Selling Links

[Andy]

I am getting very interesting in selling links from my sites to others.

There are various middlepeople but we don't have to have them.

For individual webmasters, I think all we can do is sell ad slots on our pages. I recently converted one of my sites over to a new script I developed for the #1 reason of selling ad space. This site is a test bed for this idea: www.readingfreeads.co.uk

[Andy]

I got stuck into this project this week and now have the paid Ad positions in place. Also, I have integrated premium Ad features into my existing script so advertisers can insert HTML links into their ads.

Also, I put up some pricing menu ( www.readingfreeads.co.uk/advertise.php )for the ad positions. I think they are cheap but if I sold all the slots, I would make £95 a month (around $200) on auto-pilot. Later there will be links from this page to the payment gateway. If you surf the site you can see the available paid Ad slots at the top of listings.

The next stage I am working on is PayPal IPN integration which means Instant Payment Notification. This works by sending my site data every time a month of Ad subscription is renewed or started. So, I should be able to totally automate the system. If I manually enable Ads, there will be an annoying delay to new advertisers and also there would be a delay in me noticing a canceled subscription.

This is just the test bed site, even though it is a live working site. Later I hope to create a business solution that other people can purchase off me to replicate in their own area of the world.

[Manu]

May be this could help you - http://www.wordlinkspro.com

[Andy]

The code of that script is zend encoded. Anyway, I have my own IPN code to modify from a previous project. Thanks anyway.

[Andy]

I think I have the PayPal IPN integration done now but not live yet.

When somebody buys an advertising slot via PayPal I get Instant Payment Notification to a script on my site. This script then validates the data, logs the transaction in a database and enables the subscriber to edit their premium Ad in their usual Ad management area. It can be a little tricky to develop and test the IPN code since the script is not a visible page on your site. Also, you need to use the PayPal Sandbox which is a simulation of the PayPal site to test transactions with your site. It is fun though.

For my script, I create a log file of all errors that are found during the transaction process and finally record the success in a text file with a time stamp in the file name. This helps to debug errors and record what may have gone wrong. One thing that always seems to go wrong is a lack of response from the Sandbox to verify the received data. So I flag this as a point of note but don't exit the flow of the code. I think the live system doesn't have a problem like this. It's just so long that I last did this stuff that I forgot.

Also, I capture every transaction in a database.

As well as IPN, I make use of PDT (Payment Data Transfer) which sends some data to the thankyou page after the purchase was made so I can personalize the response to the customer on that page.

My Ad subscriptions are for 1 month in advance so I record the expiry date for the purchased ad by use of a MySQL function in this manner:

Code:

expiry=NOW() + 101000000

This is the way to store the present date and time plus 1 month and 1 day.

Well, this is advanced stuff but maybe what I posted may help some people getting into coding an e commerce back end for PayPal integration.