I’m still getting to grips with the custom navigation side of things but seem to have cracked it and have implemented an ajax tab script for popular products, stores and searches to minimise the number of boxes in the side columns.

I’ve also dusted of my command line skills and written a small script to download affiliate window feeds to my webspace and use cronjob to refresh the feeds which seems to be working ok although it has only been tested on one feed so far.

Yes it is still a work in progress and yes the colour scheme may well be from a very popular comparison website but I intend on spending a few minutes each day on it and will eventually get round to working on the deisgn when the backend is doing what I want.

All in all a good script (even more when you consider it is free) that so far seems to be working well, some pages have already started to appear in the search results for very specific product related phrases and has been indexed well.  Wait until the unique content goes in.

Give it a go.

Options by Justin Tadlock

Mimbo by Darren Hoyt

Wordpress Magazine Theme by Gabfire

For an even more detailed list of free wordpress themes click on over to  http://socialcmsbuzz.com/20-free-wordpress-magazine-style-themes-08072008/

If you haven’t come across these before I hope you find them useful.

If I’ve managed to make pocket money from the very little traffic that I got from some of my early sites surely with more effort and hard work I could make more money?  That’s obvious I know but the way I see it many “would be” affiliates would have dropped out by now, difference is I enjoy it as well.

That leads me on to my question, is seo enough to make decent money from affiliate marketing?  I hope so is my answer.  I’ve been putting in a lot of effort to the seo of my recent site and have seen traffic steadily increase, fall of the planet (thanks google) and then steadily increase again.  This organic traffic is still very low but  I have made some affiliate sales and being in the travel vertical a single commission of £25 for one sale seems like a big deal at the moment.

I’ve noticed over the last couple of weeks that page load times seemed to have increased for both the front end (seen by visitors) but especially the backend admin pages. A few weeks back I updated to version 2.5 but I’m loathsome to upgrade to the latest 2.6.1 as I’m aware that some of the plugins have not yet been updated.

To address the front end page load times I installed the super-cache plugin.  As my site doesn’t have any dynamic content that gets updated regularly such as “most popular post” etc this wouldn’t be a problem for me.  In a nut shell what it does is serves up a local copy of the pages content instead of querying the MySQL database each time.  I’m happy to say that this seems to have decreased the page load times on the front end of my site considerably with no ill effects or problems.  I just need to play around with the plugins settings to get the expiry times etc working effectively.

Some plugins could also be the cause of slow page loads.  You could disable them all and then re-enable them one by one checking each time if it has an effect on the page load time.  For those of you who use Firefox there is a great plugin called firebug that you can use to diagnose how long each element of your page takes to load.  For an excellent guide on doing this see http://www.paulspoerry.com/2007/08/04/diagnose-slow-wordpress-performance-using-firebug/

The admin pages were another matter.  navigating between admin pages was taking over a minute in some instances, totally irritating and useless.  First I disabled all plugins to check it wasn’t one of them effecting the admin pages but this had no effect whatsoever.  Secondly I turned on MySQL query cache by adding the following lines to my  my.cnf file

query-cache-type = 1
query-cache-size = 20M

I then restarted MySQL and for good measure I restarted my Apache server (I’m on a dedicated server)  Fingers crossed this seems to have had a positive effect and the admin pages are now running much faster and more importantly are usable.

I just hope it stays this way.  I have a number of sites in the pipeline that I was planning on using wordpress for as the CMS

Save the following code as a .php file, naming it is your choice. (For the example it is called link.php).

$path = array(
'link-1' => 'http://www.aterriblelongaffiliatelinkhere.co.uk',
'link-2'=> 'http://www.anotherterriblelongaffiliatelinkhere.co.uk';
if (array_key_exists($_GET['id'], $path)) header('Location: ' . $path[$_GET['id']]);
?>

replace the ‘link-1′ etc with a keyword describing where the link is going and also the corresponding URL of the affiliate link, when you add more than 2 links make sure the last link doesn’t have the comma after it.

Upload to the root of your website

Now if you go to www.yoursite.co.uk/link.php?id=link-1 it will redirect to ‘http://www.aterriblelongaffiliatelinkhere.co.uk

If you want to clear that up even more

Put the following lines in your .htaccess file

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^go/([/_0-9a-zA-Z-]+)$ link.php?id=$1

Now if you go to www.yoursite.co.uk/go/link-1 it will have the same effect as above.

This works fine for any website using affiliate links, that includes Wordpress. I use this method to keep the number of plugins I install down to a minimum.

Hope it is of some use.

Enjoy

Searching the web for a solution quickly came up trumps with a template trick, all thats needed is a couple of lines added to your archive.php or category.php pages.  Instead of copying someone elses work visit http://lonewolf-online.net/computers/knowledgebase/wordpress-not-show-posts-of-subcategory for an excellent guide.

What we mean is turning a www.merchantwebsite.co.uk/en/category?aid=1234432234 link into www.yourwebsite.co.uk/product

Reasons for doing this are, visitors are more likely to click the link if it is pointing to your domain name instead of somebody elses, it looks more tidy and is easier to remember.

There are quite a few ways of doing this but my favourite is via htaccess

add the following line to your .htaccess file 

Redirect 301 /productname http://www.affiliatewebsite.com/?aid=32134

in the above example www.yourwebsite.co.uk/productname will redirect to www.affiliatewebsite.com?aid=32134

How simple is that and all updateable from one file.
 

There are many CMS open source scripts available, Joomla and Drupal being quite popular but one that I have been paying some serious attention to is Modx which I think is brilliant, if you haven’t heard of this CMS before visit their website, it is well worth considering it for a future project.  Although I think Modx is brilliant, I have actually chosen to use Wordpress.  But thats a Blogging tool I hear you cry, yes that’s true but with the use of certain plugins and a good theme Wordpress works very well as a CMS and many affiliates have utilised it for this very purpose, ukoffer springing first to mind as an example.

One of the other reasons that I have chosen Wordpress is a theme (or selection of themes) that I stumbled upon by Brian Gardner at revolutiontheme The magazine theme was exactly the kind of layout I was looking for so what would be the point in spending valuable time designing and developing a theme from scratch when one is already available and easily customisable if you know a little about css, html and php?

So we now have a home for the new website and a place to host it. Bargain

They may well be able to offer Broadband at very reasonable costs but is it worth the hassle when you can’t get through to anybody when there is a problem?  Maybe you do get what you pay for?