Ask HN: Please review my project "ShowSpace"

Hi Manuel,<p>Speaking as a long-time affiliate (for better or worse), I'm glad to see you release this in the wild!<p>So, with that in mind, here's my thoughts:<p>1. Overall, I like your concept of making a powerful turnkey storefront for affiliates. I especially like your outsource-ready concept. However, there are tons of others across the world, and many of them are working the work-from-home-churn-and-burn scam and have a hell of a lot of money to burn.<p>2. A big difficulty is going to be content and keeping the storefronts valuable. You see, with SEO and PPC, you generally need to have a fairly unique site with some different content. Google will heavily penalize sites that are recycled data or affiliate links with little to no information in them. A good example is this HN post: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3099875" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3099875</a><p>Matt Cutts weighed in on this and his feedback was quite clear to that affiliate: "You have an autogenerated web site that consists of practically nothing other than affiliate links to Amazon. You can make an infinite number of autogenerated pages on your site and each autogenerated page consists of literally hundreds of affiliate links stuffed with keywords for unrelated products."<p>Remember that for search and PPC, the lifeblood of 99% of affiliates out there, content is king. You need to provide many ways for them to do this and site maps, tags and clean code don't go that far.<p>3. You're going to face serious competition from the very established combo of Wordpress.com + Skimlinks. It is very easy to make a content-heavy affiliate site using that combo, as blogging is fairly simple and Skimlinks makes the monetization almost instant. If you want to hit those guys, really work on some content tools for affiliates. Writing product descriptions really isn't enough and reviews have to be really verbose to get ranked, so the more tools you provide for that, the better.<p>With all this in mind, do you have a winner here? Not yet, but you <i>are</i> on to something. Really refine your product and add some core tools. I think you'd be best served by making a solution akin to WP+Skimlinks, but look more at what your users want because it is only my opinion :)

I guess this is a kind of Shopify with affiliates' data.<p>I think you're going to have to do a lot more with the designs, by which I mean you need a lot of good templates.<p>You could try to encourage designers to submit designs, you might have to curate them yourselves for quality, but some form of template structure would be required. It's going to be some "off topic" work to set that up, and you'll have to somehow provide an incentive for the designers to do something though.<p>Polyvore springs to mind, because actually it gives college fashion students a great way to experiment with colours, layout and design, I'm sure there's a complex engine behind that though. (Those guys are ex-Yahoo.) The point being, that students can be a great source of content, if you give them the right tools/incentive

If you're not aware of it already, make sure to show this off over at www.warriorforum.com I suspect they will go crazy for this kind of thing.