David Fiske Affiliate Marketing & Web Development

It's been all quiet on the blog post front so apologies for that. I've been coding scripts for other people for what is effectively now a few months so I've not had much of a chance to post.

That said, I'm on the verge of releasing a new Wordpress plugin. Since launching Sunpress Exchange (download - 105 other people have already), I've been looking into creating a more complex plugin.

An idea raised in the competition brief was this:

Nothing is off limits, so if you make a plugin that adds listings for other merchants: feel free, we'd love to see that!

Over the past few weeks I put my thinking cap on (suggestion to Firebox, IWOOT, Shiny Shack, etc. - buy in a stock of "Thinking" caps) and came up with this:
 


Here's How It Works

In the admin area, you set up merchant profiles, adding a name, default affiliate URL and a 120 x 60 banner url.

Under each post, you have a list of tick boxes for each merchant. By ticking the check box, the merchant is listed in the widget, which is displayed on each post page.

Furthermore, you can specify a deeplink so that you can link to specific pages for each merchant on specific posts. Rather than send the traffic to the home page, you can send traffic to the relevant hotel or flights page, for instance.

The affiliate side of things is controlled via the admin panel and changing links (e.g. a network change) is a doddle. Links on the front end are encoded into a (perhaps too) long string of random characters.

With regards to the front-end, you can specify the order in which you'd like merchants to be sorted, with the default being alphabetical. The most favoured merchant (or first if alphabetical) gets to sit at the top of the widget with some extra blurb around it. The remaining agents are lined up below, again in order.

Things To Do

So far, I've only set up deeplink functionality for Affiliate Future, being as it's one of the easiest to do as well as one of the most popular for travel merchants. Naturally, there's more to add.

I'm also looking to make url masking optional, as it's not everyone's cup of tea.

What I'm Asking From You

Firstly, I need convincing that it's worth releasing to the public. You can register your interest by leaving a comment below with the URL of your travel Wordpress (or SunPress) powered blog where you'd use such a widget.

Secondly, now is the time to add functionality so if you've got an idea on how to improve it from what I've discussed here, please feel free to comment.