I've been asked by a couple of people about my site at www.lizardz.com , so I'll start this thread to discuss it.It was originally created to demonstrate different Bombs and Tuelz. I've never promoted it in the way a site should be promoted. Even though it hasn't been promoted, I've made a lot of money from the site through sales of my products, as it's a great example site.
First, I believe in having sites of varying quality. www.Lizardz.com is a "high-quality" site. It's a site that if I want to apply for an affiliate program, I have no problem using www.Lizardz.com .
I consider www.Lizardz.com to be a "gold site"...I'll use lesser sites to push traffic to www.Lizardz.com .
About the design:
I bought a high quality template from Template Monster. Even using a pre-made template and having decent html/graphic skills, it took me 10 hours just to tweak the template to get it how I wanted it.
The next thing I did was use AllPosters as my "clip art". It's free to sign up for, has a great search engine, has great pics, and you can even earn a little money.
Why pay for clip art when you can get paid to use All Posters?
If you want to sign up for All Posters, please use my affliate link. It doesn't cost you anything, you'll get paid the same, and I'll make a little money from your sales as well.
http://affiliates.allposters.com/link/redirect.asp?ParentAccount=E0266102121
For www.Lizardz.com I used AllPosters in two places:
1. The left column
2. The "main" category pictures.
When selecting the graphics, I had to pay attention to the shape/size of the poster. This was important to keep the general layout in place and just make it look good. When possible, I also tried to pic a main poster with good colors that matched my site.
For the left column in EACH category with the AllPosters, I used SSI tags. This is so I can replace the posters on each dog (cat, reptile, etc) page all at the same time.
If a dog poster is no longer for sale, I just modify the appropriate SSI file and all the dog pages are updated at once.
It is essential to use SSI on larger sites...The extra few minutes upfront will save tons of time down the road.
In the right column I use Bo's Amazon script and BlogBomb to add Amazon products to the site. Amazon doesn't pay much, but much like AllPOSTers, I feel Amazon adds free "decoration" to the pages, with a chance to earn some "pizza money".
Because I'm using the Zon script and BlogBomb, the Amazon stuff will refresh and update itself.
In the main section of each category index page, I use two tuelz:
Scrubz BlogBomb
Commentz
I use Scrubz for the "Newz" section. Scrubz takes a bunch of RSS pheeds and lets me hand pick which ones I want posted. I feed this custom RSS pheed to BlogBomb, which inserts it on the page.
Note: I need to manually "approve" the newz pheeds for each category, and haven't done so in a while...But you can see that the "scrubed" newz/RSS pheeds on each index page are of high quality and interesting...This is because they are hand-picked.
Note: The free version of Scrubz will let you create one project...And we'll get to Scrubs in the future.
Next is Commentz: I've added Commentz to each category. This lets my static html pages act like a blog and accept comments from readers, as well as add the ability for readers to submit their own articles.
Commentz will also create and ping an RSS pheed from all posts created.
Here's the "fun" part: I've taken 50 dog articles and 50 cat articles and converted them to RSS.
I've taken some Amazon reviews, in RSS format.
I also have taken my Scrubed RSS pheed...
Then I added all three to GodFatherBomb to create an automatic email newsletter.
If I get traffic and comments, I'll also add them to the newsletter.
This newsletter is written automatically for me each week, although I would need to spend 10 minutes a week on each newsletter using Scrubz to get the best RSS pheeds and make sure no junk is included.
If you want a demo, sign up for either/both the dog and cat newsletters...Dogs is Wed., Cats is Thurs. Each newsletter took a few hours to set up, with the help of PLR articles, and is written for a year.
I could also archive the newsletters to create more content, and I will if the site gets traffic.
Again, this site was built to demo Bombs and Tuelz and has never been promoted. It uses PLR content which has never been dedooped. But it is a great example of how to use various resources and especially how to automate a site and newsletter.
If I were to spend just an hour a week, I can update each category using Scrubz, and also send out a newsletter for each category, all pretty much on autopilot.
Having said this, I like this site and will probably start promoting it and using it as an example for this forum.
It has a lot of potential...I can easily create a ton of screen savers and submit them to all the screen saver sites. It's a natural for linking, as well as bookmarking...Who doesn't like animals?
I have more PLR content which I can use some Tuelz to spin into tons and tons of content that can be posted on blog farms, create RSS blackholes and more...
In the future, as we move on to Tuelz, I'll likely use www.Lizardz.com for any examples...
-Boom boom boom boom.