This tutorial will teach you how to build a “Book Rotation.” On pageload, it picks a random book from a list of your favorites, and displays it’s title and cover, linking to it’s Amazon page with an affiliate link. You can see it in action here (look in the sidebar). Still interested? Okay, let’s get started then.

First of all, log-in to Amazon Associates. If you don’t have an account yet, you might want to get one. Associates is an affiliate program where you earn commissions for referring customers to Amazon. If one of your users clicks on one of your referral link, and buys something from Amazon withing 24 hours, you earn a commission (up to 8%) of anything they buy. Once you’re logged in, head over to the “Build Links” page. You want the “Product Links” option (you’re screen should look something like the screenshot below). (more…)

Have you played around with SimplePie? If not, start experimenting. SimplePie is an amazingly useful file you include in your PHP scripts so you can parse RSS feeds. It’s fast, it’s powerful, it’s easy to use, and there’s a lot you can do with it.

In addition to the ordinary stuff, like displaying feed content on your website, you can also utilize SimplePie for more interesting things….like combining RSS feeds. Why would you want to do that? Well, some of us have multiple blogs. Using SimplePie you can create a feed that aggregates all of your blogs’ feeds. Blog networks may find this technique useful as well. (more…)