Great tool written by fellow affiliate for adding bike maps to Wordpress sites and mobile app
As an affiliate, a large number of you will use wordpress as a blogging platform or even as your core affiliate website.
The beauty of WordPress is that its totally free, comes with a great and easy to use CMS, and utilises plugins that can do just about anything you can think of.
Wordpress has a number of valuable features that you may find useful:
- Easy to change the look & feel of a site by simply changing the theme used
- Add your content quickly and easily, no HTML knowledge required
- User accounts allow you to outsource certain tasks
- Choosing the right theme ensures effective on-page SEO
- Plugins allow complicated code to be added to your site to deliver useful functionality, without any knowledge of PHP or other coding languages
But what next? What comes beyond using wordpress as the basis for your website? Google has always said that websites should be built with users in mind, naturally built sites with naturally generated links. Thus, as webmasters it is important to deliver good quality content. Content, however, is both interesting, uniquely written articles on a broad range of related topics, and functionality that users find useful. For example, the Walk, Jog, Run website [walkjogrun.net] provide running routes. It’s a free online running route planner that allows runners to see how far they have walked, jogged or run over a course.
So why is this important for affiliates? Link bait. If your website offers something that users find interesting, it will attract links from admiring webmasters. Links that are on-topic and relevant, two elements that are important in obtaining positive responses from the SE bots.
Route Finder
Another example of a site that provides a useful tool is Bikes.org.uk which has developed a Route Finder tool for cyclists, mountain bikers, walkers, runners and even sailers.
The Route Finder tool is available as a Widget, iPhone App, Android App and as a Wordpress Plugin. The wp plugin allows webmasters to embed routes into wordpress posts and pages. It is ideal for Wordpress Blogs dedicated to cyclists, mountain bikers, runners, joggers, walkers, hikers, swimmers, canoeists, sailers, motorbikers and anyone else looking for routes, trails or tracks, on roads, paths, trails or even on water.
Calculate Uptime and Downtime Table
I was recently on some Exchange 2010 training at work which was pretty boring but whilst I was on the course and thinking of Affiliate Marketing and the project one thing caught my attention, so I woke up and noticed a section about high availability and downtime. So I decided to do a table below showing the downtime as it was quite surprising how much downtime you could expect from your service providers or web hosting companies. Because all Affiliates will be hosting their websites and have looked at Web hosting at many points in their Affiliate business, I thought it would be useful to highlight this and recommend people consider this element when choosing their hosting package or provider. I mean I thought 99% was pretty good and our sites were going to be up pretty much all the time, well not according to this. Shocking really!!
Calculate How much downtime using the table below
| Uptime | Downtime per month | Downtime per year |
|---|---|---|
| 100% | 0m | 0m |
| 99.999% | 0.4m | 5m |
| 99.99% | 4m | 52m |
| 99.9% | 43m | 8h46m |
| 99.8% | 1h26m | 17h31m |
| 99.7% | 2h10m | 1d2h17m |
| 99.6% | 2h53m | 1d11h2m |
| 99.5% | 3h36m | 1d19h48m |
| 99.4% | 4h19m | 2d4h34m |
| 99.3% | 5h2m | 2d13h19m |
| 99.2% | 5h46m | 2d22h5m |
| 99.1% | 6h29m | 3d6h50m |
| 99.0% | 7h12m | 3d15h36m |
Note: Many service providers do not count downtime caused by planned maintenance into their uptime numbers.
Can you afford to lose this amount of downtime for your websites? Our web hosting with EUKhost is currently 99.5% for both packages. So we’re currently looking at approx 2days per year downtime. I don’t think you should look for anything under 99.0% and this is why I stopped at this level in the table. If you are looking for 100% uptime then most Web hosting companies should offer this, but you might need to opt for Business Hosting solutions or dedicated servers.
Circus skills would be useful for Affiliate Marketing
We’ve been revisiting some old niches recently and have realized they have gotten a bit out of date, feeds need re-doing as products have disappeared and new products are available, some merchants have been removed and some merchants have moved networks. So why the title of this post. Well it struck me that there would be some circus skills which would come in very hand in affiliate marketing. Namely juggling and plate spinning. We have been quite busy on our big sites so our niches may have been a little neglected. Therefore we are going to spend a bit of time updating them as they are our main bread winners at the moment. All our own fault for maybe having too many plates to spin but hey who wants a nice easy life as an affiliate marketeer!
We are working on ways to make our life easier. We have been working on ways to auto update our feeds so that say for example over every weekend the feeds are updated via scripts and just need checking to make sure products appear ok. This is work in progress and testing will be starting very soon, in fact maybe later today. We have it working on one of our bigger niches so just a matter of porting across to all sites. Right off to book that circus skills course. You never know if life in affiliate marketing gets too tough the skills learnt might mean a career in the circus might be a decent alternative.
Affiliate Project keeping up with the times, now available on iphone
As a treat to ourselves and to help us be more mobile with affiliate marketing we have both bought iphones. We have had them about 2 months now and they have been a great asset, checking things like google reader, accounts, email and all this from the comfort of the local pub 
We both wanted iphones anyway and this project was a useful excuse to get them.
As a result of checking our site on the iphones we have now installed onto our theme the iphone plugin making this site easy to read and much more accessible on the iphone. Here is a screen grab (very sexy feature on the iphone) of our site on an iphone.
iphone capture
The plugin we have used is the WPtouch plugin. So all you iphone users, have a look and let us know what you think.
Free links to your site when people cut and paste your content using Tynt Insight
I recently discovered this cool new tool called Tynt Insight which basically tracks who is copying your content from your site. This is being used by many big sites to protect their content. The Daily Mail are even using this to reward them for creating the content they get a free link back to their site or the page where the content originated from.
The way this works is you copy a simple bit of javascript code and add this to your website. This javascript simply adds a attribution link to your page where the content was copied from. This has many benefits, some of which includes:
- See what content is being copied, this helps you know what content on your site is interesting and popular with real-time reporting
- More traffic and more page views as you’ll attract other visitors from those links back to your site
- Better Search ranking because you’ll have more referral links to your site
- Improved Content Visibility with a useful auto tweet tool
Apparently some sites are getting over 1000 links back to their site each day.
Have any other Affiliates used Tynt Insight? Feel free to test this out by copying the content of this article and paste this into your blog site
Search Engine Optimization – Backlinks and Link Building Guide by Affiliate Project
We have followed the below guide and have had huge success in Search Engine Optimization. We hope this helps others rank well.
Introduction to Backlinks and Link Building
Backlinks and Link Building is a very important factor for ranking well in search engines. The search engines robots scan all indexed sites billions of times a day.
The algorithms compute how many links and the value of those links back to each site. Google will rank your site well if you have backlinks from quality and relevant sites back to your site. They will determine the authority of those sites and the link back to your site.
In simple terms, you will rank well if you have a lot of quality Web sites that link to your site for those keywords based on anchor text links.
Anchor text links is the text you link the address to. So an example is when you see Click here, this is the text but it will be associated to a web address.
Check out the Competition
The first step to building links back to your website is to research the competition and how they are ranking well. Find your keywords that you want to target, see who are listed in the top 3 spots and then evaluate their backlinks using the seo tools below.
Because search engines value the quality of those incoming links, you should then go through the competitions links and try and partner with the same websites.
SEO Tools to Check the Competition
I’d recommend looking for an SEO tool that will check what backlinks the competition has. We have used SEO Spyglass from link-assistant.com. This software is a paid for software but well worth the money. Starting from around $99. You can also use the free version but it does have some limitations. Still the free version can be very useful in finding how many backlinks, the quality of those links via link popularity, anchor text keywords used, number in links, age of site and much more.
Another free tool is Yahoos Site Explorer. This is a very fast tool but is very basic, however it will give you a good idea if its going to be easy or difficult to rank well against your competition. For example if you enter a competitors website and run the search, you could potentially find that they have thousands of links back to their site. This could take a very long time to gain that amount of links unless you are paying for links.
Google does also have a tool, again very basic but it doesn’t seem as up to date as Yahoo. This is simply run by typing link: url of website in the search box.
Another great tool is the SEO for firefox by Aaron Wall from SEObook.com. This firefox plugin will allow you to see in your search results quite detailed information about each result which includes pagerank, age, incoming links and loads more.
Link Partners
Once you have analyzed the competition, you will be able to check out the potential link partners and evaluate the quality of those links. The age of the domain of the potential link partner is an important factor. Google will treat an older domain with a higher priority than a domain that has only been registered recently.
Try and acquire links from domains with .edu and .gov top level domain extensions. Search engines know that these education and government sites are much less likely to link to a low quality site. Also the web was started as a research and education resource so these sites will most likely have been around the longest.
Focus on links from pages that already rank well. If a page has a page rank of 0 or 1 then its likely to be a fairly new page. Additionaly try and get your link placed on a page with has unique and relevant content.
Try and think ‘Quality and not Quantity‘ when link building.
If you have 10 Quality links and 100 low quality links you are likely to rank better, depending on the value of each link. Follow this tip and it will hopefully save time when trying to do any link building campaigns.
Web Directories
Another method of link building is to get one way links from Web Directories. There are many of them out there and some are free and some are paid for directories.
A Web Directory is just a site which is a large page link database categorised.
Some useful Web directories are:
Yahoo – Not free, but could be a worthwhile link
DMOZ – aka Open Directory Project is one of the oldest directories on the Web, you can submit your site for free.
BOTW – aka Best of the Web, another very old site, been around since 1994. This is free for 60 days but after this time will cost you a small fee but could be well worth it
Try and focus on Web Directories that have been around for years and have a good PageRank.
Article Sites
The preferred method of link building over Web Directories is by submitting articles to Article sites. This will allow you to write the content so that its related to the specific theme of your site.
Some useful Article Sites are:
Ezinearticles.com – been around since 1999
Goarticles.com – been around since 2001
ArticleBase.com – not been around as long, since 2005, but has a good ranking
Blogs and Forums
Get networking with communities such as blogs and forums as these often allow you to post a link back to your site.
You can find related blogs by using Googles blogsearch http://blogsearch.google.com.
Another useful tool from Google is the Google alerts. you can set-up alerts for certain keywords and get results e-mailed to you. This is great for being ahead of the game and you can either make articles or post of forums/blogs with some of the results found. This is great for targetting someone either writing content about that theme based on the keywords or possibly even posting a question about where to buy a product that you might offer.
Try and make sure when you post comments onto blogs or forums to make them useful otherwise your link may not be added.
One Way Links
Search Engines value one way links very highly especially if the one way link comes from a authority site and that the link is relevant to your site.
You can contant Webmasters directly asking for a link. This can be time consuming without much response as it will take time out of their day to review your site to see if they would like to add your link. They may even request a link back, but it would be preferred if you can get a one way link.
If you can be sincere when you ask for the link, maybe comment on there site or an article they have done, or even if you spot a mistake on the site, then you are building some trust.
There are many ways you can try and obtain one way links. If you are offering help for someone, such as free advice. You will see here a thread on Affiliates4u forum where this example has paid off – help and advice for newbies who need a kick up the backside in 2009.
If anyone has any other methods or recommendations that could help other affiliates, please comment below.
If anyone would like to offer a backlink or add our site to their blogroll to say thanks for this post, then it would be greatly appreciated.
Affiliate Project gets better at SQL
This affiliate business is a steep learning curve and this is great. We are not afraid of learning. During our 6 month journey so far we have learnt many things a few of which are Web Design, SEO and pulling data feeds but one of area we are recently really improving our knowledge in is SQL.
With the sites that we are currently doing we are mainly using product feeds and we often get these from different merchants and each merchant has their own way of doing their feeds. So we are getting better and better and pulling the right data out of these feeds and manipulating it in the way we need to to make sure our sites are displaying the best selection of products and the right products for the pages the customers are looking at. This involves using quite complex SELECT statements with a variety of arguments, joining table outputs together and then getting results on the joined information.
Both Gary and I have found this really interesting. SQL is a great tool and thinking it through in your mind and on paper about how to get the correct information out of a database and into tables and displayed on the web page is both an interesting and challenging task.
Google Docs – a useful tool for us
If you regularly read this blog you will know there are two of us on this project. We write lots and lots of documentation that we need to both access as at the moment we use Google Docs to do this. This is a great tool as we can both access and change documents at the same time, and even msg each other while we are doing so through google docs. What tools do you other affiliates use to store and share your documentation? Would be interested to know if there are better ways of doing this but for now Google Docs is great for our needs as remote affiliates.
How to pull product datafeeds using PHP and MYSQL and display into your Webpage
Affiliate Project recently received a comment on this post – Niche site launched using data feeds and decided to create this post to help any other affiliates with displaying product data feeds.
We initially struggled to get product data feeds working. We found it hard to find how to get this to work, so thought we would document this on our blog and this could also help other affiliates.
There was 3 basic steps to get the data feeds to be displayed on the page.
Before you do this, you will need to download your data feeds and then create a new database using phpmyadmin (often from cpanel tools). Create the field names as per your datafeed or merchants datafeed.
1st step:
Create a php page template. So in the php file you will specify template name, pull in the header and title, then when you login to wordpress and add a new page, you can specify this new page template (your_template_name).
EXAMPLE:
<?php
/*
Template Name: your_template_name
*/
?>
<?php get_header(); ?>
<div id="content">
<span class="breadcrumbs">Browse: <strong><a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/">Home</a> » Your Template Name</strong></span>
<h2 class="title"><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
<?php
2nd step:
Put the php code that has the mysql statements that query the database which holds the datafeed
EXAMPLE:
// Connect to Database
$con = mysql_connect("localhost","database_name","database_password");
if (!$con)
{
die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());
}
// Select the Database
mysql_select_db("database_name", $con);
// Select the data from table_name
$result = mysql_query("SELECT field_a, field_b, field_c, field_d, field_e FROM table_name WHERE field_f='category_name'");
3rd Step:
Display the data from the database in table format, then loop the products. After that close the connection and display the sidebar and the footer
EXAMPLE:
// Display the table
echo "<table border='0' cellspacing='16'>";
// Put results into table
$counter = 0;
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
{
echo "<td WIDTH='112' align='left' valign='top'><a href=\"" .$row['field_c'] . "\">
<span class='producttable'><img width='140' src=\"" . $row['field_d'] . "\" border=1 alt=\"" . $row["field_d"] . "\" title=\"" . $row["field_b"] . "\"></span>
<br><span class='producttext'>$row[field_a]</span></br><br>$row[field_b]</br></span></a>";
echo "<br><span class='producttext'><strong>£$row[field_e]</strong></span></br>";
$counter++; # increment count every iteration
if ( $counter % 3 == 0 )
{
echo "<tr />";
}
}
echo "</td>";
echo "</table>";
// Disconnect from Database
mysql_close($con);
?>
</div>
<?php get_sidebar() ?>
<?php get_footer() ?>
You can style the output how you wish with css styling.
w3schools.com is a great resource for website coding such as html / php / mysql.
Hope this helps other affiliates.
Affiliate Projects recent SEO success
Through hard work and improving on our SEO skills we have had some recent success. We have managed to get Maternity Swimwear onto the 1st page for global and UK search term “maternity swimwear” so we are really pleased at this. To get on the 1st page with SEO alone is a major achievement.
We have also managed to get our Power Plates site up on the first page for a particular brand and model name, body sculpture power trainer bm1500 and the reason we have done this is this is our best seller and a product we want to promote. Again this is through SEO alone so our skills are improving.
So for the sites we have really been concentrating on, Affiliate Project, Power Plates and Maternity Swimwear we are ranked on the 1st page of Google for the search term we are targeting for each of them and for Affiliate Project and Power Plates we are raking in the top 5. Not bad we think for two people who only recently started this.
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