StoreStacker advice
Some of you may have heard of a new affiliate store builder that came on the market that really does seem to trounce many of the existing storebuilders (the closest competing product costs over $1,000/year).
But even though they will limit the first version to 1000 customers I do NOT recommend you go nuts and run out and buy it until you go through the following and see if it's really a good fit for you.
If you have no idea what I'm talking about you might want to visit the StoreStacker Website here before reading the following advice about whether you should even consider this store builder.
I'm going to split this advice from "most likely to be a good fit" down to "least likely to be a good fit" based on your online business experience level.
1) If you are ALREADY running your own website StoreStacker can be a very smart way to build out more pages to your site easily, target more related products and give your visitors a better user experience. Also, keep in mind that in general Google LOVES big sites.
2) If you are ALREADY considering buying the affiliate website builder XSitePro or similar affiliate sitebuilders you should seriously consider StoreStacker either instead or in addition to XSitePro.
3) If you already have intermediate to advanced online business knowledge it will be worth taking a serious look at StoreStacker and possibly grabbing it if you think it will fit into your long-term business plan.
4) If you're a newbie to online business I would recommend you read the eBook they've put together. It's a great read even if you have no intention of buying StoreStacker. Actually, even if your NOT a beginner it's still worth taking a few minutes to read as it really will help you understand how to generate more profits in a business.
You can grab a copy of their book here:
"Your Mother Was Right" – Why listening to your Mother will make you more money online.
PC Users: Right-click the above link and select Save Target As or Save Link As to save the e-book to your PC.
MAC users: just click the link and hold down on the mouse button
How to view the e-book:
Once you have downloaded the e-book PDF file, you will need a PDF reader program to view it. PDF is a common type of file used for sharing documents on the Web.
The most popular PDF reader program is Adobe Reader which you can download for free here.
The following is the StoreStacker factsheet as of 4/1/2008:
In a nutshell:
StoreStacker does what NO other software on the market can – load a site with products from eBay, Amazon, and Clickbank, targeting virtually any topic or subject matter. Users build and run their own, 'conglomerate' affiliate store, covering any niche they want, on any site they want. More programs will be added over the coming months – Paydotcom, Linkshare, Shareasale, Walmart, and more are planned.
StoreStacker can be used to add products to an existing site or as a standalone site builder (a user can build a site from the ground up with StoreStacker alone).
StoreStacker enables website owners to give their traffic more of what it wants. More content to read, more information to digest, more products to look at, compare and purchase. In addition, StoreStacker makes it possible to manage a horde of affiliate offerings (more than they ever could manually) from one interface and updating / trying new product categories is a snap.
Why stack?
Think of it this way. Let's take a subject matter like marketing. Amazon, eBay and Clickbank each individually have a lot of products covering this topic – books, reports, software, etc. But, StoreStacker enables you to pull products from ALL of these sources and stack them all in one place. The result? One site has ALL of the marketing products available. Essentially, the StoreStacker user's site has 3 times as many products to feature as Amazon, eBay or Clickbank individually.
With this kind of 'pull', a site can become the go-to destination in their niche, because they list EVERYTHING available in one place – more than any other single place. Add more product sources like Paydotcom, Linkshare, etc, and the sites using StoreStacker become more and more powerful.
HUGE SEO benefits:
StoreStacker can add thousands of pages of content to a site and tons of low-fruit, product-based keywords. Added to sites that already have solid in-links, this can translate to a nice bump in search engine traffic. A new site created with the system has a big advantage over any 'regular' website.
List their own products:
Users also have the ability to list and sell their own products, right along side the products they pull from their 'regular' sources.
Who can use it?
We created StoreStacker so that inexperienced users can operate it easily and advanced users will be happy with its depth of functionality.
Unlimited use:
Users can use StoreStacker as many times, on as many websites as they want.
Price:
$97
You get the StoreStacker software along with the ability to pull products from eBay, Amazon and Clickbank (first 500).
First 500 Customers:
Get the Clickbank plugin for free. Please note – this is ONLY the first 500.
1000 customer limit:
We're opening to 1000 customers and upon our thousandth, closing our doors.
Forum:
We have a seasoned customer forum at www.halfagain.com/forum/
Email support:
Coverage is close to 24 hours a day.
Users need a domain and hosting (like any website). Hosting should include php, mysql and zend.
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12:33 am
Hi,
Just a thought, but if StoreStacker is so good why isn't it working or visible on this website?
Anyone, other than the (Pingback) guy above who wants to sell it to me, who by the way is not using on his sales page either?
What the?
G.
1:32 am
We have a system for putting out hundreds of sites – kind of like the FirePow Blogging Software does, but a bit more automated. We've tested StoreStacker there, but haven't integrated it fully.
For that system we use the following tools:
1) Mass Account Manager to quickly create hundreds of domains for our sites.
2) WordPressAutInstaller. There are other cheaper ones, but they didn't handle subdomains well and didn't handle pre-sales questions well at all. Basically the purpose of this tool is to create a "master" plug with all of the plugins you're using.
3) WordPress Cloner. We use this to copy the master blog to multiple destination blogs on the domains we set up with Mass Account Manager. This step takes about 5 to 10 minutes to put up as many as a hundred blogs…maybe more – I don't do this part, but my main business partner there told me he could do at least 100 in about 10 minutes.
Steps 1 through 3 can be done in around 30 mins.
Once we have our sites set up – right now Joomla and WordPress, we have a mixture of off-the-shelf systems and proprietary systems to allow the sites to grow organically and naturally over time with real, high-quality content. RSS2Blog and similar systems we had developed ourselves.
Nothing new to you I'm sure – we had a script programmed to pull YouTube videos into Joomla via their API based on keywords because surprisingly none of the existing extensions really automated that task well enough, and we developed quite a few ways to aggregate content in a meaningful way.
I've kind of lost track of the number of components that went into our system so far, and we continue to find ways to automate it even more. I actually like the way FirePow does their article pulls better, but each system has it's own advantages. And of course, we don't sell ours.
There are quite a few excellent books at OReilly Media on this type of thing.
And of course we have a lot of scripts we tried that weren't right for what we were doing – not necessarily bad – just not a great fit.
The interesting thing is we spent the past year on this and during that time quite a few other similar systems have come out.
The problem prior to that is most of them produced complete completely useless garbage for the end-user. Of course that's no secret, but just thought I'd mention it for some of the people newer to marketing online. The name of the game now is to emulate what real human beings would do to build a website.
Even though this WorkAtHomeTruth site is an authority site in Google and gets great rankings, it's still mainly a hobby site for us.
8:48 pm
Thanks for the info. What content engine do you use?
9:21 pm
We had our own system developed based on mixing articles, rss, video and other plugins – polls, etc. We use mainly Joomla/Wordpress now, but will be adding in other platforms – THIS site I still do in notepad. LOL – well ProgrammersFileEditor sometimes, too. We do use RSS2Blog as a piece of the puzzle and have not had any major issues with it and support is really good.
Anyhow, with the Joomla system, we can pull hundreds of REAL articles and mix and get content to be published over time within a period of 10 or 15 minutes. Right now we're building based on an S-Curve growth pattern – but we'll be testing different growth patterns although all of that is really just a guess. The main thing of course is to put out REAL, QUALITY content.
But now that you mention it – it might work to push out sites in Happar and then put StoreStacker on top – although I'd wait until you had a decent number of pages on the base site first – probably 60 to 100 pages – before putting on StoreStacker.
I tried HalfGains ContentClub – but it wasn't nearly as automated as we needed it to be. Their spinner did a few smart things that I've not seen others do – like allow you say whether you want to keep the same synonym through a sequence of text or if you want it randomized – also it had someway to set antecedents I believe…that ones a bit vague for me right now.
I've not tested BlogEvolution because last time I visited the forum for it it was pretty dead and a dead forum typically isn't a great indicator. That may have changed, though.
1:20 am
Does storestacker work with a Mac?