For some time I have been pulling in the rss feeds from some of the very best UK affiliate marketing blogs and publishing them in an aggregated form on Internet Marketing Blogs, I set this site up simply for myself to use in January 2007 although I suspect one or two others do find it useful.

Last Saturday I decided to set up IMB with its own twitter @affiliateblogs, I mentioned it to my good friend Purple and he suggested automating the tweets by putting the rss feed through HootSuite, somewhat skeptical I took a look to see what was involved. It couldn’t have been easier to set up the account and plugin in the rss from IMB, maximum setting is 5 automated tweets / hour, so I put it on that, can always throttle it back if it seems too intusive or spammy.

Thats all there is to it, and so far it has gone pretty well, @affiliateblogs has picked up 300 followers in the week and at time of writing there have been 400 clicks through the twitter links.

The stats that Hootsuite provide are pretty good too here is the full week by click and location;

It also lets me know which blog articles have been most popular;

All in all a satisfactory first week, the jury is out whether I use similar automation on other projects but there is a fantastic potential, just hope Hootsuite keep an eye on their users to prevent it getting too spammy.

Last week John Lammerton announced the launch of Easy Content Units (ECU), if you haven’t already signed up and had a play with them I suggest you do so now as they are awesome.

These days the majority of my websites are on Wordpress  and even though ECU embeds pretty easily into a wordpress article I got to thinking there must be an easier way, so I looked at what plugins I was already using to embed elements into posts and decided that Youtuber fitted the bill, so a bit of hacking with the code and I came up with wp-ecu the output of which you can see below.

Click here to download the wp-ecu zip file.

Instructions

Edit the file wp-ecu.php

change ecu_mid=3  to your own id number or I will get the commission

Installation

1. Upload ‘wp-ecu’ to the ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress

Usage

To embed one of your Easy Content Units in a post enclose the content units ecu_uid like so

[ ecu]77[/ecu ]  (remove the spaces I had to put them in to stop it parsing)

where 77 = the ecu_uid

This is an alpha release and not been thoroughly tested, I would appreciate if you could leave feedback below, or if you modify the plugin please send me a copy to have a play with, one thing I would like to see in a future release is an options page to save having to edit the file wp-ecu.php before uploading, if anyone can write something that will do the job it would be great.

In Fraser Edwards recent Discount Codes Podcast in which I was involved along with Joe Connor and Chris Frost we touched on the subject of the Paid On Results Voucher Manager Tool.

It is around three months since POR launched their voucher manager tool, one of the purposes of of me writing this article is to serve as a reminder to merchants and affiliates alike of its existence.

What does it do?

The purpose of the Voucher Manager Tool is for merchants to quickly and easily inform affiliates about discount voucher codes which are available, both generic and exclusive.

The tool also allows affiliates to request exclusive codes from merchants.

Can it be improved?

Undoubtedly, as this is only the first release of the tool several improvement will be made I’m sure, POR have never been the type of company to say “right we’ve done that, lets forget about it”.

A couple of things I’d like to see in future releases are:

• Email Alerts – notification of new codes already exists however I’d like to see this extended to expiring codes etc.
• The addition of another column on the table of codes possibly colour coded for pending, live and expired codes.

Personally I think this tool is a great innovation, however like anything else it will only build up into a useful resource if it is used and kept up to date.

Buy.at recently released their LinkEngine so I thought a short article about the deep linking tools available at the affiliate networks I use the most was in order.

Buy.at

Log into the Buy.at Management area, on the Content and Creative menu click the ‘LinkEngine’ link.

You can create product deeplinks for programmes you are approved for using the LinkEngine.

Simply navigate to any products on merchant sites and copy the URL from the browser. Enter this into the text area and click the ‘create links’ button.

It is possible create multiple deep links in one go entering the urls on separate lines.

Verdict: pretty easy to use multiple deep links is a nice touch. 8/10

AffiliateWindow

Log on to your Awin account, navigate to the merchant you require, click the green links button, click the tick icon under ‘text’, click the link ‘generate deep link’, enter url of page you want to link to in the text box and click the generate link button.

Verdict: does the job but 6 steps is a bit long winded. 5/10

Webgains

Log into your WG account, click link ‘Text/deep link generator’, select merchant from drop down box, enter required url in the ‘Click Target’ box, your deeplink code is automatically updated so no need to do anything else except copy and paste.

Verdict: simple enough to use 8/10

Paid On Results

Navigate to the merchant page you want to link to, Click on ‘Paid On Results – Deep Link Creator’ in your favourites or bookmarks menu and that is it, all you need is to copy the resulting code from the box.

It really is that simple, to set it up go to your POR account, follow the ‘Deep Link Generator’ link in the Tools menu and you will see full instructions.

Also POR have a form based ‘Deep Link Creator’ that can be accessed via the Tools menu where you may create a up to 10 deep links at once.

Verdict: an absolute godsend top marks at 10/10, with the back up option worth 8/10 in its own right.

Affiliate Window have today launched the latest incarnation of ShopWindow a totally new linking method, the ShopWindow Toolset (beta).

Here’s what they have to say on a4uforum:

ShopWindow Toolset provides you with product comparison functionality that can be customised and integrated within a website with minimum effort.

You can earn commission through adding ShopWindow functionality in the way that best suits your skill set and website architecture in one of three ways:

1. ShopWindow Direct – sending your web traffic to the shopwindow.com website
2. ShopWindow Client Software – integrating a fully customisable software package within your website, adding product comparison functionality
3. ShopWindow API – using our ShopWindow web-based service which allows you to develop applications based around our product data

First thoughts, “I’m impressed” I knocked up a test site for ShopWindow Toolset in about 5 minutes >> 4 Prices.

Also check out the ShopWindow Forum