Costas Recursos’ Blog

The first time I got took Affilistore for as spin, it was still version 1 and I could not have chosen worst web hosting provider (Yahoo!) to host my website. The problem with Yahoo is that did not have access to htaccess file therefore it is impossible to implement custom URLs through what is known as mod rewrite. Besides there few limitation in the first version of Affilistore that prevented me from using this script as often as I wished.

If this the first time you read about Affilistore, you should know that Affilistore is a script that allows you to create affiliate websites using product data feeds. Such websites tend to keep visitors for a longer period of time on your website. The downside of such websites is that there are many other affiliates that use the same product data feed, making it more difficult to achieve some decent positions in the search engines. Having said that, there are ways to make your website unique. The latest version of Affilistore has a few features that can help you to make your website standout.

Affilistore 2 lets you manage multiple data feeds. This feature can be very useful if you plan to feature the products from multiple merchants. It may also help you slightly to make your website unique.

Let your visitors review the products on your website. Of course it is up to you to encourage such reviews. But if you do these reviews are definitely going to make your website unique and will provide value to other shoppers. This option along with opportunity to manage several product data feeds can create quiet decent shopping/comparison website.

RSS Feeds. Affilistore outputs two RSS feeds. One for “News Items” and another for “Popular Products”. “News Items” is a blog feature which you can use to update your regular visitors about news on your website. Popular Products is a feature that determines which products on your website are viewed more often. With some creativity you can use both of these RSS feeds to promote your website.

Bonus Tip: It is very easy to get carried away with scripts like Affilistore and create a website with 1000s of products. While there is nothing wrong with large websites, it would be wise to add products gradually. This will lower the chances of getting your website “sand boxed”.

Now listen again an replace every word “girl” with “BumpZee” … Unfortunately this is exactly how I feel lately about my favorite community.

Yes you have read my question correctly. Google has plenty of results on how to make easy money online. I am asking you about the time you have made some money that made you smile. I am not talking about a smile of satisfaction. I am talking about the kind of smile you put on your face when you see or hear something funny, something that cracks you up.

Here is How I Made My Funniest Money Online.

I have to give credit for it to good folks at Google maps. Let me tell you, these guys really have a sense of humor. Last year just around April 1st the Google team put out somewhat unique directions to Europe:

I happened to be among the first to discover the joke and posted it on my blog. I believe I may still be ranking on the first page of Google for “funny directions from NY to London”…

In any event, the days that followed brought me a lot of traffic to that post. So I decided that it might be a little easier to follow the directions if you take a GPS device along with you. I slapped the Amazon ad thinking people will look at it as a joke. About two weeks later I have made $12 from that ad.

To this day when I think back to that post and the money I made with it and it till cracks me up. So there you go, my funniest online money. Now is your turn. What was the funnies money you have ever made? Unless of course you are too serious to share.

If you have just recently joined PapperJam Network, I urge you to give pepperjamADS a try. When I initially saw the video below, I was very skeptical. However today I have created several ad zones that will feature pepperjameADS. I am blown away. I really have no idea how these ads will perform in terms of click through or conversions. But you can tell that a lot of thought into this feature at PepperJam Network. If some critics are still looking for the prove of innovation- pepperjamADS is one of those innovations. Yes I know, they just look like AdSense, AuctionAds and bunch of others…. But none of other major affiliate networks has this feature, at least I ma not aware of one. Again you will not be able to understand how much thought went into these ads unless you try them.

Here is a quick video that explains more about the pepperjamADS:

If you have a website or a blog in a tight niche and give these ads a try I predict you will stop using AdSense ever again in your life .

Here’s a little plugin that I should have looked for a long time ago!

It adds RSS feeds to all of your categories.  This is very handy if your blog is somewhat diverse and some of your readers want to specifically follow just a category or 2 via a feed.

Its even more useful if you want to establish some interesting layouts on your blog with pages, feeds, and feedburner!

The Plugin

The plugin can be found at Perishable Press.  Its called Category Live Bookmarks which is kind of an old fashioned way to refer to feeds and getting a link to a feed, but there is not too much that is old fashioned about the plugin in its final execution.  Its compatible with WordPress 2.3.

It doesn’t come with an installation folder, which is a little annoying if you like to keep your folders and plugins organized.  Fortunately it only has 3 files.

You Upload and activate the plugin, then replace your normal category list call with the code provided by perishable.

<?php if (function_exists(‘clb_plus’)) { clb_plus(); } ?>

.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre
{
font-size: small;
color: black;
font-family: consolas, “Courier New”, courier, monospace;
background-color: #ffffff;
/*white-space: pre;*/
}
.csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; }
.csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; }
.csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
.csharpcode .str { color: #006080; }
.csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; }
.csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; }
.csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
.csharpcode .html { color: #800000; }
.csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; }
.csharpcode .alt
{
background-color: #f4f4f4;
width: 100%;
margin: 0em;
}
.csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }

You can then set some variables to display the feed icon or a count of articles next to each category or what have you and that’s about it.  There are CSS options if you want to code things more effeciently with CSS.

Rocking and Rolling with Feeds

Once you have this setup, you can achieve some very interesting results with your blog design and organization of articles, pages, and more creating a very dynamic presentation. 

One of these days, I’ll write a more complete document on how to do this, but for now I’ll just leave you with the plugin.  Later on when you are ready for the step by step tutorial but do not want to walk up the stairs yourself, I’ll power up a stair lift tutorial and let you go to town, like that old lady in the Movie Gremlins that gets ejected out of her house. 

I would like to offer up an example of Good Flash Button implementation in web design.  The site in my example is primeview.com.  They are an arizona web design firm so you would hope that they know what they are doing.

Well, judging by their flash buttons alone, I suspect they do have a few good tricks up their sleeves.  Check out this video below with an example of how their flash buttons engage and inform a visitor or reader.  I found these to be pretty good, although I would give them an excellent if they had just a little bit of sound effects added in to give the buttons more texture.

Primeview also works in search engine optimization.  That is very important for small to medium sized firms looking for web design solutions.  Most small and medium sized companies need more than just web design or programming.  They need a business solution and functioning web site.  SEO helps a web site launch and operate in a way that is search friendly and on a good day brings in more business and leads.

They also offer a cool before and after gallery of images of websites that they have designed.  You will probably notice if you view this flash element yourself, that their own website is more advanced in appearance and functionality than many of their client websites.  This typically indicates to me that their clients have not bought into the concept of how the advanced features are evolving on the internet today or how they are being used.  Sometimes, that is a smart decision for a client to make, but in this case I suspect that their clients missed out on an opportunity to have some very good work done for them.

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