Affiliate Marketing Blog from UK Offer MediaWelcome to Kieron’s blog - the life and times of an Internet Marketeer

Content Units

Content units are a great idea…in principle. I say in principle as I’ve yet to find a network that has a user friendly solution that works.

As someone who doesn’t use datafeeds due to my inability to grasp anything even slightly technical I have always had high hopes for content units. BTW my definition of a content unit is where you can choose a merchant and quickly create a table of say their top 10 selling products. Or maybe their top 10 products produced by a keyword. All I want is to be able to display them in a very simple table that I can format. I.e. I say I want a table that is 2 columns across by 5 down displaying 10 products. I would like to format the text, colour and length of the description text. Shouldn’t be too hard should it?

Tradedoubler’s content units are shall we say complicated. Despite there been some quite in depth instructions I found them very confusing and gave up trying to make something decent after a few hours. I think that this could be down to the fact that you have to actually create a content unit and also a template. Anyway without getting into too much detail here they are a bit too detailed and unfortunately aren’t supported by all the merchants yet either.

Affiliate Window’s custom content units are quite simply full of bugs. I tried them last Christmas and after lots of trial and error their support team admitted that they simply didn’t work. Unfortunately a year later and they still don’t. However they have committed to getting them fixed soon.

Affiliate Future have Deepfeed which looks like it could be a good product but there just aren’t enough features on it to make it usable. For instance you can’t select what merchants you want to feature and you can’t change the product description length.

Paid On Results have a good content unit system but again it is aimed at people who have at least a reasonable technical capability. However I do believe that POR are aware of this and are soon to release a more user-friendly option for people like me

So is there a solution for the masses out there then?

No, not yet.

I say not yet as I was kindly invited by a certain network that shall remain nameless to have a look and give some feedback on their new content units. Now I don’t want to steal their thunder here but they really do have a first rate solution for content units. Their interface is so easy and intuitative that its a pleasure to use. I managed to get *exactly* what I wanted in a content unit in about 30 seconds. They are going to be going live with this very soon and when they do it will make all of our lives much easier. One of the best benefits of their solution is also that unlike other merchants it doesn’t rely on a piece of Javascript so they are really search engine friendly and great for adding content to your site. Watch this space!!

What I’m listening to right now: Charlie Wilson - “Charlie, Last Name Wilson”

Sunday, November 20th, 2005 at 3:16 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.