Affiliate Data Feeds, Constant Contact, GraphQL and Visual Hooks

Here’s the corrected transcript with your requested edits:

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BobWP:
Hey everyone, back to the Do the Woo podcast, show number 22. Bob WP here, and my wonderful co-host who is struggling through this summer. How was your 4th of July, Brad?

Brad:
It was great, man. There’s something about the 4th of July. I feel like I always forget how much I enjoy the holiday until the day of. Maybe that’s just me, but there’s something about celebrating the country with barbecues and, obviously, exploding fireworks. It’s always fun to set things on fire—but just for me, I feel like the 4th of July really kicks in. We’re in full-fledged summer. Memorial Day is the unofficial start, but the 4th of July is like, “Yep, we’re here. Let’s do it.” So I had a good one. How about you? Did you have a good fourth? Did you launch any fireworks out there?

BobWP:
Actually, what’s interesting is where we live now, we’re just a little ways from the beach, and they have quite an elaborate—it’s not an organized firework display—but fireworks are only allowed on the beach. So we look out, and just right over the scrub, we can see fireworks for at least, oh, I would say, it’s got to be a good six to eight to ten miles down the beach.

Brad:
Wow. You don’t have to leave your house.

BobWP:
It’s great. Yeah. So everybody goes down there, and this goes on for a good two to three hours, and it’s just this constant stream. You just see it all the way down. I just pulled out my iPad, did some reading, and every once in a while, I looked out the window and looked down there.

Brad:
That might be the best way to enjoy fireworks—sitting in your house, enjoying life rather than fighting the crowds to get a seat and getting stuck in traffic. But that is fun. It’s always a fun time of year.

BobWP:
Yeah, good time. Well, I’m pretty excited. We have Eric Bush as our guest today. He’s with Data Feeder—or I think it’s Data Feeder—and it’s spelled F-E-E-D-R at the end there. Hey, Eric, glad you were able to join us.

Eric:
Hi. Thanks for having me. I’m really happy to be here. I actually stole the “R” at the end from the old Flickr days.

Brad:
Oh, yeah, Flickr. And there’s nothing more appropriate after the 4th of July than having a Canadian on the show. So what do you do on the 4th of July? You work?

Eric:
Yeah, that’s right. Most of my customers are not working, therefore I’m not doing support.

Brad:
Well, you just had—what is it, Canada Day? Is that what it’s officially called—not too long ago?

Eric:
Yeah, that’s right. So we also did the whole firework thing, went down to the water, watched the fireworks. It’s nice. It’s kind of the whole weekend that leads with Canada Day and ends with the 4th of July.

Brad:
Nice, nice. I like it.

BobWP:
Well, I know that it’s kind of taken a different direction a little bit with WooCommerce, talking about affiliate marketing, and I know this is a very interesting service that you provide and how it integrates with WooCommerce. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about what you do there and exactly what Data Feeder does?

Eric:
Sure, yeah. So Data Feeder allows you to import affiliate products into your WooCommerce store, and Data Feeder manages the stock, updates, and removes old products. So basically, what we’ve done over the past 11 years is we’ve aggregated data feeds from more than 30 affiliate networks and from more than 14,000 retailers, bringing in over half a billion products into our database. Our customers can then search and find the products they want to promote on their site, import those products into the WooCommerce store, and our plugin will keep those products up to date. So if there’s a price change, if they change the name, and most importantly, if they change the affiliate link, the products in your WooCommerce store stay updated. Additionally, when the person is searching—so let’s say you have a website related to dogs, you blog about dogs, and you want to sell some dog beds—you can do a search and find some dog beds to import into your store. But let’s say a new retailer or new merchant adds more dog beds that match your search. You don’t have to go and think, “Okay, well, PetSmart added a whole bunch of new dog beds to their inventory. I need to go find those.” With Data Feeder, you can actually subscribe to your searches, and it will go and, every couple of days or whatever you configure, search PetSmart and the other merchants that you’re wanting to promote to see if there are any new dog beds, bring those down, update any of the products that you had in your store with new links or new prices, and if PetSmart removes the dog bed from their inventory that was in your store, Data Feeder handles that and deletes that product from your store.

Brad:
That’s cool. I mean, it sounds like a really hands-off solution to affiliate products, affiliate stores. Whenever I think of stores that are affiliate products, I remember 10 or 15 years ago, it was almost like a gold rush. When it became easier to do this and the feeds were more standardized, everybody was just spinning up and launching stores of affiliate products. That’s all they had—affiliate products—so they basically were just collecting money, just raking it in. Then it seemed like the landscape shifted, where it was less about a 100% affiliate store and more complimentary to other products that you might be physically selling. So you have 10 dog beds that you sell yourself, and then maybe you have five other ones through affiliates that you also include, or whatever. I’m curious, from your perspective, where’s the landscape at today? Is it still right for a 100% affiliate-based product store? Is it more complimentary? Is there something else that you’re starting to see trending, or where do you see it on your side?

Eric:
Yeah, so you’re right. Back in the day, it was the heyday. Just put it up, and it’s a gold rush—put up the products, and they will come. But it’s not like that anymore, mostly because of a lot of what Google has done to try to eliminate thin affiliates from their search results. Google has a webpage where they lay out what a thin affiliate is. Basically, Google says, “If you’re not providing anything else, nothing else of value, if you’re just adding product links to your site, we’re really not going to place high importance on you.” So what we try to encourage all of our members to do is to build out a site and build value around your content, whether it’s blog posts, articles, video, or whatever. Build as much value around that content as you can, and then bring in a store afterward.

So that would be—we don’t see too many of our customers actually selling their own products along with some affiliate products because the actual checkout process becomes a little strange. If you’re selling your own product, you’re going to check out in your own cart. But then, if you want to add another affiliate product to the cart, well, you need to go to the merchant’s website to buy it. So we don’t actually see that use case very often. Mostly, it’s our customers who we see have the most success really developing a bit of a brand around their site, as well as providing a lot of valuable content unrelated to the products. Then the products complement the rest of their site.

Brad:
Yeah, I love that idea. You mentioned kind of blogging—pulling in specific products related to whatever topic you might be writing about, whether it’s that specific product itself or just kind of related to the topic. Bob, I mean, you do some of this. You do quite a bit of this with WordPress products. You write about them, you review them, you have a number of affiliate accounts, and it’s a great way to earn revenue around content, especially when you’re first getting started because there’s really no barrier to entry. You just launch a site, start writing, and hook up some affiliate stuff and hope people click. But it’s a good revenue model, right, Bob? I mean, you’re a prime example of somebody doing it.

BobWP:
And I think it’s interesting because I’ve thought about it—I did write a post on it, and I actually was able to experience this. I thought exactly what Eric said: if, down the road at some point, I had some content around, and it seemed to be common sense to pull in maybe even 50 or 100 products that really related to what I was talking about a lot. Like I said, it would smoothly integrate with my content. I wouldn’t be suddenly, “Here, I have this store—just buy.” It does make a lot of sense. So I think it’s very cool. It’s a great tool to kind of have. For me right now, I’m thinking, “Okay, there it is, it’s available,” and I know now that if that time comes when something works, I’ve got my hands on it.
And I think that’s where the strength of

it is—a lot of times, you don’t have or you don’t prepare for those kinds of things, or you think, “Sometime down the road I’m going to do that,” versus, “Okay, now I’m to the point where I can easily pull this in, integrate it, and it’s not going to be rocket science.” I’m not going to have to build something from scratch. And I know Eric and I were chatting a little bit before, and Woo has its built-in external affiliate option. That’s great if you want to do four or five or a few handful, and I’ve done that in the past. But boy, you start adding any number, even if you get up to a dozen, couple dozen, or more—it can be a pain keeping track of and, exactly what he said, making sure the links are always working and everything’s on top of things and the prices are changing. This thing just seamlessly, it’s like bam. I even set up a demo with a couple of them just to see how it would work, and it was kind of a set-it-and-go type of thing.

Brad:
Yeah, good stuff.

Eric:
Yeah, you really need something in place to keep the products up to date, or else it’s going to be a maintenance nightmare. We did an interview—podcast, actually—a video interview with one of our customers a few years back. I don’t know how much content he had on the site, but his focus was on maybe a few dozen products per site. Not huge—thousands of products—but maybe a couple of hundred products. He said these products had to be hard to find locally—if someone had to drive 20 miles to get this product or more, that was the kind of product he wanted to have in his store. He just really focused on these kind of long-tail niche little sites and was able to do high four figures and low five figures a month. It was insane. He wouldn’t share the URLs, rightfully, because people would just copy them right out. But yeah, I was just kind of amazed at what he had done.

Brad:
Yeah, I love the automated approach. I remember on my blog, back when I used to blog more regularly, I had a number of affiliate links to mostly WordPress stuff. I ran into the same problem where URLs would change or they were constantly switching the affiliate service they would use. So they’d switch from ShareASale to something else or whatever, which meant all the URLs had to change. So I quickly realized, “Oh, I need to use short URLs or something where the URL I’m using publicly doesn’t change, but I can change it behind the scenes.” And even that was a bit of a decent amount of work, and we’re talking maybe 20 products at most. I can’t even imagine hundreds or thousands and not having some kind of an automated way to work that process. So I think that’s massive—a huge feature. I would imagine that’s a huge selling point for you with this tool.

Eric:
So that was kind of critical—it had to be done. You can’t import 5,000 products into your WooCommerce store and then be like, “Well, there they are. I’ll just wait a month or wait a year, and all the links will be broken and it’s just useless.”

Brad:
Yeah. I’m curious—whenever I think of data and imports, and obviously you’re using structured data, whatever type of feeds, XML or JSON or some other format, but just importing data from a lot of different places—you said you had like 35 plus different networks. What kind of challenges do you run into? It always worries me, right? Because even though things are structured and you expect things to come in a certain way, that’s never actually really the case.

Eric:
Right? They never do. I mean, we’ve been battling this since 2008. You would think that there would be more standards in place, and I think Google is starting to impose a standard on a lot of the merchants, but right now there’s still no standard. So you’ll get all sorts of data. Just the other day, we had products coming in that had the affiliate links in the wrong field in the data feed. So it’s like, “Okay, well, now we need to adjust our parser so that when we bring in that data feed, we need to make sure that, okay, the affiliate link needs to go in the right place.” So what we’ve tried to do is normalize all the core fields of a data feed—product name, product description, price, sale price if it’s on sale, brand, etc. A lot of these things we’ve been able to normalize. But then you’ll get a ton of other information—maybe you’ll have a color field, maybe they’ve put “red” into the color field, but more likely than not, they’ve put “red” into a field called “custom1” or “red” into “additional information.” And so you have to pull that out and parse it as well.

So that’s a huge challenge—trying to deal with this disparate data coming in all different forms. Another issue we deal with is, we’ll go try to download the feeds from one of the affiliate networks, and their API or their feed service is down. So that ends up like, “Oh, why do we have zero products from ShareASale in our database?” We need to run the update again and push out all those products into our system, which can get a little hairy at times. It’s a constant—we have all the parsers in place, we have the whole system in place, but then it’s a constant monitoring to make sure that the data feed structure and the URL that we’re getting the feeds from is the same, etc.

Brad:
Yeah, I mean, in a sense, it kind of goes back to security around developing for WordPress or anything, and that’s basically never trusting the data you’re given, right?

Eric:
Exactly.

Brad:
You always have to validate, you always have to sanitize, you always have to verify that what you’re getting is what you actually are expecting. You can’t just trust that because the field says they’re going to give you a URL that it’s actually going to be a URL. What happens if it comes over and it’s just a zero? Are you ready for that? Does your system, your plugin, whatever, understand what to do if it’s a zero and not a URL, or is it going to blow up?

Eric:
Why are there three decimal places, or three points after the decimal, for a price? It’s like “19.999.” It’s like, “That is not a price.”

Brad:
Yeah, there’s the “plan for the unexpected” approach.

Eric:
Exactly—plan for everything. On one hand, I would love for everything to come under the Google Shopping product format, or something—I can’t remember the name. I would love for everything to come in that format, but then it might actually be like, “Well, if it all comes in and it’s all clean, do we need Data Feeder anymore?”

Brad:
Yeah, definitely a cool product—certainly one that people should check out. I think there’s a lot of value to it, obviously, just the amount of time you would spend doing this yourself or using the various different tools to throw this all together with these networks. For the price point, it would make zero sense rather than just going with a solid, proven tool. It’s impressive that you’ve been around for 11 years, honestly. In the world of WordPress premium products, that’s old. You’re old.

Eric:
We started doing—from the get-go, we were doing SaaS models (software as a service). Even at that time, WooCommerce wasn’t around. It was just like, “Well, what do we do for recurring billing?” Stripe wasn’t around, all these services weren’t around. So that was—just doing recurring billing back in 2008 was really…

Brad:
It doesn’t sound like that long ago, but in the world of the internet and technology, it was forever ago. A lot has changed, like you said.

Eric:
So much.

Brad:
Yeah, Stripe wasn’t around. I can’t even—that’s crazy to even think about.

Eric:
So it was like Authorize.net, and it’s like, “Ugh, no one wants to do that.”

BobWP:
These conversations always make me so happy I do what I do, that’s all I can say.I know This is near and dear to Brad’s heart, and I thought he could tell us a little bit about it because I think he has a little bit of hands-on experience with what’s going on there. That’s right. Not only is it a cool plugin, but my company, WebDevStudios, built this plugin for Constant Contact and helped them release it. I love it, but it’s relatable. So yeah, check it out

Brad:
’s Constant Contact + WooCommerce plugin. It’s on WordPress.org, freely available, but I really like this—not just because obviously we built it and released it, which is always great. That’s a win-win in my opinion when someone pays us to release open-source software—it doesn’t get any better than that. But I love the idea of companies actively building projects to not just work with WordPress, but to work with a specific plugin for WordPress, which in this case is WooCommerce.

I think that’s really neat to show the value around something like WooCommerce in that space. So we worked with Constant Contact and decided to roll this out as a separate plugin instead of an add-on to the official Constant Contact plugin, just to keep things separate and clean. That way, they could go whatever direction made the most sense for those codebases. But it does a lot of cool stuff. You can pull products from your store into your emails. You can automatically import your WooCommerce contacts and customers into Constant Contact. You can do segmented, pre-seeded lists that are generated so you can fire off marketing campaigns or emails to, maybe, all the customers that purchased in the last 30 days, or first-time customers versus repeat customers. There’s a lot of segmenting you can do in your marketing emails that go out in a really automated way, which is neat.

So it’s the initial release. There’s definitely a lot more on the roadmap coming, but if you have a WooCommerce site, and certainly if you’re using Constant Contact, you should check it out. But even if you’re not, you should give it a look and see if you can up your email marketing game a bit. I tell you, email has been around forever, and we talk about your product being older in the WordPress world, but it’s amazing how effective email marketing still is today. It works if you do it right, and you have a good strategy, and you’re not blasting emails every day or every hour, but you have a really good strategy around it. It converts, it converts really well. So it’s cool to see that and to work with a great company like Constant Contact.

Eric:
It makes a lot of sense to release a WooCommerce-specific version too, just to handle a lot of the segments that you were talking about. Trying to shove that into an existing plugin would be quite tricky. I think it would make the interface for the user using the plugin really tough. “Okay, well, do I want to promote posts or products, or what in the emails?” So it makes a lot of sense to keep them separate.

Brad:
Yeah, I like it too. Like I said, that way the directions can go different. I mean, there’s always the Jetpack approach, where you just put everything in and then let them pick what they want to use when they really only want one feature. But I’m not that big of a fan of that approach. I think having something as big as a WooCommerce plugin and what that entails, which could be anything around eCommerce, deserves its own plugin. So definitely happy we went with that approach. But it’s a bit of a soft launch—it’s out there, it’s public, there’s been a little bit of talk about it, but there’s a bigger marketing push coming up. And again, the roadmap of all the ideas on the horizon of what we want to work with Constant Contact on is really cool. They’re a great company. They do a lot for WordPress and open source. Of course, Constant Contact is part of a larger company that includes Bluehost, who have at least one, if not more, dedicated contributors to WordPress fully on staff. I know John’s over there. They do a lot of great stuff for open source, so it’s great to see, again, them giving back and getting some plugins out there. Obviously, it promotes their service, but it’s open source and it’s available.

Eric:
Yeah, that’s really cool.

Brad:
Give it a look-see. It’s up on WordPress.org.

Eric:
Oh, so it’s free. Nice.

BobWP:
Yeah, I love it. The people who are using Constant Contact and using WooCommerce are probably going to be like, “Whoa, I’ve been doing it this way, or trying to do it this way, or trying to pull in other resources or tools,” and now it’s all neatly packaged.

Brad:
It’s nice to have the official one, right? Yes, there are other ways to do this out there because there wasn’t an official way, but when you work with the company and you’re making the official plugin, they can do what they need to do on their side to make this plugin as integrated as possible and make it as easy as possible to use. So now there’s an official path forward for that integration.

BobWP:
For sure. Yeah, very cool. So I’m going to let our guest, Eric, introduce the next one because I have no idea what we’re talking about here. So I’m going to have both you and Brad tell everybody about it, and maybe I’ll actually make some sense out of it.

Eric:
Okay. So yeah, I thought it was interesting. There are a couple of projects going on right now—and it’s still early days—to integrate GraphQL with WooCommerce. One of the links I shared was basically a WooCommerce Gatsby integration. So if you’re not familiar with Gatsby, it’s kind of a React framework where you can pull in data from all different sources. This particular package here on GitHub is actually pulling in the data from a WooCommerce store via the API using GraphQL, which Gatsby really understands and works well with. You bring it in and you can import your products into a Gatsby site. The nice thing about a Gatsby site is that it’s blazing fast. If you have a small store and you’re looking for high performance, Gatsby is super, super fast because it’s essentially… what’s it called? It’s basically a static site with React. So you’re serving up flat HTML files, and then you can distribute those HTML files over a CDN. So then you get this super, super fast speed. This GitHub package that I linked to allows you to integrate Gatsby with WooCommerce. I did a little test last week to see how well this plugin works. I tried to bring in some products from one of my Data Feeder stores—so I had all these products in my WooCommerce store—and actually imported them into a Gatsby site. It was really cool. There were some limitations for sure, and there was quite a bit of work to get it to work, but once I got the products in there—blazing fast—to see a hundred products just load on a single page in milliseconds, it’s just like, “Wow, that’s awesome.”

And I think we’re going to see a lot of— I know there are some integrations with Gatsby and WordPress—people using WordPress as a headless CMS and importing their WordPress content over into Gatsby. I think in a year from now we’ll see some really strong Gatsby integrations for WooCommerce people because I know Gatsby already has an official Shopify plugin. So you can run your Shopify store on a Gatsby site, and I think in a year from now we’ll see some pretty solid integrations for WooCommerce and Gatsby. It’ll make for some pretty interesting setups, especially for if you’re doing some agency work, client work, to get a client’s site into a Gatsby setup. It makes hosting and security cheap and safe.

Brad:
It’s the vicious cycle, Bob. We started building websites with just HTML.

Eric:
Yeah, yeah. I was going to say, it’s static.

Brad:
Static, and now we’re back.

Eric:
That’s right. How many times are we going to reinvent the wheel to put text on a page?

Brad:
It’s great though. Eric’s spot on. We’ve been working with Gatsby quite a bit. We’ve been working with clients and discussing what a Gatsby integration could look like and some of the advantages of it. But yeah, you can’t get a faster site load than with static files, and that’s basically what Gatsby does. It takes WordPress and generates a static website. So WordPress still powers the content and everything, but Gatsby is the front end, if you will, and that’s why they call it headless—it’s not directly connected like a normal theme where it’s kind of building things on the fly with the database and all that other stuff. So you’ll be hearing a lot more about Gatsby. This is cool though—yeah. Not only are we seeing it in the WordPress space, but now we’re seeing it in WooCommerce, and some of the other plugins are making sure that they can integrate and work well with it. Obviously, WooCommerce is a juggernaut—just a massive plugin with a lot of functionality, and most plugins aren’t at that level. But it’s cool to see that Gatsby is growing and spreading in the WordPress ecosystem.

BobWP:
Cool. Now onto something… well, I actually get this, but again, I don’t really use them that much, and I’m sure both of you—I don’t know—live and breathe these sometimes: Business Bloomer’s WooCommerce Visual Hook Guide. It’s always a promising word because we all need more guides, for sure. So what are we looking at here with this visual hook guide? Why don’t we start with Eric again here?

Eric:
Yeah, so on the BusinessBloomer.com site, they’ve taken various pages from WooCommerce, like your single product page, your category page, your shop homepage, and broken those into each section of the page. It’ll

show you, here’s the thumbnail, here’s the price. Basically, what they’ve done is they’ve exposed where all the hooks are on that page. So if you want to—let’s say you have a buy button or add-to-cart button on your single product page and you want to display a message under that, like “Use this coupon within the next 24 hours to save 24%,” you can go to the visual guide, check out the single product page, and you can find exactly the hook you need. I actually think they have some code samples on the site to put whatever text you want above your add-to-cart button, below your add-to-cart button, above your product price, below your product price, or anywhere on that single product page that has a hook exposed for it. So it’s super useful if you just want to add some quick visual elements to your page and you don’t exactly know which WooCommerce hook to use. This visual guide makes it so easy to figure out, “Okay, if I add this little snippet of code, this text will appear right there on my site.” So yeah, it makes it real easy.

Brad:
Yeah, hooks are a really integral component of WordPress in general in terms of extending WordPress and customizing it to do exactly what you want. So all major plugins also utilize hooks—there are actions and filters. But I think this is helpful, especially for the non-super-technical, because in my opinion, I really like visuals. I like seeing stuff like you said, “Oh, I want to put a piece of content right here on the page. What hooks should I use?” And it tells you. And if the idea of actually using that code is a bit intimidating—which I could absolutely see how it could be if you’re not a developer—there are even plugins you can use that allow you to type in the hook name and then type in whatever you want to show there—HTML. Some take it even further. You can upload images and stuff, but that way you can actually fire code against those hooks without actually writing code. All you need to know is the hook name and then what you want to put there. I know Beaver Builder has it built right in, and I think you can even do this through ACF as well—fire off a hook. So look for a plugin that does that if the code’s a bit intimidating. But it is super helpful because WooCommerce—I don’t know how many hooks WooCommerce has. I don’t know, Eric, if you know, but I would bet it’s hundreds, if not thousands.

Eric:
Tens of thousands.

Brad:
So there are a lot of hooks available.

Eric:
Whenever I want to customize something in WooCommerce—before this visual guide—I would always end up going to open up the WooCommerce template files and just start diving into the code. “Okay, where exactly is the buy button?” or “Where exactly is the price?” Now it’s just like you can go to the site, “Oh, there it is. I know exactly what hook I need to do what I need to do.”

BobWP:
Yeah, well that’s good to know because for us non-tech people, anything is helpful, especially for somebody that’s still finally feeling like they’ve semi-conquered CSS here. Whenever I do something correctly there, it’s like I have my own little party here that I celebrate by myself, but that’s another story altogether. Anyway, one of the things I found—another, I don’t know how I came across this, but I guess you’d say in celebration of talking about affiliate marketing—this one just caught my eye. This title, it says, “Four Tips for Combating Link Rot in Affiliate Marketing.” I’d never heard of link rot before, but as I got into it, I had an idea what it was. It’s basically—I’m trying to synopsize what they’ve said here—but it’s links that basically don’t work. They say deep links decay to the point that they no longer earn money for the publisher. I imagine you’ve even kind of touched on that a little bit, Eric, when you talked about keeping things updated, keeping the links updated. So probably when you think of link rot now that this actually exists as a term, you’re thinking, “Oh, okay…”

Brad:
This is kind of what we’re solving in several different ways too. So what did you think about the article?

Eric:
It makes total sense. I think, like Brad mentioned, when you have an affiliate link to, let’s say, a theme or hosting or something and it runs through ShareASale, and then that company that you were linked to changes over to Commission Junction, or now they have their own in-house affiliate program, well, that link that you had on your website no longer works. So all those people who are coming back to that article month after month, year after year, they’re clicking a dead link. So typically the link will just 404 or redirect to someone’s homepage. But the important thing is, you’re not getting paid at all. So it’s hard. Like Brad mentioned, you almost need a backend system to manage all the various affiliate links you have out there. So if you have almost like a Bitly, your own personal Bitly, where you can—is that the URL shortener? Bitly, is that what it is?

Brad:
Yep, one of them. Yeah, Bitly.

Eric:
You have your own personal Bitly so that if you put out your link to whatever web host that you prefer and you put that on five or six different sites, and you don’t even remember where you put them, and then all of a sudden that affiliate link changes, you just have to change it in one place instead of going to those five or six different sites or posts or wherever you put that content. If you managed it in one central location, then you can kind of mitigate the issue a little bit, but you still have to manage it. It’s a big issue.

Brad:
It’s still work. I mean, I know Bitly—Rebrandly is another one that we started using that I really like. There are actually plugins in WordPress that will do this. I used to use one very basic—you would just put in the slug, I think, and then where you want it to go. It was just a CPT that would redirect, which was basic but got the job done, right? Actually, I set up links when my books came out to not only link to Amazon but also to use my affiliate link to Amazon. So anytime someone was like, “Where can I get your book?” Here’s my Bitly. So now I get a small commission on the backend, but then I’d get some credit for the affiliate sale from Amazon as well.

BobWP:
Yeah, I use plugin management—affiliate management—it’s called Thirsty Affiliates. I mean, I couldn’t live without it because one thing it does is if an affiliate gets changed and you have it in 30 different posts, you don’t have to go through and dig it out, you just change it in one central area. Also, you can scan all your posts and find out which posts have that link in them. They do have an affiliate health setting on it in their pro version. But the odd thing about it is, for some reason, ShareASale affiliates’ health always comes up questionable, no matter if it’s good or not. And I’m sure it’s something they just can’t get around.

Eric:
ShareASale is questionable, yeah.

BobWP:
Yeah, so sometimes you go in there, and you see all these and you think, “Is it even working?” So you test it—yeah, it’s working fine. I was told that was just something that comes out of ShareASale alone. So there’s nothing perfect, but it is a matter of—I know when I had several hundreds of links on some sites and they actually changed the affiliate program, I was able to easily make a change on them because of that reason. It wasn’t as tough because, yeah, it can be a nightmare having these broken links. So now I have a word for it: link rot. So when I’m on my site, I can think, “Oh, what link rot is happening today?” So it’s always good to have a nice term for it.

Brad:
I like it.

BobWP:
Alrighty, well, I think that covers everything we wanted to talk about. Let’s see, first, anything exciting going on that you want to share? How about Eric? Anything going on in your world?

Eric:
No, I’m just enjoying the summer. It finally feels like it just got here, so that’s it. Once the winter’s gone, I don’t leave Canada. It’s too nice. In winter, I try to fill up my time with getting out of here.

BobWP:
How about you, Brad?

Brad:
No, not much. I feel like there’s always that kind of summer slowdown around events and stuff. Spring and fall are the big times of the year and for good reason—vacations, people are out. So yeah, nothing in the immediate future. Got a few things coming up in the fall, which we can talk about when they get a little bit closer.

BobWP:
Cool. Yeah, pretty much that’s the name of the game for me too. Just going through the summer, sliding through the summer. So before we leave, Eric, where can people find you, find Data Feeder, all that good stuff on the web?

Eric:
Yeah, you can find me at datafeedr.com

. I don’t really do much social media stuff, so datafeedr.com, and I blog at ericbusch.net.

BobWP:
Cool. Excellent. Well, yeah, I think that pretty much wraps it up. I just want to once again thank Liquid Web for their support of our podcast. You can get 33% off six months of the Woo Managed Hosting. Just use the code BOB-WP—a way to get your site all going, especially when you get Eric’s plugin hooked up and you’ve got all those affiliates coming in. You’ve got to handle all that traffic. So, good stuff.

Eric:
And if I could pipe in about Liquid Web—I’ve been with them since 2005. I had a few hosts before them, and since then it’s just been rock solid. They’re awesome.

BobWP:
Cool, cool, cool. You hear that, Liquid Web? Alright, well guys, great show. I appreciate it. Enjoy the weather, enjoy this part of the summer. See you in a couple weeks, Brad. And sir, until next time, take care and we’ll be back with Do the Woo. See you.

Eric:
Take care.