One Problem I have found since developing Keith’s Easy Rss WordPress Plugin has been the lack of decent up to date merchant RSS feeds, but no longer is that an issue thanks to those awesome guys at Easy Content Units as they have made unit feeds available via rss*, and after consulting with yours truly they have ensured they are compatible with the aforementioned plugin.

*available only to ecu pro members.

An example feed can be seen here.

To use these feeds with Keith’s Easy Rss WordPress Plugin include in your wordpress post in this format.

[ker]rss url,number of results required[/ker]

as so

[ker]http://www.easycontentunits.com/rss/6553/3/rss2.rss,10[/ker]

Click here for full details of this wordpress plugin and to download.

More about the Easy Content units rss feed can be found on the ECU blog >> ECU goes RSS – Pro Feature

Example of an ECU rss feed in a blog post Denner Cashmere voucher code

I seem to be turning into an old cynic lately always having a moan about something, my previous posts  Merchant 404 Pages and Why I dislike graphical emails are a just couple of recent examples.

Anyway I don’t like being an old whinge bag and I usually leave the complaining to others so in order to start looking at the bright side of things again I need to get a couple of things off my chest.

Merchants changing the URL structure of their websites… why oh why (like the points of view style?) can’t they put in place some form of mod rewrite / .htaccess to redirect old urls to new ones, not only will this save affiliates having a load of broken links it will also help the merchants own seo as the search engines will not be finding a million 404′s.

Reversals of sales – any merchant that has had an internet presence for any length of time knows what percentage of reversals they are likely to have, why not reduce the commission by this factor and pay out on everything, result happy affiliates and less admin to do.

Deeplinking – there really is no excuse in this day and age for an affiliate network not to have simple deeplinking in place, I wrote about Affiliate deep linking tools some time back, and these are excellent however, deeplinking should be as simple as adding the target url to the end of the affiliate code, its not rocket science.

Finally more a niggle than a moan, when you sign up to RSS by Email please don’t use an email address that sends an out of office reply because usually these go out between midnight and 2am and I really do hope you are out of the office at that time.

Right rant over now I hopefully can get get back to the business of trying to scratch a living.

If you have an opinion on any of my whinges or if you have a  moan of your own please leave a comment below.

Amazon have just published a nice little tutorial on their blog about creating RSS feeds for affiliate use check it out here Create Associate RSS Feeds!

• Basically you navigate to one of the categories in the Amazon Tutorial such best selling childrens books http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/bestsellers/books/69/ref=pd_ts_b_nav
• replace gp with rss
• replace everything after the category name and number with ?tag=YourAssociateID-21
• you should now have a url in this format http://www.amazon.co.uk/rss/bestsellers/books/69?tag=affiliate-marketing-21

Here is a page I knocked up yesterday using Amazon RSS on my golf site Top 10 Golf Books – Live Updates.

I integrated the Amazon RSS into the WordPress page using the feedList Plugin not perfect as it messes up a bit in css but it does the job, If anyone knows of a better RSS WordPress Plugin please give me a shout.