Even easier than adding articles is adding advertisements to your website.

You will need to edit the advert.php.

Paste in the html code for your advertisement. Save the file and upload the advert.php to your web server. That's it.

If you want to add an autoresponder email capture form - same thing. Edit the advert.php file and paste in your autoresponder html code.

You can add as much html code to your advert.php file as you want - THE SCRIPT will display whatever html code you include (it will not parse PHP code though).

A 3 minute video - music included free of charge - shows exactly what to do.

Here is the video ... CLICK HERE >>> advertisement video.

Adding articles to your new affiliate gardening site involves uploading a text file to your web site.

The important points are:

- Your article needs to be a text file, for instance, "rose-bushes.txt".

- The text file needs to be named EXACTLY like you want it to appear on your site. If your text file is "rose-bushes.txt", then the page that gets displays your article on your site is "http://www.example.com/rosh-bushes.html".

- The text file needs to be in the same directory as THE SCRIPT.

This short 3 minute video shows you how to upload a text file using a FTP program (I use SmartFTP)

Click here to see the ... CLICK HERE >>> article video.

And as an added bonus, the last 30 seconds include some music from the a movie of the 1970s. Enjoy.

... "or what do I do now"

Seriously, this short little report is about how to get the most out of your newly created affiliate datafeed site.

Contents

What These Sites Do
What Are Tokens And How Do I Use Them
How Does The Cache Work
How Do I Modify The Template
How To Add Articles

What These Sites Do

You have a database driven affiliate site that uses a datafeed from Nature Hills.

You make a commission, 15% of the sale's price, whenever a visitor from your site clicks to the Nature Hill's site and makes a purchase. Additionally, Nature Hills will "cookie" that visitor for a full year.

This means that if that person comes back and purchases within the next - even if they don't come from your site - that you will earn a commission.

Like that?

So do I.

Your site was created by one of my two sons using PHP scripts that I created.

First, they logged into your website's CPanel account and created a MySQL database to store the datafeed information provided by Nature Hills.

Then they uploaded the PHP scripts along with a subdirectory that is used to cache pages created by the script.

Permissions were changed on the subdirectory and a couple of files.

Next, a script was run that asked for information about your site; title, if you want to cache files or not (they said "yes"), how long you want to cache pages (default is 7 days), MySQL database, user, password, and table, and ShareASale id # (six digit number).

The last script was run that actually loaded up your MySQL database with the 4,000+ items from Nature Hills.

If they created a site for you using the default template, then they created a basic header image that included the title to your site.

If you had a custom template, then that's where I stepped in. I copied the template in the template.php file on your site and adjust the tokens so that everything looked like it should.

What Are Tokens And How Do I Use Them

Most people do NOT need to know anything about "tokens" and can safely skip this section.

If you are one of the people that want to modify the look and layout of your site, then you will need to understand what tokens are and what to do with them.

For our purposes, tokens are used for as a placeholder for information you want to show up on a particular part of your web page.

For instance, if you want an article to show up near the top of your web pages, you would place the %%ARTICLE%% token in the template.php file near the top.

If you want a search box to show up at the bottom of the page, there is a %%SEARCH%% token that is available to use.

The other tokens - and the purpose of each:

%%TITLE%% - This is a placeholder for the title of that particular page. For instance, if the page you are at it http://www.example.com/red-apples.html, then the title is "Red Apples".

%%SITETITLE%% - The site title. This gets used as the anchor text for your site in any link back to your home page of your affiliate site.

%%HOMEURL%% - Similar to the site title, this is the actual url of the home location of your affiliate site. If you site is in the root of your web server's directory, then %%HOMEURL%% would be http://www.example.com/. If your site is in a subdirectory, then http://www.example.com/subdirectory/. If a subdomain, then http://subdomain.example.com (by the way, when I use example.com, I make using that as a placeholder for your particular domain :)

%%URL%% - Reserved for future use.

%%AFF_LINK%% - The affiliate link to the vendor's site. It actually is a cloaked link that hides the fact that you are linking through ShareASale to the vendor, in this case, Nature Hills. There is nothing illegal or blackhat about doing this.

%%IMAGE_LINK_TEXT%% - Shows a product image that the vendor supplies. Also hyperlinks that image so visitors clicking on the image are directed to the vendor's site.

%%PRICE%% - Price of the product.

%%PRICE_LINK%% - Reserved for future use.

%%ARTICLE%% - Article is shown where this token is used.

%%DESCRIPTION%% - Product description provided from the vendor's datafeed.

%%OUTDESCRIPTION%% - Description on an out of stock item from the vendor's datafeed. This is very much an optional token, one that provides additional content. Some people consider this spammy.

%%MENU%% - A list of links to the major categories provided by the vendor

%%ADVERTISEMENT%% - The title is misleading, but it is the only thing I could think of :) This reads in the contents from a file called advert.php which you can add whatever you want. I know this is very open ended. But the possibilies are endless. Use this to display Google Adsense or an email capture form. For this to work, you need to add content (i.e. - Adsense, autoresponder, etc.) to the file on your site called advert.php.

%%KEYWORDS%% - Reserved for future use.

%%OTHER%% - Reserved for future use.

%%BREADCRUMB%% - A link or links that leads back to the home page of your affiliate site.

%%SEARCH%% - Search box for affiliate products that searches the database for instock items related to the search query.

To use these tokens, you need to edit the template.php file on your affiliate site and place the tokens where you want the substituting content to display. Does require some understanding of how html works.

Note well: If you are testing the look of your site with tokens, be sure to turn off the caching ability so that you see the most recent version of your template ... see the next section for instructions.

How Does The Cache Work

The "cache" saves the recently loaded page to a subdirectory on your site so that the next time it is viewed, the file is loaded from the subdirectory rather than from the database.

Two reasons for doing this.

First, if your site becomes popular - and when I say popular, I mean really popular like 10,000+ visitors a day - then creating a page from the database every time can be a burden on your server. Serving up static pages previously created and "cached" reduces the server load.

This should not be an issue for 99.99% of the people - though it would be a great problem to have :)

Second, caching saves the page so that the next time it is loading it is exactly the same. I say this, because the way THE SCRIPT works is on ever page load (from the database), the layout is ever so slightly different. The sentences in the description might be ordered differently, the link to the vendor might use different text. Caching the pages keeps the content relatively consistent over a period time (default it 7 days).

If you are making changes to the template.php file - which controls the look of your site - you will want to turn the cache off. To do so, you will need to edit the config.php file on your webserver and change the value of $cache from "on" to "off". Save the config file.

Once satisfied with the results, you can go back to the config.php file and change back to having the cache on.

Finally, last item with regards to the cache. In the subdirectory with the cached files, you can delete all of the cached html files if you want to start off fresh. This is especially useful if you have made any changes to your template.

How Do I Modify The Template

The most important thing ... ready?

MAKE A BACKUP COPY OF THE TEMPLATE.PHP FILE BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING.

(Did I make myself clear?)

This will potentially save a lot of heartache after you do a bunch of changes that don't work out as your expect. I usually rename the template.php to template.php.bak.

Modifying the template for your site is an art. You need to understand html and how the html tags impact the look of your web pages.

Edit the template.php file (AFTER YOU MAKE A BACKUP COPY).

(There I go again yelling)

This is where you get to make use of the tokens previously mentioned.

My recommendation is to start small. Make one change to the template.php page, then go back to your site, reload the page (you turned off the cache, didn't you?) and see what it looks like. If nothing broke, go back and make another change, reload the page, check for errors. Repeat.

How To Add Articles

The question I get asked the most ... and this is where you can make your site stand out even more.

I'll explain by way of example.

Say you want to have an article about herb gardening on your site.

You would write an article, put it in a plain text file, and save it as "herb-gardening.txt" on your computer. Next, you need to upload it (FTP) to your web server.

A few important points: what you name the file has to be the same as the page you want it to show up on. In this case, the contents of "herb-gardening.txt" will display on the page http://www.example.com/herb-gardening.html". When this page is called (herb-gardening.html), THE SCRIPT will read in the contents of herb-gardening.txt and load this article into the database for use now and in the future.

Notice that the words in the file name are separated by a dash ("-"), that's important. You can't use an underscore or any other character to separate words. Capitilization does not matter.

Where this article shows up on the page depends on where the %%ARTICLE%% token is located in the template.php file. By default, for every installation we did, an article will display just below the title of the page.

If you are planning on using PLR material like Tiffany's PLR Articles here's a recommendation for you ...

For instance, Tiff provides an article called "Benefits of Growing Your Own Herbs". Do NOT use that title as the name of your article file. Simplify the text file name to something more generic like "herbs.txt" or "herb-benefits.txt". The way THE SCRIPT works with an article is that it will also search for related products to display. I can almost promise you that it won't find anything about Benefits of Growing Your Own Herbs, but it will find items for sale related to "herbs" or maybe "herb benefits".

Get Tiff's PLR articles by CLICK HERE.

This should be enough information to get you started on using your new gardening affiliate site.

Post questions in the comments section. Don't be shy - if you have a question, it is likely that some else has a similar question. Thanks.

Here's how to setup Robert Plank's JVPlus for use with ClickBank.

1) First thing you should do is buy it. The second thing is to upload all of the files to your website.

The files include jvplus.css, jvplus-config.php, jvplus-packer.php, jvplus-share.php and jvplus.php.

2) Next, you need to test it out to make sure it works on your PHP enabled web server.

Open a new text file and created a web page that links to some url, for instance, http://www.example.com. At the bottom of the text file, add the following line:


<script type="text/javascript" src="/jvplus/jvplus.php"></script>

Save the file as either index.html. index.htm, or index.php.

3) Upload the newly created index file to a directory on your server, in my case, you can visit my JVPlus subdirectory to see an example.

Here's what it looks like.

Fancy, huh?

If you were to put your mouse of the link, you should see that it goes to "http://www.example.com".

4) Now add on a "?hop=yourname" at the end of the url. Something like this:

Click here for an example, http://www.davewooding.com/jvplus/?hop=dwooding

5) Put your mouse over the link now and notice the difference ...

Everything should be working now - you should see your name show up in the url that you put your mouse over.

6) Time to do this for real.

Edit the jvplus-config.php file.

Add in links to your clickbank products that look like these:

Save and close the jvplus-config.php file

7) Edit your index file.

Add links to your Clickbank product(s) that look like straight links (and not Clickbank hop links).

8) Save the index file and close it. Go back to the subdirectory and reload, here's what my page looks like now.

9) Put your mouse over the newly added links and notice that the link goes through ClickBank's hop link system.

10) Let people link to your subdirectory with you Clickbank products and have ALL your products use THEIR affiliate link, give them a link that looks like this
CLICK HERE

Here's what you need to do to get signed up as an affiliate for Nature Hills.

1) Go to ShareASale and signup as an affiliate. If you are already an affiliate, sign in.

2) Click on the link that says "View those with Datafeeds" under the Find/Join Merchants title.

3) In the keyword search box type "garden" and change the Show me merchants programs that ... to "Both - show me all."

4) Find Nature Hills Nursery.

5) Click on "Join Program"

Typically Nature Hills auto accepts and you are ready to go.

You read that right. Datafeed affiliate sites are ready for you.

Thanks to the beta testers that participated - I was able to check THE SCRIPT out on sites as the homepage, in a subdirectory, and as a subdomain.

Here's a brief tour of what these sites look like.

Home Page

The home page randomly selects an instock image from the database to display on each page load.

What remains consistent is the links to the categories - the gateway to the 1,400 unique pages that make up this site.

Category

Lots of content on this page. Each category page will display a random, instock item with image at the top of the page, followed by a list of other items from the same category. Some little programming *twists* I put in include:

• sorted by highest to lowest price
• Decreasing amount of information per item - the first few items display the most amount of information, farther down the list, the items have less information about them, until you get the the last few items - all there is at that point is links. Why did I do this - to be different. I don't want these sites to be run-of-the-mill datafeed sites that are practically identical to other datafeed sites

Product page

Specific information about each instock item in the datafeed - includes a image, price, title, description.

What's unique about about these pages is:

• Randomly arranged sentences - the sentences are not the exact same structure as what is provided - THE SCRIPT rearranges the results and displays them in a different order each time the page is refreshed ...
• ... which leads to this, THE SCRIPT has a cache feature so the results remain the same for each dynamically generated page. During setup, the cache is either turned on or left off (I recommend having it on). If on, then specify how long pages are cached for before being regenerated. I don't see any reason to set the cache for anything less than 30 days.
• Something you should know, there are actually 4,000+ items in the database. Unfortunately, most of the products are out of stock. That's a lot of perfectly good information going to waste. So what did I do, I include a random item description from an out of stock item from the same category for the same reason I added a few twists to the categories - to be different.
• Also, the side bar - besides containing links to the categories - also includes links to random items in the same category

Search

Included a "smart" search feature - well, maybe not as smart as Google, but smart enough to almost guarantee relevant results showing up.

Here's how it works, say you type in "apple". THE SCRIPT will randomly pull results that have the word "apple" show up in the title. If THE SCRIPT doesn't find any results, then it makes a second pass through the database looks for the word "apple" in the description. Pretty smart, huh?

Ready To Go

A simple, powerful script that displays results from the datafeed in a unique fashion - that's what THE SCRIPT is.

P.S. - If you want a "behind the scenes" view of how the code works for this datafeed site, visit the link, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLeGbqEb9L4.

Thanks to the beta testers - your feedback has been great. And for those that volunteered but I didn't respond to - you'll get a site soon, very soon.

A couple things left to do before I turn this one loose.

- add the ability to include articles

- some more randomization based on modulus

- the all important readme.txt file, video help file - need to explain how to use tags to customize sites so they are COMPLETELY unique

- some little bugs that are still crawling around, like the header image linking to the root instead of a subdirectory if that is were THE SCRIPT is installed.

Here's a snapshot of the latest - now includes a search function and the categories now displays a random listing first, then an alphabetical listing of up to the top 30 entries:

If you have THE SCRIPT setup on your site or have viewed the demo on this site, let me know what you think - what else do you want to see.

The database driven affiliate website is coming along ... if I do say so myself.

I am back from spring break 2008. Before you start thinking fun in the sun and wild parties, guess again. The family went down to southern Utah and visiting a couple of state parks, Kodachrome and Escalante, to get a little warmth in the desert. We camped out in the tent trailer - the first couple of nights were chilly - in the teens, 15-20F. But the days were very pleasant, 60-70F, and sunny.

Like I said, THE SCRIPT is moving along. I banged out some code tonight to have it pull results from the database.

Note, the PHP code above should look familiar. It is a slight modification of the query code I created previously. It takes a word and finds one item in the database that has the same word, and pulls out the information from the MySQL database: title, affiliate link, image link, price and description.

Creative Code

The second chunk of code is where I get a little creative.

I am randomly choosing 5 to 10 additional items out of the database. This is for a sidebar menu that leads to other products.

Keep in mind that this is first pass coding for this affiliate site. I'm just randomly requested information - not taking into account whether the item selected is even in stock.

I'm thinking it would be worthwhile to have some hard coded links in place - specifically to categories like "trees", "shrubs", "flowers" - that kind of thing.

Print Out The Results

Three things in a row.

This PHP code does three things.

1. Opens the template and reads it in to the script
2. Makes replacements - substitutes the tokens (as an example, %%TITLE%%) with database results
3. Prints out the results

There it is - let me know what you think so far.