Yes, it’s a month till Valentine’s Day; probably one of the most expensive ’special’ days of the year. And I’m planning on doing some exploitation.
I’ve been investigating mashups, as I’ve mentioned before. Last week I began to get to grips with Commission Junction’s developer API. It’s the flakiest, most frustrating piece of shit I’ve ever had to program with, but after days of sweat I managed to bodge together some code to grab all the products from my affiliated merchants.
Of course, it wasn’t even as easy as that. The CJ API keeps crapping out with Internal Server Errors and suchlike. You really don’t want to attract thousands of visitors only to show them zero products! I’ve therefore had to learn how to populate a local database with the product list to improve reliability. A couple of incidental benefits are of course that the app responds much faster and I’m able to perform more powerful searches.
Anyway, so now my merchant product lists are all saved, what can I do with them? Well anything really. But in this case I’ve decided to build a jewellery website, on account of Valentine’s Day being around the corner.
Interestingly, the domain name I bought, Buy Jewellery Online, turns out to have been active in one way or another for the last 5 years or so. It’s already got a Pagerank of 2, which isn’t spectacular, but should make it a lot easier to get search engine ranking once I start promoting it.
So how does the site work? Well at the moment it’s pretty simplistic. All it does is have a category list which grabs lists of products from pre-defined searches from the database, plus some basic click tracking. As I flesh it out I’ll probably develop such functionality as ‘popular products’, custom searches, links between similar items etc.
Next up comes the promotion, though. Obviously all the standard link-building applies, like using hubs (squidoo, hubpages), blogs (blogspot, ebay blogs) and social bookmarking (digg, delicious).
Choosing keywords to promote could be tricky. After all, Valentine’s Day is highly competitive. Fortunately there are such tools as GTrends Made Easy and Google’s Keyword Tool which should provide some insights.
After that’s all sorted out the money should start rolling in. I mean, 10% of a £4000 diamond ring would certainly be a nice commission…
January 8th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
Damn,
You better not ever let that domain go to waste. That is a steal!
January 8th, 2008 at 9:10 pm
Tell me about it. I couldn’t believe my luck.
It’s just a shame that ‘jewellery’ has so many different (mis)spellings. I believe it’s ‘jewelry’ in the US, which will frustrate my SEO attempts a little if I go international.
January 9th, 2008 at 12:32 am
Hey HP, nice site!
I see you have (Make her day!) at the end of your copy.
How about his day? Don’t limit it to just the men searching your site for gifts.
Add something for the ladies too!
January 9th, 2008 at 2:56 am
Yo pimp mashup…I love it!
Wanna share?!?
January 9th, 2008 at 11:05 am
Dukey, I think you may be right. In fact, the keywords associated with gifts for men for valentines are certainly worth paying attention to. My original choice however was made on the assumption that men don’t have jewellery bought for them very often. Perhaps if I can find some male-targeted products (designer watches?) then I’ll revise my copy. It’s certainly worth looking into.
Steve, thanks for the praise! I’m afraid I won’t be sharing this one (unless someone offers me a fair price…) but I do have a prototype CJ API script which you can play with.
You can see the script in action at http://scripts.hugepedlar.com/cjapi/
And you can download a copy at http://scripts.hugepedlar.com/cjapi/cjapi.zip
January 9th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Thanks for posting your CJ script. I was just getting ready to build my own solution to wrap the CJ API.
February 4th, 2008 at 3:53 am
Hi HP,
Cool info, Keep up with the informative posts on Mashups
The explanation of your experiences with mashups is like a case study.
I have a couple questions regarding mashups if you don’t mind..
1.)Where would you recommend buying domain names like “buy jewellery online”? When I go to sites like digitalpoint, I find it difficult to find keyword optimized domains.
2.)What keyword tool do you use for countries like Canada or the UK? I’m using Wordtracker and Gtrends for the U.S. I remember Ruck saying that mashups for countries outside the U.S. is a good idea.
February 4th, 2008 at 9:28 am
1) This is a great tip. I’ve never bought an existing domain name, only new ones or ones that have lapsed. I use the technique found in this youtube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXhbV_IXAUY
2) I just use Google’s own Keyword tool for the UK as you can specify results from a particular country. It doesn’t have all the wondrous features of other tools but it’s good enough for ideas.
February 5th, 2008 at 4:34 am
Nice video, thank for the tip! The Go Daddy bulk search can save alot of time