HugePedlar’s Blog

I’ll be writing a proper article on this topic soon, but here’s a brief introduction to the topic of bluetooth marketing.

Most mobile phones these days are bluetooth enabled, meaning they can connect to ad-hoc short range wireless networks. Once a bluetooth connection has been established it becomes possible to transfer files from one device to another wirelessly.

With a laptop, a bluetooth dongle and appropriate software, you can go out into the world and transmit files to anyone in range (up to 100 metres).

Imagine going to MacDonalds and blasting out animated gif ads to all the kiddies’ mobile phones advertising a ringtone service. Or negotiating a deal with a local night club to send out ‘free drink’ ads to punters in the pub next door.

In the next article I’ll get into the details of how to set up your own bluespam equipment and how to get started with offline location-based advertising.

OK this is pretty cool, even if I do say so myself.

I’ve written a guide on how to earn money by promoting your own Affiliate Store.

The guide is a PDF file, and it contains affiliate links to my AMS product, which sells for $199.

I’ve created a tool for anyone to ‘rebrand’ the PDF with their own affiliate links. All you have to do is rebrand the PDF and distribute it however you want.

Give it away to your email lists, offer it as an opt-in bonus, share it on Limewire or BitTorrent, whatever.

Then when people click through the links in the PDF to my Affiliate Mashup Store, you’ll get $50 per sale.

Easy as that.

Go get your rebranded PDF guide at http://affiliatemashupstore.com/rebrander

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.

OK here’s an easy way to make bags of cash by giving away a free product: Create some kind of website-based solution, like an autoblog or mashup script, and give it away (or offer to install it) free on the condition that your customer signs up for webhosting with the company of your choice.

This way your customer gets a useful product for the low cost of a monthly hosting fee (typically as low as $4.95 a month) and you get a hefty commission from your affiliated webhost.

Two things to be aware of:

1) You’ll need to be able to track individual purchases of your webhosting offer. You can do this either by giving each customer a unique code to use for their SID or by creating a form getting them to enter their own unique SID which you then automatically incorporate into your affiliate link.

2) You’ll need to consider refunds. Some people might sign up for their webhosting to get your free product and then cancel their subscription. You can either write this off as the cost of doing business, or require them to wait a month or two before delivering on your promise. This is unlikely to work very well for a free product, but might be tolerable if you’re offering a rebate on a product you’re actually selling.

I’m considering using this technique for my Affiliate Mashup Store product. If I sell it for, say, $200 I can offer a rebate of up to 50% if my customers sign up with Hostgator, since they pay a massive $100 commission for new contracts. Since it’s a product which requires webhosting, and the monthly cost of Hostgator packages is very low, it should encourage people to sign up. They save money, I earn the same per sale, and Hostgator gets a new customer. Everybody wins!

Following on from what I wrote yesterday about Facebook ads, I came across a couple of videos about making money from Facebook Applications.

The idea here is to create an app where either your users’ participation is rewarded by a free offer (and your users sign up with a CPA offer) or your app requires ‘points’ to take advantage of extra features (and your users complete CPA offers for points).

It occurs to me that this kind of application would be ideal if combined with current hot trends on the net.

Simply create a generic Facebook app (a voting app, for example) and add a new survey to it whenever you see an appropriate ‘hot trend’ on Google. You’ll be tapping into your audience’s current fascination with the latest celebrity topic instantly. And the very nature of Facebook means your app has a strong chance of going viral. All for free.

What we need - those of us who create online stores and product comparison websites - is an open review database.

What do I mean by that? I’ll try to explain.

When I create an online store I have a database full of products. Let’s say TVs. My database contains all the details from the retailer, such as Name, Description, Price, Offer price, Picture, etc.

I can do a lot with that. I can display them nicely on my pages. I can rate them by how popular they are (how many clicks they receive).

All this is great, but it lacks a certain amount of user feedback. I might have thousands of products on my new site when I set it up, but there’s nothing to tell my customers what other people think about them.

So I could add functionality that lets people write a review of a particular product. Then others can see the review, rate it’s usefulness, add their own, and so on. Gradually my store gains value and trustworthiness in the eyes of its visitors as people contribute their reviews.

But I’m lazy and impatient. I want all my products to have customer reviews right now, as soon as I publish the website. I don’t want to start with nothing and wait around for the site to become popular.

What I need, just like the product feeds that give me my ‘inventory’, is a database of customer reviews.

The database would be hosted somewhere (somewhere big and reliable, ideally) and allow anyone with a website to interface with it and upload their own customers’ reviews of the products on their site. Likewise, it would allow anyone with a website to access a feed of existing reviews for their own products.

Now with TVs this would be easy. There are a finite number of TVs in existence, and many shopping comparison sites essentially display the same products. Would it not be useful to have a public (or semi-public) database of customer reviews which matched a review with a TV (either by the TV’s name or SKU or some reliable identifier)?

So now you could create an online shopping store with thousands of products and thousands of customer reviews, all ready to go live in a few minutes.

Of course, you say. TVs are easy. But what about obscure items like, I don’t know, dog blankets or chocolate kettles? Simple. As well as having an open feed to grab reviews from, the database can accept new reviews from any site capable of interfacing with it (as I mentioned). Sure, your chocolate kettle site might not have any reviews to grab initially, but once you’ve uploaded your customers’ reviews to the database they’re there for anyone else to use - so the next time you create a website with obscure products there’s a chance someone else has uploaded at least a few suitable reviews for you to grab.

Eventually, of course, if enough website owners use it, the database will grow to encompass every product on the market. And then your next website will come complete with instant trust.

So the only question left is, of course…

Who’s going to build it?

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?

So here’s an idea which I will try to implement this week:

1) Obtain RSS feed of Google’s hourly Hot Trends

2) Grab the first two or three

3) Search Google News, or Blog Search for content on the above hot trends

4) Post resulting topics to a set of autoblogs (different blog each hour)

5) Monetize… PROFIT!

Should be simple enough to code with PHP and a crontab entry. Any bright ideas on monetizing (apart from Adsense of course)?