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

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.

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.

This was inspired by Robert Plank's Black Hat PHP ebook.

So you know, I am working on increasing my online exposure. Part of the way I am doing that is giving away some of my stuff - show you what I can do. If you have been a regular reader of this site, you know that I am creating a database driven affiliate web site that I am going to give away (how to you get a free site, you ask? Use the signup form and get on my mailing list).

Additionally, I have recently added a feature that gives you the possibility of making money from this site.

If you refer people to this site and they either signup or purchase one of my products that I sell on Clickbank - you can get credit using a special link to direct visitors here.

Send people to this site using the following link: http://www.davewooding.com/visit/cb_aff

Replace the cb_aff with your ClickBank affiliate id (IMPORTANT: do NOT put a trailing slash (/) at the end or it won't work)

Your affiliate link will show up in the autoresponder:

Any emails I sent out for a product of mine will have your affiliate id embedded.

Also any product that I sell off of this page via Clickbank (yes, there is a product for sale):

If you are familiar with looking at the html code, go look at it now - see if the html code looks similar to what I just showed you. If not, type in this link in your brower's address bar, http://www.davewooding.com/visit/cb_aff (replace the cb_aff with your affiliate id).

So there, I have come clean with my intentions - I'm looking to increase my online exposure and am willing to pay for it!

There's a problem with datafeed affiliate sites - at least it is a problem if you want your sites to stand out from all of the competition - duplicate content.

Who do you think will rank higher in the search engines for specific terms that you might find in your datafeed? Probably the merchant. If this happens, then your site is less likely to get the click that gets the affiliate sale.

So what to do, what to do - let me think. Hmm.

Let's get a little creative with what the merchant gives us, shall we.

Here's an example entry that we can use from the affiliate's datafeed.

I was planning on using the second line, the one that says "American Beech" as the title. What is to stop me from also adding the word "Tree" found on the 12th line down to the title. Nothing really. I can make the affiliate script combine portions of the datafeed and mash it up to create a new title. Pretty cool, huh!

Or how about this idea.

Instead of using the "Dahlia - Dinnerplate - Magic Sunrise" as the title, why not (1) get rid of the dash (-) and also rearrange the words to read "Magic Sunrise Dahlia Dinnerplate"? I can already see the PHP code to do that.

Want in on a big secret - on how I am going to make each site affiliate datafeed site that I create unique?

What secret little piece of PHP code that I have planned for making certain that no matter what, each site I build is not identical to any other site.

Ready? Here it is ... modulus.

I'll explain later :)

Brian asked the following question in a reply to the random image post I made.

How do you do the same for random snippets, or lines of text that you have in one txt file?

I thought it was a very good question considering that I am working on a database driven affiliate website - the ability to pull in random info is useful, in particular if I am interested in having "unique" content - and I am interested.

So I thought I would share how to pull in random snippets for everyone to see.

For this to work, we need to make a few assumptions.

In this example, you will need to have a text file with your snippets in the same directory that that you want to display the snippets in.

The file should be readable (most are by default).

And finally, each snippet is a separate line (which means that a carriage return was typed at the end of each snippet) - the importance of this is shown further down the page ..

Contents of your text file should look like something like this:

This is the first sentence.
The second sentence is here.
Read the third sentence.

Now we want the php script to (1) open the file and (2) read in the contents.

Here's what that looks like:

<?php

$file = "file.txt";

$fh = fopen($file, 'r');

$content = fread($fh, filesize($file));

?>




Next step is to dump the results into an array.

<?php

$contents = explode("\n", trim($content));

?>




For those interested, this little line of code says to clean up the info from the variable $content (trim), break the information into pieces every time a carriage return shows up (explode and \n), and put the pieces into an array called $contents.

Now, just print out a random selection (array_rand) from that newly created array.

<?php

print $contents[array_rand($contents)];

?>



Magic!

Here's what the final script looks like.

<?php

$file = "file.txt";

$fh = fopen($file, 'r');

$content = fread($fh, filesize($file));

$contents = explode("\n", trim($content));

print $contents[array_rand($contents)];

?>




This is something you can insert in your php pages (or php enabled html pages) to display random snippets of text. Like I said, stuff like this is what you can use to make the content of your web pages unique - especially if your are using similar content to others, like database driven affiliate sites.