I often think of my approach to site building as being like kite flying. I throw up plenty up in the air and if any start flying, then they get my attention and I then dedicate more time to them. Others fall by the way side and never progress further than the time it took to create them in the first place.

One site which has recently started flying is a site called Toys and Video Games, which I mentioned back in April when I developed it and made use of Amazon's Web Services. It was designed to hook up with the toy inventory of Amazon in the US.

After that initial development phase, which did take a couple of days whilst I got my head round Amazons Web Services and how I was going to make use of it, I've done hardly any work on the site at all except for add in a Transformers toy page and put a link to back packs on the front page for the Back To School period.

But despite it being left to its own devices (which thanks to the live product info through Amazon's Web Services is quite a reasonable thing to do), it has started to generate some very decent sales. Individual toys - and quite popular ones at that - have somehow ranked well within Google and Yahoo! and I've occasionally been knocked sideways after logging into Amazon Associates and seeing how many items a particular toy has sold in the previous day.

Whilst doing online marketing, the prospect of having a .com site, hosted in the US, promoting US products to US customers has always appealed to me (because of the size of the market) and I'm pleased that that's what I've got. So the site has shown me its potential so I hope to develop more actual content for the site before Christmas.

Labels: amazon, progress, update