I know, it's been a fortnight, I've been busy! We've been working on getting our new WordPress plugins site up and running. I originally had just a couple of commercial plugins to sell however I've been working on more and so we'll have a few more products to launch with. Luckily the plugins have all been written from requests so every plugin has been sold once at least which means that time isn't 100% wasted if it doesn't sell again!

We've worked out our pricing structure for this as we want to try and offer something for everyone. As the plugins are not anything major we're not looking at charging a lot for them, but charging enough to make it worth while. Obviously each plugin is charged according to the complexity and time taken to create it, however with a few other sites selling plugins too, we also need to keep it competitive.

Our pricing options for these plugins are going to be

• Single site license
• Multi site license
• Yearly upgrade license

The 3rd option can only be purchased if one of the first two options have been purchased in the past. This way someone who just wants a cheapy plugin can grab the single site license, but as WordPress upgrades or if we happen to add more features in, then the yearly upgrade license will have to be paid for to get an upgraded version. Of course if a major amount of new features are added then I'll probably release it as a new product as a Pro version.

To deal with the pricing we're going for simple maths ie. a Single site license costs X, the multi will cost 2.5*X and the yearly upgrade will cost 0.5*X. I think this works out reasonable. Of course the single vs multi site usage goes on trust, but hopefully most of the businesses that buy from us will be honest, as the plugins are not going to be exceptionally expensive in the first place.

We'll also be offering a couple of freebie plugins, mainly because one has been available on my own site for quite a while (and is pretty basic) and the other uses partly modified code from another plugin, and naturally I wouldn't want to be selling someone else's GPL code! Plus I think offering a couple of products for free will attract the buyers in and we'll be offering all the plugins for free to registered charity sites too.

So hopefully the site will be virtually ready to go live soon. I've just got the hard part to do now, write the content!

April Earnings came in at $284 so just $8 short of March, which has an extra day in it (well that's my excuse!). Cash in the bank (the real stuff not just virtual figures) has hit £603 which compared to last year's average (£127*4 = £508) is almost £100 improvement. We're averaging £150 a month at the moment which would give us £1800 for the end of the year. I'm hoping to go over £2k so hopefully the two major sites I've been working on all month will help towards increasing the average.

The past month I've been a bit quiet and a lot of my spare time has been taken up with tinkering with WP eCommerce for one of our sites that has over 100 products for sale on it. I've uploaded about 20, it's a bit time consuming! However once those are up and I've finished customising the code for the cart then that will be done for the time being. My other site is the plugin site which we're still working on getting some content on it, however we already know of one sale that'll be made (once I've written the plugin!) plus a yearly license for upgrades. This site, although not finished, is also eagerly awaiting the shopping cart system that Secure Delivery is about to unveil, so it'll be great to put that to the test too.

However, it's a bank holiday weekend here and I'm taking the weekend off (besides writing my article for BloggingTips) so hope you have a good one

I've been working on setting up my new site and decided to try out the WP e-Commerce plugin on it for dealing with selling the products. I would have used Secure Delivery however I need to give the option of a shopping cart to visitors as most will hopefully purchase two products, the main product and an upgrade license (more on this another time).

WP e-Commerce is just like any other plugin for the installation. Just unzip the files and upload the directory to your plugins directory, and activate it in the WordPress admin. You then get an extra menu for it, where you can set your shop settings, other preferences, and start adding categories, brands and product information. It can deal with physical products or digital products, the latter was what I was interested in. You can also easily select which fields to have in the form on the front end, and which of these fields to send PayPal so that they're prefilled. As I'm only looking to sell digital products I took the address details out as these are not needed.

The lite version of this plugin allows you to sell products via PayPal only. Whilst it's called 'lite' it's not that simple as such. You can have your products in categories, there's a shopping basket and it uses the PayPal IPN for instant notification. I've not gone through the whole process but I would assume that if you're selling a digital product it will also then provide a download link to the buyer to download the product, as I've had the option to set how many times the product can be downloaded by the buyer.

There are optional extras that cost a little extra (very little to be honest!) which I may look at in the future if the site gets busy enough to need them. Whilst I could have coded this all myself I figured that it was worth looking at the plugin and to be honest it's a good plugin to use. I may also convert one of our other product selling sites over to it as that's been needing a shopping basket for months but I've just not had the time to sit down and really finish the coding myself. With this plugin I could probably get everything added over a couple of days (100+ products) and convert the site to WordPress and hopefully, if my thinking is right, see the sales rocket

So if you're after a free, light, product selling script then this is a good option to look at.

Bit quiet around here at present as I've got a couple of things underway. The first is the continued work on adding to my Foodie site. I'm adding a 'bookshelf' page, listing all of my cookbooks (I have a couple!) with links through to Amazon, along with a kitchenware page, again listing products I have or recommend, linking through to places to buy them. It won't be a major money spinner but once the pages are set up (I'll use a database table to hold the info and just populate the pages from it) then it could make a little additional income. If I can find a decent kitchen affiliate site then that would be better, so I'll have a look through my affiliate networks too (any suggestions gratefully received).nnThe second is a new product selling site selling what I'm (semi) good at, programming. After writing a few plugins for commercial sites running WordPress, a friend and I have decided to set up a site selling WordPress plugins designed for the commercial market. Most of these are designed for CMS usage as opposed to blogging usage, so we're hoping to target people using WordPress for a budget site and website developers who offer WordPress as a CMS. We've found a great domain name available (a rarity these days) so just need to get the site set up reading to sell the products. We'll most likely use Secure Delivery to deal with taking payments and 'delivering' the products, and then set up a members area for receiving upgrades. Of course, WordPress will be used to power all of this too.nnSo a couple of things on the go

I may not be on the ball here, so forgive me if this is old, but I noticed this on one my sites today. On the ad shown left, you'll notice up and down arrows below the ad in the bottom left. Spotting this I decided to click it to see what would happen. It then allowed me to scroll through 5 different adverts. I've also got a single ad elsewhere on the same page but that didn't have this feature, however one is a small horizontal banner and the one in the image is a 125*125 button.nnIt's quite a cool feature although I wonder if it's that noticeable. Also, my reason for putting one advert there was because the highest paying ad would be shown, if there are 5 there I presume it goes into the order of payment, which means I could lose out if they don't click the highest earning ad. But then again, it's not like they make much these days anyway