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

Greetings fans of affiliate quick tips!  This week I have been mostly fiddling around trying to reduce duplicate content on my blogs (again).  The reason i’ve been having to do this is that I have reorganised my increasingly out of control category structures on sites such as my new offering Blokes Undies.  I created lovely sub categories to help organise my content better.

To prevent any unfortunate duplicate content issues I decided it would be better if my categories didn’t contain full post content.  Instead of listing posts in full, there is now an excerpt and a list of post titles like this example here in my new hosiery department on Lingerie Brands.

How To Do This

In the file that controls your category, which will be called something like category.php or archive.php simply look for the following bit of code: -

<?php the_content(__(’Read more’));?>

Simply swap it for: -

<?php the_excerpt(__(’Read more’));?>

And you’re set!

I’m also experimenting with plugins that might give me an option to create thumbnails of images associated with individual posts and display them at the category level to make my new page structure more inviting to users.

If anyone has any clever excerpt related tricks, do please pop them in the comments field and help make this “quick tip” more useful!

Christmas Greetings fellow affiliates and affiliate fans.  I remembered about a little bit of code I formerly used quite frequently to let me dynamically add data on which keywords were converting to sale when using a single landing page for a broad keyword set.

Php Echos in a Nutshell…

Are an incredibly easy and quick to use way to pass a variable (such as a search term) into any part of a webpage you desire.  You can use it to pass data from your url directly into your affiliate link or to make your landing page look instantly relevant to the keyword your visitor searched on.

Clear As Mud?  Don’t Worry, Here’s a Quick Guide!

1. Getting Your Landing Page Ready

It’s very simple to get your landing page ready to work alongside the php code.  Just develop your page as normal and when you’re finished save it with a .php file extension.

2. Inserting Your Code

This is a straightforward cut and paste job.  Our small but perfectly formed insertion is the piece of code below:-

<?php echo $_GET['ref'];?>

All you have to do is paste that wherever you want to be able to dynamically change your page content.  For example, in an affiliate url thusly: -

http://clkuk.tradedoubler.com/click?p=0000&a=000000&g=000000&epi=<?php echo $_GET['ref'];?>

You can also put it in something like a page header element, or in anchor text.

3. Passing The Variable To Your Page

Sounds like the hard bit, but really it isn’t!  All you have to do is add a little bit onto your landing page URL and then stick in whatever data you want to be placed on the page.  Essentially, it enables you to create a unique URL for as many variables as you like whilst only using a single landing page.

Just add the code below to the end of your url:-

?&ref=

This creates a URL that looks something like this: -

http://www.yourlandingpage.com/index.php?&ref=Whatever The Hell You Want

You can see this in action at an old landing page of mine which still miraculously generates the odd commission for me, despite having been abandoned for 2 years: -

http://www.cheapdvdrentals.co.uk/index.php?&ref=HELLO AFFILIATE STUFF FANS

If you hover over any of the “Visit Site” links, you’ll see my affiliate links have whatever is added to the URL after “&ref=”

Use this in combination with my recent thoughts on concatenation, and you’ll be able to create a fully tracked PPC campaign in no time!

NB – There is a way to pass this variable through “cloaked” affiliate links, I found the code on my hard drive earler… it’s just something I never ended up using as I changed the way my business operated.  If anyone wants to add this to the post, please do leave a comment.

Got A Handy Tip You Want To Share?

If you have a time saving tip of any sort related to the wonderful world of computers which you’d like to share, please contact me.  I’ll gladly give anyone who sends something useful in a lovely backlink from the blog to say thanks!

Bit of a new feature in the blog.  I’ve been meaning to do something about all the various wee tips and tricks that help me manage all my day to day tasks more quickly.  Every time I’ve thought about it, I couldn’t quite work out how to structure the post – it’d be mahoosive.

I’ve solved this issue by deciding to split it into a series of mini posts.  First up is the saviour of all affiliates…

The Concatenation Feature in Excel

For those of you who do not know, Excel has a feature that allows you to take the content of cells within any row, stick them together in any order, and pop them in a single cell all nice and stuck together. I personally use this feature to create large keyword lists around set search term variations, to create urls, and also for tasks such as creating large lists of links to be pasted into websites.

To help out, I’ve popped some screenshots below to illustrate what I’m talking about!!

OK, so we start with the contents of some adjacent cells we’d like to have all living in a single cell together to form a phrase: -

To make this happen, all I have to do is create a very simple formula in excel in an adjacent cell:-

Popping in =concatenate( will automatically cue Excel to allow you to use your cursor to select which cells you want included. These can be anywhere on your spreadsheet and in any order.  Simply use the arrow keys to select your cells, placing a comma between them.

To create the appropriate spaces between words or even to add in additional words and symbols you need to place the following between each field selection:-

You can put just about any text or symbol in between those commas, except “-” which does rather confuse the formula function!

The finished formula looks like this: -

Simply press enter and….

All your cells are magically put together!

At this stage, the formula will still be there if you copy the cell content rather than the information you are looking to compile.  To paste the info you want into the spreadsheet, simply copy the contents of the column in which your formula is contained, right click, and select “Paste Special” then “Values”.  This will remove the formula and leave you with your key phrase.

And That’s It!!

You can use this great function to create all sorts of lists of just about every kind. For me personally, it is one of my biggest time saving devices in the often repetitive world of affiliate marketing.