I have recently been taking one of my all-too-regular breaks from developing WordBay, and indeed from any major affiliate marketing efforts. I guess I am a dabbler at heart, plus a April plunge in EPN earnings really demotivated me too. Seems to have picked up again now, so perhaps it was an initial reaction to the economic crisis.
One of the things I have devoted a little time to is testing a new money-making tool called WAHA CMS. Just to disclose straight away - I agreed to accept a beta version for testing in return for writing a review. Otherwise, I am not affiliated in any way, do not earn anything from sales of WAHA and am not otherwise being paid for a review. Also, I do not see WAHA as competition for WordBay - WAHA is a commercial product, WordBay is not and I do not mind competition!
What is WAHA?
WAHA is described by the authors as a “…a content management system (CMS) for quick generation of quality web sites but it is not a simple CMS…” Someone else I talked to perhaps a little unkindly referred to it as “splog” software.
If I had to describe WAHA, I would say that the term “CMS” is perhaps a bit ambitious. Really, it is a richly-featured mashup system - the ultimate automated website generation system that you always wished you could write! I say this because I have often thought how handy it would be to have a CMS which took feeds or API data from all the sources that are out there and bundled them into one affiliate site, based on just a few keywords you type in - the lazy man’s software!
Well WAHA certainly does that. Based on a set of keywords that can be partially automatically generated, you can integrate text from news, articles, Yahoo Answers or any other RSS feed, photos from Flickr, videos from YouTube AND, the most important bit for affiliate marketers, product info from Amazon, eBay, CJ, LinkShare and a number of other networks.
The aim of course is to generate a constantly refreshing site that attracts organic search visitors with its relevant content and sells them what they are looking for via the affiliate networks.
What does the end result look like?
Have a look at my test site, Used Musical Instruments, a site you may remember as originally being set up to demonstrate WordBay, and which I never did anything with. I think it would be fair to say I spent about an hour or so on the WAHA version, and you can see the way the different types of data have been integrated with product data to produce something that looks like a website!
Installation
Briefly, installation is fairly simple, although because the source code is protected using IonCube, you do need to make sure your server supports this module. This also means a few hoops to jump through with registration of WAHA, which will also lock you in to using WAHA only with the domain you registered for. So it’s quite a restrictive license, but that’s their right of course.
Setup
The bit you are really interested in is actually setting up the site. The backend admin section is nicely laid out and full of mostly self-explanatory and very functional settings. I never bothered reading any instructions before diving in. However, I should point out that the instructions that do exist are still not great, especially as they are written by a non-native speaker. They might like to think about investing in proofreading of the text (in fact, my company can do that - maybe I’ll offer them a deal :)). However, I asked the guys about some queries I had, and they were quick to reply.
The only slightly onerous bit is setting up some of the affiliate networks. It goes without saying that you need to be a member of EPN, Amazon, and any other networks you want to use on the site (and for some of the content feeds too), and to insert your various affiliate IDs, campaign codes etc. But for some of them you also need to obtain an API key. This is actually quite simple in most cases and makes sense - if the WAHA people inserted their own API key in there they could quickly run into trouble with the number of calls being made to the API. eBay only allows 5000 calls per day, for example, in the basic package. This is the reason I have not used the eBay API for WordBay up till now, but this is an OK solution and I may think about this…
Without going into all the settings, the fun part is of course setting up your niche. This is done through the Category/Keyword section, where you name the title of your category (for example Used trombones, on my example site) and then choose keywords to populate that category. This is made very easy through an automated system which presumably polls eBay for related keywords and pops up a whole list of them. For instance, if I type in “French horn” I get a list comprised of: “Double French Horn, Holton French Horn, Yamaha French Horn, Single French Horn, French Horn”, and I can choose which to include in this category.
It’s as simple as that! The category will then be automatically populated with data from ALL the sources you have specified. It will take a few seconds to generate the page the first time you click (not surprising with 10 different data sources to query!), but after that the page is cached and displays much more quickly.
So after the initial settings, setting up your site pretty much boils down to choosing keywords!
Other settings
Used Musical Instruments is completely generic at the moment, except I changed around the order of some of the data sources, which you can do in the back end, as well as specify how many items to display etc. (e.g. 3 Yahoo Answers). You can also choose from a number of colour schemes, or if you are a bit more adventurous, make your own template - WAHA uses the Smarty template engine. It would have been good to see some more choices of template by default, but then again, all built-in templates would quickly grow old, however many there were.
There is a built in “synonymizer“, which processes articles and swaps in substitute words using some kind of thesaurus, presumably with the aim of simulating original content. You can also manually edit articles. Personally I would not use this - as a native English speaker it is blindingly obvious to me that an article has been “synonymized” and it makes the site look very dodgy.
The autogrowth feature is a very nice one - with it, you can set the speed at which new keywords are “published” to your site. So you can create 100 categories off the bat, but have them slowly appear on the site over a period which you specify, creating the impression of a gradually growing site, which the search engines like! Sneaky!
The bottom line
Well, I hope I have given you a fair overview of the WAHA CMS and its features. The cost of a licence (locked to one domain, remember) is $28 USD and I suppose you want to know if it is worth it!
Well, first the “don’t likes”: I guess the major criticism of WAHA would be that, well, it IS a little “sploggy”. At the end of the day, the claim that it creates a “quality web site” would be seriously contested by Google et al, since it ultimately relies primarily on unoriginal content. Eventually I fear that Google would start getting wise to WAHA-created sites. In fact, after an initial spike, Google search traffic HAS reduced to a trickle, though I am currently getting some 10 Bing search visits a day, which is enough to generate something in sales. However, this does remain a concern.
The “quality” claim could be qualified with the clause, “…for an automated site generating tool”, since the site actually generated DOES look pretty good - it would not necessarily be immediately obvious that it is all auto-generated, mostly because there is so much going on on-screen
I would also like to see some sort of built-in stats. Sure, you can plug in Analytics, but I’d like to be able to see the number of click-throughs for each page, for example. Maybe it’s a lot to ask, with all the other features, but there’s an idea anyway.
Perhaps the licence is a little restrictive too - the price, well, you can judge yourself from reading below. But maybe a licensing option for multiple sites might be worth considering, it could net the authors more sales ultimately too.
The “likes”: The fact is, if you have no objection to an auto-generated site, then they don’t get much better than WAHA. It IS essentially “white-hat” - I believe that none of the data is actually being “scraped”; it’s all taken from official feeds. I was pretty impressed by the effort that has gone into this, the huge number of options, and the inversely proportional amount of effort needed to produce a content-filled site. If you are fine with creating this kind of site, or you don’t have much technical knowledge, or you are short on time (or just plain lazy like me) you should certainly consider WAHA.
The very bottom line
OK, so how much did it net me? After an initial slow start, and having only created a few categories, a few sales started to drift in (after about 3 weeks), such that my sales since mid-March when I installed WAHA have been about $25, and that only through EPN - my sales have been zero through the other networks, (which is about usual for me!) I have recently added a lot more categories, so I hope this will improve things somewhat.
Now that doesn’t sound like much, but I can’t begin to describe how LITTLE work I did to promote the site - no link-building, no AdWords, nothing. I barely looked at it. All visits are through organic search. And the fact is that if I had paid for the licence I would have almost made the money back in a couple of months. After that it’s all profit. So I think a bit of effort in marketing would see you recoup the investment pretty quickly - and if you were ambitious, you could invest in, say, ten licences, make ten sites, and start to see some reasonable returns within a few months.
Hope that’s enough opinion for you to make a decision - well done to the WAHA guys for the effort, now we have to see if it has been worth it! But that’s affiliate marketing, right?
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It hasn’t had many votes considering the number of downloads.