Content Units made easy – easycontentunits

I nearly kept this a secret. It is so good that I may be damaging my own potential by sharing it ….. and I am not even getting paid a commission!!

Content Units … essentially product ad placement can be a chore to manage and difficult to get the presentation right and keep maintainance effort low as products disappear from merchants catalogues.

Affilistore (and Affilistore Enhanced) produces content units that can operate cross-network if you have loaded the products you need into a single database, but these tend to be niche sites and all your product portfolio may be scattered across many different Affilistore environments.

Merchant Networks also offer the opportunity to create content units, but once again these will not allow you to build a set of content cross-network.

Step forward Easy Content Units. They load all the products across multiple networks into their own database and allow you to create content units stuffed with products you pick from a search. The products then become fixed, but in your admin area, you can quickly see which products have been deleted from merchant feeds and address those quickly.

A really neat touch is that when you choose to add the products to your content unit, easycontentunit.com’s back end attempts to call and resolve the deeplink to the merchant site … if it doesn’t resolve, then it is highlighted that you may not be signed up and you have the option to delete the product from that merchant or leave it and go sign up.

It is fabulous. A few observations from my perspective

-ve – Only UK Merchant Networks presently supported (I expect that will change over time)
+ve – It is Free to use (your aff ids will be served 80% of the time and easycontentunit’s the other 20%) in a revenue share type arrangement. I expect paid for versions to come along in due course.
-ve – Not all merchants are immediately available at present
+ve – So far, I have found support to be fast, with a merchant added within 20 minutes of requesting it.
-ve – Presently served up as Javascript, so not very SEO Friendly … but there may be more friendly option coming soon.
+ve +ve +VE!! – Very, very customisable for different layouts. This tool ROCKS!!

See the following panel which was produced using easycontentunits, but not only that, there is now a Wordpress plugin available to make it easy to add content units to your WP pages via tags. The unit below is vailla cut & paste without use of the plugin … I will try the plug-in in due course and report back.

Added 27/1/08 01.54
Or what about the following format perfect for following a well-written review page :

So we have :

Pleo – Lifelike Interactive Animatronic Dinosaur

Every Pleo is unique. Yes, each one begins life as a newly-hatched baby Camarasaurus*, but that’s where predictability ends and individuality begins. Pleo doesn’t just do what he’s told. He develops his own personality, moods, and habits—all shaped by the time he spends with you. *Camarasaurus was a late-Jurassic North American herbivore, 60 feet long in adulthood and just Pleo’s size as a newborn.

Unlike other interactive creatures, Pleo is completely autonomous and totally unique. It explores its environment without any help from a controller, moves organically, interacts with its owner and expresses emotions based on its life experiences. It’s just like owning a living, breathing creature. Incredible!