I love this new Firefox plugin called Domain Lookup, which lets you quickly look for domain name availability on keywords which you simply highlight on your browser page.

So you see some combination of words in a webpage and wonder to yourself if they would be available to register as a domain name. All you do is highlight the text with your cursor, right click and do a domain lookup. A new tab opens up with the results of your domain name search. The plugin does the useful stuff you'd need it to, like remove spaces and illegal characters, and can be customised to use different registrars depending on your preference - there's a big list already and you just need to request other ones be added if you don't see your favourite there.

You can specify your top level domain of choice, such as .com, .co.uk, .net etc, but most registars tend to give most of the available options on the results page anyway.

I think it's especially useful if you're going through keywords on something like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool (see below).



A very nifty plugin for anyone that buys a lot of domains: Domain Lookup Firefox Extension.

Labels: affiliate tools, firefox

What do I mean by Affiliate Marketing Live? No, it's not a suggestion for another affiliate marketing conference, it's to do with talking to your users, live and in real time.

Increasing numbers of websites offer the facility to speak live to a customer service representative in a chat window on their website. When I was more active with my computer support business, I had a Live Chat option on my website which meant I could try to convert visitors into clients.

When a user came onto the website, I would see from my control panel that they were on there, and I could see their IP address and browser information. Actually seeing the IP was interesting because often it would auto resolve it and tell me the hostname and it was obviously rival companies.

And I didn't need to wait for them to click on the Live Chat button - I had the option to initiate a popup box inviting them to a chat. In the chat, I could fill them in on details of services available, give them URLs, collect their email address, log the chat and generally establish a relationship which might lead to business being done.

So I got to thinking how this could be exploited for affiliate marketing. How useful would it be for you to talk to your users, advise them on the best products and then give them the URL to a recommended product? I think this could be a great to offer a personal shopping service and increase conversions.

What are the drawbacks? Well, it will require a lot of your time so the things you are selling would have to be worth in terms of commission. You don't need to sit there 24/7 though - most of the chat services offer the function whereby if you're logged in, the button on your site says you're available and if you're not, it says you're not available - simple.

It would really work best if it was in subject area in which you had expertise and could genuinely give advice. I'm thinking high end laptops, bikes and TVs would be a good way to go (probably not on the same site though). If you had a lot of traffic, you might soon become overrun, so would this be a better solution for a very niche, low traffic, high product-value site.

One of the live chat solutions is from a company called, well, Live Chat Software. Check out their website, give it a go and speak to their operators and try the 14 day free trial if you think it's something that could benefit your site. I might give the trial a go one one of my sites soon and I'll let you know how that goes.

Labels: affiliate marketing, affiliate tools, ideas, live chat

If you have some programming knowledge, you can do some cool stuff with affiliate datafeeds. But I got to thinking a while back about coming up with a tool that allowed affiliates with no programming knowledge of server side languages to create large websites using a datafeed. I had a particularly requirement for it myself because I'm from a MS-centric background and don't know how to do a .net equivalent of mod_rewrite which is available in PHP (well, I don't know how to do it on a shared hosting platform where making changes to IIS is limited), so I wanted to create a large volume of web pages with great looking directory structures.

I decided to create an application which would generate a static HTML document for every row in a datafeed, not dissimilar to how mail merge works in a word processor. I also wanted it to make it particularly simple to create nice directory structures which would be particularly SEO friendly.

I called it EssEeeO - SEO Made Simple. The point of it is to allow affiliates with little or no knowledge of server side technologies to build large websites, with SEO friendly URLs that will work on any hosting package and don't need a database back end.

I made it. It works and I use it. So what to do with it now? There are other off the shelf solutions for affiliates without programming skills, and I understand an application called Webmerge does what my app does and more, but I think that costs $99 and my app would be a fraction of that, or maybe even free.

I have done about 98% of the project. Now I'm trying to get an idea if there's a demand or interest in me making that final push to get it completed for resale or to give away. So if you think you might be interested, trundle over to EssEeeO.com and check out the demo and register your interest.

Apologies that the video has come out hopelessly blurred - I tried to make it clearer but that was the best I could do.

Labels: affiliate marketing, affiliate tools

Experienced affiliate marketers can probably skip this one. This is my basic guide to using product feeds which aimed at entry level affiliates who want to know about the tools available to them.

What Are Product Feeds?

Product feeds, or data feeds, are a great tool for affiliate marketers building websites and wanting to incorporate product information into them.

Many merchants will export their product information into a text based format such as CSV or XML. These are called product feeds or data feeds and are usually available through your affiliate network.

What's In A Product Feed?

These files will usually contain at least the following pieces of information:

• Product Code/ID
• Product Name
• Product Description
• Price
• Image URL
• Affiliate URL

With this information, you can quickly build large sites full of great product data.
Excel is commonly used to open and view CSV files. Excel could traditionally only handle files with 64,000 rows, but the latest version can handle about a million rows, which means you can even work with large product feeds like the one from Play.com which is about 250,000 rows in size.

What Can I Do with A Product Feed?

You can use the data feed file as a data source itself and have your web pages read directly from it, or import it into a database server like MS SQL or mySQL. I have recently started to just use CSVs as data-sources if they are not too big, and only bother importing them into a database server if they are large or will be getting a lot of hits.

I define "large" for this purpose as being about 1000 rows. Anything more than that and you may possibly be putting a performance hit on the server as it reads the text file every-time your web page is requested. If it's for a site I don't expect to get high traffic, I may be more relaxed about using slightly larger CSV files.

As well as creating dynamic pages, you could also use an off-line application to generate static web pages based on the information in a product feed. I started work on an application like that, but have yet got round to finishing it as there are probably better solutions out there.

How Often Do Product Feeds Get Updated?

This varies between merchants and you're best of checking with them. Popular mobile phone merchants may refresh their data feeds many times a day. Other types of merchant may not need to update a file for months. If you are having to update a product feed frequently, you can look at automating the process in a batch file by getting a direct download link from the affiliate network and using a tool like wget

Why use Product Feeds?

Product feeds enable you to quickly build large sites full of product information. This is great for white label style sites or price comparison, or generally just adding affiliate content to your site.

Anything to be careful of when using product feeds?

If all affiliates are using the same product feeds, then there's a risk of too many people duplicating the same content and being penalised by search engines. Be creative in choosing what information to use and balance it with text of your own or even consider functions to replace certain words with alternatives to create web content that is unique - for instance, replacing "great" with "excellent".

Conclusion: Product feeds represent a convenient and accessible way for affiliates to incorporate useful merchant information into their own websites.

Labels: affiliate marketing, affiliate tools, beginners, product feeds

I've recently been working on a new mobile phone website, which has got off to a very nice start thank you very much, and had to research data feeds to find the right one that would make my life easier in giving me the information I wanted.

I found varying levels of quality and usefulness in the feeds provided by merchants and thought I'd share with you, dear reader, the results of my findings. The site I was making was just going to be using the CSV as a data source and I was looking for good product data and details of tariffs I could simply pull out and display on the page. I was also only looking at merchants who provide phones from a selection of networks (so didn't look at the feeds provided directly by network operator programs)

Carphone Warehouse (Buy.at)
Decent description field giving all required information but lacking column names telling me individually the tariff name, the inclusive minutes, the inclusive texts which would make it easier to show in a tabulated form. Availability column is useful.

e2Save (Affiliate Window)
Not many products in this one - only a shade over 400 - and doesn't include separate columns for inclusive minutes or texts. Decent description field. It's not been updated since Dec, but the feed is marked "Contact merchant for update", so maybe there's a better one available directly.

Rainbow Mobiles (Affiliate Future)
Easy to download from merchant site direct, has separate columns for minutes, texts and contract length. Unhelpful header row with field names that contain spaces and special characters. No individual handset columns but the info is contained in a product name field (which contains tariff name too).

Dial A Phone (Buy.at)
Great feed, separate columns for contract length, inclusive minutes, inclusive texts, handset, free gift. This data feed has it all and is a joy to work with, and with payouts of £40 for validated signup, quite a healthy commission too.

So Dial A Phone would be my favourite, except Dial A Phone has been DISQUALIFIED because their feed is hardly ever available on Buy.at due to ongoing and recurring technical issues that have yet to be resolved because of lack of resource at the merchant end, and last time I looked, the buy.at short links in the feed weren't working properly.

This is really frustrating because the feed was so useful but if all I have is a data file that is weeks out of date and no sign of a new one, then it's no good to me.

So my preferred Mobile Phone Product Feed award goes to Rainbow Mobiles on Affiliate Future.


What I'm Playing Right Now: Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07 - Nintendo Wii

Labels: affiliate network, affiliate tools, mobile phone, product feeds

I mentioned a few days ago that I wanted to revisit some of my older websites and improve Adsense performance rather than just see the headline figure for all the sites and be satisfied with that and not delve too deeply in. Of course I've always checked how Adsense Channels were performing but as long as the total was OK, I was generally happy.

But to help with my new approach, I have been making a habit of printing out a "Custom Report" from Adsense advance reporting that shows me Yesterday's Adsense status for all channels, grouped by Channel. I'm someone that reads stats best from a printed page, so I save the report as a CSV and print it out. So far so good, and then I noticed that using the Report Manager, you can have the custom report emailed to you on a daily basis. This couldn't get any better I thought, so I set it up and received my first email report today from Google.

I was happy with that except for one thing - they sent the report as a .zip file. This means that to access the info how I like it, I need to save the attachment, open the Zip file, file the CSV file within, and then print it. It's OK, but it's click intensive. There must be a better way, I thought...

Step forward EZDetach...

I googled around and found EZDetach from a company called TechHit. This dreamy little add in for Microsoft Outlook automatically detaches attachments from email messages. It works as a toolbar button, or more importantly, as a custom action, meaning you can set it up to work as a rule applied to incoming messages. But it doesn't stop there - after it detaches the file, it gives you the option to unzip the file and then another option to execute a script of your own - from where you can then print the file automatically too.

The end result is that I receive the email from Google, the attachment is automatically saved, unzipped and printed. The report comes shooting out of my printer with no interaction or work from me at all. I just pick it up and start analysing.

This solution is so sweet, I thought others might be interested, so here's exactly how I've set it up:

1) Install EZDetach (http://www.techhit.com/ezdetach/) - Free trial is available, and the actual price is only $29.97

2) Open Outlook - I'm using Outlook 2003

3) Find an existing Adsense Report received, and right click on it, then select "Create Rule"

4) Select "Subject Contains - Adsense Report Request..."

5) Click Advanced Options, and then click Next to proceed to the "What do you want to do with the message?" screen. Scroll down and tick "perform a custom action"

6) Click the underlined words "a custom action" to choose the action, and then select EZDetach in the drop down list. Click Change to configure it...

7) Set an Output path, tick Execute and enter "c:\printfile.vbs" and also click Unzip File. So you have told it where to save the file, that it needs unzip to the file and that it needs to run a script called printfile.vbs which is on the c:\ - now we need to make that script! Just click Ok, and Finish first.



8) Open Notepad.exe and enter this text, than click File->Save as-> enter "c:\printfile.vbs" for the file name and be sure to select "All Files" for Save as Type.

Option Explicit
Dim objShellApp
Dim strFilename
strFilename = "c:\my documents\mailattachments\Adsense-Report.csv"
Set objShellApp = WScript.CreateObject("Shell.Application")
objShellApp.ShellExecute strFilename, "", "", "print", 0
Wscript.Sleep(5000)
Set objShellApp = Nothing

I should add - the company behind EZDetach is so cool that they made a print file script available on their website which I hacked about to make this. this script relies on there being the same output path as I had, but you can easily change accordingly.

9. That's it! Next time you get a report from Adsense, it will just print straight out ready to be collected from the paper tray.

Of course, not everyone will want to receive and consume their stats like this, but for the way I like to do it, this method works so well.

Labels: adsense, affiliate tools, review

There's a whole load of affiliate blogs out there, and luckily there's a few tools to help keep track of them.

Bumpzee is really a fantastic new site from Scott Jangro, which has been going for a few weeks now and I meant to mention it before now. It allows you to get a great overview of a big selection of affiliate related blogs, and incorporates social networking elements and the ability to "bump" or "dump" postings in a digg style. This has quickly become my first choice affiliate marketing resource. Bumpzee is one to watch because other communities could be added later, so this could grow and grow.

Keith Bond has just launched Internet Marketing Blogs UK, which pulls together all the UK blogs, and he intends it to cover not just affiliate marketing but the whole realm of internet marketing, including subjects like SEO.

And I shoudn't forget MashedBlogs.com which was probably the first site I saw which was aggregating the affiliate marketing blogs and has been a useful provider of traffic to my own blog.

Labels: affiliate tools, blogs

It's always great when a merchant operates a discount code so you can promote them to your users with that extra angle of "use this code to get your discount" etc.

But my much preferred method of discount codes is the one available on Regnow.com for all the software available to buy through their merchants.

Say the commission on a piece of software is 40%. That 40% is yours to do with whatever you like. If you want to login and create a 20% discount code to offer your users, that's up to you. Heck, if you're feeling charitable you could give the whole commission amount back as a discount. You put your own characters into the discount code generated to make it "fit" the site you're promoting it from. And there's loads of useful option: offer the discount on an entire range from a merchant, or just one item. Or even make it available if they buy another item at full price.

It's really a useful system and one of the reasons I really like using Regnow (aff link)

Labels: affiliate network, affiliate tools, regnow

I like to do all my coding and am pretty useful in VB.net. I get by OK with it but I've always marvelled at some of the cool stuff available to PHP developers - especially mod rewrite which lets you take a dynamically generated and make it look like static content by rewriting the URL for example converting ...products.php?category=adult-toys&product=rabbit into something more palatable such as ...products/adult-toys/rabbit/

I looked into it a bit and couldn't find any decent ways of doing this is .Net and the only options I could see involved making changes to IIS on the server which is not really an option on shared hosting package.

So, since I couldn't do what I wanted to do, I set about looking for a workaround and decided that if I couldn't find a way to generate the pages I wanted on the fly, I would just come up with a way to generate the actual static pages and upload.

And then a new project was born: "EssEeeO: SEO Made Simple". I got to work and created a little application which works a little bit like mail merge. It connects up to your CSV product feed, you enter your code and design the output path you want and hit the button. Very quickly you can have thousands of pages created with search engine friendly file names.



Obviously it's not as elegant as database driven site and takes time to upload all the pages again. But it has some advantages which didn't occur to me until I had done it - you don't need to pay additionally for database hosting and it's easy to go in and edit individual pages if there's special offer or promotion.

Now, this isn't a unique idea. I searched around and found products that did pretty much the same thing, but was surprised to see costs of around $100. I've reached a point with the application where the core functionality is all there. I actually use it myself regularly so it's already been worthwhile in doing it. But now I'm wondering whether to make a final push and add the necessary to gloss to make this a product I could make available to others - either by selling it or giving it as freeware. I'd love to have a digital product to sell and let affiliates promote it for me, but also freeware is a great way of getting links and traffic. And I shouldn't forget that a previous freeware app I did called What Process? has done brilliantly well for me, especially since the BBC featured it.

But it could well be that this isn't really of much use to anyone else, so there's no point spending much more dev time on it. So really I'm after feedback to help me decide whether to give this project the final push to get it full complete. If you can ever imagine finding a use for this application, feel free to let me know.

Labels: affiliate tools, EssEeeo

I posted back in July about the size of large product feed files and asked how best to manage them. I had just downloaded a CSV file containing the Woolworths product feed which contained over 100,000 rows. My default application for opening and managing CSV files is Microsoft Excel, which has a row limit of about 64,000.

So for those large files, it was necessary to change my normal routines and try other methods to open and manipulate the date. The way I did it was to import the CSV into an Access database. It was workable but not the way I like to do what I wanted to do.

So I was pleased to find out that in the latest version of Microsoft Excel (known as Excel 2007 or Excel 12), the row limit has at last been increased - to a whopping 1million rows. The 64k limit has been there, like, forever, so this development is long overdue and means handling large files should be a lot simpler.

Other features in the new Excel include:

• New Interface and menu system
• Improved ability to render charts and sheets in a web browser using Excel Services
• New XML based file format - creating smaller files and offering improvements in data recovery.

Find out more about Excel 2007.

Labels: affiliate tools, excel

I'm sure when Amazon launched its rather cool aStore feature, you could only have one aStore linked to your associate ID.

Just noticed you can now have 100 aStores per Associate ID.

Happy Days!

Labels: affiliate tools, amazon

What thing that has often occurred to me is just how boring most of the banner ads are that are supplied to affiliates by merchants. Very often, you will just a selection of banners in some standard formats and the most imaginative they get is to have some animation.

But if you're a broadband merchant, why wouldn't you just supply a banner form that provides a postcode lookup function which takes the user to an availability page?

If you're a web registrar, why wouldn't you provide a domain search box for affiliates to put on their sites?

If you're the National Lottery, why don't you have banners that display results or are an entry form? Or maybe a number generator?

And if you sell books, how about a RSS feeds of your best sellers in various categories that could be integrated into affiliate sites?

It just seems to me that most merchants just come up with some boring ads for you to plonk on your page when they would be better off by using their imagination to come up with ways in which they can be seamlessly integrated to become part of the content.

Labels: affiliate marketing, affiliate tools, ideas

I blogged recently about how Pagerank 10's affiliate scripts made it easy for newbie affiliates to get a site up and running with little or no technical expertise.

Another new product that makes an affiliate's life easier is DataFeedFile.

Basically they take care of handling the product data feeds from merchants at major affiliate networks. They host and manage the data and serve it up to your website with you just needing to enter a few lines of code on your page. They've come up with a full suite of searchable product listings and comparisons you can integrate into your page.

What's in it for them?

Every 4th click that comes from your website will go through their own affiliate link rather than yours. So in exchange for their service, you are giving away a quarter of your potential leads.

It seems like a reasonable trade off if you're starting out and don't think you have the aptitude to manage your own data sources, or are just a casual affiliate dipping your toe in the water - but my personal recommendation would be that you try to learn the skills required because if you become a serious affiliate, giving away a quarter of your traffic could be a big deal.

Labels: affiliate tools

Commission Junction gets a bit of stick for not making product feeds as easily available as other networks such as Affiliate Window and Buy.At.

But could they turn around affiliate opinion with their launch of web services and their own API?

We are pleased to announce the launch of Commission Junction's Web Services. These services have been tested in beta for the past several months and because of their success are now being made available to a wider audience.

Web Services are made for tech-savvy publishers who are looking to increase their ability to promote their advertisers and shape their network environment. With Web Services, you can create innovative applications to extend the power of your affiliate program through enhanced Product Catalogue functionality and advertiser searches. Use Web Services to connect directly to Commission Junction's technology and create custom applications to access the specific data that matters most to your visitors.

This is the first in a series of Web Services releases and includes the following Application Programming Interfaces (APIs):

• Product Catalogue Access – This API offers real-time access to the Product Catalogue database. Using it, you can find a product or group of products to display on your site since the API enables keyword searches as well as item specific searches by UPC, manufacturer, model number, advertiser, SKU and more.
  
• Link Search Functionality – Publishers can use this API to search for links through a SOAP interface using a set of parameters to return link results that include information like their relationship status and link code that can be used to capture publisher referrals. In addition, you can find the perfect link for display on your site using search options that are very similar to those available via the CJ Account Manager™, including searching by link type and size, advertiser, language and other link attributes.
  
• Advertiser Search Functionality – This API allows publishers to search for advertisers through a SOAP interface using a set of parameters to return advertiser results that include information such as their relationship status and program terms with the advertiser.

As part of this launch, we are also unveiling our new Web Services developer site, located at http://webservices.cj.com. This site contains helpful news, resources, sample code and forums. Use this site to get information on how to use Web Services and share your best practices.

Use Web Services to boost your revenue and develop applications today! Let the innovation begin!

Labels: affiliate network, affiliate tools, commission junction

I mentioned on the blog a few weeks ago about PageRank10's new service where they provide a script for an affiliate website ready to go. All you need to do is select a script for the merchant and network you want to use, and then download the csv and whack it all online.

It seemed a nice idea and my friend purchased a couple of scripts. She put the sites up, linked to them and then left them to get indexed. I'm actually very suprised that she has already had her first sale. I launched a site in the same market at around the same time and am waiting for its first sale.

In a way, I'm kind of reluctant to use a method which is so accessible to anyone as it almost takes the skill and mystery out of it, but ultimately, I'll go with whatever works so might have to the scripts a try.

Labels: affiliate tools

Found this Affiliate Scripts resouce, which is a repository of handy scripts for affiliate web masters. Personally, I prefer to do all my coding myself and there's not much on there at the moment for asp.net (for not much, read "none"), but it's still a nice idea and worth a browse.

http://www.affiliatescripts.co.uk

Labels: affiliate tools