You need to invest alot of time configuring your store, adding products, writing articles and unique descriptions for each of your categories and products. I launched the store last May and started to see some earning within two weeks, mainly due to the fact that i chose a not so competitive niche. From last May up until around October i was probably making around £10 per month and then the Xmas season came.

From October to January i made over £300 with Fresh Store Builder and easily made my money back. Hell i didn’t even do any optimisation to the website, i just left it and hoped for the best. Usually that is the worst thing you can do when launching a website, leaving it alone and not doing a thing on it. Alot of people expect magic to happen when left alone but 9 times out 10 it never happens.

Luckily for me, Fresh Store Builder bought all my Xmas presents and i thank Carey, the creator of the script.

If you have a niche idea or if you have a hobby and want to start an affiliate website, check out Fresh Store Builder.

The first thing that strikes you about FSB is the ease of installation. All I had to do was upload the script folder to my server through FTP and then follow the instructions on the URL which asked me for a few details like store name, categories etc. I’m pretty sure any layman could go about installing this script, though one does require rudimentary knowledge of FTP to get started. However, if you’re still stuck like I was at one point, FSB support will sort you out, or in case you have absolutely no idea, will install the script for you for a small fee!

Having used other similar scripts like Build a Niche Store (BANs), I was quite surprised with original and unique content which FSB requires for all its stores. Though writing this content can be a bit of work, it’s all for the better since it allows your store to be ranked high on Google (sometimes even better than Amazon itself for a particular niche) unlike other store scripts which get branded as ‘thin affiliates’ and are down ranked by Google. If it’s too much work, you could outsource the content writing, which is another useful service FSB offers along with logo creation and script installation. I’ve been burnt by Google on occasion, and the presence of this feature is perhaps one of the biggest selling points for me since Google is a great source of traffic which is otherwise lost with other scripts.

The script itself is very easy to use and offers a degree of customization which is not only comprehensive and deep, but also intuitive. The detailed control panel is unparalleled, offering modification options for nearly everything from adding products manually/automated, creating and editing categories, automating updating of products on a daily basis and editing of the template, so you can get down and dirty with the code itself. Of course, the only flipside to making design changes yourself is the fact that you need some coding experience. However, if you know your way around, the script can be modified endlessly since everything is hosted on your own servers.

Apart from the script itself, the support and community behind the script is fantastic. The private forums accessible on purchase of the script are small but lively with a number of like minded webmasters who use the script. The support team behind FSB is also there to sort out your problems at the drop of a hat, even going as far as logging on to my server to fix a PHP error I had been encountering for a while. The script is also regularly updated for no extra fee, unlike other scripts which are intent on just making sales and do not care about improvements thereafter, FSB is a continually evolving product which has grown leaps and bounds since I first tried it. I heartily recommend it to anyone looking to start an affiliate Amazon store.

Ending this on a cautious note, I would just like to say that though FSB is a great platform to launch a store, you will still need to work on the store in terms of researching the right products and promoting the site. FSB does most of the work for you, but it’s not a magic wand which will cause money to start pouring in right away. The forums and comprehensive guides are great for pointing you in the right direction, but I had to research myself what are the best paying niches and what products actually sell. Buying the script and just setting up a store and adding products will probably not get you any results. After a fair bit of research and site promotion, I’ve been able to pull in on an average $20 profit per day. Without FSB, I’m sure it would have taken me a fair more time and effort to reach where I am today.

Check out my Hair Straightener store called The Hair Straightener Shop where you can buy cheap hair straighteners online!

We worked very closely on the project and Carl Rosekilly wanted a site that had a lot of visual impact, yet retain clarity and purpose. He also wanted some javascript animation that would add dynamics to the site. Working on such a visually strong website always provides me with a fantastic challenge and something that I rise to.

It’s a great feeling when a developer and designer collaborate on a project and discuss the options of what can be achieved.

Carl Rosekilly was more than pleased with the outcome of his site and I have to say I am very proud of it too as it really showcases what I can achieve as a developer.

The site can be viewed here:- www.carlrosekilly.co.uk

Please look out for my site too as Carl Rosekilly is creating the visual for me as a favour of me developing his. So we will be working very closely yet again to produce a fully functioning and accessible website and I am really looking forward to it.

Am I happy with that? Of course I am! That’s around £1800. What will I do with the money? Well what I might do is put it into any future projects I might work on, this sale has made me realise what’s to stop from me trying different niches, getting them good page ranks, high in google, 28k backlinks and then selling them off?

All in all I think the sale of Talk Playstation was fair and I’m very happy with the result.

I’ve had some private offers of $3000 and currently negotiating an offer of $3800. To be honest, I’m not really that fussed on how much the website goes for, I just want it out of my hair.

So far more than 600 people have viewed the auction and 28 people are keeping an eye on it.

I’ll keep you updated.

It’s gaining quite alot of interest, I’ve had a few private offers, one being $3,000 (around £2k?) but I think i’m going to let the auction run. I’ve also been looking at past sites sold on a similar scale to Talk Playstation and they have gone for $4k.

The auction is currently sitting at $600 and I only put the listing on last night, it runs out next Monday/Tuesday night, we’ll see where we are at then.

I’m quite happy with what I’ve achieved and learnt from running the site, the stats are excellent. Here’s some of the highlights:-

• Page Rank 4
• 28k backlinks
• 66.72% of the 45k monthly visits come from Google
• Had a steady income via Adsense

Anyway, we’ll see where we are at next week. I did mention just before Xmas that Talk Playstation is worth around $3.5 to $9.5k.

I’ve been looking at a number of ‘we give an estimate on your site’ websites and a few have come back with some legit looking results and others have come back with some unrealistic results. I got an estimate of around $800,000 once!

Anyway, the three sites I’ve properly looked at are:-

• mywebsiteworth.com
• peekstats.com
• yourwebsitevalue.com

MyWebsiteWorth gave $4,078, Peekstats gave $9,536.36 and YourWebsiteValue gave $3,587. I’m pretty impressed with these results but what is it really worth? No one knows unless I put it up for sale which I’m not prepared to do.

Here are some stats that these evluations go off…

• Alexa Traffic Rank: 245,218
• Compete Rank: 362,353
• QuantCast Rank: 564,615
• Indexed Pages: 6,359
• Backlinks: 32,410

I’ve been look at websites that have been sold for those estimated values above and they have pretty much the same stats. I’ll say it again, it’s not going up for sale. I just found it interesting to know. Try your website.

I use Google Analytics to track my web stats as i find it most reliable and best of all FREE! So, the below stats are from March 08 until December 31st 08.

Visits

• 691,878 Visits
• 1,002,373 Pageviews
• 1.45 Pages/Visit
• 515,945 Absolute Unique Visitors

Browsers and Screen config

• Firefox 312,944 (45.23%)
• Internet Explorer 270,309 (39.07%)

Looks like Firefox is gaining or if not already overtaken Internet Explorer in the browser market share. Here’s an interesting one:-

In third place was the Sony Playstation 3, maybe because it’s a Playstation website? It even beat Apple’s Safari. (Playstation 3 40,081 (5.79%))

• 1024×768 174,817 (25.27%)
• 1280×1024 161,160 (23.29%)
• 1280×800 119,074 (17.21%)

Operating System

• Windows 591,923 (85.55%)
• Macintosh 45,935 (6.64%)
• Playstation 3 40,081 (5.79%)

Countries

• United States 288,173
• United Kingdom 108,060
• Canada 49,060

Top Traffic Sources

• n4g.com (referral) 200,777 (29.02%)
• google (organic) 195,018 (28.19%)
• (direct) ((none)) 126,267 (18.25%)

I’m rather happy with the above stats, i’m hoping the year 2009 will take things to the next level. I’m currently looking at a site re-design as i think it needs one.

Talk Playstation has gone a long way in such a short time, the site currently has around 5 authors working on it, they work brilliantly hard to keep the site up to date.

Anyway, lets wait and see what happens.

I’m just about recovered from jet lag and back in full motion.

I bet your wondering what i’ve been doing with my life recently. In my spare time i try to see my girl friend as much as i can as well as friends. She starts college next week so that will free up some time and plan to use that time to develop this blog a little as it’s been a bit inactive for the past few months, very sorry that.

In a month or two i plan to be more active and possibly write up some good articles that will hopefully drive some traffic here. No idea what i’ll be posting but stay tuned!

This is what it looked like:

As you can see there are quite a lot of errors to take care of. I’ve taken care of them all and i’m just waiting for Google to crawl my site again and i’ll take a look at it again when it has.

I think its important to keep an eye in Google Webmaster Tools because it lets you know if there are any conflicting errors with your site and if you iron out all the errors, chances are you could rank a lot higher than you do now.

I got to 192 subscribers and the goal was 180 while i saw 125,597 (94,808 Absolute Unique Visitors) and the goal was beyond 100k.

This is where i didn’t meet the goal. Although to increase the visitor count from 84,376 to beyond 100k was challenging i think i’ll get there one month.

I also held a competition where you could win a copy of Top Spin 3, i was hoping this would make me achieve my goal. I’m going to do another competition this month so keep your eyes peeled on talk playstation.

So without me advertising the blog i probably won’t get as many visitors and subscribers so i’m going to be a bit more realistic this month.

Goals for September 1 2008

• To reach 220 RSS Subscribers (currently around the 190 mark)
• Last month i saw 94,808 unique visitors. August will see around the 80k mark

From 1st July 2008 until 31sth July 2008:

Visitors

• 2,914 Visits (2,716 Absolute Unique Visitors)
• 5,162 Page Views

Subscribers (in accordance to Feedburner and as of today)

• 10 (June average: 12)

Bandwidth Transfered: 911.2 Meg

talkplaystation.com

Visitors

• 125,597 (94,808 Absolute Unique Visitors)
• 184,678 Page Views

Subscribers (in accordance to Feedburner and as of today)

• 192 (June average: 168)

Bandwidth Transfered: 161.06 Gig

Summary

Daparky.com has pretty much stayed the same with slight increase in visitors not much though. Talk playstation on the other hand has gone up once again from 102,786 visits to 125,597 visits. This time last month the subscriber count was 151, it is now 192. Transfer bandwidth stayed the same.

Lets see what August brings us.

Basically when i show my stats for July they probably won’t have met the goals i set, but who knows. I will have to take this into account.

On the other hand, i didn’t have time to implement that plugin i found (Content Gallery). I’ll try and get it in this weekend if i’m not busy.

Goals for August 1 2008

• To reach 180 RSS Subscribers (currently around the 155 mark)
• 35 of which must be subscribed via e-mail
• Last month i saw 84,376 unique visitors. August will see above and beyond 100k

Like i said its a bad time to start setting goals and i’ll need to make a habbit of setting goals at the beginning of each month.