Amazon RSS Feeds for Squidoo

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How to Generate your own Amazon RSS feeds for Squidoo.

This weekend I discovered a way to generate my own Amazon RSS feeds for use on Squidoo using the Storestacker affiliate store software. Is my new idea 100% perfect? No. I may find that I get more clicks using the Amazon link builder at squidutils.com, but I am going to give this method a try for a little while.

This method will allow you to create Amazon RSS feeds for your Squidoo lenses with more than 5 items and allow you to keep 100% of your earnings without giving up the 10th click to Fluffanutta. I have nothing against him, he does a ton for the Squidoo community and I love the tools that he provides, but that 10th click could be the person that actually buys something.

The Storestacker software is not free 

Using Storestacker to generate feeds for your Squidoo lenses is not free, it will cost you some money up front. If you don't have money to spend right now, please continue to use the Amazon RSS Feed generator for the time being and save up some money before trying this.



If you have $1.00 to spare and a domain laying around then you may want to give this a try for 14 days.

Step 1: What you will need 

Now that I have the disclaimers out of the way, we'll get on to this. Maybe someday I'll make a video out of this, but for now you're stuck with my writing and screenshots. You will need the following items in order to try this for generating your Amazon RSS Feeds:


  • A subscription to Storestacker. If you are just using it for Amazon feeds you do not need any of the plugins. Do not waste your money on the Overstock plugin because they haven't updated it to the Commission Junction links yet.

  • A domain to install Storestacker on. Don't worry about it being a great one; a .info domain will work very well for this.

  • Webhosting with Zend Optimizer installed. Stay away from Godaddy for hosting this software, it's not worth your time trying to get them to install Zend Optimizer. I totally recommend Mochahost. They have great pricing, great support, and you don't have to worry about asking them to install Zend Optimizer.

  • FTP Software for uploading files to your server. I use Core FTP Lite which is a free software that I've been using since I first started building sites in 1998. I haven't found any reason to upgrade to paid software at this point in time.

Step 2: Download Storestacker and install 

I'm not going to go through with installation instructions for Storestacker here because the instructions included with the software are real easy to follow. The site also includes video instructions to help you through the process. Remember when uploading the software to your hosting site to upload in binary mode. There are been numerous times where I forgot to do this and received error messages all over the place. It's not that big of a deal because you can always upload everything again, but it is a minor annoyance.

Step 3: Setup Storestacker for use on your Squidoo lenses 

I have the site that I'm drawing my feeds from set up exclusively to generate feeds for Squidoo so I have not done anything with this site for SEO purposes. If you are planning on promoting your site, make sure to change your titles, keywords, and other options. For purposes of this tutorial, I'm not going to go through those items. The first thing you want to change under "preferences" is the RSS link option; make sure that this is set to the second option which states "Product page of the item directly at the merchant's site".



Directly below that you may or may not want to change the number under "RSS Limit". I believe I have mine set at 50 which is plenty; you will probably not be using more than 10 items in a feed on a Squidoo page anyways.

Under preferences you will want to at least change the Adsense code or delete it because the default setting is the Adsense account belonging to the publishers of the Storestacker software.

Step 5: Set up your categories 

As I stated earlier, the store that I set up for this purpose is not meant to be found so it's gong to be a hodgepodge of numerous unrelated products. Your store may be different.

The next thing you are going to want to do is setup the category for the products you will want to feature on your Squidoo lens. The tutorial for setting up a category at Storestacker is great so I won't go step by step here. In fact, if you are using your initial setup like I am you really won't even need any content for the top or bottom, just give the category a name and save. I think I added some keywords too, but that's totally up to you.

Step 6: Add items to your new category. 

This is the most important part of the whole process and it is rather quite simple. After you've set up your category, click on the "grab & push" button at the top of your admin screen. You will need to click on "Add Rule" as shown below.



You will need to choose the Amazon rule for creating your Amazon RSS Feed. As shown below.



You will then need to create a title for your rule, add your keywords for products, choose the number of items you want to add to your category, and then choose which Amazon categories you would like to draw your products from. I have often found it easier to do a search on Amazon for this and then see which categories the majority of my products fall into. Then go back to your Storestacker admin and find that particular category. Once you have found your category, click the "save" button and your rule will be created.

Step 7: Run your new rule to add products to your store 

Once you click the save button you are taken back to the rules page. Click the check box next to your new rule and click "Run Selected" at the bottom of the page. This may take a while so be patient and work on the rest of your lens while your products are being added. Once you are done running your rule, hit the refresh button to see the products which were just added.

You may want to glance over these the first time you run a rule to see if there's anything that doesn't belong. I usually look for items with "N/A" as the price or duplicate listings if I catch them. If you find something that you don't want to be in your store, then click the check box next to that item. A small bubble with pop up asking you what you'd like to do with that item, click delete and then you will asked if you are sure, click yes.

Step 8: Grab the RSS Feed from your site 

If you look at the category page on your live website you should see an option that states "RSS Feed Of This Page". Click on that, copy your RSS Feed URL and insert it into your RSS Module on Squidoo. The link will look similar to the one in the picture below:


For some reason, the link like the one you see in this picture has disappeared from my store. If you can't find the link, the RSS feed URL format for Storestacker is as follows:

http://domain.com/rss/category-name

The Amazon RSS that I created for affiliate marketing books 

Below is the RSS Feed which I created while running through this tutorial.

Loading Fetching RSS feed... please stand by

Have you tried this method yourself? Do you have a method for Amazon RSS feeds that you use? 

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The Disadvantages of using Storestacker for your Amazon RSS Feeds 

No niche store building software is perfect and Storestacker is definitely not an exception. Here are my biggest complaints.

1. The pictures are not clickable. If you look at my feed above, you cannot click on the pictures in my feed; I feel this may be a major drawback with using this method. All I can do is wait and see though.

2. It costs money up front, but the Storestacker license is unlimited so you can use it to build an unlimited amount of websites for yourself.

3. You need to pay a monthly hosting fee. Hosting is pretty cheap and if you are serious about affiliate marketing you will need it down the road anyways.

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