What does this screenshot-rich tutorial do?
You'll end up with a new page or pages on your Blogger blog. If you have a look at the tabs along the top of this one, you'll see some examples of what I mean.It's all about getting your (or other folk's) Zazzle products "out there" in such a way that you can see how effective your efforts are. If you looked at the examples, did you notice that if you hovered over any of the images or links, the url revealed on the bottom of your browser window shows the tracking code in place? You don't get that with RSS Feeds straight from Zazzle!
This is really crucial because if you can't see where your efforts are working (or not!) then you have nothing to tell you that you need to do more of xyz because it's working or change xyz because it's not.
What do you need?
Well, as you'll find out is usual for this series, being able to click, copy and paste is the main thing. Here's the other things you'll need. (links open in a new window)- a blogger blog
- a link to the Google FeedBurner service
if you have a Blogger blog, you must therefore have a Google Account, and then FeedBurner is just another service you can use with it - a link to my Yahoo! Pipe, the one that does half the magic
- a link to the RSS Feed Widget service that does the rest of the magic
- If you web browser doesn't display the feed correctly when you paste in or ccik on an RSS feed address, then temporarily switch to Firefox as it works well for this
What are the main steps?
These are all shown and explained below with piccies. For now this list just summarizes what we'll be doing. (I've been quite detailed because I'm using it as a list for what I've got to do as I write this tutorial!)- Get to Zazzle and decide on a search that will draw out the products you want to appear.
It's your choice and you could search the market place or your own or someone else's store - Get the equivalent Zazzle RSS feed url
- Go to the Yahoo! pipe I set up
- Paste in the Zazzle RSS feed url
- Replace the default Referrer Id with yours (also called your Associate Id)
- Replace the default tracking code with the one you want to use
If you make a sale as a result of someone clicking one of the displayed items, this code will appear in your Referral History report in the first column - Set the image size as you want. To begin with, stick with me and use 500 (a pixel value)
Later you may want to try different sizes for different layouts but for now, the other dimensions I give for the widget box work well with this image size - Run the pipe and then choose the Get as RSS option
- Copy the feed url that you get taken to
- Go to your FeedBurner account
- Create a new FeedBurner feed by pasting in the url you just copied (and set a couple more options)
- Copy the url of the FeedBurner feed you just created (the feed address)
- Go to the RSS Feed Widget page
- Paste in the Feedburner feed url you just copied (and set a few options)
- Click the Get Widget button
- Copy the code you get given
- Go to your Blogger blog's design view, click on the Pages option in the left hand menu
- Click on New Page and choose Blank Page
- Click on the HTML button (next to the Compose button) to switch to html view
- Paste in the code you just copied
- Click on the Compose button and finish off the initial page you want to see
- Click on Preview to see your new widget properly and then publish to make it live
- Edit your page as desired to polish it
Decide on a Zazzle search
Once you've decided on your search term(s) you need to create the feed's url. Here's a template that I start with:http://feed.zazzle.com/hightonridley/rss?qs=beach&at=238582202591969585&ps=30&st=popularity
And here's what it looks like in Firefox:
If I want to search the whole market place and not my store, I remove the storename (hightonridley) and the / symbol immediately after it.
I then change the search term (beach, in this case) to what I want. If I'm using more than one search term, I separate with the + symbol. For example, rocky+beach.
You'll also want to change my referrer id to yours - it's the long number after &at=. You can get yours from the Associates page on Zazzle.
The &ps=30 means give me a page size consisting of 30 items. You could go up to 100 but I think that 30 is a good balance between keeping things snappy and showing a goodly number of items.
So copy the template feed url I gave you above, paste it into Firefox, make your changes and keep playing around with search terms until you get results you're happy with. Then copy the url ready to paste in the next step.
Setting up the Yahoo! pipe
In this step we're going to give the Zazzle RSS feed url you just created to the Yahoo! pipe.The pipe will give you a new feed url, with the same items we got from Zazzle but with your chosen tracking code appended to each link and images at the size you specify. Note that anything bigger than 512 pixels will have the Zazzle watermark on it Note also that the image size here is ignored by the Badges.
Go here, http://pipes.yahoo.com/cilcocouk/zv3p0p and you'll see this:
Fill out the fields: paste in the url you just copied from Firefox, put in your referrer id, decide on a tracking code to use (lower case letters only, no other symbols allowed) and a size of 500.
Click the run pipe button.
Where it says Get as RSS, right click and choose "open in new tab". This is just in case you need to edit the pipe details.
In the new tab, copy the url, ready for pasting in the next step.
Creating the Feedburner feed
This step is essential because the length of the url you just copied exceeds what the RSS Feed Widget can cope with. So even if you don't want the stats that FeedBurner gives, you've still got to use it.Go here: http://feedburner.google.com and you'll see something like this:
you may have to log into your Google account first
If you've used FeedBurner before, you'll see something slightly different but with the same "Burn a feed" option.
Paste in the url you copied in the step above and click next. Next you get to name your feed and give it a "friendly" feed address:
Once you've filled in the details, click next:
You next tell FeedBurner that you want it to track stats:
You'll get to the last FeedBurner screen for this tutorial, the one where you get the address of the feed you just burned, ready for pasting into the RSS Feed Widget. Here's the screen with the bit you need highlighted:
Click that "chicklet" icon highlighted (that's what they call the universal feed symbol) and a new window will open, showing the final feed results. Have a scroll around to see you're getting the expected results at the sort of size you chose.
Copy the url of that feed as highlighted, ready for pasting into the RSS Feed Widget:
Customize the RSS Feed Widget
Go the widget configuration page at http://www.rssfeedwidget.com and you'll see this:
Look at the next screenshot, below: Paste in the url of the FeedBurner feed you copied in the previous step and click the Create Widget button to see your feed displayed in the widget.
When you're changing the other items as indicated, click the button every so often so you can see the results of your choices. When you're finsihed customizing, make sure you click the Create Widget button one last time and copy the code you get given (on the right), ready for pasting in the next step.
Do use 600 and 580 for the height and width, respectively. With the image size chosen earlier (500 pixels) these all work together nicely. Also, set the headline size to 16 and tick its bold option box. I forgot to highlight those in the above screenshot...
Note that the link you get when you tick "include headline" is the one that FeedBurner uses to track the stats of what items have been clicked. In reality it means that some folk who get to your product page will have clicked that, while others will click the image and yet others will click the link displayed under the image.
This means the FeedBurner stats will report only around one third of the clicks on average. Just so you know :)
The other two thirds will use your tracking code so, if sales result, you'll know it by the tracking code appearing in your Referral History report (in two thirds of the cases on average).
You should also appreciate that you won't be credited with the sale (and therefore no tracking code in your report) if the person doing the buying has been to Zazzle before via some referral id other than yours.
Putting the RSS Feed Widget on a new Blogger Page
In this step you're going to create a new page for your Blogger blog and then paste in the RSS Feed Widget code you copied in the last step.Get to your blog's design screen and navigate to "pages" (the link is on the left hand side):
Click the "new page" button as shown and then choose "Blank page". You'll see this:
See how I've also typed in a short line at the top? That's so when you click the compose button to carry on polishing your new page (without all that nasty code in your face), you can get the cursor above the widget.
Here's what mine looks like once I've clicked the compose button
Finishing Off
When you're happy, hit the Publish button and you'll end up with a new tab at the top of your blog, like I have on this one.Final words...
If you've found this useful and you've learned some stuff, please +1 it and / or share in other ways.If you've got any questions, pop them into the comments and I'll do my best to answer them.
Happy promoting!
~~Mark (Highton Ridley)
The Zazzle forum post about it is here:
http://forum.zazzle.com/promote/trackable_promotion_boost_for_blogger_blogs
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