For those of you who are still on ECU Free, this will help you understand the differences between the different out put methods available on Pro, one of which may suit you more.

Javascript Output

On ECU Free, you build your unit, and offer you Javascript code to copy and paste on to your site.  This takes all your styling and the products and enables you to load the unit on your web page – nice and easy.  The Java units are unable to be read by search engines, which is good for SEO as the description provided by the merchants is not included in your page and so you won’t be slapped for duplicate content on your site.

Affiliates however sometimes would like to display this information so that the engines can read it, well fair enough.  As long as it’s used alongside plenty of your own content then you might not get a slap from Google.  So we set about adding different ways of adding units to your sites.  Unfortunately both the methods we have come up with has meant that they can be recoded and to protect our revenue share, have had to make them Pro only features.

PHP Output

The first thing we thought of doing was to add PHP output for the units, this would allow affiliates with the know how to take our code an place it on their sites and for the contents of the units to be read by the search engines.  For those less able to use PHP, or for those using Wordpress as a CMS, you would need to use the PHP code in conojunction with a plugin such as EXEC-PHP, which lets you place PHP in posts.

RSS Output

In a stroke of genius, we came up with RSS output as another means of getting our units onto your sites.  RSS is a lightweight, yet powerful means to display the contents of your units on your sites.  Again there’s a plugin for Wordpress which enables you to do this easily – thanks to Keith Bond for his Keith’s Easy Rss Wordpress Plugin.  The contents of the unit are able to be read and updated automatically the same as the other methods.  Whilst they don’t take any of the styling/customisation from ECU, they do use your own CSS so fit in beautifully with your sites.

We believe that RSS output is a major step forward for our affiliates and merchants especially when they are used in conjunction with the managed units.  You can now show your users top products from a variety of merchants, via RSS direct onto your sites.

I will be updating ECU with examples of each method, so you can see them all in action in the next couple of days.  Let me know what you think by leaving a comment below: