EzSEO Newsletter # 247

 Print This Post

In this issue:

1. Tutorial: Amazon Datafeeds

2. Top Linking Secrets Review

Hi Again

As promised mid-week, I’ve got a great tutorial for you, plus news (and a coupon) of Neil Shearing’s new product on link building.  If you have ever wanted to add Amazon product datafeeds to your site, you’ll love the tutorial in the first section.  I’ll show you how (and there is even a video with the complete process).

Let’s get started..

– — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — –
1. Tutorial: Amazon Datafeeds
– — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — –

Adsense has a couple of benefits which make it the monetization choice of the masses:

1. People don’t need to buy anything for you to make a commission.

2. You can set it up and forget about it.

Now I have never been a big fan of Adsense.  Yes it is easy to setup, and you can make commissions when someone clicks an advert, but quite often the amount you make is hardly worth the effort.

One great alternative to Adsense is Amazon.  Amazon even include a bunch of tools to help you add products to your site.

One of the big benefits of promoting Amazon is their brand name – everyone trusts them because nearly everyone has bought from them in the past.  An additional bonus is that once you get someone to Amazon, they could buy just about anything, and several different items – all working towards increasing our commission (e.g. I sold 4 products from my test site at Amazon.com yesterday and not one of them was a product I am promoting on my site).

While Amazon has a great set of tools to help you get products on your site, I prefer to tap into the Amazon datafeed, and this is something you can do as well.

Have a look at my diabetes site:

Blood Sugar Diabetic

Do you see the Amazon Best Sellers in the right hand column? 

Those products are drawn from Amazon’s datafeed from the books category, using a search term I have specified when I set it up.

Amazon will return the required number of products to my page and I can be sure that prices are always up to date, as well as the products changing over time. 

I have this setup to cache the Amazon results for faster loading of my pages.  The cache is recreated every 12 hours, so in theory, the products on those pages can change every 12 hours.

If this is something you would like to experiment with, I have created a tutorial showing you exactly what you need to do.  There are three basic steps:

1. Create an Amazon Web Services account.
2. Download and install Carp:

Download Carp Evolution

There is a fr.ee version of Carp that you can use, though I think the amazon images are not displayed in the free version.

3. Setup the feed on your site.

Let’s go through these points.

To join Amazon Web Services, head on over to:

Amazon Web Services

Top right is a link to create an account.

Once you have joined, login and click on the link to "Account Identifiers".  You should see your Access Key on that page.  Copy it somewhere safe (I recommend copying and pasting to a text file rather than writing it down so you don’t make any mistakes).

Now you need to download and install Carp.  I wrote a tutorial on adding rss feeds to your site using Carp a while ago, so if you need help with the downloading and installing, please read this tutorial and then come back here:

Adding RSS Feeds to your web site

You don’t need to worry about the displaying feeds part of that tutorial, just the installation.  However, do make a note of the code that Carp gives you to display feeds on your site, as you will need the path for loading carp later in this tutorial.

OK, now the trickier part. You need three files.  You can get these files from the Carp website, but to make things easier, I have created a download with all three files here. 

Carp Amazon Integration Files

The three files inside the zip dowload are:

Amazon2RSS-2.0.xsl
Amazon2RSS-2.0.php
Amazontemplate.txt

STEP 1: Uploading Amazon2RSS-2.0.xsl

OK, on your server, create a folder in your webspace called xsl, and upload the Amazon2RSS-2.0.xsl file there so that the URL of that file will then be something like:

http://mydomain.com/xsl/Amazon2RSS-2.0.xsl

STEP 2: Editing the Amazon2RSS-2.0.php

Open Amazon2RSS-2.0.php in a text editor (I recommend Notepad++ as one of the best available, and its fr.ee).

Edit the second line:

$xslt=’http://www.yourdomain.com/xsl/Amazon2RSS-2.0.xsl’;

Change the www.yourdomain.com to reflect your actual domain (and location of the xsl file).

On the next two lines:

$AccessKeyId=’put_your_access_key_id_here’;
$AssociateTag=’put_your_associates_id_here’;

Replace the put_your_access_key_id_here with your Amazon Web Services Access code you copied earlier.

Replace the put_your_associates_id_here with your Amazon affiliate ID (you need to be an affiliate of Amazon to have this, so sign up if you haven’t already).

Finally in Step 2, change the country code if you want to promote a non-US Amazon (note: Make sure you are an affiliate with the country you choose).

e.g. Instead of

$country=’US’;

You could choose:

$country=’UK’;

Other options are: ‘CA’,'DE’, ‘FR’ & ‘JP’

Save the Amazon2RSS-2.0.php file and upload it to your server in the same folder as carp.php.

STEP 3: Preparing the template code

Open the Amazontemplate.txt file.  This file is a slightly modified version to the one on the Carp Web Site. 

The only line you need to edit is the one that has the path to the Amazon2RSS-2.0.php file:

include ‘/path/to/Amazon2RSS-2.0.php’;

This "/path/to" is the server path to the file.  NOTE: This is not the same as the URL to the file.

Remember earlier I told you to save the code Carp gave you at installation because you would need the path to carp on your system?  Well now is the time to dig that code up and have a look.

Since Amazon2RSS-2.0.php is in the same folder as carp, the path will be the same.  You’ll find it on the second line of the code after the require once bit.

There are a couple of other options to set in your template.

After the $q= bit, enter a word or phrase inside the quotes that will be the seed word for your Amazon search.

MaxItems is the maximum number of items to display.
MaxReviewLength is the number of characters to display in the reviews.
SearchIndex is the searchable index at Amazon to pull results from.  You cannot just type in any category or sub-category here, you need to use one that Amazon recognises. 

These are the valid Amazon Search Indices you can currently use (though do check Amazon documentation to see if these have changed):

Apparel, Baby, Beauty, Blended, Books, Classical, DigitalMusic, DVD, Electronics, ForeignBooks, GourmetFood, HealthPersonalCare, HomeGarden, Jewelry, Kitchen, Magazines, Merchants, Miscellaneous, Music, MusicalInstruments, MusicTracks, OfficeProducts, OutdoorLiving, PCHardware, PetSupplies, Photo, Restaurants, Software, SoftwareVideoGames, SportingGoods, Tools, Toys, VHS, Video, VideoGames, Wireless, WirelessAccessories

With the template finished, save it.  This code is going to be included in your website page.

If you want to add the feed to a standard html site, follow the instructions on the Adding RSS feeds tutorial:

Adding RSS Feeds to your web site

Instead of using the carp feed integration code, just use the template you have created.

If you want to include the feed on a Wordpress site, you need to be aware that PHP code won’t work if you paste it into a blog post.  You can use the Carp Wordpress plugin if you want:

Carp Wordpress Plugin

Alternatively, what I did on my test site was to edit the sidebar templates, adding the template code at the point I wanted the feed to appear.

I have made one other change in the dispaly of my feed – using the more link to open up the user comments if the visitor wants to see more of the comment.  If you want to do that, check out the Carp Expander plugin.

I am sure this tutorial has thrown open a lot of questions, and many who try to integrate Amazon feeds in this way will have problems.  If you have any questions, problems or ideas, please post a comment at the end of this blog post (do not email me).

As a bit of extra help, I have created a video showing the entire process:

– — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — –
2. Top Linking Secrets Review
– — – — – — – — – — – — – — – — –

We all hate having to go out and get links into the pages of our sites, but know that it is an essential part of building a quality, long-term business online.  I was therefore happy to see that Internet Marketing veteran Neil (and his wife Linda) are coming out with a new guide to link building.  It will be released on July 7th.

Neil was kind enough to let me see their latest draft word document, so be aware that what I discuss below is based on an unfinished draft, not the final PDF.

The course is split into three sections and I’ll go into more detail on each of the sections in a moment, but let me give you an overview. 

The first section discusses some of the background information you need to know before embarking on any kind of link building exercise. 

The second section concentrates on link sources – that is, the types of resources avaiable for acquiring links.

The thirds section of the course is Neil & Linda’s Step by Step Link Building plan of action.

Let’s look at the course in a little more detail.

The first section is really important as Neil describes links in terms of why they are so important to your search engine rankings. 

This section starts with a history lesson and covers the basics, but even veterans in Internet Marketing should read these first few chapters as they cover important up to date stuff like the nofollow tag changes as well as a novel idea about how links can save your content from thieves ;O)

Neil discusses important issues like natural and artificial linkage, and why this is important to you as you go about your link acquisition.  There are a number of variables at work here and many of these are discussed to show you how these will help or hinder your own rankings.  The bottom line here is that link building needs to be done properly, or it wont be effective – Neil shows you how.

The first section is an excellent introduction to links, how they work and why they sometimes work against you.

In Section 2 of the book Neil and Linda show you the "categories" of places you can go to get links e.g Link Directories, Press Releases, article submission  plus many more (including one sneaky method Neil used to get a link back to his blog from me!!), with vital information on all of these link sources.  This section is the most comprehensive coverage I have seen on link sources, and will be something I refer back to regularly for my own sites.

I know from experience that many people want to be shown exactly what to do, and when to do it.  Well, section three of this book is for you.  Neil & Linda have included a step-by-step action plan, showing you THEIR recommended way to start building links to a new site.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who struggles with link building.  By the end of the course, you will know more than most webmasters, and have the knowledge to go out and build links with confidence, while not getting into hot water with Google.

While this product is not available for a few more days, you can go and download Neil’s excellent PDF on Linking Myths from:

Link Building Secrets

The product itself will be available on Tuesday 7th July. 

When it is available, you can use the following coupon to get a massive discount:

save30

This coupon will only work for 72 hours after launch.  As soon as I hear from Neil that it is live, I will send you a reminder.

Well, that’s it for this issue.  If you want to read the recent issues of this newsletter, you can read them online at my
blog:

http://ezseonews.com/

For older newsletters, you will need to visit the old archives at:

http://ezseonews.com/archives

Have a great week!

#######################################################
Visit the subscriber Bonus page for fr.ee reports and other subscriber-only:

Subscribers Only

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please recommend it to your friends. Also if you have any tips of your own, questions or comments, please leave a comment at the online version of this newsletter: http://ezseonews.com

Any tips or questions & answers I print in this newsletter will also be put up on the web version of the newsletter with a link to your site if you want it. That’s extra free traffic for your site as well as an incoming link to your site.

The contents of this newsletter is copyright 2009 Andrew Williams.  If you want to republish any of the articles, you must get permission from the author.

This newsletter disclaims all responsibility for the advertising copy or the product advertised. You cannot rely on the fact that the newsletter has examined the product or recommends or endorses the product, unless it clearly says that it has, when you make your decision whether or not to purchase the product or interact with the advertiser. You are advised to do your own investigation before buying. Additionally, this newsletter may accept articles that we do not write or investigate the accuracy of and for which we may receive direct or indirect benefit or compensation. We specifically disclaim any responsibility for the content of such copy.

#######################################################

Related Articles

• EzSEO Newsletter # 246 -   In this issue: 1. How an article killed conversions 2. Wordpress Shortcodes 3. Success Story
• ezSEO Newsletter #238 - In this issue: 1. Adrian Ling's New Script 2. Science of Getting Rich 3. What am I working on? 4. T
• EzSEO Newsletter # 236 -   In this issue: 1. Creating Wordpress Templates in seconds 2. Moving a Wordpress Blog to the R
• EzSEO Newsletter # 275 - In this issue: 1. Competition is not what it seems... 2. FOUR Recommended Strategies for Starting yo
• EzSEO Newsletter # 269 - In this issue: 1. Web Content Studio Is NOT... 2. Sell ice to Eskimos - Part III 3. Annoying Wordpre