JTPratt’s Free Niche Site Script

Looking for a “free niche store script”? Try your hand creating free niche sites using this handy eBay, Amazon, YouTube mashup script that’s easily customizable, completely hackable, and free! Is it Free BANS? No! It’s free Mashup!

Last year I came across the free script at 45n5.com “How to Build a YouTube eBay Amazon Mashup Affiliate Site in Under 10 Minutes. I thought it was a really cool niche script - and it was free! But for some reason I just never really got it working well enough to use in my site(s). I tried a couple more times over the months, but finally just gave up. Now it doesn’t even work with the new updated YouTube and eBay API’s. Then last month I stumbled across Just Ask Ran’s EAYA hack of 45n5’s script and I gave it another try. Ran hacked the crap out of that script, because he added caching, support for both PHP 4 and 5, and versions for both Linux or Windows. It works with the eBay Partner network, the new YouTube API, and the pages load fast! Thank you Ran - that was awesome work!

I going to show you how to build one of these free niche stores from scratch in minutes, but before I do - maybe you want to checkout our test store first…

Guitar Review Video Cafe

The beauty of this niche store mashup script is that everything is completely automated through the beauty of social media and free API’s. With just a few keywords you can grab a related YouTube video, related eBay auctions, and related Amazon products with reviews (when available) - and sprinkle it with relevant adsense ads. It’s an awesome niche store on the fly. The only problem I had with it was the fact that none of the store pages had any original content. So I hacked Ran’s version ever so slightly to allow you to create multiple templates pages based on keywords - so you could add a paragraph of original content (or whatever you want) to each. To be able to use this script you don’t need any coding skills, but a smidge or HTML helps - depending on how much customization to the template(s) you want to do.

To use this script: You should at least be familiar with FTP, and being able to manually setup scripts or blogs like Wordpress would probably help, in addition to any HTML knowledge. If you don’t have any expertise in any of these areas - it’s probably not for you (remember, it is free!). You don’t need any programming skills at all - and it doesn’t require the use of any database, all you have to do is follow these instructions, upload the files to your server, and it should work out of the box.

To get started, first download the free niche store script.

Unzip the files to your desktop, and open the “config.php” file first. In order to build a free niche site you to have the appropriate ID’s and logins to get the content. I’m sure you’re already signed up with the eBay Partner Network, but you may not have a “rest token”, which you can only get through developers.ebay.com. You also need an Amazon API key which you can only get through Amazon Web Services, in addition to an associates account. Both of these are free. The amazon key is fairly easy to get and find once you sign up. The eBay rest token, however, is a bit more difficult (if you’ve not done it). Once you are signed up you have to create sandbox and production “keys”. Once you have “Key Set 1″ for production, you are assigned a “DevID”, “AppID”, and “CertID”. Click on “Generate User Token” and you will get a “rest token”, which is what you use in the config file. The rest of the items to fill in the config file are pretty self explanatory. The only hiccup I ran into was adding in my adsense ID, you enter in only the number, not the “pub-” part.

The next thing you need to do is come up with some keywords for the niche mashup site. Theoretically, the keyword phrases could be as long as you want - but I personally think you’d be best to keep them from 1-4 keywords per phrase. Now, edit the “keywords.txt” file and put one keyword phrase (only) per line. You could have as many as you want, but I think somewhere between 10-25 (lines) would probably be best. Use only letters or numbers, don’t add any special characters at all - which means NO -=_+[]{}\\’”;:<>,./?!~ characters at all, and don’t use any CAPITAL LETTERS at all. We’re going to create a template file based on each keyword phrase so your one line phrase “ipod nano white” will become “ipod-nano-white-template.php” (the script automatically adds the dashes).

Now open sample-template.php and edit it. “Save As” the first keyword phrase in your keywords.txt file, again if your first phrase was “ipod nano white” then save sample-template.php as “ipod-nano-white-template.php”. It has to be exact - again, don’t use any capital letters! This is the most tedious part, because you have to create one template file for each keyword phrase you added to keywords.txt. I hope you didn’t go too wild with the keywords, but you need a template file for every keyword phrase you entered in keywords.txt. This is so you can add the original content, and anything else you may think of (like other ads, or other forms of monetization). It’s really nice that this script has no database and no overhead, but going back to the days of static web sites, it really sucks to have to individually edit the pages. I guess that’s the price you pay for “FREE” eh?

Now that you’ve saved your first template page, just scroll down and edit the original content section. Edit the H1 header first, and then the paragraph of original content. I usually try and have 5-8 original sentences that are targeted and keyword relevant. Then save-as for your next keyword phrase in keywords.txt, and so on until you are done! You can make as many pages as you want, our test site - the video cafe is 12 pages.

There are a lot of improvements I’d like to make to this script that I think would make it even nicer. In the future, I’ll be sure to post about anything I add. In the meantime, I’ve anticipated there will be questions about the free niche site mashup script. Please direct all issues, problems, hacks, and tips to JTPratt’s Forum.

I want you to download and try this script for yourself, and then post back in the forum with a pic or link to your example so you can share with everyone what you’re doing with it (if you don’t mind). If you have some really cool ways you think this free mashup script can be hacked or used - please comment now!