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.

So now onto the good news!

Got one of these in my email today:

Dear advertiser,

We are writing to let you know that your Google AdWords account has been disabled due to one or more serious violations of our advertising policies related to Landing Page and Site Quality. As a result, your ads will no longer run through the Google AdWords system and we are unable to accept advertising from you in the future. Please note that future accounts you open will also be disabled.

What ghastly things have I done to deserve this tragic fate? Well, the ONLY campaigns I EVER ran in that account were for 2 Amazon affiliate stores that I had written about earlier. One of those I had bought and know that the previous owner ran Adwords campaigns for (hey, I knew why he was getting rid of it and knew what I was buying, as I explained before) and the other is one that I made myself. I only ran the campaigns for a short time before they got ‘google slapped’, but I was going to turn them off anyway, as they were not profitable and I was doing better with organic traffic.

A google slap for a thin affiliate site I can understand. But a permanent ban from Google? Seems a little excessive. Again, there were never any other campaigns in that account, which I opened around the beginning of this year, but never used until August. I also have two other accounts, which do not appear to be banned and are connected by an MCC account, which includes client accounts (campaigns for local small businesses). Only the client campaigns are currently running in the MCC and I’ll have to keep an eye on whether they keep running. The only other campaign I’ve personally had running in those accounts was an old Clickbank campaign which I turned off about a month ago. Might see if I can reactivate that one. Another funny thing I noticed – a couple of campaigns that had been google slapped a year ago and got zero impressions on for months have been getting a trickle of impressions again after months of inactivity. I have no idea why. I think I’ll delete all those slapped campaigns anyhow, before I get these accounts banned also, if anything they’re the ones I would have expected to be hit for. I’m not sure I’d be able to create new campaigns in them anyway, will have to try. As you can tell, its not like I’ve been doing much with Adwords this whole year anyway, but this still complicates things for the future, if I cant run campaigns for local business clients.

One other reason for the ban hammer may have been that I didn’t have that account added to my MCC, which technically it should have been. Who knows. From the experience of others its useless trying to argue or even ask why the ban occured. Chasing it up will likely simply get my other accounts disabled, if their days aren’t numbered already.

In a previous post I wrote about recently buying some Amazon Affiliate (or Associate, as they call it) stores to play with. Since then I’ve built one more and have been working on PPC campaigns for the sites. And I quickly hit yet another problem – Amazon’s tracking absolutely sucks. Actually, its absolutely non-existent. There is no way to pass subids from your site to Amazon so you can tell which keywords in your Adwords or other PPC campaign are converting, ie generating sales. Driving traffic blind like that you are guaranteed to be wasting money on non-converting keywords, instead of pushing more traffic to the converting ones. Not a situation any self-respecting affiliate marketer would want to be found in.

Well, just as I hit this little hurdle my friend and fellow affiliate marketer Net-Entrepreneur emailed me with a solution. He’s come up with a simple step-by-step method to add subid click tracking for Amazon Affiliates at the keyword level and then laid it all out to help out fellow AM’ers.

So if you’ve found yourself in the above situation, head on over to Niche Fever and grab his report and the other resources it comes with. Without it you’re most certainly leaving money on the table! And don’t worry, there’s really not much more to it then some copy-and-pasting, and you’ll be pretty much walked through the method by the hand.

Last, but not least – reader’s of this blog get a 10% discount, just use coupon code muaffiliate10 and you’re good to go. Enjoy and make some money!

Recently I bought three fully built Amazon affiliate stores. It is often said that the secret to success in Affiliate Marketing is to keep testing and trying new things and when you find what works keep diversifying your income into new areas. Hence I bought the sites to diversify, but even more so to learn from the experience. What I wanted to learn is the following:

- Learn to spot opportunities in this area. My experience running 3 stores should help me better spot and think of ways to make these types of stores or similar work. There are better ways to work with affiliate stores then Amazon or the eBay Partner Network, but Amazon is an easy place to start.
- Whats involved in actually buying an existing site like that? As expected completely unexpected hitches came up. Next time I’ll be much better equipped to make a cost/benefit analysis on a similar purchase. For example, not surprisingly, the process took far longer than I thought it would. Thankfully the seller was very helpful along the way.
- I wanted to take a few of the features of these stores apart, so I can use them on other sites.
- I want to use the sites to learn about the SEO side of things. I’ve been pretty much focused on PPC until now, through affiliate networks and working direct with advertisers.

In this post I just want to go over the second point above – what was actually involved in buying the sites and transferring all its components to my relevant accounts. Here’s the rundown:

1. The domain name registration was transferred to me, which was fairly simply as we both had GoDaddy accounts, so the seller just pushed the domains into my account.
2. Transferring the physical site. FTPing the files across is a no-brainer, but where I hit a slight hitch was transferring the databases. The seller gave me access to his hosting account and I used phpMyAdmin to export all the databases and FTP them to my machine. Then in my hosting account I had to import the tables into my database. The databases were for the Wordpress blogs which each site came with. So at this point I had to modify the Wordpress install to point at the new databases. Thankfully this worked without any surprises. This is were I half expected things to go wrong, so I was pretty relieved.
3. And this was were we hit a hurdle neither of us had foreseen. The sites have Amazon aStore blocks on them. Unfortunately Amazon does not offer any way to export your store or move it to a new account and its certainly not as simple as just changing the Amazon ID to mine, as I had hoped. At first I thought I’d have to regenerate the stores from scratch in my Amazon account. There are a number of ways generate these – for example you can add items one by one or you can add whole categories. And you need to configure it’s features (colours, size, layout etc) to suit your site. These stores had been created item by item… and there were pages and pages of these. This looked like it was going to take a while. The seller had not foreseen this issue either, but fortunately he was able to simply give me his Amazon account with the three aStores in them. I then just changed all the info in the account to mine and voila. Phew. I was damn grateful at this point.
3. The sites have dozens of Adsense blocks on them. The blocks are specific to an account and have to be generated in the account. It was not as simple as just changing the id in each to my own. This was tedious and time consuming. There were also some other affiliate links and ad blocks to change over in the blogs.
4. The sites also had Google Analytics code on every page, which I also had to go through and change to mine, after adding the sites to my account and verifying them.
5. Changing over the contact forms to my email addresses. As I had moved the hosting I had to create new email accounts for each domain (ie support@myamazonsite.com etc).
6. Likewise the Wordpress blogs needed the contact info changed over to mine, including the info in certain plugins.
7. I changed the AWeber email list forms on each site to my own. This included creating the new lists on AWeber, with the subscription confirmation emails etc and generating the form for each. Then I took the form code from my new form and modified the existing form on the site.
8. Last but not least, once I had the sites setup, Chrome and Firefox 3 both flagged exploits in two of the sites. They were flagged as ‘attack sites’, because they had been hacked (XSS exploits most likely or someone had captured the FTP login details from the old owners machine) and malicious code with hidden iFrames had been inserted. The seller had no idea about this problem. Thankfully simply removing the malicious code was enough to fix this. I was more worried that this was an SQL injection and the code was being rendered from the database. The browsers are no longer reporting a problem. I had added the sites to my Google Webmaster Tools, were the problem was also reported. I submitted them for a re-evaluation and its ok now.

So there you go. I certainly got the learning process I was hoping for and then some.