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

Lately my blog has been flooded with comments on all posts and articles that are very popular. 75% of these comments are lines lie thank you for posting this information, i will definitely follow your instructions and all kind of gibberish. These are comments from all these cheap SEO spammers who want to take advantage of popularity of site or blog to put their links in the comments. After reviewing these comments for some time, I came up with following techniques that you can use to discourage these spammers.

1. This is mother of all tricks. In your content management system (CMS) or blogging engine, make a change to add rel=nofollow attribute to links that are posted in the comments or web site URLs that these spammers have used in their profile. Their main objective is to put a link in your site so that they can get a boost to their ranking. If you add this attribute, that kills their whole motive to put any link in your blog or site. Trust me, this works very well. Google's web spam team invented this attribute purely for this purpose so that other sites can't take unfair advantage of popularity of a site or blog.
2. Do not use a (anchor) tag to display their URLs. Simply put it in a span. Moment they will see that their URL is simply being shown as text, they will not come back to post any comment on your site.
3. Keep record of IP addresses from where these spammers are posting comments. After X number of violations, you can add entry in your web server to block users from that IP address. Or do not allow these users to post comment.
4. Delete the comment if it is too offensive or complete garbage. If they have spent some time to put some few words, you may want to keep it. They are adding some content to your site.

These are very simple techniques you can use to discourage these spammers. In next post I will post some prototype implementation demonstrating how you can achieve this.

I remember i used to get calls from SEO companies and they will talk about how they are going to improve ranking of my page and tell me problems about my pages. And I always used to tell them, show me some data so I can see what you are talking about. I have been working with lot of client on web scrapping projects to extract data using HTMLParser.Net. During these projects I saw how people structured their pages and how their links and images were lacking some minor things that could really improve visibility of their pages and get them tanked higher than their competitors. So 2 weeks I ago I decided to create a new tool that will allow to analyze web pages and give me all the raw data details that I need. From this raw data I can analyze what could be wrong with the content of the page that is driving down its rank or relevancy. For example I can see how many times my keywords are appearing in description and content of a page. And if my keywords are no where to be seen in content, that is bad news. That means either my page is irrelevant to keywords or keywords are not relevant to the content of this page.

Now I decided to offer this free SEO analysis tool to everybody. Now when you talk to a SEO company or ask your contractors to fix the pages, you exactly know how does the current page structure look like and what needs to done about it. I will say ..... it costs nothing to try it.

SEO Blocks - Free SEO Analysis

If you are using some Content Management System (CMS) for your web site, then there is good chance that all your content along with meta tag content like Title, Description, Keywords etc. is stored in some data source and need to be added to the page dynamically. This all is doable from server side using HtmlMeta html server side control to Controls collection of Header of your page. You just need to add head element to your page and make sure that you have set runat=server for it and you are good to go. See the following snippet how it is done.

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
 if (!IsPostBack)
 {
  this.Header.Title = "My Page Title";
  HtmlMeta meta = new HtmlMeta();
  meta.Content = "my description for this page";
  meta.Name = "description";
  this.Header.Controls.Add(meta);
 }
}

And on the page I have defined the mark up like this.

<head runat="server">
    <title></title>
</head>

Everyday I find a lot of people scrapping content from our web sites and publishing it without asking for permission. 90% of the times they will publish the content for monetary gains like adsense from various providers like Google, Yahoo etc. These are what we call IP thieves. They are making money using your content. A lot of content creators do not mind somebody publishing their content if other person will ask for permission and acknowledge the original content creator in some way on their site as well.

I have to run a BOT to find sites who are stealing our content. And then we send them legal notices to remove the content from their site. If you find yourself in similar situation, I would recommend that you go to Chilling Effects Clearinghouse and report such violations. And that provides a lot of good information about Intellectual Property, DMCA and Copyright laws as well. It is definitely worth spending some time there.

Last week I added a new page to my blog site. The article was very popular and lot of people bookmarked it as well. After 3 days I realized that there is typo in the title that I need to fix. So I made the change. After few minutes of making the change I started getting flood of emails about broken link from the people who bookmarked that article. Then I realized that BlogEngine.net generated URLs for posts and pages based on Title field. So if you change the title of the item, your URL changes as well. Well there are following problems I see with this approach.

• Biggest problem is that URL changes if title changes. That would mean that you will have keep track of where you have used this URL internally and externally and update them.
• If i specify a very long title for my post or page, I will have a gigantic URL. This is not something that is recommended in best practices of URL creation.
• Now to keep the URL to manageable length, I will have to come up with short titles that explain what the page or post is all about. Well, in some cases you want to have a title that is little bit more descriptive for SEO purposes

After thinking through this, I decided to make change in BlogEngine.net to include a new field named MetaTitle for pages and posts.

This new field allows you to enter a title that is different from what is used to create URL of that post or page. And when you want to update title of the item, you just need to update MetaTitle and never have to worry about URL change because you changed title. You can still change Title field, but it will result in a new URL for your page or post.

You can download the updated code from BlogEngine.Net Update 1.5.3. This update requires change in SQL Server tables. The updated script has been appended at the bottom of the page. I will post that update here as well. This update requires addition of new field MetaTitle in be_Pages and be_Posts tables.

/* Script for MetaTitle features */
ALTER TABLE [dbo].[be_Pages]
 ADD
 [MetaTitle] [nvarchar](255) NOT NULL DEFAULT (N'')
GO
 UPDATE [be_Pages]	SET [MetaTitle] = [Title]
GO
ALTER TABLE [dbo].[be_Posts]
 ADD
 [MetaTitle] [nvarchar](255) NOT NULL DEFAULT (N'')
GO
 UPDATE [be_Posts]	SET [MetaTitle] = [Title]
GO

Admin pages Add_Entry and Pages have also been updated to include new text box for MetaTitle field. And all the core code has been updated to account for new database field as well. If you have any feature that you would like implemented or modified, please feel free to contact me. I will be glad to work with you on the changes.

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.