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.
March 30th, 2008 at 1:52 am
Hello, Jewelery website looks cool! I was reading up on mashup sites and had a quick question. In your previous mashup software, you had ebay and affiliate future data feeds to avoid duplicate content. In your recent mashup software, you use commission junction’s api if I’m not mistaken. I’m confused on why the new software is considered a mashup if its from one source. My understanding was that mashups required two different stores. Is the main advantage the large number of products? Thanks!
March 30th, 2008 at 10:21 am
Hi Ron,
Good question, and the answer is simple: the CJ API delivers content from several merchants together. For example, my UK jewellery catalogue contains items from Argos, Swarovski and Freemans, among others - all handled through the api.
Plus apart from the api content there’s also youtube videos and ebay listings.
All that combines to deliver unique content that you won’t find anywhere else, at least in that configuration.