Money-Code

Simple modification to FD Feedburner Plugin

admin — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 11:38:45 PDT

Today for one of my sites, I needed to populate a Facebook page with a feed, but I didn’t want the entire post as the ‘note’. I found a great plugin called Feed Facebook, Leave Facebook that leaves a partial feed with a link to ‘leave Facebook’ to your site. This is EXACTLY what I needed, but I was having problem with my FD Feedburner Plugin which auto-magically converts my RSS feeds to feedburner feeds. In this particular case, I needed to exclude a single feed from this. Unfortunately, this is not a configuration option.

So I’m posting this mainly for myself in case there is a plugin update and I need to know how I did this the first time, but I can see that few might find this useful.

Basically in the feedburner_redirect() function, we need to add a conditional:

if ($feed_url != null) {
// Redirect the feed
header("Location: ".$feed_url);
die;
}

Needs to be changed to this:

if ($feed_url != null) {
// Redirect the feed
if(!eregi(‘facebook’,$_SERVER[‘REQUEST_URI’])){
header("Location: ".$feed_url);
die;
}
}

The feed url that Facebook will be using looks similar to this : http://www.yourdomain.com/feed?feedfacebook, if we detect this in the REQUEST_URI, we do nothing with the redirect. Now Facebook will be happy with our new feed, while any other requests to our site’s feed will be directed to Feedburner.

So you messed up, now what?

admin — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 07:12:18 PDT

I pretty much try to avoid the official EPN forum these days. The amount of negative, paranoid and panicky posts there can sometimes freak you out. But, those posts are real and should be looked at on occasion to understand how series EPN is about violations.

I’m still trying to diversify my affiliate marketing pie and get EPN more in the balance by promoting heavily with Amazon and CJ products over the last few months. In fact, I just recently did some new EPN development for the first time last week. During this development phase I clicked on a rover link to test that the proper CampID was being sent and I was landing at the appropriate listing. The next day, I purchased something on eBay and realized that I just purchased an item after dropping my rover cookie on my machine. Normally, I do eBay purchases on another box that has none of my affiliate cookies (or clear my cookies). Not doing any EPN development for a while, I forgot about the rover. Total rookie mistake on my part.

I’m sure a lot of people do this, intentionally or not intentionally, but I didn’t want to be one of those users at the EPN forum complaining that I can’t log in, or that I’ve been booted from the program without any reasons, etc. I decided to take a proactive approach and contact EPN and let them know what I’ve done, and request that transaction be removed from my earnings.

After submitting my email (via their Contact/Help form in the ‘Can I test my own links?’ section) I received the classic ‘canned’ message stating that they’ve forwarded my email to the Network Quality team at EPN. I didn’t get a response for about a week, but then finally received a great email from the Quality Team, thanking me for being proactive and notifying them of the accidental click. The letter stated that this would not be a problem (this time) and request that I be sure to clear cookies before making any future purchases at eBay. No problem!

Nothing probably would have happened if I didn’t send them a email. This was the first and only time I’ve purchased someting on my rover cookie, but you never know. I’d hate to lose my EPN account over simple purchase at eBay.

Update WordPress!

admin — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 08:37:14 PDT

Okay, looks like WordPress released a ‘hardened’ release for 2.8 which will jack your release version to 2.8.5. It’s very important to stay upgraded to ensure that your sites will run properly, but more importantly to maintain security. You don’t want your money-making sites to go down, or to have your account suspended due to your site being compromised. As they say, “A ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”.

Details of the release can be found here: http://wordpress.org/development/2009/10/wordpress-2-8-5-hardening-release/

The headline changes in this release are:

A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen.
Removal of areas within the code where php code in variables was evaluated.
Switched the file upload functionality to be whitelisted for all users including Admins.
Retiring of the two importers of Tag data from old plugins.

Are you distracted by earning stats?

admin — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:24:19 PDT

I’m not sure where I’m going with this post. Maybe it’s a personal observation and something I need to work on. I guess I should start out…

“Hi, my name is Hank… and I’m addicted to stats”

I would be embarrassed if I counted how many times I log into CJ or EPN’s control panel to see my numbers. I’m particularly most annoyed with my habit to login to EPN, since that updates (earnings) once a day. I think I find myself checking to see if earnings had posted, but even after they post, I still login often.. I guess to see what my click counts are doing. It’s quite silly. With Amazon, I only check once a day (in the morning) since earnings/clicks only post once. CJ, I check continually (same time as EPN), but at least earnings trickle throughout the day.

What I’m not liking is the time I waste doing this. Add this to my email and IM/Twitter conversations, and various mailing lists alerts, I know I spend a lot of time where I could probably save a lot by doing it once at set time. This is where the addiction is identified. The thought of doing it once a day, seems ‘weird’ to me. It’s like I need to do it all day long?

Am I alone here? Or are there other internet marketers wasting time on earning stats? What’s the cure? Is there a patch of some sort?

GoDaddy’s Discount Domain Club

admin — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 09:20:26 PDT

Today I wanted to bring up GoDaddy’s Discount Domain Club. If you own a lot of domains at GoDaddy, you need to join this club!

Over the months, I’ve heard people mention this, and I have one friend that has told me in the past that I needed to be a part of this. Basically, you pay a yearly fee to be a part of the club, but the club offers some sweet discounts that add up! In my case alone, I’ll be saving several hundreds per year.

Prior to my joining, I’ve been purchasing domains at regular price (sometimes on sale, etc) and then setting them to auto-renew. Pretty simple. You can get a discount by manually renewing your domains, but I feel that is trouble waiting to happen (for me anyways).

By joining the Discount Domain Club, your renewals (automatic) are discounted. You purchases on new domains are always the lowest price at GoDaddy, that alone is great deal, but the renewals is what is going to save me some serious yearly dough.

Joining the club is not free though, it cost’s $89.99/year, so you need to do the math and figure out if it’s worth it for you based on the numbers of domains you have in your account. If you have lots of domains, this is a no brainer. I think 20 domains is the break even point.

So what types of savings are we talking about?

.com is $7.29/year (31% off)
.net is $5.99/year (53% off)
.org is $7.29/year (51% off)

You also get free Premium CashParking and get to keep 80% of the revenue generated. You get fre membership to GoDaddy Auctions. You get discounted Domain Buy Service (this is for negotiating domains that are already taken).

It takes the headache out of the mix. No longer waiting for ‘weekend specials’ or looking for coupon codes to get a deal on domains, just auto-magic, which saves me time… and I like saving time and money.

EPN Tracking Image

admin — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 09:19:07 PDT

A good friend of mine, just starting out in EPN, asked me if I add a tracking pixel as suggested by the link tool. Hmm? I haven’t ccreated any links using the tool in over a year, so I didn’t see mention of that. I do remember that one of the EPN webinars that someone mentioned that they wanted to see some more impression tracking for more publish transparency, but I didn’t hear more on the subject.

I quickly went to the tool and generated some links and saw the mention…

Tip: We recommend serving at least one impression pixel per Campaign on every page that has eBay links. For more info, click the help link to the left and contact us.

As some of you know I roll my own EPN sites (No BANS) so I needed to quickly add this tracking image on my sites. All of my sites have a ’store’ section, so within that template I added the following PHP code at the bottom:

echo ‘.EPNID.‘&customid=&mpt=[CACHEBUSTER]" alt="" />’;

The EPNID variable is a PHP constant that contains my campid for every site. I’m not seeing increased impressions in my campaigns. I had ’some’ impressions before, but those were from various pages that had Editor Kits, but now I’m seeing proper page impressions for my RSS and API pages.

I wanted to post this in case others like me, didn’t see the ’suggestion’.

Side note, EPN’s QCP is still better than my daily commissions under the old system. I’ll be officially ramping up my EPN development again. I’ve been working on Amazon store fronts during the last month and half, and seeing some ‘okay’ earnings from there. Still nowhere near my EPN earnings, but I’ve been learning alot about what works.. and what doesn’t. I’m hoping that these Amazon sites will really pay off during the holiday shopping spree.

Bookmarking Demon 5 is out!

admin — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 09:16:54 PDT

Just got the email today that Bookmarking Demon 5 is official out and available. This is absolutely great news since BMD4 was having all sorts of trouble as of late. I’ll post a follow up post on my thoughts of the new features, and how the migration of accounts went (basically, I’ll put together a full review of Bookmarking Demon 5). I’m particular excited about the scheduler feature where you can drip submit to bookmarking sites, and the inclusion of phpDug sites.

If you’re unfamiliar with Bookmarking Demon, it’s a great piece of software where you create social bookmarking accounts and submit sites to them. You can create many accounts, and also submit ‘filler’ RSS feeds to make your bookmarking submissions seem more natural. By creating a level of bookmark backlinks you can help increase your rank in the SERPs and eventually gain more traffic. Granted this quality of traffic seems pretty poor in general, but the SERP position is the greatest benefit of the tool… and that’s the traffic you want in the long run.

A word of warning, if you do not make this look natural and are clearly self-promoting your ‘money sites’, then you could be de-indexed from Google or have specific social bookmarking accounts banned. The trick is to promote pages relating to your site, not your sites directly.

The bottom line, it’s a great tool for generating backlinks and search traffic to your sites. It’s awesome tool for the fact that it saves you a ton of time by doing things for you vs. manually doing it by hand. You should really check out the promotional video.. since is shows some of the features.

- Browser mode. You get to see what is happening right in front of you.
- Multi-threading for both account creation and bookmarking.
- New open source bookmarking script PHPDug added.
- Added a Scheduler.
- Email verification system added.
- A better project management system.
- Visual aid (coming soon)

If you already have a licensed version of BMD4, this is a free download.

Quality Click Pricing (QCP) starts tomorrow (10/1/2009)

admin — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 13:19:24 PDT

If you’ve been following along with the new changes at EPN (and people, you should be following along since the changes have been significant), you should know about the their new commission structure. They’re moving to a Cost Per Click pricing model, but still based on performance. So the higher EPC you get, the higher commissions you’ll make per click.

EPN publishers that have signed up since September 1st have already been using this new model. Publishers that have been around prior will be migrating to the new model starting tomorrow (Oct 1).

If you’re unsure of how this affects you, you need to run a Preview Report. As for me, the initial signs look quite promising, but it all depends on the quality of traffic and users you’re sending to eBay. The better quality, the better EPC. It goes beyond just what they buy. They factor on frequency, target, and history of the user to determine the quality of buyers out there.

Good luck everyone!

If I had to start again today….

admin — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 08:37:53 PDT

I read “If You Had To Start Over With $0 Budget” at Deneil Merritt’s blog (great blog by the way), and it got me thinking about how I would start again. I don’t think I would start with a $0 budget, and if you’re interested in affiliate or internet marketing, you should try with a hearty effort, or don’t try at all and save yourself the misery of making $0 on your $0 budget. I think I do have some different opinions now for starting in internet or affiliate marketing.

Start with what you know..?

Seems like the common suggestion is to pick a niche that you’re familiar with. It definitely makes sense, and that is definitely the direction I started a few years ago. If I was to start over now, I would through that logic out the window. I think you should start with what can earn can earn decent commissions. It’s easy to be comforted with areas of interest and feel there is a level of knowledge or expertise related there, but reality says.. it doesn’t matter. It can be helpful, it can make things easier, but not worth the lost commissions.

I would start with products, services and/or niches that earn and learn about them. Spend a few hours understanding categories, trends and values and grow from there. The energy and time devoted here will reward you more in the end.

One site or many sites?

I see this question often, and there really isn’t a ‘right’ answer here. Is it better to have a few or one great site vs. many mediocre sites? Initially, I started with one ‘community’ site, then started branching out from there, tweaking, waiting, tweaking, waiting, etc. If I was to do it again, I would start with my current regiment of a minimum of 2 sites per month. Either creating new ‘test’ sites in new niches, or using the 10 degree separation with sites that are earning. All other down time is spent in blog posts, or tweaking and improving existing sites. I really believe creating new sites is the key to success to finding what you’re good at, what sites produce earnings and enhancing new traffic strategies.

What types of sites?

I’ve always broken down my earning sites into three basic categories. Community Sites, Store Fronts and Blogs. Each are good for different things, but it’s somewhat important to generate all three types, especially when starting out.

Community Sites are sites that are based on a common interest to a group of individuals. Once the site starts and grows, it will basically grow from the content provided by the community itself. Forums is a good example of a community site. These sites are great, once they go, it’s basically set-it-and-forget-it since the content is always evolving and growing without your involvement. You’ll still need to admin the site, etc. These sites are great for AdSense, product placement, etc. But the hard thing is developing a site and getting users and achieving that momentum needed for it to grow itself. Lots of time, lots of effort with very little return in the beginning.

Store Fronts are basically product stores utilizing product feeds. EPN sites and CJ sites using categorization is a example of store fronts. To me, these are by far the most successful. You’ll be targeting buyers vs. readers and conversion is much much higher. I like to promote these sites with PPC to even target better traffic than organic search traffic.

Blogs are blogs. You can blog about products, news, etc. I’ve always been ‘down’ on blogs, thinking the work is to high vs. the return and they’re hard to maintain over the long haul. I’ve changed my opinion on this.

So, if I was to start today, I would focus on getting a network of store fronts initially, maybe start a community site, but a site that I have good confidence that I can gain interested users. I would then work on a few product oriented blogs or review blogs and associate all these types of sites with Twitter. Once I saw some earnings, I would begin light PPC campaigns on the store fronts. Then work on building more sites and diversifying across affiliate networks.

Use Twitter?

Wow, Twitter. This is one of the biggest things that have changed my position in affiliate marketing over the last 6 months. I would DEFINITELY get Twitter accounts for my sites if I was to start today, and I would definitely buy Bird Feeder to grow those Twitter accounts. I cannot believe how useful Twitter is for getting consistent traffic to my product blogs or store fronts. Using Twitter Tools in my WordPress blogs to auto-Tweet posts is a must, and using the TweetMeme plugin for others to re-tweet posts is another fantastic way to get traffic back to your site.

Initially when creating new sites, I would do the normal, submission to search engines, do a few backlinks, post to a few directories, then wait. If I think it’s a hot site, I’ll fire up a PPC campaign, but overall the initial launch is slow going. Now with Twitter, I can get immediate traffic to the site, and traffic that seems to convert. Not super great like PPC traffic, but WAY better than low organic traffic or Stumble traffic.

Use Tools?

This is something I was a little behind on. For some reason, I could never justify the expense for buying tools. I’m also a web developer by day, so I always felt I could write some of these things. Now, I’m starting to value my time more. The time it would take me to write a plugin costs more than purchasing the plugin itself. The time I would be spending writing a plugin or platform, I could have spent on writing new sites, reviews, researched new niches, etc.

I’m a total believer of software tools now. The amount of time these tools save and the amount of work these tools accomplish throughout the day is incredible. If I was to start over again, and after getting some earnings coming in first (I like to roll my earnings back into the pot for tools, domains, etc initially). I would buy the following tools for sure:

ReviewAZON product review plugin for Amazon products
WPReviewSite Review plugin for ranking across your blog
BirdFeeder awesome tool for getting targeted Twitter followers
SEO Elite excellent suite of tools for determining where you rank, find backlinks, research competition, etc.
Blog Comment Demon excellent tool for finding WordPress blogs related to keyword search. Great way to find quality sites for potential comment backlinks

In conclusion, I think the most important thing is consistency when it comes to production. Make sites, keep making sites, keep improving sites, keep moving forward. The earnings will trickle and drizzle in, but it’s important to create the foundation of sites where you can always research with analytics and determine what sites work for you. The other item to pay attention to is diversification, remember to diversify across different niches, affiliate networks and sites. Things change ALL the time so you want to make sure your eggs are not all in one basket. Lastly, remember to be flexible and learn to adapt to situation. Don’t let your network crumble because of a ‘change’ to policy or TOS, learn to take the punches and adapt with the new trend, and be ‘okay’ with letting something go if you need to.

Well, I hope this was useful to someone. I really wish I could have a time machine, I would definitely do some things differently, but at the same time, the path I took gave me the experience I needed for where I’m at today.

Finding BrowseNodes for Amazon API search (AWS)

admin — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 08:56:44 PDT

So, I’ve been hitting the Amazon sites real hard over the last month. With a combination of ReviewAZON, WPReviewSite and my own amazon store script, I’ve been picking niches and working on traffic. Today, I was looking at one of my good performing EPN store fronts, and I wanted to include Amazon products in there as well. The problem I was having was getting it targeted to the sub category. I knew the SearchIndex, but couldn’t figure out how to get the proper BrowseNode of the sub category. The solution is to do a BrowseNodeLookup call.

To do this, you first need to determine the main BrowseNode, basically the number related to the main category where your product is located in. To get this number, you may be able to see it in the URL, or use this matrix to get the proper BrowseNode based off of country:

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSECommerceService/latest/DG/index.html?BrowseNodeIDs.html

Next, you need to query Amazon’s AWS and send this BrowseNode. You will receive a XML file containing all children related to this parent including name and BrowseNode.

Here is a basic function I wrote that will do a signed request for BrowseNodeLookup operation:

function find_browse_node_aws_signed_request($region, $params, $public_key, $private_key){
$method = "GET";
$host = "ecs.amazonaws.".$region;
$uri    = "/onca/xml";
$params["Service"]    = "AWSECommerceService";
$params["AWSAccessKeyId"] = $public_key;
$params["Timestamp"]    = gmdate("Y-m-d\TH:i:s\Z");
$params["Version"]    = "2009-03-31";
ksort($params);
$canonicalized_query = array();
foreach ($params as $param=>$value){
$param = str_replace("%7E", "~", rawurlencode($param));
$value = str_replace("%7E", "~", rawurlencode($value));
if($param == ‘ItemPage’ && $value == ‘x’){
$canonicalized_query[] = $param."=".$i;
}else{
$canonicalized_query[] = $param."=".$value;
}
}
$canonicalized_query = implode("&", $canonicalized_query);
$string_to_sign = $method."\n".$host."\n".$uri."\n".$canonicalized_query;
$signature = base64_encode(hash_hmac(’sha256′, $string_to_sign, $private_key, true));
$signature = str_replace("%7E", "~", rawurlencode($signature));
$request = "http://".$host.$uri."?".$canonicalized_query."&Signature=".$signature;
$ch    = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $request);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
return $response;
}

To call the function you would do something like this:

$resp = find_browse_node_aws_signed_request($country,
array("Operation"=>"BrowseNodeLookup",
"Service"=>"AWSECommerceService",
"BrowseNodeId"=>"111111111"
),
$pubKey,
$privKey);

$pubKey is your Associate Key ID (not your tracking ID) and the $privKey is your Secret AWS Key ID. You can do a var_dump($resp) to see the values of the returned array of values. After retrieving the BrowseNodeID, you can search within that category by passing ‘BrowseNode’ to your ItemSearch API call. Hope this helps!