About one year ago I was cruising the Digital Point forums for a cool, sweet, nice, attractive blog theme. Uncoded was the goal, because at one point I wanted to teach myself learn how to code wordpress themes, since it’s a decent way to make freelancer type money!  After looking for about a week, I stumbled across this one, thought it was nice, yet seemed like an easy conversion.  Snatched it up for $10, I think, not bad huh?

So, once I got the theme in my email and tried to find time to learn a thing or two about coding it.  That was about 6-7 months ago and finding time was actually harder than I thought it was going to be.  I found a tutorial at http://psd.tutsplus.com/, signed up and downloaded a very well planned video tutorial on “how to code a wordpress theme”.  I still did not find the time to get through the whole tutorial.

With all that set aside, I realized that I might just take a minute to search blogs and see if any of these fancy coders are giving away a conversion from PSD to Wordpress.  Guess what?  I found one, what a one-in-a-million shot that I find one, when I am looking for one and have a PSD that needs to be coded.

The contest was simple, leave a comment showing the URL to the post you have about said contest.  BAM!  I love those contests.  My new buddy, Thomas, wanted to have at least 25 entries otherwise he might cancel.  So I was all over the place on Twitter, etc, just trying to get enough entries.

Long story short, there were only 2 people that left comments, thus entered into the contest.  I thought for sure it would be cancelled, but once I commented and asked Thomas, he agreed to let us two fight it out.  The best part is, the visitors were going to have to VOTE as to which entry should win.

It’s a WIN-WIN for Thomas, cause now he doesn’t have to pick the winner himself and he gets a couple extra visits from those voting in the poll.  Well, because I am such a ninja at marketing whatever I want on the web, I went ahead and found my favorite forum, with poeple that actually like me, and asked them all nicely to vote for me.  They did and I won the contest with 17 votes and the other guy had only 2!  Woot!

So, I killed in the contest, my first ever win online, so that was nice and now I am jamming all my affiliate marketing stuff with this cool new theme that Thomas converted for me, a $200 value, for FREE!

I installed it in short order and I was up and running sitewide link packages in no time.  The sidebar widget made it super easy to add the “recommended sites” area to my blog.  If you want to see it in action, just click “advertise here” and see what happens.  You don’t have to complete a sale to see how it works.  The OIOpublisher uses Paypal and allows you to sell ads for many different places on your blog.

Right now I only have one area setup (sitewide links), but I plan to add links or banner zones in the near future.  Right now, I wanted to focus on going through all the options and making sure that I knew how to run this plugin from my point of view as the author of this blog.

If you want more information just check out OIOpublisher’s website and see the demo for yourself.

You are allowed to put a number with the importance of certain attributes of a post.  If you think a post is more popular because of comments, you can set that number high and the posts with more comments will show to be more popular than posts that have fewer comments.  Maybe you think that the more permalink views your post gets, the more popular it should be.  You can set it up that way as well.

In my opinion I think the more comments a post has the more popular it is.  So I set that number a bit higher.  Permalinks and trackbacks are second on my list.  That is really all I care about and when I see the list of popular items for the month, the posts look fine to me.

I think the plugin is a good way to go if you want to showcase the posts that get more attention than others.  This will allow your readers further access deeper into your blog.

I will have to do some more digging tomorrow and see what this update is all about.  In the meantime, why not enjoy subscribe to my email updates and read my most popular posts.

Good night!

You can auction off anything you want on your widget and there are NO fees.  Paypal payments are set up to get your money ASAP.  Right now, you can see that I have a 250 word review on my widget for $1 (well that’s the start), but it’s not limited to anything.

The sky is the limit and with a couple of screenshots on the way, this is really looking like a ocol tool.  Regular bloggers might find it useful for advertising space auctions or reviews, like I have, but it can be used for a blog in ANY niche!

They offer a LIVE auctions section you can register for which allows others to see what you are putting up for auction.  Don’t forget to register there!  The WPAuctions widget is a perfect tool for marketing and promotion for your blog.  Have one auction per day all month or have one auction that lasts all month.  I really haven’t seen any ways that this won’t be a good thing!

Enjoy, and I will post how it has worked for me in the coming weeks!  If you have a good, or bad, experience, post it here in the comments section!