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Example Media Buy Letter
Here is an example media buy proposal letter that can be used as a cold email, contact form or social media message. Response rates for media buy proposals are low so anything you can do to connect with the person responsible for monetising a website first is going to be beneficial. Check the whois information,
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Book: How to Be an Imperfectionist Review
Link: How to be an imperfectionist review I think there must be quite a few affiliates, digital marketers and high performers who are on the OCD scale. This book is about perfectionism which is very closely related or part of that scale. OCD is obsessive compulsive disorder. I’m terrible for it. I can’t sit at
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Pop Under Code 2020
Updated September 2020 This pop under code is used for running pop under traffic on your own site. It adds an onclick function to every link on the page which opens a new tab with the clicked link and changes the existing window (underneath) to a popped ad URL. Opening links in new tabs isn’t
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Capitalisation of Links (www.MySite.com) CRO Test
I thought an interesting split test would be to test if text links on a landing page that are capitalised get more clicks than ones that don’t. For example: https://www.jamesbachini.com/ – standard (control) https://www.JamesBachini.com/ – Capitalised This was for a site that wasn’t a personal name and contained a full directory and page like http://www.MyGreatWebSite.com/example/page.htm
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How to Sell Anything
I found this “How to Sell Anything” infographic and thought it was a really good example to show what happens on the other side of the sales marketing divide. For most online marketers the thought of having to make a phone call or actually talk to someone probably seems a bit alien. We just buy
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PHP Redirect with Parameters | Passing GET variables in a Redirect
Update March 2023 To do a 301 PHP redirect with parameters to another page we can use the following code: The entire query parameter string is stored in the following variable. Everything after the question mark. So for the URL: server.com/index.php?test=123&hi=hellothe $_SERVER[‘QUERY_STRING’] will contain this string “test=123&hi=hello” We can then pass this out when redirecting
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Publisher Side Ad Platform Statistics
This really shows the dominance of Google for display advertising, especially for smaller sites with their Adsense platform. I’ve thought for a while that Facebook should be able to enter this market and using their vast amount of user data increase CPM’s for small publishers. As of yet this hasn’t been widely adopted and Adsense
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Instagram Add Call To Action Button
Instagram call to action buttons can be found on profile pages and advertisements. This article will show you how to Add a call to action button to your Instagram Profile Add a call to action button to your Instagram Ad Add a call to action button to your Instagram Profile Follow these steps to add
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Wasabi AB Testing Platform
Update July 2020 – Wasabi is no longer maintained or supported. Check this article for more information on conversion rate optimisation. Wasabi AB Testing Platform Intuit have opensourced a enterprise grade A/B testing platform called Wasabi. This runs as an API on a separate server from your site/landers. It isn’t the easiest thing to setup
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Book Review: How To Get Rich – Felix Dennis
Amazon Link: How To Get Rich This book was recommended on someones most life changing books list. Despite the guru title “How To Get Rich” it’s actually quite a bit different to the standard Tony Robbins spin-offs. The writer Felix Dennis isn’t selling anything, there’s no upsells or hidden agenda. He’s an older guy that
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List of websites with the most links
I was doing some SEO research using the cloud compute engine and ended up analysing tens of millions of URL’s using a link checking tool I built. The following list of websites with the most links is a collection of the most linked to domains online. It will have a UK bias and isn’t in
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Online Marketing Predictions For 2017
Here are my online marketing predictions for 2017. I reviewed this in 2020 (ticks/crosses) to see what I got right. 1. Native will go mainstream and start attracting big brand spenders Native advertising has been affiliate marketers little secret for a couple of years now. The volume is now at a stage where brand advertisers
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How to display different banners for mobile
I had a situation where I wanted to use different ad banners depending on the screen size of the visitor. To display different banners for mobile and desktop traffic. What I wanted was a dynamic ad block that displayed different ads depending on the width of the browser window so it wouldn’t mess up the
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Beautiful Email Template [Download]
Here is a beautiful email template layout which you can download from here: http://jamesbachini.com/misc/email.zip View the HTML page: http://jamesbachini.com/misc/email.htm Update all the images and links before you send out. The background skyline is in the zip file, you could modify to suit your niche just keep the color the same.
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robots.txt Disallow All | Block Bots
In this article we are going to look at how to block bot traffic using the robots.txt disallow all feature, then some of the more advanced uses of the robots.txt file. How To Disallow All in robots.txt Custom robots.txt for Specific Bots and Directories Complete List of Bots – robots.txt How To Disallow All in
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Vibrate Phone with Javascript
The following javascript uses the Vibrate API to make a phone vibrate when a page is loaded. You can time it with setTimeouts or onclick/onscroll if required. There’s more information available at: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/vibrate This can be used to draw a users attention to the landing page or to create message effects etc.
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Ben Horowitz Hard things about hard things review
Andreeson Horowitz is Silicon Valleys leading venture capital firm. Their portfolio itself is worth a flick through at: http://a16z.com/portfolio/ It’s incredible how many of the tech startup success stories they have been involved in. Ben Horowitz is one of the cofounders and in his book the Hard things about hard things he talks about his
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Node.js client for Moz API (MozScape)
Update 2020: This is outdated now and not maintained. I’d recommend using one of these packages: https://www.npmjs.com/package/moz-api https://www.npmjs.com/package/moz-api-wrapper Original Post: I was doing some work with SEO domains and realised there wasn’t a node.js client for the MozScape API… so after Googling and not finding what I was looking for I built one. What this
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REGEX | A Complete Guide With Examples
Regexes are a powerful way to do search queries on a text string. They can be used to replace text, sanitize user inputs and much more. Contents Introduction to REGEX REGEX Cheatsheet REGEX Examples REGEX Javascript Code An Introduction to REGEX A REGEX or regular expression is used to match text strings in many programming
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All the Facebook ads targeting options [infographic]
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Book Review: Delivering Happiness – Tony Hsieh
To get through this you are going to need to read a hundred or so pages of why Zappos is such an amazing company how how they are changing the world. That said Tony does make some interesting points throughout the book. His story of how he got started in the tech industry first with
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A simple floating feedback/support button
Updated for 2020 with a cleaner design. This uses the mail command in PHP to send the email but if this is disabled on your server you can connect it to Sendgrid/Mailchimp/AWS etc for the sending of email queries. There is a working example at: https://jamesbachini.com/misc/feedbackexample.html The code for this is really easy to implement
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New Page Level Ads – Adsense
These new ads are now available in the Adsense platform: They can be added to your adsense site and will only pop on mobile when Google thinks it’s a good time to launch an overlay. I’m not sure how they calculate this but it is described as displaying at “optimal times”. Most importantly you can
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Book Review: Will it fly – Pat Flynn
This book is about testing an idea before you go all out and build a business around it. Pat goes through some interesting thought experiments based on what you want personally and how your business idea will fit in to that. There is some good information about market research in there. I particularly like the
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CTA Conf 2016 Notes (PDF Download )
The CTA Conference was put on by Unbounce in June and they also produced this really good notes PDF which is worth reading for anyone in the digital marketing space. You can download it here: http://calltoactionconference.unbounce.com/docs/CTAConf%202016%20Notes.pdf
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Setting Up Facebook & Google Adwords Conversion & Retargeting Pixels
Conversion tracking is important because it will show you how much each lead or purchase is costing you in advertising costs. For most marketers this is their key performance indicator as it has a direct influence on their profits. Retargeting (or remarketing) tracking is important because by building an audience we can launch cost-effective marketing
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Jim.am has moved to JamesBachini.com
Welcome to the new blog. I have updated the design with a new theme and some pretty pictures. I changed the domain name too as I wasn’t doing anything with the last one and wanted to keep a personal blog anyway so this will suit me more. I still plan to talk, rant and go
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Microsoft to buy Linkedin
News this morning is that Microsoft is going to buy Linkedin for $26 Billion USD. Now I’m not saying we are in a new .com tech bubble but… Linkedin has 433 million users. That would give a cost per user of $60usd. Now my first thought is that if Microsoft spent that money on advertising
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New: Facebook interest targeting brainstorm tool
This is more for my use but others might find it helpful when trying to come up with targeting ideas for interests on Facebook Ads. Facebook Ads Targeting Tool
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Facebook changes ad text guidelines
Facebook has changed it’s policy on disallowing ads with more than 20% text. There are now 4 bands in which your ad will be placed. OK, Low Text, Medium Text, High Text. The higher band your ad comes in the lower your quality score and less traffic you will get or higher you will have
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Alert box on click through to offer
The following example will allow you to create an alert box when the user clicks through from your landing page to the offer page. This can be useful to remind users of your offers value proposition, sign-up requirements (double-opt in?) or just to increase conversion rate on the offer end. A working demo is available
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A simple iOS / Android traffic splitter in PHP
The following basic PHP code will split traffic by device with iOS traffic going to the first out link, Android to the second and leftovers to the third. TIP: This uses a 301 redirect however you can do any type of programmatic variation based on the user agent. You can copy and paste this into
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No More Forced Tablet Traffic On Adwords
At last Google has put an end to the way it was allowing bid adjustments for mobile and desktop but not tablets. For years this has meant that Adwords advertisers were forced into getting unwanted tablet traffic and paying the same rate for it as desktop. Here is the blog announcement from Google: http://adwords.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/ads-and-analytics-innovations-for-a-mobile-first-world.html If
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Splitting traffic to different offers on mobile
If you are buying bulk traffic to a mobile offer the chances are that you can split some of your traffic off to different offers. For example if you have a pin submit that only accepts android but has a much higher payout then you can separate your android traffic and increase your bottom line.
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RAM & CPU Usage PHP Script | Server Health Check
This single file server health check script works on Windows, Linux and possibly others. It is written in PHP to show CPU usage, RAM usage, Incoming Connections and Hard disk usage. Update September 2020 Server Check PHP was getting a lot of downloads so I’ve updated the code and open sourced it on Github. If
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Basic exit intent pop up script
The following script will launch a pop up and redirect if the user moves the mouse off the page. You can add this to your landing page targeted at desktop users, on mobile it wont work obviously. This is just a basic version but you can change the popUp() function to load an email capture
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Resize youtube/vimeo iframe to maximum available height and width
Here is the code to make a flexible youtube.com or vimeo.com video fit both the height and width of the containing div. Like a flexible adsense unit it will take up the maximum available space on the page or be constrained within a containing object such as a div. CSS: .vcontainer { position:relative; padding-bottom:56.25%; padding-top:30px;
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Book Review Finch Premium Posts 2016
It’s really hard to find any kind of information from experienced performance marketers. You generally have to wade through all the gurus who have no real idea or sign up to a paid forum full of newbies. Finch is an English guy I believe who now lives in Thailand, has been doing affiliate marketing for
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Calculate distance between two geocooridnates
Here is a javascript function to calculate the distance between two latitude and longitude coordinates. function deg2rad(deg) { return deg * (Math.PI/180) } function calcDistance(lat1,lon1,lat2,lon2) { var R = 6371; // Radius of the earth in km var dLat = deg2rad(lat2-lat1); var dLon = deg2rad(lon2-lon1); var a = Math.sin(dLat/2) *
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Building Basic Websites
Every now and again you just need a basic site setup to have an internet presence. Normally this occurs for me when a friend or family member tells people I “do websites” and I get roped in to helping them out. So what options are there for a basic, modern website template. The obvious answer
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Option to Disable Adsense Ads
In some cases it is beneficial to provide a link or option for visitors to a site not to see the adsense ads the first time they visit a page. Ads can sometimes be viewed negatively and for the first visit or under certain circumstances it is best to temporarily disable them. Here is the
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What is required to dominate an online niche?
Here is a checklist of factors that need to be taken into account when building an online business. Money Site (main website) High Converting Optimised Landing Page Effective Sales Funnel Lead Magnet / Lead capture methods Designed for user The money site is where prospects will be converted to leads. An effective sales funnel is
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Download: Basic Email Newsletter Template
Here is a template for a basic email newsletter: http://www.jamesbachini.com/misc/emailnewsletter.zip http://www.jamesbachini.com/misc/emailnewsletter.html Some important things to note when creating email newsletters: Inline CSS Only, no style sheets or <style> tags as they will be stripped by most clients. Make it responsive, a lot of email is read on mobile, it should collapse and expand beautifully. Add
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Leading Ad Networks
Here is a list of the leading ad networks @ Dec 2015: Search PPC Google Adwords MSN Adcenter Social Networks Facebook Twitter Plenty of Fish Reddit LinkedIn In-text Ad Networks 50onRed Infolinks Clicksor Pay per view PPV Traffic Vance Lead Impact Media Traffic Clicksor Pop Unders Wiget Media Adcash AdsTerra Banner Display Networks / Exchanges
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The truth about online advertising agencies and consultants
I see a lot of companies promoting online marketing services to small and medium sized businesses. The engineering company I am involved with gets emails every day from companies offering adwords optimisation or SEO (search engine optimisation) services. How many of these companies actually know what they are doing though? I would hazard a guess
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Tuesday Morning Funny
What’s not smart? Not testing your dynamic tokens when email marketing: Like a pro!
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7 easy ways to make money with affiliate marketing
Build a blog and setup adsense banners This is where most affiliates start, all you need is a domain name and a wordpress installation with some hosting. Build your blog, do some guest posts, read about SEO and hope Google sends you some traffic. Monetisation is usually done with Google Adsense which means selling advertising
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How to choose offers from an affiliate network
The most useful bit of information you can get from your affiliate manager is what offers are running the most volume. This is the only data I ever ask AM’s for because it tells me in no uncertain terms what is competitive on the network at the moment. AM’s are notorious for bombarding us with
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11 Proven Headline Formulas For Affiliate Marketing
Here is a list of headlines, most you’ll probably recognise. They are all over the web because they work. Use the formulas and adapt it to your product/service. ONE SIMPLE TRICK TO A …[BENEFIT] EXPERTS HATE HIM FOR …[BENEFIT] WARNING: [BENEFIT] 1268 LONDONERS [BENEFIT] IS [PRODUCT] A SCAM? CAN [PRODUCT] HELP YOU [BENEFIT]? HOW TO
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Automatic Redirect for Mobile Landing Page
Want a mobile lander with a 90%+ “CTR”? Simply add the following javasript: <script> function go() { location.href = ‘http://www.jamesbachini.com’; } function init() { setTimeout(function() { confirm(‘You have two friends who recommended this app’); },3000); setTimeout(function() { go(); },5000); } </script> Then run the init function on body load like so: <body onload=”init();”> This does
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