Richandzhaoyans Business Update

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Location: Stroud, Glos, United Kingdom

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

A few more Amazon affilitate sites

Ok, not a lot to report. I have been working on the amazon affiliate script and have now managed to rework it into a state that I can quickly and easily create a new amazon affiliate site. I have kind of reverse engineered it from a nice css layout to a rather clunky table layout, which would probably have the original creator screaming but which I can work with easier. Its the osCommerce background I am afraid.... ;) I have added a news feed to the site, based on keywords and adsense to the product pages.

The new sites are www.cookwareandsaucepans.com, www.burnersandstoves.com and www.moremotorcycleparts.com. A little info on the three sites:-

Cookware and Saucepans - We sell a pretty good amount of cookware on our uk oscommerce site. The nice thing about it is that if you can sell a cookware set it is a reasonably high value sale which should lead to a reasonable bit of commission and it is a fairly good all year round seller - although sales do drop off a bit in the summer.

Burners and Stoves - A bit of a pot shot this one. We have only just added a large range of fireside accessories to our osC site so I cant really comment on how they might sell online. We have sold a fair few companion sets and the odd fire grate before from wholesaler listings but I reckon we should do ok now we have a major supplier listed on the our site. Its obviously a seasonal sale but again it is reasonable value goods so would lead to good commission if any sales are made.

Motorcycle Parts - Easy one this... I just like motorcycles! So why not try out selling motorcycle parts through amazon.

Thats it for now. No earnings of any consequence to report as yet but then its only been a few weeks and still waiting for the search engines to give me any chance. Whether or not this will happen in the future only time will tell ;)

I think I may try and start a couple of uk amazon affiliate sites now. Could link between the uk and us sites then which may help the search engines. Might have to go with a few stores on subdomains as well for the time being - cheaper option till I can see any sign of returns. ;)

Friday, October 17, 2008

Fancy Dress Costumes!

So... nearly another month gone buy.... Guess I am never going to be a regular blogger - lol

Believe it or not, I have been slaving away nearly every night on the reincarnation of my affiliate dream Not a great deal to show for it on the surface. In fact just the one site, uploaded tonight.

Unfortunately its going to be too late for halloween this year but the site is another amazon associate site and its the place to buy fancy dress costumes online.

Given that I launched the pests and insects site last month, why has it taken me this long to launch another, almost similar shopping site???

Well the technical answer is that I couldnt be doing with the css layout of the template store, so I have modded it to a more tabulated layout.... maybe not very purist, but it will make it easier for me to add to/modify in the future. I also added a php rss feed - not a huge task you would have thought.... I certainly didnt think so, but on a limited time/day scale it kind of escalated. :;

There are plenty of javascript news feed options available and sites that will provide you with a piece of script that will link through to there news feed, with there link attached of course..... I wanted a simple news parser that would let me submit keywords and then show as html on my site. The answer was magpie and yahoo..... It seems to work well on the site but how the search engines will view it remains to be seen. Anyhow, it was easy enough to setup bar the usual unforseen problems.... In this case, if a news description conatainesd a long url it screwed up my tables, leading me to suddenly need to learn about how to wrap text within a table.... another few hours wasted.

To be honest, I think my downfall in the whole affiliate marketing method of earning money is down going to be down the fact that I prefer to be tinkering with the code rather than churning out the sites.... For sure, one site a month means that if we work on the old adage of $1/day/site means that I will need 100 sites to give any decent income, at the current rate, its gonna take me at least 100 months (8 years?) to get to that level.... lol

Ahh well, it is just a hobby after all....

I got a few things to sort out now on the current sites and I will post about earnings, but not till they reach a slightly more respecatble/break even level... :;

In the mean time, for all your halloween costumes please give buyfancycostumes.com a look - thanks