Blogging sucks. I make very little money on my blog sites. You know, those sites where I write articles and hope people click on Adsense or an affiliate banner. Nope, I don’t do so great with them. But I do fine with blogs and datafeeds. StoreStacker sites. Ebay widget Blogger sites. XSP sites. Even stores hanging off a main blog.

So I spent half of this past weekend building StoreStacker stores. The other half was spent with my daughters at their softball parties, swimming and watching stuff on TV they wanted me to join them in. At least half the weekend was supremely enjoyable.

I’m sick of niche blogging again. I’m even tired of building XSP sites too. So I decided to drop a bunch of stores on to the Web. I used both domains and subdomains for this little exercise. I went to top seller lists (like Ebay pulse) and started building stores on stuff people seem to have an interest in buying. I stacked stores. I used Overstock, Ebay, Amazon and Clickbank products. I created various category listings and added products to them. I set up my cron jobs so I will have an ever changing catalog of goods on these sites. I used RSS feeds and YouTube videos to create a different interest in the site. These are all plugins that you can use within Storestacker. It effing rocks.

This holiday season is bound to suck. The economy has started to reek. I don’t know if people are going to buy shit for Christmas. Half of 2009 could suck equally as hard. I’m not building for 2008. I’m building for next year when the economy will turn and people decided they aren’t going to do without for two years in a row. By that time my stores will have aged. I’ll have bookmarked them. I’ll have written articles and submitted them to Article Marketing Automation. I’ll have commented on blogs and anchor linked back to them. And hopefully I’ll have tons of pages indexed.

Those stores hanging off a blog? Well, I’m letting AMA populate those blogs with articles. If they aren’t rewritten at least 70% they most likely won’t get posted on my blog. You can bet I link from those articles to my store. Mostly I hope people click straight to the store and bypass the bullshit niche articles, but if they find the article in the search engine they’ll still see a link to click to go to my store.

I like building Storestacker stores. I want commissions. I do not want Google click scraps. Want to see what’s what? I decided to build a Storestacker store and put the link up. I went out and got some free hosting and built a store on something I could care less about. That way you could see what I was doing and people with an ax to grind wouldn’t be able to eff with sites I am personally hosting. This best coffee makers site took about 45 minutes to build out, including signing up for hosting. The products are from Amazon and Overstock. I can’t get to anything related to Ebay (i.e. campaign number) at work so items from there are not included yet.

Many of you might turn your nose up at the design. Maybe some will think it’s too thin. All I know is it’s a vehicle to get people to click over to make a purchase. I think it presents the products well enough. There are a bunch more templates I can use. And if you are handy with Smarty then you can edit and build templates until you create something that you like. On most of these stores I’ll add Clickbank products, an RSS feed and a few You Tube videos to thicken it up. If I really get motivated I’ll add a few static pages to the site as well.

Maybe I’ll just keep on building these out on free hosts. It’s risky of course. Have to be prepared to lose everything when/if they close down (Storestacker lets you save your store config in a tasty XML to redeploy elsewhere if needed). Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned this at all. Then again none of you are going to spend $100 for Storestacker anyway. And the few that do, survey says that most of you won’t deploy the software anyway. And for those couple that builds out stores, I doubt our paths will cross. There is a lot of shit out there to try to affiliate market.

I’d rather build 100 stores like this on free hosts and self hosted sites than build a ton of niche blogs on Blogger and try to collect Adsense. With the cron job the search engines will see a never ending change of products getting populated to the store. I guess at least with blogs I can rely on AMA to populate them when I’m lazy.

So now that I have a means of getting my niche blogs written without me having to do it (AMA). And I have stores that are dynamic and require no maintenance once built (Storestacker). I can now spend time getting backlinks through article writing (AMA again), bookmarks with the lovely new BMD version 4 and comment links on other blogs.

Hope all this makes sense. Thanks for reading.