PHP for Affiliate Marketers. Is it required to know PHP or other serverside language when working on affiliate marketing? Absolutely not. Does know PHP or other serverside language help with affiliate marketing? Absolutely YES!
Knowing programming, specifically PHP, can greatly increase your options when it comes to affiliate marketing. How so?
Originality
You’ll have the ability to stand out of the pack by creating your own applications that will work and look differently than others? You’ll be able to avoid the BANS Google Slap, etc. By being original you’ll catch the eye of potential customers and gain those valuable clicks.
Customizations
Knowing a little PHP will allow you to customize applications to fit your needs. Or to add enhancements that might give you the edge to separate from the rest of the pack.
Flexibility
You can work with APIs, RSS feeds and use datafeeds to bring in real time product updates, etc to your site. Along with features, you can enhance your keyword tracking with a little PHP knowledge by auto populating your sid or custom id tracking vars with the keywords from your PPC campaigns. I wrote example of this here.
Community
You can leverage PHP to create applications that have Web 2.0 community. Include videos, forums, Twitter, etc to create a true community portal. These portals are fantastic for drawing repeat visits.
How much do you need to know? It depends on what you want to achieve in the end. If you want to start working with API or create a custom portal, then you should know PHP at a pretty decent level. If you’re looking to customize applications like BANS (yuck) or WordPress, then you could get a lot done with very little knowledge of PHP.
If you’re interested in learning some basic PHP, I would recommend that you first create a WAMP environment. WAMP stands for Windows Apache Mysql PHP. If you’re a linux guy like me, then you would create a LAMP environment.
Here is a great download for Windows that will install everything you’ll need to work with PHP on your local workstation (http://www.wampserver.com/en/). Basically, you’ll want to create a ‘development’ environment. Getting something to work ‘locally’ first, then promote the code to the production server. You should never work on the live server. Get it working perfectly in development first. Creating a local development environment will provide you a playground to learn, so it’s the first place you need to start.
Next you’ll need some basics under your belt. There are tons of tutorial resources on the internet and books you can purchase that will get you on your way. You’ll need to learn about PHP, xHMTL, CSS and SQL. JavaScript wouldn’t hurt as well. I would continue to come back to Money-Code since I do offer PHP snippets and examples specific affiliate marketing that could be useful. Also, I like to frequent the Digial Point forums for programming tips, and of course php.net for function definitions.
Please feel free to contact me either here or via Twitter if you have any programming questions, if I can, I’ll try to help.