If you are interested in purchasing software or books that could help you with web development, please visit my Web Development Software and Books Store!
Enter the Web Development Software and Books Store
If you would like to learn how to create your own store, please read How to Create an Amazon Store and Make Money Online.
Amazon is a great way to monetize a highly trafficed website. Amazon is one of the worlds leading e-commerce websites which allows people to buy just about anything online. Joining Amazon as an associate allows you to earn a commission on any sales you generate from your website.
I’ve never used Amazon before because I never had enough traffic to make it worthwhile. However, thanks to the growth of BattleCity, I’ve decided to experiment with Amazon as a possible income stream which could help support the costs of running the game.
Many websites like to use affiliate links directly in their articles to specific items they may currently be writing about. For example, if I was writing an article about how awesome my Canon PowerShot A550 7.1MP Digital Camera with 4x Optical Zoom
For the above reason, I instead decided to create an Amazon store! Take a look at the BattleCity Amazon Store to see what it looks like. If you have visited the BattleCity Classic website, you will notice that it is even possible to customize the look of the store to match your website!
When you create an Amazon store, you can even specify exactly what you would like to display in it. For example, you will notice that in the BattleCity Amazon Store, the first items you are presented with are Video Games and Video Game Consoles. I felt this would be the best landing page considering this is a store for BattleCity which is a computer game! On the right-hand side, there are other categories users can browse as well.
Will this store actually generate any income for the game? If there are players who do shop online, some may be persuaded to use the Amazon store in order to help the game. I’ll post about the stores success or failure in a few months! I expect that the store would generally remain a very small income stream given the nature of the BattleCity website, but any little bit helps!
So how do you setup your own store? Visit Amazon.com and click the Join Associates link to sign up with Amazon. Once your account is created, login and click aStore. Then select, Add an aStore. To show you how it’s done, I’ll create an aStore for Web Dev Notes!
At this point, I am assuming you were able to create an Amazon Associates account and have found the aStore button. Click the Add an aStore button as shown below! As you can see in the screenshot, I already have two Amazon aStores! You are allowed to create up to 100 which should be more than you will ever need!
Next you will be presented with the “Create aStore Pages” area which will allow you to setup your different store categories and select the items to display. You can select specific items, or specific Amazon categories. Since I want something related to Web Dev Notes, I’ll add Web Development Software and Books to my store! The screenshots below show how I have done this! If any of the screenshots are unclear, click them to see the full-size view.
First we want to “Add a Category Page”
Next, select the category to begin editing it. I will select the “Add products by Amazon.com category” option so that I can include the entire Web Development section. Click “Select an Amazon Category” to browse the categories and to select the one you want in your store.
Since I am looking for Web Development Software, I will first select the Software category. I will then specify that I only want to display Web Development software.
After saving all these selections and changes and giving my category an appropriate name, I am taken back to the beginning where I can add another category, or continue to the next step. I’ll add one more category for books then show a preview of what the Web Dev Notes Store looks like so far!
First, a look at the Category Pages screen which now has two categories! Before going on, I’ll hit that up arrow to move the Books category above the Software category because I believe books are more popular with my readers than software. The category shown at the top of this list will be the default one displayed first.
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And, a preview of the store so far!
Wow, that was all pretty easy so far! Next step is to customize the look to match your website better! There are some themes you can select from or you can define your own colors and edit the CSS file.
How did I match up the colors to resemble my website? First, I took a screenshot of my website and then pasted it in Paint. Then using the color selector tool, you can get the exact RGB value for the colors. Since you need the hexadecimal value of the color, I used this RBG to Hex Converter.
First, I define my new theme.
Here is a new preview of the store with the updated theme.
Before you continue, give your store a name!
The next step is to check a bunch of configuration options such as whether you want to display the sidebar menu on the right or left, if you want to show similar items or not, etc… I put my sidebar on the right and then checked every box! Once you’re done that, click finish and you are done!
Want to see the final product? Visit my Web Dev Notes Store!
As you can see creating an Amazon store is very simple. You can also now easily browse your store to find products you think your readers might be interested or which you own and highlight them with links to your store in future articles!
Remember back in April when I became the new writer for Web Dev Notes? I started off by introducing Joomla, PHP-Nuke, phpBB and PHP. I even recommended some cool software like the ALT-Tab Replacer, Virtual Desktop Manager and the Firebug plugin for Firefox. After a slow start, I finally got my big break when my article Formatting Text in Wordpress started to bring in steady traffic!
In my early Web Dev Notes days I stuck to covering more technical topics such as how to insert CSS on your website or how to create your first PHP page. However, after testing out the use of humor in posts like the Top Ten Stupidest Joomla! Administrator Tricks and When will GoogleBot index my Brain I discovered that this unique approach was actually quite well received! I also realized website marketing and SEO was a very popular aspect of web development so I decided to venture into this area with posts like The Battle for Traffic - SEO vs Content, No Contacts, No Money and Validate Your Website for Better SEO!
Of course, even though I would later discover that marketing and SEO would be a very popular topic on my blog, at the time I had no idea yet! Looking at my stats, the posts about PHP were the most trafficked so I decided to cover this area more extensively! In May I introduced some great web development resources and then discussed the relationship between PHP and a Web Server/Browser in order to build a solid foundation before diving right into PHP for the rest of the month. I then covered how to comment PHP code, the debate over using Print or Echo, how to use variables, how to use concatenation with variables and variable naming conventions. Using this introductory material, I was then able to go even deeper and cover topics like using arrays, if/else programming logic, nested IF/ELSE conditional statements, and PHP Loops. Since the topic of loops is already an extensively covered subject, I decided to make my articles sound unique by naming them, “The magic of WHILE Loops“, “The incredible FOR Loop Multi-Tasker“, and “The FOREACH Loop Love Affair with Mr. Array“.
In order to stay informed, I subscribed to many RSS feeds relating to my topic. In so doing I noticed that Digg and Google were two very popular topics. I decided to explore these subjects a bit with articles like, “List of Google Hoaxes“, “Who’s Digging You?“, “Google’s PageRank Explained by Phil Craven“, “Declare Warr on Digg Doondles!“, “I Hacked Google and Stole Their Robot lolol“, and “Are Your Archives Burying You Worse Than Digg“. These articles continue to bring in traffic to this day!
During the month of June I was taking a course on Interface Design so decided to cover similar topics on Web Dev Notes. I began by discussing the advantages of using personas during development and then decided to list nine causes of software error before discussing software quality and the three general principles of quality assurance. I introduced the subject of human/computer interaction and demonstrated how good design can help us better interact with computers. In fact, making the interaction between humans and computers as easy as possible is an important goal of improved user interface design. I also mentioned that building the right product is even more important than building a product right.
It was around mid-June when I also began to notice how well my SEO, blogging and marketing tips posts were doing! I therefore decided to write about the guaranteed way to generate incoming links and conquering the crowded niche! I also wrote about some issues I was having with trying to follow my own advice when I noticed my trackbacks were being kidnapped and asked if it were possible if my bullets were killing them! Not wanting to stray too far from the very roots of web development, I also introduced the Pixel Groovy website, discussed how to created animated favicons and threw in 21 CSS tutorials answering frequently asked questions.
During the month of July I continued to cover a lot of marketing topics. I created a new Top 11 Posts section and asked if people thought linking to other sites increases incoming traffic. I also started to learn a great deal about blogging and realized that my very own archives contained in itself the power to help WebDevNotes succeed. I therefore stopped considering old posts like dirty socks thrown into a laundry bin, and instead began viewing them as cornerstone content that should be linked back to frequently so that new visitors could access my best content easily.
Upon making this realization, I began offering my visitors some blogging advice with the help of Lolcats to make the posts more fun and easy to read. For example:
Don’t let Chihuahua’s hold back your website! Start working with the purrrrfect partners and plot your plan for success. Make sure you plant the seeds for success early and listen to feedback so you can feed your readers a happy meal. Make good use of article directories and other marketing techniques and never forget the secrets to writing a successful blog!
In conclusion, to those who say linking to old content is difficult, I beg to differ! Don’t let those archives go to waste 
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