Monetizing Blogspot Blogs with Shopping.com & Grouper
Posted on June 9, 2007 in Blogging | Comments (0)
I always think of new ways to monetize content. Let's face it there are many Blogspot bloggers out there who are not taking full advantage of the power of the Blogger platform. I thought of this post as I was working on how to build a cool shopping mashup with no programming required; Part 1 and Part 2. Since many people start out with Blogger platform, it's important to build multiple revenue streams beyond Adsense.
As I pointed out in my previous post Monetizing Blogger blogs with Ebay RSS Feeds, Blogger has a powerful piece of functionality that allows you to include outside RSS feeds. This functionality is simply underutilized by most bloggers in favor of monetizing their blogspot blogs with Adsense. The goal with any blog should be a diversity of revenue streams - the more revenue streams the better. The following approach requires a Blogspot blog (obviously), a API partner agreement with Shopping.com (apply right here), another cool tool from Geckotribe (the makers of CaRp) called Grouper and a separate hosting account. This approach is a bit more complicated than my post on making money with blogger blogs using Ebay. Once this is installed and set up, not only will you be able to monetize Blogger blogs with Shopping.com, you will have a tool that can generate custom RSS feeds from the Shopping.com API that you can use in Squidoo lens, the comparison shopping engine.
The first step is to download Grouper. Grouper is a tool that can do the following;
- RSS Manager
Manage RSS search feeds from Google News, Yahoo! News, Feedster & Daypop. - XML Converter
Create RSS 2.0 feeds from other XML formats. Pre-configured for Atom 0.3, Atom 1.0, RSS 0-91-0.94 & 2.0. - Affiliates XML Feeds
Create RSS feeds from affiliate searches on Amazon.com, Shopping.com, and All Posters. Use with CaRP to display them on your website. - Website Scraper
Includes plugins for scraping both regularly and irregularly structured webpages to RSS.
Those last two features are pretty powerful. Once Grouper is installed you will be able to scrape websites, convert the results to RSS and then display them either using CaRP or the built in tools of Blogger blogs. The script for creating RSS feeds from affiliate searches on Shopping.com comes with your purchase of Grouper . I have already used this tool to add shopping.com content to the Earlymiser development blog and my Playstation 3 squidoo lens. See once Grouper is installed, you can then use Grouper's functionality on numerous sites and blogs (Via http://bestbuyszone.co.uk/shopping.com2rss.php?q=nintendo+wii . It should return results from the Shopping.com site for Nintendo Wii. If it returns an empty file, either your path to grouper or shopping.com linkinid is wrong.
Once this is up and running on your hosting account, monetization is quite easy. You can add these RSS feeds to you blogspot/blogger blogs in exactly the same manner as I showed in Monetizing Blogger blogs with Ebay RSS feeds. Or you can use CaRP to display them on your hosted blogs. The possibilities once it is up and running are nearly endless.
The best way to find content that matches your blog or web site is to go to shopping.com itself and look at the content featured on the site and then find what would match the product name used at shopping.com.
