As you may have read, we have now introduced a search function prior to the creation of units. On top of that for Pro members we have released an exciting new tool for creating your affiliate deep links.

We realised that not all content needs a content unit, but a text link or image link is what is needed. This new search function enables you to spot products for your articles and pages and then offers you the deep link for the product and the image url too. This makes creating your pages a doddle. No more searching a merchant’s site, and then logging into the network and then finding the program and creating your deeplinks, they’re all available through our search.

You can search for a product and apply the same filters as you are used to, by network/merchant/favourites to drill down to find the products you want. Then click on the link icon, and you will then be shown the url for the deeplink, the html to use the link and the image url too all to copy and paste into your content.

Please let us know if you have any comments or suggestions for Easy Content Units.

At the end of last week, we released a new feature for all, and took it one step further for Pro members. This new development will make it easier for researching product options for your units. For those of you who would rather look to see what’s available before creating a unit, you now can. Useful for researching possible niche sites, you can see what products are available first, before creating the unit.

By clicking on the ‘Product Search’ link, you’ll be able to search for products in our base and see what’s available, if of course you see products you like, you can add them to a new unit, if the opportunity isn’t there, then simply start searching again.

For Pro members we have taking this one step further, and added a really special feature which will help you with your content writing. More about that on another post…

If you have any suggestions or comments, please leave them below or on a support ticket.

We have teamed up with Buy.at and HMV to create a number of Top Ten managed units for you to use on your sites. Each of the managed units can be added to your accounts and styled any way you like to fit in with the look of your sites. All of the units will automatically update daily with the current top selling products of each unit type.

The units we have available are:

Use these units as true put up and forget creative, also available as an RSS feed if you would prefer (Pro users).

These units are only available through the Buy.at platform, so please make sure you’re signed up to HMV through Buy.at

As you may know, you are able to embed any You Tube video within your content units, offering your visitors another dimension to your pages. These are already being used to good effect by a number of affiliates.

I thought it would be a good idea to compile a list of merchants who have a You Tube Channel, so you can find the videos easily and get some ideas for pages and content units. So here goes:

Character Online – program via AffWin
Dead Good Undies – program via Paid on Results
Blue Chip Vacations – program via AffWin
FireBox – Program via AffWin
Prezzybox – Program via Paid on Results and AffWin
Buy Cosmetics – Program via Buy.at
Kiddicare – Program via Buy.at, TD and AffWin
JML Direct – Program via AffWin
Buy A Gift – Program via AffWin
Red Letter Days – Program via AffWin and Affilinet
Ethical Superstore – Program via Buy.at
Haven Holidays – Program via dgmPro and Buy.at
DFDS Seaways – Program via TD
Maplin – Program via Webgains and AffWin
Kitbag – Program via AffWin
Gizoo Gadgets – Program via dgmPro
Garmin – Program via dgmPro
Virgin Vie – Program via dgmPro
All Up and On – Program via AffWin
Advanced MP3 Player – Program via AffWin, Paid on Results and Affiliate Future
Extreme Element – Program via AffWin
Online TEFL Course – Program via CJ
Debenhams – Program via Affilinet and AffWin
New Look – Program via AffWin
MyWardrobe – Program via Webgains and AffWin
I Want One of Those – Program via AffWin
Jokers Masquerade – Program via AffWin

Of course you don’t have to limit the videos to the merchant’s own efforts, how about showing a product review from another youtuber, and then add price comparison for it with the ECUs? How about using the numerous trailers for games and films that are available on You Tube to compile a Price comparison such as this below:

Or maybe a promo video for a fashion label, and show off a selection of the products available with the unit like this one:

The options are limitless, well depending on your ideas maybe, if you need any, drop me a support ticket with your domain, and I’ll come up with some ideas for you!

List compiled from resource at Affiliates4U If you spot any others, please leave them in a comment below:

We have added a new search option to aid you in finding the products you want in your content units. When searching for the products, you can now choose from ‘Exact match’ ‘Broad Match’ or ‘All Keywords’.

These basically operate in the following ways but still all search the ‘Product Name’ field:

Exact match – looks for products which have the keywords in the title as per the search query.

Broad Match – looks for products which have any of the keywords in the name

All Keywords – this new feature will look out for products which feature all the keywords in the name, in any particular order, but all must be present

Hopefully this will help you to narrow down your products when searching, and need less emphasis on the post search filtering.. As always, if you have any questions/suggestions please leave them below, or send in a support ticket.

One of the common complaints we hear about merchants who feature in the content units, or more importantly don’t is down to their images in they provide through the datafeeds. Unfortunately there’s no standard image required for the feeds, not even at a network level, so each merchant provides one of their images. This leads to a bunch of mismatched images appearing in our content units, not great.

So we have looked at various ways to tackle this problem and come up with – Add Your Own Image

So on a product by product basis you can choose to use the image supplied by the datafeed, or specify your own image to use instead. Of course this can be any size/shape/quality you want, so if a merchant has a poor image which doesn’t look great appearing with products from other images you can now overcome it.

Click on the 'Edit Product Description' link, found on the Customise Unit page.

The interface for choosing the image can be found by clicking on the ‘Edit Product Descriptions‘ link on the edit unit page. Where, as well as being able to change the description, you can now specify an alternative image.

Specify the url to image in the Custom Image box, as well as change the description if required

Update: We have now added the ability to resize individual product images within the units, so if this is a way of making things look good, then great.

Have fun!

This has been taken from the blog over at Insight-UK, where the affiliate manager Bob came up with the method for you to rewrite your URLs, here it is straight from the post:

There are currently 2 methods to embed the Content Units into your website. JavaScript, or PHP. The JavaScript method is the easiest but is not the best as Search Engines cannot index JavaScript. If you have the technical skills, you can drop the PHP code that ECU supply directly into your website. This allows search engines to know what products you are offering. However, there is still the downside that for every product you promote you have an external link to easycontentunits.com. This is generally bad SEO practice as every external link is a drop in page rank. Thankfully, ECU provide the ‘rel=”nofollow”‘ code in the anchor tags, so you shouldn’t be penalised too much, if at all. In addition, most PHP servers have a security setting which prevent this code from running.

There is the fact that some folks just prefer to see that the links are on their own website, rather than an external website. For this reason, I’ve come up with a different bit of PHP code. If you use the PHP code supplied by ECU; then I’d highly recommend you implement this code. For an example of both php methods go here:

http://iq.insight.com/blog/ecu.php

The code is as follows and goes wherever you want the content unit.

/*
    Retrieve HTML for Easycontentunits.com product unit.
    Note: 'fopen wrappers' must be enabled. Requires PHP 4.3.0. or above.
*/
/*
    Code by Bob DeVeaux for ECU
    This re-writes the ECU link to the same domain as the code
*/

// function for downloading file
function curl_get_file_contents($URL)
{
    $c = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_URL, $URL);
    curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 5000);
    curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10000);
    $contents = curl_exec($c);
    curl_close($c);

    if ($contents)
    {
        return $contents;
    }
    else
    {
        return false;
    }
}

$ecu_mid = 839; // your member id
$ecu_uid = 20212; // your unit id
$ecu_tracking = ''; // optional tracking id
$ecu_keywords = ''; // optional keywords for random product unit
$ecu_debug_mode = 'no'; // debug mode (yes or no)
$domain = "http://".$_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"];
$path = '/blog';
$ecu_url =
'http://www.easycontentunits.com/phpunit.php?ecu_mid='.$ecu_mid
.'&ecu_uid='.$ecu_uid.'&ecu_tracking='.urlencode($ecu_tracking).
'&ecu_keywords='.urlencode($ecu_keywords).'&debug='.$ecu_debug_mode;

// cURL download file.
if($content = curl_get_file_contents($ecu_url))
{
    $content = str_replace('href="http://www.easycontentunits.com',
                            'href="'.$domain.$path, $content);
    print $content;
}

You then need your own version of product.php in the location you specified for ‘$path’.

$domain = "http://".$_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"];
$qs = explode('product.php', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
$url = 'http://www.easycontentunits.com/product.php'.$qs[1];
header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
header("Location: ".$url);

The final step is to prevent search engines from spidering the redirect page by editing your robots.txt.

Disallow: /PATH_HERE/product.php

Amazon Users
If you have products from Amazon in your units, you will also need to add the following page:

amazon_product.php in the location you specified for ‘$path’.

$domain = "http://".$_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"];
$qs = explode('amazon_product.php', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
$url = 'http://www.easycontentunits.com/amazon_product.php'.$qs[1];
header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
header("Location: ".$url);

Plus the robots file will need amending to:

Disallow: /PATH_HERE/product.php

Disallow: /PATH_HERE/amazon_product.php

I’d like to thank Bob DeVeaux for coming up with this solution for us. If you would like to include any Insight products in units, or indeed use their Weekly Deals managed unit, that would help thank them for this useful code.

We have been looking at the front end of ECU now for a few weeks, trying to tie up all the tweaks and features we’ve added since it’s release. We have released a new ‘Wizard’ to aid with unit creation, which at present, will help you get products into the unit.

We’re working on expanding the wizard to include customisation options, for those of you who are happy to create the units in the old way, then simply turn off the wizard.

To find out how to use the wizard, check out our Create a Unit Wizard page.

First of all we added a feature to enable you to add your own merchants to price comparison units, now we have extended this to allow you to add your own products to units.  You will now find a new option on the ‘Add Merchant’  page which enables you to specify your own image for ‘merchants’ that you add.  By putting in a product image, and changing the Title, Description, link and price you have in fact added a new product to the unit.  The image below shows the new option on the page:

Remember you can change all of the values in the boxes in the image, to create your product.  Make sure you add your network affiliate deeplink in the ‘URL’ box, so that clicks are tracked to you.

This new feature is good for adding products from independent programs to your units, which would otherwise not be able to be included in your Easy Content Units.  The only draw back is that you will need to manually monitor pricing etc, but not to fear, the other products will continue to update from the datafeeds.

Our thanks for those of you who suggested this idea!

If any of you have any other ideas for ECU, please let us know here, or on a support ticket.

We have been asking our merchants to prepare a special ECU for their Valentines Day products, and below you can see the list which have, along with links for you to get them added to your accounts. Remember the merchant will control the products shown in the units, but you can style them any ways you want. Simply add the unit to your account, and customise it to fit in with your site and you’re off.  These units will serve your valentines pages for years to come, as the merchants will update them – put up and forget!

House of Fraser (program via Linkshare) View/Add Unit

Avon (program via Linkshare) View/Add Unit

Red Letter Days (program via AffWin) View/Add : (program via Affilinet) View/Add

The Gift Experience (program via Webgains) View/Add Unit

Gorgeous Shop (program via Affiliate Window) View/Add Unit

Passion 8 (program via Affiliate Window) View/Add Unit

Prezzybox (via Affiliate Window) View/Add Unit : (via Paid on Results) View/Add Unit

Night Sky Lanterns (via Webgains) View/Add Unit

Sparkling Direct (program via Affiliate Window) View/Add Unit

Gadgets.co.uk (program via Affiliate Window) View/Add Unit

Chocolate Trading Company (program via Affiliate Window) View/Add Unit

Cult Beauty (program via Linkshare) Gifts for Her: View/Add Unit : Gifts for Him: View/Add Unit

Top Man (program via Linkshare) View/Add Unit

Natural Elements (program via Paid on Results) View/Add Unit

Perfume Superstore (program via Affiliate Window) View/Add Unit

Blooming Direct (program via Affiliate Window) View/Add Unit: (program via Webgains) View/Add Unit

Lloyds Pharmacy: Male Fragrance (program via Affiliate Window) View/Add Unit : (program via Webgains) View/Add Unit

Lloyds Pharmacy: Female Fragrance (program via Affiliate Window) View/Add Unit : (program via Webgains) View/Add Unit

If there are any merchants I have missed off, or if you are a merchant who would like to offer this to your affiliates, please let me know.