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How ClickBank Hotshots Was Built
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How does a website like ClickBankHotshots.com come into being? In this article I discuss the steps that were required to build the site.
Before we get started, let me just remind you what ClickBank Hotshots is all about--in case you stumbled across this page before getting a good look at the site. ClickBank Hotshots is a customer review site dedicated to revealing the good, the bad, and the ugly of ClickBank digital goods. It is a place where both customers and affiliates of ClickBank products can come to learn about the quality of the goods. Customers can also offer their assessment of them. The ClickBank network is a large marketplace catering to merchants who offer non-tangible goods--ebooks, software, subscription services, and so on. There are a lot of great products represented in the ClickBank catalog, and there are a good deal more that will simply leave you shaking your head in disbelief. Sorting out what is what is the goal of ClickBank Hotshots. A Little History I write software for a living, and I am very good at it. I should be, I have been programming in one form or another since the mid eighties. Way back then I programmed computer simulations of quantum mechanical systems. I was what people like to call, with some exaggeration, a rocket scientist, and Fortran was the name of the game. In the late nineties I turned to Perl in order to write web applications. Even though the language is no longer the first choice of burgeoning web programmers, and PHP seems to be the flavor of the day, I still like Perl. Virtually all code I write is Perl-based. Without boring you about the fine details of the winding path that lead me to it, I eventually decided to build a software package I believed people would find very useful. It would be the best off-the-shelf customer review application on the market. The end result was something I named Red Queen, and it is the platform on which ClickBank Hotshots is built. So while it is true that I built this site 100 percent from scratch, it is also true that I simply used a slightly customized version of an application that anyone can get their hands on. If you want a copy, go to http://www.randommouse.com/redqueen/ and download it. View From The Top If you take a few minutes to look around ClickBank Hotshots you'll see that the overall design of the site is fairly simple. There is a way to navigate to the featured digital products, each of which appear in several related categories, or you can pull up a selection of products that match a search query. When you find a product there is a little information about it, usually accompanied by an image, and a link to the off-site merchant sales page. More importantly, there is a means for ClickBank customers to submit reviews about products (and get paid for these), as well as read existing reviews--which cannot be submitted unless the reviewer also rates a given product on several distinct attributes. These ratings are averaged over reviewers and compared to the averages of other products found in the same category. The end result is that it becomes very easy to tell at a glance which are the really great products worthy of more investigation. SEO Considerations If life was a simple affair the features outlined above would be sufficient to run the site successfully. The problem, of course, is that a customer review site needs reviewers. So the design of the site needs to take into account the means by which those reviewers are to be found. This is a multiple-pronged problem, and I formulated several different strategies to address it. The first was to ensure that review pages should be easy to find in the search engines. Red Queen already allowed for the building of static HTML pages, the kind that search engine spiders love to crawl. However, my initial SEO efforts consisted of putting lots of metadata into the header of each published Red Queen page, and ensuring as well that the page <title> tag carried suitable keywords. But more can be done to help the search engines figure out what the pages are about. One of the more useful things you can do is to put the keywords for the page into the name of the file that stores it. So instead of naming the detail page for product number 7 something like /7/index.html it is much better to go with /7/the-definitive-guide-to-dog-grooming.html Furthermore, search engines are generally smart enough to know how to extract categorization information from the full URL associated with a web page. So whenever possible, categories should be named with this in mind. Ideally the example ebook title suggested above would be found at the end of a URL that looked something like this: /Family/Dogs/Grooming/7/the-definitive-guide-to-dog-grooming.html Unfortunately, because the logical categorization scheme to use is the one that ClickBank associates with its products, the actual categorization is going to be much coarser--closer to /Family/7/the-definitive-guide-to-dog-grooming.html The more granular categorization is unfortunate. It means visitors will likely have to resort to using the internal search engine to find what they are looking for. On the other hand, as a practical consideration for maintaining the site, I do not have to worry about category assignments. It has already been taken care of by ClickBank. This is actually a VERY important consideration, because it means the assignment can be automated, and automation is absolutely critical to running a site as large as ClickBank Hotshots. From the outset it had to be kept in mind that the site would be one of the largest on the web, though this fact should not be apparent to anyone surfing the site. Because descriptive file naming is such a useful SEO tactic, it was incorporated into Red Queen so that my customers could make use of it. As it turns out, lots of improvements to ClickBank Hotshots functionality went right back into Red Queen making the program even better than it had been. That said, due to the amount of disk space required to build all sortings of items and reviews, the site will initially be run dynamically--at least until there is sufficient traffic to warrant the generation of static pages. Site Maintainance The biggest obstacle to running a site like ClickBank Hotshots, which mirrors a product catalog from another site which is constantly changing, is to keep the product catalogs synchronized. Every week ClickBank dumps around 100 or more products from its database of around 6000 products, re-instates about the same number of products which had disappeared earlier, and adds about 100 new products. The only possible way to keep on top of things is to automate the monitoring process. I am certainly not the only person to extract information from the ClickBank site. Several other businesses are founded on this practice. ClickBank has even constructed a gigantic XML file to "help" businesses keep abreast of its product catalog changes. Unfortunately when they designed their XML solution they forgot to take into account its parsability. Easy to construct, incredibly difficult to parse in a straightforward manner. This is just one of the realities of life you have to deal with when a third party is involved in your business and they do not do the sensible thing. Suffice it to say, ClickBank could do with a little rethinking of this part of their business (and yes, I certainly did send them my suggestions for improvements in this area). It would be great if the synchronization process could be automated 100 percent, but that is simply not possible. ClickBank does not collect any information from its merchants relating to a product image or logo. That means if I want to add this information to my own database I have to go out and get it myself. Which is precisly what I did. ClickBank Hotshots is the ONLY ClickBank related site to present the entire product catalog with accompanying product images. Believe me, this was not easy to do! However I was adamant that images should appear on ClickBank Hotshots pages in addition to the little product information that ClickBank offers. It is like putting a face to a name--it just makes a huge difference in your appreciation of the offering. So the requirement that product images should appear on the site means some part of the process has to remain manual and cannot be automated away. I guess that's the price I am willing to pay to give ClickBank Hotshots its signature look. I certainly enjoy scanning its pages in a way that just isn't possible anywhere else, and I think other people will appreciate this too. In a very real sense, then, the site represents a customized presentation of the ClickBank product catalog. You will not find anything like it elsewhere. Because part of the process is manual, I actually maintain the product portion of the ClickBank Hotshots database on my home machine. Once a week or so I upload the changes to the product catalog by creating an SQL differences file and an uploadable directory of images for new products. Writing the machinery to power this process was a non-trivial task. Once the catalog has been revised, I rebuild all the pages on the site. The only other part of site maintainance involves approving/rejecting submitted reviews, which can be carried out from the Red Queen admin interface, and is a simple, but potentially time-consuming process. Traffic Building Once you build a site you have to find people to frequent it. Never mind that the site is potentially very useful to people--if they do not know it exists, they will not be visiting! Here is the approach I took, broken down into 4 main strategies:
Of course, how successful these traffic-building initiatives will prove to be in the long run remains to be seen. In Summary... It took roughly a year to build ClickBank Hotshots in my spare time. Had I not built it on top of an existing platform (i.e. Red Queen) it would never have happened. A small or medium-sized review site can be set up with Red Queen in a month or two with some work. So if you are thinking of building a site something like ClickBank Hotshots, but with an entirely different focus--such as reviews of restaurants, or theme parks, or golden age comics, or who knows what, then you'll have a very good chance of pulling it off it you put Red Queen to work for you. Just as I have. To Your Success, Stephen Carter Stephen@ClickBankHotshots.com |
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