As part of the AffiloBlueprint membership, you get a Wordpress theme that Mark used when he created his example site.

It is a really good theme; simple, 2-columns, with a Wordpress admin interface to easily customized the colors, fonts, and images.

But it assumes you are going to create all your pages as pages (as opposed to posts). When you add a page, it automatically adds it to the sidebar.

I think I’d rather that my content gets added as posts instead of pages. That way every time I add something new, the pinger will send it out into the web community instead of me having to wait for a search engine bot to find it. I’ve noticed that Google indexes most of the pages from my blog sites, and almost instantly. Whereas some of my static page sites only have a few pages indexed.

I tried to add the loop for posts into the sidebar of the theme by copying/pasting it from one of my other blog sites. But it didn’t work; it still showed only pages.

So for now I’m going to use posts instead of pages as planned, but I’ll hard-code the link into the sidebar. *Gasp* Hard-code?? Yup. Another advantage to this is I can put a topic heading instead of just having a big list of article titles down the sidebar with no logical grouping.

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I set off today to follow Affiloblueprint’s training video on making a header for my pages. I have Photoshop, but they recommended a free tool I’ve never heard of called paint.net (not to be confused with the Paint program that comes with Windows).

You can get it here:
Paint.net.

So instead of using my Photoshop (which really slows down my computer), I downloaded and used this free tool. It worked great and I made a professional-looking header.

A little aside: I have a list of really great tools and resources that I’ve compiled over the last few years. It’s interesting that the AffiloBlueprint’s training videos have mentioned a lot of them, and without promoting their affiliate link (it one case they flashed it on the screen but clearly said it was an affiliate link which we could use if we wanted, but don’t feel obligated.)

For example, I came to the conclusion that Host Gator is the best web hosting source for someone like me; I want free add-on domains, I want really good up-time, and I don’t want to pay a lot. Interestingly, that’s exactly the host that AffiloBlueprint recommended.

Another example, I used to work for a graphic designer, and we used a royalty-free photo service that charged us a lot per month. Right before I left, another employee showed me IStockPhoto.com which has great photos for dollars. Again, AffiloBlueprint mentioned their website.

I’ve tried a few free FTP programs but decided that Filezilla was the best. Guess what FTP program the AffiloBlueprint videos recommended?

So right away I trust them and I know they’re giving me the most helpful information, not stuff that will make them the most money.

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I watched the videos from week 2 (Yeah, I’m in a hurry) which were all about writing articles for your chosen niche.

Mark gave some really good tips for working with eLance.com to hire someone to write, and also other ways to get content including writing yourself.

Since I’m pretty poor at the moment, I’m going to try my hand at writing them myself.

So I wrote 3 articles (well actually 1 long article I’m going to break up into 2 with a tip he gave, and another normal-sized one).

These articles are more general, but I think I’m going to have to hire someone to write the more technical ones since it will take a lot of time to get proficient in this niche in order to write them myself.

Hmm…a friend of a friend moved near me after graduating. Wonder if I could entice him to write some for me for a fee…

I want to mention again how impressed I am with these AffiloBlueprint training videos. They are clear and well thought-out. They’re in the form of Mark giving a presentation while one of his staff listens and asks questions. Everytime I start to wonder about something, his staff member asks exactly my question. And you can tell they took a lot of time to edit these videos because her question and his answer become part of his presentation in the video on a slide.

And there’s none of Mark trying to impress us with how rich he is (*cough*GCD*cough*). All you see are screen shots and video captures of what he’s doing on the computer.

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