Affiliate Marketing Blog by James Little

I liked linkedin - I’ve “connected” with some people I used to work with but the fact that you need someones operational email address can be a bit of a pain.

Today I found the fantastic Linkedin Fast Generator widget which you can see in it’s full glory in the left hand navigation of this page.  Once you click on it it will send an invite directly to me so you don’t need to worry about which email address I happen to be using.

Kudos goes to Andy Beard.

Rather than editing the sidebar code via Wordpress I like to use the Widgets function that is built into my skin; it’s quick, easy to move things about and quite effective.   I also like to use the BUMPZee recent visitors / entries Widget rather than MyBlogLog as it’s a lot more relevant to my site.

Ultimately the two of these did not want to work together.   Whilst Scott is working on a solution for it I did find a workaround to get the BUMPZee widget to work via the standard sidebar Widgets system for Wordpress.

You need to get the PHP Widget Plugin and activate it.   Once this is done if you go to the Sidebar Widgets section under Presentation in your Wordpress backend you will see a new option called €œPHP Code Widgets€.   Select 1 and click Save and under Avaliable Widgets you will now see €œPHP Code 1€; drag this to where you want the BUMPZee widget to appear in the sidebar.

Now click on the options link for the PHP Code 1 (the little graphic on the right) and input the code that is given in the BUMPZee section under options.

Click Save, go to your website, and you should now have the full functionality of the new plugin by Scott.

After changing my hosting provider a few months back I finally got around to putting my image gallery back online.   I installed F-Spot on Gnome and organised a bunch of my photos (not all of them yet) into Tags.  I then put a fresh install of Gallery2 up and uploaded them all though F-Spot.  Simple enough.

Next however, I wanted to display a random image in the sidebar of this blog which is hosted on the same server but on a different domain.  I picked up the line of php from the Image Block section of gallery and tried to put this in one of the text widgets.

Text Widgets don’t support PHP however.

I looked all over the Web and couldn’t find a solution; I tried a few different widgets but none of which seemed to work.  I even tried a widget which lets you run PHP Execs but it gave a security error generated by Gallery2.

In the end I came up with a solution.

I inserted the PHP External Image Block code generated by Gallery2 and put this line into a .php file (I called it photos.php and located it in the wp-content directory).  Then I created a new text widget and setup an iFrame with the following aspects:

src=”/wp-content/photo.php” FRAMEBORDER=”0″ MARGINWIDTH=”0″ MARGINHEIGHT=”0″

The result is the Random image that you should be able to see to the left.  It’s hardly ideal but seems to work.

I just upgraded the site to Wordpress 2.1 today so hopefully everything is appearing as it should be. Please let me know if you spot any issues.

On other notes, I purchased BusinessBlog.org.uk today but am not sure exactly what to do with it. Please do comment if you have any suggestions!

Scott Jangro is a man on a mission.  Bumpzee was born just a few months ago and already it is becoming a regular haunt for loads of people involved in the Affiliate Marketing community (192 members signed up so far).

What I love the most about it is how the features just keep expanding.   The first Widget was released last week giving the ability to Bump posts from the referring site (ala Digg) and yesterday Scott released a New Posts and Recent Visitors widget that is similar to MyBlogLog which was recently purchased by Yahoo.  Tags now feed in automatically too if you are using Ultimate Tag Warrior with your Wordpress install.

It doesn’t stop there.  Another release yesterday gives an Active Discussions page, showing comments made on Bumpzee about the latest posts which I am sure will develop the community aspect even more.  Hopefully it won’t be long before this functions automatically with comments on the actual blog posts and will display vice-versa (a plugin for Wordpress maybe Scott?).

If you are in Affiliate Marketing and have not seen Bumpzee yet then I really would suggest that you drop by and sign up.

The fabulous super affiliate & blogger Keith Bond has released his first version of Internet Marketing Blogs UK, an RSS aggregator inspired by Scott’s Bumpzee.

I’m a massive RSS/Feed reader fan so it’s great to see sites like this coming out and Keith’s latest release is sure to be a must read for a lot of us.

He’s also taking the feeds from AffiliateManagement so if you are in the Affiliate arena and have yet to sign up to this free service you should definitely get started.

After a little rant in my previous post, I hinted to setting up some free blogs on an affiliate URL that I didn’t use. Since then I have discovered Wordpress Mu & installed it on AffiliateManagement.net. There are no ads, it’s completely free & easy to get started. There are a number of installed themes and I’ll be adding a few widgets and plugins to get people started shortly.

Hopefully it will encourage a few more affiliate managers or merchants to start blogging and discover another excellent form of communication and relationship building.