pilkster.com

Just 24 hours after my first WordPress theme auction started it received a Buy It Now bid. The sponsorship slot was bought by Maiahost, a hosting company who specialise in wordpress web hosting. It is a great buy for them as their link will be seen by thousands of tightly targetted potential customers.

Spurred on by this success I have decided to auction another theme called ‘Flowers‘. You can see Flowers in action on Themey.com until the end of the auction (at least). Again, I would love to hear comments on the theme and the new site.

The auction is here.

For anyone who would like a bunch more inbound links to their website, here is a great opportunity to buy a shedload for cheap!

Themey is auctioning the Glow WordPress theme over at DP. The starting bid is only $1.

Buying sponsored links on a WordPress theme is a great way to build (potentially) thousands of links. The links are build steadily over time, and you get to specify the anchor text. Check out this article on sponsored theme link building for more on the advantages of building links using this cost-effective method.

I was writing a comment on RugJeff’s blog this morning which turned into a bit of a ramble, so I brought it over here instead. The post I was commenting on was a paid post sponsored by the PayPerPost service. That I was considering commenting on it, and that I am now linking to it, must mean that it has some real value & isn’t just a ‘junk’ post.

I still can’t make my mind up about PPP and ReviewMe etc. I’ve had some offers from ReviewMe, some I’ve taken, some I’ve not. I guess it depends on how it fits in. If I was to start posting about some of the topics available in PPP then I’m sure my readership would reduce pretty quickly.

I have another old ‘junk’ blog (or two) that has good PR that I have used for PPP and various other things though. You can make quite a tidy sum from blog posts if the PR is good and the niche is high value. If you have a PPP account you will surely have noticed that the majority of the offers are from financial services sectors.

I’m sure there must be a bunch of people picking up dropped domains or buying domains with PR & bleeding these paid posting services for all they are worth. I wonder how many checks PPP make into the background of the domain? Their requirements (from memory) are 3 months age and 20 post minimum. Setting up a blog to look like that by editing timestamps is pretty easy, you could even scrape another blog if you were so inclined. Archive.org generally wouldn’t have a history on a site 3 months old, so what other checks could be made?

Even easier would be to use an old hosted blog address. There are plenty of abandoned and deleted blogspot accounts available, never mind wordpress.com, livejournal and other smaller hosted blog providers. In the case of subdomains there is obviously no useable whois service, which makes checking the background even harder.

I have never read SEObomb before, but this marketing campaign is one reason the guys blog will be added to my reader.

I’m surprised more people aren’t using the excellent aLinks plugin as a tool for creating temporary deep links in WordPress blogs. WordPress is the SEO’s choice for content management, and aLinks makes it really easy to change any keyword or keyphrase in the database into a link (the plugin actually creates the link on the fly when the content is being printed to the screen, it does not change the text in the database).

Relevant deep links are of increasing SEO value as more traditional methods of producing links (see directories and article marketing) are being devalued. If someone like text-link-ads.com were to produce a similar plugin to integrate with their link sales system it would be a great improvement on the blogroll style links they are selling now.