Potential Wordpress Plugin

[nick-harper]

I have developed a Wordpress plugin which I currently use for myself which will get items from about 2000 - 3000 UK stores with affiliate links and also Amazon UK and eBay.

I have got it down so that there are only 3 variables and a bit of shortcode you need to get these displayed on your page which are:

Keyword
Negative Keywords
Number of Items

The CSS is all set in a file in the plugin so it can be customised to suit the webpage that it is on.

After a conversation with somebody they have said that I should share this either by charging a monthly fee or a profit share where I would take a small % (but would have to figure out how that would work)

Would anybody want to know any more or would find it useful? At the minute it is obviously using my links, my ebay and amazon links etc so in theory it shouldn't be too hard to have a user add their details in Wordpress so that the links are converted to theirs.

An example is here

If people were interested and thought it could be useful I could create a proper API for it with more options such as only showing from certain stores, excluding certain places (ebay, amazon). Other scripts that do it you have to manually add feeds etc whereas with this you would literally just add 1 line of shortcode and my servers would do the hard work.

 

[Retired_Member38]

After a conversation with somebody they have said that I should share this either by charging a monthly fee or a profit share where I would take a small % (but would have to figure out how that would work)

A profit share business model will mean that you only ever get to deal with tiny affiliates making pennies.

There is no way any serious affiliate is going to give you a cut of the money. Coding a Wordpress plugin is relatively easy/cheap in comparison to ranking a site and getting valuable traffic. So for a bigger affiliate, it only makes sense to pay up front and keep all the money.

Why not do both? a free version that has a profit share, and then a paid version without the profit share. The former lets small affiliates use it, and lets everyone test it out. The latter is far more suitable for the big players.

 

[nick-harper]

A profit share business model will mean that you only ever get to deal with tiny affiliates making pennies.

There is no way any serious affiliate is going to give you a cut of the money. Coding a Wordpress plugin is relatively easy/cheap in comparison to ranking a site and getting valuable traffic. So for a bigger affiliate, it only makes sense to pay up front and keep all the money.

Why not do both? a free version that has a profit share, and then a paid version without the profit share. The former lets small affiliates use it, and lets everyone test it out. The latter is far more suitable for the big players.

Yep that would be the way I would do it.

If you don't want to pay monthly then I would get a small % of anything (I would have to find a way of sharing this, whether it is using my link once every 5 clicks or something). Otherwise, people can just pay monthly to use my service and they get all of the money from it.

It is just seeing if people would be interested in this soft of thing to monetise their sites.

 

[Skinner]

There was a similar script a while ago which used to put the authors aff code in about 5-10% of posts it generated. That used to do Amazon only, when generating 100s or 1000s of entries it may work.

I would look at selling it, the affiliate blaster script I bought, was like a one off £20 and included free updates, it was easier for me buy it in than write my own.

Price it low-ish, sell many.

 

[nick-harper]

I think it would need to be monthly as a subscription as it uses my servers so a small monthly payment.

I'll need to think about how it will work in terms of sharing and how people can monetize from it as they will need to be accepted onto programs to earn.

Only way is for me to basically go like skimlinks and pass payment on.

 

[Adam H]

There was a similar script a while ago which used to put the authors aff code in about 5-10% of posts it generated. That used to do Amazon only, when generating 100s or 1000s of entries it may work.
.

If its the same one im thinking of i believe the author of the plugin inserted his own affiliate id for all plans, but because Amazon needed you to sign up to be an affiliate in every country that you wish to promote their used to be alot of excess left over which often landed its self into foreign serps etc.

So although the plugin user may have signed up to the UK amazon if anyone clicked through and was from the US then because the plugin user had chosen not to sign up for the US affiliate program it defaulted to the creators.

I believe this was done across the board as the creator of the plugin had signed up to all of the amazon affiliate programs.

Nice little idea because most amazon affiliates never signed up to them all and there were thousands of people using the plugin ( which was free with the knowledge not everyone would use all programs. )

Pretty sure he made a pretty penny, cant remember what the plugin was called now though.

I normally create amazon stores with : http://codecanyon.net/item/woocommerce-amazon-affiliates-wordpress-plugin/3057503

Basically lets you do what you've described above, search for keyword and import into woocommerce platform like a real shopping cart, The difference obviously being your giving people the option to compare prices and shop at other places not only amazon.

But if you use the above plugin as an example, if you distributed your plugin through somewhere like code canyon then at $33 , over 3000 sales.......... Cool $99,000 might be worth supporting it

 

[nick-harper]

If its the same one im thinking of i believe the author of the plugin inserted his own affiliate id for all plans, but because Amazon needed you to sign up to be an affiliate in every country that you wish to promote their used to be alot of excess left over which often landed its self into foreign serps etc.

So although the plugin user may have signed up to the UK amazon if anyone clicked through and was from the US then because the plugin user had chosen not to sign up for the US affiliate program it defaulted to the creators.

I believe this was done across the board as the creator of the plugin had signed up to all of the amazon affiliate programs.

Nice little idea because most amazon affiliates never signed up to them all and there were thousands of people using the plugin ( which was free with the knowledge not everyone would use all programs. )

Pretty sure he made a pretty penny, cant remember what the plugin was called now though.

I normally create amazon stores with : http://codecanyon.net/item/woocommerce-amazon-affiliates-wordpress-plugin/3057503

Basically lets you do what you've described above, search for keyword and import into woocommerce platform like a real shopping cart, The difference obviously being your giving people the option to compare prices and shop at other places not only amazon.

But if you use the above plugin as an example, if you distributed your plugin through somewhere like code canyon then at $33 , over 3000 sales.......... Cool $99,000 might be worth supporting it

The Amazon thing sounds cheeky but clever!
I'll have a look into it, it isn't just the code it's linking to my servers so they will need an api too.

 

[Adam H]

The Amazon thing sounds cheeky but clever!
I'll have a look into it, it isn't just the code it's linking to my servers so they will need an api too.

Yeah i thought it was clever but the plugin creator made it very clear that he was doing it, because of that most users didnt mind because all they cared about was the country or couple of countries they were physically marketing too, the rest was fare game.

 

[timter51]

You keep mentioning that it runs off your servers, is this critical? I don't think it's a good way to go... I think you'd make your life a hell of a lot easier, attract more customers, and make more money if you sold it as a standalone package. I agree with AdamH on CodeCanyon, if this plugin is as good as you say it is, things catch fire quickly on there.

 

[nick-harper]

It is critical in terms of speed of a query otherwise it would be using web api's for the different networks.

ie if you searched for something it is going to have to go to Affiliate Window's API, Webgains APi, CJ API, Tradedoubler API, Amazon API, eBay API, then sort the data, then display it which could take a fair bit (although it is possible of course).

The code for the plugin just links into an API that will then give the results quickly from one place as the actual servers are constantly updating pricing, stock etc. Then it is across a couple of servers that are always talking to each other in case one of them goes down and to spread the load a bit.

The easiest theorical way with it being a must that it uses my servers is that it will be a monthly payment or some sort of profit share. The simplest way would be to become a sub agency like Skimlinks so they literally just add some shortcode on their website, it shows the items and then I pay them monthly.

 

[timter51]

OK I see what you're saying Nick, but could you offer a "developer" version where people can buy the whole thing, host it themselves and set their affiliate programme profiles and APIs up themselves? Or would you not want to let this out like that?

I used to use Datafeed Studio a lot on my affiliate sites. This did a similar thing to what you are developing except (as the name suggests!) it pulled in affiliate product datafeeds on cronjob (it did also have basic support for Amazon API). It came with a Wordpress plugin which automated site creation to some extent, posted price comparison tables etc. It worked well, I was happy to pay the £300 for the Pro version, it transformed my work flow on a lot of sites. But development and support died off, there were bugs which always annoyed me, and my sites also eventually got killed by Google

I do think there is a good space in the market for a quality solution to this.

 

[nick-harper]

OK I see what you're saying Nick, but could you offer a "developer" version where people can buy the whole thing, host it themselves and set their affiliate programme profiles and APIs up themselves? Or would you not want to let this out like that?

I used to use Datafeed Studio a lot on my affiliate sites. This did a similar thing to what you are developing except (as the name suggests!) it pulled in affiliate product datafeeds on cronjob (it did also have basic support for Amazon API). It came with a Wordpress plugin which automated site creation to some extent, posted price comparison tables etc. It worked well, I was happy to pay the £300 for the Pro version, it transformed my work flow on a lot of sites. But development and support died off, there were bugs which always annoyed me, and my sites also eventually got killed by Google

I do think there is a good space in the market for a quality solution to this.

Did that work with mySQL? It may work for people with only a few products but I found when using 10 million plus products mySQL hung and froze and took ages to search so started using a specialist database that means the people will need probably a dedicated server to run it

In terms of doing it I guess I could do it for them on their server and then give them the script but I am not 100% sure about doing that just yet, way too easy rip off

 

[mally]

Looks and sounds good to me, would like to give it a try