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5 Essential Modules for Running a Drupal Powered Affiliate Site

Chase — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 04:31:51 +0000

Drupal is a fantastic open source content management system for all types of uses. A particular use that I like to use it for is for all of my Affiliate Marketing websites. While I love using WordPress for my blogs, I have found Drupal to much more efficient and flexible for me with my affiliate websites. So with a couple years worth of experience with using Drupal for this purpose, here are the 10 Drupal Modules that I found to be essential to my affiliate marketing success.

1. Administration Menu

This module for Drupal adds a simple javascript dropdown menu that shows up when you as the administrator logs in to edit your site. The biggest reason I love this module and use it so often is because it allows you to quickly access every administration item within one click. This speeds up management time tremendously.

2. Page Title Module

This module basically gives you more control over the head title tag of all your drupal pages. This is a huge SEO benefit being that you can customize each individual page’s page title to improve SERP’s with specific pages. And since SEO plays such a critical role in Affiliate Marketing, this one is a must have!

3. Global Redirect for Drupal

When you enable the Paths module for Drupal, you are given the opportunity to change your URL’s from something like this… yoursite.com/node1 to something like this… yoursite.com/about-us. Doing this however can cause a Duplicate Content issue with Drupal which can cause you some SEO headaches. This module eliminates this problem by auto creating 301 redirects from the /node1 type URL to your new revised URL.

4. XML Sitemap Module

This module creates and submits a Google friendly XML sitemap to Google from your Drupal site, helping you ensure that all of your content is being crawled and indexed by Google. It also helps Yahoo! And Bing of course. I would never build a Drupal powered website without this plugin. A must have!

5. Image Captcha for Drupal

This is in my opinion your best protection against spam with Drupal. You can create a custom image captcha for your comment form and other contact web forms to help keep the spammers and bots away. WordPress has Askimet which let’s you tie into their cloud (servers) for filtering of Spam which is something Drupal does not have. This is why this module for Drupal is so important.

Other than these, Drupal can pretty much take care of itself. There are so many features and customizations that can be made with Drupal that are by default built into Drupal which is what makes Drupal such an amazing content management system. On top of that, stick with these 5 modules and your Drupal powered website will impress you with the amount of things it can do!

Auto Responder Module for Drupal

Chase — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 20:10:38 +0000

You’ve heard me mention before the Forumbuilder Module for Drupal called Webform. Basically if you are looking to build custom PHP forms on your Drupal site than the Webform module is by far the best choice. You can very easily and quickly create tons of new forms and manage who those forms are sent to. Recently a client and friend of mine John Hut of Aquaveo asked me what the possibilities were for an Auto Response email to be sent once someone filled out a Drupal webform.

Webform Auto Responder Module

With some Google searching and some “Elbow Grease” I found the Webform Auto Responder Module for Drupal made by budda. Much thanks to Budda for taking the time to put this together. When you add in this module to your Webform module, you can now create an auto response email for people when they fill out one of your Drupal Webforms! When you are creating a new webform or editing an existing one, the new auto response option appears 2 fields:

All you have to do is put in your subject line, and then the body of the email you want sent. And whallaaa, you just created an auto responder!!! Never been easier. For installation, remember to copy the entire module folder into your /modules directory. It basically acts as it’s own module independent of the Webform module. Hopefully soon the two will just be integrated so you won’t have to install the both of them.

10 Commerce/Advertising Modules for Drupal

Chase — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 03:18:31 +0000

Okay, so I spent some serious time this weekend researching, testing, and researching some more to find 10 really good Commerce/Advertising related Modules for Drupal. Needless to say I found some really fantastic stuff that I think will be extremely helpful for you!

A Referral Credit System for Users

1. User Referral
This module provides users with the ability to refer other users to a site they are registered at. When the new users registers, the referral is recorded. Users can see a list of users they referred, and the site admin can view more detailed reports. The module works by displaying a referral link (such as referral/123) in the user’s page. When a non-registered visitor clicks on this link, and then registers to the site, the referring user’s ID is recorded
in the database.

If the Adsense module is installed and Revenue sharing is enabled, then the referral is used to share the revenue between the referring user and the referred user.

Sell “TextLinkAds” on Your Website

2. TextLinkAds.com Integration
Simplified setup right on your site. All you need is your Website XML Key from Text-Link-Ads.com and you’re ready to start publishing ads. A built-in tool to customize the looks of the ads, including borders, background color, link color and font size. Access to your publisher statistics from within your website. See your site details, including how much money you’ve earned and how many links are being served. Cron-based updates of your ads. The ad links are kept up to date via Drupal’s cron functionality.

Tell a Friend Tool

3. Tell a Friend
Module creates a “Tell a Friend” page that allows page viewers to send form e-mails about the site to their friends.

Integrate Drupal with SugarCRM

4. SugarCRM Webform Integration
Adds capabilities to webform to facilitate submitting a form to SugarCRM to capture leads. The module adds configuration fields to editing the webform, and constrains the field keys on the form to parameters that the SugarCRM lead captures script (leadCapture.php) is able to process.

Paid Listings on your Drupal Website

5. Pay2Publish
Pay2Publish lets users publish basic versions of listings (nodes) for free, and later be able to pay to “upgrade” them to custom Levels (categories) to add more visibility (Views plays) and/or show more information (CCK fields). set up different “Levels” with different costs and properties (Silver, Gold, Platinum style). Each level will have its corresponding taxonomy (category) term. to upgrade a node, the user will have to buy the desired “Level” and assign it to one of his published nodes. The corresponding taxonomy term will be assigned to the desired node.

Sell Content Pages on Your Site

6. PayPal Node
Use PayPal to charge users to post a specified content-type. Costs are calculated based on combinations of taxonomy terms. Nodes can be set to expire (become unpublished) after a specified number of days. Use this module to create a custom classified advert system, or charge for hosting any content that users might categorise.

Click Thru Tracking & Reporting

7. Click Thru Tracking
This module provides the ability for site admins to track clicks on their site such as advertising campaigns and newsletter click throughs. The clicks are organized into groups, so ad campaigns can be tracked if they involve more than one node.

Your Own Affiliate Program

8. Affiliate
This module allows site owners to issue affiliate links to their partners. When anonymous users follow these links, the clicks are counted by affiliate, day, and optional keyword. When referred users sign up for an account, the account is associated with that affiliate.

Ad Management & Tracking

9. Advertisement
The ad module is a powerful advertising system for Drupal-powered websites. It supports the random display and tracking of graphical (banner) and text ads. Ads can easily be displayed in themes, blocks, or embedded in site content. The module records comprehensive statistics about when and how often ads are viewed and clicked, including a plug-in module for generating graphical time-based reports. Ads can be assigned to multiple owners, each of which can be assigned their own set of permissions. Installation is simple by design. An API is provided allowing the development of additional functionality and integration with other Drupal modules.

Product Feeds from Commission Junction/Linkshare

10. Affiliate Products Shop
This module targets the users who want to use affiliate products on their drupal sites. The module facilitates affiliate products feeds transfer from http://www.commissionjunction.com/ and http://www.linkshare.com/. You just have to fill information that the above sites provides and the system will bring the products links to your site in a fully categorized and alphabetically sorted fashion in terms of different merchants. The module also provides the facility to edit these feeds once in your database.

7 Drupal Modules I Use Often

Chase — Thu, 15 May 2008 06:38:40 +0000

1. Ubercart
Provides a full featured and in depth shopping cart/ecommerce system into your drupal website. I especially like to use this with a website that is only selling a few products. Rather than using a big Zen Cart or Magento installation.

2. Admin Menu
This plugin gives you a cool CSS Based administration menu, enabling quicker admin navigation and an easier overall management of the website. This one is a must have for every Drupal site.

3. Page Title
This plugin gives you full control of your Page Titles, giving your Drupal website an extra seo boost. You can have a custom page title for each individual content page.

4. Nodewords
This plugin gives you full control over your meta tags for each individual node or content page.

5. WebForms
Gives you the ability to create custom forms on content pages. Very useful and advanced module.

6. XML Sitemap
This module creates your XML sitemap automatically as you generate new content. Also gives you full control over the sitemap to edit it to your liking.

7. Lightbox2
Gives you the cool “lightbox” effect on your images when clicked on. One of my favorite “design friendly” modules for Drupal.

I hope this list helps. There are many other cool modules for Drupal. Many! But these are the 7 that I find myself using the most. The cool thing about Drupal is that it comes with so many features and so much flexibility out of the package, that you rarely ever need to setup very many modules. That’s one of my favorite things about Drupal.

Not Many Modules For Drupal 6

Chase — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:55:38 +0000

There are pros and cons to using the new Drupal version 6. The biggest pro is that it is just flat out awesome and has so many new features you hate to not use it. However, the biggest con right now is that there simply are just not very many modules that are up-to-date with it yet. The Drupal community is a fantastic one that will in due time catch up with this newest Drupal version. But right now it is just not the case. You limit your flexability right now by using Drupal 6 or Drupal version 5.

Keep Using Drupal 5.7

Drupal version 5.7 still maintains all the bug fixes and security updates for version 5 that you need. Plus it still gives you the ability to add nearly 70% of all the modules in the Drupal modules database. This is what I am doing right now. Then when all the modules I depend on catch up, then I will upgrade my websites to Drupal version 6.