Aside from visiting doctorofcredit.com, there are numerous ways to keep up with the site:
- Signup for a daily email – each morning your’ll get an email with all the posts from the previous day. Signup option can be found on every page of the site at the bottom-right.
- Signup for our weekly newsletter – each Monday morning you’ll get an email with a roundup of posts from the week before, as well as a full list of all last week’s posts. Signup option can be found on every page of the site at the bottom-right.
- Sign up for our RSS feed. You’ll see new posts in your reader/feedly when they go live on the site.
- Follow us on Twitter or Facebook. You’ll see new posts in your feed when they go live on the site. We’re also active on Twitter posting about smaller deals which don’t warrant a dedicated post and answering reader’s questions.
- Follow the dedicated Dochotdeals Twitter account. We only post there when there’s a hot deal which might die fast. You can even receive mobile notifications for these hot deals using Twitter notifications as outlined here.
- Signup for Desktop Notifications on your browser. This option will show you every new post instantly when it goes live on the site. It’s the fastest way to see any DoC news since there’s no delay. Signup by clicking the bell on the bottom-right of the page (Chrome, Safari, and Firefox).
Those who are signed up for our daily emails or RSS feed may have noticed that some links are missing from the posts shown. This is due to a new plugin we use which removes all Amazon links from going out in those emails.
Amazon recently reached out to let us know that they don’t allow using their Amazon Associates affiliate program in private communications such as email. They had apparently tracked the clicks and saw some of our traffic was coming from email and RSS, and they sent us a compliance warning with 5 days to fix the issue.
To conform, we’re using a plugin which simply removes all Amazon links. (I guess we weren’t the first one’s who had this issue. 🙂 ) Would be great if it were possible to have the link go out as a standard link without the affiliate tracking, but the plugin doesn’t work that way. If anybody knows of any other solutions, we’d love to hear them. Thankfully it’s not difficult for users to be able to see the real links, just click through to the actual post and they will be showing fine on the normal website.
Thought it was worth a word of explanation about this. Maybe some bloggers will find this interesting too. And as always, we appreciate those who support the site by using our Amazon affiliate link!
View Comments (26)
@will
It appears the rss feed hasn't updated in a while.
Not sure what happened, but I think it's fixed?
Yes, it fixed itself after a while. Weird.
It appears the RSS feed is broken.
@will @chucksithe
Working for me. Do you use Feedly?
Looks like some invalid format, which I guess will pass as soon as the post drops off the feed:
https://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2FDoctorOfCredit
Should be fixed shortly
Thank you! It's working now :)
Phew
I have no idea what any of this means...
Damn it, Jim, I’m just a doctor
Oh one more thing. If you’re using the Amazon link removal plugin that I think you are it’ll only remove links from RSS feeds, not emails. The only way to remove links from email subscriptions (that I know) is to use excerpts which will truncate what’s sent out and force people to click through to your blog for any text with links (just place Amazon links further down).
Tina
Right, it removes from the RSS and the emails feed on the RSS so emails end up clean.
Be aware that anything that says you’re supported by Affiliate links such as “support this site by using our Amazon link” or “we appreciate you using our link” is also a violation of Amazon TOS. It’s in their Operating Agreement, item 5 I think. Unfortunately I’ve seen lots of bloggers shut down with that one, so you’ll want to update that too.
Tina
Could there be a placeholder, something like "LINK, see blog post"?
Yeah that might work
They need to protect their dwindling market share somehow! /s
Yeah all you need to do is install a simple PHP redirect script on your website. Send the links thru that and it'll send traffic to Amazon (or wherever) with a HTTP referer of "doctorofcredit.com" instead of gmail.com or other provider.
The link will look like:
https://www.doctorofcredit.com/bounce.php?url=https://www.amazon.com/All-New-Amazon-Fire-7-Tablet/dp/B01GEW27DA/
You might need to add some security like a whitelist of websites the redirect allows. But other than that it is pretty straight forward. Probably like 10 lines of code. Reply if you need some help. A way I can give back for all your great finds.
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Doc, alternatively, if you prefer to track clickthrus on your links and don't mind manually creating individual links in your Wordpress backend you can use a plugin like:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/easy-affiliate-links/
I don't think that is allowed either as the link would still appear in e-mail communications and then just be a simple redirect that is basically just spoofing the address.
This seems easy enough, but isn't it also banned by #2 highlighted in the following blog post?
(I'm asking. That's how I read, "You will not cloak, hide, spoof, or otherwise obscure the URL of your site containing Special Links (including by use of a redirecting page) such that we cannot reasonably determine the site from which a customer clicks through such Special Link to the Amazon Site")
https://marketever.com/mistakes-get-banned-amazon-affiliate/
I don't think he is trying to either cloak/hide/spoof with the redirect. They are not going thru something like Bit.ly which will hide the original referral source.
SD and other deal websites use a same URL redirect and don't seem to have a problem.
But how is RSS a private communication feed? It's open to the public :/
Whatever, dem's da rules.
RSS is most likely fine, but the e-mails sent out are based on our RSS feed so the easiest work around is by just removing them from there as well.
Doc - Amazon was easier on you..
Check out the 2nd part of the post here https://daringfireball.net/2017/09/serfing_on_the_giants_farms where they just terminated John Gruber's Amazon Associates account.
Thanks for the read