I’ve posted quite a few different times on adding a unique description to your WordPress categories.  The last time I spoke about it was here.

The most recent update from my journey in using this technique on one of these sites is that I discovered that when your category gets spread over more than one page, the description gets repeated as well.

At the moment Google is just ignoring this as it’s only a few of my categories that have been affected. However, as the site grows so will the duplicated content – and I’m not at all comfortable with that sort of thing on my sites if I can possibly avoid it.

Just (Another) Simple Line of Code

A very kind friend of mine helped me out with this as it’s several million light years beyond my abilities.  If you replace the little snippet that makes your theme display the description with this one: -

<?php if (strpos($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"], “/page/”) === FALSE) { print(category_description()); } ?>

That should do the trick nicely. It certainly worked on my site.

Why Bother Kirsty?

Most likely Google will continue to ignore it for quite some time, so I don’t think this was an urgent fix.  However, the way I like to think about a duplicate content penalty is a large (and possibly menacing) robot type chappie standing with a set of scales with which to measure my content. Should the Djinn of Dupe Content plant his thumb too heavily on the aforementioned scales it’s penalty time, the symptoms of which are an unpleasant “cardiac arrest” type shape on my beloved site stats.

Anything I can do nice and early to avoid a cardiac arrest like sensation around my own heart department seems like a great way to spend a quick five minutes in any working day.

When I was starting out, I very stupidly thought you already had to be driving volume in order to ask for more commission.  Upon reflection, that’s patently ridiculous and I was a bloody idiot.

Waiting until you’re already driving thousands or tens of thousands of pounds in sales a month is the wrong way round.  That leaves you in a position where you’ve most likely exhausted a lot of avenues to ramp up volume.

Lets face it, most merchants / affiliate managers / agencies don’t tend to pay extra for sales volume they’re already getting, the rotters.

So If You’re Going To Work Hard On A Site….

Drop your local friendly affiliate manager a line.  Here’s what I usually say (now that I remember to ask BEFORE I spend hundreds of hours promoting someone!)

Hi Insert Managers Name Here,

My name’s Kirsty McCubbin and I run, Insert Site Name Here.  As we’re about to invest significant time and marketing resources into the site I thought it might be worth asking if you guys ever offer higher commission teirs for more volume?

I’ve always responded very well to targets so I thought it was worth querying this with you now in case there is something we can set up for me to aim at with the site, and a goal to keep me motivated through all the hard work that lies ahead!

Big up love and affiliate hugs and kisses,

Kirsty

There, that wasn’t so hard now was it?? (OK maybe I don’t sign off like that – but I’d like to!)

When To Ask

As soon as possible really, although doing it before you’ve even built a site may be jumping the gun ever so slightly. Also, if a merchant already has some commission tiers in place I tend to wait until I’m climbing up them a little, and then hit them up before I make that final push to generate even more sales.

But I’m Only A Small Affiliate?

That doesn’t matter – if you don’t ask you don’t get. Inferiority complexes get you nowhere. A special deal between you and a merchant is great motivation to keep pushing for those pennies.

If You’re Already Driving Good Sales and Don’t Have a Way Of Ramping Up

It’s worth testing some of your traffic with another merchant. Don’t be put off by lower commission rates, some merchants will convert better and earn you more money.

You can then use the data you’ve gathered to either ask the new merchant you’ve identified for more money by letting them know how much volume you think you can drive to them (you’ll be able to work this out from the EPCs of the test you’ve done) or go to your existing merchant and ask if they can offer an enhanced rate to keep you. No, it won’t always work – but you’ll be amazed at how often it does… and not just for people driving huge volumes.

It’s Never A Rude Question…

The worst that’ll happen is that someone will say no, or ignore you completely. The last time I checked my affiliate medical dictionary it wasn’t a terminal wound. Should you get a rebuffal, just use it as motivation to drive those sales to beautifully high levels… and then send them all to their competitors

One of my readers brought this plugin to my attention recently (thanks Chris). Basically, there is a plugin that will override the function in WordPress that’ll strip out all but the most basic tags from your category descriptions. Allow HTML in Category Descriptions means you can add a nice content unit or similar and take advantage of and monetise any traffic your blog categories may be getting.

This Plugin Hasn’t Been Tested by Me!

Usually I’ll thoroughly test anything before I mention it on the blog, but I’m very short on time at the moment and it’ll likely take me several weeks to have a play with it.  I think this plugin could be a juicy one so I didn’t want to make y’all wait to hear about it.

But I Think I Can Put It To Very Good Use If It Works Well…

As you all might know, I add descriptions to my WordPress categories to get a chance at some additional search terms.  I also use the Thumbnails for Excerpts plugin to display nice product images at a category level so visitors hitting those pages have something to browse through.

It’s A Good Idea, But It Looks A Bit Pants!

You can see an example of this on my mens underwear site, here.  It’s not the smoothest looking solution in the world, but as I was putting out so many posts at the individual product or collection level for this site I thought it’d be a shame not to take the time to write a few hundred words and jam them into the category descriptions to try and get some extra traffic in. This has been very successful on Blokes Undies and I now rank very well for most terms around my categories.

The only issue is that the categories have a relatively high bounce rate. Previously I’ve always just figured it’s worth having the traffic going to those sections till I work out a solution. If this plugin does what it says on the tin I think I might have found it! I think it will create a very nice, integrated looking blog structure that’s very efficient with no page going to waste for either SEO purposes or traffic channelling.

I’ll probably try it out in the next few weeks. I’ll let you guys take a look when I’m done (I should really tidy those category images as well – I’m sure we can have them looking better than that!).

If you try this plugin please let me know how you get on

Hey guys, I’ve been tinkering with the Scheduled Post Shift timestamp plugin for the last few weeks so thought’d I’d share it on here.

This plugin will take the timestamp of your oldest post and make it look like your latest post.  I was a little concerned about this plugin (I was a little concerned Google might take umbrage at such tactics) so I tested it on two older sites of mine that have bags of content but have been sadly neglected for the past year or so.

Both sites had an upturn in traffic, one around 15% the other around 30%.  I’ve been running the plugin on one of them for around 3 months and no signs of anything other than positive effects.

If any of you guys try it out do please let me know how you went with it as my two sites aren’t really enough of a sample to definitively say this plugin has a positive effect.

Happy blogging

In honour of the fact I know a number of UK affiliates will have been “networking to the max” at the Buy.at Speakeasy last night I have decided to help out all those poor delicate souls by publishing my very own cleansing hangover cure.

This should help rehydrate, calm those churny tummies, and make all the affiliates who have partied just a wee bit too hard at the free bar feel a little bit better again!

Kirsty’s Affiliate Hangover Remedy

Ingredients (based on using a 2 mug tea infuser):-

Half a Lemon

Half a Lime

1 – 2 tsp of freshly sliced ginger.

Boiling water.

Optional: 2 Hedex Extra to serve.

Instructions: -

• Chop lemon into 3 or 4 slices whilst attempting to stay upright. Wonder why the knife sounds so damned loud. Place lemon into teapot.
• Repeat with lime, and try to ignore the flashbacks from the evening before. Do so with only one eye open if it helps you aim the knife more effectively.
• Add your chopped ginger.
• Pour boiling water into the pot, leave to infuse for 5 minutes. Use the time to ponder if those last 5 rounds of Sambuccas really were the hilariously good idea they seemed.
• Serve in the drinking vessel of your choice.
• Repeat recipe until you feel human again.

My recommended method of intake is to have 2 mugs of this, let it rest in the tummy for 5 to 10 minutes, and then complete the hangover cure with a monster bacon sarnie with lashings of sauce. Allow bacon to do its stuff, before treating your poor punished body to some more cleansing tea for dessert.

This recipe will also work if you use a mug to infuse your ingredients and can also be used in non affiliate hangover situations. These include, colds, flu, tummy upsets, and when you’re just feeling golly gosh darned sluggish and under the weather. A great detox that’ll leave you feeling lovely inside and out

Now don’t say I never try to do anything to enhance your health and wellbeing. This blog is also about the affiliate mind and soul don’t you know. Well, either that or I’m burning time instead of working again. You decide!!

“Arrggh!!!  F***ing WordPress!!!  Why won’t it just leave my damned formatting be????”

Sound familiar? Then you may be suffering from a well known affiliate affliction known as “WordPress Formatting Rage”.  Commonly experienced right after you’ve spent an age carefully positioning text or images to create a landing page that is the very epitome of perfection – right up until you hit the save button.  At this point WordPress’ WYSIWYG editor code cleanup thingamyjig springs into action like a lithe gazelle and proclaims “Oh ho!! Look at all those line breaks. We don’t want those cluttering up the place do we?”

The result is often less than pleasing and results in a frustrating few minutes spent laboriously re-entering those line breaks (It just must have been a mistake after all. What system would be silly enough to remove them?).  This then brings us back to the first line of the post with a few extra profanities added to reflect the increase in general frustration levels.

Fortunately There is a Fix

Tiny MCE Advanced (download & more info here)

Simply install this wonderous little plugin, and select the “Stop removing my damned well line breaks” option which is located in the big red box on the plugin admin page.

You can then enjoy the bliss that is being able to add line breaks wherever you please as well as having access to some other cool additions such as emoticons, search and replace functionality whilst editing,  support for tables, and heaps more.

“Ahhhh…. that’s better!!”

Google Adplanner has been around for a little while now, but I don’t see it widely spoken about in forums as a niche research tool so I thought it was worth flagging here as a Quick Tip.

If you’re researching a new niche this interesting tool can tell you how much traffic a top ranked site is getting as well as key visitor demographics, other sites visited, and keyword data.  Definately handy if you are interested in ascertaining just how much traffic volume there might be around your chosen niche area and perhaps also a way to ascertain potential earning power if you use it in combination with network EPC data.  Great to have a wee nosey at how your competitors are doing too

As for how accurate the data is?   This blog post by Kevin Hague, who co-owns Petplanet.co.uk and Greenfingers.com gives insight into how he rates it in comparison to the Hitwise data and his thoughts on its accuracy levels (quite good to be succinct!).

Check out the Google Ad Planner here and do post back comments re: what you think of it. Interested to hear other people’s experiences and how the data can be used by affiliates!

A while back I shared how I’d discovered you could create descriptions for categories, thereby giving those often useful resources a chance at ranking.

Having FINALLY gotten around to getting some content created for the categories on the website I intend to use this handy dandy little tip on, I was moderately horrified to discover that WordPress will use these descriptions as link titles (well my theme does anyway).  That sort of volume of text showing up when someone hovers over one of your links is very unappealing as is the thought of how Google may react to 3,000+ words of text on every page of the site that isn’t always visible and is the same on each page!

So, if you decide to create nice unique content on your category page and don’t want mahoosive chunks of text flying all over your site, here’s how to fix it!

Just A Simple Edit…

One file controls all this hoo ha, and you’ll find it in: WP-Includes > category-template.php

Simply open this file and do a search for the following text snippet: ‘use_desc_for_title’ => 1

Change the 1 to a 0 thusly: ‘use_desc_for_title’ => 0

Save your changes.

And the pesky link titles should be gone!

That’s A Fascinating Looking File…

And I’m pretty sure it’ll do lots of cool things which I will investigate and report back upon in due course.  However, I might just leave it alone for now as I can do without accidently turning my site upside down, inside out, and back to front without knowing how or why I’ve blinking well done it in the run up to Christmas!!

Oh, and do take a back up of that little file before you change it, just in case you have an accident.  I’m way too good at editing the original file and accidently deleting a single (but crucial) character somewhere along the way whereupon our neighbours hear something close to the following: -

“Arrghhh, ohhhh, Noooooo!!!! F**K!!”

Then the line my long suffering and lovely husband is all too familiar with;

“Duncan!  This f**king WordPress has f**cking well stuffed up the site again.  Get it Fixed!!”

“What were you doing right before this happened, my love?”  He will say, mild mannered as always.

“Oooh… Arrghhhh, I dunno!  Fix the chuffing thing, quick!”

*Ahem* so yeah, I hope you guys find this tip useful!  Particularly the bit about backing up your files first.  You don’t all have Duncan sitting in your office to swear at and make it all nice and functional for you again should you make a small error

Greetings copy and paste fans!  Here’s something I am messing around with this week – I want to see if I can get my categories to rank on one of my blogs.  The reason I’m trying to do this is that I’ve realised they have created a good shopping resource, gathering together hard to find products which I am reviewing and categorising as part of the broader content strategy on the site.

I have already found the categories ranking in a few different places without any input from me so I figure what the hell.  I won’t lose anything and I’ll only learn something!  With that in mind, i’ve decided to create some unique text in each one describing the type of products within them.

To Do This is A Simple Cut and Paste Job

1. Go to “Categories” which you will find located under “Posts”.

2. Add in your desired description in the appropriate box.  Basic HTML markup will work, so you can make your text look all nice

3. Locate the file controlling your categories – most likely archive.php

4. Pop this code in wherever you want your description to turn up: -

<?php $description=category_description(); echo $description;  ?>

And You’re Done!

I’ve popped mine in after the post and gone through the category page titles using my SEO plugin and given them a quick optimise as well.  I think I’m going to try to make the description a nice robost 250 to 300 words.  I’ll be interested to see if I get any additional traffic from this.  I’ve already fiddled around and created thumbnails of each post image contained within the category so in theory it should be an attractive page for users.

As always, I’ll let y’all know how I get on!

Yesterday Adam from Dead Good Undies alerted me to a handy dandy wee tool that I didn’t even know existed.  I’ve not seen too much about it myself, so my apologies to those of you for whom this is old news.

LinkedTube is an almost painfully clever tool that will allow you to create links from YouTube videos.  You can add a button with the URL of your choice plus 3 different bits of unique selling text to any YouTube video.  Adam let me know about it as he’s aware I quite often use videos related to products to create content for my site.  I think this is amazing as it gives me the ability to have more of a crack at monetising those pages with appropriate affiliate links and calls to action.

Allow Me To Demonstrate…

I’ve selected a beautiful video from the annals of the Affiliate Future trip to Barbados last year.  Here you will see Jlil grooving away like the funkster he really is and entertaining his hordes of late night Karaoke buddies with his rendition of American Pie.  As you can see, I’ve realised that his singing talents will inspire other would-be rock stars to buy some of their very own home equipment and created a nice link to the Argos site on there.

The only issue I had using this is that their HTML generator seemed to produce code twice which mucked up the page on the blog and I had to strip out the excess. Not sure why that’s happening! However, it is a very very interesting little tool and I can forsee it being of great use to me when I write video related content.

Whats that?  Yes… you can all see quite clearly I was very jealous of all those who have just returned from Barbados! Pass the rum