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Refactoring for ROI in affiliate marketing
The importance of refactoring is well documented in the programming world. But I haven’t seen it mentioned in an affiliate marketing context. So what is refactoring? Basically starting again from scratch. So instead adding variations to your banners or landing pages, start again and use everything you’ve learned to produce a better campaign. If you
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Simple PPC List Builder
I used to use a programme called JAH Simple PPC to build out wordlists for pay per click campaigns. Basically it would combine different key word variations. I couldn’t find it anymore so decided to build my own and get a bit of practice with javascript. Hope this is useful to someone. http://www.jamesbachini.com/misc/ppc.htm http://www.jamesbachini.com/misc/ppc.htm The
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A lesson in writing headlines
http://www.viralnova.com/ This site is an epic resource of great copy for headlines. Here are some examples and the techniques they employ: This $145,000,000 Spiritual Headquarters Is Just Ridiculous. I’m Sure You Know Who Built It. Questioning the reader to draw intrigue The ‘Before’ Photo Made Me Sick. Yet The ‘After’ Photo Is So Great That
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How not to do maintenance
This was from an affiliate programme for a site which used to have an Alexa top 500 listing!
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Local Sims
Travel and work – a tough combination. One thing that makes it infinitely easier is to purchase a local sim card with 3G data. I’m typing this from a hotel room in Cambodia. The hotel’s wifi like most hotels in SE Asia is questionable at best. Having a local sim card allows me to tether
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Epic Advertising Legal Action
Legal letter we had come through against Epic Advertising Limited. Anyone else had one of these? Looks like they went bust owing about 3.2 million and someones not happy about it.
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ATW: Singapore
Overall Singapore is the best city I have ever visited. It was like an oasis of calm after travelling in Sri Lanka and India for three weeks. Cars stop to let you cross the road, the streets are cleaner than any other city, people are generally more respectful to one another and their surroundings. Public
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Kerala and leaving India
Kerala was the highlight of India for me. Situated at the bottom of the country the region is made up of beautiful beaches, stunning backwaters and vibrant local towns. Fort Cochin is a small Portuguese colonial town with a few things to do and see. They have a fish market where you can buy freshly
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ATW: Goa
I’ve finally got round to setting up a category for travel stuff and have set a redirect at jamesbachini.com/atw Goa was a lot of fun, I’d love to go back between December and January because it gets pretty crazy apparently. In off season it’s quiet with not many western tourists. Beaches are beautiful, traffic is
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Mumbai Reality
Dharavi is the most populated slum in Asia with over a million people living in a square kilometer. It’s an incredibly eye opening place to visit because of the way the people there just get on with their daily business. With conditions such as running water limited to 3 hours a day you’d think the
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Ideas for improving landing pages
The following is a list of proven methods that can improve the ctr and cvr of a landing page. Big Bright Buttons – Have you split tested different buttons, button text etc? Copy and Text – Persuasive text is key and an art form in itself. Images – Every image on that landing page should
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Using Google Fonts on Landing Pages
This is how you can use Google web fonts on your landing pages, blog posts and web pages. The benefit of this is that the font is loaded from a remote server include on the Google APIs so it does not depend on the local storage of that font on the users computer. This makes
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Online Banner Design Tool
Need to design/modify banners but don’t have Photoshop installed? Try this online image editor: http://pixlr.com/editor/ A great little tool for the affiliate that only does image editing once in a blue moon, you lucky souls. Pixlr – The online alternative to photoshop
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Installing Prosper202 for Affiliate Marketing
Things you’ll need to get setup with Prosper202 and affiliate marketing: > A webhost or VPS or Dedicated server (web host is cheapest, Dedi’s are most expensive, VPS is a good compromise) > A domain name, just use a .com in case you want to run international in the future. Godaddy are pretty good. >
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Yousif Yalda Recognition
Recognition for being a complete idiot. Don’t ever run traffic to Profit Kings Media (PKM) or you’ll end up with stupid Skype messages like this:
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Facebook Funnies
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Neverblue Out of Bounds Thailand 2013
Thank you Neverblue for a great trip to Phuket Thailand, was good to see everyone in the Neverblue team and meet some new faces. Just when you think the out of bounds trips can’t get any better… The Westin Siray Hotel where we stayed Everything required for an OOB trip was supplied Boat trip to
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Coding PHP for Affiliates | A Getting Started Guide
Coding for me is one of the most important skills you can have as an affiliate marketer. I’ve met plenty of affiliates that are running huge volume, making millions and can’t write a single line of code. “I just outsource it all” but for me I couldn’t imagine coming up with a tweak to a
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High CPU usage on mysqld but low memory usage
Had a problem with a server that was running alot of traffic and doing a lot of logging and updating mysql tables. The CPU usage was through the roof and it’s an 8 core server with 30GB of RAM. The strange thing was that mysqld was using all the processing power but hardly any memory
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346 million clicks handled by Prosper202
Credit where credit is due, for free open source software, Prosper202 is great. I’ve had a few issues along the way but this software can be scalled to huge volumes relatively easily. If you aren’t using it to track your campaigns get it setup today: Some tips on running prosper at volume: 1) Check your
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Some info on popular traffic sources…
I came across this summary from an old manual I wrote some time ago. Alot of it is still relevant today, I’ll get round to updating it at some point: Traffic Sources Summary SEO Little to no cost – Free Trafic Long term can take six months to rank Requires large volumes of content Massive
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EWA Gone Under
It’s not nice to see any company fail (especially when they owe so much to so many) but never in this industry have I seen it happen to a more deserving character. Goodbye Ryan Eagle and the joke/scam that was EWA.
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Las Vegas 2013, Affiliate Summit West, iDates etc.
Four shows and countless parties in 8 days. Here are some pics from Las Vegas this January: Some takeaways I had from this trip: Don’t ever book meetings before midday and preferably later still. Even if you can party till 4am and get up and sober for a meeting at 10am the chances are the
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Out of Bounds Thailand March 2013
Just had the email come through confirming a place! Looking forward to seeing everyone for Out of Bounds Thailand. The official dates are 13th – 18th March but I am thinking of going out on the 9th and staying till the 24th. Let me know if anyone else has plans outside of the OOB dates.
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Firing a S2S tracking url from an image conversion pixel
Use this on your landing page: setcookie(“cid”, $_GET[‘accid’], time()+7*24*60*60, ‘/’, ‘.mydomain.com’); This sets up a cookie so you can track a click id in www.mydomain.com?accid=123 You could also set this up track any other data you want, subid, affiliate id etc. Then setup your conversion image pixel as <img src=”http://www.mydomain.com/conversion.php” height=”1px” width=”1px” /> This code
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Maxbounty setting an example
Credit where credit is due this is awsome from Maxbounty: Hello James, For the past 8 years, MaxBounty has made it a tradition to give back to our community during the holiday season. This year is no different, and once again we are inviting you to help us out. On Saturday, December 22nd, 2012, we
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Automatic backup of MySQL database
Would you like to have a backup of your critical MySQL database emailed to you automatically? The following script was moified from backup2mail and needs setting up as a cron job, instructions are in the code. Download it for free here This is what the code looks like: <?php /// Setup /// // Test it
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HC Traffic – Campaign Setup Guide
Most affiliates will know that pop under traffic provides a great way to scale campaigns to really high levels. A site which has 300×250 banners will usually charge $0.50~ cpm, the equivalent pop under ads will cost $5+. The reason sites can earn so much more with pop unders is because the user interacts much
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Stupidly Simple AB or Multivariate Testing
Here’s a simple way you can setup a simple multivariate or A/B split test without any software just using the subid variables provided by an affiliate network and some really basic php. <?php $out = ‘http://www.myaffiliatelink.com/page1.php?affid=123&subid1=’; if (rand(0,1) == 0) { $out.=’g1′; $girlimg = ‘1.png’; } else { $out.=’g2′; $girlimg = ‘2.png’; } // this
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Endorsement
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Internet Marketers Web Browser of Choice
Here are some stats from Google Analytics for this blog: I thought it was interesting to see how far behind Internet Explorer has fallen for people who know how to use a computer. It was only 5 years ago when they an 85%ish share in the market. In 5 years time I would expect it
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First Steps in Automation
One of the great things about this industry is the lifestyle flexibility it offers you. The dream is to setup a campaign or website, let it run itself and live off the money tree you’ve made. In reality it rarely works like this but automation can release hours off your daily routines and go some
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Optimising Nginx in Linux
I found one of the servers was throwing up a 500 error quite regularly. I checked the logs and in /var/log/nginx/error.log I found the following errors: socket() failed (24: Too many open files) while connecting to upstream, client socket() failed (23: Too many open files in system) while connecting to upstream, client Solution was to
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Lessons learned from writing a bespoke tracking platform
For a recent project I wanted to develop a tracking platform which was specifically designed to suit my needs. It needed to be simple to use, capable of handling seven figure audiences daily and built on technology I understand so it can be customised on the go. I decided to build it arround php /
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Combining Maxmind GeoIP with Google Maps iFrame
This is a quick script which uses Maxminds geoip location db downloadable for free from here with Google Maps iFrame. I haven’t tested this enough to find out if Google restrict the number of requests by referrer but you could always put a meta refresh page in the iframe to blank the referrer if thats
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Resizing images and adjusting landing pages based on screen resolution
So many browsers so many different screen resolutions. Here’s a way to modify html code based on the screen resolution of the browser. In this example I have changed an image but there is no reason why you cant change text, font size or even use it to redirect users who have mobile sized screens.
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Loading a conversion pixel on click through
Mobile campaign optimisation throws up a number of issues in regard to tracking. One thing I’ve found really useful is to load a conversion pixel on click through from the landing page to the offer page. This can be a traffic source pixel which can then be used to give some indication of site/device/carrier quality
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iframe to a specific div id on a landing page
Below is the code to iframe an offer page but cut out all the stuff you don’t need. This is useful if you just want to iframe the form while using your own images etc. This is setup so you just enter the url and div id you want to jump to at the top
