The Micro Affiliate

UPDATE 21/1: Ok, the new affiliate program is finally up and running – use coupon code F8801F657C to get 25% off when you get the WFReview Plugin for Wordpress!

UPDATE 10/1: WFReview has a new owner, who is currently transferring the affiliate program from C2M to his own. If you get the plugin via this site you’ll get 25% off, but you’ll have to wait until the new affiliate program is live, hopefully in the next couple of days – I’ll post the discount coupon code then. Btw, the new owner is an insane programmer and the author of the Ruby Cookbook out on O’Reilly. His name is Lucas Carlson and the updates he is working on for the next version of WFReview are going to take it to a whole new level and then some. The update will include content spinning, themes, the ability to sort posts by price or overall ratings and thats not even a tenth of it. So get your drool on for this release.

There is a number of review site plugins for Wordpress out there, but none really match the power and flexibility of WFReview. WFReview works with CSV files, allowing you to easily import product info into a Wordpress install, typically for a review site, but there are other possible uses well, such as a Local Directory.

The plugin allows you to easily work with the feeds provided by networks such as Shareasale or LinkShare, which host hundreds of affiliate programs. If you’re a member of one of those networks you can login, grab the product feeds as CSV files and import them into your site, typically simply using the Product Description as the review. You can then use WFReview to generate comments for all the reviews, with the comments containing “customer ratings” for various features of the products you’re “reviewing”. For example the appearance, durability and feature set of a digital camera. You can upload as few or as many products as you like and you can even schedule them to be added to the site over time. Alternatives the plugin can set random dates from a given time period in the past to add a bit of perception shaping.

If you’re a member of the Amazon Associates program you probably know that Amazon doesn’t provide the kind of interface you get with say Shareasale, were you can simply save product lists/feeds as CSV files. Unless you have a scraping script or want to waste some time manually creating the CSV files you’re bit stuck.

Here’s a step by step solution if you want to be able to leverage the power of WFReview with Amazon products but dont have the programming knowledge to write your own scraping tool. Grab these tools and follow this process and you’re set, no technical knowledge required.

The no-brainer Amazon scraper you can use is called Optimal Product Finder (not an aff link, although the WFReview one is). Its not free, unfortunately and at $79 a bit overpriced. Use coupon code WS10 to get $10 off. I’m sure there are other similar tools out there, you may even find a free one. Or you could get someone to code one for you on Elance or something. If you’re planning on doing more scraping or any other tasks that can you can use a bot for I’d recommend you use the awesome Ubot Studio to build your scraper. This tool ain’t cheap, but in this case its easily worth it. It uses a Visual Scripting Language, so you need no programming knowledge whatsover to create your bots. This tool is insane. The price is $249, but you can use the coupon ‘muaffiliate‘ to get $50, so you’ll get it for $199.

For the rest of the post I’m going to assume you’re using Optimal Product Finder. Its the most basic solution requiring the least work.

You should already be a member of the Amazon Associates program and you’ll need to enter your ID into OPF. You’ll also need an AWS API Key and the Secret API Key from Amazon. You can get these by signing up for a Product Advertising account. Its free to join and you can just put Optimal Product Finder as the application you’ll use it for. You need this in order to access Amazon’s product datafeeds using their API. Grab the Keys from the “Manage Your Account” page and enter those Keys into OPF. OPF comes with an instructions PDF so I won’t go into what it does here, but there is one more step you need to do to get things rolling. Amazon change the IDs for the Browse Nodes in their datafeed from time to time. These are described in an XML file that OPF needs to load in to know which categories and subcategories to display in its menus. The XML file you’ll get initially is likely out of date.
I got the correct latest ID’s here. The OPF instructions give a second source, where you’ll have to pay a donation. I tried doing that, but didn’t find what I was looking for. Open up the RootBrowseNodes.xml file that came with OPF – its in the BrowseNodes directory – and copy and paste in any IDs that you notice are different.

You should now be set to grab your Amazon products. You may find your scrape returns thousands of products, which may take a while to scrape, so be patient. If thats not what you want you may want to try just getting the Best Sellers, Most Wished and Latest in the category you’re after. One approach is to go for volume, throwing in thousands of products and getting as many sites up as possible. Another is to get the the 10 best sellers and 10 most wished, write actual reviews of them (I’m a slow writer, so I prefer to save time and outsource) and legerage your now original content and ‘real’ revues to build trust.

Once you’ve got your data and saved it to a CSV (make sure you save it as a comma delimited CSV!) you may want to open up the file and check its all in order. The Description field often comes with a “Amazon Description” heading in it, which I prefer to remove. Add any Custom Fields for your posts here too – just add a column into the CSV named the same as the Custom Field for each one. Its pretty much good to go into your site as is though. So just go to the WFReview screen in your WP install and load in the CSV file. At this stage you’ll need some basic HTML knowledge to lay out the data in your review. Ie lay out the description (which is your ‘review’), the manufacturer, the image, model number etc how you want them to appear in your review post. You’ll probably want to add some buttons here too linking to Amazon with your affiliate link, something like “Read More”, “Buy Now” or “Visit Site Now”. I also add an Amazon logo under “Seller”. If you dont know how to throw down some div tags to format the fields or are feeling particularly lazy, but bought WFReview via this blog, contact me here and I’ll give you my template, as well as some buttons to use with it. Import the data, set up your Categories if you need to (the Manufacturer works fine as the Category, assuming you’re not reviewing a single brand), and you’re ready to generate some comments for your reviews. Set up the review parameters, eg Size, Stylishness and Functions, and press go. WFReview does a good job of guiding you through the process and it has its own support forums, but feel free to contact me if you need help with anything like setting up the cron job or even the whole process.

Thats about it. You should now have your blog populated with products, reviews and even some reader feedback. Promote it via your favorite method, rinse and repeat.

Oh, one more thing. If you also need a theme for your review site, a free one available is aWickedReview. The theme is by ‘radio’ from WickedFire and he is the author of the auction2post plugin (not an aff link, I just like the theme), which you can use it to create eBay stores on a Wordpress site. I have not used it, but have heard good things about. If you want to thank him for the free review theme, buy his plugin. Here’s what the theme looks like. Note that its currently limited to 5 products and if you need to add Pages (like TOS, Privacy, etc) you’ll need to hack the theme. I’ve actually added a second WP install in a sub directory when I used this theme for a review page, so that the main install has all the content and links straight to the review page from there.