Kevin Muldoon

ShoeMoney did a review this week of an ebay turnkey script called Build A Niche Store. Basically, for $97 you get a script which lets you create an ebay like store in under 30 minutes.

After reading shoes review I decided to give it a try and paid for the script. The script is extremely straight forward and I was very pleased with the documenation which came with it which explained how the script worked. Was it worth $97? I won’t know for a few months. If I break even with the script I’ll be more than happy as with these type of things I’m just looking to test something new. I created two sites very quickly, MP3 Player Mayhem and Console Cage. I made a point in not spending much time with them – I really dont want to spend a lot of time til I see how it performs (perhaps something I’ll later regret).

This script reminds me very much like the AWS Amazon CGI script which was out a few years ago. That script let you create an Amazon store very quickly and it proved to work well, I personally didn’t get make a lot of money but the sites got traffic and I sold over a dozen of them for a nice little bonus. Infact, the last site I had which used it was MP3 Player Mayhem. I had been redirecting it to a domain parking since last year because it had traffic so hopefully since already it will make a few commissions from ebay quickly.

My gut feeling is that I wont make much from this script but if I create a few I’ll at least be able to sell them on at a low price and make my money back.

I do think that if done right, these kind of sites can be very successful. There’s probably more to be made from the ads which compliment the ebay listings than the money you make from ebay itself. A great site which does this is Wii Pre Order. Wii’s are currently out of stock in most stores in the UK in the run up to christmas with most wii’s selling on ebay for 50%-100% markup. All Wii Pre Order does is show what sites have wii’s in stock but all links have affiliate links encoded in them. I have no doubt that the guy who made this is making a packet from it!! It just goes to show, not all sites need a great site to be successful, if your site helps people in some way then people are going to use it.

Related link : Build A Niche Store

In the last two weeks I have spent a lot of time emailing companies to arrange partnerships for games and affililiation with my poker forums. I quickly realised how time consuming emailing can be – you take the time to write the email, they reply not answering some of the questions you asked, they reply again and answer it in a roundabout way and so on and so on. Of course, this kind of work does not show any increase in traffic or income right away but over time it usually proves to be worthwhile.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I have spent a lot of time looking into scripts for new projects and not only can it sap your time, that time can also be wasted if nothing comes to fruition.

Thankfully, one of the ideas I was looking for a script for came to an end today as I finally added a classifieds area to Blogging Tips. It took me a while to find the right script though. Along the way I checked out a lot of classifieds and job scripts.

Here is a list of some of the scripts I looked at. Perhaps, someone out there will find the list useful :

• VBClassifieds – A script which would have integrated with my forum, it was supposed to have a few bugs but on the whole it looked ok. It was discontinued a while ago so it wasn’t an option.
• PhotoPost Classifieds – I have the photopost script on my forums however their classifieds script seems like a half assed attempt at making some extra money without the extra work!
• GeoDesic Solutions – A poor script in my opinion. Perhaps the functionality and coding is good however the awful design makes me question who would pay so much money for this product.
• Web Scribble – Not what I was looking for but seems like an ok script.
• A href=”http://www.68classifieds.com/”>68 Classifieds – Very poor in my opinion, particularly for the price. Better free alternatives out there.
• PHP Classifieds – Not what I was looking for but I’m sure it could be useful if modified well for a certain topic.
• PHP Yellow Pages – Not what I was looking for.
• IntoEx Job Script – Nice script but too basic in my opinion. Would suit a different project perhaps.
• A href=”http://www.phpprolance.com/”>PHP Pro Lance – A very nice script and one which I did consider.

A script I did consider strongly was the KubeLance script from KubeLance. The problem was it wasn’t exactly a classifieds or a job script so it would have been harder to modify. The reason was the script is an elance clone and therefore has a lot of payment type features integrated into the script. Regardless, KubeLance has some useful scripts which are quite cheap so I recommend checking them out

2 More scripts which might interest you

I know that Digg like sites are everywhere now thanks to the success of Pligg however I liked the simplicity of Swik. Swik is open source so you are free to use it, amend it and..well do anything really as long as you follow the rest of the GNU license rules. You can download the source code from here but unfortunately, the download link wasn’t working for me yesterday. It seems to have an active community so I’m sure the script will be back up soon

Another script which I think some of you will like is ClipShare. ClipShare is a youtube clone. There are dozens of other youtube clones out there however ClipShare is the most professional looking in my opinion and at $199 for the pro version it’s definately worth looking into it if you fancy starting a multimedia site. Of course, the one thing you need to worry about with a video sharing site is bandwidth!

Why did I spend so much time hunting for scripts??

As you know, I’m actively looking to start 1 or possibly even 2 new projects in the next 4-6 months. I have various ideas and most of them would require a unique script or modifying an existing script for my needs. I have used elance a few times in the last 5 or 6 years however my experience with them hasn’t been great. The guy who designed my poker calculator 2 years ago was good to work with but the minute he was paid he was gone…it would have been easier finding wally!

Going back 3 or 4 more years I was trading a lot of website domains at the time. Myself and another member of DNForum agreed to put up 50% of the cost of hiring a coder at elance to design a unique domain script which would list the domains a domain trader owned with the latest bids etc. It was a simple enough script however there wasn’t any other like it out there. Our plan was to resell it on for $50 a time (or around that price). My partner for the project contacted me and told me that the guy had resold the script onto other people and used the exact same code for various other scripts, and most of these ended up in turnkey website stores!!

So to summarise, unless I really can’t find the script I need for a project, I prefer to search for an existing script and then modify it for my needs

If I come across any other useful scripts in the future I’ll post them here for you all