Moving hosts.. shudder...

I got my reply to my ticket submission requesting a content review and Jeremy wants me to schedule a phone meeting. All the slots on his Jiffle calendar are post midnight my time zone, so I'll email to try to set something up for next week. 

He also mentioned that there have been some issues with HostGator for the Partnership project, so they'll be moving the sites. 

I backed up my site and am downloading the whole directory JIC. I can't imagine trying to move 59 database sites. 

Since I started hosting at FutureQuest.net, I've only had nightmares with other hosts. So yes, I pay a bit more in hosting, but for my peace of mind it's worth it. Today I just put in my request for MySQL5 upgrades on my sites so I can be a good girl and keep my WP versions up to date. I'm out of date on all of them.

59 sites to move. This sounds like a disaster in the making, I have to say. It's not like they're static sites, they're all WordPress based. I think I'm going to try some of the new dark rum based drinks I downloaded from recipezaar.com soon...

Oh thank heaven for friends who are WordPress gurus!

I used to be very active at ABestWeb.com back when I was supporting my family with affiliate marketing. I still have some good friends from there.

One is now quite a WordPress guru, so I asked her what she thought of my problem. After a couple of questions, she made a suggestion that worked.

Being more of a coder than a designer, I work in the HTML tab most of the time. Her suggestion was to actually add the link in the WYSISYG window, and it worked!

What was that mantra again? I know WordPress is supposed to be the best for a content management system, I know WordPress is supposed to be the best...

Forums down, sigh.

The Partner forums are down.  Been working on starting to add affiliate links and having some unknown problem in WordPress.

I put in a support ticket for a content review, since I am sure I need more, better, and some honing of what I posted. However since I am finding working in WordPress so challenging, I want to get focused with some constructive feedback.

Meanwhile I built a Squidoo page as a feeder to the site and unabashedly asked all my Facebook friends to at least click through, preferably add comments and rate the lens. That should start the lens rising slowly and hopefully by the time the site is actually ready for prime time the Squidoo page will be sending some nice traffic.

Also writing ezine articles, and taking advantage of the Title Tool at EzineArticles.com. So far I'm not impressed with the results of using the tool. Nice for brainstorming, but a quick look at Wordtracker or SEOBook has always been  successful for me at finding titles that get my article viewed.

The advantage of the Squidoo page is that it's very Squidooly to compose in the first person. I wrote from very much my own head space and experience, which was fun and informative.

Okay, back to WP. Guess I should put in a support ticket.

First draft ready!

Three comparison categories, three top contenders in each category. I have enough material to post a couple more reviews of products that didn't make my top contenders lists, too. Then I will have to check what's new again in the niche... it's a fast moving niche and my Google Alert comes in every day with more material.

I spent some time on the side bar widgets in WordPress last night. My default template still doesn't seem to take hold and I end up having to make the same side bar for every category template that I've used.

Then I also wasn't satisfied with how to link to the comparison pages in a navigation tab so I created a new subcategory called comparison under the review category and moved the comparison pages to that category. Beware if you put a slug in the box for a category, WP uses that for the link archecture and doesn't always find the right category template. Sigh. I made the plug the same as the subcategory and WP found the right page template.

Today I will request a content review from Jeremy's team. I reapplied at Amazon.com for Associate status for the site. They had rejected the application when the site wasn't functional. I also reapplied at Shareasale.com, for the same reason. I'm a long time affiliate, so both of them can look at other work I've done, but I wanted separate accounts for the Partnership site. Still have to reapply to the Ebay Partner Network for the same reasons.

Time to start getting preliminary feedback from social networking and driving some traffic from article marketing. Though all my friends on Facebook are actually people I know from my real life, some of them are in the market for this product, just as I was.  When I mentioned I was building a site to compare this product niche, many were interested. I plan on being shamelessly self promotional and asking everyone to click through, bookmark, tweet, Digg, and pass on to all their friends a link to my site. While this is not necessarily big time traffic, it should be a nice natural start to link building and traffic building. Not to mention free content review comments from people who know me. ;)