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.
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.
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 $30 per copy (though you can make as many sites from it as you want).
The reason I’m charging a small sum for this is for a couple of reasons. 1) I’ve had dozens of people telling me I’m missing out by not charging for the original ebayoutube mashup script, and 2) this one is significantly more evolved and robust than the first. I don’t want to start charging for the free script, so I figure charging for ‘version 2.0′ is the next best thing.
But you CAN still get it for free… when you buy the soon-to-be-released Affiliate Mashup Store. I’ll be making an announcement regarding the release date for this premium affiliate mashup script soon, but I’ll say right now that I’ll be giving away a couple of extra scripts with it in the first week of release - this new mashup script being one of them.
I’ve recently updated my homepage to better reflect my online presence. It now mostly consists of a bunch of RSS feeds for the sites I interact with.
It turns out that rolling your own RSS reader is really simple, so long as you have PHP5 with the handy ‘SimpleXML’ extension.
I’ve written a quick little function you can plug into any webpage to grab an RSS feed and display it. The function takes two parameters, the URL of the feed and the number of items you want to display. It puts each news item in its own div so you can format it how you want with a little CSS.
Here’s the function listed below. It’s fully commented, so you can just paste it into a page of your own (or use an php ‘include’ to add it) and call it whenever you need to display a feed.
<?php
//Call this function using the following example:
//$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.
Since eBay has kicked Commission Junction to the kerb and set up their own affiliate programme I’ve had to update my ebayoutube mashup script.
I figured while I was at it I might as well change a few other things too, so I’ve added a Disclaimer, TOS and Privacy page to help with Google’s Quality Score, and I’ve revamped the layout to make it a little cleaner.
If you want to download the new script in its entirety just use the opt-in form below.
If you’re upgrading from a previous version then you should be able to do it by uploading everything except your adsense .inc files and redoing your changeme.php - but I recommend making a backup of your old site first.
I’ve been dabbling in PPC (pay per click) marketing recently, and to be honest it’s pretty hit and miss. Some offers convert like crazy for a few days, others are DOA.
But one category that’s turning out to give a consistent return is porn, specifically free porn.
As we all know, porn makes the internet go round. The quest for increased bandwidth, multimedia websites, streaming video, webcams, ecommerce… it’s all been pioneered by the porn industry.
The reason? Because it can be outrageously profitable.
Think about it. What is the most successful type of marketing? The kind that plays on your emotions. People ultimately make choices based on their emotions, not on rationality. You’ll see emotive content on every advert on TV these days.
And what could be more emotional than porn? Let’s face it, it’s hardly an intellectual subject. Raw emotion dominates, at least for the first few minutes.
Even better than porn is free porn, because who in their right mind would turn that down?
So for the last week or so I’ve been promoting free porn, courtesy of cecash.com - they have an excellent CPA offer which pays $1.50 per email submit for a free magazine subscription. It’s an international offer too, so you can target loads of traffic.
But the porn industry is extremely competitive to say the least. So how can I get the traffic? Well PPC is easy and quick, but it can be bloody expensive. The trick is naturally to target keyphrases with low competition and funnel your traffic through a high-converting landing page.
Oh yeah, sounds easy doesn’t it. Well it turns out it is.
One thing I’ve found with free offers is that people don’t believe them. Why would you offer something for free unless there is a catch?
But! Make someone complete a task and offer the free product as a reward and they’ll feel like they’ve earnt it. It’s a very simple technique but one that really works.
So I’ve set up a series of polls asking people to vote on a subject. Then as a reward for voting they get presented with the free porn offer (this actually works with any industry, but particularly well with porn). I actually have a custom-developed poll script that can churn out a new poll in less than a minute, complete with Quality Score -optimised keyword content, which makes the whole process a breeze.
Now you can set up any kind of poll you like, it doesn’t need to be clever or special. It’s just a lever to help convert your traffic. One of my polls, for example, has a rather ambiguous picture of a section of female anatomy. The question is ‘Tits or Ass?’, and you have to guess which it is.
Once you’ve got a bunch of polls you just need to set up some PPC campaigns with appropriate keywords and watch the traffic come in.
One thing I like to do to improve email confirms is to iframe the CPA offer underneath a section of my own text explaining exactly what the user needs to do. So rather than say ‘Submit your email below for free porn’, I’ll say ‘Submit your email, click the confirmation link in the email you get sent, then log into the members area’. It helps to make it as simple as possible.
And that’s all there is to it. Free porn for them, a healthy profit for you. Just keep a damn close eye on your PPC campaigns, because profits can still be hit and miss.
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.
However, Affiliate Future has changed their members area to display a range of new account tools (personally I don’t like it much, but whatever). This means the instructions in the guide are a little out of date.
So I’ve made a little video to walk you through how to sign up with a new merchant. I don’t have Camtasia or any other decent screencapture software, so you’ll have to put up with my shaky camerawork. Here it is:
I used Viddler because you can annotate your videos, which is really, really cool.
I’m offering a $100 prize, plus a FREE copy of the mashup store (worth $199), plus a JV affiliate rate of $100 per sale (normal affiliate rate $50) for customers you send to the page.
Full details of the competition can be found in this forum post.
One of the simplest ways to sell an ebook is doing it through eBay.
The problem is the eBay marketplace is pretty saturated with ebooks - especially the make-money-online ones. So how do you stand out from the crowd?
Here’s what I did. I used to sell an ebook on eBay for a while last year. I found the best way to get exposure was to get onto the Pulse.
What’s eBay Pulse? It’s a front page list of current hot products. The list is compiled from products with the most ‘watchers’ - that is, people who have added the item to their watchlist.
The Pulse is divided into categories just the rest of the marketplace. Within the Information Products / How-to Guides section it’s possible to get onto the Pulse with around 20 watchers.
I used two methods to get people to add my item to their watchlist.
First, I added a prominent link to my listing inviting people to watch my item. Simple enough. Here’s the format of the url I used (on the UK site):
The XXXs represent the item number. I also added that url as a link for all the pictures in my listing. People love to click pics, so when they did it automatically added the item to their watchlist.
The second method involved offsite promotion. I used to advertise online survey sites using free online classifieds. The classified ads would direct people to my own site where I listed banners for a number of survey sites.
Pretty standard, but I also took advantage of the traffic (around 100 visitors a day) by displaying a nice bold link saying “Click Here to find out how I quit my job!”.
The link of course sent them to my item listing on eBay and automatically added the item to their watchlist.
On a ten day listing that was enough to get the item on eBay Pulse within about three days. After that the views soared and I usually sold around 15 copies a week - enough to make about 50% profit on my listing fees.
Speaking of which, it goes without saying that you need to pay for Featured listing and have a gallery image, bold text and a subtitle - all that stuff, which racks the fees up but without it you’ll be invisible.
The tedious part of this setup is you’ll need to change all your links each time you relist (because the item number changes). I never found a satisfactory way to automate this, but I found the least painful way was to use a php redirect.
I used the url myrandomdomain.com/ebaywatch.php for all the links in my listings, which redirected back to the listing through the add-to-watchlist url. Then I only had to update that one url each time I relisted.
So there you go: Want to sell an ebook on eBay? Get on the Pulse using offsite promotion. It works.
I just got an email from a guy who’s been using the free sample of the Affiliate Mashup Store, saying he’s already made three sales in the last week without even doing any promotion.
Which is pretty awesome.
I’m beginning to wonder if having only 20 copies on offer in the pre-launch tomorrow is enough.
I mean, I don’t want too many people getting it all at once - I’ll be overwhelmed trying to support the product (I want to offer as much help starting up as possible, seeing as it’s essentially a beta test).
On the other hand, I’ve had so many people asking to get it early that I know some of you are gonna be disappointed.
It’s a burden, I know. But I had no idea it was gonna get so popular. I just hope I can live up to the expectations.
In fact, I’ve already encountered a potential problem.
The CJ API, which the mashup uses to populate its catalogues, seems very contrary. A couple of the people testing my script have had trouble getting it to work on their webservers.
This is obviously an issue, since if you can’t create a catalogue the mashup store’s pretty useless!
So I’ve come up with a workaround. If the API doesn’t work on your server, you can run a script on my own website which will create a csv datafile of products for your catalogue. You can then upload this datafile to your own site and create your catalogues that way.
It’s a bit cumbersome so it’s not ideal. I still insist that you try the sample script before purchasing the Affiliate Mashup Store. But if it doesn’t work and you still really want your own mashup store then it may still be possible.
If you’re looking for a webhost which will work with your store, then I can confirm that HostGator has no problems - I use them myself for most of my sites.