How to use Excel to Automate Wordpress Affiliate Content (with template)

Here is an Excel sheet which you can use automatically create a list of products, for "best ..." type of affiliate content.

A simple version of it looks like:

This sheet was created by someone and shared in /r/juststart/. I am just resharing it here.

I've had quite a few PM's asking for my magic sauce excel templates.

It wouldn't make sense to give away the templates I use specifically since they are tailored to my website, but, I've created a very basic template for you guys that is essentially the same thing, just a very simplified version of it that took me about 20 minutes to make.

You can download the template here:

http://docdro.id/BN7QkeS

(You'll need to download the actual template to your machine and open it with excel, the auto preview thing sucks)

This is a simple example of what this exact template would create from Wordpress:

http://imgur.com/a/zfakN

The magic of this template happens in cell D19. If you click that cell, you can see a very simple merge formula.

The formula looks like this:

=D11&J12&I5&J5&E5&L5&F5&N5&O5&D5&J13&Q5&G5&J12&I6&J6&E6&L6&F6&N6&O6&D6&J13&Q6&G6&J12&I7&J7&E7&L7&F7&N7&O7&D7&J13&Q7&G7&J12&I8&J8&E8&L8&F8&N8&O8&D8&J13&Q8&G8&J12&I9&J9&E9&L9&F9&N9&O9&D9&J13&Q9&G9&J12&D12

This is a super simple merge formula. I'm no excel guru, all this formula does it combine the contents of cells in the order that the cells are called.

First it calls D11 which you can see this is the introduction content to the list.

Then J12, which is simply the code for a line break.

Then I5, which is the beginning of an H2 header.

Then J5 which is the HTML for a link, opening in a new tab, followed by the beginning of an amazon affiliate link.

Then E5, which is the ASIN of the product.

Then L5, which is the section of HTML that is going to assign your affiliate tag to the link.

Then F5, which is your actual affiliate link (in this example "wearable-20")

Then N5, which closes your affiliate link and bolts on a nofollow attribute.

Then 05, which is just a static text start the list in the H2 (#1)

Then D5, which is going to call the product name.

Then J13, which is just a universal anchor closing to finish your link.

Then Q5, which closes your header.

Then G5 which plugs in the content for that item on the list.

J12 again for a line break.

Then the whole process loops over again for each item on the list.

Copy D19 into the HTML section of a new post, and viola. Instant post.

So you can see how much power and automation a solution like this can deliver. This is an extremely basic template for an extremely basic list. You can create tables, insert schema, add css buttons, make Amazon API calls, add tables of contents, insert clickable images/image titles/image alt attributes, google analytics tracking, interlink content on your website, literally anything you can imagine by taking this template, adding more and more cells with code and content, and modifying the formula in D19 to merge those cells in the correct order.

Some times, you'll be linking out 5 times in a single list item, from the header, the image, mid content, end of content, and manually re-linking the same affiliate link 5 times for each item is a huge pain.

Spend an afternoon creating a couple of these for the different types of content that are repetitious for you and you'll save yourself hours of ass pain.

Disclaimer: Always be careful copy and pasting cells around. Almost always you'll want to highlight the content in the cell from the formula bar and paste it, because copy and pasting the cells moves all the attributes and cell calls and can change the formula and screw everything up really quick.

Feel free to ask me any questions.

Edit: I didn't include it in this template, but I like to make SEO friendly image file names by using an excel add-on called ASAP Utilities (free) to automatically lower case the product names and to automatically replace spaces with hyphens. Usually I'll have a column for product name like this template has and one next to it for Product name hyphenated which ill use to save images in photoshop and also to create link paths for the images in content.