HugePedlar’s Blog

Well I finally got round to updating my Buy Jewellery Online site.

It’s been sitting there promoting Valentine’s Day for over two months now. But it was my first attempt at a mashup store, so it needed a complete overhaul.

So I’ve replaced it entirely with an instance of my Affiliate Mashup Store. Took me about 20 minutes to get it up and running with about 12,000 products spread across US and UK catalogues (a nice feature of the mashup store is Geo-IP location, since a lot of my traffic is international).

The tricky part with making a jewellery store is the keywords. Fortunately my US merchants had a tonne of products with ‘jewelry’ as a keyword (about 100,000 of them in fact) so setting up the US catalogue was easy.

The UK catalogue was a little harder though, since there were only around a dozen ‘jewellery’ keyword products available. That meant I had to run the catalogue tool over and over again, with searches like ‘necklace’, ‘pendant’, ‘gold chain’, ’silver chain’ etc.

I managed to get around 1000 UK products though, and no chainsaws as far as I can tell, which is good enough.

One thing to note if you’re populating a catalogue with multiple keywords like this is to make sure you don’t add duplicate entries. For example, I ran the tool once with the keyword ‘jewellery’. When running it again with, say, ‘necklaces’, I had to specify ‘necklaces -jewellery’; otherwise I might have added products with both keywords the second time, resulting in duplicate products in my catalogue.

Now I just need to do some more SEO. I was in 3rd place on Google for ‘buy jewellery online’ last month. Now it’s down in 8th. Time to start cranking out some more links.

If you’ve read my ‘How to make money with Gumtree‘ guide you’ll know that I use Affiliate Future to generate cash with surveys and cashback sites.

However, Affiliate Future has changed their members area to display a range of new account tools (personally I don’t like it much, but whatever). This means the instructions in the guide are a little out of date.

So I’ve made a little video to walk you through how to sign up with a new merchant. I don’t have Camtasia or any other decent screencapture software, so you’ll have to put up with my shaky camerawork. Here it is:

I used Viddler because you can annotate your videos, which is really, really cool.

Are you an excellent copywriter? Have you written landing pages for best-selling products?

I need a killer sales page for my Affiliate Mashup Store.

I’m offering a $100 prize, plus a FREE copy of the mashup store (worth $199), plus a JV affiliate rate of $100 per sale (normal affiliate rate $50) for customers you send to the page.

Full details of the competition can be found in this forum post.

Closing date: Friday 28th March.

Good luck people!

One of the simplest ways to sell an ebook is doing it through eBay.

The problem is the eBay marketplace is pretty saturated with ebooks - especially the make-money-online ones. So how do you stand out from the crowd?

Here’s what I did. I used to sell an ebook on eBay for a while last year. I found the best way to get exposure was to get onto the Pulse.

What’s eBay Pulse? It’s a front page list of current hot products. The list is compiled from products with the most ‘watchers’ - that is, people who have added the item to their watchlist.

The Pulse is divided into categories just the rest of the marketplace. Within the Information Products / How-to Guides section it’s possible to get onto the Pulse with around 20 watchers.

I used two methods to get people to add my item to their watchlist.

First, I added a prominent link to my listing inviting people to watch my item. Simple enough. Here’s the format of the url I used (on the UK site):

http://cgi1.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?MakeTrack&item=XXXXXXXXXXX&ssPageName=VIP:watchlink:top:uk

The XXXs represent the item number. I also added that url as a link for all the pictures in my listing. People love to click pics, so when they did it automatically added the item to their watchlist.

The second method involved offsite promotion. I used to advertise online survey sites using free online classifieds. The classified ads would direct people to my own site where I listed banners for a number of survey sites.

Pretty standard, but I also took advantage of the traffic (around 100 visitors a day) by displaying a nice bold link saying “Click Here to find out how I quit my job!”.

The link of course sent them to my item listing on eBay and automatically added the item to their watchlist.

On a ten day listing that was enough to get the item on eBay Pulse within about three days. After that the views soared and I usually sold around 15 copies a week - enough to make about 50% profit on my listing fees.

Speaking of which, it goes without saying that you need to pay for Featured listing and have a gallery image, bold text and a subtitle - all that stuff, which racks the fees up but without it you’ll be invisible.

The tedious part of this setup is you’ll need to change all your links each time you relist (because the item number changes). I never found a satisfactory way to automate this, but I found the least painful way was to use a php redirect.

I used the url myrandomdomain.com/ebaywatch.php for all the links in my listings, which redirected back to the listing through the add-to-watchlist url. Then I only had to update that one url each time I relisted.

So there you go: Want to sell an ebook on eBay? Get on the Pulse using offsite promotion. It works.

This thing’s taking on a life of its own.

I just got an email from a guy who’s been using the free sample of the Affiliate Mashup Store, saying he’s already made three sales in the last week without even doing any promotion.

Which is pretty awesome.

I’m beginning to wonder if having only 20 copies on offer in the pre-launch tomorrow is enough.

I mean, I don’t want too many people getting it all at once - I’ll be overwhelmed trying to support the product (I want to offer as much help starting up as possible, seeing as it’s essentially a beta test).

On the other hand, I’ve had so many people asking to get it early that I know some of you are gonna be disappointed.

It’s a burden, I know. But I had no idea it was gonna get so popular. I just hope I can live up to the expectations.

In fact, I’ve already encountered a potential problem.

The CJ API, which the mashup uses to populate its catalogues, seems very contrary. A couple of the people testing my script have had trouble getting it to work on their webservers.

This is obviously an issue, since if you can’t create a catalogue the mashup store’s pretty useless!

So I’ve come up with a workaround. If the API doesn’t work on your server, you can run a script on my own website which will create a csv datafile of products for your catalogue. You can then upload this datafile to your own site and create your catalogues that way.

It’s a bit cumbersome so it’s not ideal. I still insist that you try the sample script before purchasing the Affiliate Mashup Store. But if it doesn’t work and you still really want your own mashup store then it may still be possible.

If you’re looking for a webhost which will work with your store, then I can confirm that HostGator has no problems - I use them myself for most of my sites.

It’s been a while since I last posted, mostly because there hasn’t been much to say; I’ve been working non-stop on the ol’ affiliate mashup store script (and taking some time out to develop a super-secret landing page tool), but now it’s ready to start pushing out to the world.

Here’s the plan:

I’ve given out a couple of copies to some colleagues of mine for testing. This week I’ll be updating the sales page. And on Friday (14.03.08) I’ll be launching a ‘pre-release’ beta test of the store to a select group of inside users.

I’ll be offering the beta test version (essentially the full product, but with scope for improvement after feedback, and with a guarantee of updates to future versions) to my list members for $99.00 - that’s a saving of $100 on the final retail price of $199.00

If you’re on my list (and if not, you can sign up here) I’ll be sending out details of the pre-release later this week. The special offer launch will be open for 24 hours OR until 20 copies have sold - whichever occurs first (and judging by the size and responsiveness of my list I suspect it’ll be the latter).

Then we’ll play with the store for a week or so, make sure everything’s OK and implement any suggestions and improvements (assuming they’re feasible) and then the retail version will go on sale to the world.

So stay tuned - this is gonna be an exciting ride.