Professional affiliate marketing with JavaScript

22/01/2008 by paul

Excuse me for disappearing for a few months...this was largely due to the birth of my daughter, so no apologies due ;) ... I haven't been completely slack, though; I've been working on a couple of new sites and some nifty new tricks to boost site traffic through affiliation with related sites.

I wanted to create dynamic content from one site that I could publish on other sites. One example of this was the Photography-Courses.com.au website. This site lists photography courses from schools around Australia, with course schedules, intended audience, etc. The site currently contains around 100 courses.

The site generates reasonable traffic on its own, but the original plan was always to promote the courses through affiliates; I just needed a way to share the dynamic homepage schedule (courses commencing in the next 6 weeks) with related websites and affiliates such as Camera-Warehouse.

Targeted exposure on affiliate websites provides high-conversion opportunities for Photography-Courses.com.au and relevant extra content for the affiliates - a win-win situation

The method I created means the affiliate adds a snippet of JavaScript code, which creates the course listing, to a page on their website and gets paid a percentage of the commission received for any bookings they generate (using affiliate tracking through cookies) (more information on this affiliate scheme here).

The following is what I came up with...

This table is drawn dynamically by calling a JavaScript script on the Photography-Courses.com.au site that builds and displays the table contents. This is done in real-time (although cacheing is a probably a better option), so the list stays up-to-date. There are also options to add geographic filtering by state (if your audience is local to a particular area), and by default only courses that offer commission are shown. A further option is available to filter the list by the level of commission. Affiliate tags are embedded in the links to track commission.

Functionally, the script works well. The styles are static, but this hasn't been an issue to date, and you can adjust the basic styling by including the script in a div and styling locally.

The only problem that using JavaScript in this way presents is with search engine optimisation. The template page is created, then a dynamic script adds the table at the client end. This won't work for any of the search engine spiders, unfortunately, so I'm currently working on an SEO friendly version that will display in real time.

This script is ideal for inter-site or affiliate marketing of things like 'top-sellers' or 'most popular' lists, but can pretty much be adjusted to create any dynamic content on one site that's sourced from another.

For more information on this or any other topic, please send me an email.

Keywords :  javascript, rss, xml, cross-site pollenation, affiliate marketing,