Friday 15 May 2015

V4 of ZazMySite - release imminent


I've been slaving away in the coding saltmines to add a major new feature to ZazMySite - the Must-haves filter.
In creating your product grids, it can be used to work on each pullled product's title, description and tags so that you:
  • only get products from a list of named stores
  • only get products from a list of product line names
  • only get products that have any of a list of terms / phrases you give
The earlier updates that gave you exclusion lists made it the most flexible way of getting products that any tool for promoting Zazzle products offers.

With the addition of the must-haves filter, ZazMySite is now so far ahead, nothing can even come close to touching it for website creation and product grid maintenance.

While the semi-official tool (ZazzleStoreBuilder) gives away a lot of your page's SEO to Zazzle, ZazMySite keeps all the SEO for your page - a massive boost for being found in search engines.

With such flexible features for getting just those products you want into your product grid, there's lots of ways ZMS can be used by people, depending on their circumstances and what they're trying to achieve, be it
  • a complete store for your website (serious affiliates)
  • a section for a website (serious affiliating)
  • a single page for a website (Zazzler who likes to promote a lot - or wants to)
  • a product grid for a blog post (Zazzler who likes to promote a lot - or wants to)
  • a product grid for a blog sidebar (great for Zazzlers just getting into promotion)
Such a major change in flexibility meant I had to do a lot of testing and so I created stores for each of the following sites. There's nothing like doing something for real to give it a good going over :)
One thing I did discover when I was being ultra-ultra precise in using all the slection features together, Zazzle must have at least 5 RSS feed servers.

Sometimes generation wouldn't get a full product grid, with Zazzle giving the first empty page of results (i.e. it had run out of products) after, say 20 pages. Trying again immediately after (just hitting the generate button, no changes to anything else at all) might get to page 35 before running out.

And trying again might give a full product grid after 83 pages. And then trying again might go back to running out after 20 pages again.

I suspect that this is all to do with the work that Zazzle is doing on their indexers, trying to fix the "disappearing product" bug everyone's reporting on the Zazzle forum.

I'm busy preparing all the material for the release of the new version, so it should be ready for release after the coming weekend. Fingers crosssed ;)

Meantime, I've updated the testimonials page for ZazMySite, which you can see here.