Shopier

I guess this blog isn’t going as good as I was hoping, or to be more exact it can’t even be considered a blog. Of course it’s just my fault since I never post so why should people visit? It’s like when I start one of those suduko puzzles and never find the time to finish it or getting too annoyed and leaving it in unfinished. For those of you that don’t know what it is, sudoku is a puzzle game that has become extremely popular both in western and eastern countries. It’s addicting but frustrating at the same time and I guess this is the reason why it became a success. More about sudoku at wikipedia.
Anyway, enough with the puzzle talk, for the time being this site and domain will remain dormant until I finally decide what I am going to do with it (something that doesn’t need much time) :).

I have neglected this blog not longer after I created it mainly because from some reason what I thought would be nice to blog about doesn’t seem to interest me much anymore. However, I like this domain and I guess I will continue blogging but I will change the main focus of this blog to internet marketing and making money online. Of course there will also be the occasional post of how to spend those money in cool products

I just came across this site from Chitika called Shoplinc. I must say that Chitika is really innovating in online advertising once more. The eminimalls program in my opinion was just brilliant despite all the problems and publishers complaints. Don’t forget that Chitika is actually a relatively new company and definetely not a company with the financial power of Google. Anyway back to our topic, the Chitika shoplinc. Shoplinc looks like an online mall a lot like the large ammount of Amazon affiliate stores all over the internet or like the ones I have created for these blog (Check sidebar under shops).
Now lets look at some of the points of the Shoplinks overview.

Incremental revenue beyond advertising via merchandising: Your ShopLinc will feature revenue-earning paid listings, promotions, and offers from name brand merchants, generating additional revenue to supplement your current ad revenue.

Forgive me if I don’t understand this completely but I am not a native English speaker. The way I hear this is that merchants will have the ability to buy featured listings at specific sites and blogs and the owner of the site will then receive a commission irrespectively of whether the ads were clicked, or any products were bought. Something like CPM advertising but my guess is that the price will be monthly and will not depend on number of views. (just guessing here)

Maintained by Chitika, “remote” controlled by you: Your custom ShopLinc store will be based on your own RSS feed, and hence will feature products that are relevant to your website content.

This means that the featured products will be chosen algorithmically according to the content of the site. The contextual nature of the ads means that they can’t be used along with adsense or YPN. Anyway, since the shoplincs will be hosted by Chitika (see below) that was out of the question to begin with. Now if you are wondering if you will be able to use adsense at the rest of your site the answer is yes. According to the adsense TOS

We do not permit Google ads or search boxes accessing Google search services to be published on web pages that also contain what could be considered competing ads or services.

Notice that it says web pages not web sites (disclaimer: This is just a personal opinion, you should always contact google when in doubt)

Hosted by Chitika, mapped to your own domain: Your ShopLinc will be mapped to your domain, and based on your website template. Hence, your ShopLinc will have the same look and feel as your website, providing a good user experience to your site visitors.

So the shoplincs will be hosted by chitika and they will be mapped to your domain. So you will get a subdomain in the form http://shoplinc.yourdomainhere.com . This is really good for people that don’t have a lot of technical knowledge to setup an affiliate store like the amazon ones (I was always wondering why Amazon wasn’t doing something like that) plus it saves you the money of buying a script like the one I bought for my stores. One thing that I am wodering is if you would be able to change the name of your subdomain, for example if you have a site about mp3 players instead of using shoplink.yourdomain.com to use mp3players.yourdomain.com. That would probably help from a SEO point of view. Oh! and they will match it to suit you design, what more can you ask for?

Some final thoughts: According to the above Chitika will read your RSS feed in order to decide what kind of products to add to your shoplinc, that makes it ideal for blogs and to be honest it seems to me that Chitika created this new service mainly having blogs in mind.

Oh and let’s not forget the Eligibility Criteria:

Represent merchandising related specialty content such as product reviews, recommendations, discussions, etc. ShopLincs are not a good match for portals, search engines, and sites with minimal content but with links to other people’s content.

Consist of English content only. We are currently not offering this service to sites with non-English content

If you want to try it you should send an email Chitika. You can find the email and more information here.

Welcome everyone to shopier. Shopier is a shopping blog that will report on all the latest shopping trends. In addition to that I will try to keep it updated with offers and coupons for all kind of products. Finally as you can see in the column on the right there is a list of shops, all those shop are in association with Amazon and every sale will provide shopier with a small commission, so if you are thinkg of buying something from Amazon why not buy it from the shoier shops?
That’s all for now.
Have a great day