Overview
Example of an Easy Content Unit
Jon Cook of Work Smarter, not Harder is an affiliate marketeer who has a number of niche websites promoting different products. Jon wanted to easily advertise the best price for a particular product, but without any of the hassles of dealing with data feeds.
Jon is a big fan of the Easy Content Units service which makes it easy for affiliates to create blocks of products which feature special links that will earn an affiliate a commission if a website visitor clicks on one of those links and makes a purchase from that retailer. With Easy Content Units, you can create a range of different product blocks, most notably, a price comparison block. A price comparison block allows you to display how much a particular product costs from many different retailers.
Jon wanted to automatically extract the best product price from each of these blocks, and then associate it with a post (as metadata). This meant that he could show the best price for a product on different parts of the website, rather than just within the block. Since prices change, these prices had to be automatically updated too. As a direct result, Jon has achieved a better conversion rate (i.e. more sales) simply by making the best price appear naturally within the design of the website.
What we created for Jon…
We created a plugin that fetched the latest price information from the Easy Content Unit blocks that Jon was already creating and using. When creating or editing a post, a small box appears where Jon can enter the ID of the price comparison block for a product. The plugin then automatically fetches the best price, extracts the product image, and extracts the affiliate link for the product. All of the top prices are updated automatically by the code every 24 hours too.
Before Entering Unit Details
After Entering Unit Details
Using the pricing information…
So that Jon could use the details for the cheapest product, the extracted information was saved to standard WordPress custom values. These values are easily extracted within a WordPress theme, which Jon was doing for the price information.
Custom Fields for Cheapest Product
Using one of Jon’s websites as an example, you can see the cheapest prices being shown for each of the products on Jon’s Monopods website. (Monopods are basically extendable walking sticks).
Showing the pricing information
What Jon says about us…
Our portfolio of websites had reached approximately 30 when we decided to revisit the look and feel of the websites. Following a previous recommendation of Dan we had been using Artisteer to create wordpress templates for our affiliate marketing sites. Although Artisteer was incredibly flexible in what it could deliver we were after more functionality and so looked for a suitable base premium wordpress template to deploy and build upon.
We found a shop style template that displayed product prices against each of the items but unfortunately this would involve us manually updating thousands of products each day! They obvious solution to this was automation! We were already using Easy Content Units which meant we already had an automated way of pulling the cheapest price and retailer information but we wanted a way to push this data into the wordpress database so the theme could extract it.
I approached Dan of WP Doctors to initially discuss whether my ideas could be turned into reality! Dan provided a great sounding board for my ideas and suggestions and countered my thoughts whilst extracting additional information I hadn't even considered! This collaborative approach to defining our requirements meant that once development began Dan knew exactly what was required and what was to be delivered. Throughout the project Dan gave me status updates and delivered the agreed work within budget and on time. With Dan's help we deployed the plugin to our monopod website and we've been extremely happy with the way that the plugin performs. We will now look to roll out the template and plugin combination to some of the other websites in our portfolio.
I would not hesitate to recommend Dan and WP Doctors for any wordpress or other such web development and will definitely be using them again in the future!