When you think of ways for a blogger to make money, you instantly think of Google AdSense, Yahoo! Panama, and Amazon Associates. However Google AdSense chooses the ads for you, Yahoo! Panama isn’t completely open for everyone, and Amazon Associates is slightly complicated to use. This is what gives PopShops.com an instant advantage over the aforementioned competitors.
Seattle, Wash. native, Jessie Jones will be officially launching PopShops in a couple of weeks with the rest of her development team: Angel Djambazov, Dan Harms, and Eric Artzt. PopShops allows bloggers and website designers to create their own virtual store in the form of widgets and leverages Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX and Ruby-on-Rails platforms. Jones previously worked as a product designer for 15 years at Microsoft Corporation.
A blogger looking to set up shop has been streamlined by PopShop. It is a simple three-step process:
1. Pick (from a choice of 15 million products)
2. Click (to customize showcase of products)
3. Pop (storefront into the blog or website)
The purpose of PopShops is for bloggers to make more money and provide an alternative to the other services. There is a video demo available at http://www.popshops.com/faq/typepad showing how to set up a PopShop on TypePad. Other platforms that are supported include Blogger, Squidoo, and WordPress.
There are three levels of service plans for PopShops. A basic account is free, a Pro account is $5/month, and an Enterprise account is $30/month. And an outline of the differences in abilities for each account is highlighted at https://www.popshops.com/signup.
The commissions for the products sold are provided by third-party services like Commission Junction, LinkShare, Red Galoshes, and ShareASale. After an account is created, users can create a new shop. After entering a shop name, users then manage their inventory.
What are the constraints for entering the online advertising market? Even some of the top-rated blogs and websites are struggling to find ways for visitors to even click on their ads.
I read a report on Valleywag about how Facebook.com is suffering from a 0.04% click-through rate on their ads. While this could be because of the way Facebook ads are set-up, it proves that simply having a large user-base may not mean squat.
