A while back Bec did a tutorial here on how to do a fake tube site with WordPress. Well, that got me to thinking and when we decided to rework the hosted blogs for My Gay Cash I remembered the tutorial and suggested we do a fake tube instead of regular blog. As a result we’re working on moving from Blogs Organizer to Wordpress and consolidating all of the My Gay Cash hosted blogs (there’s currently one for every pay site) into just one hosted blog - Milk Your Bone.
[In case you’re wondering… I’m not an owner of My Gay Cash - just an affiliate who gets compensated for managing their hosted blogs.]
I wanted Milk Your Bone to kill two birds with one stone - be both a blog and a tube site, plus provide all the features we were supporting with the existing hosted blogs, so the features are:
- Tube style design
- Video, text and pics - like a blog
- RSS feeds that can be used for automated blogs
- RSS feeds in two widths - 400px and 640px
- Niche category and tag pages and feeds.
- Proper calls to action and links to the pay site in each post
- 2257 links in every blog post and in each feed item
I’d really like your guys feedback. We’ll be doing final tweaks over the next few days.
You can start using it if you want. If you encounter any problems, just let me know… Of course, you’ll want to be an affiliate of My Gay Cash to get credit. Here are some other details that may come in handy…
To get credit, just add ?aff=XXX to the end of any URL where you change XXX into your My Gay Cash affiliate ID. You can also optionally use campaign codes. In that case you’d add something that looks like ?aff=XXX-CRYYY where YYY is the campaign code. So for example: http://www.milkyourbone.com?aff=1196801495-CR116 - if you look at your other My Gay Cash links that will all seem very familiar.
You can send traffic to any URL on the site - just put your affiliate code at the end. So if you want to send traffic to a page with just hairy men that would look something like http://www.milkyourbone.com/hot/masculine/hairy?aff=1196801495-CR116
And realize that since Milk is based on WordPress, every page has an RSS feed, so you could get an RSS feed for hairy guys as well. To get the feed for the page, it’s available at the top of your browser (depending on how your browser displays RSS feeds), but you can also just add /feed to the URL, so the hairy guys feed would be something like http://www.milkyourbone.com/hot/masculine/hairy/feed?aff=1196801495-CR116
Now, speaking of RSS feeds - as I mentioned above they’re available in two widths. The default is 640px. If you add &f=n to the end of the URL you get a 400px wide feed. That would look something like http://www.milkyourbone.com/hot/masculine/hairy/feed?aff=1196801495-CR116&f=n Basically there are wide and narrow versions of every picture and every video and when you ask for &f=n (which stands for format=narrow) the narrow pics and videos are substituted for the wide ones. It’s not done via CSS tricks.
The site isn’t 100% done yet, but it is working pretty well and you’ll get credit for sales. Let me just list out some of the things we’re working on. They’ll be resolved early next week before the official launch…
- Tag links are missing on the post pages. They'll be added under the category links.
- ?aff=xxx is not on many of the internal links on the site. A cookie is set so you get credit, but we understand that the ?aff=xxx is important for bookmarkers, so it will be fixed shortly.
- We'll start migrating all the old blog posts from the current blogs later in January and we'll redirect the traffic. Please consider changing your links.
- Current RSS feeds will be redirected to the feed for the pay site-specific tag page. So technically you may not have to change your feed URLs, though we do recommend that you do.
- The "meat" of the RSS feed is in <content:encoded>, not <description>. We'll improve that, but right now you should use <content:encoded> to feed your blogs.
- When I get a chance I'll work on the video preview images. They sorta suck right now.
- We're working on the colors of the logo.
- A blogroll will be instituted, like on the old blogs. To get listed in the blogroll you have to be one of the top affiliates sending traffic to Milk Your Bone.
So if you have any comments or questions - just let me now…
And thanks again to Bec for the tutorial!