Wordpress Set up and Forget Affiliate stores

There are loads of claims that you can buy in to ’set up and forget’ Wordpress cash machines, but rarely do they live up to the promise.

In the last few days I have been looking at a suite of plugins for the Wordpress platform that might just be able to meet that promise.

The particular plugins that I am looking at pull products into Wordpress posts or pages to create a well-structured article. There have been many such products in the past, but they often shied away from including price .. mainly because the post was not refreshed in any way and the price became out of date. The new plug-ins are different.

So far, plugins are available for the Affiliate Window and Linkshare Affiliate Networks with Webgains and Paid on Results to follow.

The difference with these is that products are fetched back on the fly, based upon a query string you enter for the post. That way, the post will live for ever with very latest product data, including pricing.

The Linkshare plug in is available for free as is the Affiliate Window Version.

Whilst the Affiliate Window version works on a revenue share basis (your affiliate ID is used 80% of the time unless you purchase a paid-for version at £23 for as many domains as you like and lifetime updates), the Linkshare version is available for free with no revenue share.

I have been using the paid-up Affiliate Window version and it works just as well as the Productserve API … no great surprise because that’s what it uses (the author’s API on the free version or your own API if you opt for paid-for).

My initial impressions are very good … and you can see the authors own results at http://www.panfashion.co.uk.

I was initially disappointed that the plug-in did not handle empty results very well, displaying an ugly and unfriendly error. However, trading emails at 11pm on a Friday evening with the author (how sad is that?) suggesting some controlled and softer management of empty resultsets (e.g. product discontinued or merchant leaves the network) as well as an email to the admin to advise of the empty query results met with a prompt and positive response, suggesting that it would be top of the agenda This Morning.

I was going to wait until I heard back before telling you about the tool, because I felt like it was not quite finished. However, nosy as I am, I followed the developer site across this weekend and saw that the error is now handled with an alternative suggested product … an email to admin advising that the post needs updating will be a trivial next step; and with that step, this will truly be a set up and forget affiliate site …. you only need to change something if the site tells you that you need to or if you wish to add new product.

The perfect addition for me would be if the plug in could auto-insert posts over a period of time to keep fresh content landing on site to keep the search engines happy and maybe I can twist Tony’s arm to do that.

If you want to see the latest Affiliate Window plug-in results with an empty resultset, then have a look over at http://www.wiixiiw.com.

Tony has Paid on Results and Webgains in his sights, but the problem with those networks is that they do not currently have a product API … there are potential workarounds (e.g. build his own API by importing all the feeds to a server), but these may take longer to materialise because of the issues to overcome.

I definitely commend these tools as a great weapon in your affiliate arsenal. Anything that saves you time in getting a site up with relevant products has to be worth it … and with maintainance being minimal, it has got to be worth some small configuration time to walk away and let it generate your commissions.

EDIT: Get the Awin WP Plugin here.