Archive for 'November, 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

.

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!
.

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.