Using Forum Software

[lufbra]

Hi there, another newbie here.

I'd like to know if it's possible to have affiliate (coupons and bargains) coding set up to be added automatically to a forum set up?

I did see this kind of set up a few weeks ago (unfortunately I've lost the link to it), and did send a message to the site owner asking how he has his set up, but got no responce. I assume that it's done by some kind of automatic method, rather than the site own adding all the "post" manually.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi lufbra, Welcome to 5 Star.

Well there are some "it depends" in my answer.

It depends on the forum software and the type of coupon coding the merchants give you.

One easy automated way I know of is if the merchants offer coupons via an RSS feed and if the forum is Vbulletin.

With the lastest version of Vbull you can set up a "bot" to pull RSS feed entries form any blog or feed and post them automatically as new ones come out.

You can see a related example in action here. My clients that have blogs - I have bots set to pull from their blog and post here in their forum.

Example ShareResults forum: http://affiliate-marketing-forums.5staraffiliateprograms.com/share-results/
any posts made by "ShareResults Blogger" are auto posts.

That could be new coupons auto posted again if the merchant offers RSS feeds.

Hope this helps and best of luck!

 

[lufbra]

Thanks for the welcome Linda, and thanks for the help here. I'm hoping to do this using the "MYBB" forum software, so I guess my next thing to do is go along to their "help" forum and see if there's such a bot already created for that set up, or if one can be created by someone.

 

[Linda Buquet]

If there is no such animal yet, you may want to search the Vbull forum and find a couple scripts that coders made to do it before Vbull integrated the feature. Maybe the coder could port it over to that software for less that a developer would charge to code it from scratch.

Just be careful and read up before you use one and make sure others arnet having problems. The 1st srcipt I tried was buggy and it started spitting out tons of dups of old blog entries. So in the AMWSO forum they had May coupons in September and 4th of July contests in November.

Wasted lots of time on it, plus paid a coder to install for me.
In the end just had to kill the bot!

 

[lufbra]

I did find this one...

MyBB Mods - View Download - RSS To Post v1.1.0

I looked around to see how others were getting on with it, and although there may have been problems with it at first, I think all the "wrinkles" have been ironed out, so I've installed it. Now the problem is finding afilliate programs that do actualy use rss feeds. If I can't find any, I may just have to put some more thought into creating another page set up.