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!
In my last post I talked about my new mashup script which I used to create my Home Cinema Audio site.
I registered the domain name and created the site just five days ago and, looking through my Analytics account, it’s already hit Google UK’s first page for a handful of search terms.
The term ‘Panasonic SCPTX50‘ ranks in 4th place, and ‘ps3 cinema sound‘ ranks 3rd and 4th place… with over 4 million results! These may seem like obscure keywords, but they are actual searches people have made when they found my site.
And, just checking now, the phrase ‘cinema audio‘ is up at the top of page two, with 8 million results total.
There are a couple of important points here. 1) The site has only been live for less than a week, and I spent a total of maybe an hour promoting it (by way of linking from a few of my blogs and creating a Squidoo lens, nothing spectacular). And 2) Many of the search terms which are getting ranked are new to me… by which I mean the site is basically generating its own keywords. I don’t know what a Panasonic SCPTX50 is, but at least four people have visited my site looking for one.
And the way the script operates is that any search term entered into the site’s search box gets an automatic permanent link. It’s self-perpetuating. Plus, because it grabs news feeds on the fly, the chances are high that the very latest cutting edge gadgets will appear on the site, along with ebay and adsense links for them. So you’re likely to be way ahead of your competitors in terms of ranking for new products.
Back in the day when I created my first mashup, the ebay-youtube-adsense script, I was pretty much a beginner at php. Despite that, over 100 people have downloaded the free script in the last few months, and my flagship site http://smartphonereview.co.uk now gets over 150 organic search visitors a day, netting me about $100/month in ebay commissions and adsense revenue.
I figured it was about time to take this script to the next level with what I’ve learnt since I began programming php applications.
So behold my latest mashup site: Home Cinema Audio review!
This is a substantial evolution of the original mashup script. The key features are essentially there, but upgraded substantially.
The biggest change is I’ve replaced the Affiliate Future product section with a feed from the Commission Junction API, which gives far more results and improved SEO over the former.
It also means I’ve had to switch the script from php4 to php5, so now I’m using my custom RSS parser I mentioned in the last blog post. This improves the loading time of the script enormously (although it’s kind of offset by the slightly slower loading of the CJ API feed).
The other big change is in the style of the site. It now sports a much cleaner and more modern theme, with pale blue smooth divs and better separation of posts and product items.
Oh, one more cool feature not found in the earlier version: Static URLs! Now the links generated by site searches take the following form: http://homecinemaaudio.co.uk/review/home+cinema.html
This is great for SEO and looks much nicer for your visitors than …index.php?q=home+cinema
I’m still working on the finishing touches to the new script so it won’t be ready for public release yet. But when it’s done it won’t be a free download. The older mashup script will still be free, but this new one will be on sale for around $30 per copy (though you can make as many sites from it as you want).
The reason I’m charging a small sum for this is for a couple of reasons. 1) I’ve had dozens of people telling me I’m missing out by not charging for the original ebayoutube mashup script, and 2) this one is significantly more evolved and robust than the first. I don’t want to start charging for the free script, so I figure charging for ‘version 2.0′ is the next best thing.
But you CAN still get it for free… when you buy the soon-to-be-released Affiliate Mashup Store. I’ll be making an announcement regarding the release date for this premium affiliate mashup script soon, but I’ll say right now that I’ll be giving away a couple of extra scripts with it in the first week of release - this new mashup script being one of them.
So until then, check out the new mashup site, then head over to http://affiliatemashupstore.com and sign up for the waiting list to get some cool free stuff.
I’ve recently updated my homepage to better reflect my online presence. It now mostly consists of a bunch of RSS feeds for the sites I interact with.
It turns out that rolling your own RSS reader is really simple, so long as you have PHP5 with the handy ‘SimpleXML’ extension.
I’ve written a quick little function you can plug into any webpage to grab an RSS feed and display it. The function takes two parameters, the URL of the feed and the number of items you want to display. It puts each news item in its own div so you can format it how you want with a little CSS.
Here’s the function listed below. It’s fully commented, so you can just paste it into a page of your own (or use an php ‘include’ to add it) and call it whenever you need to display a feed.
<?php
//Call this function using the following example:
//$feed = getNews("http://domain.com/rssfeed", 5);
function getNews($site_url,$n){
try{
// create a new cURL resource
$ch = curl_init();
//Set useragent (need this for Digg to let us view it)
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0
(Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.9)
Gecko/20071025 Firefox/2.0.0.9');
//Set curl to return the data instead of printing it to the browser.
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
//Follow any "Location: " header that the server sends
//as part of the HTTP header
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
//Set timeout
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10);
//Set the URL
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $site_url);
//Execute the fetch
$data = curl_exec($ch);
//Close the connection
curl_close($ch);
// Create an XML object
$sxe = new SimpleXMLElement($data);
} catch (Exception $e){
$Content = '<p>No RSS Feed available at the moment.</p>';
}
// Loop through the number of items specified in the call
for ($i=0;$i<$n;$i++){
$title = $sxe->channel->item[$i]->title;
$link = $sxe->channel->item[$i]->link;
//format the URL
$url = "<a href = '" . $link . "'>" . $title . "</a>";
$desc = $sxe->channel->item[$i]->description;
//Format each post with a div of its own
$Content .='<div class = "post">';
$Content .= "<h3>$url</h3> <p>$desc</p>";
$Content .='</div>';
}
return $Content;
}
?>
That’s it. Take it and liven up your pages with a little dynamic content.