Recently one of my clients asked me question about affiliate web stores and how they work. I have been involved in creating affiliate mashup webstore creation for quite some time now. I have created mashup web stores based on Amazon, Ebay, Google etc. affiliate programs. And lot of these stores have been very successful in generating decent revenue for clients. Lately I got introduced to Commission Junction affiliate program by a new client. This client was looking into creating a web store based on Commission Junction web services. In this post I will provide some information on how to use Commission Junction web services to create a targetted web store.

Get Started

• As with every affiliate program, first you need to sign up with Commission Junction affiliate program. Click here to get started with sign up.
• Now you need a develop key from Commission Junction to access their API. It is a simple process. Go to CJ Webservices page and register for a developer key. After completing this step, the key will be sent to your mail box as well as displayed on the page. Save it and keep it safe.

Build The Site

Now that you have completed the registration process and everything, you are all set to build the site. As with any application or web site, you will need data to show some content and products on the site. The data is going to come from Commission Junction web services. Commission Junction provides REST services to access following kind of data.

• Products
• Links
• Advertisers
• Categories

These are bread and butter of making the site. There are some other services available as well. But for now you can focus on these only. You will need to build an API or some sort of agent that can consume REST services to access the data from Commission Junction web service. Since I am mostly doing .Net development these days, so I have a built a nice handy library that hides all the implementation details and downloads the data from web service and makes it available to the web site. You can Contact Me if you are looking into using .Net API.

Now that you have the data, you will need to think about what type of products or category you want to target to build your store. You have all the data for all the categories from advertisers that you signed up for. But that does not mean that you want to create some store that is going to market all type of products. Well, I am not saying that you can not do that. But it is always better to concentrate on one or two categories. That makes it easier for you to create some focused marketing and promotion plan for your web site.

I created a mash up store where I am marketting all products from all advertisers. You can see how the landing page shows all the coupons and deals of the day from all the vendors and then you can navigate to each page to see how the product page combines links, coupons and product list data to display information to user. Click below to see the store in action.

Affiliate Webstore Demo

This code sample shows how to use Commission Junction REST API using .Net. The code is very straight forward. Only thing that you need to pay attention to is that you will be passing your user credentials through request header named Authorization. The value for this header is the Developer Key that was assigned to you when you signed up for Commission Junction web services account. This is a mile long string that was sent to you in your mail box as well when you signed up for CJ Web Service access.

class Program
{
 const string ADVERTISERS_LOOKUP_JOINED = 
 "https://advertiser-lookup.api.cj.com/v3/advertiser-lookup?advertiser-ids=joined";
 static void Main(string[] args)
 {
  var reqUrl = string.Format("{0}", ADVERTISERS_LOOKUP_JOINED);
  var webReq = WebRequest.Create(reqUrl) as HttpWebRequest;
  webReq.Headers.Add("Authorization", App.Default.DEVKEY);
  var resp = webReq.GetResponse() as HttpWebResponse;
  // Get the stream associated with the response.
  var receiveStream = resp.GetResponseStream();
  var readStream = new StreamReader(receiveStream, Encoding.UTF8);
  var respText = readStream.ReadToEnd();
  resp.Close();
  readStream.Close();
  if (resp.StatusCode == HttpStatusCode.OK)
  {
   // Parse response.
   Console.WriteLine(respText);
  }
  else
  {
   // what is the error??
  }
  }
}

If you are looking for any help building any tools based on Commission Junction API, contact me. I can guide you through the development using .Net.

Every now and then I get question from somebody, How may google ad units I can place on my page?. All this information is actually available on google's site. I will just put that data in a nice table form so it is easy for you to refer to it. I have extracted this data from google's site. I will suggest that for more accurate and upto date information you do visit the link that I have supplied at the bottom of the post.