Archive for the 'Niche Sites' Category
One of my recent projects has been Twitopolis.com. I actually started this site some time ago but then shelved it for other stuff.
Well, I dusted it off, put a UI on it and got it up and running. As you can probably guess from the name it is a Twitter based site. With a community theme, it uses tags, via the hashtag, to organize public tweets into various categories.
So if you want to see whether you want to see what people think about movies, politics, sports, weddings, school, or whatever, they are all there.
You can even respond to a tweet directly from the site. If the site gets some traction I think I will add the ability for a user to customize the site, so that it only show the categories they are interested in.
Yes it has been a while since I posted about TUNS, but it is not dead 
I’ve recently updated it with the new eBay category numbers and it also now works on subdomains. You can see an example of this at Scrapbooking.NicheStoreMall.com.
I forgot to post about my first check, which was a whopping $87. However today I got my second check and this one is a bit nicer at $206.63. If I could only double my earnings month over month I’ll be rich in no time!
The majority of this check came from one of my eBay sites created off of my niche store builder software. I’m in the process of finishing up converting my old BANS sites to my new software and upgrading my other sites as well to use the new eBay Partner Network setup. Then it will be to find a bunch of new niches and working on prettying up the exiting ones to hopefully get some more sales.
In any event, it is encouraging
With eBay moving to their own inhouse affiliate program, I was almost dreading the changes to TUNS for it. However, like the good developer that I am :), most of the config stuff was external to the code and making the change over was pretty easy. I just took to long to get around to it honestly. The hard part however will be converting over my existing stores, but I have some free time this weekend so maybe I can knock those out without too much trouble.
Since I started the beta testing program, I’ve made 19 updates to date and things are moving along nicely. I plan on having another big update tomorrow with an eye to launching in a couple weeks with a version 1.0.
I’ve already completed the features for version 1.0 so I feel good about that. So I just need to polish it off, improve a few things here and there and unleash it upon the net
I recently wrote about eBay’s CEO leaving and how that might affect you. I opined that I didn’t think it would affect affiliates too much, and according to an article on TechCrunch, it looks like I was correct. The article takes a closer look at the fee structure change and it looks like an according to a quote from the AP,
selling a purse at auction for $25 would have cost the seller $1.91, including 60 cents for listing the item plus eBay’s commission of $1.31. Under the new structure, the seller would pay $2.74, including 55 cents to list the item plus a higher commission of $2.19.
More Commission Is Good!
So while eBay sellers may not be all that happy, it works out quite well for the rest of us. Looks like my timing for getting into the eBay niche store business is a good thing.
I’ve pretty much wrapped up the major features for my niche store builder. I’ve built out the first two layouts and will do a couple more before open testing begins.
Speaking of Layouts
One feature that I decided to build in with regards to layouts is theming. The first set of layouts will have 4-6 themes to choose from. These first themes are basically just color variations on the say layout, but you can see the benefit. By simply changing the CSS file you can create a whole new theme for a given layout. I will also be including the Photoshop PSD files that I used for each theme to make customizing them even easier. If you don’t have Photoshop or some other software that can’t read PSD files, the graphics are exported into PNG format which is also easily customizable. You can thank a beta tester for that request
Right now the there themes for blue, brown, gray and green. If there are any color requests get them in now!
I’m going to build one or two stores myself before letting the beta testers loose with it. So at the moment I’m targeting next Monday for beta testing. I still have some slots available if you are interested. Let me know before I make an announcement on some forums.
Last night I completed a big development milestone, moving me even closer to a beta release, perhaps closer than I had originally anticipated. I will be doing some more testing, on my own sites, either this weekend or early next week, but so far it is looking pretty good.
What’s Next?
With this milestone met I have one other rather important feature to implement, then I will be focusing on building some templates. As I’ve mentioned before, I will probably start with a half dozen or so, but depending on how quickly that goes I might make some more before the beta testing proceeds.
The title says it all really. I’ve spent the last two days getting some core admin functionality in place. It wasn’t overly difficult, just a little time consuming. I also got my second site up and running. While the site itself isn’t spectacular in that it is a lot like the UsedMacMini.com site, it did allow me to test out the install process that I mentioned I worked on. With the exception of me forgetting to add some SQL for the database, it went flawlessly.
In putting together the second site I have noticed a few things that I forgot about, so I’ll have to address those pretty soon before I’m ready for other to beta test this thing. Speaking of which, a few people have already volunteered to test for me which is great! If you want to be included, I’m adding a simple contact form at the bottom of this post. Just drop me a note and I’ll add you to the list. I would expect another week or maybe two before it is ready for someone to try out.
While I’m going to try to make it as production ready as possible, there might be some rough edges that I’ve yet to smooth out. With that in mind, it would be helpful for me and less frustrating for you, if you have some experience in installing other software packages. It could blogs, store builders of some sort or other, or anything else like that. It would help with troubleshooting. Just in case
The last two nights have been pretty productive for me with my niche store software. I first implemented RSS feeds which is a nice feature to have. Oh yea, it will also work for search results
You can see an example on my first site,
UsedMacMini.com. Notice the gray RSS logo/button. Last night I worked on the install process which is pretty much complete now, so that is covered and naturally greatly eases things.
While working last night I uncovered a big goof on my part. Seems the way I was including the CJ ID was incorrect, so nothing was getting tracked in commission junction. Oops! No tracking, no commission! So I got that fixed and verified by checking CJ this morning that I had some clicks on the new site. Glad I found that one early!
How did I know?
How was I aware that clicks were even happening in the first place? Ah yes, I have added a feature that tracks how many clicks are going to the item detail page and how many are going from the item detail page off to ebay via the “place bid” link. This is far better than the hack I had to do for click tracking in BANS, and it happens under the covers, no javascript for this one. It tracks the item clicked by item ID and title, and the time the click happened, as well as the IP address.
What’s next?
Well I still have some admin features to work on. I need to implement a couple and clean up a few others. Hopefully sometime this weekend I’ll get most of them finished. Once I finish those I will work on building out the templates, which shouldn’t take too long.
I also need to work on a report page for that cool click tracking feature I mentioned above. At the moment I just go directly to the db through phpMyAdmin to look at it, but that isn’t user friendly.
Stay tuned for more. And if you want to be added to the beta testers list let me know!
