So I’ve made myself another Wordpress Affiliate Shop. This is my second one besides the one I use at dogsrule.us. It is a modified free theme as opposed to the other witch is pretty much custom. It’s probably a pretty ugly hack but it works and looks nice, I think.

Wordpress is so easy to use it should be a staple for any affiliate. Again, this one just uses the “Optional Excerpts” for the products and the full post is used for the detailed description of each. I also used the folding categories plugin widget for the menu.
Gives it a more professional look I think.

All of the content is just newegg items that I’m using for demo purposes. There are no aff links. In fact, most of the links probably don’t work. It’s pretty easily customizable too which is nice if you wanted to use it for something other than tech.
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Submitting your website to directories can increase traffic to your website and give you better exposure in search engines. It will help raise your search engine rankings and natural search engine traffic can increase significantly. This is due in part, to several or even hundreds of websites linking to yours. Below is a list of 550 free Directories. The more you can submit too the better. You could always hire a submission service to do it for you too. Me, I’m too cheap.

I just submit to 10 or 20 a day and before you know it, you’ve submitted to hundreds or even thousands. One thing I would do is set up an email address just for this purpose.
I have one I set up on one of my hosting packages, it’s simply submissions@someemail.com. That way any request for verification or any garbage that sometimes comes submitting goes there. It’s all in one place and doesn’t clog up my important email inboxes.

Of course, there’s no guarantee your site will be accepted into every directory. So the more you submit, the better.

So on to the list…

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I stumbled across this cool tool over at wordze during my web travels today. I’m not sure how new it is but since it only goes back to January 8th I assume it’s relatively new. Either way it’s new to me.

The tool lets you download Google Trends top 100 searches for every hour, of every day from January 8th to current. It seems to be almost real time too. Within an hour or so..
Here is a sample of the top searches from this morning.

Keyword Rank Date & Time

• chicken and waffles #87 2008-02-24 07:10:03
• chicken and waffles #88 2008-02-24 06:10:02
• chicken and waffles #49 2008-02-24 00:10:01
• chicken and waffles #80 2008-02-24 01:10:01
• chicken and waffles #58 2008-02-24 03:10:02
• poltergeist #13 2008-02-24 00:10:01
• poltergeist #39 2008-02-24 04:10:01
• poltergeist curse #53 2008-02-24 00:10:01
• poltergeist curse #89 2008-02-24 01:10:01

There are apparently some hungry, haunted people out there.

There is one problem I have found with it though. They send it to you in an Excel file.
That isn’t a necessarily a problem other than the fact that the database contains 111,000+ search terms, and anyone who uses excel knows that it can only handle 65,000 rows. That issue is overcome easily enough using one of my favorite tools, Microsoft Access.

I just change the file extension from .xls to .txt, import the data and viola, a search-able list of the top 100 searches for every hour, of every day for the last two months! It’s a really neat tool that you can use to find that hot new product to that everyone is searching for.

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262 Links to Affiliate Marketing Resources

In my travels through the affiliate making web, I’ve come across a lot of lists. Everyone seems to have a list of their favorite tools. So here is my list. It’s not a list of my favorites, but a compilation of the other lists I’ve found. Some of these tools are free, some are not.

I’ve never used the bulk of these so always do your due diligence when deciding whether or not to pay for a service. Don’t come screaming at me if you sign up for something and are not happy or feel you’ve been scammed. There are no affiliate links here (well just 1) so I gain nothing by posting these.

There are too many sources to list but the major source of this list was the wickedfire forum and some other miscellaneous blogs that I can’t honestly remember.

So click on the read more link to see the whole big long list. Enjoy!
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I’ve seen a lot of the affiliate blogs post about how wordpress is a must have for affiliates. And while I agree, the lack of actual “Storefront” templates for wordpress is a downside.

I see a lot of affiliate sites that just pick a template and go with it. Although that may work for them I always hated how they still looked Blog-like. So with that I went on a hunt for something to use for my site. I’ve used Joomla and OSCommerce in the past and while they’re nice and all, they a big PITA to use…at least in my opinion. OScommerce doesn’t even really offer an option to use it as an affiliate shop, at least that I was able to find. So I gave up on those.

My search for a decent wordpress template didn’t really yield any better results so I was left with one choice… To make my own! So here it is, you can see the working site at dogsrule.us. I’m still adding products to the site and may make a few tweaks to the design here and there but it otherwise complete. Somehow over the last week, I’ also gained a PR2 on the site, with Zero back links. People say PR doesn’t really mean anything but it’s still cool as far as I’m concerned.

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