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Affilistore Is Now Available For Free

Vlad Zablotskyy — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 15:12:33 +0000

I have been using Affilistore to build some of my affiliate websites using datafeeds. I really liked the product for the beginning and was contemplating on purchasing the the full version at the time for £49.00. A friends and a fellow blogger (Jon over at SuccessPart2.com) have alerted me that the product is now available for free, and the developer is only asking for a donation from those who liked the script.

One of the reason that I was considering full version of Affilistore was that it offered an option to use multiple datafeeds.

I highly recommend to get this product if your will be using datafeeds to build your websites.Similar Posts:

Trying Out Affilistore: Affiliate Website In 3 Easy Steps

Vlad Zablotskyy — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 00:22:03 +0000

I have downloaded Affilistore few weeks ago, but after running into a problem with installation, I have let it rest until yesterday. The installation glitch was my own fault: improper MySQL configuration. After realizing where the problem was it took me literally 30 minutes to create a website with hundreds of products. But first thing first…

What is Affilistore?

Affilisotre is a website building software that allows you to create and maintain affiliate websites utilizing merchants datafeeds. Both PHP and MySQL are required in order for this site builder to work. While I am still testing the free version, with limited features, I can see myself purchasing the full version in near future.

Installing Affilistore.

Before you will be able to install this software on your server you need to set MySQL database that will be used to store the data. There is no need to create ables, the Affilistore will do it, but you need to create a database and assign the user. When you set and ready to go just run the install.php from the directory to which you have uploaded your Affilistore software. This step will bring you to the following window:

Make sure to provide correct information about MySQL database to avoid errors. The information about your website can be changed and adjusted later but you need to provide it in this step in order to get o step 2 where you have to provide the URL for your data feed. I have used an URL for datafeed hosted remotely on a different server, but you can upload the file onto your own server:

After clicking “step 3″ button your browser will show a window where you can match the fields of your datafeed with appropriate tables of your store database, trying to match as many fields as possible. If there are some fields in the database that could not be matched with the fields in your database leave them along and these will not be reflected in your website:

That’s it! You have just created a website with hundreds of products: just like this printer ink store that I created in under 30 minutes.

One particular thing that I like about Affilistore that all the affiliate links are clocked and your visitors are being sent to merchant website via a PHP redirect page: go.php. This is particularly beneficial if you are using CJ merchants datafeeds where your affiliate links look some what ugly.

I wish there was also a way that this website would allow appending SID or other similar variables to your affiliate inks for the purpose of keyword tracking should you chose to dive the traffic to your site through pay par click advertising.

While the Affilistore Pro will set you back Â£49.99, it’s hard to beat the price of Affilistore Basic- it’s free! Also keep an eye on Affilistore Blog for the latest news and updates.Similar Posts:

Converseon Affiliate- Data Feed Solutions

Vlad Zablotskyy — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 17:34:18 +0000

If you are an affiliate and decide to build website that will feature hundreds or even thousands of products, one of the way to go about it is to utilize data feeds from your merchants. Unfortunately in order to build the site on your own you will need some programing skills, knowledge of MySQL or similar data bases in conjunction of knowledge of server side scripting such as PHP. These are not difficult to learn and if you can, learning them can greatly enhance your affiliate websites.

If you decide to take my “path”, which includes of looking at programing as a big “monster” that is conquered only by few chosen ones, there are still solutions for you out there. Even if you do not have these specific programing skills, as long as you know how to copy and paste HTML code into your website, you will be able to create dynamic websites that will feature hundreds and even thousands of products.

In the past I wrote briefly about products/services that I have used in the past to build my affiliate sites: DataFeedFile, GoldenCan and FeedShare. While with both DataFeedFile and GoldenCan, the wast majority of merchants participate on so called 4^th click basis, which means that you loose every 4^th outgoing click from your website. FeedShare on the other hand is providing data feed solutions at absolutely no cost to affiliate. You “keep” all clicks.

Converseon Affiliate offers very similar solutions to what FeedShare is offering as well, in fact they have one common merchant- My Wines Direct. Here are the list of solutions offered by Converseon Affiliate when it comes to particular merchants:

EZ Store-This method allows you to feature hundreds of products on your affiliate website by simply adding a line or two of JavaScript, PHP or ASP/ASP.net code. If your decide to utilize this method you need to remember that the data displayed on your website via JavaScript code will not be indexed by the search engines.

PHP Store Front- this a pre-build website for you. All you need is to upload several PHP files to your website in order to utilize this solution. Your web hosting provider should support PHP 4.1 or newer in order for you to be able to use this method. You will also need to be able to modify certain settings so your website fill display products from correct merchant.

Raw Data Feeds- Finally Converseon Affiliate provides raw data feeds (either XML or CSV file) for your custom solution.

I have not used Converseon Affiliate services yet. The only merchant that I am affiliate with is My Wines Direct and I currently use FeedShare data feed solutions for My Wines Direct. But based on what I have experienced with FeedShare, Converseon Affiliate is a website worth to keep our eyes on. I hope that both of these sites will be able to feature and offer data feeds from larger number of merchants. If you are an affiliate for a merchant that sells hundreds of products you can always write your affiliate manager recommending either FeedShare or Converseon Affiliate.

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Have you signed up for Weebly?

Vlad Zablotskyy — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 21:24:35 +0000

Weebly, a web-based website creation tool, looks quiet promising. Although they have reach the initial minimum of offered accounts, I signed up today and hopefully will be able to use this very promising tool in the future.

The video below shows you how Weebly works:

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjY83SnrO1M[/video]

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Pinging Technorati: Surprise and Disappointment

Vlad Zablotskyy — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 03:43:57 +0000

After reviewing October web logs for all of mine WordPress powered websites, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that approximately 5% of the traffic was due to Technorati. I was disappointed to see though that most of my traffic ended up landing on an error (404) page. After taking a closer look I realized that it was to my own fault and I would like to share it with you if, so if you are operating a WordPress site or any other blog that pings Technorati on a regular basis, you will not end up showing your visitors 404 error pages.

As you know whenever your website pings Technorati, short afterÂ thier boot comes visiting your website and providing the fresh content from your site to everyone at Technorati. This of course can result in some extra traffic to your website.

Why did my visitors ended up looking at 404 pages?

Well it was completely my own fault. Few times, or should I say many times, after a writing and publishing a new an article, I would become dissatisfied with either content or titles of my articles and by the end of the day may have change them. Since I am using Smart Update Pinger Plugin, my website does note ping any services unless new content is published. You can set that option in order to avoid of being seen as a spammer. Of course if you are a die heat blogger it probably will not matter. But for me it does, I do not publish very often.

Whenever I would change for example a title of one of my article, I would right away adjust the url to include keywords. But since after editing articles my sites send no pings, Technorati and maybe other service as well, do not update the change until days later. So whenever a Technorati user finds my site, it inevitable leads him or her to a 404 page.

What have I learned from this?

First of all, I underestimated the amount of traffic Technorati can provide toÂ my sites. I was truly surprised by the numbers I saw. Most of all this traffic cost you nothing, its almost like a gift!

Secondly, I have learn good lesson about editing my posts. I know from my own experience that if I lend on “404″ page, the site has less than half a second to grab my attention. I would be much better for my visitors to see an updated page. So he lesson learn here is to take more time when writing the articles. This will assure less “404″ pages for may visitors and hopefully more than half a second to grab their attention.

Conclusion.

After this episode I know that Technorati got my attention for real this time, and I would highly recommend to any blogger to make sure your website pings Technorati along with other “blog search engines”. Also, whenever writing an article, if your are not satisfied 100% with what you have written, take more time before publishing it, otherwise you may end up just like me, showing your visitors error pages.

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DatFeedFile: Data Fee Integration Example.

Vlad Zablotskyy — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 20:24:21 +0000

I have been using DataFeedFile for quiet some time now and today I would like to share with my readers some practical steps in creating “Merchant Search Engine”. The reason I chose this tool over other available is that this one tool that makes DataFeedFile a little different from GoldenCan. Some web-masters think that either websites do not provide enough flexibility, but for some one like myself, without programing skills, these two website offer wonderful opportunity to create a website quickly and easy.

What kind of editor should you use?

If you can afford either Microsoft FrontPage or Adobe Macromedia Dreamweaver, these are wonderful tools to create websites. If you are serious about affiliate business one of these softwares will be a good business investment, a tax deductible one I should add.

If you can not afford these editors, any HTML editor will do, including simple notepad that is on every computer. I never use notepad, since writing a website in notepad requires knowledge of HTML and being able to write HTML code some what quickly. I have started my first pages by using Nvu, a web editor that allows you to switch quickly from visual editing to HTML code. Nvu is a wonderful free tool, probably the best there is, among free software that is. It was my first web editor therefore I will use it as an example.

How to create a “Merchant Search Engine” with DataFeedFile?

First of all you should register at http://www.datafeedfile.com/ (free) and set up all the necessary affiliate ids and apply to few merchants.

In this example I will show you how to create this a small website using only two pages and two java script codes which you will copy and paste from your account at DataFeedFile. I will not use any styling for this example so the finished product may not look so appealing, but hopefully it will give you an idea of how to use DataFeedFile.

Step 1: Create “store.html” and “products.html”

Create two HTML files with Novu naming them “store.html” and “products.html”. You will need both of this files in order for your site to function.

Step 2: Edit “store.html”

You will need to login to your DataFeedFile account, go to Get HTML>Menus>Merchat Menus.
Chose any template (I have chosen Standard template), if you wish the text to show in bold you may select that option, but I generally leave “Show product in new window” unchecked. Define font size (I use fonts no bigger that 12pt). Define number of columns and rows ( I opted for 3 columns and 4 rows). Select view mode (I selected Gird), next to it you can also define the size of the merchants logo (I leave it blank for due to the image quality. In the field of Target URL you will need to provide URL of file named “products.url” in my case it will be http://sageblogger.com/products.html. Then click “Generate HTML Code”, from the first window titled “JavaScript” copy and paste the code anywhere inside the “body”Â tags of “store.html” file. Save the file and then upload it to your server, in my example I placed the file to http://sageblogger.com/store.html .

Step 3. Edit the “products.html” file.

Going back to your DataFeedFile account go to Get HTML>Shopping Tools>Price Search Engine. Select a template style. The rest of the options you may leave untouched (at least for now). Click Generate HTML code then copy and paste JavaScript code anywhere inside the “body”Â tags in your “products.html” file, save and upload the file to the location you have specified in step 2 for Target URL, in my case it is http://sageblogger.com/products.html. That’s it, your website is ready. It should look something like this:

http://sageblogger.com/store.htmlÂ

Using the JavaScript code does not give you SEO benefits. In odrder to have the data of your site indexed you will need to use PHP code. To do that you will also need to save files “store” and “products” with a php extension: store.php and products.phpSimilar Posts:

DataFeedFile- programing solutions for Affiliates.

Vlad Zablotskyy — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 06:26:20 +0000

DataFeedFile is another website, similar to GoldenCan, that provides data feed solutions to affiliates. There is no charge for using their services, nevertheless most of the merchants participate on a “4^th click” basis. What it means that a link for every forth lick produced from your website is being replace with their own affiliate links. It is important to keep in this in mind when running and comparing your reports, especially if you are using pay per click advertising to promote your website. I have used extensively this website and I would like to share with you what are the benefits of using their website.

Both GoldenCan and DataFeedFile is a good solution for affiliates that would like to create their own websites but do not have necessary programing skills to integrate large amounts of data into their websites. DataFeedFile actually has some solutions for advance users who would like to use XML data feeds for their websites. One of the great benefit of using DataFeedFile is that they update their data from participating merchants on a daily basis, and if you choose for example to download data as a CSV file, DataFeedFile sends you an e-mail notificatio every time data is updated. But I have no experience on using raw data files so I will share with you only about the “the shopping tools” that are require less than five minutes to install on your website.

On of the features called “Shopping Comparison” Tool of DataFeedFile stands out and is not yet available at GoldenCan. It allows you to create a “mini” shopping search engine that allows users to compare price of a particular product across several different merchants. I am currently working an a post/tutorial on how to create this kind of search engine.

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How to Get Your Website Listed Quickly on Major Search Engines

Vlad Zablotskyy — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 05:52:25 +0000

Recently I have read few articles on how to make sure that your website will be listed quickly on the major search engines. There are of course countless articles on the subject and even e-books you can buy. But here I am putting in my few cents.

In the past in order to list my websites I extensively used “submission” form specifically provided for that purpose. The one after you use to submit your website, you receive a thank you note for submitting your site and a statement that indexing takes a long time some times up to several weeks. I also made sure to submit a sitemap via Google Sitemaps as soon as my websites went live.

Most of the articles that I have read discouraged very much from using the form, saying that it is much better for your site to be discovered by the search engines on their own. So I have decided to let them discover one website on their own. For this purpose I have written an article at Ezine Articles as well as using Digg.com and Bluedot.us to share the content from my website. I should mention that I have not created sitemap for Google yet for this website, and now I even hesitant to do so, and this is why.

The above mentioned website went live three days ago and has already two pages indexed on Google. Yahoo and MSN did not list my site yet, nevertheless I was absolutely astonished that Google picked up my site so quickly. While it is possible that the website may disappear from Google’s index tomorrow, it still was the quickest ever that my site was listed by any search engine.

Now I am not sure even if I should submit sitemap to Google, I would not want to spoil the little success that I have achieved so far. I hope that this article may be read by a SEO professional who can set me straight on using Google sitemap and its benefits or disadvantages.

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Measure your SEO efforts with Page Strength Tool

Vlad Zablotskyy — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 07:29:53 +0000

Many webmasters spend much time optimizing and promoting their websites. If you are using pay per click advertising, you may be able to tack conversion rate and in such manner measure the success of your work. When it comes for measuring your work in SEO it can be some what difficult and may take longer to aggregate necessary data in order to measure your success.

Seomoz.org offers this wonderful tool called Page Strength, which I have been using lately to improve my websites. The tool it self offers just one paragraph worth of suggestion for you to consider or encouragement and praise if your site/page shows strength of 3 and above. But if you pay attention to aggregated data you may be able to improve your site within days. They refresh the data only once every 72 hours so checking in more frequently will not produce any better results.

I have to admit that I am in no way qualified as SEO guru or anything close to being one. But after looking at the results and changing few things I was able to improve my page strength for some of my websites from 1 to 3 within two weeks.

There are few factors of your website that you will have no control over, as for example domain’s age. This factor will improve over time. But there are few that you can improve yourself.

Here is what I did. Since most of my websites are powered by WordPress, I have started to use plugin that allows your visitors to add your posts to deli.cio.us, and withing days I saw an improvement. Also since the tool measures your websites position for first four words of your title in Google, I have chosen less competitive keyword phrases for my website, and some of my websites when from not showing on the first page of natural search to the 1^st and 2^nd place on Google.

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EzineArticles- How Soon Can You See Results

Vlad Zablotskyy — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 16:29:26 +0000

Few months ago I have joined EzineArtiles after reading a lot about benefits you get from publishing your articles there. I have not published many articles there since when I made an attempt to publish my first article, it was not approved and to be honest I gave up on it. When you join EzineArticles, you have 10 initial submissions , which have to adhere to editorial guidelines. Since English is not my native language, I thought that writing 10 articles would be too big of a task for me. Nevertheless tow weeks ago I dedicded to give it another shot and submitted 10 articles. Now I am a “Platinum” member which is not a big deal, since almost anyone can become a Platinum member at EzineArticles, but it sure helps since being a Platinum member allows you to submit unlimited number of articles. Also editorial review is much quicker when you are a Platinum member.

So what about results?

I can’t say I saw dramatic results from publishing my articles at EzineArticles. I may not have the sufficient amount of data to pass a judgment. But here are few clues to how effective my approach was.

Link Popularity.

You probably have read that publishing your articles on EzineArticles will increase your websites link popularity, since there will be many publishers who may republish your article on their websites. So far my articles were republished few times, but the sites that picked up my articles either do no have high page rank or are entirely made of ezine articles. I am yet waiting to see any of my articles to be picked up by more reputable website. I have to admit that EzineArticles itself is highly ranked by many search engines, and if nothing else having and incoming link from them may help my websites a little.

Search Engines Indexing.

I definitely noticed some improvement on how my pages are indexed by search engines. I have noticed that Google, Yahoo and MSN, have indexed some of my older pages. I could not understand why these pages were not indexed in the past. Some of the pages were as old as websites themselves, but newer pages would get indexed quicker. I can’t guarantee that this change can be attributed to EzineArticles, but coincidently these “older” pages were indexed by search engines after I started publishing with EzineArticles.

How long does it take to see some real results?

Some people say that it takes about 20 articles before you will notice some real results. It is also have been said that ezine authors with 100 articles and more get the most results. So I guess I still have some ways to go.

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