HugePedlar’s Blog

Well it’s been a while since my last post, but you can put that down to laziness and moving to Australia.

To get started in Bluetooth marketing you will need three things: a laptop, a bluetooth transmitter, and software.

I use an eeePC as my bluetooth laptop, because it’s small, cheap and quick to boot up. My bluetooth transmitter is a Belkin F8T012 - make sure your transmitter is a Class 1 device (100m range) and compatible with Bluetooth 2.0. The software I use is Blue Market Pro which is quite buggy but has all the features you’ll need.

Now with Blue Market Pro you’ll need your eeePC (assuming you go for one) to be running Windows, and specifically you’ll need your transmitter to be using the Microsoft bluetooth stack, not the manufacturer’s. Instructions on how to install the Microsoft stack properly can be found here.

I’m not going to get into the details of installing the software or how to set it up, because it’s pretty straightforward. Basically you want Blue Market Pro to be running in server mode with a file or list of files to transmit from its outbox every 60 seconds or so. I’ve used both animated gifs and plain text files successfully, the main difference being a text file can contain more information for your prospects but a gif looks prettier.

So all you have to do now is head out there and try it out. Bear in mind that most phones won’t sound an audio alert when your device tries to transmit to them, so catching people walking around isn’t going to work. Best places to try this are where people are sitting down, for example in cafes and bars. You’ll also need to be around a LOT of people, because most phones will refuse a connection, and others will time-out before the owner notices the message. Depending on the country you’re in (Australia seems to be the easiest) a 10% successful transmission rate is pretty good.

To be honest, sitting around a food court with one of these devices for a few hours probably isn’t going to be a good investment of your time, simply because the numbers are so small. But if you really want to make money out of this idea, try persuading your local cafe or bar owners to buy one of these babies off you (or rent it) to advertise to their own customers (and next door’s customers). They’ll be able to leave the device on all day, and if only a handful of people respond to their ads (free cake when you buy a coffee, for example), it could mean an extra few grand for them in income per month. Offer them a week’s free trial then hit them up for a couple of grand if they want to buy it. Your outlay on the device shouldn’t be more than a few hundred dollars, leaving you with a nice ROI, and possibly a monthly support contract.

I’ll be writing a proper article on this topic soon, but here’s a brief introduction to the topic of bluetooth marketing.

Most mobile phones these days are bluetooth enabled, meaning they can connect to ad-hoc short range wireless networks. Once a bluetooth connection has been established it becomes possible to transfer files from one device to another wirelessly.

With a laptop, a bluetooth dongle and appropriate software, you can go out into the world and transmit files to anyone in range (up to 100 metres).

Imagine going to MacDonalds and blasting out animated gif ads to all the kiddies’ mobile phones advertising a ringtone service. Or negotiating a deal with a local night club to send out ‘free drink’ ads to punters in the pub next door.

In the next article I’ll get into the details of how to set up your own bluespam equipment and how to get started with offline location-based advertising.

A little while ago I wrote about a new version of my eBay-Youtube-Adsense mashup script, here and here.

I won’t repeat everything about it here, except to say that it’s based on the free script I released last year and it uses Commission Junction product feeds as well as eBay and Youtube Adsense blocks. It also sports a different URL structure which improves SEO by creating deep links within the site (in fact a lot of my SERPs are getting double listing results because of this, one for the main page and one for a deep link).

I originally offered this new script as an early-adopter bonus for my Affiliate Mashup Store script.

I’m now offering it for sale on its own for $27.00.

If you’re interested in upgrading to the new script click here to learn more.

Holy shit I’m getting really annoyed.

My ADSL has been down since Monday morning. It’s now Friday. I’m typing this from the library.

I don’t have a business account so I can’t complain that I’m losing money, and my provider keeps telling me they’ll call me back when in fact they don’t.

Not only can I not do any work, I can’t do anything except sit around with my thumb up my arse. I can’t download TV shows, I can’t play games… I spent two days drawing pictures, but I can’t even show you because I can’t fucking upload them.

Bah.

In the world of affiliate marketing it’s inevitable that you’ll want to cloak your links to some extent.

‘Naked’ affiliate links at best look ugly, and at worst suspicious, so displaying a friendly url to your visitors is desirable.

Compare these two links, for example. Which looks better:

http://www.tkqlhce.com/click-2747150-10378494

or

http://mediawebsearch.com/go/godaddy

Now it’s easy enough to create a redirect. You just upload a php or html file to your website with a bit of code including the destination url. Give the file an appropriate name and send your traffic through that instead of straight to the advertiser.

The problem with creating and uploading a file each time you want to make a new redirect is it’s tedious. You need to break out your text editor and your FTP program.

I don’t know about you, but I’m far too lazy for that shit.

So I built a tool to automate it all.

Now I just load a page in my browser which displays a form. I type in a name for my link, put the affiliate url in there, and choose the type of redirect (php or meta - one redirects transparently, the latter overwrites the referrer).

Then the script works it magic and generates a nice clean link like in the example above.

No need to edit files, create directories or use FTP. And I can do it from any PC.

And now so can you. I’m offering the script for free download.

Instructions are included. All you need to do is make sure you have PHP5 enabled.

Here’s the link:

http://scripts.hugepedlar.com/ezredirector.zip

Enjoy!

OK this is pretty cool, even if I do say so myself.

I’ve written a guide on how to earn money by promoting your own Affiliate Store.

The guide is a PDF file, and it contains affiliate links to my AMS product, which sells for $199.

I’ve created a tool for anyone to ‘rebrand’ the PDF with their own affiliate links. All you have to do is rebrand the PDF and distribute it however you want.

Give it away to your email lists, offer it as an opt-in bonus, share it on Limewire or BitTorrent, whatever.

Then when people click through the links in the PDF to my Affiliate Mashup Store, you’ll get $50 per sale.

Easy as that.

Go get your rebranded PDF guide at http://affiliatemashupstore.com/rebrander

I’ve been playing with Camtasia recently and managed to record a video of the Affiliate Mashup Store Admin Panel in action.

The video is about 10 minutes long and walks you through how to set up a catalogue, create category links, new custom pages, change themes and a bunch of other stuff.

The admin panel is pretty easy to use, but unless you’ve bought it it’s kind of hard to know what you’re getting. That’s why I recorded the video, so hopefully you can now see exactly how easy it is to create a 100-page affiliate store in a few minutes.

Check it out by clicking here.

The time is upon us.

The Affiliate Mashup Store is now available for purchase.

$199.00 gets you an unlimited site license to create content-rich affiliate stores with thousands of products and SEO-friendly pages, catering to multiple countries at a time and pulling product feeds from dozens of merchants as well as eBay listings and Youtube videos.

Go and get your store now!

I’ve been developing another script lately. This one’s a simple search engine for affiliate products.

The script itself is more an exercise in using AJAX (Asynchronous Jacascript And XML), which is a way of updating webpages without refreshing the browser.

Have a look at the script in action by clicking here.

It uses both the Prototype and Scriptaculous javascript frameworks, which make it ridiculously easy to add animations and AJAX calls… even for someone like me who doesn’t know shit about Javascript.

What’s nice about this script is that it dynamically updates the latest ten searches being performed while you watch, which is kinda cool.

I was planning on developing the script to sell it, and I may still do that, but for now I’ve decided to give it away for free to my Mashup Store subscribers. I’m sending out an email tomorrow morning with the download link, so there’s still time to get in on the list at http://affiliatemashupstore.com

Just a quick post here.

I’m giving out copies of the installation manual for the Affiliate Mashup Store tomorrow morning.

People have been asking what’s involved in setting up their own stores, so I figured the easiest way to explain it would be to hand out the actual installation manual… right?

You can only get it if you’re on my list, so head over to the site today and sign up.

That’s all!