Easy Content Units Review - First Review of 2010

I have actu­ally wanted to review this prod­uct for a num­ber of months but for what­ever rea­son it has always been put on the back burner. I am not being paid for this review and the prod­uct has no cur­rent affil­i­ate pro­gram so you can be 100% assured that the review is of a gen­uine nature.

I have never been very good with code (whether html, php, or any of the oth­ers that i cant name but am sure exist), but have always wanted to learn how to use data feeds to cre­ate online affil­i­ate stores. For those of you rel­a­tively new to affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing i will give a brief descrip­tion of what data feeds are:

Data Feeds are essen­tially a feed from an online retailer that enables you to dis­play prod­ucts on your affil­i­ate site. They are 100% self updat­ing so when price changes occur they will also occur on your site. To effec­tively imple­ment data feeds involves many hours of cod­ing and styling so that the data feed prod­ucts do not look out of place on your website.

When i began research­ing data feeds in the hope that i could learn to imple­ment them on my web­sites i became very aware very quickly that this was never going to be pos­si­ble, so i turned to look­ing for tools that could basi­cally do this for me. Although at this time there were a num­ber of tools claim­ing to be able to do what i was look­ing for on closer inspec­tion it was obvi­ous that the look, feel & func­tion­al­ity was never going to be such that i could com­pete with affil­i­ates who were adept to using data feeds never mind the mer­chant them­selves. I real­ized there was no prod­uct to help me and turned my atten­tions to other (non store­front) affil­i­ate ambitions.

I have always been a reader of good affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing blogs and espe­cially a num­ber of great UK blogs (see my blogroll for more infor­ma­tion) and one day quite to my amaze­ment a post was made regard­ing Easy Con­tent Units. I was excited but fully aware that they would prob­a­bly not be to the stan­dard i was hop­ing for. They were!

I imme­di­ately pur­chased their pro­fes­sional ver­sion cost­ing £19.99 + VAT per month and have never looked back. The units look great and can be cus­tomized with­out know­ing one </b> of code, they also pro­vide vir­tu­ally every feed from every net­work (worth their salt) in the UK and will soon be launch­ing a US ver­sion too.

So lets have a look at what the units can look like (and do look like on many of my sites):



As you can see they are excep­tional and the sup­port pro­vided by Jason & John (Lammo) is sec­ond to none. The ECU units are also con­stantly evolv­ing with new fea­tures being added all the time.

ECU offer a free ver­sion of their units with an 80/20 split (for every 10 clicks your affil­i­ate links receive ECU will take 2 at random).

I decided to imme­di­ately take advan­tage of the paid ver­sion for a num­ber of rea­sons but mostly because of the fact that you can add these to your Word­Press web­sites in PHP which means they are read­able by search engines and because prod­uct descrip­tions can eas­ily be rewrit­ten from within your ECU mem­bers page mean­ing you can avoid any nasty dupli­cate con­tent penal­ties and in most cases get a jump on your com­peti­tors (even those using home coded data feeds).

In con­clu­sion this is a prod­uct that i can­not rec­om­mend highly enough and if you are only ever to buy one affil­i­ate prod­uct / tool in your life­time make sure it is this one.