HugePedlar’s Blog

A little while ago I wrote about a new version of my eBay-Youtube-Adsense mashup script, here and here.

I won’t repeat everything about it here, except to say that it’s based on the free script I released last year and it uses Commission Junction product feeds as well as eBay and Youtube Adsense blocks. It also sports a different URL structure which improves SEO by creating deep links within the site (in fact a lot of my SERPs are getting double listing results because of this, one for the main page and one for a deep link).

I originally offered this new script as an early-adopter bonus for my Affiliate Mashup Store script.

I’m now offering it for sale on its own for $27.00.

If you’re interested in upgrading to the new script click here to learn more.

I’ve been playing with Camtasia recently and managed to record a video of the Affiliate Mashup Store Admin Panel in action.

The video is about 10 minutes long and walks you through how to set up a catalogue, create category links, new custom pages, change themes and a bunch of other stuff.

The admin panel is pretty easy to use, but unless you’ve bought it it’s kind of hard to know what you’re getting. That’s why I recorded the video, so hopefully you can now see exactly how easy it is to create a 100-page affiliate store in a few minutes.

Check it out by clicking here.

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

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.

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.

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.

OK here’s another example of the Affiliate Mashup Store in action, and as you can see it sports a totally different theme from the previous example.

SAMSUNGTVREVIEW.COM

This theme is adapted from Free-CSS-Templates.com and the cool thing about it is that I didn’t need to change ANY of the underlying store code to get it to work. I only had to edit two files: the stylesheet and a layout file.

What this means is that, if you don’t like the themes that come with the mashup store, you should be easily able to make or adapt your own - without worrying about delving into the programming portions of the code.

If you haven’t yet signed up for an early-bird alert for when the Affiliate Mashup Store becomes available, click here to do so - and be in with the chance of an inner-circle pre-launch discount.