Holy shit, there it is. Someone clicked on my adsense tower on Smartphone Review UK and generated $1.20 for me. Not bad for a single click.
And particularly not bad considering it hasn’t even been picked up by the search engines yet. It’s only been live for two days.
Smartphone Review is a bit of an experiment on two fronts for me. First, it’s a mashup. The whole site is generated by taking a search term (or else a default keyword) and grabbing feeds from Youtube-Adsense, eBay searches and GoogleNews. Income is derived from eBay, adsense and a CPA or two.
Secondly, I’m generating links to it using Squidoo, Hubpages, Blogspot etc. and a magnificent tool called OnlyWire, which submits to a bunch of social bookmarking sites all at once. Hopefully this will kick-start my search engine rankings.
I pretty much got the idea from two sources. First, Mark from 45n5 published a Youtube-eBay-Amazon mashup which looks impressive, but being the simpleton that I am I couldn’t get it to work properly. Secondly, Ruck from Cashtactics talked about Aggressive Article Marketing in which he discussed the advantages of creating a site that generates thousands of pages rather than creating a site with a few manually constructed pages.
So there was my inspiration. I decided to create my own mashup. It ended up looking similar to Mark’s but is nowhere near as sophisticated (plus it doesn’t use Amazon). All it does is grab RSS feeds (you have to insert adsense code manually, but that automatically matches your content of course), so there’s no need to worry about API keys or anything like that. All you need is a Commission Junction PID for the eBay feed and BANG you have your affiliate product list.
I’m going to Germany for a week tomorrow, but if I get a chance I’ll publish the script here for people to download and use. Just need to write some simple instructions.
December 16th, 2007 at 7:03 pm
indeed the best way to go about things is not copy what others are doing but make your own version, or add your own spin or twist to existing ideas, which you seem to be doing well
glad your having some success!
December 16th, 2007 at 8:22 pm
Hey, Mark. Thanks for Christening my blog with its first comment! I’ve been burning through your Youtube vids in the last couple of weeks. Very entertaining! Matter of fact I was going to email you a link to the script in case any of your readers were interested, but I’ve still got some tweaking to do and I’m literally typing this inbetween bouts of holiday packing. Later…