Kelvin Firminger of Build A Niche Store decided, quite unprompted, to build me a niche store to show off how easy it is to use his software. He built a niche store around my pet fence guide. It only took a few steps. I'm posting the email he sent me below along with my comments — the sections in italics are Kevin's words.

I’ll walk you through the process that I took to get a targeted affiliate store for that niche.

1. I Went To eBay. There I did a search for “pet fence” so that I could find which category had the most related products in. It was this category (it has 552 products inside it): eBay pet fence products.

I now knew where this category was located: “Home & Garden > Pet Supplies > Dogs > Electric, Invisible Fences”. Therefore it was easy to find the category number from the eBay sitemaps which the Build A Niche Store demo links to: eBay sitemap.

The category number was: 116388.

I noticed that this was an “End Category” meaning that were no more eBay categories inside it. What this means is that if I enter that category number into Build A Niche Store I would get a searchable store that could access the 552 products inside that category but no way of navigating them. I would therefore need to create a custom navigation.

Kelvin then continues with his description of custom navigation. You don't have to do this if your category has sub-categories in it.

2. I Worked Out A Custom Navigation. Using Overture's Keyword Tool I entered “Pet Fence” to get a list of keyword searches that contained that keyword phrase: Get list of pet fence keywords

My navigation would consist of two lists. One is “Types of Fences”, which includes these options: Electric Fence, Wireless Fence, Invisible Fence, Underground Fence, Radio Fence, Indoor Fence. The second list is “The Best Brands” and includes PetSafe and Innotek.

Here I have to make a correction to his lists. “Invisible Fence” is in fact a brand name and should be moved from the first list to the second list. I don't need any more trouble from their lawyers!

3. I Built My Store. I then installed Build A Niche Store, ran the setup.php file, built the store, placed the 6 tags inside the template, added my custom navigation and modified the CSS style sheet. (End of letter)

What Kelvin's referring to here is Build A Niche Store's templating system, which lets you modify the look and feel of the store fairly easily.

What he's done is take an eBay category listing:

eBay — Electronic Dog Fences

And transformed it into a page that blends right into my site:

Mockup of Eric's new eBay store

Notice how the AdSense ads still there. He basically took the main page of the site and threw in the special tags at the appropriate spots, leaving the rest of the page (including my AdSense code) unchanged.

Very cool little demo showing how easy it is to add an eBay store to an existing site. And you could embed stores like this into each of your sites and make them look like part of the site with only a bit of adaptation.

Thanks for the demo, Kelvin, I'm sure my readers found it useful. Build A Niche Store sells for $97. To buy it, visit the official site.

Sponsored Link: If you're apprehensive about writing content, I highly recommend you read Turn Words Into Traffic to break the writing process into a set of manageable and not-so-scary steps.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?

Some Internet marketers are pushing an e-book called The Adsense Formula. It's really cheap, less than $8 as I write this right now. Should you buy it?

First of all, I have an immediate distrust for any e-book that misspells “AdSense” in its title and throughout its text. It's “AdSense”, not “Adsense”. Same for “AdWords” — it's not “Adwords”. This may seem picky, but small things like this are indicators of quality to me.

Putting the spelling aside, let's look at the e-book itself. It's 97 pages, yes, but with a large font, huge margins and lots and lots of (generally useless) screenshots. So really there's not much text. This is nothing like the pages packed full of information that Affiliate Project X or even my book offer.

At the bottom of each page there's a footer: The Google Adsense Empire Handbook. So this is just a re-titled version of an e-book I've seen before called “AdSense Empire”.

The book makes some dubious recommendations, telling you to look at Traffic Equalizer, for example. It's not recent — no mention of link units or anything.

Take a pass on this one. Read my (free) article The AdSense Formula instead.

Sponsored Link: You can buy CamStudio IM, software for making screen capture videos, for only $1.99.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?

This is related to my recent experiments with integrating AdSense and Amazon data. A reader of mine has just released a product called Build A Niche Store that does something similar for eBay data. The product is a PHP script that you install on your server (you can install it on unlimited servers) and an accompanying manual. After installation, you run the script and it asks your for some details about what kind of eBay store you want to run, including which eBay category you want to pull data from. It then builds a store for you using eBay's RSS feeds. The store updates itself automatically as data changes on eBay.

The nice thing about this product is that you can also add AdSense ads to the store and make two streams of revenue. And yes, the pages are actually all generated on the server, not the within the browser, so there's lots of actual content on the pages for the AdSense crawler to examine. I'm going to do a detailed review of this product at some point on my GeekAffiliate blog, but for now you can just read the details they have posted on their site, which includes some demo stores. Looks very cool. If you've worked with any of these data feeds you know how painful it can be to build scripts and applications that process the data.

Sponsored Link: You can buy CamStudio IM, software for making screen capture videos, for only $1.99.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. If you like this posting, why not link to his blog or bookmark it as one of your favorites?