SuitcaseLifestyle.com

Jesus, ever since moving into my new place(I’m living with mostly students), I can wander into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee and stumble out 3 hours later drunk. Does not make me very productive but fuckit, it’s good fun.

So recently I’ve been playing with datafeeds from ShareASale, in particular, mashing multiple datafeeds together. This is part of my plan to generate a more stable affiliate income. I figured due to the code/time needed to make these, for every 100 affiliates who consider this kind of project, less than 5% will actually do it(and from my research, probably far less than 5%). And once you make a working site, it’s pretty easy to copy everything into a new template with a new datafeed and have another site.

I won’t cover actually making a site using a datafeed, but if you don’t have any programming or database experience, this is the kind of perfect project to learn on. Basically shove thousands of products into a database, and then display them on a site, not so difficult! My first working site had less than 100 lines of PHP code. It’s now way beyond that, but it’s a good learning exercise anyway.

Because most datafeeds have lots of products and you’re basically spitting products out of a database, it’s easy to have a brand new domain, 0 days old with 100,000 pages… After which, the site never changes. From a SEO standpoint, that’s not so good. So here’s what I implemented.

The Auto-Growing Website

So rather than have a new domain with 100,000 pages, each new site will have around 10. And as the site gets more hits, it will grow accordingly. If you know databases, you’ll know that it’s simply one extra boolean field in the database such as ‘active’ 0 or 1.

Cronjobs would of been an option, but I wanted ensure that the site grew as it’s popularity did, so it needed to be based on visitors.

At first I tried this: Every time a visitor hits a product page, one new product is released. This did not work so well, because products were being unlocked way too fast by Googlebots, and the entire site would be unlocked in no time.

So to slow it down and make it more variable, and here’s exactly what I did:

//Unlock more products
$lottery = rand(1,5);
if ($lottery == 1) {
unlock_product();
}

If this makes no sense to you, “Select a random number between 1 and 5, if it is number 1, unlock another product”.

This will greatly slow down the speed in which products get unlocked, and you can slow it down or increase as you like by increasing or decreasing the random number pool.

This simple little function means you can create affiliate datafeed sites with thousands of pages, and leave them growing on their own, giving them a more natural growth pattern.

I’ve only been playing with these for a few weeks, but I’m seeing definite improvements in terms of indexed pages vs previous sites I made which were brand new with thousands of pages, never to be updated again.

If you’re not already with ShareASale, join up!