Tutorial 6 – Content Unit Usage

Creating & Using Affilistore content units (Draft - Screengrabs to be added and some additional information added)

Affilistore Content units are a neat way of attaching smaller promotional listings to various pages of your Affilistore site. For example you may wish to write up an editorial page covering say “Casio Watches” and then add a set of corresponding watches below your editorial.

It is equally possible to use a content unit generated by one site on a completely different site altogether.

To make use of Content Units, first of all, enter Admin of your store and select the Content Unit page, then define the criteria and layout parameters for your content unit. Unlike Custom Navigation where you had a free rein to select positive and negative keywords, Content Units only allow you to define positive keywords (which still work on an OR basis – a product identified will not necessarilly have all of your keywords) and these positive keywords are searched for in pre-defined fields of your product database. In addition you may define a price range – both price condition AND keyword must match the product for it to be returned via the content unit. (I need to come back and define which fields are searched)

Once you have selected your criteria and display options, go ahead and click on create content unit.

You will then see the various code options that you can use, along with a sample as to how your content unit will look on the page:

(Insert Image) 

The Content Unit code

As you will see, there are three code snippets capable of displaying the same content unit, and you will find each of them having either different degrees of difficulty or benefits, depending upon how you incorporate them.

Let’s look at each of the three snippets in turn and the scenarios where you can use them:

• PHP – when this can be embedded in your page and passed through a PHP pre-processor, it will present your content unit as pure HTML with the content fully search engine friendly. Unfortunately, Affilistore is not capable out of the box to support PHP embedded in pages, although some work has been done by forum members to make it work and the more adventurous of you may wish to embed the PHP version successfully within an Affilistore page.

The more typical use of the PHP version will be where you already have a pure PHP page outside of Affilistore, e.g. a PHP main site where you promote items from your store, which may be in a sub-folder.

• Iframe URL – The application of this code snippet to present a content unit is not too dissimilar to the Javascript version.

Search Engines typically ignore content within an iFrame and there will be no search engine kudos for any content contained in such a manner.

The URL as given will not of itself create an iFrame – the code given is the URL that should be embedded inside the iFrame resource. You will need to place code on your page as follows to include an iFrame content unit, adjusting size and scroll parameters to suit your own needs as follows.

• Javascript - the easiest implementation by far, but once again, the search engines do not see the content – they only see the actual javascript and promptly ignore it

This is the easiest way to embed a content unit to an article page on Affilistore e.g.  on your store home page.

Adding Affilistore content units to your site

The easiest route to add content to Affilistore is to add through the ‘Manage Pages’route.

When you enter the editor it will default to a WYSIWYG editor. You need to move to source code editing by clicking the ‘source’ button on the toolbar (what else!!).

The PHP insert will not work here unless you have mastered the PHP include techniques discussed in the Affilistore forum.

The only two snippets to choose from are effectively either the javascript
or the iFrame alternatives.

The following is the same insert via javascript

and finally, via an inline frame:

Unfortuntely, I can’t explain why the currency symbol is not showing. I assume that is a WordPress thing or something else that I am missing. There is no problem on my Affilistore sites.