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.
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.
New version of Wordpress and indexing Maternity Underwear
Recently we designed a new site, Maternity Underwear and this was ready really quickly, probably our quickest site design to date. So it was rather frustrating when Google just wasn’t indexing it. Initially we thought it might be the fact that the robots.txt file had incorrectly disallowed access to everything but this was changed and still almost 1 month later the site was being indexed despite it being complete, good content and starting to be linked. Then Gary found that in the new Wordpress and option had changed. Under the Privacy settings the default now appears to be to block search engines and allow normal visitors only. We changed this and about a week later it is starting to be indexed. Hopefully given a bit more time the site will be fully indexed and start to climb and the hard work will pay off. Has anyone else noticed this option change?
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.
New plugin we are using
We noticed that we were getting a lot of spam comments, hundreds a day which uses up time removing them and also bandwidth to our site. So we looked for a plugin to combat this. The simple way we thought was to add a question to the comments section so that spam robots cannot automatically post comments. We came up with the following plugion and so far this seems to be working well for us. If you are having trouble with spam robots hitting your comments, try this plugin.
Math Comment Spam Protection
Asks the visitor making the comment to answer a simple math question. This is intended to prove that the visitor is a human being and not a spam robot.
Our Top Wordpress Plugins
We are utilising more Wordpress plugins as we get better at webdesign and want to add more functionality to our websites. We thought we’d write a review of the ones we’ve used so far.
Akismet
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. We have seen an influx of spam comments to our site and this plugin has helped get rid of them to the spam folder where we can review them to make sure they are spam.
All in One SEO Pack
This has been a great tool to help get this site to number 1 on google search. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is very important for websites to improve the amount of hits they get.
Similar Posts
Displays a highly configurable list of related posts. Similarity can be based on any combination of word usage in the content, title, or tags. This is very useful to direct readers of your blog to other related content they may be interested in on your site. Requires the latest version of the Post-Plugin Library to be installed.
Social Bookmarks
Adds a list of XHTML compliant graphic links at the end of your posts that allow your visitors to easily submit them to a number of social bookmarking sites. You can pick from a large number of social sites which makes this plugin great.
WordPress.com Stats
Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. This is useful for determining how much traffic you are getting and what they are doing once they get there.
Wordpress Popular Posts
Retrieves the most active entries of your blog and displays them on a list. As you can see we use this plugin on our sidebar. It means readers can immediately see which are the most popular articles on a site.
WP125
We use this in our sidebar as well to easily manage 125×125 ads within your WordPress Dashboard. It allows you to run ad campaigns for either a specific amount of time or indefinitely.
How we have used Wordpress so far
We researched about how to create our blog and the best package to use. We came up with Wordpress. I had been following other people’s personal blogs which were written using Wordpress and I liked the feel of them. Looking into Wordpress further it seemed that its ease of use suited web design beginners like us to create a blog fairly easily using a good standard of tools.
So we then looked at using and installing Wordpress. The installation was straight forward with a good step by step guide on the Wordpress website which can be found here
Wordpress comes with a nice dashboard which really makes designing and managing the website straight forward.
We had a look at some themes and decided on the layout we wanted. We wanted a 3 column layout. We had a look at lots of themes that we could customize to suit our blog. We came across the Revolution website which has lots of great themes to use at a great price.
As well as the main blog theme two components of Wordpress have increased the speed at which were able to get our blog up and running and to have the look we wanted. Firstly plugins have been very useful to add functionality to our website with ease. They can be used to do almost anything you can imagine with Wordpress. Many people have designed and written plugins for Wordpress. Some plugins we have used are the Popular Posts plugin and the SEO plugin both of which aid the website development to do what we want it to easier and to make is better content wise. To have a look at some plugins available to Wordpress click here
Secondly we have used widgets. Widgets are standard sets of code to create items you can put in your WordPress blog’s sidebar without needing the knowledge on how to edit a web page. Initially we were trying to modify php code to do things like add Categories and other sections to the sidebar but with widgets they give you the code to do this and through the widgets dashboard option you can modify them to appear how you want without having to modify code. Again for a beginner this is a very useful tool.
In time we hope to create some “How to …” guides such as “How to install”, “How to use plugins” so please keep coming back for updates.
Wordpress for Dummies
This book is a must read if you are new to Wordpress and blogging.
It will help ease the process of setting up your Wordpress blog site.
Wordpress for Dummies is a comprehensive and easy to follow book, which covers everything from Getting started with Wordpress, to Designing your blog site, using Templates and Plugins and also some examples of good templates and plugins.
We created this website using Wordpress and as well as this book we came across Revolution which has some great themes that are easy to use and customize.
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