such as Christmas holiday!), it creates trouble for me. Even though I can design custom Twitter background, timewise it is not a wise decision to do all designs manually by myself. On the other hand, not all customers are ready for paying high prices such as $100 or $250 for a custom Twitter design. When looking for an easy and quick solution, I discovered TwitrBackgrounds.com.

During Christmas rush, I was so happy to discover their  Happy Holidays Backgrounds service which let me install custom Twitter backgrounds to my customer via their website merely by entering their Twitter userids/passwords and uploading their photos in just about 5 minutes. You have two options; You can either install a free happy holidays background (see my Twitter background) or have a personalized one for as low as 4.95$.

They also design professional looking Twitter backgrounds for $250. These are really helpful for branding.

Benefits of a Custom Twitter Background

• A custom Twitter background immediately legitimizes your Twitter profile.
• You can build your brand and your Twitter presense with an attractive and informational custom Twitter background.
• It let users know exactly who you are, and earn the trust of your followers easily above other Twitter profiles and competitors.

Visit TwitrBackgrounds.com today and change your Twitter background with one of their Happy Holidays Backgrounds. Your Twitter followers will see the difference and you will have lots of fun. Happy holidays!

As anticipated by WordPress fans long-awaited WordPress 2.9 have been released on December 18. The good thing about this new release is it is not merely a  security release. It comes with some brilliant enhancements. I will later address what is new in this release. Today I would like to tell you more about a solution to Simple Tags plugin with this new release.

Simple Tags plugin users (including me!) have been shocked with this new WordPress release because they got an error message saying “Simple Tags can’t work with this WordPress version !” While I have been trying to find a fix, I discovered my friend Alex Sysoef’s brilliant post WordPress 2.9 Upgrade And Simple Tags Solution. If you are still struggling to use Simple Tags with the new WordPress release, you might find Alex’s post handy and quite useful…

You might wonder why I desperately tried to fix Simple Tags. Let me tell you more about it. I extracted below from the Simple Tags plugin page:

Simple Tags is the successor of Simple Tagging Plugin.It was written with this philosophy : best performances, more secured and brings a lot of new functions

• Administration
  • NEW Related tags !
  • NEW AJAX Admin features !
  • NEW Tags suggestion from Yahoo Term Extractions API, Tag The Net and Local Tags with AJAX request
    • Compatible with TinyMCE, FCKeditor, WYMeditor and QuickTags
  • NEW Improve performance !
  • Auto tags !
  • Auto link tags in post content
    • This feature may degrade performance! Be careful !
  • Importer for embedded tags
  • type-ahead input tags / Autocompletion
  • Click tags
  • tags management (rename, delete, merge, search and add tags, edit tags ID)
  • Edit mass tags (more than 50 posts once)
  • Possibility to tag pages (not only posts) and include them inside the tags results
  • Embedded tags () for compatibility with old plugins
  • Easy configuration ! (in WP admin)
• Blog
  • Meta keywords generate from tags in your header’s blog
  • Technorati, Flickr and Delicious tags
  • Dynamic Tag Clouds with colors with Widgets (random order, etc)
  • Related content since common tags
  • Possibility to add related posts inside RSS
  • Extended the_tags function (outside the loop, technorati, etc)

It’s been almost one month since I posted on my blog. I feel a bit guilty because of this. Have I told you before that since last summer I offer SEO and Social Media consultancy services? Frankly speaking I did not expect these two tasks to consume most of my time when beginning. On the other hand, I also did not expect to gain so much experience in social media, search engine optimization, and e-commerce in such a short period. That is why I do not regret. Anyway, this is just another story. Today I would like to tell you more about another experience I gained about blogging during this period;how to non-stop launch various niche blogs and regularly post content without actually writing anything. Sounds great, huh? Here we go… Read the rest of this entry »

The good thing about Chitika Premium ads is that they only appear to a visitor that clicks through to your blog from a search engine. Seth Godin and other marketing gurus call it “permission marketing”.  You don’t disturb your existing or temporary blog visitors with Chitika Premium ads.  I have a blog farm of around 30 blogs, and so far Chitika Premium ads have performed very well because all the blogs in my blog farm have already been optimized for search engines.

Until this year you were not allowed to use Chitika and Adsense together on the same blog. But now you can use them together and double your blogging income.  I have been using Chitika Premium ads since June 2009 and Chitika has become my second largest income source.  Having said that, using Chitika Premium and Google Adsense together is not an easy task especially for the dummy bloggers.

If you don’t know how to start or struggling to use both ads together, here is a nice and free guide from Chitika: Adsense & Chitika Ad Placement Guide

Featured in this eBOOK:

• How to combine Chitika & AdSense ads for a higher total revenue.
• The importance of customizing your ad links to your website links.
• Successful AdSense & Chitika Placement ideas
• Advanced customization tips

Download your copy this weekend. I am sure you will not regret.