Please use the comment section to ask questions about the datafeed site you have.

The help file for getting the most out of your affiliate datafeed site:

Readme

Details on HOW your datafeed site works:

Datafeed site technical details

Video showing you how to add articles to your site:

Article video

Video showing you how to add advertisements to your site:

Advertisement video

So, you want to be an Adwords rockstar?

Well then, you'll need to wrap your brain around dynamic keyword insertion.

And I'm not just talking about the basics - just using dynamic keyword insertion in your Google Adwords advertisement. I'm talking about playing with the big kids and using those keywords that appear in your Adwords advertisement also on your web page.

That's right, if you are targeting a specific search terms in your advertisement - make that keyword show up on your landing page. Heck, even have it show up as the title and actual url of your page. Now we are talking.

Maybe instead of talking, let me show you a few things to give you the picture. It will all be crystal clear in just a moment ...

What Is Dynamic Keyword Insertion?

Lets say you are advertising using Google's Adwords program. One of the things you provide for your ad is a list of keywords that you are interested in having your advertisement display for.

For instance, if you were selling "kobe beef", you might want your advertisement to show up on Google's search engine page every time someone types in the words "kobe beef" in the search box on Google.

Same goes for someone searching for "kobe steak" - you want your ad displayed.

With dynamic keyword insertion, every time someone types in the exact search term you are targeting, your advertisement would include those keyword - in bold - on your advertisement.

Here's what the syntax looks like:

{keyword:} - will display the search term or not if there is not a match

{keyword: Default} - will display the search term or "Default" if there is problem displaying the search term. Of course, you can replace "Default" with whatever you like.

Some specific details regarding keyword: (source: Red Fly Marketing )

keyword - No capitalization, all word(s) are in lower case
Keyword - The first word is capitalized
KeyWord - Every word is capitalized
KEYword - Every letter in first word is capitalized
KEYWord - Every letter in the first word AND the first letter of the second
KEYWORD - Every letter is capitalized

More details at Google Adwords

How Do You Do It?

Login to your Adwords account. Create or edit a campaign. Create or edit a Text Ad.

Here's an example of what an ad might look like that uses keyword insertion.

Notice that use of the {KeyWord: Default} in the Headline and Description line 1.

This is the important part for getting the search term to show up on your web site. Use the {Keyword: Default} as part of your Destination URL. In this example, I have added my top level domain, http://www.DaveWooding.com/ followed by the keyword insertion expression followed by ".html". Note that I have added a dash, "-", in between my default word.

Display the Adwords Search Terms On Your Page

At this point, somebody clicked on an Adwords ad of yours, something that might look like this:

In this case, the search term is "kobe steak". A visitor that clicks on that advertisement would be sent to this url, http://www.davewooding.com/kobe%20steak.html.

If someone searched for "kobe beef" the advertisement would look like this:

On To Your Web Site

Now that you have setup your Google Adwords advertisement to use keyword insertion, it is time to separate the men from the boys, the women from the girls, the ... you get the point.

Time to play big. You want your site to display an appropriate page for each of those particular search terms. Sure you can do it the old fashion way and grunt it out - create an individual page for each and every possible search term.

Or you can do it the right way.

Using PHP or some other scripting language that allows for extracting information about the referring page - the referring page that uses dynamic keyword insertion. Ding, ding, ding <<<--- important

First, assuming you are working from the top level domain, i.e. - http://www.example.com, you will need to add or modify a .htaccess file to include the following:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([^/]+).html?$ index.php?q=$1 [L]

I'm going to assume that if you are reading this far into the article that you are willing to use php files instead of plain html file (otherwise you will need to include additional code in your .htaccess file, specifically "AddType application/x-httpd-php .htm .html").

Very simply, the chuck of code above says to turn on the rewrite engine, reference to the root directory, the rule that follows is applicable if the file or directory referenced does not already exist, then grab all the info after the domain but before the .html extension <- this is our dynamic keyword insertion stuff courtesy of Google Adwords.

Take that information (the dynamic keyword info), shove it into memory - which we will call "dollar one" = $1 and send it over to the index.php file as part of the "q" query string.

You like that techo jargon?

The PHP Code That Displays Adwords Search Terms

... on your site.

As I mentioned, you will need to be using php files for this to work (or you can modify your .htaccess file to accomodate).

At the top of your index.php file, the code should like like this:

This chunk of code checks to see if any information has been passed over via the "q" query string (remember the .htaccess grabbed any info between the top level domain and the .html and sent it over as part of the query string parameter).

If there is info, then that information gets assigned to a variable called $replace (after it replaces any dashes with whitespace - assuming there are any dashes).

If no query string info is present, no problemo, there is a default value set previously - "kobe beef" in this case.

Next a few other variables are set based on the what is in $replace. $title is the same as $replace with the exception that the first character of every word are capitalized. $h1 is the same as $replace except that just the first character is capatilized.

Following the php script part of the index.php file is plain old html code - with the $title and $h1 variables thrown in.

This is how you display the Adwords search terms on your site.

What's Next?

We are only scratching the surface of what is possible here.

Lets just speculate that you have a datafeed that you want to create individual landing pages for that you want to use PPC to drive visitors to. Or you are a Clickbank affiliate that wants to use Adwords to promote products and you want to use the Clickbank datafeed? Or you have an Ebay store that uses a RSS feed from Ebay to display items for sale that could afford pay per click marketing?

What you have seen here is perfect for creating relevant, high quality score landing pages for using Google Awords with.

Stay tuned, or sign up to get on the mailing list, for the next article which will show you how to integrate a datafeed - like SpeedPCC - with dynamic keyword insertion.

HTTP response codes

Here's a PHP script that checks a web page's HTTP response code.

Submit a web page, click on the button, see the results, and get the PHP code.

100 Continue
101 Switching Protocols
200 OK
201 Created
203 Non-Authoritative Information
204 No Content
205 Reset Content
206 Partial Content
300 Multiple Choices
301 Moved Permanently
302 Found
303 See Other
304 Not Modified
305 Use Proxy
306 (Unused)
307 Temporary Redirect
400 Bad Request
401 Unauthorized
402 Payment Required
403 Forbidden
404 Not Found
405 Method Not Allowed
406 Not Acceptable
407 Proxy Authentication Required
408 Request Timeout
409 Conflict
410 Gone
411 Length Required
412 Precondition Failed
413 Request Entity Too Large
414 Request-URI Too Long
415 Unsupported Media Type
416 Requested Range Not Satisfiable
417 Expectation Failed
500 Internal Server Error
501 Not Implemented
502 Bad Gateway
503 Service Unavailable
504 Gateway Timeout
505 HTTP Version Not Supported

No magic here, just a video showing you how to get your site indexed in Google's search engine using articles and Pingomatic.

This 15 minute video shows you step by step what to do.
1) Write an article.
2) Post the article to your site.
3) Create a link from your home page to the article.
4) Go to pingomatic and submit that page. Watch how the different search engines scurry over to find out what you just posted. (Notice that I am using pingomatic for static pages - who said you had to use it for blogs only?)
5) Since I only posted a few pages, it took a few days for one of the new pages to get picked up by Google.

Check To Verify Your Site Exists

I'm getting ready to open up the offer I made a couple months ago - to build you a gardening database driven website.

Before I do that, I want to make sure you are ready. One thing I will ask you is if you have a website ready to go ... and I have a script that will verify.

The reason I am doing this is so that when you place your order, we can get your site setup and ready to go in a short amount of time.

Here's part of the script I will have when the order page goes live next week:

Thanks.

Dave

P.S. - If you have any questions, please use the comment section below to ask, thanks.

Working on another simple PHP script. One that helps you write articles quickly.

It is called Articletator.

I'm planning on having a working version ready very soon.

Here is a ten minute video demonstrating what it does so far - and the code that generates the results.

Articletator Video

The idea is you search for a keyword phrase of interest, tell the script how many results to get and where the results come from.

Articletator goes off and does its thing - grabbing urls of sites that provide the information of interest, parsing out bits of information relevant to your query and reporting back the results in an easy to use format.

Just an update on the sale of the gardening datafeed sites.

What we learned.

Simplify

If we (the kids, mostly) are to do this again, we have to streamline the whole operation. In particular, the order form where you fill in details like domain, login information, affiliate id needs some more error checking. The form needs to force people to provide exact details. There was too much "slop" allowed. Sure, you had to fill out part of the form, but there was no error checking or verification of details.

Unfortunately, this allowed for partially filled out forms to arrive in my email box with important details missing. Which meant, I had to email people asking for details. The result was I spent more time than I thought I would on requesting necessary information.

This was my fault completely.

My Oldest Son Likes Money

... and he likes it right away. Here I am trying to educate him on the value of providing great service and that people will pay, and pay well, for that; and he wants to know when he gets paid.

I told him once all of the sites are complete.

I ended up paying him and his younger brother about 2 weeks after we had the sale - even though there are still a few people that need to provide their details (hint, hint).

The delay in payment resulted in them losing interest. I ended creating about 10 of the 30 sites. Recall, the original plan was for these guys to all of the "grunt work". Well, the lack of "instant cash" kind of made them lose their interest.

For the next batch of sites, I'm going to have a stack of cash sitting right in front of them - they can have payment as they go. Still, I want them to understand that controlling their urge for instant gratification can result in larger rewards (monetarily, emotionally, physically, spiritually, etc.).

People Trust Other People

Most of the people who purchased these gardening datafeed sites did so because of the recommendation of others. In particular Tiffany Dow and Geoff Shaw. I contacted both of these two and asked if they would recommend this offer to their customers - and they did.

The only problem with the recommendation is that some of the people buying are doing so on blind faith - without even knowing what they are exactly getting. That speaks highly of the trust these two have with their customers.

There's more, but that's enough for tonight.

Or "The Poor Man's Split Testing Method".

There's no right or wrong way to do this. Darren Rowse made a post about split testing Google Adsense and showed how to do so using channels and a little javascript.

Like a lot of things, there are other ways of accomplishing the same thing.

Enter PHP, that fancy web scripting language that gives you the ability to do some pretty neat tricks.

The code snippet below allows you to split test your Adsense by day. Instead of having to setup separate channels to split test, just login to your Google Adsense account, create two versions of the Google Adsense code you want to test, paste those two versions into the PHP code shown below, put that PHP code in an include file on your site, and call that include file in your web page. Then, if you want to see how you are doing, go back to your Google Adsense account and look at your results by day.

O.K. maybe that was a lot of stuff to do.

If you have a PHP enabled web site and you are not using PHP includes, tsk, tsk.

All of the even numbered days (even numbered according to PHP) will display one version of your Adsense code while all of the odd numbered days will show another version of your Adsense code.


<?php

if (date("z")%2 < 1) {

?>

<!-- Google Adsense #1 goes here -->

<?php

} else {

?>

<!-- Google Adsense #2 goes here -->

<?php

}

?>


The most important part is the "if" statement, the code that checks whether today is an even or an odd numbered day.

In this PHP example the "z" represents the day of the year.

The date("z")%2 < 1 checks if today's number modulus 2 is less than one (which asks if today is an even numbered day), then do whatever is between the set of squirly braces - the "{" and "}" - else do whatever is between the next set of squirly braces.

The whatever I am referring to is display your Adsense code.

By the way, there is nothing to prevent your from putting anything between the squirly braces.

There are some limitations to be aware of for sure. Namely, you still need to generate two versions of the Adsense javascript code to include on your web site. Also, if you want to get a better understanding of your results, you will need to download the results and group the data by even or odd day. I don't even know if Google allows for an easy way to get your Adsense results - I'm not even going to login to find out.

But, for a quick and dirty way of split testing your Adsense results, this PHP code will do the trick.

Extra: You don't have to just use the day of the year ("w"), you could just as easily use day of the week ("w"), hour of the day ("G"), day of the month ("j") - or some combination. Whatever your mind can conceive and believe it can ... oops, that's for a different topic :)