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

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.

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.

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.

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.