Tristan Crickett

I announced it a few weeks ago, but today we have actually finished the website, Discount Supplements Guide is up and running and ready to start comparing prices for all those fitness fanatics and bodybuilders who are searching for ways to save money during the economic downturn.

We have built the UK’s first dedicated price comparison search engine for nutritional supplements. Currently there are only five or six suppliers on the website, but during the course of the next few weeks we will be adding more suppliers.

In case you’re wondering “Is this just for bodybuilders and fitness fanatics?” then the answer is a resounding “No!”. This website will trawl the web for all kinds of nutritional supplements, regardless of whether they are sports related, health related, age related, gender related - it really doesn’t matter.

By the time we (that’s me and my brother - the guys that built it!) have finished adding all the suppliers, we expect to have covered all areas of nutritional supplements and uncovered all the suppliers available, thus making finding the right supplements at the best price as easy as possible!

I’ve been a busy bee this week, done lots of new posts on my fitness blog, mainly because I’ve been feeling creative, but also because I’ve been spurred on by seeing my traffic double in the last few weeks!

I’m now doing more than 100 unique visitors everyday on my fitness blog, still not enough to start making any serious money from, but the general trend is upward, with steady month-on-month growth.

My latest article has been written just to provide a taste of the benefits of bodybuilding and is entitled lift weights to lose weight, fairly self-evident what the article is about, but amazing how so few people still don’t understand this simple truth.

In addition to being busy on my fitness blog, I’ve also been busy putting together a new internet business, discount supplements guide, which although not finished yet, will be a website full of lots of information about different sports supplements.

This is something that I have to do on a fairly regular basis, and I always have to look it up in a book or something to remember how to do it, as such I figured there would probably be other people who keep doing the same, here’s how to do it:

• mysql -h(host) -u(username) -p(password) (database) < (data_file)

You don’t need the brackets (), they are just there to delimit the variables that need to be replaced. The datafile should be a .sql file, and I’ve found that sometimes, depending on the setup, you don’t always need to specify the host, in cases like this just remove the -h(host) and run the rest of it.

I need an affiliate system for an internet business that I am building, so rather than go and buy a ready made “off the shelf” system for lots of money or get suckered into using an existing network and stuck paying their horrendous setup and monthly fees, I figured it would be easier to simply build my own affiliate tracking system.

At first I thought it would be really difficult, and wasn’t sure how I would go about doing it until I spoke to my brother who recommended using an Iframe for the tracking, apparently it’s how most of the big affiliate networks solve the problem.

The thinking is that by giving a non-technical web retailer a simple line of code that can be pasted into their webpage(s), the rest can be taken care of by the affiliate network. This seemed simple enough, so I decided having a spare half hour, I would have a crack at it myself.

Within the iframe, you need to pull in a tracking url and pass it at least one variable – this would be the id of the affiliate that you are tracking. You can add more variables if you like, but it makes more sense to try and track other variables dynamically using your script rather than the retailer having to edit the iframe code to ensure a bunch of fiddly variables are passed back to the affiliate network.

Here’s a simple example of an affiliate tracking iframe:

<iframe src=”http://www.affiliate-network.co.uk/affiliate-tracker.php?merchantid=1” width="0" height="0"></iframe>

The iframe simply pulls in the url from the affiliate network server, passing it the id of the merchant back to the server. This allows the affiliate network to know that there has been traffic on the merchants website.

The next problem is tracking the affiliate id, which needs to be dynamically passed to the affiliate network. This again can be done by passing a variable in the query string, for instance:

&affiliateid=<?php echo $_GET[‘affiliateid’]; ?>

This will pick up the affiliate id from the query string and pass it through to the scrip on the affiliate network server. You can leave this code in the iframe on every page, but it is not a safe bet to rely on there always being an affiliate id in the query string. To ensure that your affiliate gets credit for any sales that go through a merchant, it is imperative that you save the affiliate id in a cookie.

To do this is fairly simple, you will need to pass the affiliate id through to the tracker script initially via the query string, use the id to set the cookie, the code (in php) can be something like this:

<?php

session_start();
$merchantid                = $_GET['merchantid'];
$affid                        = $_GET['affid'];
$cookie_time_out    = time()+(60*60*24*31);

if ($affid)
{
    setcookie("cookie_affid", $affid, $cookie_time_out)
}

This will set the cookie for a 31 day month, clearly to adjust the length of days for the cookie, simply adjust the last figure in $cookie_time_out to be the number of days that you wish the cookie to last for.

What you need to understand about this cookie is that it will only work on the affiliate networks’ domain, it will not be accessible from the domain of the merchant, this is a good thing, as it means they can’t destroy or amend the cookie.

The next issue to solve is saving the stats for each affiliate, this can be done quite simply by sticking the data into a database, most likely MySQL. I won’t go into the details of how to do this, instead I’ll look at how to record a sale.

On the “check out” page, the merchant will need to pass a unique transaction reference to the affiliate tracker script. This will usually be the transaction id, which is unique to a transaction, can be traced to a customer and will only materialise if there has been a sale. This can also be used to cross reference between the merchant and the affiliate network should there ever be any discrepancies between the amount of business the affiliate has recorded for the merchant and what the merchant claims has been transacted.

So there we have it, a really simple way of recording third party transactions through an affiliate tracking script. To make this more secure, it would be better to give the merchant a code slug of Javascript and keep all the code needed to pass data back to the affiliate tracking script on the affiliate networks’ servers.

I have recently been the victim of content theft on my bodybuilding and fitness blog, where some unscrupulous website owner stole the content of this article high intensity hill sprint interval training session and posted it on their own blog, as if it were their own content.

At first I was furious at this because their page was ranking in Google before my page was, despite my page being the original content. It turns out however that this is fairly commonplace and happens to lots of bloggers.

I decided that I wasn’t going to stand for it and that I should do something about it. First port of call was Google, to flag it up as duplicate content. To do this, go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en and report it. You will need to put in offending URL, then the search that you entered into Google to find the duplicate content (spam) and lastly the Google results page that it brings up. There are a bunch of check-boxes, select “Duplicate site or pages”, then there is a free text box to add in your own words about the problem.

After you’ve submitted the spam request to Google, it’s worthwhile trying to defend against this happening in the future by making some amendments to your WordPress installation. Sorry if you are using other bloggin software, but I have no experience of them so can’t help.

To add a copyright notice and related posts to your feed, download the Copyright Feed plugin from WordPress, install it on your blog, then activate it via the Plugins tab.

Once activated, you will need to go to Settings tab and click on the ©Feed tab to amend the settings. I have added a digital fingerprint to mine. To do this, I just did an MD5 hash of a phrase that is dear to my heart, and I’ve kept a copy of this phrase on my dev server. This means that if I do a search on Google for my digital fingerprint, I should find any offending content thieves - assuming they haven’t removed the digital fingerprint from the content they steal!

I’ve recently added some links on my other blog that I wanted to ensure the paths were not clear to anyone viewing the blog. You may need to do this on your WordPress blog also, so if so, here’s how you do it:

1. Create a directory to store all your external redirect links in. I chose “Go”, but you could call it “Redirect” or “External”.
2. Add a file to this directory, which is simply a php file that contains all the info about your external links. My file is called merchant.php, because I have links out to various merchants from my file.
3. In your redirect file, you will need to have an array of the various different url’s that you want to link to. If you have distinct groups of websites taht you wish to link to, it’s best to have more than one array. Your arrays should be set up so that you have a key and a val, for example: array(key1=>val1, key2 => val2)
4. If you are using more than one array, you will need to pass the array and the key of the url to your redirect script. I used the variable names $a for the array and $n for the number of the key.
5. If you have more than one array, you will need a switch statement, to ensure that you pull the correct url from the correct array, here’s an example of how to do this:

switch ($a)
{
  case “array_1″:
     $url = $array_1[$n];
      header (”Location: $url”);
      exit;
 case “array_2″:
     $url = $array_2[$n];
     header (”Location: $url”);
     exit;

}

6. You will need to acquire the variables $a and $n from the query string, like this:

$a = $_GET['a'];

$n = $_GET['n'];

7. To use this in a post or a page, you’ll need to make your links like this:

<a href=”<?php echo get_bloginfo(’url’); ?>/go/redirect.php?a=array_1&n=1″>Link to redirect urk</a>

8. Upload and test to make sure it works!

Another great fitness blog that I’ve come across is that of Colin Timberlake, a fitness freak from America or Canada. He writes about his running training weight training, giving all the information about what times he does a run in and how much weight and number of reps/sets he does for his weight training.

What is different about this blog, is the numerous inspirational people that Colin writes about, and the reasons that he finds them inspirational. For instance, one of his inspirational figures of the day was Madonna. Not (I’m guessing from what he writes about her) for her personality, but for the fact that at over 50, she is still in very good shape and can most probably out-do most women half her age!

It’s these daily inspirational figures that populate the site, and they range from sports personalities, actors, singers, musicians, fighters and of course, a few choice bodybuilders, including the great Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The site is built using WordPress, or a similar blogging solution. The theme looks to have been custom made or at least an off the shelf theme that has been tweaked to fit in with the author’s content and style.

The design is clean and easy to read, with a two colum design that favours the adverts and navigation on the left hand side and the content on the right hand side. My only issue with this is that the advertising is far more prominent that the website navigation, and there does seem to be an awful lot of advertising and affiliate links.

For instance, the left hand column has two Google Adwords text ad blocks, a Doubleclick image ad block and two Amazon widgets that contain affiliate links to various fitness related books and inspirational (or just preferred viewing) films chosen by the arthur. I’m not against monetising a blog, but I don’t believe it should be done at the expense of the navigation.

I would also argue that the Google ads may be more successful if they were integrated into the blog posts, as would the Amazon affiliate links, if they were integrated into the posts and related, so for instance, if he wrote about how Madonna inspires him, he could have an affiliate link to Amazon to a Madonna products page, which could contain books, cd’s and dvd’s of hers.

In terms of the search engine optimisation that has been done on the website, I can’t see that any major sins have been committed. There are no spammy site-wide links which is good, but there is also no tag cloud, which is bad, purely from the point of view that he could be missing out on some easy long tail traffic. I know from my own blog that I get a bunch of random search engine traffic that is directly resulted from my tag cloud.

Last thing to say on the SEO side of things is that the author hasn’t disabled the blog title from each title tag. This means each page title has “| colintimberlake.com” appended to it, which neither adds any extra meaning to the visitor nor the search engines, and in fact will reduce the relevance of the words in the title tag. A small issue that can be resolved easily, and may as well be to maximise the benefit of on-page optimisation.

What would make the biggest difference to the search engine optimisation efforts of Colin’s blog would be to get more links coming into the blog. I could only see six inbound links according to Google, and as the blog has been online since January, that’s measly 1.5 links gained per month so far.

All in all though, it’s a well written blog, the title’s of each page are well thought through to include varying keywords and each page of content contains the keywords and is good quality content which search engines just love.

I’ve been busy today adding some really useful content to my body building blog about body building nutrition.

I’d been having a week off from weight training, and in fact decent nutrition, taking the time to let my body re-cuperate after having gone fourteen straight weeks training and eating right.

During this time off, I’ve been reading a really good book about nutrition by Anita Bean, called Sports Nutrition. From reading this book, I realised some of my nutrition habits were slightly outdated, and so I’ve written up my findings in these two new posts.

The first post is all about your resting metabolic rate, which is vital to know if you are going to have any success in either weight loss or weight gain. If you have ever wondered - what is my resting metabolic rate - read the article to find out.

The second post is all about correct nutrition for gaining muscle, something that I am keen to understand as best as I can, so that my weight training yields good results. In my mind there’s nothing worse than working hard at your fitness or physique and only seeing marginal results, you have to have the patience of a saint to continue only seeing slow results.

For my money, you’re far better off maximising your results by ensuring you give yourself the best possible platform from which to work from, and in body building this means training hard and eating right. If you want to gain muscle fast by eating right, then this article will provide you with lots of useful information about how to calculate the amount of protein and carbohydrates are needed to stimulate fast muscle growth.

I’ve added a new article to my bodybuilding and fitness blog about body building techniques that work. I’ve been experimenting with the heavy duty techniques most notably pioneered by Mike Mentzer in the 1970’s during my workouts over the past few weeks and have noticed a sizeable increase in the muscles during this period.

My article is just aimed at giving out some useful advice to novice bodybuilders who want to know how to get results fast. I know there is no short cut with body building, but there’s no point in pursuing a strategy that is going to take longer than you may have patience for before seeing any results.

I’ve added a new article to Find Financial Freedom, my financial blog. This new article is a quick synopsis of the various measures that can be taken to protect one’s financial security.

The article is entitled how to protect your financial security and draws on my training and experience of working in the financial services industry for two years as a mortgage broker.

From what I can see there doesn’t seem to be a lot of free advice about what products can be bought to protect your financial security and the financial services watchdog, the Financial Services Authority don’t seem to want anyone to have an opinion on this unless they have been authorised and regulated by them.