Behind the Lens: How It Was Made
Here is a behind-the-scenes look at how the lens Best Wii Games Ever was built, with details of how it was put together and some of the tricks used.
This commercial lens was built to attract visitors to an Amazon aStore featuring some the most popular Wii games. An article is used to provide some juicy content, followed by groups of items from the aStore.
Best Wii Games Ever was voted Best Gaming Lens in the 2008 Giant Squid Awards.
« Lens photo generated online at Imagechef.com.
The Ever Project
The lens is not a regular lens, but is instead built using the Ever Project. This gives the lens a different style and a unique URL: best.wii--games.ever.com. Apart from that, it's a regular lens with the same choice of modules.
Ever lenses do not seem to perform well on search engines, but this lens gets a reasonable amount of traffic from other lenses on Squidoo through the Discovery Tool (aka Explore Related Lenses), and also from some other websites.
Using Amazon Listmania
The aStore is built from Listmania Lists, put together by other Amazon members. Listmania lists are good because they consist of hand picked products, either by you or someone else, and they can be updated over time. The person that builds the list can also add comments for each of the items they have added.
Those same lists are featured on the lens using Amazon RSS Feeds. These feeds are for anyone who is an Amazon Associate, and they will earn commissions from any of the items that get sold.
Using the 'Grid' style, the first 6 items from the list are displayed with pictures, names and prices. An additional link is added to the description module that goes to the matching section of the aStore so that visitors can see the full list.
This same technique can be used with an aStore had been put together from categories, or even without any aStore at all. Using an RSS feed based on a specific category (browse node) is good because the items are relevant and will update automatically. You can choose between Top Sellers and New Releases, plus there are other styles that include descriptions of each item.
If you're not an Amazon Associate, then you can use regular Amazon module instead, and hand pick the items that you want to promote.
Example Listmania Feed
Here is an example feed featuring items from a list, generated by the Amazon RSS Feed tool using the Listmania ID is R2GQ3XOZB6DNHW and the 'Grid' style. The RSS Module is configured to show everything from the feed, including the HTML.
Fetching RSS feed... please stand byUsing CSS Effects
I have employed a few CSS Tricks, but only sparingly. The font-size of each module is increased slightly to 14px, and padding is sometimes used for quoting. There's also a nifty hack to center the video module too.
The most significant use of CSS is with the links. Using only the <a> tag, these links are given a fixed width, padding and a background color. The magic bit come from "display: block;" which turn the tag from being inline to be more like a paragraph. A nice side effect is that the entire block can be clicked on.
Here is some example code:
<a style="background: #cef; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold; padding: 8px; display: block; text-align: center; width: 500px;" href="http://astore.amazon.com/top-wii-games-20" target="_blank">See the Best Wii Games »</a>
...and this is how it turns out:
See the Best Wii Games »
Tracking Traffic to Your aStore
Here's a bonus tip: using a 3rd party statistic package like StatCounter, you can see exactly how much traffic you are getting to your aStore.
First thing you need to do is sign up, and set up a new project. Enter the URL of your aStore, and pick the other options as appropriate.
You will then need to get the code for your counter - you'll probably want to choose the 'Invisible Counter', and also the option for it to be 'HTML Only'. Within the tracking code is the URL to an image; this is the URL that you need for the next step.
On the second page of the configuration screen for the aStore, there is a section at the bottom titled 'Configure Store Header'. You need to copy the URL for the tracking image into the box provided. This will then track every visitor to every page.
Interpretting the results can be a little tricky, because Amazon give different URLs to each visitor that comes to your aStore. However, you will be able to see which are the popular entry pages, and get charts of your visitors and page views for the last month.
See the Finished Result
Thank you for reading this behind the lens look at how I built the Best Wii Games Ever. Now that you've seen some of the elements I've used to put it together, you may want to have another look at the lens to see how it all hangs together:
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The Best Wii Games Ever
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If you own a Nintendo Wii, then there's a good chance that you'll be looking for the best games to buy for it. Here is are just a few of them, compiled by some keen gamers. I have put together my own list of favorites here: My Top Wii Games...
Reader Feedback
Ener-G wrote...
This lens is going into my Squidoo Book Mobile! Thanks for the great tips.
Posted January 06, 2009
Tipi wrote...
I like your lens on the tips. Listmania is one I need to check out! I need to study those CSS tricks and others too. I'm a bit behind the times...lol!
Posted January 06, 2009
aj2008 wrote...
This is another lens I will use to analyse my own affiliate marketing & see if I can do better than I am already - which is not very well! Thank you.
Posted January 06, 2009
lakeerieartists wrote...
Very useful. Cool effects too. I always learn something from you. :)
Posted January 06, 2009
Update Lens moved to regular lens
After continued lack of interest in the lens from search engines, I've moved it to the standard lens format:
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The Best Games for the Wii
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If you own a Nintendo Wii, then there's a good chance that you'll be looking for the best games to buy for it. Here is are just a few of them, compiled by some keen gamers. If you know of a title for the Wii that you think really is the best...
by thefluffanutta
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