Monetization So Far and Alinks

Monetization So Far and Alinks

This weekend was another research weekend, hence my last links post. I have been looking a lot at the alinks plugin.

This plugin allows you to assign urls to phrases within your posts. The plugin does it dynamically. It even has modules for such affiliate programs as Clickbank and Commission Junction.

By using this plugin, you can monetize your blog and link deeper to older posts at the same time. But I didn't want to go about this manually, more like semi-manually.

So this is going to be one of my thought process posts where it go off on tangents trying to find an answer for what I am trying to accomplish.

I also have the landing sites plugin and an old stats plugins that still works with the current Wordpress called Chaitgear cgref.

The landing sites plugin recognizes a query from search engines and when a visitor comes from one of the search engines, it lists related posts at the top of the page. Click on my link in these search results and you will see what I mean.

The cgref plugin is a very raw stats program, but being raw, it allows me to sort and access the keywords visitors have used to access my site.

Now, the alinks plugin allows you to import keyphrases. I was thinking I could update the cgref plugin with the more up to date query data from the landing sites plugin. I could then catch more of the keywords used to access my site. Then export the keywords and urls and import them directly into alinks, filtering them manually as I do.

In theory, I think this would increase traffic by boosting the rank that I already have for certain keywords and phrases. But I never stop with simple.

Or maybe just integrate these plugins into one plugin and have a site that automatically adjusts its own links. But that was not quite enough either.

Or maybe create a central tracking/ad server. One server for all of my blogs that uses the alinks modules to interlink related blogs based on the data from search engine hits collected at the central server. The advertising side of the server will use the search engine queries and the tags on blog posts to match affiliate products to the posts. Then I will use just simple feeds to deliver the related products with an ad block inside the post or serve them via alinks.

This will work will any affiliate program that provides data feeds that can be imported into the server like Clickbank, ShareASale or Regnow.

To build the matches I may have to use the Yahoo API or simply do a full text search on the affiliate database.

But then, how would I rank the products. What if 100 matching products come back for one post and I only want five? I could use the programs own ranking data to start. Clickbank gives you this info. And then I could collect clickthrough data and actual sales data to tweak this ranking.

And this is why I disappear for a couple of days at a time. I get myself into these projects I created myself and spend months finishing them. I'll let you know if I have bitten off more than I can chew. But I see the prize. I think it's a nice one. And if any of you know of something that works like this, save me.


Stephan Miller

Written by

Kansas City Software Engineer and Author

Twitter | Github | LinkedIn

Updated