CTO, PHP Programmer, Affiliate Marketer & IT Consultant
There’s been talk lately that the Google Panda loves keyword-rich subdomains, so I decided to test this on my coupon website.
Aside from a WordPress blog, the pages on the coupon website are all driven from a coupon database. I use a system I wrote myself, although you can just as easily use a service like For Me to Coupon.
I’m probably going to ruffle some feathers with this post, but I have to disagree with item #6 on 10 Most Audacious Typosquatting Cases Ever
Search Engine People claim that an affiliate who registered typo’s of the Lands’ End domain, landsend.com, where defrauding Land’s End
by redirecting the traffic through their affiliate link.
First of all, how is this done? It’s actually quite simple.
I know a lot of my posts are rather technical, but this one is a bit different. I’m going to show you an affiliate website that anyone can build, and walk you through exactly how I did it.
First, you need a niche. I’ve covered this before, How to Choose an Affiliate Offer to Promote. For this site, it was all about a love (some may say obsession) I have with Christmas and the movie, A Christmas Story.
I met with A Christmas Story House at the recent ShareASale ThinkTank, which boosted this project to the top of my list. (Hear that, merchants? When you meet with affiliates face-to-face, you become a priority to them). What resulted from this meeting is Buy Leg Lamps.
There was a Tweet that was going around today:
[blackbirdpie id=”60389972049543168″]
I had a need to get some data that wasn’t available in the merchant’s datafeed, and since I wasn’t going to be putting a huge burden on the merchant’s site (ie: if you scrape, be nice*) I decided to write a little scraper to do so.
In this script, I’m using all, pure PHP functions: cURL, Document Object Model, SimpleXML. By using PHP’s built-in functions, the script will be as portable and efficient as possible.