eBook & Internet Publishing News
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Piranha Feed is our script for Amazon.com associates (affiliates) who wish to quickly integrate many automatically updating product links in their sites. Among other things, it allows visitors to search Amazon without leaving your site, and also allows to put product links (which update automatically) into your web pages, by specifying a product category (e.g. “books” or “software”) and a keyword. An example of the latter would be if you said “books” and “sudoku”, your page could always include the latest Sudoku books… always up to date… of course you could pick words/phrases not just for 1 page, but for dozens, hundreds, thousands, or more.

As mentioned previously, Amazon have made some changes that have necessitated an upgrade to Piranha too. Fortunately upgrading to the new version is very quick and simple for you (we’ve done the heavy lifting), and you also get new functionality - like the ability to search on a whole load of additional product types such as unboxed videos, sporting goods, and jewelry.

For Piranha Feed, we normally provide free access to upgrades for 90 days from the date of purchase. If you fall into this category, you can get the upgrade at http://www.scriptrocket.com/piranha/upgrade.php.

We have also decided to provide free access to the latest version of Piranha Feed, to any customer who purchased on or after 1st September 2007 - provided you contact us before 1 July 2008. To request the upgrade please write to webmaster@ebookcompiler.com including both your Amazon Associate ID, and your ClickBank receipt number.

As regular readers know, Piranha Feed is our PHP script intended for webmasters who are members of Amazon.com’s associate (affiliate) program. The script allows visitors to search Amazon without leaving your site, and also for webmasters to incorporate automatically updating lists of Amazon products within their sites. Check out the demo and you’ll get a pretty good idea of what it does.

One of the nice things about Piranha Feed is that it only interfaces to Amazon using their documented programming interfaces (”APIs”) and thus doesn’t break when Amazon upgrade their site. Of course, if Amazon change their programming interfaces, an upgrade to Piranha Feed is necessary. This doesn’t happen frequently, but it can happen from time to time.

Just this situation has now arisen: Amazon have announced that they are phasing out ECS 3.0 (their older API) on March 31st 2008. This means that in order to continue to work, ECS 3.0 applications (including Piranha Feed) need to be modified to use the newer ECS 4.0 API.

We will shortly being releasing a new version of Piranha Feed that is compatible with ECS 4.0. I will make another post to this blog when it’s ready for download. And, I’m pleased to announce there will be some cool new features too!

Normally purchases of Piranha Feed include free access to any upgrades that we release for 90 days after the date of purchase. For this new version of Piranha Feed we will extend this - anybody who has purchased after September 1st 2007, will be able to get free upgrades to new versions through until the end of April 2008.

One other thing, the current price of Piranha Feed is US $39.95 (+VAT if you are in a European Union country). Even though we are adding some powerful and cool new features, I’m pleased to also announce that we’ll maintain that pricing for new customers through to May 1st 2008.

So look out for another blog posting coming soon, including

1. Migration instructions for the Piranha Feed upgrade
2. Details of new features in the Piranha Feed upgrade
3. How to get the best price for the new version

We have completed our price review of the products at ScriptRocket.com - our web site which offers a range of flexible PHP scripts for webmasters. Some changes have already been implemented, but others will be going through shortly:-

• Polls - Create your own web polls - is now priced at US $24.95^*
• Click/Counter Tracker - Invisibly count visitors to web pages or clicks on your advertising links - is now priced at US $24.95^*
• Feedback Form - Email form to get feedback from your visitors - is now priced at US $14.95^*
• CBRocket - our flexible search engine and text link advertising solution for ClickBank affiliates, is still available at the old price for now - US $34.95^* - but the price will be rising on approximately the 23rd January. Pleas e purchase on January 23rd if you wish to get it at the current price!
• All other prices, are unchanged for now, though of course we do reserve the right to make further changes. It’s worth pointing out that the Essential Scripts - collection of scripts which includes containing Top Site, Polls, Click/Counter Tracker and Feedback Form is now even better value than ever.

^* These prices don’t include VAT (Value Added Tax) which applies for European Union residents at their national rate.

According to the stats page in their resource area, we’ve been a member of the Internet Marketing Center’s affiliate program since February of 2000. Really.

I can’t say we’ve earned a fortune with them - but we have had a few commission checks. To be fair, the limited earnings that we have had are all our own fault^* - we’ve focused on other things, and not really been active in promoting them - just the odd banner ad on some of our company’s lower traffic web sites.

In any case, we’ve now posted a review of the Internet Marketing Center affiliate program for anybody’s who’s interested.

^* I should mention that there is a certain person that I know, who unlike us has generated a nice regular income using the Internet Marketing Center’s affiliate program. This person buys the products, writes reviews of the products, and then promotes those reviews at every conceivable opportunity. It wouldn’t be right for me to reveal the person’s name or website, but I can say that most of this person’s commissions are apparently earned from sales of the Internet Marketing Center’s flagship product, "The Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet".

Auction Buyers Guide is a free eBook about shopping at eBay and other Internet auctions. You can read it yourself, or give away to your customers, eBay auction winners, as a bonus with your product, etc., - I don’t care. The guide is brandable with your affiliate links, and you can also insert your business name and a link back to your web site. You earn money if a reader clicks one of the affiliate links and buys the linked product.

Click here for details

CBRocket is our PHP script that allows webmasters to allow their visitors to search ClickBank without leaving their site. And set up targeted text ads. A new release, version 2.10, fixes the limitation that had recently appeared, and which I wrote about in a recent blog post. As well as fixing this limitation, we’ve taken the opportunity to add a neat new filter feature, which is explained below. If you want to upgrade to the new version, we’ll provide it free to existing customers - so please contact us including the receipt number of your original purchase.

CBRocket: Filtering the ClickBank marketplace

CBRocket also now includes a feature that allows you to filter out product listings from ClickBank’s results, based on keywords that you specify.

Why would you want to do that?

Although ClickBank contains many excellent products, there may be some products that you feel are inappropriate for your site.

For example:

• There might be some products that you consider unsuitable for your audience. For example, in site that is principally aimed at families,
  you might not wish to list products relating to nude photography, or improving your casino and gambling skills.

• Many affiliate programs and advertising programs have restrictions on what type of content may appear on the same site as their ads. For
  example, you may not be allowed to put gambling ads on your web site. For this reason, you wouldn’t want CBRocket to display ClickBank products
  related to gambling, betting, casinos, poker, roulette, etc.

So how does this feature work?

First you set up a list of keywords describing products that you wish to filter out. And, from then on, whenever you retrieve the last ClickBank
data (by clicking a link in the admin screen of CBRocket), any products which contain any of these keywords will be automatically removed from your copy of the ClickBank marketplace.

Example: if you set this parameter to "casino,roulette,poker,horse racing,bet,bets,betting,gambling" it would filter out any ClickBank products which contained any of these gambling terms in their title or description.

If you ever want to narrow or widen the criteria, you can simply change the list of keywords, and click the retrieval link (in the CBRocket admin
screen) to update your copy of the ClickBank marketplace. It really is that easy.

Remember "The Rich Jerk" - the infamous e-marketing guide that caused a boatload of controversy about 18 months ago. I bought a copy myself, and wrote a review back when it cost quite a bit more (although I do understand the newest version is somewhat improved from the version that I reviewed). Anyway, you can get the guide, by using this link for just $9.95.

I’m not going to pretend that reading the Rich Jerk, or any other guide for that matter, is going to turn you into an Internet success. But I do think it could give anybody interesting in internet or affiliate marketing some good ideas - and at this price, you can’t go wrong. If you don’t already have the guide, I’d suggest that you go and buy it right now.

When you visit the site, you’ll probably also get the option to purchase a Deluxe version (for an extra $9.95), which comes with 57 MP3 recordings that walk you through the entire book. You could listen to them in your car, on your iPod. I think that’s a pretty good deal, but you’ll have to decide for yourself which you just want the eBook or whether you prefer the Deluxe version.

CBRocket is our PHP script that lets your web site visitors to search ClickBank without leaving their site. And set up targeted text ads. And all the links to the various ClickBank products, in both cases, are tagged with your clickbank affiliate ID, allowing you to earn commissions on sales.

A customer wrote to me recently with a limitation that has just arisen (because of recent changes at ClickBank’s site), and my testing has now confirmed it. When you log-in and ask CBRocket to retrieve the latest Clickbank marketplace data, CBRocket seems to only be retrieving the first 100 listings from each subcategory (subcategories are things like “Marketing -> Promotion”). This sounds like perhaps CBRocket may be leaving out a significant chunk of the ClickBank marketplace - but as always with computers - things are never quite as simple as they first seem.

• When I just tried CBRocket on the marketplace, it did retrieve 5729 unique items, plus a further 1916 duplicates. I don’t yet know the number that should have been retrieved, but it does not sound like a vast number of items have gone missing.
• Many subcategories contain less than 100 items - items in these subcategories won’t be affected at all.
• For those subcategories which contain over 100 items, items 101 onwards are often duplicated in other subcategories which do contain less than 100 items. So, these types of items also won’t be "lost" either.

By "lost", I mean that CBRocket is not retrieving these items from the ClickBank marketplace to its database, and hence these items won’t be displayed in ads or search results (although of course other items would be). At this exact moment, I can’t say that no items are being "lost", but neither can I yet say that any items are actually being "lost". I simply don’t know yet - although my gut tells me that the chances are, a few items are being "lost".

Anyway, I’ve examined the problem, and it should be fairly straightforward to fix. We expect to have an update to CBRocket within a week or so. Check here for updates, and don’t be afraid to email us if you have any questions.

Update:

I’ve done some more testing. It does seem a fair number of lower ranked items are affected - I guess the ClickBank marketplace had grown even faster than I realized. According to my data, there are now 8365 unique items in the marketplace, plus a further 3641 duplicates - which means that 2636 lower ranked items are currently not being retrieved. This would correspond to items which rank below 100 in all the subcategories in which they are listed.

Anyway, the good news, is the planned fix appears to work fine - so we should hopefully (fingers crossed) being able to release a fix within 1 week, and perhaps a bit sooner.

CBRocket is our PHP script that allows users to search ClickBank from your site, and also display targeted ClickBank text ads (all tagged with your ClickBank "nickname" - which is their word for Affiliate ID). We’ve just released version 1.02.

Version 1.02 is mainly about fixing some minor bugs and issues with the software, but there a few important additions/improvements too, including:

1. A new feature allows you to configure the script to use any of 4 different methods to retrieve data from ClickBank. For most people this will make no difference - but if you have a web host who runs a hobbled version of PHP which doesn’t allow fopen on remote sites (and there seem to be some around, particularly towards the cheaper end of the market) - then this offers a work round.
2. The script now works if you have PHP’s register_globals turned off. Again, for most people, this isn’t an issue, but again it makes the script compatible with more web hosting companies.
3. The synonymizing (is that a word?) - basically the method the software uses to find matching items in the search results which contain similar (but not identical) keywords has been improved.
4. There are some new options for configuring the ordering of results (like whether to prioritize MarketingRocket products which include images).
5. The Mini-Links and Auto Mini-Links system (targeted text ads) has been considerably improved. You can set-up a series of "default" keywords which are used to find extra text ads, if not enough can be found using the keywords that you set-up for your page (Mini-Links) or have in your page title (Auto Mini-Links). What’s more, you can provide a list of default keywords for the software to select from a random, so the ads tend to vary ("rotate") each time your web page is loaded.
6. The log-in screen for administrators includes the latest news headlines from our company (of course your site visitors would never see these - but it could be useful to you as the operator/administrator of the script)

If you haven’t bought CBRocket before, you’ll get the new version automatically, when you buy the script.

If you bought CBRocket 1.00 (if you’ve bought it prior to 1st December 2005), then we’ll upgrade you to version 1.02 free of charge. To get the upgrade, please email us at webmaster@ebookcompiler.com. To get the upgrade, you must quote your ClickBank receipt number for the CBRocket purchase in the body of your message.

We’ve just released version 2.50 of our free eBook, "117 Ways To Increase Web Site Traffic".

This is a big improvement over previous versions, correcting and expanding quite a few points (not to mention some typos), more resources, and well, generally all round just better.

If you want to download a copy, go go here for information.

Oh, and in case you didn’t know:

• You can distribute copies of this eBook (subject to the terms in the License) if you want. It could make a nice gift for customers or visitors to your web site. Perhaps a free bonus to give away with your product. Use your imagination…
• Before you give it copies, you can download the Rebrander (also free), which allows you to customize the eBook. You can insert your own link to your own web site - on every page in the eBook - and also all the links to our company’s products can be coded with your affiliate id. Thus, if one of your readers, clicks on these links and buys a product from our company, you can earn a commission.