HugePedlar’s Blog

Well I’ve been working on it for some time now, and it should be ready for launch in a week or two, so here’s a preview of my Affiliate Mashup Store:

You’ll notice the homepage defaults to a video page, which is one of the options available (you can set any page to be the homepage) and is more appropriate than a list of products in this instance.

If you like what you see and you want to get in on the launch early, head over to AffiliateMashupStore.com to register and download a free ‘lite’ version to play with while you wait.

I thought I’d give a little update on my forthcoming Affiliate Mashup Store.

So far I’ve got the admin panel up and running with tools to create and edit Category links within the mashup site, set up Default Catalogues and Country-specific catalogues, and create and edit Custom Pages (with a simple form for html input).

I’ve also updated the layout with a wider right-hand Content Box area, with the ability to add search boxes and external RSS feeds for extra dynamic content. Oh, and the site will generate its own RSS feeds for any page with products on it, including search results.

I’ve made it really easy to add and edit new themes too, because I’m not much of a graphic designer so I wanted to make it as simple as possible for people to customise their own layouts. All you have to do is copy an existing theme’s folder, rename it and edit the style sheet and layout file (and any graphics you want to change). The new theme will automatically be added to the admin panel for selection.

I’m also working on some extras like Youtube and eBay integration, just to add even more value and diverse content to your mashup stores.

I’m still evaluating a price-point for the whole package, but it’s likely to be at least $200. This will include lifetime updates and an unlimited site licence so you can create as many mashup stores as you want.

Loads of people have already signed up to the waiting list in the last couple of weeks, which is great. They’ll be among the first to know when the mashup store product is released for sale and I’ve decided that a proportion of people on the list will also be offered the chance to buy at a significant discount. So if you haven’t signed up yet, click here to do so and grab a bargain before the rush starts.

I’ll probably be selling the mashup store package through PayDotCom which means there’ll be an opportunity for people to become affiliates of the Affiliate Mashup Store program. If you have a blog or list and you think you can drive significant traffic let me know and we can work out an appropriate commission rate.

I’ll be posting some screenshots and maybe video in the next few days. A tentative release date is some time around the middle of March, depending on how the beta testing goes, so stay tuned!

Yes, that’s right. I’m releasing a ‘lite’ version of my own affiliate mashup store script for anyone to download and use.

AffiliateMashupStore.com!

Loads of people have asked me if I could make them a custom mashup store. While my skills aren’t quite up to the level of producing from a design spec, I’m quite confident I can build a pre-packaged affiliate store website application.

So I’m offering a free sample script for download. If you use it and like it, perhaps you’ll be interested in purchasing the full version when it becomes available.

Why do I need an Affiliate Mashup Store?

Because you can promote thousands of products at the flick of a switch. While your competitors are busy writing sales pages for dozens of individual affiliate products, you’re churning out dozens of massive websites with thousands of affiliate products all automatically optimised with their own keywords.

To get a better idea of what a mashup store is and how to promote it, click here and read ‘How to Rock Out with an Affiliate Mashup’.

To find out more about the giveaway, to download the script, and to try out a demo site, CLICK HERE. And let me know how you get on.

P.S. Get your free eBay Youtube Adsense Mashup as well. Plus keep informed of new posts by subscribing (use the box on the top right of this page).

Sweet! I’ve got BuyJewelleryOnline.com into 4th place on Google for the keyword valentine’s day necklaces, which I noticed by virtue of Google Analytics. And by doing a little searching of my own I’m number one for valentine’s day earrings!

It’s quite a relief actually, since the site had been doing pretty poorly in search engine rankings for the last couple of weeks. I think perhaps the last owner of the domain name may have adversely affected its pagerank, as it used to be one of those directory landing page sites with no value and some spammy backlinks.

I’ve been getting a fair bit of traffic from the social networks like digg, squidoo and scribd, but most of that is US traffic. I should probably make a US version of the site but it would be a lot of effort - trouble is my database has to be very broad because it’s hard to specify a datafeed with ‘jewellery’ as a keyword - it just doesn’t work for product names. Hence why there are still things like chainsaws in the UK site. I really should sort that out one day.

Been chatting with my good friend Mr Flower today on Skype about BuyJewelleryOnline.com and using datafeeds in niches. He seemed unimpressed that searching for chains, for example, returned such results as chainsaws and bicycle locks. I explained it was still a work in progress.

Anyway, he somehow managed to convince me that having a store full of coloured items was a good idea, and I ended up buying the domain name BuySomethingPink.com so now it looks like I’m going to be marketing to 12 year old girls and gay men (essentially the same demographic). How much farther can I fall?

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…