I know that this has been in testing since 2007 but I’ve been seeing it more & more often recently.

What happens is that you search for a product & when the results are displayed you see the normal adwords ads, but one of them (this can be above the results or on the right hand side) will have a hidden div & the text “Show products from RETAILER for SEARCHTERM” it might look like this (at the top):-

or like this (on the right):-

& when expended, they look like this :-

& this :-

Now I’m sure you’ll agree that this is quite cool – & if you can ever get any control over it, it could improve conversions. The data is being pulled from a google products account so this will be more something for merchants than affiliates though.

Oh, one final thing, All of the above screenshots are from a search for 32″ tv amazon. Do Tesco (& eBuyer, Dixons, Money Supermarket, Revoo, Nextag etc. really think I want to see their ad when I’ve specified Amazon?

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First post for a while – been stupidly busy & any free time tends to get wasted used on twitter.

I was looking at the source code of the Google UK homepage earlier on & spotted some strange code.

So, they have a hidden textarea, with an ID of “csi” & they have a js function which loads with their logo which makes the window lol & lol.

Any conspiracy theorists care to hazzard a guess as to what they’re up to?

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Unfortunately, I’ve been completely snowed under at work recently & have been neglecting this blog.
I have a list of things I want to write about but haven’t yet managed to….

Here’s the list :-

• ChannelAdvisor – what it does & how I use it
• Recommended WordPress Plugins
• Affiliate Theme – Why it’s crap
• Affiliate Theme – Why it’s great
• CJ Datafeeds – why I don’t like them
• Excel trickery – cleaning datafeeds & timesavers
• Expensive Chocolate – how I built it in less than 2 hours
• 3M Select – relaunching the affiliate program

I think I’ll probably get around to writing all of the above at some stage, but if you would like one or more of them sooner rather than later, please let me know in the comments below.

EDIT : posted this as a poll on A4U if you’d rather use that…..

TTFN

BFG

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Here’s an example (from here):-

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BFG

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Stephen Fry looks a little messed up

Here’s what it should look like :-

Stephen Fry looking a little better

TTFN

BFG

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How do I get a screenshot from my iPhone? (or iPod Touch)

It’s really very simple – sort of like the iPhone equivalent of Windows Prt Scrn key.

Just hold down the power button on the top of the iPhone & push the Home button at the bottom of the front – Bingo – it will make a camera shutter noise & save the image as a .png in your Saved Photos folder – which can then be copied to your PC next time you sync or you can email them to yourself.

Here’s mine :-

My iPod Touch

TTFN

BFG

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I’ve just been asked for the third time this week how to do the stylesheet switching you can see at the top right hand side of this site – so, here’s a quick guide :-

Add the following code to the section of the page (for a wordpress theme, you’ll find this in the theme directory in header.php) :-

<script type="text/javascript" src="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); ?>/styleswitcher.js"></script>

The above assumes you’re using wordpress & that you have a copy of styleswitcher.js in the same directory as your themes stylesheet.

If you’re not using wordpress, you need to use the following :-

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.domain.co.uk/javascript/styleswitcher.js"></script>

Again – make sure that the path is correct.

Then, Use something like the following to actually create the links to switch styles :-

<a href="#" onclick="setActiveStyleSheet('bfg'); return false;">Turn stylesheet ON</a>
<a href="#" onclick="setActiveStyleSheet('none'); return false;">Turn stylesheet OFF</a>

In this example, the first link will cookie the browser to use a stylesheet called bfg.css & the second will set it to use none.css (both of which exist).

I forget where I got the javascript from originally, but a quick search tells me it was probably A List Apart.

Hope this helps.

TTFN

BFG

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My last post was explaining that I bought myself an iPod Touch, I’m still loving it.
One of the fist things I did was to check out all of my sites to see how they looked in safari on such a small screen. Everything worked very well & looked pretty good, but sometimes I found myself getting a little annoyed with the sideways scrolling (although Apple have done some incredible work with the interface to make this as painless as possible). I then stumbled upon a plugin for wordpress called WPTouch.

WPtouch formats your WordPress blog with an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects. The theme only shows when viewed from an iPhone or iPod touch.

It’s an incredible plugin – I’ve added it to my list (unpublished – maybe sometime in the future) of must haves for wordpress. Here are a couple of screenshots of it in action (sorry the first 2 are quite looong) :-

First – Here’s the homepage of this blog with the default settings



You can also set it to show the exerpts



Here’s an individual post



& finally here’s a shot showing the ‘menu’ in action

I suspect that there are going to be more & more people reading RSS feeds on an iPhone or an iPod Touch & they may end up clicking through to read the content on your site – this plugin will make the experience a lot nicer for them. So – here’s an open message to everyone whose blog I may ever read.

TTFN


BFG

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BFG

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You may remember, I posted an SEO friendly theme for wordpress a while ago. I’ve been using it for this blog in all it’s ugly unstyled glory since then & I’ve spotted some interesting results. I posted about Spotify Registration being opened up to UK users the other day & almost instantly I found myself in the number one spot on google for spotify registration. That’s quite impressive given that I have no pagerank & pretty much no backlinks! Now if only they had an affiliate scheme….

TTFN

BFG

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