Affiliate Stores

Maybe you run several stores to keep each one compact and running efficiently, but you would like to include links as part of Affilistore’s navigation structure, or maybe you would like an exit back to your domain home page if you host Affilistore as a bolt-on.

Here is a tip that I shared previously on the forum, but with additional usage context.

Create a page for your other store (or it could be a blog .. or anywhere else for that matter) and edit source.

On that page, enter the following :

<meta content=”0.001; url=http://www.pagetogo.to/” http-equiv=”Refresh” />

and in 1/1,000′th of a second the new page will be left behind to take you to your selected page. So, if for example your domain runs around a niche blog talking about ‘Dedicated Servers’ and you host an Affilistore shop selling domain services on a sub-domain, you can now create an exit point back to ‘The Dedicated Server Blog’.

Pretty neat, huh!!

I promised you a beefed up version of Affilistore with additional features over and above the standard Affilistore.

I wanted to give you a progress report.

Affilistore Enhanced as we are calling it, is kindly being put together by Steven over at Anyname. Steven is already well known at the Affilistore Forum under his alter ego Tifosi, and has brought some of the more interesting modifications to Affilistore.

Just as a tease, here are some of the modifications that are included in our private Beta. Bookmark or subscribe and I will tell you a little more about each mod over the coming days.

Integrated Mods

• GroupMod
• NavCatCSS
• NavCatDropDown
• ThemeSelect
• Blocks
• PaginationCSS
• PageBanner
• Enhanced RSS MultiFeed
• Enhanced Cache
• RefineSearch

One thing, this is not an upgrade path due to changes necessary on the underlying tables. You will need to rebuild your sites from a new Afflistore ‘Enhanced’ installation.

Why not Subscribe to Affiliate Stores by Emailand get the release news delivered straight to your mailbox?

Did you know that RSS feeds are already embedded in your new Affilistore storefront?

It isn’t obvious on looking at the site whether there is RSS or not. There are buttons to digg.it on news pages, but there isn’t that nice big RSS button, thus :

However, Affilistore 2.0 and 2.01 come out of the box with two feeds ready enabled and operating, but it does it almost under a veil of secrecy.

As an example, Have a look at the feeds from our gifts and UK days out Affilistore tutorial site

• Your site news articles: http://www.foodwithpassion.co.uk/feeds/newsfeed.php
• Your popular products feed :http://www.foodwithpassion.co.uk/feeds/popularproductsfeed.php

If you view the source on your site home page, you will also see these enabled (with your shop domain of course) and being published to the world.

However, in order to make best advantage of these feeds, you need to publish them … that gets external links back into your own web site and helps increase traffic.

The Googlemeister has its own feed aggregation service at http://www.feedburner.com/ and at a minimum I would recommend that you should publish your news article to feedburner. You can of course look for other RSS aggregation services … the more the merrier as far as traffic is concerned.

Just one little tip, Affilistore editor has a habit of entering characters in your news articles that are unwanted in feeds (such as ‘&nbsp;’), just check out your feed at feedburner each time you write a new article (it will tell you if it doesn’t like characters and you can also subscribe to alerts for broken feeds) and be sure to go back and santise your article to remove any unwanted characters.

If you upgraded to Affilistore 2.01, then it appears that a bug has crept in in the Content Unit element whereby it fails to redirect to the merchant ( a call to go.php gets stuck in a perpetual refresh)

Whilst the developer is on holiday, I have worked out the fix.

Open up contentunit.php from your store root and look for the last line of code .. you will see

.$content['prodID'].

Change this for :

.$content['dbProdID'].

and everything should be sorted.

Just make sure that you observe the mixed case and enter exactly as shown above. If you fail to change the ‘p’ to an upercase ‘p’, it will still not work.

This is a bit of a test to see whether php can be included using the Exec-PHP plug-in. If it works, then we will have the ability to add content that is fully indexable by the search engines.

The plan is to add an Affilistore content unit here, but using the PHP version of the output code. There is a complexity, as the Visual editor risks corrupting the code, converting the php tag into something meaningless

Therefore I am using a separate plugin Deactivate Visual Editor. Let’s see if it works.

Hopefully below (or following the rest of the post), you will see a selection of driving experiences drawn from one of my Affilistores.

Read the rest of this entry »

This site has now been upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress - version 2.6.1.

Contrary to my earlier experience, this upgrade went just fine using the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plug-in.

What I would say is that because of previous issues in upgrading from 2,5 to 2.6, on this occasion I opted to perform my own file and database (using MySQL GUI Tools) backups. It wasin the backup area that the plug-in seemed to get all hairy last time and I wanted to avoid that, so skipped all backup steps as part of the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade routine.

This release was more about security and stability with around 60 bug fixes included. For the full list read here : http://trac.wordpress.org/query?status=closed&milestone=2.6.1&resolution=fixed&order=priority

There is no question that Affilistore 2.01 is a massive step forward in terms of the time it takes to generate a page, but is there more that can be done?

I have reviewed the code and determined that there is, and with one easy applied sql script through phpMyAdmin or whatever tool you use to run mysql directly.

The patch:

ALTER TABLE `affilist_products1` ADD INDEX `singleprodmerchantid`(`prodDB`, `merchantProdID`),
 ADD INDEX `singleprodnomerchantid`(`prodDB`, `dbProdID`),
 ADD INDEX `popularity`(`prodPopularity`);

Standard Affilistore uses the merchant database number (proddb) in conjunction with either the merchants own product id or, where you have not selected via admin that the merchant product id be used, it will fall back to use the row number in the feed (the dbProdID).

Unfortunately, Affilistore does not come with indexes to allow it to find the product without performing a full product table scan … barely noticeable if you just have a few hundred products, but very noticable if you have a catalogue with 100,000+ items.

The third index will help in fetching back the most popular items as it will allow mysql to quickly locate the biggest ‘prodpopularity’ numbers without the need to trawl through the entire database to find them. This only really kicks in however after there have been some visits to merchant and there really are popular products … also worth a note is that ‘prodpopularity’is reset to zero for products subject to a feed refresh.

I hope you like this modest hack. It certainly seems to make a difference. See http://www.tool-of-the-trade.co.uk which is running on bog standard shared hosting and serving 140,000 products. It isn’t necessarilly the fastest site, but the point is that it actually runs very well for Affilistore with that many products.

Why not subscribe to the feed now and watch out for any more tips, tricks and tools that I bring you.

In starting this site, I said that I aim to cover all affiliate store tools available.

There is a relatively new kid in the block now in Datafeed Studio.

At the time of writing this post, I have been unable to get it to run in my Linux/Apache live environment, which the developer has suggested is down to my host environment.

There is an evaluation version available which is limited to two feeds. The feature list from the developer is as follows :

Datafeed Studio converts your merchant datafeeds into dynamic money-making websites and comes with out of the box support for rapid building of the following types of affiliate based web site:

1. Niche Online Stores Example
2. Price Compare Sites Example
3. Product Price Compare Pages (Ideal for PPC) Example

User Generated Content

In true Web 2.0 fashion, Datafeed Studio themes can allow the user to participate on your web site by providing reviews of products.

These are held in a staging area for you to moderate, and approve before publication. User reviews are great as they give your site free user-generated content, which Google and other search engines will lap up!

Amazon Support

Want Amazon products on your site? Unable to get an Amazon datafeed?

Datafeed Studio has the solution with its built-in support for accessing the Amazon product database (from any country). To use this feature you will need to sign-up with the relevant Amazon Web Service program for your locality (free) to get your Amazon Web Service account credentials.

Amazon is a great merchant for converting clicks into sales so it is highly recommended that you activate this feature. Once enabled you can search Amazon’s huge product database (including those provided by Third Parties) and add the products you want to your Datafeed Studio database. What’s more, Datafeed Studio can be configured to automatically keep the product details (price, description, availability, etc.) synchronised with Amazon’s database.

Create Niche Online Stores, Price Compare Sites and More!

Unlike other affiliate solutions, Datafeed Studio is not limited to a single type of affiliate site, and can generate online stores, price compare sites and highly profitable PPC landing pages at a push of a button.

Experiment with the best choice of money-making site for you niche (and let us all know about your successes in the Datafeed Studio Discussion Forum!)

Themes

Datafeed Studio comes with a selection of user customisable themes to help you create great looking affiliate websites. These act as a great starting point for your own customisation and imagination.

All the presentation files used by Datafeed Studio are freely editable either using the built-in theme editor, or as they are just normal files stored on the web server, via your favourite editor via FTP or SSH.

Created a great theme or site using Datafeed Studio? Let us know about it and we’ll mention it on the blog or even link to it from this site.

Integrate With Existing Web Sites (including WordPress)

Advanced users might want to use Datafeed Studio as an affiliate product database and reference selected products from other blog or CMS publishing systems such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.

Datafeed Studio makes this possible by allowing you access to the same functions that native Datafeed Studio templates use from your other web sites.

See integrating Datafeed Studio with WordPress to understand how little effort is required.

Automated Refresh of Datafeeds

Datafeed Studio comes with a set of PHP command-line scripts that enable you to automate the download and import of datafeed products into your database (e.g. via cron).

Don’t worry - if your not a fan of the command-line, you can manually refresh a particular feed, or all feeds at once, with just one click from the Datafeed Studio administration interface.

Master your Products

When you have thousands of products at your fingertips, you need to gain some control over them. Datafeed Studio comes with a powerful search tool that allows you to quickly find the products of interest to you.

What’s more - with Datafeed Studio you can create special categories of products (great for online stores) either by manually allocating them from the administration interface, or creating dynamic categories that will automatically list all products matching the criteria you specify (e.g. all products that match the word ‘TomTom’).

In addition, you can override almost all the product information that is provided in the datafeed about a product, including it’s name, description, URL for SEO purposes, etc. Datafeed Studio even remembers this information when you update your datafeeds, so you never lose your valuable unique content about products, and can continue to create great value added affiliate sites that will be appreciated by your site visitors.

Incidentally, the support I received from the developer was excellent in trying to resolve the problem, even logging in to my host to double-check all the configuration and the installation. Unfortunately he was defeated by my host where it appears that the mysql server version required updating to eliminate bugs that are causing my install to fail.

The product relies upon an Apache environment (and the newer SQLi libraries) and is unsuitable for Windows IIS hosts. Until such times as my host upgrades and I can get a working environment to show you, please feel free to leave your own comments and views on the product and showcase your Datafeed Studio sites/pages.

I recently wrote a recommendation for WebCEO as a great tool for webmasters looking to get sites submitted quickly, perform onsite optimisation and to check on the competition.

I received an email today advising of some extra special discounts meantime :

Treat your visitors with Web CEO discounted prices - the special price will let the customers save up to 62%! The speciality of this campaign is an additional cash bonus. This means people who buy Web CEO Professional Unleashed or SmallBiz Unleashed editions during the campaign will get not only a huge discount, but also $50 or $30 as a bonus for use on services (our HitLens Web Stats or Premium Website Monitoring packages).

Just take a look at the prices that will be offered during the summer campaign:

Small Biz Unleashed $159 USD +$30 (your visitors save $210 or 62%)
Professional Unleashed $269 USD +$50 (your visitors save $260 or 54%)

The campaign starts on 12.08.08 and ends on 23.08.08. No coupon code is required.

Whilst there is a free edition (with limitations), the premium editions unlock more feature and extend existing functionality (e.g. from analysing 5 keywords). If you think that a premium edition is right for you, the you should buy now. I haven’t seen an offer in quite some time.

You can download an evaluation (time unlimited, certain features disabled/limited) copy of WebCEO 7.7 here.

I confess that I am a rank amateur in CSS and modifying pagestyles. It always seems so complex and difficult to grasp.

Well, there are plenty of knockers of Microsoft, but this time they seem to have produced a really useful tool in the design arena - Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar.

This toolbar has a multutude of ways to look at the tagging and the site layout objects on an existing site with graphical overlays.

This is a tool that I am going to use a lot in reskinning projects as it helps demystify a whole lot of existing CSS.

Use it on your existing Affilistore site to see what all the different objects and classes are as well as the CSS values.

From early impressions, I recommend the tool highly.