Well you asked for it, so here it is… Custom Desriptions

How many times do you look at the description field in a merchant’s feed and think, if only there was more detail, or no code, or more keywords in it – or better still it contained unique content? Well now you can with our new feature available to Pro users.

You can now edit/replace/add to the merchant descriptions for any products you add to a unit.  Get yourself ahead of the game by writing your own descriptions, use them in conjunction with the RSS or PHP outputs and beat the duplication penalties which affects most other websites using datafeeds.

How do I do it? I hear you say, well that’s easy…

On the Styling Page, there’s a new link – ‘Edit Product Descriptions’ (as seen below), click on this to be taken to the edit page.

find the edit link

Now you should be on the edit page, simply change the description for the items you want to edit:

change the description

Then when you are happy click on the save button found at the bottom of the page, and your new descriptions will be saved for THIS unit.

Save the descriptions

Each time your unit is called, your new descriptions will be shown instead.  At present we are limiting the descriptions to 100 characters, if there’s a requirement to increase this, please let us know and we’ll look into it for you.

Easy Content Units, Always Innovating…

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:

We are looking at adding some more information to the daily ‘Out of Stock’ email which the system sends out and would like your feedback.

The email currently contains the unit name and a link to the offending unit.  We are already thinking of adding the product which is missing, if you want further things adding, please let us know by leaving a comment below.  We estimate looking at this in a week’s time.

Current email structure:

Dear NAME

You have 1 unit that contains unavailable or out of stock products:

——————————————————————–

* Bestsellers

unit url: http://www.easycontentunits.com/?p=create2&uid=XXXX

This notification email is sent out once per day, if unavailable

products are found in your units.  You can change which emails you

receive from us by logging into your account, and going to the ‘My

Details’ page.

Many thanks

The Easycontentunits.com Team

We have now added functionality for Pro Users to capture the data each time a unit is clicked. This is an advanced feature for those with the technical know how. With this feature you can specify a ‘Callback URL’ to a script on your site which is called on each click, passing various parameters for you to record.

You can use the script to input the data into your database or indeed to stats packages such as Google Analytics.

Parameters you can call include:
[UNIT_ID] your unit id number
[UNIT_TITLE] your unit title
[TRACKING_ID] your units tracking code
[PRODUCT_TITLE] title of the clicked product
[PRODUCT_URL] the affiliate link url of the product
[CLICK_TIME] date and time of the click (YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS)

You can input your ‘Callback URL’ on the bottom of the My Details page, where we have also put some help to using it.

Let us know what you think, by leaving a comment.

We are always looking at ways to improve and expand Easy Content Units, and have found a network which didn’t make it into ECU from the start. Online Media Group (OMG) have a selection of merchants, of which some are exclusive, so it was only right and proper to add them to ECU. We have now finished adding the following merchants, whose products are now available to choose for your content units:

Ernest Jones
F Hinds
H Samuels
Goldsmiths
MyPix
Swim Shop
WH Smiths
Vie at Home
Warehouse Wines

As more merchants make their feeds available, they will be added to Easy Content Units.  If there’s one you spot that we haven’t added, and you’d like it, please let us know (via support ticket) and we’ll add it straight away.  Of course if you haven’t yet become an affiliate of OMG you can sign up here

If there are any networks that you’d like us to support, please let us know by leaving a comment, and we’ll try to get them added.

For all those pro members we’ve released a new feature which I am sure you’re gonna love.  At the moment, free members have the ECU outputted to your site via javascript – great for the most part however members wanted to put all the data contained in the units so that the search engines could read them and so we added php output for Pro users.

PHP out put is great for those a little more technically minded but not so good if you don’t have the know how.  So we have come up with RSS output.  Which is easy to use and presents the data for the search engines to read with out much effort.  Especially when you use a plugin such as Keith Bond’s which enables you to copy and paste the code straight into Wordpress.  You can find the plugin and instructions here:

Keith’s Easy Rss Wordpress Plugin

Where once activated, you simply include in your wordpress post in this format.

[ker]rss url,number of results required[/ker]

So an example would be [ker]http://www.easycontentunits.com/rss/6553/3/rss2.rss,10[/ker]

Yesterday we added Haven Holidays to ECU at the request of dgm, and whilst it doesn’t quite fit into the retail focus of Easy Content Units, I think what can be created is fantastic for both affiliates and Haven themselves.

dgm have created the first managed unit for Haven which features the best priced weekend breaks available at Haven.  These are automatically updated for you, so you don’t have to worry about the availability.  You can find out more about this unit on the dgm Knowledge page.  Remember you can add the unit to your ‘account’ and style it any way you would like.

To use the unit, visit the ‘managed units’ page, and click on Haven, you will then see a list of the available units (there are more coming soon) click on view unit to see a preview of the unit (this is to show you the contents of the unit) you can then tick the box if you want to change the styling and click on the Add to My Units button, and that’s it.  Pick up the code and put it on your site as you would normally do.

The units are updated for you so you don’t have to worry about that, and you have access to the stats as if they were your unit.  As my friend Alexander would say – Simples!

Here’s an example of the unit, looking very smart I think you would agree:

dgm have also created a custom Haven call to action button as you can see below, you can take the image url from the image below:

For those of you who would like to create your own units, we have had to configure the mapping a little, so brand is the park name and category is the location, so when filtering results, you can narrow them down by these two factors.

We’d love to see where you’re using this unit, so feel free to leave a comment letting us know or fill in a support ticket.

Managed Units are ECUs which are created and maintained by the merchant’s themselves.  They are updated regularly to contain the top selling (popular) products on their sites, which gives you a top performing put up and forget piece of creative for your pages.

You can now choose from the following managed units for merchants on the dgm network.  As a reminder, all these managed units will show your affiliate links 100% of the time, so feel free to add these units to your site in the knowledge that they are being updated for you, and that you’ll get all the commission for these units.  Click on the merchant name below to get the code for the unit, remember you must be logged in to see the code.  All these units can be added to your units to customise and gather stats on.

Ben10 – Children’s Character Store

Bump to 3 – Maternity and Baby specialists

Car Audio Centre – Everything to do with sound in your car

Gizoo – gadgets and games store

High & Mighty -  are the market leader in European big and tall clothing, delivering fashion that fits to men of above average stature.

Hot Watches

Jacobs – Digital Video and Photo store

Machine Mart - is Britain’s leading specialist supplier of tools & equipment for DIY & Trade

Mazuma Mobile – mobile phone recyclers

Micro Warehouse - is the perfect choice to supply customer’s IT requirements being the market leader in providing high quality computer equipment and consumer electronics to consumers and business

Snow+Rock - sells winter sports and outdoor equipment

Soletrader

The Dog House

Vodafone

Wilkinsons Plus

Useful links:

Log in to Easy Content Units

dgm for Free – so what does it mean?

Managed Units – you want them your way?

We have been busy adding new merchants to ECu this week, rather than bombard Twitter with an update for each one, I thought I’d write a summary post on here instead.  By the way, before i get down to it, can you let me know (by way of a comment) if you use the Twitter updates at all?  Thanks in advance!

Merchants added:

Affiliate Window
B & Q Next Day
Graham & Green
Manjoh
Aerobed
Brook Taverner
InkXpress Direct
Projectors Direct
Sharp
Blooming Direct
991 (rare music shop)
The Ultimate Finish
Bullguard (software) 
Wickedelic Lingerie UK 
Into the Blue 
Slimming Solutions 
Media Storehouse 

Tradedoubler
Novatech
Game Station
Total PDA
Dolphin Music
Hamleys 
Purely Gadgets
Kiddicare 

dgm
Orange Mobile

Affiliate Future
Running Bare
Furniture Choice

Webgains
Caterpillar
MDS Battery
Forgan of St Andrews