I have recently been taking one of my all-too-regular breaks from developing WordBay, and indeed from any major affiliate marketing efforts. I guess I am a dabbler at heart, plus a April plunge in EPN earnings really demotivated me too. Seems to have picked up again now, so perhaps it was an initial reaction to the economic crisis.

One of the things I have devoted a little time to is testing a new money-making tool called WAHA CMS. Just to disclose straight away - I agreed to accept a beta version for testing in return for writing a review. Otherwise, I am not affiliated in any way, do not earn anything from sales of WAHA and am not otherwise being paid for a review. Also, I do not see WAHA as competition for WordBay - WAHA is a commercial product, WordBay is not and I do not mind competition!

What is WAHA?

WAHA is described by the authors as a “…a content management system (CMS) for quick generation of quality web sites but it is not a simple CMS…” Someone else I talked to perhaps a little unkindly referred to it as “splog” software.

If I had to describe WAHA, I would say that the term “CMS” is perhaps a bit ambitious. Really, it is a richly-featured mashup system - the ultimate automated website generation system that you always wished you could write! I say this because I have often thought how handy it would be to have a CMS which took feeds or API data from all the sources that are out there and bundled them into one affiliate site, based on just a few keywords you type in - the lazy man’s software!

Well WAHA certainly does that. Based on a set of keywords that can be partially automatically generated, you can integrate text from news, articles, Yahoo Answers or any other RSS feed, photos from Flickr, videos from YouTube AND, the most important bit for affiliate marketers, product info from Amazon, eBay, CJ, LinkShare and a number of other networks.

The aim of course is to generate a constantly refreshing site that attracts organic search visitors with its relevant content and sells them what they are looking for via the affiliate networks.

What does the end result look like?

Have a look at my test site, Used Musical Instruments, a site you may remember as originally being set up to demonstrate WordBay, and which I never did anything with. I think it would be fair to say I spent about an hour or so on the WAHA version, and you can see the way the different types of data have been integrated with product data to produce something that looks like a website!

Installation

Briefly, installation is fairly simple, although because the source code is protected using IonCube, you do need to make sure your server supports this module. This also means a few hoops to jump through with registration of WAHA, which will also lock you in to using WAHA only with the domain you registered for. So it’s quite a restrictive license, but that’s their right of course.

Setup

The bit you are really interested in is actually setting up the site. The backend admin section is nicely laid out and full of mostly self-explanatory and very functional settings. I never bothered reading any instructions before diving in. However, I should point out that the instructions that do exist are still not great, especially as they are written by a non-native speaker. They might like to think about investing in proofreading of the text (in fact, my company can do that - maybe I’ll offer them a deal :)). However, I asked the guys about some queries I had, and they were quick to reply.

The only slightly onerous bit is setting up some of the affiliate networks. It goes without saying that you need to be a member of EPN, Amazon, and any other networks you want to use on the site (and for some of the content feeds too), and to insert your various affiliate IDs, campaign codes etc. But for some of them you also need to obtain an API key. This is actually quite simple in most cases and makes sense - if the WAHA people inserted their own API key in there they could quickly run into trouble with the number of calls being made to the API. eBay only allows 5000 calls per day, for example, in the basic package. This is the reason I have not used the eBay API for WordBay up till now, but this is an OK solution and I may think about this…

Without going into all the settings, the fun part is of course setting up your niche. This is done through the Category/Keyword section, where you name the title of your category (for example Used trombones, on my example site) and then choose keywords to populate that category. This is made very easy through an automated system which presumably polls eBay for related keywords and pops up a whole list of them. For instance, if I type in “French horn” I get a list comprised of: “Double French Horn, Holton French Horn, Yamaha French Horn, Single French Horn, French Horn”, and I can choose which to include in this category.

It’s as simple as that! The category will then be automatically populated with data from ALL the sources you have specified. It will take a few seconds to generate the page the first time you click (not surprising with 10 different data sources to query!), but after that the page is cached and displays much more quickly.

So after the initial settings, setting up your site pretty much boils down to choosing keywords!

Other settings

Used Musical Instruments is completely generic at the moment, except I changed around the order of some of the data sources, which you can do in the back end, as well as specify how many items to display etc. (e.g. 3 Yahoo Answers). You can also choose from a number of colour schemes, or if you are a bit more adventurous, make your own template - WAHA uses the Smarty template engine. It would have been good to see some more choices of template by default, but then again, all built-in templates would quickly grow old, however many there were.

There is a built in “synonymizer“, which processes articles and swaps in substitute words using some kind of thesaurus, presumably with the aim of simulating original content. You can also manually edit articles. Personally I would not use this - as a native English speaker it is blindingly obvious to me that an article has been “synonymized” and it makes the site look very dodgy.

The autogrowth feature is a very nice one - with it, you can set the speed at which new keywords are “published” to your site. So you can create 100 categories off the bat, but have them slowly appear on the site over a period which you specify, creating the impression of a gradually growing site, which the search engines like! Sneaky!

The bottom line

Well, I hope I have given you a fair overview of the WAHA CMS and its features. The cost of a licence (locked to one domain, remember) is $28 USD and I suppose you want to know if it is worth it!

Well, first the “don’t likes”: I guess the major criticism of WAHA would be that, well, it IS a little “sploggy”. At the end of the day, the claim that it creates a “quality web site” would be seriously contested by Google et al, since it ultimately relies primarily on unoriginal content. Eventually I fear that Google would start getting wise to WAHA-created sites. In fact, after an initial spike, Google search traffic HAS reduced to a trickle, though I am currently getting some 10 Bing search visits a day, which is enough to generate something in sales. However, this does remain a concern.

The “quality” claim could be qualified with the clause, “…for an automated site generating tool”, since the site actually generated DOES look pretty good - it would not necessarily be immediately obvious that it is all auto-generated, mostly because there is so much going on on-screen

I would also like to see some sort of built-in stats. Sure, you can plug in Analytics, but I’d like to be able to see the number of click-throughs for each page, for example. Maybe it’s a lot to ask, with all the other features, but there’s an idea anyway.

Perhaps the licence is a little restrictive too - the price, well, you can judge yourself from reading below. But maybe a licensing option for multiple sites might be worth considering, it could net the authors more sales ultimately too.

The “likes”: The fact is, if you have no objection to an auto-generated site, then they don’t get much better than WAHA. It IS essentially “white-hat” - I believe that none of the data is actually being “scraped”; it’s all taken from official feeds. I was pretty impressed by the effort that has gone into this, the huge number of options, and the inversely proportional amount of effort needed to produce a content-filled site. If you are fine with creating this kind of site, or you don’t have much technical knowledge, or you are short on time (or just plain lazy like me) you should certainly consider WAHA.

The very bottom line

OK, so how much did it net me? After an initial slow start, and having only created a few categories, a few sales started to drift in (after about 3 weeks), such that my sales since mid-March when I installed WAHA have been about $25, and that only through EPN - my sales have been zero through the other networks, (which is about usual for me!) I have recently added a lot more categories, so I hope this will improve things somewhat.

Now that doesn’t sound like much, but I can’t begin to describe how LITTLE work I did to promote the site - no link-building, no AdWords, nothing. I barely looked at it. All visits are through organic search. And the fact is that if I had paid for the licence I would have almost made the money back in a couple of months. After that it’s all profit. So I think a bit of effort in marketing would see you recoup the investment pretty quickly - and if you were ambitious, you could invest in, say, ten licences, make ten sites, and start to see some reasonable returns within a few months.

Hope that’s enough opinion for you to make a decision - well done to the WAHA guys for the effort, now we have to see if it has been worth it! But that’s affiliate marketing, right?

Posted on June 12th, 2009 by markowe
Filed under: Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

I need to point out something that I have only recently discovered. If you have noticed that the keywords you are using to produce WordBay eBay listings are giving you different results to when you type them direct  into eBay search, there is a reason, and right now, if it’s what I think it is, there is not much I can do about it.

I believe it’s because of the new eBay search that is being introduced, to replace the old style search by the end of April this year, and which you may have already noticed on the eBay site (US, at least). Among other features, it offers a more intelligent search which gives you a greater number of relevant results. The old style search only searched on the item title, unless you ticked the box Include title and description in which case you were likely to get all kinds of irrelevant results, but new search has an improved algorithm which finds more relevant items.

But guess what - the eBay RSS feed, which is where WordBay and a number of similar products get their listings from, still appears to implement the old-style search. So unfortunately we are rather limited now in comparison to the search that can be performed directly on the eBay site and there is nothing much I can do about it - believe me, I would be very glad to have the new search working with WordBay as a number of my sites are displaying inferior results to what they could be showing. I hope this new search will also be available through RSS too soon. I will keep you posted.

Posted on March 18th, 2009 by markowe
Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Note: something weird happened with version numbers here, we already had a v0.999, but for some reason the WordPress repository wasn’t updated, so I am not sure what happened. Just pretend this is v0.999 anyway and replace your previous version.

Available through the Download link now.

Note, this version will slightly “break” your old 0.998 or previous version, by reverting your product category to “All categories” - no big deal, but you do need to act quickly to get it working exactly how you want.

This version finally deals with the issue of differing eBay category numbers for each country site. Now when you go into the back-end you will see this (click to enlarge):

It is a list of eBay country sites, with a field to insert a product category code by each one (all defaulted to -1 = All categories). Yes, if you want to specify a category for your listings you will need to insert the equivalent code for each country, using the list that I have linked to for each country. If you are not geotargetting then you only need to do this for the country you are targetting with your “listings site” setting, not for all.

Was there any simpler way of doing this? Well, no, not without using the eBay API, and I’m afraid I can’t do that with a free program like WordBay.

My recommendation, despite this big change to the back-end, is: don’t bother with this, leave them all, or mostly on “-1” and just be very judicious with your choice of keywords. Your keyword “cream cheese dispenser” will not yield many results on Swedish eBay anyway, never mind if you try to limit the category! Also, as explained in the backend, the countries listed in brackets (which now also include Hong Kong and Singapore which were recently discontinued) are NOT available through EPN anyway, so be aware of these limitations of using geotargetting! As I have said before, visitors from some countries may very well get no results at all, while non-EPN sites will get your traffic without paying you any commission, so use at your discretion.

Let me know if everything is working fine (as I know you will) and apologies for not having added any of the other functionality people have asked about. I am really trying to get the major quirks out so I can finally call it v1.0!

Posted on February 13th, 2009 by markowe
Filed under: Uncategorized | 8 Comments »

One user (ChuckMcB) recently pointed out a major quirk with WordBay that never occurred to me, and I just wonder how no-one complained of it before! I thought I’d better let you know about it!

The problem is if you specify a category (any other than All categories) such as, say, Antiques, erm, well, there’s a slight problem I never realised before! The category codes are all different for different eBay sites. The codes were all taken from eBay US. So choosing Antiques will always use code 20081, even though on eBay UK Antiques are under category number 353.

What I can’t figure out is how come people didn’t run into this problem before! Like, if you were setting up a non-US site and you chose Antiques, what happened?! Surely you would get a drastically reduced listing. And of course if you are using geotargetting there is no telling what will happen when a Belgian visitor comes and gets Cuckoo Clocks instead of USB Flash Drives…

What to do?

Oh boy, this is a tricky one… I mean, why can’t the category numbers be the same across all eBay sites?! There really is no ready solution for this - I am really not prepared at the moment to use the eBay API to let users choose from the live list of categories. It’s a LOT of programming, the category numbers are going to change occasionally, so you would have to periodically check up on them, and anyway, my eBay API keys are tied up elsewhere right now.

I am going to have to go away and think about this, but basically, the most likely solution will be to allow users to MANUALLY enter category numbers, possibly for each eBay country. Some people have asked for this anyway, as it would give them greater flexibility - at the moment WordBay only allows the 30 or so top-level categories to be selected. The other way would be to set up an internal list of all the top-level categories for all the different countries. These do not change all that often (while categories lower down the hierarchy certainly can), so it might be a reasonably safe solution. But it will take a while to implement.

In the meantime…

Unfortunately the only solution in the meantime, unless you are solely targetting eBay US (and not using geotargetting) is to choose the All categories category (which is the same for all countries) and be very judicious about your choice of keywords. Sorry. Actually, this is what I have done on all my WordBay-based sites anyway - with a good choice of keywords, you can usually narrow things down pretty well anyway.

Meanwhile, I will go away and bang my head on a wall somewhere and try to think of the best solution.

Posted on December 22nd, 2008 by markowe
Filed under: Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

I am banging my head trying to figure out this “Value out of range 10008″ error, as mentioned here. But I can’t seem to reproduce the error on any of my sites, so could someone who is having the problem help out?

How? Well, by going into Plugins in WordPress - and then choosing Edit WordBay. Find the section that says:

$url = $rssurl .
‘&siteId=’ .
$first_siteID .
‘&sacur=’ .
$currency .
‘&salic=’ .
$first_location .
‘&satitle=’ .
$searchterms .
$first_otherparams .
‘&sabdlo=’ .
$first_minbids .
‘&afepn=’ .
$first_campid .
‘&customid=’ .
$first_customID .
‘&frpp=’ .
$first_maxitems .
‘&sacat=’ .
$sacat.
‘&saprclo=’.
$first_minprice.
‘&saprchi=’.
$first_maxprice;

Directly on the next line to this add the line:

echo $url;

and hit Update file.

Now when you reload the offending page you should get a big long URL appearing, beginning with “http://rss.api.ebay.com…“. Please copy/paste this as a comment here and let’s see if I can figure out why it’s causing problems.

By the way, once you have done that you can delete the line “echo $url;” and Update again and everything will be as before. If something really goes wrong (don’t do it if you are not sure) then copy the WordBay.php file from the latest plugin zip back into the wp-content/plugins/wordbay directory of your WordPress installation and everything should be fine and dandy.

I hope this will help solve this problem, which seems to be a result of some change to the feed parameters, since it wasn’t happening before to this extent… Thanks.

Posted on December 3rd, 2008 by markowe
Filed under: Uncategorized | 3 Comments »