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Some Surprises From Christmas Amazon Ebay Mashups…
I had a few surprising things happen when I created an Amazon Ebay mashup site for Christmas. I posted earlier about Mark’s script to create these sites.
Holiday sites can often do quite well, so I had the idea to make one of these sites for Christmas. I eliminated the Youtube video part, because you never know what videos it will select, and I didn’t want anything weird to show up.
Here’s the site I created: My Holiday Decorations. I created it on the Friday after Thanksgiving. I put a link to it from this site and one other site I have, and bookmarked the main page and some of the subpages in onlywire.
The next day, it only got 3 visitors, but imagine my surprise when, the day after that (Sunday), it got 440 unique visitors and 885 page views! Almost all the traffic was from Google.
For that one day, it earned $6.11 in Adsense. 20 items were ordered from Amazon (I don’t know the commission yet, because the orders have not shipped yet). I did not earn anything from Ebay. Update: Commission from Amazon: $16.80 (for 17 items – 3 items are not yet shipped).
I got so excited that I made two more sites, Favorite Christmas Songs and My Christmas DVDs.
Things fizzled out rapidly, though. I guess most people buy their Christmas decorations on Thanksgiving weekend. By Monday, I only had 213 visitors, 431 page views, and $2.10 in Adsense from the Holiday Decorations site, and it is going downhill from there.
The other two sites are only getting trickles of traffic and one or two clicks.
So what are the lessons to learn from this? I think they are these:
- Holiday sites can be profitable!
- You need to create your Christmas sites well before Thanksgiving.
- Ebay doesn’t do much except make the sites look pretty. The real earnings come from Amazon and Adsense.
- Next year I am going to create more Christmas sites, but I will start them a lot earlier.
- I really should stop messing with these little mashup sites and focus on creating products – it is a lot more lucrative. (But the mashup sites are so quick and fun!
)
By the way, what about Google’s so-called sandbox? This is what people call it when Google does not send traffic to new sites for a period of 3-6 months. Sometimes you can get a lot of traffic for a day or so before the sandbox kicks in. So it is possible that this is what is happening to me. I’m really not sure.
If it is the sandbox that is holding me back, by next year I will be out of the sandbox and the sites will do well.
Anyway, I hope my sharing the results of this little experiment will give you some ideas…
- Pat Doyle
Congratulations! WOW! Thank you so much for sharing your success with us. Please keep us updated!
Thanks, Nathania! I will have to be better prepared next year.
I just saw how Garry Conn did on Thanksgiving weekend: Over $1500 In One Day. Wow!
Thanks for sharing Pat. I need to talk to you sometime about these niche sites.
These little sites seem very fun to do.
I have it on my todo list to finish building one but maybe I should increase ths priority.
I did get the Amazon Ebay mashup code from Mark but getting the ebay keys is tough… got stuck in getting the REST key! Any hints on that ?
Fab, you need to go to http://developer.ebay.com/ to get the REST key. You put that in for $RequestToken. I had some trouble getting signed up for that. The site seemed to be having some problems. For $RequestUserId you put in your Ebay user id. It was all very confusing, but I did get it working.
At least once you have it set up, you can just copy it for other sites.
congrats on the great results pat.
i sometimes find I get a new site high in the search results before getting sent to the sandbox also.
it’s like google ranks it to get some user data on the ctr of your posts then if they aren’t good enough they kick you down.
i always seem to get kicked down though.
Mark, that’s an interesting theory.
Thanks for providing the script. These sites are fun to make.
I believe your ebay links need to be formatted with the rover.ebay.com prefix to get commissions. There is an update for this on 45n5.com in the comments for this mashups.
This would explain eBay.com lagging behind the other affiliate programs on your site.
However, if you were able to recieve any commissions from eBay under your current link please do tell!
Thank you, Online Creator!! You are correct, I got an updated version of the script, and now I get the “rover” URL’s! Do you know what the variable:
$trackingpartnercode=”1″; //what network
is for? I left it at 1. It seems to be working.
Thanks again for letting me know. No wonder I was not getting any commissions!
Hi,
Great article, just curious how the decoration site is doing now that its a year later?
Thanks again for the article.