August 2008

{Post Update - Check out the Create Product Data Feeds For E-Commerce E-Course }

E-commerce sites need to get their content deep linked on search engines and indexes- one of the quickest and cheapest ways to do that is to create a data feed of your product catalog and post it to shopping sites.

Creating files for shopping feeds like those for Shopzilla or Google Product Search is easy, once you master some basic techniques. The steps are as follows:

- Export Shopping Cart Data
- (Normally, you are exporting MySQL data using phpMyAdmin)
- Import Data into MS Access
- Create Queries to Format Data in Shopzilla/Google/ShoppingDotcom format
- Export Data From Query to Create product data feed file

This same technique can be used to create affiliate data feeds and any other type of web data export.

Start With Google Product Search

Google Product Search is fed from Google Base. To create a product feed for Google, you must first do an export of shopping cart or catalog data to create what Google terms a bulk upload. Follow Google’s instructions, particularly the field name conventions for products, carefully.

After you have downloaded the data from phpMyAdmin, you import the data into Access, then the key step is creating the format queries:

Most providers recommend using Excel to process feed data. We like to import catalog or merchant feed data into MS Access and use the powerful query functions to massage and manipulate the product data.

The process works like this:
1. Import your raw feed or data file into Access using the import feature
2. Create a query to reformat the data into the desired result:
a. Use the field alias feature to ‘hard code’ field data that may not exist in your original file ie:,
expiration_date: “YYYY-MM-DD”
b. Use the concatenation feature to reformat fields from existing data -
ie, your product_image filed contains “image.jpg”:
image_url: “http://www.yourdomain/images/” & [product_image]
3. After your fields are created in the query, simply export a delimited file from your query and process. You can re-import your original feed data into your Access file, run the query and re-export very quickly whenever you need to refresh your data.

Format Query In Access

You use the field alias feature in Access to create the fields with the required field names, and use the concatenation functions to piece together the data in the required formats.

Start with the basic fields (use Google’s naming convention explicitly):

title
description
brand
condition
link
price
product_type
image_link
model_number
payment_accepted
expiration_date (format: YYYY-MM-DD)

You can use any type of delimiter you wish for your file, we prefer pipe “|” for readability, but the Google default of tab delimited works fine as well. (If you change the default delimiter, you’ll need to specify the change in the bulk upload properties.)

You will need to re-upload your file regularly to Google, since bulk uploads typically expire in 30 days.

About The Author:

Carl Ringwall is the owner of Data SystemsPlus, a web consultancy offering a variety of e-learning offerings, software and tools. Considered one of the top blogs for forming a coherent internet marketing strategy, Carl’s online business blog is a must for anyone running a internet home based business.

Hundreds of visitors have viewed my blog to get information about adding e-commerce functionality to Moodle®. Well, here it is. In this series of videos, I show you step-by-step how to add the cutting edge EJunkie Shopping Cart to Moodle® - complete with:

• A professional-looking cart and checkout system
• The ability to use any payment processor - not just PayPal
• A pro-grade affiliate management system
• Ability to track payments
• A system that integrates with popular 3rd party systems such as autoresponders
• Professional design and a reliable system

Here is a 9 minute YouTube preview (the actual ecourse video is much higher quality):

Disclaimer: This procedure should be viewed as a ‘hack’, not a ‘module’ - it will not likely survive a Moodle® version upgrade. Moodle® is a registered trademark of Martin Dougiamas.

This is a Video E-Course post - (only $29!)

Click To Purchase:

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Note: my affiliates will earn 50% commission promoting my e-courses! More info….

There are numerous tools and services on the internet that allow you to track your backlinks and keyword position in the search engines. The one I use and like the best is FREE and is from DigitalPoint.

Set up a free account - and you’ll have some options to configure. You’ll need a Google search API key - there is a link in the sign up form - you also have the option of installing an advanced usage script on your own server - this allows daily updates of your data.

The keyword tracker allows you to track multiple keywords by domain, in other words, you can see where you rank for a given key phrase for any number of domains you (or your competitors) own. Simply enter the keyword and domain, and the system will show your rank on Google, MSN, Yahoo - or you can choose ALL to get your rank on all of the engines.

The backlinks tracker is simple - enter your url, and the system tells you how many backlinks you have on Yahoo for the single url, backlinks for the whole domain on Yahoo, and the backlink count on Google. The feature that makes both of these free tools really outstanding is the ability to track and graph your results over time. You simply set up a simple script and cron it daily, and your stats will be updated each day, with your progress, up or down, logged regularly.

The service even has a simple graphing feature so you can get visual graphs of your progress. All of this takes a couple of hours to set up, and then you can just forget about it - until you want to see your data. It’s interesting to watch how your rankings go up as your backlink counts increase - a great way to validate that a linking strategy is working.

Try the DigitalPoint tracker - it’s a great free tool. I’ll be posting a premium video post on how to set all of this up very soon.

Carl Ringwall is the owner of Data SystemsPlus, a web consultancy offering a variety of e-learning offerings, software and tools. Considered one of the top blogs for forming a coherent internet marketing strategy, Carl’s online business blog is a must for anyone running a internet home based business.

If you’re looking for a tool to promote your website(s), the buck stops with social bookmarking. With the advent of Web 2.0 and its focus on the social aspect of the Internet, listing your pages on bookmarking sites is a surefire way to get visitors to your pages – they either get there by directly clicking on your link, or if your page is ranked highly enough, it turns up on a Google search depending on how trusted your site is.

Since it’s tedious and time consuming to manually add bookmarks to various bookmarking sites, most people turn to automated software that is able to do this for them. While there are many options available, some free and others at a cost, the thing to remember when choosing automated social bookmarking software is to make sure your site is not blacklisted as spam.

Automated software that creates a large number of profiles and continually posts all your pages to every social bookmarking site there is, runs the risk of getting your site(s) labeled as spam. You also abuse your Internet Service Provider by running this tool continuously and risk cancellation of your service. And finally, the bookmarking sites you post to will end up blocking you and putting an end to your posting days.

The key to selecting a good social bookmarking tool is to look for one that does not send out your bookmarks on a continuous basis, but which posts tags gradually and once every few days. You must be able to set the time frame for the posting. You must also look for software that is server based and does not run on your PC. It’s more complicated to install but the difficulty is worth it when you consider the savings on your resources.

The bookmarking tool you use must randomly select tags and bookmarking sites so that the posting process looks like it’s been done by human beings and not a machine. Some tools even offer to post from proxy servers thus reducing the possibility of your sites being blacklisted and blocked as spam.

Automated social bookmarking tools are useful only when used judiciously – after all, there’s no use for a bookmarking strategy or tool when your sites are all blocked out as spam.

This post was contributed by Heather Johnson, who writes on the subject of dial up Internet.   She invites your feedback at heatherjohnson2323 at gmail dot com.