Archive for '2008'

Now that our first WordPress affiliate store is built – it’s time to promote it! We have some great products, some original content, we’re indexed – and now we have to bring some people to it. What I mean is, we need to build some links and traffic, because the best store in the world is worthless without visitors.

This post is part of the “How to Build a WordPress Affiliate Store Series“.

For those of you that may not have read the rest of this series – I’m going to recap for you…

• In the first post I explained why creating an affiliate store from a datafeed in WordPress is a great way to build online income
• The second posts shows how specifically how to setup WordPress for an affiliate store, including plugins and 12 steps to getting your store indexed!
• Third we talked about How to Setup Datafeedr in WordPress, which entailed creating a store with products and categories from a datafeed and importing it into our WordPress blog.
• The fourth installment we integrated our affiliate store into the WordPress theme and SEO.
• In the fifth post we created a coupon page for our WordPress affiliate store.
• And the sixth post was about enhancing datafeedr dripped posts

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So like I said, now that we have a store up and running – we need to promote it and bring traffic to it. There are many ways to do this – and I’ve written about most of them already, but some of you are new to my blog and may not have read some of the golden nuggets I have buried away in the last year of archived posts. Rather than re-write what I’ve already written – I’ll give you a list of things to do to promote your new datafeedR affiliate store in WordPress. Granted – these techniques can be used to promote virtually any affiliate, niche store, blog, or web site you have. The next time you’re surfing the web wasting time and watching YouTube videos of talking dogs or barking cats – spend that time actually building up your network of links to get better pagerank and rankings for your new WordPress affiliate store!

Register with Search Engines

I shouldn’t have to mention this – but I will…be sure to register your site with MSN, Yahoo!, AND google so spiders for all the major search engines are visiting you regularly.

Perform Basic Keyword Research

If you’re going to be building backlinks and pagerank for your blog, then you need to know what keywords you are going to key in on and use when posting in forums and commenting on blogs. Use my Keyword Research Cheat Sheet to get started. Also be sure to read How to perform Keyword Research Day #1, and How to perform Keyword Research Day #2. It also wouldn’t hurt you to read How to Rank Well for Specific Keywords.

Submit 3 Quality Articles

Once your store is up and running one of the first things I would do is to write and submit 3 quality 1,000+ word articles to article directories. Read my Guide to Article Directory Promotion. Also read Article Marketing with AffShpere. You’ll want to submit at least a few articles to the directories each month for best results, but good article submissions will get you quick backlinks – a great jumpstart!

Leave Blog Comments

Leaving blog comments is not only a great way to build links, but you can get a great deal of traffic from it too. I make a point to post on both dofollow blogs (for links), as well as nofollow (high traffic) blogs for traffic. For best results, read BANS: Success Building Backlinks Part 1. At the time I wrote it for my Build a Niche Store series, but the techniques can be applied to any blog or affiliate store as well.

Create Targeted Pages on Free Sites

This is a topic that could go on about for days on end. There are dozens (probably hundreds) of sites that you can use to creat targeted pages to build traffic, authority, and links for your site. When I wrote the post BANS: Building Targeted Links and Authority it was about using both Squidoo and HubPages to leverage your site for better search rankings. Both are great, but there are bunches of other ways as well. One is using wiki’s to build links. I wrote about that in Working the Wikis for Backlinks.

Create links in documents and upload them to free publishing services like Scribd.

Create free web sites or blogs using free services like Newsvine, Blogger, WordPress.com, Google Pages, MSN Spaces (now Windows Live Spaces), Yahoo 360, and on and on and on…

Use Social Media

Get social traffic with social bookmarking or ranking sites like del.icio.us, digg.com, StumbleUpon, etc. Sign up for entreCard to find and network with other blogs in your niche. If you get friends in the social media world, you can exchange links, stumbles, diggs, etc. Google it – there are many forums for this sort of thing!! Especially on BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog.

Use Profile Pages

Profile pages can be used to build links easily and quickly. Once you create an account, fill out your profile completely including links to your web sites. This is something you can do with a YouTube account, Technorati, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, BlogCatalog, Bumpzee, MyBlogLog, MySpace, BlogFlux, Mashable, digitalpoint, and many more!!

Post in Forums

Posting in forums is a great way to get backlinks and traffic as well. Well-used forums are indexed almost daily (hourly even), and there are many ways to do this. If you post a lot in the same forum setup your signature links to point to your sites. Be sure to follow the rules of that forum for how many and what type of links you can use. Read my post How to Build Better Backlinks in Forums to get an idea of the best way to do this.

Also, I’ve found a way to find nearly any forum postings for any niche quickly and easily. You probably don’t know that there are search engines out there that only index forums. If you search them for keywords in your niche, you can start creating backlinks directly related to your niche or affiliate store blogs!! Check out Boardtracker, BoardReader, Twing.com, and Omgili.com and you’ll find more forums to post in for backlinks then you ever thought possible!

And where did I find those 4 resources for searching forums?? In my free subscription to Webmaster magazine! It came in my weekly email from Webmaster Magazine about better SEO techniques. If you aren’t subscribed, get signed up now, it costs nothing and you get no spam.

Wrapping it Up

I just gave you about 100 ways to promote your new datafeedR WordPress affiliate store. These resources and techniques can be used to promote any blog, web site, niche store, etc. But if you’ve been following the How to Build an Affiliate Store in WordPress series – these techniques are extremely valuable to you because better SERP rankings equals more money, and more traffic equals more money! You need to do something off this list each week at least (and in some cases every day).

Do you have a promotional technique not listed here?? Comment now!

Now that I’ve created a test Datafeedr affiliate store in one of my WordPress blogs, and I have one product per day “dripping” to my home page as a blog post, and the navigation has been added to my sidebar, I’m trying to make sure that I have some original content everywhere I can – in addition to making the store a seamless part of my blog, and a value add for my readers as well. The last thing I want to do is piss off google, or make my site so spammy that users just end up leaving quickly. There are a couple different ways to add value to both the affiliate store, and to posts as well.

This post is part of the Series How to Build an Affiliate Store in WordPress. Check out the previous posts to see how we arrived at this point with our WordPress affiliate store.

Spice Up Your Dripped Posts

I think that the option to create posts from your affiliate store an timed intervals is great, but you are surely treading on thin water here in many regards. First of all – all the products in your affiliate store come from a datafeed, where the titles and product descriptions aren’t unique to you. Anyone that uses that feed, and possibly the original merchant store as well – uses the exact same product title and description. Google won’t throw you out just for that, unless of course ALL your blog content is dripped posts, and you’re dripping like dozens per day to try and attract traffic.

An affiliate store makes a great addition to any blog, but it shouldn’t be the crux of it. You should be rewriting the posts as they are dripped to actually benefit your blog. Think of dripped posts as “automatic blog ideas”. Then, change the title, the permalink maybe even, write some original content – and then add other things that might add value or monetize the post further. I don’t mind leaving the original description content, as long as I have some kind of lead in for it using my own original content. If you don’t know what to write – you can always do some searches for the product and read reviews about it to become more knowledgeable. In one of the next few posts I’ll show you a great way to quickly get up to speed on a product for a post.

If you have any doubt that just dripping posts “as-is” to your blog a good idea, just try it. I had 4 days where I was busy and content auto-posted to my blog homepage. Each and every day my traffic went down about 15-20%. In addition none of the incoming keyword phrases were related to those posts. All the days I used re-written and spiced up dripped posts I had no change in traffic at all.

eBay Auctions

If you already have a plugin to quickly add eBay auctions to your blog, how easy is it to just add the tag and some keywords to the bottom of each of these posts to add a few eBay auctions? It wouldn’t hurt to write a blurb above it about finding “new and use deals on xx on eBay”. I use BayRSS WordPress eBay Affiliate plugin to add auctions to my posts on nearly all my blogs.

YouTube Videos

YouTube videos are a GREAT way to keep your visitors attention – AND they can be a great source of product info. Especially if you can get a video of someone actually using your product. The YouTube video is easy to add, just copy and paste the embed code. Try to write about the video for some additional original content… “here a video of someone using ginsu knives to saw aluminum cans in half – don’t you wish you could do that?”

Amazon Widgets

Amazon has virtually every product on the planet (with reviews). They have a ton of widgets in HTML, flash, javascript, iframes, and more. You can add images, text links, widgets that show different products everytime, and Amazon is famous for: BOOKS! I mean, if you show a fancy food chopper blender thingie, a YouTube video of it in action, some eBay auctions of it, why not throw some cookbook links at the end from Amazon? It gives you the chance to write EVEN MORE original content about why you like this or that cookbook – or a recipe that you made.

I’ve been sending in little “wish list items” to DatafeedR staff regarding things that I believe would make my affiliate store (and their service) even better. One of those would be to actually drip posts to a queue (or just to “review” status). This way you could rewrite them before they were even published. Automation is great, but the best results usually require some kind of manual intervention and review! I’m sure that even if you don’t use DatafeedR to build an affiliate store in your WordPress blog, that you’ve done lots of things to extra-monetize or spice up your blog posts. What were they? Tell us in comments below…

**UPDATE**

After a couple comments it’s clear that I need to show you a little example of what I meant in this post rounding up the points I made.

Here’s an example of what a datafeedr “dripped post” looks like on one of my blogs:

I wanted you to see this example first because it’s what datafeedr auto-published for me without any intervention on my part. Well, I did change both the title and the permalink before I took the screenshot (I forgot). The title was something like “Modulus Q5 5-String Bass Bubinga Top Electric Guitar New” or something like that. On my blog Guitar Review, one new post drips from the datafeedR store to my homepage at 9pm each night. The next day sometime, I change the title to something with just a few keywords, and I change the permalink to the same thing.

Now I know somebody out there is saying “won’t that screw up your indexed pages in the search engines?” Let me tell you, google’s index is so minty fresh that it’s just fine. I check this morning and here’s my proof:

I had to change 2 posts today since I slacked off the last few days – and when I checked google a half hour later the change to both the permalink and the title had already been indexed and updated in SERP’s. I’ve done this check before and seen the update in as little as 5 minutes. THAT is the power of using a blog for an affiliate store!

Now then – here’s what the updated post looks like after I enhanced and monetized it further:

See the difference? In the original datafeedr dripped post I got a (very long) title and permalink, and the standard description from the merchant’s site. This isn’t going to get me very good SERP indexing or organic results at all. Sure, you could build an entire affiliate store based only raw datafeed posts dripped to the homepage, and then just do an adword campaign against it to generate sales and conversions. But if you can get each and every dripped page indexed well for additional long-tail keywords, why not? If you drip a post or two per day, and enhance them – once you get between 50-100 you will be fueling your affiliate store with all kinds of organic traffic!

Datafeedr just updated their WordPress plugin, and along they also added over 1,000 coupon codes from ShareASale. If you’re only promoting physical products now, sometimes the addition of a “coupon” page can increase converstions and entice people to click more often. For example, if there’s a section of your site for say “mp3 players”, readers may or may not buy one depending on what they perceive the value to be compared to the cost at other sites online. Coupon codes work to increase their impulse to buy with special offers like free shipping, free accessories, or a percentage off. Some people actually surf the web looking for the best coupon codes before they buy.

This post is part of the How to Build an Affiliate Store in WordPress Series.

Some of the larger affiliate houses have started to add special sections for coupons and sales, ShareASale has a large list of over 1,000 coupons. Since Datafeedr added all 1,000 coupons to it’s database, it’s easier than ever to build a “coupon page” for your wordpress affiliate web site or blog. The latest version of the Datafeedr wordpress plugin also includes a special “coupon” template page to display them.

I created my own coupon page for one of my blogs quickly in about 5-10 minutes. I logged into the datafeedr members area, adn in the “Factory” I updated an already existing store I had created. I added the category “Sansa Coupons”, and then clicked on “Add products to this category”. In the network dropdown, there’s a new selection “ShareASale Coupons/Deals”. I chose that and the merchant I wanted (Shop Sansa) and got 12 records back for coupons. I just hit the “subscribe to this search” button to get them all, and then exported and downloaded the new version of my store.

I imported my store feed file into WordPress using the datafeedr plugin, and then I went to “Datafeedr -> Categories” and clicked on my “Sansa Coupons” category and then clicked “edit”. On the edit screen I added in the meta description, some keywords, thumbnail and category images, and in the advanced section I added “coupons.php” for the custom category template. The latest version of the datafeedr WordPress plugin comes with coupons.php ready for you to use, all you have to do is upload to your /wp-content/themes/your-theme/datafeedr directory. I saw all the offers I put in my Sansa Coupons page were good for the next month or so (and all the dates are listed on the page automatically when they expire). To update them, all I have to do is download and import an updated version of my store from the factory (takes 2 minutes).

So, what did this get me? A cool little coupon page:

Now that I’ve shown you how easy it was to create a coupon page using the Datafeedr service and WordPress plugin – let’s investigate other options for doing this. Datafeedr is of course a monthly subscribption service (and worth every penny), but there will undoubtedly be those of you that want to know if you can do this for free – and what the level of effort required will be.

Commission Junction Coupons:

Commission Junction doesn’t seem to have any way to list special deals or coupons available at all. You just have to go through the merchants one by one to see what everyone’s got. I looked at the available offers for dell, and there were some discounts listed on the text links page:

Unfortunately you have to click on these one by one and copy and paste the code to your blog. When the links expire – you have to remember to remove them too.

LinkShare Coupons:

LinkShare does have a coupon section – although it was harder than hell to find. I guess they call it their “Deal Dispatcher”. The page lists everything by month segregated by category and type of deal (free shipping, discount, etc):

I clicked on the link for one of the offers, it took me to a merchant page, and then I had to click “coupons” again – and there weren’t even any available. I tried another, and I got the same as Commission Junction had to offer – just copy and paste code.

Google Affiliate Network Coupons:

Next I figured I’d try the Google Affiliate Network and see what they had to offer. They have a section under “Get Links” called “Hot Promotions”. Unlike the other merchants – at least this page only listed merchants I had already signed up for! Take note affiliate houses – I shouldn’t have to dig around and figure out who I’m already signed up with?! Unfortunately, the only thing I can do is (sigh) manually “generate link”.

Then I saw an option for “Link Subscriptions”, which I checked out. This seemed pretty cool, you can get the latest deals for merchants you are signed up for automatically sent to you in either email or FTP:

I “thought” that was cool when I signed up for it. The only “automatic” thing about it is that they sent you new links automatically. You STILL have to manually add them to your blog or web site, or know some kind of magical mystery programming to grab the text files when they are uploaded.

Pepperjam Network Coupons:

Next I tried Pepperjam Network, thinking they would have something! Under “generate links” they have an option for “coupon feeds”. Promising right? That page lists all the merchants you are signed up for (great!), and all you have to do is check off the ones you’re interested in and click “generate feed”.

Wait a minute – that’s fr?#$ng manual again – isn’t it? You actually have to DO something with that feed file once you get it. All you get is a CSV file that you need software or programming trickery to manipulate. Pepperjam does have “Pepperjam Ads”, but that’s basically where you pick links from merchants and you get some javascript code to display the ads adsense style on your site. You can’t choose from deals or coupons directly. Then I tried their new “Pepperjam Store builder”, which seemed kinda cool at first…but all I could do was choose a merchants via checkbox and filter results by keyword. You would think since this works off datafeed that they could just connect it to the “coupons datafeed” I looked at earlier.

ShareASale Coupons:

Next stop – ShareASale, the same place I got the coupons from using Datafeedr earlier. At least as soon as I logged in all I had to do was click on “View available coupons and deals” at the top of the page (whew!). I searched for “mp3 player” to see what I would get:

Well I got results quickly – but they were all just copy and paste, so it’s all manual work here too!

GoldenCAN Coupons:

I decided to check out GoldenCAN last because I was pretty sure I could get something done here. GoldenCAN is a datafeed manipulation service you can use for free. They have tools to create little mini stores, and either the feed is free (paid for by the merchant) or every 4th click goes to GoldenCAN. If you don’t want to give up any traffic, – just use the free feeds.

Their service is pretty cool. All you have to do is signup for a free account, and then click on “Coupon Integration” for single or multiple merchants. I decided to do single merchant for Shop Sansa (again) – mainly because it was both free, and from Google Affiliates. I wanted to see if this version of the same merchant from another affiliate house was different or not, to compare what I did earlier.

There are a lot of options you can set to create a coupon blog for your blog or web site. You can control all the various options of style, and here you can even choose to use coupons and price drop products. The default layout looks like this:

The layout is nice and clean, and with the style options you can customize it to the look and feel of your site. The price drops are pretty cool too. So the only drawback to this method vs. datafeedr is that you have to add in your meta description and keywords with an SEO plugin or something, and even at that all you’re going to get is a single page which (unless you hide it) will be listed in your default WordPress “pages” navigation.

Pros and Cons

The only two viable options seem to be GoldenCAN and Datafeedr. GoldenCAN is nice if the merchant you want is free and not 4th click. Datafeedr lists all coupons ShareASale has in the database, but not from any other affiliate house (yet). GoldenCAN would be nice for little single pages of deals, but with the Datafeedr option you could setup a whole coupon store, or categories and sections with just coupons, or even coupons as subcategories of products, etc. Like I had mentioned in previous posts, Datafeedr gives you complete flexiblity in setting up an complete WordPress affiliate store, something you can’t get currently from any other product or service.

Be sure to read the rest of the posts in the How to Build an Affiliate Store in WordPress series!

There is no shortage of people trying to make money blogging, especially in today’s economy. There is however, a shortage of people actually making the money. It’s kind of like the have’s and have not’s in a way. Does it seem unfair? The recent article in Slate Blogging for Dollars says that on average blogs getting 100,000 or more unique visitors per month earn an average of $75,000 annually. That number is skewed further by a very small percentage of those blogs making more than $200,000 per year. But with nearly a million blog posts published daily, all the money in blogging is being made by a very, very small percentage of blogs. These are regular bloggers too, not affiliate or niche sites at all.

The best resources online are free. The best free content comes from knowledgeable people. When you find a great resource you bookmark it and go back time and time again. Why do people spend time giving away free expertise online? Is it ego? Self gratification? Charity? I recently read a problogger post “10 Innovative Blog Business Models” that talks about bloggers that painstakingly write expertise based blogs with an ulterior motive to sell something else. I don’t find that innovative at all – it’s just smart, and what I call “natural monetization”.

Why do you think I take the time to write this blog? It’s certainly not because I want to help the world. It’s also not for ego, and for sure not because I think I’m the next John Chow. I figured if I wrote enough about my problems slogging along as a blogger, my experiences and opinions would be worth something over time. I’m building a reputation and a body of work through this blog, and those that find value in that will try and use products and services I recommend. I’ll make money from those referrals, and hopefully the amount of money I make will increase over time.

The first 6 months on this blog I didn’t make dime. I wrote 50 posts on faith alone. The second 6 months I made maybe $150. Since I wrote 50 more posts, I guess I was paid $3 per post for those. Then I made $40 in one month, and then $75 the next, $125 the next, and $200 the next – do you see a pattern here?

Think about your success online in terms of a series of deposits, or even earning a degree. You have to pay to play. You have to pay your dues. You have to blindly and selflessly forge ahead until you reach the payoff – or else you have forfeited all your time for nothing.

What is success really? What does it mean to you? The degree to which you actually obtain success is determined not by your own sheer drive alone, but instead is measured by the quality of your content. Go back to the bank analogy again. Think of your posts like bank deposits. Are you depositing $1 posts, $100 posts, or $1,000 posts? Do you wonder why I don’t blog much anymore about passing fads or day to day crap in the blogosphere? It’s because I see those as $1 posts – why should I waste my time? You can read that crap on 100 other blogs. I try to make sure that every post is a $100 – $1,000 post. You come to this blog to read about how to fix something in WordPress, how to make more money in your blog, or how to get more traffic or readers. I try to make sure (now) that every post has some direct instructions on how to do one of those things. If not – I just don’t post. It just like if I owned a business and just didn’t go to the bank to deposit until my bank bag had at least $1,000 to deposit.

How does all this translate to you and your online work? Whether you writing in a blog, a niche store, or an affiliate site, think of each and every post as money. Think of the long term. Will this post be useful tomorrow? Next week? Next month? Next year? Think of the VALUE in terms of money. Think of every page and post as a resource that spawn some kind of action. Think of posts and articles and pages as “products” like a brick and mortar business. Would it be easier to sell 100,000 1 cent pieces of candy or just one Cadillac automobile? Don’t let your blog or site become a dollar store for your ideas – think of it as a “dealership for your business”.

Most of the posts I’ve written for this blog take 2-3+ hours or more. Guess what, nearly every one gets viewed each and every day. When you write are you putting money in the bank?

Now that we’ve imported our store datafeed into WordPress using the datafeedr plugin, I’m going to show you how to integrate it into your blog navigation and posts, and also how to add original content and fine-tune SEO options.

This is the third installment of the series “How to Build an Affiliate Store in WordPress“

Once you have the initial options setup in Datafeedr, it’s time to actually integrate it into your blog. This is where Datafeedr really shines. I mentioned in the initial post of this series that the main problem with large affiliate house like Commission Junction and LinkShare is the fact that they provide nearly on tools at all for affiliates. You are left to copy and paste individual products and offers one by one into your blog or web site. Some forward thinking affilate services, like Pepperjam, have started to provide tools to add javascript stores you can setup and add to your site. This is nice, and a step in the right direction – because when you set that store up you can choose what products to list and display. It is (unfortunately) not the “total integration” that most of us have been looking for…

Enter “Datafeedr“. As we’ve already learned in this series, Datafeedr is both a service and wordpress plugin that helps you manage affiliate data feeds from Commission Junction, LinkShare, ShareASale, and Clickbank. You choose the choose the products you want to display and setup categories to list them in as I showed in How to Setup Datafeedr in WordPress. Now I’m going to show you how the WordPress plugin integrates your affiliate store into your blog in ways that no other product or service does.

Datafeedr Widgets: When we logged into the Datafeedr members area in the last post, we created an entire affiliate store by setting up categories and adding products from various merchants. Then we downloaded that datafeed and imported it into WordPress using the Datafeedr plugin – which in turn created an entire store with categories and products. Datafeedr has 5 “widgets” ready to go for your sidebar. Once you import your store into WordPress, using these widgets you can add the store, categories, pages, search, and featured products into your sidebar navigation. You can use as many or as few of the widgets as you’d like.

In this example I added 3 widgets to integrate my affiliate store in my blog navigation. You can’t see it in this pic, but on top is a search box for my entire blog. Next is a search box for the store (clearly labeled). Next are the pages listed in my blog, and then a link to the store home. Then I have store categories, and then blog categories. At all times, my store navigation links are clearly labeled – we’re not trying to trick anyone here. We are, however, trying to make the links to the store as natural as possible – just as is best for setting up an Adsense block. We didn’t have to manually create any links at all, and as the store evolves and changes (and categories change) – the navigation will automatically be updated.

Datafeedr SEO Qualities: So, now that we have an affiliate store officially setup and available in navigation – let’s look at the SEO qualities of the store itself.

The Store Home SEO: The HTML title of my store by default was “My Online Store”. In addition, in the sidebar navigation the link title was “Front Page” by default. The advantage of the Datafeedr WordPress plugin is, unlike many copy and past javascript “stores”, you have total SEO control at every level. In my WordPress dashboard I just visit “Datafeedr -> Pages -> 1) Front Page (default) -> Edit”. Now I can change my page link name, HTML title, meta description, and keywords!

You have the exact same options for the category pages, but I chose to leave that default since the HTML and page titles are all generated dynamically for each category (which is GREAT seo!). This was also true of the product pages. I did add a few keywords to the search results page though.

All in all I’m very pleased with the SEO qualities of my new datafeedr store. In the picture below I show a product page, and you can see the product is listed in the HTML title, the breadcrumbs, and also in an H1 header for the page, just above the description. Awesome!
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Original Content

Original Content: So, now that you’ve watched me create an affiliate store and add it to my blog – you may be wondering how to add original content to keep you out of google’s crosshairs. The last thing you want to do is create a huge affiliate store in your blog with nearly no content. One way I found to do that is by adding “pages” within the datafeedr store itself. I use these pages much in the same way I use WordPress blog pages – to organize and talk about already existing content. The only difference is we’re going to re-organize and talk about products within the store! If you do this a lot your store will be completely unique, and this should keep you out of the wrath of any potential search engine penalty. The most important thing of all is – if you’re good at this you’ll get some great listings in the search engines for these pages AND get a much higher conversion rate for sales (and make more consistent money)!

Adding Datafeedr Pages

In this example I used the page option again from “Datafeedr -> Pages -> Manage Pages (Add New Page)” from my WordPress admin dashboard. When I created this page, I had the same options as the above example pic when I modified the store home page options (html title, title, meta description, meta keywords). Once I saved it, it’s listed in the “Manage Pages” options of Datafeedr like this:

Once created the page, by default, is blank. All it has is a title and a breadcrumb. You see in the pic above that the options we have are to add any one of four modules to get some content on that page. First we’re going to add original content to the page by clicking to add an HTML module. What that gives you is the same editor you get for WordPress posts (with the Visual or HTML options). This is where you add your original content.

So now my new page has a header title, breadcrumbs, and some original content. Next it needs some products! All we have to do is add the “product listing module” to get products on the page. Now, I’m going to take the easy way out on this one. I could have gone back to the “Factory” in the datafeedr members area to create a new category and assign a dollar value to include only guitars from $1-200. What I did was just use the product listing module to show products on the page in the categories I want with the lower priced ones showing first. This will of course show guitars over the $200 pricepoint, and I can come back and change this later one once I create a special category for this in the factory, and re-import my store data feed into WordPress.

Also, under the products listings I added the category module to list the categories for the store again, so visitors have another method of navigating the store. The product listing module also has an editor box, so you can add some additional HTML or content above the category listing. The ability to add these extra pages is very flexible and almost ingenious in a way. If you’ve ever used Build a Niche Store or other niche store standalone scripts you know that you have the ability to setup “pages” to add content to within the niche store. Since Datafeedr is a WordPress widgets that manages an affiliate store within WordPress itself – you can take advantage of the full functionality it has to offer. If you have a plugin installed that will display amazon items – use those tags on datafeedr store pages to display amazon products. If you have a plugin installed to display eBay auctions, use those tags in your datafeedr store to add some eBay auctions to your affiliate store pages. Since there are hundreds of WordPress plugins the possibilities are endless.

One of the things you might be wondering is – why does datafeedr manage pages itself within the store and not use the normal WordPress “post” and “page” functionality. It’s really good that it doesn’t if you think about it. WordPress is a blogging platform, and when you create and edit posts and pages it sends out a “ping” to the blog engines. That’s the advantage of using WordPress vs. scripts like Build a Niche Store (blogging functionality). Original content or not, I don’t need to send out a “ping” every time I update my datafeedr affiliate store within my WordPress blog. I’d rather let the search crawlers follow the links as it naturally finds them. If you’re going to add an affiliate store with thousands of products, it might be smart to let the crawlers only index the top level category pages, and keep them out of the product pages. A simple disallow for /store/product/* in your robots.txt file would be an easy fix for this. This would probably be good in the long run as it would maintain a healthier balance of affiliate pages to content across the blog and store as a whole.

Individual Product Content

As I just pointed out, you might not want search crawlers to index all your product pages – but if you wanted to you could add original content to any or all product pages in your datafeedr store. This is quite an amount of work if you have thousands of product pages, but you could definitely edit specific ones you think would be most popular or top sellers. This is also one more opportunity to add tags for other WordPress plugins directly after a product description if you wanted to also add products from amazon, ebay auctions, etc.

Here’s a pic of an individual product page in my blog with a datafeedr store, all you have to do is click the “edit product details” link to edit the category, description, or title for this product. You can also edit products directly from the wordpress dashboard under “Datafeedr -> Products”.

Category Pages

Within “Datafeedr -> Categories” you can add and edit catgories within your datafeedr store. When you setup your store in the datafeedr members section within the “factory” you had the ability to assign products to and setup categories. Once you download and import the datafeed for your store into your WordPress blog, the Datafeedr plugin allows you find grained control over the category details, like a description, keywords, and even a category image and thumbail.

Every category also has 3 advanced options you can set. The first one (pictured below) is the ability to set a custom theme page to a category. The template will display for all pages in category displaying assigned products. This would be very helpful in my store, for instance, if I wanted to display specific rotating banners ads, or youtube videos say in the “guitar books” section. These template page have to be uploaded to your theme’s datafeedr directory in order to work properly. This is a great way to add original content directly to category pages. You just have to remember that if a catagory has dozens or hundreds of pages+ that the content will display on all product listing pages within a category. This would be another time to edit your robots.txt file to make sure that only your category home gets indexed.

If your category page is /store/category/electric-guitar, then what I would do is put a one list listing in my robots.txt file to disallow every number followed by a wildcard like this:

/store/category/electric/electric-guitar/1*
/store/category/electric/electric-guitar/2*
/store/category/electric/electric-guitar/3*
etc..

They may be better ways to do this, but that’s the easiest that came to mind…

The next advanced option is the ability to set template for custom product listing pages. The reasons for having a template like this are the same, you could place a custom message or ad across every single product within a category. Just remember that whatever content you add will be on every single product page.

The last advanced option is the ability to assign a custom css ID around a product listing. This would give you the ablity to control font, color, size, background, borders, and more throughout your store.

Adding products to WordPress posts

Another great option is to combine some original content in a WordPress post with a product from your new datafeedr store. If you visit “Datafeedr -> Products” in your WordPress dashboard you can see all the items in your WordPress affiliate store. As you can see in the picture below, when you are viewing your products, each one has a unique product code on the left column. All you need to do is select and copy that code with your mouse, and go to the next step.

Now, create a post as you normally would in WordPress and give it a unique title and content. Then, using the “visual editor” you should see an icon on the editor toolbar with a blue and red “dr” – click on it to get a popup box you can paste the product code into, and then insert it into your post:

Here’s a pic of what the post I wrote and added a product to looked like once I published it:

Datafeedr product post “drip” feature

I believe the pinnacle of datafeedr’s wordpress plugin to be the “drip” feature. I think that all the features I wrote about so far have been simply amazing. I have used, purchased, and reviewed all kinds of wordpress plugins, and services that manage datafeeds allowing you to create an affiliate “store”. I’ve never seen one that allowed you to create a store from a datafeed and create and manage an affiliate store, create categories, add orginal content, use templates, AND add products to posts. This “drip” features allows you to CREATE posts from products.

I want to take a second to talk about why this is good, and why it’s bad. You could use the “drip” technique in both good and bad ways. Here’s the options in the datafeedr dashboard when you enable drip: I

You can see in the options that it tells you when the last post “drip” was, and when the next one will occur. You can set this in minutes, which is great to have that amount of flexibility. I can see where this could be highly abused. Imagine setting up an affilliate store with tens of thousands of products – and then dripping them as posts to your blog every 60 seconds. Your blog would surely be in the top 10 most wanted for google to remove from the index.

The next drip option is to control which category the dripped posts go into. I created a special category called “featured” for mine. Next you can choose what to do when (and if) you run out of products in your affiliate store. I chose to stop the drip featured and get an email notification.

Next you can choose whether or not to allow comments, which I did – because I allow comments on all my posts. You can also choose to have pings on or off. This is kind of a crucial decision. If you have thousands of products and your purpose in dripping them as posts to your blog is for people to read them on a high visitor count blog either on the home page or in RSS, I would leave pings for dripped product posts “off”. I would also make sure you setup your robots.txt as I stated earlier a few times to keep the crawlers out of your stores product and category listing pages (other than the highest level). If your purpose in dripping posts was to have more indexable pages and to attract more visitors – then I would only drip one or two products per day (which is what I’m going to do).

You should already know perfectly well how the drip feature could be abused. Spammers could setup spamblogs with nearly no content, and tons of products in an affiliate store, and drip dozens or hundreds of products to the blog home page per day. A spam “autoblog” if you will. This is the situation you want to keep yourself from getting into. I’m going to drip one or two products per day, and once they are posted I’m going to edit the posts to add my original content to each and every one.

I saw in some of the other posts in this series about datafeedr, readers have left comments that they’re concerned about a WordPress affiliate store becoming something google will target next in the near future. My advice to you is this…in a BANS or “Build a Niche Store” in about 10 minutes you can setup an entire web site full of products (and no content). For most of these BANS sites you could spend a month of Sundays writing original content for all the categories and pages. Some people setup hundreds of these BANS sites, and more than they could ever add content to. Also, the cost of BANS is one time $97 – and you can use it on unlimited web sites. I believe tens of thousands of licenses were sold, and entirely too many “thin affiliate” sites were created with nothing more than eBay auctions.

It’s just as easy to setup a datafeedr affiliate store in WordPress with thousands of products, but instead of starting the site out with products and adding content later, with datafeedr you can add products to an already existing and established blog (which would be your best case scenario). In addition, datafeedr carries a monthly fee – and to continue to use it with fresh products you will have to subscribe and pay each month for the service. It’s well worth the money, but many people will never use it for just this very reason. This is good news to me (and should be to you as well), beause that means that it should never reach the critical mass “spam” tipping point that BANS did.

Also, I didn’t mention that the othe reason I like the drip feature is because it auto-creates posts for me that I can add content too, and it FORCES me to post to my blog each and every day. The hardest thing about owning multiple blogs is that you have to come up with things to write about. Also, sometimes you forget to (or don’t have time) to write posts for a few days, or even a week. With Datafeedr – this will NEVER be an issue and it should FORCE your blog to be more successul and make more money!

Now I have a fully functional affiliate store in blog, and I firmly believe that it puts my earning potential on a new level.

How to install the DatafeedR plugin for managing datafeeds and adding affiliate products and links to WordPress blogs

This is the third installment of the series “How to Build an Affiliate Store in WordPress“

The next step in creating an affiliate store in WordPress is to actually setup the datafeedR WordPress plugin and configure it’s options. In the first installment how to build an affiliate store I talked briefly about why datafeedR is one of the best solutions, and in the second installment Setting up WordPress for an affiliate store, I gave an overview of how to setup WordPress and get it ready to use the blog as an affiliate store type of web site. Next, I will show you how to setup datafeedR itself.

What is DatafeedR?

DatafeedR is an “affiliate datafeed management service”. They will do for you what you can’t do on your own. DatafeedR is the only product or service I’ve ever recommended (other than web hosting) that has a monthly fee. I’ve already had a few questions about why in the world I would use or promote a product like this that cost money month after month. The answer is, it’s worth every penny and there isn’t anything else like it ANYWHERE online that I’ve found to date. Their service saves me more time than anything else I’ve ever used.

DatafeedR manages the datafeeds

They have datafeeds for 200+ merchants through Commission Junction, ShareASale, LinkShare, and Clickbank – which contain more than 30 million products. They strip all the garbage from the datafeeds and give you tools to easily add the products to your WordPress blog, in ways you never thought possible.

DatafeedR has a WordPress plugin

Part of the DatafeedR service is the downloadable WordPress plugin that comes with it. The plugin is the bridge between your blog and the datafeedR service. In the Datafeedr online members area you can setup stores in the “factory” area. Basically you will be creating categories and subcategories for products, and choosing products from various merchants. When you are down you download the store in a text file. Using the “import” feature of the DatafeedR wordpress plugin the store you created is setup in your blog, complete with home page, categories, search, and more.

Key Datafeedr WordPress Plugin Features

• Store structure including categories and pages
• Completely control over all permalinks, titles, and descriptions
• Ability to create and modify templates at any level
• Search functionality
• Give products multiple attributes such as “featured”, “best selling” or “on sale”
• Delete or edit individual products from your blog admin without going back to the “factory”
• Ability to add original content ANYWHERE
• Assign images to categories
• Sidebar widgets with search, categories, products, or pages navigation
• Exclusive “product drip” feature, which creates blog posts from store products are specified intervals

DatafeedR is a Complete Service

DatafeedR charges a montly fee because they have ongoing maintenance. It’s not a plugin you download and configure and use one time only. As merchants add and remove new products to their data feeds, DatafeedR updates it’s data feeds adding new products from merchants and removing old products that are no longer for sale. If you used to copy and paste link code from affiliate sites and placed in your blog before, you would have no way of knowing which ones were still for sale and which ones were not. With datafeedR if you export a copy of your store from the “factory” on a regular basis – you will constantly be updating the store by importing the feed within your blog to have the latest products available. By the same token, if you tried DatafeedR for a month or two and build a store with 1,000+ products, the store does not go bad after you cancel the datafeedR service – the links just get slowly outdated over time and go bad one by one as merchants update their product listings and links. If you are serious about making money online as an affiliate, I don’t know why you wouldn’t want this service – or why anyone would ever cancel. I will show you why as I go through this series.

Initial Setup of the DatafeedR Plugin in WordPress

Uploading the plugin

After you signup for the service, you just upload the files to the proper places per the readme.txt file. This includes uploading the /dfr directory to the root of your blog, and uploading the contents of the DFR-Plugin/wp-content/ to the /wp-content directory of your blog.

Activation and Affiliate ID’s

Next you active both the datafeedR plugin and widgets in your WordPress dashboard under “Plugins” on the top right. You will need to add in your affiliate ID’s and set the initial store options. As in the picture below, just add your affiliate ID’s in the proper places – you only need to add the ones that you know you will be using. I entered them all except for Bridalux and NetShops.

Next in the store options are breadcrumbs and global settings. You have the choice of breadcrumbs on or off, the root name of the store, what you want the separator to be, and whether or not to display them on the home page of the store. You can choose to mask (or cloak) your affiliate URL’s (or not), and whether or not to resize product images.

You have complete control over permalinks and rewrite values specifically for your datafeedr store, including category, product, and search pages. You can even change the images and redirect URL directory name.

You can choose if products appear when accessed from specific WordPress pages, including the front page, single posts, category pages, archive pages, feeds, trackbacks, search results pages, and just pages. It’s great to have this kind of fine grained control.

The last section for general store options are the “drip settings”. I previously mentioned that datafeedR had the ability to “drip” products, which essentially takes a single product page and creates a blog post from it. This of course moves it to your blog home and pings the blog engine crawlers that you have new content available, as well as places a new post on your RSS feed for subscribers to read.

If you are a blogger, you know how invaluable this feature is (if used wisely). It’s not meant for you to setup a spamblog or autoblog (although you could) – that will just get you thrown out of google eventually. What this could be used for is to review the products of your store one by one, and when they are dripped to your home page, add original content to each and every one! If you blog multiple times per week with completely original content, you could also use these posts to fill in the days and times you don’t have hand written content (just don’t overdo it!).

You see here from the options that you can turn it on and off, you can set the time based interval, you can even choose to copy your datafeedr store category structure into your blog categories (or just place those posts in one category).

The nice thing about this feature is that datafeedR keeps track of what products are dripped, so the same ones aren’t used twice. Once they are all used up you have the option of getting email notification, disabling the drip, or repeating the products again. You can even have comments and pings turned off for the dripped product posts.

These are all the general “store options” for datafeedr, and once you have configured them all you have to do is login to the DatafeedR members area and create your store in the “factory” so you can upload it into your blog and populate your new datafeedR store with products.

Creating your first DatafeedR Affiliate Store

I’m going to show you how I created an affiliate store with 6,000 products for my guitar blog in about 20 minutes.

Before you do this there are 2 requirements:

1. Make sure DatafeedR has the feeds you want
2. Make sure you are signed up for and approved for the merchants of those feeds

I wanted to add products for several music merchants, so I checked what DatafeedR had. There were two I wanted, but one wasn’t in their list. I contacted them and asked them to include it, and 48 hours later it was available. They may not be able to grant all requests, but in my experience they were very accomodating (and quick!). Next I logged into my Commission Junction and ShareASale accounts to make sure I had applied for (and was approved for) those merchants. Remember – you can’t build links and include products from merchants you aren’t signed up for (you won’t get the commissions!).

Once in the members area, you just click on the big “Build Your Store” link. This takes you to the “factory” homepage, where you can watch 2 videos describing how to build a shop (or just go straight to your shops). I liked the fact that these videos were available (the first time), they answered a lot of questions right up front before I even got started.

You can create up to 99,999 shops – and if you ever reach that limit, God help you! I’m creating a new shop called “Guitars”.

Now I create a category called “Electric” and click to “add products to this category”.

Next I choose what affiliate service to use. I could have chosen “any” to get results across all 200+ merchants at all affiliate houses, but I specifically wanted to choose ShareASale Merchant “SameDayMusic”. I entered “fender” into as a text keyword (to search product titles and descriptions).

My search for products returned 264 records. You can see in the images below that not all the products listed are actually guitars. In addition, each results has some “tags” listed at the bottom you can use to additionally filter your product results.

I refined my search a bit by adding the tag “electric-guitar” and making the minimum price 200 dollars to weed out all the accessories that were coming up (and were also tagged with “electric guitar”). This quickly whittled down the selection to just 66 guitars – exactly what I wanted!

Now I have some very flexible options for adding these products to my store. If I wanted to I could just go through one by one and click “+ add to category” to each and every individual one I want to add. But that’s time consuming – and I got exactly the results I wanted. So – all I have to do is click on “subscribe to this search” to add all 66 products to the “Electric” category of my store. I can even add these to a new category right now if I want, and I can rename, modify, or edit my categories at any time, at any level.

The beauty of using the “Factory” to create shops and stores in the DatafeedR site is that you can do all kinds of products searches across multiple affiliate houses and merchants, and add them to whatever categories you want. As you can see in this image, you can also go back to any category and edit, copy, or delete those subscribed to searches at any time. You can also individually remove any products one by one as well.

So, in about 20 minutes I was able to setup a very nice category and subcategory structure like this for my store:

I was able to add over 6,000 products from 5 different merchants, and I even get a detailed listing of how many products I added to each category. Now all I have to do is click the “download shop” link at the top to get the text file containing all my store’s products to import into my blog.

Importing Your New DatafeedR Store into WordPress the First Time

Once you have created your first store in the members section of the DatafeedR web site (the “Factory”), and you’ve downloaded it to your desktop, all you have to do is login to your WordPress blog (with the DatafeedR plugin enabled) and go to “DatafeedR -> Import Feed”.

Once you’ve done this, you have instantly created an affiliate store in your blog. Now of course, there are hundreds of additional options for you to explore and setup, like sidebar widgets and navigation, adding original content, category and page templates, and dripping products into posts. You can even take it one step further (which I will) and add things like YouTube videos, amazon products, eBay auctions, and more throughout the store.

The next post will explain and explore some of these options in greater detail. You can view the store I created in 20 minutes in this example by clicking here.

Building affiliate stores in WordPress using datafeedR is both time saving and profitable

I will describe the process of setting up WordPress on a brand new domain with the intention of creating an affiliate store within a blog that you will post to on a regular basis to build online income over time.

This is the post #2 of the series How to Build an Affiliate Store in WordPress

If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you would realize that I try to feed you information one chunk at a time. All my posts together, are a recipe for creating online monthly income working online regularly, and the more experienced you get, and the bigger your sites get – the more money you will make. I got a very timely email last night from a nice person in Norway who is starting out and wants to know how to get (new sites) indexed and ranked in search engines. I’ve talked about this before, but some of these posts may be buried in the archives by now. I’ve also blogged a LOT about setting up WordPress too, but much of that is now a year old – and probably in dire need of refreshing.

Why Use WordPress to Make Money?

If you don’t already know the answer to this question – you have some reading to do. My post Should I Use a Blog or A Niche Store? talks about this in great detail and provides my best case as to why you should be using a blog to make money in the root of all your domains instead of BANS, or StoreStacker. Notice I didn’t say not to use BANS or Storestacker – I just said don’t use them in the root of a domain.

Google Loves Blogs. Google Hates Cheaters.

To google a blog is a person. It’s a person that writes original content. If you blog regularly and people link to you – you will gain authority (and traffic). Google also likes RSS and RSS subscribers (they own Feedburner for god’s sake). Don’t you think they keep track of how people get to your site, and who views what pages? Remember, they own analytics too, AND they keep track of everyone’s search history (unless you opt-out). If you create and maintain a quality blog, you will always stay on Google’s good side and within their TOS and “quality guidelines”. I don’t mean to be sappy here and talk about their “Don’t Be Evil” philosophy too – but my advice as an online affiliate and marketer is “Don’t Be Spammy”. This will always keep you out of google’s target for being a “thin affiliate” site (heavy on affiliate links and light on content). Only create web properties that you would read and shop at yourself!

There’s nothing like the immediacy of a blog post getting indexed in less than 5 minutes. If you want to make money online – WordPress is your best bet for a starting point in the root of your domain. You can build any domain or site out from that point forward over time any way you like.

Getting Started with WordPress

Wordpress is easy to use, and easy to learn. It’s free, and easy to setup. There are thousands of free themes and plugins to do just about anything you want. I have WordPress installed on nearly every domain I own. I’ve set it up so many times in fact, I wrote Best Practices for Setting Up a New WordPress Blog in 60 Minutes or Less last year (and it’s been viewed almost 5,000+ times). That post is a great quick and dirty list to get WordPress up and running on your new domain in no time.

Your goal with a new domain is almost always the same…

• Get WordPress uploaded to the new domain
• Create the database and set the config file
• Upload a new theme
• Upload the plugins
• Write some content
• Create some backlinks, work on getting indexed

The Best Practices guide I linked above will help you get WordPress and the basic required plugins setup. What it doesn’t tell you is how to setup WordPress up specifically for an Affiliate store.

WordPress Specific Plugins for an Affiliate Store

If you’re going to create a blog with the intention of making money, than you want to place relevant things for sale on your blog that people (reading your content) will want to buy. You can do this in your sidebar, header, footer, and even in the blog posts and pages themselves. You can even revolve posts around reviewing and price comparing actual products with your own expertise too. To do this – you need to have the right plugins installed, and a LOT of options available.

The best options (for me) are usually eBay, Amazon, and Commission Junction as a base, and then anything else that’s relevant and beneficial. I also like a couple of different plugins for ad management – depending on the blog, theme, and type of visitor. If you’re reading yesterday’s post you might be confused since all I talked about was “datafeeds” and how powerful they were to add products to blogs. They sure are, but you should get used to always using every single thing that’s available to you at all times. There’s no reason a blog can’t have merchant products, amazon items, eBay auctions, and more if they’re all relevant to the niche topic of your blog.

datafeedR: I mentioned yesterday that this was my new holy grail of WordPress affiliate plugins. You can add products, pages, and categories within WordPress from Clickbank, Commission Junction, ShareASale, AND LinkShare with this little gem. I will be doing in more in depth posts on how to set it up and use it as part of building affiliate stores. This plugin has a monthly subscription fee (but it’s well worth it).

*update: I no longer recommend BayRSS – follow the link if you want to know why. I now have my own eBay plugin, visit the WP-Easybay web site.
BayRSS: BayRSS is currently my eBay affiliate plugin of choice for WordPress. It’s half the cost of PHPBay and works great. There are other options available, but most aren’t as featured (especially the free ones).

Amazon Machine Tags: This is a great plugin for adding Amazon items to blog posts with just the ASIN number in a tag. This plugin is free.

Max Banner Ads: Manage multiple banner ad campaigns for your header, sidebar, footer – it even tracks clicks! This plugin is free.

OIO Publisher: OIO Publisher can manage banner ad campaigns in your header, footer, or sidebar just like Max Banner Ads, but it can also manage “selling” ad space on your blog – including subscriptions, paypayl payment form, and more. You can also sell text links with it, and many other things. This plugin is $47.

MaxBlogPress Stripe Ad: A great unique way to add text ads to any blog, I get clicks (and sales) from it every month. This plugin is free.

Psychic Search: This plugin is essential for keeping track of what people search for on your blog, and provides detailed search and keyword stats beyond what WP-Stats and Google Analytics provides. This plugin is free.

Getting your new WordPress Blog Indexed in Search Engines

Creating an affiliate store is no good without content, and content is no good if your domain isn’t even indexed in the search engines. Before you do anything – write at least 2 quality posts, fill out your “about” page, setup a “contact” page, delete the WordPress default “blogroll” links – and replace them with other relevant blogs in your niche. Setup your blog with an SEO plugin like WP-SEO or All in One SEO Pack, and then start the process of getting your blog indexed. You want to have your blog as setup as possible before calling on the army of search crawlers.

How to get a new blog indexed in Search in 12 Steps or Less

1. Create 2 quality posts as listed above
2. Fill our your about page, and create a “contact” page as listed above
3. Create a “privacy policy” page, as required by both eBay and Adsense
4. Register your site with google webmaster console, Yahoo! Site Explorer, and MSN Webmaster Tools
5. Claim your blog with Technorati
6. Save a bookmark to one of the posts at del.icio.us, Furl, Propeller, etc.
7. Create a Feedburner Feed for your blog
8. Setup your robots.txt file for WordPress
9. Add a MyBlogLog widgets, maybe BlogCatalog too.
10. Add an entreCard widget “above the fold”, not because you want either the traffic or the exposure, but more because an “above the card” entreCard widget will get you on card droppers lists, which will get you bookmarked, visited, linked, AND indexed!
11. Blog in a half dozen forums using they keywords in your domain name as text and your new blog URL as a signature link
12. Leave comments on a half dozen blogs using your domain name as the “Name” (separated by spaces of course), and your new blog URL

I know I promised to tell you how to setup datafeedR today, but I almost forgot, you can’t put the cart before the horse. Stay tuned for more affiliate store goodness!

To build monthly income, building an affiliate store in WordPress blog is like putting money in the bank. Every post is like an investment that will pay you back again, and again, and again…

The next 8 weeks will be the busiest time of the year online. More people will search, shop, and buy than ANY OTHER TIME OF YEAR! What you do for these 2 months will determine how much income YOU WILL EARN during that period. Some bloggers and affiliates spend nearly the entire year getting ready for just these 2 months. I have used just about every affiliate product, service, and plugin out there – and for the next two months I’m going to post a lot about which ones work (and which ones don’t).

I consider this post to be the first in the “How to Build an Affiliate Store in WordPress” series, but I kind of consider it a sub-section of both How to Build Income Online, and How to Monetize Your Blog series. There will be soooo many posts about setting up an affiliate store, I felt an entire series devoted to it was in order.

What is an Affiliate Datafeed?

In the past I’ve blogged briefly about data feeds twice: Create an Affiliate Store in 5 Minutes From a Data Feed, and Monetize Search Results with Data Feeds in WordPress. I will explain once again what a affiliate merchant “datafeed” is. If you are already an affiliate for Commission Junction, Google Affiliates, LinkShare, Pepperjam Network, or ShareASale you already know that you can sign up for Merchants that sell products. You can put up banner ads and text links on your blog or web site, and if someone clicks (and buys) – you get a small percentage commission on that sale for the referral. Most merchants now also allow you to find products on these affiliate sites, and will give you the copy and paste code to place actual products and descriptions on your blog or web site. Most of us have been blogging, and adding relevant products to our posts, reviews, and web pages for years.

Imagine if you had access to every product in a merchants store without having to copy and paste them all one by one by one? What if you could add thousands of products, pages, and categories turning your blog into a virtual store? When you visit Google Affiliates, ShareASale, LinkShare, and Commission Junction and view merchants product descriptions and links, what you see is just the result of a “merchant datafeed”. In other words, when you look for merchant product links for say – Target, Best Buy, or Sharper Image when you’re logged in to LinkShare or another affiliate program, the merchant supplied those products to them in a datafeed file. Nearly all affiliate programs will give the datafeed to YOU if you ask. Some now have tools where you can download the datafeed directly, or set it up to email to you or FTP to your web server. Depending on how many products that merchant has, the datafeed file can range from a few megabytes to hundreds of MB’s. Each datafeed file typically contains fields like title, product number or sku, description, keywords, image URL, buy URL, and more.

Problems Trying to Manage a Datafeed on Your Own

Problem #1: Actually getting the datafeed file

Once I first found out about datafeeds I was enthralled. I thought that I could use this data for all kinds of virtual online storefronts and I began to collect datafeeds from all over to see what I could do with them. Apparently, some affiliate programs were inundated with requests too – some datafeeds I didn’t get access to for months. Some affiliate programs wanted to charge a “setup fee” to get the datafeed to me, anywhere from $50 – $250 (per feed).

Problem #2: Finding software, scripts, and plugins to parse the merchant datafeed files

I did a lot of research to find software and scripts to setup BANS like niche stores from data files, as well as WordPress plugins, scripts, and downloadable software. Some were free, and others cost up to a few hundred dollars. Most had some useful qualities, but none did nearly as much as I was looking for (or had hoped).

Problem #3: Inconsistent or Bad Data

The worst thing about a data feed is the fact that merchants constantly update and remove products, so the data changes all the time. In addition, no two merchants use the same format. Some have descriptions, some don’t. Some have both a large image and a preview thumbnail, some don’t. Everybody names their fields differently, and every merchant has them in a different order. On top of that, merchants can their format at any time, name the datafeed file something new, or send a corrupted file my mistake (hosing up your entire virtual store). I had one merchant have all kinds of weird characters in their datafeed, probably something that didn’t translate well from another language to latin encoding.

How to Create an Affiliate Store Without Touching Datafeed Files

If you had wasted as many hours on this as I have you would most likely come to the same conclusion, manipulating these merchant datafeeds on your own (unless you’re a genius programmer) isn’t really much of an option. You know of the power that a datafeed could provide as an affiliate, but for some reason none of the affiliate programs like Commission Junction and ShareASale offer any tools at all other than copy and paste code for individual products. That’s pretty moronic if you ask me, I’ve always said that was an absolutely HUGE missed opportunity. I had (a glimmer) of hope earlier this year when I thought Pepperjam was developing some tools like this, but so far they have only made datafeed downloads available (like everyone else).

There are quite a few third party developers out there that have created products, and/or services for affiliate datafeeds. As I said – I’ve tried nearly of them that I could find. I’m going to give you a short list of affiliate datafeed tools I think you should look at – followed up by the one I think is better than anything I’ve ever seen…

GoldenCan: GoldenCAN is a datafeed integration service. They get the datafeeds, parse them, remove the garbage, and give you some copy and paste code to add little shops to your blog for merchant products. It’s free, costs no money, and is paid for by taking every “4th” click generated from your site. There are, however, 75 or so merchants that have paid to make their feed completely free (and you get all the clicks). Great little service for being free – not enough (in my opinion) to build a fully featured affiliate store.

PopShops: I only got interested in PopShops because I found out they had a Blogger, Typepad, and WordPress Widget. Their basic account is free, and the “Pro” version with SEO friendly URL’s is only $5 per month. With the widget, when you blog in WordPress using the visual editor, you can popup a window that allows you to search for products, and the results that come back are from all the merchant’s datafeeds they have in their database (some 20 million products). I liked their service (and still use it), but the only cons for me were the fact that you can only look up and add one product at a time, and you had to be very careful that you were signed up for the merchant the product came from (or no commissions for you!).

WebMerge: WebMerge is downloadable software that you install on your computer to parse a merchant affiliate datafeed file and created static web pages from it. It’s $99 for a single user license. I’m sure it can do what it says, but I’ve been building web sites for 13 years and I found it hard to use, hard to setup, and the static pages I created were pretty piss poor, even after creating a “template”.

My Datafeed Scripts: This site sells scripts that parse ShareASale datafeeds (only). I’m sure they work fine, but I wouldn’t pay a hundred bucks for scripts that only work for ShareASale merchants.

Feedshare: Feedshare seems to have a great service, with the ability to build mini-shops as well. You can also setup products and shops using both JavaScript and PHP. The drawback seems to be they only have 45 merchants listed, and the only one who I even knew was Overstock.com. This service appears to be free, so there’s your “pro”.

AffiliStore: When I found Affilistore I really thought I had the holy grail. This free downloadable script sets up an affiliate store that sucks up datafeed files and creates products, categories, and pages including seo titles and descriptions. The sample stores look great, but I found the script provided very mixed results depending on your datafeed format. In the end, it was too much work, categories weren’t working right, some links were breaking, and it was just taking completely too much time for what it was worth. It basically would have been a BANS like niche store, but with affiliate links from a datafeed. I’m glad this never worked out (for me), now that google is attacking “thin affiliate” sites anyway. You’re welcome to try it out, but be warned – “your mileage may vary…”.

How I Recommend Setting Up an Affiliate Store

DatafeedR: Having tried just about everything I could find to setup an affiliate store from a data feed, I think that I may finally HAVE found the Holy Grail of tools! DatafeedR is a service that you can sign up for to build affiliate stores from merchant datafeeds. They get the feeds, remove all the crap and format them so you can add them to your web site or blog. You can add products from Commission Junction, ShareASale, LinkShare, NetShops, Bridalux, AND Clickbank (something none of the previously mentioned products will do).

I just couldn’t believe when I found DatafeedR that it did nearly everything I’d been looking for, for so long…

Features of DatafeedR:

• Create unlimited affiliate stores
• Drip feed products into blog posts
• Products Sidebar Widget
• Unbranded (no “powered by” text or links
• Pick products from multiple merchants and networks
• Include up to 100,000 products per store
• Product categories
• Breadcrumbs
• SEO friendly URL’s
• Meta Description and keywords tags
• Editing of product titles and descriptions
• Add original content to ANY product, category, or store page
• Product “tagging”
• full HTML and CSS control
• Choose what to display (description, image, URL, etc.)

I will be using DatafeedR for the next 2 months to prepare all my blogs and web sites for the holiday season. I will blog about everything I’m doing with DatafeedR multiple times per week. I encourage you to follow this series to see if you can benefit from it as well. The next installment will show how to set DatafeedR up and all the customization options that are available. Stay Tuned!

To build online income you need to understand how to diversify where you generate your revenue. There is a time and a place for a blog, a static web site, and a “niche store”. Each has it’s place, and purpose within your portfolio of sites.

This post is part of the How to Build Income Online series.

I’ve seen the discussions a thousand times in forums “should I use a niche store (BANS), or should I use WordPress”. Some say “static pages are best for mini-sites”. Some say – “I use a blog and an affiliate plugin”.

I’ve blogged about creating mini-sites.
I have written about using BANS.
This is how I blog with an eBay plugin.

What I’m going to do in this post is explain once and for all the clear differences between those three things, including when to use them. My opinions may or may not be popular with some of the so-called “gurus” – but my advice is aimed at those of you still trying to build a monthly income over time, and it’s not to position myself to “sell” you something. When I use affiliate links on this blog, it’s because it’s a product that I use myself to build sites and generate income.

First, let me say that the 3 methods today I’ll talk about for building sites all use “affiliate links”. In my right sidebar is a section entitled “Earn Money Online” that contains links to “affiliate programs” you can sign up for. If you aren’t already – you should at bare minimum be signed up for Amazon, eBay Partner Network, LinkShare, ShareASale, Google Affiliate Network, and Google Adsense.

Method #1: Creating (Authority) Mini-Sites

The first method you can use to promote services or products as an “affiliate” is to create a mini web site or what’s commonly called an “authority” site. This type of site is usually under 20 pages (many are under 10), and the pages are either static HTML, or generated using a small script with no database like the 19 pages software I blogged about last week.

Pros and Cons of Mini-Sites

• Pro: Quick to Setup
• Pro: Small Amount of content required
• Pro: No database or plugins required
• Pro: Low or no maintenance once setup
• Pro: Easy to target a “niche” topic or product
• Con: Lower conversion rates
• Con: One time purchase – no returning visitors
• Con: Tougher to build “authority” (links) for
• Con: Constant ongoing linkbuilding for organic traffic
• Con: Best results with “paid” search traffic

Mini-sites have their place. Quick and dirty sites are attractive, especially to those using targeted search traffic through and adwords campaign and PPC (pay per click) marketers. You can build a profitable authority site manually to get organic (free) search traffic, but it takes a bit longer than other methods. A good time to create an authority mini-site are for short term offers, trends, fads, or for things that have gone “viral” but may soon fade out. Many mini-sites do well for a short period of time, and then slowly die out. Then you can sell the site, or re-work it to be profitable again.

Mini-Site: small investment of time up front for short term profit…

Method #2: Creating a “Niche Store”

The second method is to create a “Niche Store” using a script, software, or service. I’m NOT talking about using a plugin within a blog (yet) – this is strictly for standalone scripts – like Build a Niche Store, and StoreStacker. Niche Stores are becoming very popular. I even posted JTPratt’s Free Niche Site Script earlier this year. A niche store is a web site that contains (links to) lots of products in a particular area or topic with original content in those same areas.

For instance, a niche site about “dog training” would have all kinds of articles about training dogs, and links to videos, books, courses, accessories, and more. There has been a lot of furor in this area this year, since google has been attacking (removing from it’s index) niche sites they feel violate their “quality guidelines” and are “thin affiliate sites” (low on content, high in affiliate links). This is largely due to the popularity of BANS software, and lots of spammers setting up sites with no content and all eBay auctions.

Pros and Cons of Niche Stores

• Pro: Easy to build pages and mashups with affiliate links
• Pro: High commissions of many links (eBay)
• Pro: Very high conversion rates
• Pro: Auctions, videos, and other items complement your content
• Pro: You can be a “virtual” store without selling anything at all
• Pro: Support forum for paid products are major source of free help
• Pro: Customers may come back for additional content or additional shopping
• Con: Nearly all niche store scripts cost money
• Con: Some niche stores (scripts) are difficult to setup for those not technically inclined
• Con: LOTS of original content required
• Con: Constant maintenance required (of both software and content)
• Con: Linkbuilding or paid search traffic required
• Con: Niche sites can be wiped out in google search EVEN if you have lots of quality original content
• Con: eBay Partner Network has been kicking out some affiliates that don’t send “quality” traffic

Niche stores are an EXCELLENT way to diversify and build your monthly online income. They are more work than a mini-site, but less than a blog. Your profits can last a long, long time as long as that niche is still popular. I tell most people that it’s best to start building niche stores in areas that you are experienced and passionate about. If you’ve been a lifelong golfer, the least path of resistance would be a golfing site. Following this route makes it quick and painless to create original content since you can write all kinds of pages from your own experiences. You can also setup the categories and products better as well, since you have shopped for items in your niche for many years.

Even though some niche site owners have been adversely caught in the crosshairs of either ePN (eBay Partner Network) or Google cancelling accounts or deindexing, most with quality original content and established sites are still enjoying high profits. I once read a post by a niche store owner that said “the entire goal of every niche store page is to make an affiliate sale”, and that’s just NOT my philosophy at all. If you follow that mentality, you WILL be one of the niche store owners complaining about a canceled account eventually.

Google and eBay don’t mind you making money (that’s why they exist), but their first goal is to provide a service to people. That should be your goal too. If you create a niche store that YOU would shop at and that YOU would come back to read original content at over and over again, and that YOU would bookmark or tell other people about – then you will (over time) create not only an “authority niche site”, but LOYAL visitors who visit repeatedly. The reason niche stores have such high conversion rates compared to traditional authority sites, are because it goes beyond the normal “price comparison” site. You don’t just offer options to buy the products, but real world grass roots info people are looking for when shopping online. The less your niche site looks like “yet another spammy store” and more like an informational resource – the more money it will make.

Niche Stores: long term investment in a knowlegeable area for long term profit…

Method #3: Blogging with Affiliate Plugins

Blogging with affiliate plugins is becoming more and more popular each and every day. Blogging while trying to make money as an affiliate is also one of the most cumbersome and time consuming things that you can do. It requires the most setup and up front work to get up and running, and definitely requires the most mainenance over time. If you do the right things, I think that it can be the most profitable – and it’s also the most flexible solution you can create.

First let’s talk about why a blog is optimal for marketing and promotion. Usually niche stores by definition have no “RSS feeds” because they don’t have regular updates. Even if they did, unlike a blog – they don’t have “ping” mechanism. When you post to or update a blog it sends out a “ping” to crawlers and search engines that says “look I have new content”. It’s an announcement type feature that traditional web sites, and niche store scripts, don’t have. Google (and search engines in general) love blogs, because they (are supposed to) have regularly updated content.

I’ll give you an example. Last week I added an announcement paragraph to the top of the homepage on a blog I own. Three days later I searched for (local and very specific) keywords that should have come up in top few pages of search results. The keywords didn’t come up AT ALL, on any page, even with quotes and my site specified. That paragraph hadn’t even been indexed by the search crawler. I realized at that moment what I had done. I added the announcement into the template of the homepage itself (so it was first on the page). I did this because I wanted it at the top of the page for a week. This was great for my visitors – but it didn’t use the power features that a “blog” provides. Next, I removed it from the template, and then created a “blog post” with the exact same content and published it. WITHIN 5 MINUTES I WAS THE #1 SEARCH RESULT FOR THE EXACT SAME KEYWORDS.

Now do you understand the unrivaled value that a blog can provide for promoting affiliate offers?

By blogging with an affiliate plugin you combine the power of blogging and creating authority within a niche with the flexibility of monetizing all of those posts and pages with affiliate products and links. You COULD blog and just make money with Adsense. Or you COULD blog and login into Commission Junction manually find links and copy and paste into your blog posts one by one. But with the multitude of (both paid and free) affiliate plugins available – you can quickly and easily monetize your blog posts with affiliate products and links with very little effort at all. The only problem is – you have to continue to blog consistently to fully take advantage of all this has to offer.

Pros and Cons of Blogging with Affiliate Plugins

• Pro: Highly profitable once established
• Pro: Ability to promote nearly anything as an affiliate
• Pro: Can setup multiple sections / categories / pages / series within the blog to monetize
• Pro: Can promote niche stores and mini-sites once established
• Pro: Possible to do everything for free (except for your own time)
• Pro: LOTS of blogs and forums worldwide to help
• Pro: Even with no linkbuilding at all a blog can and will get organic search traffic (over time)
• Pro: Paid search campaigns can accelerate profits
• Pro: Social traffic can come from Stumble, Digg, etc.
• Con: Technical knowledge required (can learn as you go)
• Con: Large initial setup required (blog software, theme, plugins
• Con: Constant maintenance required (for blog / plugins / content)
• Con: Required multiple weekly posts
• Con: Some (better) affiliate plugins cost money
• Con: Some research required (HTML, CSS, plugins, blogging, SEO, etc.)
• Con: New blogs and domains can be “sandboxed” (penalized) in google for growing too quickly at first
• Con: Having many blogs to maintain can be simply overwhelming

Blogging with an Affiliate Plugin: Large setup and maintenance, constant work, most flexible and profitable option…

Next Steps…

I’ve had this post in mind, and the “How to Build Income Online Series” as an idea for a very long time. My goal in this series is to give you every different way I can think of to make money online, so you can pick which ones are best suited for you. I chose to talk about these 3 areas today, because in the coming months I will be reviewing every single free and paid for way to blog and setup niche sites you can think of. I will show you plugins and scripts that you probabaly have never even seen or heard of. I have found these things spending hundreds of hours online over the last few years – and my goal is to create an informational resource for you that puts it all in one place to save you all the time I have invested.

I also have some exciting things in the works. Because of what I’ve found, and because so many of these products, plugins, and scripts don’t do everything I want them to – I am in the process of creating both a WordPress theme and an affiliate plugin that will be available in the near future. Some very, very exciting things will be coming from JTPratt’s Blogging Mistakes – if you haven’t already subscribed to our RSS feed or subscribed to posts via email – do it today!

Organize your wordpress blog by setting up a post series people can follow for specific topics.

When you blog I think the most important 2 things are the usability of your theme and the organization of your content. If people can’t find their way around and use your navigation, and if they can’t similar and related content they need – they will leave. One of the best things I ever did for this blog was to start some article series on related topics.

This is installment #20 of 30 WordPress Hacks in 30 days.

Writing posts in a “series” has many benefits…

Benefits of a Post Series

• Readers come back for new installments
• RSS subscriptions increase
• Easier to come up with new blog posts
• Easier to monetize a “series” than individual posts
• You can seek out “sponsors” for the series
• You could solicit “guest authors” for the series
• You can promote the series with article marketing and backlinks
• A series gives you rankings for new keywords
• A series “home page” is another indexable page for search, and can be an SEO goldmine

I’ve been asked “What’s the difference between a ‘post series’ and just adding posts to categories or tags?” The answer to that question is “original content”. You could write a series of posts in WordPress and just assign them to the same tag or category. Then, all you would have to do is create “tag-slug.php” file or “category-id.php” file to add original content to that page before “the loop” of posts. That page would then contain your intro paragraph, and then listings of posts (either full or excerpts).

What I prefer to do is to create a WordPress “page” manually instead. What I did on this blog was to create the page “series”, and then ALL posts series are children of that, so they become /series/name-of-this-series. Then, in my Sidebar’s list of pages, it has “Article Series” and then the list of the series are automatically added as I create them. If you took the tag or category approach, the series would be listed either in a tag could or category list (which I don’t like).

The other reason I like the WP page approach to series, is because you can list the posts one by one, and instead of full posts or “excerpts” you can create an original content description for each and every one of them. This can be tedious (I know), but the SEO benefits of creating a brand new description of every post in a series are innumerable. Your series home page (can over time) become much greater in SERP’s than any individual article ever could. Also – what would you rather have dugg or stumbled, a page listing a dozen+ posts, or a single post?

I wrote this post because I want you to think about your blog over the long haul. If you create a plan for a post series, you can set it up to be most beneficial from the very beginning.

Planning for a Post Series

• Create a WordPress theme template for the series home page. Read Hacking WordPress Template files.
• When creating the template, add a “file include” before and after the loop (see below)
• Create a WordPress “page” and assign the template you just created and uploaded
• Make the first paragraph a brief 20 word synopsis of the series, then write 1 to 3 paragraphs of original content “before the loop”
• In additional paragraphs, write one “header” with the title of each post, and then a paragraph or original content describing it after each

Using “file includes” for posts

The reason I like to create a template for the post home page is because this way I can add 2 “includes” to the post series home page, which can also be used in each an every post. All you do is create the files in notepad, and name one “common-series-name-before.php” and the other “common-series-name-after.php” like this:

<?php include('common-series-name-before.php'); ?>

<?php include('common-series-name-after.php'); ?>

In your theme template, place the first with the before file “before the loop”, and the second line with the after file “after the loop”. Save and upload to your theme directory. Now all you have to do is create those files in Notepad and upload to your theme directory for it all to work.

The only thing I haven’t told you yet is what to put in those files! It can be anything you want, text, html, you name it. The goal is this, you have an area before and after the content of your series home that you can use to monetize, add affiliate offers, promote other sections of your site, add adsense – or anything else. You could also use select that same template for each post in the series, and monetize them all with exactly the same ads.

These included files are a great way to re-monetize posts and series with new offers, or even announce to readers (without deleting the content and losing indexed SEO pages) that the content is no longer valid – please visit page ABC now for new info.

Additional Ways to setup WordPress Post Series

I have described to you in detail the way that I like to setup post series in WordPress, and the reasons I do it this way. I personally (now) avoid plugins when I can when you can use native features and functions instead, because the more plugins you add to WordPress – the slower it becomes. The good news is, for those of you that aren’t as comfortable hacking templates and code, there is an easier way (you just might not get as many SEO benefits). There are several WordPress plugins that are capable or organizing posts series.

In Series: is a WordPress plugin for managing a series of posts in WordPress, including next and previous links for each posts, tables of content, and more without editing any theme files. Unfortunately the highest version of WordPress listed (tested) with is 2.3. It is not listed on the WordPress 2.5 or 2.6 Plugin Compatibility lists.

Organize Series: is a WordPress plugin that actually adds a new taxonomy to your blog so you can add either “tags” or “categories” or “series” to posts. It provides better organiztion by allowing you to access and list series posts directly from the “Manage” page, and it’s (currently) on the WP 2.5 Plugin Compatibility list.

I hope you start (or continue) to use posts series within your blog. Your readers will visit more often, you will attract more new readers, and it will be easier for you to continue to write new posts!