ProInterneter

I received this email in January from someone who was using my Free PHP eBook I am very sorry that I am only now replying to this. I will try to do a better job of checking this email address in the future.

Hi thereI am working my way through your eBook and I am having a lot ofdifficulty with the passing of the variable from a form to a phpscript. I have even gone as far as cutting and pasting your exact codeon page 18 and its still not working. All I am succeeding in doing isshowing

Hello, you are years old

The variables for name and age are not being passed. The form side ofthe code seems to be working.Please could you help as I have no idea what the problem could be.Thanks

There are two possible reasons that this code is not working for you.

Reason #1: Sometimes when you copy-and-paste code directly from a document (Word, PDF, etc) and paste it into another document, the special characters (Quotes, etc) will be encoded differently between the two documents, and this causes a problem. Aside from the learning aspect of it, it is important not to copy-and-paste your code for this reason.

Reason #2: Your server may have additional security settings, which I did not account for in the first version of the Free PHP eBook.

Basically, at the top of the page which is receiving the variables (in this case, form1output.php), you need to use the $_POST action for each variable. I will be accounting for this as begin to revise and update the eBook.Thanks again to everyone that has taken the time to download and use the PHP eBook. I’ve had over 700 downloads, so I consider this a success thus far.

I don’t post on this blog very frequently because it is more for me to keep my ideas floating, but not in a day-by-day matter. On my main project (Blog Project A) I currently post 1-2 posts per day, and plan to up that to 2-3 posts per day as the weather begins to warm.

I have several competing blogs in my RSS feeder, and have noticed that some of them post an insane amount each day. One blog in particular, which has several writers and is part of a larger blog network, has posted 14 posts already today, and it’s now 2pm. To me, this is excessive. Yes, they are building a lot of pages and that may bring in more traffic, but these posts are not SEO’d and some of them are simply pictures with a few words of text. To me, it’s annoying to have 14 posts from one site in my RSS Feed. I usually just mark all those posts as ‘read’ and then move on to the next blog that has 1 or 2 new posts.

After having a big day on Wednesday, I was disappointed to find that I did not make any money on Thursday. With 17 Product Link Clicks, Thursday had 5 more clicks than Wednesday, yet there was a lot more buying action on Wednesday.

Thursday also marked the first full day where I ran AdSense on my Amazon Affiliate Site. I figure I can pick up some loose change and maybe push my AdSense Account a bit so I can finally get a check from Google. Really that’s the only reason that I’m interested in using AdSense at this point - I’ve banked about $45 from other websites, but unless I get it up to $100, I’ll never see a dime of it.

So of course this brings along the question - is the AdSense going to cut into my Amazon Sales? We’ll see how things go over the next week. With the holidays upon us, it probably isn’t the best time to be testing out ideas, but this is the first month of my Amazon Affiliate Site, so I’m just going to try a lot of different things - by this time next year I should have it honed and working like a well oiled machine.

Yesterday my Amazon Affiliate Site had 17 Google Organic visitors, which resulted 29 clicks and 4 sales (13.7% conversion rate) and should bank me $8.00. I’m not really clear about why I keep having days where my clicks outnumber my visitors, maybe my linking scheme is working well enough and people are clicking the “Click Here” links multiple times.

I think it is important to note that all of my sales came for the same item, and I don’t know if it was one person buying 4 copies, or if it was 4 different people - but this particular brought 12 of my 17 Google Organic visitors. This is how things have been working so far for most my blogs - if you can get one post that drives a good amount of traffic, the other things will fall into place. Having that extra traffic gives you a warm fuzzy feeling inside while you spend time building more posts, and hopefully learning something from what made your one post good enough to bring in the visitors.

Over the last two days, I have had 40 Google Organic visitors to my Amazon Affiliate site - 20 visitors each day. On Monday I had 15 “Product Link Clicks” and yesterday I had 2 “Product Link Clicks” - not sure what causes a difference like that since I haven’t changed anything on the site. Of these 17 Product Link Clicks, I haven’t had any sales. Overall I have had 100 Product Link Clicks and 3 sales, totaling $3.21 in profits for myself.

I’m guessing that Christmas is also helping to balloon my numbers a bit, as a lot of people will be searching for gifts now. I’ve been able to target specific search terms for each page, and have found certain search terms that work better than other. Basically you’ve got to look at the competition and see where you can slip in at a weak spot.

So I have thus far maintained my 3% conversion rate. I would like to keep it above 3% and get a few more sales before Christmas.