NOTE - these installation instructions only apply to the old 0.7BETA version. The new 0.5BETA PLUGIN version is installed like any other WordPress plugin and the keyword tags are used as detailed below (scroll down to Search Keywords). I will soon be putting up instructions for the new version, so please IGNORE the first part of these instructions unless you want to try out the old version.

Firstly, in these instructions I am assuming you want to set up a standalone eBay niche site. If you want to use it with an existing WordPress installation then it’s even simpler, and you can skip the first 2 steps. These steps are outside the scope of this help, there is plenty of info on these subjects elsewhere and a working knowledge of WordPress would be useful. It also helps to join eBay ( ) and you MUST be a member of the eBay Partner Network if you want to earn money from WordBay!

Hosting set-up

1. Get hosting and get a domain that you want to use for your niche site. You may have the former already, but if not I can recommend BlueHost – I have used them for over a year and am very happy with them. Another popular host is GoDaddy, who also currently offer .info domains for $1.19 (bargain, or what!?). That’s where I bought www.used-musical-instruments.info, which I will use throughout as my example.

2. Install the latest version of WordPress in the root directory of your site, or in a subdirectory of an existing site if you prefer. This should be very simple through the SimpleScripts or Fantastico utilities in your control panel.
During installation you will have given your site a name and specified other details. I called my site Used Musical Instruments and added the catchline Previously enjoyed musical instruments… going for a song! (very original, I know!). Your WordPress dashboard can then be accessed via http://yoursite.com/wp-admin.

I would also immediately suggest the following adjustments to your WordPress setup:

i. Options (or Settings) -> Permalinks - choose Custom and use the following format: /%year%/%postname%/
This will ensure you have SEF urls – though don’t do this on an existing site if you hadn’t already! You’ll mess up all your links!

ii. Install a sitemap generator like this one and set it up so that Google is kept up to date about your site, and that your pages are indexed as often as possible, since they will frequently be changing.

iii. Settings/Options -> Discussion – untick “Allow comments” – you probably don’t want user comments generally – there’ll be more spam than it’s worth.

WordBay setup

3. Download and install the free Wordpress Evanescence theme. I am using this for our example site – you can always change it later, or use a different one straight away if you know what you are doing. Evanescence suits us because it is free, very simple and has only one sidebar and is a liquid design, which we need, at least for the out-of-the-box WordBay installation. You can fiddle with the template later, let’s get it working first! Remember to activate the new template in the Design/Themes section!
If you are using an existing site you will want to skip this step and get to work adapting WordBay for your own site design – there is some basic info on this later, but there may be a bit of stress here!

4. OK, this is the bit where we install WordBay. Are you ready?! Copy the file WordBay.php and WordBay-config.php to the same directory as your template, in our example it’s wp-content/templates/evanescence-12/. Copy buy.php to your root directory (or anywhere you like, just remember to change the link url when configuring WordBay). And that’s it!

5. Now, let’s just see if it works first. Write a new Page (not post) in Wordpress. Let’s call it Used Pianos and let’s write a few lines of text as our content. We are also going to add the following code below the content: [wordbay]used piano[/wordbay]. This is our search code, and is pretty self-explanatory, but we will look at this in more detail later.

Also, we want to change the page template so it uses the new WordBay template. So go down to Page Template and choose WordBay (not WordBay-config!) from the drop-down menu. If it’s not there, you haven’t put the WordBay.php and/or the WordBay-config.php file in the right directory, simple as that!

6. Now you can go to your live site, in my case www.used-musical-instruments.info and see what you have! Your front page shows the latest post (which is just a default post if this is a new WordPress installation) – we’ll change this in a minute to display the page we want. But in the right hand Pages menu, you should have a new entry with Used pianos or Rubber ducks, or whatever you called your page. Click on that and you should get something like this:

…and there you go! A lovely page of products pulled down from eBay. If there isn’t, check the search terms you used first of all – maybe there are no products. Oh, and the colours and layout probably won’t be the same - this was an early version of the template.
Notice that there are TWO panels – that’s why we went for a liquid layout. So on the same page you can have listings both from, say, UK eBay and US eBay, which increases your chances of click-through. The two panels are currently hard-coded into WordBay, i.e. if you want just one (or three!) you will have to do some hacking of the code! The configuration for the two panels is explained below – you MUST configure WordBay immediately, especially if you want to ensure you will get paid!

7. You also want to have a default page displayed on your home-page, right? This isn’t a blog probably, so the latest posts aren’t much use, your site will most likely be made up entirely of pages. Just go into Wordpress Settings -> Reading and under Front page displays check the A static page radio button, and choose the page you made, or any other page you decide on in future. It is up to you what your home page will be.

8. …And that is how you make the whole site! Just keep creating new WordPress Pages with new keywords! You will probably want to create a hierarchy by choosing Page Parent when creating a new page.

This is more of a display thing, but the SEF urls also reflect this hierarchy. So under my Used Pianos page I might create a page called Used Yamaha Pianos, with the code [wordbay]used yamaha piano[/wordbay]. In the page editor I would select as Page Parent, “Used Pianos”, and this would show up in the page menu as here:

As you can see, it is very simple to quickly set up a site with lots and lots of categories and subcategories and populate it with lovely products to sell!

BUT WAIT – this is fine if all you want to do is just display stuff from eBay! But if you want to earn money from it, you MUST configure WordBay, otherwise any earnings go to the author of WordBay, who it must be said, will not kick up a great fuss about it!

WordBay configuration

WordBay has not been made in the form of a “proper” WordPress plugin – maybe we can do that one day, but although there may be one or two ugly hacks in there I think this is a nice, simple implementation (besides, I haven’t got the faintest idea how you write a “legal” WordPress plugin). It does mean though that configuration is not done through the WordPress admin backend, but rather by editing WordBay-config.php. However, we have made this file into a WordPress template, so it CAN be edited from the backend. This also means that a new version of WordBay can be installed without affecting your parameters. So…

1. Go into Themes/Design (depending on your WP version) and Theme Editor. Select WordBay-config.php from the right-hand menu. The config file will open up in the editing window and you can make changes here. If you mess anything up you can always recopy the original config file from the installation.
2. The first thing you will see are the WordBay CSS classes. I have put them here so we don’t have to change the main theme stylesheet, but once you get into customizing your site you might want to cut-paste these into the main stylesheet. These are currently set so that WordBay works with the Evanescence theme. Scroll past these until you get to <!– End of WordBay classes –> and here you should find /* WordBay - user editable parameters */.
3. Now, these are the parameters you need to change. Tell you what, I think there are enough comments in the code itself to get you going. If there are any problems, let me know here and we will clarify things. If you are not familiar with editing php, well, it’s simple, just be careful to only change the code in question. E.g. if you want to change ‘$first_location=1;’ (items dispatched from US – for the left panel) to ‘$first_location=3;’ (dispatch from UK) then make sure you ONLY change the number, don’t overwrite the ‘;’ and if there are inverted commas, make sure they are left alone.
4. Generally, the first section of parameters relates to the obfuscation process, whereby you specify where the “buy.php” (obfuscation routine) is located and which words you want rover and ebay to be substituted with. I have put “buy” and “cheap” – who knows, maybe this helps with SEO :). If you want to change this, you need to change it in the buy.php, so don’t worry about it for now. I will try to explain obfuscation elsewhere at some point.
5. The second and third sections configure the left and right-hand panels respectively and the parameters are exactly the same for the left - $first_xx - and right - $second_xx – panels (why didn’t I just call the variables $left and $right to avoid confusion? Very good question…) As I said, these are hopefully explained adequately in the config file itself, but if you have any questions, post them here.
There is a little confusion (in my head at least) regarding the various parameters relating to the country, so feel free to fiddle with these until you get the proper country, currency and site etc. working.
Also you NEED to get a campaign id from eBay Partner Network and insert it in $first/second_campid, otherwise revenue will continue to go to the WordBay author! (who will say, “thank you very much”). Once you have done this, please consider setting the $generosity variable to something, well, symbolic (more than 0!) at least. In doing so a small percentage of your impressions will go to the author of WordBay (me), who has invested a lot of time in the project, when I really should have been doing something else, and it would warm the cockles of my heart to see a few pennies as a result of my hard work!

Well, that’s pretty much all we need to do! You should try a few clicks and track them in the eBay PN dashboard to make sure everything is working. Otherwise, it’s time to get building your site!

Search keywords

As you probably figured out, the tags [wordbay]fish[/wordbay] inserted anywhere in your page body text will search for all products with “fish” in the title. However, it is difficult to target searches with just this, so here are some more tips:

[wordbay]grand piano[/wordbay] - this is logical AND – space between the words means all products with “grand” and “piano” in the title.
[wordbay]”grand piano”[/wordbay] – exact phrase match – means the exact phrase “grand piano” must be found in the product title
[wordbay]piano -yamaha[/wordbay] – AND NOT – searches for all occurrences of ”piano”, but minus sign excludes any titles with “Yamaha”
[wordbay](piano,“mouth organ”)[/wordbay] – OR – brackets apply logical OR (also AND/OR I think) to all items in the brackets, whether single keywords or phrases, i.e. this will find all items with either “piano” OR “mouth organ”.

By the way, supposedly you are not suppose to put spaces after commas or minus signs, so it’s best to stick to that just in case. Here are a couple more examples:

[wordbay](“used piano”,“used guitar”) -yamaha[/wordbay] – find all items with either “used piano” or “used guitar” in the title, but excluding “yamaha”.
[wordbay]”used piano” –(stool,cover,music)[/wordbay] – this will search on “used piano” BUT will exclude “stool” and/or “cover” and/or “music”. This type of search is especially useful as it allows you to eliminate most of the junk/irrelevant items like “used piano stool” and narrow the search down to just actual pianos!

There is more help on the relevant eBay page.

Well, what are you waiting for!? Get building and get earning!!