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 :)

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.