Money-Code » cj

Issues with CJNiche WordPress Plugin

admin — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 02:36:27 +0000

So I’ve been working with the cjniche plugin. Overall, it’s a pretty good plugin, but I definitely have some issues with it. I noticed that a few of my requests were getting the dreaded PHP warning:

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in
/var/www/wouldnt/you/like/to/know/wp-content/
plugins/cjniche/cjniche.php on line 79

Want to see if it’s a wide spread problem on the interwebby? Check out this Google search on the topic.

The line number may vary with yours, I added some extra special customizations to the plugin. Googling around on this, I see constant references to this error relating to this plugin. I also see crazy recommendations like deactivating and reactivating the plugin. Reminds me of the ‘did you reboot your computer’ and if the answer it ‘yes’, you follow up with ‘how many times’. Odd how some things just go away. Well, I wasn’t buying it.

It is true if you add a space to the advertiserIds or dork up your CJ Key you’ll get the same error, but I was experiencing intermittent errors. It would work a few of the times, then not work the other times. That would have NOTHING to do with variable values stored in the database. I did some digging (which is hard with this particular plugin since they encode everything.. really?). I was able to get to the root of the problem.

If you’re getting this error every time, the plugin is not receiving a proper XML response CJ and that is why the foreach is blowing up. Unfortunately, the plugin is not checking for a good product set return from CJ and just explodes. Now, if you’re getting this error some of the times, the problem is very similar. I was able to echo the XML returning during a failure and this is what I saw:

[error-message] =>; The server is currently at
capacity or down for maintenance. Please try again later.

Wow, now that helps shed some light on the problem for sure. Looks like CJ is having problems. This is my biggest irritation dealing with CJ’s datafeed. I’ve mentioned that in the past that it’s just not reliable. This plugin is nice for something quick and if you’re working with small data sets or small merchants, this probably works really well. If you’re dealing with larger product catalogs, the keyword filtering is obviously going to take longer and probably cause issues with many requests. Now this is an assumption. I’m not sure if yesterday and today are the only two days having problems.. who knows. What I wanted to do with this post was shed some light with the PHP error and this plugin. I definitely see mention of it in many places.

I’ve written some error handling in the plugin to catch vs. explode when this occurs, but I might need to work on a caching solution to fall back on a stored data set if it has trouble.

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Thinking out loud about EPN Quality Click Pricing (QCP)

admin — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 03:05:04 +0000

So, I’ve been paying close attention to analytics and most importantly, my QCP preview in EPN reporting. Just like what it was stating for the end of August, my earnings will be looking really good under this model and I was trying to figure out why.

I really think the major benefit in my case is that I use limited PPC via YSM to promote my good earning niche sites. I never been too heavy in SEO, and relied on PPC to drive traffic to these sites. Finding the right balance of advertising cost with profits earned is tricky, but I think that is why my EPC is good on these sites. I’m driving ‘buyers’ to come to the site, and eventually ‘buy’ on eBay vs. driving a bunch of readers. I wrote a post about this in January 2008 “Readers vs. Buyers“.

Now, with this improvement with EPC, I think I’ll do some tests in October or November by ramping up my PPC campaigns to drive more quality traffic to eBay.

While I’m still waiting for the dust to settle, I’ve been working hard (hence the lack of recent posts) on creating Amazon store fronts, CJ based store fronts, hub support blogs to my various sites. I’ve been working on creating a new Amazon store front plugin, but I’ve been absolutely LOVING ReviewAzon. I can’t say enough how great this plugin is. If you’re interested in working on your Amazon affiliate efforts, please pick this plugin up. Only $79, you can’t afford to NOT try it.

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Talk to your merchant contact at CJ about coupons!

admin — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 17:02:07 +0000

Personally, I think this is a good tip and can be applied to other affiliate merchant networks, but I primarily focus on Commission Junction. It’s important to contact your merchant contacts and request that you get updated with information regarding deals, coupons, promotions, etc. This is a incredibly useful for providing some useful content besides the usual product information.

As mentioned earlier, I’ve been working on creating various WordPress hub blogs within my niches. When there are promotions and specifically coupons, I like to blog about them. I’m notified by several of my merchant contacts as soon as they’re released, then I also like to tweet the blog entry regarding those offers.

I see this creating value to my hub blogs. Basically, people are starting to sign up to my RSS feeds to find promotional opportunities. If you haven’t done so, contact your contacts at CJ and request that you get mailed promotions! Might help with your commissions!

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Working the backlinks

admin — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 14:57:39 +0000

I currently have many domains focusing on primary niches with additional micro-niche sites. Over the years, I’ve paid little attention to SEO aspects on generating traffic. One reason I haven’t been a fan is the type of visitors that sometimes arrive to the site organically. Last year I wrote a post titled “Readers vs. Buyers” that discuss getting targeted visitors that want to buy to your site. I always felt that general SEO traffic would be “readers”, but now, I realize that I am WRONG with this thinking. In general terms, I was correct, but you definitely could target organic “buyers” by focusing on the proper keywords and couple that with useful hub blogs to bring interested buyers to your EPN or CJ store front pages.

One of the keys to gather any kind of organic traffic is to create MANY quality backlinks to your sites. Currently, I’m focusing on establishing backlinks to the hub blogs since these sites will be content rich and will work easily with continued updates to social networks and bookmark sites. Of course inside of these hub blogs there will be many links going to my store front domains based on keywords.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be going into more detail on how I’m getting backlinks and some of the tools I’m using to help automate the process.

FTP’ing files from CJ’s FTP server to your host

admin — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 01:59:37 +0000

I had a few people email me about my Parsing XML CJ Product Feeds article regarding how to FTP the file to your server. You can use various FTP function depending on how your PHP is configured. I used wget to grab the files. It was easier to gather all of my feeds. To do this, you’ll need to use PHP’s exec() function to execute the wget program on the server (assuming you have access and permissions to use wget via script).

exec("wget -P/path/to/your/site/cj/files ftp://username:password@datatransfer.cj.com/outgoing/productcatalog/111111/*.*");
?>

This will log into the FTP server using the username:password values being passed. Please substitute this with your actual username and password. All files be sent to the path you specified with the -P argument. Please update this with a valid path on your system. If you don’t know what your directory structure is on CJ’s FTP server, you may need to contact CJ support or log in with a simple FTP client to see what your path is. My example is using ’111111′ is just a example.

Once you have the files downloaded, they may be like mine and are zipped or gzipped. You could use exec() again to unzip it or install a PHP extension to unzip this (dev-php5/pecl-zip). If you need example of this, I can try to help. My server is customized by me, so I’m using the pecl-zip extension for PHP.

hanji

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Parsing XML CJ Product Feeds

admin — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 02:32:43 +0000

I mentioned on May 29th that CJ allows you to create and manage product catalogs now. This is great. You can create a product feed and have it available in your FTP directory (or whatever delivery method you wish). For my personal set up, I have it stored on their server, and I need to FTP to it and grab it. I do everything via PHP on a scheduled intervals.

I wanted to show you how you can grab the XML data and parse it. You could use it directly or push it into a database, etc. In my situation, I want to update a local database with product items. Items will be updated every week. I won’t go into the database piece (let me know if you need me to go into INSERT/DELETE SQL examples).

For this example, you will need PHP5 since we’ll be using the simplexml_load_file() function. This is assuming that you’ve already FTP’d the XML to your working directory. Again, let me know if you need this process as well, and I can provide some examples.

Once we have the XML file, we pass it to the simplexml_load_file function. This function quickly parses the XML into a object. Since it’s a object, it’s snap to reference the values. My example loops through the XML object and sets local variables with the values from the XML file. You could then INSERT this values into a database or display them in real time.

$xml = ’1111111_11111_20090528.xml’;
$resp    = simplexml_load_file($xml);
foreach($resp->product as $item){
$name    = $item->name;
$catalogname = $item->catalogname;
$lastupdated = $item->lastupdated;
$programurl    = $item->programurl;
$keywords    = $item->keywords;
$description = $item->description;
$sku = $item->sku;
$manufacturer = $item->manufacturer;
$manufacturerid = $item->manufacturerid;
$upc = $item->upc;
$currency    = $item->currency;
$saleprice = $item->saleprice;
$price = $item->price;
$retailprice = $item->retailprice;
$buyurl   = $item->buyurl;
$impressionurl = $item->impressionurl;
$imageurl    = $item->imageurl;
$advertisercategory = $item->advertisercategory;
$instock = $item->instock;
$condition = $item->condition;
}
?>

My version of MySQL is 5, if you’re running 5.1 or 6, you can use a sweet MySQL command called “LOAD XML LOCAL INFILE”. For example, you could run this and it would populate your database table very quickly.

$sql = "LOAD XML LOCAL INFILE ’1111111_11111_20090528.xml’
INTO TABLE tblProductsTest
ROWS IDENTIFIED BY ‘ ‘";
if(!mysql_query($sql,$connect)){
echo mysql_error()."
".$sql;
}
?>

I think the ability to quickly make some product feeds is awesome. Now, I just need to find time to create some new store fronts and make some cash. If you find this post useful, please follow me on Twitter and Digg this post!

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CJ now allows you to manage/create product catalogs!

admin — Fri, 29 May 2009 18:25:07 +0000

CJ now allows you to manage/create product catalogs data feeds! This is great to be able to generate new product feeds for FTP downloads. I’m not sure if their policy for the one time $200 product feed is still there or not. Here is the announcement from CJ:

“Product Catalog Feeds are now Self Serve, which means you can add, delete or edit your catalog data feeds through the account manager. Please read our FAQ.”

In the next few days/weeks, I’ll put together a little parser script to add/update a database table. I have this in place in a few sites, but I’ll review and update the code and post it when it’s ready.

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More sites or more quality?

admin — Fri, 22 May 2009 16:58:01 +0000

Currently, my affiliate efforts seem to be plateauing and I’ve been looking at how to continue the growth in sales. I’ve been looking at various factors that can “boost” my affiliate network. Thoughts of exploring into new niche territory, optimizing PPC efforts, producing more sites and improving existing sites. I’ve had these thoughts multiple times in the past and I believe to continually think is important and healthy in affiliate marketing.

The most common dilemma I often face is deciding on creating more sites or to improve the existing sites I currently have. I do have a good bucket of affiliate sites now, and to increase the count seems to be burdensome, but I do realize the big players out there.. have tons and tons. I also know that when I work on existing sites, I do usually see an boost in sales related to those changes.

Right now, I’m in the belief that I need to do BOTH. Creating new sites, but exploring new niches to find potential hot spots. Without creating new sites, it’s hard to tell if you’re missing a potential great niche. I also took inventory of “not-so-good” sites in my network. I’ve identified those domains and have a plan to get them to work/look similar to my more recent sites, or to add completely new functionality. This is similar to exploring new niches. I might offer a service or present products in a new way that can translate into higher sales.

I’ve said in the past many times, it’s important to test and experiment. If you do so, make sure you watch and track those sites… and most importantly UNDERSTAND what changes you did that led to increase dollars.

Clicks and sales down, time to evaluate and adjust and react.

admin — Sun, 03 May 2009 17:21:13 +0000

Starting in April, I noticed a significant dip in commissions, initially from EPN. Reviewing posts at the EPN forum, I started to see others with similiar observations and complaints. Coincidentally there was a reporting error (for a small range, commissions were double posted). Currently the sites and network that I have created has been incredibly steady. Earlier in the month I did not see a decrease in traffic or clicks, just a decrease in commissions.

As the month progressed, I started to see a dip in other areas. Google Adsense was showing a drop in clicks as well but earnings are still holding up? My Commission Junction stats were also showing similar results. Immediately I thought it could have been due to Google slap, but checking Google, all of my sites are still indexed, and I’m still receiving organic traffic. Like wise, my paid YSM clicks were down as well. What does this mean?

During April of 2008, I experienced the worst month of my affliate career. I initially blamed it to the transition from CJ to EPN, but it’s odd that I’m seeing similar results 12 months later. It’s definitely not as bad as 2008, but it’s a very significant drop compared to March/2009.

Here are my theories, and I would love to hear yours if you have any.. or if you’re experiencing similar results.

- United States economy is finally hitting the affiliate marketting sector. Currently, all of my sites have been primarily targetting US traffic. People are making less money and are possibly losing their jobs. Internet spending is down. This could be the reason why my paid YSM clicks are mirroring my earnings dip. Oddly, my Google Adsense clicks are down, but the earnings are still in the averages. I’m thinking that people are compensating the lower click throughs by raising their cost per click… and because of that I’m making more or the same but with less clicks? I’m still digging into this one.

- The other theory, which I’m not leaning towards is the tax month. April 15th is the tax deadline, and often if you’re paying, you’ll wait to make that payment at the end. I’m not liking this theory too much since the clicks/traffic seems to be similar across so many of my niches.

I’ve identified a problem and a threat to my earnings. It’s time to react and compensate this issue. Possible solutions…

- Create more sites now, and take advantage of this knee jerk reaction to produce more sites. Find new productive niches?

- Find the highest performing sites and attempt to improve them. This is a bit sketchy, since I don’t want to negatively impact the performing sites. I don’t want to focus on the low performing sites, since I want my efforts to be financially productive during this weird phase. I would work on the low performers as a experiment when I have free time. I need to turn the ship around now.

- Adjust my PPC campaigns. I could be targetting the wrong customer base or I’m being buried by other PPC marketers. So I might need to gamble a bit more and pay for higher priced keywords to gain those sales and commissions.

The bottom line, it’s not a time to whine and complain. It’s time to see what the problem is and see if you can fix it.

Are you guys seeing similar issues with April (and now May)? Love to hear your thoughts, so please comment!

Thanks!
hanji

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CJ – Sorry, your application was not approved

admin — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 15:40:27 +0000

This is a very common thread topic at Digital Point. It happens quite often and can be concerning and frustrating, but I do have a tip for everyone. I too get these, and get them often. People at Digital Point will almost automatically ask where you are from. It appears that immediate declines are indicative of filter rules that are in place at CJ. These rules could be the number of earning bars within your account or the location you listed with your account. Manual approvals take longer, and can often lead to declines as well. Since it’s a manual decline, it means that someone physically looked at your request and possibly visited a site or looked closely to your account.

Earlier this year, I received a notification that I was being dropped from a program. I replied to that email and asked the affiliate manager the reason why I was being dropped. He emailed back stating that they drop inactive publishers on occasion, and I was the only one to write back. Because of this, he said he would reactivate my account. This got me thinking. I started to see the position of the merchant. They probably receive thousands of publisher requests, and only a handful probably do any work for them. Could this be part of the ‘test’ when dealing with manual approvals? I thought I would give it a try. So this year, I was declined by a few merchants that I really wanted to promote. Instead of giving up and complaining on a forum, I thought I would pursue it a bit more. Each one of these I replied back to the affiliate manager with a nice email. Basically, I would thank them for considering my application and requested that they give me another look. I also explain how I was planning to promote their products and what sites I would promote them on. I wanted to give them a ‘action plan’ to show that I would be a proactive publisher. Sure enough, within a day or two, I would get a request to join the program.

The bottom line, if you’re really interested in the product or merchant, don’t give up and seek opportunities for acceptance. Remember, they want affiliates to promote their products or services, but they don’t want deadbeats. So if you get accepted, start promoting them!

I hope this helps with your CJ success.