I started up a Wordpress site at the beginning of March, Online Shopping Network. It's still a little rough around the edges, but I have noticed that the number of clicks that I show in my associate account has increased significantly. Sales, on the other hand, have not increased yet. Just wanted to share it. Thanks!
Wow, that's pretty impressive. Are you using an API? How are you pulling that data from Amazon? I tried using their RSS feeds but the results were terrible. Searching for "Toyota" brought back a Dr. Suess Book. WTF? I took Wordpress, threw in some eBay RSS feeds, and made something I like to call The Poor Mans Build A Niche Store - should check it out
Howdy. Well, to be honest, I'm using Amazon's RSS feeds. I'm not using all of them, and I wouldn't recommend using all of them because the Wordpress database would grow -- fast and furious. I'm juggling a lot of wordpress plugins to make this happen, most notably would be the FeedWordPress plugin. This little plugin is useful because it grabs and posts RSS feeds found on other sites. The implications of this would stretch beyond Amazon's product feeds, I would imagine. Rather than specifying category product feeds, one could use RSS products feeds with specific tags, and these tags would reflect the niche the general wordpress blog. As far as the template goes, I'm using Revolution Pro Media, which is a paid Wordpress template. Now the tricky (and expensive) part of my particular integration was to pull images from Amazon.com and embed them into the blog post itself on the frontpage. And the other expensive part of this was to manipulate the FlickrRss plugin to grab images from Amazon.com instead of from Flickr.
I had this script coded for me over at Scriptlance; and the script I'm using is custom made for the paid template that I'm using. While I wouldn't mind selling off copies (10 copies @ $55?) of the script that was coded for me in order to recoup the cost of development ($550), I don't think that I could offer support for it, and I'm definitely not smart enough to offer it as a stand-alone WP Plugin.
Nite - how/where did you find your Amazon RSS feeds? Maybe I was looking in the wrong place?? Can you provide the direct URL?
Ok, basically, I gathered up all of Amazon's product feeds, and placed them in the "About" section of my site. [Edit] Well, I shouldn't say ALL, because it seems that there an RSS feed for each and every category and sub-category on Amazon. [/Edit] Books http://www.amazon.com/rss/bestsellers/books http://www.amazon.com/rss/new-releases/books http://www.amazon.com/rss/most-gifted/books http://www.amazon.com/rss/most-wished-for/books http://www.amazon.com/rss/movers-and-shakers/books When you browse the "Books" section, you'll see (in the upper-left-hand corner) the following URLs Bestellers New Releases Most Gifted Most Wished For Movers and Shakers Following each of those will lead you to the re-organized feed, and if you're using FireFox, you'll see the RSS icon appear. Click that icon, and there you go.
aaahh, nice. Then how do you go about inserting your amazon associate ID? Or - what's the "format" I should say?
XXXXX = AFFILIATE TAG. YY = Number of items to be returned. Ok, http://www.amazon.com/rss/bestsellers/books?tag=XXXXX-20 . And you can control the # of items in the feed by adding &num=YY So, if you want a feed to return 25 items : http://www.amazon.com/rss/bestsellers/books?tag=XXXXX-20&num=25
On a sidenote, I wouldn't trust any other site to "GENERATE" my affiliate rss feeds. It would be easy enough for them to randomly insert their own affiliate tag instead of mine. Do it yourself, that way, you can trust all of the work you can do. If any people have found this useful, then please social bookmark me.
Oh wow - now that's hot. You're awesome I dunno what the heck I was doing when I tried implementing amazon feeds. +REP for you! thanks!