Building your own Niche Stores

Creating your own affiliate niche stores can be very easy when you know how. All you require is a basic template for your store, appropriate graphical elements and other site content (e.g. blogs, articles, etc), and a knowledge of the affiliate program you wish to use. It also helps a lot to know some HTML and CSS, particularly if you want to design and code the stores yourself.

Some major affiliate programs, such as eBay, Commission Junction and Amazon, have their own Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). An affiliate program API allows you to search for and display products on your store pages automatically, through the use of some simple programming, e.g. using a simple PHP script. The code is incorporated into your niche store pages to display products relevant to that page. The advantage of using an affiliate program API is that it gives you the flexibility to display products on your store pages exactly how you want (e.g. in a grid, on separate rows, etc). This enables you to format the appearance of the product display to match your own website theme.

The eBay Partner Network (EPN) is a popular affiliate program which allows you to earn commission through the promotion of products in the eBay marketplace. It has it’s own API, in addition to a range of pre-formatted product widgets you can use on your sites. The EPN is free to join, although you will need to have your own website up and running first (e.g. a blog with at least a handful of useful articles) before you apply. Once you have been accepted into the program you can then start displaying products from eBay.

Another popular program is Amazon, which again has it’s own API. The Amazon API is more complicated than the eBay API, in that each search request made to Amazon has to be digitally signed before it can be accepted by the program. This has caused numerous problems for many people trying to use the Amazon API. However, a number of different scripts are available which will enable you to easily sign your search requests. If you are a novice in web development, probably the easiest way is to use a simple PHP script to create and sign your requests. To provide you with an example, here is a .zip file containing a script you can use for the Amazon API. It should work using PHP 5.

Once you have built your own niche store you will then need to drive traffic to it. This is the crucial part, because more visitors means more sales. As well as submitting your site to Google and Yah0o, think about other methods you could use to increase your online exposure. You can create blogs for free, submit articles to article directories and post free ads to help bring in more visitors.