Affiliate Marketing Blog by James Little

It’s been a while since Wordpress 2.3 was released in September but today should see the release of Wordpress 2.5.

I’ll likely be online later tonight to give it a test drive and I’m sure we will see loads of plugins and themes that have been broken by it, but here are some of the new features:

• New admin interface (looks quite neat)
• Widget based dashboard (wooo!)
• Built in Avatar support
• Tag management
• Full text feeds
• Automatic plugin upgrades(!)
• Built in Gallery feature

Just need to get a built in forum and bbPress integration and I’ll be a happy man.. Hopefully that will come in the next release.

Download will be from the usual place.

I might also upgrade Ciarans blog, which went live last night and should be added to your RSS reader!

Late last night after doing all my Christmas shopping online I found myself wondering how I was going to pay for it all (god bless having children) and started looking at wordpress themes for a product based domain that seemed to be available to buy.

It was then that I came across what is potentially one of the best themes I have yet seem for Wordpress.

See Demo Sites 

Revolution Themes have released a few different styles that really push Wordpress to the next level and provide an entry level solution to getting an online magazine up and running in the space of a few hours.

Ultimately if I was to buy a theme I’d probably want to get the full pack that is priced at $500 and slightly out of my price range (if anyone wants to buy me a Christmas gift you’re more than welcome) but I imagine there is a lot that can be done with these - would love to see a site like Lee’s Pleo Toy in this kind of template.

While we are talking of themes I’ve found a few more themes and plugins recently that are really neat & will be adding them to the Wordpress Theme and Plugin back in the next few days.

A while ago I released a wordpress pack, containing a number of plugins and themes along with the standard wordpress install.

Seeing as I hadn’t updated it for a while I’ve created a new page on the 3wdl site with the latest version that you can download and get going a bit quicker than usual.

Wordpress Pack - containing over 40 themes and plugins 

Enjoy

In my previous role at St. Minver I had a blog installed to keep our affiliates up to date with the latest news and promotions - the systems were all tied up so I didn’t have FTP access to be able to get it up and running myself and it meant that no spamming filter was put in place, but comments were moderated.

This week the new affiliate manager started and one of the guys I used to work with sent me a message asking if I could remember the login details so they could start to use it again.

I attempted to login to get the username and password and noticed the following:

If there ever was a good reason to install Akismet then I suspect this is it.  Unfortunately it does show how bad the dark side of the industry is - especially when I only left about 3 months ago!

One of the glories of the web is the number of visitors that come to your website / blog via longtail search terms - it can drive lots of targeted traffic but often visitors come to the site only the once.

A small bit of php can be integrated into wordpress to try and combat this. Take a look at the screenshot below:

Now just follow our few easy steps to integrate this into your wordpress installation:

1) Save cookie.php.txt to cookie.php somwhere locally.
2) Open up cookie.php.txt and change the text and feed URL to match that of your server.
3) Upload the file to the root directory of your server.
4) Open up your wordpress backend (wp-admin) and select “Presentation” then “Theme Editor”.
5) Select style.css on the right and add the following code (you can modify it to change the colors, etc) in the file somewhere:

/* Cookie style document */

.cookiestyle {
width:450px;
text-align:left;
padding:5px;
background-color:#EAF4FF;
border:1px solid black;
font-size:12px;
margin-bottom:15px;
}

6) In the Theme Editor, select “Main Index template” and insert the following line:

<?php include(”cookie.php”); ?>

This should generally go near the top of the file and in my theme is above:

<?php $countervariable=1; if (have_posts()) : ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

Do the same with the Single Post page

7) Re-visit the site and you should now see the message display - Refresh and it will disappear.

It’s another “nice touch” and if your content is high quality it may well encourage your visitors to sign up to the RSS feed and visit more often.

Regular wordpress users will know that there are hundreds (or perhaps thousands) of plugins on the web and recently I think I’ve found my favorite yet, Comment Relish.

Once downloaded and activated you are able to setup text within your wordpress backend and whenever someone comments on an article for the first time, they are emailed thanking them and linking though to the RSS feed. Here is an example mine:

John,

Thanks for your comment on 3wdl blog at www.3wdl.co.uk

I hope that you like the blog and if you want to keep up to date with all the latest posts then you can subscribe to our feed at: http://www.3wdl.co.uk/feed/

Thanks again,
James
www.3wdl.co.uk

John is now happy at the seemingly personal touch and is more likely to convert into a long term subscriber, especially with the link though to the RSS.

This and the Subscribe to comments plugin fit in pretty nicely and are features that anyone serious about their blog should be looking at. Both are available on the wordpress pack that I put together.

It really is fantastic to see when networks get it right.  I’d like to say a quick well done to Paid on Results, the first UK network to launch their own network blog.

I’m really looking forward to seeing more content on there and with my affiliate hat on it seems like another great way to get updates (especially as Paid on Results are one of the only networks not to spam people with newsletters!).

Lets hope that more networks follow their lead - it’s something that a number of bloggers (including myself) have been banging on about for a long time and good to see that it’s starting to happen.

Today the eyefall search engine marketing blog was put live with quite a bit of content to come over the upcoming weeks/months ahead.

My aim is to continue writing on exwebjunkie (a lot to come about the IAB meeting today) and use the eyefall site to contribute guides and tips for running an affiliate program.

There are a number of other contributors and hopefully it is a site that readers will find useful and though provoking.

Since this plugin is a bit of an arse to get hold of, I’ve put a copy of it on my server for download.

A bit of history about the plugin.

It was created by Robert Deaton  and hosting on Something Unpredictable, which crashed due to a hardware failure and has not been back up since.

It works in Wordpress 2.0 - I have not tried it for 2.1.

Download No Ping Wait Plugin

It’s very useful if you you ping a lot of servers (A list of some good ones can be found on my post about Wordpress and SEO).

A bit of a long shot posting it here, but I’ll give it a go none the less.

I’m about to embark on a new (rather exciting) project and am looking for a designer / HTML coder to create a logo and some page mock ups then put them into HTML/CSS.

Ultimately as this is being built from the ground up I don’t have any spare cash to put into the design so am looking for someone with the required skills that wishes to be my partner for the duration of the project and in doing so will receive a share of any profits generated.

If you are interested in working on the project or want to sign an NDA and get some more information then please get in touch.