review

Going on from my last post, there are still some slots left for the brand spanking new price comparison service.

In this first phase, I’m only taking 80 people and then closing it off.

When it re-opens, the price will double. This trial service is a one month one dollar trial.

There’s also a very special bonus for those people canny enough to sign up in this phase.

This is going to blow your socks off, so close the door and sit down.

The next phase will be to offer a site builder as part of your membership.

I’ll let that sink in.

…

…

This will mean you’ll be able to choose a site template, paste in your keywords and some text, set up your comparisons, and the site builder will build a fully SEO’d site for you and FTP it to your domain.

This will dramatically cut the time it takes you to build an IPK site. In fact my estimate is you could sit down, do the market and keyword research, register a domain, source the content, edit your graphics and have your site live in about 60 minutes.

And if I know Paul, he’ll be able to do something about the graphics for you too. He’s been doing some real time graphics manipulation in PHP recently, so I’m sure this is a distinct possibility.

So… As an extra sweetener for the price comparison service, when you sign up to this first phase now, you’ll get the site builder thrown in for free when we build it.

That’s what’s called a clincher I think.

A warning though.

We’re only going to take 80 people in this first wave.

You’ll be getting second “dibs” at it – the first people are already signed up and enjoying the service.

After a few hours of you reading this blog post, I’ll be sending emails out to my other mailing lists until the few remaining spots are filled.

We figure we can just about handle that amount of people in this first wave and be able to deal with any issues that arise as we go.

Once you’re logged in you can read about how it works, and there’s a video or two to follow.

We’re limiting the initial phase at 50% off (forever) to just 80 people. You’ll kick yourself if you miss this.

You can find out all the details and subscribe for a one dollar one month trial here:-

http://www.vendiva.com/subscribe-price-comparisons.php

-Frank Haywood

P.S. If you haven’t already grabbed it, you can get Info Product Killer by going here and then entering promo code FHW777 to get IPK at $79 instead of $147.

We now have the price comparison service working with Link Share which is a major US affiliate network like Affiliate Window is for the UK.

We’ve also included the ability to manually add a comparison and affiliate link which is a good stop gap until we get more affiliate networks added. However, the prices won’t automatically update of course, so you’ll have to keep an eye on them if you’re that bothered about it.

I say that because the whole point of this exercise is to steer buyers towards Amazon.

Typically, Amazon have the lowest price including shipping. They will almost always make the sale – Craig quotes a figure of 80% – in fact it’s the good old 80-20 rule if you think about it.

So if you have a couple of manual prices and links for a smaller supplier that are out of date… I say, so what? It’s extremely likely that the visitor to your IPK site is going to click on the lowest price which is almost always Amazon.

If they click any of the other links in curiousity, then they’re going to get cookied, and if they buy from there, great! If not, it will likely be from Amazon, which is where we really want people to go.

Okay?

That means we now have Amazon US and UK, Affiliate Window, Link Share, and the ability to add affiliate links / comparison manually.

The Affiliate Window API (Application Programmers Interface) has also let us add the ability for you to select merchants who don’t stock the item, but who may well do in the future – it’s your call whether you use this or not. In all, the Affiliate Window API is so far the best we’ve come across and is very well thought out.

However, there’s always a few problems isn’t there?

We’ve written to Trade Doubler (UK and US) to ask for details of their API. Apparently they have one, but we can’t find it. We can’t do anything with them until we hear back.

The Link Share API seems to have an intermittent random glitch. Sometimes it works perfectly, sometimes it returns zero results for the same search. We cache everything returned in any search for 12 hours, but it’s not ideal.

It also has a habit of returning bad results with good. So we’ll sometimes get details of merchants supposedly stocking products, but if you click through there’s either no stock or no details of the product on the merchants site.

Not a big deal, but NOT right. There’s not much we can do about dealing with that at our end, we have to rely on the data that Link Share send us.

We’re going to write to them to ask what’s going on, if Paul hasn’t already beaten me and done it.

As we go along and we find new affiliate networks and they have (hopefully working) APIs, we’ll add them to the service.

Just bring it up in the forum.

And as I’ve mentioned the forum, I’m hoping to supply you with the details of that later today.

Just one thing though – it’s NOT a support forum. Any support requests will be closed and / or deleted. The forum is for discussion and sharing and raising issues. I know there’s a fine line between raising an issue and making a support request, and I’ll see if I can’t come up with some guide lines.

Tomorrow, we’ll open the Price Comparison service.

We think it’s as ready as it will ever be, but we have to do a few bits and pieces first to make the site presentable. We’ll do that today and open the doors tomorrow.

Remember I said the other day that it’s a one dollar one month trial. After the first month, the price goes up to the regular price, but you’ll quickly realise it’s worth every penny once you start using it.

At the moment, all prices are 50% off.

It’s a good deal.

More information later today and then tomorrow the service is live.

-Frank Haywood

P.S. If you haven’t already grabbed it, you can get Info Product Killer by going here and then entering promo code FHW777 to get IPK at $79 instead of $147.

It’s been exactly one calendar month since I put up the jumperoo site.

I’m very pleased to say that my recent prediction of hitting the £50 in commissions mark after the first month has been hit. It was looking a bit shaky since Saturday with no commissions earned Sunday or Monday, but then 3 sales yesterday brought in £9.38 and pushed the final total to £51.10 ($75.49).

To say I’m thrilled and very pleased with that is an understatement.

As I’ve said before, I don’t believe the traffic for this product is exceptional. It’s not really a Christmas toy as such and it’s unlikely that a 6 month old baby would be bugging it’s parents to buy one…

I believe these are fairly typical results for any product when everything is set up properly, but only time will tell.

Other things then now, all associated with IPK. BTW, we’ve been working VERY hard getting this all sorted for you.

#1 – An IPK Working Group

I’ve had a few people ask me about setting up a forum. The way I see it is, for every 1 person that speaks up, there’s another 99 who haven’t, but are interested in the same thing.

I would be more than pleased to find 30 people who are interested in contributing in the way of sharing their results, tips, templates, PSDs, and even back links.

That last one is quite important I believe and to give each other a helping hand, I think it would be a good idea to give a few links on each site to other IPK users. I’m not sure about the best mechanism to do this yet, but I’ll have a think about it.

So, I’ve decided to set up a working group if I can get enough interest. If you want me to do this, then please “vote” by clicking the link at the end of this post and signing up.

To help this along, today I’ll be starting the process of contacting everyone who bought IPK via my affiliate link. I’ve downloaded the details from ClickBank and I’ll be sending out a manual email inviting everyone who’s also interested to “vote” by signing up.

When I feel there’s a decent amount of confirmed interest, I’ll get the ball rolling. 😉

I’ll also use that mailing list to let you know as soon as the Price Comparison is completely working.

And on that topic, I’ll just answer a few things now that came up in the lost blog post.

#2 – Price Comparison Trial

It’s not a free trial. 🙂

Okay it effectively is as it’s going to cost just $1.00 for the first month, and you can choose which of three plans you want to go with.

I apologise if it sounded like a free trial I was offering. I was careful not to say free and I think someone else did and the wrong impression was made. Now corrected.

But the good news is it will be half price for all the early takers. Make sure you choose the program you think will suit you best depending on how seriously you’re going to pursue the IPK methods.

Sadly, some people only put up a few sites and then drift off to do something else.

Like many income streams, you need to treat putting up your IPK sites as a JOB. You have to imagine there’s a big fire-breathing boss sitting a little way away from you and he expects you to put up a site a day. He’ll relax if you can put up two sites a day – he certainly expects five a week.

But after you’ve put up 50 sites, he’ll leave off a little and you’ll have some breathing space.

That’s the best way of looking at it and the best advice I can give you.

Take it seriously and work at it and you’ll do well. None of this is really hard and it will work out for you as long as you put the time in.

#3 – Other Affiliate Feeds.

At the moment we have Amazon US and UK working plus Affiliate Window (UK based). This is because I’m in the UK…

We looked at getting Trade Doubler up and running, but it’s going to take Paul a little more effort than the first three. This is because Amazon and Affiliate Window have APIs that Paul can use to get product and merchant data as required, in fact he said Affiliate Window’s was excellent.

But Trade Doubler only have a feed and so this is going to take more work and we haven’t yet agreed how we’re going to do it. I said grab their entire database every day, but Paul isn’t so sure we can do that.

I guess the same issue will arise with other affiliate companies who only supply an XML feed. We’ll have to address them all in the same way.

One thing I can guarantee you. Whatever method Paul decides on will be the best possible way of doing it. He’s very thorough and will examine all available methods before opting for the correct one.

As for US affiliate companies, we weren’t sure which ones we should target first. We thought maybe Commission Junction should be next, but we were really waiting for someone to point us in the right direction.

So thanks to Greg R for letting us know that Walmart and Toys R Us use LinkShare for their affiliate scheme. I’ve signed up with LinkShare and we’ll target them together with Trade Doubler as the next feeds we look at. We’ll add others as we go, based on feedback from you.

#4 – WordPress.

Yes the price comparisons should work fine with self-hosted WordPress blogs.

The process works like this.

A) Set up a comparison in the members area and download a snippet of PHP code.
B) FTP the code to your site and create a cron job or run it manually each day.
C) The first time you run it, it will create a snippet of HTML and another snippet of PHP code.
D) Use a PHP include to display the HTML snippet where you want the comparison to appear.

All your affiliate links in the comparison are cloaked and point to your domain rather than the target site.

If you’ve set up a cron job, then each day, the PHP code mentioned in A) and B) will update the HTML in C).

So it should all work with WordPress too, as all you’re doing is embedding a little bit of HTML into your page. The other bits work outside WordPress. At some point I’ll test this out.

#5 – Expansion.

While this system is designed to work with single products and create price comparisons for them, I can’t see any reason why we can’t later expand this into something bigger and give you the ability to create entire auto-generated price comparison sites.

We won’t even start to look at that though until we have a handle on all the various affiliate company feeds. So that will be in the new year some time. 😉

And speaking of the new year, we’ll also be looking at an automated site builder service. Fill in the placeholders, upload your images, fill in the FTP details, and publish. But one step at a time eh?

Finally, that link. If you want to vote for me to set up a working group, click the link below and join the mailing list. When I get enough subscribers to that list, I’ll sort it all out.

Tell your friends if you really want to get this ball rolling. 😉

http://www.vendiva.com/ipk/

-Frank Haywood

Update: I’ve just had a bit of a chuckle to myself as there’s a new PDF in the IPK members area called “IPK Xmas Bonus – Last Minute Shopping Profits”. There on pages 5 & 6 is an example all about the jumperoo.

Is he talking to me? 😉

Yesterday I said I’d let you know how I knew that Toys R Us were selling the jumperoo (one of my target toys) at the same price as Amazon. I didn’t go trawling through lots of sites to find that out, which is what most people end up doing.

For me it was easy.

One of my developer partners, Paul, has been working on and has almost completed a price comparison routine.

We have it working with Amazon UK, Amazon US, and Affiliate Window (AW).

In case you didn’t know (I didn’t until a few days ago), Affiliate Window have a lot (most?) of the big UK toys gifts and gadgets sites on their books. So if you sign up to Affiliate Window, you get access to most of the main sites that are running affiliate schemes.

Toys R Us use Affiliate Window for their affiliate scheme.

So Paul now has a panel working where you enter your affiliate details with Amazon and AW, and then create a data object called a Comparison. You then search for your keyword (in my case jumperoo) and it goes off and searches the merchants who stock products with jumperoo in them.

It then returns the price of each one, and you can then click the ones you’re interested in to add them to your comparison.

Once you’ve added them to your comparison, they’re clickable and have your affiliate link embedded inside them.

You can then add products from another affiliate source. As I said, we currently have Amazon UK, Amazon US and Affiliate Window working. You can also add merchants who don’t stock the item at all and have them show in your comparison, again with your affiliate link embedded to the merchants home page.

So even if a visitor to your site decided to click through to one of the out of stock merchants, you’re still cookieing them, and if they decide to buy something else while on that site, you get to earn a commission for it.

BTW, in that second image, notice that Amazon have now dropped their price by 50p since yesterday. That’s very slick! I reckon amazon must monitor all competitor prices and drop theirs automatically (based on internal rules in their system) to always be the lowest price, even if only by a few pence.

My guess is their system noticed that Toys R Us had dropped their price to match Amazon, so the Amazon system reduced it by a further 50p to remain at the top on price comparison sites. Wow! I can’t imagine for a moment there would be any human intervention there at all given the huge amounts of products Amazon hold.

Anyway…

So the next step is to generate the code to insert on your site to pull the daily changes to prices.

Paul has templated this so that you can create your own template for the snippet of code to match the rest of your site. Isn’t that REALLY cool?

He’s created a default one to use out of the box, and it currently looks like this:-

It’s all very easy to use.

At the moment it’s an almost fully working version and I wanted Paul to let me do a video showing you how it works but he won’t let me do that until he has everything working correctly. He’s nearly there, and as soon as he’s dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s, I’m going to install the comparison code snippet on my jumperoo site and unveil it.

So how important are price comparisons on your IPK site? Or any affiliate site for that matter?

As I said yesterday, I believe they’re absolutely vital.

They earn you trust and they earn you gratitude. You’re saving time and trouble for the person doing the searching for the product, and time is one the thing that most of us don’t have enough of.

So if you can supply useful information on the product, plus a list of locations and prices for people to buy, they’ll trust you and be grateful.

I believe that if someone has had a good experience with one of your IPK sites then they’ll likely be interested in your other sites too. This is where you benefit from having toy suggestions and links to your other sites.

Let’s also not forget the SEO side effect of having changing prices on your site. The search engines will love it, and that little change each day or every few days will register.

Okay, where am I going with this?

In the next day or so when we know it’s all working correctly, I’m going to ask a few people to try the comparison out for themselves as a trial.

Would you like to be one of the triallists?

When it all goes live, the service itself will be a monthly subscription. Your IPK site will more than pay for the subscription so it’s nothing to worry about!

It’s like… er… you need an autoresponder service right? The cost doesn’t matter if it makes you money.

So if your site was making $50 / month and adding price comparisons improved the performance by 50% to $75 / month, and it cost you $5 for the automated comparison, the $5 is irrelevant isn’t it?

Don’t worry, it won’t be $5 per comparison!

You know me. Value for money is what you get.

So if you’re interested in this service (I would be if someone else was offering it to me!) let me know. Leave a comment.

-Frank Haywood