Building a Pepperjam Lens Part 2 - Add Products
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Okay, in Part 1 of the series on PepperJam lenses we found our new affiliate program - Jimi Hendrix Clothing.
Today I went ahead and created a lens titled ‘How to Dress Like Jimi Hendrix’ . Honestly, it’s the first thing that popped into my mind that wasn’t something like ‘Buy Jimi Hendrix..blah..blah..blah’ .
When crafting titles, especially for ‘affiliate’ lenses, I definitely try to make it something that I would click on if I saw it on a search results page.
Here are a few screenshots of the lens setup. I think most of the first couple steps are pretty self-explanatory. If you need help with setting up a lens for the first time, check out the training center (top of the blog), I’ve got a bunch of lensbuilding 10 1 videos on there from about 6 months ago.
After having my lens all set up, I then opened up Pepperjam and clicked on ‘Generate Links - Program List’ and found Jimi Hendrix Clothing and viewed the banner ads. You’ll notice there’s a box above the auto-generated ads that looks like this:
If you notice, Deep Linking is ‘Allowed’ which means that we can link directly to specific pages on the Jimi Hendrix Clothing site.
Opening up the Jimi Hendrix site, I navigate to a page selling a shirt I want to put on the lens that looks like this:
Right-click on an image, save it to your computer, and upload it to somewhere on the internet (your web host, flickr, photobucket, etc.).
Next, create the HTML to display the Image on your lens. (full info on this at my Image linking lens)
now, we fill in the box for the SID code (this code identifies where the traffic comes from on your link reports, use something short and descriptive) and copy/paste the URL to the URL box on the Pepperjam page.
It should look something like this:
Next, hit update and all of your links in your banner codes will update to reflect the SID code and the destination URL.
copy JUST the URL and make that URL what your image in your content links to.
Now, each time someone clicks on the image of that shirt in the lens, they will be taken directly to the page that has that shirt for sale. Pretty neat huh?
I repeated this step a few more times and added some other content (videos and a poll at the end) to come up with the finished product - How to Dress Like Jimi Hendrix.
A few points to remember -
Make sure the links are ‘nofollow’ - here’s how to make no-follow links
Actually write some content or modify product descriptions a bit, using the default isn’t going to get you a lot of love with visitors or with search engines.
Add some other things to interact with (videos, polls, guestbooks, etc) so visitors feel comfortable clicking stuff on your lens.
Use all kinds of links to the site - if you notice, I have text links, a banner, as well as the linked product pictures.
Here’s a little bonus - the HTML code I used for the main Text/Write module so you can see exactly how I did it.
These lenses don’t have to be super long, but they need to have a point and not just be a list of products with no explanation or back story.
I’m sure there are going to be a bunch of questions (hopefully 
) so ask away and I’ll address them in a follow-up post.
I’m also working on a super secret project that will help you guys build these lenses SUPER fast and will cost you a whopping $0 … stay tuned for that as it’s still in early development.
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Comments
I assume you’re going to talk about marketing your page? I’ve read some stuff on affiliate marketing and they all say “don’t be afraid to lose a lot of money at the beginning.” It sounds like they do paid search / buy AdWords and stuff to drive traffic. There’s all this information on writing ad copy and bidding for keywords. Do you do this too?
[...] a great post by Captain Squid about building a Pepperjam lens. If you use Squidoo to make money, I would definitely recommended signing up for his RSS [...]
This is a great series. I haven’t done a Pepperjam product lens yet — but I joined through you and will make one soon! Thanks!
Wow. This is exactly what I want to do — but all that html is really scary to me. Also wondering — all those banners I have been putting on my sites just copying and pasting……was I not getting credit for those? no wonder I did not have any sales!
I must have over 50 to fix! Overwhelmed!
[...] how this goes. I hope to make a lot more book lenses where I can also place these links. I followed Captain Squid’s PepperJam tutorials, although, I’m not too clear on pixel counting or whatever it is. I used the generated URL [...]
You Rock! I got into Pepperjam last week. I’ve built a couple of lenses so far.
I need to tweak them a bit after reading this. I’ve been doing the deep linking with images. However, I’ve been putting links below the image. I guess either would work, but I like your way better.