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

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.

A frequent question among the niche site owners is ‘how many products should I add to a unit?’ Of course for many this can be dependent on the number of product available, however for home pages, you might think that you should show all the available products from all the merchants. Well this is one way to do it, and with our paginated units, this can be easily achieved, however stop and think about it for a moment.

As a visitor to a website, how many show all their products on the home page? If they did, would you wade through them? How many pages do you think a visitor may go through before getting bored and give up on your site?

The same can be said for search results, most people never stray too far from page one, and very few will go through to page 3 before trying a different search, same is said for shoppers I would say.

Better for your niche site home page is a selection of best selling products, and a clear navigation for visitors to drill down to the actual product they are after. The home page is the one which most people will stop on for (at best) a minute or so before hitting the back button, or if you hook them in, a link on your navigation menu.

So back to the original question, I would say that between 5/10 top sellers would be a good number. Along with your text and navigation this should give your users a good feel for your site, and provide them the choices.

You could then look to divide your navigation by a number of means, popular are by price/colour/brand/size/model numbers, this is very dependent on your chosen niche, and lets not forget you could split up the pages by more than one variable.

Like the home page, the category pages will benefit from a best selling bunch of products rather than the whole lot, with links to the individual product pages. I would however increase the number of products to say 15/20 for these pages. This shows more choice and that you have a wider range of products available.

Finally on the individual product pages, the favoured option is to provide some price comparison for the item, and another unit with ‘related’ or ‘accessories’ type products in it (again limited to say 5 products). The price comparison unit, will have as many products’ as there are merchants selling it, which is fine, you could also choose to include one or more merchants who should be selling it in there as well, to show you have covered the entire sector.

To see how others are using ECU on their Niche sites, check out our Showcase.

If you have any further questions about the number of products showing in the units, please ask away below or on a support ticket.

It’s hard to believe, but it was only a year ago that we unleashed Easy Content Units on the public after several months of private beta testing. In the 365 days since, nearly 1,300 people have joined ECU, creating nearly 32,000 units between them, which have been shown more than 24 million times, generating in excess of 2.2 million clickthroughs to merchants – not bad for a one year old tool started with zero VC money and just a handful of dedicated, hard working staff!

To help celebrate ECUs first birthday, we’d like to invite you to see first hand the only thing that’s better than ECU – and that’s ECU Pro! The Pro version of ECU removes the revenue share so you earn 100% of the commission (so if you earn more than £100 in commissions each month, you’d be better off on pro anyway), but also has a whole host of hidden features to further customise your units and increase your sales such as search-engine readable content, custom descriptions, brandable units, URL masking, integrated Google Analytics, advanced stats reporting and much, much more.

ECU Pro usually costs £19.99+vat per month, however if you join via the button below you can try it out for just £1. Yup, the full version of ECU Pro, for a whole month, for the princely sum of a quid (including vat). This is a strictly limited offer for the first anniversary of Easy Content Units, and will expire at midnight on the 1st February 2010.

Sorry, this offer has now ended. However, please Click here if you would like further information about ECU Pro.

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